Vilageidiotx

Do you know what 'reconnaissance' means?

I pronounced the word "Archive" like "R-chiv" for a while. Took a while to shake myself of that mistake.

The Second Whenever Cross-Site Hunger Games: Revolution Edition

jesus how the fuc have you guys not filled this?

20: The British Empire


21: Captain Kirk


22: A Vanishing Hitchhiker


23: A Sassy Black Woman


And, in honor of the Bronies we are up against,

24: Catherine the Great

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@VilageidiotxSo to veer away from the topic a little, I noticed that you have somehow more posts than me and ive actually been on here two days longer.

How in the fuck did that happen, Ive never seen you post anywhere but here and occasionally spam, do you even roleplay? I'm starting to think you are only on this site to critique my memes and passively endorse communism.

@Dynamo Frokane

I came here with a specific RP, alongside @Dinh AaronMk and a dozen or so other people. That RP died last year though. I used to be pretty active in spam, but I haven't been consistently active in a while because I've been busy.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

1. Prepare to be impressed! Just by talking about it, we've made a big dent. Follow-through is important though, or else that's all coming right back.

@mdk

Okay, we don't have to construct a money sink. Problem solved.

2. 600 of 1900 miles, if my sources are any good (they're probably not) are currently walled. That's a LOT of open territory. Anyway if we had the sensible places all shored up then why do we still have illegal immigration?

You get your visa overstays and your people using coyotes. Yeh, you'll have people skipping through the desert, but what I am arguing is that the continuous cost of such a bizarre construct doesn't match the threat from this specific subset of illegal immigrants.

3. I mean I'm waiting to see what the project looks like before declaring it useless. One proposal involved covering the whole thing in solar panels -- I mean how badass would that be? We are, after all, talking about deserts. That could be huge. Another proposal worked in some mass transit (though I dunno how many passengers/goods take that route -- I mean I guess our own little land-borne panama canal could be neat).

I'm not sure of the practicality of constructing your solar farm as a straight line in terms of dollars spent. A highway along that route would be redundant since I-10 seems to fill that roll. I mean, these ideas sound neat on paper, but they kinda feel a lot like attempts to justify a money sink.

The reality of managing the upkeep of a mostly concrete and steel structure is minimal in a desert; it isn't like it is going to rust that much.

A simple cement boundary in the desert would be completely irrelevant. For a wall to be effective it has to be constantly manned and serviced, which is the primary cost involved. Without all that, it's just sort of an obstacle in what is already an obstacle course naturally speaking.

But again, I'm not opposing it. It's a pork project. Government has been dealing with pork projects since forever. Hillary Clinton wouldn't have dealt with any real issues either, so it's pretty much neither here nor there for me. Better than having him fuck up anything that matters.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

When you do the math on the financial impact of illegal immigration, building a wall is about 90% cheaper (assuming a 100% elimination, which is a faulty assumption, but just for the sake of argument). It would save us money; and in terms of feasibility, large portions are already built (the wall was already approved years ago -- Clinton actually voted in favor). But anyway "physically (im)possible" just sounds like a challenge. I do physically impossible shit every day. Dream big!

@mdk

I feel like this bit highlights all the practical problems with building a wall, and why it isn't a worthwhile investment, and why it is mostly a political red herring used to keep us from focusing on our real problems.

1: That 100% effectiveness is unlikely and shouldn't taken into calculation. 50% elimination would be wildly impressive.

2: That we've already got walls in the sensible places, and what we are mostly discussing now is the utility of building walls across the remote deserts and mountains that make up so much of the border.

3: That it would be a continuous cost to upkeep a massive piece of infrastructure that more or less doesn't do anything. This means it would probably be abandoned in portions as both parties look to reapportion that money to active projects, so that I would expect the Trump portions of the wall to be mostly abandoned and let go into ruin since they are impractical.

I personally don't have a problem with them building the wall. I'd rather Trump focus on it, actually. Sure, it's a waste of money, and there is probably some dark and dirty corruption behind the plan, but corrupt wastes of money is something we can swallow and forget. Get the dumb thing out of the way so we can get to forgetting about it sooner, and hope that Republicans don't start pushing something equally "useful" like building a really really really tall tower on the Canada border so we can see to the artic.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@The Harbinger of Ferocity

The argument of police checkpoints appearing every few weeks at random, or in specific static locations, is a "police state" is hollow in comparison and contrast to other, historically well known police states.

If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck.

