US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4719

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Simberto

Germany11310 Posts

January 25 2025 10:46 GMT

#94361

On January 25 2025 19:36 Gorsameth wrote:

Show nested quote +

Wasn't that complaining that FEMA wasn't doing enough for them?
Like literally the exact opposite of what they are doing now.

That is my memory of what was going on then, too. So I guess it might be a combination of "They didn't do enough for us, and now they are doing things for democrats, they are bad!"

oBlade

United States5268 Posts

January 25 2025 11:14 GMT

#94362

On January 25 2025 16:41 Salazarz wrote:

Show nested quote +

On January 25 2025 00:57 oBlade wrote:

On January 24 2025 23:49 Salazarz wrote:

Yes I really don't see how the existence/employment of white people is problematic, or troubling, or as Magic Powers said an "overabundance."

You really don't think that it's a problem when a guy named John is 50% more likely to get a job interview than his clone who has the exact same experiences and skill set but happens to be named Ahmed, or another clone of his with exact same experiences and skill set that just happens to have a vagina instead of a penis? Like, I really hope this is just some kind of a misunderstanding, but you're really going to have to elaborate on this because I don't really see how else to read your comment.

Okay I notice you avoided the question that was supposed to trap you into admitting that the proportion vs. population per se can't be touted as a problem. Since you did ask politely let me address this new/related issue - apparent blind probability to get called into an interview, with as frank detail as I can:

1) Many things in the world are problems, the government is not always the vehicle to solve them. They may not always even be solvable, or they may actually be presenting as aspects of other problems.

2) You may be underestimating, or have completely overlooked, the fact people named Ahmed may have higher in-group preferences for hiring than Johns as well. Yet there aren't as many of them in the US, so them calling each other back wouldn't show up in the very general statistic brought here.

Due to variance, Ahmed may have cases of way above average callbacks, and way below average callbacks, whether dealing with his in groups or not. Additionally, their probability of landing a job per callback may not be identical. Think about what you're saying. People discriminate against Ahmed because of his name. Imagine how interested in him a firm would have to be to get past that filter and then actually call him back, right? The job is as good as his for all we know.

3) If Ahmed has a base of 50 callbacks and John has 75 and they both get a job anyway, I can't commit to seeing there is much of a problem here, still. Like what are we talking about, did Ahmed and John's resumes both contain their 4 years at St. Christopher's Catholic School under education? This is not pure facetiousness; I really believe the ability for social science researchers to correctly conduct a blind controlled experiment with a middle school level statistic and get any meaningful conclusion about the world should be taken with a grain of salt.

4) People with Jewish names are less likely to get calls back, but make more money than the national average. Is this balanced, a fair penalty that evens out, or do we need affirmative action for them while using 1960s EOs to force companies to lower their pay and redistribute it to coworkers/subordinates? These are all hopefully difficult questions, that happily remain rhetorical - as long as we don't adopt the mantle of social engineering hubris that modern leftism would mandate us to.

5) Forcing Google to raise Ahmed's frontend developer salary by 30% and promote him to team lead does not remedy the fact that there are poor, un(der)educated Ahmeds out there with grim communities and prospects. At all. It helps: Possibly an HR employee, a consultant, a government official, and maybe even a lawyer justify their existence. Oh and it helps the already comfy upper/middle class Ahmed who has a career at a Magnficent 7 company. This is certainly good for employment, but not in the way we want - it does nothing for the real Ahmed we should be worried about or have empathy for. It in fact placates us as we pat ourselves on the back for thinking we achieved something, while not understanding anything about the complications of the world.

6) There are thresholds in the law (something like 5/15/25/50 employees depending on the regulation) where the government presumably realizes it can't bother distinguishing discrimination from basic free association among small groups of people re:employment. Or that it would be just Orwellian/prohibitively difficult to attempt to. Other than that, there are labor laws in place, there are regulators and there are lawyers ready to sue at a moment's notice as it remains illegal to discriminate under protected characteristics. I tend to find those protections acceptable as is, if applied and applied correctly.

So in other words, it's okay if Ahmed's job opportunities are limited due to his name (or skin color), but if a white guy doesn't get his preferred job once in a while due to DEI initiatives, now that is a problem, am I reading your stance right?

Of course you aren't, you just made it up, thanks for asking.

On January 25 2025 16:41 Salazarz wrote:
I don't think anyone in this thread believes that diversity and inclusion can be brute forced by mandating all minorities get an X% raise to bring them up to national average, or by introducing hard quotas for every job position, or anything else similarly ridiculous -- I certainly don't. But there's a whole lot of ground to cover between 'let the invisible hand of the free market decide' and 'hire X number of gay black communist women or be prosecuted by federal law.'

