The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

Well they're deploying gestapo-behaving police on peaceful protesters.

policemen beating up firefighters.

Well, as got pointed out by the spanish president, the referendum is essentially a coup.

Though i think it makes more sense if they got into a room and actually talked, in stead of this spiel, as doing it this way will never get them anywhere.

I don't think they're going about this the right way.

....and if britain has the freedom to break from europe why can't catalogna from spain. sure it's a bad idea for them but we're debating freedom here.

anyways latest last week tonight is utter genius :

That referendum was called by the UK government, which has the power to break away from the EU due to it's statues. On the other hand, a regional government doesn't have the power to call a referendum to break away, nor is it very desirable to set a precedent here.

Hence my comment: it makes more sense for them to actually talk.

http://splinternews.com/every-member-of-congress-who-took-money-from-the-nra-an-1819059582

Apparently the shooter had enough guns to equip a small militia. So much for successful gun control.

Seriously who needs more then 8 guns...
I'm betting they are not disabled historic collector items...

we need lees dangerous hotels

What a tragedy this week has been. Its difficult to wrap our heads around how something like this could possibly happen. This individual clearly planned out the most most optimal location for his slaughter; concerts always have fencing surrounding the venue, making everyone trapped.

Unfortunately, I don't know if this incident will make people reconsider their stance on gun regulations. Guns in America have the same social capital as liquor and marijuana*. Once they are legalized, there is no turning back because the voting bloc of supporters is too large to ignore.


* Marijuana, in my opinion, will never get fully legalized because its too easy to use it as a tool to create a larger voter turnout. A politician supporting marijuana fuels disinterested voters to go out and vote on a single issue**. While a larger turnout is good, single voting issues rarely make headway without civic engagement beyond pushing a button at the ballot.


** I am stereotyping a particular demographic that has historically had low voting turnout; young people. Other demographics may support marijuana, but they are engaged in other policy decisions that have a higher importance, like taxes and healthcare.


Edit:

One thing with Puerto Rico and disaster situations in general that has always confused me is the loss of life. In any national disaster, people always end up dying but we don't necessarily talk about WHO ends up dying.

When ridiculing a disaster relief attempt, we often attempt to judge whether the assistance is good or bad based upon the amount of deaths that occur. With Puerto Rico, death have increased over the days despite aid efforts. In my opinion, this could be because of two reasons:

- There actually isn't enough aid coming to the island.

- People who are dying were in a fragile state to begin with and the toll of the disaster caused it.

That second option sounds erroneous because the first option should have prevented it.

However, upon closer consideration, we need to ask ourselves whether these deaths could have entirely been prevented to begin with. Hospitals in Puerto Rico ran out of fuel to keep those on life support alive and the destruction of the power grid has caused a lot of elderly to die from heat stroke.

I know this is all very dark to think about, but people who entirely depend on infrastructure, such as the elderly and the hospitalized, will have a higher chance of mortality when their resources disappear.

If we take this perspective, disaster relief so far in Puerto Rico has been decent considering the entire islands infrastructure collapsed.

To some extent I feel a "zero" death policy is very unreasonable with a CAT 5 hurricane.

As long as their is continued relief to Puerto Rico over the next few months, I consider the US relief efforts to be pretty good.

There's this thing called a Jones act which means that ships moving goods in america need to be american owned and operated. When faced with the crisis in Texas and Florida, trump wasted no time to lift it. With Puerto Rico, he waited several days. Time wasted that could've saved more lives, time that could've been used to get more critical supplies.

not having drinkable water will kill you damn quick and isn't preventable when you're an island hit by a hurricane other then "don't live there" but then again I'm sure they'd take lofty NY suites any day of the week if they could.

I believe the issue with the relief in Puerto Rico is more attributed to the distribution of good on the island rather than the getting supplies to the island.

I think a timeline is important here. I have tried to do my best with various articles presented in bold.

09/08 Jones act waiver issued
09/10 Hurricane Irma makes landfall in Florida
09/15 Jones act issued one week extension
09/20 Hurricane Maria makes landfall.
09/22. Last day of Jones act waiver
09/23. Jones act officially expires.
09/27 US issues another Jones act waiver (for Puerto Rico)


From the 09/20-23, Puerto Rico was within the Jones act. Within a four day window, the argument was made that foreign maritime vessels could have entered Puerto Rico's ports.

However, according to this article , the following comment seems to take away a lot of that speculation

And this one too from the same article

.



So what does this all mean? I think that based upon these sources, which I believe to be decent enough to draw conclusions, that there was no foreign merchant ships in existence that were being withheld by the Jones Act.

If anything, I would say there was more than enough US maritime ships and resources from the mainland to provide the relief to Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone expected the destruction of Maria to the point that there weren't even any requests by foreign vessels to considered sending goods.

Distributing said resource on an island where the majority of the infrastructure is in shambles I believe is the real issue.

who's the mass shooter of las vegas

That "there is nothing about him to hate" really made my day.
Wtf fox news. xD

That would be too extreme, here is the breakdown for 2017 tax year:

income-tax.co.uk/after-tax/23000

• You'll pay no tax on the first £11,500 that you're earning.
• You'll pay £2,300 tax on £11,500 (at 20%)
• You'll pay no higher rate tax
• You will pay a total sum of £1,780 in national insurance

Net pay is £18,920.

There is some truth to the argument that there probably is no realistic change to American Gun laws that could've prevented a 60-something years old wealthy guy with no criminal record, no warning signs whatsoever, from doing this.

Just like the "guns for self defense"-crowd should accept that guns are completely useless to defend against an attacker shooting from a distance on the 30-something floor of a high rise building in the dark.

But there will be more such attacks in the future and there have been many more in the past and at least some of them could have been prevented. It's not about preventing 100%. It's about reducing the number as much as possible. Not giving guns to people with a criminal record, with mental health issues, on no-fly lists, limiting access to guns with especially high firepower, etc. all could help achieve that.

hilarious abortion story :

Depends on what you mean by "realistic change". Republicans have been anti-control for ages, and they have the majority. So yea, i mean almost any change at this moment is unrealistic.

The thing is, you can be deemed bad enough to not fly yet still buy a gun. As John Oliver showed, existing data storage is antiquated and no research is being done to even figure something out. It would require a political awakening in the USA for gun control advocates to fight back. Which they could do, in theory, but will that happen in practice? How realistic is that?

So yea..