Rand0m her0

by 1941 US unemployment was already the lowest it had been since 1929, and had been on a sharp downwards trend for the years prior. by 1936 the US GDP had *already* exceeded the 1920s peak. by 1941 it was already one and a half times greater than the 1920s peak. the idea that "Franklin Roosevelt...forced the Great Depression to go on for years" is abject luncey and you need to find whoever told you that and beat them with a shoe for lying to you. By the end up 1936 the USA's economy had already largely recovered from the great depression. As in it had recovered before the end of FDR's first term. There is no possible way to support that claim when the 1936 GPD was $1.113 trillion dollars (2005), exceeding the 1929 value ($1.109 trillion), and the first three years of his presidency were three years of double digit percentage growth in the US's GDP. Your statement is absolutely and utterly false.

This is fantastically untrue. By the end of 1939, the great depression was over in its final days, and the decade that followed were the single greatest period of economic growth in the united states history, including even the "roaring" 20s. As well, by 1933 (ie, shortly after he took office) the US economy was back on the upswing, although still recovering. By 1934 the USA's GDP had grown by something like 9%. Over the period of Roosevelt's presidency, the US GDP grew by a factor of 4. Not four percent, as in by 1940 it had more than doubled from it's 1933 value, and it damn near doubled again by 1945. There is a reason why he was re-elected twice and by a ridiculous landslide in both cases. the "slow" recovery is pretty attributable to the USAs at the time dogged insistence on the gold standard (the rate of recovery correlates very strongly with how long it had been since the country left the gold standard. ones that were will still on it didn't have the monetary flexibility, and the post war return to the gold standard in particular caused massive deflation. the USA at the time being a massive gold sink for the world didn't help that, and the USA was obligated to honor the contractual rate. Compounding this further deflation is particularly hard on the agriculture sector and as you may recall, the US economy was highly dependant on agriculture at the time. There is no economic school of thought worth discussing that considers either of the the New Deals to have had a deleterious effect on the US's recovery. The exact effectiveness of the policy varies based on who you ask, but the *most* negative opinion is mostly a monetarist point of view that the effectiveness of the economic policy was neutral, but kick started public confidence. That caused an expansion in the monetary supply as people stopped hoarding, which allowed for inflation to replace deflation. Lys you couldn't define socialism if I handed you a portrait of Marx, a dictionary, and a copy of Das Kapital. The democrats regularly run economic platforms that swing further right than that of the conservative parties in just about any other western country. Calling Keynesian economics "socialist" is absolutely farcical, and John Maynard Keynes would be very pissed off at you for the comparison.

Not really. All it would really require is an interstate compact. It wouldn't happen tomorrow, but there are workable frameworks. For example there's the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. While it's not proportional assignment, if it comes into force, their states legislatures would appoint electors instep with the national popular vote. Assuming current legislation passes, it would be up to 45% of the 63% of the electoral college votes needed for it to come into effect. it'll need a few red states to get on board (well assuming the swing states don't sign on, but like hell ohio or florida are giving up their hilarious outsized influence), but at that point the supermajority of the electoral college votes will go to whomever wins the popular vote. Which at least solves that particular issue. If there was an amendment at all, throwing out the electoral college in its current form would be better. We no longer live in a world where the fastest way to get news is a guy on a horse, and the current system breaks down for larger populations. While there is something to be said for biasing to geographic regions, a vote in alaska is worth 3.3 times as much as in texas and 4 times as much as in california, which is just broken. No longer tying it to integer number of senators and using a population weighted average that then gets split proportionally would be vastly preferable. Unfortunately no such amendment is probable in the vaguely near future so interstate compacts are the likely way to go.