Thanks for the olive branch.

On January 25 2025 16:41 Salazarz wrote:
When Ahmed gets 50 callbacks while John gets 75 while applying for the same jobs with the same CV, that is a massive problem.

Last time you ignored the follow up I was okay, but at this point you're intentionally engaging in willful ignorance towards the inconvenient inquiries that may cause us to have to expand our worldview.

Callbacks are not offers. Ahmed may have a higher overall chance of being hired. Ahmed may have a lower unemployment rate when controlled for socioeconomic status. Ahmed may be less likely to get fired once he's hired. Ahmed may have higher starting salaries. You do not need a wide imagination to explore this - you just need basic skepticism that the person trying to sell you a worldview would obviously only show the smallest most closely magnified part that might possibly support their worldview.

Uneven callbacks in this case is exactly what you would expect and do get under race conscious DEI systems. The pools of white applicants and Arab/Muslim applicants may not have equal distributions for Fortune 500 companies. Ahmed's resume may be 50th percentile among his demographic. John's may be more exceptional among alllllll the underqualified but privileged white people who assume they have a shot and are flooding the applicant pool.

+ Show Spoiler +

There can be another cause why John's resume would outperform a bottom-heavy white applicant pool when the same Ahmed's resume wouldn't: Perhaps the company is in LA, and Johns from the whole country are applying, because as a larger group they have more people with the economic security to consider cross-country uprooting for a job, whereas Ahmeds only in the expensive and elite LA area are applying.

That would also lead to Ahmed having fewer callbacks as he isn't competitive enough vs. the other Ahmeds that Obama or Biden forced the company to consider and hire ahead of him.

This is somewhat analogous to what happens at universities when you get underprivileged Asian students from broken homes and 1550 SATs getting nowhere because they're lumped in with 1600s from upper class stable families.

You say oBlade no, surely you're just making this up. No, in the case of Jewish names, what I said is literally true. Their names get fewer callbacks. They make more than national average. They're a minority. What degree of ~~Nazi~~communist fiddling do we need to right this terrible injustice?

On January 25 2025 16:41 Salazarz wrote:
When Timmy gets paid $100,000 but Willy, who has the exact same experiences and qualifications yet happens to be black, gets paid $80,000 doing the same job, that is a massive problem.

That's already illegal if they also have the same skill/productivity and can't be differentiated by how well/much they work, or some other factor. Which is usually how the world works outside of hypotheticals. However, even in the case of being identical, it's not a massive problem because the company and both workers entered a voluntary contract, they're both doing well and supporting themselves. Willy may be the future beneficiary of a DEI-based race promotion track that's closed to Timmy because the anti-racists counted too many whites.

A good example is Ricci v. DeStefano. A fire department tested 118 people for a promotion. None of the people that passed were black, so instead of promoting 3 people, they promoted nobody, on the assumption they might get accused of a racism.

By the way, a third Jimmy might also be white and only make $80k and not $100k but nobody realized it was just that he's more conservative, less confrontational, less proactive and aggressive at negotiating salaries. Or he signed a contract when the labor pool was more competitive, unlike Timmy who joined the company when he had more leverage due to being the only one capable of doing the job, which is why he could land a higher salary.

On January 25 2025 16:41 Salazarz wrote:
Lashing out at the fight against inequality as 'leftist propaganda' and 'made up social studies bullshit' is ridiculous given how severely minorities continue to be disadvantaged in the US.

Not "social studies." "Social science." Have you never encountered the distinction between the social and natural sciences before and noticed the difference between what they're studying, their methods and objectivity?

"This number is 9% bigger than that number" is an interesting factoid. It piques curiosity and invites follow-up investigations. On its own it means jack shit.

The second half of your sentence is your own assumption. It's not one of my axioms.

On January 25 2025 16:41 Salazarz wrote:
If you thought existing DEI initiatives aren't all effective and could be improved, I'd be amongst the first to agree with you. But I don't see you proposing any actual solutions, and the whole 'just hire the best candidate for the role lul' thing doesn't actually work in the real world.

I do not have a "real solution" for the fact that some Fortune 500 companies call back identical blind white sounding resumes 9% more than black sounding ones.

You want things to do to help disadvantaged people, take crime and drugs out of poor communities, invest in their communities and infrastructure, promote family stability and give them education and school choice, and create job and business opportunities. Not play musical chairs to see which social constructs will be slightly more and slightly less middle and upper class and how many peanuts in fines the trillion dollar companies will pay to make us feel like we changed the world.

