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Post by Amadan on Nov 26, 2018 19:32:05 GMT -5
Perry Mason was horrible.
And I like true crime stories, even the ones where we never find out whodunnit, because a lot of true crime stories have no tidy answers. No one ever confessed, no one ever cracked on the witness stand, no one ever gave the answers.
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Post by Amadan on Nov 26, 2018 19:30:08 GMT -5
Wow. You guys are amazing. You took one thing I said, then another thing I said and twisted them together to make something that I didn't say. That's real talent. I can't compete with that.
You said "personal responsibility." You said "Should countries go to (economic) war over one individual's poor choice?" You said he could have avoided his fate.
I don't see how anyone is twisting what you said.
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Post by Amadan on Nov 24, 2018 13:51:05 GMT -5
So Khashoggi chose to do what he did knowing the risks. But earlier, you used that to argue that we (the US) should not be responsible for his choices. I.e., that we shouldn't be expected to take any action against the Saudi government that would be to our disadvantage.
Your definition of "personal responsibility" seems to be that if you choose to be a journalist who antagonizes hostile and autocratic governments, you should not expect anyone to have your back.
I know it's almost laughable nowadays to talk about the United States defending a free press and human rights, but at least compared to Saudi Arabia, we historically have at least given lip service to those ideals. Even for non-US citizens.
Now you're saying "Eh, Kashoggi knew the risks, why should we put ourselves out on his behalf?"
We should do that because it's right. We should do it because otherwise we might as well just admit that we don't give a fuck about anything other than gas prices. We should do it because why wouldn't Saudi Arabia and other countries keep doing things like this, now that we've shown we don't care?
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Post by Amadan on Nov 23, 2018 12:24:36 GMT -5
Yeah, if there is such a thing as victim blaming, that's it. Anyone can use 20/20 hindsight and say "Maybe he shouldn't have done that," but no one should expect that he's going to be murdered when he walks into his own country/s embassy, and you're basically saying we should shrug and say "Well, he should have expected that his country was like that."
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Post by Amadan on Nov 21, 2018 9:00:09 GMT -5
There is a small but very loud cadre of trans activists that have been attacking any public associations of "vagina" with "woman" and they're starting to generate a backlash from women sick of being told they can't talk about their physiology without genuflecting to "women who don't have vaginas."
That said, Liberal University Does Stupid Thing Because Social Justice is a day ending in y.
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Post by Amadan on Nov 21, 2018 8:53:34 GMT -5
Once again, words in my mouth. "Claiming that people who support minimum-wage laws are also in favor of central planners deciding when you can turn on your heat in the winter" are not my words. What I said was "Minimum-wage laws are price fixing, but the support for them is ridiculously high," which you strawmanned into your version, then accused me of being dishonest for the statement. If you're going to condemn me for my words, please use my words to do so. Thanks. Who's being dishonest here? You. Your original statement was that 99.9% of the left and over 50% of the right thinks "profits are evil" and that price-fixing is fine. When I pushed back on that, you gave support for minimum wages as an example. People who support minimum wage laws (by and large) do not think "profits are evil" or that price-fixing is good. (Yes, I understand you are claiming that minimum wages are an example of labor price-fixing, but even if you are correct in an abstract sense, you know that "price fixing" of the kind you initially described is not that.) Likewise, I said your conspiracy theory is that shadowy government interests deliberately propped up the USSR as an enemy when it was never a serious threat. That is very different than saying that a lot of academics were stupidly credulous and that the Pentagon has always been happy to exaggerate any threat that will pump up its budget. You just can't deal with gray, can you?
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Post by Amadan on Nov 20, 2018 19:35:12 GMT -5
For some people? Probably. For enough people that it actually changes the outcome? If it were that close, I doubt they'd be calling it so soon.
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Post by Amadan on Nov 20, 2018 15:32:23 GMT -5
I don't want to crow. I just want you to stop being so blindly defensive of Trump. It's not about "winning." I don't hate Trump for the sake of hating Trump, and I've taken plenty of shit for saying I don't think he's a fascist or that sometimes he actually hasn't done the worst things he's accused of (e.g., being personally responsible for racial violence). You know I also have never been a blindly partisan defender of Democrats. I don't think anyone here is. But you seem to have wrapped up your entire identity in being the iconoclastic Republican who will defend Trump no matter what. Rob does that sometimes, just to kick the libs a bit, but every time Trump does something egregiously stupid and/or horrific, like clockwork we can predict that you will post something like "Oh, that's the liberal media blowing things out of proportion, he's just being uncouth, how unfortunate, but he'll say something more sensible eventually LOL."
I'm making fun, but it's because I am sure on some level you know you're ignoring the cognitive dissonance. And really, admitting that Trump has screwed the pooch does not mean you have to surrender and admit the Liberals Are Right About Everything.
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Post by Amadan on Nov 20, 2018 15:03:20 GMT -5
No, no, it's very complicated. Trump is acknowledging that. ("Maybe he did, and maybe he didn't.")
