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The past few days of the DNC have demanded pause. I am an Independent. I do not like Hillary Clinton. I am a Bernie supporter, and I was upset by his endorsement of Hillary. I had vowed not to vote for Hillary; I would instead vote for Jill Stein. The DNC, while very well done with a deeply compelling facade, has not changed my perspective on Clinton.
It is perhaps said best by Bernie himself: "It's easy to boo, but it's harder to look your kids in the face who would be living under a Donald Trump presidency". The conflict here is between my deep ideologies and reality. It's often said that a vote for Hillary is a vote against Trump; such a perspective would shallow and purposeless. But this isn't an election for president---this is the most threatening assault on everything I stand for that I hope I will ever witness in my lifetime. To stand for ideological purity would be to stand atop a mountain while the world around me burns. This is why Bernie chose to unite.
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Should Trump win, my ideals that seem within reach could be blown back decades. As a matter of strategy, I cannot justify _not_ swallowing every ounce of my pride. Hillary's presidency is an unfortunate but necessary consequence of the only permissible outcome. I am not electing a president of the United States. I am electing _a United States_.
So I am doing what I never thought I would do: proposing that others too factor this obscene equation and recognize how the very few remaining variables affect the result. My ideals continue to exist in part and in spirit with Hillary as president. With Trump, they are all but vanquished. Donald Trump must not be elected president of the United States. When (and if) you vote, think of it as a shot fired, not as a vote cast.
"Election".
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@mikegerwitz The Democratic party is not doing itself favors by burning bridges with independent voters and Bernie supporters. I also suppose that voting for the "lesser of evils" only shows the poor state of the current political system.
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@mikegerwitz The Democratic party is being destroyed by people that are actually enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton. I can respect someone who votes tactically for Hillary Clinton with full understanding of what they are trying to prevent. But in another four years you will be railroaded into two bad choices again.
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@hfaust @mikegerwitz or you could take jello biafra's opinion that it's really a one party system only masquerading as a two party system.
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@moonman @mikegerwitz thing is like with me i am indiependent liberal and dislike hillary because she will be another obama being a first of somthing then doing a nice job
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@moonman I'd never would suppor her anyways. I didn't care too much of her until this email leak bullshit began to happen. Considering she also "changes" her opinion so much, she's too dangerous to trust. Jill Stein is better, even Trump is better. :P
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@hfaust Many of the Bernie supporters are either independent or joined the party because of him, so idk if they're necessarily burning bridges that weren't already there.
@moonman I can hope that the next election will not be like this one: this is the first in history. In any other election, I would vote my conscience, or not vote at all.
@roundduckman You can't say you dislike someone for changing their opinion too often and then say that Trump is better.
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To someone like me outside US, Trump or Clinton doesn't make much of a difference. Clinton is an accomplished war monger who will further continue Bush's and Obama's legacy of more and more war in Middle East. Trump is the only president to have called out the war on Iraq as based on lies, something which Obama or even Bernie didn't. Although I don't think he will go against the milliary industry complex. The last person who went against war ended up dead(Robert Kennedy). So Trump is a lesser evil for Rest of the World.
And I don't think Trump will do half of the horrible things he says that he will do - like banning Muslims or Mexicans and so on. He looks like a loudmouth. He's not like Hitler who truly hated Jews.
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@solariiknight To assume that Trump would be anything, letalone a "lesser evil" for the rest of the world, is akin to rejecting climate change because you don't want to believe in it. There is no evidence to suggest that would be true---in fact, there's evidence _against_ that. He invites foreign espionage; incites violence; promotes xenophobia, racism, and sexism; is a bigot; exudes qualities of a dictator; has totalitarian principles; suggests restrictions on free speech with extended libel laws and Internet restrictions; changes his stance within sentences; has a history of exploiting workers and not paying up; hypocritically makes products overseas; thinks he knows more about the Islamic State than our generals; somehow thinks that bombing them will defeat them (not their ideology!); rejects science (climate change); suggests leaving NATO and suggests that countries "pay up" for our defense; ...he is the presidential antithesis. A vote for Trump is blind to reality.
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@mikegerwitz @solariiknight Perhaps politicians and parlor games are not the solution to the world's problems, and there are of course better ways to change things than by voting for crook A or crook B.
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@mikegerwitz @augustus @roundduckman Emotions are always a valid reason in political debate. How do you think I won the Republican nomination? I know how to win, and that's why you should vote for me in November. #MAGA #TrumpPence2016
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@realdonaldtrump >emotions
I'm guessing you're the type to 'pull' the trigger =p
@mikegerwitz @augustus @roundduckman
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@fl0wn @mikegerwitz @augustus @roundduckman I indeed will when it comes to ISIS, they need to be stopped! I will ally myself with Putin to make this happen. We will retake Constantinople!