I specifically prefaced my statement by saying "I would say." because I do, just as I disagree that "America is what we make it."; I contrarily believe that America has some fundamentals that cannot be compromised, especially not in the name of socialism and its foundations in social justice.

I still disagree. Justice is more important than arbitrary concepts like "Americaness".

You can however, entirely rationally argue that my advocating for elevated security across the board might lead down a slippery slope to a police state.

It probably would in the sense that it would involve desensitizing people to the presence of the state in their personal lives so that it becomes easier to argue for an even more invasive state. But besides that, I still maintain that the stuff you are recommending is a cure for a disease we don't have, and therefore both invasive and pointless.

or at minimum being carded if you are buying with cash

wat? why? What problem are we trying to solve here? Are you implying society needs to enforce some sort of "License to purchase"?

Despite this note, I will never concede communism as anything less than an actual, not hypothetical, enemy of the free world, namely the United States.

What specifically are you talking about here? Stalinism? Bernie Sanders? FDR? I'm not sure what part this had to play in the conversation before.

To the next topic, I do not believe there is any issue in semantics. A natural bell curve exists in that the further you get from what is considered "centrist" the more you become an extreme by that virtue. If the center right is "Republican" and the center left is "Democrat" that reasonably moves the Right Wing, "Alt-Right" and Alt-Right to the fringes in that order, just as it does in mirror with the left. Political motives become deeper and stronger the further you go to either side and the reasonability of violence to achieve those wants becomes more likely. The extremes of the left are made up of everything from communists to anarchists who have and do advocate violence; they are the more recent propagators. The real Alt-Right is notorious for this too because they so strongly cling to the ability to maintain arms - it is a cliché of their faction that they are all supposedly skin headed and surrounded by "assault rifles".

Imma start with the last first and say that gun ownership isn't a far right phenomena. The center right is just as into it. Not only that, I've seen surveys that suggest the Gun issue is the most common issue where Democrats disagree with their party. Aggressive racism is what divides them from the regular right.

Also, I think you are overgeneralizing still. Because violent groups tend to exist on the extremes doesn't mean all politics out of the center are violent.

I do not believe in the notion of privilege

Well that's just silly. To say this is to say that both myself and Donald Trump have the same access to power, which would be a ridiculous statement. You can disagree about how certain groups determine privelage, but to say we live in an exactly equitable society is frankly fantastic.

The cost in this circumstance is the comfort of the remaining 99.7% of the regular populace, a noteworthy portion being roughly half of which disagrees with the concept, or that a law needs to enforce it. It is not the duty of the populace to bow to or cater to a minority, especially an extremely small minority. It is the duty of that minority to integrate and become part of the rest of the population and explain to those who are misinformed on it. Here there is no misinformation, as this is a largely out of proportion issue, just as the "Women's Rights" argument that somehow women in America are not equal to their male counterparts; they're both Americans.

Before I go on, I gotta point out that you are going waaay out there with this subject, further than most of the Libertarians in this thread would go. Which is to say that you are...

AN EXTREMIST!

But not a violent one. I sympathize with you.

I don't see how requiring, say, ramps for disabled people would be "Forcing the population to bow to the needs of the disabled". The purpose of this sort of thing is social utility, to make the most out of every member of society by giving them access to their own needs. I admit you are an interesting sort of statist who believes in more police but less social utility.

To the other topic, there are those who are flying Nazi flags, but then there are those across the line - who you actually consistently see - flying the Hammer and Sickle unironically; both massacred and murdered their populace and those that they held dominion over and both are the symbols of the worst of humanity. No less, the former is extremely uncommon to the point that from everything I have seen in these riots, there has not been one flown.

I've seen more Nazi stuff being trotted out than Soviet stuff tbh.

I disagree that Bike-Lock Guy is somehow not a representative of the Black Bloc

Sure, the Black Bloc. But not the left in general.

dded this in post, but that question alone begs from me these thoughts, "Who determines what is or is not 'systematically disadvantaged'?", "Who decides what benefits they need in particular?", "When does someone cease being 'systematically disadvantaged'?", "Does someone who falls under multiple spectrums of 'systematic disadvantage' gain more benefits than those with fewer? Doesn't that put those people at their own disadvantage?", "What about those who are not 'systematically disadvantaged', what is their role? Do they need to take on the burden of other people? Is it by option or force?"

