08-15-2016, 05:11 PM | #2126 |
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So I started writing out my full platform position on the issues of drug policy, rural revitalization, border security, and international aid in an effort to completely overwhelm the thread but decided that wouldn't be the best use of my time.
All I'm going to put in this thread is that the addicts themselves shouldn't be targets for arrest and imprisonment, that should be the dealers and manufacturers. Instead the focus should be on reaching out to addicted people and helping them get the treatment they need. We also need to consider why people turn to drugs and deal with that. The opioid epidemic started in and remains the worst in rural areas that have been forgotten and left behind the world, places where there are no opportunities to move up the income ladder and where there are often very few jobs of any kind, even jobs that pay the minimum wage. This is the most important aspect of fighting the opioid epidemic in the long run, because you can rehabilitate as many people, arrest as many dealers, or shut down as many labs as you want but if we don't deal with the underlying issues of poverty and hopelessness there will always be a market for drugs and a supply that follows them.
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08-15-2016, 07:59 PM | #2127 |
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That's a very good point, deh.
I'd say another would be identifying the line between users and addicts, since not all people who use a given drug (for argument's sake, including the legal ones such as alcohol, tobacco, and even caffeine here as well), but aren't addicted to it or abuse it. Particularly: not everyone who would be caught and arrested for using actually requires any rehab. Sure, many do, but there's a lot of people who use sometimes but not often, maybe have a higher threshold to cross before they become physically addicted. Or what they use is significantly less physically addicting than other drugs (such as how pot has very little to no properties that cause a chemical addition). There's a certain limbo there, between the "arrest all the users" and the "rehab all the users", where there's people who don't deserve to really be incarcerated (also for-profit prisons are the worst thing ever, especially since mandatory minimums), but also don't require rehab. I'd personally say that's a wider grey area than some would like to acknowledge. |
08-22-2016, 11:59 PM | #2128 | |
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Trump, as I predicted, has begun his centrist swing. Right now, doubtless you've heard about Trump's comments on black issues such as crime. He's aggressive about it, and you may not actually recognize how he's courting black voters because he's not directly appealing to them just yet.
From an opinion piece on CNN: Quote:
Trump's web site details plans to help struggling communities and boost up women and minorities. His hope is to make it economically viable for women and minorities to compete with white men in the work force - in other words, not to regulate the free market, but encourage it to take advantage of promising female and minority workers. This is where it all becomes clear: Similarly to how Trump courted dissatisfied Republicans, he will court dissatisfied women and minorities. He's going to position himself on their side and has already taken steps to discredit anything that Hillary is planning to do for them. If you read through the opinion piece, you can see the argument is weak; this is why Trump has allowed himself to seem racist. The only real argument that anyone has against Trump's possible benefits to black communities is..."he's racist." It's not even true! His strategy is to bring attention to problems that these groups face and then propose bold, sweeping, actionable solutions to them. Immigration -> A wall ISIS -> Mass murder + war crimes Unfavorable trade agreements -> Speak softly and carry a big stick Racism/Sexism -> Boost struggling communities to make black workers and female workers competitive with white workers* Trump does not believe that Latino and Asian communities need help. Which is half true. Latino is definitely worse off than average as a whole. Buuuut it's not as bad as black people have it. So there we have it. By...beginning of September, we'll see Trump really come out in support of black communities, citing fixable problems with those communities and promising to build something. It's fun to speculate what it'll be! Here are some possibilities: 1. A greatly expanded conservative-minded affirmative action that legitimately enables poor minorities 2. A new style of public school system that grants money fairly and adequately, reduces standardized testing, and rewards good teachers (ugh i had a wet dream about this last night) 3. Some other revolutionary tactic It's possible he'll lean hard to the right and blame immigrants for minority problems, but he'll have a hard time arguing that. It doesn't make sense. Immigrants mostly live along the southern border, and poor black cities are scattered across the US. There aren't any illegal Mexican immigrants in Baltimore. I honestly think he'll bring out something new and crazy. Can't wait to see what it is! ~-~-~-~-~ *Any other racism-ending strategy will not work. I've been over this before; if we want racism to end, we have to end the institutional biases that exist within the system. That means boosting up minority communities so that they are competitive with majority communities. Programs like affirmative action will work for now, but they're just a band-aid. If Trump pulls this off he will be the man to single-handedly end racism, permanently. I could write several paragraphs about his ridiculously ballsy strategy to end racism for good. My one criticism is that he doesn't seem to realize that native americans exist. Hopefully Dept. of the Interior will help him figure out some answers to those struggles!
