13thLetter

True, but there was a big to-do about US spying on German officials a little while back. If it was that horrible and offensive for us to spy on the German government, it's also just as horrible and offensive for us to spy on the Israeli government.

(My personal view is that the US should definitely spy on every government in the world, and they're welcome to try to spy on us if they want, because it's dumb to pretend that it's not going to happen and then pitch a fit when what everyone knew was happening is revealed to be happening. But under that policy it's not better or worse to target Germany as opposed to Israel.)

Doing a ctrl-F for "emanuel" or "daley" in this comment section produced zero results, which is unfortunately rather telling.

Chicago has been run by the same political party since 1931. If the police are this bad and you keep re-electing the people running the city anyway, you are part of the problem. Throw the bastards out, don't just grump on message boards and then keep obediently pulling the same lever in the voting booth where it counts.

Or put it another way, money doesn't buy happiness but it lets you be miserable in comfort.

> I'm skeptical that's a significant factor, because right-populists seem to be gaining even in countries, like Denmark and the USA, which have a large portion of mainstream media and politicians hostile to mass immigration.

The populist complaint against rightist politicians in the United States is that they claim to oppose illegal immigration, but that's actually just a scam to fool the rubes into voting for them. When push comes to shove, they quietly endorse the current (Democratic) administration's policies on the matter and make sure that efforts to block them always fail. Given that, the factors behind Trump's support aren't so different from the factors behind support for populists in Europe.

Nah, not really. Hard-right evangelicals have been dwindling in power in America for decades, and I'd be surprised if most conservatives could pick "Christian Dominionism" out of a police lineup.

Deterrence exists, but all the research (in the US) suggests it's caused by certainty of punishment, not magnitude of punishment. A two-week stint in jail that's almost guaranteed will do far more to deter criminals than a ten-year stint that almost never happens.

Unfortunately, it's much easier to crank up the penalties and posture as "tough on crime" than it is to make sure police are actually closing cases.

Just like the rest of the cyberlibertarian blue-skying that went on back in the '90s, it was a nice dream, seriously! But in reality it turns out that governments can just send some armed men around to beat up the people with the encrypted faxes, email, and digital cash, and that'll largely put an end to it. The extent to which a government is helpless to stop that behavior is purely the extent to which it is reluctant to send, or incapable of sending, the armed men.

Hopefully we've moved past the strawman of trying to make such political discrimination illegal. That being said...

You need to consider the long-term consequences of being comfortable with such behavior on the part of employers. If it's considered admirable to fire people with political views the employer does not approve of, as it is now, that simply makes the country's political divisions ever more extreme. If you work for Google you have to be a Democrat, if you work for McDonnell Douglas you have to be a Republican. Soon enough you won't be able to live in certain places if you have certain political opinions, because you won't be able to find anything more than menial employment. At best, we have two angry and completely distinct political sides, with absolutely no understanding of the other or willingness to compromise, staring at each other over state borders and fighting dirty for every nationwide policy. At worst... well, there's no limit to the "worst" part.

Now, consider the alternative philosophy: employers explicitly do not care about their employees' behavior on their private time as long as it doesn't involve the employer. Not only do we avoid political segregation, but under this scenario, you can hold whatever opinions you want, and you can get into endless meaningless flamewars with the other side on social media without worrying about retribution. I really have trouble understanding why anyone wouldn't prefer this to constantly having to look over your shoulder, wondering what your employer might think of your opinions.

"An employer can already fire you for saying something in your free time. An employer can fire you for ANY reason, ANY, that doesn't violate civil rights. This is well known and no one is fighting for any laws to change this."

Literally five replies ago in this very same comment chain, I stated that it was indeed completely legal for employers to behave in this fashion, and should continue to be so; I merely pointed out that it was not right.

"This lawsuit is about harassment, not free speech, and celebrating (legal) "harassment" on the grounds of "free speech" is again, flawed reasoning."

But this comment chain very definitely is about employers firing people for exercising their free speech, on their own time, not related to their employer. I don't think they should do that. What do you think?

I hope for your sake that the political winds never blow a little differently, then.

Best part is, the media does your advertising for you by convincing terrified citizens that they're going to get taken out in a mass shooting at any second, while the actual odds are substantially less than those of getting struck by lightning.

Hmm, perhaps these clothes could be paired with a special lightning rod hat?

Are you comfortable with your employer having the power to control what you say, in your free time, and not about said employer? Because that's what this boils down to. I would expect people who are skeptical about the great power that large corporations hold to oppose that kind of behavior.

Then it's a good thing that's not what I said, isn't it?

Not everything that's legal is right. A company that fires someone because they got in a Twitter argument on their own time is behaving legally, and an attempt to make such an action illegal would probably cause more problems than it solves. But a company that does such a thing would not be right.

"hetero white dude,"

So just curious: what's with referring to men as "dudes" when you're trying to make points about inclusive behavior and language and such? I'm seeing this a lot, and this weird language tic really detracts from whatever point the person is making. You don't refer to women as "chicks," do you?

