The GOP under Trump have already pushed bills to allow coal companies to dump into rivers and now want to eliminate the EPA altogether. How is it that normal Americans can't see this as a problem to them, especially after last year's Flint, Michigan water debacle?
This is the thing that I just cannot understand. This is an ethics thing. How can you not see that you are harming your country, your people, and ultimately your economy by not moving past the old world of doing things. Times have changed, destroying the EPA is only going to result in the country hurting. Then what? It is unethical to consider this to continue in my mind.
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Intolerant liberals. A very interesting article that hits so many nails right on the head.
It's refreshing to see a progressive admit that their ideology isn't liberal, isn't about tolerance or trying to build the best life for the most people, but about achieving an artificial level of equality, regardless of the consequences.
This is opposed to the liberal values of tolerance, fairness, individualism, and social support based on individual need.
The progressive movement as described in the first paragraphs is a movement that primarily helps middle class people feel better about themselves without actually having to solve the underlying issues around poverty, class segregation, early childcare, and culture. I'll take the liberals that are building schools in poor neighborhoods, helping poor families and single mothers, etc with the express purpose of solving some of these underlying issues (which disproportionately affect minorities) through innovative, tailor made programs 10/10 times over the divisive ideology described in that article.
The rest of the article goes up and down, making some good points that are widely agreed on like not all worldviews being equal, not all presidents are equally worth outrage, conservative blind spots, etc while overstating (and IMO, misunderstanding) the challenges and attempting to back up his article with misapplied math.
The strongest part, and an argument I like to use on occastion, is that conservative morality is too often relativism masquerading as objective morality.
It's refreshing to see a progressive admit that their ideology isn't liberal, isn't about tolerance or trying to build the best life for the most people, but about achieving an artificial level of equality, regardless of the consequences.
It's not even, though, despite the parade of statistics that are aimed at exactly that sort of equality of outcome (the "we need 43 straight female presidents before it's equal" is basically a self-parody). It's about, for that author and those who think like him, casting themselves as the heroes in an epic struggle against the forces of evil.
Quote:
The progressive liberal agenda isn’t about being nice. It’s about confronting evil, violence, trauma, and death. It’s about acknowledging the ways systemic power, systemic oppression, systemic evil, work in our world around us. I’m not fighting for diversity. I’m not fighting for tolerance. I’m fighting to overturn horrific systems of dehumanizing oppression.
Anyone who sees himself like that is an utter horror show of authoritarianism in waiting. The worst sorts of despotic regimes are the ones that are utterly certain of their righteousness. The road to hell is paved with good intentions... reminds me of this.
Spoiler!
The whole premise of the article appears to be "all positions aren't equal, all choices aren't equally moral" - which is clearly right, but then follows with "and the progressive doctrine I espouse is unquestionably the correct and moral one in every case, while all conservatives have to offer is backwards narrow-mindedness", which is a disastrous failure of reasoning. It's manicheaism run amok.
EDIT: I took a quick look at the comments. This one sums it up pretty amazingly.
Quote:
This has now become my Get-to-know-me article. I sent to a religious friend of mine who does understand my liberal stances. I told her that, much like her religious beliefs, this article is not up for discussion.
Aside from erroneously describing her dogmatic ideology as "liberal", couldn't have said it better myself.
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Last edited by CorsiHockeyLeague; 02-06-2017 at 02:34 AM.
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So, negative polls are fake polls? The Donald lives in some sort of made up reality.
Quote:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump 3h3 hours ago
Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.
I wonder what kind of data he is talking about here? I'm guessing tv.
Quote:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump 3h3 hours ago
I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it. Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies!
It amazing how Trump is destroying the meaning of fake news. Say it so much it loses all power as a word to convey meaning. He is definitely a communication savant. I don't think he intentionally does it just His narcisism leads him right into it.
But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.
It's not even, though, despite the parade of statistics that are aimed at exactly that sort of equality of outcome (the "we need 43 straight female presidents before it's equal" is basically a self-parody). It's about, for that author and those who think like him, casting themselves as the heroes in an epic struggle against the forces of evil.
Anyone who sees himself like that is an utter horror show of authoritarianism in waiting. The worst sorts of despotic regimes are the ones that are utterly certain of their righteousness. The road to hell is paved with good intentions... reminds me of this.
Spoiler!
The whole premise of the article appears to be "all positions aren't equal, all choices aren't equally moral" - which is clearly right, but then follows with "and the progressive doctrine I espouse is unquestionably the correct and moral one in every case, while all conservatives have to offer is backwards narrow-mindedness", which is a disastrous failure of reasoning. It's manicheaism run amok.
EDIT: I took a quick look at the comments. This one sums it up pretty amazingly.
Aside from erroneously describing her dogmatic ideology as "liberal", couldn't have said it better myself.
Yeah, I thought he had some good points, but he is mixing up "equal" with "equality". This is the point where I often start disagreeing with a lot of other liberals. Things don't need to be historically equal before you have equality. If you are waiting for that, you will either be waiting a long time or are going to have to put up with some form of authoritarianism (which of course, tends to lead to eventual repulsion and people like Trump gaining power).
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But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.
So a president that just signs what is put down in front of him. Great. And his biggest concern is he got played for a fool rather than the harm he might do to people and families.
I can guarantee you this...if he can't even be bothered to learn about the executive order he is signing he sure doesn't know a thing about the US refugee process. But of course 95% of the US public doesn't either. If they did they'd already know that refugees go through "extreme vetting" except for, well, based on religious grounds which is what this was about. Bannon's hate for Muslims.
The fact he won when every poll said otherwise kind of legitimizes his view.
This isn't an election poll though. Those polls need to be done in a way to get the likely voter model correct, so they don't just pick 1,000 random people, they try to weight it properly to match how they expect voter turnout to go. Approval ratings are asking any random group of 1,000 people. So it's significantly easier to do, and is more reliable as a sample than the election polls were.
Plus the national polls in the election were basically spot on in the end. State polls were wrong.
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Plus the national polls in the election were basically spot on in the end. State polls were wrong.
And not even that wrong. The big problem in Wisconsin was that there weren't enough state polls out there, and not enough frequency, to get an accurate prediction. Most of the models were banking pretty heavily on history. The margins were so narrow there that it's hard to say they got it heavily wrong... although Michigan was a total clusterf*** even in the primaries. All in all, the expert analysis of the data was more misleading than the data itself. And even that gave Trump, what, a one in four chance of winning? So it hit.
The characterization of news and polls that say things that aren't supportive of his message as "fake" is nakedly Orwellian. He couldn't be more obvious if he were a comic book villain and for tens of millions of people it apparently just doesn't matter.
But outrage at Trump ultimately makes users vulnerable to false stories, said Fil Menczer, a professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University. And if progressives do start reading higher quantities of fake news, he said, the country would probably become even more divided. “It means more polarization, more segregation and stronger echo chambers.”
And that from the Guardian, of all outlets.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Last edited by CorsiHockeyLeague; 02-06-2017 at 09:43 AM.
But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.
