Ouch. Translated into English, many or most (all?) of the benefits of Pre-K might come from selecting parents who care about education, or who have the resources to send their kids to Pre-K.
The first order question, “Should Obama have to nominate a loyal conservative?” is crazy on its face...
Is it? The Senate really did twist Reagan's arm into nominating a guy who wouldn't shift the balance of the court.
Relations between the Prez and the Senate were less poisonous then, and the SC was less of a hot issue, but we've actually seen this sort of thing in living memory.
But the fact remains that whoever uses a weapon first is the one who used it first, so this round of escalation goes to the Republicans...
Sure.
even though I don’t doubt that if we’d waited long enough, a Democractic Senate would have done the same.
Given that Joe announced many years ago that if it happened on his watch, they'd do it? Yes.
A split between the White House and the Senate isn’t that uncommon. I expect this one to come back to haunt us pretty regularly. If the party in control of the Senate has any sense, it means no more Supreme Court confirmations without a friendly President in power.
If it's split, then hopefully we get moderates (presumably Garland or someone like him would have ended up on the Court if Hillary had won but whatever).
My expectation is that both sides jockey for position, tell lies, and brand the other guy as racist for not doing what they want. So business as usual. Thomas is a good example, the Dems had the choice of either looking anti-black or voting for a conservative.
Overall, it just means fewer centrists and more extremists at every appointed seat as we continue down this road.
Yeah. One of the big things which creates civil wars is the gov becomes too important to trust with the other guy.
We're not close to that, but everyone who argues for *X* expansion of the government needs to understand the other side will be using *X* sooner or later.
And, we just elected Trump. My expectation is he's not even close to what "bottom of the barrel" looks like. Power attracts people who abuse it.
The voters weighed in on who should fill supreme court vacancies occurring in 2016 and picked Obama.
The voters in 2012 game Obama the ability to pick Supremes for the next four years. Then in 2014 they solidly gave the GOP the ability to stop him. That's a problem.
If the standard used to justify this blatant disregard for Supreme Court nomination norms is “let the voters decide on the specifics” then I think it’s wholly unfair to nominate a justice the voters haven’t yet had a chance to consider.
:Amusement: Trump ran on putting this guy on the court.
No one has ever done that before, apparently Trump thought people wouldn't just trust his judgement. The fun part with all that is yet to come, if/when the Dems take back the Senate, does Donald break his word or push through a nominee from that list? Either way it's probably a trainwreck.
If you assume he doesn't have any political ideals, then right now he's basically handed his SC pick to the Senate in exchange for their support. That's an interesting dynamic if the Senate switches sides.
Great, so let’s leave the spot open until 2018 and see whether we have a wave of democrats take office. I just don’t think it’s fair not to let the voters weigh in first.
What you mean is the voters need to weigh in again and again until they get it right, and they should be ignored otherwise.
Like that guy who is falsely claiming he was shot at a Milo event.
(I tried posting the link and my post got axed so here's a longer quote. I think this is the event in question.)
Radical leftists staged a violent riot outside of a Seattle speaking event by Milo Yiannopoulos on Friday night. They assaulted people and threw bricks and paint at police officers. Then someone shot a 32 year old white male in the abdomen. The injury was considered life threatening. The victim was still listed as being in critical condition on Saturday. Two men, including the shooter, turned themselves in to University of Washington police a few hours after the shooting.
Shortly after, a local “Antifa” gang in Seattle announced that the victim is one of their “comrades.” They immediately blamed the shooting on a “Trump supporter.” So-called “Antifa” gangs wear all black and routinely engage in violence...
The man who was shot was wearing political buttons identifying him as having a far-left/Marxist ideology. Friends told Seattle media that he is a dedicated “anti-racist,”...
However, the police have now disclosed information about the suspect. He is a fifty year old “Asian.” He told police he was attacked by “some type of white supremacist,” and was forced to shoot the man in self-defense.
Seattle authorities appear to be treating the shooting as justifiable self-defense.
Hey, at least we aren’t pretending there’s a high-minded principle any more.
Oh, I thought the Biden rule was clearly not "high-minded" when Joe created it. For that matter Bork (and multiple others on both sides) showcased this.
The last time we had a Justice opposed for good (meaning non-partisan) reasons was when Bush nominated that airhead.
You’re just using it to define your personal preferences as the compromise.
