Real World Event Discussions

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
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1KIKI

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 7:14 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
I don't care what the party leadership does, SECOND.

New parties arise. Old parties disappear.

Trump is not the problem. He set himself against the Deep State's agenda. And the Deep State's been heading for WWIII for years.
As for you, you're just a Deep State useful idiot, furthering its agenda. So I hope you enjoy cesium in your coffee. You've earned it.

SIGNYM

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 7:36 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
I jenerally agree with you. Exept for the attack on 2nd and SGG.

If you 2 can state your pozition on hiz complaints, we can all hav a good laff at hiz unfair karakterization.

You'll tolerate unfair attacks on me and KIKI all day long, but when I do to SECOND EXACTLY what it does to me, you think I should explain myself?

Quote:
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ?

No, that doesn't seem right to me. So, why should I explain myself to you?

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 7:41 AM

HERE IS SECOND'S REPUDIATION OF DEMOCRACY. BECAUSE "PEOPLE".

Quote:
Most monkeys operate in troupes of 50 or so. But somebody slipped them a slightly larger brain and they estimated the ideal group or society for this particular animal was about 150.

That brain, of course, was human. Probably from a homeless man they snatched off the streets. "So that's the big news? That humans are God's big-budget sequel to the monkey? Who didn't know that?"

It goes much, much deeper than that.

You see? I said you hated the USA and here you are: hating the USA, hating democracy, and especially hating Americans.

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

1KIKI

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 8:23 AM

So, to get back to what's wrong with the ironically-named 'democratic' party.

For a start, SECOND is what's wrong with the party. SECOND and its wealthy ilk who don't like republicans but really don't want to change the way things are: where the rich get richer and more powerful by the day, and everyone else gets screwed.

'Third-way' politicians like the Clintons are what's wrong with the party. These deeply cynical people have no interest in the rest of us.

SGG and people like him are what's wrong with the party. Those are people who are permanently wedded to the party's identity politics because it gives them 'special victim' status. They'd rather go home with the plastic consolation prize, instead of finding common cause to change the system - or instead of seeking true fairness and justice for all.

Do-gooder organizations like the Sierra Club are what's wrong with the party. They are so deeply entrenched that they, too, refuse to give up their little, meaningless piece of turf, to join forces to move the system.

1KIKI

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 9:15 AM

Perhaps to put this in context -

I'm under no illusion that I'm telling anyone what to do, let alone directing my opinions to the democratic party leadership as SECOND seems to think. And I'm also not deeply interested in changing the party. My loyalties aren't to the party, but to ideals. And ultimately, the party will either pass or fail the test of history.

But as a decades-long registered democrat, I have opinions on the direction of the party.

Over the very, VERY long term, the party has lost - lost membership, and lost support - from the composite voting base. It seems to have lost its way. And at this point, the party is in dire straits in terms of counties, state legislatures, governorships, the House, the Senate - and - the last bastion of political relevancy, the Presidency.

OBVIOUSLY it's doing something wrong. To think otherwise is to be deeply rooted in fantasy.

In the past it relied on select groups for loyal support, especially unions. Need I point out that unions are no longer the force they once were? (And if the Supreme Court rules aversely, the last bastion of unions will be decimated.)

Recently it's tried to cobble together support by fostering and aligning itself with various victim groups.

Don't get me wrong. People are being discriminated against. Most recently, State Street Corp - the firm that brought us 'Fearless Girl' - paid a $5 million fine for underpaying women and minorities. "The feds concluded that since “at least December 1, 2010,” State Street discriminated against women in senior-level roles including vice president, senior vice president, and managing director positions by paying them lower base salaries, bonuses and total compensation than men in “similarly situated” positions. The government office also found that they did the same thing to 15 black employees at the vice president level."

That said, catering to identity politics is not, in my opinion, a way to garner broad-based support.

I've already posted my ideas that I think are workable.

But surely other people have their own observations, opinions, and ideas.

SECOND

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 9:42 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:

That said, catering to identity politics is not, in my opinion, a way to garner broad-based support.

But identity politics works for Trump. Trump congratulated mostly non-American NHL team on being “incredible patriots”.

