Mate, did he just compare American / Mexican relationships with the Arab-Israeli conflict?
He bloody did, mate.
Mate, did he just compare American / Mexican relationships with the Arab-Israeli conflict?
He bloody did, mate.
Walls work. To pretend otherwise is ignorance.
They certainly do keep roofs up.
Hey mert, would you identify as "alt-right"?
Silly name but this is a pretty cool website on polling.
http://rocknpoll.graphics
<opens tab>
"Elections in PollLand"
<closes tab>
No, I think the alt-right is poison albeit useful in the short term; they are the radical social justice warriors of the Right. I would say I'm a Ben Shapiro conservative.Quote:
Originally Posted by ItalAussie
Trump within 2 in 4-way race, best showing since post convention bump:
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/08/2...-margin-error/
He's since softened his stance and says he will probably vote for Trump.
Newest purchase to troll liberals:
https://d2w04addmnh2aq.cloudfront.ne...ax&align=faces
I would honestly assume that anyone I saw wearing that shirt was wearing it ironically.
Yup, me too.Quote:
Originally Posted by ItalAussie
Top trolling.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrEl2lTUMAAMSCR.jpg:large
Bubonic plague being more favorable than Trump. :D
Reading the WSJ this morning and it says 8% of people are voting neither according to one poll. Later on it states Green and Lib on for around 15% of the total vote (not sure how that tallies up). My colleague told me he was voting Lib yesterday because he can't vote Trump and Hilary is a crook.
I know a lot of people who say the same thing but then 4 beers deep confess to me that they can't wait till Trump is president. This includes pretty much every single white male who gets laid.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kikó
Not exactly a ringing endorsement if only the drunk will vote for him.
A sad reflection of the fascist repression and marginalization of dissenting view points by the Left more than anything.
Trump up 3:
http://graphics.latimes.com/usc-pres...oll-dashboard/
So, they're afraid to speak up? Bless.
I know right, drunk after only 4 beers, and american beers at that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mert
Facist repression is telling someone to leave the country if they don't want to stand up for the national anthem. Not being so beta you won't tell pollsters who you're voting for.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mert
If you don't stand up for the national anthem and hate the country you live in, why do you continue to live in it? Serious question. Surely if you care enough about your beliefs you would move out instead of whining like a little bitch?Quote:
Originally Posted by phonics
I'm not sure that's quite how it's supposed to work.
Remain and Reform!
1. Emigration is hard. Ask your parents.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mert
2. Your argument only works if America is some faultless, limitless land of opportunity. It is not.
3. Define hatred of a country. America was founded off the back of pissed-off Americans. The Civil rights movement was spearheaded by pissed off Americans. In general, resistance and revolution comes from pissed off people who want a better place to live.
But, y'know, if you don't like it ... there's always Turkey.
Put all of Mert's claims together, the polls being purposely biased, shy-Trump effect, and anecdotal 'evidence' that secretly everyone white wants Trump, and anything less than a forty point margin in the actual election will mean either Mert is undeniably full of complete nonsense or that Trump has underperformed.
By the way, the person who says British and Australian style gun bans won't work in America because it's different then saying that a fuck off wall will work because it works in Israel is my favourite thing.
David Cross has a bit which is quite relevant to the flag standing "controversy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX1evRf4uh4
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politi...ton-foundation
Quote:
Three of these stories, in other words, found no wrongdoing whatsoever but chose to insinuate that they had found wrongdoing in order to make the stories seem more interesting. The AP even teased its story with a flagrantly inaccurate tweet, which it now concedes was inaccurate but won’t take down or correct. The final investigation into the seat assignments at least came up with something, but it’s got to be just about the most trivial piece of donor special treatment you can think of.
...
But once you “know” that a putative charity is really just a nexus of corruption, then even the failure to be swayed by contributions becomes a news story. And of course once your decision-making is put under that kind of scrutiny, your impulse is to shut down and try to keep information close to your chest. But when you “know” that a person is corrupt, her lack of transparency is further evidence of corruption. And any minor information that does slip out is defined as news, even if the information does not actually contain evidence of anything all that interesting.
Are you fucking dumb? Some analogies are valid and others are not. Your analogy doesn't work, mine does, you want me to deconstruct why that's the case I'll be happy to do so. Not to mention the 2nd Amendment is primarily about the Natural Right to self-defense and withstanding tyranny, not security on an individual level.Quote:
Originally Posted by John
Ital do you believe there were problematic aspects with how the Clinton Foundation was run? If so, what? What do you think about the allegations that donors were granted special favors by the US State Department? How do you think a Republican who had committed similar offenses would be treated by the media? How do you feel about the fact that Hillary deliberately deleted emails in a way that made them unrecoverable? How do you feel that of the many emails deleted by Hillary claimed to be simply 'personal emails', the FBI has discovered that around 30 concerned Benghazi?Quote:
Originally Posted by ItalAussie
Keep in mind, you're an emotionally detached objective academic. Let's see that unbiased rational opinion.
