Russian ambassador told Moscow that Kushner wanted secret communications channel with Kremlin

Clevfan4life

While i agree the shit is out of hand, obf, what did u think....honestly....when trump was like in office 5 minutes before he started calling people fake news, was going to happen?

OldBrownsFan

@clevfan4life said:
While i agree the shit is out of hand, obf, what did u think....honestly....when trump was like in office 5 minutes before he started calling people fake news, was going to happen?

How Tribalism Overrules Reason, and Makes Risky Times More Dangerous

http://bigthink.com/risk-reason-and-reality/how-tribalism-overrules-reason-and-makes-risky-times-more-dangerous#articles-nav-dropdown-0

I found this interesting and although I don't agree with all of it it does kind of explain what is going on in our country today.

DieHardBrownsFan

MLD Woody

@oldbrownsfan said:

When it comes to something that is subjective like politics which is what I am talking about reputable sources are in the eye of the beholder.

On another subject you post on (climate change) I would only say those on your side of this argument have been caught fudging numbers, lying and for years using fear mongering tactics which erodes credibility. I can go back to articles a few decades ago written by the environmental alarmists about some of their wild predictions that never came close to being true.

The "other side" has been exponentially worse in lying and making shit up. Hands down. Their whole playbook is to create doubt in the public, just like Tobacco companies did.

Many of those "wild predictions" that you and others seem to remember either never happened or weren't from a reputable source.

MLD Woody

@mld-woody said:

From the Harvard study which I am reading through (weird, right? actually reading astudy that was posted instead of just using it as a headline)

Have the mainstream media covered Trump in a fair and balanced way? That question cannot be answered definitively in the absence of an agreed-upon version of reality against which to compare Trumps coverage. Any such assessment would also have to weigh the news medias preference for the negative, a tendency in place long before Trump became president. Given that tendency, the fact that Trump has received more negative coverage than his predecessor is hardly surprising. The early days of his presidency have been marked by far more missteps and miss-hits, often self-inflicted, than any presidency in memory, perhaps ever.

Whats truly atypical about Trumps coverage is that its sharply negative despite the fact that hes the source of nearly two-thirds of the sound bites surrounding his coverage. Typically, newsmakers and groups complain that their media narrative is negative because theyre not given a chance to speak for themselves. Over the past decade, U.S. coverage of Muslims has been more than 75 percent negative. And Muslims have had little chance to tell their side of the story. Muslims account for less than 5 percent of the voices heard in news reports about Islam.[31] So why is Trumps coverage so negative even though he does most of the talking? The fact is, hes been on the defensive during most of his 100 days in office, trying to put the best face possible on executive orders, legislative initiatives, appointments, and other undertakings that have gone bad. Even Fox has not been able to save him from what analyst David Gergen called the worst 100 days weve ever seen.[32]

Again, posting this portion of that Harvard study you've repeatedly referenced

Clevfan4life

@oldbrownsfan said:

How Tribalism Overrules Reason, and Makes Risky Times More Dangerous

http://bigthink.com/risk-reason-and-reality/how-tribalism-overrules-reason-and-makes-risky-times-more-dangerous#articles-nav-dropdown-0

I found this interesting and although I don't agree with all of it it does kind of explain what is going on in our country today.

It explains the whole fuvking world obf. Ive been harping onbthis concept on this board since i got here becsuse i see how pervasive it is.

OldBrownsFan

@mld-woody said:

The "other side" has been exponentially worse in lying and making shit up. Hands down. Their whole playbook is to create doubt in the public, just like Tobacco companies did.

Many of those "wild predictions" that you and others seem to remember either never happened or weren't from a reputable source.

Isn't Al Gore one of the top banana's for the climate change crowd?:

Clevfan4life

Self appointed. If i had gores money and ran around unintelligently promoting climate change, it would be no different. He's a huckster but it doesnt really change anything.

MLD Woody

"some of the models suggest there's a 75% chance the entire northern ice cap could be completely ice free in some of the Summers in the next 5-10 years"

Sounds like a lot of "some's"

No, Al Gore is not the end all be all. Something isn't true on climate change because he says it. No one on here has ever made a claim like that.

It's the reputable scientists and scientific groups, that produce peer reviewed studies, that provide the source for climate change into.

MLD Woody

You aren't going to like that I'm going here OBF, but this is something I never expect you to change your mind on. If you can honestly believe a man lived inside a big fish, then I don't expect you to all of a sudden follow the science behind a greatly politicized issue.

