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Author Topic: AmeriPol thread  (Read 3670815 times)

Doomblade187

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26880 on: January 02, 2019, 03:04:04 am »

https://youtu.be/wrJYd87m9Kk
It is considered polite to at least tell us what the link is, so we don't go around clicking random links, which can be risky in the workplace.
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SalmonGod

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26881 on: January 02, 2019, 05:33:48 am »

https://youtu.be/wrJYd87m9Kk
It is considered polite to at least tell us what the link is, so we don't go around clicking random links, which can be risky in the workplace.

It's titled "Clinton Foundation Hearing Highlights"

Opened it up, but haven't watched it
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In the land of twilight, under the moon
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Maybe people should love for the sake of loving, and not with all of these optimization conditions.

McTraveller

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26882 on: January 02, 2019, 07:04:09 am »

I’m not sure how they can spin their way past the optics that...
This is only tangential but... what does this mean? Are people using 'optics' now instead of 'appearance'?

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wierd

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26883 on: January 02, 2019, 07:04:17 am »

https://youtu.be/wrJYd87m9Kk
It is considered polite to at least tell us what the link is, so we don't go around clicking random links, which can be risky in the workplace.

It's titled "Clinton Foundation Hearing Highlights"

Opened it up, but haven't watched it

Highlight reel:

5:15 seconds to 7:04 seconds, special investigator investigating the clinton foundation has filed a "Probable Cause" claim for IRS audit of the foundation; asserts that the foundation acted outside of its IRS permitted charter, and that .001% of donors gave >80% of all donations; most of those being foreign interests.

7:05 to 7:39 Further asserts that the foundation has operated as a "foreign agent" for foreign governments for most of its existence, Asserts the foundation is not entitled to tax exemption, due to the nature of its transactions.

7:40 to 8:28 Asserts that the foundation intentionally misused its assets; falsely attested that it had used funds for charitable purposes-- Rather than use its assets for charitable purposes, acted instead as a closely held family partnership, for the purpose of enriching its principle holders.

8:29 to 8:54 states that the donors were required to pay taxes on their contributions, and cites appropriate IRS tax code statutes.


I will update with more highlights later.
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Starver

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26884 on: January 02, 2019, 07:25:42 am »

s/Clinton/Trump and it's the same. The question then is probably in the eye of the beholder. One of these is being accused of things they haven't really done (or they did, but everyone does it, and they didn't do it knowledgeably, or at least with malicious intent) and the other does it because they are evil/incompetent/sociopathic/any-or-all-of-these.

Personally, I see one party as having more smocking gun, which is not to say the other hasn't bent things to their benefit. On the other hand, only one party has a proven track-record of doing Good Works with their foundation (and not said they have but been refuted too many times to count.  Again, another beholder might have the switched opinion on this, confirmation bias being possibly applicable to both sides.

(I also tend to assume that whatever Trump accuses someone else of, he's already done it himself. With very little practical evidence to the contrary and some very obvious examples for.)
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wierd

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26885 on: January 02, 2019, 07:33:12 am »

That may or may not be the case starver.

See also, the nasty bombshell at 15:24, concerning mr clinton's "regular use" of foundation funds for "Personal use"
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Starver

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26886 on: January 02, 2019, 07:57:57 am »

Have not seen it, yet (travelling, awkward to), but I refer you to what I already said about being not so different (except in interpretation or which way you personally bias your respective borderlines).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/01/this-is-the-portrait-of-himself-that-donald-trump-bought-with-20000-from-his-charity/
https://www.bustle.com/p/did-trump-once-pay-his-sons-boy-scout-registration-fee-with-charity-money-72545

All that I have seen does not make me like the Clinton Foundation any more than I might like any other (Gates, etc) but when it comes to relative good, and especially relative good vs the bare-faced rhetoric spouted, I know which low-hanging fruit I would first condemn, is all I'm saying. Doesn't mean there's no substance to the next fruit up. Or argument about which branch needs most urgent pruning.
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wierd

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26887 on: January 02, 2019, 08:07:08 am »

My personal take, is that if the misuse of such foundations is so pervasive, even with foundations that do in fact at least sometimes engage in their stated set of objectives-- To me, it means such foundations should not exist, since they are predominantly misused.

