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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Can someone give me an overview of current race relations in South Africa? My rich rear end in a top hat friend was being casually racist the other day and I asked him to stop so he threw a tantrum because he's white and was born in South Africa and "for us in South Africa right now is like blacks in the US in the 40's." Apartheid was ended by a negotiated settlement between the white ruling minority and the Mandela-led ANC. Because of international isolation, economic sanctions, and increasing black unrest, politicians and officials of the Apartheid state saw that South Africa eventually going to reach a point where they would no longer be able to maintain control. If they stayed the course, the state would collapse and the white population would lose everything in a bloody revolution. De Klerk and his administration instead decided, with the support of a majority of whites, to turn over political power to the majority by a process of peaceful reform, in exchange for which they would not be punished for their criminal acts under Apartheid, and they would get to keep their property. The current status quo is severe economic inequality, among the worst in the world, with incomes and aggregate wealth for the median white South African vastly higher than for the median black. Meanwhile, the political system is completely dominated by the ANC. It consistently gets >60% of the vote in elections, with the second largest party (the predominantly white Democratic Alliance) clocking in at 22% of the vote earlier this year. The post-Mandela ANC is unfortunately very corrupt and wasteful with government funds, President Jacob Zuma is a joke, and the government does little to nothing to address the country's problems, most of which arise from the ridiculous income and wealth inequality. Crime in South Africa has apparently been on a slight downward trend recently but is still extremely high, which leads to a siege mentality among the white minority. So things are not exactly a bed of roses for South African whites, because of the crime rate and nonfunctional political system, but your friend's comparison is obvious bullshit because of the wealth issue. African Americans didn't control most of the land and wealth in the USA during the 1940s. They're also in a much better position than they really have any right to expect considering they stole the drat country in the first place and then spent a century brutalizing the indigenous population in a doomed effort to hold onto it.
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Jul 18, 2014 20:58
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Blowdryer posted:Furthermore, here is a news report on a study that essentially supports that claim. Firstly, it's not a news report, it's an editorial. Secondly, one of the things you need to get familiar with if you're going to be a politically engaged American is the fake think tank. Employment Policies Institute is a shell entity that exists only to accept donations from industry groups, which it then sends directly to the lobbying group Berman and Company. Berman and Company is a go-to lobbyist for the alcohol, tobacco, meat packing, and (most significantly in this case) restaurant industries. One of the main tactics of the fake think tank is to locate scientists or academics who will play ball and commission them to produce studies that will support whatever viewpoint the fake think tank is shilling. This is how tobacco companies got medical studies that showed tobacco doesn't cause health problems. Any time somebody throws a "study" at you, the first thing you want to do is establish who paid for it, because the sad fact is if you have an agenda you can pretty much make the numbers say whatever you want them to say. Basically, Richard Berman got a check from the National Restaurant Association, walked it over to the authors, and ordered up a study to show that minimum wage hikes harm minorities much the same way as you would order a pizza.
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Jul 22, 2014 20:05
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:(I think the CEPR is an okay resource in this matter but they're a think tank and I haven't thoroughly vetted them so use that second one at your own risk) Like I said above, with think tanks you want to look for a couple of things first. There are good ones, bad ones, and phony ones. I'll use EPI and CEPR as examples of phony and legit think tanks, respectively. One, does the think tank actually exist? Check to see if it has a staff. CEPR has a staff listing, EPI doesn't. In fact, EPI doesn't have a staff at all and if you dig around in google for about a minute you'll see that it functions as a mail drop for the Berman and Company lobbying group. If somebody creates a fictional entity to issue press releases while keeping their actual identity a step or two removed, then what they're saying is probably not on the up-and-up. Of course, having a staff and an actual existence is not a guarantor of legitimacy. The Heritage Foundation has a fat budget and a huge staff, for example. This brings us to item two, where does the think tank get its operating budget? CEPR has their major contributors listed right on their website, and it's mostly unions and foundations. You can look more into the foundations if you want to see what each of them are about, but it's an easy guess that CEPR is going to have a left orientation. At the same time, if they're getting money from the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Family Fund, etc. they're probably not too disreputable. Heritage Foundation is also up front about who funds them, and it's mostly individual donors with conservative ideals, and foundations set up by same (also South Korea and Taiwan for some reason). EPI, meanwhile, does not state where its money comes from. This is actually the main reason it exists in the first place, because certain kinds of non-profit corporations don't have to disclose their donors. Again, by some basic googling you can find that they're funded by a small number of enormous donations from industry groups, such as the National Restaurant Association. This is a sure indicator that a think tank is full of poo poo.
