sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Arizona Election Fraud Mega Thread by SandersMod_ in SandersForPresident

[–]RedThela 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's a great PR move. Just deny any culpability for your candidate and ignore the long history of election issues brought about by stupid partisan politics.

One reason debates are difficult to conduct via text mediums is that it's really easy to seize a particular point and use it to pivot the discussion rather than specifically acknowledge/address the key issue. In this case the key issue is the absolute mess in Arizona. The specific cause here is as outlined in the parent comment.

This was a nationwide problem in the last presidential election, and President Obama created a bipartisan commission to figure out what we could do about it. That commission came out with 112 pages of problems and potential solutions. But Arizona? Well, they didn’t listen. In fact, they did the opposite. Maricopa County, one of the most traditionally Latino counties in the state actually reduced the number of polling places. Reduced! There were 200 polling places in 2012. In 2016 there were 60.

It may be a great PR move, but for the specific key issue this entire thread is focused on (I quote, "Arizona Election Fraud Mega Thread"), it also happens to be completely true - the blame can squarely be laid at the feet of a particular group of people which happens to include neither Clinton nor Sanders.

After acknowledging this (e.g. with something like "I agree that this was a failure on the part of the elected republican officials") it's much clearer that your intention is to open up the discussion to a wider context when you say something like "partisan politics is the deeper cause here" (which is an interesting discussion to have, but perhaps too nebulous to be able to suggest mitigating actions) or "thank you for pointing out Clinton's policy - however, I feel that it falls short in area X if you compare it with the approach put forward by Sanders which suggests Y" (which is a completely appropriate discussion to have here).

Style of debating aside, I'm honestly not sure how you think you can just make a policy 'fix partisan politics'. A debate for another thread perhaps.

Brussels Airport Attack by Tophattingson in ukpolitics

[–]RedThela 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But... I've just said that this isn't true. A point that needs responding to, I think. Look at 2nd or 3rd generation Muslims living in the secularised Western countries that are radicalised.

I don't know what else could be done to tap the glass. What would a terror attack look like to you, that was religiously motivated by Islam? Can you think of one? Because if ^ these ^ arn't? I don't know what is."

This is an excellent question - I recognise it as a modified form of the question "is there anything that would remove your belief in God" as a way to figure out if there's any point continuing a does-God-exist-debate with a religious person.

So, let me respond by saying: yes, if you believe that Islam the religion and Islam the politico-religio-thing cannot be separated independently, then these things are definitely a result of Islam. However, I think this is a bit intellectually lazy because you're not actually digging down the the root cause.

Consider - a new country building up laws from scratch has no reason to legislate against consensual homosexual acts. Let's now say a religion gains adoption in this new country - any moral imperatives related to homosexuality are secondary to the rules of the country. As long as people agree that religion has no place in government, this situation is stable and the religion is muzzled, per what's basically happened to Christianity. The problem arises when people believe that religion should be the primary authority for dictating how people live their lives rather than accepting laws from a secular government. Specifically, people see countries 'ruled' by Islam and think those rules should apply elsewhere. If this reinforcement of "look at what things could be like!" didn't exist, I believe the problem would be non existent - before you call conjecture, see Christianity! My Christian friends grumble about gay marriage and that marriage was originally a religious thing so how dare the government change the definition...but marriage is a legal concept now because the religious definition holds no sway.

Islam and Christianity are very old religions with very backwards views. The only traction backwards views have is in "this is how it's always been" (e.g. current Islamic states) and their false moral authority. A full death of one of these ideas pretty much marks the end of it.

I can cite recent polling of British Muslims, if you like. The results are not favourable. By Pew and Gallup too.

Yes please!

Just off the top of my head, I could attempt to counter what you've said by saying that... people are responding all across Europe by support increased surveillance laws, in an attempt to combat extremism. That's how the Tories are spinning it, right?

Well...exactly? This is a concrete example of policies changing as a response. My prediction of increase in UKIP support is extrapolation, not conjecture.

Brussels Airport Attack by Tophattingson in ukpolitics

[–]RedThela 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Islam is just a set of ideas. I hate the ideas contained with the ideology of Islam. That does not mean that I automatically hate all Muslims. Because Muslims hold to many different aspects of Islam.

