babble Hall of Fame: version X.2.1

You want gun control?  Start a website devoted to arming the left.  Education on weapons, how to purchase, how to navigate the regulations, etc.

You'd have gun control faster than Flaherty at a blind man kicking contest.

Hey, this is a thread about personal attacks, not techo-babble. Either launch a personal attack or go elsewhere.

Bagkitty shadow moderating the personal attack thread...

 

Quote:

Hey, this is a thread about personal attacks, not techo-babble. Either launch a personal attack or go elsewhere.

Sven,

I think the individualism you promote would have been very sensible in the 18th century, when the state of philosophical knowledge was as it was. The simple fact is that a lot of these individualist theories have been comprehensively discredited by reasoned arguments and detailed research. They simply don't hold. I don't buy into the environmental determinism of a few on this thread but they very much have a point and they're closer to reality than you are. I'll address some of your points.

Sven wrote:

In reality, many problems require a combination of systemic solutions and personal initiative.  If a society has poor roads and a virtually non-existent transportation infrastructure, even Herculean personal efforts will not result in a competitive economy.  If laws don't prohibit hiring and firing for discriminatory reasons, both society and the individuals effected by those discriminatory actions will suffer.

 

This for example is a completely false dichotomy. The example that immediately comes to mind is the 1960s USian civil rights act, which a lot of charlatan libertarians like to argue forced a behavioral system on innocent business owners by government fiat. It was nothing like that... it was the business owners forcing their backwards way of mind onto African Americans for hundreds of years. The nominal change that there was was not brought in "by government", but actually by the collective individual actions of millions of people who were actively fighting the system and bringing tremendous pressure on the Johnson administration.

Sven wrote:

You're failing in school?  Huh.  It must be that the school's fault.  The fact that you spend hours every day playing video games instead of cracking open your books couldn't possibly be the cause of your failure.  Instead, the school needs more money - that is "the solution"!!

 

Blaming video games is a nice populist theory but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. There simply are better schools, better learning environments and better teachers and these make a tremendous difference. There's an excellent article in this month's The Atlantic which investigates 20 years of data that Teach for America has collected on the rrecent graduates it sends to inner city schools. They try and select for better teachers, and now they find that 44% of their teachers succeed in raising their students test scores by over 1.5 grade levels. If teachers didn't matter as you imply then that wouldn't be the case.

In all schools, there's a distribution of the amount of time kids spend on video games, as there is between schools as well. It's not the games. It's everything. Teachers, schools, home environment, etc.

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If anything, going after simple explanations like "video games" is not jut false, it's lazy. You're being frightened away from the underlying complexity of reality, because you don't want to think that hard and you might not like the answers.

Well, there is the thousand David Frum rule, I'll give you that.   

 

But without mummy, and unless marrying astutely is a journalistic skill, there's not much between him and "would you like fries with that?"

In fact, a true conservative would look at the huge amounts put away by Norway over a relatively short period of time and recognize Alberta as financially imprudent, at best, and probably stupefied by an idiotic ideology that argues you put yourself first by screwing thyself and beggaring thy neighbour while handing all thine wealth to huge corporations that will leave your home a smoldering ruin when they're done. What a bunch of fucking idiots.

Come on; who else defends ethnic cleansing, theft and murder because God is their realtor?

KeyStone wrote:

OK, so Cheri isn't perfect. Who is?
And so, not every one of her views aligns perfectly with the self annointed progressive left.

She's still better than most of the other politicians out there, by a long shot...

I don't understand these kinds of comments.  They're portraying the people who are crticial of DiNovo with all these stereotypes of people on the left.  That we're purists who denounce anyone who strays from the party line, that we're doctrinaire, wtc.

We need to remember, that it was DiNovo who denounced us and called people nasty things on facebook and whatnot.  Why aren't people saying "Okay, so the IAW folks aren't perfect.  Who is?  But so, not every one of their views aligns perfectly with the self-anointed adjudicator of what is acceptable on the left, Cheri DiNovo"

I mean, this is really showing some messed up and unbalanced power relations between activists and politicians on the left.  It's almost saying that we need to quickly forgive them for their transgressions, while they are free to constantly denounce us for our principles.

Well the problem with a monument to the victims of capitalism is that you need to put an electronic ticker on it to keep tallying up the victims...

What a moron.

I think there are US style Trotskyists who feel that socialism can't possibly survive without first condemning the Soviets, Koreans and Cubans as having been the evil empire. They feel obligated to legitimize themselves in the presence of liberals and conservatives. And I find they tend to sound a lot like American and Canadian conservatives at times when regurgitating the rabid anti-communist cold war era rhetoric.