kimmy

I think people have forgotten what a cluster things were by the end of the Bush presidency in 2008. Despite the fear mongering over ISIS and Ebola, things aren't all that bad in comparison. Consider the state of the economy in 2008 when large businesses were going out of business, laying off people left and right, and being bailed out, and now consider it today where things are stable and the unemployment rate is now lower than Canada's unemployment rate. To me, the biggest failures of the Obama tenure haven't been the stuff that conservative cranks are always howling about. To me, Obama's biggest failings have been in failing to get meaningful financial reforms implemented, having his signature healthcare endeavor watered down to the point that they might as well have not bothered, failing to hold Wall Street accountable for blatant fraud and misconduct, and doing the exact opposite of what he promised in regard to privacy rights and accountability in "national security" matters. As the song says: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." -k

If you are under the impression that our messages are being carried through the wires by tiny Temporary Foreign Workers, you're mistaken. TFWs aren't an innovation that lets us accomplish things that would be impossible otherwise. TFWs are an innovation that lets deadbeat employers undermine wages. Nothing more. Why is that you Free Market Heroes hate the free market when it comes to the cost of labor? -k

And what again is causing people to conclude that modern teaching isn't successful? Students have to learn a heck of a lot more nowadays than the old cranks who talk about "back to basics!" as if learning "the 3 Rs" and cursive writing were enough to prepare you for a career doing anything more than operating a cash register in 2014. Yeah, but the point is that at some point memorization isn't practical anymore and understanding the underlying mathematics has to take over. -k

I saw Guardians Of The Galaxy a few weeks ago, and really liked it. At first stuff was going by too quickly and I didn't really get into it, but before long I felt completely charmed by the characters and felt like was bonding with them even as they were bonding with each other. I don't think many movies have juggled adventure and comedy and feels this successfully. I recently saw How To Train Your Dragon 2. I liked the first one, but this one was pretty meh, IMO. I also recently saw Divergent. The premise is that in a post-apocalyptic city, the peace is maintained by a "faction" system. There's a faction for smart people, one for kind people, one for honest people, one for brave people, and one for selfless people. The heroine is a "divergent"-- a small minority who are considered a threat to the system because they are-- wait for it-- two things. She bonds with another person who is secretly Two Things. But in a shocking display of TwoThings-ism, the smart people and brave people ally with each other in an attempt to seize power and wipe out the Two Things people once and for all. The premise was too stupid for me to get past, and I couldn't really enjoy the show as a result. I kept waiting for it to start making sense, but it just kept getting stupider. And I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past recently. It's kind of a time-travel story... Wolverine's consciousness is sent back from a war-torn future into his younger self-- in the early 1970s! --to convinces the X-Men to stop an event that leads to a disastrous chain of events and a horrifying future. It was ok entertainment. The highlights: -the general 1970s retro atmosphere. -a scene involving a goofy teenager named Quicksilver-- whose super-power is Ludicrous Speed. When he's doing his thing, everything else around him is almost frozen in time... and seeing it from his perspective-- set to "If I could save time in a bottle" by Jim Croce-- is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. -Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. These two became best friends back in the 1990s while playing Charles Xavier and Magneto in the first run of X-men films. They return to those roles in the "Future" scenes in this film (the 1970s Xavier and Magneto are played by James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender). I don't think this was one of the best comic book movies to come along, but it was fairly entertaining. -k

Season 2 of The Blacklist starts Monday! It's one of the few network shows I still watch. The writing is sometimes pretty bad. For example, if you take a shot each time somebody says "reach out to", you'd be drunk by the end of each episode. Everybody on this show is always reaching out to their contacts. There's so much reaching out going on, people gonna hurt their arms. And the formula is sometimes as by-the-numbers as House MD. Shocking death occurs! Inexplicably, Reddington has a connection with the killer. He tips them off. They go flailing around trying to catch the killer! They fail! They return to Reddington for help. He gets their shit together. They catch the suspect in the nick of time! And the "information" they get from Reddington is sometimes completely inane. "Liz, you're looking at this the wrong way. To catch a thief, you need to think like a thief." Really? They need a criminal mastermind to give them advice like this? Or the number of times Liz gets in a snit and refuses to work with Reddington because she's mad at him, when lives are at stake. What is she, 12? And so on. But, in spite of some of the less than brilliant aspects of the show, I still enjoy it. While the villain-of-the-week aspect often falls flat, the serial aspect of the show keeps me interested. Last season's building tension as Liz and the viewers gradually learned that her husband wasn't what he seemed kept me eagerly awaiting each new episode. And the mysteries-- what is Reddington's connection to Liz? What secrets are hiding in her background? --are compelling enough that viewers need answers. The main reason to watch is James Spader as Red Reddington. He's very enjoyable to watch as this character who shifts from upper-crust dandy to cold-blooded killer to tortured old soul and back. -k