They would represent a high-bound limit to what oversight is able to reliably correct, vs the potential for systemic abuse that this failure enables.

Bluntly:  Many smaller orgs would be better managed, and less capable of systemic harm, because oversight would be more effective, and more of the resources of those smaller orgs would be used for their stated objectives.


Naturally, there would be a lower-bound as well, where the costs associated with overhead (payroll, regulatory costs, et al) of the operation of those many smaller orgs would greatly overtake the effective resources of those orgs to accomplish anything of major significance. (Quite likely, we already have more than sufficient data to establish where this threshold is. It is the upper-bound that we lack sufficient data on.)

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Starver

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26888 on: January 02, 2019, 08:51:35 am »

Then are we disagreeing or agreeing, within the wriggle-room of some comparatively minor details?

Maybe when someone has accumulated vast wealth anyway (Bill (and Melinda) Gates, frex.) it's probably best to put it all in the same umbrella (to disperse it in a coordinated way) rather than fragment it then rely on it doing the same useful work without any form of 'figurehead oversight and steering'. I think there should be a limiter (not a hard one, but size-related additional resistance/justification-overhead, the benefits so handed over going to help assist getting causes currently at the lower end of the scale to be given proper footings to find their proper scale, maybe) on expansionist causes "growing for the sake of growing" under a single given leadership entity, and governance towards ensuring no hidden conglomeration of 'separate' entities to try to get round this.

But how I'd do this (e.g. how I'd I allow angel-investors to be on multiple charity boards they can benefit from their experience, without letting that be a back-door to creating a covert federation of minor entities actually acting as a monopolising money-machine) is well beyond my pay-grade. Consider this an idealistic aspiration, only.

And doesn't stop me criticising things I consider worth criticising, because they've apparently just been too lazy to be clever about how they have mismanaged things.
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wierd

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26889 on: January 02, 2019, 09:30:04 am »

Analogy:

Suppose for a moment, a drug. (like, the kind you take.)

We will say it has two potential kinds of effects; Beneficial, and detrimental.


Based on how this drug is used (oversight), it can weigh in at one side, or the other, of this spectrum.


For instance, THC. (the stuff in Pot that gets you high.)  This substance has very real therapeutic use potential.  If you could somehow guarantee that it would never be misused, this substance would be of tremendous value to humanity.  Assuming you could perfectly make and enforce this guarantee (through fucking magic, I dont care) then there would be no reason to otherwise restrict its availability.

However, this is not descriptive of reality.  The reality, is that the non-therapeutic use cases greatly exceed the therapeutic use cases, and there is no way to reliably restrict how people use it.  This is why we generally try to make it illegal. (the cumulative consequences of non-therapeutic uses is in totality, generally detrimental to society.) The fact that we can literally just squeeze it out of a plant, with little processing, means this stuff is also dirt cheap. 

Compare that with a more difficult to synthesize drug, that is created with a very specific set of baseline criteria about how it operates, and what it is meant to do.  Something like say, a synthetic antibody, or even a vaccine.  There are very few, if any, non-therapeutic uses for this substance.  However, this specificity greatly increases the cost to manufacture.


For the purposes of this analogy, the following parallels are established:

Potential for therapeutic use == Potential for a foundation to do its stated objective
Potential for non-therapeutic use == Potential for the foundation to do some other work, at the public's expense/loss
Cost of manufacture == Cost of operation

EG-- the vaccine, is like a highly regulated (and thus high-recurring-cost of overhead) foundation, for a single, and specific task: Triggering innate immunity to a single pathogen. (for a foundation, it performs a single service: say, giving shoes to orphans. It does nothing else. ONLY SHOES.)