Basically, nothing tells me you'll all of a sudden follow the science that will cause you to disagree with what your political side is pushing.

OldBrownsFan

@mld-woody said:

You aren't going to like that I'm going here OBF, but this is something I never expect you to change your mind on. If you can honestly believe a man lived inside a big fish, then I don't expect you to all of a sudden follow the science behind a greatly politicized issue.

Basically, nothing tells me you'll all of a sudden follow the science that will cause you to disagree with what your political side is pushing.

The whole of our Christian faith is built on miracles. It would take a miracle for the story of Jonah to be true and I believe in miracles the same as I do about the miracle of Jesus who died for our sins on a cross and rose from the dead and went to prepare a place for those who put their trust in Him.

As for climate change I rarely post on it because I don't follow it enough. I hear some of these strange ideas coming from the liberal side that scare me such as pretty much having the masses go back to the stone age with no air conditioning or washing machines while the wealthy can pay some kind of carbon tax and plant a few trees and still fly around on their private jets and not have to sacrifice at all.

From the Christian perspective we are to be good stewards of this planet which means doing what we can to not pollute the environment but I believe in a common sense approach. I think it is silly to wreck our own economy and close down coal plants while China and India are building new ones monthly. To be effective anything like this has to be done worldwide or we are just spinning our wheels.

Clevfan4life

Wait, obf u treat the story of jonah not as an allegory but as an actual event?

OldBrownsFan

I do. Jesus used the illustration of Jonah as an example of his death and resurrection. I don't believe he would have used a fable to illustrate this.

Clevfan4life

@oldbrownsfan said:
I do. Jesus used the illustration of Jonah as an example of his death and resurrection. I don't believe he would have used a fable to illustrate this.

i havent read the bible in some time so im not entirely fsmiliar with the story anymore, but i vaguely recall this from childhood.....and it was in the allegorical context. I went to catholic school and they didn't even treat it as literal

MLD Woody

@oldbrownsfan said:

As for climate change I rarely post on it because I don't follow it enough. I hear some of these strange ideas coming from the liberal side that scare me such as pretty much having the masses go back to the stone age with no air conditioning or washing machines while the wealthy can pay some kind of carbon tax and plant a few trees and still fly around on their private jets and not have to sacrifice at all.

Wait... What?

Clevfan4life

obf's been walking around too many wall st ptotests

Clevfan4life

Nobody of any real pertinence is suggesting we go back to the flintstones

calfoxwc

#woodylovesdick

OldBrownsFan

@mld-woody said:
Wait... What?

One example of what I am talking about.

What progressives want to do is bring back sumptuary laws. Such laws govern how and what people can spend their money on.

The Menace of Air Conditioning

In their quest to ban ‘harmful’ luxuries, progressives want to solve something that has not been considered a problem for 250 years. Something strange has happened to air conditioning of late. It has become one of America’s chief sources of hot air. For the last decade, each summer as temperatures rise, so does a tempest of dismay at Americans’ affection for artificially cooled air. The latest gust of disapproval was vented by the Washington Post’s Karen Heller, the title of whose rambling, incoherent column against Willis Carrier’s gift captured well the attitude of a small but vociferous cabal: “I don’t need air conditioning, and neither do you.”

Air conditioning isn’t the only thing people are being urged to give up for a better life. An array of commentators, predominantly on the left, have been imploring their compatriots to forswear not only air conditioning but cars, meat, soda, and even children. While air conditioning and its “accomplices” are usually charged separately, it’s not difficult to discern a common reasoning behind the indictments. I don’t mean environmentalism, either, though that’s part of it. Rather, all are driven by the conviction that the items in question are luxuries, things people don’t need — and, because they aren’t needed, it is proper to beseech (and ultimately compel?) others to surrender them.

There are two ways to get people to give up goods society doesn’t want them to have: making them more expensive and banning them. The records of both can charitably be described as mixed. Nevertheless, the Left has been clear that it is open to both approaches to reduce the presence of these “bads.” The Left does have historical precedent on its side. For most of history, luxury items were subject not only to moral and social but also legal sanction. For most. But not all, and there’s the rub. For the Left’s solution to the perceived ills of air conditioning etc. is to revive sumptuary laws — a solution that, to be viable, requires turning the consumption of luxury goods back into a social problem, something it hasn’t been considered for 250 years.

