this thread is awful — Maw

A complete waste of time, space and energy... :roll:

Perhaps participants might want to consider that there are more important issues to be considered: global warming, resource depletion, environmental destruction and pollution and accelerated extinction of flora and fauna and exponentially increasing economic complexity and instability.

What a fucking wank! — Janus

This is one of the better threads in quite some time in my view. Even if it might be frustrating to see intelligent people disagreeing on some fundamental aspects of what meaningful democracy means, the role of police and other state sanctioned violence and violence (and everything less than it) as a political instrument for citizens.

I actually also see similarities between for instance racism and the insistence of race being grounded in biology and the insistence global warming is a hoax. If we're incapable of convincing people racism is bullshit on stilts, we won't fare much better with the other issues.

It is as condescending as thinking that every social democrat is actually for Marxism-Leninism and authoritarian communism. That they 'just disguise' themselves as believing in things like democracy. — ssu

Social Democrats are just badly informed Marxists. :razz:

I'm replying sideways to csalisbury, streetlightX and Noble Dust I guess.

We can commentate without participating and still know what we're talking about. Just look at football. So I'm not sure about the necessity of things having wordly consequences outside of this thread.

I find the comment that there is an inherent asymmetry between an platformed speaker and regular Joes persuasive. I doubt this is fixed through deplatforming or disrupting speakers. First, half of the time the whole invite is troll baiting. I sincerely doubt serious Conservative students care about Milo's brainfarts. It's just to set up the situation so they can then claim neo-Marxists and SJWs are against free speech. And that is all about appearances which basically is what politics has devolved into.

That's the second point there, that it is indeed all about appearances. The insistence that it shouldn't is just a wish. Without a plan to enrich the debate it will not change.

The devolvement means clickbait, memes and one liners have become more effective as political tools to get the necessary votes to give a thin veneer of democratic legitimacy. But nuance is lost because it cannot be captured in three words, it needs to be teased out through debate. What if left is two sides who just repeat their positions ad infinitum without actually engaging the other side that we still need for meaningful political action.

Just look at Brexit and how this was initially attempted as something to be imposed on the "losers". How a certain segment of Brexiteers insisted on going at it alone and a parliament voting down every option without the ability to develop real alternatives.

We're creating schisms in societies by setting up every difference as irreconcilable, with us vs them, winner-takes-all, while we still need to live together. It's all pretty toxic.

And it gets worse because freedom of speech isn't meaningful without freedom to information and we don't get the information we need to make informed decisions because we're inundated with clickbait, memes and one liners.

Yeah, I suppose because it's done for the greater good it's all fine and dandy and totally lessens the vindictiveness of it all. :chin:

Pat Robertson thinks this is not the best approach, because it goes SO far, it's easy to strike down without having to wrestle with the nuances. Even so, if it's struck down - it will show the current SCOTUS supports SOME abortion rights. We'll see. — Relativist

And some support for limitations on it.

At least we know Kavanaugh will be in favour of abortion in case of rape because presumably a rapist like him doesn't want illegitimate children to walk around as proof.

Well admittedly, Trump did manage to raise taxes through tariffs without anyone complaining about it. No mean feat in the US. I think he's secretly a communist.

Might be in the automatic filter; it sometimes picks up things it shouldn't. When they (moderators) find time they'll check it.

Alternatively, there was an error sometimes that causes a new post that creates the next page in a thread not to show up but I haven't seen that happening in quite some time.

As others have said Biden is Hillary with a penis. — Wallows

That was me, glad you liked the analogy. :lol:

1. Alabama Lawmakers Vote to Effectively Ban Abortion in the State — Maw

This is just vindictive. No abortion even in case of invest and rape.

The insults are unnecessary and you certainly can't expect a European to be as informed or even interested in the details of certain aspects of US politics. It also makes you sound unconvincing.

Politics isn't about facts most of the time. Once I've got you classified as a Conservative I obviously don't have to listen to you because of course a Conservative would say such things and we all know they're wrong.

You do the same about me as a pansy leftist and we can happily talk past each other while your buddies confirm what stupid dimwits those leftists are. Meanwhile, I'll be once again reinforced in my belief that to be conservative requires you to be as ignorant today as you were yesterday.

*Cue world collapsing because we can't get shit done*

I stand corrected. I was going on reporting in the Guardian and that linked the tweet in my post which had one possible meaningful explanation. The tweets in the Time's article are pretty dumb.

not entirely, because it means American consumers wouldn't notice the effect of the tariffs as prices would remain more or less the same. So while technically they pay the tariff the economic burden would be shifted to the Chinese government and their tax payers.

