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Hopefully this is appropriate, these are things that were posted elsewhere on SA and I'd like to collate them here. A criticism of the Pro-Life movement from the perspective of a former member, and her realization that the capital-M Movement wasn't about saving fertilized eggs, but about controlling sex. It's a blog, but seems to reference a lot of other studies http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/10/how-i-lost-faith-in-the-pro-life-movement.html A study concluding that children with lesbian parents are just as well-off or perform better than their peers. http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/nllfs-adolescents-with-lesbian-mothers-2012.pdf Finally, a letter to conservatives from a former young conservative. So far it doesn't seem to have convinced any of my friends, but their responses have been less negative than some of the other arguments I've made. I imagine it's also useful to more liberal perspectives to see what kind of mindset to argue from to be persuasive. http://dcpierson.tumblr.com/post/35030817854/dear-young-conservative
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Nov 8, 2012 18:25
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You may get some benefit from this thing I found, an argument from a former Pro-Lifer, about what may be the mindset to approach the issue. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/10/how-i-lost-faith-in-the-pro-life-movement.html
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Nov 19, 2012 20:27
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Mo_Steel posted:My personal view is that abortion should be legal up to survivability outside the womb, and after that point abortion should only be legal in cases where the mother's health is at grave risk. I don't believe life begins at that point, I believe personhood begins at that point. As far as I'm concerned there wasn't a point along the continuum that is definable for life to "begin"; the sperm was alive, the egg was alive, the blastocyst was alive, the embryo was alive, the fetus was alive, and the newborn was alive.
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Nov 19, 2012 22:39
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If they bring up the argument that unions kill manufacturing with high wages, one particularly handy fact to use is that Germany is roughly 80% unionized, has one of the highest wages in the EU, and is only beaten in exports by China (beating the US, to belabor the point... no pun intended). If they try to say that then they have to explain Germany.
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Dec 16, 2012 04:31
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Instead of welfare (or only welfare) you might want to mention public utilities like water, electricity, roads, police, firemen, and teachers. He seems incredulous about paying for roads he doesn't use, but I can guarantee something or someone that benefits him has used those services. Raw materials come from everywhere, employees need basic education to become a successful workforce, everyone benefits from safe water and safe homes... it's the cost of living in a society, of civilization. By everyone contributing those resources are much more efficiently deployed in the manner that benefits everyone the most. Economies of scale don't disappear just because the government is the one doing it. For welfare specifically, it's the cost of not having starving, desperate people breaking into anyplace they can (showing a little initiative, eh? good ol' bootstraps) just so they can survive and dragging their families and everyone else down with them. However, if he's especially morally repugnant and talks about free market or some bullshit, ask him to consider whether welfare might just be the market-derived optimal solution? How much would it cost for everyone to get security guards, upgrade the security with their house, and the lawsuits from hurting or killing those desperate people? Surely giving them some food is a much better and cheaper alternative, born out by estimates by Moody's where every dollar spent on food stamps returned $1.50 to the economy.
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Jan 31, 2013 03:54
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Tab8715 posted:I'd suspecting the knee-jerk reaction would simply be something such as - if the I don't use those roads and despite me benefiting from them those whom use them should foot the bill. As an aside, you should have used "who" in that particular case. As a rule of thumb you only use "whom" when you'd use "him" or "her" when answering the (implied) question; "To whom should I give this letter?" "Give it to him," vs. "Who uses these roads?" "He does." I could give you a more precise answer of their distinctions, but that would require an even bigger derail detailing parts of speech and object/subject cases. It's just about always safe to use "who" though, as "whom" is rapidly falling out of circulation (and hence much of the confusion about its use).
