How exactly is this racist?

wendolynne

A person with Asian ancestry felt insulted by the image of the chinaman. Made a big deal about it. People of color seem to be triggered by cartoons. I don't know any white men who feel like Elmer Fudd is ridiculing them, but I have met people who take images of little black Sambo personally.

wendolynne

When the restaurant doesn't ask, they just give you the senior discount.

wendolynne

glad you are ok. Did your house get any water damage?

wendolynne

Corn is open pollinated, meaning its pollen floats in the air, sometimes a long distance. Thus GMO pollen contaminates crops that they prefer not to be GMO.

wendolynne

How does a society function if everyone has the child's attitude? Who will grow the crops? Who will make the clothes? Who will build the houses? Who will keep the internet working? Where will all the consumer goods come from? One component of a happy life: Find joy rather than drudgery in doing the things that need to be done. That is what Grandpa is trying to teach. He offers it with love. He wants you grow up to live in a happy functioning society, not a distopia where problems fester because no one will do any slave-work.

wendolynne

it would be like facebook 'likes'. you could see who agrees with you. cliches would form.

wendolynne

"Build bridges, make a big tent, and win over the majority of people. I sincerely don't believe that conservative causes are unpopular ones. Explained rationally, almost everyone in the world can agree with at least some of them. The objective must not be to set 50% against the other 50%, but to unite the 99% of honest people against the 1% of elites."

Keep the focus on the issues and causes. Avoid attributing your ideas to one side or the other, which only invites people to dismiss your ideas out-of-hand. If it is truly a good idea, something that will make the world a better place, then it will appeal to most people who listen to them. Don't unnecessarily give them a reason to avoid reading/listening.

Politics seems to attract crazy people. Rallies seem to attract violent people. Crazy and violent people seem to attract news reporters - "if it bleads it leads." Crazy violent people steal the focus and are a setback. Promoting good solid solutions is not as dramatic.

wendolynne

Vaccines had mercury in them, which was believed to cause autism. Congress passed legislation protecting pharma from lawsuits. Was that the early 2000s?

wendolynne

I don't know which is more atrocious : The videos of people climbing thru broken windows or this 'welcome tourists' video. Both sides against the middle indeed.

wendolynne

Ah word-smithing, the favorite pass-time of law-makers. They are not banning the words for family members. They are just cleaning up some cumbersome language - changing "mother or father" to "parent", "brother or sister" to "sibling", etc. in specific places in this particular document, where they have specified a long list of family members that this particular law applies to. It reads a little easier with half as many words and has the same meaning. Y'all are so melodramatic!

wendolynne

People who believe in subjectivity over objectivity are just as common on the right. It is the default human condition, and takes training to overcome.

wendolynne

I've heard it said that in the US, the people fear the government, while in France it't the other way around - the government fears the people.

wendolynne

Keep them around, and stop attacking them. Y'all need to learn how to respect people who are different from yourselves.

wendolynne

Clean up the clutter. Keep only the most insightful.

wendolynne

Seattle begs to differ: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/seattle-isnt-afraid-of-immigrants-mr-trump/2019/04/12/f26c370e-5d5e-11e9-9625-01d48d50ef75_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f6a3a574e042

wendolynne

It's a big internet, it's impossible to be all things to all people. Saidit's promise of high quality debate is attractive. Too often the 'debate' degenerates into propaganda and insults. The challenge is to live up to the promise, not to degenerate further, to propaganda, insults and porn. Plenty of other sites have that market covered.

wendolynne

A few years back I read a book by some sort of brain scientist, I forget the details, but their research showed that people start with the conclusion and then they look for supporting evidence, although they believe the opposite - that they have arrived at the conclusion after weighing the evidence. This is due to the bio-mechanical structure of our brains, that's how the mechanism works, the neural pathways and such. Once a position is taken, people will posit and believe all sorts of unrealistic scenarios to support their position, tolerating high levels of cognitive dissonance, resisting changing their minds as long as they can hold out. Sorry I don't have a link, it was an interesting book.

edit: I think this is the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/522525.Mistakes_Were_Made_But_Not_by_Me_

wendolynne

Lol, you want me to access a PDF in the downloads directory of your C: drive, Rob? Somehow I doubt if that is a government website. It just gets more lame every time I look into it.

wendolynne

"And there was evidence voting machines were counting 1.26 for every Biden vote, but only .74 for every Trump vote." As a software engineer, I find it highly unlikely that voting machines are programed to count the vote with floating point rather than integer data types. Fractional vote counts have not been used since the civil war days. As a mathematician, I have yet to see their evidence. Nothing is preventing them from posting it on the web. the links that I have followed have not been convincing.

wendolynne

Human nature and the two-party system conspire to limit intelligent discussion. Intelligent discussion on the internet is easier if the topic is car repair or cooking - easier for the mods to recognize off-topic posts, and far less knee-jerk hatred. Yet the effort is admirable and necessary.

wendolynne

Bottom of the pyramid behavior. Name calling.

wendolynne

Maybe when they realize that no body is down-voting them, the fun will go out of being so bad. If there is way to measure how bad you are...

wendolynne