No, but he caucuses with them. He votes with them. Maybe he doesn’t have that magical “D” after his name, but he’s still on the left wing of the political spectrum. Even though you hate him, I bet you’d still side with him over Trump.
Sorry, I didn’t know that. I just remember you once compared Sanders to Robespierre of the French Revolution. :dubious: Based on your posting history, I interpreted it as a term of abuse, and not a term of endearment.
Yes. And he attacks them. He calls them corrupt. He paints them as weak-kneed pawns of Wall Street. He sours millions of left-leaning young people (like my 17yo son) on the party, weakening its strength among the very same cohort we need to counter all the crotchety old white folks on the other side.
Sure, but that’s a low bar. The list of people I’d side with over Trump is long and includes many Republicans. If the general election ballot featured Bernie vs. Romney, I’d vote Romney. Same goes for Kasich, Huntsman, or Fiorina.
On the contrary, we’re trying to save the Democratic Party. The Clinton/Obama corporatist wing has had it’s chance. Look what it got us. Trump is President. The GOP controls all three branches of the federal government, and the state legislatures of 32 states. Time for some new leadership in the party. We tried it your way, and your way has failed. I’m willing to roll the dice on a new strategy.
I’m sure that’s exactly what McGoverniks were saying in 1972, including the Clintons and Gary Hart, all of whom were stung enough by that wipeout to tack to the center strategically.
And what the Bernie crowd never seems to understand is that the DNC is not ultimately defined by its DC leadership, but by the state parties who elect the DNC members who select those leaders. If the Bernie wing wants to change the DNC, throwing a fit every four years during a losing presidential primary fight isn’t going to get 'er done. You will have to go and join all the county parties and attend regularly, help organize soup dinners and July Fourth parades, get your people elected to leadership positions at the county level. Then from there, you get your people elected to leadership positions at the state level.
Then and only then, if you pull that off in enough states, you can take over the DNC. But I see no sign of that happening. My college town was lousy with Bernie stickers last year, but at the county party meetings, everyone was for Hillary. Most were over 50, but the few young people were also Hillary backers. I have heard the same story from several others around the country.
So my impression is that either there is something about that group that leads them not to understand how the internal small-d democratic apparatus of the party works, or–less charitably–maybe they don’t really care. Maybe they can’t be bothered to put in all that effort and week-in, week-out commitment, but just want to take an extortionist shortcut: “You boring old geezers better get to work and remake the party the way we want it to be by 2019, or we’ll throw another tantrum and give it to the Republicans again. Real nice party you’ve got here: shame if anything happened to it.” That about the long and short of it? :dubious:
Spoken like someone who has never studied a foreign language.
Much like SlackerInc clearly knows nothing at all of either genetics or childhood development, not even at a junior high school level; given that he thinks a correlation to maternal IQ specifically would point to genetics.
I’ve read about two pages of Mein Kampf. Is that sufficient to call A. Hitler a bigot, or…?
ETA: On those pages, he was whining about “bow-legged Jews.” But hey, maybe that was irony! e_e
Wow, that’s not what we thought you meant. Calling someone a bigot is not the same as burning his bigoted book.
You were raised atheist, right? You don’t know whereof you speak.
Then you’re “conservative,” though perhaps not a “movement conservative.”
My county’s mass meeting was mostly Bernie supporters. Granted, we may been an exception in the state; but I’d speculate that many places with a combination of a lot of manufacturing and weak local union leadership were the same way. We even had an independent show up who chose to join the party and go to the state caucus for Bernie. How many of those did the Hillary side have? How many independents have been becoming Democrats since 1992? How many Democrats have been becoming independents in that time?
But hey, maybe the New Atheists will show us the way! Sure! Bunch of cocky Aspie internet atheists who tell black people that they’re too dumb to be educated and denounce people from the Middle East & North Africa as savages. Big help.
Hey, you know what? I’d be content to let you and Sam Harris take the Democratic Party brand, anyway. Put his name on it. Make him its face! Right there in the best Anglo-Saxon nationalist tradition with Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk. You can be the party of Indian Removal and Manifest Destiny again. I bet David Duke will join! You might even get more votes than the party of Pelosi, Clinton, Schumer, and Obama! You’ll still lose, mind. I just want you losing over in your own deluded white nationalist corner, while* real *progressives, who know that Brave New World is not a progressive prescription, start over with a Labor Party or something.
Dummkopf.
One thing I know, foolsguinea is damn sure that while skin tone and height are genetically heritable intelligence isn’t.
Color me convinced. Creating special exceptions for feel-good political expediency is always the firm ground of reason.
Height (mostly) isn’t genetic, though. It’s pretty much a function of nutrition * height of the mother.