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Jul 23, 2014 03:22
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Avian Pneumonia posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOjdy0bslGk I'll just do a quick look, but you could probably a get a full breakdown from somebody (probably several people) if you took it to the ongoing Gaza thread. To start with, the current hostilities didn't begin because of rocket fire. The video cites the fact that 2000 rockets have been launched over the past two weeks, but that's because Israel began heavily bombing Gaza two weeks ago. What actually occurred is three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered in in the West Bank in mid-June, and the Israeli government responded by immediately blaming Hamas and commencing mass arrests of Hamas members, including senior leadership. This in spite of the fact that no evidence was presented to link Hamas itself with the crime, and what little is known indicates that it was carried out by a rogue cell without Hamas approval. From January to mid-June about 120 rockets were launched from Gaza into Israel, mostly by groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad which are not under Hamas command. The arrests triggered Hamas to resume mass rocket attacks in earnest, and then the massive Israeli retaliation led them to increase their tempo further, which is why so many rockets have been launched over the past two weeks. The video then waxes dramatic about the plight of millions of Israelis who have to seek shelter from the rockets, but of course it doesn't note that only one person has been killed by those rockets, whereas the Palestinian civilian death toll is now over 1,000. You can guess why the video doesn't mention those numbers. They go on to accuse Hamas of a "double war crime" because they're using Palestinian civilians as human shields, but the fact that somebody is being used as a human shield doesn't absolve Israel from responsibility for actually shooting them. There's some more stuff about the IDF going to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties, which just isn't worth addressing because it's total bullshit. The IDF sometimes issues such warnings but it's purely for the sake of appearances, because they generally give a window of only a few minutes for residents to flee, and more to the point there is nowhere to flee. The whole area is subject to bombardment and the IDF preferentially attacks
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Jul 26, 2014 20:06
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SirKibbles posted:One of the people I know is really getting into charter schools and Waiting for Superman bullshit I thought there was some stuff about charter schools and what in the OP but maybe I overlooked it? It's not in the OP, it's just slightly down the first page. People discussed this article by Diane Ravitch, which is a very good response to the film and a useful primer for the whole issue. Ravitch is generally excellent and you should try to find more articles and books by her to learn more about the issue. In a simpler sense I usually find it helpful to point out the inherent contradiction when somebody says that American schools are failing because we're not keeping up with other first-world countries, as an argument in support of the kind of policies favored by the education "reform" movement (e.g. charter schools, incentive pay for teachers, etc.). If the US education system is falling behind countries like South Korea, Finland, et al., it would seem to follow that we would look at what those countries are doing and try to emulate their success. Instead the reform movement is more-or-less sprinting in the opposite direction. This should tell you what's really going on: the reformers have specific policy objectives that they're pursuing for other reasons, and poor performance in public schools is just an excuse. The short version is that there's an enormous amount of money spent on education in this country, and the private sector can only nibble around the edges of it. If the teachers' unions were broken and the schools were privatized, the whole thing is opened up for profit seeking.
