The Good Post Gallery

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Just because I don't agree with someone doesn't make me juvenile.

No (American)

This. The system of oppression the British Empire has been operating under for hundreds of years has gone on long past fashionability. Hopefully one day, loyal patriots in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales can shed the burden of tyranny like we in American did so long ago and join in a union of liberty.

Yes this, the fascist monarchists with their tea time, and vast riches will soon be deposed by the great people of the Isles, and when it happens, the freedom fighters of today and of days past like: Washington, Lincoln, TR, Ron Paul and Jesus will be there smiling, clothed in white robes, basking in the glorious sunlight of victory, for they will know that justice has been served. And the riches will be distributed among the poor, and a drunken feast will last for 1,000 years, and we will all scream the battle hymn of the Republic, and ride off into the eternal sunset.

[opebo]

Yeah, the ridiculous thing about Inks' position is that he wants to punish people for making a choice that they don't have. All this diet stuff is largely decided by corporations and government policies; individuals have very little say in it unless they make a concerted effort. Food corporations spend millions and millions of dollars developing addicting, unhealthy foods, and then additional millions in advertising and marketing convincing people to eat them. And once a kid's palette develops, based on fatty, sugary, high cholesterol foods, as we've seen with Bushie, even normal foods like salad are disgusting and inedible.

[traininthedistance]

Regarding the matter of using regions to take cognizance of them, I was never clear how using regions worked mechanically to force/influence changes in maps (just as I am not clear exactly how to measure erosity except by eye, even though I keep asking that we work on  that issue, and try to agree on the best approach that makes stuff look appealing to the eye, and  on that one I need your mathematical mind to help me), as opposed to just being a useful tool to find micro-chops, whatever one might want to do with them. Perhaps you might explain that.

On the issue of compactness, maybe there is no good solution, but it is a negative for a CD to just wander all over the state, like that AZ CD that went from Sedona to Snow Low via the Indian reservations. Maybe erosity measures that we have not yet defined, is the best that we can do. Sometimes unfortunately the mind of man is just too inadequate to fashion rules that really work on a global basis. Such is life.

One of my observations from public discussions of gerrymandered maps is that what bothers people are the really gross shapes that have nothing to do with natural geography. They don't mind river bends and modest deviations from a straight line. They do take offense at shapes that create unnatural deviations from regular shapes. In a sense the public has a threshold where a district is shaped well enough, beyond which they'd rather concentrate on effects other than the shape such as geographic integrity or competitive districts. Most mathematical models of compactness continue to reward improving the shape ad infinitum with no natural threshold. One goal is build in a sense of a threshold based on the shape of the underlying geography.

Let's use pentonimoes as counties with uniform population in a perfectly rectangular state. Here's an example I found at random on google search.



Now suppose we have to divide this into 4 districts. Clearly there are a wealth of ways to group these 12 counties into contiguous groups of 3 pieces each. Since the ideal division without counties would be four rectangles that are 3 x 5, most compactness formulas are going to reward whatever mechanism gets you there. If the formula entertains chops then it would force so many chops to get those rectangles that I expect the public would be hugely unhappy. So we recognize that something has to be traded between the shape and the number of chops.

Traditional formulas that try to work with the compactness of an area would generally consider a district made of the magenta, blue, and light blue counties in the NW corner more compact than the pink, purple and orange district in the NE corner. That's because it's more square or circular in shape than the elongated district I describe for the NE. Yet, I contend most ordinary observers would say that the elongated one makes the better district. We would describe it as less erose, and from that I conclude that one has to look more at the perimeter than at the area. In particular the internal perimeter is what matters to the public observer, because they will always forgive erose shapes due to the external border of their state.

For this simple example one could start by finding the division that minimizes the total perimeter of all districts. The outer perimeter is the same for every plan so that can be subtracted from that total. The difference that is left counts for each district on the boundary so it should be divided by two to get the unique amount of perimeter created by the division into districts.

This works well when all the boundaries that are under consideration are built from straight lines. But suppose that the boundaries are sometimes straight and sometimes winding rivers. A pure formula like the one I just described is going to be strongly biased towards avoiding putting winding county edges on the perimeter of the district because it adds to the length without changing the area. Yet my experience is that the public sees no reason not to treat the county river boundary as equal to the straight line segment as long as there's a bridge across the river on that segment.