No, I'm pointing out that "compromise" was impossible since the two sides had diametrically opposed ideas on whether or not the court should have it's ideology flipped.
Trying to claim that it's a "compromise" to flip the court Left is absurd. Ditto claiming that it'd be a "compromise" to force Obama to submit a Hard Right justice... and those are the only options I see on the table.
This situation was going to have a winner and a loser.
The good news is that when it’s time to replace Ginsburg, the Republicans will surely hold to their tradition of supporting ideological continuity and not try to pull the court to the right.
If the Dems control the Senate then maybe. Trump probably doesn't have political ideals. It's easy to picture him copying Reagan and just giving the Senate what they want.
The new normal is that if you can steal a seat, you do it. That’s unfortunate for a bunch of reasons, but it is what it is. Why try to hide it?
Why try to claim this is "the new normal" after Biden openly proclaimed this as Dem policy many years ago? My expectation is everyone involved would make the opposite argument if the seats were reversed (and Biden actually has).
I'm not blaming the Dems for taking us here with Biden or even Bork. The political forces at work transcend any one person, or even any one president. The GOP basically had no choice but do this, and if the issue had come up with Bush the Dems also would have had no choice.
Partly this is happening because Congress is handing divisive issues to the Court, and otherwise not doing it's job by creating bad and badly written laws. And partly this is happening because the gov is intruding into every sphere of life.
We're not done fighting over the role or makeup of the Court, however this stack up of circumstances doesn't happen very often.
In other words, after Bork, Reagan yielded to the Senate and attempted to replace the Court's swing vote with another swing vote... and Kennedy is certainly that.
With Obama replacing Scalia? Obama isn't going to go with someone hard Right, or even moderate Right, so instead he went with very ethical moderate Left and hoped for the best.
Your "political fact" link, while true, cherry picks the dates. This is the longest vacancy we've seen in 30 years, but that's only because the issue hasn't come up in 30 years.
This is going to be the 7th or 8th longest vacancy in history.
conservatives’ newfound belief in the will of the voters after they won a close election.
Oh, it was expressed before the election when they didn't think Trump would be making the pick. They even kept it when it looked like Clinton would win and they might lose the Senate.
Unless you can link me to comments where you poo-pooed attempts to prevent the ACA from passing because Obama “expressly made [the ACA a] big point of his election,
Considering we had wave of GOP after wave of GOP take office by opposing it, starting with Ted Kennedy's replacement, maybe "the voters wanted the ACA" isn't the rock to stand on.
trying to badger Democrats into unilaterally disarming.
Eh? It's impossible for me to picture Joe letting Bush have a Supreme choice when there was a chance to unseat him, and that's even without Joe expressly saying he wouldn't. The problem isn't that things just got worse, things were that bad when Joe laid down his line, and probably even before that.
If Bush had the option to fill a seat, and Joe had the option to stop him and give it to his replacement (Obama as it turned out), would that help or hurt Joe's personal election odds?
Outright preventing a president from filling a Supreme Court vacancy at all is quite new
That depends on whether or not Biden was lying about the practice being for Presidents to not try this in an election year.
Oh, and there’s also the fact that nobody doing this to Garland even bothered to spell out some kind of problem with Garland as a nominee.
You're complaining that he wasn't Borked? That the GOP didn't make up lies and paint him as a horrible human being? Garland as a judge and as a person are left with their reputations intact. Ethically that's way better than what the Dems did to Bork and what they're about to try with Trump's guy.
If the system were working properly, someone like Garland would have been the compromise candidate Obama had to accept because he didn’t have a friendly majority in the Senate.
That "compromise" would shift the Court as a whole pretty seriously to the Left given who he was replacing. Trump's guy won't shift the court at all, my expectation is the Left will still throw down a massive attempt to wreck his life.
Why don’t individual hate crimes count? Those are acts of violence directed randomly, but usually happen with one victim.
The definition of "hate crimes" is heavily subjective, political, and geared to protect minorities so the data is not good. And we're also introducing a lot of background noise here.
...the thing we are discussing is activity by *Muslim Americans*, or at least Muslim immigrants. Domestic terrorism.
Domestic terrorism is terrorism that is domestic, that's where it happens, not who died or who killed. Lots of terrorists overseas target tourists, if that ever happens here then their corpses will still add to the body count.
To compare *failed attacks* to anything, you have to have some sort of big list of ‘attempts at mass random violence by the population’, which in addition to neither of us having, is *extremely* hard to define.
