If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
General politics thread (was: General U.S. politics thread)
Comments
But when it claims that Donald Trump said something outrageous...well, it actually turns out to be entirely true. And repeated several times, just to whip up the crowd.
The usual profile of Trump supporters being from economically-stressed areas may be more complex than you think.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/hillary-clinton-climate-team-226930
Clinton prepares to advocate strongly for action on climate change in both campaign rhetoric and assembling a policy advising team.
A nicely detailed rundown of how the Republican Party has been courting hatred and bigotry for political gain, since the 1950s.
http://imgur.com/7gQJGPe
So I've got this one article that seems interesting, so I wanted to share. It's applicable on a greater scale than US alone and it could certainly serve as a basis for discussion for more philosophically inclined amongst us, but it mostly reflects on the state of US presidential race, so I'm posting it in this thread.
Oh hey it's a Super-Rare Arch-Conservative Ghost Pepe as well.
You're not my shield, Milo.
No, actually, there's just a bunch of philosophical wankery going on, and people attempting to find meaning in their lives by chaining themselves to philosophical and political ideology.
Now, they have a point to say that there's something missing from this "everyone is a statistic" type of thinking that the modern culture-independent economics/business mindset has.
But what's missing is respect for cultures, not culture war.
No one wants to erase the study of "dead white males" -- and do of course note that the study of "dead white males" is widely and overwhelming practiced today. History from this perspective is a part of history, but there are other parts of history that are less often told. People want to tell more of other parts, because, y'know, there are other dead people than dead white males, as there are dead white females, as well as dead non-white females and dead non-white males.
Now, I guess these so-called "natural conservatives" (going by the name the article gives them) have a bit more of a point if they're talking about a zero-sum situation such as a gen-ed world history class. But do consider that right now, world history classes basically focus on western civilization, while the other parts of the world are big question marks that no one fills in until westerners come in contact with them. But there are clearly people there. And the subject is "world history", not "western European and recent North American history".
Just because we didn't used to know as much about ancient Africa or ancient South America doesn't mean that they don't count. In fact, learning about them can tell us more about understanding how the world is today.
As for hero worship, it would be nice to note that people aren't perfect. Now the only reason that people talking about worshipping famous figures less seem to be always talking about dead white people is because these famous figures just happen to frequently be dead white people, and mainly dead white men. If you got more statues and more worshipping of dead other kinds of people, there'd be people discussing how they did "unheroic" things in their lifetimes.
Besides, hero-worship is a little silly when what you're actually admiring is values like bravery, which only happened to be exhibited by certain actions of famous people (whose lives were always far more complex than you can summarize in a quote at the base of any statue).
The mistake here is thinking that it's race and culture that makes people sort themselves into groups that come into conflict. Race and culture are just two convenient excuses for this. Give a large and dense enough group of people -- say, basically anything bigger than a small town, or even a small town itself -- you can find long-running feuds with strongly-partisan opponents lining both sides. This even happens within a family.
If there is something that can be fought over, humans will fight over it. Differences in race and culture are mere excuses.
There's nothing wrong with pondering the eventual fate of anything.
The problem comes with using that pondering to fuck over someone else.
This is very true.
I want to know what the "back of the campus -- or in another campus" thing is. They might be talking about affirmative action.
As for what "absurd feminist positions with no basis in fact" are being referred to, I don't have a guess. And what the last bit refers to, I don't know either.
The problem with this is that sometimes, intentionally or unintentionally, the idea of "build[ing] homogeneous communities" is used in order to exclude others and generate resentment -- especially resentment born from inequality of economic resources, and thus economic opportunities.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/02/the-national-economic-implications-of-a-taco-truck-on-every-corner/
Yes someone actually said this.
Then again Donald Trump is actually running for president so whatever that is can be journalism too I guess.
I don't like her fearmongering on vaccines and anti-science positions like that. I thought the Greens respected science, but I guess it's selective.
...at least she probably knows that Aleppo is?
Also stuff with GMOs and general "chemophobia" or "artificial-phobia". Also sorta nutty positions to take.
I care a ton about climate change, to the point where I study climate change policy, so don't say that I'm anti-environmentalist or someshit. I just actually care about good scientific reasoning to back things up.
Similarly, I don't unconditionally love nuclear power, nor do I unconditionally hate it. Incidentally, I hear that they're developing a molten salt reactor that is a safer procedure and can even use what is currently considered spent fuel to generate power. That seems promising.
Certainly a possibility but I think Lauer got enough flak even from his own industry colleagues that people learned a lesson from him.
Regardless, I'm not exactly "worried" on a personal level. If it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen, and this in particular is a piece of the puzzle that I have no control over so it's kinda pointless to fret over it.
I haven't joined the chorus of people lambasting Matt Lauer, but I could certainly join a chorus of people lambasting the debate moderators if they did that.
If Hillary Clinton is not sufficiently progressive (even though everyone
has a different standard for that), like backing off on debt relief for
college, voting rights restorations, minimum wage, and such, then go
primary her in 2020.
If she at least tries, and fails, it's basically what would've happened with Bernie anyway, so there you go.
Presentation is huge in these debates. Cause, you know, on policy, it's not even a contest here, and by default, Hillary wins by a landslide on that.