Try reading again. You have it totally backwards.

When was I insulting or dismissive? Because it was unforseen that educated people would elect a bombastic insulting sexist popularist con man who was obviously lying to them simply because he wore a red hat and tie? Those are facts, not opinion. Many of them are saying how much they regret it now.

I offered solutions you appeared to agree with, like funding lower education so everyone has a decent, if not equal, opportunity to get an education.
Using race as ONE criteria amongst many for admission is not ideal, as I said, but until a better system for identifying and addressing financial and societal issues that stymie opportunities for people often based on their pigmentation is created, it's the best we've got.

What we don't have is what you imply is the problem.....rich white men with 1570 SAT scores (old school SAT, I don't know how it's scored now) and 3.9 gpas are not being turned away from Yale to make room for indigent African American women with 990 SATs and 2.7 gpas...but the Latina woman with 1550 and 3.6 gpa earned while raising 2 siblings and holding a full time job, yeah, she gets the slot, and that's proper. One skewed test that benefits one privileged group is hardly a decent measure of their work ethic or intelligence....often it's only an indication they hired the right student to take the SAT for them. There were at least 3 hired test takers out of 30 students taking the PSAT when I took it, we talked afterwards.

It is the right (and people making the arguments you are) who are far more insulting and dismissive of non white people's frustrations at being racially discriminated against....to a level and consistency exponentially higher than the trifling discriminations whites suffer. That doesn't mean some whites don't suffer some deleterious effects, it means they come out way ahead in the discrimination game.

You wish to ignore all racial discrimination and racial obstacles except that single instance you can point to where it doesn't come out in your favor, then suddenly racism IS a problem that needs eradicating....but only the kind that harms white guys, forget the myriad of insurmountable racist mountains non whites climb daily, both institutional and societal, this speed bump for whites is unconscionable and must be removed immediately!

Come back and whine about institutional anti white bias when anti white racism permeates every facet of your life but not when your race doesn't give you a free leg up that one time. Maybe talk to your right wing friends about why funding education for others is good for you as step one towards eliminating programs like this that address inequities in opportunities, and giving the less fortunate extra opportunity to overcome their situation is good for all. After reasonable basic educational opportunities are available for all, schools will still take the student's home life, finances, and extra curricular activities into account....with luck that will be on an individual basis eventually, but that's not likely until education reforms occur that give everyone an opportunity to display their skills on a more level field..

@Ickster
"That we're equating that with something like gay people being refused service because of who they are says a lot about how skewed our perception of balance is."

This is the fundamental point. I DON'T equate the two at all.

But as soon as we open this door, we have to deal with the permutations of it.

Let's say that for the sake of argument, gender identity and sexual orientation are now protected classes (legally, they're not, but let's assume they are).

Ok, you can't discriminate against someone for being LGBTQ. Great, that is obviously correct.

But we're making the argument here that you CAN discriminate against someone based on their political affiliation. Would you be ok with someone refusing service to Obama? Hillary? Bernie? What about an employer in a Republican town who finds out their employee is a prominent local democrat?

I get the argument and honestly, I agree with most of what you've said. If any of Trump's cronies had shown up in my (completely imaginary) restaurant, I'd probably have turfed them out with a lot less civility than SHS was shown.

But I'm just not sure that the world following my example is a good idea....

Until you've argued that black is white, the sun rises in the west, that we've always been at war with Eastasia, and are perfectly willing to fuck over most of the world for your own self-aggrandizement, you have come nowhere near to sinking to Trump's level.

SHS was politely asked to leave a restaurant because of her role as a willing and eager mouthpiece for policies that physically and emotionally have hurt (at a minimum) thousands of people. That we're equating that with something like gay people being refused service because of who they are says a lot about how skewed our perception of balance is.

People making the civility argument in good faith (i.e., not Fox talking heads) are making it because they actually have a moral compass and know that two wrongs don't make a right.

However, what was done to SHS isn't a wrong--no harm was done to her other than embarrassment, which is exactly what she should be feeling about her role in the world. When people are being terrible, whether it's a child, the president, or one of his enablers, they need to be told politely but firmly that it's not OK.

Think of this less as pouring gasoline on a fire and more like a controlled burn to help control the blaze.

I disagree. Pinpointing the problem isn't very hard if you have some idea of where to look.

As someone who was 'coming of age' in my profession when No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its successor the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), I can provide some insight into how these policies have been enacted and how both have been detrimental to the public education system as a whole. The former is a GWBush policy, and the latter is an Obama policy meant to mend the original law, so both liberals and conservatives are to blame to some degree, but both are based on the same philosophy of education and teacher-accountability.