Only if you have a narrow, pinched, legalistic definition of "free speech" which would be unrecognizable to any of the philosophers and statesmen who created our modern understanding of the concept.

If, for getting into an argument with certain people, you can be punished with being ostracized, fired, prevented from earning a living, demonized by the news media, and put through a years-long wringer in the courts, your freedom of speech is harmed even if at the end of it a judge says not guilty.

Then perhaps Ms. Johnson should take that up with 90% of the people who use the word "privilege" in arguments nowadays, because they're not using it the way she thinks they're using it.

"I think the hardest part is probably recognizing that when people talk about privilege, it's really not personal,"

Most times I've seen people talk about privilege, it got personal (as in, filled with obscenities, personal attacks, and thinly veiled threats) very quickly when others did not immediately agree with them. So your statement does not comport with my experience, at least.

That's nice, but it's not going to convince Amazon to turn itself into a full-bore social services agency. It's job offers or nothing; which do you pick?

> It's not enough to say "I'll hire the homeless, give them a chance" just to make the news...it's much better to say "I'm committed to doing whatever it really takes to put someone back on their feet, provided they are willing to work "

If that's the price of admission, Amazon will probably decide it's not worth the trouble and abandon the project, and the homeless people you're concerned about will have even fewer opportunities.

"But obviously the '90s were not sustainable."

Sorry, it's not obvious to me at least. Can you explain why they weren't sustainable?

"Is this so bad? Falling into something of a European-type rut with permanent 8% unemployment and modest GDP gains? I remember the 90s. Everyone was buying shit non-stop. What kind of life is that?"

It was a pretty fabulous kind of life. People felt rich, there were shiny new buildings going up everywhere, the government's budget was running at a surplus, there was a general feeling of optimism and hope for the future. Given the choice, I'll pick that over trying to come up with reasons why our current situation of general political and economic misery is somehow morally better.

As usual, nobody advocating a CoC can point to any situation in the project's history where having a CoC would have improved the situation. There's also a few classic kafkatraps in the discussion ("your opposition to my proposal is just proof that my proposal is required.") All it'll need is to wrap up with some high-level authority ramming the code of conduct down the community's throat to be a classic example of how these discussions usually go.

It is a well-known and fully solved problem of how to deal with nuclear waste. The reason it is not dealt with is purely political, at least in the United States: an anti-science Senator who was pandering to anti-science constituents in his state by killing the waste disposal site.

This neglects how the great expense of nuclear and the long amount of time it takes to build is at least in part due to decades of anti-nuclear propaganda. There are certain activist groups who have created this problem and are now disingenuously pointing to the problem as if they had nothing to do with it.

Doesn't the old saw about "never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity" comes to mind instead? American political leadership is desperately incompetent and is obsessed with avoiding bad publicity at all costs. That more than adequately explains our comically ineffectual war strategy.

The consequence of not destroying this infrastructure is that a vicious and brutal regime has much more resources and has an easier time surviving. By protecting a couple of "civilian" truck drivers -- and if your day job is illegally smuggling oil for a terrorist organization, one must question how much of a "civilian" you really are -- we guarantee that actual civilians in the Islamic State, not to mention civilians in areas attacked by it, will suffer far longer.

I'm sorry, at this point I don't even understand what you're saying or how it relates to the topic. I meant "theft" as in, you know, somebody breaks into your house and steals your TV set, not some weird fringe theory about reparations.

> Victims of a crime -- say theft -- are eligible for restitution, while people who are not victims, aren't.

But I'm pretty sure you wouldn't endorse a policy where, say, white victims of theft are entitled to restitution, whereas black victims are not. That's what is all too frequently proposed by the "experts."

I think you're missing the distinction between what is legal and what is right. I will cheerfully agree that the "expert" attempt to marginalize those who disagree with them politically is legal, and any attempt to legally prohibit it would have worse consequences (not least of which, the experts would use new laws as a weapon against their enemies rather than the other way around.) I will not, however, grant that it is right.

> Well, as any form of full or partial freedom-restriction works both ways, the thinking is that social groups with less power deserve more protection. Obviously, no one like to be marginalized in any way -- even the more powerful members of society -- but if someone must be hurt, we prefer it to be a group that will suffer less real damage.

Bit of a tangent, but if you deliberately wanted to create furious opposition to your policies there's no better way than to put unequal protection front and center. "Everybody should be protected from X" is a winning policy. "These strangers over here should be protected from X, but not you" is, to put it charitably, not.

"It's not clear why failed applicants would automatically leap to the theory that they didn't get in because of affirmative action, rather than just assuming they weren't good enough."

Why wouldn't they? People generally look for an explanation of bad events that doesn't put the blame on themselves. Even better, if it defines a specific culprit and paints them as a villain. "I didn't get into X because they discriminated against me, those racist bastards" is therefore a very appealing narrative.