Agreed it's hard to define and impossible to do, but I'm not sure it makes the point irrelevant. I'm trying to make a "quality not quantity" argument, with some of the really high body counts being a reflection of the quality of the attacker and not "chance".
Proportionally, Muslims should be committing 2% of the mass violence crimes in America. They appear to be committing *about* 8%, in a very very rough estimate.
Your 8% is from counting events, not corpses. If we stayed with corpses we're at what, 40% or more?
And your 8% also discounts the Boston Bombing, which is problematic to the point of absurdity if you're trying to count events of mass violence.
Further, we can dial up the definitions and tell a very different story. Killed or injured more than 50 people limits us to the Boston Bombing and Pulse. Although there's an element of cherry picking there, it might be appropriate because these events inflicted a lot more trauma on the country than the typical 3-dead.
...the ‘animal rights groups’... aren’t anywhere near the level of the pro-life network, who have actually managed to kill two people since 9/11.
Agreed pro-life is much worse, and even counting bodies is probably understating things. However they are bigger in other countries, and they are known for crimes against property here. If we were going further back in time I'd include McVay's outfit, but I'm not sure if they survived the shock of his actions.
white supremacists, which commit crimes even *more* out of proportion to the population.
Oh, I believe it. But the equiv would be narrowing the focus from "all Muslims" to "radical Islam".
If you see the various -ism’s as social/cultural phenomena and, correctly, see white/male/hetero/etc as the dominant force in our society, and you see discrimination as the active issue, then that statement sorta makes sense.
There are minority cops, politicians (even Presidents), employers, millionaires, billionaires, cities, and so forth. The concept that they don't have any power to abuse is laughable.
IMHO a good translation of that is: "Charges of -ism are supposed to be a political club used against the Right, but never against the Left."
Far too often this is about political power, not fixing things.
Depends a lot on the claim, the details, and the level of self serving-ness.
So for swastikas made from fecal matter, probably all of them are false. For Rape? I think I remember studies suggesting a hair more than half of rape police reports are false.
"more or less common than actual" is probably the wrong question. I assume many/most cases of abuse aren't reported because people have lives. That doesn't change the level of falsehood on actual reports.
There are people who *like* the drama, the attention, the sympathy, and the power from being a victim. Support groups offer sympathy and take everything at face value. They don't ask detailed questions that would show the victim is making it up. This is true in spades for SJW incidents which happen to SJW activists.
This btw is yet another reason why the police and not colleges should be handling this sort of thing. The *idea* that false claims even happen, much less is a serious problem, is heresy for certain groups.
If someone says they're a victim then that's supposed to be this ultimate trump card. But since we mostly don't punish for false reporting it's a very-high-reward very-low-risk move.
Remind me which Justice’s nomination Joe Biden refused to vote on again?
Joe stated he'd refuse to consider *any* Bush nomination during an election year.
Something about how Presidents historically held themselves back from submitting one at that time, so it'd be unethical and a break in precedence to do so, and the Senate would be ethical and submit it to the voters.
What Joe thought he was doing was establishing rules he'd then say were defined ahead of time. There's a lot to be said for that.
There was a norm, the GOP broke it.
The norm is that the Pres can submit Supremes (which he did), and the Senate can say "no" (which they did). The norm (and the Constitution) doesn't cover what form that "no" needs to take, this is the 5th time the Senate has killed a nomination by deliberate inaction. The GOP took the route of maximizing their ability to say no while minimizing the political fall out.
In theory the President is supposed to go to the voters with this and they'll punish the Senate for inaction. Instead the voters rewarded the GOP by letting them keep the Senate.
Given that Trump expressly made which person he'd put on the Court a big point of his election, we have something like judgement via the voters.
The speech I happened to read, the person he singled out was someone who had reported harassment for wearing a hijab, and he decided that the harassment claim was bogus, and she was just a liar.
Didn't someone on this forum point out that she actually was lying, or am I misremembering?
As far as I can tell, false claims of victimhood by SJW are pretty common. If he'd come to my old campus, he could have talked about two false claims of rape. One of my ex-inlaws has made five or so.
If you're going to make public false claims of abuse, then a public shaming is appropriate.
As I pointed out, those are *literally the only Americans killed by bomb attack in the US in the last two decades*, so hardly is evidence that some large amount of attacks are being overlooked?
