The Trump Presidency

Discussion in 'Politics' started by joepistole, Jan 17, 2017.

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  1. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    Well I'm saying that you'll be making excuses for Trump no matter what info comes out next. Feel free to surprise me anytime you like.

    No, if you share the sentiments expressed by Sculptor about the Floyd incident then there's no reason to apologize for accusing you of double standards, because the accusation would still be correct. Here's the main post at issue, although there are plenty of others suggesting the same sentiments:
    http://sciforums.com/threads/why-george-floyd-matters.163224/page-3#post-3637820


    He then proceeded to suggest in a followup post that the people calling it an act of racism were themselves racist or mentally ill. So you go ahead and tell me whether that's Sculptor being racist, or whether you find his comments defensible.
     
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  3. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    What is it with fascists and spread eagle fetishes? Even Syrian fascists use that symbol. You'd think they'd identify more with cockroaches, because cockroaches are survivors!
     
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  5. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    i think its supposed to be an homage to the Roman aquila
     
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  7. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    Well, at least you admit it's a straw man.

    Learn to read. I JUST said that I don't agree that Chauvin had any reason to fear Floyd. And you have no intent to apologize anyway, continuing your straw man about double standards, when I've repeatedly and explicitly told you otherwise. So you've opted for intellectual dishonesty then.

    The only thing I disagree with in Sculptor's post is "The policemen were acting out of fear of the big man". That's utter nonsense. Not sure it's racist to make a bad assumption, but I'd be open to more evidence in that direction if you've got it.

    You'd need to support that claim. I'm finding stuff like:
    Except that no one that I've seen is arguing that any of the cops weren't at fault but please continue with your post...
    The #1 reason he died? He was black.
    That's probably the case but it's hard to tell.​
    I think it's much easier to start by firing all the cops with a negative bias towards minorities and jailing those who violate legal protocols.
    I agree with your latter point about cops.​
    So what specific comments are you talking about?
     
  8. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    If you would kindly take the time to read the quote I sent you and read his other comments in the thread, you will see exactly what I'm talking about. Here's the tl;dr version for you:
    "Big scary man resisted the police and made them fear for their lives. He was being dramatic and crying wolf before they took him down. He wouldn't have died from what they did if he wasn't on drugs and infected with Covid 19, they didn't mean to harm him." Now he's telling us that slavery wasn't a meaningful reason (let alone the primary one) for the Confederate states to have declared their independence.

    So once again, do you find these comments to be racist against black people? If he didn't have all the facts, why jump to conclusions? Prejudice out of ignorance is still racism. If you won't condemn these comments then I'm not going to take it seriously that you believe the law should apply equally and fairly to white and black people. It's already enough that you deny the readily available statistics proving differential racial treatment by the police under otherwise identical circumstances, and the gross disparity in convictions and sentences for identical charges. Twitter's AI can't even distinguish between Republicans and white supremacists in general, which forced them to make exemptions for white supremacy on the platform.
     
    Last edited: Jul 2, 2020
  9. douwd20 Registered Senior Member

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    I would call it the scandal du jour but this one just makes the head spin on the deeper meaning. Putin puts a bounty on American soldiers head, the US finds out about it and a) tells the president who sits on it and does nothing or b) his staff knows he cannot handle any bad news that involves Russia which is the story today.

    Troubling on so many fronts.

    Why Does Trump Put Russia First?
    It’s exceedingly difficult to believe that no one told the president about the intelligence on Russian efforts to harm Americans in Afghanistan.

    Since at least February, and possibly as early as March 2019, the United States has had compelling intelligence that a committed adversary, Russia, paid bounties to Taliban-linked fighters to kill American troops in Afghanistan. American service members were reportedly killed as a result.

    To this day, the president of the United States has done nothing about it.
    "The president has created an environment that dissuades, if not prohibits, the mentioning of any intelligence that isn't favorable to Russia," a former senior national security staffer told CNN.

    Trump flew into a rage every time US intelligence warned him about Russia, so officials gave up briefing him on it, report says
    Now let this sink in:

    "The president has created an environment that dissuades, if not prohibits, the mentioning of any intelligence that isn't favorable to Russia," a former senior national security staffer told CNN.


    At this point it's clear we have a traitor in the White House. Russia and pleasing Putin is more important than the lives of American servicemen.​
     
    Last edited: Jul 2, 2020
  10. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    Once again it all comes full circle back to "A Tale of Golden Towers and Golden Showers" <---- That's what they should call the official biography when it's all over.
     
  11. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    You know, I get no notification unless you quote me. Maybe that's the point.

