Author Topic: The Politics Thread v3  (Read 95803 times)

Offline dman11235

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #420 on: November 12, 2016, 09:43:30 AM »
Chemus.  Do you believe that government should be allowed to prevent people from marrying, in a religious, civil sense? As in, do you believe government should prevent a business or church from doing the ceremony, with no legal ramifications and should be allowed to prevent people from saying that they are married? Ignoring all the benefits that couples get, just, should government be allowed to tell people what they call themselves with regards to marriage?
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Offline Chemus

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #421 on: November 12, 2016, 10:53:14 AM »
No dman, especially stripped of the legal ramifications, I don't think government should be involved in marriage. It's not a large issue of mine though.

And Ranieh, government power, indeed anyone's power, is a means to 'any' end. The more power someone has, the more options they have. I don't trust in the benevolence of government (politicians and bureaucrats) to exercise those options, so I want the power reduced. The powers of the government are increasing (ACA, unopposed executive orders, etc) and that scares me.

And you appear to have ignored the paragraph you quoted. Population is not necessarily the only factor; increased interaction, esp. negative interaction, with police == greater risk. And correlation != causation; skin color or conviction rates may not play a role. There's no work for dialogue by BLM; skin color is the only important factor I hear from them.
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Offline dman11235

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #422 on: November 12, 2016, 11:17:23 AM »
Very well.  Are you aware that what I said above was what the law was?  And that is what Mike Pence wants it to be?  They want government to be involved in the marriage and relationships of people, preventing them from being in a relationship with someone of their own gender.  I understand it is not a large issue with you, but can you understand how it can be a large issue for someone else?  Particularly someone who is gay or has gay loved ones?

EDIT: Also, this is something I don't think a lot of conservatives get.  As a liberal, my view about government is that it exists solely to be a protector and benefactor of the people.  Very, very similar to what you said you view as the role of government.  Our differences lay with how best to go about this.  I understand how government providing healthcare can benefit its citizens more than simply not instituting laws about healthcare can.  Using this example, the government regulates the industry simply to protect its citizens.  And because this regulation does(n't) increase cost, a subsidy for the people would benefit them (the regulations actually don't increase cost.  That is a fallacy.  The regulations actually have reduced cost, because without regulations we could and in fact have in the past had cartels and monopolies which artificially raised prices on things). So it's still under the 'protection' mission that these things come about.  Same thing with the social safety nets, like Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare.  Those are protecting the citizens.  Things like police and fire obviously protect.  Military too.  But so does the mass transit systems that a lot of cities have produced (more efficiently in other places like Europe, but still in the US).  Those things protect because it makes lives easier for the people using them, making it easier for organizations like police to move about (if there are fewer cars, that means it's easier to drive).  Even such frivolities like public parks protect.  They protect the mind, making people happier, and making it so QOL is better.  But the more important aspect of things that improve quality of life are that they generate revenue.  A happier populous is a more productive populous.  A more educated populous (free/subsidized education) is a more productive populous.  This generates the excess revenue used to fund those other, more concrete protection thing.  If it wasn't for our public education system, we would not be as successful of a country as we are now.
« Last Edit: November 12, 2016, 11:43:06 AM by dman11235 »
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Offline Solo

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #423 on: November 12, 2016, 12:51:07 PM »
Quote
As a liberal, my view about government is that it exists solely to be a protector and benefactor of the people.

The state is a violent machine.


The proletariat must seize the means of production and do away with the state. ¡Viva la Revolución!
« Last Edit: November 12, 2016, 12:53:02 PM by Solo »
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Offline Raineh Daze

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #424 on: November 12, 2016, 12:56:49 PM »
No dman, especially stripped of the legal ramifications, I don't think government should be involved in marriage. It's not a large issue of mine though.

And Ranieh, government power, indeed anyone's power, is a means to 'any' end. The more power someone has, the more options they have. I don't trust in the benevolence of government (politicians and bureaucrats) to exercise those options, so I want the power reduced. The powers of the government are increasing (ACA, unopposed executive orders, etc) and that scares me.

And I trust in the restrictions and oversight that politicians have to operate under far more than market freedom. Businesses exist to make money and without something to enforce regulations, that's never good for the people working there. And ethical businesses tend not to have the same wealth as vast industrial conglomerates. At least the government itself doesn't operate on a purely monetary motive and can therefore choose to do things because it could help people.

I'm in complete opposition to the "government has no place in healthcare" idea, for one. It's business that I don't see having a place in operating such things. Same as with the police, or fire services. It's profiteering entirely off of saving lives and that's disturbing. It's something that anyone could need, and even more likely than the other two, and which everybody in society benefits from.

Privatised prisons are nearly as creepy.

Quote
And you appear to have ignored the paragraph you quoted. Population is not necessarily the only factor; increased interaction, esp. negative interaction, with police == greater risk. And correlation != causation; skin color or conviction rates may not play a role. There's no work for dialogue by BLM; skin color is the only important factor I hear from them.