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Aug 6, 2014 23:31
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on the left posted:If we did things like Korea, we'd have students take tests, and the dumb kids wouldn't even get to go to the same schools as the smart kids. This makes it impossible to implement in the US, where disparate impact interpretations of civil rights laws would shut down any similar scheme almost immediately. I'm not arguing that we should simply adopt a foreign system wholesale. Rather that there should at minimum be some discussion within the supposed education reform movement about what features of foreign systems we should be adapting to improve performance. Instead, union-busting and privatization are treated as a panacea, and in a lot of respects that's opposite to what supposedly more successful countries do with their education system. That's a sign of ulterior motives. It would be like healthcare reform organizations noting that the US system is more expensive and has worse outcomes than Canada, and using that as an argument for deregulating the insurance industry. The point is not that we should instead adopt an exact copy of the Canadian healthcare system, rather that they'd come to a very weird conclusion that didn't really follow from their premise.
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Aug 7, 2014 17:28
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Demon Of The Fall posted:I had this bit of info come out in an argument about welfare on facebook, I've never heard about it, can anyone give me more info? There's a few things to address. (1) Greater Houston is a byword for low-density suburban sprawl, with a metro area spread across 10,000 square miles and an average population density of 630/sq mi. For comparison, the entire state of Massachusetts is 10,555 square miles with an average population density of 840/sq mi. Considering that the people in FEMA housing almost by definition lost everything in the flood, and they tended to come from the densest and most impoverished parts of New Orleans, they may not have had personal vehicles of their own to begin with. As a result many evacuees would be reliant on Houston's spotty public transit infrastructure network to navigate potentially enormous distances to seek employment and get to their workplaces. I don't know where in Houston FEMA placed their emergency housing, but I kind of doubt they laid out the money to settle people in high-rent areas with bustling local economies. I believe that they tended to place them in areas that were already minority neighborhoods, which tend to have less access to employment and other resources. If you look at news articles about the issue from 2005-2006 people are talking about 2-hour bus rides just to get to an interview. (2) Many evacuees planned to return home to New Orleans rather than stay permanently in Houston. This would make it harder for them to commit to long-term employment. On their end, employers would be reluctant to hire evacuees who might leave their jobs to return to Louisiana in a few months. (3) Employers in general systematically discriminate against African Americans. This has been attested by a million studies, it is not open to dispute. The African American unemployment rate typically hovers around double the rate for whites, and before your facebook friend protests that it is only further evidence that blacks are lazy, remember that the rate specifically tracks people who are actively seeking work and unable to find it. There are actually plenty of news articles about the issue that you can find just by googling "katrina evacuees unemployment" and so forth. They're usually not that sympathetic to the evacuees because scolding is the default tone of American news when covering race and unemployment, but they do go into some of the issues I mentioned above. Anyway, the example is beside the point in an argument about welfare, because the government agencies that help welfare recipients keep detailed statistics about them and their economic behavior. This includes data like the fact that most welfare recipients have jobs, and are on welfare only briefly to get through a "rough patch" caused by things like job loss, divorce, health problems, etc. When available it's a good idea to get the argument out of anecdotes and into statistics.
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Aug 15, 2014 21:06
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Cingulate posted:Or you ask more precise and more interesting question, such as "is Islam a pacifying or radicalising element in Syria". Another thing that happens when you start asking these questions correctly is you'll begin learning information that undermines totalizing arguments still further. i.e. the notion of Islam as a uniquely violent religion and Islamism as a dangerous global force is historically recent, 1970s onward. Until about 1979 the Western powers were actually quite supportive of Islamism because they viewed it as basically non-threatening to their interests and a useful counter to secular leftist nationalism, which actually was threatening. Thus you had the USA supporting radical Islamists in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, etc. as a hedge against the Soviet Union, or Israel supporting Ahmed Yassin to undermine Arafat. The Iranian Revolution was a sea change in the way political Islam was perceived, and also in the way that other Islamic movements asserted themselves politically. Around the same time (and partly as a response to the Iranian Revolution) the Saudi state began heavily promoting Wahhabism and funding fundamentalist Islamic schools around the Islamic World, which has had it's own radicalizing effect. This is all to say, if radicalism and violence are essential aspects of Islam as a religion, that probably would have become a pressing global issue before 1979--or really, 2001.
