Chairchucker

I remember hearing that at the roast of Trump, the only thing that was 'off limits' was that roasters weren't allowed to suggest that Trump has less money than he said he did.

I get the impression that a prime motivator for Trump is generally 'bragging about how rich he is'.

Speaking as an Australian Christian, I absolutely despise the Australian Christian Lobby.

Well Bruce maybe you'll be interested in the other 'Big Story' in Australian 'Politics', which is that the most recent outgoing Australian of the year Grace Tame, was found to have once... taken a photo with a bong! DUN DUN DUN! https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/brilliant-response-to-grace-tame-bong-photo/news-story/54cff740ed0c851666f8faa72b9ddbc2 Some backstory. Grace Tame was a victim of child sexual assault, and later became an advocate on behalf of other victims, and due in part to her work, a law was changed. The law previously disallowed victims of child sexual assault to speak about the crimes committed against them; this was theoretically to protect them, but it didn't really do that very well. Grace was presented her Australian of the Year award or whatever it's called by the PM, Scott Morrison. The Liberal Party had recently had a sexual assault controversy of its own. It was not handled well. Grace made no effort to pretend she was happy to be near the leader of a political party who badly mishandled a sexual assault allegation. There followed much pearl clutching by various people about how Grace should be more gracious and smile more etc, which eventually culminated in The Daily Mail digging up a photo from 2014 with her next to a bong.

I mean sure, they're two different crimes, but it's not a huge stretch that someone who is criminally violent in one area of their life could be so in another.

Here's one of the most recent articles. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-14/ben-roberts-smith-ex-wife-gives-evidence-at-defamation-trial/100827084 There's a few. The people testifying that they saw him commit war crimes are other soldiers who were in Iraq or Afghanistan with him. The woman claiming that she spoke to someone who appears to have been abused by him is his ex-wife who discovered that he was cheating on her with the woman he is accused to have abused.

AUSTRALIAN THINGS This isn't new but it hasn't really been mentioned in the thread as far as I've seen so I'm gonna post about it. One of Australia's most decorated soldiers, Ben Roberts-Smith, (one of like 6 men ever to receive the Victoria Cross: Aussie Edition that I'm too lazy to look up the actual name of but it's something like that) recently decided to take a bunch of news vendors to court for running stories that said he did some war crimes and some domestic violence. And it turns out that maybe this is a bit of an own goal, in that because he's taking them to court they now have to try to prove the defence of truth, and a whole host of witnesses have come forward to say that actually, they totally saw him do a war crime, or saw a woman with a black eye say she probs wasn't gonna go back to him because she didn't feel like falling down the stairs again. So anyway, evidence does seem to suggest that he's a war criminal, which adds to our long and storied history of making heroes of war criminals.

Generally speaking, anecdotal evidence is less than worthless. Definitely true in this case. It shouldn't be too surprising that you prefer it over the actual reliable evidence that is what studies generate, because that tends to be what humans prefer. See also: antivaxxers who aren't interested in hearing about the stats that overwhelmingly show that being vaccinated gives you on average a way better chance of surviving any given illness, but may be somewhat persuaded by a single person telling their own personal story of how not being vaccinated led to illness. In any case, the benefit of studies is, if they are actually using a decent sample size, they will include the 'lived experiences' of a large number of people, and will actually reliably measure these against each other free from the individual biases of those who experienced it. That's not to say that studies will be free from biases, but that's what peer reviews and having a large number of related studies will help. As Gromnir notes, while the specific study I found with a hasty internet search might have its issues, it does have the benefit of being backed up by the overwhelming bulk of studies on the subject. 'I turned out fine' or 'it was helpful for me' is relatively meaningless because most people consider themselves to have turned out fine, and don't really have anything to compare against. Also, that's one isolated occurrence, whereas studies with a larger sample size than one can find you overall positive and negative trends. Also, if someone's good behaviour is predicated on corporal punishment, does that mean we can expect the good behaviour to dry up if they no longer fear that corporal punishment? Let's say someone is 'kept in line' by corporal punishment until they become bigger than the person who was previously meting out said punishment. What then? The reason for their good behaviour is gone, except also you've taught them that they can get their way by dealing out 'corporal punishment' to those weaker than themselves. Also, I see someone suggest group punishments, i.e. punishing everyone but the perpetrator. Interesting to note that in armed conflicts, group punishment is specifically disallowed by the Geneva Convention. I assume that poster was merely joking, however, as they hinted at punishing everyone else and the situation would 'sort itself out', presumably implying that the rest of the students would in some way induce that one student to comply. I assume that poster didn't genuinely think that could possibly be a positive thing, having a whole group gang up on one student.