Calling an all-white assembly of mostly foreign hockey players patriots, in clear contrast to the group of African-American athletes that the president has blasted, suggests the real issue here isn’t love for America. It’s how well the athletes fit in to Trump’s and the GOP's vision of America — one in which black athletes shut up about racism and perform the sort of patriotic spectacle that Trump likes.

Trump’s approach to politics is often labeled nationalism. That’s right, to a degree, but imprecise. Trump’s actual view appears much closer to ethnonationalism; certain groups of people qualify as “true” Americans, while others who don’t fit the mold aren’t entitled to the same rights and level of concern. See Puerto Ricans for a recent example. They didn't get the concern of Texas or Florida.

Ultimately, some people matter more than others — which is how white foreigners are “incredible patriots” while black Americans asking to be treated equally get labeled “sons of bitches.” That attitude has propelled the GOP to the very top. Maybe the Democrats could learn the lesson and stage a comeback from second place?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 6:18 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

You see? I said you hated the USA and here you are: hating the USA, hating democracy, and especially hating Americans.

Trump wants Americans to be great again:

Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.

Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.

It was soon after the meeting broke up that officials who remained behind heard Tillerson say that Trump is a “moron.”

Any increase in America’s nuclear arsenal would violate international disarmament treaties signed by every president since Ronald Reagan. Nonproliferation experts warned that such a move could set off a global arms race.

“If he were to increase the numbers, the Russians would match him, and the Chinese” would ramp up their nuclear ambitions, Joe Cirincione, a nuclear expert and MSNBC contributor, said, referring to the president.

“There hasn’t been a military mission that’s required a nuclear weapon in 71 years,” Cirincione said.

www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-wanted-tenfold-increase-in-nucle
ar-arsenal-surprising-military/ar-AAthYSc?li=AA5a8k&ocid

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 8:20 PM

SECOND, remember that interesting quote that you posted about algorithms and systems? Here it is, just to refresh your memory. In that quote, did you see ANYthing about Republicans, Trump, or Democrats?

Quote:
I remember a conversation I had with Walt Mossberg in which he recounted a conversation he had with Steve Ballmer who, at the times, was the CEO of Microsoft. He told me he’d said, "Steve, if you guys would be 5 percent less greedy, the world would like you 100 percent more." I'm now watching that dynamic play out again with Google where, despite their "don't be evil" philosophy, they're becoming the focus of antitrust investigations.

I look at these patterns in platforms in which they start out with a burst of optimism and creation of public value, then gradually they start turning away from that. I'm trying to understand why that is.

Hmmm... nothing about Trump yet.

Quote:
It seems to me that the same pattern we've seen with technology platforms is playing out today in our broader economy, where financial markets in particular have turned into an extractive monopoly rather than a support system for our economy. Something like 85 percent of all corporate "investment" today goes to dividends and share buybacks. Very little goes to actual investment in people, building things, and R&D. It's all going into financial gamesmanship.

Looking at the pattern of algorithmic systems like Google and Facebook, I started thinking about how that applies to financial markets. A system like Google has hundreds of factors that are being taken into account, but they all have a master objective function, a fitness function, which is relevance in search results and ads.

Facebook's fitness function, their objective function, is to produce content that's engaging. We saw how that went wrong with fake news. Mark and the Facebook team are trying to deal with that. They're wrestling with the fact that they had this idea about how to build an engaging product, and it's been subverted.

Nothing about Republicans ...

Quote:
I look at our economic system where inequality is increasing, and I ask myself: Is that also a system that's dominated by an algorithm? What are they trying to optimize for?

I started to realize that thirty or forty years ago was the point we told companies that there's only one thing to optimize for, and that is shareholder value. That's the point in the '70s where you see this great divergence between the increased productivity brought on by technology and the actual benefit to the economy, where you see inequality soar, where you see people not doing as well as their parents. I came around to thinking that in some ways financial markets are that rogue AI that people like Elon Musk have been talking about.

Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk and everybody use these artificial thought experiments, like the AI which follows its objective function of making paperclips. Musk used one recently about the strawberry-picking robot that decides humans are in the way of its picking strawberries. Those aren't realistic. What is realistic is a world in which you have an increasingly algorithmic financial system saying, "Hey, optimize for corporate profit because it drives stock price. Never mind what happens to the people. Never mind what happens to society." We're in that AI-driven situation.