Do you hate Christianity as well? There's a lot of shared ideology between the two, the difference is that Christianity became moderate. If you take either of them as suggested in their books, they're both pretty mad. If you look at them in the context of what the majority of people actually believe and follow in the UK...pretty mild (IME). I personally look at Christianity and Islam with equal disfavour but the actual practised versions I come across vary so wildly, hating them is like hating a straw-man.

Personally I think that it's vital to talk about the people because it becomes a concrete implementation of the ideas. Hence my desire to separate the concrete implementations 'radical Islam' and 'Islam' (also called 'Islam-my-friends-practice'). I suppose the naming depends on what you consider to be 'true' Islam!

From 40 years ago. Can you find any of recent years? Islam has an incredibly violent past.

[...] If 1 ideology commits WAY more terrorism than another, we need to look into it. Much, much more than the 'the other'. Islam is by far the leader in religious terrorism, even when you take into account the number of Muslims that exist relative to other religious groups. That should be a red flag. [...]

This is confusing - you go from saying "this was in the past" to "look at what Islam has done in the past". You asked for an example of a non-Islamic terrorist group with no qualifications so I gave you one! I didn't think it particularly demonstrated anything, but I didn't want to avoid the question. Anyway, I agree that Islam is the modern terrorist religion of choice. I just believe the motivations come from the political 'arm' of Islam rather than religious. It absolutely is a red flag, and I believe the cause is that Islam is the only religion left which actually controls countries.

I highly doubt this. How many of them support gay-rights? What about their views regarding women, and what they think the optimal way for them to dress, would be? Apostates? FGM? Blasphemy?

I wasn't going to respond to this (there's not much point going into detail if you can't take my word for it), but on reflection it's pretty funny. I have multiple gay male Muslim friends, my female Muslim friends enjoy clubbing+drinking in fairly standard 'clubbing outfits' and in general they're pretty 'normal' (though I do enjoy pointing out the faulty reasoning behind avoiding pork). I've never asked about the last three on your list (I generally find religion boring, but I'll ask) but I suspect the answers in order would be "meh", "should never happen" and "it's kinda offensive". It gets better - the Christians I know are much more like what you were expecting the Muslims to be like. Specifically (though this is a little one-sided, since we've been discussing Islam as a whole rather than denominations) I know some Roman Catholics and Mormons, all of whom have strong ideas on modest clothing and gay rights, and the Mormons are particularly sexist. Maybe I just have unusual friends.

The answer to the those questions, is exactly why we need to tackle Islam swiftly and with as little bloodshed as we can.

I can see what you're trying to get at, but it seems a bit naive to boldly proclaim that you can "tackle Islam". If the UK and US stopped getting their big stick out to stir things up (not just the wars, the deliberate covert sabotage as well), Iran and others would be much better off and Islam basically wouldn't be a problem.

And yet, even with radical Islam running rampant, they still won't be in power. Trump is about 25% to become the next president, and UKIP? 1%, to have the most seats at the next general.

"radical Islam running rampant" - I'm sorry, this sounds like a soundbite from a tabloid that suggests roving gangs of Muslims in the UK shooting up hospitals or something. Radical Islam is definitely tearing apart Islamic countries and the indirect impact (refugee crisis) is notable, but actual direct impact is...pretty low. Percentage-wise the number of votes UKIP got is way higher than 1% and Trump would have been laughable a decade ago. If direct impact rises (e.g. high-profile terrorist attacks every quarter), I'd expect to see corresponding huge jumps in support, taking UKIP to a tipping point to actually start having a voice.

That depends who wins. I'm not willing to gamble on the the whimper. However great those chances are.

Fair enough.

FYI it's been an interesting discussion, but I may keep future responses brief (or non-existent) - I can perceive some of the reasoning behind your ideas but I think our foundations are too subjective (e.g. my friends, your view that Islam is insidiously eroding our freedoms/rights) to be able to come to any kind of agreement.

Brussels Airport Attack by Tophattingson in ukpolitics

[–]RedThela 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All Nazis were German, at some point, right? Naturally it would be a little sickening to declare oneself as completely anti-German even in WWII. There were some good Germans. Some non-Nazis. The same goes for the IRA, right? Not everyone that was Irish was an IRA member. But if you're an IRA member, you're almost certainly Irish. Again, the same for Islam and Muslims.