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Post by Amadan on Nov 20, 2018 13:13:45 GMT -5
This happens in every election. Some media outlets call some races early, and in the aftermath they are blamed by the losers for influencing the outcome. It's possible (though unlikely) that such premature announcements really have made the difference in some cases, but it's not provable. It would also be hard to prove that it was a deliberate effort unless you catch someone stupid enough to be recorded saying "Let's call the race for the Democrats so all the Republican voters will stay home."
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Post by Amadan on Nov 20, 2018 13:08:56 GMT -5
I agree he's out of his depth here. (What person new to politics wouldn't be? This is really complicated.) "This is really complicated." That's what we elect Presidents to deal with. Trump is not new to politics. This is his first elected office, but he ran in large part on supposedly being such a tough negotiator and a smart guy. You really are reaching for the most desperate defenses you can find. Bet?
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Post by Amadan on Nov 20, 2018 9:49:56 GMT -5
And yeah, I'd guess those percentages regarding price-fixing are accurate. Minimum-wage laws are price fixing, but the support for them is ridiculously high. Claiming that people who support minimum-wage laws are also in favor of central planners deciding when you can turn on your heat in the winter is dishonest, Don. I know you see even a little bit of "central planning" as being like a little bit of shit in a stew, but for most people, that is not how the world works. In fact, for pretty much the entire world, that is not how the world works. That's an interesting conspiracy theory, but it's another subject.
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Post by Amadan on Nov 20, 2018 9:44:09 GMT -5
Here's a thing that drives me crazy, and both the left and the right do it:
If I predict there is an 80% chance of a thing happening, and that thing does not happen, it does not mean I was wrong.
It is possible my model was wrong and I overestimated (or underestimated) the actual probability of the thing happening. But the fact that the thing didn't happen doesn't prove that.
This is basic numeracy and I am ever shocked by how many people can't seem to grasp this.
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Post by Amadan on Nov 20, 2018 9:40:40 GMT -5
Well, he’s already done a couple of things that are more than finger wagging, and I stil think there will and should be more, so no, that doesn’t really compute with my opinion and thoughts thus far, Amadan . No, he hasn't, and no, he won't.
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Post by Amadan on Nov 20, 2018 9:38:27 GMT -5
"Well, how many people, especially in the US, would disagree with any of that?" Seriously? About 99.9% of the left and over 50% of the right would disagree with tons of that article. Profits are evil, don'tcha know, and price-fixing is important and not uneconomic when it's labor you're price-fixing, and the state SHOULD maintain it's monopoly on primary education and should establish a monopoly in healthcare, and Bernie says we have too many brands of toothpaste. And that's just off the top of my head. Did we read the same article? Rob did say he changed the link a while back. Yes, I did read the article. I do not think that 99.9% of the left and over 50% of the right would agree that profits are evil and price-fixing is important. Speaking of "this is how it's done," what I notice is that you jumped from Tupy's very common-sense observations, that a state-run dictatorship that micromanages every aspect of the economy does things terribly, to your usual ranting about "state monopolies on primary education" and warfleblibbering about whatever pull-quote you can grab from Bernie Sanders. Nowhere did I see Marian Tupy complaining about state-run schools. (In fact, one thing that communist countries have usually done pretty well is churn out highly educated proletariat.) This is how it's done, this is how you do it - refuse to acknowledge that economic models are not a binary, where you choose either "Communist dictatorship" or "Unregulated free market with no stinkin' gummint to tell meat-packers what they can put in their sausages." And then attack straw men, as if minimum wage laws are indistinguishable from Marxist labor practices, as if the existence of the EPA means we live under a dictatorship where no business is allowed to thrive or innovate, as if K-12 public schools have destroyed the American mind. You. Are. Being. Dishonest. BTW, this ("The USSR really sucked at managing their economy") is not true. The Supreme Soviet was excellent at managing their economy. They even willingly put people to death to manage their economy. They erected vast fences and shot people for trying to escape from their economic hell. What they sucked at was scientific thought. They believed they could replace critical self-organizing components of the economy with bureaucratic edict, and they did so. They then did everything up to and including killing citizens to keep that economy functioning. And it failed to function miserably. And as we can see in the US, those sectors of the economy most heavily under central planning are precisely those areas where the economy fails to function adequately. Of course, the solution to central planning failures is... more central planning. The error is not one of execution, it's one of design, as the article rob posted makes abundantly clear. The two are not mutually exclusive, and you're wrong - the Supreme Soviet was terrible at managing their economy. One of the big revelations, when the Soviet Union fell and their books were opened, is that the West learned that it had vastly overestimated the Soviet GNP. We thought their economy, mismanaged as it was, was comparable to ours. In fact, when you removed the smoke and mirrors, their economy was, IIRC, about about the size of Spain's. Which is why they crashed so hard once the USSR collapsed, and set the stage for the rise of oligarchs and autocrats and why so many Russians today still think they had it better under the USSR (because in terms of standard of living, many of them did). I am not arguing that communism could work on a large scale, because you know perfectly well I do not. But you are conflating a whole multitude of problems and shoving them all under the catch-all label "communism" - i.e., everything that is not your preferred model is "communism." Ironically, you sound just like all the leftists who apply the screeching label "Fascist!" to everything non-SJW.
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