Off Topic Politics Thread

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Puck said:
I can't remember where I read about the Ultimatum Game, if it was on here I apologise.

There's an economics experiment called the Ultimatum Game. It's played by two people. Person 1 is given a sum of money and has to propose to Person 2 how they split it. Person 2 then has to choose whether to accept or reject Person 1's proposal. If Person 2 accepts the proposal they both get the amount proposed by Person 1 and if Person 2 rejects the proposal neither of them gets any money at all. Logically speaking Person 2 should accept almost any offer. After all even a 99% - 1% split in favour of Person 1 will leave Person 2 better off than rejecting the offer. People's minds don't work that way though. Many people, if they see the offer as unfair, reject it even though that decision means they end up worse off as well.

I think a similar thing is happening here. A large part of society feels that a smaller part of society is getting an unfair share in various ways and in response they're choosing to reject the whole deal, choosing to reject mainstream politics and politicians. Michael Moore gets it:

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I should point out the video has been clipped and he goes on to point out that the good feeling will last maybe a month before people realise Trump is no better than anyone else and may well be much worse in many ways.
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I linked to the Ulimatum game either on here or another forum over the past couple of days.
 
FinishedHere said:
Limey? Pomme? Are these racist? Should we be offended? Should the BBC ban them?
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Limey - what the Americans called us cos we had the sense to eat limes on board ships to prevent scurvy - is a compliment.
Taffys - Welsh called this cos the majority lived close to the river Taff - geographical
Chinkys - the Chinese restaurant - not a single person who went to the restaurant felt racially superior to the Chinese - in fact racially inferior cos the food was fantastic!
 
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I think racist words whulst not intentionally offending sometimes , shouldnt be kept just because you have always used them. I can understand it still being used but if after being educated on it and is still being used then i would find it distasteful so I'm with IRTP on this.

As for 100 of years of racism so we should have more positive discrimination and double standards in enforcing of our law? This is what alienates those that are discriminated. The only way to stamp out racism is to educate the young and have more integration.

We are seeing less of this though as there are parts of the country where there are not many migrants and there are sections of the country where communities live in segregation. Then there are also people who are just racist and no amount of education will help them not be racist.
 
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Puck said:
I think a similar thing is happening here. A large part of society feels that a smaller part of society is getting an unfair share in various ways and in response they're choosing to reject the whole deal, choosing to reject mainstream politics and politicians.
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But they didn't even accomplish that. They actually made it much worse. But that's beside the point.

I think that a lot of pundits in the media are bending over backwards to explain why this happened and using examples like the Ultimate Game. I personally don't care.

If you are playing the Ultimate Game, you take the money. If you don't take the money, you made an irrational choice. The only thing I can do is try and make you understand why your choice was irrational, and to try to protect you from the consequences of your irrational choice, as well as all the other people you just screwed over.

The "mistake" that Clinton and Clinton supporters supposedly made is that we should not have told these people they were wrong. But no, we should have told these people they were wrong. We should have tried much, much harder to tell them they were wrong. But in the end, if you choose to retreat to your echo chamber and vote in the enabler, there is nothing more I can do for you.

Clinton told them exactly what they needed to hear which is that their jobs were going away and they needed to transition into something else. She even promised to fund it. She said that some of their thinking was "deplorable" which it was. There was an intervention. We offered them help. They walked away, so now we all have to do the same. For all of us.
 
I Sorry I Ruined The Party said:
But they didn't even accomplish that. They actually made it much worse. But that's beside the point.

I think that a lot of pundits in the media are bending over backwards to explain why this happened and using examples like the Ultimate Game. I personally don't care.

If you are playing the Ultimate Game, you take the money. If you don't take the money, you made an irrational choice. The only thing I can do is try and make you understand why your choice was irrational, and to try to protect you from the consequences of your irrational choice, as well as all the other people you just screwed over.

The "mistake" that Clinton and Clinton supporters supposedly made is that we should not have told these people they were wrong. But no, we should have told these people they were wrong. We should have tried much, much harder to tell them they were wrong. But in the end, if you choose to retreat to your echo chamber and vote in the enabler, there is nothing more I can do for you.