There are some other mitigating factors and outside influences at work that should be noted: gun violence, the rise & ubiquity of the internet, and universal cell phone availability, all mostly concentrated in the past 10 years that play a large role. Cell phones, for example, are probably the worst thing to happen to education ever. They distract, they assist in cheating, they perpetuate arguments which can lead to physical altercations, and parents themselves advocate for their use "what if there's an emergency?!?!"

The idea of "teacher accountability" is the biggest culprit though.

Anecdotally, I've caught people cheating on papers. A girl in my honors English class basically plagiarised her entire final paper that we worked on for close to a month. The zero tanked her grade, which was already floundering, and the parent wanted to meet. I'd rather not go into detail to protect both the girl and my own anonymity, but suffice to say, all of the blame for this was aimed directly at me. How? Well I (apparently) "should have caught this sooner and intervened." Now, the final in that class is 8 pages long, I have ~125 students all working on it at the same time. but my ability to check something like that and my workload are beside the point. I'M NOT THE ONE WHO COPY PASTED A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE AND DOCTORED IT UP SO IT COULD SQUEAK BY THE PLAGIARISM DETECTOR (shows she knew what she was doing, IMHO). Yet, I'm still the one being told that I was responsible for what happened.

Teacher-accountability SOUNDS like the right thing to do, but consider the following analogies

--Students are earning poor grades, therefore teachers should be demoted; put on probationary programs; lose some of their salaries; and if they do not improve their test scores, grades, and attendance; be terminated from their positions.

as to

--Impoverished people have poor oral hygiene/health, therefore their dentists should be forced to take pay cuts from insurance companies. If the patients continue to develop cavities and the like, the dentist should be forced to go for further training, and possibly lose his practice.

I have no control over attendance.
I have no control over their home life.
I have no control over children coming to school with holes in their shoes, having not eaten breakfast.

@Mordhaus the part about money grubbing could not be further from the truth.

I'll be brief b/c I know this is already too long for this forum, but Houton Mifflin, McGraw Hill, Etc. Book Company is facing a shortfall of sales in light of the digital age. It may be difficult to blame one entity, but that's a good place to start. They don't sell as many books, but guess who produces and distributes the standardized tests and practice materials? Those same companies who used to sell textbooks by the boatload.

When a student does poorly, they have to retest in order to recieve a diploma. $$$ if they fail again, they retest again and again there is a charge for taking the test and accompanying pretest materials. Each of which has its own fees that go straight to the former textbook companies. See: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/testing/companies.html

In short, there is an incentive for these companies to lobby for an environment where tests are taken and retaken as much as possible. Each time a student has to retest that's more $ in their pocket.

How can they create an enviorment that faccilitates more testing? Put all the blame on the educators rather than the students.

That sounds a little tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory-ish, but the lobbying they do is very real: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/30/report-big-education-firms-spend-millions-lobbying-for-pro-testing-policies/?utm_term=.
9af18f0d2064

That, combined with exceptions for charter/private schools where students have the option to opt-out of said testing is skewing the numbers in favor of all of these for-profit companies: http://sanchezcharter.org/state-testing-parent-opt-out/ << one example (you can't opt-out in a public school, at least in my state)

@bobknight33 idk if i'd call business-minded for-profit policies "liberal"

I don't think any prosecutor wants to be the first one to put a person of non-Caucasian ethnicity on the stand for a hate crime, even when it clearly should have been counted as one.

That said, Turner was most likely under-sentenced. Not 'just' because he was white, but because he was from a rich family. In addition, he was lucky because, at the time, California law did not consider digital penetration rape. If you did not penetrate the woman's body with your penis, the most they could charge you with was assault with the intent. They also managed to tack on sexual penetration by a 'foreign' object.

On the other hand, you have a gang rape that there was photo and video evidence of. Evidence that showed that the defendant mentioned in the video not only participated in the rape, but urinated on the victim and told her "That was for 400 years of slavery, you bitch."

Finally, this is a hot issue. There will always be disagreements. @C-note linked a high rated video featuring someone we would 'expect' to be racist, due to stereotyping, confirming that racism still does exist and that racial privilege does as well. I agree that there are still racist issues in our society, although I personally feel we are moving more towards privilege based on monetary worth than racial worth. However, the simple fact of the matter is, this video is playing hard AND loose with the facts to skew the opinion of the viewer. A lot of videos do that. One of the good things about the sift is they WILL call people out on it, usually gently at first but with more force if it is repeated.

@PlayhousePals

Heh, I'm just getting old is all. I am rooting for them, and good on them for turning the tables and shaming the adults. When I joined the Sift many years ago I would've absolutely have been optimistic about their chances of effecting change. But in the past decade, I have learned from first-hand experience how the world works, and seen too much happen in the world to give them more than a snowball's chance in hell.

