The General US Politics Thread

Does that mean we shouldn't try?

Sure we should, but it’s kinda unreasonable to force the kids that need help away from said help until we succeed.

We should be building public schools up, not tearing private ones down.

Simpler?

Caring in the abstract is not an incentive. Caring about how the policies affect specific people, your loved ones, allies, and masters, that's an incentive.

Maybe your school should send some people be the authority, except instead of 'starving the beast', they could help domesticate it.

IIRC, teachers are paid pretty well (at least that's what a teacher said to me). The issue is that they have very few hours.

It’s not a deliberate choice by the school, more a byproduct of the kind of people it tends to produce, people who’ve lived (and support) anarcho-democracy aren’t going to get far in politics. Plus it’s a small international school, so the numbers play against it. Mainly it produces various types of artists.

You’re missing my point about your idea, the politicians can still give their children all the advantages even if they’re forced to send them to public school, they can hire private tutors and put them in home-study groups.

Hell even if your idea would work the better way to do it isn’t to ban private schools, it’s to legally require members of congress/state legislators to send their children to public schools. It still won’t work, but a lot less people would be caught in the fallout.

Some teachers may be paid well, but certainly not all of them. And their pay is only one of several problems.

Edited by TheRoguePenguin on Feb 10th 2019 at 3:47:22 AM

We had a massive teacher's strike in Kentucky.

Mitch came close to firing them all.

Somebody linked me to this video when a discussion we were having on a tangentially related subject touched upon the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, because they wanted to explain to me why they're more worried about the "far left" (their words; not exactly sure whether they're referring to the actual far left or is assuming that the Democrats have already become slaved to the "far left") than the far right.

This "Sargon of Akkad" kinda sounds reasonable on a surface level, and does seem to make a couple of good points (we agree that accusations shouldn't be believed without evidence), but several things tripped warning bells in my head (seemingly using "SJW" and "feminism/feminist(s)" as political slurs, unusual interpretations of certain lines, overly focusing on the initial lines of a list of points while completely glossing over the elaboration of what that initial line is supposed to mean). I'd like it if you guys could help me formulate a decent rebuttal to this video's credibility to present to the guy I'm talking to, because God I wish I was widely and deeply knowledgeable in modern US politics, the details of the subject incident, or Logical Fallacy terms and what not.

Of particular note is a short clip of one of Kavanaugh's hearings (probably a late one) where Lindsey Graham is ranting over how Kavanaugh is being treated. It's at around 18:30-ish.

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 10th 2019 at 3:10:24 PM

@Silas Doesn't even need to be 'legally', it can be a 'norm', where it's very bad for your reputation as a politician and patriot if you don't put your kids through public school.

Edited by Oruka on Feb 10th 2019 at 4:21:23 AM

Sargon is an idiot.

That's not really helpful or useful, especially since I know nothing about him and therefore cannot tell whether or not your accusation is accurate.

Credit where it's due: Sargon does make it clear at the very end that when he's saying "far left", he's talking about a fringe portion of the left wing and the Democrats that is neither the majority nor in overall control of the party... yet.

Also, he says he never even knew who Brett Kavanaugh is before he suddenly popped on his radar in late last year, and still knows little about him.

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 10th 2019 at 3:22:26 PM

Marq, here's a video that meticulously proves that Sargon can't read. Here's another showing he's full of crap. Here's another.

Sargon is worse than an idiot: he's a liar with pretensions of rationality, and a gateway to the alt right, with which he flirts constantly. Not unlike Jordan Peterson.

"we agree that accusations shouldn't be believed without evidence"

Witness testimony is evidence. This professional lawyer goes into the Kavanaugh case in detail.

Edited by Oruka on Feb 10th 2019 at 4:32:47 AM

See, this is a useful reply. Still watching the first video, and while it hasn't actually showed how Sargon "can't read"... I got a good laugh from Microsoft's Cortana's absolutely sassy response at 4:40 to "You're a p**y/d**k"^note Bing Search ("The P*** Song" video).