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@realdonaldtrump as a marksman you just lost me. TL;DR you _squeeze_ the trigger. Only a fool pulls (and misses) =p @mikegerwitz @augustus @roundduckman
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@roundduckman @mikegerwitz @augustus Of course I am Donald J. Trump, who else would use the username realdonaldtrump on an internet site, also impersonating me is a legal offence now i'm a nominee, and I will make the Secret Service track you down! You will beg like a dog!
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@fl0wn @mikegerwitz @augustus @roundduckman I will protect your 2nd Amendment rights to pull and squeeze your triggers until France stops getting attacked by radical Islamic terrorists!
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@roundduckman spray & pray FTW o,0 @realdonaldtrump @mikegerwitz @augustus
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@bob They're certainly not. Nor is a two-party system. But unfortunately, that's what we're stuck with now, and it won't change before the end of this election. I hope that this will be eye-opening enough for many people.
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@mikegerwitz @solariiknightIs Is there proof to him being racist? Sure he's a bigot, against everybody. Sure he's xenophobic, against muslims because a huge minority (10 % I think, might be less) are terrorists or support terrorism and want Sharia Law as the law of the land. He even said some fishy things of women, not to say that he's fully sexist though, that might just be him being all angry and all that, need to look that up. Most of the rest is usually just him being an angry old man though towards people he hates.
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@roundduckman @mikegerwitz
>Most of the rest is usually just him being an angry old man though towards people he hates.
Sounds like a Republican to me.
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@roundduckman @mikegerwitz Back before he entered politics, Trump got attention for himself by being outrageous but the only person he was representing at the time was himself. Now I think he's doing the same thing but the consequences are much higher.
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@roundduckman Here are some:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-racist-examples_us_56d47177e4b03260bf777e83
> Most of the rest is usually just him being an angry old man
He's free to be an angry old man with his own affairs. He has no place in the White House; such a post belongs to a leader, not an inciter.
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@karl @mikegerwitz Duh. :P
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@mikegerwitz Even though HuffPost is biased, you do at least bring in proof, not just the usual "he's racist, sexist, and everything-ist!"
An example is Black Lives Matter, which while points out the issues of police brutality and militarization, forgets that:
1. Whites are killed a lot by cops too, in fact it's around twice as much (but blacks are 2.5 times more likely)
and 2. Black men cause a huge chunk of crime that's highly disproportionate. This hasn't always been the case, before the sexual revolution black crime was at low numbers I think (need to research more on that, but I know that's true) No wonder the bias of cops against blacks.
However also, Black Lives Matter also does their rhetoric wrong, being very aggressive overall. If they want people to believe them, they shouldn't be acting like as if most or all cops and whites are racist scum, but rather tell people to try to improve on certain matter and that whites and cops are flawed when it comes to not being racist, just like how we're all flawed in general on many things.
If there's one major thing I've learned from the Christian Right, it's that, nobody wants to be a Christian when you're telling them they're going to hell for believing different, in a aggressive style. Do that and you're going to likely have people reject the message then.
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@mikegerwitz BTW, I mean aggressive as in saying negative things at the person as if they're evil monsters. It doesn't help when you make others look like the bad guy.
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@mikegerwitz I'll say 2 things though, yeah it's not the greatest to have bitter people rule, he'd probably nuke everybody up. XD
Also, why don't we support Jill Stein as an alternative to Bernie Sanders? Her competitive nature, and also the fact she can build on top of the remains of Bernie's revolution might be enough to downplay both Trum and Hillary, and she could, if she does it right, win. Maybe. I'm probably being a bit too naive though.
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@roundduckman From the standpoint of a president (or any public official), the challenge is how to react to such rhetoric; one needs to be able to filter the substance from the noise and proceed objectively---no matter the type of group.
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@mikegerwitz True. It's hard however, when you got that, and some parts of BLM being a bit more.. ridiculous. It's where some people are turning slightly racist, leading them into a rabbit hole towards neo-nazism. For example I didn't care about too much about race until recently, and now I'm beginning to have a bit of racism, due to me not considering real problems because the mistakes of many modern activists, and bits of OCD. Especially as you get deeper in the rabbit hole, when you find about stuff like the fact Blacks often have a lower IQ, as documented in things like The Bell Curve.
