because he likes trump?

one time his snapchat story was a bunch of dead rabbits

for the first time in 16 years ive managed to go more than 10 days without biting my nails until they bleed and i cant touch anything

I have no idea why this happened

How do i keep it up?

tf2 as a game is still perfectly playable, even up to a fairly high level. It certainly isn't growin and eventually the proud vampire slayer valve finally get that stake through its heart but as it is its only dead in name.

tftv is dead like a vampire like yeah its undead but only in some weird abstract sense because as long as you stay out of the sun its still fine

the problem is that in a "fair" election California, Texas, New York, and Florida are the ones that matter. They represent the most important states from a population and economic perspective. But at the same time, if you pander to them the other 70% of the population and 50% of the economy would go to shit. You need something to make sure the people who don't actually matter that much don't get shafted

the problem with this is you could argue Trump supporters are the ones being left behind in a globalizing world with a fair amount of evidence.

Theories are all nice and great but trying to be predictive in such broad strokes with geopolitics is difficult.

the rate of healthcare premium growth (2nd derivative) has been increasing since before Obamacare. example You can see that the actual growth isn't increasing, it's holding to what it was. Calling the ACA an outright failure because it didn't deliver on campaign promises and didn't reverse a 20+ year trend is myopic as shit because it discounts the actual advantages that the ACA has given and implies that repealing it would somehow both reverse the trend and end end up with more people insured.

You also ignore that states that fully embraced Obamacare have seen much better returns than those that neglected to fund the state portions (example). Compare this with a map showing states that accepted medicaid expansion and you'll see a reasonable correlation that shows that Obamacare isn't inherently evil.

I'd pick someone who actually understands healthcare administration, which is a COMPLETELY different field from actual medicine. Management and floor work aren't the same, and the crossover between the skillsets isn't inherent. Assuming that pharmaceutical companies or hospital execs don't want universal coverage is kind of dumb too. Hospitals lose money on uninsured people for a multitude of reasons. Even people who go in debt at the emergency room tend to not be as good of investments as people with insurance because people who have crippling medical debt also tend to be sick and not able to earn much money. You could argue a conflict of interests as far as premiums go, but premiums are always increasing due to the way demand works in healthcare and as a result any administration that doesn't attempt to cap their growth will see the same problems with healthcare costs.

The problem with trying to be fair is that it isn't fair in the end. 51% of the population agreeing on something that is very divisive means that 49% gets completely screwed. The point of the electoral college (modern) isn't to make it so that rural states count more, but make it so that you can't just appeal to 10 cities and then say you'll give Arizona a tax break to be president. Spreading out the vote insures that its impossible for a single base to control the entire election

I think the EC has failed and the results end up similar, but the way it has failed is still probably better than pure democracy. Right now you have to appeal slightly to your parties' locked states and then campaign across a few relatively diverse swing states ensuring that various types of Americans get some campaign time. Pure democracy would basically be decided by New York, California, and Texas and the democrats would never lose just because they could promise to do whatever the big cities want and then play nice with a few localized regions to push them over 50%.

So no, the EC isn't fair, but its less unfair than pure democracy so its not likely to leave soon.

trying to use Chicago to explain why gun laws don't work is like trying to use the most recent Measles outbreaks to prove herd immunity is bullshit

Chicago doesn't exist in a vacuum, all the surrounding areas have lax gun laws that make acquiring one a day trip at worst. The problem with trying to use comparative stats to discuss gun laws is that both sides can point to other areas to show where gun laws are good or bad. Japan has strict gun control and a far greater suicide rate than the US while Australia has strict control and lower homicide rates that can be measured as decreasing since gun bans took effect.

So many cultural and socioeconomic factors play into things like crime and gun violence as well as suicide and mental health that it becomes nearly impossible to even try to test gun laws in a scientific way. This makes most of the stats basically useless for comparison.

earlier you said you were a 4.0 student?

affirmative action could only negatively affect you if you were at the VERY bottom of your class

Yeah, Carson is a token. He has no qualifications for anything at a government level. He knows absolutely nothing about healthcare from an administrative point of view. It would be like making a grocery clerk the CEO assuming that since he knows how to do the floor stuff he can figure out the rest.

