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@Greyparrot
lol oh ...
You know I've been on this war path since March 2020.
May 2020 may have been when it was beyond obvious Ferguson was wrong. But anyone with the relevant background could have told you why he was wrong before he even published.
Diamond Princess Cruise data, Exhibit A to this point.
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@Greyparrot
Holy shit coal.
What?
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@thett3
See post above. you might appreciate.
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@HistoryBuff
When I posted "lock them up" or whatever I wrote, that was obviously meant to be hyperbolic. Although I would try Fauci for fraud, among other crimes he has clearly been implicated in.
I assume based on how literally you interpreted what I wrote, and just based generally on how you seem to write and communicate, that you're about 14-16 years old. And that's fine. I'm going to go easy on you, for that reason.
But you should know some background on me, though. The methods behind the modeling used to justify these lockdowns were the bread and butter of my academic background. You should assume that when I am speaking on this subject, I am doing so from the position of someone who (1) has expertise that Anthony Fauci does not (he has no background in statistical modeling whatsoever); and (2) someone who has familiarized themselves with essentially all of the relevant literature behind each of the competing models used by state-level and international COVID forecasts.
I had this dialogue with another user who has, I think, now come to see things my way. He's a little older than I think you are, though, and he's pretty smart. If you think you want to dive into the deep end, however, that's ok too. But if you're going to debate with me about the merits of what I'm saying, you're going to have to do better than "the media said [x]."
There is hard data out there which obviates every aspect of the initial model used to justify all of the lockdowns and every copycat model to follow. The original model was designed by Neil Ferguson. It's called the Imperial Model. You can google "Ferguson Imperial Model" to locate the publication he submitted to the British Government in March 2020. While the original source code he used (in a language that is about as practically useful as ancient aramaic, and is equivalent to that by current standards) he has failed to release, you can find the revised and corrected code which is still disastrously incompetent on GitHub. The story behind that fiasco is a scandal in itself.
You must read, carefully, what Ferguson claimed would happen in the world without lockdowns as he recommended (to either mitigate or suppress, they're different and you need to understand why and how). In the absence of any lockdown, Ferguson set a timeframe for how quickly COVID would spread and what impact that would have on medical resources as they existed in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Most of the world locked down, but some places did not. Among them are Sweden and Belarus. Likewise, other states like Florida also never 'really' locked down; and only imposed minimal restrictions for a limited period of time that in no way come close to what Ferguson advised. This means you have at least three data-sets against which to test Ferguson's model's assumptions; i.e., did he predict correctly? Turns out he did not. To just chart a few of his egregious errors, Ferguson assumed R-0 factors (i.e., how contagious is this thing, based on how many people any one person with COVID is likely to infect) which had no basis in reality, he failed to distinguish susceptibility to infection by age group (even though it was amply known before he published that he needed to) and assumed universal susceptibility where data were already published sufficient to falsify that claim.
Any academic who was not out to engage in fraud would have at least endeavored to recalibrate his model based on improved training data derived from the actual virus. He never did. He ignored data-sets that were inconsistent with his fantastically absurd predictions and misrepresented the significance of data he had. Ferguson published end of Q1 2020. He made predictions for Q2-Q4, and beyond through the end of the pandemic. By the middle of Q2 (so, end of May 2020) it was clear the exponential growth he predicted was not going to happen. The cases just weren't rising fast enough, and they never would.
So, why did the United States (in democrat-ran states), Canada, England, New Zealand and Australia maintain their lockdowns? I have my theories. But evidence in the form of data to support their efficacy does not exist, unless you gerrymander the data by arbitrary criteria. But even if you did do that, there exists no data that actually supports that lockdowns worked. Why, you might ask? Because the virus spread in the exact same way, no matter whether there was a lockdown or not. Said another way, there is no evidence that lockdowns had any effect on either (a) rate of community spread or (b) fatality rates (based on either the case-fatality rate or the infection fatality rate).
If Ferguson was right, then the rate of case growth in Sweden should have been not just a little ... but precipitously higher than the case growth rate in a country like the United Kingdom. Except the opposite happened. Likewise, if Ferguson was right, then at least some metric of fatality rates from COVID in Sweden should have been greater than in the United Kingdom. There too, just the opposite happened.
