World is Falling Apart Thread (Locked forever)

[CRTGAMER]

He's already implied a willingness to impose martial law on Chicago. From there, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to making up some excuse to declare a national state of emergency and suspending the Constitution. Even if the Supreme Court strikes down an action like that, he could just pull a Jackson and refuse to comply.

Wow, that is an extreme thought. Never heard of a proposal to Martial Law, Link to that?

Chicago does need something done immediately due to all the violence, though any thought of Martial Law would be nuts. The Chicago Mayor needs to make the crime control priority one and look at what is not working in his city.

[jp1]

So quick and dirty, full disclosure I haven't done diligent research yet, so these are impressions that may be swayed pending further info.

15. Remove Lobbyist
Does not go far enough. All existing 10,000 Lobbyists should be removed as well and forever. No one should have an advantage over the voters influencing the lawmakers in Congress.

Looks good for saving face, the hypocrisy of letting his own business dealings affect policy is only the start of my problem with this. Backroom dealings are certain to happen. All this does is remove what little transparency we had on these matters.

14. Refugees and terror
A limit of countries banned does not go far enough. Terrorists can slip in thru any country and already too late anyways. Too many innocent immigrants are affected thru the current ban, but then how many slip by with ulterior motives? Elaborated on this in my previous page Reply with what should be done. No country has the right to visit the United States Of America, more need to learn that.

We are a country of immigrants, built by immigrants, and whose entire mission was to provide freedom and refuge to the people around the world who need it. This is not American values, it is the opposite. We are profiling people, it is bigoted and worse it is cruel and shows our lack of empathy to the rest of the world. I'm sure it is not doing us any favors with the rest of the world and our already struggling image.

13. Reshaping the military
A good move giving Defense Secretary Mattis full control on the Military. This a necessary step to get rid of past policies inside the military and starting fresh. The President believes in Waterboarding and backs his Defense Secretary decisions who does not believe in torture. Now that is a leader, placing the trust in his cabinet.

This should be all about the Veterans and their families in my opinion. Stop wasteful spending on nuclear weapons. Nuclear war = the end of civilization...who cares who wins?

12. Border wall
I live in San Diego the only location of a "two fence" wall. Immigration has slowed down but still a problem with the drug tunnels. An absolute yes on the wall which includes more Border Patrol. Do whatever possible to cut off the drug flow, illegal immigration and possible terrorist infiltration. No it will not stop the flow, but certainly will slow it down.

Stupid and childish. Ineffective, which is a good thing. Put this money into our infrastructure or education, or healthcare for those you are about to strip of it.

11. Deportations and Sanctuary Cities
Mayors of the Sanctuary Cities have taken an oath to uphold the law including Immigration laws. It is not their place representing the voters on deciding which laws to follow or ignore. Change the law if you do not like it and PROTECT the American Citizens from the few criminal immigrants hiding in the masses. I say cut their funding, maybe gives me a bigger tax return and too much Government waste anyways. The Catch and Release signed by President Obama is so stupid, police are supposed to be upholding the law! The sad excuse of not my department so I do not have jurisdiction is so wrong.

Elected officials are upholding the wishes of their voters in these cases, because these cities are blue anyway. I'm glad some of our country has the good sense to stand in opposition of the bullshit that is being shoved down our throats.

10. Review manufacturing regulations
Absolute yes. All the regulations is what is killing jobs. Keep the enviroment and OSHA regs at a reasonable level and not the beyond outlandish that it is now. I feel sometimes the study groups drag out regulations to justify their departments existence and monetary gain.

Money grab. Kill environmental and safety regulations to further exploit the planet and the workers for increased profits for the rich. Don't expect this to play out well. Workman's comp and lawsuits abound when the safety regulations go to shit. Also, how in the world is "It's too late for the environment, lets just keep burning it to the ground." a valid point? We are in the eleventh hour here and we need to uphold the Paris agreement and exceed it's proposed goals.

9. American steel in pipelines
Takes a businessman in the President to do what should be common sense. Made in America creates jobs and makes America strong thru a strong economy.

Don't know anything about this. Doesn't seem like a bad idea to use American steel if pipelines are going to be in place.

8. Speeding up environmental reviews for all priority infrastructure
This falls in with line 10, get rid of the excess bureaucracy. The President mentioned "It should not take ten years for an environmental study and then get approved or rejected. If no then no immediately, if yes then yes immediately."

Getting things like this done fast and sloppy is dangerous and does little to provide a picture of the long term effects on the environment. You can't rush something like this and expect valid results. This is a push to get past long term consequence for short term gain.

