[jogs]

Richard Dreyfess accused Donald Trump of being an idiot for his treatment of fellow republicans while campaigning for president. Trump won the nomination and won the presidency. Trump is brilliant and Dreyfess is the idiot for not recognizing this.
Donald Trump speaks like an uncouth trash talking 18-year-old enlisted man from the hicks.
The self-righteous progressive left has taken a page out of the Mao playbook. Mao did not allow criticism of his policies. With PC the left does not allow criticism of its views. Critics will be called racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, bigots, etc. Well, I happen to be a proud shariaphobe. How can anyone be in favor of a morality system from the 7th century?
One can't be for both political correctness and free speech. That would be an oxymoron. Donald Trump is the first national figure to speak against political correctness. The first amendment protects people who are uncouth and unrefined. The first amendment allows everyone to offend. The left needs to develop thicker skin.

rob reiner, on 2017-April-02, 07:14, said:

There is no question that DT is going down. Only concern-how much serious damage before the mentally unstable fool is gone.

Sorry Rob, American voters prefer Archie to Meathead.

[kenberg]

jogs, on 2017-April-02, 07:35, said:

Sorry Rob, American voters prefer Archie to Meathead.

Some of us would like a third choice But you have a point.

[Al_U_Card]

ldrews, on 2017-April-01, 16:57, said:

Trump is a political neophyte and it shows. Also, Trump is not really a Republican, but rather a populist who hijacked the Republican nomination by going directly to the voters. So Trump has almost no traditional political capital. We will see if his direct appeal to the voting base is sufficient to accomplish anything legislatively.

One thing has not changed, the 0.1% (Rockefeller, Harriman etc.) are still calling the shots (sometimes rifle shots...) from behind the scenes and only popular sentiment and action will effect any kind of significant change. Thus far, the sleight of hand and shiny object distractions are working so nothing is likely to happen in the short term

[Zelandakh]

jogs, on 2017-April-02, 07:23, said:

Where is the judicial branch given any authority on immigration?

In Section 2 of Article 3? Any time an EO is against existing law or treaties, a judge (of any level) is duty-bound to hear the case and make a ruling. It is precisely the point of the American constitution that the judicial branch puts a limit on the executive branch in this way.

jogs, on 2017-April-02, 07:35, said:

One can't be for both political correctness and free speech. That would be an oxymoron.

Why? It is perfectly consistent to want a society that ostracises those who use offensive terms but protects that choose to do so despite the social stigma involved.

[PassedOut]

Zelandakh, on 2017-April-02, 08:57, said:

In Section 2 of Article 3? Any time an EO is against existing law or treaties, a judge (of any level) is duty-bound to hear the case and make a ruling. It is precisely the point of the American constitution that the judicial branch puts a limit on the executive branch in this way.

Why? It is perfectly consistent to want a society that ostracises those who use offensive terms but protects that choose to do so despite the social stigma involved.

Yes. The ACLU has defended both Nazi marches through Jewish neighborhoods and Klan marches through black neighborhoods, even though those who support and donate to the ACLU (including me) loathe what both those despicable groups say and stand for. And we all know that the ACLU has often come under fire from those who oppose the civil liberties guaranteed by the US constitution, so it's not always easy to stand up for free speech.

[Zelandakh]

PassedOut, on 2017-April-02, 10:43, said:

Yes. The ACLU has defended both Nazi marches through Jewish neighborhoods and Klan marches through black neighborhoods, even though those who support and donate to the ACLU (including me) loathe what both those despicable groups say and stand for. And we all know that the ACLU has often come under fire from those who oppose the civil liberties guaranteed by the US constitution, so it's not always easy to stand up for free speech.

I am not sure I agree with them here. These groups have a right to free expression but not necessarily to do that anywhere they like without consequences. In the same way that I cannot get 100 of my mates to march along Pennsylvania Avenue and block it without being arrested, I do not see any reason why the respective neighbourhoods should be subject to the disruption that such marches entail. As always, free expression does not trump every other right and here the issue is not exactly clean cut.

[PassedOut]

Zelandakh, on 2017-April-02, 11:38, said:

I am not sure I agree with them here. These groups have a right to free expression but not necessarily to do that anywhere they like without consequences. In the same way that I cannot get 100 of my mates to march along Pennsylvania Avenue and block it without being arrested, I do not see any reason why the respective neighbourhoods should be subject to the disruption that such marches entail. As always, free expression does not trump every other right and here the issue is not exactly clean cut.

