Real, True Headlines

[theweaselking]

"Study of Pot Smokers' Brains Shows That MRIs Cause Bad Science Reporting"

(Warning, crank site, full of bad logic and counterrational leaps. And they also make one of the very same mistakes they are complaining about: How do they know the MRIs *cause* bad science reporting, instead of just being correlated with bad science reporting in at least one case? But still, very funny.)

Comments

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/16/prostitution-thought-crimes-monica-jones

http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/23/a-constitutional-case-for-gay-marriage

"Crank site"?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/24/democracy-and-affirmative-action

http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/24/paying-for-obamacare

Crank site.

"Reason" are hard-lolbertarian, with all the included blind spots, abandonment of principle and logic in favour of ideology at the first sign of conflict, and monstrous outcomes that implies.

They're better than whale.to or infowars, at least?

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

I do know ObamaCare has forced six million people to give up insurance plans they liked.

As for Affirmative Action, I grew up in the house where it originated. It was my liberal racist mother who proposed to the rest of her chapter of the League of Women Voters that black people did not have the ability to get jobs if given equal opportunity, and so should be given jobs as charity, to obligate them to the Democrat Party.

None of the other White Liberal Democrats there disputed the central premise. I grew up believing that horseshit. There is not one thing that can bring me to absolute rage faster than that recollection.

So far in this thread Reason is 5 for 5.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I do know ObamaCare has forced six million people to give up insurance plans they liked.

The fraudulent ones, where you pay out and they deliver nothing, which were deemed to no longer be legal because they were abusive to the consumer? Which were being sold to consumers who didn't know any better?

Those plans they liked?

As for Affirmative Action, I grew up in the house where it originated.

Bullshit.

It was my liberal racist mother who proposed to the rest of her chapter of the League of Women Voters that black people did not have the ability to get jobs if given equal opportunity, and so should be given jobs as charity, to obligate them to the Democrat Party.

Perhaps she said that. Perhaps she even meant it. This is irrelevant to the purpose, implementation, and effect of employment equity practices.

None of the other White Liberal Democrats there disputed the central premise.

Perhaps confronting racist assholes in their homes was determined to not be the most productive of actions. Perhaps you don't remember it accurately. Perhaps you misunderstood the statement, or the response. And perhaps the only people who'll tolerate the assholes your family produces without comment are themselves assholes, and thus it was an audience where all the non-assholes has pre-emptively not shown up.

We'll probably never know, for many reasons.

I grew up believing that horseshit.

And? The important question is, did you ever learn what the truth actually was?

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

"...abandonment of principle and logic in favour of ideology at the first sign of conflict...."

Nope, not bullshit. She was President of the Prince George's County League of Women Voters. Virginia Marian Clarke Ring Harrington got LBJ nominated in 1964 despite his flagrant graft, got The Wild Wild West and most Warner Brothers cartoons taken off the air, and came up with the most unfair system of hiring ever devised.

"Employment equity" has nothing to do with Affirmative Action. Equal Opportunity was the opposite of Affirmative Action. The former was the establishment of hiring practices that prevented people from being refused a job on any basis other than ability. Affirmative Action specifically sets quotas on the basis of race-- which, when it was first implemented, resulted in preferential hiring of white people by the then predominantly-black Post Office Department.

Your final question shows your prejudice in this matter.

Ignorance resulting from the abusive school system is not your fault. Ignorance resulting from refusal to listen to facts is. Don't presume to call someone a liar until you have at least some facts on your side-- which will in my case be never, given my personal birth defect in this area.

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

Affirmative Action does not set quotas on the basis of race, and has not since such quotas were ruled unconstitutional in 1978.

I'd love to hear how the president of a Virginia LWV chapter got Johnson nominated in 1964, given that Virginia didn't have a Democratic primary in 1964 and that Johnson as a sitting president had no actual competition to begin with.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Is it possible that things that our good buddy saw when he was four years old, half a century ago, are perhaps fuzzy and not entirely the way he remembers them?

No. Impossible.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

They aren't called "quotas" anymore, no. It's still what they are.

PG County is in Maryland.

Johnson had hella competition, as you would know if you bothered to check; he agreed to make Humphrey his VP rather than force a split ticket with a third Party. (Humphrey failed to make that deal with Wallace in '68, so Nixon got in... which was handy, as he was so revolting a human being he could be blamed for all the unnecessary deaths in Viet Nam and people wouldn't question it.)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yes bullshit, given that it predates your birth *and* that timeline. Leaving aside whoppers like "the most unfair system of hiring ever devised."

