MadDAsHell
MadDAsHell's JournalThat "Excuse Me"= Bernie is Sexist gets any play...is the reason why "loony left" also gets play...
I've posted before about how we're eating our Party from the inside out with our political correctness obsession (or at least our use of PC as a political tool) and I'll say it again:
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR OWN PARTY WITH THIS SHIT.
Can we PLEASE, for the love of God, agree as a Party to go back 50-60 years and start using accusations of discrimination for their intended purpose: to call out and influence the demise of actual discrimination?
The longer and more we use them as political silencing tools, the less meaningful they become (and the less aware future generations will be of what sexism and racism actually are).
I believe in my heart that the vast majority (not all, mind you) of the individuals accusing THE MOST LIBERAL SENATOR and his supporters of racism and sexism know in their hearts that what they're saying is untrue, but they can't resist the political points these accusations score. There is nothing democratic or progressive about those kinds of political games.
Has Melissa Harris-Perry, with one email, talked her way out of a tv journalism career?
I mean once you've outright admitted that you "played the race card" (I hate that phrase but she's basically admitting in her own words that that's what she did), will any network executive be willing to touch her with a 10-foot pole?
HR lesson one for journalists: If you're going to use racially charged buzzwords like "token" and "mammy" to allude to the idea that your network is racially discriminating against you, maybe wait a few days before backpedaling and saying the core issues have nothing to do with race or racial discrimination. When you backpedal 24 hours later, you look at best, like someone who has no filter or ability to control their emotions for the good of their own career, or at worst, a race-baiter.
What network in their right mind would hire someone who just openly admitted that she dropped allusions to racial discrimination into a conversation just for kicks?
She's normally one of the best and brightest minds on television, but she may have just committed career suicide, not just with MSNBC but with any network with an audience of notable size.
When the #1 most liberal Senator and his supporters are the "racist" wing of our party we've lost it
If the goal for our party is to have zero credibility with independents, and to generally look like we have no idea how to actually vet and evaluate a candidate and his/her positions, we are beyond exceeding.
We are (no joke) calling the nation's most liberal senator a racist. If we're saying it simply to elevate an opposing candidate, we're liars. If we truly believe he's racist, we're nuts.
After this new low, how do we expect as a party to ever be taken seriously again?
Everyone's for political correctness/policing speech until these tactics are used to silence THEM.
Policing speech has all kinds of political advantages:
1) You can take something completely out of context and use it to label your opponent as sexist, racist, whatever label is mostly political effective
2) You can then use those labels as your excuse to not engage in debate/discussion, especially if you're fairly uncertain of the validity/strength of your own argument. e.g. "I'd be more than happy to discuss your concerns about Hillary's donors but Bernie and his supporters are racist, you're a Bernie supporter, and I don't have time to engage with racists.""
It's been all fun and games using these tactics over the last few decades against opponents on the right but it's shitty as hell that we're now having to deal with them internally. Who in their right mind, 1 year ago today, would have guessed that Bernie Sanders and his supporters would be considered the "racist" wing of the Democratic party?
Not to mention that whole separate discussion that we as a party are ACTIVELY eliminating the true horror of such words by using them as political tools. With how much we've abused these words over the years, does the average young person today even know what racism looks like? What sexism looks like? What bigotry looks like?
The question is, will we learn anything from this? Or will we be right back to this the next primary season?
Why the extreme vitriol over a completely thankless job that 99% of us would avoid like the plague?
These folks are asked to interpret the original intent of a 230-year old document...would you want that job?
There's no doubt that some of Scalia's votes tilted Supreme Court decisions in directions we didn't want it to go, but are you surprised? The whole point of having an odd # of Supreme Court Justices is that we know trying to find unanimity on the interpretation of a 230-year old document, whose authors have been dead nearly 200 years in some cases, is nearly impossible. So we force a decision one way or another by (for the most part) not allowing ties.
Some of the responses on DU and elsewhere seem to assume that:
1) we should all 100% agree on the interpretation of this document, and
2) we should be shocked that some justices would come to different conclusions than us personally, and
3) those justices must be idiots, or more likely "evil" for doing so.
None of us would want this job; IMHO both liberals and conservatives ought to have a little more tact when a SC justice dies, regardless of where they tended to ideologically land on their decisions.
On edit, I clearly underestimated how many people would want this job. Personally, I value my personal life, the safety of my family, and my privacy way too much to take a job like this.
And that's not even taking into consideration what we learn each time a SC justice dies: that there are literally millions of people hoping that person is burning in hell. I'm not willing to live a life like that regardless of salary, but clearly not an issue for many DUers?
The accusations of racism against Sanders and his supporters is never going away. We created this.
When a few decades ago we decided that calling someone a racist, sexist, bigot, etc. was useful as a political tool to silence our opponents, whether it was the truth or not, we created this.
This circus world where those words have become absolutely meaningless, is of our own making. Today's young people don't even know what racism or sexism is, because in their lifetime they've heard that EVERYTHING is racist, sexist, etc.
The chickens are home to roost; unfortunately I saw this coming years ago and we have no one to blame but ourselves that our party eats our own.