Why might this be? How could Ferguson have been so profoundly wrong? The answer is simple: he's a complete fucking fraud. Which is why no one in his field took him seriously before this. He was laughed out of the Obama administration in a "thanks but no thanks; don't call us we'll call you" type situation when he tried to pitch his model for Obama's pandemic prep measures. So what was different between then and now? One answer comes to mind. Trump was against lockdowns. A scientist with a fringe theory said otherwise. Behold, the "follow-the-science" opposition. To this end, anyone who disagreed got their career ended because the media and left took this as an "us versus them" type battle. Science, evidence and data had nothing whatsoever to do with any of their "safety measures," for if they did they'd have changed course by May 2020.
But Coal, you're the only person I've heard saying that! You can't possibly be right!
It pains me tho know that that's probably true, because you likely have only heard what has been reported to you in the media --- which have silenced those who disagree, and who published at the same time as Ferguson --- as steadfast voices of reason amid alarmist paranoia from idiots in media and the political left who were hell-bent on hanging every single COVID death around Tump's neck. Of course, they called Trump a racist for even talking about COVID in January and February 2020, when it was beyond obvious this was going to be a global pandemic. Videos still exist on YouTube, by some miracle, of Nancy Pelosi encouraging all in February 2020 to go celebrate Chinese New Year.
There are thousands of others (find their names in the Great Barrington Declaration), but two names you should know are John Ionidis and Jay Battacharya. Both are at Stanford's Department of Public Health. Ionidis is not just "a" but the expert in this area. He has all but vitiated everything Ferguson ever wrote. And when you read and understand the actual evidence behind any of these lockdowns, and comprehend how lacking it is or ever was, only then will you appreciate how even proposing them was sheer and complete insanity.
no, I explained why it was sheer insanity.
You did no such thing. Though you may think you have. You have not.
Anyone who wants to save lives should imprisoned. And we should protect freedom by taking away people's freedom. Do you think that this isn't crazy?
When you expand the power of the state to ruin people's lives, livelihoods and steal their liberty based on a self-evident lie; you are a criminal and must be imprisoned.
And I mean, none of the covid restrictions are new powers of the government.
Every word of this sentence is false. There is not now, nor has there ever been, precedent for the lockdowns. And do not conflate masks and lockdowns. They are not the same thing and do not involve the same issues.
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@thett3
If there is even a modicum of covd restrictions left by 2022 democrats are so screwed
I'm not so sure about that. When Gavin Newsome started talking about "climate lockdowns," he accidentally showed his hand.
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@Wylted
So to be clear… you believe a bunch of (or a few) powerful individuals made the decision to pretend that lockdowns were needed, and convince the entire world of this, so that wealth could be transferred to them. And the US government - lead by the biggest anti-lockdown mouthpiece in the world, was the largest purveyor of this global conspiracy?I'll look at amazon stock prices and how many of their competitors were ruined to see if this theory is accurate.
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@Double_R
Do you think this is a coincidence?
I could point you to tens of thousands of data points that touch on the same issue.
Are you really so sure this wasn't intentional? Do you really believe the ruling class has your interests at heart?
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@HistoryBuff
"Sheer insanity"
That's pretty strong language, devoid of any basis whatsoever to justify it.
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@HistoryBuff
Do you actually expect me to respond to your question?
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@thett3
@Tejretics
Here's my list:
1. Restore liberty. End all lockdowns.
2. Imprison anyone who supported lockdowns, from Fauci and his grant fraud to the politicians that implemented them.
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@DebateArt.com
All I really want to see is for the categories to be alphabetized, and conceptually de-duplicated.
There is too much conceptual overlap in the existing categories and the fact that they're not alpha-ordered is a source of immense frustration. Very un-user friendly.
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@Wylted
That's all the two party system is. That's why Trump was such an aberration.
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@Wylted
This is what concerns me a ton. Any time a party has complete control of all branches of government, they seem to grant whoever their president is more power. It's as if both sides are too stupid to see that power shifts occur.
Both parties basically agree on most things. Unless one of those parties is led by Trump. In which case, they had to get rid of him by any means necessary. And they did. COVID was their tool.
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@thett3
These aren't really "conspiracy theories," so much as they are observations based on patterns that hold their consistency at multiple levels of analysis:
Theory 1: Identity politics exist solely for the purpose of keeping working class groups fighting with one another. The idea of social justice itself is an illusion; a normative framework through which to provide meaning for people's lives in the absence of an external --- metaphysically grounded --- value structure. And all of it is a just a power game played with language.