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08-23-2016, 03:55 AM | #2129 |
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Suggestions for a US news source to catch every morning? I'm thinking NYT or WSJ given that I already have to work with them. But it could be Buzzfeed or something like that.
Not looking for a major bias in eother direction, mostly looking for politics and business. (I would dearly love to give up reading the news, following my choice to quit FB, as they're both depressing, but I work in public affairs so I can't do that.) EDIT a good amalgamator/aggregator such as Politico or RCP would also work. Last edited by Mercutio; 08-23-2016 at 04:21 AM. |
08-23-2016, 06:49 AM | #2131 |
Banned
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It's online is the point.
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08-23-2016, 06:51 AM | #2132 |
Snackin'
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I mainly use CNN and Politico for news myself.
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08-23-2016, 07:25 AM | #2133 |
Golden Wang of Justice
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You will probably consider WSJ to have a slight right bent but it covers business much better than the NYT.
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Mozz's Van, named after Bulbagardens creditor, was a hidden forum section where staff members could share pictures of their tiny penises and engage in homosex. Sadly, HAVA media, Bulbagardens new corporate overlord, forced it's closure. Can't have porn on a children's website. |
08-23-2016, 07:49 AM | #2134 |
我が名は勇者王!
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Mozz, I thought you were recommending Weekly Shounen Jump for a second, there. Which gave your post a surreal look.
... I use MSN myself, since all I care about are the articles/facts and just repeating the Associated Press is often just enough to satisfy that. Narratives are fun but they're often not as informative unless the writer knows his/her stuff or has been covering the topic long enough to make it a meta analysis. Wall Street Journal has the highest quality writing, but it's behind a paywall. Forbes is behind an adwall. NYT and Huffington are free, for what they're worth.
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08-23-2016, 09:05 AM | #2135 |
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That's ok I know how to get around pay walls.
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08-26-2016, 10:07 AM | #2137 |
我が名は勇者王!
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I don't want to call it "depressing" as I was never super invested in Trump, even if I was to (and still would) vote for him.
But it's disappointing, if a little sobering, since it tells me that true outsiders really have no chance in American politics anymore.
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08-26-2016, 10:09 AM | #2138 | |
Archbishop of Banterbury
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In fairness, an outsider who didn't make such a huge hash of their campaign might. Like, all political opinions aside Trump has been doing an exceedingly poor job of contesting this election pretty much since the primaries ended.
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08-26-2016, 10:48 AM | #2139 |
我が名は勇者王!
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As mentioned before in here (perhaps by you?) Obama was relatively outsider, and he played his campaign perfectly...into a relatively mediocre presidency.
I'm not convinced Trump is a Harry Truman type, a guy who would probably not win the presidency on his own merits (without the incumbency advantage) but would be a capable leader. He's much closer to the Obama mold, a better campaigner than administrator. His appeal as a president is a willingness to do things differently, and backing off on that is what's causing his campaign to collapse on itself. For better of worse, he should have stuck to his extreme policies but scaled back the ad hominems. Yet he's so bad at debate, and has no real policy makers supporting him, he had to resort to doubling down on the personal attacks as compensation.
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08-26-2016, 11:37 AM | #2140 |
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One magazine served me nicely through my free periods of late high school, and that was The Week, which has plenty of things news wise from both sides of the needle and an only in America section for you to mock us over.
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08-26-2016, 11:55 AM | #2141 | |
Archbishop of Banterbury
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>Dopple
Wasn't saying anything about Trumps capabilities (although I'm sure you know my views on that), was just making the point that it's not his outsider status that's sinking him here, it's his inability to run a competent campaign.
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08-26-2016, 03:38 PM | #2142 |
我が名は勇者王!
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I wasn't very clear. Obama was "relatively outsider", but he actually wasn't. He was a senator and was able to parlay his initial senatorial campaign and time in office into an ability to network people capable of getting himself elected president. His personal charisma and the times drew people to his campaign who were capable, and his people were able to identify them and sort them into jobs where they were effective.
Trump is a true outsider in that while he had political friends, but he had never held office and he knew nobody who could run a campaign. He has personal charisma and "the times" on his side but either due to his message or himself he's been unable to attract the right people and/or his people haven't been able to assign them into the necessary jobs to succeed. The end result is a logistical mess that can't raise money, has no clear message and can't mobilise itself. I do think holding office, i.e. not a true outsider, is a necessary requirement to running a strong campaign. If only for selection bias - if you've won before, you've proven you can do it at some level. Hence why I have this feeling if Trump's presidency fails, he'll try to run for Mayor of New York and one of his less crazy kids runs for president later down the line. It's all tragic because Hilary is a fat, sitting duck as far as candidates go. I think Trump would get destroyed by any of the non-joke candidates over the past few elections. Certainly when it comes to organizing a campaign he'd be whipped.
