ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

You'd think by now you'd have learned to take polls with a grain of salt. If you repress all your memories of the 2016 election, you'll never learn anything from it.

The polls were, broadly speaking, pretty good. The polls that saw Clinton winning were closer to correct than the poll that saw Trump winning, and the overall spread was more accurate than in 2016. The idea that they were horribly skewed is, by and large, a myth. Not coincidentally, it's a myth that has carried through since 2012. Werid, right?

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In this case, the obvious polling bias is that they started polling the tax cuts a full year before they were even applicable.

Why yes, they asked people their opinion on upcoming legislature before said legislature passed. That's... pretty normal. Current polls of people doing their taxes show that most of them aren't expecting a cut. That may also be preemptive, and I guess we'll see how it shakes out,

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The tax cut attitude is changing currently currently. It's not even properly pollable yet — that'll be more of a late May thing. And the Democrats have already fallen partially into Trump's trap — they attacked the cuts just as they attack everything he does, automatically, uncritically.

I'm sorry I just can't take "Trump's trap" seriously. The man is not playing 4D chess - he's found a checkerboard and has repurposed it for tic-tac-toe. A trap would be something like a tax cut bill that isn't blatantly a handout to the 1%.

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2. You don't beat bad ideas by treating them like a plague. It's my sincere hope that Ghost's song Rats is ironic; it's beyond Orwellian otherwise. When it comes to bad ideas, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Is it, though? Does that actually consistently work for you? Have you found that bad ideas, given attention, tend to go away? You'd think at least one major world religion would have been disinfected by now! And I'm sure that the "sunlight" offered by Joe Rogan and Logan Paul have been terrible for noted fraud Alex Jones, and haven't given his career (which has been floundering since he was taken out of the spotlight of social media) a much-needed shot in the arm. (That's sarcasm; it's exactly the opposite of that.)

I'm very much of a different viewpoint. In the free marketplace of ideas, the currency is not correctness. It's attention. For the most part, many of these bad ideas persist because they have very attractive built-in mechanisms to self-sustain. And when we give undue attention to ideas that don't deserve it, we legitimize those ideas.

And beyond all that... Maybe I just don't feel like explaining kindergarten politics to a man who can't figure out that "taxation is theft" is a stupid fucking argument.

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RPGlitch wrote:

Yeah, it also raised premiums for everyone and fined anyone who didn't have enough money to pay for insurance.

Common, obamacare was not a popular bill.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/obama_and_democrats_health_care_plan-1130.html

It wasn't popular... Until republicans tried to get rid of it. Weird, right?

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And it was forced in a manner that required republicans to literally kill people, who had been moved to the new system if they wanted to completely repeal it.

Yes - if you give people health care, they don't die. Then, if you take that health care away, it's pretty inevitable that some will die. That's how health care works. That's why UHC is so valuable.

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Because once you add people to a healthcare plan. You can't exactly undo that without hurting people with pre-existing conditions.

Yeah, and this is the exact dynamic we saw in the Obamacare repeal.

Look, it's not an original observation on my part to point out that people looking to the right for information on Obamacare were not so much fed rational analyses that came down against the bill, as a bunch of crazy fucking nonsense without even a passing relation to reality. This is a factor we cannot forget. The right-wing media went into a full propaganda blitz on Obamacare. They threw everything and the kitchen sink at it, to the point where the ACA polled above Obamacare - even though they were the same thing.

But in 2017, things changed a bit. Why? Because, well, all those insane lies came home to roost. Projections of the republican repeal and replace bills starting coming in, and people realized, "Hey, wait a minute, Obamacare isn't some evil commie bogeyman, it's literally the reason I'm not one failed GoFundMe campaign away from dying." You ended up with stories like this, of people realizing that Trump and the republican congress had lied about replacing Obamacare with something better. And since then, Obamacare has been in the black in terms of public opinion.

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And that kind of resentment that built up for doing that sneaky bullshit, is at least partly why it failed, and why the next President, simply dismantled it.

Frankly I haven't the foggiest what you're talking about here. Obamacare still exists. It wasn't repealed. It's still trucking along, despite Trump's best efforts to sabotage it with no replacement plan.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/obama_and_democrats_health_care_plan-1130.html

It wasn't popular... Until republicans tried to get rid of it. Weird, right?