I'm not sure whether that happened and I'm not sure that that's what Trump meant in his tweets but I'm also not sure what to make of his tweet otherwise.

Edit: also, those comments under his posts are depressing. Communication is really breaking down in social media. It's just opinions, opinions, hate or unswerving loyalty.

There's one possibility you're overlooking though and that's when the Chinese government increased subsidies to compensate for the tariffs. I don't know if that happened but I wouldn't be surprised.

See the problem. — Baden

Yes, an over reliance on probability to predict the future.

I'll buy you a beer when Trump loses.

dude, polls had Clinton winning with a 90% likelihood. Excuse me for not taking them too seriously.

You're straw manning up the ying yang. Nobody here made issue with the number of deported but the treatment of immigrants. Obama deported illegal immigrants that were convicted criminals (which is explained in the first article you linked!) and only separated adults from children if ICE thought they were a danger to the children or if they were convicted felons or caught in a criminal act (drug running). Trump criminalised border crossings causing a split of families in every instance, which up to then was dealt with as a civil procedure not requiring the seperation of families because they could be detained together. Equivocating the two as basically the same is rather missing the point spectacularly.

Wishful thinking I'm afraid. Biden is just ms. Clinton but with a dick. That is to say, mainstream Democrats don't appeal as much as you think. Trump's appeal is and was because he isn't part of the establishment. Pitting him against an establishment Democrat is not going to do much.

Not even relevant for pointing out your argument wasn't representative of how things work in practice.

great argument.

1. I'm white.
2. There are sanctions against my use of the n-word.
3. Black people say the n-word without sanctions.

C. Therefore there is a contradiction that can only be resolved by

C1. Black people should stop saying it
C2. I should be allowed to say it. — frank

1. I'm a guy.
2. There are sanctions against me calling my wife's friends "bitch".
3. My wife and her friend say "bitch" without sanctions.

C. Therefore there is a contradiction that can only be resolved by

C1. Wife and friends should stop saying it
C2. I should be allowed to say it.

Yeah, but no. I'll leave it to you to figure out where you're going wrong.

This process of a group of people co-opting a word originally intended as derogatory of that group as a badge of honour is a very common process. That the word continues to be offensive when not used by people part of that group (or sub-culture as jamalrob describes it) is apparently confusing to some. However, it shouldn't be.

I can't say to a co-worker "you're such an asshole sometimes" when he takes the last cookie from the jar because it's unprofessional and unacceptable in the given context. I can say it to my best friend. I can flip my finger at a friend, I'd better not do so at a random stranger. If my wife calls her best friend "bitch" in a playful manner, I'd be pretty retarded to think I'm privileged to call her best friend "bitch" as well. It doesn't work that way.

We apply double standards all the time. Black people get to use that word, we honkies don't and we lost the right to do so because our dads and granddads were assholes to black people.

Lock him up! Lock him up!

EDIT: Whatever. We all know the economy is humming along nicely and Trump will get re-elected. Meanwhile, the Democrats still don't know whether they want to be somewhat socialist or not and without a coherent message their bid for the presidency is doomed to fail. They need to stop pandering to special interests and tap into the overarching issues of justice, such as tax evasion/exemption of the rich and corporations, job security, health care.

It's not right that many people are one hospital bill away from poverty. It's not right people need to work 2 full-time jobs to just make ends meet. It's not right you're forced to wear a diaper because you can't take a break from your assembly line work. It's not right you have to sleep in your car even though you have a job. It's not right the American Dream has become just that... just a dream instead of reality people can aspire to even with the lowest paid job. If society cannot afford basic dignity for low wage labour then it's simply barbaric.

Were those national passports or documents guaranteeing safe passage? Precursors to national passports have existed even in Eqypt before the Roman empire. And the second step is to use such passports to enforce immigration policy.

Yet the vast majority of people thinking that borders shouldn't be totally open aren't white nationalists. — ssu

It's interesting to put this in a historic context. We've been issuing passports since about 1912 (taking the Brits) and the rest of Europe a bit later. We didn't really start enforcing immigration control until after WWII. The whole idea of closing borders for people is rather new.

I haven't read or heard what Paglia has to say about rape so I'm just going by what people have written here. It appears as if Paglia has chosen bad wording to communicate that she thinks rapes should be reported to the police rather than universities. I think if we intend the perpetrator to be punished for the crime, it's the only way to go.

It's unclear what exactly she means with "a university tolerating a complaint" though. It sounds harsh. A good faith interpretation could be exasperation at what victims expect from the complaint. A university isn't as well equipped to research a possible rape that happened 6 months ago as a police department. At the same time there's a lot of behaviour that's strictly not criminal but should still get a person expelled. So there's situations where a complaint is actually better but that concerns situations that don't qualify as rape.