It sounds like you're describing the Republican relationship with John McCain. Fortunately, because of mortality, we don't have that problem any longer. Jeff Flake on the other hand, is still doing it. Even when he knew for a fact that he would never be reelected, he still is pissing in our face, and has now surrendered his seat to an actual Democrat. Now at least Arizona will experience having a real Democrat represent them. Time will tell how they handle the future. Your 40/30/20 example is pretty damn close to the actual Presidential election of '92, that blessed us with the Clintons. Ross Perot took 20% of the Republican vote to a third party candidate. It denied George H.W. Bush a second term, and graced us with a pair of Captain Corruptions that we still have to deal with to this very day. Ralph Nader without a doubt prevented Al Gore from being President, and I believe a strong case can be made that third party candidates prevented Hillary Clinton from becoming President. We live in a Republic, and each state can make their own rules on elections. From our conversation here, you make a strong case that we should eliminate the multi-party system. The nation as a whole, will never incorporate this lame "Second Choice" model. Either way, you must take it from beyond the enormous power of the IRON forum, and into the weak realm of Constitutional Amendments. I vote to keep our Republic, and our Electoral College. That's the thing though, you don't even need to touch the electoral college. Almost none of the current american voting system has anything to do with the constitution. Basically everything that currently exists boils down to "the state legislature passed a law saying this happens" Tomorrow, your state could decide that you don't get to vote for president anymore. Your states contribution to the electoral college could be appointed by the legislature.Primaries are a thing because everyone decided they should be, not because they're some intrinsic process enshrined in the constitution. How the US conducts voting today is barely older than you are. A hair over 100 years ago, you probably couldn't vote for your senator. Primaries didn't exist. Most of the rules for getting on the ballot are no older than the 40s. The parties can conduct their primaries however they please. They could dispose of them tomorrow. The GOP could decide that next election, their candidate for president will be decided by a farting contest. There's zero reason either party couldn't do so. All the 17th amendment requires is that "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof". The system for electing them doesn't matter. For the electoral college it's even less restrictive. They could make the presidential election entirely proportional. Texas has...32 electoral college votes? So the state legislature can go, 52/43/3? Ok we'll appoint 17 pledged to trump, 14 for clinton and 1 for gary johnson. Or california would have appointed 34/18/2/1 Clinton/Trump/Johnson/Stein. The push back against this happening has nothing to do with some supposed sacred process (that's barely old enough to retire), but the fact that neither party wants to risk their precious gerrymandered districts. as far as ranked ballots go...many states in the USA already have pretty much this system in various places. It's just a vastly more expensive and unwieldy version. If you live in Georgia or Louisiana and no one receives a majority, that triggers an entire second election between the top vote getters. Maine outright uses IRV, North Carolina uses it for judicial elections Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, have all used it in the past, 10 states currently use some form of run off election in the primaries, including Texas. Not to mention that quite a few large cities use it as well. It's not like this is some new an untested idea in america. claiming that "The nation as a whole, will never incorporate this lame "Second Choice" " is nonsense. A sizeable chunk of the nation already uses something similar at some point in the process. A ranked ballot simply results in an instant run off without all the expense and clusterfuck and other nonsense with current systems. And I mean if you want to be a constitutional originalist...feel free to go tell your wife she shouldn't be allowed to vote? And stop voting for the president. Or your senator. And I mean if you want to be a constitutional originalist...feel free to go tell your wife she shouldn't be allowed to vote?

I hear you clearly. Trump by name recognition alone carried 30% of the Republican primary vote when the lion share of the vote was split between the rest of the herd. It was obvious that 10 others would have to drop out for anyone to beat him, but they wouldn't do it. Scott Walker tried to start the exodus, but they were too slow, and Trump just gained momentum until it was too late for him to be stopped. Sure but how would you feel if say Captain Corruption Chris Christie had managed to squeak through instead. Or if you take an edge case: Your local primaries for things like the house are shit.Turnout for that stuff is pathetic. And with the republican parties appeal to the right, every so often some uber fundamentalist evangelical gets a decent chunk of the vote. Because hey you only need a few thousand people to vote for you in the primary due to that bad turn out, and the fundamentalist wing nuts will come out for the fundamentalist wing nut candidate. So now you've got some whack job getting 15%-20% of the vote on a platform of instituting religious tests for school attendance or whatever bullshit. If you lived in Washington state, would you be all that happy Matt "Wants to institute a theocracy, and published a manual for terrorist holy war" Shea managed to get through the primary into the state legislature. Regardless of our differences, i don't think either of us would trust a guy who writes this shit to bother with the constitution, or rule of law, or "Not advocating for war crimes". Or in illinois, the republican party is so messed up that Arthur Jone ended up running unopposed. The dude is so vile that Bruce Rauner (as in the Republican governor) took a bit of time out of running his own campaign for reelection to stump for Arthur Jone's Democrat opponent. Given that third party candidates have zero chance, right now you'd be forced to just accept the primary and vote for a member of the American Nazi Party, stay home, or vote Democrat. Would you not prefer a system where you could at least take a look at the independent or third party candidates and while any of them might only get 3% or 4% of the vote, a larger percentage of the voters (say 10% to 20% again) would collectively support at least one of them over either main party. Personally I also like the argument that ranked voting keeps parties honest. Your local republican has little interest in representing your views. Hopefully they do that for you, but realistically right now their campaign pitch could consist of walking up to you and pissing in your face and your choice would be to vote blue, not vote, or say "yes sir can I have some more" and vote for them anyways. If there's a third party or independent candidate you like more, but you could still tolerate whoever is on the republican ticket, some form of ranked voting lets you vote for them without screwing yourself over with the spoiler effect. And if a third party candidate gets a large percentage of them popular vote, that'll sure as hell make the republican party sit up and take notice. Like if the vote goes 40/30/20 D/R/L that'd be a big wake up call that the republcains better get their shite together or next time it might be the same split but D/L/R.

I'm curious why on earth you see that as a negative. Do you like a voting system where you feel required to vote republican or not at all, regardless of the quality of the candidate or their policy? If you feel your local republicans are screwing up (Massive corruption scandal maybe) , would you not prefer to vote for an independent or third party candidate? Hell let's take the primaries alone: A republican candidate will, not uncommonly win the primary with less than 30% of the vote. Infact if people refuse to concede, it can be worse than that. Would you prefer the Republican Party run a walking disaster of a candidate that you and 70% of all republicans in the state voted against?