Theory 2: College really only serves two purposes, which reinforce the contemporary power structure. The first is ideological indoctrination. That's what all this "diversity, equity and inclusivity" nonsense is really about. In that way, the moral-political framework through which you conceptualize the world is blighted by the ideological lens into which you cannot help but be thrust. The second is financial enslavement. That's why college admits everyone, at the price of indentured servitude. And make no mistake. Tuition prices have almost nothing to do with the actual cost of providing education. It's about the loans. And the securities and other financial products the right to collect on them becomes.
Theory 3: Lockdowns are not, and never were, about "safety" or "public health." The "scientific" evidence to support their efficacy, even independent of COVID, is virtually non-existent outside of a fringe strain of research that was the offshoot of Neil Ferguson's quackery at Imperial College in London. No one in the field of epidemiology believed they could be realized, efficaciously. Most if not all of his peers outside of a very select group of the most mathematically dishonest (or incompetent) recognized his academic fraud for exactly what it was (and have done so for many years).
But what was different about, say, H1N1 or MERS (or any other pandemic Ferguson was off by orders of magnitude in forecasting) was the relationship between people and their governments, as populism swept the United States and Europe. Ferguson's "solution" provided something that appeared to be --- and could be sold in the media as --- a "scientific" justification for the government's taking people's lives, freedom, livelihood and dignity; in the name of "safety." Those images we all remember from Italy in March 2020 were horrifying. They were the shot heard round the world.
All of a sudden, the Davos-type globalists now were back in control; having reminded "the herd" why they "need" centralized power. People and governments turned to "public health leaders" and the "World Health Organization" for "guidance" to protect people's "safety." A much easier sell than "we're going to confine you in your homes, bankrupt your business and force you into debt that will destroy you and your family on an intergenerational basis," all because "we know what's best for you."
Linking lockdowns to safety was the single greatest lie that any government has ever told its people. It is a complete and utter fabrication. And yet, it has become "common knowledge" among any watcher of the BBC, Sky News, any Canadian news station and most Australian news sources. They even framed it from the perspective of something like a health-based noblesse oblige: "stay home, save lives."
I'm not saying everyone who repeated that bullshit knew they were being used. I'm saying everyone who did is a useful idiot to the power-holding interests that exploited this crisis to transform it into the single greatest transfer of wealth in recorded history from the worlds' rising middle classes, in countries developed and developing, to the hands of private capital.
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@thett3
Hard to nail down a single purpose. So many present themselves. But of all the stories out there on JFK's assassination, this is the one that has been the most difficult to tear apart. From what it looks like, there were a variety of different people and groups who were very interested in getting rid of Kennedy. I don't think their motives were all the same. They just had a common goal.
In reality, we'll never know what happened. But Jim Garrison's book, On the Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy looks pretty believable to me.
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-General Patton was assassinated by the US government
Maybe.
-The official narrative surrounding the JFK assassination is BS, although I don't know what actually happened
It was likely the CIA.
-COVID-19 was made in a lab
Not a conspiracy theory. Verifiable fact.
-There really were significant numbers of American POWs left behind in Vietnam
Alive? Yes. Dead too.
-The Soviet Union held onto American POW's after WWII, and after failed negotiations they died in the gulags (this was originally in the second category, but a WWII veteran I met a few years ago who ended his war near Czechoslovakia told me out of the blue that he witnessed Americans in Soviet camps and that they never came home)
This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's widely known throughout Russia and even has been reported on by American press. They were in Kolyma/Magadan, Vorkuta and many others. And it wasn't just POWs. It was Americans who were suspected of spying anywhere throughout the Soviet Union.
-UFO's are a government psyop
No opinion.
-The official narrative behind the Las Vegas shooting is BS, but I don't know what actually happened
Official narrative?
-Jeffery Epstein did not commit suicide, and may in fact still be alive
With his pal Bill Gates? (I'm only half joking).
-Joe McCarthy was right about almost everything
No he wasn't. Though, if he was alive today and oriented his ire against the Chinese, he would be.
-The 1960 election was stolen
No opinion.
-The concept of "conspiracy theories" is itself a conspiracy to cause a reflexive rejection among the populace against any explanation of that contradicts the official narrative
I generally agree that the term "conspiracy theory" is used for the purpose of reinforcing existing power structures.