Us. Democracy exists so we can have these discussions, and make these decisions. We haven't put a Junta of disabled people in charge (well, I mean... not that kind of disabled) who are dictating terms to us. We are deciding them as a society. You make it sound like people without disabilities have no say in the matter, but in reality we do.

Yeah that's my point. They're trying to frighten you so they can use you, and 'they' aren't the GOP. Spoiler alert: they've been doing it since Jim Crow. They're not your friends.

Eck, both parties do this scare tactic shit. You should have read the crazy e-mail my grandma sent us all the day before the election. The Republicans are no glorious white knight, nor the Democrats the Great Satan. They are just good ol' cynical political parties.

I would rather have a potentially smaller voter turn out with less fraud than I would with a larger voter turn out with potentially more fraud,

Personally I prefer it the other way. I'd rather see democracy active but imperfect over seeing it snuffed out through bureaucracy. And, as a professional Bureaucrat, I gotta say that you probably shouldn't be trusting is with something like access to the ballot.

State-level care is a whole other beast (think RomneyCare) -- it's reasonable to think a system could be devised that works for Rhode Island, but unthinkable that this exact same system will work in rural Wyoming.

Here's where I really diverge here. The United States doesn't really work like that anymore, where each state is its own completely separate and individual unit. The Midwestern states are largely poor, we already drink more tax dollars than we pay in, so there is no way in shit that we could create a system like this. If things go this way, where blue states develop themselves and red states are left in the dust, the trouble currently experience by Middle America will worsen as everyone flees. Me included. States-Rights-Land is a land where I have to find a way out of Middle America quickly, Grapes of Wrath style if need be.

What I know about Wyoming, their only recourse for a health insurance system would be some sort of dating site to hook people up with rich ranchers.

Which is all to say that, since large parts of the midwest are the agrarian supportive structures of the urbanized coasts, the entire country is a single financial system rather than fifty separate ones and has to be treated as such. Pretending Kansas can do all the same things that Texas or California can do is utopian at this point.

What is your favorite type of cloud

when they look like genitals.

stop tit

that is the breast joke ever

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@The Harbinger of Ferocity

You would be right that is not how people think, which I believe to be detrimental, and while it is on that level of inconvenience that everyone would rather to just avoid, the sort where it is just another irritation in life perceived as irrelevant, there's few cheaper, more expedient options to implement as examples that are not only practical, but effective. The reduction in the rate of traffic is to be expected with it, but I find that a small price to pay. Areas of extremely high population density, such as New York and California would need to use their traffic data, as would they all, to help alleviate issues of that nature while meeting the objective.

The thing is that all these prices we would be paying, the invasiveness and severe inconvienence, wouldn't be buying much. We just don't have a major terrorist problem in the United States right now. There is a point where safety ventures into paranoia.

I am of the thought that the advancement of socialism, as with the New Deal, as a platform in the United States is inherently negative to the system as a whole. Sanders arguments by comparison to the general qualities of the Democratic party are much further left, throwback or not. I would say the same and more about anyone openly advocating communism in the United States, to add at that point they have become largely un-American. I can see the appeal of socialism, even to citizens of the United States, but it is still much further left leaning in the same vein that hysteria was made about how "Alt-Right" Donald Trump was and that the Nazi party and its ilk are running for presidency. The difference being, Sanders and others with socialist values are actually strongly left leaning compared to the rest of their party and embraced for it while we have even seen here in this discussion that Trump and his administration is its own animal which is mainly Republican in label, with some overt leanings.

Well, first and foremost "Unamerican" isn't an argument for or against anything. If it were, I'd point out that your police state idea is thouroughly unamerican. But this is neither here nor there because America is what we make it to be.

This would I assume betray and Austrian vein in your economic thinking, so we'd hit a more fundamental disagreement here. I think government intervention in the economy saved us, and the retraction of government intervention has destabilized the economy.

To me, anything that varies too far from center enters the realm of potential for extremes. To use an example of my stance, communists and libertarians are far to the sides of their associations in my eyes. As I will maintain no less, I never accused anyone of being evil, just that I cannot sympathize with the right - which I belong to - on those grounds and others related. And yes, while you would be correct the "taxation is theft" crowd has existed for quite a long time, I am fairly confident that they are still a minority and not even a vocal one at that in comparison to some of their neighbors or those on the other end.