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Dec 23, 2014 08:12
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Disinterested posted:Rightist critics of Islam often like to make a lot of dubious references to Islam's initial rapid expansion and the excesses of the Ottoman empire, as well. I thought about mentioning that, although I would say it depends on your definition of "rightist". But that's a digression. If anything that specific argument just serves to highlight the bankruptcy of their position as a whole. It requires making a huge chronological leap from the classical or renaissance era to the modern with no thought to the intervening centuries, which is self-evidently ridiculous. It also immediately elicits comparisons that belie the notion of Islam as worse than other religions. Such as at the same time the Ottoman Empire was supposedly being so excessive, Christians turned Central Europe into hell on earth, with violence and depredation which I don't think has ever been equaled--not even in WWII, not even by the Khmer Rouge. My read on all this is that critics of Islam (and religion generally) are unconsciously internalizing claims that religious people make about their faith and practice: the claim there is an authentic version (which they practice), that this version has always existed, and has always been the same in every place and in every time. Criticizing a religion for having essential characteristics is really giving it far too much credit for persistence and immutability. They're collections of ideas. quick edit: Cingulate posted:What parts of the law still apply, what don't? Jesus certainly doesn't state anywhere that circumcision and stoning adulteresses is out, but the ten commandments and hating gays is in. Again, we're returning to the theme of social and political context. By some amazing coincidence, the laws that Jesus had rescinded usually turned out to be "anything that stops Gentiles from converting" (see Acts 10:1 through 11:18). Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 17:56
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Cingulate posted:What do you mean? 30 year's war? Yes. 30 years of continuous warfare, primarily targeting defenseless civilians, with a toll usually reckoned at 1/3 to 1/2 of the population of Central Europe, coinciding roughly with the peak of the Ottoman Empire.
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Dec 23, 2014 18:13
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spacetoaster posted:Which nation (s) are you basing this statement on? It depends on how you define "progressive." During the 1950s-1970s many countries that you might call Islamic nations were ruled by secular nationalist dictatorships that suppressed dissent but at the same time pursued modernization policies that involved economic & industrial development, education reform, promotion of 'modern' cultural practices like improvements in women's rights, and so on. Examples would be Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc. etc. etc. I could go on. After the decline of the European empires and the decolonization of most of the Muslim world, there was a period of widespread experimentation with Developmentalism and that expressed itself in a lot of policy that could be characterized as progressive, within certain boundaries (e.g. democracy was not on the table in most countries). quote:I must be looking at the wrong nations. Probably. Which nations were you looking at?
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Dec 27, 2014 01:15
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Cognac McCarthy posted:Content: I've never actually heard a libertarian provide a proper explanation for why racism exists or how it operates. Don't most libertarians tend to operate under the assumption that power resides pretty much entirely within the state? What would a libertarian explanation for racism actually look like? American libertarianism isn't that cohesive intellectually so you would get different answers depending on who you asked. Many libertarians, including some very prominent ones, are themselves racists: Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, etc. Hoppe's attitude is essentially that a libertarian society will "solve" racism by allowing it free reign. With no coercive state people will form contractual communities based on voluntary membership, which can exclude undesirable racial minorities if the members feel it necessary, so racism will be foundational to society but because of total segregation racial conflict will not be an issue. The excluded minorities can form their own communities, though in other contexts Hoppe has stated that he believes there is a natural hierarchy of talent among people and certain people will rise to the top and form a born aristocracy--one guess what color those people are. So presumably the black