Conspiracy theories I don't believe, but wouldn't be that surprised if they turned out to be true:
-The official narrative around 9/11 is bunk
It is not that it's "bunk," so much as it is "incomplete." There are few people who have ever touched that third rail in the way it deserves, but Vince Flynn is one of them in his Mitch Rapp series. There are aspects of that series that are closer to being true than anything that could ever be reported on in the media.
What is missing is how deeply, personally connected the Saudi government was to the Bin Laden's and how directly responsible the Saudi government is for 9/11.
Further, missing from the narrative is what role Bill Clinton's incompetence in terms of foreign policy and hamfisted paranoia related to the CIA played in 9/11 coming to be. There's a non-trivial argument to be made that if Bill Clinton had have listened to the CIA about Bin Laden in the 1990s, it would have never happened.
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@Wylted
Ah, yes. The old IP leak ...
Relatedly, this is such a futile thread. whoever that fucking guy yyw was .... he should stay the hell away.
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@Vader
@oromagi
When I was a male
Looks like Oro beat me to commenting on this little gem.
Oh well.
In any event, we can strike a balance between girls (and all people) not engaging in psychologically destructive thought processes and behaviors; and encouraging people to be healthy and responsible about their weight.
I think the so called body positivity movement has been very bad for girls and women alike. Fat is not attractive and any suggestion to the contrary is dangerous and promotes irresponsible lifestyle choices. Some people can't help it, true enough. And the food the socioeconomically disenfranchised can afford often makes it impossible to maintain a healthy weight, which is something I'm sympathetic to.
But everyone should strive to be physically fit and healthy. The alternative is dying of any one of the dozens of foreseeable health problems and/or complications associated with obesity, and living a life that's a lot harder than it has to be in the mean-time. Of course, you also leave family and friends who care about you behind.
That's the long-term cost of the so-called body positivity movement. It encourages teenage and 20-something girls to develop unhealthy eating habits that will take them away from their families and kids before their time has come.
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@RationalMadman
@Undefeatable
I agree with RM. I'm not going to publicly highlight anyone's flaws, in a circumstance like this.
If there's something you've done that needed to be addressed, I would DM you.
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@Greyparrot
That all being said, I strongly support gay/lesbian parenting. For reasons that I think should be obviousPlease expound for the edification of everyone interested. I highly value your insights.
If you're gay, and you want to have a kid, you have to try REALLY hard to make it happen. Whether through adoption, surrogacy or whatever else may be available. But it's not easy. There's a huge time and financial commitment just involved in making it happen, which is a barrier to entry heteros do not experience.
And the two-parent model is about as good as can be hoped for. But one will do, although frankly I couldn't imagine adopting a kid before I was married. I know what my work schedule is and I barely have time to take care of a dog much less a child. Although the time will come when I'll probably rearrange my priorities there.
Beyond that, for those kids who need to be adopted, couples that cannot biologically reproduce are prime adoption candidates. I should note that adoption is a kind of uniquely Western and really most commonly American thing (it just doesn't happen in non-Christian countries at even close to the same rate), but it is absolutely absurd to claim that being raised by the system is better than two dads or two moms. If not totally insane.
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@Vader
Since when has Wylted been troubled to follow "the rules"?
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@RationalMadman
I don't see why his sign-up date matters.
Wylted multi-accounts all the time.
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@Greyparrot
In a world where it is increasingly no longer socially acceptable for a biological male to lead a nuclear family, the next best option over a child being raised by a single parent would be being raised by 2 gay parents.Disagree?
I disagree with the premise, sure. Of course it's acceptable for a biological male to lead a nuclear family, and any suggestion to the contrary is preposterous. Though I'd note there's no shortage of preposterousness from the woke-types who have developed an almost fattishistic obsession with bitching and moaning about "whiteness" and "maleness" as if those identity-claims were the sole proximate causes of all their --- mostly imagined --- grievances with the world.
Having moved the ball so far forward in the direction of achieving equality before the law and society, all that's left for the former-social justice warrior types is to invent new grievances for them to rectify. Yesterday (and today too, I guess) it was the so-called "patriarchy" but today, it's "whiteness" and "maleness." I can only await the coming "final solution" to both they'll start advocating for in the years to come.