[/quote]

I feel there is a semantic issue here regarding the different ways we can interpret the word extreme. To say that "The farther from the center you go, the the more extremely far from the center you are" is a tautology and isn't really worth the time saying. But if you are saying that leaving the center implies violence, with extreme meaning violence, then I disagree. I think you can believe that severe changes are good and necessary without saying that violence has to happen. The Sanders movement, or the Ron Paul movement, never in themselves requested violence, so leaving a charge of violent extremism on their doorstep seems incorrect.

A minority of people should not be explicitly catered to at the cost of the rest of the norm. I will repeat my opinion as preface, but I do not believe transgendered - or other - persons should be allowed to use the male or female restroom that does not match their biological sex unless they've transitioned completely to that gender. I do believe it should be requirement that there is a neutral bathroom, using the model some locations had of the "family restroom", which could be used by anyone. It is not the duty of those regularly gendered people to compromise themselves or morals for others; they can if they want to.

Personally I think gendered bathrooms is kinda silly, but I pretty much keep quiet about it because I figure as a guy I am getting me some juicy privilege by keeping bathrooms gendered, since, like, have you ever seen the line for a womans bathroom at a major event?

I don't really give too many shits about this issue to be honest, though I don't really agree that there is any cost at all to the norm in this case. Though I do find the bathroom policing implication kinda creepy.

You do not see me arguing that Autistic people are treated unfairly in the public eye, even being the butt of a joke here, and demanding they receive special accommodations such as non-fluorescent lighting or making the outrageous argument that wanting to treat it as an illness and cure it is a "Final Solution" type ordeal. These people in question are significantly more common, roughly 1 in 68, albeit still considered statistically abnormal. If you revert this back to my prior example and overlay the parallels, I believe my point to become clear - that the far left made a far larger deal about transgender, among other issues, than legitimately exists; they're all still people in the end.

You could if you wanted too though. If there are serious issues that make autistic people less functional, and we as a society could accommodate those issues without being too put out, then it is wise to make those accommodations. People worry too much about being too nice for some bizarre-ass reason. The point of accommodations is to make society function more fluidly, and get the most out of everyone as possible, while in turn making sure everyone gets as much out of life as possible. Personally, I don't think most accommodations of this sort put out the average person, and I say this as an average person.

To change topics entirely, the fact that this behavior has been permitted at all is proof enough to me that it is not taken seriously. I would say the same for the "Alt-Right" if people began flying Nazi flags, fighting with the police, setting fire to things and other improper behavior I described. Regardless of who is doing it or why, it is uncalled for and allows a dangerous standard to set in. It does not matter how much is occurring either; it needs to be controlled and put to an end all the same. Either you protest peacefully and obey the rules, or your protest has become unlawful and needs to be disbanded. If you riot, you are to be treated as criminals.

Well, first and formost there are Alt-Right protesters flying Nazi flags. That is a thing.

Second, I am fine with you arresting people who commit crimes, that's how the law works. I have a problem with generalizing the behavior of criminals as being the responsibility of the larger section of society they belong too. I don't think you have anything in common with Dylan Roof just because you are right of center, and for the same reason I'd rather people say all people left of center are the bike-lock guy.

albeit I still advocate the deployment of National Guard units to restore order and as a show of force regardless.

yeeeeh, let's not do that. We are not nearly at a level that requires marshal law. I know a bar that spills more blood than Berkley every Friday night, but nobody would dream of military occupation as a response.

@SleepingSilence

Once again, if no one is taking the conversation seriously, I'm more than okay with it but I'd like for people to stop whining about me being mildly aggressive. If shitposting gets nobody to complain. <.<

Eh, I think we can only be so serious. We are all peasants after all, none of us belong to the elite, so none of our opinions really matter in the end.

All of what? But, libertarian is sometimes considered a right or left wing opinion. When it actually isn't. It's just the counter to authoritarian.

Well, yeh, technically Libertarian is anything south of the authority spectrum, this is true. I'm more talking about the way the term is used in the United States, where we usually use it to apply to the right wing of the libertarian spectrum. Like, I'd definitely consider myself a left-libertarian, but I wouldn't go around calling myself a Libertarian because everyone would assume I'm a Rand Paul type of guy.

Anyway, in the United States we use Libertarian to mean anything from an anti-war Republican all the way down to a foaming-at-the-mouth An-Cap.

It's usually the same as private though which is my point...So both words tend to mean the same thing. There isn't a difference from what I can tell.

They are lumped together in the current system, but I do think there is a recognizable difference. Like I said, one you use the object, the other you use the income and don't interact with the object. If somebody has to take the object from you in a physical sense, it probably it's personal property. Again, this is my practical definition, not the current legal definition where personal property is non-real-estate property.