My solution for this is to count segments instead of the actual distance. Each boundary between two different counties on either side of the district boundary count as a segment. On the average for the straight line pentominoes it is equivalent to the actual length, but it has none of the problem of biasing against naturally wiggly county lines.

In an upcoming post I'll address the connection between this type of erosity and chops.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

The middle class thinks they're rich and the only thing holding them back is taxes and government regulations.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yeah, just as LB said, if this were a 250 pound man wearing a speedo, he would not have even been approached. The problem was that she did not fit the societal standard of what a woman should look like in a bikini. She wasn't disgustingly, oh-god-look-at-her-ribs thin. And that's a problem apparently. We're bringing up kids to think "fat is gross" instead of "some people like to eat or have metabolism problems and that's okay and it doesn't make them disgusting"

Just the same as we bring kids up to think "A woman is showing skin? Well she's just ASKING to get raped" instead of the revolutionary idea that a man should never ever ever under any circumstance ever attempt to have sex with a woman without her consent

This is a case of sexism because a woman must look a certain way in order to wear a type of swimsuit. A man just has to be wearing something and that's okay.

[windjammer]

What rhymes with Mitch?  Son of a-

Too easy.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I was trying to get to 10,000 characters of kitty gifs, but I only got to 4278 before I got bored.

[rejectamenta]

Console gaming is going to give you the character it takes to run three miles in freezing rain wearing naught but a cross country uniform?

And let's not pretend the mind is everything for all the sports/physical activity haters out there. I take it they'd prefer us to be giant floating brains, relying on machines for movement and lifting, or maybe pale ghoul-like creatures whose only muscles are contained in the fingers needed for keyboard tapping. Hilarious how the death of Man shall come about.

[opebo]

I love this post.  TNF you're exactly right and thanks for sharing.

I was born when my parents were young'uns. We lived in a trailer until I was four years old, and moved out of it largely because my dad landed a job at a plastics plant and joined the United Steelworkers of America. So I guess you can say that my pro-union positions are largely a response to seeing first hand how unions make it possible for someone to go from living in a trailer to living in a decent sized home, and because of that union (and my mom's union) I've been able to go to the doctor my whole life, been able to get through college entirely debt-free, and been able to have a car and all that. People who say unions are outmoded or do nothing for their members are ignorant or kidding themselves. If it weren't for my parents' unions, and if it weren't for the labor movement, I would be a completely different person with a completely different history.

Much of my family is in some way involved with the labor movement. My grandfather, uncle, and great uncle are/were all members of the United Association of Pipefitters and Steamfitters, which helped move them (especially in my grandfather's case, he grew up rather poor in the 1950s) and into the middle class. My mom is a member of the Kentucky Education Association (KEA) as am I, and I plan on sticking with the union (or if I move elsewhere, the AFT) until the day I die.

I think the earliest thing I can remember my grandfather telling me as a kid, concerning politics, is that the Democrats were for the workingman and the Republicans for the wealthy. With a bit of nuance I understand that's not always the case, nor has it ever been, but the association of the Democratic Party with American labor, and the continued (if limited) influence labor wields within the party has largely prevented me from abandoning the Democrats, even if I otherwise have grown to detest the average liberal in someways more than I detest conservatives. I was an unapologetic Obama apologist for the duration of last year and I really regret that, as the whole of 2013 has been nothing but an endless assault by the administration on the underpinnings of the American social welfare state, high minded rhetoric aside. Given the option, I'd go back and cast my 2012 ballot for Jill Stein a second time around, though by no means am I ideologically committed to the 'green movement' in its current incarnation.

I consider most issues subordinate to the question of economic dignity, but on those issues too, I think my background has had an important role in shaping my beliefs. I am strongly opposed to gun ownership regulation, in spite of a slip-up earlier this year into Obama apologism, and have been growing more opposed to the notion of gun ownership regulation in response to the increasingly mafia-like organization of the state itself, with it's naked alliance with business and financial interests and willingness to spy on and deny due process to American citizens for flimsy reasons. I feel those who are unilaterally pacifistic or non-interventionist, or even oppose the use of violence for political reasons are naive and misread history -- those willing to use force to achieve their aims are largely those who have written history. I am not saying that I am in favor of armed force by [insert group here], rather that the threat of force has always been the driver in rapid social or economic reform. If you don't believe that, I would suggest checking out all of human history at your local library.