THC on the other hand, does a LOT of things.  This is more like what Clinton Foundation, Trump Foundation, et al-- are.  They do A LOT of things.  They do a lot of things that are not beneficial.  THC will get you high as a fucking kite, as well as help with your depression, anxiety, promote hunger to counter your cancer treatment's loss of appetite, stimulate the retrograde signalling pathway to reinforce new memory circuits in the presence of neural damage (such as from Alzheimer's), etc.  Likewise, a private foundation like this can be a fucking personal piggy bank to get around those NASTY taxes.


The goal is to find the ideal balance between "Can accomplish more than one goal" and "Potential for abuse greatly exceeds potential for proper use."

Orgs like Clinton Foundation, Trump Foundation, et al, have a tremendous potential for abuse-- greatly exceeding their potential for good, based on raw statistics from reality. (EG, even through Clinton Foundation, Gates Foundation, et al-- all DO IN FACT do charity work, and enable some very high profile charitable projects to get completed, because of their comprehensive scopes of operation, they also enable, routinely and more regularly, very much NOT CHARITABLE projects to get completed. )

Orgs like these are like "High risk of abuse" drugs, like Oxycodone, THC, Fentanyl, etc.

Yeah, they are broad spectrum, (in this case, they are all generally pain relievers-- If you have a pain, ANY KIND OF PAIN, they will hit it.) However, they really should not be the first choice medication, and aside from things that really and truly cannot be accomplish in any other way, should not be used at all, because of how dangerous they are when abused, and how often they become abused, because of how easy they are to abuse.

Since we cannot effectively regulate orgs like these, (because of a wide raft of political reasons), we really should not permit their use, AND-- for the reasons why we want to avoid using drugs like fentanyl, when something like topical lidocaine would be vastly safer at the same effective relief (for example), we really dont want to reach for orgs of this kind or size, when smaller and more targeted orgs can get the same job done, with far less potential for abuse.



Simply put-- There is a growing showing of real world evidence that these kinds of orgs represent a political health crisis, in the same vein that hard hitting broad spectrum drugs pose a growing public health crisis.


Quibbling over weather or not Crystal Meth (say, Trump foundation) is worse than Adderall (say, Clinton Foundation), is a red herring.   Both are used recreationally, to great public harm. The latter just so happens to also be an effective treatment for a specific condition, while the former is not.


This argument is more of this form: 

If you can get the same benefits for ADD that adderall offers, without all the recreational use potential, there would be no reason to make or prescribe adderall.

Likewise, if you can get the same benefits to the public good that Clinton Foundation offers, without all the corruption and misuse, you should not have orgs like the clinton foundation.


It currently looks like these super-orgs have greater potential for abuse than they do for intention of corporation.  As such, they should be either banned outright (such as with dangerous psychotropics, like LSD) or they should be extremely regulated to bring that potential for abuse under control for the public good.

Since the mechanisms to enforce that regulation are defacto "Always captured" (the foxes do not regulate themselves, when it comes to accessing the henhouse), this leaves only the option to effectively ban them as a practice, to prevent that abuse.

EG, these orgs should not exist, even when they are in fact, sometimes doing what they are supposed to be doing.

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Trekkin

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26890 on: January 02, 2019, 09:50:59 am »

And doesn't stop me criticising things I consider worth criticising, because they've apparently just been too lazy to be clever about how they have mismanaged things.

It's not mismanagement so much as an inherent effect of capitalism and its associated positive feedback loop with regard to the concentration of wealth. Put enough money into anything and it will either be used to make more money or supplanted by equivalents that will.

The whole principle of private charities, and indeed all charitable works under liberalism (economic, not political), is to counterbalance the wealth-concentrating effect of everything else just enough to keep the workers from actually starving, with the added bonuses of social control and a flimsy moral justification for the whole system. See, they couldn't keep the poorhouses open if they didn't keep consigning everyone else to them.
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SalmonGod

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26891 on: January 02, 2019, 10:20:19 am »

And doesn't stop me criticising things I consider worth criticising, because they've apparently just been too lazy to be clever about how they have mismanaged things.

