Delta1212

Hello... Hello... Hello...

I'm not sure I understand the question.

Nobody is calling Trump racist because he's white. They've called him racist because some of the things that he has said. It's not like that accusation gets leveled out of nowhere. I think a generalized statement about all Trump supporters being racist is unfair. That's a lot of people with a lot of diverse reasons for voting for him. But Trump is not himself a whole category of people. He's an induvidual with a record of things he has actually said. And I think you should be able to discuss someone's own words and what they mean without having to tiptoe around the fact that they're racist things to say.

Thanks. I'll save that to look through this afternoon.

Do you have a link to the original report?

I grew up 20 some minutes away from Paterson. All of the drug dealers I knew of in high school were white kids.

On the other hand, do we just tell children who have a shitty parent or parents "Sorry kid, you're screwed. Should have picked a better family to be born into if you wanted a chance to succeed" You don't take care of children for the people who have abandoned their responsibility to them. You do it for the children.

Well, it looks like Paul Ryan is angling to give them exactly what they asked for, so I guess those protests were successful after all.

If your quarks are exchanging gluons with someone else's quarks, the title of the movie "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" comes to mind

If they already influence other people's votes and decide elections, why do they also need their own votes to count extra? The people who own and run things already do have a voice. The same voice as everyone else. In fact, they already have a considerable advantage in that they tend to have much larger platforms for making their voices heard. Making their voice legally worth more than someone else's seems like it is pushing a further concentration of power, which runs counter to the check that democracy is supposed to provide on the accumulation of power in hands that do not need to concern themselves with the well-being of the powerless. Faithless electors aren't going to happen, and there is no way a Republican House and Senate is impeaching a Republican president. And I'm also thinking the outcomes to either of those events wouldn't be all that pleasant. The protests taking place now would likely be mild compared to what you'd see in the event of the EC giving the presidency to Hillary Clinton, and an impeachment would leave you with Mike Pence as President, who is the head of the transition team who is responsible for organizing a lot of these appointments in the first place.

Yeah. The appointments so far are not filling me with confidence. I'm also kind of thinking that someone who not only thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the EU but has in the past advocated for landowners to take steps to intentionally render their property uninhabitable to endangered species so that there won't be anything left alive for the government to step in and try to protect with environmental regulations is perhaps less than an inspiring choice for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

But it's not just high population blue vs low population red. Here's going back to that map of 2012 I trotted out earlier but this time shading each county a hue between red and blue to represent the percentage of the vote that went to each side with more red being more Republican and more blue being more Democratic: And again, proportionate to relative population size: As you can see, much of the map is less split between red and blue and is mostly intensely purple with a blue bias is major population centers and a deep red fringe on the outskirts of those centers. The individual states don't vote one way or the other as a unified population. They don't even vote that way on the county level. That means that a fair bit of the popular vote that pushes the Democrats over the edge comes from rural areas where they get a sizable minority of the vote rather than an easy black and white (or red and blue) picture where all of the rural counties are entirely Republican and all of the cities are entirely Democratic and the Democrats win the popular vote because the cities hold more people.

Is it, on the other hand, fair to the blue cities to hand over control to the rural population?

You're using the wrong denominator. It's 5/56 elections, not 5/45 Presidents. That's just shy of 9%. It was also just shy of 6% of the time prior to 2000. And, obviously, it's been 40% of the time since 2000.

The fact that something is law is not really relevant to the discussion of whether or not it is a good thing that it is law. I think everyone knows that the popular vote is meaningless to the outcome of a Presiential election, because we're that not the case, there wouldn't be a discussion about whether or not it should be relevant.

The largest problem is not whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton are or are not themselves racists. The trouble is whether they, as candidates, promote racism and enable racists. Between the two, there is a markedly different tone that each of the two took, and their relative support among racists groups was also very different, keeping in mind that saying "Most racists supported Donald Trump" is not the same thing as saying "Most people who supported Donald Trump did so because of racism." Minority groups are afraid of how the policy changes of a Trump administration will affect them, and also the fact that there are numerous racist groups and individuals who have been emboldened by his victory, which is liable to have a tangible affect on the lives of many of the people who are currently upset about the result regardless of what Trump himself does or says from this poin forward. It's not a game of "Who's a racist." It's a question of how the lives of minorities in the United States are going to change as a result of this election. And there are quite a lot of them who are very afraid that it is not going to be for the better. That is something that you (and I, frankly) are privileged not to have to directly worry about as it pertains to our own selves.

