***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[deleted]

Sean Hannity is a comedy act.

Hopefully he follows the path of Robin Williams

 

[wavycrocket]

He was just a low level volunteer

A “kid”

 

[Based Jesus]

A “kid”

Kids make mistakes. Except for black and hispanic kids, they're just bad seeds.
Although there are some good ones who are a credit to their people.

 

[aepps20]

A “kid”

He's just a kid caught up in locker room talk

 

[Belgium]

The party leader of one of our slightly left leaning centrist parties has proposed a rather unconventional policy. They want to explore expanding the euthanasia law to people who don't necessarily fit the conditions of the current law. For now she has said the party wants to push in that direction but mainly open that debate for deliberation.
I don't know many people who are against our current euthanasia law, which I believe is great, but this is likely a step too far for many people. I don't really object to it that much personally. At the end of the day the euthanasia process is still a long and thorough process and I have known 2 people who applied for and succeeded in doing so. You need to have a terminal disease in the first place or one of the worst degenerative diseases like huntington, MS, ...
And even then that's far from an easy path towards just getting approved to begin the process.
Things like dementia make it very hard if not nearly impossible for an elderly person to apply for euthanasia due to the psychological requirements, even if they have plenty of lucid moments to commit to the process. The only real solution they have is a pre-arranged euthanasia application during the early onset of dementia symptoms. But dementia can worsen fast and someone who successfully applies possibly won't even be eligible towards the end. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad to look into expanding the euthanasia law to cater to that specific problem.

 

[aepps20]

Kids make mistakes. Except for black and hispanic kids, they're just bad seeds.
Although there are some good ones who are a credit to p people.

Barson is one, Raymond Lewis is two and Stephen Anthony Smith is three.

 

[gry60]

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...-leaders-delivered-us-into-evil-john-naughton

It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters. Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid? The cynical answer is they knew about the potential dark side all along and didn’t care, because to acknowledge it might have undermined the aforementioned licences to print money. Which is another way of saying that most tech leaders are sociopaths. Personally I think that’s unlikely, although among their number are some very peculiar characters: one thinks, for example, of Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel – Trump’s favourite techie; and Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber.

So what else could explain the astonishing naivety of the tech crowd? My hunch is it has something to do with their educational backgrounds. Take the Google co-founders. Sergey Brin studied mathematics and computer science. His partner, Larry Page, studied engineering and computer science. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, where he was studying psychology and computer science, but seems to have been more interested in the latter.

Now mathematics, engineering and computer science are wonderful disciplines – intellectually demanding and fulfilling. And they are economically vital for any advanced society. But mastering them teaches students very little about society or history – or indeed about human nature. As a consequence, the new masters of our universe are people who are essentially only half-educated. They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture.

We are now beginning to see the consequences of the dominance of this half-educated elite. As one perceptive observer Bob O’Donnell puts it, “a liberal arts major familiar with works like Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, or even the work of ancient Greek historians, might have been able to recognise much sooner the potential for the ‘tyranny of the majority’ or other disconcerting sociological phenomena that are embedded into the very nature of today’s social media platforms. While seemingly democratic at a superficial level, a system in which the lack of structure means that all voices carry equal weight, and yet popularity, not experience or intelligence, actually drives influence, is clearly in need of more refinement and thought than it was first given.”

All of which brings to mind CP Snow’s famous Two Cultures lecture, delivered in Cambridge in 1959, in which he lamented the fact that the intellectual life of the whole of western society was scarred by the gap between the opposing cultures of science and engineering on the one hand, and the humanities on the other – with the latter holding the upper hand among contemporary ruling elites. Snow thought that this perverse dominance would deprive Britain of the intellectual capacity to thrive in the postwar world and he clearly longed to reverse it.

Snow passed away in 1980, but one wonders what he would have made of the new masters of our universe. One hopes that he might see it as a reminder of the old adage: be careful what you wish for – you might just get it.