Clinton told them exactly what they needed to hear which is that their jobs were going away and they needed to transition into something else. She even promised to fund it. She said that some of their thinking was "deplorable" which it was. There was an intervention. We offered them help. They walked away, so now we all have to do the same. For all of us.
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Thats plain wrong. You are looking at the ultimatum game as a minority vs majority when that isn't what the game is about. It is the system (and their 1% friends) vs minority and majority and the system has been then offering the deals.

Beefy is right there have been centuries of oppression but the problem we have here is the over correction. PC is not a problem in itself just the extent it is used.

I've said it a multitude of times that positive discrimination will only end one way. You can't fight against discrimination by discriminating the other way.

There are a lot of words I used to use but don't now. That is just languages developing as it does anyway. Most words are disappearing but we have had a recent resurgence of words by the right to sarcastically argue with the left like "plebiscite", "hoi polloi" etc. The left have started constantly using the word "proletariat."

The problem we have is that the very people that used to argue about generalisation are doing just that to fight their cause. They call the others racists when the reality is that a minority are. They are sensationalising things rather than report on them and they are so consumed with making their argyument that they are not dealing with the argument or the aftershocks their argument cause.

Van Jones rant live on the biggest news network the other night should not be made. When he talked of "whitelash" and "what will I tell my kids in the morning." He is on the network that is considered (by some) to be Clinton biased and he played to his audience. These guys know what they are doing and they don't care what their words cause as long as they keep getting bookings.

Ahmed Sheik the other night on Question Time was the same. I wonder if she had not gone over to SNP because she couldn;t win as a conservative she would have been saying the same things?
 
fatletiss said:
Two wrongs don't make a right.
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Yes, but the view that they are being wronged by my political stance is the problem.

There are no rights and wrongs here. Only what is and is not possible. They want their coal mining jobs back. They will never get them. Natural gas is cheaper, and will be made even cheaper by Trump allowing fracking. Their manufacturing jobs have been replaced by robots. The GOP they voted for busted up all their unions.

I believe that they will come to this realization fairly quickly. Provided they do, they can still fix it. In the meantime, the immigrants who might be deported will not get that chance.
 
I Sorry I Ruined The Party said:
Yes, but the view that they are being wronged by my political stance is the problem.

There are no rights and wrongs here. Only what is and is not possible. They want their coal mining jobs back. They will never get them. Natural gas is cheaper, and will be made even cheaper by Trump allowing fracking. Their manufacturing jobs have been replaced by robots. The GOP they voted for busted up all their unions.

I believe that they will come to this realization fairly quickly. Provided they do, they can still fix it. In the meantime, the immigrants who might be deported will not get that chance.
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They aren't arguing with your political stance. They are arguing against the people that use your political stance to cover for their different agendas. You could say the same about the "other side" and my political stance.

The problem we have both sides of "the pond" is that there are 2 tribes of "uber capitalists" that are using words to make their form of uber capitalism the right version.

There is no centre or opposition. They are all playing the same game, using us as pawns and setting us all against each other while they get richer and richer and more and more powerful.
 
FinishedHere said:
Thats plain wrong. You are looking at the ultimatum game as a minority vs majority when that isn't what the game is about. It is the system (and their 1% friends) vs minority and majority and the system has been then offering the deals.
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Here's the deal, man. For a dude who rants about how it is "the system" who is playing minority vs majority and group vs group.... you do an awful lot of putting people in groups and then moaning about one group or the other.

If you want to beat "the system," and you see the game for what it is, then why are you such an eager participant?
 
I Sorry I Ruined The Party said:
Here's the deal, man. For a dude who rants about how it is "the system" who is playing minority vs majority and group vs group.... you do an awful lot of putting people in groups and then moaning about one group or the other.

If you want to beat "the system," and you see the game for what it is, then why are you such an eager participant?
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All I have is a vote. I don't do protests or violence.