Stuff like this...except if there's any snowball chance in hell for that person to win. Is not a world we should live in...but it has. Which is my point. Clearer now?

Oh that. Yeh, I'm against frivolous lawsuits. Not sure how to stop them though, short of fining people for them, which makes another messy situation.

Not always true, some small businesses suck too. Big doesn't always equal a problem. But you seem to be ignoring how social media smear campaigns can outright destroy people's lives. I think forcing people to "morally" shop is a slippery slope anyway. Granted boycotts don't work usually. But "buycotts" (stealing the word) do. So there is some level of outside forces that can effect the outcome of somebody's sales. Some people lose, but they still can try again. As bad as it seems, that's a GOOD thing for the consumers and people. If businesses weren't allowed to fail. They'd need government bailouts. Sometimes products become less needed or bought, when newer and better and cheaper stuff comes out.

Yup, it is true that small businesses aren't automatically good, but I think it is generally accepted that Wal-Mart won because it was cheap and not because people admire Wal-Mart's business practices. "Wal-Mart destroyed Main-Street" has been a topic of conversation for quite some time, and a warranted one.

The issue of social media smear campaigns is true, but it's not really a free-market issue. If anything, social media smear campaigns is an example of how the free market is oftentimes irrational.

Also, boycotts and buycotts can work in principle, but because people's purchasing decisions are based mostly on convenience, and because social movements have a short attention span, I don't think they can be relied upon to make a system moral. Which is to say that the free market might be trusted to make a lot of cheap commodities, but it can't necessarily be trusted with all of the rest of the complications of a free society. Hence why modern economics largely leans toward a market left to handle commodities but supplemented by government intervention to handle everything the Free Market leaves behind.

What does diddling the help supposed to mean there?

Err, without going up and checking, I think you had said something about bailouts in relation to a conversation we were having about what happens if a businessman sexually harasses his employees. Diddling the help would be a colloquial way of saying sexually harassing employees.

politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/01…

Hasn't stopped people from trying. ;D

Welp, shit, a diddling bailout. That's funny as fuck.

Extremes exist on both sides, but which seems to be a bigger problem right now? It seems the worst the Alt right can do, is be horrendously unfunny. I simply point it out because SJW's were started from GamerGate and that was taken quite seriously by every big media site, when it started/fueled from nothing but a farce.

Right wing is right now in political power in the US, SJW's are just bitching and throwing fists. Honestly, I think SJW's are more a threat to the left than they are to the right. No greater force of internal division has ever been devised by God or Man. I don't think they are scary though, just messy. The Alt Right scares me a little, in that I'm not sure where they came from, and their proposals are more violent than just throwing fists. I admit, the sudden appearance of ethno-states into the political discussion has spooked me.

Not a citation really. And one person isn't a whole movement. So that's all I got for that.

Richard Spencer has followers. He got that creepy torchlight thing going, for instance.

I didn't mean to get on your case too hard, unlike the other people nitpicking me to death here. You've tended to be respectful in the past. So if you felt in anyway I was being aggressive to you, I apologize. I have an actual reason for my slightly scattered thoughts. However, I will argue that it seemed like one to you because you replied to things, that weren't statements toward you. It was one post replying to three people and separating them would just be spam. Discussions of this nature NEED more context and as much evidence as possible. Also again, I'm not typing any more/less than the other person you've been discussing with.

No worries, I'm not easy to offend.

It would be nice if I could dedicate serious energy to internet debates, but it's just too much of a pain for me. I like the casual face to face style of debating, where it's mostly trading and sharpening ideas we already have stored in our heads, with certain points taken on honor. I'm not keen on the more involved types of debate though, since it takes sooo much time and energy. And though sure, citations are more empirical, I just don't have time to unpack all of that, or to pack my own for that matter.

I don't try to generalize, usually. But again, my point is kids don't even know what right or left wings even stand for. So saying their opinions are popular, doesn't make much sense.

I agree. If I recall right, and this was a while ago, the response had something to do with what teenagers were saying implying the next generation was going to be right wing?

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

<Snipped quote by Dynamo Frokane>

tfw I'm pretty sure you just implied Vilage watches cartoon horses.

;^)))))))))))))))))))

@Dinh AaronMk

Well I suppose if I were to make a fake account for political radicalism, I might as well use it to show of creepy sexual fetishes too.