In before Betsy. Why me? Aside from RH's commentary, a direct cause if a FPTP election, "winner takes all" is an idiotic thing in a democracy, compounded with that in the US most (not all) wins can be done by plurality so offcourse they (the parties) band together into a 50%+1 so they can be "sure" of winning. Meanwhile the fringe parties (green, libertarians, ...) are seen as more as a lifestyle choice. Only plus side you guys have is the lack of "protest votes", or atleast not as frequent as happening here. As for AZ's senate seat, I did enjoy the RNC being annoyed when (ignoring her trumpismy post-primary) McSally didn't go full ham into the "election fraud/steal" screams some other Reps are doing in various other still contested races. Even funnier when AGAIN your president goes into the whole FAKE NEWS part of it and adds some more ham to the already ludricous situation. That she is front runner to keep the seat warm for another 2y was a given once she started trailing in her own race. Because while America's two party system is a bit broken, lots of americans think that this means having more political parties represented always means better and more effective government (ie, more parties would "solve all of this" as MK put it). And uh. Belgium.

In before Betsy. Also america's political process is pretty much antithetical to more than two parties. There is a reason why when america plays a role in setting up new goverments, the american system is the last thing they used, and why most "modern" political structures prefer a parliamentary system. The executive is pretty much uncheckable outside of the rigidly defined system of checks and balances, and so there's a huge incentive for parties to combined outright rather than act as a coalition. In a parliamentary system if the executive can't get consensus of the house then their power is sharply curtailed and in the event of a minority government they're forced to form coalitions. Also depending on the system (for example most of the commonwealth), if a minority government shits the bed, a vote of no confidence can dissolve the the government and the resulting election turns into a sort of referendum on that issue. Under the america's system even if the house spits say 20/40/40 with a three party system, one party still ends up with complete control of the executive. The senate also screws with this, you can carry the senate with a pathetic amount of the popular vote, which theoretically means that a party can wield far outsized influence there (also the fact the VP gets to break a tie doesn't help.). If there are two parties that have a somewhat common platform, it's always the better option (at least as far as their winning the election goes. Good for america is another topic) for them to combine their resources instead of competing. Basically american politics were "republican democracy 1.0" that's been patched a couple dozen times to make it mostly work. But like any 1.0 product, it has quite legacy problems and rough edges.

Typical Progressive. Cherry pick something that supports your position and insult the intelligence of your target. It's not about nouns and pronouns, it's about context. He's not in the USA, he didn't vote for anyone, he didn't win anything, and "the war" he's talking about, is not his. I think it's important to make that clear. It's not important to argue about it. "The Dems won the house, picked up governors, gained some state assemblies and most importantly won the popular vote big time. I call it a good haul but its only a battle we won, the war rages on." Oh right. You say you grasp the grammar. Fine. There's that reason gone. So you understand that Rafay spends multiple paragraphs of that post clearly speaking as someone who is neither an American nor even a Democrat. You're aware that Rafay is from pakistan and no one else seems to think that fact is some revelation, so clearly they've not made a secret of it in the years I stopped playing. There's obviously no intent to mislead, nor even any accidental possibility of it, nor has anyone here claimed to have been mislead. But yet you keep going off about how rafay is attempting to keep his nationality a secret and claiming to be american. Why?

The only chiming was my support for the leave campaign and my congrats when they won. Since the referendum I have remained silent about all the details of the difficult task of actually leaving. It wouldn't bother me a bit if some angry European blasted me because it's none of my business, and I have never attempted to keep my US Citizenship a secret so anyone who reads it will think my opinion matters. What I take issue with is transparency. I wouldn't mind at all if Rafay said "I'm in Pakistan, and my opinion doesn't matter, but I'm awesomely thrilled the Democrats took the House in the USA!!!" He didn't do that... he said "we" a lot... he's not one of us. No "Today Americans proved me and a lot of people in the world wrong and cleared". "The Dems won the house, picked up governors, gained some state assemblies and most importantly won the popular vote big time." "Congrats once again guys." Perhaps it's been sufficiently long since your last english class: Americans is that sentence is the subject noun, while "me" and "a lot of people" are acting of objective pronouns. A sentences structured in that way indicates that the person or persons indicated by the subject pronoun are acting in a way external to the person or persons indicated by the object pronoun. The sentence is equivalent to the dative case, not the nominative case. As an example, "The store gave me a discount",can in no way be read to to imply that the speaker (indicated by the pronoun "me") is also the store. Infact, every one of those sentences indicates that the subject is external to the speaker. I would recommend you either not invent reasons to justify your comments, or brush up on your grade school grammar.