Well, I guess we need more republican presidents then, lol.

Jokes aside, I don't know why the data is skewed that direction. You and others have said it's because people are more familiar with ACA, but that doesn't sound reasonable to me.

I don't think people now are any more educated on it, then they were for the last 4 years, when they were paying the fines and doing the paperwork.

I'm just saying if I went outside and asked people. I'm pretty sure I'd get more ignorant answers than informed one.

Its just like that poll where more people disliked Trump's tax-cuts. Which was absolutely silly if they bothered to read the plan.

People are way too divided on partisan lines to figure out what's good for them. And it's the anti-republican season, atm.

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Frankly I haven't the foggiest what you're talking about here. Obamacare still exists. It wasn't repealed. It's still trucking along, despite Trump's best efforts to sabotage it with no replacement plan.

Trump got rid of the individual mandate in 2017. It doesn't take into effect till 2019. But by then. I don't believe there is any penalties to simply ignoring Obamacare. (aka making it a toothless bill)

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/385722-trump-has-quietly-saved-millions-from-obamacares-individual-mandate

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

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Me wrote:

Paid for by whose stolen money?

I jest, but Aim_Deep's political philosophy of extremist "TAX IS THEFT SCHOOLS ARE EVIL" nonsense is less worth taking seriously in the way one might take string theory seriously and more worth taking seriously in the way one might take an infection of bubonic plague seriously - there's no good ideas there, but if you let it spread, things don't end well.

Case in point:

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Aim_Deep wrote:

People have always been covered here too. Big myth they havnt. First it was charity and Hippocratic oath. None died in streets even in 1800s with practically no govt. Then EMTALA came alon in the 1980s which says providers can not turn anyone away. What they want is Cadillac plan and someone else paying for them

This is just... what? Almost every word here is wrong in some substantial way, and not just the typos.

"People have always been covered"? Medical care in the 50s and 60s is utterly incomparable to health care nowadays, and at no point were there not plenty of people falling through the cracks.

"None died in the streets in the 1800s" is just... what? I have to assume this is pulled directly out of some particularly sweaty orifice, as I have no idea how you even get that wrong.

"Then EMTALA came alon in the 1980s which says providers can not turn anyone away" - EMTALA simply means that hospitals are not allowed to leave you to die if you can't pay, and it was instituted because... *checks notes* ah yes, because hospitals were dumping patients on the street, that problem that apparently didn't exist before EMTALA was enacted to solve it.

"What they want is Cadillac plan and someone else paying for them" - yeah, if you expect a hardline libertarian to actually understand why democrats seek policies, especially policies tried and tested in other first-world countries and found to be wildly successful, they're gonna come up with gibberish.

So yeah. As said: less worth taking seriously in the way one might take string theory seriously and more worth taking seriously in the way one might take an infection of bubonic plague seriously. This isn't political philosophy, it's making a mess with a keyboard. Every statement is so fractally wrong, and that leads to utterly bizarre conclusions, like that the government has no business providing for education, or that taxation is theft, or that taxation suddenly stops being theft if it's done on the state level... (Seriously are you even going to pretend to have a coherent political philosophy? I'd respect the balls at least to say, "No, we should have no public school system", but to go from "taxation is theft" to "taxation is okay but not by the federal government" just means you have no idea what you believe and should maybe spend some time figuring it out.)

What the fuck?!

It's basically a memetic disease, akin to antivax nonsense, and I have no pretentions of being able to cure him. Alas, such is life.

This guy doesn't understand federalism either and I think he's a American. It's really clear my political philosophy - And I'm on the right side of most of american history and the Constitution.

The Federal Govt has no business in the welfare state. It's powers are enumerated in article 1 sec 8 and the Federal courts always ruled against effort to implement a welfare state until FDR threaten to pack the courts then they acquiesced and rest is history. We have the bloated, high tax, in debt govt we have now.

State can. They are the labs for democracy. I may not like it if taxes get too high but I have a choice to move to another which I don't have under federal edits.

And yes taxation without representation is theft. Thats what American revolution was all about and why founders made a federalist republic to be as representative as possible.

Not a bunch of Progressive Californians and New Yorkers deciding conservative Texans' HC as is case since we lost the Republic.

