corporate_shi11

It's important to remember that in negotiations, both sides strategically establish their initial demands to be much more extreme than what they ultimately expect to receive. That is the case here. The Executive branch is posturing for budgetary negotiations. The NEH will likely survive, perhaps with a diminished budget, as a concession.

A mission of WHO representatives has finally been approved.

"...Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, said a team of international experts has been assembled, with the goal of sending the first members of the team to China by early next week. He said he is hoping officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be part of the mission." https://www.npr.org/2020/02/08/804130735/whos-tedros-china-h...

Of course the desires of a few obscure people are irrelevant to the actual merits of voter ID. There are some Democrats who support immigration because they hate white people and want to "Brown" the country. Does that mean immigration is automatically a bad thing? Of course not.

Policies must be judged on their merits, not the reasons people support them.

That's just propaganda based on speculation about what the "other side" intends with voter ID laws. People want voter ID laws so that non citizens can't vote. This is the reason why many developed countries around the world have some form of voter ID.

That's a naive conspiracy theory. More likely culprit is the fact that Congress is in general unable to act on complex issues.

"HuffPost, citing multiple Democratic sources and campaign finance records, reported amid the caucus chaos late Monday that Shadow Inc. was behind the app. ACRONYM, a Democrat-linked technology and campaign consulting nonprofit group, owns Shadow Inc."

"Shadow Inc.’s website has scant information about the firm and its employees. But a review of social media accounts shows that three of the Washington, D.C.-based firm’s top executives worked on the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.

The CEO of Shadow Inc., Gerard Niemira, was the director of product on Clinton’s campaign, his LinkedIn profile says."

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/shadow-inc-mysterious...

Sources on previous administration's engaging in antitrust litigation for "personal benefit"?

It's not just about privacy and security. It's about not entangling your communications infrastructure with a Chinese company that - like all Chinese companies - is completely beholden to and embedded in the framework of CCP governance.

Regardless of whether using Huawei tech makes you vulnerable to spying or not, it still means you are bound to Huawei products and infrastructure through vendor lock in. Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc.

We should be actively trying to separate from China, and it's unfortunate many seem eager to do the opposite.

>"The whole RNA sequence is available online and so far no expert to my knowledge has claimed it looks synthetic."

This is no longer true. See:

'Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag'

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1

These are findings from IIT researchers who have found "uncanny" similarities between nCov and HIV which could increase virality.

Why was this deleted?

Think about what you're saying, the country was in tatters in the wake of a civil war precisely when it was not culturally homogenous. Finnish is spoken by the vast majority of the population today. Progress has been made largely due to unification. Finland would not have been able to sustain itself otherwise.

This is an important point to understand. Scandinavian countries are 1. Small, 2. Homogenous, 3. Culturally and demographically stable, 4. Economically stable.

There are genuine differences that come with national scale that make comparisons of a small country's economy to a large country's economy impossible. It is similar to how you cannot simply scale up a mouse to the size of an elephant, since the mouse's skeletal system would collapse under its own weight. There must be qualitative adjustments to the bones to allow for such a drastic increase in size.

It is unrealistic for large countries to hold themselves to the standards of small countries, yet political and social activists do so in spite of the fundamental impossibility of comparison.

It's actually very simple. The Flu has a stable amount of people it kills per year and is already quite established in the human population so it infects a very large number of people per year. nCov on the other hand is a new and poorly understood virus and has only just been introduced to humanity. Extrapolating the number of people it's killed out a few weeks or months, the death rate would be much higher than the flu. The mortality rate is also not firmly understood, with estimates ranging between 2% and 20%.

You should look at the SquattyPotty. It's a raised platform that you put next to the toilet. You squat on it and do your business as you would at a traditional squat toilet.

Not trying to gaslight, perhaps I wasn't clear enough. In this hypothetical we're not excluding all, just some. The point stands and it is revealing.

In my post I said "preferentially choosing people of one race over another". Sure the hypothetical Country Club lets in some blacks, but it really sets a much higher bar for them. It sets a lower bar for other races.