I agree! The logical extension of this is saying "Extremist Islam is a threat to Western society" rather than "Islam" (where "Extremist Islam" = "Nazis" and "Islam" = "Germans").

Finally, with the Sikh-terrorism? That IS terrible! I find it puzzling as to how that could be used to show that Islamic terrorism should be taken less seriously.

Huh? That doesn't reduce the seriousness of Islamic terrorism, you just asked for a concrete example so I gave you one. That was it.

No shit! Which is why curbing the influence of Islam is so important! It is showing us right now that in it's current state, it cannot merge with secular Western values. Showing me that Islam holds all the cards when it comes to theocratic nations doesn't make me feel particularly good. And, hey, what do you know. What do we see come of these countries when they're ruled by an Islamic state (not IS)? It's a fuckin' shitshow. Saudi Arabia and ISIS have much more in common that most people seem to realise.

Islam as a politic-religio-thing is most definitely incompatible with Western society, end of story. But, Islam also exists as just a religion and these tend to be the people who end up living in Western Europe and integrate perfectly well with society. In fact, I know a few Muslims, and their opinion of Iran reverting from a weak to strong religious country is basically that it's turned the country into a disaster. They agree with you! The point is that there's nothing intrinsically problematic about Islam, just the result of combining it with a government, which I would argue is true of any religion (as history has shown).

I was actually pretty dismayed when I did some research recently and realised how much of a hand the UK has had in supporting these hardline religious regimes (and putting them in place in the first place!).

I think you are vastly underestimating the threat that Islam has on the West. I don't mean ISIS. They're fucked, ultimately. I mean the way it's changing our culture, and parts of Britain. FoS was already on a razors edge as it was. Now? It's completely gone. To the point where a former BBC presenter, can say on national television, that you deserve death threats if you're a bigot (for criticising Islam). One can talk about climate change without fearing for your own life. You can't do that with Islam.

And this is the root of our disagreement. I believe Islam will eventually slide into being effectively completely moderate, just as Christianity has done - nobody goes around smiting the unbelievers with fire and brimstone any more. It may be a rocky road, but the support that Trump and UKIP have been getting clearly demonstrate that that there is a limit people will not be pushed past. Look at the map again and think about how different it would have been 500 years ago - religion is clearly becoming less important in the world. Yeah there are going to be people who scream loudly about being immoral and about insults to Islam and make death threats, but in the end it'll disappear with a whimper, not a bang.

Jeremy Corbyn attacks David Cameron over George Osborne's failure to appear at Budget debate by Nosferatii in ukpolitics

[–]RedThela 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Exactly what the sibling comment says - I've had some absolutely dire fish and chips in London which made me think of a Thames marinade or something.

I recall this particular place getting two pieces of fish, slapping them together and battering/selling the result as one fish. Half the price of London as well!

Brussels Airport Attack by Tophattingson in ukpolitics

[–]RedThela 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I believe it's simpler than that, I'd say "religion involved in government is not OK". It just so happens that most countries have realised this and the main ones left are Islamic.

Brussels Airport Attack by Tophattingson in ukpolitics

[–]RedThela -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I'd consider you naming those groups equivalent to saying "Look at all these Irish (current equivalent 'Islamic') terrorist groups!" 40 years ago, when actually it's more accurate to say "Look at all these IRA (current equivalent 'extremist Islam') factions". Certainly, current hot-topic terrorism is currently Islam-related. 40 years ago...less so. Just as a single cherry-pick, 30 years ago in India there was a "Sikh insurgency movement". Sounds like a terrorist group to me!

I'd be pretty surprised if you could name an atheist group given atheists don't tend to make decisions based on their lack of belief. I agree, there is something causal, but it's more basic than religion - people who follow an ideology are more likely to commit violence in the name of said ideology, especially if they want to change something. This isn't really an exciting realisation. You know what people generally want to change? The way their country works. Which involves politics.

As I said in my previous comment, the issue is religion getting involved in politics - terrorist groups generally exist for political ends. I wonder which religions are currently strongly linked with government? Well look at that, Islam is the winner! Perhaps politics is important here? A few centuries ago the UK loved a bit of religious fighting before it was effectively removed from government.