I guess they're practically the same thing, if you consider a Filipino to be a labor-saving device. -k

That's why I argue that the lack of balance by mainstream media is actually doing a disservice. It creates a sense of skepticism towards media coverage of racially motivated violence, because people assume they're only hearing about it if there's white attackers and non-white victims. And it lets racists make their version events the version that people hear. I don't purport to have any information about the rate of racially motivated crime going on, reported or otherwise. My complaint is specific to the way the media handles the racial aspect, and what I perceive as a bias that does a disservice to everyone. -k

I'm certainly aware that this is a topic you really can't talk about without many people assuming you're coming from a place of bigotry. But while referring to the president as Hussein is a weird stylistic choice that just serves to put people off what you're trying to say, in this thread it's the topic itself. I think that the only reliable way to discuss the topic of media bias in crime reporting without people assuming that you're a racist is to be black. I mean, I don't think it's an accident that Ed Bradley was the reporter who waded into the Duke lacrosse fiasco to tell the other side of the story and question the police and prosecutors' conduct. "Only Nixon could go to China," as the saying goes. -k

This song was an international #1 hit last year, but I just heard it today for the first time: This genre of music is not usually my thing, but I quite liked this. It's minimalist, with the pleasing vocals being the whole show. MEANWHILE! The Kongos brothers invade my radio from the other end of the musical spectrum! This song makes me want to knock stuff over; it's propulsive and manic and sounds unlike anything else on the radio. -k

It was already there starting with the first post. -k

I can think of two explanations, the first being a sense of social responsibility and the second being cynical. In the first explanation, the editors who make these decisions believe that they're doing the right thing by downplaying a racial aspect to crimes where whites are the victim. They don't want to fan racial tensions. In the second, it's about generating page-clicks and ratings and selling papers. As Mr Gest talked about, a "blatant racial aspect" is an "angle" that sells a story. But why not exploit this "angle" when whites are the victim? Fear of being branded racists would be my guess. What's your view? Personally I believe the "socially responsible" explanation falls flat, because if they were really afraid of inflaming racial tension they'd handle white-on-black violence far more cautiously. But they don't. Which is more likely: the return of lynch mobs in retaliation for black-on-white crimes? Or rioting in predominantly black communities in response to white-on-black violence? I have a hard time picturing the return of white lynch mobs, but black anger is a powderkeg and media types seem to have no qualms about lighting the fuse to sell papers. And I think an obvious media bias is just giving those people more ammunition. -k

If you put "truck nuts" on your trailer hitch, people are going to assume you're a dumb-ass with a room-temperature IQ and a juvenile sense of humor. You might have a completely different reason for putting "truck nuts" on your truck. Maybe you're doing it to raise awareness of testicular cancer. But people won't know that. They'll just assume you're an asshole, like every other guy who has "truck nuts" on his truck. And by referring to Obama as "Barry Hussein", you're basically putting truck-nuts on your post. It basically sabotages the point you're trying to argue. It predisposes your audience to assume that you've swallowed the Tea Party kool-aid, that you're probably a "birther" or some other form of idiot. If you want your post to be taken seriously, why start off by biasing your audience against you before you've even started? Everybody knows the president's middle name, but not everybody knows you. If you're going to start off with Barry Hussein, you're inviting people to make negative assumptions about you. Aren't you a lawyer? I thought you guys were supposed to understand that sort of thing. Go ahead if you wish. I just don't get why supposedly intelligent individuals would want to sabotage their arguments by putting truck-nuts on them. -k