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Jan 31, 2013 05:50
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Dang, I wish those charts had been there an hour ago. I got in a big facebook argument with an old college friend and came to the same conclusions independently, but I had to dredge up a lot of information from all over and my argument came across a little weak. Oh well, he ended up getting so frustrated he called me, and we had a pleasant chat and amicably agreed that we probably disagreed 
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Feb 14, 2013 04:38
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If you want to be passive aggressive you could always post this: http://www.pluralofanecdote.com/ Basically you trade slightly longer wait times on non-critical issues with not going loving bankrupt when you get sick, with the added bonus that people visit the doctor earlier and more often and therefore treat disease when it's easier and cheaper to do so. The idea that someone with a bleeding head wound or a broken arm or impaled by a spike will have to wait for care in a UHC country is ridiculous, and the assertion that it's better for people to go bankrupt for something they can't control (like cancer or an injury) just so someone doesn't have to wait as long for a joint replacement is borderline evil. Around 60% of bankruptcies are due to medical bills, even though 75% of those people had health insurance. EDIT: Here's an image from http://blog.jonudell.net/2010/01/06/two-interpretations-of-us-health-care-cost-vs-life-expectancy/ using OECD's numbers for healthcare expenditures and life expectancy. (The article is about using WHO's data with OECD data and possible problems it causes. I'm not sure what causes the discrepancy, possibly how they accounted for income differences?)  Regardless of what numbers you use the US pays way way more than anyone else and doesn't even get the best results. DarkHorse fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Feb 15, 2013 |
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Feb 15, 2013 20:30
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He didn't start it, but he was the one who signaled that unions would not be getting support at the highest levels of government, or even be actively antagonistic. He also blew up the Air Traffic Controller's union.
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Feb 20, 2013 22:35
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Two links that may be helpful to people First is the New York Times pointing out the discrepancy between corporate profits and hiring/wages. It also alludes to the alarming return of the crazy risk-taking that tanked the economy in the first place. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/b...Uq6q5w#comments Second is a viral video going around about income inequality, though I had not seen it somehow. The video is on youtube, but this link includes a few links. http://mashable.com/2013/03/02/wealth-inequality/
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Mar 4, 2013 21:38
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If they're a nerd, geek, or otherwise got bullied in school: perhaps mentioning how it's one thing to use those words with similar friends as opposed to when other people use it?
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Mar 27, 2013 00:41
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URL name aside, this is a decent summary. Basically farmers tend to be the ones screwed over if a plant's status gets called into question, so they're trying to fix it so that doesn't happen. http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/03/28/monsanto-protection-act-anti-gmo-conspiracy-theorists-lose-it-over-minor-deregulation/
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Mar 29, 2013 02:00
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Good facts are that Germany is mostly unionized and still outperforms most countries, vying even with the US and China in terms of exports. Also that unions are literally what helped stop child labor, established the 8-hour work day/40 hour week, weekends, and workplaces that wouldn't literally kill or maim you. It's also part of what fueled the booming middle-class after WWII, because all those new employees demanded adequate pay (and then spent it on new stuff, which created more jobs with high wages, which...) If they say "Well yeah, but we don't need them now" just point out all the places that are trying to get child labor back on the table. It may be couched in terms like "kids on the family farm" but there are already exceptions for those, the proposed laws are for huge agribusiness farms that have already killed several teenagers. Without unions there's nothing stopping those laws from slowly eroding. Union power is already at the lowest point it's been since the depression, I'd guess. For the corruption issues, just point out that any large group of people with access to power tends to have corrupt people trying to abuse that power; just because you have things like the jerks with Enron or Arthur Anderson doesn't mean that all corporations must be destroyed, so examples of union corruption aren't evidence that unions should be eradicated. EDIT: I deliberately just said things off the top of my head rather than link a bunch of evidence, since that was what you described. Since they aren't going to be swayed by facts or proof, you have to go for the emotional aspect of argument for rhetorical effect. Unions keep people from dying, from your life being shittier than it already is, and just because a few are bad doesn't mean they're all bad. DarkHorse fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Apr 30, 2013 |
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Apr 30, 2013 03:50
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Two examples of how racism is more than saying "friend of the family friend of the family" How people react to a person taking a hacksaw to a bike chain: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/watch-white-black-bike-thieves-treated-differently-article-1.1368401 How people portray a 7-year-old that decides to try driving the car: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/07/17/framing-childrens-deviance/
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Aug 18, 2013 21:47
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CommieGIR posted:Me and this guy were arguing about 'Free Market' and how its utter bullshit, and this was his response when I pointed out things like Standard Oil Patents are incentive for invention and the publicizing thereof: without them, anybody could steal your awesome idea you spent thousands of dollars and hours developing and sell it for pennies. They profit, you can't recoup your resources, so you don't invent anything new. Corporations are an incentive for lots of people to work together to accomplish a big task without risking the individuals' resources. Billionaires are willing to gamble a million dollars because if the idea/venture/whatever fails, oh well they lost a million dollars; if it pays off, hey they got some more million dollars! If they aren't protected by that legal fiction (of a company incorporated into a paper person) then their billions are at risk, and they'll just hang out safe in their mansion. Corporations and patents can be used for really nasty purposes, but there's a reason they were invented. They're ideas that can be (and are) abused, but they're not inherently bad or wrong. He seems to be objecting to these legal fictions. Perhaps he has the same objections to legal fictions like "The Rule of Law" or "Innocent until proven guilty" or anything besides "Might makes right," because that seriously sounds like what he's advocating.