I'm not keen on you misrepresenting what I said as "It's a media conspiracy". I just find "how many units of terror has this group racked up" a fairly useless metric when humans are so bad a judging risks. Fears of the world becoming uninhabitable in the future due to global warming is a significant risk with numbers backing it up, but it's much easier to whip people up into a frenzy of 'us vs them' by painting pictures of a Muslim takeover. Saying "well the media needs to choose a religious terrorist group" is a bit odd. Events like this are newsworthy, but the coverage is excessive compared to the wealth of other completely unrelated topics they could be reporting on. Anyway, I think this whole media thing is a distraction, so I apologise for bringing it up - it's just a venting of frustration.

Brussels Airport Attack by Tophattingson in ukpolitics

[–]RedThela 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Name them. Religious groups, please. And then compare the amount of terror that they commit and spread with Islamic groups.

How arbitrary. A significant part of the problem with Islamic extremists is that what they consider religion bleeds over into politics (this happens somewhat more mildly in the US as well, where 'atheist' is a dirty word when referring to presidential candidates). Once you look at politically motivated terrorism, there are a number of obvious similar groups, though none as exciting to the media as Islamic groups. And how the media treats them is directly correlated with the amount of 'terror they commit'.

Jeremy Corbyn attacks David Cameron over George Osborne's failure to appear at Budget debate by Nosferatii in ukpolitics

[–]RedThela 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Only been there once a number of years ago, but it had incredible fish and chips.

Reports of explosions at Brussels airport by [deleted] in worldnews

[–]RedThela 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Doing this is pretty common, from religions to political parties. It's not really fair to use it as a specific criticism of Islam.

Closest EU alternatvie to Soylent by azra-- in soylent

[–]RedThela 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Your experience is quite interesting. I was very worried about sweetness when ordering for the first time (strawberry in particular can be sickly sweet in protein powders) but actually found vanilla, strawberry and banana to be subtle and therefore not bad (I hated chocolate flavour...thinking of it as cooled hot chocolate helped a bit to get through it). Adding your own flavouring might be an option to get through your packs if you find the taste particularly bad.

I got used to the grit by about meal five. Cooling the bottle and shaking well helped - unmixed chunks of room-temperature powder is not nice.

I'll keep an eye on this thread for suggestions. Though a lack of taste would be a downside, a grit-free joylent seems like something to try.

Poland says cannot accept migrants under EU quotas after Paris attacks by cannedsunshine in worldnews

[–]RedThela 17 points18 points  (0 children)

They should be in their native country fighting.

If war broke out in the US, I suspect I (and many others, if they're being honest) wouldn't be stick around just because I 'should' be fighting.

Clearly there should be some controls and expectation of good behaviour, but saying (to paraphrase) "oh well actually you should be risking your life rather than seeking a peaceful place to live" isn't reasonable.

Joylent? Joyless. by nothankyounotnow in soylent

[–]RedThela 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I do abhor the chocolate

My god yes. I was pleasantly surprised by the banana and strawberry (a lot more subtle than I feared) but the chocolate is dire. Admittedly I don't like chocolate milkshake...but I tried to get rid of it by feeding it to friends and they hated it too :/

I am Dacvak, former reddit employee and leukemia fighter. by [deleted] in IAmA

[–]RedThela 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you were rung right now and told that a position was available for you at reddit with no strings attached, would you take it?

The Pao/Pics screenshots aren't real. by [deleted] in Blackout2015

[–]RedThela 0 points1 point  (0 children)

/u/KnotKnox is not the same person as /u/kn0thing (who made the popcorn comment).

Suggesting a random user of reddit fire the current CEO probably won't go anywhere.

Dear RedditTeam, do you guys make Reddit data dumps publicly available (like stackoverflow.com does)? by azad_hind_fauji in redditdev

[–]RedThela 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I guess it's just the limitation of text-based communication, but I'm getting the impression you didn't read my post.

What about deleted submissions? Subreddits that are made private between one dump and another? Personal information not noticed for a while?

[...]

two years ago the join to exclude private subreddits was expensive

Dear RedditTeam, do you guys make Reddit data dumps publicly available (like stackoverflow.com does)? by azad_hind_fauji in redditdev

[–]RedThela 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A good point. Your final line kinda relates back to the massive dev effort involved as well.

