TheDarkness

Don't you forget about me.

It amazes me how many people who will argue vehemently that there is objective morality will then turn around and get super relativistic when their guy is caught obviously lying and manipulating the system.

The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment: Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.
 
The next day, the kids came back and, one by one, began to tell their stories.
 
There were all the regular types of stuff: Spilled milk and pennies saved. But then the teacher realized, that only Janie was left.
 
"Janie, do you have a story to share?"
 
"Yes ma'am. My daddy told me a story about my Mommy. She was a Marine pilot in Desert Storm, and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory, and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol, and a survival knife.
She drank the whiskey on the way down so the bottle wouldn't break, and then she parachuted right into the middle of 20 Iraqi troops.  She shot 15 of them with the pistol, until she ran out of bullets, killed four more with the knife, till the blade broke, and then she killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands."
 
''Good Heavens," said the horrified teacher.  "What did your Daddy tell you was the moral to this horrible story?"
 
"Don't Screw with Mommy when she's been drinking."

It's fair to keep in mind that, at the time of the Mongol invasions, there were people in Europe who blamed the jews. Sadly, this is not a joke.

I believe that everyone we truly touch in our lives, everyone we make a difference to, carries a part of us in them, affecting how they think and feel, and how they live. That in turn affects how they touch everyone in their own lives, and in turn how those people live. So our influence spreads outward, like ripples in a pond, becoming part of the whole of humanity, enduring for as long as humanity endures.
 
That's enough immortality for me.

I'd like to know my offspring are going to live a happy life beyond me.  Other than that, what good does 'my mark' (or material things, having my existence acknowledged, etc.) do me when I'm dead?
 
I just try to be happy and live positive in the present.  YMMV.
 
 

It's a trick. Get an axe.

Statistics are not the only measure of relevance. After the end of Reconstruction, and especially after WWI, attacks on black communities represented a number of casualties that was also statistically small compared to other ways people could die, but effectively disenfranchised the black middle class and especially upper class throughout much of the South and into the midwest. In fact, had a huge influence on the course of our history until the early seventies, and in many ways, still today.
 
Those attacks were often prefaced by whistle dog politics from leaders backed by friendly press to those leaders selling the same fear, after which those leaders would take zero responsibility for the predictable results of their words. The key difference here is those leaders clearly planned for said violence to happen, the current one merely flails about.

I have no idea when it came out, but I am the guy that liked Waterworld.  Huge fan of the post-apocolyptic genre anyway (not you, Gamma World), and I thoroughly enjoyed it: went to see it three times.

The July 6, 2019 issue of The Economist had a feature article on "The Global Crisi in Conservatism."  By which they mean the conservatism of gradualism tradition and social cohesion, not the deranged nationalism that seems to be pushing it aside. Might interest people as a reminder of what "conservative" once meant.
 
Still, it also reminds me that while I appreciate cautious and gradual change, recognizing that people are not infinitely flexible; and I appreciate the need for multiple institutional channels instead of focusing exclusively on the State as a medium for getting things done; I cannot ever consider myself "a conservative." Too often even the mildest and most superficially reasonable, Edmund Burke-style conservatism seems to act as an apology or figleaf for established wealth, power, and irrational prejudice. The same arguments used for "Why we must not disrupt the Traditional Family" or "Why we must accept wealth disparities" have so much the same form as "Why we must preserve slavery" or "Why we must burn heretics." It's like a Mad-Lib where you just plug in different words for whatever institution you don't want to change.
 
Dean Shomshak

A book I just read prompted by the discussion of the earlier comparison of St. Louis and a drastically different city in this thread. It is actually a book about how the federal efforts to promote the home building sector and increase homeowndership from WWI through the New Deal until the beginning of the 1970s, explicitly required that public housing projects needed to be for whites only if they were going to receive the backing and interest rates offered in such programs, and how this and other policies by federal and state governments further ensured that African-American housing would become increasingly segregated by race, increasingly costly in comparison to equivalent housing for whites, and increasingly insecure as a result of this.

https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/
 
This included a clause prohibiting resale to African=American. Considering that the majority of the middle class in America would owe much of their success, and the bulk of their equity, to these programs, and a whole race of people were denied this, is just criminal.
 
Oh, and African-American vets got screwed, too. They were more likely to be dishonourably discharged from military branches, and it's statistically certain that a great many cases would have been racism, and given that they often were denied their benefits for buying a home even if not dishonourably discharged, as well as not being paid as much as their white counterparts.
 
And this is through to the early seventies. It was a direct extension of Jim Crow at the federal level, involving the largest potential investment most Americans would individually make in their lives.

And that systemic, institutionalized racism is still taking place today.

A book I just read prompted by the discussion of the earlier comparison of St. Louis and a drastically different city in this thread. It is actually a book about how the federal efforts to promote the home building sector and increase homeowndership from WWI through the New Deal until the beginning of the 1970s, explicitly required that public housing projects needed to be for whites only if they were going to receive the backing and interest rates offered in such programs, and how this and other policies by federal and state governments further ensured that African-American housing would become increasingly segregated by race, increasingly costly in comparison to equivalent housing for whites, and increasingly insecure as a result of this.

https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/
 
This included a clause prohibiting resale to African=American. Considering that the majority of the middle class in America would owe much of their success, and the bulk of their equity, to these programs, and a whole race of people were denied this, is just criminal.
 