It's to the point I got two sides of me, a small right wing neo-nazi side of bias that make me consider some very horrible ideas, and a more center-left (though turning more left) cautionary side that's trying to pull me out of it. I wish it were simpler days, where the only political thing I did was promote free software and other computer-related stuff, not worrying about the future, at least at this level. :(
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@mikegerwitz Probably because I got to admit that I'm not perfect myself, and that I don't know everything. It's really sad ideas I took for granted I'm now questioning now, just because I'm not viewing the radicals on the right with the same lenses as the radicals on the social parts of the left, because of some form of bias, likely because the left is the main side of politics for now, if we were living in the era of the Nazis, living in Germany, the opposite on the bias would likely be true.
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@roundduckman > Especially as you get deeper in the rabbit hole, when you find about stuff like the fact Blacks often have a lower IQ, as documented in things like The Bell Curve.
That's going to need a direct citation and some strong meta-analyses to back it up.
> Also, why don't we support Jill Stein as an alternative to Bernie Sanders?
I'm not sure if you saw the original post that started this thread (on your instance):
https://social.mikegerwitz.com/conversation/21864#notice-26476
But, plainly: that was my intent. However, after long and difficult consideration of the sorry state of things---with the inevitability of one of the two candidates becoming president, and the fact that any votes for a third-party candidate would fragment Democratic votes and thereby benefit Trump---I can't. In any other election, I would, but this one is far too much of a risk. Our voting system is deeply flawed, as is our party system.
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@mikegerwitz Here some information about the black IQ thing here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
I've also seen this though too that might indicate it's likely not genetics though: http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/
But then this exists, the person isn't seeming to cite his/her information though, maybe take a look at his/her reddit history, he also might be slightly biased: https://gs.smuglo.li/url/88050
This mainly happened while I was looking up about a certain gene in blacks (which BTW I now know is VERY unlikely true for the idea of the gene of causing violence) causing violence. Probably because of when I've heard about the high violent black-on-black crime rates though was when I looked up about that. It was there when I saw a certain series of comments citing about Black IQ and other stuff.
Maybe I can go to /r/changemyview or /r/askreddit or maybe Stack Exchange to ask more information on this matter, hopefully to purge any right-wing biases inside me. :/
That said, yeah I agree politics is a mess. And who knows, Trump might be the next Hitler. I'm just very scared. An ideal setting is where Hillary is in prison for all the suspicious things she has done, and that Trump is defeated by somebody like Bernie or Jill. I could seem to see the logic behind Bernie's decision though. I just can't vote for scum of any kind. Good thing I can't vote yet anyways, so that isn't my responsibility, will be next election though, when I would be past minimum voting age then. Hopefully 4 years on, Bernie or the Greens will have a much bigger charge against Clinton and/or Trump.
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@mikegerwitz But hey, at least we're just simply debating here rather than being filled with emotions or blocking each other, it's good to talk about this, to hopefully find the truth, and to hopefully melt any really stupid biases of mine away. I wish to stop thinking of this once and for all, and it won't happen until I find a way to satisfy this OCD of mine, or if I stop thinking about it.
BTW, had to repost because I didn't tag you right.
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@mikegerwitz @roundduckman >That's going to need a direct citation and some strong meta-analyses to back it up
here's a meta-analyses compiling 30 years of research into IQ differences which confirms the black-white gap: https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf have a nice day
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@roundduckman @mikegerwitz >Maybe I can go to /r/changemyview or /r/askreddit or maybe Stack Exchange to ask more information on this matter, hopefully to purge any right-wing biases inside me. :/
this is why i said you're far-right in waiting duck my man. this shit cannot be purged. you got mind pwned the same way i did.
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@augustus @mikegerwitz Let me say this though, one of the pages (the unz page) I've shown says however lots of successful blacks are immigrants from Africa, with not very much Caucasian blood, and even their Children have high IQs. Also there was test reports from the UK that show that Blacks there are doing pretty well, with the poor being better than poor whites (for some reason), and the lower scores were seen with the Irish Traveller ethnic group, which is pretty Caucasian. I have a bit of a feeling this might be more because of cultural and socioeconomic problems that's causing the lower IQ scores. Don't forget Hispanics score low in general too, and they have a lot of European (Spanish) blood.
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@augustus @mikegerwitz @roundduckman yep, there's no going back now
it's truly the red pill
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@delores @mikegerwitz @augustus Not exactly, more like purple pill. I'm usually forgetting to think of other matter that causes these situations in the first place, and just having the irrational bias of "oh it must be genes!" when I should think of other matters first, until the only possible option is genes.