So basically to me the sentence becomes meaningless without more context.

If I may ask: What unspeakable things did Trump do to your family? — fishfry

Why must it be personal and not what he has done, oh, say, to immigrant families by separating kids from parents?

How many lies does a person have to tell before he's a bad person?

And that many still don't think he's bad seems to me to be a cultural problem in the US (no sense of morals anymore) and the worst excess of the insane tribalism that passes for a political system over there.

To get the facts straight. Republicans continue to make the false assertion that Trump was exonerated of "collusion". The relevant facts are that there was not sufficient evidence for a prosecutable case of criminal conspiracy, but there was nevertheless a great deal of lying about the many interactions with Russians, as well as obstructive behavior that may have blocked finding the complete truth about conspiracy (particularly the manipulation of Manafort). — Relativist

But can you get "the facts straight" when there's no clear understanding of what collussion is and how the facts described by Mueller would fit? It just seems like an invitation to get into a semantic discussion.

Painkillers?

I don't know where you live but at least in the Netherlands you can get support in weening off of drugs. It would make sense to get that support lined up now before you run out of drugs and that way, hopefully the worst effects of withdrawal can be managed. Good luck.

There is indeed evidence of collusion. — Relativist

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to pursue this line of reasoning. As you say, the report has not looked into collusion because it is not a criminal term. l. So you're applying some common sensical meaning to what collusion entails (we don't have a set legal definition and jurisprudence dealing with its interpretation) and then set out to shoehorn facts of the report into evidence for something for which no evidentiary barrier is set. Why go down that road at all?

Which immediately underlines their wonderful, irrational cognitive dissonance "my culture/race is superior but I'm still afraid to be subjugated by foreigners".

Looking at it that way, I'm the ultimate white supremacist because I'm not afraid of losing my identity or being oppressed by foreigners or minorities.

But in all seriousness I think it is symptomatic of a lot of underlying fear. Being one hospital visit away from poverty, realising the American dream is dead for most, being hard working and seeing it doesn't pay off, the lack of dignity of low-skilled work, the idea you'll have to compete for jobs with these immigrants (which in some cases is real), etc. etc.

Trump has claimed — Maw

Also, I kind of shrug my shoulders whenever Trump claims anything but the fact there was a program and that other US senators and media take it seriously, that's more of a "wtf"-moment to me.

I don't like the guy from what I've read but what you wrote seems a lot to be inferred from what was quoted in this thread. So either you know more about him than I do, in which case it would be enlightening for you to share the relevant passages or quotes or you should stop making stuff up.

I had to use google for this, which for some reason makes me feel superior. — jamalrob

I thought being uninformed and disconnected from meme-rable pseudo-artistic works like two girls, one cup just makes you old (don't look that one up, trust me) but I'm happy to grant you this one.

Anyway, I reckon obscenity and disgust are crucial in any comprehensive discussion of sexuality, so I don't see any problem with that language. — jamalrob

I have to agree with that. I'm all about permissibility and at the same time am disgusted with the idea of caviar, which incidentally put me off of actual caviar. Saves me money I suppose.

10/10 for a potential ban on him ever engaging with a clitoris again (no-brainer). — Baden

That won't be necessary because he can't find it.

got it. You watch terrible porn...

on the surface maybe and that's discounting the uncomfortable positions porn is filled with. I'm pretty certain they're qualitatively different although, admittedly, I've never participated in porn so that's an assumption on my part.

Anecdotal evidence then. Or the weird assumption that porn is somehow representative of common sexual acts.

Also, what about me stimulating a clit during coitus (I'm a guy btw)?

And what about that girl that fingered herself while looking at me because she thought I was hot? How the fuck does that make me irrelevant? That made me super relevant at the time and I thought it was super hot too. There's a level of trust, openness and vulnerability involved that is far beyond banging away in a missionary position under the sheets with the lights out.

My psycho-analytical guess is that Scruton is disgusted with himself either for being excited about something he thinks is morally wrong or the insecurity it causes in him to make himself that vulnerable to the other. Since that uneasiness is caused by something the woman does, it obviously must be her fault.

Here's my prescriptive take on sex: "Have fun and don't kill each other".

Conservative intellectualism is funded by and is in service to capital — Maw

I don't know what to say about this. This is wrong on a few levels and unbecoming of you considering your regular quality of posts.

How did Scruton come to know about this practice of women rubbing their clits AND become aware of its widespread use?

Soros is a financing this conspiracy — Maw

Did you mean caravan?