@rexanglorum

 

[Belgium]

Surely this will help acquire votes for the "Cut Cut Cut Plan"

 

[gry60]

People with STEM backgrounds have been known for a long time to be unusually susceptible to conspiracy theories and any populist ideology that puts a conspiracy theory at its centre. The popular explanation for this is that it is because they tend to apply logic as used in natural sciences to issues of society. To someone who thinks everything is like math or physics and that 2 plus 2 will always equal 4, a conspiracy theory that starts with the end result and then looks for its cause will inevitably appear alluring. People educated in natural sciences are incredibly blind to the way societies actually work, it never occurs to them that conspiracies are in reality incredibly difficult to pull off, and that the bigger the perceived conspiracy system underlying everything, the less predictable it must be.

They don't understand that political and societal movements work like a pendulum, swinging from one end of the curve to the other (which is, for example, very obvious to anyone who studied arts), that they can only be understood in context (since the whole point of natural sciences is finding a way to detect universal laws, i.e. ignore context), or that there is never a single "correct" solution in humanities - there are multiple viewpoints which can all have merits on their own (which simply doesn't exist in natural sciences).

Great examples of this are the billionaires who act like engines driving a myriad of right-wing groups in the United States through their donations, like Bob Mercer (BA in mathematics and physics and PhD in computer sciences) or the Koch brothers (who both graduated engineering at MIT). Mercer successfully applied computer algorithms in the world of hedge funds, became immensely rich, and is now using his wealth to destroy the existing political system as he thinks it is inherently flawed. He donates millions to Republican and fringe-right causes, but is really a right-wing anarchist, in the process giving oxygen to crackpots like Steve Bannon (himself a Virginia Tech graduate and longtime conspiracy theorist). Koch brothers are both engineers who deeply believe the federal government itself is a conspiracy, and that climate change is a hoax.

A second strand of these half-educated STEM headcases are the ones found in the Silicon Valley, with young and greedy CEOs of Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like (but also Twitter, Wikipedia, and many others) who are insanely oblivious to the detrimental effects of unregulated mass media that the Internet is.

When people usually talk about the efficiency of World War II propaganda in Germany, they usually talk about Hitler's propaganda chief Goebbels. But that is not a story about him. It is the story of a wholly new medium which took hearts and minds of ordinary Germans by storm. Nazi propaganda was unbelievably effective because it used film, newsreels and radio - technologies that were new and most Germans had hardly any experience with. Coupled with a centuries-long cultural inclination to trust authority and put emphasis on discipline, It was inconceivable to German audiences at the time that anything said on the government radio or shown in a government-sponsored film was untrue, and the novelty of the media meant they were largely unaware of the medium's persuasive techniques such as editing, framing of shots, mass scenes, etc. (the same goes for Eisenstein's editing techniques which were also immensely successful among the semi-literate peasant folks of Russia right about at the same time). The same could be said for earlier periods in the 19th century when European populations that were largely semi-literate literally believed everything they read in the newspapers, which led to the explosion of chauvinist and anti-semitic press which in turn regularly fuelled pogroms for decades.

The mass murders, wholesale dehumanisation of millions and the unprecedented destruction that came as a result of this in World War II quickly brought on the realisation of the power of the mass media and the need to control it in the years after the war, so developed societies enacted laws and regulations aimed to prevent abuse of the mass media. Every article needs to be signed, every issue of every magazine must have a masthead, every editor-in-chief is legally responsible for anything published, etc.

In the meantime, generations which grew up used to films and television have become accustomed to advertisers constantly selling them things, much more aware of the persuasive techniques used by the medium. The world became much more cynical, but it also became much less inclined to solve problems via concentration camps.

And then came the Internet. An entirely unregulated invention that enables any single person to be their own anonymously published mass medium. Any cretin with a broadband connection can now spew whatever they like and be followed by tens of millions, without any censorship, any fear of regulation, free of any consequences.

Unfortunate but true. I have had the displeasure to discuss the current situation with another engineer who pretty much equated economic systems to human nature (as in, things are the way they are here because Americans are capitalists, all they care about is money, and they're not socialists like Europeans so they don't care about social stuff). It was almost like someone's propensity to adopt left or right policies can't ever change or be influenced by circumstances. I just told him to take some time and read a little bit about the political history of the country.

