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dirtbag
climber
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Feb 16, 2016 - 07:49pm PT
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Yeah, well, trad ridge, so I don't like retrograde, pro-confederate, racist, bigoted pukes, and their narcissistic, shallow pied piper. Sue me.
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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Feb 16, 2016 - 07:58pm PT
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Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
Feb 16, 2016 - 06:43pm PT
Sanders wishes the Soviet Union had won the Cold War.
Link please
are you going to be that clueless?
Jeb is getting feisty..
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10b4me
Mountain climber
Retired
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Feb 16, 2016 - 09:16pm PT
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Trump sure loves to hate on people. Anybody that is different from him and the way he thinks, he just insults them.
Fixed it for you trail ridge.
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nah000
climber
no/w/here
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Feb 17, 2016 - 12:04am PT
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madbolter1:
i'll start with a couple points to attempt to explain where i'm coming at this from and then for the sake of conversation i'll throw out a relatively off the cuff initial response to your question regarding what, i think, the u.s. as a structural entity might need to do in order to attempt to "right" the wrongs of the past. if you do take the time to do one of your point by point responses and i don't take the time to respond, know that i'm sure i'll find it worthy of reading, even if i don't care to flesh through all of the detail that i know you and i could get into if we were both sitting in old folks homes with nothing better to do...
first, here are some of the things you wrote that made it difficult for me to see that there was any nuance in your position and why i thought you were arguing one of the first two points that i stated:
"We owe the gansta-rap, hip-hop, BLM-while-blacks-are-the-real-killers-of-blacks, entitlement crowd NOTHING at this point."
"NOBODY is keeping you [descendents of african americans] down anymore."
"There IS no "fixing" things other than to NOW ensure a level playing field."
but one of the biggest issues was the cognitive dissonance that it took to be aware that that mother you saw in the walmart parking lot was stacking the odds against her own child's potential when you said "What chance does the 'little nigger' have when YOU keep the next generation in the gutter like that?" while at the same time you apparently had no openness to wondering why the mother might have ended up in the position where she was doing that to her own flesh and blood and rather said: "WE have done everything in our power to give a helping hand, but the "git outta dah cahh, little nigger" mindset still PREVAILS, and NOBODY I know is keeping them in that mindset."
you seem to think that once legal structures that have lasted 4-500 years are eliminated that the psychological/social/emotional results of that horrid mess should just disappear after the first generation and in the case of that mother, she should just get her sh#t together, so to speak.
but thanks for clarifying that you don't have a closed mind to the need for reparations. because if you haven't taken one of the first two positions i stated then i'm effectively in your "camp" in so much as i completely agree, that to attempt to make present day white individuals, who had nothing to do with the failings of the past, feel guilty for something they had nothing to do with is, at this point, just a form of reverse racism.
and so secondly, that last line i wrote above, is not just an intellectual/hypothetical argument for me.
an organization that i care[d] about deeply and that i felt was doing great work for a marginalized community was shut down due i large part to charges of structural racism. and to this day, i have seen no objective evidence of what was claimed. there was, from what i saw, no willingness by the accusers to bring their claims to independent third parties and at certain instances there is no question in my mind that anybody who was white was refused a voice to respond.
it was sickening.
because at the end of the day most of the community [people of color, white, and etc.] just wanted to get to the bottom of the charges, to heal, and to move forward with the work.
unfortunately a vocal minority held the whole organization hostage to the point that the people who were volunteering their time to give structure to the organization collectively resigned, effectively terminating the organization.
point being: i have a deep personal interest in these discussions.
and so thirdly, with regards to your question of what needs to be done.
first, i'm not a historian, and so am open to being corrected if i'm wrong, but i'm not aware and also don't get the sense that the u.s. government has ever fully acknowledged and apologized for it's structurally racist past.
i'm also not aware of the u.s. ever having truth and reconciliation style discussions to determine what had happened both while there was federal structural racism but also the structural racism that exists in its insidious forms to this day.
and finally the point of those discussions should be to come to agreements on what should be done. my sense is given the lengthy duration of the offence, if the u.s. was to work through a process as per the above, that the reparations would probably need to stay in place for at least two and likely even three generations. reparations would likely include affirmitive action within any government funded organizations [and yes i know you and i are going to disagree on that one] with an agreement as to when affirmitive action should end. ie. any reparations, including but not limited to affirmative action, should also not be indefinite, but rather should have a negotiated and agreed to life cycle.
the point of all of this wouldn't be to make white people individually feel guilty, but rather to acknowledge that the system as a whole failed in its fundamental intent.
but at the end of the day as long as the majority thinks as you seem to do that "There IS no "fixing" things other than to NOW ensure a level playing field." then i suspect the u.s. will continue in the same psychological/social/emotional cycles for a much lengthier time.
that's because i'm a believer that while reparations can never change the past, they can expedite healing in the present by having the perpetrator more fully demonstrate their remorse and their commitment to not repeating the mistakes of the past.
i believe this is true both when the perpetrator is an individual and when, as in the case at hand, it is an organization.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 17, 2016 - 02:06am PT
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In 1985 he said the NSA was collecting everything, from everyone, with no search warrants. He said every call, fax, radio message was collected, screened, analyzed and stored.