But we likely won't get that far. The plague of that particularly American species of "woke" progressivism is bound to die out like any African hemorrhagic fever. Notably, the reason ebola doesn't ever really present a pandemic risk is because it kills its hosts too fast to spread. Sure, there's some spreading and the initially infected die off; but it doesn't last.
That all being said, I strongly support gay/lesbian parenting. For reasons that I think should be obvious.
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I don't know who YYW was, but I get the feeling he was probably a complete asshole. It's probably best that he's gone. I've heard rumors that YYW has gone all Tom Stall on DART, where he was Joey on DDO. But it's all just rumors anyway. YYW always liked Viggo Mortensen movies a little too much, anyway.
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@Username
Wylted, how do you feel about being banned?
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@Username
Well, wylted ... I didn't know you'd made a come-back.
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@thett3
The verdict is in. Thett wins this debate.
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@fauxlaw
@FourTrouble
Resolution: Drunk driving should be legal.
PRO correctly states the BOPs in the intro:
This is a normative topic, so burdens of persuasion are equal on both sides. Starting points are equal. Pro must show that drunk driving should be legal. Con must show the opposite.
PRO argues essentially that: (1) DUI laws don't serve any interest of our criminal justice system, because (a) they lack a legitimate retributive purpose, (b) do not deter drunk driving, (c) are over- and under-inclusive and (d) aren't necessary; while contending that (2) regulation mitigates harms better, and proposing that "an additional licensing test for drunk driving" be implemented that would "mitigate a number of problems" such as actually deterring "bad drivers, which is the relevant group that we want to deter" as distinct from merely drunk drivers and would more efficiently allocate resources ("police could go back to focusing on reckless drivers rather than drunk ones").
CON, on the other hand, contends that: (1) PRO simply "assumes that criminal law serves but one purpose: retribution, or punitive justice. Criminal law actually serves three public, or social purposes: punitive, curative and preventive." (Note: I removed the Oxford comma from that quote because it irritates me. I will not, however, deduct points from CON based on his Oxford comma usage, for reasons I can discuss if the debaters are interested.) Further, CON argues that: (2) society is protected by DUI laws because DUI laws deter drunk driving (this is the most charitable and least incoherent rendering of the point CON struggled to make).
- Criminal Justice System Interests
- Purposes
- PRO's heading states only that DUI laws don't serve a retributive purpose.
- Though he is actually arguing that they don't serve a legitimate retributive purpose, wherein such legitimate retributive purposes would focus only on punishing those who in fact deserve to be published (such as the examples he cites, including rapists, murderers, thieves and sex offenders) unlike those who simply drink alcohol and drive, who are undeserving.
- CON's argument does not address the body of PRO's legitimate retributive purpose argument; focusing only on the heading which, as I noted above, doesn't jive with the actual argument he made.
- PRO was actually arguing, as per the body of his point, that DUI laws don't serve a legitimate retributive purpose (see above), not that they don't serve any retributive purpose. So even if I agree with CON, that DUI laws some at least one retributive purpose (and I do), that isn't rebutting the legitimacy point.
- And again, I agree with CON that DUI laws in fact DO serve a retributive purpose; though that's where CON's argument on this subject ends. He provides no substantive rebuttal to the body of PRO's argument relative to the retributive purpose's legitimacy. CON does not, for example, provide an example of why DUI laws' retributive purposes are legitimate, explain their utility and the like.
- PRO argues that DUI laws don't deter (a point better started in his R2), aren't necessary and are over/under-inclusive. CON says they do deter, are necessary; even if over/under-inclusive.
- PRO makes the point that cops can only identify drunk drivers if they were bad drivers first. Which is obvious. PRO suggests that "there's no evidence that adding multiple layers of criminal prohibitions leads to greater deterrence." Even according to CON's own source, PRO observes that "DUI laws fail to prevent over 10,000 traffic fatalities related to drunk driving each year." By R3, CON counters that "estimated effects suggest that having BAC above either [limit for] DUI or aggravated DUI threshold reduces recidivism," thus deterring; and "Prior to 2000, when .08 BAC was established nationwide, the annual traffic fatalities due to DUI was in the mid-to-high 30,000s."
- Even still, "As [PRO] explained in R1, DUI laws don't deter because (a) drunks misjudge their BAC, and (b) police officers can’t distinguish between sober & drunk drivers until after-the-fact. Con never disputes these underlying facts."