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 10th 2019 at 3:35:46 PM

Don't private schools reduce the burden of public schools by decreasing the number of students there? Either way, these accusations of them being propaganda instruments is ridiculous, just talk to anyone who has been there first.

Essentially it runs continually into a major problem in the US:

• The Left wishes more public services to reduce the burden on the routinely shit upon poor and minorities.
• The Right have made public services shit and do their best to privatize everything.

That depends on how the public school is funded, if it’s per student than it doesn’t reduce the burden, because the reduced costs are accompanied by a reduction in funding.

The loss of a student will often hurt a school, due to how bulk spending can make money stretch further.

The funding lost by having one less student will often be more than the cost of having that student, because things like buying one more textbook (after you’ve already bought 100) don’t cost as much as the school gains in relevant funding.

I can inform you, at least in Kentucky, the Republicans very much want to dismantle the Education funding in America and divert that money to tax cuts.

They hate spending a single cent on public education.

Hence the fact they have the Lottery money as an excuse to strip it to the bone—essentially making the public privatizing it.

Republicans seem to hate spending money on public anything, isn't the right's defining characteristic in the US being selfish to the extreme?

Saying he "can't read" is just a facetious way of summarizing that the articles he sources contradict what he claims, because he either stops at the headline or outright misquotes them completely. In short, either he's incapable of reading the next paragraph, incapable of understanding it, or a damned liar. I know which way Occam's Razor points.

Someone mention Sargon?

Sargon of Akkad (the You Tuber, not the actual King) is a Far-Right ideologue on You Tube that got his start with anti-feminist videos if I remember correctly (was he part of the [REDACTED] movement? I don't remember) who went on to establish himself as part of the alt-Right sphere. I see the Shaun and H Bomberguy videos on him have been linked already, but I'll just throw this out there: he sounds reasonable right up until he doesn't. (I don't personally think he does, but a lot seem to).

Edited by AzurePaladin on Feb 10th 2019 at 8:03:59 AM

Initially he tried to present himself as something of a centrist/"status quo warrior"; basically he makes a point of trying really hard to sound like he knows what he's talking about, and one thing I've learned is that depending of the circumstances, a lot of people will believe you even if you're full of shit.

I don't know if he's just come out and embraced it, but for a long time he actually disliked the alt-right, so much so that he got banned from twitter for retweeting gay porn at them in order to get alt-righters to stop messaging him. Naturally he threw a tantrum afterwards and accused twitter of being "commulists"(well actually that was Jon Tron, but they were in the same call whining for several hours).

TBF that's the right in most any country.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Feb 10th 2019 at 9:17:40 AM

I'm just going to leave Sargon's Rational Wiki page to give the run-down on how stupid he is:

Sargon of Akkad.

So... I should just throw these links you guys gave me at the guy that I'm talking to?

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 10th 2019 at 4:24:40 PM

If the guy you're talking to is citing Sargon of Akkad, likely you won't convince him no matter what you do.

If you want to though, go right ahead.

Edited by AzurePaladin on Feb 10th 2019 at 8:21:37 AM

I want to, just in case he's simply misguided. He only cited Sargon after throwing several other links on the main subject we were discussing, some of which I've already seen and I've deemed generally reasonable (Noble Senpai of Lost Pause is a reasonable guy, right?), and only because I raised my concerns about another Youtuber who you guys have warned me about being possibly alt-right in allegiance or at least sympathetic to them. I'm hoping it was just him having a really bad "luck of the draw" when he was looking for a video to summarize his viewpoint.

Also, what does it say about me that my opinion on Sargon was immediately sealed (though I still finished the video to get the full picture) when Shaun presented his hypocrisy concerning British Muslims' "responsibility" to decry and report Muslim-identifying terrorists but not really considering over 2000 hate crimes per year (up from 1500-something) that big of an issue because the population they happened in is in the several millions range (i.e. technically less than 1%)?

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 10th 2019 at 4:28:14 PM