@752
>I don't know how he can be a racist if he has also treated so many minorities with such great respect and hired so many of them to work at his company

Treating individuals well doesn't mean you're not still working to prevent them from rising into the upper classes

753
>people aren't poor because there black your social standing isnt determined by your race the president was literally black racism is not so widespread

Black people are still objectively less likely to make it into the middle and upper middle class. Having a black president doesn't change the fact that black people as a whole are far less likely to be successful.

>just because there is a larger number of minorities who are poor than does not mean we need to put legislation in to help them

I didn't say you had to. I said that legislation that keeps poor people poor is also racist because poor people are mostly minorities. As a result any legislation that limits social mobility (encourages the cycle of poverty) is racist because it keeps race correlating with social status.

>republicans are conservative so they don't put legislation in to help people economically for the most part this economic policy does not make them racist

Republicans are barely conservative and they do a lot of legislation to help people economically. Their way of doing this is by encouraging businesses and entrepreneurs through tax breaks as well as passing legislation that helps corporations while blocking bills that limit them. Corporate welfare is a big fucking deal in America, especially after Bernie's campaign and the fact you're not aware of it says volumes about how well informed you are.

I've gone over several times how racism is using race to maintain socioeconomic stratification but I'm gonna repeat myself for the 4th or 5th time because you really don't seem to get it:

HATING BLACK PEOPLE ISN'T RACISM (it's prejudice)

CREATING A SOCIETY WHERE BLACKS ARE LESS PRIVILEGED THAN WHITES IS RACIST

you keep thinking that when someone says Republicans are racist they mean the first one when most don't. A fair portion probably do, but realistically that's not a huge percentage. The majority of Republicans do support the second because the majority of Republicans propose and endorse bills that limit the social mobility available to the lower classes.

Why does it have to only harm black people to be racist? Racism isn't just about prejudice or targeting people based on race. Racism is about a systemic and society wide devaluing of people based on perceived differences in biology/ethnicity that we group as a "race". People saying blacks can't be racist sound dumb, but in the most literal sense they aren't wrong because the core factor in what we determine to be racism depends on a power imbalance. That power balance manifests as a stratification of social class based on race (in a purely racist society). The US isn't purely racist, but there's definitely a lot of imbalance between race and class. The fact that the two are so correlated makes targeting one usually affect the other. This is why policies that affect the lower classes are seen as racist. US society has set itself up in such a way that the majority of lower class people are black but just enough are white to say you're not being racially motivated when you target lower classes with policy and come across as genuine. Recognizing that even policies that come from a completely racially unmotivated place can still have racist impacts by serving to reinforce the marginalization of minorities is important in be racially conscious.

The fact that republicans hear this over and over and over and over and instead of explaining how their policies won't serve to maintain current social standings cry about how they aren't racist at all shows one of two things: the GOP is made up of politicians too stupid to understand basic sociological concepts OR the GOP knows that confronting this reality will alienate voters who aren't as well informed about how racism in America truly works and vote GOP by telling themselves they're voting for fiscal conservatism but don't hate black people. Most of them don't actually hate black people, but I doubt most people are particularly aware of the ways that class and race interact in America and don't realize when they get called racist it isn't because they're joining the Klan.

Occam's razor says the GOP isn't dumb

People aren't poor because they're black, glad we agree. Black people are more likely to be poor because throughout the history of the US various ethnic majorities have declared themselves white and black people black and have worked to maintain the superiority of whites over other races. The fact that black people now, hundreds of years later, are still at the bottom even though the US is not directly racial in its policy is not a waiver saying the US is post-racial. Policies that disenfranchise inner-cities or harm people in lower income brackets will disproportionately affect more minorities than whites, and as a result these policies will continue to be racist.

That doesn't mean they're necessarily bad policies or that supporting them makes you a bad person, but reinforcing a society where race correlates to social class is reinforcing racism.

meme arrows are used for quoting and they're easier than doing html for every single piece I want to discuss

why am i getting downvoted for providing the definition of racism?

@734

Policies that affext the lower class disproportionately are inherently racist since they reinforce a class structure that currently makes being white better than being black. Stuff like repealing the ACA affects the black community more.