It's not mismanagement so much as an inherent effect of capitalism and its associated positive feedback loop with regard to the concentration of wealth. Put enough money into anything and it will either be used to make more money or supplanted by equivalents that will.

The whole principle of private charities, and indeed all charitable works under liberalism (economic, not political), is to counterbalance the wealth-concentrating effect of everything else just enough to keep the workers from actually starving, with the added bonuses of social control and a flimsy moral justification for the whole system. See, they couldn't keep the poorhouses open if they didn't keep consigning everyone else to them.

Yup.  Charity is a contradiction in that as an individual act, it's a nice thing.  But in the big picture, it's a farce.  It's needed to perpetuate the system (by acting as one of many pressure valves) that creates its own necessity, doing nothing to fundamentally alter the situation.
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In the land of twilight, under the moon
We dance for the idiots
As the end will come so soon
In the land of twilight

Maybe people should love for the sake of loving, and not with all of these optimization conditions.

Starver

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26892 on: January 02, 2019, 10:31:46 am »

(Still trying to digest if Wierd is in agreement with me or vehemently opposed. The tone of that last WoT suggests the latter, but the content suggests the former. I've got nothing much more to say to support/refute whatever-that-opinion-is, though, so please carry on without me.)
« Last Edit: January 02, 2019, 10:34:18 am by Starver »
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wierd

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26893 on: January 02, 2019, 10:39:30 am »

It really is not hard.

Orgs like clinton foundation should not exist, because there is no effective means to regulate them, EVEN THOUGH they do in fact, on occasion, do what they are supposed to do.

The quibble that it is "better" than Trump foundation, because of this "Do indeed do right, sometimes" is like arguing that adderall is better than crystal meth.  It has no bearing at all on how often both are used at parties.

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SalmonGod

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #26894 on: January 02, 2019, 11:50:00 am »

And doesn't stop me criticising things I consider worth criticising, because they've apparently just been too lazy to be clever about how they have mismanaged things.

It's not mismanagement so much as an inherent effect of capitalism and its associated positive feedback loop with regard to the concentration of wealth. Put enough money into anything and it will either be used to make more money or supplanted by equivalents that will.

The whole principle of private charities, and indeed all charitable works under liberalism (economic, not political), is to counterbalance the wealth-concentrating effect of everything else just enough to keep the workers from actually starving, with the added bonuses of social control and a flimsy moral justification for the whole system. See, they couldn't keep the poorhouses open if they didn't keep consigning everyone else to them.

Yup.  Charity is a contradiction in that as an individual act, it's a nice thing.  But in the big picture, it's a farce.  It's needed to perpetuate the system that creates its own necessity, doing nothing to fundamentally alter the situation.

Peak example of this, if not something even more insidious than what you guys intended.

What I meant is that even if charity is carried out sincerely, it still functions like so in the grand scheme of things.

-Upper class owns resources.
-Only shares resources in exchange for money.
-Everyone else gets money by creating resources for upper class to own.
-Upper class only needs a limited number of people working to create resources for them, or leverages inherently superior negotiating position too aggressively.  Large numbers of people denied adequate participation or compensation / ability to survive.
-Large numbers of people get pissed off and have nothing to lose.
-Upper class says "Ok, here's some money.  Don't kill me.  And I'll take that money right back in exchange for that stuff you need to survive."
-The threat of desperate people is alleviated, and upper class remains firmly in control of the whole equation, which cycles through their ownership of stuff.  Even gets to establish control over people who don't directly work for them, by setting terms for the allocation of charity.

That is boiled down to extreme simplification, but the gist of it the way I see it.

There's a quote from a TED Talk (not sure I could easily find it now) that has really stuck with me, which I think is relevant here... nevermind I did find it rather easily (link).

"If you have to give back, you took too much."

Sorry for all the edits
« Last Edit: January 02, 2019, 11:58:23 am by SalmonGod »
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In the land of twilight, under the moon
We dance for the idiots
As the end will come so soon
In the land of twilight

Maybe people should love for the sake of loving, and not with all of these optimization conditions.
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