I thought he was exaggerating.
Today, I think he was understating what they could do back then. He wasn't high up enough, in rank, to know about the most sophisticated systems.
Except that he was exaggerating. In 1985 I worked in one to the top computer R&D labs and can categorically state that, even if the capabilities were there to collect data as he claimed (I doubt it), there was little capacity for storing it and less still for analysing it in bulk. In 1985 a typical, commercially-installed 10MB hard drive (that's right MB) was still a expensive, the size of a dorm frig and a fragile and unreliable affair and I can't tell you how many platters I saw turned into so much aluminum shavings due to head crashes. Smaller, somewhat more reliable pc-size drives started in 1980 and by '85 saw greater routine availability in 5-10MB sizes, but were still incredibly expensive and the production numbers were still quite low.
The point being, the storage just wasn't there, the I/O wasn't really there and even if you could amass a bunch of data, processing it was still slow. All in all, systems scaled out only so far and then rapidly became unwieldy. The software was also a limitation, though probably the least of the bottlenecks. The 'big data' hardware and software in use today had many hurdles to overcome (and are still overcoming) but are highly effective in comparison allowing us to tackle all kinds of problems which were previously only imaginable.
Their use at scale by the NSA was not surprising or unexpected, but what was surprising and unexpected was the NSA's near total lack of operational segmentation, isolation, and role-based access to the data as revealed by both Manning and Snowden. And you can tell that lack of 'discipline' was itself a symptom - that these basic security protocols or 'formalities' were simply cast aside as obstacles to a politically-driven need to scale out the capability with all due speed. It's a bottomline reminder that scaling out in a disciplined manner is still hard even today. The folks I think who do it best are at CERN with the LHC with its unbelievable data storage and analysis challenges.
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EdwardT
Trad climber
Retired
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Feb 17, 2016 - 04:50am PT
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narcissistic orgy of hating on people you don't know and can't relate to
Welcome to the Taco Stand.
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dirtbag
climber
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Feb 17, 2016 - 06:21am PT
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I will admit I am no Civil war scholar, but it would make sense that since they are in the South, they may have sympathies towards the south-side of that war. Could you blame a Native American wishing that they would have won the war against our precious manifest destiny? Oh I know totally different circumstances, we treated them so fairly and gave them some great land out in the desert. And the Civil War was solely fought to abolish slavery so I am the worst sort of bigot to even question what the history book recounts as true. Honestly, it may be that I relate too much to Edward Abbey and was inspired by Thoreau at an early age, and just could not shake thinking for myself and questioning authority and ideas. Try to flip off the zealous political evangelical switch in your brain for a moment, scroll through the almost 3000 posts of Donald. How many Trump fans where actually posting? This forum became a place to stereotype, insult and categorize entire states of people as inferior to you. An narcissistic orgy of hating on people you don't know and can't relate to. All in the name of hating Trump, just replace hating trump with loving God and you may have more in common with those southern bigots than you would like to admit.
No, you are clearly not a civil war scholar. Because lost in the whitewashing rationalization of the civil war is the simple, indisputable fact that it was about slavery. And after 150 years of debating this point, I have little patience for butthurt rednecks who defiantly, ignorantly cling to the myth that there was some noble cause for the south: there wasn't. Ignorance is no excuse.
That 38% mentioned in the poll support a treasonous regime. They aren't interested in making "America great," and they certainly don't want progress: they want a return to some idealization of antebellum America where the negro knew his place.
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crankster
Trad climber
No. Tahoe
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Feb 17, 2016 - 06:29am PT
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Correct, Dirt.
The GOP is essentially the Talk Radio Party. The fact that they are goose-stepping towards nominating Trump is easier to understand if you flip through AM Radio on any given day. 24/7 Obama-hating.
Republicans are hell-bent on destroying our democracy. They must be stopped. Now.
Today it would take the political equivalent of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory that just detected the waves predicted by Einstein to discern any fresh ideas in the black hole that constitutes the GOP. Into that void Trump has strode with all the hubris of one who recognizes weakness when he sees it—and is only too happy to call it out.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/donald-trump-2016-gop-republican-party-213642
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Contractor
Boulder climber
CA
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Feb 17, 2016 - 06:43am PT
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Trump is a perfect blend of Caligula and Vince McMahon.