- The R1 distinction CON endeavors to draw between "curative" and "preventative" purposes is incomprehensible. CON argues that "curative" means "the court system of justice to resolve criminal cases" and "preventative" means "to deter criminal action by defining expected social behavior."
- If I am being more charitable than I should --- which is what I'm doing here --- I guess CON meant that the former is an enforcement mechanism and the latter comprises those expected social norms to be enforces. But even still, that's not precisely what CON said. CON is trying to talk about two aspects of forward-looking justifications for laws, generally: deterrence: the rules and the means to enforce those rules. Though he doesn't actually state that; instead he calls this "jurisdictional justice." He means deterrence. Whatever.
- CON lists effects of consuming alcohol and suggests these impair driving ability. CON lists statistics relevant to drunk driving. These, according to CON, necessitate DUI laws. Yet, these are not "evidence that adding multiple layers of criminal prohibitions leads to greater deterrence," (see PRO R1). The issue, says PRO, "isn't drinking, but rather unsafe driving caused by a significant degree of impairment." As PRO clarifies in R2, "CON fails to distinguish different levels of drunkenness/impairment. DUI laws currently prohibit driving with a BAC of .08, but some people can't drive safely at a BAC of .03, while others drive safely with significantly higher BACs. As I explained in R1, DUI laws are under- and over- inclusive."
- But that doesn't matter because, as per PRO's R2-R3, "DUI laws don’t deter dangerous driving because drunks misjudge BAC, and law enforcement can't distinguish sober & drunk drivers."
- PRO wins this point.
- Drunk Driving License
- PRO proposes a drunk driving license, which CON says is absurd because it "ignores that a driving test encounters drivers of variable skills, yet applies a single standard of acceptable driving skill. It also ignores that a DUI test would have variable thresholds of acceptance, i.e., multiple standards. It is simply illogical and impractical to eliminate a common standard in favor of imposing a standard for one, another standard for another, and so on, when a universal standard can by applied: if you drink alcohol, of any amount, do not drive." In R2, CON further adds that "Driving ability is diminished by just .02% BAC. Regardless of not being legally drunk, the driver’s diminished condition may affect his ability to avoid an accident just by failure to drive defensively with due caution, such as the above suggestion: If you drink, don’t drive, which is a necessary driving caution even for fully unaffected drivers of any debilitating condition."
- PRO rebuts in R2, "A drunk-driving licensure test could help identify unsafe drivers & alcoholics before-the-fact. It would also deter reckless driving by providing would-be drinkers with individualized feedback about their drunk-driving skills. As a result, people who fail the licensure test would know they aren't capable of driving when they drink. This results in better education about the risks of drunk driving, leading to broader & greater deterrent effects than DUI laws."
- PRO notes in R3 that "Con misunderstands how a drunk-driving license would work. It's a specialized license, like the ones people get for trucking or transporting hazardous materials. It doesn't apply different standards to different people -- the safety standard is the same for all drunk drivers, just as the standard for truckers is the same for all truckers."
- I am unconvinced either side won this.
PRO wins all points other than the drunk driving license, based on the fact that he demonstrated that DUI laws lack any legitimate retributive purpose (i.e., drunk drivers don't deserve punishment); DUI laws don't deter, and the distinctions make no difference in the outcome (or if they do, CON has not established a causal nexus between those distinctions and the societal benefits he alludes to); and DUI laws are unnecessary b/c they overlap with other driving laws, such as reckless driving. Drunk driving license point is won by neither side. There are too many problems in such a test's potential application, as noted by CON. But, this point was mostly superfluous/tangential to the resolution anyway. Even if CON won this issue, PRO still wins the debate overall.
The formatting was incredibly irritating in this debate. Particularly from CON.
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I have not read this thread. But on the off chance it relates to Joe Biden's dogs, I note they are the only members of his administration I approve of.
In fact, the feisty young dog has been wonderful. His tendency to bite white house staffers is something I regard as a benefit, not something for which he should be sent to "obedience school."
German shepherds are just wonderful dogs, though. My fourth favorite breed.
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@RationalMadman
I disagree with both of those claims.
Israel is not "self determined," and the world doesn't care about Palestine. If the world did, their actions would match their words.
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@RationalMadman
> And who 'determined' Israel, the nation we have, into existence after world war two?
What's your point? I don't see why this matters. If you want to argue about alleged historical injustices, the Muslims do not and will not exit that discussion morally unscathed.
