I would add in a penchant for denying reality — can anyone in their right mind say that doing the commute across the I-90 bridge is in any way pleasant? And yet people seemed (when I was living there a year ago) to tolerate the way the traffic on it would clog up seemingly at random, or become predictably abysmal before a Seahawks game, and render the buses immobile as well. The bicycle infrastructure is mediocre, too. Is it just low expectations, or a refusal to believe that the Seattle mindset about growth and development would have serious consequences, or what?

I've lived in about a dozen cities in the US, and Seattle is by far the weirdest about squaring how ideal they think they are with the actual situation on the ground. What makes it particularly incomprehensible is that they are doing a lot of things right, yet there's a weird collective defensiveness about criticism of the Seattle Way. Or, really, about outside input on anything. You're supposed to think they're doing everything perfectly, yet as an "outsider" you're not supposed to want to join them in celebrating their supposed perfection and moving there. I don't get it.

Also, it's pretty rich that you fault me for saying the OP should be modded down, but say nothing about his wanting to "physically wound" people who dare to disagree with his politics.

No, people who disagree with me should get modded up when they actually articulate the basis for their viewpoints in a coherent manner, respect the validity of other rational opinions, and treat their opponents with civility, because that's what makes Slashdot worth reading. And really, that's just common human decency for anyone with an active mind. I'm not a hypocrite like the person you're describing — why is that the first place your mind went?

The world must be a difficult place for you, always getting violent urges toward people who don't share your opinions and using words like "antiwhites" that undoubtedly would get you branded a foaming-at-the-mouth racist if you used them around the general public. Especially when fewer and fewer people believe in your essentialist, pseudoscientific worldview on race (hint: race and gender are not remotely the same kinds of categories) and you don't even try to make a case for yourself. You seem to be paranoid, too — how are all these supposed "antiwhites" making your life as a white person so difficult?

If these are such obvious facts, then why do so many biologists, historians, etc. disagree with your assumptions, not to mention vast swathes of the general public who reject your backward categorization scheme? The concept of race has a pretty short history, which you seem to be oblivious to. Do you even know how the position opposite yours is argued or do you just live in a vacuum where no one ever tells you you're full of shit, no different than creationists or anti-vaxxers?

Also, who the hell is modding up posts that sound like they wouldn't be out of place on Stormfront?

You're absolutely right. That's why in the context of the United States, what's significant is that there has existed a successful system of white supremacy, while no other race has been able to systematically wield that same kind of power over whites. Where there has existed limited favoritism toward nonwhites (e.g., affirmative action), it has been enacted with the consent of certain groups of powerful whites (liberals who thought such policies would make their power and wealth morally justifiable, as I see it). Black Power, La Raza, and the like haven't had any success of that sort. Thus it's nonsensical to talk about black or Latino supremacy in the US, and so your assertion is irrelevant in this context.

Does this mean something other than "I'm right and you're not, so I don't have to prove myself"? What is it that magically makes your views so much more inherently correct than those that you supposedly heard in college? How about the bullshit part — can I call your ideas bullshit and be automatically right?

That's because the US has a history of white supremacy, an ideology that was widespread among whites of all social strata and systematically applied by those in power to materially disadvantage blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, and nonwhite immigrants from anywhere else. While much of its legal force was scrapped in the '60s and most explicit expressions of white supremacy have since become socially unacceptable, a lot of Americans, especially white ones, still have a way of thinking about race that has been strongly influenced by this legacy, if not necessarily explicitly white supremacist. It's not as if that ideology just faded away once the Civil Rights Act was passed.

There are probably plenty of black people out there who overstate impact of this enduring mentality on jury partiality, but there is certainly some grounding for believing that many whites remain uniquely biased against certain other ethnic groups, African-Americans in particular. The idea that there's some kind of corresponding Mexican or Latino supremacy that has led to similar power dynamics in the US, on the other hand, is not one based in reality. That's one major inconsistency!

Romans 5:12, amirite?

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned—

Stretch your mind a little...

That doesn't sound like Evtim's suggesting that we need to change human nature, as you put it. So let's go back to the line you're probably thinking of:

If we try to analyze this line in the context of the other two, the only meaning that we can sensibly derive is that capacity for change is part of human nature itself — it is only our sclerotic ideological system that, like all other systems, denies individual agency for change. Look at people who don't benefit from our systems or who grew up on the margins of them, and see a remarkable plasticity regardless of whatever little else they may have in common, even if they often use that flexibility to thoroughly fuck themselves over.

Obviously this is not a Marxist idea. Communists, as I'm sure you well know, produced a system that was remarkable in its denial of individual ability (and desire!) to escape societal determinism, above and beyond even all the other rigid dogmas of its day.

Who's suggesting that? The GP is suggesting that the smartphone is in fact the cheapest way to do what the poor are trying to do. And if I may make an assumption, he/she is thinking primarily of the urban poor, who tend to have less housing stability (but more relative mobility) than the rural poor, to generalize broadly.

No clue about what? Why is a landline internet connection more important for someone making minimum wage at, most likely, multiple part-time jobs? Why is it more important for them to have a wired internet device than to have a low-end smartphone?

The part about sympathy is particularly weird. I can have sympathy for people who are too ignorant to make smart life decisions without validating their decisions. Being stuck in that way of life sucks, especially when part of the problem is that you're held down by self-imposed limitations.

Are you saying this is the main reason, or a substantial contributory reason? In either case — got data to back that up? Sociologists have been studying the poor for quite some time now, and from what I know of those studies, the conclusions have been quite different.

Because politics is complicated, and people who want to make it simple generally either are ignorant or have an agenda (or both).

Half of what is said in politics is already essentially "fuck you" to the other side. Saying it explicitly doesn't add to the conversation. To make this something of substance, you would have to say something like "Mexico can go fuck themselves because the US ought to protect its border in this particular way because ..."

Honestly, though, I have never heard the phrase that completes that sentence. Putting it in terms of rights rather than opinions about the best course of action obfuscates things, too. Of course we have the right to build a wall. We also have the right to make review of your Facebook profile part of the official visa application process, or to require that all Mexicans who enter the country wear sombreros. You might object and say that I'm talking about a God-given right to do something that's utterly pointless and ridiculous, but my point here is that many people against Trump's border policies think the exact same thing about the fucking wall. You can argue against it entirely in the realm of Realpolitik, without even talking about messages it might send to the Mexican people or whatever, because soft power is such a vital component to national security these days. Sending such a big, visible fuck you to your neighbor is likely to have material consequences.

So it's pointless to talk about what we have the right to do without evaluating the likely outcomes and weighing the positives and negatives. But that entails admitting that even the most brilliant and powerful leaders can't come up with plans that don't have drawbacks, and that seems to go against Trump's narrative of what strong leadership looks like.

Spitefully cutting off aid we choose to give to help poor people is not the same as getting their government to pay for something it doesn't want to pay for. If you think we should be less charitable with our foreign aid, then just say so, but it's completely disingenuous to try to use the poor as a political pawn to coerce a foreign government into doing what you want it to do. Besides, if there's anything we've learned from the 20th century, it's that trying to coerce other countries into doing things they don't want to do, without making sure there's something in it for them, tends to blow up in your face. Sometimes quite literally.

How much is that?

Does that mean something other than "I'm right because I say so"?

Just out of curiosity, what mechanism do you propose to keep people like the Rockefellers from attaining the unearned wealth that you do not feel they deserve? Or do you believe that they have the right to keep their money, even though they do not deserve it...?

That's already what you can do with Zipcar if you're in their service area, except for the part about using it for a solo daily commute which is completely infeasible. (Of course, the pricing issues there are not entirely disconnected from the terrible economic inefficiency of leaving a vehicle parked at one's workplace for 8+ hours, but North American regional planning on the whole has had little to do with generating economic efficiency, especially since the FDR era in the case of the US.)

Wi-Fi calling works on the iPhone 5s. So an upgrade just for Apple Pay?

Buying gas funds a lot of evil, too. As does eating food that was trucked in by petroleum-fueled vehicles, or fertilized with petroleum-produced chemicals. Maybe you, too, are more fucked than you realize. Or maybe your moral compass has gone haywire and reports things as being evil when they are, in fact, just a part of the normal functioning of the modern world. In any case, this sure as hell isn't about politics.