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On January 04 2019 23:29 On_Slaught wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2019 23:17 Plansix wrote:
Blaming people for Trump isn’t productive. It won’t change anything. At worst it is an annoying discussion that will never have any resolution.
Edit: Fav also has a point. The folks who supported Trump have pretty much left the discussion because they don’t want to try an defend Trump’s administration. I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt for 2016, but everyone is on notice for 2020 as far as I'm concerned. Anyone who sees what he is doing now, especially progressives, and still chooses to either vote for him or not vote for his Dem challenger (assuming the challenger isnt Hitler incarnate), will get plenty of blame from me.
I think people have gotten the message that sitting out politics means surrendering the field. But there will always be people who won’t give up heckling because performing scares the shit out of them. Cynicism is easy because it requires zero emotional investment.
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United States44367 Posts
Third party voting, and not voting, is entirely fine on an individual basis in a non proportional representation system because your vote is mathematically worthless. If you want to change national policy you’re better off buying a lottery ticket than voting in a FPTP election. As an individual that is, if everyone did it we’d have issues. I voted Lib Dem (3rd party) the last two elections in the UK because I’m in a safe Tory constituency and by voting for a worthless cause I’m signaling that their Remain policy appeals to me. It lets the major parties know that I’m willing to vote, but that I’m not voting for them.
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Although true; there is the other aspect of the voting process, which is the candidate. The thing a lot of politicians and political observers don’t’ talk about is that they have no idea how to get people to show up on election day. There are a lot of theories on how to do it and people spend a lot of money trying. But at the end of the day, it is like herding cats. Which is why reliable voter bases like the gun lobby or religious voters are able to influence so much power despite their size relative to the total population. They are reliable and loud. That is why I argue that people looking to make systemic change through political action are better of voting for someone and writing the candidate for 2 years asking for their specific issue to be addressed.
Or to put it a more hyperbolic fashion: Third party voting is the free market solution to creating political action.
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United States44367 Posts
FPTP is just trash outside of really small local races that require a single winner. A single voter has no chance of impacting even a competitive race by voting, and most races aren’t competitive. It’s an electoral system that discourages voting. If your side won then every vote above that of the next best is wasted. If your side lost then every vote is wasted.
PR is just better.
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Trump himself talking about impeachment now seems like a bad PR move. Since it's not very likely to happen why not ignore the topic.
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He stopped paying border control officers in a fight to secure the border. He isn't a smart man.
Edit: The majority of HUD is now furloughed, which means no housing enforcement for low income and the elderly in assisted housing.
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On January 04 2019 22:25 Velr wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2019 22:05 Ciaus_Dronu wrote:On January 04 2019 21:57 Velr wrote:
He is a prime example of why people don't like progressives, even people that agree with them on most issues can't fatom that bs for too long.
These types also brought you Trump... What a win. Implying all progressives argue in the fashion GH does. (He was pretty toxic, but so is that "people don't like progressives because.. " line.) Implying that a handful of progressives who didn't vote Hillary as opposed to tens of millions of conservative votes and a weird approximation of a democratic voting system brought the US Trump. Mkay. Behaviour of the worst progressives (or their worst points) makes undecides/independants less likely to vote for the candidate generally seen as «on the progressive side» or even drives them towards the other. Its really not a stretch that this stuff has turned «unhappy democrat voters» away from the party into not voting or even going republican just out of spite.
Pretty annoyed with your posting in the last two pages, two main reasons:
1) There is no substance behind your decision that radical politics are unrealistic. I could just as easily state that achieving your "hard left" goals through incremental change is unrealistic, because you've been trying to do that since the 1980s and all we've been doing is drifting to the right more and more. It's actually logical to expect that a system where the only leftist voice that is accepted is meek and wants small things will eventually drift to the right, if the right doesn't burden itself with such obstacles (and they never, ever, do).
2) The notion that "unhappy democrat voters" are going to vote for Trump rather than Hillary in order to spite progressives is absurd. We lost that primary. She's not our guy. You can't spite us by voting for someone who isn't our guy. Why would they vote for someone else, are they tired of winning or something?
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Trump just said he is willing to keep the government partially shut down for a year. There are no adults left in the White House, so he might be dumb enough to force congress to override his veto. There is no conservative base in the House that will keep the moderate Republicans from jumping ship.
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5930 Posts
Remind me about how this works. If a shutdown lasts a year, you would still have to pay taxes right? Then what happens to the IRS? Because it sure sounds like you’re not going to get any tax returns back.
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The shutdown can’t last a year without a lot of other parts of the country failing. For example, the FCC approves licenses to products that use the TV/radio spectrum all the time. Constantly. It is part of the role they fill. This includes stuff like cellphones and most wireless devices. That cannot happen while they are shut down. Other things will break long before we reach a full year. As I tell told yet another client today “There is no game plan for when the Federal Courts shut down. We just wait and do what they say when they reopen. It isn’t even worth asking them(the court).”