"Employment equity" has nothing to do with Affirmative Action.

Wrong. "Employment Equity" is what it was called before Kennedy (not Johnson) used the phrase "take affirmative action" and it stuck in the USA. It's also what it's always been called outside the USA.

The former was the establishment of hiring practices that prevented people from being refused a job on any basis other than ability.

Which mysteriously resulted in heavily segregated businesses and professions, for reasons nobody could possibly determine.

Affirmative Action specifically sets quotas on the basis of race -- which, when it was first implemented, resulted in preferential hiring of white people by the then predominantly-black Post Office Department.

It's certainly a blunt force tool to correct the problem, but when there manifestly and undeniably *IS* a problem of hiring discrimination, as shown by a dearth of diversity in a workforce despite a diversity of available workers, a blunt tool that forces you to fix the outcome of your prejudicing hiring processes even if you can't find (or don't want to find) the source of the problem in the first place has proven, historically, to be an effective tool.

Do you also feel that the other desegregation efforts were misguided? If not: Why not? If so: whoo boy.

Ignorance resulting from the abusive school system is not your fault.

Gotta love "the" abusive school system, as if "racism and attempts to correct it in the USA" were something that schools actually dealt with, let alone dealt with poorly. And as if a failure to agree with you could ONLY be caused by indoctrination by sinister authorities out to harm THE CHILDRUUUUN, but you're still only saying it more out of sorrow than anger. All by using "the" instead of "an"

It's a very clever turn of phrase. Why don't you do that kind of thing in your books?

Don't presume to call someone a liar until you have at least some facts on your side

Like the fact that you were an infant when an old concept was given a new name by a President associated in no way with your family? Like you're claiming familial ownership of a concept (aggressive correction of the obviously problematic outcome, even if you can't correct the source of the problem) that long predates you? Like how you're claiming that, because you have childhood memories of your mother saying racist things, that somehow makes the policy of correcting racist and sexist outcomes a racist policy that infantilises non-white people and has made them "dependent" on the less-white-supremacist party?

Look, I realise "Dunning-Kruger posterchild, aggressively ignorant of history" is kind of a *thing* for some of the duller kids in your playgroup, and I know you work very hard to reinforce that over at james_nicoll's place, but please don't bring it in here. You're not very good at it and I'm way less tolerant of nonsense than he is.

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

What I mainly have learned from this thread is that they'll let any fucking halfwit do SF books.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Not just SF, but SF certainly does have a long history of backwards-thinking terrified reactionaries. Why do you think so many stories are "in the future, everything is terrible because things I disagree with were not stopped" or "here is an unsubtle allegory explaining why Those People are monsters"?

Seriously, scared-old-man-SF is genuinely a thing, like how postwar Japanese cinema is terrified of atomic weapons and how the scientist investigating the unknown, if he exists, is ALWAYS the source of the problem in late-20th horror.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Did I mention my theory to you that it's simply another example of the mentality which results in so much bad discrimiflip?

I mean, bad discrimiflip is basically "the social order is different and LOOK IT'S ALL HORRIBLE NOW I WARNED YOU." Reactionary change-and-progress fearing SF is basically "the environment I might be in is different and LOOK IT'S ALL HORRIBLE NOW I WARNED YOU."

(Did I also mention I found a button that says "I have no problem with change as long as everything stays exactly the same"? I get the impulse. Oh, yes, I get it. I just don't embrace it.)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I mean, bad discrimiflip is basically "the social order is different and LOOK IT'S ALL HORRIBLE NOW I WARNED YOU."

Nah, bad discrimflip is all about "the powered are powerless, and the previously powerless are lording it over them, and OH GOD DO YOU NOT SEE HOW I HAVE TRULY EXPRESSED THEIR STRUGGLE"

[torrain.livejournal.com]

You are too gentle. Bad discrimiflip is "the previously powerless are lords, LOOK HOW TERRIBLE THINGS ARE NOW (subtext: we were right to keep them gays/women/POC powerless!)"

It's a desperate plea to reinforce and validate the status quo by suggesting that a change in it would result in monstrosities, y'know?

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Mommy? Daddy? Stop fighting! *sob*

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

But enough about Harlan Ellison.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Praise from Caesar is praise indeed.

[chrisrw109.livejournal.com]

Are you some form of crazy person?

I mean.. I know I could read all the rest of the silliness you posted but honestly you made my brain twitch with:

'I know for a fact that black people can do anything white people can do except shave comfortably, and that's a dubious practice at best. '

I mean... thanks I guess? For giving us credit for...
...
... the fuck?