What do we do about that? How do we debug the objective function of an increasingly automated economy, of an economy that's dominated by systems that are, to use a great quote from Wallace Stevens, "without human feeling, without human meaning, a foreign song"? We're living in a world which is dominated by a system that disregards human value. A great quote comes to mind from a guy named Andrew Singer. Many years ago he said to me, "The art of debugging a computer program is to figure out what you really told the computer to do i

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SECOND

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 8:55 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

There is no reason or logic behind your intense and irrational focus on the "stupidity" of people, Republicans in general, Texas Republicans in particular, and Trump specifically.

What's driving YOU, my friend, is that . . .

You really think there is no stupidity? I have yet to find any real person I know in the flesh who is both not a Democrat and also thinks Trump should not drag us into violent conflict with North Korea. I'm sorry to say I have found 1 Democrat that supports Trump's urge to drop fire and fury on N Korea. But it is only 1 and he is stupid.

Trump's bouts of rage are intensifying (and his adversary, Kim Jong-un, isn’t an island of calm either). Trump completely misunderstands the history of U.S.-North Korean relations, in a manner that moves him away from diplomacy toward war.

For instance, in the middle of the day on Saturday, Trump tweeted:

Presidents and their administrations have been talking to North Korea for 25 years, agreements made and massive amounts of money paid … hasn’t worked, agreements violated before the ink was dry, making fools of U.S. negotiators. Sorry, but only one thing will work!

Everything about this statement is wrong.

First, one of those agreements—President Clinton’s Agreed Framework of 1994—worked quite well, as far as it went, keeping nuclear weapons out of North Korea’s hands for eight years.

Second, that agreement collapsed in large part because we violated its terms.

Third, North Korea made its biggest advancements—successfully testing an atom bomb, a long-range ballistic missile, and possibly a hydrogen bomb—precisely in the years when U.S. presidents (first George W. Bush, then Trump) rejected diplomacy as a matter of principle.

Finally, if Trump thinks the “one thing” that “will work” to rid North Korea of its nukes is a military strike, it’s worth noting that it has never worked before—or, in any case, nobody has figured out how to make it work without sparking retaliation, which would kill hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of civilians in South Korea and possibly Japan.

Much more at
www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2017/10/it_is_pos
sible_to_negotiate_with_north_korea_bill_clinton_did_it.html

I also saw at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/11/16454978/chris-murphy-trump
-north-korea-war

Ezra Klein said: "One dimension of this that worries me is that a lot of people seem to be relying on a sort of soft coup to keep Trump in check. The hope, as I’ve heard it expressed, is that the generals surrounding Trump will control his paper flow, control the information he gets, and if Trump goes off the reservation and does try to order an unwarranted first strike, they will do something to stop it or slow-walk it or otherwise intercede. All of this might be better than Trump unleashed, but it seems to me to subvert civilian control of the military in a worrisome way."

Senator Chris Murphy responded: "I’m not sure I entirely buy the severity of that premise, but let me reframe it: If this ended up in the military convincing the president out of military action, it would be a dramatic reversal of traditional roles. From the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam to the Iraq War, it is usually the military trying to convince the president to view a problem through a kinetic lens. The military sees problems through their toolkit. They are not very good at seeing complicated diplomatic paths out of vexing problems. To assume military leaders will tell Donald Trump not to use the military to solve a problem belies the history."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 9:13 PM

SECOND, you have ENDLESSLY splattered the board with your anti-Trump schiess, on everything from his pink hair to his orange skin to his small hands and nude portrait; blaming Trump for being rich, for cheating on his taxes, for getting peed on by a prostitute, for colluding with Russia, for "racism", for warmongering (also see Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and Carter), and for the process of advancing wealth inequality, which (as I've pointed out) has been going on for centuries (including being aided and abetted by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) not just the past nine months.

You've posted so much anal-splatter on the board, about how bad Trump is, how bad Texas Republicans are, how "stupid" people are ... I can't even keep track of all the bullshit that you posted, most of which makes no sense at all.

Clearly, you're just obsessively and selectively looking for anything and everything that puts Trump in a bad light. If you should happen to hit on one or two real issues, that doesn't explain or excuse all the rest of the crap that you posted. You're still an elitist butt hurt globalist shill.

AND your allegiances are STILL elsewhere. It's like you can't even talk about "America" or "Americans", as if the very concept offends you.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake