Not at all. If a person is unprepared to discuss their knowledge they are unlikely to be able to act upon that knowledge in any adult environment. This ranges from synthesizing new knowledge, to succeeding at job interviews, to selling the goods you have created (all variations of convincing someone that you are right.)

What puts introverts at a disadvantage is an educational system which consistently fails to prepare them for the most basic prerequisites of participating in our society.

If it makes you feel any better, with an 18 vote difference you would actually need the entire population of Iowa voting in the primaries to determine any preference between Santorum and Romney at any reasonable confidence.

Voting is dumb.

That and since Iowa's delegates are assigned proportionally, neither one can win the state now by enough to get even one extra delegate.

Anyway, now looks like Romney wins by 14.

And it looks like Rick Perry might finally be dropping out of the race. I'll let it slide for now, MacFarlane, but I think you (and the rest of Texas) still owe us all an apology for this. Either that or you can just give me a hundred dollars and I'll forget about it.

No way, I'm not responsible for that bloodthirsty moron. I voted Kay Bailey Hutchison for governor.

You see, MacFarlane.... I gave you two choices. You went outside of the options I outlined. Please revise your response and this time choose from the list!

The key word is "inherent". It is very easy to make observations about a small subset of a given race with the knowledge that any inherent difference they might have from another race is superficial and trivial.



No. You are acting like companies can't do anything other than binary risk reward analysis. An outright ban of black employees would only make sense in very few situations. There are a lot of situations where an applicant's ability to meet job requirements in and of itself gives you enough information that the far more broad statistics about their race become irrelevant. The depressed price of black labor causes the risk to be worth the decreased price in other situations. Basically, exactly the way it plays out right now. It's not fair. But do you have a solution? Or better yet, do you have a solution with no drawbacks? I will absolutely grant you that we royally screwed up as a nation and are responsible for blacks having it so bad. But what is the best way to deal with it? I'm not sure. It's something that should be given a lot of thought. Is pretending to taking away the personal freedoms of people the way to go about it? I don't think so. Any such effort will only be a meaningless byproduct of a more significant, meaningful cultural change.

The following argument has the exact same logical structure:


Actually, laws do a pretty damn good job at keeping people from stealing. I guarantee that if those laws didn't exist, the meaning of personal property would effectively disappear overnight, especially if you assume that we continue to enforce laws against murder, ect. They aren't perfect, but they are very, very effective. Affirmative action, however, has very little demonstrable effectiveness. Maybe not none at all, but every policy has it's drawbacks. The drawback to this policy is that it undermines ideals that are designed to protect people in situations where they don't enjoy cultural favor. It's somewhat analogous to the fact protecting all unprivileged ideas is more valuable than the risk of silencing people with destructive ideas.



Who said anything about hiring quotas? I didn't. Also, you didn't give any support for your assertion that universties would become completely homogonized with out racist/sexist admission policies.



That's the point. It's not at all profound. It's trivial to say that the problem is what we are responding to rather than how we respond. That just leads us the degerate case of remove the source of the problem, which is humanity itself. It's a pointless line of thought, so it's not useful to bring it up.

So no, the problem is not that people are differnt, any more than the problem is people. The problem is that some people haven't figured out how not to be dicks about it, and how do we get those that are to stop.






That would be FANTASTIC!

Here, I've made some edits.

I at least demand that you apologize for Colt McCoy having a flimsy skull.

Well, sure. That one's actually my fault.

Alright now how about an apology for Tebow?

Nope. He's the Rick Perry of football, remember?

I demand absolution. You will not walk away from this alive. You have brought forth two annoying god botherers who aren't good at what they do, but other annoying god botherers obsess over them.

And yes, I blame you. Not the voters who actually voted for Perry. I don't blame Josh McDaniels who actually drafted Tebow, or the idiot hillbilly fans that seem to love the Broncos. I blame you.

You don't have to be in church every Sunday to know there's something wrong with this country when two idiots who suck at their jobs can be in the limelight.

Wouldn't being in the limelight suggest that, no, they don't suck at their jobs?

Unrelated: Ron Paul would repeal the patriot act.

No.

That's exactly what I said when I first saw it.

It might, if we didn't know better.

Well, it looks like Bachmann has dropped out. Rick Perry has decided not to drop out, though, citing the following reason:





Go get 'em, tiger.

This GOP contest is perhaps the most "entertainment news" styled one in some time (as the above Ron Paul ad indicates).

While it is reminiscentof Idiocracy, it's perahps just one of those cases of them knowing to know put their all into it because they're going up against an incumbent.

I just watched McCain's endorsement of Romney. It was painful to see him stand there rambling and stammering while trying desperately to make a point. It just came off as a bunch of non sequiturs.

Saw that at lunch, was quite flabbergasted at how terrible he was. Reminded me, "oh yeah, that's why he failed hard in those debates".

Anyways, speaking of Ron Paul, not sure if anyone has seen this article. I think it's pretty good, does a good job at showing what Ron Paul means to the political environment as a whole. TL;DR version: He seems to be the only candidate that staunch liberals could be in favor of (anti-wall street bailout, anti-drug laws, anti-war, etc), but the only candidate that staunch conservatives could be in favor of as well (limited government, lower taxes, anti-Fed, etc.). It presents him not as a viable candidate at all (the author admits he has some horrendous views), but rather than the mix of his beliefs brings attention to a lot of viewpoints that the media doesn't really talk about. An example would be the recent NDAA. Both republicans and democrats on a whole seem to think this bill is decent. Ron Paul is the only one bringing to the conversation "ARE YOU ****ING KIDDING ME?"

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/progressives_and_the_ron_paul_fallacies/singleton/

Which is why it would be great to see him debate Obama, but not necessarily beat him.

Ron Paul appeals to both sides because both sides of American politics only cover a tiny portion of the ideological spectrum. Ron Paul appeals to democrats and republicans where their ideology overlaps with libertarianism.

ftfy

vb ate my reply twice. ****ing PHP programmers.

No. The key part of the definition is "justifies treating them differently."

You seem to have gotten lost.

You are absolutely correct that real firms would simply pay a black employee less money. My model was based on the assumption of fixed wages, which is not realistic. However, the point you seem to be missing is that paying black people less money is also racist. It's exactly the kind of perfectly rational, free market economic discrimination I am railing against.

I'm not sure why you started your response sounding like you disagreed with me and then launched yourself into a slavering diatribe about how right I am, but I guess I accept your concession?

Yeah, great. I don't really understand what you were going on about at the end, but thanks for conceding that your argument is unsound.

Actually you pretty much did, since you said "less qualified application get a position because they are from a certain race" and you weren't just talking about universities. Did you maybe just not understand what affirmative action means and now you are backpedalling?

I also don't support my assertion that time is relative. The gender gap is just one of those things that anybody who has set foot on a university knows about.

It honestly seems that Ron Paul chose the wrong election to go into. I mean, the majority of the republican candidates are extremely right wing, while this would usually be to the advantage of a (comparatively speaking) moderate, the extremists are getting the sorts of people out and voting who would have thought that George Bush was too liberal, so there is an entirely new voting group in the primaries. This means that Paul is stuck between a rock and a hard place, as it would be impossible to win votes from this new extreme right voter group without alienating the moderate republican voters. While this wouldn't usually be an issue, as most politicians go for the biggest voter group (though it is harder these days, as you have to go pretty much for the largest group nationally, rather than locally as it is impossible to keep details of your campaigning in each region IN said region, which is how the racist vote was won in the past, by making sure that your more moderate areas of campaigning don't see what you did there) from the start, Ron Paul has already shown that he is trying to win both moderates and conservative republicans, and the ideological gap between the two has gotten too big in recent years for that to be a viable strategy (at least in the take part of your policies from the moderates, and the rest from the conservatives rather than a deeply researched compromise position).

TL;DR the republican voter base, while widely spread overall, is also tightly grouped in a few areas on the ideological scale, making a compromise political position difficult, especially when your opponents have the ability to get the whole of one section to vote for them.

Except for the part where all the lesser candidates are divvying up the lunatic right, that'd almost be true.

Doesn't matter anyway. Ron Paul opposes SOPA.

Too bad not enough people know what SOPA is, or its consequences for that matter, for that to make a difference.

Without me doing any research, what is SOPA?

It's congress trying to ruin the internet, in a nutshell. It's the Stop Online Piracy Act. Some ******* from Texas came up with it (MacFarlane, that's another apology you owe the world). Basically it's theoretically used to protect against copyright infringement. Anything posted on youtube or whatever that didn't have copyright permission would become a criminal offense, down to the act of using a song without the permission of the artist. The main problem is, it gives Americans the ability to police the entire internet. It's another instance of some ******** republican thinking that America is the world police, and we need to keep an eye on everyone and make sure no one is breaking our laws, and if our laws don't apply to them, we'll just make it so they do.

There's a whole bunch of other ****..... You can find it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act#Arguments_against

It never had a chance of passing anyway. It's even having trouble getting out of committee.

Another good piece of news is that the entire tech industry is against it and similar legislation, and they're far more loaded than the entertainment industry. They're being out-lobbied at the moment, but that would change quickly if there were any real danger.

If it somehow did pass, I doubt Obama would sign it, and if he did sign it, it would end up in SCOTUS anyway.

^^ in a 5-4 decision...

On the subject of piracy, I found this to be an interesting read.

Protecting against copyright and trademark infringement is the idea. In practice, the bill is designed specifically to help large corporations censor criticism and shut down small, rising competitors. I've posted long rants about this before.

The long and short of it is, though, SOPA won't pass because it's unpopular with voters. It also won't matter, because the DHS is a wholly-owned subsidiary of American IP producers and they've already been doing their dirty work for a long time, lack of due process included.

Wait did you just call Ron Paul a moderate?

Remember how Ron Paul is unelectable?

Hey Newt, buddy, I'm pretty sure that unless Obama repeatedly struck you in the head with the pointy end of a clawhammer it's not his fault you are a gibbering moron.

"My mudslinging has backfired??? It's Obama's fault!" - Literally everything every Republican has done for the past 4 years.

Except Ron Paul.