    I searched the thread you linked and couldn't find any of the stuff you purportedly "quoted". Probably because they are, at best, paraphrased (if not complete distortions), and like I said, with your propensity for straw men, I'm not taking your word alone on what anyone has said. So either support your claim, without trying to shift the burden on me to find whatever it is you've "read between the lines", or at least quit putting words in other people's mouths.

    So once again, unless you want to sack up and provide actual quotes, with links, I'm not judging your dubious paraphrases of someone else.

    Please, you've proven yourself intellectually dishonest enough that I can't reasonable expect that you will ever admit that I'm honestly telling you what I think. And you immediately prove that point by continuing to ignore the disparate crime rates in explaining the disparate treatment by police. Differences in sentencing likely being due to disparate recidivism rates, except in the decades-long Democrat-run cities where their policies directly harm blacks. LOL! Twitter's AI criteria is designed by leftists just as ignorant as you.
     
  12. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    No, the point is sometimes I think it looks nicer to just post the reply directly below without having a bunch of messy quote blocks. It's not like you don't get plenty of time to respond at your leisure.

    There are no distortions here.

    http://sciforums.com/threads/why-george-floyd-matters.163224/page-3#post-3637820

    http://sciforums.com/threads/why-george-floyd-matters.163224/page-4#post-3638031

    You have everything you need here to judge adequately for yourself. This is Sculptor wrongly claiming that the police were acting out of fear and had no intention of doing any harm, and that anyone who considers it an act of racism is most likely projecting their own racism. Now he is telling us about how slavery wasn't a significant motivation for the Confederates to secede from the Union with posts like this:

    http://sciforums.com/threads/intelligence-on-display.163282/page-12#post-3641150
    (Excerpt)
    You can either tell me that these comments are motivated by racism, or you can tell me that they're the product of ignorance bordering on retardation, but if you're telling me you don't find anything terribly objectionable about these comments then I will stand by my original assertion that you support a system which intentionally discriminates against black people.

    If I were to say that you were being honest about what you really think, I would have to simultaneously accuse you of being unable to read or assess basic facts.

    Watching Cops on TV isn't an adequate means of gathering your statistics. Even for first-time offenders the conviction rates and sentences are massively different, on a scale more than large enough to show strong statistical significance. Here's an example: in 2010 in the US, black people were 3.7 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession despite similar overall possession rates.
    https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-racial-disparities/

    This one sentiment I am willing to accept as being an honest expression of your own stupidity. AI doesn't have political parameters when it's being designed, there's no such thing as left wing computer math. It's like claiming that Einstein's political views determined the development and content of the General Theory of Relativity. Please stay in your lane and don't make any more idiotic layman statements like this.
     
    Last edited: Jul 3, 2020
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  13. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    And before we start hearing excuses about how police will spend more time patrolling low income neighbourhoods because more crimes occur there, take note that presuming innocence until proof of guilt means that all people have to be treated the same way regardless of what neighbourhood they live in or visit. Police are no more entitled to search a random black man's car in Compton than they are to search a random white stockbroker on Wall Street. I don't know how it works in the US, but in Canada there are laws that you can't convict people of drug possession and similar crimes unless there was a justified reason to search for them in the first place. You can't pull someone over for a broken tail light and then demand to search their trunk; if you end up doing that, you can confiscate whatever contraband you find but you can't charge them for possessing it, and the reason for these laws existing is to protect people from being unfairly targeted and harassed based on demographics.
     
  14. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    If you prefer aesthetics over making sure someone sees your reply, so be it.

    Like I already said, it's nonsense that the police were acting out of fear after he was subdued. But if nonsense alone were racism, you'd have him beat hands down.

    And? Projection is a well-known psychological defense mechanism.
    How is agreeing with psychology racism?

    And just as I predicted, nothing you quoted even vaguely resembles what you claim it says. Nowhere in those quotes does he claim that police had no intention of doing any harm, nor did he say presuming that specific incident was racist is itself racist. You're obviously reading between the lines.

    And he's free to have his own opinion (prefaced as it was with "imho"). That's his reading of the history, just like your skewed reading of his posts. Both likely involve some motivated reasoning. What those motivations may be are not obvious in anything you've quoted.

    I'm not a mind reader. Unlike you, I don't pretend to know the heart of anonymous strangers online. Only what they actually say. I would agree that both you and sculptor do display a degree of ignorance. To what degree, I wouldn't want to surmise.

    And exactly as predicted, you'll make up any excuse not to apologize, which only proves your intellectual dishonesty.

    That's just because you've erroneously elevated your subjective beliefs and ideology to a level of surety you equate with fact.

    Try to read what I write this time. "Differences in sentencing likely being due to disparate recidivism rates." Recidivism rates are not determined per the individual criminal. They are the rate of reoffense across a particular demographic.
    Yes, if you live in a neighborhood with a higher police presence due to a higher crime rate, there will be more arrests.