The moral stigma that once attached to the idea of luxury has been effaced from the West’s cultural memory. (Look at some advertising if you don’t believe me.) Yet until recently, most societies regulated the purchase of luxury goods. They did so via sumptuary laws, as laws restricting personal expenditure are known. Sumptuary laws don’t outlaw the sale of certain goods; rather, they outlaw their purchase by certain people. The goods that can’t be purchased are “luxuries,” and the people who aren’t allowed to buy them are the poor. Sumptuary laws, write the scholars Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, “confine the consumption of specific commodities to the elites,” thus “enforc[ing] rigid status structures.” Different societies defined luxury differently, but whatever it was, they all thought it was something the poor shouldn’t have.

Luxury for Me, but Not for Thee

Throughout history, one generation’s luxury has been the next generation’s necessity. What is novel about the goods discussed in this essay is that in their case, some advocates hope to reverse the process and turn this generation’s necessities into the next one’s luxuries. (Nor are the more ambitious likely to rest content restricting only these.) Some find that a laudable goal. Personally, I can’t help but think that a world without children and road trips would be a poorer world than the one it succeeded. Even today, few of humanity’s greatest advances would meet Mandeville’s definition. Are antibiotics a luxury? Humanity survived for eons without them. But who now would give them up because they are not strictly necessary? What about broadband Internet? The federal government certainly thinks it’s a necessity, as it is subsidizing access for the poor, thus sparing them from suffering the same deprivation all mankind did until 20 years ago. Examples could be adduced indefinitely. By now it should be clear that there are no definitions of luxury or necessity that can definitively describe even a single commodity, for even a single commodity will meet both definitions depending on who is applying them. And who is most likely not to have air conditioning, or to bear the brunt of consumption taxes? The poor. If an affluent, middle-aged white woman telling someone he doesn’t need air conditioning isn’t white privilege, there’s no such thing.

The rich have complained about how the poor spend money for as long as there has been money. For most of history, this was an illiberal posture. Now it seems to be gaining currency on the left. Sumptuary laws are oppressive. They exist solely to reinforce social hierarchies; that is, to keep the haves up and the have-nots down. They were already reactionary in the 18th century. They would be even more so today.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439581/air-conditioning-ban-puritan-reasoning-work

Varad Mehta‏ @varadmehta 3 Sep 2016

Love air conditioning, meat, sugar, cars, and children? Watch out, the left is coming for them. My first for @NRO.

What progressives want to do is bring back sumptuary laws. Such laws govern how and what people can spend their money on.

What sumptuary laws do is, in effect, tell the poor they can't buy things rich people can. They're designed to keep the poor in their place.

The rich are telling the poor what they can and can't have. And they can't have AC, cars, sugary drinks, meat, and children.

What else do you call it when you tell people they don't need air conditioning? It's always some affluent bien-pensant lefty saying it.

"Oh, someone wants to ban X, Y, or Z for the environment? That's just a sumptuary law in a new bottle."

OldBrownsFan

Another article on same lines:

Steyer Panelist Wants Massive Tax Hikes, Smaller TVs Experts: Panelist at NextGen event betrays environmental radicalism

The political activist group run by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer featured a Canadian speaker at a Monday event who has called for significant tax hikes and for people to give up their televisions to combat global warming.

Steyer’s group, NextGen Climate Action, hosted Dr. Danny Harvey at a Monday event in Washington, D.C., titled "Can Keystone Pass the President's Climate Test?" Harvey has previously called for massive amounts of government spending and significant levels of personal privation to stem "climate change."

Harvey, a geography professor at the University of Toronto, said in a

that he believes that climate change is a "moral" issue, and that consumers must give up numerous modern luxuries in an effort to stem the rise of global temperatures, which have not actually increased since the 1990s.

"At the individual level, we need to adopt frugality and simplicity as a part of our moral compass," he told Dr. Mishka Lysack, a professor of social work at the University of Calgary, who conducted the interview. "You don’t need that large 52-inch plasma screen TV. It’s an electricity pig. Be happy with something smaller and more modest."

"I think our taxes are going to have to go up because some of the things that need to be done are going to be collective expenditures and it’s going to have to be paid for," Harvey added. He called for massive increases in government expenditures, on the order of a trillion dollars per year, to combat what he sees as the existential threat of global climate change.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/steyer-panelist-wants-massive-hikes-in-taxes-government-spending/