I mean, shame only works on people that feel shame and the United States government has proven time and again in the past decade that it, like the current President, is absolutely shameless. The only way to make politicians understand is to actually threaten their re-election, but with lobbyist money skewing politics how do individual voters even do that? I just don't see enough of a grassroots campaign forming that actually gives the NRA and gun industry a run for their money.

Of course, I would be more than happy to be proven wrong. I didn't think I'd see the day gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. either and figured it wouldn't happen until I was a senior citizen if at all. Hopefully my pessimism is just grumpy old man talk.

So, they want full representation, but not to have to follow the full federal laws (any pay full federal taxes).

Last year was the first time (in 5 votes since 1967) that they have clearly voted for statehood, however, there was record low voter turnout (23%) due to the party supporting keeping territory status boycotting the election (and IMO not being done in an election year), and possibly skewing the results.

2017-
97% voted yes, to statehood with only 23% turnout (78% turnout in the 2012 election).
A poll done in 2017 found that only 52% supported statehood (Although in my opinion, it was a very small sample size at 966 people)

It is trending toward statehood, but so far, it is not even clear that Puerto Ricans want it.

I believe I am impartial as I really don't care one way or the other, but this video feels like it is only telling half of a sob story, but it is a mess.

I feel, in 2020, they need a measure that ask 1 question: statehood, colony, or independent. Last time they asked it that way was 1993.

So, there's no evidence any hack was by request, except that one, highly illegal hack where he repeatedly publicly requested a foreign country hack into and release to show his opponent used then for top secret info...meaning he also requested they hack and release that top secret info. Lucky for us all there wasn't any secret info in them....after thanking them for hacking the DNC on his behalf, and the Russians followed his direction to the letter. To me, that's pure unquestionable collusion in public intended to skew the election for the benefit of a hostile foreign power...or treason. Edit: his claim now that it was just a joke is as ridiculous as the spurned lover who hires a hitman, pays them, and revels in the murder claiming the instructions to murder were a joke. It just doesn't fly.

The email hack was not the first publicly known instance of Russian interference this election, sorry. It might be the first well known to the majority of the public, but there were many known "items" before that. Trump suggested they hack her servers and anywhere the missing emails might be because it was already well known they were hacking American systems on his behalf, clearly and repeatedly....also it was clear the FBI was investigating Trump in the final weeks of the election, but Comey didn't feel the need to tell the public about that, only about the baseless reopening of the Clinton investigation over not new evidence...WTF?

When you're talking about something that clearly skews the stats, like hyper religious people thinking divorce is totally a slap at God, that's not confirmation bias, it's statistics.

It's also evidence that it is a better way of life, but that is something you apparently refuse to consider. That is why I am calling confirmation bias.

Do you feel the same about those who imprison women, force their silence with abuse, and treat them like abused pets because their religion says that's proper? What if they're Christians?

The bible says that husbands should lay down their lives for their wives, like Christ loved the church and died for it.

What say you about those God has chosen to be non believers? According to you, God created them with no purpose besides eternal torture in hell, because according to you they have no alternative since God never revealed himself to them so heaven is barred to them. Pretty fucked up God imo. I prefer Mt (Mot, Mewt, etc). He's older than Yahweh and far more honest and stable.

It's not that God wouldn't reveal Himself to them; a lot of ex-christian atheists simply inherited the faith of their parents, and when they got turned loose in the world, they fell away because they didn't really know God. They need to have their own faith that is wholly theirs. No one can make you or by proxy give your life to Christ. That is a decision each individual person has to come to on their own.

When you're talking about something that clearly skews the stats, like hyper religious people thinking divorce is totally a slap at God, that's not confirmation bias, it's statistics.

Do you feel the same about those who imprison women, force their silence with abuse, and treat them like abused pets because their religion says that's proper? What if they're Christians?

What say you about those God has chosen to be non believers? According to you, God created them with no purpose besides eternal torture in hell, because according to you they have no alternative since God never revealed himself to them so heaven is barred to them. Pretty fucked up God imo. I prefer Mt (Mot, Mewt, etc). He's older than Yahweh and far more honest and stable.

I'm not really debating about the quality of the marriage, although I believe that would be far better to only love one person and stay with them your entire life. Your argument about the rates being skewed because they are highly religious; it's interesting that you choose to explain that away rather than count it as evidence for the opposing view. That's a classic case of confirmation bias.

When I said Christians raise Christians, I meant it to mean that you shouldn't be surprised that these men are raising their daughters that way. I think you should be thanking God to see a father in this day and age take such an interest in his daughters well being. They are following biblical principles which is exactly what they should be doing.

There are plenty of ex-christian atheists, I understand your point. However, a profession of faith doesn't make you a Christian; God has to do a work in your heart. You have to be born again and many of those "ex" christians never met God. There will be some though that did meet God and fell away from the faith.