6 + 7. Speeding approval of Dakota Access and Keystone Oil Pipelines
A smart move using the XO action that could be rescinded later. Too late, pipe already built. There are thousands of miles of oil lines running all over the continent already, safer then transporting by rail or ship. Oil independence is another step to keep our nation strong, without having to cater to other country policies to gas up our cars.

Don't know enough about this, but it seems like a good idea to be less dependent on foreign oil. I still think we should be investing in clean energy heavily and immediately. Putting it off until we "can afford it" means it will never happen. With other countries sustaining almost or completely on clean energy the blueprint is available, stop being bullheaded, give up some of those oil profits and invest in a future in which our planet is still inhabited by people.

5. Federal hiring freeze
Another good move. Federal employees make so much more then the private sector, the scam of the pension in any city makes one grit their teeth.

Don't get it, if agencies are understaffed what does this accomplish? It feels like a play for vetting and weeding out the candidates who might pose a risk to the singular mindset.

4. TPP
Good riddance. Only useful if EPA, OSHA and Pay is EQUAL in all participating countries. Until then, bring on the Tariffs!

Let's piss off the people who do 90% of our manufacturing on the cheap. We don't need allies. I'll have a low paying factory job, but my quality of life will diminish because I won't be able to afford any of the "Made in America" goods. This is a move to "create jobs" that will be mediocre at best and whose labor will benefit the wealthy and diminish the value of our dollars.

3. Abortion
This has been misinterpreted as making abortion illegal. Not so, just cutting off funding to charities for just foreign countries. I say cut it all off, we as taxpayers thru the people we elect need to decide what countries get a handout and tax money not controlled thru some private organization. I have strong feelings on the abortion issue. I am NOT against 20 week term abortion but FOR removing any tax payer funding.

Don't care if abortions are government funded or not, as long as they aren't illegal. However, the funding being pulled for any orginization that provides abortions seems like a direct play to close all these places down passively. At best the other programs that are in place will cease to exist and the already privately funded abortions will continue as usual. This is a counterintuitive measure for the bottom line tax dollar voters. It looks like what they want, and perpetuates what they hate. Abortions are more lucrative than preventative measures (which is where the government funding goes).

2. Regulation Freeze
Same as lines 10 and 8. Way too much bureaucracy delaying new construction and new businesses. I feel sometimes the study groups drag out regulations to justify their departments existence and monetary gain.

"I'm the boss now, things are going to change!" "I don't want things like the law or the constitution, or regulations standing in my way!" Also, easy way to kill Obama policies and appease his fan base. It's much easier to destroy things than to accomplish them. It looks like he is "getting something done." It's a power move, one of many, that give him and all his corporate CEOs a sandbox to play in.

1. Affordable Care Act rollback.
Oh absolutely yes. The biggest farce is shoving the ACA down our throat making anyone pay a fine if they do not have health care. The priority first should be jobs, force the jobs creation with the same emphasis as ACA and the country would have been better today with more taking home a paycheck.

Gentrification through passive murder. People will die, a lot of them, all poor. No replacement that is going to pass through a Republican congress will take care of them either. This act alone, without a fallback plan, is an impeachable offense in my opinion. Not a far cry from genocide.

Happy to hear counterpoints, or information that refutes my impressions, as I said these are initial impressions and I haven't had the time or frankly inclination* up to this point to go in depth on them.

* Not because I don't care, but because it feels like a futile attempt to understand something that is clearly sinister.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Chicago does need something done immediately due to all the violence, though any thought of Martial Law would be nuts. The Chicago Mayor needs to make the crime control priority one and look at what is not working in his city.

Chicago has seen a spike in violent crime, but its murder rate is still below where it was in the early 1990s (not by that much, however...). It is an interesting case, however, because violent crime in other major metropolitan areas has continued its historical decline, and Chicago excepted, most large cities are safer than ever.

Interestlingly, Chicago - despite a spike in violent crime - is not in the top ten most violent cities in the United States. In fact, it ranks 25th, just three spots above...Anchorage, Alaska.

http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/most ... tates.html

[MrPopo]

Additionally, the violence in Chicago is pretty localized. Downtown and the North Side are great places to be, whereas the South Side is the kind of place you don't want to be in after dark.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Additionally, the violence in Chicago is pretty localized. Downtown and the North Side are great places to be, whereas the South Side is the kind of place you don't want to be in after dark.

Agreed. People do live there, though, and the overwhelming majority of them are not murdered. I have found that people who are unaccustomed to urban environments often have an irrational fear of poor neighborhoods. Certainly, many of them aren't great places to live, but they are by no means war zones or zombie-infested wastelands. The way some people talk about them, however, you would think that stepping into them after dark would result in instant death.