And that conversation is a futile one to have, anyway. I could talk about how the Crusades should have gone the other way, how it's a complete injustice that the Holy Roman Empire ever fell to Muslims and how the only way to correct the historical error that was the Ottoman Empire's existence would be to raise Constantinople once more.
That's the issue with even humoring those arguments.
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@FourTrouble
> As a general matter, what justifies possession of land?
States are states because they (a) have borders they possess the ability to enforce with violence and (b) are recognized as having those borders by other states. Whether this system is justified in any sense isn't something I am concerned with. It's the way things are.
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@FourTrouble
> What do you view as the civilizational risks of national self-determination?
At some point I might forward you something I worked on while in grad school on this issue, if you're interested. But most of my PhD work was focused on conflict in Eastern and Central Europe after the USSR's fall. Central Asia and the Middle East, to a lesser degree.
There's a phenomenon we've come to recognize as "Balkanization," which typically refers to a series of events leading to the fragmentation of a larger state into smaller ones, disputed territories and the like --- typically that fragment along ethnic/national lines.
While the term's roots trace back to the Ottoman Empire's dissolution, the nastiest, most brutal and most deadly border/ethnic conflicts largely broke out around the world after the Cold War ended. Essentially, there was fragmentation at two levels. First, the world order had been redefined from a bipolar hegemonic order in which the United States and USSR were dueling superpowers (or so they were said to be); to a unipolar hegemonic order in which only one superpower remained, the United States. Second, the geopolitical utility of maintaining alliances with great and even regional or lesser powers totally changed ... almost overnight.
So, what that meant was that powder-kegs of ethnic conflict like Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Albania, Azerbaijan and others remained relatively at peace due to overlapping alliances that kept them from fighting with one another. For example, ethnic disputes within the USSR or between Warsaw pact members were dispersed with swift and exacting brutality. The idea was that the costs of doing anything that would threaten the integrity of the Eastern Bloc's alliance against the West was greater than any threat posed by the neighbors that people hated. On the other hand, ethnic disputes within NATO-allied countries were sanctioned and their leaders usually dealt with by the intelligence agencies of one or more of the United States, England or France --- if not handled appropriately, internally. And conflict between any particular Warsaw-pact-allied ethnic group with a rival affiliated with NATO would never dare throw the first stone, given the risks of escalation.
All of that changed when the USSR fell. The most horrifying violence seen in Europe since WWII swept across the slavic world, mostly along ethnic/national lines. You can look into the breakup of Yugoslavia and particularly the Bosnian war for examples of this. I was a kid when that was going on. Though, our church hosted refugees from Bosnia inside and outside the United States. Similar, and sometimes even worse, things took place in Africa a well; largely for the same reasons during the same time period. And while it may sound racist, the patterns of ethnic conflict that characterized Africa before colonization and which now characterize much of sub-Saharan Africa now would be the mean to which the world would regress if national self-determination were the norm.
And the risks should not be discounted, either. There are at least 218 identifiable and discreet ethnic groups in Russia at this time, more than 100 in China (I don't know the exact number) and about a dozen or so substantially represented in the United States. Russia is the most ethnically diverse country on earth and for the most part has always been, if you were curious. But the risks aren't limited to Russia. If Palestine gets a state, for example ... why can't the Chechens? On the other hand, if the Chechens CAN have a state, why not the Palestinians?
Consider the implications, in view of the blood Putin spilt during the Chechen wars throughout the 1990s. That's why, whatever Putin, Lavrov, Peskov or others may claim; Russia will never support Palestinian statehood. Ever. China would make the same argument about, at least, the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Behind closed doors, Spain would make the same argument about Catalonia and the Basque. The list goes on and on.
I think most of the world's leaders recognize that, while Palestine might not be the domino that sets everything in motion, the risks that it might outweigh any benefit. So they do what they can to maintain the status quo. If all of Palestine's alleged supporters (none of them actually give a shit about Palestine) actually united their efforts against Israel, it would force the United States' hand. They do not, because they know that Palestine is a problem that could one day be their own. Meanwhile they condemn Israel and pass resolutions that mean nothing in the UN, while "Islamic scholars" decry Israel's purported "violations of international law," where the "international law" at issue isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
People do not understand this, even though it's the 800 lb gorilla in the room.
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@sadolite
Well said.