At least on the “population group” level, it isn’t genetic. Netherlanders born in the Depression were very short. Netherlanders today are very tall. Same genes, different diet.
Telling yourself that slavery happened to the blacks because they were too dumb to stop it is, in fact, “creating a special exception for feel-good political expediency.” (What inferiority led to the Shoah, by the way? Or the enslavement of the Irish? Or the Balkans War twenty years ago?)
It’s nonsense to say, “Well, of course we expect differences.” Please, point to racial differences in color perception, or hearing range, or the sugar content of breast milk. Or number of phalanges on extremities, or number of teeth. Where are the Storm Giants? Where are the men with their faces in their chests? Centaurs? Merfolk? All of these were expected by the ancients, surely they must exist, yes?
What genetic differences do we see in population groups again? Lactose tolerance, melanin concentration, and sickle-cell trait are specific positive environmental adaptations. Other than that: Eyelid shape? Earlobe shape? Shape of the maxilla? Whoo, yeah, some real meaningful differences there.
As I said upthread, we can explain differences in cognitive development in environmental ways without resorting to genes. A correlation with maternal IQ, specifically, points* away* from genetics and toward nurture. Do I need to explain Mendel to you? Ockham’s Razor implies that there may simply not be any meaningful genetic difference.
This interview with James Heckman (linked I don’t know how many pages ago) is really interesting, and a lot more so than the wild speculating about genes and race:
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/interview-with-james-heckman
He says there are real differences in ability, on the individual level, that derive from early childhood nurture.
When something looks heritable, there could be a difference from family culture, from something happening in gestation, from epigenetics, sure. A straight-up bunch of “smart genes”? I still don’t buy it.
Even the researchers recently talking about finding genes linked to intelligence aren’t really convincing, and I doubt they’re really entirely convinced. What was that quote again?
From https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/science/52-genes-human-intelligence.html
Think about the implications of that. Even genes for height aren’t consistent in other populations. Do we actually know what we’re doing with genetic analysis, or are we mostly kidding ourselves?
Also:
So, yeah. This is very exciting for them, but it’s also very preliminary. This is still less than a clear win for the genetic heritability of* g*.
New article on Charles Murray:
Apparently Murray is much, much worse than even I thought:
In his book “Human Accomplishment”
Murray discounts anything produced by black people (except for Duke Ellington – the single one that gets mentioned), including all genres of music produced by black people:
None of these people count as significant to Murray. My god, what an asshole.
Funny how my similar point about black musicians was treated as though it was an insult or backhanded compliment at best.
It wasn’t remotely similar. You, without any genetic evidence, divided up different races/ethnicities into different supposed inherent competencies/abilities/geniuses; Murray, without any evidence of any kind, dismissed any achievement of any kind by black people (except for Duke Ellington), and was rightly excoriated for it.
Do you agree with Murray, or do you agree with me and his critic that these points in his “Human Accomplishment” book are colossally stupid (and racist)?
After seeing how they were mischaracterized in the Vox pieces, I can’t say for sure. But do I agree with that (possible straw man) thesis as presented? No. Do I believe Western culture can be objectively shown to be the most excellent and accomplished? No. Do I subjectively believe Western culture is the most excellent and accomplished? Yes, mos def.
Aren’t you worried that you might be hopelessly biased for Western culture since you are indeed a product and member of Western culture? And how many points do you deduct from Western culture for committing most of the worst atrocities (the Holocaust, American chattel slavery, the Holodomor, other European genocides, etc.) in human history?
Debatable. Tamerlane, the Khmer Rouge, the rape of Nanking, etc. And large portions of the Muslim world are engaged in an ongoing and enormous atrocity in their brutal subjugation of women.
You only answered half the question, and that answer demonstrates some likely strong bias to me.
No one lacks bias. But a lot of left wing Westerners (like my mom, who recently urged me to watch Oliver Stone’s cringe-inducingly obsequious Putin interviews with her) are reflexively biased against the West generally. The further anything is from containing or representing white, heterosexual, cisgender men, the more virtuous it is presumed to be.
ETA: I realized after posting how white/male/cis Putin is. But he opposes the US, so that is good enough for Stone and my mom.
Why do you keep making these claims that only white supremacists make, yet act like Trump’s racism was a bad thing?
The idea that there is prejudice against us white westerners is just fucking false.
I’m reading the shit that shows up on /r/the_donald. Stop it. Stop acting like right wing bullshit to excuse their own racism is actually legitimately true.
Oliver Stone’s idiocy has no more to do with “left wing Westerners” than any other random left wing idiot in entertainment. This sort of broad-brushing is just ridiculous and sounds pathetic (as well as being totally irrelevant to our conversation).
White hetero cis men are not under attack. We’re doing fine.