No, it is not clean cut for sure.

Here is an interview touching on a more recent free-speech controversy: The ACLU Explains Why They're Supporting The Rights Of Milo Yiannopoulos

Quote

The American Civil Liberties Union defends free speech, even if it's hateful. That has some of their supporters upset. Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks to Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU.

LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Now we're going to turn to another issue on a lot of people's minds, free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union has raised a lot of money, $24 million in donations in just one weekend in fact, after President Trump announced his executive order on immigration. Hundreds of thousands of people were motivated by the organization's work to defend people who were detained at airports. And then this week, the ACLU expressed support for a free speech case. This one involves Milo Yiannopoulos. He's the divisive editor of the far-right website Breitbart News, and he's said things like feminism is a cancer.

He was recently supposed to speak at UC Berkeley, but intense protests led the school to cancel the event last minute. The ACLU says no matter how much you might dislike what he has to say, it's protected free speech, and that makes some of its newest supporters upset. Joining me now to talk about this is Lee Rowland. She's a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

Welcome to the program.

LEE ROWLAND: Hi. Thanks for having me.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what's the case for defending Mr. Yiannopoulos in your view?

ROWLAND: Well, the case for Mr. Yiannopoulos is the same as it would be for any speaker, no matter how despicable or offensive we might find them, which is the First Amendment protects our right to speak out on matters of public concern, to talk about things that are as offensive as the things that Mr. Yiannopoulos says without censorship by the government. And ideally, as in his case, without people physically preventing him from speaking at a place where he had every right to speak.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So the ACLU and you specifically, actually, have received criticism on social media about this. Does the ACLU need to do a better job explaining why it's defending him and other cases like this, where someone is committing what some would consider hate speech?

ROWLAND: Well, look, I certainly understand that, especially for many of our new members, they may be surprised by the ACLU's robust First Amendment positions, but it's certainly not new. Indeed, one of our most high-profile and controversial moments in the ACLU's history was defending the rights of literal self-proclaimed Nazis to march through the streets of Skokie, a town made up largely of Holocaust survivors. What's amazing about the First Amendment is it protects us, regardless of our viewpoints, regardless of the causes we hold dear.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: But isn't hate speech different?

ROWLAND: There's no question that the things that Mr. Yiannopoulos says are unbelievably hateful in nature. But the phrase hate speech is a form of free speech. Again, in defending the rights of others to speak, whether or not we agree with them, we must all reach out and protect the speech that we most disagree with or else the First Amendment is just reduced to a popularity contest and has no meaning.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: At a time like this, when the country's so divided, many see the ACLU as a check on the Trump administration. You've been at the forefront of several important battles. Are you worried that taking controversial positions like this will erode your support, especially among new members?

ROWLAND: Well, I certainly hope not. I mean, as our - as my colleagues' incredible work as of late has shown, we at the ACLU consider ourselves the first responders for the Constitution. That's a core part of our identity here at the ACLU. And look, we often say - if you disagree with us 20 percent of the time, it means you're a thinking person. If you disagree with us 50 percent of the time, you should consider coming to work for us.

So we respect diversity. No one has to fall in line with all of the ACLU's positions. But I do believe that our defense of the First Amendment is an integral part of our fight for civil rights, for equality and liberty for all.

It's definitely okay to disagree with the ACLU -- it's encouraged!


Another take on the ACLU's proclivities: ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters

[barmar]

Zelandakh, on 2017-April-02, 11:38, said:

I am not sure I agree with them here. These groups have a right to free expression but not necessarily to do that anywhere they like without consequences. In the same way that I cannot get 100 of my mates to march along Pennsylvania Avenue and block it without being arrested, I do not see any reason why the respective neighbourhoods should be subject to the disruption that such marches entail. As always, free expression does not trump every other right and here the issue is not exactly clean cut.

The point is that there should be consistent rules regarding getting permits for a parade, and the political stance of the organization should not be part of it.

However, that doesn't mean their politics is irrelevant. I expect that most permitting regulations require that potential violence to be addressed. An organization whose politics are very controversial, especially if they're directly opposite to the area where they plan on holding their rally (neo-Nazis in a Jewish neighborhood, KKK in Harlem), is likely to incite violence, so they'll need to pay for additional police protection.