On January 25 2025 19:36 Gorsameth wrote:

Show nested quote +

Wasn't that complaining that FEMA wasn't doing enough for them?
Like literally the exact opposite of what they are doing now.

Nobody on God's green Earth is complaining that FEMA is helping Democrats. The "conservatives" (or more accurately, the Americans) are thinking about this issue more than you and have been consistent for a long time. The complaints are the same as they were months ago. That FEMA is incompetent and sucks.

Sadist

United States7166 Posts

January 25 2025 12:51 GMT

#94363

Oblade why do you say FEMA is incompetent and sucks? Can you provide some more detail?

Magic Powers

Austria3709 Posts

January 25 2025 13:02 GMT

#94364

On January 25 2025 19:18 BlackJack wrote:

Show nested quote +

For the record, this is the study cited previously in the thread, which is the most recent and largest study of its type.

The white/black gap was about 9% and they found no significant gap between men/women as some firms favored men and other firms favored women.

So the results of this study would tell us that Lakesha gets 50 callbacks while Adam and Jane get 55.

Up to 25% race gap depending on the industry. Nice try.

GreenHorizons

United States22664 Posts

January 25 2025 16:48 GMT

#94365

On January 25 2025 10:56 Sermokala wrote:

Show nested quote +

On January 25 2025 01:18 GreenHorizons wrote:

On January 24 2025 07:31 WombaT wrote:

On January 24 2025 03:20 GreenHorizons wrote:
The calls for informing on immigrants to your local gestapo are already going out

After watching billionaires fighting to kiss Trump's ass like this is the premier of a new Apprentice I fully expect cities and states to help him crackdown on immigrants under threats of prosecution by Trump.

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has directed prosecutors to investigate officials who resist immigration enforcement efforts, intensifying a sweeping crackdown that Trump launched the day he took office.

In a memo seen by Reuters, Trump's acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, told Justice Department staff that state and local authorities must cooperate with the immigration crackdown and federal prosecutors "shall investigate incidents involving any such misconduct for potential prosecution."

www.reuters.com

Predictably gross.

I feel your fine sig quote is often apt, but it feels even more so now.

People like to look at history and think 'If that was me back then, I would have...' We're living through history, and the truth is, whatever you are doing now is probably what you would have done then"

+ Show Spoiler +

If the driving force of such sentiment really was legitimate concerns about employment prospects and the likes, one would expect to see at least a decent fraction of that anger directed to businesses that hire illegal migrants and clamping down there too.

That it is not remotely close proportionally says rather a lot about the motivations of folks who would likely have touted on Anne Frank if they lived in a different time and place

About that sig quote...

Look guys, it is going to be at least a year before you are even thinking about falling in line behind Democrats (besides spending the next year or so making excuses for their impotence/incompetence). What harm would there be in redirecting a fraction of the time you'll spend arguing the most inane things you can with BJ, oBlade, posters like that, to sincerely exploring whether revolutionary socialism might offer something better than lib/Dem politics? At least while you wait to find out who you'll be voting for almost 2 years from now.

I don't expect everyone that gives revolutionary socialism a try to become one, but I'm confident that anyone here that refuses to try while perpetually engaging in bad faith distractions with the BJs and oBlades simply isn't serious about wanting to stop the rise of fascism in the US.

You all tried the Democrat strategy. They have nothing for you to do until it's voting time again. Just TRY revolutionary socialism (I'd settle for socialism generally at this point) on for a bit. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

We already do consider revolutionary socialism. And the consideration is that it has no depth to the concept. Its just a naive underdeveoped utopian ideal. Every "solution" is "lets just make everything worse so it can possibly be better".

Its watching star trek and saying "yeah this is the world we should be striving for and is where we should be developing to" and then forgetting that it requires magic level tech to handwave issues away.

We live in houses that are shitty, the solution isn't burning down the house so we can rebuild it better from scratch. We still have to live in that house. Everyone knows the house isn't shitty, it would be really helpful if you could help us convince the other half of the people who live in the house to try and improve it instead of being manipulated by them to help them make the house worse.

If nothing else, why are you expecting people to ally with you when you refuse to ally with them? You've been nothing but an insufferable ass to the people who are at least close to you politically. At least BJ and Oblade have actual positions to argue against instead of nebulous idealism that has no substance to it.