I consider myself an egalitarian and am strongly antiracist, antisexist, etc. I believe in the eventual abolition of marriage and generally take a libertarian stance on state power outside of the economic realm; I would consider this a reflection, a reaction, really, to my upbringing as a devout Southern Baptist, a worldview I now reject wholeheartedly.

[rejectamenta]

Very well said! I can only hope TNF and people like him are the future, or perhaps I should say the cyclical re-emerging of the American left, as opposed to the clown car of Seinfeld characters we're currently sporting.

[Antonio the Sixth]

In this thread, like every other one about gender on this forum that devolves into guys arguing about why they don't have girlfriends, misses the quite simple truth: there's a difference between wanting to have sex with a girl (and having the confidence to say so) and treating all women like they're just walking pairs of tits. The former is a good thing, because, believe it or not, women actually like sex (I know, crazy right!? ), while the latter is obviously not.

I hate how every thread on this issue turns to posters' lack of success with women, although I guess it should be expected given the readership of this forum. But if you absolutely must debate this, the answer is really obvious. The men who have the most success with women aren't ones who live their lives in the he-man woman hater's club and venture out occasionally to collect a living f**ktoy, nor the ones who place women on a pedestal and talk about how they're so nice for not just wanting to have sex with them. It's those who understand that women are people and so are able to actually to just talk to them them without getting caught up in all this crap.

[Sopranos Republican]

This thread is going exactly how I expected. Take that how you will.

Snowstalker has weighed in, all debate cease.

[traininthedistance]

In this thread, like every other one about gender on this forum that devolves into guys arguing about why they don't have girlfriends, misses the quite simple truth: there's a difference between wanting to have sex with a girl (and having the confidence to say so) and treating all women like they're just walking pairs of tits. The former is a good thing, because, believe it or not, women actually like sex (I know, crazy right!? ), while the latter is obviously not.

I hate how every thread on this issue turns to posters' lack of success with women, although I guess it should be expected given the readership of this forum. But if you absolutely must debate this, the answer is really obvious. The men who have the most success with women aren't ones who live their lives in the he-man woman hater's club and venture out occasionally to collect a living f**ktoy, nor the ones who place women on a pedestal and talk about how they're so nice for not just wanting to have sex with them. It's those who understand that women are people and so are able to actually to just talk to them them without getting caught up in all this crap.

Came here to post that.

[Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God]

What a fun thread this is.

I think, perhaps, there is more pressure on women (particularly young women) to be a certain way, in terms of social skills, etiquette, interpersonal relationships, etc., and there is risk of exclusion from social groups (by both men and women) if a woman reveals herself to be a "nerd" or "geek" in terms of personality and interests (Men face that risk too, don't get me wrong, but I seriously doubt it's nearly as much of a stigma for men as it is for women). It's the same reason why engineering, sciences, mathematics, etc. are such sausage-fests. Of course, the sexism and misogyny and general trolling among groups of like-minded men don't help matters....

I also think, perhaps more of the women who are politically active are more interested in real-world, relevant political and social issues than they are in, say, reading about whether Robert Taft should have run for President in an alternate history timeline in 1952, or reading a manifesto of Cogendism or Communitarianism or whatever, or indeed, looking at the nuances of past and present election maps.

Most of this is just me speculating/thinking out loud, and should not be taken as assertions of fact.

[Antonio the Sixth]

What a fun thread this is.

I think, perhaps, there is more pressure on women (particularly young women) to be a certain way, in terms of social skills, etiquette, interpersonal relationships, etc., and there is risk of exclusion from social groups (by both men and women) if a woman reveals herself to be a "nerd" or "geek" in terms of personality and interests (Men face that risk too, don't get me wrong, but I seriously doubt it's nearly as much of a stigma for men as it is for women). It's the same reason why engineering, sciences, mathematics, etc. are such sausage-fests. Of course, the sexism and misogyny and general trolling among groups of like-minded men don't help matters....