Oh, and African-American vets got screwed, too. They were more likely to be dishonourably discharged from military branches, and it's statistically certain that a great many cases would have been racism, and given that they often were denied their benefits for buying a home even if not dishonourably discharged, as well as not being paid as much as their white counterparts.
 
And this is through to the early seventies. It was a direct extension of Jim Crow at the federal level, involving the largest potential investment most Americans would individually make in their lives.

A book I just read prompted by the discussion of the earlier comparison of St. Louis and a drastically different city in this thread. It is actually a book about how the federal efforts to promote the home building sector and increase homeowndership from WWI through the New Deal until the beginning of the 1970s, explicitly required that public housing projects needed to be for whites only if they were going to receive the backing and interest rates offered in such programs, and how this and other policies by federal and state governments further ensured that African-American housing would become increasingly segregated by race, increasingly costly in comparison to equivalent housing for whites, and increasingly insecure as a result of this.

https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/
 
This included a clause prohibiting resale to African=American. Considering that the majority of the middle class in America would owe much of their success, and the bulk of their equity, to these programs, and a whole race of people were denied this, is just criminal.
 
Oh, and African-American vets got screwed, too. They were more likely to be dishonourably discharged from military branches, and it's statistically certain that a great many cases would have been racism, and given that they often were denied their benefits for buying a home even if not dishonourably discharged, as well as not being paid as much as their white counterparts.
 
And this is through to the early seventies. It was a direct extension of Jim Crow at the federal level, involving the largest potential investment most Americans would individually make in their lives.

On my morning walk, I saw a cable guy on my street. He asked me what time it was, so I told him it was between 8am and 1pm.
 

I find that conservatives generally have a very poor understanding of the internal politics of the Democratic party, and of the particular distinctions in left of center ideologies as well.  Many, for example , see little distinction between Biden and Warren ideologically, and only marginally distinguish Sanders' policies from "mainstream" Democratic policies(and exaggerate the extent to which he differs, at that.)  Some of this is due to a kind of information cocoon that many conservatives immerse themselves in--Fox/Info Wars/Breitbart/World Net Daily/Daily Caller/NY Post/WSJ/Limbaugh/Hannity are the only "valid" sources of news, and they aren't exactly bending over backwards to explain, "Well, actually, Democrats aren't all communists out to eliminate your freedoms and take all your stuff..."

It's easy to see how this article would be incomprehensible to someone still hoodwinked by conservative media, but it's still accurate.  The Democratic Party keeps striving for centrism and bipartisanship, and in so doing alienates their base.  Actual independent/swing voters are rarer than hen's teeth in modern America; the key to victory is base turnout, not appealing to a class of voters that is practically nonexistent.  The GOP understands this--Trump has an unbelievably low 42% approval rating, but by God those 42% are going to the polls to protect Amurrica from "socialists" and brown people.  While the "socialists" and brown people look at their choice between a right-wing old man and a far-right-wing old man, shrug, and stay home.
 
If Democrats want turnout, they need to stand for policies that will make an actual difference, they need to stand against policies and people who hurt America, and they need to be vocal about it.  This is why Warren and Sanders are popular: extremely popular policies delivered with conviction.  If Biden's put out a concrete policy proposal voluntarily, I haven't heard about it, and I'm paying pretty close attention.

Two things on St. Louis to keep in mind.
 
One, it is a massive transportation (and thus, transport) hub in the center of the country, and that means it's a hub for all things legal and illegal.
 
Two, stats that speak of just St.Louis proper have the crime rate higher, but the actual urban area extends well past that, and so the numbers become closer to other cities when that area is included, though still high.
 
Third, there is very serious infrastructure problems and structural inequality problems from how the city used the New Deal and later, desegregation, to force black St. Louis residents to North St. Louis and move investment away from there. This meant that my parents generation, if they were black St. Louis home owners, would not have a fraction of the home investment that they actually did, even less for the fact that they were almost guaranteed to be paying much worse rates on their loans. (To be clear, I am white and from Chicago, which has similar structural issues.)
 
Plano had nowhere near the population of St. Louis during those eras, and so didn't develop along the same lines. In fact, Plano was not even approaching the same size as just St Louis(not St. Louis county) until after 2000. Infrastructure is going to be a huge factor in any comparison that will make it hard to compare those two cities for other factors.

To help simplify, the suit is not about a work of fiction, but a book making a concrete claim. This is a textbook libel case, as well as defamation. It isn't unusual in the least.

To help simplify, the suit is not about a work of fiction, but a book making a concrete claim. This is a textbook libel case, as well as defamation. It isn't unusual in the least.

To help simplify, the suit is not about a work of fiction, but a book making a concrete claim. This is a textbook libel case, as well as defamation. It isn't unusual in the least.

Libel has been against the law since 130 AD.  No precedents scary or otherwise were set by this case.  All that happened was that the courts enforced laws that have been part of American jurisprudence since the very founding of the republic.  They did not enforce the law in any new or novel way.  If anything at all is new here, it is the brazenness of disregard for truth by publishers that really should know better.
 
 

This judge was cited as running one of the best "drug courts" in the state, an institution that diverts low-level drug defenders into programs that help them avoid re-offending and get clean. Any conviction in the court is then expunged and taken off the defendant's record -- an important consideration when so many doors are slammed shut in the faces of ex-convicts.