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@zedvictor4
Palestine is not a state, but it provides aid and comfort to terrorists, particularly Hamas.
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@RationalMadman
I'm really not kidding when I say I will never support any "Palestinian" state. And that stance has less to do with my feelings about Palestinians than with the civilizational risks of national self determination.
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@RationalMadman
One state of Israel, comprised of everyone in Israel and anyone who currently lives in what is known as the Palestinian territory.
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@RationalMadman
> you wanted to wipe their culture and would-be-national identity away from them.
I didn't say that either, and that is not something I am advocating for now or have advocated for at any point.
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@RationalMadman
Why do you think "one state" solution means "wipe all palestenians off the map"?
I didn't say that and have never made that claim.
Nor would I.
Why are you putting words in my mouth?
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@RationalMadman
> West Bank and Gaza to lose all of their identity and culture because it is written in some bronze age texts that a certain ethnicity is superior
That is not what I said and it is unclear to me how you reached that conclusion.
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@RationalMadman
I decline to consider this issue from the perspective of who "owns" or has any "right" to claim any land --- especially where such claims are based on ethnic or national identity. Neither ethnicity nor nationality can "entitle" a person to own a piece of geographic territory. In this way, I do not defend Israel's possession of any land or territory on the basis of their purported "right" to it. Nor, for that matter, will I ever support vesting the Palestinians with any state based on their ethnicity or nationality.
I do not now, and will never, support giving the Palestinians a state; nor do I even think it is proper to refer to "Palestine" as a state, where it is no such thing.
I have, however, said before and will restate now that I regret the current state of conflict between the terrorists known as Hamas and their sympathizers/enablers in the PLO. Civilians are caught in the crossfire between the IDF, and Hamas indeed choses the locations from which to launch its missiles for the explicit purpose of maximizing civilian casualties. Hamas regards those who die in this way as involuntary "martyrs." They are, after all, a cult of death that increasingly resembles ISIS or Al Qaeda.
How this happens is straightforward:
Hamas choses a location in the middle of a neighborhood, such as a preschool or a hospital if they can find it. Then, they mount their rockets and fire them into Israel for the purpose of murdering civilians. Hamas makes no distinction between civilians and strategic targets, unlike Israel, who more or less operate according to the "just war" tradition in the Western world. Israel then identifies the physical location from which Hamas's rockets are launched, and retaliates with counter-strikes only in the specific area from which the missiles are launched and nowhere else. Civilians inevitably die.
Why does Israel retaliate against the specific launch sites, you might wonder? Three reasons: (1) to kill any remaining Hamas who may be on-site (and they usually do stick around long enough to be killed by Israeli air-strikes because Israel retaliates swiftly); (2) to signal to anyone who saw the rocket strikes that Israel knows exactly where they came from, and will respond in kind when targeted (ideally to motivate Palestinian people to interfere with Hamas's terrorism); and (3) to prevent that site from being used again for the purpose of launching missiles into Israel.
Why not just respond with ground-forces, you might wonder? This is the IDF's preferred response, due to the fact that soldiers can better discriminate between Hamas and civilians than airstrike missiles. Nevertheless, they are often prevented from doing this because of Hamas's control of the Palestinian border. The day may well come that Israel kills every member of the Palestinian army to stamp Hamas out (a day I hope to see in my lifetime), but for now, the counter-strikes are the only viable option for the most part.
For so long as Hamas exists, there will never be peace in Israel. Nor will there be any peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. There is really only one solution, though its costs in the short term are unacceptably high. Thus the status quo continues. And so shall it continue, for the foreseeable future.
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Others are encouraged to ask away. The better your question, the more likely I am to write a detailed response --- although the fact that I might not write a detailed response doesn't mean I thought your question was bad.
RM's question on the trans athlete, for example, was a fine question. It just required only one sentence to answer.
Suggested topics include:
Politics, including everything from first principles, to competing values to specific policies.
Books, including both fiction and non-fiction; pulp fiction and mass market thriller novels to hard-hitting Russian literature.
Advice, although it's entirely possible I may start asking you questions if I need more information from you in order to understand your situation.
Hobbies, including everything from YouTube, to first-person-shooter type videogames (ideally on consoles).
Culture, whether your own or a different one.
Etc.
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@Theweakeredge
Do you think I'm transphobic? If so, state your reasons why.
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