I actually work with a guy who believes that a minority government is the safest form of government. Because any party doesn't have the majority vote, and because they're only willing to compromise to a certain degree, it means that most of the outrageous or the questionable shit doesn't stand a chance in getting passed. The only bills that go through are the banal ones that everyone agrees on or the emergency ones that are needed in a time of crisis.
Trump's speech last night was almost entirely bullshit. For example: He was wrong about immigrants; wrong about how he "knows the system better than anyone" when he hasn't even come up with a budget plan to build this stupid so-called wall; and he was wrong about killings of police, saying they have doubled when factual statistics show police are safer on the streets now then they have been in decades. All I hear about is how "great of a speech" it was, but does lying through your teeth during a presidential acceptance speech not count for anything anymore?
Almost anyone who I've ever talked to who is so blatantly anti immigration(the brown people kind) have never actually met that many or worked with them before. Mexicans are some of the kindest and hardest working people you will ever meet. It's a complete distraction and brainwashing technique to try to get a group of people to hate another group so the focus is off the real criminals.
Have you never watched a US political party convention speech before? Thats how every single one of them is. Its just lip service.
The thing is, Trump isn't anti-immigration. He's anti illegal immigration. There's a huge difference. As far as properly vetting people from certain areas of the ME, that is something that we need to figure out. The guy that attacked those folks on the train in Germany was supposedly from Syria, but he spoke a regional Afghan dialect, they're not sure where he's from even now. The whole "Sanctuary Cities" thing is a crock of crap. They will harbor illegal aliens without turning them over to Immigration. When did our federal government get so damn selective about which laws they want to enforce? If they're here illegally, they are breaking the law and cities that give them a safe haven are harboring fugitives....estimates are between 13-26 Million illegals in this country now. That puts a huge strain on everyone and for what reason?
But his speech wasn't lip service because he didn't outline any actual policies. Put America first and protect our streets is not a policy. Adding millions of new jobs and trillions of dollars to the economy is not a policy. He didn't lay out one single action he was going to take to make anything better. He just announced how horrible everything is in America and how he is the ONLY person to fix it. How he will fix it? He didn't expand on that.
It doesnt matter, its not a State of the Union address. The point is to say whatever it takes to unify the party and look the fight ahead. Thats the entire purpose of each Convention.
I thought Trump's speech was too long, and didn't understand why he shouted it. (Was it loud in the hall, even when people weren't cheering or chanting?) But, I wasn't expecting very detailed specifics. I thought that was the point of that type of speech - you touch on a lot of things, then you spend the next few months of the campaign trail outlining the plans. So, by leaving out details, a reporter has to ask, "well, HOW will you get better trade deals?" or something. Was the statistic correct that the Republican party got 60% more votes than 4 years ago and the Democrats received 20% fewer during the primaries? NPR did a little "fact check" piece on his speech http://www.npr.org/2016/07/21/48688...trumps-republican-convention-speech-annotated but that wasn't one they checked.
From CNN: "CNN estimates that there was a total of 31,377,481 votes cast in the 2016 Democratic primary season, compared to 8,571,580 in 2012, according to the Federal Election Commission. So, rather than a 20% decrease, that's a whopping 266% increase in total votes." With this caveat: "Perhaps Trump misspoke, and meant to refer to the 2008 Democratic primary, which featured record turnout. In 2008, Democrats received a total of 37,235,154 votes -- or 20% more than in this cycle." Also remember that in 2012 Obama was the incumbent, so there wasn't a whole lot of need to get out and vote in the primaries. As far as the Repub side: "CNN estimates that there was a total of 31,155,487 votes cast in the 2016 Republican primary fight, compared to 20,790,899 votes reported by the FEC in 2008. That's not quite as big a leap as Trump claimed, coming in at a still significant 50%."
About 60 million people voted for the Republican (and Democrat) presidential candidate in the last general election. I guess when only half the people show up to the polls for the primaries, I get tired of people asking "how did so-and-so win the primary?"