That is affirmative action. Don't believe it? Look at the data unearthed from admissions data provided during the Harvard AA lawsuit. Asians must pass a much higher bar than certain other groups.

The question is, if it's not ok for the Country Club, why is it ok for Universities?

Based on that picture alone? Some tall, some short, some old, some young, some men, some women, some skinny, some fat, etc. Lots of superficial diversity in that picture.

Do you know their backgrounds? Do you know whether they were raised rich or poor? Perhaps some come from the Eastern states, some from the West, others from the south. Some are young and some are old. Maybe some like classical music while others prefer rap. Some like long walks on the beach while others like spending time hiking in the forest.

Lots of diversity is probably contained in that photo, just not the superficial type you're most fixated on.

Imagine if I owned a country club and it came out that I'm preferentially choosing people of one race over another, say actively excluding black people. How do you think that would be received?

That's literally what affirmative action is.

And yet a board of all women, all black men, etc. would be celebrated. This is pure racism and sexism.

Unfortunately we live in an age when "white people" and men are unjustly blamed for many things, and the confluence of this blaming culture leads to the demonization of white men. This demonization is encouraged by many in the media, academia and HR departments. It masquerades as virtuous and "progressive" when it is just the opposite. People are reluctant to call it out for what it is because they are afraid of being slandered as racist or sexist.

Policies like Goldman's, while well intended, are ultimately regressive, racist and sexist. When we reduce individuals to their race and gender we fall farther back into the dark ages when these things mattered far more than they do now. Rather than running away from that time towards a world of equality and universal justice, these policies drag us back and breed only resentment and mutual distrust.

That's a good point. I'm reflecting on my own experience as an adult but as a child I was definitely more active than most of my peers. As an adult I've put considerable effort and practice towards controlling myself in social situations.

I think there's an important distinction between hyperactive thought and hyperactive outward activity. Most people associate ADHD with the latter when it's really more about the former, as this essay describes well.

The US is not imperialistic, that's just a cute talking point.

That said I do agree we spend too much on our military. We should always spend more than any other nation to ensure dominance, but I'd imagine cutting the budget down would force efficiency and actually improve the military at this point.

However it seemed the person above was saying that militaries in general are bad or murderous which is very different from saying the budget just needs to be reduced.

Reality is such that militaries are necessary both for self defense and defense of the weak and vulnerable.

The US military has ensured peace and prosperity for billions around the world for decades given its formidable global presence.

Imagine the chaos and crime that would descends on a community without police or law enforcement. The world operates the exact same way. There will always be a most powerful country enforcing stability and global compliance, and I would much rather it be the US than Russia or China.

What they're describing is different from the hunting culture that persists in developed societies. It's more like hunter gatherer hunting for bushmeat embedded in an agricultural and livestock raising society where such hunting is unnecessary so the hunt is more about status, which is a bit unique.

And that example has nothing to do with misrepresentation or mistelling. Unless the podcast is specifically about slavery, I see no reason why the podcaster should be expected to mention slavery in reference to Jamestown.

I'm taking issue with that specific example, but if podcasts are rife with inaccuracies and misrepresentations it's odd that the writer felt the need to include that example, which does not support their point.

>"Though this episode is pointedly titled “Utopia for Whom,” it fails to mention that American slavery began in the colony."

So just because a podcaster doesn't include your favorite pet fact about a particular topic the entire industry is broken? Since when is there an official set of facts that must be mentioned when addressing a given topic?

If you don't phrase your letter weirdly, making sure you to keep focused on conveying your thanks and relating how they impacted your life, I'm sure they'd appreciate it! Just put yourself in their shoes, if you received a letter of genuine gratitude I'm sure you'd appreciate it as well, like most people would.

The only reason courts have authority to arbitrate disputes is because they are backed up by the will and authority of the government, which in turn has a monopoly on the use of force in society.

Exactly. Rules must always be enforced by some higher authority. Because the highest functional units of governance are nations, this means that there will always have to be some "most powerful" nation enforcing order.