He has a right to protest that I am happy to defend. I have a right to criticize his protest for being idiotic, hypocritical and delusionally misguided.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
Black people have more opportunities and access to a far higher standard of living on the whole than anywhere else in the world today. Are there enduring issues, of course, but on the whole White people fucking bend backwards and wall on eggshells to create an inclusive environment. They are undeserving of this criticism.
Neither works. Israel is a tiny, tiny little country, America is the third biggest country in the world. To give that some context, stretch Israel out along the Mexican border and it could only be four miles wide if it was to maintain its current square milage. Saying 'build a wall, it works in Israel' is equivalent to an Israeli at the conception of their wall saying 'build a wall, it works in my garden.'Quote:
Originally Posted by Mert
Given the current situation, allowing people to defend themselves against hypothetical tyranny from the US government would necessitate allowing private citizens to build and maintain a nuclear program and an air force. Are you in favour of that?
Size can be scaled. America has 44% of households where a gun is present, not to mention cultural difference and the fact that it is not an island. Confiscation is just not possible period. There are differences as to why your analogy simply doesn't work.
No you don't. It's about deterrence, the threat of a protracted guerrilla war is sufficient (see Chinese Civil War/ Vietnam War / etc). Also if I'm not mistaken the 2nd Amendment allows for private gun ownership for personal self-defense meaning that ordinances with indiscriminate killing power (aka mortars, nuclear bombs, etc) are not protected.
I wasn't talking to you, and don't plan to change that, so this is a one-off response. Literally the main premise of the article is a direct comparison with the way Colin Powell's charity is received. The boogeyman Clinton foundation is a series of attempts at looking for any traction that will stick. That's literally the premise of the article.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mert
The email thing has been done to absolute death, and there was nothing. Her own political enemies tried to come up with something in an inquiry they controlled, and still came up with nothing. It's reached the point of being a swift-boat style beat-up. It's like how everyone got hot and heavy over the leaked emails, and all it ended up proving when people combed through it was that Hilary Clinton is relatively boring in her workplace demeanour.
Amusingly, although not a point made in the original article, Colin Powell used a bloody AOL email address. I like Colin Powell, but at least have your own server, man.
It can be interpreted in any one of a hundred different ways, because the people who wrote it couldn't have imagined AR-15 rifles or grenade launchers. It doesn't specifically allow or ban any one weapon, all it says is that people have a right to keep 'arms'. By the way, you could probably argue reasonably effectively that a drug gang is a 'well regulated militia', with its bosses and captains and soldiers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mert
It's almost as though the constitution was written for an America which no longer exists.
Anyway, we've done guns a hundred times. I was just lolling at you for not seeing the absurd contradiction in your positions on guns and walls.
Wow. Just wow. You are far more delusional than even I imagined. Everything you just said can be easily debunked with a simple google search and even the most superficial knowledge of the issues. Do you want me to go through every inane 'argument' you just presented or will it fall on deaf ears?Quote:
Originally Posted by ItalAussie
Dude. I'm serious you need to be better than this, it scares me to think you are in any way associated with academia.
Eh phones didn't exist when the Constitution was written, does that mean I don't have 1st Amendment protections for my speech when I'm speaking on the phone? That's not how the Constitution works.Quote:
Originally Posted by John
And yes, there are many interpretations of the Constitution...but there is also established law. This is what the law says.
I have no issues with 'gangs' legally owning guns...they would have them whether they were legal or not anyways. At least this way the regular law abiding citizen can protect himself from those gangs.
No, because speaking on the phone doesn't fundamentally change the nature of speech. The internet sort of does, because it means that your words can be seen by millions upon millions of people with minimal effort, but then I'm sure the people who said anyone should be able to say whatever they want would be fine with that. Trying to contort a sentence written about weaponry by people who only had muskets and swords to fit a world in which helicopter gunships exist is just bonkers, and I'm not sure the people who used 'arms' as shorthand for the six types of muskets available would be fine with some NRA crackpot using their words to argue that he be allowed to keep an AR-15 in his boot.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mert
By the way, you should start just doing all these things you're threatening to do. Asking someone if they want you to provide substance to your argument is hilarious.
Yeah but you realize it's understood that the reason they kept the wording general was to purposefully accommodate for future technological developments, it's done so purposefully. It's supposed to apply to modern, personal weapons to be used for self-defense. What sort of purpose would the 2nd Amendment have if it didn't apply to weapons necessary for effective resistance against tyranny in a given epoch. Think about it.
I'm busy. If I'm going to spend 20 minutes meticulously debunking every single one of his arguments with citations, I want to know that it's worth my time. I've done it in the past and he just stops responding.
I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that people smart enough to write the constitution were stupid enough to think they could foresee and legislate for all future developments, which is why I find arguments based on it so utterly daft. We know more now, we are smarter, the world has changed, why are people arguing over whether this proposed change fits a document written two hundred and fifty years ago instead of whether it would make the country better now?
There's middle ground between spending twenty minutes looking up sources and just offering a bit of substance to go along with your DO BETTER DUDE bullshit.