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@roundduckman @mikegerwitz >blacks doing well in the UK
sure if you ignore the fact that voodoo and witchcraft ritual killing has resurfaced for the first time in 400 years in parts of south london
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@roundduckman @augustus @mikegerwitz its not biased to jump to the right answer, its biased to try and avoid saying it until its inevitable
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@augustus @mikegerwitz And who's causing that? You forget to mention everybody causes horrible acts, even whites. Remember the Holocaust? (and don't tell me that it's some conspiracy, there's in fact a entire website dedicated to refuting the idea of a fake Holocaust; http://www.nizkor.org/). Remember the years of chaos after Rome's fall, and the wars (Crusades, World Wars, and more.) Nobody is perfect.
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@augustus How do you explain Ben Carson,Neil degrasse tyson and morgan freeman?
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@augustus @roundduckman Thank you for the citations. This is not a topic that I will discuss further without deep research and consideration. But I can say that in any case---regardless of whether those studies indicate statistically significant IQ variances void of social and environmental factors---such is no reason to consider any person inferior to another as a human being, or in potential. My respect for an individual is rarely due to an observance of their intellect---it is the integrity of their character and the impact that they have made on the lives of other(s).
@roundduckman > But hey, at least we're just simply debating here rather than being filled with emotions or blocking each other
And if only Trump would see it that way. ;)
> I can't vote yet anyways, so that isn't my responsibility, will be next election though
You can still make an impact on others who can.
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@delores @mikegerwitz @augustus Science works by seeing if an idea is infallible. The fact that at least some blacks with few to none Euro blood that immigrated from Africa are very intelligent (compared to the African average), and they give birth to intelligent children, shows that the idea of genes causing the issues of IQ has an Achilles heel. lots of top scientists are also Black, so something else is at work here. For example I've heard from a few that many blacks are discouraged by peer pressure from learning, in favor of following their stereotype, because it's too "white" to be smart. Seriously.
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@roundduckman > lots of top scientists are also Black, so something else is at work here.
I'm very skeptical of any claims of racial variances in IQ; IQ can vary substantially within any population, even within a single household. More likely are social/environmental factors or bad/biased research.
But I have done no personal research.
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@roundduckman you sound like you're trying to convince yourself rather than me
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@mikegerwitz @augustus True, the good people generally are the ones that leave their animalistic instincts and try to help others, not the ones that simply kill and rule overs. It's easy to forget for people like me that most sociopaths are known to have high IQ... and they're pretty cold hearted. :/
It's just the OCD, bias, and fear, mixed with the hunt for information.
I hope one day Africa's problems will be fixed, and people are out of ghettos, to the point there hopefully won't be a IQ gap.
*If only I never heard of gamergate, I would be caring about why we would need Vulkan over DX 12, rather than getting myself dragged into politics, I might be stuck with it now...*
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@fl0wn hue hue hue.
It's just I've seen so much of that in the past, so I mentioned it.
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@realdonaldtrump @mikegerwitz @augustus This isn't really political. (BTW I know you're not Trump, lol.)
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@mikegerwitz I haven't looked up too much on how many scientists that are black, but they seem common. I think there's two sides of it, you got your "gangsta/ghetto" type of blacks, and you got the hard working good ones that work their ass off for a living and success.
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@fl0wn @mikegerwitz @augustus @realdonaldtrump >Only a Stormtrooper pulls (and misses) =p
FTFY. XD
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@roundduckman > I think there's two sides of it, you got your "gangsta/ghetto" type of blacks, and you got the hard working good ones that work their ass off for a living and success.
That's still a dangerous stereotype; there aren't two sides to Blacks, just as there aren't two sides to Whites, or Hispanics, or Muslims, or any other human being. What _is_ unfortunate is that Blacks _do_ have a much harder time in the US and many are unable to reach their full potential because of a huge variety of reasons. Usually, it's not by choice---if you took a kid out of jail, reversed time, and put him in a safe, loving household; or gave him a job to keep him out of trouble; or gave him help rather than jail time, his life will have been made indistinguishable from the previous. So saying "'gangsta/ghetto' type of blacks" as if it's a chosen identity is, for most, mistaken.
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@mikegerwitz True, not everybody poor in the ghettos is of the stereotype, but there's a reason though it does exist, because most people in that category fit that stereotype.
Be honest with you, this mess for me is just of an entire case of me being confused. I've only seen mixed results into the causes of IQ gaps. I don't know everything.
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@mikegerwitz I looked up more about it, and I forgot at least partially of the existence of the one-drop rule, what I'm meaning is that many blacks have Caucasian blood, yet there is still low IQs, meaning likely it could be that this whole genetic thing could be bullshit, considering that the theory of many neo nazis is that blacks lack Neanderthal brain genes. Most or at least many of the American blacks should have the genes then, and I don't think they come partially. Like as if it's one gene or whatever. Ehh, this is a debate for another night, I need to go to sleep. The Wikipedia page on race/intelligence might have a bit more facts against the idea of "genetics=IQ." Good night.
