My position is stated. I only debate in good faith.
4,435 karma · joined July 13, 2013
Considering the inexpensive housing, an excellent Jesuit preparatory school for $7k/year, the low cost of living, and the huge scholarships to the city's University, a family of five could live extremely comfortably for $150,000-$200,000/yr. Couples with occupations such as lawyer, doctor, engineer, or small business owner live like they're downright rich.
I suppose it's the old adage that keeps me in DC: You could sell your house here and live like a king anywhere else. But you never will, because you're afraid you'll never be to get back.
2. The "dominant" vs. oppressed false diachotamy gives you away as an ideologue with whom I cannot have a productive discussion. At one time or another we are all the oppressed and we are all the dominant.
This ridiculous caste system isn't some static hierarchy that was ordained by God or an inevitability of our history. Race, class, and gender are societal constructions which must be actively sustained to survive. Yet you insist on utilizing the very same categories drawn by racists, which only reinforces the persistence of hierarchy you claim to despise.
Finally, dismissing every contrary argument by attributing identity-based motives to your opponent is facile. Categorizing all those who disagree with you as stooges of some eternal shadowy "dominant" cabal is the exact type of unscientific babble that constitutes every conspiracy theory.
Most importantly, it is also a very convenient way to turn every argument into an ad hominem based on the race/gender of the speaker.
This is what happened:
I read a post written by someone who broadly stereotyped millions of people in a racial and gendered fashion, and I raised an objection. It was very simple.
The question is, why are you so desperate to make this about "white male dominance"? This is about what the author stated.
Is it because you realize your vacuous arguments cannot stand on their own merits, or because you are too insecure to confront the intellectually arid world view which you clutch like a safety blanket? Or do you merely think that the "dominant" persons (as determined by you) simply have no right to a voice at all?
It's a very common political quip. The usual attribution of the original version is to Churchill, with the specific phrasing I used reappearing in various contexts in the United States for the last fifty-odd years.
Scorn is a badge of honor if earned when speaking the truth.
No logical person would conclude that outburst was free of gender or racial bias.
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EDIT in Reply:
1. Your comment is, however unintentionally, quite interesting.
Never have I seen someone so self-righteously accuse another of self-righteousness. The closest analogy I can devise is an infinite regression of ignorance, a perfectly formed fractal of feces. Maintaining that level of willful lack of self-awareness must be exhausting.
My goodness.
2. Overt racism is a heuristic I use to determine whether to take a person's other viewpoints seriously. This article did not pass that test.
If you punched someone in the face, and then specifically asked her not to pay attention to it, would you be shocked if she failed to carry on as if nothing had happened?
When someone falsely deems you, your family, and your children bigots by mere virtue of the color of their skin and the shape of their genitals, that is not any less radically offensive due to the author's own race and gender. This type of casual discrimination cheapens the experience of racism, engrains the very cultural atrocities it claims to combat, and alienates the very people who's minds we need to change.
To raise racial specters for personal gain and social gratification is extremely troubling, and I will not hesitate to speak out against it.
They want to know that if someone attempts to blackmail you, you would rather the information become public than betray your country.
Russia's goal was to create the perception that they're meddling in this election, so as to delegitimize the electoral process itself.
Her father's with USAID, which does help explain the foreign policy connections.
USAID is much more powerful than is commonly recognized, with an unclassified budget about twice that of the CIA, and is frequently involved in international strategic matters.
The problem in this election was that Facebook did exactly what it was designed to do: show people more of what they wanted to see. Unfortunately that creates extreme echo chambers, where blatantly false news ricochets around the site, blindly liked by partisans on each side.
So that leaves open the question of what to do.
On the one hand, Facebook is a massive media company, and I am not comfortable handing them carte blanche to police and control the speech of their users. On the other, Facebook's current policy of "neutrality" creates an environment that favors political isolation and the spread of outright falsehoods.
At the very least, it seems Facebook could do something about purveyors of those falsehoods algorithmically. But even then I have my misgivings about a private corporation, or really anyone, determining the acceptable range of public discourse.
After all, whenever there's a world event, one of the first questions asked by the United States leadership is, "Where is the nearest carrier group?"
There is no longer a unipolar hegemony in Eurasia. That's the message these maneuvers, and indeed the Chinese acquisition of this carrier itself, are intended to convey.
Over the next few months, we can expect the dominance of the United States Navy to be increasingly challenged, as the other great powers try to determine the limits of the President-Elect's isolationism.
The most significant mentions in the Western canon primarily have to do with the Greco-Persian Wars. As much of European understanding of that time period is filtered through Greek and Roman sources, we hear more about their conquests than their failures.
I do some heavy data mining, but any problem that won't fit in RAM gets offloaded to a cluster on AWS.
However, if you look at the bottom it states that this case is a reference design, much like the Google phones, intended to be a platform upon which others can build new products.
The barriers to moving beyond Excel can be overcome, but it will take some serious effort on many fronts. Both Excel and SQL embody genius concepts, but are such poor implementations that it is easy to conflate the cruft with the advantages.
Excel is something managers and executives can understand, so it became the default language for data analysis. Now technologists trapped using it have to create ex post facto justifications for why it's really "just misunderstood."
Excel is massively slow, makes it easy for beginners to make massive mistakes, computes lots of types in very odd manners, performs floating point operations wrong, and leads to spaghetti code that is a rat's nest of incomprehensible cross-references.
Worst of all, the lack of code path visibility usually leads to a bus factor of 1.
Sure, one can learn to operate Excel for data analysis with a decent level of efficiency, in the same manner one can cross the Pacific in a canoe, but both are still terrible tools for the job.
I think you're very confused about what sovereign immunity actually is. Sovereign immunity, also known as crown immunity, is the common law right of the monarch not to be sued, from which judicial and investigative immunity descend. My comment had nothing to do with the American Revolution, except to note that the British imposed this terrible concept across their now-defunct empire.