Another thing I was thinking about as I was feeding my trees (so boring but gardner never adds enough fertilizer) is that the reason politics is so toxic is because we have lost the representation (federalism lost). You basically have 1/2 country telling other half what to do every election cycle and they think other was illegitimate.

Obama alleged born in Kenya Muslim traitor
Trump alleged Russian spy

Basically last two presidents called totally illegitimate by losing side.

This toxic politics will continue until you wrest control back to states.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

I'm sorry I just can't take "Trump's trap" seriously. The man is not playing 4D chess - he's found a checkerboard and has repurposed it for tic-tac-toe.

Whatever game he's playing, Democrats have been losing to him. If you say he's playing tic-tac-toe on a checkerboard, Democrats are playing Fling the Turd.

I am not trying to say that being effective is being moral. I have some degree of respect for Michael Moore's appraisal of Trump; he calls Trump an "evil genius." I don't know if I'd go so far as calling him evil, but I could probably settle on "amoral genius."

What is frankly just an evasion of reality is the notion that the guy who beat the odds on the most shoe-in election in decades is some kind of moron. Trump is Light Yagami tier, regardless of whether you're talking social intelligence, future prediction, skill at deception, or differing opinions on whether he represents a benevolent or malevolent force in the world.

I'm not saying he's a good guy, mind you. Moore isn't either.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

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2. You don't beat bad ideas by treating them like a plague. It's my sincere hope that Ghost's song Rats is ironic; it's beyond Orwellian otherwise. When it comes to bad ideas, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Is it, though? Does that actually consistently work for you? Have you found that bad ideas, given attention, tend to go away? You'd think at least one major world religion would have been disinfected by now! And I'm sure that the "sunlight" offered by Joe Rogan and Logan Paul have been terrible for noted fraud Alex Jones, and haven't given his career (which has been floundering since he was taken out of the spotlight of social media) a much-needed shot in the arm. (That's sarcasm; it's exactly the opposite of that.)

I'm very much of a different viewpoint. In the free marketplace of ideas, the currency is not correctness. It's attention. For the most part, many of these bad ideas persist because they have very attractive built-in mechanisms to self-sustain. And when we give undue attention to ideas that don't deserve it, we legitimize those ideas.

And beyond all that... Maybe I just don't feel like explaining kindergarten politics to a man who can't figure out that "taxation is theft" is a stupid fucking argument.

You're correct that the currency in a free marketplace of ideas is attention. But you're implicitly arguing for an impossibility. Correctness can never be a currency. It can't be spent; opportunity cost doesn't apply to it; you can't trade something and get correctness in exchange.

The driving force behind any market is not its currency; currency is merely a medium of exchange. The driving force behind a healthy market is rational self interest. However, when the driving force behind purchasing decisions is something else, the market can accommodate.

When I say sunlight is the best disinfectant, I don't mean in terms of the marketplace of ideas; I mean in terms of human evolution. Those religions you mock, for all the obvious lies in them, helped propel the societies who believed in them to live while others died. Even the challenge you proposed — to name a major religion that died to competition from competing ideas — shows you don't understand how ideologies work; it's like a creationist thinking he's stumped a biologist by asking him to name a major species that has gone extinct due to natural selection. Major religions are resilient organisms, because they historically have made their hosts more resilient — less likely to die, more likely to breed, and more likely to pass the religion to their offspring.

Can you name me a single irreligious cultural tradition more than 500 years old? Why don't we hear tell of the great ancient civilization of the guys with enough sense to know gods don't exist?

I'm not arguing for theism here; what I'm saying is that despite what they got wrong, major religions got enough right to be adaptations to human life on this planet. Not the endpoint of ideological evolution, but an advancement over whatever came before.

Lest you begin thinking this is a digression, the point is that cultures are different rubrics for assigning value hierarchies, and value hierarchies are used to determine expenditure of scarce resources such as attention. Attention paid such that it makes us less likely to die and more likely to breed (without disturbing homeostatic equilibrium with our habitat) is what determines which cultures rise and fall. The cultures that promote paying attention to dumb shit will not last in the grand scheme of things, and those that do will inherit the future and — if we can use the Sunlight Method of tying their downfall to their culture — be laughed at by children of future generations, not to be repeated again.