I also think, perhaps more of the women who are politically active are more interested in real-world, relevant political and social issues than they are in, say, reading about whether Robert Taft should have run for President in an alternate history timeline in 1952, or reading a manifesto of Cogendism or Communitarianism or whatever, or indeed, looking at the nuances of past and present election maps.

Most of this is just me speculating/thinking out loud, and should not be taken as assertions of fact.

...came here to post that.

[Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God]

Interesting, but trying to judge Genesis 1-11 by its scientific merit largely misses the point.  ..

Still, your criticism of Genesis 1-11 is not wholly without merit.  In a real sense the Bible begins with the tale of Abram and what precedes it has the appearance of something added on later to establish a cosmology as was found in neighboring religious traditions even tho it was not originally of major importance to the Hebrew religions.

My critique had nothing really to do with science; I was very specific on that. I was stating that if there was 'The God', then as Christian claims of Jesus' divinity are strongly linked to Yahweh once you start walking through the Old Testament you start running into issues which should make you question whether the book could have been inspired by The God at all.

Your premise seems based on the admittedly common assumption that the message of Christ (as opposed to that of the structured church that arose from that message) was an exclusionist one.  I come at Christianity from a Universalist perspective.  I see Jesus' message as having been that the one true path to salvation was based on his teachings, not that he was the only one who could teach them.  Indeed, he quite explicitly rejects the idea that there is some checklist of things that once done without any consideration of why they should be done, you are assured of salvation and need not do more.

I see the Divine as providing guidance to mankind, not absolute rules that would eliminate free will.  It's quite clear that for whatever reason, God values free will and rarely intervenes to directly impose it.  I see the Hebrew testament as inspired by God, yet shaped by men who would impose their own will upon others as that of God. Yet as Jesus himself taught, do not judge prophets solely by the wonders they do but also the purposes for which they do them.

Much of the problem of the Abrahamic religions, as with other religions, has been people asserting that their own will is that of God.  Yet if one looks, one can find the divine message shining through the gaps in the wickerwork that those who seek to impose their own sense of order upon the Divine have woven around it. I choose to work with the wickerwork known as The Bible because it is the one I am most familiar with.  I'll admit, I want more order in religion than I find, and I do worry about what wicker I might be weaving in my search for it.  Yet I am only human and I can but do my best.

[Keystone Phil]

Sometimes a simple statement of the obvious is really good...

I mean seriously, Kendrick Lamar looks like he comes from the set of the Cosby Show. This is the culture that is killing black youths?

Kendrick Lamar's album Good Kid, M.A.A.D City reduces women to "bitches," and talks about using codeine (the purple syrup is a popular topic). On the cover of the album, Lamar's uncle is flashing the Crips sign, and a lot of time is devoted to raping about the pressures of gangs and gang violence. Hell, the song The Art of Peer Pressure is about participating in a home invasion.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out why conservatives are upset. There's a fine line between telling a story about the place you escaped, and glorifying the place you escaped from. Many people don't get that.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I always consider it rather notable if someone who rarely makes posts of value and usually belongs in the Deluge manages to get off one worthy of inclusion here:

Preventing children under your care from being adopted by qualified families is an exploitative abuse of guardianship powers, and if you as an orphanage are unwilling to do so you cannot claim the moral right to exercise guardianship powers.

The Catholic Church is not going to accept the classification of gay couples as qualified families, so it must leave the adoptions market in states that require it to do so. If there is an example of how government recognition of gay marriage requires religious organizations to agree with it, here it is.

