451–460 of 491 posts
I wonder how many people don't realize there are classrooms all over the United States where kids literally play on their smartphones and text all through class and don't pay any attention at all. They do F work and it gets graded on a curve up to a C. The teachers are powerless to do anything about it.
Do you think that banning smartphones - or attempting to - will fix any of that?
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Our history is ugly, but that particular detail needs to address the southern realignment where the Jim Crow-era Democrats moved to the Republican Party. I think it’s less about bipartisanship and more that there’s a group of people who both switch parties and influence within parties trying to accomplish their goal of maintaining their superiority over other groups. Their loyalty is to their group, not the party.
Get a list of all democrats in office then highlight the ones who changed party. The number that switched were a small minority. Wikipedia lists less than 70 and most of those were state rather than federal. Compared to the thousands of state and federal seats, it’s minimal. So-called civil rights pioneers like Lyndon Johnson were raging racist who saw the civil rights act as cheap lip service to get black votes for…
No, they didn't. The Republicans took up the “States Rights” rallying cry of the old Confederacy only after they became the party of the racists, years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. From the 1866 Civil Rights Act up through and including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Republicans were always more supportive of federal action than the Democrats on the issue. Each of the key votes on the 1964 Act (passage of the original version in the House, cloture on the Senate version, passage of the Senate version, concurrence of the House to the Senate version) passed with 80-82% of Republican votes in the respective chamber and 60-69% of Democratic votes. The attempt to pursue the disaffected Democratic white racists, upset about Johnson support for the bill, is what distinguished the 1964 Act from earlier conflicts over segregation that had split the same faction off the Democratic Party temporarily, but not permanently when they found no other (major party) place to go, and couldn't form their own competitive major party. And that was the second phase of the long 1930s-1990s overlapping realignment.
LBJ wasn't a civil rights “pioneer”. He was just the Democratic President that opened the opportunity for the Republicans to steal the most dedicated racists away from the Democrats as a constituency by not seeing his personal bias as a reason to block equal rights as public policy. And all Republicans had to do to win this prize was give up on the concept of equality, under the same rallying cry pro-slavery forces before the civil war, and anti-civil-rights forces from the day the war ended, had always used.
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Our history is ugly, but that particular detail needs to address the southern realignment where the Jim Crow-era Democrats moved to the Republican Party. I think it’s less about bipartisanship and more that there’s a group of people who both switch parties and influence within parties trying to accomplish their goal of maintaining their superiority over other groups. Their loyalty is to their group, not the party.
This isn't an accurate picture either. A good example would be Justice Hugo Black, Roosevelt's first appointee to the Supreme Court. Black remains one of the most noteworthy big-time liberals in the history of the court (with a few exceptions like Korematsu.) He was a southern democrat and a klansman; not a member of some shadowy cabal that exploited the democrats for political expediency but a true believer in progr…
Opposition to slavery isn’t exclusive to the left, but also if that isn’t hyperbole you really need a wider sample. By far the most common perspective I’ve heard from anyone in the anti-racist camp is that nobody is perfect because we are all shaped by our environment. The whole point of entire campaigns is to avoid reinforcing those biases because they’re so widespread.
This also touches on the perceived inaccuracy you mentioned: my argument is that the key part for Black isn’t the Democratic affiliation but the southern white identity. People are motivated by issues but some people prioritize that one above everything else, and that’s what happened with the southern realignment: some people valued white supremacy most and changed what were in many cases generational party affiliations, while others decided that things like labor rights or social programs mattered more and shifted correspondingly. It was largely the same people but they sorted themselves into different parties and that shaped the policies of those parties.
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Get a list of all democrats in office then highlight the ones who changed party. The number that switched were a small minority. Wikipedia lists less than 70 and most of those were state rather than federal. Compared to the thousands of state and federal seats, it’s minimal. So-called civil rights pioneers like Lyndon Johnson were raging racist who saw the civil rights act as cheap lip service to get black votes for…
> You also forget that republicans were radically IN FAVOR of civil rights, but wanted the changes at the state level instead of the federal level. No, they didn't. The Republicans took up the “States Rights” rallying cry of the old Confederacy only after they became the party of the racists, years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. From the 1866 Civil Rights Act up through and including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the…
I am personally opposed to maintaining what I see as an overreach of the federal government. This goes back to the start of the new deal and stretches through much of what primarily the Warren Court found constitutional. Plenty of us "states rights" types are in favor of it on a whole host of other issues, e.g. many of the policies Trump promulgates. Please stop trying to erase the concept of local governance with hostile and incomplete interpretations of the past.
