So…the Louisiana Democratic Party just changed their rules on the spot with a fake vote (ending with 80-40 with under 100 people present) specifically to deny Chambers the party nomination he had won in the primary and instead endorsed every candidate….in the name of “unity”.



Not sure why top Democrats work so hard to ensure they lose, but they do. Reminds me of the DNC changing and breaking their rules to endorse Hillary despite her being the worst possible candidate with so much baggage she needed an army of porters, the only person who could get Trump the votes he needed.

Sabotaging progressives shouldn’t be a feature of the Democratic Party.

First, It’s 1.6% - 5% (and rising fast), not .5% bob.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/07/about-5-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-say-their-gender-is-different-from-their-sex-assigned-at-birth/

Also, 100% - .5% = 99.5%, bob. Or are you pretending only 1% balks at this idea? Considering your math skills, it’s impossible to know.

If so, why should the 99% capitulate to the 1% of intolerant assholes that insist everyone must eat pizza?

If ther are 100 people going out to eat together daily and 5 are deathly allergic to cheese, are you going to insist you prefer pizza so they should be excluded from the population because you don’t feel like a burger right now so everyone MUST eat pizza, even though the restaurant serves both?

No one is trying to make you eat the burger, they only want you to admit burgers are on the menu and that everyone has the right to choose their own meal, you don’t get to choose for them, nor do you get to deny there’s more than one choice nor enforce that insane denial.

Trans people self determining their gender in no way forces you to do the same thing. Such a dumb argument, Bob. It’s the old Con. argument…“You having a choice infringes on my rights to force my choices on you.”.

The real question is why is 98.5% of Americans capitulation
to he the desires of the 0.5% .

Surely if there are 100 people going out to eat and 99 pick pizza and 1 picks hamburger, why do you need to cave and get 100 hamburgers ?

How about July 4 weekend? nearly 100 people shot

Yea, but if the 100 people surveyed don't agree with your definition, you still get a ⌧ BAHHHHHHN!

We need to coordinate something like that where once the first person gets kicked out the next is there to keep reading; get like 100 people there!

Your video, If 100 People Lived on Earth, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This man is responsible for more random happiness than 100 people in their entire life times.

@Mordhaus

The idea of US being a gun violence culture just makes no sense to me. A gun ownership culture among a subset of the population sure, but a culture of resolving conflict with violence? No, it's a product of gun availability. The numbers ChaosEngine quoted on guns / 100 people really is the unique differentiator that makes murder rates some 5-20x the developed country average.

Poverty leading to crime, poor mental health treatment are the tinder but the easy access to weapons is what leads to the death tolls to combust incomparable to any other developed country. Also if legislators can't pass gun control after Sandy Hook, or even restrict people on or previously on the terrorist watch-list from buying guns then the idea of any kind of slippery slope is farcical.

Slippery slope fallacy.
"If we allow gays to marry, what's next? Can I marry my dog?"

No-one is talking about banning guns. I wouldn't support that myself. I have friends who are hunters and target shooters.

But be reasonable; you can have a gun for target shooting or hunting or even "home defence" (if you're really that paranoid), but you don't need an AR-15 or anything with a high capacity magazine and it's not unreasonable to make sure that people who own guns aren't complete nutjobs.

NZ is in the top 15% of gun ownership rates per capita (22 guns per 100 people), but our average annual firearm homicide rate for the last 30 years or so is ~0.2 deaths per 100k people.

Compare that to the USA. The US tops the chart of gun ownership with 112 guns per 100 people. So the gun ownership rate is 5 times that of NZ, but the average annual firearm homicide rate is 4 deaths per 100k people. That's 20 times the number of murders. Even if you allow for the higher gun ownership rate, you're still 4 times worse than NZ.

And the difference is simple: we have sensible gun ownership laws.

I saw a great post the other day.
"The conservative mind:
Abortions? BAN THEM!
Gay Marriage? BAN IT!
Marijuana? BAN IT!
Guns? eh, banning things never works"

But hey, you're gonna need those guns for when Donary Trumpton ushers in a tyrannical dictatorship. Good luck with that; let me know how you get on with an AR-15 versus a predator drone.

@harlequinn

I see the root of the problem in the US simply being existing gun availability (incomparably high to any other developed country) which makes them cheap, plentiful and relatively easily obtained without a license. I'm sure that better mental health and poverty programs would help in the US but those would surely only chip at the problem and many would fall through the cracks. To me, a more trusted, reliable and locally available police force is more the answer. I guess the relative geographic dispersion in the US is a factor here, and probably why guns took off like they did in the first place.

Comparing to here in Australia, I would much rather bans kept a lid on availability so that we never have the problems the US does. Not that any other country is ever likely to match the US (89 guns per 100 people, versus 15/100 here in AU), but better safe than sorry. I think that statistic better than anything describes why so many Americans have the attitude to gun bans of 'well then only the criminals will have guns'. The ubiquity and accessibility is highly apparent in the US, whereas here in AU and probably most parts of Western Europe they are a rarity and that argument seems bizarre.