You are using children as helpless pawns in that scenario and deliberately worsening their lives to fit your bigoted worldview.  Denying a child the benefits of an emotionally, socially, and financially supportive home simply because you hate gay people means that you are not qualified to care for children, since you put your own "values" ahead of their well-being.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Ideally people wouldn't 'hit on' one another (as such) at all, but it's usually possible to get an at least surface-level feel for behavior and perhaps interests after being in somebody's company for, depending on the person and situation, a few minutes to a few hours. Sometimes elements of a person's actual self code themselves in fairly immediately noticeable ways. There admittedly isn't always a terribly immediate or stark dividing line between this and the sort of aspects of physical appearance that make people superficially attractive to one another--the way one dresses and comports oneself, for instance, generally has some sort of bearing on what one is like as a person, as opposed to as a chunk of meat, and is usually as obvious as more immutable aspects of one's appearance if not more so. There's nothing inherently shallow about expressing an appreciation for or interest in someone's clothes or makeup.

tl;dr if you've been noticing someone for a significant portion of an afternoon or evening or what-have-you, you should start to have a reasonable if basic idea of what they're like, or at least what they act like. If not, why are you hitting on them?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Back to the original topic, now that I'm on my computer and have more time:

No one would argue that listing legitimate advice as to avoiding rape (don't go alone in dark alleys, don't get intoxicated or put yourself in a vulnerable situation) is blaming women that don't follow those who do get raped. But "Don't dress like a "slut" or you might be raped" is not that, since as noted it's about power exchange. "Don't go in creepy back alleys in shady areas after dark" is not bad advice, and no one would argue that a guy who gets assaulted and mugged in such an area deserved it or its his own fault, or even a woman for that matter. But if a woman is raped in such a situation, it doesn't matter if she was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans or a miniskirt. Neither is going to make a difference to such a rapist.

Of course no one would also argue that a woman who's raped in a back alley really enjoyed it or wanted it. But in the type of situations where most rapes occur, it becomes a frequent accusation, and this "advice" is just a way of shifting the blame onto the victim. It has its origins in old backwards thinking that all women are slutty and probably enjoy it anyway, and is the basis for why in so many Islamic countries the burden of proof is put on a rape victim to prove she didn't want to have sex and fought back to avoid prosecution. Even in countries where extramaritial sex isn't illegal, it can still be used as a source of "slut shaming" if that sort of thinking gets out, or ridiculous thinking like "OK he might've raped her and it is his fault, but if she didn't wear that outfit he probably wouldn't have been tempted" which once again is now what rapists seek.

And this also ties into why Todd Akin's comment was so messed up. It wasn't that it was factually innaccurate and scientifically garbage, while it was, even if that wasn't the case the implication was also there that it was only a "legitimate" rape if the woman was under physical duress and fought back, so if tricked or drugged and in other cases it's not truly rape. The old "Well she was asking for it". No defended in court would ever argue "well she was asking for it for walking in that alley so clearly it was consensual" but "she was asking for it otherwise she wouldn't have dressed that way" IS used. It doesn't always work of course, maybe not even a majority of the time when there is an obvious rape, but it's still used. It's not the same as "It's not OK to take your iPod, but you shouldn't have left it in that location", more like "Well if you left it there you clearly didn't want it anyway, so whoever took it didn't do anything wrong."

[Joe Republic]

lol, no one is talking about infanticide, calm down dude.

This abortion thing is exhausting. We know conservatives think women should go back to being treated as the baby-making property of their husbands. We know they're hiding this in arguments about the well-being of babies or whatever, even though conservatives repeatedly vote to cut funding to actually give these babies food and healthcare once they're born. This constant fake outrage about the poor babies and evil leftist baby murderers is really tiring.

If a pregnant woman thinks a child is going to inconvenience her life, she should be able to have an abortion. Conservatives sure aren't going to take care of the child for her. Look at Texas. Abortion is basically outlawed now, and the government refuses to expand medicaid so those unwanted children and their mothers aren't going to have healthcare. But conservatives don't give a sh[inks] about that, because they're both out of the womb by that point, and no longer conservatives' problem.

[Goldwater]

Yeah, this petition is basically useless, don't know why a bunch of liberals think that signing it is going to get a gay teacher re-hired at a religious school.

If you don't want this kind of s**t to happen, just get rid of religious schooling. It's as simple as that. Make everyone go to public schools, ban private schools, end homeschooling, etc. It's all terrible anti-social activity anyway.

The second paragraph hopefully is just a troll.

We should encourage religious freedom in this country, not condone it. Public Schools were initially set up to indoctrinate young immigrant children and to pry them away from their 'corrupt' parents. My family saw this first hand when they immigrated in the 1920's. Fortunately, catholic school allowed them to send their kids to an institution that allowed for the preservation of the religious and cultural heritage. Many were not so lucky, and fell into the traps of racists like Wilson.