The conversation is about corporations and if they have the right to influence how our country operates, and you pull up a 3 year old article from the Obama Administration about China and the trade deficit. I think you're back to trolling me. China is bad. The trade deficit, under the Trump Administration, is under a long overdue correction. Walmart still has the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances, just like Unions, the NRA, activist organizations, as well as every other American Citizen. I believe you should be more concerned about Brexit... notice I don't chime in on that issue? So walmart spends lobbying money to influence congressional votes on trade, tariffs and employment laws that make it easier to move manufacturing jobs overseas. It uses its money in local city lobbying to influencing zoning exemptions so that they can build SUPERCENTERS, that proceed to spend their first two years of existence operating in the red deliberately to push out local small businesses, resulting in a net loss of competition and jobs. Walmart uses political lobbying to get changes to regulations on part time vs full time workers in order to deflate wages and result of fewer stable jobs for individual americans. I thought you were pro small business, pro good jobs, pro american manufacturing lys?

I was aware, but it's not really that interesting, and figured i'd leave the "dead dog voters" jokes for someone else

Very curious RH. What do you have against corporations? Since just about everything you see, touch, hear, smell, or taste is brought to you by a corporation, it's hard for me to understand why you have such disdain for everything that makes your life much easier, cheaper, and enjoyable. Even my very own business is an LLC. Why do you hate corporations so much? Corporations are fine. They're a tool. The problem isn't corporations, but how corporate power is just an unchecked extension of the state. As a simple example, consider how many tech corporations have been used to conduct a run around of the 4th and 5th amendment. Or consider how Boeing has the US government by the balls. The largest planned economy in the world is the US military industrial complex. You can't achieve "smaller government" by giving corporations more power. When you do, you just transfer the power of the state out of public hands and into the hands of those who can buy it. And the more you do that, the harder it is to take back. Something like Walmart isn't a individual. It isn't a citizen. It's basically just an autonomous machine that seeks to exploit every avenue of profit that it can. It doesn't work for your benefit, and if it can make more profit by directly working against you, it will do so, and you have no way to hold it accountable. There are examples of the danger of corporate power all through history. Just within the context of the USA, Adam Smith wrote on it extensively, there's a long history of corporations dictating American foreign policy, and the end of the 19th century saw corporations use the US military to enforce their will on the American citizen. Coercive power isn't removed by giving it to someone else.

You make an excellent point. A lot of “libertarians“ object to gay marriage, a woman’s right to control her body, decriminalization of drugs, freedom of religion or atheism, free speech, free press, etc.- not very consistent with the tenants of libertarianism. I don’t know what proportion of libertarians these people represent, but they sure are loud. I was sincerely afraid we wouldn’t. Like I said, I was starting to feel discouraged. We have a long way to go still, but I’m much more hopeful. What Libertarians are you speaking about? Because I'd say you're completely wrong with what you seem to be suggesting. What libertarians *should* be and what people who claim to be them are very different. Gary Johnson is the closest to a non terrible libertarian figure (at least one with enough public support to be worth mentioning), and even he is far far to willing to acquiesce on things like corporate power. The fact of the matter is that in much of America, "libertarian" is just another synonym for social conservative, and the libertarian movement has pretty much been entirely co-opted by the Republican party. You don't need to like that, but it's the truth of the matter. Many self described libertarians want a government small enough to fit in your bedroom, support the war on drugs, support the expansion of police powers, advocate for military interventionism and similar. They're libertarian in nothing but name, but that's enough for America. the libertarians ran one of the best candidates they have in a generation, the GOP ran on a platform that's as opposed to libertarian as you can possibly get, and the 15% of self described libertarians in america....pretty much lined up and voted R. Right now, the average american moderate is pretty skeptical of libertarians for that reason. They see people stand up and go "I'm a libertarian" and then sit down and vote in favor of the war on drugs, vote to extend the military industrial complex, vote for military interventionism etc. The American moderate leans to the left on social issue...and they see libertarians vote with the evangelical righ while spouting of objectivist BS. The American moderate is untrusting of corporate power and they see libertarians cheerfully vote to give corporations more power over their lives. It's never going to happen. All those Libertarians in name only aren't going to break from the republican party, but most libertarian candidates seem to think that they will. And until the libertarians are willing to sit down and flip the GOPs big tent every bird in existence and stop compromising with the GOP out of convenience, the party will just be viewed as little more than Pro-Pot Republicans. They can't caucus with the GOP and claim to be a third party.