Let's just hope it doesn't cost us 2016.
Congressional productivity - Would you be in favor of a single term limit for all congresspeople?
I realize the 2 year House terms would probably need to be adjusted upwards given the learning/ramp-up period for a new congresspeople, so I'm thinking something like 3 year terms for representatives, 6 years for senators.
After one term (as either), they are ineligible to serve in either chamber again. 75% of the country is over 18, I don't think we'd have a shortage of people eligible to serve just because we eliminated the permanent political elite.
Their egotistical need for re-election (and the changes to their behaviors/voting patterns that come from that need) disappears. Sure they'll still lie/promise anything to get elected (not sure how we would ever fix that), but once in, you can pretty much trust that they're going to vote their conscience because future votes/campaign dollars are no longer at play. Promises of future cushy jobs, etc. would still be an issue but that's another topic.
Yes, we would lose some good long-term legislators. But I think what we gain by being able to in a very short time move on unproductive/obstructionist legislators would fair outweigh the few quality legislators that we would be losing with such a setup.
The one negative I see (have heard this before, can't claim I had this insight) is that the non-politicians (advisors, consultants, etc.) would be more powerful than ever, as those would be the only people with long-term experience on how the system works.
To Shine A Light On Salary Gaps, Obama Wants Companies To Disclose Pay Data
Source: NPR
The Obama administration is proposing a new rule to address unequal pay practices by requiring companies with more than 100 employees to submit salary data by race, gender and ethnicity.
The announcement comes seven years after President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — his first piece of legislation as president — which makes it easier for women to challenge discriminatory pay in court.
In repeating the call for equal pay, the White House noted that the median wage of full-time female workers in America is 79 percent of a man's median earnings. That's a slight bump up from the 77-cents-on-the-dollar statistic, based on older numbers, that the White House has often alluded to before.
The comparison of median earnings is sometimes criticized as a crude metric for the gender pay gap. Economists have found that if you control for a host of factors, the pay gap is smaller — but persistent. The gap varies widely based on a woman's age and her race. It also shifts depending which industry you look at.
Read more: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/29/464856100/to-shine-a-light-on-salary-gaps-obama-wants-companies-to-disclose-pay-data
I'm not sure what to think of this. Much that I've read (even on liberal blogs) seems to say that the $.77 statistic is a political bumper sticker, and that even the people that use it know it isn't true but repeat it often anyway because it's so powerful.
I want to see a mechanism to see that discrimination is detected and punished, but as the husband of someone who works in HR, I do feel sorry for yet another reporting requirement for employers. I know my husband's company is still trying to figure out how they're going to get all the data they're now required to report for the ACA; this is not going to be welcome news for him and the rest of his HR team.
Not to mention that the government, while it gleefully applies very strict privacy laws (such as HIPAA) on private entities, has not shown itself to be capable of complying with its own rules. This is highly sensitive data on tens of millions of individuals that is now going to have to be (somehow) safely transmitted to and stored by the government. I'm more than a little skeptical.
Academy's puzzling approach to racially diversifying award nominees...
Their gut reaction to increase the racial diversity of award nominees is to increase the racial diversity of the Academy members/voters themselves.
Is that not openly admitting that the Academy assumes its voters, both persons of color and white, are going to mostly vote for nominees of their own race?
And if that's indeed the truth behind how most Academy voters vote, then why are any of us, of any race, supporting this bigoted organization?
Should 90 year old women be patted down just to "be fair"?
There was a lively thread a couple days ago about criticism of Islam and Islamaphobia. It got me thinking about something I saw a few years ago going through O'Hare on way east for a wedding: A woman, who appeared to be at least 90 years old, sitting in a chair on the other side of the metal director, being patted down.
The TSA website mentions "expedited screening through risk-based intelligence-driven security" for individuals 75 and older. When your read further, all that means is that those individuals may keep their shoes and a light jacket on during screening. Other than that, they are screened exactly the same way, including being no less likely to be randomly selected for a pat-down than someone who fits the profile of nearly every successful or unsuccessful plane hijacker of the last 40 years. Namely: a 20-40 year old male.
Namely: me.
I was not randomly screened that day, and to this day have not been.
My heart (which goes on nothing but my personal opinion) tells me it's unfair to single someone out based on their age, gender, or race. But my head, which can do math, tells me it's insanity for us, just to "be fair", to slow down our security processes and inconvenience someone who is 1) probably in the last years of their lives and 2) is of an age and gender of exactly 0 plane hijackers ever.
...while I am let through everytime presumably because, since I do fit the profile, they're too cowardly to actually check me for fear of profiling accusations.
Is the purpose of screening to prevent potential incidents, or to create the illusion of prevention while making sure not to offend?
It appears to me that we ultimately, ironically, tragically, and to our own potential demise, end up screening the people that every historical statistic tells us are the least likely to commit the act we're trying to prevent, and (for fear of offending) refuse to screen the people that every historical statistic tells us are the most likely to commit the act we're trying to prevent.
50 years from now, after (I fear) many more incidents of terrorism, are our descendants going to think fondly of us for refusing to offend, or are they going to think we were insane for refusing to acknowledge what was right in front of us?
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