Make no mistake, Donald is repulsed by the dipshits that flock to his candidacy but he understands "the mob".
I feel terrible for the unfortunate Trump supporter who has found that, the demands of our society has left them on the sidelines. Trump's hollow promises are so obviously pandering to the masses base insticts- I'd laugh if I thought he didn't have a chance to win.
Caligula was adored by the masses as he ascended to the throne but when he ran out of prisoners at the Circus Maximus, for his amusement, he ordered the first five rows of citizens into the arena to face the hungry lions.
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guyman
Social climber
Moorpark, CA.
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Feb 17, 2016 - 09:43am PT
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Hahahaha... this is so funny...
JEB! lost his domain name.... the brain trust of the republican elite, forgot to pay the bill.
and The Donald took control.
Donald for the win!!!
winning
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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Feb 17, 2016 - 11:03am PT
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I love Trump now, saying what needs to be said about W. and the rest of the Neo-conned.
This is just too good to not post
The Trump Heresy on George W. Bush
The Rude Pundit
2/16/2016
At the 1487th Republican debate on Saturday night in some f*#kin' place, South Carolina, the fuzzy combover with a belligerent leprechaun attached to it, Donald Trump, lost his goddamned mind over the presidency of George W. Bush. Asked if he still believed if, as he said in 2008, Bush should have been impeached over the Iraq "war," Trump demurred on the question itself, but used the occasion to continue what he had done at a previous debate: calling "bullshit" on the notion that Bush "kept us safe," using, you know, the worst terrorist attack in United States history as an example of making us particularly unsafe.
Trump committed the greatest heresy of his increasingly heretical run for the Republican nomination. He not only spoke of George W. Bush, but he raked Bush over the coals rather than adhering to a milquetoast, generic "mistakes were made by everyone." Trump laid it all at W.'s motherf*#king feet: "Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right?...The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don't even have it. Iran has taken over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously, it was a mistake...George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East."
And there it is, the thing that Democrats are regularly excoriated for saying, that the United States bears responsibility for the clusterf*#k that is the Middle East, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Now, yeah, you can say that it pains you to agree with Donald Trump, but you can turn that around and say that Trump is agreeing with the critiques from the Left (leaving out his incredibly destabilizing desire to "take the oil"). It was f*#kin' beautiful because the filthy f*#kin' secret that Republicans want to keep repressed in the minds of their base is that George W. Bush f*#ked the country up, f*#ked it up like a group of drunk Manchester United thugs catching a single Liverpool fan in an alley.
Republicans have spent the last seven years trying to erase Bush from voters' memories. They've convinced their base that whatever anger they have about the state of the nation, President Obama should bear the blame (although that's like blaming the plumber for your leak that's flooding the house). Now, Trump wasn't trying to say that Obama shouldn't have Republicans' idiot anger directed at him. But he was bringing Bush back into the equation, ostensibly to discredit Jeb and the rest of the GOP establishment. When Jeb said that his brother built "a security apparatus to keep us safe," Trump wrecked him with "The World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign, remember that...That's not keeping us safe."
Marco Rubio tried to jump in and say that he was glad Al Gore wasn't president on 9/11/01, which should have been immediately followed up with the question, "Do you really think a President Gore would have invaded Iraq?" Instead, Trump went totally Godzilla on the whole proceeding, taking a giant sh#t on Tokyo while burning down everything around him with his nuclear breath: "How did he keep us safe when the World Trade Center -- the World -- excuse me. I lost hundreds of friends. The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush. He kept us safe? That is not safe. That is not safe, Marco. That is not safe...And George Bush-- by the way, George Bush had the chance, also, and he didn't listen to the advice of his CIA."
Prior to that, Trump uttered the gravest heresy of all: he accused George W. Bush of war crimes. "They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction," Trump said as he watched Tokyo go up in flames. It's this part of his rant that has made the right-wing punditocracy lose their goddamned minds. He's a 9/11 truther, says torture apologist and Bush ball washer Marc Thiessen. How dare he say Bush was responsible for making us unsafe on 9/11, says some f*#king piece of sh#t from the National Review. (Trump did pull back a little on Monday, saying he "didn't know" for sure if Bush lied.)
What Trump knows is that not only would his voters not abandon him, but that he alone was saying what they sincerely believe about the Bush administration but have been silenced by the GOP from saying it. The post-debate polls have showed no change in Trump's numbers. He is going to trounce everyone in South Carolina.