Race isn't the only advantage that people can be born with. You brought up natural talent and ability. Some of that is being brought up in the right environment, which is also down to luck since children don't have any control over their earliest environment, and some of that is down to genetics. That comment wasn't about race.

You're not personally oppressing anyone. What you are doing is ignoring serious instructional problems that are faced by other people but not you, and then blaming people who point this out for drawing attention to existing divisions that you aren't inerested in solving as if they are the cause of those divisions instead of just getting in the way of you pretending that they don't exist. You aren't a bad person. I think you are probably a fairly good person. But you are willfully closing your eyes to serious problems and seem to get upset whenever anyone points out that these are problems that won't just go away if everyone shuts up about them. In effect, while I do not think that you are in any way evil, I do think that you are much more comfortable being a good man who does nothing than confronting the idea that evil is being done within our own borders to our own citizens frequently by otherwise normal people. And that it is easier to do that if blame can be laid at th feet of people who complain instead of listening to and thinking about the things that are causing the complaints.

Does winning the genetic lottery in terms of raw ability mean that you inherently deserve more than those who didn't get lucky? That you are, in effect, qualitatively better than them as a human being? But yes, of course the barriers are ambiguous. That's why it's such a difficult subject. It is so much harder to see the obstacles that were simply never in your path. That you never encountered. And that you can easily take for granted as not being a part of your life.

That seems like rather a fiction based on the timing and easy grouping of the vote counting, though. If California's votes were counted first, would that make a difference? What if Florida and Texas were the last two states to come in with their results? Without them, Clinton would have had a lead in the Electoral College and an even bigger lead in the popular vote. Minus Texas and Florida, quite literally the entire country voted for Clinton, but their votes were enough to reverse the election.

I think you are missing that being able to go to a private school and afford a college education is exactly the kind of privilege that Phi is talking about. There is a disconnect, because when a lot of people think of "privilege" they think of elitist who have the world handed to them. Then they look at their own struggles and the work they had to do to get where they are and they think "what privilege." But privilege is not defined by whether anyone has it easier, but by whether anyone had it harder. And life is not a binary of work/no work. In most cases, privilege is a multiplier on the effect of effort. So you can work extremely hard to get where you are and still be privileged by the fact that the same amount of effort has not gotten many other people nearly as far, or by the fact that they were never given an opportunity to put that effort in in order to acheive those results in the first place. Most people don't recognize the privilege that they have because they think having had to work automatically means that they aren't privileged and, frequently, that it is just a matter of other people having to do the same work they did in order to get to where they are. That in effect, they deserve what they have because of the work they put in, and you can't be privileged if you are just getting what you deserve. It's a major blind spot in our culture.

That seems relatively easy to make, actually. It's not even a full loop. It looks like it's just a few frames of rotation with the final few fading into the original few frames so it's not noticeable when the cycle resets. You could probably even draw something like that by hand a lot more easily than you'd think given the relatively low frame count it seems to have.

Except it seems that socialism is actually easiest to get support for in the city where people are surrounded on all sides by "the other" and hardest to get support for in the countryside. That seems to imply that the problem is less that the population is not homogenous and more that large sections of the population has had little or no exposure to the peoples and cultures that make up a large part of the rest of the population. Homogeneity is far less important than recognition of similarities and acceptance of differences. I still think the primary liberal vs conservative disagreement on social programs is not whether or not they should exist. It's a question of priorities. The liberal perspective is that everyone who needs help should receive it, even if it means some people who don't need help are able to take advantage of the system. The conservative perspective is that no one who doesn't need help should be able to take advantage of the system, even if it means some people who need help don't get it. In reality, of course, no program is going to be able to help every single person who needs assistance and no program is ever going to be completely proof against gaming the system. Most people fall on a continuum of balancing these priorities holding one up higher than the other but not completely discounting the lesser (in their eyes) concern.

The social point of touching is to induce a sensory perception of human contact, which you can obviously do regardless of the actual mechanics involved. I think you are overthinking this a little.

But there is no special correlation between competence and trustworthiness. There is no reason to expect that the most capable 10% of the population is also the the most trustworthy 10% of the population. The common complaint about democracy is that the people can just vote to give themselves more money/benefits/whatever at the expense of whoever's money it was originally. But that's not actually a flaw in democracy. That's what ultimately happens in every system of government. Whoever has the power grants themselves privileges at the expense of those with less power than themselves. In an outright democracy, those with power are the majority of people. In pretty much every other form of government, it is a much smaller minority. For some reason, we much more comfortable with a small leadership of the most powerful individuals accumulating wealth and privileges for themselves at the expense of the larger mass of people than we are with the larger mass of people taking privileges and resources from the most powerful class.