Another problem with NDTs words in this video, he tells us that 50% of scientists believe in god/are religious, and this is somehow proof there is no contradiction, or that science does not lead to non-belief. But this is a laughable failure of statistical analysis by NDT. I think the 50% number seems quite high, like he has been using a really bad sift on who qualifies as scientist (is it anyone with a science degree on any level?) But fine, lets make it 50% of scientists in the US. The takeaway from that is that the number of religous is MUCH LOWER than in the general population.
T
he general population is like 85% religious. That means that if 100 people go get a science degree, 85 will be religious, and 35 of them will lose their faith on the way to becoming a scientist. That means that if you study science, and you are religious, theres a 40%
chance youll lose your faith along the way. (This doesnt take into account that many of the 15% non-religious are probably already scientists, so the general population number is probably even higher.)

If you make it all the way to the National Academy of Sciences, a whooping 78 out of the 85 will have lost their faith. Thats about as damning for the no-contradiction/conflict-hypothesis as you can get.

Its like arguing that most drunk drivers never actually crash, therefore alcohol-intake does not influence your driving skills.

I was uncomfortable with this video because I was afraid that it would be used as fuel for homophobia.

I upvoted because really, it is the most anti-homophobic thing out there. It dares to treat gay people as people. Fully, 100% people with a range of personalities.

As a woman, I wasn't offended by the "gayness" of the character, I was offended by the blatant sexual nature of his comments. All this chatter about gayness completely misses the point about what is appropriate behavior in the workplace. And in fact, all this chatter disturbs me deeply -- it is misdirection from the true "crime" here.

Equality is asking everyone to be treated EQUALLY. You don't talk about sex in the workplace like this -- not if you are gay or straight.

Having said that -- my male boss and I are completely inappropriate with each -- but NOT around anyone else. We have bawdy senses of humor and we crack each other up. As he said early on in our working relationship -- it isn't sexual harassment if it is UNWANTED sexual attention.

This guy's co-worker was plain in his language that he was uncomfortable and didn't want to hear sexually explicit stuff, and he wasn't homophobic in his comments. He was ignored. That was not okay.

The point was brought home by making him happily and openly gay and letting the chatty one have a moment of self-truth. Because yeah, he was an asshole.

Explaining comedy and social commentary is so boring.

Please do give us a closer look at ISIS is doing. Massacres, torture, rape, collective punishment and on, correct? Maybe killing what, 100 people at a time in the worst instances? That doesn't distinguish them from Saddam. Within Saddam's rule those crimes are what guys like yourself colloquially referred to as Saddam's 'firm' hand. They are his, so to speak, lesser and more routine crimes. I'd left them beneath mention thus far.

If you must insist on parroting your ignorance of Saddams al-Anfal campaign I'll resort to posting excerpts as evidence that the gassing was but a small part of it.

4,500 Kurdish villages were destroyed by Saddam, that's entire villages turned to rubble.
182,000 dead civilians by counts gleaned from Saddam's own records of how many Kurds his forces had succeeded in eliminating.
The concentration camps Saddam ran were pretty clearly modeled after Hitler's:
With only minor variations ... the standard pattern for sorting new arrivals [at Topzawa was as follows]. Men and women were segregated on the spot as soon as the trucks had rolled to a halt in the base's large central courtyard or parade ground. The process was brutal ... A little later, the men were further divided by age, small children were kept with their mothers, and the elderly and infirm were shunted off to separate quarters. Men and teenage boys considered to be of an age to use a weapon were herded together.

The conditions within the camp were terrible and torture, abuse and beatings were routine. The men of fighting age though were sorted for the express purpose to later drive them out into the desert by bus or truck for mass execution. This is how Saddam carried his genocide of the inhabitants of the 4,500 villages he'd destroyed.

Anyone interested in more or questioning the veracity of the above account can find more and endless references and evidence here:
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/index.htm#TopOfPage

As for American policy, I don't quite see where I suddenly bear personal responsibility to clean up the world if I choose to form my opinions on world events independently of it's 'fit' to American policy.

I don't care much if it was Bush or Putin that took Saddam out of power aside from hedging on which would leave a better Iraq, either would be tough not to be an improvement from Saddam. Similarly for Sudan or the Congo, I'd be rather glad if world powers finally cared enough to try and spare the people there suffering under brutal military repression and endless war crimes. I'm not quite sure why you wouldn't share such a view?

First off, I don't think those base numbers are accurate.

But even if they were, looking at averages doesn't make any sense.

The average wage of 100 people earning $10 a day is $10 a day.

The average wage of 100 people where 99 earn $1 a day and 1 earns $901 a day is $10 a day.

Talking about averages is a good way to confuse people when what should be discussed is the median number (for those non-numberphiles, the median is the point where half the group is above that number and half is below).