Oh that again! We had a discussion on that recently. it's here But because I will never ever get tired of mocking those clueless twits, lets do it again. So lets break there little experiment down by the numbers: 7 papers accepted. 7 papers still undergoing peer review, 1 undergoing it's first review, 6 more previously rejected that they attempted to resubmit. 6 outright denied. So outright, 2/3rds of their hoax papers were rejected from publication which already rather strongly undermines their conclusion. Oh and two questions for you I''ll answer at the end. How many total attempts to submit papers were made, and what was the highest ranked journal they managed to get to accept something. What's interesting is that their essay goes out of its way to obfuscate which paper was in which category. I spent a good half hour cross referencing through their essay to put that together. Not surprising when "2/3rd of our papers were rejected". However many of the papers they spend time dwelling upon, were those outright rejected and they cheerfully lump them in with the remained. The Masturbation, Progressive Stack, and several others that they lavish over were infact....outright rejected. Of course that doesn't stop them from fitting square pegs into round holes no sir. They take the fact they were rejected as symptomatic anyways because the person assigned to peer review the paper gave them respectful feedback...exactly like the peer review process kinda requires of them. There are other issues with the essay as well. For example they go out of their way to criticize the field of sociology throughout it. Despite the fact they were rejected from every sociology journal they submitted to. Not that they bother to mention that. Of course that's the boring part of the essay really. "Hoax paper gets rejected, fails to be published" is such an utter non story. The remaining 7 are what we should be interested in. One of them wasn't a paper in the first place, but a collection of poetry published to a poetry journal. It was garbage ass poetry, but it was hardly an academic work. Three more were scholarly essays. Which are at least a piece of academic writing, but again, hardly interesting. They're not research papers. They don't present any conclusions, they don't really contribute data any field and the standard for them is quite a bit lower for that reason. Those journals are aggregators and unless your essay is irredeemable trash, they don't care, because "is this essay good" isn't their problem. For that matter, the impact factor of the journals those ended up in are quite low. Without getting into the grit, low impact factor indicates a journal that is more geared towards highly theoretical and esoteric work. To put it simply, they're the academic equivalent of r/showerthoughts So now we're down to 3. The dog-rape paper, the dildo paper and the breastaurant research. And all of these papers have something in common. Every single one of them contains *extensive* fabricated data and detailed construction of the experimental design. For the "dog-rape paper" they faked a 1,000 hours of observation. It shouldn't surprise anyone that made it through peer review. Peer review is not there to be an arbiter of truth. It's not there to go "yea this was a good use of your time to study". It's there to look at the paper, judge the presentation of the data, judge the experimental design, and make sure it's original research. That's it. And those three papers presented hours and hours and hours of empirical data. One them claimed to be the product of two freaking years of study. Empirical data is valuable and for all your undergrad TAs bitched at you for not having a flawless crafted objective, in reality no one gives a fuck. Regardless of the bullshit that surrounds it, meticulously collected data is always valuable. Which means those three papers aren't hoaxes, but outright fraud. The peer review process does not protect against that and it can't protect against that.This is true of every field, and there have been cases of it everywhere. The Schön scandal is a rather famous example, and you can't get a much harder field of science than condensed matter physics conducted at the freaking Bell Laboratories. That's just one case. There's a reason why the academic disciplines are so harsh about that. They'll boot an undergrad out of university for that shit. If your ass has a PHD and you try that shit? You get fired. You lose any fellowships you have. They will revoke your degree That phd you spent 10 years and a hundred thousand dollars getting? Gone . No research facility in the world will touch you. The penalty for that isn't "your paper doesn't get published" but "watching as your career burns to the ground and they salt the ashes where it once stood." You could run exactly that sort of "sting" in any sort of academic discipline and get the same results. It's the academic equivalent of something like the police opening a bar, arresting everyone who comes out for public intoxication and then publishing a report that says "DRUNKEN LAWLESSNESS UP 200%". Seriously, look at this cause if you think "good empirical science" is immune to it, and this is the "degeneracy of the social sciences" whooooo boy. Picking up on that kind of fraud is left to the larger academic community. The journals aren't arbiters of truth, the handful of peer reviewers don't know everything, so "is this data right, is this data valuable, is this source being used correctly" is left up to the field of as a whole. And that works. All three of these papers were flagged almost immediately after being published for a deeper investigation. Bascily as soon as their fraud hit print, their entire experiment went so thoroughly tits up they had to immediately drop it. Which means they've managed to confirm that the process works. OK so considered those questions at the start? they submitted 47 times. they were rejected 39 times. That's discounting the one paper they had only just submitted before scrubbing it. 82% failure rate out of the gate. THe "Best" journal they could get is Gender, Place & Culture: It's the #9 journal in the field of Gender Studies. So they couldn't manage anything outside of the 10th ranked journal in an already really niche. Oh and as a bonus: The average impact factor for those journals is less than one. Significantly less than one. To put it in perspective, the various journals produced by the Nature Publishing Group (which is pretty damn well regarded) are in the high teens to low twenties. The review journals occasionally push the 30s. CA which is pretty much the most well regarded journal period has an impact factor of 64. Most of the journals they "stung" have a impact factor of less than 0.64.