Furthermore, considering the awful track record of our public schools, why would you ever, ever want to encourage people to send their kids through that type of system. Unless of course you want them to grow up with a sub-par education. Private schools are for the rich, fine, let them do their thing. Homeschooling suits some people, fine. Charter schools are fine as well.

I understand many on the far '+' side of the authoritarian scale love the idea of collectively brainwashing young children, but to the rest of us its a repulsive idea.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Inks, Cory is an admitted eugenicist.

Cory, I wish I could say that saying things like this makes you a bad Democrat, or a Democrat-in-name-only, but the sad thing is, that's not actually true. There's very much a place within the Democratic Party for your positions, but it's an ugly place and a lot of what's wrong with the party and the contemporary American 'left', such as it is, in general. The only thing you seem interested in, at least in any positive sense, is advancing a set of scientific and pseudo-scientific agendas and narratives into areas where no scientific and pseudo-scientific agendas and narratives have gone before, on grounds that are utilitarian to the point of outright bloodlessness, somewhere between completely unconcerned and actively gleeful at the collateral damage thus wrought on preexisting cultural and humane values. You don't seem particularly concerned with taking a critical attitude towards class or sex (but I may have missed this; if this is incorrect, I apologize), and your attitudes towards race, particularly as it relates to crime and punishment, and mental health, particularly as it relates to crime and punishment, are atavistic, filled with calumnies against black bodies and unwell minds more suited to the most unselfconscious set of Southern Senators of old.

You're certainly not alone in any of this, and it's not really identifiably Old Left or New Left in the American context at all. If anything it's the attitude of an unlucky Liberal Imperialist who fell through a wormhole from 1890s Britain into the wrong place, or an attitude from an alternate history in which Liberal Imperialism in more or less its original form persisted and managed to internalize the language of the most strident, immoderate, and unhelpful liberal and in some cases socialist or communist attacks on religion on its way from its proper habitat to the present day. Or just a sort of (terms used as shorthand and thus not a hundred per cent accurate) anti-religious neoconservatism or punitive Trotskyism. The Other isn't there to be either met and understood as Other (pace many forms of leftism) or assimilated as reflected Self (pace many other forms of leftism and some of rightism), but to serve as a figure of fun at best, and to be warred against without quarter when it's particularly annoying to one's own sensibilites. Certain of the paeans you've made to the cultural power and glory of the West seem to have more points of contact with the geopolitical realities in The Lord of the Rings than those in real life. There's a very specific society that is right and meet and good and just and proper, and that which is not--those who are not--in conformity with it are expendable, and acceptable targets for state-sanctioned killing or worse. The self-righteousness involved is the least of the problems with this.

(To those who say I'm at least as self-righteous as Cory if not more so: Of course I am. This is, for my psychology, the natural outgrowth of considering my beliefs better than his, and if I didn't consider my beliefs better than his I wouldn't hold them. I admit that said self-righteousness is as much personality flaw for me as for anybody else, but again, it's the least of the problems I see in the worldview I'm describing.)

If I'm to give one piece of constructive criticism, it's not so much to change any of these aspects of your worldview, as I'm not sure you can and I think your perspective is in some ways valuable if in my opinion awful, as to make more of an effort to understand those who disagree with you as something other than the Enemy. I still remember the first time we discussed gene therapy, human genetic engineering, eugenic abortion, and related issues. That time you treated my objections as those of a lunatic who was out to make people suffer, rather than as somebody who happens to value diversity of experience more than you and normative functioning less, who's perhaps more prone to naturalistic fallacies than you and less prone to category errors. I'd hate to see how that conversation would have gone between you and somebody who's a comparably strident reactionary on those issues.

And no, of course Professor St James shouldn't be tried, except possibly in the Court of Awful Assumed Names. That would be double jeopardy, at least in spirit (probably legally also, since it seems like he would have had to be tried in 1967 in order to be found insane).

[Antonio the Sixth]

That was beautiful, really.

[Joe Republic]

tl;dr