We're deep into small numbers and outliers, so anything we exclude has dramatic effects on the analysis. It's VERY awkward to claim the Boston Marathon Bombings (which killed or injured 186 people) were not legit terror attacks because bombs aren't used by normal people. That same logic could be used to exclude 911.
I am ignoring attacks without fatalities by Muslims because I am ignoring attacks without fatalities by *everyone* because I am comparing two otherwise identical things.
This may not be appropriate. Granted, there's a logical purity to just counting dead bodies, and in other contexts I like it a lot. There's also a logical purity to apples to apples method wise... however...
That other groups aren't using bombs or crashing airplanes into buildings doesn't means you get to exclude those data points. 911 and Boston weren't in the news because they were done by Radical Islam, they were in the news well before that for good reason, ditto Pulse, etc.
The second problem is you're claiming a lack of dead bodies means we don't have terror attacks. At the Curtis Culwell Center two heavily armed and armored attackers showed up to kill everyone there. The media reported some cop headshotted both of them. That's a seriously impressive level of skill, and demonstrates the problem.
These numbers we're looking at are *after* law enforcement uses their A-list players to stop this. I'm fine saying we have a controllable problem, but that's very, very far from claiming there is no problem.
I'm fine with that guy on the subway (or even the car) being lost in background noise of random nuts, but at some point we're in a different category.
Further it's also extremely awkward to start out counting dead bodies and then switch to counting incidents. If we extended our timeframe you'd be claiming 911 was "one" incident just as bad as others.
Further, even with your numbers, you’re ignoring percentage of population. Multiple either the number of attacks or (especially) the number of dead by 50 (because 2%) and we get really high numbers.
I have no idea what that math is attempting to show.
I'm pointing out that adjusted for population (i.e. multiplied by 50), even your numbers are eye-poppingly high. Radical Islam is way more popular in it's niche than White Supremacy is in it's. That shouldn't be a shock since the whole "can field armies" thing.
Best training they could get, a perfect crowd, and two people manage to kill…two people. One each. Nice work.
They got to be in the news, shut down a city, injure more than a hundred people, and "cause terror". They may end up with schools named after them in certain parts of the world. I'd say it was very successful.
Pro-life organizers... turned terrorists, for example, are *way* out of proportion of their numbers.
Oh, much worse than that. Many pro-life organizations actively use tactics which I'd say are "terroristic", threatening people's families, that sort of thing. Ditto the animal rights groups. They've gotten away with it because these groups haven't gone after the general public, they have political support for their ideology, and it hasn't been a police priority.
Pakistan has shown that tolerating terrorism because it's politically convenient can result in out of control terrorism causing large problems. I'd argue Israel has demonstrated the same since the tools (and social acceptance) used to attack Jews now are used on the people who created them.
Both the radical pro-life and pro-animal groups should be treated seriously while they're small. There are a few other groups I'd lump in there but whatever. Tolerating violence & terrorism from groups that are currently your allies is a long term problem because that's what the future looks like for everyone.
So I agree with you that these groups are also problematic, but where I disagree is I'm willing to go further and say they also need extra attention. If your friends are terrorizing people, for whatever reason, then that's a problem and society needs to treat it as a problem.
Out of curiosity, can you name any media figures or elected officials on the right that liberals accurately characterize as racist or anti-Semitic?
Let's reverse the question.
Is there anyone on the Left that is characterized as racist or anti-Semitic?
If memory serves there used to be serious people claiming it was *impossible* for a minority to be racist (apparently even against other minorities, much less against Whites).
On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous”
So I've got a bad news article? Wouldn't be the first (or last) time the media has made stuff up.
On “Linky Friday: Learnin’ & Earnin’”
I should have tagged that "L4"
On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous”
President Pence. Has a nice ring to it, no?
On “Linky Friday: Learnin’ & Earnin’”
RE: Pre-K studies
Ouch. Translated into English, many or most (all?) of the benefits of Pre-K might come from selecting parents who care about education, or who have the resources to send their kids to Pre-K.
On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous”
Depends on whether getting rid of the filibuster is in the best interests of the minority party.
"
Wasn't that in the context of Souter or Steven's replacement?
Gorsuch was voted into the 10th circuit *unanimously* by the Senate.
"
Is it? The Senate really did twist Reagan's arm into nominating a guy who wouldn't shift the balance of the court.
Relations between the Prez and the Senate were less poisonous then, and the SC was less of a hot issue, but we've actually seen this sort of thing in living memory.