and brown communities would be poorer than the white ones. Anyway Hoppe's position is then that racism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice aren't in themselves problematic, the real problem is that currently the state and society force people to be in contact with undesirables. And in fact Hoppe went on to argue that it was also imperative for the communities to crush freedom of speech and sever anyone who showed inclinations towards democracy or tolerance. This is all from Democracy: The God that Failed. So you can see that Hoppe is not only racist, but he commits so fully to the logic of libertarianism that he comes all the way around to a kind of sinister feudalism, even worse than historical feudalism because he refuses us even the slim consolations of noblesse oblige and traditional rights of serfs. Rothbard didn't advocate for such a complete revision of human society so his concept was less elaborate and less terrifying, but he also believed in the biological inferiority of non-whites. Apparently he vacillated on the topic of voluntary separation. Initially he thought it was a good idea to have separate societies for whites and blacks, but later he decided that the black nation-state would inevitably fail due to their racial inferiority and become a burden to whites. In this essay he goes on to say that it might be desirable to send them all back to Africa but laments that black perfidy would most likely cause them to refuse that gift: hosted on lewrockwell.com. In other essays he hints that his solution to that impasse is "libertarianism for me but not for thee": lewrockwell.com again posted:3. Abolish Racial or Group Privileges. Abolish affirmative action, set aside racial quotas, etc., and point out that the root of such quotas is the entire "civil rights" structure, which tramples on the property rights of every American. You can check out the rest of that one, he basically says that his program is libertarianism for white men and fascist repression for everybody else. And of course Rothbard was very sympathetic to the Confederacy in the Civil War and regarded the abolition of slavery as illegitimate, and at other times he hinted that he thought slavery would be a necessary, even desirable feature of a post-libertarian free market economy (specifically he advocated for the sale of children). So to sum up his position as I understand it, rigorous racial separatism is desirable but unfeasible because non-whites are helpless without white supervision, and (this is more a reach on my part, extrapolating from other stuff he wrote) perhaps the revival of slavery would be the best solution. All well and good, but these two guys are not wholly representative of libertarianism, which as I said is not totally cohesive intellectually. There's room for variation, which is good, because the above people are obviously deranged and it would be very discouraging to think that they had a real following. You could also go to Ayn Rand, since objectivism and libertarianism have a lot of overlap. Rand was opposed to racism because she believed it was irrational and, even worse, a form of collectivism since it implied that an individual person was a member of a racial community rather than a island separated from all other humans by a vast gulf of self-interest. Yet she was also of the opinion that the dispossession and (incomplete) extermination of Native Americans was necessary and good because they were "primitive" and Europeans could make better use of their property. There's some contradictions (i.e. hypocrisy) there but generally speaking she didn't appear to give any credence to biological racism and, in her sociopathic way, regarded people more on an individual level. And I think that's a position held by a lot of libertarians who aren't overtly racist, or who at least don't consider race a hugely important category. But then this practice of not seeing race, so to speak, leads to other places. For example you will get libertarians who argue that racism is enabled by the state. e.g. as a rational economic actor who owned a lunch counter in 1950s Mississippi, you would naturally want to serve both white and black customers because that would give you the most business, and it was only because the Evil State intervened with Jim Crow laws that discrimination happened. I think this is a topic that could be discussed in more depth but for now I would just characterize as the belief that it's unnecessary and, in fact, oppressive for the state to intervene against racism, because the libertarian has faith that (A) People are rational, (B) Racism is irrational, thus (C) Racism can only exist if the state forces it to do so. For a specific example you might see somebody argue that welfare disbursement is the real racism because it encourages black dependence. So maybe not actually mean-spirited, but naive and stupid.