    LOL! You obviously have no clue how AI works. AI is such because it can learn. In order to learn it must be taught, by someone with whatever biases they bring to the table. Even if that bias is only expressed in how they editorialize the data they feed to the AI. AI is, as yet, not autonomous.

    It's irrational garbage to assume that you must treat a gang banger as you would a banker. For one, the former is far more likely to be a threat to the life of an officer. For another, the former is also far more likely to be a threat to law-abiding citizens in their own neighborhood. When I was a young long-hair, police would search my person and vehicle at any traffic stop. Was that due to my race? No, it was because I fit the description of a demographic more prone to crime. And I had nothing to fear if was doing nothing illegal. So profiling is just common sense, accepting the demographic statistics. It doesn't imply guilt, and the only statistics we have for it are when it pays off, by leading to an arrest.
    Probably cause means that if you pull someone over and you smell illegal drugs/alcohol or they are acting suspicious, you have a duty to ensure that they are not a threat to the community. But I presume you'd rather leave the threat, so long as Canadians can maintain their reputation of being nice.
     
  15. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    It is rational sobriety to mandate that similar violations of the law be treated similarly by the police, regardless of the race of the violator.
     
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    And if you live in a neighborhood that is falsely labeled with a higher crime rate because the police make more arrests there, you are more likely to be abused by the police - with all the consequences that follow from that, such as inability to get a decent job or take out a loan or rent an apartment in a better part of town.
     
  18. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    I haven't really been following the diatribe that seems to be flowing in this thread lately but....
    I think there is a need to differentiate between systemic racism in the law enforcement and the actual racism of the officers involved.
    Also the fact that a deliberate act of murder appears to have been carried out regardless of racial implications.
    Extrajudicial capital punishment ( killing) by a man who took it upon himself to be judge and jury.
    The officer in question had no intention of arresting Floyd under any known laws and appeared to be solely focused on homicide.
    so we have at least three categories of issue:
    • Systemic racially motivated bias in some police operations.
    • Serious racial bias in certain members of the police force.
    • Homicide due to racial bias and individual supremac-ism ( regardless of race) in the offending citizen.
    • A culture actively promoted by an elected POTUS, other members of government and bureaucracy.

    All appear to be the product of social and governmental culture that supports white privilege at the expense of those that are not considered "white".

    Criminal stats are subjectively able to be manipulated, etc but the fact remains that a man ( regardless of race) died at the hands of a man (with accomplices) who appeared to have no intention of arresting him using their badges as a way of indemnifying their crime.

    I use the word "Appears" because, at present, the crime is only alleged and not yet proven in a court.

    It certainly appears that a homicide has taken place with in a racially biased system of enforcement that believes that black lives are of little to no value.
    That law enforcement have failed in their duty of care towards the sanctity of all their fellow citizens lives and well being.
    Thus the movement Black Lives Matter is about challenging the devaluation, or dehumanization that appears to be occurring on a regular and systemic basis, so that homicides such as witnessed become less culturally acceptable.
    Maybe they should chant "Black Slaves Mattered" to clarify the point? ( note: past tense) for surely there is ample evidence that the imported slaves of the past held only pecuniary value at the most, by their white over lords.
     
    Last edited: Jul 4, 2020
  19. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    If you want to ignore demographic statistics and even individual criminal records, I invite you to take a stroll in any large US inner city, late at night this weekend. Go ahead. Go treat neighborhoods the same yourself. Money where your mouth is.

    That's complete bs. "Falsely labeled"? By the victims calling 911?
    Again, go take a stroll through one of these supposed "falsely labeled" neighborhoods yourself, this evening.
     
  20. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    It's more than just nonsense. He gave a non-malicious explanation for police motivations which completely contradicts what's plainly visible in the footage and accounts that were already available, let alone what is now known due to the Floyd family's independently commissioned autopsy.

    Because it was completely baseless to dismiss this incident as an obvious example of police racial prejudice, and to imply that everyone who sees evidence of prejudice in this case is simply projecting their own beliefs onto others. These kinds of things virtually never happen to white people, and when they do you don't see the mass cover up attempts with fraudulent autopsies blaming it on drugs and health, delays in charging the other officers involved and initially calling Chauvin's crime "manslaughter".

    Ok, you want to play Mr. Magoo then that's fine with me, but you clearly don't deserve that apology I was offering for misquoting you, because it's clear that you don't see the obvious and well documented racial prejudice in the US justice system, and you have no objection to anyone denying it when obvious cases such as the Floyd case pop up again and again and again. If Sculptor wasn't rehearsed on the actual facts of the case, then there was no need for him to voice an opinion on it as if he had, nor to condemn those who had already done their homework and to deny any evidence of racism in this case or related ones. What he said isn't just "nonsense" as you allege, it's nonsense motivated by a prejudice whose existence you refuse to admit to.