Clearly you haven't. You've all essentially steadfastly refused to actually engage with it in good faith. That said, I said plain "socialism" would be a fine start and am only asking for a portion of the time people dedicate to bickering the most inane things with the BJ's and oBlade types + Show Spoiler +

(also the "here's the latest stupid thing Trump/his supporters said/did. Let's point and laugh at how stupid people are for saying/doing that/for voting for him")

. Just a small redirection of a fraction of some of the time they already spend online arguing with idiotic bad faith talking points for no measurable benefit. Instead using that time working toward real solutions through a socialist framework. Meanwhile libs/Dems act like I'm demanding their first born instead of the absolute minimal level engagement required for functional democratic governance. If it's too much, just understand you can't/you refuse to do the minimum amount of work to maintain a democracy, let alone stave off fascism.

What you're describing is a utopian socialism, which revolutionary socialists roundly reject (and you would know if you bothered to learn about it). The house is already on fire (Trump won). I'm telling people to get out before it collapses on them. Dem/libs are doing the "this is fine" meme.

Democrats have no leader, no rudder, and everyone knows it would take ~40+ years of uninterrupted Democrat presidents just to undo the damage Trump is getting done in his first weeks. That means the US will be fascist if Democrats are what is supposed to stop it.

I think even BJ and oBlade will tell you that the libs/Dems are closer to them than they are to me politically. That's part of how libs/Dems and oBlade agree about how Democrats should move forward strategically. Surely oBlade has your best interests at heart and is giving you the best advice to counter the desired agenda oBlade shares with Trump/Republicans...

DarkPlasmaBall

United States43759 Posts

January 25 2025 16:52 GMT

#94366

Donald Trump secretly fired at least 17 independent watchdogs of federal agencies, without giving Congress the required one-month notice or any official explanation for why the inspectors general were removed. Their jobs are to monitor parts of the government to make sure that everything is running smoothly, ethically, and legally; given Trump’s Project 2025 promise of replacing non-partisan experts with MAGA sycophants who will do anything Trump says, this isn’t surprising. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-fires-17-independent-watchdogs-multiple-agencies-late/story?id=118097873

BlackJack

United States10180 Posts

January 25 2025 18:22 GMT

#94367

On January 25 2025 22:02 Magic Powers wrote:

Show nested quote +

Up to 25% race gap depending on the industry. Nice try.

I posted the average. Thanks for also cherry picking the biggest outlier to share, I guess.

KwarK

United States41934 Posts

January 25 2025 20:00 GMT

#94368

On January 25 2025 19:33 Taelshin wrote:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fema-fires-employee-who-told-workers-to-avoid-helping-trump-supporters-after-hurricane

I think that might be where some of the FEMA hate started and assuming a large org like FEMA has one employee like this maybe there is more. Its worth looking into at minimum because an org like this needs to be bi-partisan.

FEMA hate is decades old buddy. They think FEMA is planning to round them up and make them go to Walmart.

Zambrah

United States7106 Posts

January 25 2025 20:00 GMT

#94369

On January 26 2025 01:52 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
Donald Trump secretly fired at least 17 independent watchdogs of federal agencies, without giving Congress the required one-month notice or any official explanation for why the inspectors general were removed. Their jobs are to monitor parts of the government to make sure that everything is running smoothly, ethically, and legally; given Trump’s Project 2025 promise of replacing non-partisan experts with MAGA sycophants who will do anything Trump says, this isn’t surprising. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-fires-17-independent-watchdogs-multiple-agencies-late/story?id=118097873

Cant wait to vote ourselves out of this situation!

I truly hope everyone who thought the system worked in any capacity now understands it works exclusively for the worst of the most powerful.

KwarK

United States41934 Posts

January 25 2025 20:04 GMT

#94370

Oblade declaring that to help black communities we need to support education and “school choice” is pretty silly given “school choice” is the slogan they came up with for “my white child shouldn’t have to go to the same school as all these ‘inner city’ kids”. They’re literally still mad about desegregation.

Magic Powers

Austria3709 Posts

January 25 2025 22:27 GMT

#94371

On January 26 2025 03:22 BlackJack wrote:

Show nested quote +

I posted the average. Thanks for also cherry picking the biggest outlier to share, I guess.

MP: "25% of my house is on fire, please help quick!!"
BJ: "Why the rush? According to the statistics only 9% of your neighborhood is on fire."
MP: "Yeah, and 0% of your neighborhood is on fire. Stop being so selfish and help me right now!!"
BJ: "Honestly I'd really like to, but according to my information you're a statistical outlier. I guess you're out of luck."

BlackJack

United States10180 Posts

January 25 2025 22:58 GMT

#94372

Is that supposed to be your argument for why we should reject the mean to focus instead on the biggest outlier? For a seemingly intelligent person the amount of nonsense you post is a statistical outlier.