Sure.
Given that Joe announced many years ago that if it happened on his watch, they'd do it? Yes.
If it's split, then hopefully we get moderates (presumably Garland or someone like him would have ended up on the Court if Hillary had won but whatever).
My expectation is that both sides jockey for position, tell lies, and brand the other guy as racist for not doing what they want. So business as usual. Thomas is a good example, the Dems had the choice of either looking anti-black or voting for a conservative.
Yeah. One of the big things which creates civil wars is the gov becomes too important to trust with the other guy.
We're not close to that, but everyone who argues for *X* expansion of the government needs to understand the other side will be using *X* sooner or later.
And, we just elected Trump. My expectation is he's not even close to what "bottom of the barrel" looks like. Power attracts people who abuse it.
"
Sarcasm?
Thank you.
"
The voters in 2012 game Obama the ability to pick Supremes for the next four years. Then in 2014 they solidly gave the GOP the ability to stop him. That's a problem.
:Amusement: Trump ran on putting this guy on the court.
No one has ever done that before, apparently Trump thought people wouldn't just trust his judgement. The fun part with all that is yet to come, if/when the Dems take back the Senate, does Donald break his word or push through a nominee from that list? Either way it's probably a trainwreck.
If you assume he doesn't have any political ideals, then right now he's basically handed his SC pick to the Senate in exchange for their support. That's an interesting dynamic if the Senate switches sides.
"
What you mean is the voters need to weigh in again and again until they get it right, and they should be ignored otherwise.
That sounds self destructive.
"
(I tried posting the link and my post got axed so here's a longer quote. I think this is the event in question.)
Radical leftists staged a violent riot outside of a Seattle speaking event by Milo Yiannopoulos on Friday night. They assaulted people and threw bricks and paint at police officers. Then someone shot a 32 year old white male in the abdomen. The injury was considered life threatening. The victim was still listed as being in critical condition on Saturday. Two men, including the shooter, turned themselves in to University of Washington police a few hours after the shooting.
Shortly after, a local “Antifa” gang in Seattle announced that the victim is one of their “comrades.” They immediately blamed the shooting on a “Trump supporter.” So-called “Antifa” gangs wear all black and routinely engage in violence...
The man who was shot was wearing political buttons identifying him as having a far-left/Marxist ideology. Friends told Seattle media that he is a dedicated “anti-racist,”...
However, the police have now disclosed information about the suspect. He is a fifty year old “Asian.” He told police he was attacked by “some type of white supremacist,” and was forced to shoot the man in self-defense.
Seattle authorities appear to be treating the shooting as justifiable self-defense.
"
Oh, I thought the Biden rule was clearly not "high-minded" when Joe created it. For that matter Bork (and multiple others on both sides) showcased this.
The last time we had a Justice opposed for good (meaning non-partisan) reasons was when Bush nominated that airhead.
"
No, I'm pointing out that "compromise" was impossible since the two sides had diametrically opposed ideas on whether or not the court should have it's ideology flipped.
Trying to claim that it's a "compromise" to flip the court Left is absurd. Ditto claiming that it'd be a "compromise" to force Obama to submit a Hard Right justice... and those are the only options I see on the table.
This situation was going to have a winner and a loser.
If the Dems control the Senate then maybe. Trump probably doesn't have political ideals. It's easy to picture him copying Reagan and just giving the Senate what they want.
Why try to claim this is "the new normal" after Biden openly proclaimed this as Dem policy many years ago? My expectation is everyone involved would make the opposite argument if the seats were reversed (and Biden actually has).
I'm not blaming the Dems for taking us here with Biden or even Bork. The political forces at work transcend any one person, or even any one president. The GOP basically had no choice but do this, and if the issue had come up with Bush the Dems also would have had no choice.
Partly this is happening because Congress is handing divisive issues to the Court, and otherwise not doing it's job by creating bad and badly written laws. And partly this is happening because the gov is intruding into every sphere of life.
We're not done fighting over the role or makeup of the Court, however this stack up of circumstances doesn't happen very often.
"
In other words, after Bork, Reagan yielded to the Senate and attempted to replace the Court's swing vote with another swing vote... and Kennedy is certainly that.
With Obama replacing Scalia? Obama isn't going to go with someone hard Right, or even moderate Right, so instead he went with very ethical moderate Left and hoped for the best.