As for grouping. 2 sides of the window. I don't group people or demographics that way. I mix and socialise with all demographics and get on very well with them despite my very open stance. Maybe face to face they can see I am not against them and that it is those in power that I argue with.

On the stance of immigration you can argue all night long I am protectionist and I won't argue. However face to face if I say this to Portuguese or Polish they will agree that they would feel the same way if they were in my shoes. Then we have a beer, watch the match and get on with life.
 
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For the record, I live in a city the history of which is a history of immigration. French protestants and Eastern European Jews fleeing religious persecution, generations of Irish fleeing poverty at home, people from every corner of the former British empire, from the Caribbean to India and Pakistan; Greek and Turkish Cypriots (living happily side by side in Green Lanes), and now the hard working dry humoured Poles and Slovakians; they have all enriched the life and culture of their adopted home.

And none of them are to blame for the loss of the old well paid industrial jobs, nor for the emasculation of the Trade Unions, nor for the piss poor terms and conditions on offer in the service industries that have replaced those jobs.
 
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Archers Road said:
For the record, I live in a city the history of which is a history of immigration. French protestants and Eastern European Jews fleeing religious persecution, generations of Irish fleeing poverty at home, people from every corner of the former British empire, from the Caribbean to India and Pakistan; Greek and Turkish Cypriots (living happily side by side in Green Lanes), and now the hard working dry humoured Poles and Slovakians; they have all enriched the life and culture of their adopted home.

And none of them are to blame for the loss of the old well paid industrial jobs, nor for the emasculation of the Trade Unions, nor for the piss poor terms and conditions on offer in the service industries that have replaced those jobs.
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Yes, it is the right wing press that demonize these people and get the poor of this country fighting against each other. Divide and rule has been a tactic throughout the ages to keep the poor down.
 
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I Sorry I Ruined The Party said:
Right, so you believe in protecting your turf from the Portuguese or Polish. And you believe they would do the same.

And yet it's "the system" that is pitting side against side.
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I don't believe in "protecting my turf" from Portuguese or Polish. I believe in "protecting my turf" against a system that uses a portion of lazy British workers as their reasoning behind only employing Portuguese and Polish and being backed up by a government that seems to not care what their very words say to the public.

Because some people are lazy is no excuse to then back unscrupulous employers that then have their excuse as to why their employees are now not British, never mind why they are now NMW when they weren't before.

This is a system that aides and abets(sp) those who profiteer backing up their arguments, protecting them when they utilise generalisations against workforces as a whole and then ignores real people when they give real stories as "anecdotal."

I have no problem with having to compete. I do however think I should have an equal chance in that competition and not be ignored because of my nationality.

All elections are won on jobs and security. Those at the top always say it is economy but for most people jobs and security is all they know about the economy. Put pressure on jobs and make them less secure and you will have a problem like we have now.

They keep on talking about the economy growing and the benefit to the economy of migration. Those that are at the bottom see nothing of that and where the growth is is in more profits.
 
Archers Road said:
For the record, I live in a city the history of which is a history of immigration. French protestants and Eastern European Jews fleeing religious persecution, generations of Irish fleeing poverty at home, people from every corner of the former British empire, from the Caribbean to India and Pakistan; Greek and Turkish Cypriots (living happily side by side in Green Lanes), and now the hard working dry humoured Poles and Slovakians; they have all enriched the life and culture of their adopted home.

And none of them are to blame for the loss of the old well paid industrial jobs, nor for the emasculation of the Trade Unions, nor for the piss poor terms and conditions on offer in the service industries that have replaced those jobs.
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And I don't blame them either.
 
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Saints_Alive said:
Yes, it is the right wing press that demonize these people and get the poor of this country fighting against each other. Devide and rule has been a tactic throughtout the ages to keep the poor down.
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Right and left wing press and media are at it. not just the right. The left is constantly labelling every person on the right as racist or xxxxx. They see neutrality and centre as the preserv of the centre left. To the right of centre you are a sinner.
 
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