Okay but that's literally what they did...it's in the Congressional records of the conversations which took place while they were debating the Bill of Rights. Do you really think they were so stupid to not realize that technology would advance past muskets, and that the citizenry would in turn need to have access to this new weaponry in order to fulfill the original purpose of the 2nd Amendment?Quote:
Originally Posted by John
Everything he said was wrong. I don't know how else to respond.
I'm sure you'll find a Breitbart link or something. I'm truly tired of arguing with you, as neither of us believe anything the other says or any of the references the other uses, nor do we hold the other in any kind of intellectual regard.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mert
Let's just stick with parallel discussions. Neither of us enjoy engaging the other. You won't believe anyone even marginally left of Pinochet, and I think an undergraduate liberal arts degree is almost worth the ink used to print it. It's truly not worth the energy looking for a way to reach common ground.
I was speaking more generally there, in response to you opening the conversation up to freedom of speech. I'm sure they thought they could foresee certain things and I'm sure they did, they were smart men, but do you honestly think a time travelling Jefferson would look at today's world and think that document was sufficient?
When was the constitution closed for new amendments, incidentally? It seems odd to hear people shouting YOU CANT CHANGE THE CONSTITUTION when citing the Second Amendment.
How about the NY Times editorial board:Quote:
Originally Posted by ItalAussie
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/op...f=opinion&_r=0
Jefferson was an oddity...he wanted the Constitution to be re-written every generation...Quote:
Originally Posted by John
It's not. It's just hard to amend, anyone who says 'you can't change the Constitution' is stupid, it's been changed a bunch of times.
See, that's exactly the kind of article it talks about. Nothing the Clintons did there is unreasonable in the context of running a charity. Colin Powell had numerous meetings with foreign dignitaries due to his charity - that's the normal way that figurehead charities run. Yet Clinton does the same and it's breathlessly reported as some kind of scandal. Then she stops because of that (largely unfair, or at least inequitable criticism) and it's reported as another kind of scandal. These stories really ought to be reported in the context of how comparable charities are run, and if you still think it's reasonable to criticise them given that context, then have at it - that's a fair stance.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mert
It's actually very interesting how similar Clinton is to her predecessor, and how differently she's being received. And it's honestly kind of sad, because it's going to hamstring the good work that they've done. Look, I know you think she's using the charity as a front for running corpses full of drugs for children or something, and that's fine. I truly don't want to argue with you, because we clearly aren't going to reach common ground. Let's just not.
"Well they did it too" is not an argument to justify poor ethical decisions. The NYT is calling for her to cut her ties with the organization and to immediately stop taking donations from abroad; we're talking the most sycophant Hillary supporters essentially agreeing with Trump on this topic. It's bad.Quote:
Originally Posted by ItalAussie
There's a reasonable argument that the way charities are run should be changed. As a rule, I'm not a fan of people making their own figurehead charities. We aren't exactly short of charities, so go help out with an existing one. But that's largely how it's done in the current environment.
The evil truth about Hilary Clinton is that she's a boring typical beltway politician in every possible respect. She'll be a boring President, and will be unlikely to spearhead any particular interesting moves in any political direction. She's certainly way too dull to bring about any kind of political apocalypse. She'll pretty much just hold the tiller in place for eight years and call it a day.
I have often wondered about whether a politician could run on a platform of "things are mostly alright, and I won't make any drastic changes - maybe some tinkering around the edges, but that's it". I honestly think that would probably fly in countries with more sensible and reasoned political environments, although they'd probably get savaged from both sides in the US.
"My name is Bruce McDundee, and I'm here to maintain the status quo. Vote for me if you'd rather things stay mostly the way they are for a little bit."
"Always remember our motto: 'Change is hard. Bugger that.'"
I agree. She's not terrible, I recognize in fairness that to grease the wheels of the world you need to be willing to compromise ethically in ways the public would naively scoff at, and if this was 8 years ago when moderate Democrats existed (you know the ones who believed in the neoliberal consensus accepted by literally every economist, fiscal responsibility, and moderate compromise on social issues), I would be seriously seriously tempted to vote for her. I just can't live with a very far left SCOTUS nominee. I can't.Quote:
Originally Posted by ItalAussie
If Hillary came out tomorrow and said, "I'll nominate a moderate SCOTUS candidate, lower the deficit to a sustainable level and complete free trade agreements exhaustively shown to bring about greater economic growth" I would literally campaign for her.
She'll nominate Sri Srinivasan, who so well-regarded that his nomination would be impossible to block. Slightly center-left (by US standards), but basically the middle of the court. Clearly smart, and respected by sensible moderates from both sides of politics. As non-controversial a pick as it's possible to produce.
He's basically destined to end up on the Supreme Court. The question is when, rather than if. The fact that Clinton has such an obvious consensus nomination first-up means that you don't even have to worry about that - it's going to happen eventually, so why not now. It's the most boring possible pick for the most boring possible President. :nodd:
If I could get a guarantee I could live with it. Honestly.Quote:
Originally Posted by ItalAussie
But I can't have her throwing around outrageous proposals like granting citizenship to millions of illegals, free public university, regulating coal production out of business, and single-payer to pander to Bernie Sanders supporters. I think it's just necessary lies, but who knows.
Pretty much I just want Bill Clinton again.