Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Lord Shonus]

I get that, and only mentioned the Khyber Pass AK-47s as a fairly-famous reference point to how such a weapon could be made.

[WealthyRadish]

Oddly enough, by purely party affiliation Texas should also be purple.  Differing levels of voter turnout, gerrymandering, and the electoral college make it kind of a moot point tho.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Percentage votes cast for Hillary/Trump in 2016:

Population distribution:

Those are counties, not congressional districts. The county borders don't matter for any federal election, including the presidency.

Texas is, however, one of the most gerrymandered states in the country (you can see how the progressively more chimerical borders developed here), and lawsuits over racially discriminatory gerrymandering in Texas have gone to the supreme court after both redistrictings of the the last two cycles.

[bloop_bleep]

I have to strongly disagree with you, RedKing. Your statements are equivalent to somebody from the East Coast hating somebody from the West or wherever because they were raised differently.

If you've been subjected from birth to one point of view from your family members, your friends, and the media and literature you read/listen to, you tend to adopt that point of view. Humans are impressionable beings; if someone is born in a Christian family, they are raised a Christian and adopt Christian values. If they were born in a Muslim family, they are raised a Muslim and adopt Muslim values. If they were born in a Conservative family, they are raised a Conservative and adopt Conservative values. Attempting to convince someone who was a Conservative from the time they were born to become a Liberal by hating them for what they were taught since childhood is the perfect way to do the exact opposite of what you want.

Think about it -- if you or I were raised in an average Alabama family we would probably believe many things that the average Alabama family believe. These people believe the "fake news" narrative and many other narratives put forth by Republicans because that's the only thing they know. If they think these allegations are fake news (and many allegations are, if not this one specifically), they will believe that they are fake news, and vote for the man anyway. It is completely incorrect to degrade these people's intelligence or morality. They believe what they think is right because that is what they learned to believe.

[WealthyRadish]

I personally think it can be fine to compare your own values to someone else's and judge theirs as alien or stupid, and that the inherent subjectivity and difficulties in doing this are usually overstated. The trick is to also learn to judge your own stupid values against the values of others, and I think this process happens more easily (at least from passive observation under amiable settings) than many people think.

However, this is totally distinct from assessing the degree to which people are responsible for their stupid values (and everyone has stupid values), which is a far more complicated question drawing from many more areas of thought and innumerable unknowable details of a person's life. In my opinion it isn't a question worth pursuing, and that it is far more productive to just accept that people have stupid values, concentrating on improving your own stupid values wherever you are fortunate enough to notice them.

Anyway, my main point is that if you never compare your own values to others and judge them accordingly, improvement is impossible, and that conflating this with the question of personal responsibility out of a good-willed sense of tolerance can be harmful.

[hector13]

The thing is, bloop, that some of these people are saying that being accused of attempting to rape a teenager is making them more likely to vote for someone.

[Dunamisdeos]

@RedKing, at what point would you have handed out that label to yourself? At what point would you have become a person that no longer deserves another chance? Or are you outside the scale that you set for others?

It doesn't matter if they are good. It doesn't matter if at some point you stopped caring about changing the things you know are wrong with the world and decided that assigning a label of "more right" or "more good" was more important. It doesn't matter if they are a bad person, or if you are a good person, or if you fall on a happier place in whatever scale you judge others by. Your actions and your beliefs enable their system to continue. You are a living example of the fear they use to justify their actions, and you are thereby perpetuating everything you claim to be against.

In allowing ourselves to hate, we are then a part of the system we want to destroy. This isn't trite cliche, it's demonstrably true, and much more so in our ever-more-transparent society. The Far-Right constantly justifies its actions because they claim that the people they hate have it out for them, and that they have no choice but to hate in response to the hate they get from "ivory-tower big-city liberals". Their racism is paired with the idea that minorities hate them for the same reason they hate them, that there can BE no reconciliation with the other side because they are incapable of it. If we see this, and know that this is their justification (as anyone heavily involved in this does), and then we adopt their very principle, we are every inch as much a part of racism, inequality, and hate as they are.

The only way, and I mean the literal, sole, only way we will ever stop this as a society and as a race of thinking beings is to look into this abyss of hate, that lashes out at us to try and wear us down into what they expect us to be, and then not blink. It doesn't matter how we label them, or even if we are right for doing so, or even if they deserve to be hated because in doing so we are ensuring that future generations will never be free.