You make an excellent point. A lot of “libertarians“ object to gay marriage, a woman’s right to control her body, decriminalization of drugs, freedom of religion or atheism, free speech, free press, etc.- not very consistent with the tenants of libertarianism. I don’t know what proportion of libertarians these people represent, but they sure are loud. In America? enough. The core of American Libertarianism is basically rooted in Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and everyone's favorite hypocritical loon, Ayn Rand. ( Which kinda makes the current anti feminism, pro traditional gender roles thing many "libertarians" have going on halarisad.) All of them were overly focused on perceived over reach of the state (although given that they did their writing in the era of the new deal, not surprising), and all fail to recognize that other institutions than the state can wield similar power without the check of democracy or that they can function as extensions of the state. Unfortunately in the wake of the red panic, America went *hard* in on traditional institutions and military interventionism, and anyone who deviated from that orthodoxy was pretty much labeled a communist and similar. Which left those three (and the people they inspired) and the only acceptable voice of libertarianism. And then the Vietnam war *really* drove the wedge in, cause that was a bad time for anti interventionist ideologies. . These days American Libertarianism has been co opted as a synonym for "socially conservative". The Republican party goes out of it's way to either crush any sort of actual libertarian candidate or basically borg them into the big tent (hellooooo tea party), because in its current state, an actual libertarian swell would be an existential threat to the GOP.

See, that’s the thing, racism shouldn’t even come into play when discussing the actul merits or demerits of a policy like Affirmative Action, unless they are made with a clandestine agenda of „keeping down” certain minorities. But it seems that all to often simply disagreeing with certain established policies will get someone labeled as such. That’s because this too has become dogma. What pisses me off is that I look around and see rational discourse melt away in the world on the Right as well as the Left. In an ideal world I'd agree with you. However the world we live in is one there are people who were born during jim crow who can't retire yet. You fundamentally can't remove the topic of racism from policy. It's a world where the KKK was still active and lynching people less than 40 years ago. The last several decades have taught those bastards that spouting off their racist crap will get them ejected from the table, but they haven't gone anywhere, just changed their phrasing, at least when outside their echo chambers. Affirmative action is a rather charged topic and there's not a shortage of bad actors that show up when it comes up. Start a discussion of it on any public forum etc and wait and see how long it takes for someone to start spouting off eugenics nonsense. So if your going to discuss it, it's something that warrants discussing with care, otherwise there's zero way to distinguish you from all the people JAQing off and otherwise arguing in bad faith. If your approach to the topic mirrors there's or references racist true-ism...your probably gonna get lumped in with them. And if someone points out how your rhetoric references or mirrors there's and you flip off PC culture.you're defiantly going to get lumped in with them. It might not be fair, but ultimately no one lives in your head but you. Rhetoric and praxis are all you've got and all other people can judge you on. That's *especially* true online. Some of those shits have google alerts and such set up, so you even mention something like affirmative action online and they'll come flooding in to concern troll or just preach the word of white genocide. I sure as hell don't have the time or mental energy to sort someone putting their foot in their mouth vs the actual neo nazis. If your on reddit and want to lose some hope for humanity, go invest in mass tagger and hit up just about any politically charged thread. Like anything slightly feminist comes up and you find lotsa people Just Asking Questions and being all "reasonable" who wandered in from braincels and similar. Sure but the lack of a definition in this study makes it worthless. Political correctness can mean anything from "people say mean things about me when I say gay people deserve to die" to "We should make sure not to alienate minorities in how we discuss and approach topics" to "that thing we said in the 70s to mock pre sixtys revolutionary groups" . And I could go on listing definitions, The first group thinks potential correctness is a problem. They can also fuck every off they possibly can. The second group can take the question to mean "do i see an issue with that general goal of being respectful" and decide it isn't a problem. Or hell depending on how the question is worded it (If it's a bland "do you see potential correctness as an issue" or example) could be interpreted as "Do I have a problem with a lack of such basic manners". And the last group you might get some mid 60s socialist who goes "oh ffs yes and if i need to listen to Karen spout off about how tea is a bourgeois affliction one more time....", or who goes "oh god yes, fucking tankies...." If you think eugenics and "Racial Biology " is bunk science, I can find someone who'll spend 2 hours bitching you out for being brainwashed into political correctness. All of those definitions exist. None of them have anything to do with one another. Seriously, find me examples of "political correctness" being raised as an issue, and not being used as a way to deflect criticism. Yea ok and? "I guess as long as X stay reasonable and not become dogma, they’re fine." is true for pretty much any X. "I guess as long as people who like chocolate stay reasonable and don't become dogmatic, they're fine" Darmore got sacked because he turned himself into a walking hostile workplace lawsuit. The paper he released to the public was bad enough, but it was also heavily edited from the one he published internally. He didn't argue against affirmative action, he argued that literally every person at the company who wasn't white and male could be genetically unsuited for their position and should not be there. It wasn't a "hysterical offended mob" it was his coworkers and peers going "holy fuck this guy is a massive a hole". I sure as shit wouldn't want to work with him, I really couldn't blame any woman or minority at Google who wouldn't want to be on a team with him, and if you think a company is going to keep an ambulatory tort employed...yea no. Also no the jury is not out on the science. In most cases his claims are entirely unsourced. in the remainder he usually entirely misrepresented those sources. If you want a take down of the science, Erin Giglio published one more than a year ago that is exceptionally through, and there's no shortage of neuroscientists and similar who've ripped into it. It's bunk. Granted right now i'm given even fewer fucks about darmore than usual seeing as we recently had some dumbfuck at work complain about how the "eyecandy" (ie, women) at work are sexually harassing him by walking past his desk, and happened to reference darmore so yea. Quotas are pretty much not used anywhere, and as said are forbidden in the USA. Like *outright illegal. You can probably find *some* dumbass doing it, but I can also find you some dumbass pocketing pocketing their employees tax withholds and telling the IRS they're "contractors". In either case as soon as evidence comes to light, they're pretty much gigafucked. You show me someone using quotas and I'll show you a lawyer drooling like a Labrador looking at a hamburger. Also the Harvard lawsuit pretty much isn't going anywhere. The claims are questionable and the Harvard model has been tested in the courts enough times that they'd need to complete ignore precedent for it being an issue. We're talking "The supreme court has dealt with this twice and held it up as a testing model in other cases" level of precedent. The most the court could conclude is that Harvard has allowed unconscious bias into the process, should unfuck that and order something like greater transparency. Even that's iffy. Without getting into it the statistical analysis used based purely off consideration compared to "academic achivement" alone. However Harvard literally receives more applicants with perfect SAT scores than most universities admit in a given year period and SAT scores are a pretty mediocre indicator of future academic achievement. To a large extent, they've managed to prove is that perfect SAT scores aren't enough to get you into Harvard. Which isn't surprising, if you're not entirely useless academically, you can turn money into SAT scores and high grades in AP classes. Harvard actually gives fewer fucks about academics than many universities and someone who came from a disadvantage background and did really well is going to be more interesting to them than someone who's parents paid for years of prep classes and tutoring.

