911–920 of 1001 posts
Biden is the hugest illusion in American politics. You will probably get very angry when the truth comes out (in a few weeks), because Trump will (OF COURSE) stay president.
Nothing is as it seems. Illusions will go away. Only the Truth will stay forever.
Better wake up now, The Great Awakening!
One candidate supports separating children from their families for certain groups of illegal immigrants, kept those children in cages for some time, and has since lost track of around 500 of them; not reuiniting them with their families. This has all been extensively documented. And approximately seventy million people have voted for that candidate. Okay, so with all of that in mind, please provide the nuance you wan…
You're playing a rhetorical game, rather than having an honest discussion.
There's a famous optical illusion with a spinning silhouette of a dancer. When you look at it, you'll swear it's spinning in one direction -- say, counter-clockwise. In fact, you'll be so sure it's spinning counter-clockwise, that the idea it could be spinning in the opposite direction will seem impossible to you. But if you stare at it long enough, and intently enough, you can make it spin the other way. I've notice…
I firmly disagree. Not all political climates and discourses are as poisoned as they are in the US.
That said, not all political disagreements are created equally. We can have a rousing polite disagreement about immigration levels, national financial priorities, cultural values and so on, but if the discussion is premised in a fundamental disagreement about whether or not certain people deserve dignity as human beings then there's very little common ground to build off of.
OK, so the transition from Make America Great Again slogan to Make America Decent Again (and Better) reality is inevitable and welcome. It is easy to get overjoyed by results of the U.S. Presidential Election (and some celebration certainly is in order). Uniting the country is definitely a commendable goal, though it is easier said than done. The election results across all levels clearly illustrate just how divided…
This site used to not be filled with leftist cheerleaderism, as far as I can remember. Shocking that such a nebulous non comment is at the top. It's my opinion that freedom should be of primary importance in America, not feel good authoritarian inducing woo.
So... same as every president after election everywhere. Watch as Biden doesn't undo any of the things he promised to undo. Same as Obama.
For me the bottomline of the Trump administration is that he has started zero new wars, sparing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. As an outsider I hope that the US will not go back to its foreign military interventions.
The US withdrew from Syria, and it does appear to me that for a moment that were a sense of morality from Trump there, he genuinely did not like the idea that lives would be lost as a consequence of his actions. That is commendable, though perhaps something that should have been considered in advance of such a situation rather than reactively.
But what was the consequence of not intervening? It created a vacuum, into which stepped many military powers, and many people have died or been displaced. We also have to consider the long-term consequences of an isolationist foreign policy.
There is a balance to be found between war-mongering and exerting influence to shape the world positively. Particularly, you have to avoid leaving a vacuum that can be exploited.
At the least we can say he didn't start an arbitrary new war, and that is a small but significant positive.
Trump and the MAGA crowd are absolutely fine with things like separating kids from their parents, forced sterilization, intense racism, celebrating and stimulating police violence, attempting to steal elections, open corruption by a sitting president and much much more. And yet you go “gosh darn that foreign interference is causing leftist ideas”. Maybe you should take a series look at your media consumption because…
Every time this is brought up, and the usual analogies to Nazi Germany are made, people get uncomfortable when it's pointed out that the doctor at the center of this is named Mahendra Amin, that he's an immigrant himself, that he has a history of medicaid fraud (which is likely what this was; more fraud), and is (from his name and photos) obviously non-white:
> https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-10-22/women-alle...
But "Nazi doc sterilizes immigrant women of color" clearly has better optics.
A fundamental cause of political polarisation is social media. Tech platforms incentivised by advertising to increase engagement have (probably mostly inadvertently) become manipulation engines that have destabilised democracies.
I think at this moment in time the tech community should take pause to consider what we have done. We started with heady ideals and hopes, especially for the internet, but we have veered a long way from that vision.
As engineers, we have great power in this world. For the foreseeable future, our skills will be highly in demand and shape the future of humanity, in every area of society - from finance to health, from entertainment to politics.
If you work for a social media company, or a search engine, or any company that is reliant on adtech or high engagement for its income, then I implore you to think long and hard about how your actions may have contributed to bringing us to this point, and whether it is possible to change the course of your organisation or it would be better to leave.
More positively, the large social media networks are now entrenched corporations, and they have lost the advantages that startups confer. With sufficient imagination and hard work there are many opportunities to disrupt those companies with the compelling mission of making the world a better, not a worse, place.
On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.
I think it's more fundamental than numeracy. If the polls suggest there is a 2/3 probability you are going to win an election, but you lose, does that mean the polls were wrong? What if the probability was 9/10? I think the problem is trying to make sense of outliers and uncertainty, and that, in an election with 150M+ variables, you will end up with a result that isn't quite what anyone predicted. In other words: it…