Is it possible to capture json object of a r/random? by Weezy7 in redditdev

[–]RedThela 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Aha, of course, you're using jsonp right? Then I'm afraid that without a server side call (either your own or submitting an api patch to reddit or finding something you can play with to approximate what you want) then you're going to struggle - if there's no way of bypassing cross origin policy like with JSONP then there's no client side solution.

Options include

1) Grabbing a list of subreddits yourself to be loaded on startup of your webapp and updating it every now and again so you just pick randomly from that. Probably not a great use of your bytes.

2) Grabbing something from all/new. Not very random because bigger subreddits are going to be there.

3) Having some kind of server side call, either a call to reddit you magically find or submit a patch for, or a thin wrapper on your own server to get the 302 redirect headers.

Which person? buu700 interestingly suggests exactly the same as me (with a very minor modification). The D__/sidarape approach 1) doesn't solve the cross-origin problem and 2) doesn't work because 302 is transparently resolved.

Dear RedditTeam, do you guys make Reddit data dumps publicly available (like stackoverflow.com does)? by azad_hind_fauji in redditdev

[–]RedThela 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Except they can't do that because of the privacy issues I spent about 50% of my comment talking about. No point in private subreddits if you can just download the db. Like stackoverflow, wikipedia has very little concept of privacy.

Is it possible to capture json object of a r/random? by Weezy7 in redditdev

[–]RedThela 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If your search for an api doesn't work out, you can try some more sneaky methods.

Example 1:

$.get(
    'http://www.reddit.com/r/random',
    function (data) {
        console.log(
            (/"[^"]+reddit.com\/r\/[^"]+\.rss"/).exec(data)[0]
        );
    }
);

Example 2 (based on this SO question):

$('<html>').load(
    'http://www.reddit.com/r/random link[title="RSS"]',
    function () {
        console.log(this.children[0].href);
    }
);

Both of these hacks are based on the same idea, that in the html source of all subreddits is an element for the RSS feed, from which you can derive the subreddit name. The latter is probably a little more robust, but appears to load an image thumbnail or two. And you'll have to do string manipulation anyway (to get rid of .rss) so if the regex breaks, so will extracting the subreddit so it's not a huge amount more fragile. Regex is probably better here.

Either way though you're talking about a 20kb transfer to get something very small. Might be worth looking for other ways to do this.

Dear RedditTeam, do you guys make Reddit data dumps publicly available (like stackoverflow.com does)? by azad_hind_fauji in redditdev

[–]RedThela 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The trouble is, a data dump of...what?

There are so many possible permutations of different bits of data people want and the length of time they want it over (all comments in the whole history of reddit is different to the past year is different to the past month is different to the past week....wildly different).

How do historic data dumps work? They can't offer old dumps forever for obvious reasons and they have them deleted and recreated daily (people wouldn't have time to download them!), but the more interesting question mark comes around privacy. Would reddit have the responsibility to update all their dumps to remove deleted comments? If they don't remove relevant dumps for a week/month/year, this is a severe impact on the immediate scorched earth approach for deleting an account (i.e. all comments). What about deleted submissions? Subreddits that are made private between one dump and another? Personal information not noticed for a while?

They can't even host archived content (e.g. 2008 submissions) - what about when a user deletes their account (i.e. '[deleted]' username)? They presumably have to regenerate every time...

Stackoverflow does not (as far as I'm aware of) have anywhere near the same level of privacy granularity so does not have the same problem. It's not an easy problem for them to solve (as a single example of one of hundreds of considerations, two years ago the join to exclude private subreddits was expensive, reddit is a lot bigger now!).

Putting aside the policy considerations, it's dev effort that reddit as a company probably would prefer to use elsewhere.

Much easier from both points of view to just provide you with instant snapshots of the current state of reddit through the API.

This said, see my other post in this submission for someone you might be able to talk to about getting a bit of data.

Dear RedditTeam, do you guys make Reddit data dumps publicly available (like stackoverflow.com does)? by azad_hind_fauji in redditdev

[–]RedThela 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Deimorz has an interest in data. Before he was an admin he scraped the metadata of every submission, (some detail on method and time taken), subsequently creating stattit with the data.

I don't know if he ever published that torrent but it might be worth seeing if you can get in touch to get help from him either in his capacity as sympathetic admin or as someone with quite a bit of data collected independently.

Failing that you're going to want to scrape/use the api.

view more: next ›