They can't simply prohibit the KKK and Nazi groups from holding rallies.

[kenberg]

I also regard the issue as a little tricky. I support the right of an individual to say something stupid, or bigoted or whatever. But some gatherings, marches, and so on are not really expressions of opinion, they are intimidation.

Take an extreme example. A young woman is out walking. Make it after dark, and deserted. Deserted except for the three guys walking twenty yards behind her discussing in crude terms what they would like to do with her. The do not carry out any actions, they just walk and discuss. I would expect her to be intimidated. For that matter, a guy would be intimidated, it's just the situation is more likely with a woman. Intimidation is the intention, intimidation is the result.

Back to Nazis and Jews. Or whites and blacks. Or Irish and Poles, I don't care. At some point we have a crossover from speaking one's mind to intimidation. I think a Nazi march through a Jewish area carrying signs celebrating death camps has made that crossover.

I do regard it as tricky, but I also do think at some point we are no longer just seeing the free expression of opinion.

[gwnn]

Which president said this?

a. JFK
b. Clinton
c. Obama
d. Donald J Trump

[Trinidad]

gwnn, on 2017-April-03, 00:29, said:

Which president said this?

a. JFK
b. Clinton
c. Obama
d. Donald J Trump

Many people see JFK as a president with a vision for the future. But few people will think that this vision was so clear that he would be able to refer to Obama.

Rik

[gwnn]

Yes too bad I was too lazy to blur out the name of Obama, otherwise it would've been next to impossible to guess!

[Zelandakh]

gwnn, on 2017-April-03, 02:25, said:

Yes too bad I was too lazy to blur out the name of Obama, otherwise it would've been next to impossible to guess!

You are kidding I hope. It is obvious just from the style of speech. Many say that JFK was the first modern politician because his appeal was more visual than oral (Nixon actually won the radio vote but lost the TV vote more heavily). Even so, his oratory style is very different from that of Trump. The difference between JFK and Obama would be a lot more difficult to spot I think, if for no other reason that that Obama appears to have consciously decided to model himself on his predecessor. I would like to think I could recognise Clinton in this line-up. I guess he would be easiest to mix up with Obama due to the "easy" style of delivery but I think there are enough differences that it should not be so difficult except for "canned" answers and speeches (which are essentially not really that person speaking).

[jogs]

Total obstruction by the Democratic Party. The national Republican Party is in disarray. The Trump administration is unlikely enact any major tax reform. Have no clue how to provide healthcare to all citizens. Trump will only be able to roll back regulations which were created by bureaucrats not elected by the people.
The optimism in the business community is at record highs. Trump will demonstrate that any successful businessman is better than the best politician at running the U.S. economy. This will open the door for Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerburg to run for president.

[PassedOut]

jogs, on 2017-April-03, 07:31, said:

Trump will demonstrate that any successful businessman is better than the best politician at running the U.S. economy. This will open the door for Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerburg to run for president.

We read it here first!

[y66]

From Tamsin Shaw's review of The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis:

Quote

Lewis’s tale of this intellectual revolution begins in 1955 with the twenty-one-year-old Kahneman devising personality tests for the Israeli army and discovering that optimal accuracy could be attained by devising tests that removed, as far as possible, the gut feelings of the tester. The testers were employing “System One” intuitions that skewed their judgment and could be avoided if tests were devised and implemented in ways that disallowed any role for individual judgment and bias. This is an especially captivating episode for Lewis, since his best-selling book, Moneyball (2003), told the analogous tale of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, who used new forms of data analytics to override the intuitive judgments of baseball scouts in picking players.

The Undoing Project also applauds the story of the psychologist Lewis Goldberg, a colleague of Kahneman and Tversky in their days in Eugene, Oregon, who discovered that a simple algorithm could more accurately diagnose cancer than highly trained experts who were biased by their emotions and faulty intuitions. Algorithms—fixed rules for processing data—unlike the often difficult, emotional human protagonists of the book, are its uncomplicated heroes, quietly correcting for the subtle but consequential flaws in human thought.