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@mikegerwitz @moonman @augustus I've looked up the Wikipedia page on the race and intelligence thing, and yes things are pretty mixed. On one hand you got a few concluding it's likely genetics, and the other hand you got the conclusion it's environmental reasons. I'm tending to lean on the latter, for a few reasons:
1. Most African and Hispanic countries are horribly poor. This causes education to be pretty bad as well, to the point IQ is likely to be influenced by that.
2. The Flynn Effect shows that the gap is slowly closing, too. Basically the Flynn Effect is when intelligence quotient (IQ) tests are initially standardized using a sample of test-takers, by convention the average of the test results is set to 100 and their standard deviation is set to 15 or 16 IQ points. When IQ tests are revised, they are again standardized using a new sample of test-takers, usually born more recently than the first. Again, the average result is set to 100. However, when the new test subjects take the older tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above 100. This paper describes a bit more on the matter to prove the gap is closing. It describes that the IQ gap closed by a few points in the past few decades. http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/dickens/20060619_iq.pdf
3. Stereotype threat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat) might also be an effect. I think I remember about saying that I've heard about that some blacks are pressured to fail more because they're "acting too white?" Well there's an entire Wikipedia article on that matter as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white
4. Don't forget many blacks are poor and live in poor neighborhoods in big cities too, might be a huge contribution.
5. A reason that might also affect IQ is the fact many black children are born out of wedlock, meaning without 2 parents helping a child out, one working and the other teaching (I'm not fully implying the nuclear family here, this might still be possible with gays, transgenders, and reversed roles, where a male would stay at home and the female would work), the kid's likely to be a wreck.
6. As said by the Unz article I mentioned earlier and likely a few others around, immigrant African IQ scores are pretty high, and they have minimal Caucasian blood, and even their children are usually having high IQ as well.
There's likely other points to mention too later on.
So who knows, @augustus is likely wrong as a result. :)
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@roundduckman @moonman @mikegerwitz it's both
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@augustus @moonman @mikegerwitz As I said, it's likely that at least mostly it's non-genetic reasons. Maybe we'll know for sure about this topic 20-50 years down the line, when things could get better, even though then I'll be as old as mold then. :P
Also even if their IQ is still low-ish, they are still human, not animals, lol.
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@roundduckman @moonman @mikegerwitz steve hsu is pretty confident that beijing genomics will have mapped the genes responsible for intelligence fairly soon. however i believe that even after a full understanding of that, its conclusions will be no less taboo and thus the 'debate' of injecting squid ink and demanding more proof will continue
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@augustus @moonman @mikegerwitz You might be biased yourself too. I've had that myself because groups like Black Lives Matter have affected my views where I seem biased against most anything about proclaiming social rights. Don't forget a few bits of the neo-nazi narrative can get you into thinking blacks and other minorities are the big bad, just as the left makes the neo-nazis look like the big bad. It gets you into a bias where it's the infamous "us vs. them" mentality.
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@augustus @mikegerwitz @roundduckman I basically don't argue about this anymore because you have to take in a ton of knowledge and be up to date on what's been replicated and what hasn't (for instance, the case for stereotype threat is falling apart under repeated replication failures) why meta-analysis is mostly junk, how you fake results using p-hacking, or the fact that even experts make category errors regularly. At the end of the day, there are people smarter and more knowledgeable than me in these exact subjects who both agree and disagree with how I see things.
Here is all I think anybody needs to know:
Intelligence is highly heritable, this is far more scientifically verified than other scientific beliefs intelligence-deniers tend to consider settled science. China has no compunctions about studying and experimenting with genetic basis of intelligence, so the West had better get smart because we're in a genetic arms race whether we want to be or not, and if you don't participate you effectively have surrendered.
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@moonman @mikegerwitz @augustus How is the case of Stereotype threat falling apart? I remember one article where Asian women performed less when thinking they're women, but performed better thinking they're asian. Will try to find that.
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@moonman @mikegerwitz @augustus
The ability to think in a certain way along certain paths, is heritable, actual intelligence is not. Furthermore, there are various types of intelligence. For instance, many people who are considered highly intelligent have a mathematical intelligence, but tend to not have high social intelligence. This incidentally is why I often say psychology is the most difficult field to do well in, because to succeed, you need both.
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@maiyannah I could write a lot about this but I'll just say that multiple intelligences theory has far less scientific support than general intelligence (in part because it's a newer theory admittedly)
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