No matter how you flip it, net result is negative. These apps are like crack, and it’s morally right to protect developing brains from that.
I wonder how many people don't realize there are classrooms all over the United States where kids literally play on their smartphones and text all through class and don't pay any attention at all. They do F work and it gets graded on a curve up to a C. The teachers are powerless to do anything about it.
US teenagers are the ideal target market for TikTok, because they (get to) spend so much of their time on that app.
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> If you think that you have a right to shoot someone in the head, you're fucking nuts. Period. Go see a shrink. To defend your life, liberty, and property you absolutely do have that right in most of the civilized world. Some places may put restriction on your ability to access a firearm, but self-defense is a basic necessity to have /any/ human rights. That said, I agree, trying to shoot someone in the head /is/ cr…
Head, dead, I misread. Not the point. You do not have a _right_ to kill anybody ever. However, you do have a _right to defend yourself_, within reason. That could in some situations mean that you take actions that kill someone. A judge and/or jury will decide whether it was reasonable. If it wasn't, you broke the law. They did not "take away your right" to kill. FYI most of the world do not allow you to kill someone…
You are trying to indicate a difference where there is none. It's not me that decides another person's life is less than what they're trying to rob me of, it's them by taking an action that necessarily forfeits their life when I must defend myself against their criminal act against me. A right to self defense is /necessarily/ a right to kill, because in many cases self-defense necessitates lethal force.
I have no desire to ever kill anyone, but the right to self-defense is absolute, it is the very basis of /all/ human rights and is based on a foundation of the simple principle of bodily autonomy.
> FYI most of the world do not allow you to kill someone to defend your property. That is a very American thing. If someone takes your stuff, you call the police.
You seem to be thinking that /property/ is the issue, it's the /taking/ that's the problem. How does someone /take/ your property? They use force. You have a right to defend yourself against that force, and in fact you MUST do so, or you will likely be killed or seriously harmed by the criminal through their use of force. Yes, you also have a right to defend your property, but the real issue is and always will be the force a criminal uses against you. Taking property is a forcible act. There is a false separation in the minds of some people between property crimes and violent crimes, property crimes /are/ violent crimes, in all but very narrow circumstances.
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What’s the skill though? Most everything you do on a smartphone is trivially easy thanks to all those hard working app developers. We all know from experience that the vast majority of actual phone time is spent consuming some kind of media. I’m not at all worried about kids not learning to use a smartphone well enough- that part will sort itself out. It’s all the other (boring) skills that get pushed aside in the mi…
Where my kids went to high school, a smart phone was required. The teacher would encourage kids to put assignments and tests on their calendar. They would use the camera to take a picture of a home work assignment written on a whiteboard. They used the camera for photo and movie projects. They had some twitter-like app for the teacher to broadcast to all students.
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What’s the skill though? Most everything you do on a smartphone is trivially easy thanks to all those hard working app developers. We all know from experience that the vast majority of actual phone time is spent consuming some kind of media. I’m not at all worried about kids not learning to use a smartphone well enough- that part will sort itself out. It’s all the other (boring) skills that get pushed aside in the mi…
Using the smartphone a a useful tool while avoiding the mindless scramble for dopamine is the skill.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Head, dead, I misread. Not the point. You do not have a _right_ to kill anybody ever. However, you do have a _right to defend yourself_, within reason. That could in some situations mean that you take actions that kill someone. A judge and/or jury will decide whether it was reasonable. If it wasn't, you broke the law. They did not "take away your right" to kill. FYI most of the world do not allow you to kill someone…
> You do not have a _right_ to kill anybody ever. However, you do have a _right to defend yourself_, within reason. That could in some situations mean that you take actions that kill someone. You are trying to indicate a difference where there is none. It's not me that decides another person's life is less than what they're trying to rob me of, it's them by taking an action that necessarily forfeits their life when I…
The progressives' attempts to make it even more complicated, which btw started with them outright wanting to outlaw personal firearm ownership, all failed. And now that the rising crime has people crying out for order, plus their dismal approval ratings, they will be voted out this December for sure, they stand no chance.
What helps is how you framed the idea that the act of taking something by force IS the violence, which is what we’ve been trying to get across here, something that most people are indifferent to, until they experience an attack to their personal safety. Mindsets have shifted here in the last five years.