A lot of my prior posts on this topic appear to have been in threads that don't exist anymore. That's probably because they were topics started by Lictor the neo-Nazi. I did find an article I'd linked to once upon a time. This piece contrasts the Duke lacrosse media circus with the non-coverage of the gruesome rape/torture/murder of a white couple at the hands of a group of blacks: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/18745632/#.VBR8OhbE6uo Note the obvious catch in Mr Gest's comment: "a blatant racial motive". People are predisposed to find a racial motive if the victim isn't white. People are predisposed to find some other explanation if the victim is white. White cop shoots black teenager? Hate crime. Mooks in Courtney BC harassing a black guy in a parking lot? Hate crime. Frat boys allegedly assault black strippers? Hate crime. The people in that grocery store? Wrong place at the wrong time. What happened to Channon Christian? Just a car-jacking gone wrong. -k

Well that's a very poor counter-example, because no racial aspect of the story was mentioned in any of the coverage I ever saw. It wasn't until the verdict was televised that most of us found out that one of the defendants was black. I've been in several discussions on this topic over the years here at MLW and I have always argued that the media makes a big deal about race when it's white people attacking non-white people, but handles it like it's made of nitroglycerin when it's non-white people attacking white people. I will dig up some of my old posts on the topic. I think some obvious examples include cases like the Duke lacrosse team incident, where people were screaming "HAAAATE CRIIIIIME!!!" from the rooftops. As if racial hatred would be the only possible reason college boys might sexually assault women. Then it turned out that the supposed assault never even happened and the only people who'd been victims of a hate crime were the college boys who'd been lynched in the media. Or the incident in Courtney BC where where three white guys were caught on video harassing a black guy in a parking lot, and the whole country was screaming "HAAAATE CRIIIIIME!" as if guys never get in fights in parking lots unless racial hatred is a factor. By contrast, if you look at cases where non-whites are the aggressors, race is seldom mentioned at all. Consider the case where 16 black high school kids were charged and eventually convicted of sexually assaulting a white student in Toronto. The only reason we ever heard about the race of either the attackers or the victim is that the mothers of the accused went to the media to their sons were victims of racism by the police. We can find the same tendency at work in this incident as well. It's "Tennessee: flash mob attacks grocery store" with the race aspect being tip-toed around. -k

Don't be sad, there's enough porn for everyone! -k

I think it's pretty funny that the same people who were mad that I kept using Mr Romney's first name are arguing in favor of using Mr Obama's middle name. Regardless, people who insist on referencing the president's middle name are really just stereotyping themselves. Who refers to Mr Obama as Hussein? Tea Party morons, Facebook cranks, birthers, conspiracy kooks, and the like. If you want to self-identify yourself with that crowd, go right ahead. It won't change anybody's opinion of Mr Obama, but it certainly invites people to make assumptions about you. -k

This week in Islam, a group of Muslim chumps in the German city of Wuppertal have donned jackets reading "SHARIA POLICE" and are patrolling the streets to harass people. Personally, if a group of morons stop me on the street to tell me to conform to Muslim notions of propriety, I will tell them that I have no time to talk with them because I need to go back home and drink Scotch, eat bacon sandwiches, and watch girl-on-girl porn. Frickin imbeciles. -k

A picture with some uncited information and unsubstantiated claims on it is not "news". It's most likely the work of a tin-foil-hatter. -k

Worse in almost all respects, except for employment, not being in 2 wars, not having banks and major employers going out of business left and right... Have people really forgot what a shitstorm 2008 was? -k

Wow! Sounds like a real traitor! -k

Ok, leaving the identity of your friend aside, what legitimate grounds for impeachment does your friend cite? Does your friend believe "I don't agree with the way he is handling this" is a legitimate reason for impeachment? ha ha, suuure. One of the hallmarks of the Bush Jr presidency was a reluctance to do things that his political opponents disagreed with. -k

In 2004 when Muslim kooks beheaded American hostages, nobody seemed to think it was G.W, Bush's fault. -k

Is your friend, by any chance, named Allen West, Alan Keyes, or Erik Rush? -k