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Dec 30, 2014 01:20
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Cingulate posted:I wonder if these libertarians, who're I heard are often anti-war, also include all the homeless veterans under their "get rid of bums" policy. I alluded to this bit from The Ethics of Liberty (Rothbard) in the above post, but to elaborate a little more on what a reprehensible piece of poo poo Murray Rothbard was: Rothbard argued that parents had no moral responsibility to care for their children; on the contrary, compelling them to do so would be the very essence of immoral coercion. So he believed it was perfectly fine to abandon your child any time you felt like it, because you have the right to dispose of your private property however you want, and if you want to withhold resources from your child and condemn him to a slow and painful death from thirst/hunger/exposure (whichever gets him first) that's your choice. Of course your child also has the right of self-ownership and should be free to leave your home if he should so desire, so if you stop feeding your four-year old he just needs to bootstrap his way into a new and prosperous life. No charity cases, please. Rothbard goes on to argue that whereas this is all morally just fine, people who are worried about the plight of abused and abandoned children should rest assured--human beings are rational actors, and even if they hate their children and would like to see them dead that will be an unlikely outcome because there are economic incentives to keep the child alive. Namely, why let your kid die of neglect when you could sell him at a profit? No rational actor would choose otherwise, so clearly it would all work out for the best--the parents get the money, the pederast gets a four-year old, and the kid gets to avoid starvation, after a fashion, unless the buyer gets tired of him. It's really a pity that the state interferes with the free market by banning these sorts of transactions. So, to answer your own question after digesting the above, does Rothbard strike you as the kind of person who would be worried about homeless veterans getting exterminated with the rest of the riff-raff?
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Dec 31, 2014 05:04
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Cingulate posted:At this point, he seems completely alien and incomprehensible to me. If you're interested in going down the rabbit hole, here it is: Libertarian, An Cap and Jrodefeld appreciation station. It's huge and a majority of the posts are just people echoing their contempt for libertarianism, but you could do worse than just filtering to posts by the OP (Caros).
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Dec 31, 2014 07:39
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Cingulate posted:Related: what's up with this terrible fear of "redistribution of wealth"? For all I can tell, US society already includes massive redistribution of wealth (not necessarily from the rich to the poor ...). During the last election campaigns, it seemed as if the phrase was used in a way as if it was something that's not being done in the US right now, and as if it would be a radical change to start doing it in the US. In American politics the phrase is understood to mean the confiscation of wealth and its allocation to the undeserving poor, with the listener allowed to fill in the blank as to who that is. Generally speaking, racial minorities. If you told most people that the current economic system was redistributive because real wages have been stagnant since the Reagan administration while per-worker productivity has more than doubled, you would be correct but people wouldn't believe you. Even among people who think it's a bad thing, it's usually seen as something that just happens passively due to economic principles, rather than as the outcome of the government taking a policy position favorable to capital rather than labor.
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Jan 6, 2015 16:12
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TwoQuestions posted:I'm sorry if this was already discussed earlier, but how do you debate with someone with actively malicious views? For example, someone who wants prison to be harder because "those fuckers deserve it", or someone who wants to cut public education not because it will save them money, but because things were hard for them so it should be hard for everybody. His position as you describe it is pure lizard-brain stupidity. Generally speaking when somebody develops these opinions it's by instinct or gut feeling, so it's not going to be vulnerable to intellectual appeal. He arrived at his position without reasoning, why should you expect reason to bring him out of it?
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Feb 12, 2015 18:59
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TwoQuestions posted:Because that's how most people think in America, and it's the default position of anyone you'll talk to, and it's not that stupid. If you make everyone else's life bad enough, yours look good by comparison, and it's easier than improving your own life. People hate other people, that's all there is to it. Wait, are you talking about an individual person you actually know, or are you generalizing about Americans writ large? I thought you were directly quoting or paraphrasing an intransigent friend of yours whom you'd actually tried and failed to convince, which is why I specified "his position as you describe it." If you're drawing generalizations, then I just don't agree with your premise. A fair number of people will express ideas like that off the cuff but the depth of their support is as shallow as their reasoning. There's a few ways to get a better response. First, talk to a person individually. The people in the video you posted expressed those rotten opinions because they knew they were surrounded by like-minded people. This reinforces their sense that they are right, makes them feel more secure in rejecting contrary arguments without even considering them), and makes them feel insecure about reversing themselves. So try to discuss things on a personal level, one-on-one. Second, begin by making it clear that you respect their opinion and try to find a common starting point. For example, with respect to prisons, start by getting them to agree that the justice system should protect people from crime. Then move on to the proposition that prisons should protect citizens from crime, by separating offenders and discouraging them from committing crimes in the future. Or to take the example of health care, get them to agree that health care systems should get good medical outcomes while being economically efficient. Third, present your evidence, emphasizing the fact that it's credible and unbiased. Rehabilitation works, punitive measures don't. Universal health care has better outcomes and is cheaper than fully privatized systems. Both are slam dunks, all the evidence points that way. Fourth, be okay with it if this doesn't work at any point. Maybe you can't even start to talk to them because they're such assholes that they won't listen. Maybe they'll spitefully refuse any attempt to find common ground. Maybe they'll refuse to believe your evidence simply because they don't want to. In any case you can't knock over a brick wall by arguing with it. But getting angry makes it worse, and a position like yours--"it's useless to argue because people generally are just spiteful and mean"--isn't true and has no value as an explanation of anything. It is, frankly, an excuse to avoid talking to people who disagree with you, while still feeling superior to them.