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08-27-2016, 01:21 AM | #2143 |
Foot, meet mouth.
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Well, obviously a complete outsider will never do well in a Presidential election. How are you going to get people to vote for you without some kind of experience? If anything Sanders is the true winning story for outsiders. Sure, he got fucked over by the DNC, but at the end of the day he's probably contributed more to President-ship than Trump ever will, by bringing democratic socialist ideals into the public eye.
And in the meantime, Hillary's hitting bullseyes on her speeches while Trump's saying incomprehensible bullshit about Obama founding ISIS. The part about the Breitbart dude is solid gold. To be honest, I really wish Obama was campaigning instead of Hillary. Obama's burns are legendary - just see some of the WHCD videos. He'd be making mincemeat out of Trump if he was running a campaign. Hell, he's hitting them out of the park while just in office.
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08-27-2016, 04:48 AM | #2144 | |
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1. His friends 2. His charisma/message I watched Arnold Schwarzenegger get elected in California following those two principles. Arnold had no political experience, but he had the connections (in no small part due to Maria Shriver) and had the charisma/message to attract talent to him. Experience gives you those connections; experience by itself doesn't necessarily make you a better campaigner. Running a presidential election is x50 harder than a gubernatorial campaign, because the political parties are even more heavily involved and it's micromanaging a campaign in all fifty states at once. Trump's campaign would have been unfit if he were running for Governor of New York, let alone President of the United States.
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08-27-2016, 06:58 PM | #2145 | ||
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Quote:
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Trump says a lot of stupid things, but this isn't one of them. It's wrong, but it's wrong in the same way that a lot of satire is factually incorrect - ex. America does not actually need the money hole. It's a common tactic that's used to introduce complex ideas in quick sound bites. Prompt: America dumps a bunch of money into a hole in the desert. Instant Response: Factually wrong. Internal Prompt: Why would America dump money in a giant hole in the desert and then light it on fire? What does The Onion claim it does? Internal Realization: American government has money sinks that are a waste of resources that are kept around for reasons that just shouldn't apply in a sane society, and the arguments against them miss the point of why it is a bad idea to continue the program: Money shouldn't be destroyed or thrown away on pointless projects, but managed efficiently and usefully for maximum gain. In the same way: Prompt: Obama founded ISIS Instant Response: Factually wrong, and ISIS predates Obama. Internal Prompt: Why does ISIS exist, and why does Trump claim that Obama started it? Internal Realization: Trump's claim is that the actions of Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama encouraged the growing Middle Eastern threat by mishandling the entire situation so dramatically that it exploded into a nightmare. In a way, the US really is responsible for ISIS. Trump is not able to call Reagan out on bullshit like Iran Contra because he will lose the election if he does. Instead, he's sneakily going around the Republican Party by blaming it on "Obama" aka the office of the President and claiming that an "interventionist foreign policy" is what led to terror in the Middle East.
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08-27-2016, 09:08 PM | #2146 |
You sayin' I like dudes?
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Except Trump denied that exact meaning of his Obama ISIS statement, so who knows what he actually meant.
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08-27-2016, 11:02 PM | #2147 |
Foot, meet mouth.
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Shuckle I would really advise you to stop trying to make excuses for someone who clearly has no idea what he is doing or saying. I mean if you still really think Trump is on top of things and "intentionally" pandering to votebases then nothing is ever going to convince you.