Magic Powers

Austria3709 Posts

January 25 2025 23:36 GMT

#94373

On January 26 2025 07:58 BlackJack wrote:
Is that supposed to be your argument for why we should reject the mean to focus instead on the biggest outlier? For a seemingly intelligent person the amount of nonsense you post is a statistical outlier.

Statistics are not your strong suit, I know. That "25% outlier" is only the biggest portion of the 9%. It's an entire industry that discriminates 25% against a black sounding name.
Your terrible understanding of statistics is kinda irrelevant compared to black people facing racism. It's also a great example for why CRT even had an argument to begin with: because you use statistics incorrectly to justify racism.

Actually I have an idea. Lets apply the 25% name discrimination to your name and whichever industry you're working in. We can then see whether or not you'll apologize for that kind of racism.

BlackJack

United States10180 Posts

January 26 2025 06:00 GMT

#94374

On January 26 2025 08:36 Magic Powers wrote:

Show nested quote +

First of all, no. One company of the many they tested was at 25% by their calculations. The 2 worst scoring were both autoparts stores but there were also other auto parts stores like O'Reilly Auto Parts and AutoZone that were in the middle of the pack so you can't claim the entire industry was at 25%.

Secondly it's still not a very good point to analyze how bad a problem something is generally.

BJ: The infection fatality rate of COVID is <1%.
MP: Nice try BJ, but actually over 25% of geriatric, ventilator-dependent, long-term care residents will die if they contract COVID. How would you like it if you were a geriatric, ventilator-dependent, long-term care resident?

Uldridge

Belgium4558 Posts

January 26 2025 08:41 GMT

#94375

What % of the population is significant to you, Blackjack?

I'd argue that the trap, from a certain point onwards, is focusing on % and not absolute numbers. 500k people, for example are, on an absolute level, quite a bit of people, but they're only 0.15% of the US population.

BlackJack

United States10180 Posts

January 26 2025 09:21 GMT

#94376

On January 26 2025 17:41 Uldridge wrote:
What % of the population is significant to you, Blackjack?

I'd argue that the trap, from a certain point onwards, is focusing on % and not absolute numbers. 500k people, for example are, on an absolute level, quite a bit of people, but they're only 0.15% of the US population.

Significant to what? Depends what we are talking about. For example 10 people dying of cancer won’t have the same weight to me as 10 people being brutally murdered.

I think it’s important that people accurately understand the scope of things. For example there have been polls that show people on the left drastically overestimate the number of black people killed by police and drastically overestimate the likelihood of being hospitalized for COVID compared to people on the right. It’s easier to find common ground on a prescription if we can all agree on the scale of the problem in the first place. If someone thinks discrimination from law enforcement doesn’t exist and another person thinks law enforcement is genociding black people then they will never see eye to eye.

KT_Elwood

688 Posts

January 26 2025 10:14 GMT

#94377

Without voter surpression, Trump might have lost:

https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/

Good thing for Putin, since Trump just cut all the help for Ukraine.

Also good thing for Netanyahu, since Trump suggest to "clear out the thing" .. talking about Gaza.. and rebuild housing in other countries.

Acrofales

Spain17827 Posts

January 26 2025 11:04 GMT

#94378

On January 26 2025 19:14 KT_Elwood wrote:
Without voter surpression, Trump might have lost:

https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/

Good thing for Putin, since Trump just cut all the help for Ukraine.

Also good thing for Netanyahu, since Trump suggest to "clear out the thing" .. talking about Gaza.. and rebuild housing in other countries.

It is increasingly clear that the US has no interest in being a modern democracy. How are vote tallies secret for at least a year after the election? The only countries I can think of that do that are (a) banana republics or (b) dictatorships masquerading as democracies (Russia, Venezuela, ...)

The US may have had a forward thinking constitution in the 18th century, but its core structure remains untouched since and is now incredibly outdated. It is time to throw it in the trash and start again.

Magic Powers

Austria3709 Posts

January 26 2025 12:33 GMT

#94379

On January 26 2025 15:00 BlackJack wrote:

Show nested quote +

All I'm reading is "I know better than the scientific researchers". Not a single valid argument why that research is flawed. Just admit you think you're better than people who study these things for a living.

Magic Powers

Austria3709 Posts

January 26 2025 12:35 GMT

#94380

Just as I said Trump (and fascism) won because democracy broke. But some people prefer to stick their heads in the sand.

Edit: and to nobody's surprise it's in part because of racism:

"If the purges, challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast."

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