"I can ignore studies if anecdotal evidence serves my pre-existing biases."

I found out about the Indiana Jones thing when I watched a Legal Eagle video about laws broken by Indiana Jones and went 'oh no'. I guess when I first saw it I thought she was speaking figuratively or something I dunno, like 'comparatively, I was much younger' which is maybe still creepy, but not 25 year old shagging a 15 year old creepy.

It's probably because The Studies have shown that the actual results of corporal punishment is that they're more likely to grow up to be domestic abusers. Corporal punishment is not good. EDIT: Article on one such study that references the overall consensus. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2002/06/spanking TL;DR is that generally speaking, there's no evidence of long term positive results, and there's growing evidence of long term negative results.

Disclaimer: haven't seen the special, don't have access to Netflix. It seems like a poorly constructed joke. The punchline is just 'it's good that Roma got killed'. It's not really presented in a way that makes it anything more than that.

Ugh I posted a big thing and it disappeared. How I'd define it personally is that it's the 'default'. By that I mean, it doesn't manifest itself by people going 'oh heck yeah you're a straight white guy here's some free stuff for you or whatever', it manifests in a lack of oppression that other people get. Women are way more likely to get sexually harassed, assaulted, or passed over for jobs. For many jobs, there's an unconscious bias against women for a couple reasons, which mostly boil down to 'the people doing the hiring are overwhelmingly older men, and even though they are not allowed to officially have gender based hiring practices, they instinctively think of men as more suited to certain roles.' (The inverse is also true for certain roles, it's just that nurse, cleaner and teacher don't pay as well as doctor, engineer or scientist.) I'm less likely to have political parties run on a platform that people of my ethnicity or religious background shouldn't come to this country. I'm less likely to have people pass me over for jobs because 'my accent is difficult'. I'm less likely to be killed in custody. Because of how generational wealth works, I was statistically more likely to be born into the fairly well off middle class situation I found myself in. Also, because I'm straight and CIS, there hasn't historically been legislation that supported the view that I was a mentally ill deviant who should be executed, (death penalty for sodomy removed in Victoria in 1949) or at least imprisoned, (sodomy decriminalised in Tasmania in 1997) or at the very least, that if if I hit on someone, that they could use that as a legal defence against murdering me. (Gay panic defence struck down in South Australia in 2020.) Also, there's not been any schools trying to get parents to sign contracts that state if their children come out as straight they can have their enrolment cancelled, but a school sure tried to do that contract about LGBT students about a week ago. As to friends and family, it varies. Anecdotally, I tend to get on better with those who acknowledge it is a thing, but I think that's in part because there tends to be some compelling Venn diagrams regarding those views and the willingness to ignore science around climate change or vaccines, or support Trump as president, or say that suggesting we stop marginalising people is 'political correctness gone mad'.

Yep the CCP sucks, that's why I compared them to Dahmer, still confused how you saw that and somehow thought I wasn't being critical of them. No, the Trump presidency didn't create this negative view, although it sure contributed. The USA, like Australia, was built off the backs of racist policies and racist people. I think it is incredibly naive to think that just because the specific laws that mention race have been eradicated, that racism within the general population and in the practices within institutions is solved, and furthermore, as has been brought up a number of times, there is a bunch of evidence that institutional racism exists, this is not just our opinion, this is people looking at the date and going 'yep, minorities are not being treated equally'.

Did you take the Dahmer analogy as a ringing endorsement of the Chinese and Russian governments? With regards to the USA, I do not share your optimism. Several million voted for Trump the second time round, I expect several million will vote for him if he stands the next go around, and it is simply not good enough to blame people voting for Trump entirely on the Democrats not having a strong enough candidate, because at some level, several million people still have to make a conscious decision to vote for Trump./

lol 'white beta male geeks' also get the hell out of here with that 'no one outside of a country can judge that country' garbage

On the other hand, a fair bit of ink has been spilled with regards to Russia's treatment of LGBT people, or China's approach to unapproved dissemination of certain topics like for example the Tienanmen Square incident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy They would! We have a long and 'proud' history of preferring immigrants from European countries over, in particular, immigrants from Asian or African ones.

