Donald Trump and US politics

Why does Maddow keep calling Viktor Yanukovych a dictator when he was democratically elected?

How can she say in the same sentence that someone ran a political campaign for a dictator - why does a dictator need a political campaign? Are her viewers just that stupid?

This is someone who was prime minister from 2002-2004, ran for president in 2004, and resigned when he lost the election. He re-ran in 2010, he won first round voting then faced a runoff against Tymoshenko. Ballots were counted, the Ukrainian central election commission declared Yanukovych winner, and this election result matched all the advanced public polling.

There's a separate parliament with 450 seats and a separate judiciary. How the fuck is he a dictator? I'm so triggered by the bias.

The US ousted a democratically elected president after he rejected an EU association agreement and took a bailout from Russia instead of signing over assets/collateral for an EU bailout. Then the US installed a puppet government via a largely undemocratic process where huge swaths of eastern Ukraine wasn't permitted to vote. All the instability in the Ukraine is due to US foreign policy regime change completely shitting on democracy.

And Maddow's focus on Yanukovych's house, ostriches, cars, etc - that's to fit the dictator narrative. Yanukovych was a multi millionaire before becoming president. He bought that fucking house in 2007.

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Vhlad wrote:

Why does Maddow keep calling Viktor Yanukovych a dictator when he was democratically elected?

How can she say in the same sentence that someone ran a political campaign for a dictator - why does a dictator need a political campaign? Are her viewers just that stupid?

This is someone who was prime minister from 2002-2004, ran for president in 2004, and resigned when he lost the election. He re-ran in 2010, he won first round voting then faced a runoff against Tymoshenko. Ballots were counted, the Ukrainian central election commission declared Yanukovych winner, and this election result matched all the advanced public polling.

There's a separate parliament with 450 seats and a separate judiciary. How the fuck is he a dictator? I'm so triggered by the bias.

The US ousted a democratically elected president after he rejected an EU association agreement and took a bailout from Russia instead of signing over assets/collateral for an EU bailout. Then the US installed a puppet government via a largely undemocratic process where huge swaths of eastern Ukraine wasn't permitted to vote. All the instability in the Ukraine is due to US foreign policy regime change completely shitting on democracy.

And Maddow's focus on Yanukovych's house, ostriches, cars, etc - that's to fit the dictator narrative. Yanukovych was a multi millionaire before becoming president. He bought that fucking house in 2007.

Probably because it's highly bias left MSM?

Just like Fox is highly bias right MSM.

Look beneath the bias spin, it's the only way to interpret news. You should really know that.

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Vhlad wrote:

Why does Maddow keep calling Viktor Yanukovych a dictator when he was democratically elected?

Because that's the narrative of corrupt establishment media? It's not like the average American knows any better, or even who was Yanukovich.

Pro-russian president = dictator
Pro-USA dictator = president
Ukrainian neo-nazis = democracy loving EU partners
Islamic terrorists = moderate freedom fighters
medieval Arab theocracies funding terrorism = parters for peace and stability

etc.. same old Orwellian rhetoric that was used during the last 16 years of Obama & Bush reign.

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Vhlad wrote:

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

Hatred against white people?

Where?

Have you seen a black lives matter protest? Some of their signs and chants are so outrageously racist. There's a severe cultural problem emerging where hatred against white people is being normalized.

There was that incident where 4 black youths tied up and tortured a white disabled person, and streamed it live on facebook because they were so confident people in their community would praise them for beating a white guy. When was the last time you saw a white person torturing a black person? Those crazy people with the pointy hats are long gone, and any few remaining are shamed into hiding. If an actual Nazi recruiter showed up at a university to try recruit youths ANTIFA wouldn't even be needed, the white people would just troll and heckle that recruiter into oblivion. The white supremacist boogeyman died well before a black president won the popular vote, twice.

That case was disturbing, and black-on-white hate crimes exist. However, the FBI has recorded about three times as many hate crimes going the other direction. I'm talking about the general direction of society here. I just find this statement, made by another poster:

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In the past few years I've seen so much hateful rhetoric pushed against white that at one point I really thought everyone else hated us.

Speaking as a white guy, I have no fucking clue what he's talking about. Yeah, there's some racial resentment. You'll find the odd case of anti-white racism. But we're not dealing with some huge trend here. In fact, the trend is kind of the reverse.

Also, claiming that "the white supremacist bogeyman is dead" is cute given that Steve Bannon is currently sitting on the national security council.