New Topic: Some of you may have read about this over the last few days. Milo Yiannopoulos was banned permanently from Twitter for inciting attacks on comedian Leslie Jones. For those of you who are uninformed, here are some brief facts: - Milo is a talking head for the extreme side of the Republican party. He's flamboyantly gay and a self-described internet troll. He makes outrageous declarations regarding any hot button topic. He got his start by being one of the main instigators in Gaming Gate a while back. - He has been temporarily banned before. - He wrote a review of the new Ghostbusters that was scathing in its opinion, although not incendiary or confrontational. His followers read his review and turned on Jones, who is the only black cast member. - Jones was subjected to two days' worth of appalling abuse, where people photo shopped her covered with semen and tweeted it, called her racial slurs and posted memes of her as a gorilla. - Milo retweeted some of the harsher pictures but did not himself attack her or threaten her. - Jones went public with the attacks and the higher ups banned Yiannopoulos permanently. Here is an interesting article outlining some concerns. Twitter is a publicly traded company that is not beholden to any code short of "make money." It's within their rights to ban or allow whomever they wish. Does it set a bad precedent, though, if someone is banned for being a shithead? Focus: How should social media police their users? Should they police them at all? There have been SO MANY examples of Twitter turning into a mob when someone tweets one inappropriate or stupid thing. Clearly there have to be some controls so people's lives aren't ruined. Does it set a bad precedent, though, to censor the people we find offensive? Who gets to decide if someone is too offensive to deserve a voice? "Hate speech" gets thrown around as something to stop, but how do you stop "hate speech" while at the same time allowing free speech?
I can't speak to other social media platforms other than Facebook and Twitter since I don't use them or know how they work. In Twitter's case, they absolutely need to police their community. The only difference between Twitter and an unmoderated comment section is that the trolls are able to directly contact you whenever they say something. There's a reason why more and more sites are closing their comments sections down is because they're cesspools of hate and negativity. In the end, while Twitter is for public consumption, they have a terms of service. You don't follow their rules, then GTFO.
Their problem is the same as Reddit's, etc... they have a lack of consistency. In Milo's case, you can go back through Jones' tweets and see a ton of racist and antagonizing comments, much much worse than Milo's. So why did Milo get shut down and she didn't? One of the hardest things you can learn as a moderator is objectivity. Even on this small little board there is discussion around what crosses a line, what the line is, how it should be handled, etc. Some moderators have one impulse, others have different ones. Never mind trying to do that at scale, with well known people, who have very "energetic" followings. More than anything Twitter has just entered into a PR problem due to the fact that they now have to rehash their narrative and rules to fit their actions. Again, Reddit has been going through the same thing for months/years. Interesting read from yesterday: https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/21/reddit-is-still-in-turmoil/
Yeah as a non governmental body Twitter isn't obliged to give a shit about your free of speech. As a user of their products I hope they'd be even handed to both side which is Milo's argument now. But it's their company.
The underlying problem is that these sites are marketed and grown around ideals but funded by investors who want to get their money back. It's all "free speech" except when it goes against or potentially negatively impacts that investment, then there's the backtracking and the addendums: "Free speech... unless/until/except for..." In Milo's case it's about the very vocal (and somewhat weird) feminist/misogynist duel that's been created around the new Ghostbusters. Because it's now all women, you're no longer allowed to criticize it as a bad movie, and if you're a feminist, you HAVE to support the movie because "yay women!". So the initial shitstorm over this bad and unnecessary remake was turned into a social justice/media fight rather than a movie review, and now Twitter is afraid of looking anti-feminist or going against the "yay women" narrative.
Just given up on, not banned. It was an idea by RotN and he ran with it for a while but it never gained any critical mass. And now there's a shooting in a German shopping mall... weeeeee! http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36870874
I love Milo because he knows how to push the right buttons with surgical precision. In the case of Twitter, when they allow accounts owned by ISIS but will ban his, it's obviously politically motivated. Reddit varies by community. /r/news ruined its own reputation with the Orlando shooting. Overall, they are losing credibility over the claimed need to change the ranking algorithm because a pro-Trump sub was making it to the front page when liberal ones had done so countless times before.
It goes deeper than that with Reddit... Ellen Pao came in and started pushing her own agenda and the admins were cleaning house with things that they didn't agree with. Very uber-feminist, anti-msyogeny bent, with a lot of "don't say shit about Pao or you're banned". They wrapped it all up around some sort of new "community rule set" that was being selectively applied to a few subreddits, with others most notably being immune. It got bad enough that Reddit "revolted" and they fired Pao and brought back one of the co-founders to run things again. Now they've been focussing on monetization work and basically letting shit run rampant except for the occasional, arbitrary admin action.