Quote from: Azendac on November 16, 2016, 06:53:54 PM

I simply don't gain anything from being wrong.

You're different than I remember.

I like you.

I really, really hated being the petty socially inept guy that I was. I didn't have anything that I felt strongly about so I never knew when to stand up for myself and when to admit that I've screwed up. Just for the record, there's only one person in my life both online and off that shares similar views with me, and he's my little brother (so of course he takes after me). Everyone else I mostly hold my tongue when talking unless they bring the topic up, and I pretty much always learn that they've got some good reason for disagreeing anyway.

tl;dr I did some growing up at university.

Oh, I agree completely. I'm not trying to shill for Hillary here. I just see this as an overly-broad court ruling waiting to happen.

Ayy, it's jsut this sort of headline sets off alarm bells for me, I know at some point down the line i'll have a conversation with someone in real life that goes like this.

them: "you said clinton was so bad because of her emails, but CHECK THIS OUT, Pence is just as bad"
me: "I bet I know what you're talking about, and that's a gross misinterpretation"
them: "but he has his own email scandal, wasn't the problem with clinton that she deleted emails? I delete my emails"
me:  "no that's also oversimplyfying, the problem is [20 minute rant of me explaining what i just typed in a way that doesn't confuse them]"
them: "yeah well, i just don't have the time to look into all this, i'm just saying what I hear"

This has happened way too many times this past year.

I know neocon means neoconservative, but what exactly do they stand for? Like, who is the person who inspired their ideology? Is it like old school Republicans?

You could roughly categorize it as the #neverTrump brand of conservatism, but that's really just a first approximation. Off the top of my head, Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer sort of embody the ideas of neocons, but I can't say I know enough to give a good description beyond that.

Thank God for the electoral college.

The EC doesn't protect rural areas de jure, it's simply a coincidence that it slightly coincides with it right now.

Quote from: Azendac on November 16, 2016, 12:17:09 AM

Let's not pretend that handing in a redacted email is anywhere near the same as dodging a subpoena, destroying evidence in an FBI investigation, using a private server to avoid FOIA requests, and doing it all to cover up your connections to bankers to whom you tell your "private positions" to.

I never did. Dodging a state transparency law and hiring a private attorney on the taxpayers' dollar isn't the high crime Clinton committed, but it's not exactly setting a good example either.

Adding to this so it gets attention, the Pence administration's argument that a court shouldn't be allowed to determine what is or isn't in the public record sounds vaguely like the Clinton camp arguing with the FBI over the classified status of certain emails. Both parties in their respective cases insisted on giving a figure in the executive branch the benefit of the doubt without letting the public decide for themselves.

However petty the Pence situation may seem in comparison to Clinton's scandal, 1) it in no way validates Pence, and 2) could still have similar legal consequences if Pence gets his way, as I explained earlier. For me, it's difficult think that one could be against Hillary but also support Pence here.
[/quote]I agree that covering stuff up doesn't suddenly become ok just because my preferred candidate does it, I wont defend them (and there were a few points in the campaign where I was ready to drop them entirely because it looked like they were going to sell us out, but they haven't so far). However, comparing this to Clinton's situation is an exaggeration of what Pence has done, and a serious oversimplification of what amounts to the culmination of Cinton's political career.

See if we look at what Pence is being accused with:

Pence hired Indianapolis law firm Barnes & Thornburg to join the Texas litigation. A representative from the firm — which is also representing Pence in this case — did not respond to IndyStar requests for interview.

In December 2014, Groth requested information regarding Pence's decision to hire outside counsel and the cost to Indiana taxpayers.

"I think joining the lawsuit without the attorney general and hiring that firm was a waste of taxpayer dollars and the people have the right to know how much of their money was spent,” Groth said. Groth is known in Indiana for representing the plaintiffs in the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court voter identification case, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.

Pence produced the documents in the request “but those documents included substantial redaction,” according to court documents.

So Pence got buttmad about Obama's immigration policy and hired some people to argue against it in court. The 'scandal' is that he did this on taxpayer dollars and didn't reveal how much it cost. You could argue that he shouldn't have tried to battle with Obama and that it was a waste from the start, or that he was incompetent with how he handled the case, or that his precedent of fudging numbers gives reason to be concerned (although it sort of worked out alright in the end). Now the problem is that none of those are anywhere near level of what Clinton did both in terms of how many things went wrong, and the scale of what did. A short bullet point list is:
-knowing that US ally Saudi Arabia is funding US enemy ISIS, and not telling anyone in government
-knowing the above, and telling bankers
-giving the saudis weapons despite knowing it will be given in part to ISIS (this is a serious crime under the patriot act btw)
-taking money from Saudi Arabia and other dubious states in the form of donations to the Clinton foundation
-giving out government ambassadorships to donators of the clinton foundation
-giving private speeches to clinton foundation donators, to whom she discloses her private positions
-giving classified information to her daughter (who has no security clearance)
-giving classified information to her maid (who has no security clearance)
-storing classified information on a server so insecure that up to five different security agencies from other countries were able to hack in
-and doing everything I mentioned before to cover it up

This is in comparison to Pence potentially misspending money and then redacting how much he spent, it's bad but not in anyway comparable.

Australians are a genetic shitpost.

Let's not pretend that handing in a redacted email is anywhere near the same as dodging a subpoena, destroying evidence in an FBI investigation, using a private server to avoid FOIA requests, and doing it all to cover up your connections to bankers to whom you tell your "private positions" to.

Trump is the most pro-Israel Zionist you'll find in American politics.

This is nonsensical.

"Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth" - Donadolf "Jew york must be purged" Trumpler

>mfw

"I don't think he is ideological, I think ultimately he is pragmatic in that way and that can serve him well as long as he has got good people around him and he has a good sense of direction," Obama said.

Changing diet can also potentially change your DNA. With some careful genetics and diets we could have an entire generation of girls who love to swallow.

Damn, I was making a killing off of this
http://phys.org/news/2016-11-google-facebook-ad-revenue-fake.html

Google and Facebook moved Tuesday to cut off advertising revenue to fake news sites, after a wave of criticism over the role misinformation played in the US presidential election.

The move by the two tech giants aims to choke off funds to an industry fueled by bogus, often sensational "news" circulating online and seen as a potential influence on public opinion.

A Google statement to AFP said new policies "will start prohibiting Google ads from being placed on misrepresentative content, just as we disallow misrepresentation in our ads policies."

The shift will mean Google restricts ads "on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher's content, or the primary purpose of the web property," the statement said.

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said the company receives billions of queries daily and admitted errors had been made.

"There have been a couple of incidences where it has been pointed out and we didn't get it right.

"And so it is a learning moment for us and we will definitely work to fix it," he said in a BBC interview.

Pichai said there should be "no situation where fake news gets distributed" and committed to making improvements.

"I don't think we should debate it as much as work hard to make sure we drive news to its more trusted sources, have more fact checking and make our algorithms work better, absolutely," he said.

On Monday, internet users searching on Google were delivered a bogus report saying Republican Donald Trump had won the popular vote in addition to the electoral college.

The numbers on a blog called 70News—contradicting official results tallied so far by states—said Trump received 62.9 million votes to 62.2 million for Hillary Clinton.

The blog urged those petitioning for the electoral college to switch their votes to reflect popular will to scrap their effort.

Explicit ban

Facebook is implementing a similar policy, a spokesman said.

"In accordance with the Audience Network Policy, we do not integrate or display ads in apps or sites containing content that is illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news," a Facebook statement said.

"While implied, we have updated the policy to explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news."

One report said Facebook had developed a tool to weed out fake news but did not deploy it before the US election, fearing a backlash from conservatives after a controversy over its handling of "trending topics." Facebook denied the report.

Some critics have gone so far as to blame Facebook for enabling Trump's victory, saying it did not do enough to curb bogus news that appeared to help rally his supporters.

Stories that went viral in the run-up to the vote included such headlines as "Hillary Clinton Calling for Civil War If Trump Is Elected" and "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President."

The prevalence of fake news has prompted calls for Facebook to consider itself a "media" company rather than a neutral platform, a move which would require it to make editorial judgments on articles.

Facebook executives have repeatedly rejected this idea, but since the election have pledged to work harder to filter out hoaxes and misinformation.

In a weekend post, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the notion that fake news helped sway the election, and said that "more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic."

Still, he said that "we don't want any hoaxes on Facebook" and pledged to do more to curb fake news without censoring content.

"Identifying the 'truth' is complicated," he said.

"While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted."

Ken Paulson, a former USA Today editor who is dean at the media school of Middle Tennessee State University, said Facebook and other platforms should not be required to filter out news but that it would be good for business.

"My hunch is that most of Facebook's loyal customers would welcome a cleaning up of the town square," he said.

Quote from: Azendac on November 15, 2016, 01:32:18 AM

However, if we look at Europe, it's not hard to imagine the situation in America going in that direction.

Just gonna point out that:

- the official report your first link cited also says that the effect of immigrants on crime is small, largely attributed to simple increases of population and most prevalent at refugee centers due to the overpopulation there.

Yes and no, the article also mentions severe limitations to what was reported, such as:

he report does not include crime data from North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state in Germany and also the state with the largest number of migrants

The actual number of migrant crimes is far higher, however, because the report, produced by the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA), includes only crimes that have been solved (aufgeklärten Straftaten). According to Statista, the German statistics agency, on average only around half of all crimes committed in Germany in any given year are solved (Aufklärungsquote). This implies that the actual number of crimes committed by migrants in 2015 may exceed 400,000.

The report also lacks crime data from Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, and Bremen, the second most populous city in Northern Germany.

But I have no problem with admitting that violent crime is overblown, I picked the specific topic for this thread out of catching attention since it caught mine immediately. Anyway, the report also mentions that most of the crime is financial, which I consider the more important issue since Germany still has to pay for these people. This is on top of the fact that these discussions are based around using "immigrant" as a proxy for "non-Western-European"

According to the report, most of the crimes were committed by migrants from: Syria (24%), Albania (17%), Kosovo (14%), Serbia (11%), Afghanistan (11%), Iraq (9%), Eritrea (4%), Macedonia (4%), Pakistan (4%) and Nigeria (2%).

Healthy scepticism is definitely due here. This and this are pretty good reads on it.

Those were good reads, I'm glad that the situation isn't as bad as I had thought. The first two do corroborate that it's the financial crimes/problems that are more important than violent/social ones, and the third one was pretty insightful on it's own (despite it skipping over the issue of refugees lying about their age.

- your second link illustrates that the increase has to do with increased confidence among victims due to the increased openness about reporting rapes and the changes in recording practice of British law enforcement personnel, while not pointing any fingers to immigration at all. Much of the "immigrants cause rape" rhetoric is often largely unfounded. Even in commonly cited instances like Sweden, the actual numbers do not corroborate the arguments and the link I gave above on Germany reveals that less than 1% of all crime committed by immigrants (which already isn't disproportionally high) is of a sexual nature.

I'm not too interested in this particular debate, but you should be careful when making arguments like that.

For sure, I've got both feet in my mouth right now, but I learn from my screwups.

memes were a mistake xDDDD