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.)

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I don't know what people you're thinking of that don't place a good chunk of the Vietnam War blame on LBJ.

[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.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

*runs to the kitchen*

I'm making popcorn! Who wants it with what?

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Butter, pepper, and a spare bucket, please!

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Woot!

Coming up in a jiffy! Just give me a yell when blood begins to splatter for realsies, I don't wanna miss it!

[torrain.livejournal.com]

...the guy with the first-you-scream-then-you-leap icon has begun explaining how Affirmative Action was just set up to oblige black voters to kowtow to liberals, how in the very same school black kids pass school because of quotas while white and Oriental kids get an education, and how Our Graciously Snarky Host is a bigot who should go beat up crippled Jews to make himself feel better because apparently he should be feeling bad for some reason, although I will be shot if I could tell you what it is.

(Would you like wine? I've recently gotten rather fond of this weird white-wine "beverage" that's got grapefruit and pineapple flavours mixed in, but I'm sure there's something else about if you'd prefer...)

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Coming! *hauls bucketfuls of popcorn* Oh, if you got pineapple juice with pulp, that would be fine with me, though I gotta stick with water after one glass. Gotta mind sugars (and starches).

I'm not late, right?

Aw crud, flounce has happened!

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Your racism is apparent.

It was surely named for Kennedy's remark, but the program didn't begin until the late half of the 60s. As you would have bothered to check if political ideology had not caused you to abandon any pretense of principle or logic.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Your racism is apparent.

Really? Where? Given that I'm in favour of "aggressively correcting racist outcomes even if you haven't yet solved the racist processes that produce them", and you're in favour of allowing racist outcomes to go uncorrected, I suspect you've got a fair bit of work to do, there, but I'd suggest you at least *try*.

In the mean time, your failure to answer "Do you also feel that the other desegregation efforts were misguided? If not: Why not? If so: whoo boy." is, uh, "apparent".

Answer it.

the program didn't begin until the late half of the 60s.

Uh-huh. So you've moved the goalposts: the pre-existing principle of "correct the outcome", which you've already falsely claimed familial credit for in at least two ways, now started existing only when it was implemented, allegedly (and falsely, again) due to your family.

Would you like to continue to maintain that a policy devoted to correcting racist outcomes is inherently racist, because you have confused childhood memories of someone racist supporting it?

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

First, don't make shit up and then demand that I defend something that came out of your head alone-- which demonstrates how you really think.

Second, a policy of turning racist outcomes into permanent institutions is what you are making excuses for. 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. You're the one demanding that no encouragement be given them to excel.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

a policy of turning racist outcomes into permanent institutions is what you are making excuses for.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Unless you really *do* mean to imply that single-race-only and single-gender-only workforces are NOT a racist (and sexist) outcome and that enforced desegregation of segregated spaces is a bad thing.

PS: That's what you've said. And I notice your CONTINUED refusal to answer a simple question.

"Do you also feel that the other desegregation efforts were misguided? If not: Why not?"

Answer it, or leave. It's not a difficult question - it's not like I asked if the viral theory of cancer was suppressed by moneyed interests.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

It's surely a simple question. It's also a barefaced lie. Affirmative Action is a segregationist policy, segregating not bodies but minds, part and parcel with "diversity" and "cultural relativism"-- all of them excuses for keeping Them Other People out of Real English-American society.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

except shave comfortably

All white people can shave comfortably and all black people have the same coarseness of hair and softness of skin. LOL.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

By the way, just to toss some fuel into fire...

Gosh, who would have guessed that?

"When conservatives looked at Bundy, they saw not just a white guy, but also a cowboy, and that particular brand of character who waves an American flag while fighting the American government (in his case by stealing public property). And they saw lots of guns, which also told them he was their kind of people. Everything about him told them he was their kind of guy. And I’m sure if liberals had thought about it, they would have said, “I’ll bet this guy has some colorful ideas about race.” Conservatives would have protested that that’s a vicious and unfair stereotype. But in this case it turned out to be true, and how."

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

If so: whoo boy.

If we can only come up with a good solution and not a perfect solution then no solution should be tried at all.

[misanthrope-mom.livejournal.com]

OH MY GOD that's exactly it!