While Trump is still a frightening prospect who truly has no chance of winning on his platform of rank xenophobia and absolutely no concrete plans, his purpose in this race is clarifying. He is forcing the GOP into a reckoning with its most poisonous beliefs and with its suppressed past. It's about f*#king time someone did, even if that someone is a gluttonous ogre who is the embodiment of the ugly depravity of capitalism.
Meanwhile, the ghostly figure of George W. Bush is campaigning for Jeb, and he looks for all the world like a man who is so lost that his soul is already damned and he's just waiting for his body to finally give out.
 See more at: http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/#sthash.2kDCiDAT.dpuf
I love him exposing the evil underbelly of the conservatives, but doesn't mean I will ever vote for him
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dirtbag
climber
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Feb 17, 2016 - 12:22pm PT
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Couch, not to put words in his mouth, but no he wouldn't. Craig and I have said many times that the parties flipped starting with the New Deal and accelerating duribg the 60s and 70s (i.e., the Southern Strategy). The liberal republicans abandoned the party and became democrats, and the old southern conservative segregationists abandoned the Democratic Party and became republicans. This is basic political history 101, which Craig has posted
often.
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dirtbag
climber
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Feb 17, 2016 - 01:17pm PT
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How do you trump supporters expect him to work with congress when he says this about a senator from his own party (Lindsay Graham)?
“He’s one of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever seen,” Trump said.
I talk like that, but I'm a dirtbag, not a leading candidate for president. I realize that being un-PC is "in" nowadays, but applying a basic insult filter on your mouth is not a matter of being PC, it's a basic life skill.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/trump-lindsay-graham-insults-219374
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guyman
Social climber
Moorpark, CA.
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Feb 17, 2016 - 03:11pm PT
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How do you trump supporters expect him to work with congress when he says this about a senator from his own party (Lindsay Graham)?
Dirt.... Lindsay is a stupid, tool, really.... and I think Donald is doing the right thing calling out all of those do-nothing except talk, Congress folks....
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dirtbag
climber
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Feb 17, 2016 - 03:15pm PT
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Stupid or not, trump still needs to work with him if he wants his agenda to pass. He insulted McCain too, another powerful senator he would need to work with.
If there is an advantage for a president in insulting powerful senators, I don't see it. This is why Cruz would have problems as president.
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pyro
Big Wall climber
Calabasas
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Feb 17, 2016 - 03:37pm PT
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He insulted McCain too, dirtbag you call NOT listening to ur Generals an INSULT.. damn dude..
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dirtbag
climber
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Feb 17, 2016 - 03:41pm PT
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Pyro: At the beginning of the campaign Trump said:
He’s not a war hero,” said Trump. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
The remarks, which came after days of back-and-forth between McCain and Trump, were met with scattered boos.
McCain, a former Navy pilot, spent roughly five-and-half years in a notorious North Vietnamese prison known as the “Hanoi Hilton,” where he was repeatedly tortured. He spent two of those years in solitary confinement.
At a press availability following his remarks, Trump denied saying that McCain isn’t a war hero and said, “If somebody’s a prisoner, I consider them a war hero.”
He also continued his attacks on the Arizona senator, saying, “I think John McCain’s done very little for the veterans. I’m very disappointed in John McCain.”
Trump received four student deferments from military service between 1964 and 1968. In Ames, he told reporters another medical deferment he received after graduating was for a bone spur in his foot. When asked which foot, Trump told reporters to look up the records.
In a follow-up statement sent to reporters, Trump again declined to apologize, calling McCain “yet another all talk, no action politician who spends too much time on television and not enough time doing his job.”
Again, if this is part of some brilliant strategy to woo and persuade senators in his own party to enact his agenda, I don't see it.
Edit: of course, this tendency goes beyond senators. He has insulted so many people, how can anyone expect him to bring people together to solve common problems?
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guyman
Social climber
Moorpark, CA.
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Feb 17, 2016 - 04:02pm PT
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of course, this tendency goes beyond senators. He has insulted so many people, how can anyone expect him to bring people together to solve common problems?
Fear and Force.... LBJ was an effective president (IMHO) he had a lot of IOU's in his pocket to use as bargaining chips.
I don't think Donald would hesitate for a second before calling out someone for not working, for lying to others in a bargaining session. These are the chips in 2016 that hopefully might be effective.
And that scares the SH%T out of those in power.... and that is a good thing.
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dirtbag
climber
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Feb 17, 2016 - 04:34pm PT
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Actually, it scares the sh#t out of those out of power even more: those people, more than senators, have born the brunt of his tirades. And telling someone they are stupid isn't calling someone out, it's calling someone names.
"Hi, you're stupid. Now let's work on a bill together."
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