"
Bork was hard Right, the next guy was a compromise.
The problem is "compromise" and "will swing the court solidly to the Left" are basically opposite by their very nature.
"
Your "political fact" link, while true, cherry picks the dates. This is the longest vacancy we've seen in 30 years, but that's only because the issue hasn't come up in 30 years.
This is going to be the 7th or 8th longest vacancy in history.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/26/long-supreme-court-vacancies-used-to-be-more-common/
Oh, it was expressed before the election when they didn't think Trump would be making the pick. They even kept it when it looked like Clinton would win and they might lose the Senate.
Considering we had wave of GOP after wave of GOP take office by opposing it, starting with Ted Kennedy's replacement, maybe "the voters wanted the ACA" isn't the rock to stand on.
Eh? It's impossible for me to picture Joe letting Bush have a Supreme choice when there was a chance to unseat him, and that's even without Joe expressly saying he wouldn't. The problem isn't that things just got worse, things were that bad when Joe laid down his line, and probably even before that.
If Bush had the option to fill a seat, and Joe had the option to stop him and give it to his replacement (Obama as it turned out), would that help or hurt Joe's personal election odds?
"
That depends on whether or not Biden was lying about the practice being for Presidents to not try this in an election year.
You're complaining that he wasn't Borked? That the GOP didn't make up lies and paint him as a horrible human being? Garland as a judge and as a person are left with their reputations intact. Ethically that's way better than what the Dems did to Bork and what they're about to try with Trump's guy.
That "compromise" would shift the Court as a whole pretty seriously to the Left given who he was replacing. Trump's guy won't shift the court at all, my expectation is the Left will still throw down a massive attempt to wreck his life.
On “Trumpwatch: on prioritizing Christian refugees”
The definition of "hate crimes" is heavily subjective, political, and geared to protect minorities so the data is not good. And we're also introducing a lot of background noise here.
Domestic terrorism is terrorism that is domestic, that's where it happens, not who died or who killed. Lots of terrorists overseas target tourists, if that ever happens here then their corpses will still add to the body count.
Agreed it's hard to define and impossible to do, but I'm not sure it makes the point irrelevant. I'm trying to make a "quality not quantity" argument, with some of the really high body counts being a reflection of the quality of the attacker and not "chance".
Your 8% is from counting events, not corpses. If we stayed with corpses we're at what, 40% or more?
And your 8% also discounts the Boston Bombing, which is problematic to the point of absurdity if you're trying to count events of mass violence.
Further, we can dial up the definitions and tell a very different story. Killed or injured more than 50 people limits us to the Boston Bombing and Pulse. Although there's an element of cherry picking there, it might be appropriate because these events inflicted a lot more trauma on the country than the typical 3-dead.
Agreed pro-life is much worse, and even counting bodies is probably understating things. However they are bigger in other countries, and they are known for crimes against property here. If we were going further back in time I'd include McVay's outfit, but I'm not sure if they survived the shock of his actions.
Oh, I believe it. But the equiv would be narrowing the focus from "all Muslims" to "radical Islam".
On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous”
There are minority cops, politicians (even Presidents), employers, millionaires, billionaires, cities, and so forth. The concept that they don't have any power to abuse is laughable.
IMHO a good translation of that is:
"Charges of -ism are supposed to be a political club used against the Right, but never against the Left."
Far too often this is about political power, not fixing things.
"
Depends a lot on the claim, the details, and the level of self serving-ness.
So for swastikas made from fecal matter, probably all of them are false. For Rape? I think I remember studies suggesting a hair more than half of rape police reports are false.
"more or less common than actual" is probably the wrong question. I assume many/most cases of abuse aren't reported because people have lives. That doesn't change the level of falsehood on actual reports.
There are people who *like* the drama, the attention, the sympathy, and the power from being a victim. Support groups offer sympathy and take everything at face value. They don't ask detailed questions that would show the victim is making it up. This is true in spades for SJW incidents which happen to SJW activists.
This btw is yet another reason why the police and not colleges should be handling this sort of thing. The *idea* that false claims even happen, much less is a serious problem, is heresy for certain groups.
If someone says they're a victim then that's supposed to be this ultimate trump card. But since we mostly don't punish for false reporting it's a very-high-reward very-low-risk move.
"
Joe stated he'd refuse to consider *any* Bush nomination during an election year.