'Random' searches (when legal) disproportionately target black men despite the chance that there is, in fact, something illegal still hovering on the level of 'not at all'. When police unintentionally focus on one group more than justified, that's going to yield an increased chance of getting killed.

Then there's the bizarre drug sentencing mentioned before.

Offline oslecamo

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #425 on: November 12, 2016, 01:06:02 PM »
Quote
The world's real problem is population. Unless we can stabilize it, nothing we try to fix will stay fixed. But that's racist talk because right now the most populous areas, and the fast growing ones aren't white. Thus we can't discuss anything that might work, regardless of its palatability.

Birth rates level off as a country gets more prosperous and free. So we just need to make everyone better off. Which is the point of liberal economics in the first place, according to Adam Smith.

Except that if everybody suddenly started making as much trash as the populations in the USA and Europe, things will get pretty ugly pretty fast.

Heck, there's already a big pollution problem in China with all the factories and new cars around. And that's after the one-child policy bringing the birth rate down.

Last but not least there's certainly not enough energy for everybody to have first world living standards right now even if the companies didn't charge anything for it.

Offline Solo

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #426 on: November 12, 2016, 01:10:25 PM »
Quote
The world's real problem is population. Unless we can stabilize it, nothing we try to fix will stay fixed. But that's racist talk because right now the most populous areas, and the fast growing ones aren't white. Thus we can't discuss anything that might work, regardless of its palatability.

Birth rates level off as a country gets more prosperous and free. So we just need to make everyone better off. Which is the point of liberal economics in the first place, according to Adam Smith.

Except that if everybody suddenly started making as much trash as the populations in the USA and Europe, things will get pretty ugly pretty fast.

Heck, there's already a big pollution problem in China with all the factories and new cars around. And that's after the one-child policy bringing the birth rate down.

Last but not least there's certainly not enough energy for everybody to have first world living standards right now even if the companies didn't charge anything for it.

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Offline dman11235

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #427 on: November 12, 2016, 07:43:03 PM »
Quote
The world's real problem is population. Unless we can stabilize it, nothing we try to fix will stay fixed. But that's racist talk because right now the most populous areas, and the fast growing ones aren't white. Thus we can't discuss anything that might work, regardless of its palatability.

Birth rates level off as a country gets more prosperous and free. So we just need to make everyone better off. Which is the point of liberal economics in the first place, according to Adam Smith.

Except that if everybody suddenly started making as much trash as the populations in the USA and Europe, things will get pretty ugly pretty fast.

Heck, there's already a big pollution problem in China with all the factories and new cars around. And that's after the one-child policy bringing the birth rate down.

Last but not least there's certainly not enough energy for everybody to have first world living standards right now even if the companies didn't charge anything for it.

Waa waa waa things aren't perfect yet :P  China's problem stems more from the government policies and whatnot than population gross.Sure the population has an effect on it, but the lack of clean air standards there really hurts things.  Same with India.  India still burns poop for warmth in a lot of places.  Certain places in Europe have very high factory production but much less pollution.  Same with the US, but we aren't as good about pollution as Europe is.  The EU anyways.  As for energy needs....can I introduce you to my friend, fusion and fission power?

And Chemus, that whole drug sentencing thing is probably the biggest indicator of racism in the police force.  Not the biggest, the most apparent.  Crack cocaine carries a long jail sentence for possession.  Powder cocaine carries, I believe, a fine, and probation.  They are both the same thing, but in different forms, a large(r) crystal vs a powder.  One is used more heavily by urban blacks, the other by wealthy whites.  The sentences were decided on long after those were the stereotypes associated with those particular drugs.  And the urban blacks got hit with the much larger punishment for the same offence.  And then of course there's stop and frisk, the fact that a black male is more likely to go to jail than a white male for the same offence and for doing literally nothing, just being held, etc. etc.
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Offline Chemus

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #428 on: November 12, 2016, 11:37:35 PM »
I brought up BLM because of it's inherent divisiveness. If they're really for fixing policing, they need a better slogan.

And I didn't say 50% 'incarceration rates' but 'incarceration for violent offenses'. I wasn't speaking about non-violent crime at all.

Here are the top 4 hits that a search of 'percentage of violent crime by race' got me. They're from American Renaissance, PolitiFact, Wikipedia, and InfoWars.

To varying degrees, all four articles show greater violence per-capita of the male black population. Presuming that that data is correct, then the kids who're black are likelier to encounter police because they're likelier to be reported for violence, and thus their risk of being shot by police increases.

Interestingly, I noticed in passing the hate crimes section in the Wikipedia Article. Whites and hispanics are lumped together and perpetrate, or are reported for, a smaller percentage of hate crimes than even the 62% white percentage of the population alone (and the data presented includes hispanic hate crimes too), at 58%. And reports of black hate crimes account for 18%, greater than their 13% population. White folks're racist.