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Aug 22, 2013 23:55
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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sick-and-wrong-20100405 This should link to an article that articulates the many ways the US system sucks, for everyone. You could not design a worse system deliberately, just about nobody comes out ahead.
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Oct 10, 2013 23:18
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You could try comparing it to economies of scale: with UHC, the government represents all 10,000 (or whatever) hip replacement patients per year. The government can say "ok all you companies, bid for the right to be our supplier of hips. You gotta show they are more effective and affordable than your competition; in exchange, you get a giant and reliable contract (that likewise gives them economies of scale). It's cheaper per unit to produce a billion of some drug than a thousand different companies making a million doses each.
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Oct 11, 2013 11:47
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the2ndgenesis posted:Since the implementation of Obamacare has begun and the accusations of Obama being a "communist" have begun anew, many lefists I know (including many on D&D) have responded by saying that Obama is scarcely to the left of Reagan in terms of economic/financial policy. After all, PP/ACA is based on the plan advanced by the Heritage Foundation and Congressional Republicans in the 90's as the alternative to "Hillarycare." It's the plan implemented by former Republican presidential candidate Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts, to apparently great effect and popularity. I doubt any of those involved would have gone for something "communist." I'd also like to see them explain how private individuals buying private insurance from private (or publicly-traded) companies in a competitive marketplace that states have the option of setting up themselves is at all, in any way, describable as "communism." Bonus fact: the founding fathers seemed keen on making people buy insurance - http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2011/01/17/congress-passes-socialized-medicine-and-mandates-health-insurance-in-1798/ EDIT: Forgot the reason I opened this thread. I wanted to post this short article that helps put the debt and deficit in perspective. Not that it will convince anyone else, but I think most people here agree that the debt isn't inherently bad, and it turns out we're not even the worst of the lot (and I don't mean Greece). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24541140#story_continues_1 DarkHorse fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Oct 20, 2013 |
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Oct 20, 2013 19:33
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Whoops, I totally misread your post. Have some things: I don't know if it fits what you're trying to get across, but Obama's spending has been the least since Eisenhower. He's hardly the profligate leftist spender. He's also deporting immigrants at a rate far above anything Bush ever did. While his administration has been more accommodating of non-violent long-term residents, it's still has an aggressive deportation apparatus. This is impressive, considering that there's been much less immigration because of the bad economy - in fact, agents have been digging deeper into those non-violent residents to make up the "quota" of arrests they need. There have been fewer convictions for the global financial crisis than for the Enron scandal in 2001. As for Wall Street and Obama's connections to it, it's a tricky issue I'll let factcheck summarize: http://www.factcheck.org/2012/02/obama-white-house-full-of-wall-street-executives/
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Oct 20, 2013 23:20
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I enjoyed this article describing the "liberal media," perhaps someone else will find it useful. http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/08/10/15-things-everyone-would-know-if-there-were-a-liberal-media/
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Oct 31, 2013 22:31
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A couple of neat links I found today: Illustration of the different values of the political left vs. right. There's one for the US and for the world, useful as a reminder for when you're talking to someone and want to use arguments that appeal to their values. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/left-vs-right-us/ Looks like ALEC is having funding problems after a lot of companies pulled their support after they pushed Stand Your Ground laws. The most important thing, in my opinion, is the talk of their sister project the "Jeffersonian Project" (in the fine tradition of stealing everything you can, changing your name when you get caught, and doing it again) and the proposal that ALEC leaders (who are often legislators) had to swear loyalty to the organization first. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/03/alec-funding-crisis-big-donors-trayvon-martin It's a huffpo link, but while Americans support drug testing people on government benefits, they really support drug testing Congress.  Useful anytime that drug-testing chestnut shows up, especially if you can link all the times a (usually liberal) lawmaker proposes the law and it gets shot down.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/02/drug-testing-congress_n_4373472.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
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Dec 5, 2013 02:13
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Rogue0071 posted:This chart is total garbage. Democrats and communists have radically different ideologies predicated on totally different grounds; Democrats are much closer to Republicans (and American liberalism closer to American conservatism) than either are to socialists or communists. Nationalism is not inherently right-wing, the nationalism of oppressed and marginalized nationalities (for a few quick examples, Palestine, Quebec, Brittany, Catalonia, Black Nationalism in the US) are often left wing or strongly left-wing. The idea that Democrats are pacifists is totally ridiculous, Democrats are completely willing to participate in imperialist wars and interventions. Democrats supporting fair trade or workers beyond lip service would also be a novelty. There are extremely few differences between the US and world versions besides swapping the color scheme (I highly doubt those (unsourced) poll percentages are the exact same in the US and the world as a whole). The poll numbers are useless garbage of course.