The most influential of Kahneman and Tversky’s discoveries, however, is “prospect theory,” since this has provided the most important basis of the “biases and heuristics” approach of the new behavioral sciences. They looked at the way in which people make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and found that their behavior violated expected utility theory—a fundamental assumption of economic theory that holds that decision-makers reason instrumentally about how to maximize their gains. Kahneman and Tversky realized that they were not observing a random series of errors that occur when people attempted to do this. Rather, they identified a dozen “systematic violations of the axioms of rationality in choices between gambles.” These systematic errors make human irrationality predictable.

Lewis describes, with sensitivity to the political turmoil that constantly assailed them in Israel, the realization by Kahneman and Tversky that emotions powerfully influence our intuitive analysis of probability and risk. We particularly aim, on this account, to avoid negative emotions such as regret and loss. Lewis tells us that after the Yom Kippur War, Israelis deeply regretted having to fight at a disadvantage as a result of being taken by surprise. But they did not regret Israel’s failure to take the action that both Kahneman and Tversky thought could have avoided war: giving back the territorial gains from the 1967 war. It seemed to Kahneman and Tversky that in this case as in others people regretted losses caused by their actions more than they regretted inaction that could have averted the loss. And if this were generally the case it would regularly inform people’s judgments about risk.

That research eventually yielded heuristics, or rules of thumb, that have now become well-known shorthand expressions for specific flaws in our intuitive thinking. Some of these seem to be linked by a shared emotional basis: the “endowment effect” (overvaluation of what we already have), “status quo bias” (an emotional preference for maintaining the status quo), and “loss aversion” (the tendency to attribute much more weight to potential losses than potential gains when assessing risk) are all related to an innate conservatism about what we feel we have already invested in.

Many of these heuristics are easy to recognize in ourselves. The “availability heuristic” describes our tendency to think that something is much more likely to occur if we happen to be, for contingent reasons, strongly aware of the phenomenon. After September 11, for instance, fear of terrorism was undoubtedly disproportionate to the probability of its occurrence relative to car crashes and other causes of death that were not flashing across our TV screens night and day. We find it hard to tune out information that should, strictly speaking, not be of high relevance to our judgment.

But in spite of revealing these deep flaws in our thinking, Lewis supplies a consistently redemptive narrative, insisting that this new psychological knowledge permits us to compensate for human irrationality in ways that can improve human well-being. The field of behavioral economics, a subject pioneered by Richard Thaler and rooted in the work of Kahneman and Tversky, has taken up the task of figuring out how to turn us into better versions of ourselves. If the availability heuristic encourages people to ensure against very unlikely occurrences, “nudges” such as providing vivid reminders of more likely bad outcomes can be used to make their judgments of probability more realistic. If a bias toward the status quo means that people tend not to make changes that would benefit them, for instance by refusing to choose between retirement plans, we can make the more beneficial option available by automatically enrolling people in a plan with the option to withdraw if they choose.

Sounds like a good case for Trump insurance, not that it is unlikely we'll need this.

[jogs]

Zelandakh, on 2017-April-02, 08:57, said:

In Section 2 of Article 3? Any time an EO is against existing law or treaties, a judge (of any level) is duty-bound to hear the case and make a ruling. It is precisely the point of the American constitution that the judicial branch puts a limit on the executive branch in this way.

That is a huge stretch. This is a dispute between the President of the United States and the local community.
When the president vetoes a bill, it requires 2/3 of the house and 2/3 of the senate to override the president's veto. Now the progressive left thinks every low level circuit judge is more powerful than the president.

[Zelandakh]

jogs, on 2017-April-03, 08:08, said:

That is a huge stretch. This is a dispute between the President of the United States and the local community.

To which specific case are you referring? There have been so many already it is difficult to keep track. The main rulings seem to have been made with regard to individuals' rights in treaties entered into under international law. Is it really your position that upholding these would be beyond the remit of a judge?

[gwnn]

Yes, Zel, I was kidding. In fact the first post was also a joke. The joke was that DJT has a different (lower) level of eloquence than Obama, JFK, or Bill Clinton. So the question (posing as a riddle) is in fact trivially easy to solve, which is the contradiction leading to humour. I hope all is clear now.

[mikeh]

jogs, on 2017-April-03, 07:31, said:

Total obstruction by the Democratic Party.

Incredible! Unbelievable! How destructive to the principles of democracy! What were they thinking? Where did that idea come from?

Oh.

Now I remember.