BLM needs a better name, and a better message.
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Offline Raineh Daze

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #429 on: November 12, 2016, 11:51:18 PM »
The entire point of a name like that is to draw attention to a problem. Of course it's not a perfectly accurate statement of reality; same for clickbait, sensationalist headlines, research articles with alluring names and less interesting abstracts...

That's picking holes.

Offline Solo

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #430 on: November 13, 2016, 12:47:09 AM »
Chemus, what are your thoughts on [urlhttps://www.google.com/amp/mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.amp.html%3F0p19G%3De]the study of police treatment of minorities[/url] conducted by Dr. Fryer which tries to correct for different variables to determine how minorities are treated compared to whites?
« Last Edit: November 13, 2016, 01:08:36 AM by Solo »
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Offline Raineh Daze

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #431 on: November 13, 2016, 12:51:59 AM »
Broken link

Offline Solo

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #432 on: November 13, 2016, 01:08:53 AM »
Thanks. Fixed.
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Offline Chemus

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #433 on: November 13, 2016, 02:15:21 AM »
That it contradicts the main BLM narrative of cops shooting first more against blacks, and is at least looking at more types of data. BLM by its nature is, or appears to be, intentionally divisive, producing 'us vs. them', when I don't believe that there actually is an 'us' or a 'them'.

The articles I linked, plus at least one other suggest that perhaps the police are responding to resistance. The public narrative regarding police is that they are the antagonists, that they target blacks for crimes and mistreatment.

However, in the AmRen article, the data provided suggested that in the vast majority of reported violent interactions between blacks and other races, the offender was determined to be black; more than 80% of the time in the each case of white and hispanic violent interactions. I can't believe that the justice system, which already has significant scrutiny, is wrong more than 60% of the time. So, there's more than one side to this.

It's my opinion that youths and others who're black are effectively 'trained' to be mad at white people and police. That 'divide and conquer' is being used against us all.

(ps, link's still broken)
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Offline Solo

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #434 on: November 13, 2016, 02:24:31 AM »
Here is the study

Here is an NYT article on it, if you don't want to deal with the original paper.

My reading of the actual study leaves me with the understanding that while police are less likely to shoot blacks, they are more likely to use force for the purpose of compliance compared to whites, controlling for other variables. So the main problem is how police treat minorities routinely, as opposed to the relatively rare situations where a shooting occurs.

Study has limitations since not all police departments compile or release data, but this does indicate that there may be a real disparity in the use of force in the most common forms of police encounters.

I link this to you because, like with the global warming discussion earlier, you are the kind of person who makes fact based decisions. But, and please do not take this the wrong way, you don't have the time to investigate some issues deeply. The article debunking global warming, for instance, had massive flaws in the first section that are not apparent on casual inspection. So to with the issue of police use of force.
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Offline awaken_D_M_golem

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #435 on: November 14, 2016, 04:57:08 PM »
google search for Solo's article ... it looks like nytimes is pushing subscriptions extra hard right now :
https://www.google.com/search?q=surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

(lots of chatter on it outside of nytimes)



Check out this map of Counties that voted for Obama and switched to Trump :
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-voters-who-heavily-supported-obama-switched-over-to-trump/2016/11/10/65019658-a77a-11e6-ba59-a7d93165c6d4_story.html

Wow.
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Offline awaken_D_M_golem

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #436 on: November 17, 2016, 06:13:42 PM »
Military polls were way off, of the general populace (scroll down a bit).
http://www.militarytimes.com/articles/second-military-times-ivmf-poll-results
 :plot

Looks like the Officer corp heard Trump on McCain, loud and clear.
Johnson by +20% , is a very strong outlier , perhaps by more than
even the McMullin vote in Utah.
Those ballots are still being counted, along with other absentee votes.
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Offline Chemus

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #437 on: November 17, 2016, 10:47:30 PM »
This, however, is a poll. How did they vote? Additionally, unless you're comparing Enlisted to Officers, the spread in the poll of officers was listed as T: 26.2%, J: 31.3%, C: 31.7%, Clinton edging out Johnson. Enlisted strongly favored Trump, and disfavored Clinton. Perhaps they heard Bengazi loud and clear; 'what difference does it make now?'
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Offline Solo

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #438 on: November 17, 2016, 10:53:07 PM »
Perhaps they heard Bengazi loud and clear; 'what difference does it make now?'

I'm sorry: what are you referencing?
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Offline Chemus

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Re: The Politics Thread v3
« Reply #439 on: November 17, 2016, 11:00:35 PM »
Hillary Clinton, when being questioned on the Bengazi incident, Clinton said "Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans? At this point, what difference does it make?"
« Last Edit: November 17, 2016, 11:02:57 PM by Chemus »
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