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Dec 6, 2013 04:14
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I've found this site useful, especially since you can pick the level of detail you want for your explanation. As for his empiricism argument, you can use Occam's Razor in the following way.quote:Let's assume that the world will work following established physical principles until the year 2015. We have to wait until 2015 to actually test this hypothesis and in all likelihood will have a null result. But we can construct such hypotheses for any point in the future, an infinite number of them in fact. How this relates to his assertion is that multiple models, accounting for multiple different effects and with very different constructions, were able to track past temperatures and project the same disturbing trends: that average global temperatures are increasing, that they are increasing faster than at any point we can reconstruct from past evidence, that the rate of that change is increasing, that other natural physical phenomena are inadequate to explain the change in temperature or its rate. To deny the models is to implicitly assume that there's some other factor distorting them, and thus the burden of proof falls on him to explain it. Regardless of their accuracy, all the models have the same trend in world temperatures: up, and steeply. Depending on what he's denying (that the Earth is warming, that humans are to blame, that it's a problem) you can find appropriate responses on that site, but what I find telling is that species are moving to higher latitudes, higher elevations, are blooming/breeding earlier and migrating/seeding later, and all sorts of other evidence that this isn't just some variation in the weather. This particular link might be helpful since it focuses on models: http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm
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Dec 17, 2013 03:25
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It's not exactly veterans, but this should also work: http://whovotedagainst911healthbill.tumblr.com/
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Dec 21, 2013 23:07
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Where's that post that summarized why in-person voting fraud isn't a problem? The basic gist was that there were X cases of reported fraud; assume that 99% of fraud goes undetected so you get vote fraud of 100*x... that's a fraction of the difference in any electoral race and would not have changed the outcome for President in any state, even the closest state (I think North Carolina.) Contrast that with how many legitimate voters that would be directly prevented from voting, and the many more that would be unduly inconvenienced by new ID laws, and from a purely pragmatic perspective it's clear that it's a HUGE waste of money. Finally, compare the alleged cases of in-person fraud with absentee ballot fraud, and rhetorically ask why the former is a problem and not the latter (it's because the latter tend to vote Republican, and the former vote Democratic.) Sorry for the crappy summary, but I can't find the original post with the numbers.
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Jan 14, 2014 23:59
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Germany is like 25% unionized and is like the third biggest exporter after China and the U.S. despite being a fraction of their size. Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway have 50%+ unionization rates and are doing just fine, once again despite being much smaller economies. Unionization rates: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=20167 Export rankings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports Unionization doesn't have the effect these guys think it does. I love the irony that VW has said they might not site more factories in the south if Republicans keep blocking worker councils/unions, completely the opposite of what those legislators and "job creators" threatened would happen if workers unionized.
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Feb 23, 2014 18:20
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It would certainly be less expenditure on SNAP and other food and welfare assistance. Right now all of us Americans, via the US government, is subsidizing Wal-Mart's employees with our taxes.
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Apr 21, 2014 20:30
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There are legal difficulties, like how do you manage divorce, child custody, power of attorney, inheritance, insurance, etc. among all the participants. A lot of that is because many many different legal relationships have been bundled together into a package called "marriage" and the current system just has no way of grappling with such a different sort of arrangement. Another I've heard is that it's an arrangement that is prone to exploitation an inequity, though that could conceivably be due to culture and upbringing rather than an intrinsic part of polygamy.