Of you can just scrub the people you don't like from the history books. That is, scrub the losers from the history books, because the winners invariably write them. Your choice.

You're probably right when you say you don't have the patience for this shit. Kind of like how you don't have the patience to evolve wings or whatever the fuck is next for the species after homo sapiens. Unless one can get past their own short, petty life, no one has the patience. Natural selection takes some serious time.

Maybe that kind of patience, despite being based on bullshit, was that "it factor" that made the major religions major.

Here's some sunlight on a super progressive city Seattle that's dying due to their predictably failed policies..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw

Dems don't like sunlight they liek conspiracy theories like Trump Russia 24/7 or he's 70 IQ idiot or crazy.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

When I say sunlight is the best disinfectant, I don't mean in terms of the marketplace of ideas; I mean in terms of human evolution. Those religions you mock, for all the obvious lies in them, helped propel the societies who believed in them to live while others died. Even the challenge you proposed — to name a major religion that died to competition from competing ideas — shows you don't understand how ideologies work; it's like a creationist thinking he's stumped a biologist by asking him to name a major species that has gone extinct due to natural selection. Major religions are resilient organisms, because they historically have made their hosts more resilient — less likely to die, more likely to breed, and more likely to pass the religion to their offspring.

I have to say this is one of the only arguments I've heard from theists that has actually resonated with me as an atheist and made me seriously consider switching my stance on religion.

If nothing for the fact, that I'd want my offspring to have the best chance at life.

That for all the flaws, lies, and misinformation religion has spread. You can't deny that religion had to have been more beneficial in human development for it to have existed so long in every culture in the world.

Well said, sir.

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RPGlitch wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

When I say sunlight is the best disinfectant, I don't mean in terms of the marketplace of ideas; I mean in terms of human evolution. Those religions you mock, for all the obvious lies in them, helped propel the societies who believed in them to live while others died. Even the challenge you proposed — to name a major religion that died to competition from competing ideas — shows you don't understand how ideologies work; it's like a creationist thinking he's stumped a biologist by asking him to name a major species that has gone extinct due to natural selection. Major religions are resilient organisms, because they historically have made their hosts more resilient — less likely to die, more likely to breed, and more likely to pass the religion to their offspring.

I have to say this is one of the only arguments I've heard from theists that has actually resonated with me as an atheist and made me seriously consider switching my stance on religion.

If nothing for the fact, that I'd want my offspring to have the best chance at life.

That for all the flaws, lies, and misinformation religion has spread. You can't deny that religion had to have been more beneficial in human development for it to have existed so long in every culture in the world.

Well said, sir.

It's a pretty normal evolutionary biology stance on religion though.

it's the "function" argument commonly utilized to defend religion.

Peace,

-Boem-

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Boem wrote:

It's a pretty normal evolutionary biology stance on religion though.

it's the "function" argument commonly utilized to defend religion.

Peace,

-Boem-

Well, yes.

Also, I am still atheist, lol.

But you typically hear ontological and moral arguments in favor of religion vs one from evolutionary biology.

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RPGlitch wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

When I say sunlight is the best disinfectant, I don't mean in terms of the marketplace of ideas; I mean in terms of human evolution. Those religions you mock, for all the obvious lies in them, helped propel the societies who believed in them to live while others died. Even the challenge you proposed — to name a major religion that died to competition from competing ideas — shows you don't understand how ideologies work; it's like a creationist thinking he's stumped a biologist by asking him to name a major species that has gone extinct due to natural selection. Major religions are resilient organisms, because they historically have made their hosts more resilient — less likely to die, more likely to breed, and more likely to pass the religion to their offspring.

I have to say this is one of the only arguments I've heard from theists that has actually resonated with me as an atheist and made me seriously consider switching my stance on religion.

If nothing for the fact, that I'd want my offspring to have the best chance at life.

That for all the flaws, lies, and misinformation religion has spread. You can't deny that religion had to have been more beneficial in human development for it to have existed so long in every culture in the world.

Well said, sir.

Thank you.

To clarify, I'm not a theist; I'm a religious atheist. I say I'm an atheist because I don't believe in gods, although I think they're useful characters from a fictional perspective. I say I'm religious because I believe in holiness and unholiness, good and evil. It seems to me the truth/bullshit line of most religions lies somewhere around that area.