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Look, the whole entire goddamn point of Affirmative Action was obliging black people to vote for the liberals who gave them jobs as charity, on the supposition that they were not competent to get jobs if the only criterion were ability.

I was there when it was discussed at length. It was someone else who ripped off the Kennedy quote to name it, but the rest of its origin happened in our living room over coffee and Sara Lee pound cake. (The pound cake was why I was there instead of in my room reading.)

The weaseler's position is that it was never about quotas, quotas were abolished, it happened before I could have been present, it never happened, I wasn't really there, they didn't say that when it happened, and I didn't understand when they said that. (Scroll back. You'll find all seven of these mutually-inconsistent lies.)

The only reason for him to have insisted on all these things was his belief that this disgusting premise was true.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The weaseler's position is that it was never about quotas, quotas were abolished,

Oh hey! You share with your fellow traveller a really *impressive* inability to tell who said what in a comment thread. Hint: Unlike Tommy, I don't use sock puppets, so the things that are said by accounts other than mine? Weren't said by me.

it happened before I could have been present,

Are you saying that your wiki'd[1] birth year of 1960 is wrong?
Because I suspect your claim to have been present at the invention of a concept that predates the 1960s, and got to the point where the President named it in *1961*, is a pretty slam dunk "nope, at best you've got a false memory" if you were born in 1960.

If you were born way earlier than 1960, your story gets possible. Not "plausible", just not "manifestly impossible".

it never happened, I wasn't really there, they didn't say that when it happened, and I didn't understand when they said that. (Scroll back. You'll find all seven of these mutually-inconsistent lies.)

Actually, I suggested that all of those things were *possibilities*. Since you would have been a preteen at the time. 50 years ago. Making your memory by definition unreliable.

The only reason for him to have insisted on all these things was his belief that this disgusting premise was true.

Actually I was providing the third one as evidence that, if you truly believe the things you're saying, your memory must be inaccurate. I gave the latter four as possibilities for *why* you might believe these things that are, given #3, false.

And, to reiterate, 1 and 2 weren't me. You can tell, because they don't have my name on them. I know that's a complicated thing to grasp, but it's consistent.

And now, we rewind, to:
the whole entire goddamn point of Affirmative Action was obliging black people to vote for the liberals who gave them jobs as charity, on the supposition that they were not competent to get jobs if the only criterion were ability.

You have made this assertion several times.

This assertion is not borne out by the facts, or by history. And you repeatedly declined to DEFEND this assertion, until you finally had what I can only describe as a minor meltdown - where you asserted that whites-only hiring results were *logical* because black people *really weren't* good enough to get jobs without cheating, because *integrated education* had caused black students to be uneducated and unemployable for reasons that didn't even make sense if we accepted your premises and ignored the major timeframe problem - to whit, the thing you claim as the cause happened long after the problem.

And you're still aggressively refusing to defend the positions you've taken and/or clarify where you feel you were misunderstood in response to "wait, did you really just say that? How do you think that even works?"-style questions.

And now we are here, and I continue to wonder if you are posting drunk.


[1]: Not Wikipedia, in this case. But *a* wiki with an entry on you, and a year. And when I suggested that you would be 12-14 in 1972-1974 you didn't point out a mistake? So I figured the first wiki hit on your name was a reasonable thing to go on.

Edit: OH HEY your profile has your birthday! Assuming your own profile is accurately, then, 1960 is right.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

We can't do good things or the undesirables might vote for the people that do good things instead of the people that don't do good things!


I was there when it was discussed at length.

Hitler was a vegetarian probably in part due to animal cruelty and Nazi Germany was anti-smoking after finding out smoking was linked to lung cancer therefore vegetarianism and not smoking are bad.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

He's pretty special. Did you see the bit where he explained that whites-only hiring outcomes were logical because integrated schooling meant black kids were only graduated because of quotas and that only hiring white people was a RATIONAL RESULT of fair job competition because of it? That bit was really quite something.

Ask him about the conspiracy to suppress the viral theory of cancer!

[chrisrw109.livejournal.com]

He's pretty special.

He might be the most special snowflake ever.

Yeah, his premise that 'Affirmative action was the racist measure to overturn the legitimate lack of hiring of unqualified minorities' wasn't lost on me either.

Step away from LJ for a few weeks and they let the craziest people in here.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I try to avoid the word "crazy" these days, but yeah.

You read the comments, right? You saw the... whatever the hell that was? I'm not imagining this?

[falconwarrior.livejournal.com]

Hey now, I'm some form of crazy person but you don't see me prattling on with that nonsense.