[MrPopo]

No, but they do tend to make people uncomfortable. I remember one time my sister was driving south on Lake Shore Drive at night and missed the ramp to I-55, so then she started heading into the South Side. And after a bit she looked around and realized "I don't want to be here" and got northbound again ASAP.

[Ack]

I'm just saying, guys, having your daily commute messed up because the cops have found yet another dead homeless guy is really annoying.

[prfsnl_gmr]

I'm just saying, guys, having your daily commute messed up because the cops have found yet another dead homeless guy is really annoying.

But then, you really have no one to blame but yourself...

[Ack]

As much as I am joking about that, sadly it did happen more than once while I was living closer to inner city Atlanta. There was a tunnel close to where I lived on my commute where homeless people often slept. It was thankfully very close to a hospital, so in the event something did happen, help was generally pretty close. But passing through it at least once a day was always a sobering experience.

I did consider several times just stopping and passing out bottles of water or things like that, but I'd heard somewhere that was actually illegal in this city. Still...it feels pretty terrible to know I'm doing well when other folks aren't, and if I do encounter a homeless person and have something like water or food, I try to share it with them.

[marurun]

Sorry this post is on such a delay. Yesterday was father/son day, and those days are busy as hell, and I had a lot of catch-up at work today. Also, it's a bit long, so..... sorry. But in my defense, this is my first post in like 5 pages.

You already know the answer, there is no honest unbiased news source... Take it all in, reject the ones you do not agree with.

This is the single most ignorant and dangerous way to deal with information. Whether you agree with something or not should not be the criterion that determines credibility in an information piece or source. All this accomplishes is to further harden your own views against actual information. What if your view of the world is wrong? How do you ever correct that view if you are rejecting any information that doesn't agree with you already?

That's not the only reason this view is a problem. We talk about our political opinions, but we're really talking about beliefs, and those two are very different. Opinions are whether or not I like the taste of eggplants (meh) or enjoy fighting games (I do, but boy do I suck at them). Beliefs are how we view the world. Opinions do not need any kind of basis, because they are totally surface level. Beliefs affect how we perceive and interact with the world, and ideally have some rational or experiential basis.

But all too often our beliefs are shaped by our emotions, by how we feel about the world instead of how it might actually be. We believe a thing because we want it to be true, not because there is any factual data or observed data that it is so. We must also be aware of our perceptual biases. We are not neutral instruments. Everything we see, hear, and perceive is processed hastily in a meat computer stewing in hormones and chemicals that is geared toward fast conclusions before accurate conclusions. Unlike silicon processors we don't have error correction. We can easily be convinced that up is down and right is wrong. One need only look at history to see how regularly unreliable humans are in their perceptions and judgment.

The key here is to take in the information with debate instead of just completely ignoring it.

Debate can be such an iffy method. Debate is only truly effective if the parties engaged are following the same underlying rules. Otherwise it's just a discussion, which is fine, or a messy argument, which is not fine.

This explains a good deal why sources like the NYT, WaPo, and the major news networks reside almost dead center, when they likely belong a little more to the left.

According to who? What is the standard for what is left and what is right, especially when you get close to center? Do you include opinion content or just analyze news coverage? How important really is bias? Is bias based on public opinion? Is it based on some factual reality?

I'm not asking this stuff to be a dick. It really is important.

Some folks say that American public opinion and politics leans center-right. Of what? The rest of the world? Does that mean that the world at large is left of American politics? In which case, if there is a left-of-center bias to news reporting in traditional news outlets, that could be considered appropriate, because US news outlets, while US-focused, still regularly report world news and events.

I was going to insert a bit here with some quick research I did in a massive library database system I have access to, but what I have found is that there are meaningful cases to be made for the argument that the large, traditional news outlets are centrist, and meaningful cases to be made for the argument that most large, traditional news outlets are slightly to somewhat left of center. The research is far from conclusive (in part because of widely varied methodology and definitions of left and right bias). Notably, public television and public radio are regularly among the more center-leaning sources even among the studies that find traditional media leans somewhat left.

So while discussion of news media bias is important, it cannot be the core measure of a news source's authority or reliability. News reporting strives for truth, which yes, is somewhat nebulous (similar to bias), but research and data collection and analysis are important to reporting. Reporters and news outlets that do good research and have a more thorough editorial process are more reliable outlets, often regardless of bias. News articles need to do more than simply recount current events as they happen. The best of them put things in the context of the nation, the world, and history. Online-only outlets often don't have robust or thorough editorial processes, and their authors and reporters may not have the experience or proper support to do detailed research to underpin their reporting. A larger institution will have more checks in place to prevent false or bad reporting.