Won't happen so long as the libertarians continue to caucus with the evangelical and raw capatlist blocs. Both of them are perfectly willing to throw core libertarian ideals right under the bus, especially as far as independence from state and pesudo state powers go. Liberatinism requires independence from all coercive institutions, not some. Not to mention the hard evangelicals and wana be robber barons who think being pro pot makes them libertarians aren't doing anyone any favors. Oh and the general stank of objectivism needs to be sorted

I'm with Lysistrata here. And if he had said that, I wouldn't be taking any issue with it. But what he said was: Which is rather different both in meaning and intent.

Still not at all what you said.

Just pointing out that he's not an American, he did not, and cannot vote in our elections, and the only effect he may feel is how big the number is on the foreign aid check. I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea, and think his opinion matters. Yea that's not what you said. At all.

It's okay my friend, none of this matters to him, they teach him how to be that hateful in Pakistan. Ya ok i'm just bold that and make it a bit bigger maybe throw in a bit of colour there. Because wow.

Oh just don't. I said that if you're finding the people are regularly calling you a racist for your approach to discussing affirmative action, you are probably copying the rhetoric of racist asshats. And if it's something that's happened all of once in your life or even just a thing you've heard happened to other people, then why even bring it up like it's relevant or affects you in anyway. Either it happens all the time and you need to buy a saddle, or it doesn't happen and is in no way relevant. Pick one. Also you notice that literally nothing in this entire study even defines what political correctness is. Seriously, try to find a single consistent definition anywhere of what political correctness is. You can find studies of people trying to define "political correctness" if you look...and they can't. Turns out If you ask 10 people to define it you'll get 12 answers. And then if you take those 12 definitions, strip the word "political correctness" from them and ask the exact same people to rate how much they agree with the sentiment of each of those definitions, the answers you get back are entirely inconsistent with the first study. Americans agree that "political correctness is a problem" but they sure as hell don't agree on what political correctness is in the first place. That's because political correctness doesn't exist. It's a boogeyman. All the kids at preschool insist it's under the bed and just waiting to get ya, and there's this one kid who inists that their freidns brother totally had their toes eaten by it, but no one who's looked has ever seen it. Working off this study and taking it's stats entirely at face value....the "pc culture" you envision is as relevant to your existence as flat earthers. Less actually since a full 15% of americans aren't entirely sure that the world is a freaking sphere. It's less relevant than people who think that TVs broadcast mind control waves (14% of americans aren't entirely sure they don't). 13% of americans aren't entirely sure that obama isn't literally the antichrist. It's about as relevant as the percentage of americans that think lizard people control the world (4% of americans). Complaining about the PC culture you envision existing is like complaining that there's this huge problem in american with people screaming at you for not admitting that the lizard are trying to control your brain. Could you imagine a world where endless op ends go on about the excesses of "Lizard Correct Culture" and politician get up on stage and go "I don't believe lizard correctness". Because it's exactly as real and would be as relevant to the average americans life as "PC culture" is. Seriously, what kind of logic is this, better than 9 in 10 americans don't support political correctness but it's also somehow a huge problem? really? See what you're doing there is saying nothing. Affirmative action can refer to any of a dozen different models. A company scrubbing any personal indicators from resumes is affirmative action. The harvard map, which prioritize diversity of candidates and is just as likely to give extra consideration to a poor white farm boy from alabama as it in some inner city black kid from new york is affirmative action. If a company looks at it's internal demographics and goes "You know, women make up 20% of the workers in this industry, but only 12% of our employees, that's unlikely to be a statistical anomaly" and then sits down to examine it's hiring and retention to find out why, that's affirmative action. If Microsoft goes "there are half as many black americans in the tech sector as there are in the rest of the private sector" and decide to run an outreach campaign...that's affirmative action. What you're referring to is a one model of affirmative action that was a thing of the 70s, is explicitly illegal to use in many of the states, and has pretty much been gutted by the supreme court where it isn't outright forbidden. It hasn't been relevant in decades and dates to a period in time in which littrealty enforcing quotas was the only way to desegregate shit. Not to debate the merits, but given that this was an