The TLDR question becomes: Do you want to lessen things like corruption and racism, or do you not? Frankly the truest thing you said here was that you don't give a shit.

@hector
Must disagree. A study in Alabama is saying that allegations of pedophilia coming from a set of people they have every reason on earth not to trust makes them more likely to be sympathetic to the defendant in question.

[hector13]

Why shouldn’t they trust them, though? Various media outlets around the world can’t all be liberal shivs. Try again.

People he used to work with are saying he was dating high school girls when he was in his 30s.

[smjjames]

Are any of the local not-liberal papers and media outlets reporting it? I've heard of three Alabama newpapers (don't know which ones) who unendorsed Moore and condemned him.

On top of the tribalism, we're seeing the media bubbles.

There's now two more accusers who say that they had the same encounters and another one who says that she, as an adult, had a similar sort of thing in the 90s.

[Dunamisdeos]

Just to be clear, I think that those allegations hold water.

What that article actually says is that 35% of people expected to vote were more likely to vote for him after hearing those allegations. Not that they are voting for him because they think he's pedophile. Those allegations are suddenly being reported on heavily by news outlets that have a clear bias in favor of his political opponents, and it's them that those people do not trust.

A good parallel would be (sorry for the tired example) Bill Clinton. His approval ratings right up until the end were upwards of 65%. This obviously does not mean that 66% of the country was pleased as punch with his sexual scandals. Likewise, it does not take any mental gymnastics to understand that 35% of Alabama are not in fact cheering on the idea of pedophilia.

[smjjames]

As I mentioned earlier, there was a new poll that came out with Moore behind Jones by 12 points. There's always a few days lag in the appearance of a response in the polls simply because the polls being taken at that time and shortly afterwards won't have been finished and released yet.

[Reelya]

These things are also usually like a "levy breaks" type of situation. At first there's a trickle and it looks like nothing is moving, then the right media outlets start condemning the person and then you see a rapid shift in opinion.

Cognitive dissonance is important here. When you say "person X did the bad thing" you're not just telling them that one fact which they believe or don't believe merely on the face of the evidence. If they have other belief systems that are attached to "person X" in any way, you're asking them to challenge entire associated belief systems.

That's why nobody challenges this stuff for e.g. Jared Fogle the Subway guy. People don't have a strong emotional attachment to Subways, and it's easy to separate the guy from the product even if they're total Subway fanatics.

But it also means ... the way that people solve cognitive dissonance is by taking the path of least resistance. They'll say he was a fake, and infiltrator, not a real conservative. Like how Subway disowned Fogle and you can buy a sandwich without believing you support pedos, the conservatives will "out" him as not representative, then he will be "safe" to ostracize. Right now he's too tied up with the whole belief system.

[smjjames]

Does the word conservative even have any real meaning these days? Outside of the strict dictionary definition. Roy Moore is pretty much the stereotypical gun toting and bible thumping conservative, but yet, if they call him a fake conservative, then what's a real conservative? Heh.

Some on the right have already disadvowed Moore, such as Drudge of Drudge Report and the ever Trump loving Hannity.

[Dunamisdeos]

So many people have taken their own meaning for every political label that I find it hard to nail anything down. Wikipedia has a helpful list of how absurd things have become.

Spoiler: The many flavors of conservative (click to show/hide)

Conservatism
Conservative liberalism
Cultural conservatism
Liberal conservatism
Libertarian conservatism
National conservatism
Neoconservatism
Neoreactionary
Paleoconservatism
Reactionary
Social conservatism
Traditionalist conservatism
Ultraconservatism

Spoiler: The unique tastes of liberalism (click to show/hide)

Classical liberalism
Conservative liberalism
Cultural liberalism
Economic liberalism
Georgism
Green liberalism
Individualism
Liberalism
Liberal democracy
Liberal feminism
Liberal-progressive
Liberal socialism
Market liberalism
National liberalism
Neoliberalism
Ordoliberalism
Progressivism
Republicanism
Social liberalism

That doesn't even take into account all the modern labels like alt-right and what have you.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

We've entered the age of the quantum uncertainty conservative. Everything Trump does is conservative by fiat, and everything that contradicts something Trump did or said before was just a misunderstanding. But also, everybody is a RINO, except when they aren't, fake news, it's all Democrat pedophiles.

Sad!

[hector13]

Conservative Liberalism appears in both.

Fake news!