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Apr 27, 2014 19:36
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FOXDIE posted:Hey guys, I was wondering if anyone out there had articles or information related to the student loan problem, particularly a viable left-wing solution to it. I read this idea not too long ago, and it didn't look immediately horrible: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/06/elizabeth_warren_student_debt_crisis_it_s_actually_tom_petri_who_has_the.html Basic idea: make paying back loans like tax witholding. A certain percentage of your paycheck (above the poverty level) is deducted each month. If you're unemployed or under the poverty line, no deduction; if you get an awesome job, you pay in a lot more until it's paid off. You also get rid of a bunch of convoluted rules and agencies (smaller government! efficiency!) so there's a chance of Republican buy-in. EDIT: Whoops, this is less and explanation and more an alternative. Personally I think Warren's is the most equitable, but you'll never get it past the "job creator" types.
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Jun 15, 2014 01:53
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icantfindaname posted:To play devil's advocate I don't think anyone expected the Holocaust to follow from the prewar persecution. A big theme of the run-up to the war was that people in the UK, France and the US really really wanted to believe that Hitler was a rational, reasonable person, not someone who would murder 6 million people. Under this mindset there wasn't really reason to do anything drastic about Hitler's antisemitism, lots of people had been antisemitic for a long time, and it hadn't resulted in genocides.
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Nov 13, 2014 15:14
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Say someone has $1,000/month to live on. They have to assign rent, food, utilities, transportation, clothes, insurance/medical costs, and every other expense necessary out of that money. Consider if they have a kid they're supporting too - childcare is ludicrously expensive, plus doctor visits and clothes and... If you try budgeting on that income, it's clear there's no margin for anything. Taking out another 10% ($100) is excruciatingly difficult. Now consider someone that takes home $10,000/month. Even though income has increased 10-fold, it's extremely unlikely that every other expense has increased to scale. Rent is about the only thing, but there are lots of benefits that come with that like better school districts and safer neighborhoods and amenities like pools and playgrounds. There's a limit to what a single person can eat, and even going the most expensive route your food costs aren't going to go up by an order of magnitude. Similarly for the other cases. While 10% ($1,000) will take some effort, there's plenty of margin in this budget. It's the difference between "You mean I won't be able to buy the luxury car model? Outrageous!" and "Well I guess we have to pick between food, heat, or shelter this month  " Literally between luxury and survival.It gets even more ridiculous at the 1% and 0.1% and 0.01% ranges. Yeah, 10% of a billion is $100 million, but there's $900 million left over. Whatever will they do to survive  If someone says that's what social programs are for, ask them where that money comes from? If the poor could afford it out of the share they pay in taxes, they'd just pay that amount. Meanwhile, the rich folks are using the tax money to pay for police to protect their property, and to pay for schools so their employees can read, and for infrastructure so they can tap into water and power and telephone and roads to do their business. And, implicitly, so that the increasing number of poor people don't take it from them by overwhelming force of numbers.
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Nov 21, 2014 17:31
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If I recall correctly, there's only maybe three occasions where [what today we would call homosexuality] is condemned, using the Greek word for "men who lie with men" or somesuch. In addition, I think that word has connotations of slaver or impressment, basically a person that has power over someone using it to dominate them sexually. As for calling it "abomination" I believe that is only in the Old Testament sections with a Hebrew word that could also mean anathema, where the word is also used for things like eating shellfish and wearing cloth of two fibers and getting tattoos. That's not to say the New Testament is all thumbs-up about homosexuality, but
Your broader point about gays being implicitly second-class persons is well-taken, of course.
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Dec 23, 2014 17:23
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VitalSigns posted:No, she had some real weird gender role bullshit ideas, to the point that she said a proper woman wouldn't want to be President because then she'd have no man to look up to and no male authority over her as is proper for a woman qua woman to want. Another fun thing about her and her "onetime extramarital lover" and intellectual heir Nathaniel Branden: as part of her little Objectivist coterie, she convinced him and their respective spouses that not only was it not wrong to have an affair if you had amorous feelings, it was practically necessary! Later on, when he started another affair (with a different woman) suddenly it was an incredible affront and an immoral betrayal. The parties involved even knew she would probably blow up at the news and hid it from her for several years. Ayn Rand was basically a gigantic hypocrite.
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Jul 29, 2015 01:22
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