Something about how Presidents historically held themselves back from submitting one at that time, so it'd be unethical and a break in precedence to do so, and the Senate would be ethical and submit it to the voters.
What Joe thought he was doing was establishing rules he'd then say were defined ahead of time. There's a lot to be said for that.
The norm is that the Pres can submit Supremes (which he did), and the Senate can say "no" (which they did). The norm (and the Constitution) doesn't cover what form that "no" needs to take, this is the 5th time the Senate has killed a nomination by deliberate inaction. The GOP took the route of maximizing their ability to say no while minimizing the political fall out.
In theory the President is supposed to go to the voters with this and they'll punish the Senate for inaction. Instead the voters rewarded the GOP by letting them keep the Senate.
Given that Trump expressly made which person he'd put on the Court a big point of his election, we have something like judgement via the voters.
"
Didn't someone on this forum point out that she actually was lying, or am I misremembering?
As far as I can tell, false claims of victimhood by SJW are pretty common. If he'd come to my old campus, he could have talked about two false claims of rape. One of my ex-inlaws has made five or so.
If you're going to make public false claims of abuse, then a public shaming is appropriate.
On “Trumpwatch: on prioritizing Christian refugees”
We're deep into small numbers and outliers, so anything we exclude has dramatic effects on the analysis. It's VERY awkward to claim the Boston Marathon Bombings (which killed or injured 186 people) were not legit terror attacks because bombs aren't used by normal people. That same logic could be used to exclude 911.
This may not be appropriate. Granted, there's a logical purity to just counting dead bodies, and in other contexts I like it a lot. There's also a logical purity to apples to apples method wise... however...
That other groups aren't using bombs or crashing airplanes into buildings doesn't means you get to exclude those data points. 911 and Boston weren't in the news because they were done by Radical Islam, they were in the news well before that for good reason, ditto Pulse, etc.
The second problem is you're claiming a lack of dead bodies means we don't have terror attacks. At the Curtis Culwell Center two heavily armed and armored attackers showed up to kill everyone there. The media reported some cop headshotted both of them. That's a seriously impressive level of skill, and demonstrates the problem.
These numbers we're looking at are *after* law enforcement uses their A-list players to stop this. I'm fine saying we have a controllable problem, but that's very, very far from claiming there is no problem.
I'm fine with that guy on the subway (or even the car) being lost in background noise of random nuts, but at some point we're in a different category.
Further it's also extremely awkward to start out counting dead bodies and then switch to counting incidents. If we extended our timeframe you'd be claiming 911 was "one" incident just as bad as others.
Further, even with your numbers, you’re ignoring percentage of population. Multiple either the number of attacks or (especially) the number of dead by 50 (because 2%) and we get really high numbers.
I'm pointing out that adjusted for population (i.e. multiplied by 50), even your numbers are eye-poppingly high. Radical Islam is way more popular in it's niche than White Supremacy is in it's. That shouldn't be a shock since the whole "can field armies" thing.
They got to be in the news, shut down a city, injure more than a hundred people, and "cause terror". They may end up with schools named after them in certain parts of the world. I'd say it was very successful.
Oh, much worse than that. Many pro-life organizations actively use tactics which I'd say are "terroristic", threatening people's families, that sort of thing. Ditto the animal rights groups. They've gotten away with it because these groups haven't gone after the general public, they have political support for their ideology, and it hasn't been a police priority.
Pakistan has shown that tolerating terrorism because it's politically convenient can result in out of control terrorism causing large problems. I'd argue Israel has demonstrated the same since the tools (and social acceptance) used to attack Jews now are used on the people who created them.
Both the radical pro-life and pro-animal groups should be treated seriously while they're small. There are a few other groups I'd lump in there but whatever. Tolerating violence & terrorism from groups that are currently your allies is a long term problem because that's what the future looks like for everyone.
So I agree with you that these groups are also problematic, but where I disagree is I'm willing to go further and say they also need extra attention. If your friends are terrorizing people, for whatever reason, then that's a problem and society needs to treat it as a problem.
On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous”
Let's reverse the question.
Is there anyone on the Left that is characterized as racist or anti-Semitic?
If memory serves there used to be serious people claiming it was *impossible* for a minority to be racist (apparently even against other minorities, much less against Whites).
"
I suppose what both of us should do is find a clip of Milo's act and see if it's really vile or just somewhat vile or even just on the edge.
On the other hand I'm not into flagellation so maybe not.
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