 

[aepps20]

Surely this will help acquire votes for the "Cut Cut Cut Plan"

RINOs and clowns like this leave Da Don no choice but to let his Twitter fingers turn into trigger fingers.

 

[frink85]

Surely this will help acquire votes for the "Cut Cut Cut Plan"

"...about your favorite president"? the delusions are ultra grandeur, wow. even for him. were on our way to being north korea america

 

[rolaholic]

 

[cedric ceballos]

All we need now is Trump vs LaVar at Wrestlemania.

The times we live in.

 

[gry60]

Is a Thanksgiving massacre in the works?

 

[RustyShackleford]

Finna go into In-n-Out tomorrow and order a nothingburger animal style.

 

[Based Jesus]

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...-leaders-delivered-us-into-evil-john-naughton



@rexanglorum

When I was learning how to code one of my teachers taught me to always be mindful of what your creations can be used for. But it's hard No one thinks their program will be abused for potentially sinister means unless it was purposefully made to be malicious and even then most of the guys who write malicious code do it as a joke or just for personal use and then they share it with a friend....who shares it with a friend...who shares it with a friend....who shares it with the internet But they're not "Take over the world" types although I will say a fair share suffer from delusions of grandeur

Unfortunate but true. I have had the displeasure to discuss the current situation with another engineer who pretty much equated economic systems to human nature (as in

It's funny you post this cuz that same teacher's conspiracy theory driven fear of the government is the reason I had to be lectured on being careful about what I create

Surely this will help acquire votes for the "Cut Cut Cut Plan"

What did Flake say about Obama?

 

[AZwildcats]

Looking at those tweets man.........what a ******* clown

 

[IATT]

 

[gry60]

No one thinks their program will be abused for potentially sinister means

In college, nobody wanted to hear the inconvenient aspects of their projects. NOBODY.

Most of the time, the reason nobody considers the negatives is the naive belief in the inherent goodness of people and cost of implementation.

When I was learning how to code one of my teachers taught me to always be mindful of what your creations can be used for. But it's hard

I agree, especially if you're not the decision maker or part of that circle.

The thing that disappoints me about engineering school is the lack of emphasis on the fact that the things we create have an effect on the world at large that we can't always control.

Go look at the awesome robots Boston Dynamics is making; now tell me you're not scared to see those things fall in the wrong hands. And yet, the possibility of their inventions being acquired by the likes of ISIS never crosses the mind of the inventors. After all, it just can't happen, right?

 

[Mark Antony]

I actually think he believes that you put words you're unsure of the spelling in quotation marks. He's done it many times.

 

[biggie62]

In college, nobody wanted to hear the inconvenient aspects of their projects. NOBODY.

Most of the time, the reason nobody considers the negatives is the naive belief in the inherent goodness of people and cost of implementation.



I agree, especially if you're not the decision maker or part of that circle.

The thing that disappoints me about engineering school is the lack of emphasis on the fact that the things we create have an effect on the world at large that we can't always control.

Go look at the awesome robots Boston Dynamics is making; now tell me you're not scared to see those things fall in the wrong hands. And yet, the possibility of their inventions being acquired by the likes of ISIS never crosses the mind of the inventors. After all, it just can't happen, right?

This last part is what scares me long term. Like we are at a point where we could probably fight wars with robots to some capacity in give or take 5 years. Like all the movies we saw as children is becoming reality. I also really dislike how people don’t take Stephen Hawkins’ warnings seriously.

 

[whywesteppin]

Is a Thanksgiving massacre in the works?

Is that what comes after the October reset?

 

[rolaholic]

Now if this isn't a heavyweight tilt...

Lot of good tidbits on what's shaping up to be a legit GOP civil war for the future of the party

Rove has dude all wrong though,he couldn't give 2 damns about governing. Bannon is all about chaos and the dissolution of the administrative state

 

[boris]

These corrupt fools must think that everyone else is stupid as hell with the repeated attempts at insulting folks intelligence

At least he's admitting who's interests he serves...

I mean people did vote for Donald Trump

 

[deleted]

Karl's greatest moment