    Try to read what I wrote in reply this time. I mentioned that the disparities are just as apparent among first-time offenders, which by definition can't be considered recidivists.

    The issue isn't about higher arrests due to a higher crime rate. Virtually no one is complaining about legitimate criminals being arrested and convicted based on reliable evidence. If anything, the complaints are that not enough violent criminals are being arrested because the police are too busy profiling innocent people and chasing after petty offenders, and that when violent offenders are targeted, they're targeted by race and not in proportion to the crimes committed.

    So now you want to allege that Twitter had some conspiracy where they pick openly self-identifying Nazi and white supremacist accounts but only select those tweets from them which sound like Republican soundbites? They trained the AI to ban Nazi accounts by showing it Nazis and everything they do, then unexpectedly found that it started banning Republicans too. The AI basically told Twitter that these people say mostly the same stuff but with different language and nuances. You're correct that Twitter introduced a bias into their AI- unlike ISIS Jihadists who are readily banned the instant they pop up from their caves, Nazis and white supremacists in general do not get automatically banned by the service, because Twitter couldn't prevent it from banning many Republican officials in the process.

    There is so much wrong with this segment, it will require a separate post in order to be adequately addressed.
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2020
  21. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    I didn't see you quote him saying anything at all about the police motives behind that killing. So once again, I'm not taking any of your paraphrasing and likely straw men at face value. Support your claims with actual, linked quotes.

    Racial prejudice is not at all clear, especially if these two once worked together or knew each other. And one of the cops at that incident was black. So in the lack of clear evidence of motive, you do have to make assumptions to reach a conclusion. I didn't see you quote him as dismissing race as a possible motive. So once again, I'm not taking any of your paraphrasing and likely straw men at face value. Support your claims with actual, linked quotes.

    Police always rally around other police, regardless of the victim. You just don't see those in the news (sample bias), because they can't be used to race bait.

    I'm not going on a wild goose chase when you act as if you already know, and could link to, actual quotes to support your claims. Again, thanks for proving me right about your intellectual dishonesty. You haven't proven systemic racism nor even anyone denying it. The null hypothesis means both are your burden.

    I'm so glad you're a mind-reader, who knows everyone's motives without them telling you.

    Okay, apparently you're incapable of comprehending that simple point. Which word didn't you understand? Demographic? You do know that demographics are not about individuals, right? You at least comprehend that much?

    Then that's a nonsense complaint. How are police to proactively arrest more violent criminals without taking any proactive steps? The only way to find more criminals is to utilize statistics to focus efforts on the most likely demographics.

    No, I'm saying they didn't teach the AI to differentiate well enough when there is innocuous crossover, like religion, guns, politics, etc.. They'd catch a lot of Democrats if they tried banning far left extremists too, and for the same reason. Except they'd likely be far more careful to distinguish those.

    We'll see.
     
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    "If"?
    They do ban "far left extremists" (defined by Twitter, and apparently by you, as "people who advocate for governmental policies that 2/3 of the population of the US favors"). They apparently do it by rigging their AI to evaluate certain people on more stringent grounds than they use for "far right extremists" (defined as "people who have embarrassed the Republican Party by exemplifying it too obviously").

    There are moderate leftwing bloggers - such as this guy https://driftglass.blogspot.com - who have been keeping track of how often and on what grounds they have been suspended from Twitter and Facebook and the like. You can follow their various conflicts with Twitter's moderators on their websites, if you have been honestly unaware of this phenomenon. (You can't follow this matter on any major "respectable" news or analysis outlet, because freedom and reasons).

    Twitter and Facebook, like the very large majority of US media corporations, are both solidly rightwing and authoritarian corporate entities - always have been. Does that surprise you?

    Meanwhile, consider Trump's magnificent speech celebrating freedom of expression at the Covid party he threw on the 4th of July in front of Mount Rushmore - which you can find in its entirety on major media sites. Here's an excerpt: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.co...-speech-against-cancel-culture-at-mt-rushmore

    Even Hyman Roth's eloquence fell short of our leader Trump's inspired oration.
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2020
  23. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    Yes of course, it's all the cross-overs for Republicans that tick the exact same boxes as the white supremacists, what an unfortunate and unforeseen coincidence! We know there's practically no Democrat supporters who go to church or own guns, probably only a handful who do both, that must be why they never get banned for being Nazis. Plus we know that Nazis love dogs and beer just like Republicans, that's most likely where it all went wrong.

    Let's suppose someone told you that they have something in common with virtually every white supremacist on the entire web. What could it possibly be? Why, it must be two eyes, a nose and a mouth surely!
     
    Last edited: Jul 7, 2020
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