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08-28-2016, 12:50 AM | #2148 | |
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Quote:
Trump waited waaay too long to make a solid move. What he's done so far amounts basically to substanceless memes while he clutched aces to his chest. One or two Trump Cards™ and the dude could be a national treasure by now, but instead he stuck to his guns of hiding his true intentions and now he's paying dearly for it. He suffered not from lack of exposure or lack of intelligence, but lack of pacing. The man simply does not understand the timing of a political campaign, and his team has not been able or willing to help him. Meanwhile his campaign team seems to be actively working against him...in the end, you have one smart guy acting like an idiot who's surrounded by actual idiots who are pretending to be smart people. Small wonder the Democrats are successfully making Hillary out to be a good candidate! Most people have already chosen who they are going to vote for. Anything either candidate says or does, barring illegal things or a huge upset debate where Trump thrashes Clinton, is mostly meaningless. Everyone already has opinions about both Trump and Clinton, and my prediction is that Clinton will win the election, which upsets me for a number of reasons and excites me for a whole host of others. I won't talk about the good parts of a Clinton presidency because you all already know them. Democrat president = good for the country. At least in theory. She definitely has the ability to fuck it up big time, but "Crooked Hillary" is a myth and Wasteful Hillary can't be a thing if she's President. The absolute worst that could happen is more gridlock. My main complaints about a Trump loss: - I think Trump would be good for the country. I think more Teddy Roosevelt would be good for the country, and Trump is quite literally TR 2.0. Inflates his accomplishments, comes from a weird but absurdly wealthy background, overblown and aggressive personality, elected "by accident" with a whirlwind campaign full of ad hominem attacks. - I honestly do suspect that the RNC was rigged, and I have a lot of respect for Trump for making it through with the nomination over Ted "I picked my VP and rehearsed my acceptance speech even though I technically can't get enough delegates to be nominated unless the superdelegates all choose me" Cruz. - Hillary Clinton's campaign is based off of the positions of people who are not Hillary Clinton. And actually, you can find every single one of Trump's positions hidden in there, too. VA, gun control, education, small business assistance, fair tax system, immigration reform, and health care. A couple of them (specifically tax and immigration) differ more widely on the actual details, buuuuut it's the same damn thing. They're practically the same candidate. I'd rather have the one who feels more strongly about the positions they hold, because that to me means that they are prepared to follow through. - I'm a misogynist pig who thinks that women belong in the kitchen, not the Oval Office. In the end I do like both candidates and this election makes me very happy even as more polarized people were whining about Hillary or Trump, or both. I favored Trump because of his weird but effective campaign as well as his outsider status, but Hillary's well-connected position will make her a pretty solid President when it comes time to deal with the sulking man-babies on both sides of the aisle.
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08-28-2016, 01:09 AM | #2149 |
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The issue with Trump is that while an intelligent man (Even if you don't agree with anything he says, you have to admit he's somewhat intelligent. If he wasn't, none of this would have happened.), he's only intelligent to an extent and about certain things. That knowledge obviously ended at the ability to run an effective campaign post-RNC, especially since he probably has less support from his party to help him there than other candidates would have had (Just going from observations, could be wrong about the last little clause since can't site any sources).
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08-28-2016, 01:30 AM | #2150 |
Foot, meet mouth.
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No Shuckle, I read your posts. I just come away from them with the opinion that you're as delusional as Trump. You make excuses and you make excuses and you pull convoluted reasons out of your ass for why anything that comes out of Trump's mouth makes the least bit of sense and I'm frankly sick of it. You say all your bullshit about Trump never actually making a good campaign but the truth is that just like every other Republican candidate in modern times he can never make a good campaign. If he wants to pander to the centrists then he'll lose the far right Republican support and thus lose.
Because the harsh fucking truth is that the stuff you need to say to win the Republican primary almost completely guarantees that you will stand no chance in the Presidential election unless your opponent is literally Hitler. And I'm not going to deny that you see a very similar problem with winning the Democratic primary and then trying to shift to the center- it's just the difference between pivoting 30 degrees and pivoting 300. But let's forget that. Let's ignore the problems with the festering pile that the Republican party has become where their even slightly decent candidates never stood any chance in becoming President and the only reason why they consistently win in the House and Senate is gerrymandering and Democrats never giving enough fucks to vote. My issue with you, Shuckle, is you have been consistently, and against all attempts to have a reasonable debate otherwise, completely ignoring that Trump is an awful, racist, bigoted piece of shit. And because you've been ignoring this basic fact, this leaves you free to go through his comments and try to justify them by the simple method of twisted words until they're begging for mercy and then doing it some more. And when he says something you don't like it's only pandering to people. And when he says something you do like it's conveniently his real self. At least Clinton supporters know that she's a politician with everything that comes of being that. I'm done with this thread until November 9th. There is nothing more to say. At least there is nothing more to say regarding Trump and Clinton. There are interesting signs regarding Gary Johnson possibly reaching the threshold for federal funding but to be honest I don't really care that much about a slightly less watered down and less socially shitty version of the Republican party. Meanwhile Jill Stein remains Jill Stein and the Green Party remains a joke. I'm done with this thread and I'm done with "debating" with people who justify Trump and who justify Philippines and with fucking Mozz. I fucking tried to explain this to you in a reasonable manner but here you are again going on another "Lol look at me why doesn't Trump make me the campaign manager so he really does have the best people spiel." Oh, and I fucking know that I'm being way more arrogant and dickish than you have been. I do have the slightest smidgen of self-awareness. And because I only don't care about getting banned for the Debate forum but do care about getting banned from UPN I am not going to say any more.
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