time where some cities closed every school rather than allow in black kids, buildings removed water fountains and the military was littrealy called in on several occasions, I'd contend that the unambiguous and explicit requirements were appropriate for the era. You won't find many people who think that it would be appropriate now. It's not a controversial option; if you sit down and go through just about any map of HR policy developed in the last 20 years, it'll be held up as an example as what *not* to do, for exactly the reasons you state. Which means criticizing it is in no way relevant to any modern discussion on the topic. There's no reason to bring it up except as a red herring. "Modern" affirmative action has two common models, one is focused on removing sources of bias and the other encourages diversity with the "action" as a side effect. Removing sources of bias can mean things like scrubbing names from resumes, and making sure that no one person is always running candidate selection. Or it can mean dealing with systemic issues. Women are less likely to get involved in STEM fields, and it's not because a second X chromosome makes them genetically incapable of doing math but because there are social factors that encourage women to look elsewhere. The other can be something like Frances model for universities where the top 10% of students from any given school are given priority provided they otherwise meet admission requirements. It gives no priority based on class or race, and instead simply allows the law of averages to do it's thing. More commonly there's the harvard map which boils down to "given two good candidates, pick the person with life and professional experiences your team lacks", which more companies are implementing not because of PC culture, but because it literally makes them more money (turns out if you hire lots of people from the same background, they tend to share biases and hello groupthink.) So you know if a discussion starts up and you start all caps screaming that "you are still using RACE as a yardstick. That is BY DEFINITION RACIST."....yea your going to get called on that. That aint PC culture, that's you wading into a discussion with an understanding of the topic that dates to 20-30 years ago and proceeding to stuff your foot in your mouth.

More people turned out to vote for Hillary in the last election than anyone not named Obama in the last 40 years. That's in percentage terms. In absolute terms more people voted for Hillary in the last election than anyone not named Obama period.

PC culture literally doesn't exist. PC culture is a boogeyman invoked by people to dismiss shit that makes them uncomfortable or is inconvenient for them to examine. It's an exonym, people invoke it without meaning to go "HEY I'M NOT ONE OF THOSE GUYS" "The washington redskins mascot is kinda racist as fuck, maybe that should be changed" ....and then Del Jackson Miller gets on national TV to whine about PC culture Twitter has a problem with jackasses harassing and stalking women, takes even the slightly step to address it.... and Andrew Sullivan flips his shit about PC culture causing mass censorship. Tim Allen can't be bothered to update his material for the last 20 years, goes full principal skinner and spends the last 5 years never shutting up about political correctness instead of not being a hack. John Schnatter gets called to task by shareholders for his company underperforming...and bitches about PC culture. investors decide that 4 months of him whining about NFL players kneeling not only isn't fixing the sales slump but making it worse...and he stuffs his foot further in his mouth while whining about "political correctness" . They sit him down with a marketing company to extract said foot, and he proceeds to ram his head up his arse while complain about political correctness. The marketing company quits because they can't fix stupid, and from somewhere in Schnatter's lower intestine we hear muffled whinging about how unfair this "political correctness" thing is. it literally does not exist. It never existed. Have a case in point since you've provided CC. People crying "political correctness" have their thoughts on the matter go no further than that. Or they spit out some bullshit that demonstrates they have no knowledge of the topic...and then cry political correctness. Or they spout off something that might as well be a quote from someone arguing in favor of segregation in the 60s and cry political correctness when that gets pointed out. Affirmative action in the US aint new. It's a de segregation "policy" (using that term very loosely), and we've had 60 years of pro segregation motherfuckers and similar throwing bullcrap around about it. If you can't add anything to the discussion in more detail than "affirmative action as a policy is discriminative and counterproductive" then intentionally or not all you've done is blow real hard into a dog whistle and you're probably gonna get called on that. Cause if someone spouts off with shite that's indistinguishable from 60 years of pro segregationist assholes and similar, what they're saying will be received like they're one of those pro segregationist assholes. So if you're getting called on that on any regular basis, consider that the folks doing it aren't endless waves of idealogues and that maybe it's time to buy a saddle.