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Feb 13, 2015 01:57
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TwoQuestions posted:Here's a more specific one then: Work on the contradiction between that position and volunteering for military service. At some point this person made an affirmative decision to sacrifice his own safety and comfort in service to the common good (theoretically, anyway), so why has he reversed himself after mustering out? But again, are you quoting somebody you've actually talked to, or are you paraphrasing what you take to be a generic American conservative position? If it's the latter, it would be more productive to discuss how you formed that. Notwithstanding Mark Ames's "We the Spiteful" essay, the politics of resentment isn't a final or all-encompassing explanation. It's definitely there but it isn't the whole thing. If you pay attention to the way they talk to one another, merely saying "gently caress anybody who's different" is sufficient for only a hardcore minority. It gets play on Stormfront, not Fox News. Most people want to at least feel like they're basing their worldview on something real, which is why there's a whole huge industry set up to produce arguments and sources for consumption by conservatives. It's largely specious, of course. But the fact is there's real demand for bullshit like the Laffer Curve (just as one example), and that's a start, because it shows that people aren't just saying "gently caress the poor", they also want to believe that lowering taxes on the rich is good policy. This is your point of entry. Now, a great deal of the time it's simply not going to work. Being wrong and consequently having to revise your opinions is uncomfortable, and people want to avoid that. Usually they'll just ignore evidence that contradicts their worldview, or they'll aggressively reject it and redouble their commitment to being wrong. That's life. But you can succeed sometimes, and it's worth the effort to try.
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Feb 13, 2015 21:18
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TwoQuestions posted:The argument I quoted was real, but I'll keep the second paragraph in mind. I gotta stay the hell out of the Freep thread for a while. Nah, it's a fun thread, you just have to remember it's a selection of the worst posts on the worst website.
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Feb 14, 2015 00:10
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Triskelli posted:Question that came up: Why aren't there drug tests for receiving welfare? (A) It's bad policy. People on welfare actually abuse drugs at much lower rates than the general population, as attested by attempts to implement this policy in states like Florida and Tennessee. Testing costs vastly more money than is saved from denying benefits. If he's already seen the Tennessee numbers find the Florida ones; their program involved urine testing and was applied on a much larger scale. It's also notable because the testing was championed by Governor Rick Scott, who coincidentally had a large financial stake in the company that performed the tests. It was essentially a scam whereby a known fraudster conned money from taxpayers by trading on their unjustified contempt for welfare recipients. If you support this policy, you're a mark. (B) It's unconstitutional. The program in Florida was abandoned not long ago after a federal appeals court ruling that requiring applicants for TANF to submit to drug testing was an unconstitutional violation of their fourth amendment rights. (C) It's inhumane. Your interlocutor will probably find this the least compelling argument because of some combination of right-wing misanthropy and Calvinist moralism, but basically it's a very stupid reason to deprive people of state benefits they probably need to survive. Triskelli posted:"All the employees at my work have to pass drug tests." Has he considered whether that policy is right or necessary?
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Mar 26, 2015 13:50
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