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But the black on white hate is becoming so open. Earlier you had the knockout game as an excuse to punch random white people but now you can just scream that they're a Nazi trump supporter and run over them with a car, after taking turns punching and kicking them, while a crowd cheers you on, films it, and posts it on social media (like they think it's acceptable behavior!) - referring to that incident in November in Chicago.

The knockout game? That thing that doesn't actually exist? You point to isolated incidents, but that doesn't actually make up a real trend, and your representation of the incident in Chicago is slightly... wrong.

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The media doesn't often report black on white crime (or black on black crime for that matter).

Are you kidding me? Breitbart has an entire section dedicated to it. Drudge goes out of his way to trawl up any local media report of black-on-white crime, in a way nobody does for white-on-black crime. The national-level media doesn't often report on crime, period, because "just another gang shooting" or "yet another assault and battery" does not make for an interesting story. Would you click on those? How about if you didn't know or care about the races of those involved? I wouldn't. It's just not interesting. These things happen.

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There's some pretty heavy bias. Someone on 4chan/pol released a chrome app that globally changes the word "white" to "black" wherever it is and the results on Salon, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and others is so revolting and shameful it's amazing how normalized hate speech toward white men in the media has become. If people installed that app on school computers, libraries, etc the outrage would be enormous. Yet the outrage should be enormous as-is.

Looking at the front page of Salon right now, I'm not seeing it. Similarly, it's important to note that context matters, and that depending on the subject, the context may shift dramatically if we're talking about a group which has been historically marginalized vs. a group which continues to be socially dominant. Of course, I don't typically read Salon, HuffPo, or Buzzfeed, and I sincerely doubt anyone on /pol/ does either, unless they're going out of their way to look for things to get pissed off about.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

And has it actually translated into any real discrimination or social force, the way hatred against black people has metastasized into the pervasive systemic racism we see today

Pervasive systemic racism, today? Are you serious? Can you provide real examples of racism that is structured into organizations and government in North America?

Eh, often enough. Redlining is still a thing, just for example, and if you look, I'm sure you can find plenty. Beyond that, I can point to the continuing disparities in outcome between African-Americans and Caucasians, reinforced by a system that is at best uncaring and at worst explicitly harmful.

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The opportunities for visible minorities, women, aboriginals, and people with disabilities have never been higher. In Canada we have the Employment Equity Act which requires employers (and colleges/universities) to recruit from these designated groups over white males whenever there is an opportunity to do so.

And, is it working? So far, in the USA, despite Affirmative Action, it clearly isn't.

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We have this strange concept where we want our statistics/results to match demographics and apparently it's OK if we discriminate against groups to achieve that. That seems somewhat backwards to me and I'd prefer it if we could eliminate name/age/gender/ethnicity from the hiring/recruiting process wherever we can. It should be blind to those things unless it's a job where it becomes relevant (i.e. a private womens fitness center seeking additional female trainers, a medical clinic seeking a doctor/nurse of a particular gender that they're lacking (similar with border security/airports for patdowns, etc.)).

It would be nice if we could all just be colorblind. We can't. We aren't. Unless we are going to go out of our way to actually blind the people overseeing the hiring process to the race/sex/etc (some places do this, to entirely unsurprising results) of the applicants, there is no effective way to get rid of these prejudices.

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My local police station was recently hiring and their ad specifically stated that preferential bias would be given to openly gay/transgender applicants (OK that may sound like a weird example to people in the USA but the police sunshine list Canada is massive, i.e. within a few years they earn over $100,000 annually and get 124 sick days at 75% pay; it's relatively safe here so landing that job is like winning the lottery).

Nowadays in most cases it's definitely easier if you're not a straight white male, assuming the various identity classifications are the only differences. Unfortunately that's not the case. For example many aboriginals grow up in poor conditions and/or in environments with very different aspirations/goals/role models, and despite having so much more government help we see poor career/education performance, lower life expectancy, and greater incarceration rates.

Leaving aside the value of having gay and/or transgender people on the police force when it comes to relating to other LGBT individuals (much in the same way sending a black cop and a white cop to harlem might lead to slightly different outcomes), no, it's not. Studies have actually been done on this.Going on nothing more than a person's name, having a black-sounding name makes you 50% less likely to get a callback on a job application. For musicians, so-called "barefoot" auditions that masked their gender led to considerably more women getting hired. Similar data from restaurants. And so on, and so forth. Affirmative Action is not a silver bullet panacea, and people are generally a lot more biased than they think they are. The fact is that straight, white men still have it better than literally anyone else.

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It's so damaging to these groups to blame the results on racism. It's not racist employers, racist schools, racist police, racist judges. That's ridiculous. People here aren't racist anymore.

Okay, I linked this article earlier, but I'm going to do so again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/opinion/nicholas-kristof-is-everyone-a-little-bit-racist.html


This is a key point and I see virtually no value in continuing until it is addressed, because the fact that there are still grotesque racial disparities in outcome makes virtually no sense if you can't address this. This idea, that people in the USA aren't racist any more, is just absurd. Study after study after study after study shows clear racial biases in so many different aspects of our lives, from housing to medical care to how the police treat you to the kind of support you can get in higher education, and it just goes on and on and on. There is overwhelming evidence showing that subconscious racism is a thing. For someone who apparently visits 4chan to claim that "we're not racist any more" kind of boggles the fucking mind, to be honest. Or maybe it doesn't count because it's on 4chan, I don't know. It's no longer "cool" to be racist. That doesn't mean racism has just suddenly stopped.

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Vhlad wrote:

Why does Maddow keep calling Viktor Yanukovych a dictator when he was democratically elected?

How can she say in the same sentence that someone ran a political campaign for a dictator - why does a dictator need a political campaign? Are her viewers just that stupid?

This is someone who was prime minister from 2002-2004, ran for president in 2004, and resigned when he lost the election. He re-ran in 2010, he won first round voting then faced a runoff against Tymoshenko. Ballots were counted, the Ukrainian central election commission declared Yanukovych winner, and this election result matched all the advanced public polling.

There's a separate parliament with 450 seats and a separate judiciary. How the fuck is he a dictator? I'm so triggered by the bias.

The US ousted a democratically elected president after he rejected an EU association agreement and took a bailout from Russia instead of signing over assets/collateral for an EU bailout. Then the US installed a puppet government via a largely undemocratic process where huge swaths of eastern Ukraine wasn't permitted to vote. All the instability in the Ukraine is due to US foreign policy regime change completely shitting on democracy.

And Maddow's focus on Yanukovych's house, ostriches, cars, etc - that's to fit the dictator narrative. Yanukovych was a multi millionaire before becoming president. He bought that fucking house in 2007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-protest_laws_in_Ukraine

Probably has something to do with his attempts to stifle protests, free expression, and the activity of NGOs. This is a pattern we keep seeing - democracies backsliding into autocracies. Or maybe it has to do with him throwing the opposition leader in jail on trumped-up charges. I dunno about you, but that seems like perfectly normal stuff to happen in a democracy. Remember, Erdogan was democratically elected, and we are getting a front-row seat, live in action, of Turkey transforming from a secular democracy to an islamic dictatorship. Given the consistent backsliding of eastern european democracies into autocracies, calling out shit like this is entirely justified. Yanukovych wasn't a dictator. Yet.

Racial disparities in outcome?

I explicitly addressed that in the bottom of my post. You probably should have read the whole thing before starting your reply.

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鬼殺し wrote:

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Bars wrote:

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鬼殺し wrote:

Okay, it was dumb.

Moving on.

You sound like you need to have your jimmies unrustled.

there is no need to be upset

I am not clicking your dangerous Russian links! I had a friend who did that and now he's a watermelon.

Your loss. Spoiler: it's a profoundly stupid youtube meme video with the most heavenly of musical accompaniments.

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Vhlad wrote:

Racial disparities in outcome?

I explicitly addressed that in the bottom of my post. You probably should have read the whole thing before starting your reply.

Ironically, I can turn around and say exactly the same. I cited quite a lot of research that demonstrates that your postulation, that we're no longer racist, is wrong, and not just by a little bit.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

That case was disturbing, and black-on-white hate crimes exist. However, the FBI has recorded about three times as many hate crimes going the other direction.

Asuming the numbers you provide are correct you still would have to factor in that there are 6 times as many white ppl then black so proportionaly speaking there is more black on white crime then the other way around.

You know what I find funny, every single day when I see a reportage from CNN or any other MSM I read title such as:

"Trump just did something that will destroy America"



every single day. I will be laughing in 4 years when America will be just fine, people will look back at what the medias kept saying, and they will vote for Trump for 4 more years.