No, it's not really a no brainer. The few studies done, when other known factors are considered, showed that virgin marriages had <2% difference in satisfaction, probably within the margin of error....divorce rates are obviously skewed because most virgin couples are extremely religious, which accounts for lower divorce rates...it doesn't mean they have happy or successful marriages.
STDs and unwanted pregnancy are easily avoided with responsible safe sex...granted, most teens aren't very responsible.

Your reasoning is flawed...if Christians raise Christians, (and I assume you think the same goes for other religions) where do atheists come from? Also, you do know that children given abstinence only sex ed, usually Christians, have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and STDs, don't you? Very few follow church instructions once outside of church, that's why less than 5% of marriages are by virgins.

I try to not speak about things I don't know about.
I try to avoid "news" like this that's so clearly biased, on any 'side'. They tend to skew and ignore facts to make a political point. A good test is if they can't refrain from childlike name calling.

I can't speak for down under, here, we see "both" sides (and I still strongly deny that the antifa people are really on the left, because fascism is not a politically left philosophy, and they are fascists) acting outrageously.

EDIT:That said, only one group has actually killed so far, and only one group has fired guns into crowds of women and children so far, and that side stands firmly with the right, and the right has so far stood with them, calling them peaceful protesters that only defended themselves from antifa. I have yet to hear of a single democratic representative say antifa are good people, or peaceful protesters, the right however has made that a mantra about the alt right, Nazis and KKK.

Hmmmm...I had to look up Sargon....you've got to be kidding...he's slightly LEFT OF CENTER?!? You are absolutely bat shit nuts. He's clearly, firmly far right. It didn't take me 5 minutes to be sure.
HAHAHA!!!! You start by giving me credit for watching it, then berate me for not watching it. I gave it a total fair hearing, and it took no time at all for it to show it's colors as totally hyper biased far right Nazi apologist bullshit.

Again, only the right wing media is claiming that main stream media is hiding antifa criminality. It's clearly being shown here, and they are called out for the violent idiots they are constantly, but if the right acknowledged that, they might have to deal with the Nazis and KKK and alt right on their 'side' (and sadly, they can't denounce them as easily since they clearly courted them in the election, unlike the left and antifa)
I have absolutely zero need to watch such tripe to be informed. Here, coverage isn't one sided, no matter what Bob and Hannity tell you.

I have no doubt that my arguments fall on deaf ears with Bob, but I can give other readers another rational point of view, denounce debunked fabrications, point out information that's intentionally omitted, and point them towards verifiable sources rather than opinion pieces masquerading as news. They are the minds I hope to reach, Bob's is closed, as, I'm starting to think, is yours.

Total BS answer.

WHAT shared beliefs? There is no color requirements or religious prerequisites to being on the right hand side of the political spectrum. I know the media and lefty fanbois try to paint it that way, but that is complete drivel.

Goals? What 'goals' do these white idiot racists have that black idiot racists or hispanic idiot racists don't ALSO have ? What makes one group's racism leftist and therefor tolerable/understandable/justifiable in the media and the other group's racism "right wing" and abhorrent? And yes, there ARE black and hispanic racist groups...

Nothing but political bullsh*t. Racism is racism and it ALL should be abhorrent.

At it's core today, the right-wing political ideal maintains that free markets and capitalism is the best economic system for a free people because it promotes the MOST interchange between classes of people (poor, rich, powerful, etc). As such, a true right wing government would be small and not so powerful in an individual's everyday life.

At it's core, the left-wing political ideal is that capitalism is not "fair" and that the Government should step in to make everyone "equal", trading away freedom to social engineer equality and redistribute wealth. Of course, this means the more power that can be consolidated into the government, the better and more "equal" we can all be. (Don't even get me started on how this path leads to the shores of Venezuela or every other failed socialist country before it)

Back on my point though, racism doesn't rely on free markets or capitalism. Racism CAN and I would argue DOES benefit from leftist ideas of social engineered equality though.

So if these white racists voted as a majority for Republicans this election cycle, I would suggest that they did NOT do it because the are "right wing" at all. I suggest they did it because the other side of the ticket represents nothing but more and more "social engineering" that would NOT benefit their preferred race. Further, I would suggest that had the "social engineering" over the time period of the last Presidency been skewed towards pro-white, that these same white racists would have voted Democrat.

No. The guy's not a cop, so acting like a cop by stopping the group was also totally wrong. He had no right to stop them in the first place, and absolutely no right to touch them or try to take their keys (what he seemed to be doing).

So...why were charges pressed against the accosted atv rider and not the gun waiving, officer impersonating prison guard? I'm sure it has something to do with color, I'm just not sure if it's brown or blue that skewed their reactions.