Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo — Page 336

TV’s Frink said:

SilverWook said:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pentagon-spends-a-lot-of-money-on-viagra/

Well there goes the “costs too much” argument.

Also

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-claims-transgender-service-members-cost-too-much-true-n786891

Also also

http://www.factcheck.org/2017/07/trump-transgender-service-members/

Besides, isn’t it the government’s job to subsidize the needs of the disenfranchised? The government provides aid to those that aren’t economically favored or advantaged all the time. Maybe the military is different, I don’t know, but the whole cost argument just seems stupid to me at first glance.

SilverWook said:

There are some doubts being expressed as to the letter’s authenticity.

I wouldn’t be surprised. Link?

https://twitter.com/DrAndrewThaler/status/890212520270671872

A trip to Mar-a-Lago costs taxpayers $3.6 million.

The active-component health care costs of transgender personnel is $2.4 million.

TV’s Frink said:

yhwx said:

https://twitter.com/DrAndrewThaler/status/890212520270671872

A trip to Mar-a-Lago costs taxpayers $3.6 million.

The active-component health care costs of transgender personnel is $2.4 million.

Oh my god.

Sorry, I didn’t notice that that was in the chart.

TV’s Frink said:

White privilege time.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-op-0726-shipp-damond-20170725-story.html

In this latest incident, even without video and before any witnesses have come forward, Justine Damond’s death has already resulted in the firing of the Minneapolis police chief. There are calls for better training of police officers. When the Black Lives Matter movement has sought such responses in situations where blacks have been killed, they have often been castigated as too-racially-sensitive troublemakers.

To people who ask me why everything always comes down to race, I respond: Because it does. That has been this nation’s truth since American European colonies were established on this continent in the 17th century.

Look at what is happening with the opioid crisis. So long as black and brown people were the faces of addiction and drug-related crime, lawmakers were perfectly fine with the tough law-and-order approach. But now that white people in New England and in the Rust Belt are opioid victims, there is a sudden interest in public health solutions rather than punitive measures. To persuade reluctant senators to sign onto a stalled Trumpcare bill that would replace the Affordable Care Act, there was talk of making more money available to address the effects of opioid abuse. They could care less about addiction on Greenmount Avenue in Baltimore. It’s all about white addicts in “Red State” America.

White privilege is cold comfort when you’ve already been murdered. I see your point though, it’s just a terribly ironic way to put it.

Is there any evidence to show gender reassignment surgery is frequently paid for by the government through the use of military medical coverage? That sounds like a “few and far between” issue.

For myself, I don’t really approve of the idea, and I do kind of agree with the sentiment that one should “make that decision beforehand.” But again, I’m not sure why it’s such a big problem one way or the other that it merits national debate. I mean, of the extremely small percentage of people who are trans, how many of them have the desire to experience military boot camp; and how many of those would make the choice to reassign after enlisting? That feels to me like it would be in the double digits at best. So why is the country all up in arms about it like it’s a huge deal?

It’s very rare to my knowledge. I think it’s just a way for Republicans and Democrats to distract from real issues.

moviefreakedmind said:

I think it’s just a way for Republicans and Democrats to distract from real issues.

Yes. From both camps.

SilverWook said:

At the end of the day, this is another example of Trumpy’s rage boner against anything Obama has ever touched. If Obama had signed an executive order barring the kicking of puppies off of cliffs, Trumpy would reverse it.

With the administration obsessed with ‘make one regulation, kill two’, this would be a real possibility.

On an unrelated note, has anyone else noticed that the Onion has been reading more like real news lately?

This whole “make one regulation, kill two” sounds cool, but makes no sense in practice. What exactly is “one” regulation? I think it’s just a gimmick to make his supporters think he’s making America grate again.

Jeebus said:

I’m worried about the rise of genuine White Nationalism that’s occurred while people were worrying about “SJWs”. I mean real White Nationalists, not some redneck asshole down the street that goes to Klan meetings every weekend but doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground; but the people who are creating and citing studies that “prove” black people have a lower IQ, or are inferior in some other way; young people who know how to speak convincingly and how to pull people to their side. It seems to me that young people are becoming more and more extreme on each side of the political spectrum, and that probably has something to do with growing up in the internet age. It’s allowed these ideas to grow in isolated settings, where they aren’t ‘softened’ by discourse with opposing ideas. I really hope that these ideas stay fringe and confined to the internet and the public discourse doesn’t become Communists vs Nationalists again; it didn’t work out so well the last time.

One could also say that the internet age has facilitated a departure from herd mentality, for good or ill. Now everyone feels like they can be an expert, and I think this is a large part of why the mainstream media is so vilified. Everyone is way too cool to believe things that ‘the man’ pronounces from on high, but the problem is that nobody is omniscient and many people still can’t see the walls of their ideological prisons. For people like this, Trump’s lies don’t really matter because they know that people have talked down to them all their lives, and they believe that these media gatekeepers often lie to support their agendas so it’s no big deal if someone on their side evens the playing field a little. It’s payback. It’s also nihilistic. It ignores the difficult job of sifting though a torrent of information to cull the truth, preferring to label anything that one disagrees with merely fake news.

The silver lining is that, freed of the reliance on established media sources, more and more people are able to aggregate quality information and discuss methods of minimizing their own biases. The discussion, often taking place in the blogosphere or other less-traveled corners of the internet, is usually technical, sometimes uncomfortable, and designed to minimize aspects of clickbait which make them immediately palatable to the human mind. Here the commenters begin by saying ‘I’m probably wrong…’ instead of ‘I’m obviously right’, and I find myself avoiding them because they may slaughter yet another sacred cow I didn’t know was grazing in my mental backyard.

But we know all that, it’s the informational equivalent of eating our veggies. The latest Trump outrage is a bottomless bag of chips by comparison, and it’s hard for me to refrain from chowing down. Perhaps more discipline is needed…

Short BBC video. Makes you think…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MxUHvZ5W7E