Yes, a slur that has not aged well, and reflects poorly on anyone who continues to use it. Side note: does that one tiktok video autoplay for anyone else every time they get to this damn page? And, like, all three times - the original and both the quotes? I haven't listened to it all the way through and I hate it and the guy in it simply for that reason.

How many white people you know who have had credit denied is largely irrelevant. Systemic problems are not proven or disproven by anecdotal evidence of examples you know of personally. 'People you know personally' is a very poor and unscientific sample size. No, in fact the studies they've done that have found that systemic racism does exist, deal with thousands more people. Now you're right that they won't write on the application, 'loan denied on account of applicant being black'. Not since 1968 when the Fair Housing Act made it illegal to actually have race based mortgage lending as a matter of open policy, which had previously been the case. So then you have to get creative if you want to be 'picky' about which ethnicities you're lending to, as reports such as this one found: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/nyregion/hudson-city-bank-settlement.html The obvious problem with passing a law that makes it illegal for banks to explicitly discriminate based on race as a matter of policy, as they had previously, is that the people in the positions to approve or not approve lending are still the exact same people who were openly using racist methods beforehand. It may surprise you to hear that when these lenders were forced by law to stop openly doing the racist things they were doing as a matter of policy, it didn't immediately cure their institutions of the racist lending habits. There's a similar thing that goes on with voting, BTW. Now, if you really wanted to rig voting, and you were, hypothetically, a Republican, your first instinct might be to simply pass a law that says no one is allowed to vote Democrat anymore. Unsurprisingly, that's illegal, but did you know that you can look at the demographics and find that black and hispanic voters are more likely to vote Democrat? Again, though, you can't explicitly prevent people from voting based on their ethnicity. Not since 1964, anyway. But what you can do, is you can have insufficient polling booths in majority black areas to serve the voting needs of all the voters there. You can find that, statistically, certain photo ID laws overwhelmingly make it harder for black people to vote, and therefore try to legislate such laws. You could conduct robocall campaigns in predominantly black neighbourhoods telling them not to bother voting because the election had already been called. Now sure, these things could theoretically be done by black people in at the expense of white voters but since the people in those positions of power are overwhelmingly white, that's not usually the way it pans out. Systemic racism still happens a lot in the USA, it's pretty well documented. Is it worse than Russia or China? Dunno. Frankly I think the government of both those places seem pretty garbage, and we shouldn't be using them as a yard stick. It's like measuring how much of a good person you are against Jeffrey Dahmer. "Haven't killed or eaten anyone today, so if you look at this graph, I'm still on zero and therefore: good person."

I dunno a damn thing about South Africa and I wouldn't presume to know what the situation is there. In Australia, yes, all of us whiteys automatically, by being born white, have the 'privilege' which is that we don't suffer the systemic discrimination and conscious or unconscious bias that minorities will experience by virtue of not being white. That, of course, doesn't mean that there aren't white people who've grown up in really crappy situations and who might find it odd to hear that they have privilege. Nonetheless, no matter what a white person's economic or social or mental health or whatever else situation may be, it could always be worse by having, in addition to whatever else is going on in their life, the situation of being an ethnic or cultural minority in a country full of institutions and people who have systemic, conscious or unconscious biases against that ethnic or cultural minority. (Or whatever other minority, like sexuality or gender expression.)

Sure if they wanna. I think one of the reasons for not doing it last time around was reduced budget, and now they've got that MS money. Another stated reason was 'don't wanna', so I guess we'll see if that's changed.

This is not about 'the left'. The left is not a monolith. This is specifically about Whoopi and her own experiences and biases, specifically her experience of being part of the most discriminated against ethnic demographic in the country she's currently in right now. Also, white privilege does in fact benefit all white people in the countries where the dominant and 'default' ethnicity is white. We don't get discriminated against on the basis of race by the predominantly white holders of power like all branches of government, police, prospective employers... What she said was incredibly dumb and crappy, but I think it's important to note that the conclusion that you appear to have come to, 'so it's okay what happened', is absolutely not what she said.

Hmmm maybe a bit of a simplistic view tbh

The gentleman here appears to jump very easily from 'God is capable of anything' to 'anything that happens without direct intervention from humans had direct intervention from God.' That may be the position of some Christians, but certainly not all.