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The IRS’ acceptance of returns is an essential service, but the issuing of refunds is not. So yeah, if this drags into even February, you’re gonna see a ton of people throwing a huge fit.
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Could have sworn I mentioned that a few pages back. Anyway, as P6 has stated, the things you don't think about, will slowly stop working. NASA, FCC, SEC, HUD, etc. When these services, that affect a very, very large portion of citizens are stopped, those affected will make their voices heard. You'll see some very lively town hall meetings with politicians.
The stock market and by extension, the economy, will slowly tank as this standoff ensues, and the US will lose a credit rating or two because of it. That in turn will make borrowing more expensive, which in turn, makes other necessary things expensive. Taxes will rise but because they have to in order to pay the borrowed money, not because we want to improve infrastructure or handout free education and universal healthcare.
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Lol you did, just reiterating 
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To put it another way: Laws and structure exist because the government enforces laws and structure. The only reasons FCC regulations exist now is because people assume the FCC will reopen soon and start enforcing those regulations. I wouldn’t count on folks assuming regulations will be enforce for a full year while Trump pouts that he can’t have his wall.
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Don't take my thunder!!!!
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Canada11607 Posts
On January 04 2019 11:54 Falling wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2019 06:00 IyMoon wrote:On January 04 2019 05:53 Plansix wrote:
Watch some of the swearing in and the contrast between the Democrats and Republicans is striking. All white dudes in blue and black on one side and a lot of women in colorful clothing on the other. And one of the new Muslim women House Rep’s son dabbed for a photo right in the well of the House, so it’s already 1000% better than anything done under Paul Ryan.
Also, twitter is frothing with conservatives and others sharing this video of Ocasio Cortez from high school doing a dance from the Breakfast Club with her teenage friends. It has to be some of the creepiest and saddest shit I’ve seen in a while. And apparently dancing is now communist. Call Kevin Bacon. Wait... People care about a dance she did at a highschool dance? Well, I think the video is made in college. But seems a whole lot of nothing- it's certainly a better quality video then the stuff I used to record with an old point and shoot. If that's all they got from college days- no tweets threatening murder, I think's she'll do alright. I think it was twitter being twitter? Because all I see is a bunch of news organizations complaining about it circulating. Would it have gone anywhere if they left it in the twitter silo? Dunno. edit Like, the biggest of the re-uploads has 50k views after a month, which is nothing in youtube land.
A follow up. This is one of those news media made their own story by amplifying what was a pretty minor affair. In between the posting my quoted post and the edit of said quoted post, I also checked Social Blade, which registered 260,000 views? on the original four minute video in January with nothing before (it wasn't tracking before that). But because a bunch of news articles had been released already, it's hard to say how much of those were from the right wing haters and how many were coming in from the critical articles.
I come back today and it's reached 2.6 million views. And each news organization is putting out their own take garnering 50-100K views (unless they just put them up). By commenting on a 'viral' video... they managed to make the video actually viral. It wasn't really news until they made it news... now it's news. Congratulations, I guess.
I miss Jon Stewart 
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After doing some cursory research on the typical right-wing media outlets like Fox and the Daily Caller, the Ocasio-Cortez dance thing isn't even really a moral outrage there. The articles are usually reporting on how it blew up from the news media, and apparently there isn't a peep from Hannity or Carlson on it. It's an interesting dynamic, because the cynic in me likes to think this was deliberately engineered in today's outrage cycles to pump up AOC's social media presence or because it's a juicy story of no-fun Republicans scrounging for any petty material to crucify a person on. Anyways, I'm reminded of Franklin Foer's words on how the trends in the news media are stoking this trend.
+ Show Spoiler +Once a story grabs attention, the media write about the topic with repetitive fury, milking the subject for clicks until the public loses interest. A memorable yet utterly forgettable example: A story about a Minnesota hunter killing a lion named Cecil generated some 3.2 million stories. Virtually every news organization—even The New York Times and The New Yorker—attempted to scrape some traffic from Cecil. This required finding a novel angle, or a just novel enough angle. Vox: “Eating Chicken Is Morally Worse Than Killing Cecil the Lion.” BuzzFeed: “A Psychic Says She Spoke With Cecil the Lion After His Death.” TheAtlantic.com: “From Cecil the Lion to Climate Change: A Perfect Storm of Outrage One-upmanship.” In some ways, this is just a digitally enhanced version of an old-fashioned media pile-on. But social media amplify the financial incentive to join the herd. The results are highly derivative. Joshua Topolsky, a founder of The Verge, has bemoaned this creeping homogenization: “Everything looks the same, reads the same, and seems to be competing for the same eyeballs.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/when-silicon-valley-took-over-journalism/534195/
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another anecdote: airports are having a problem with TSA employees just calling in sick because they don't like working without pay.
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On January 05 2019 12:04 ticklishmusic wrote:
another anecdote: airports are having a problem with TSA employees just calling in sick because they don't like working without pay.
If your considered 'essential' personnel, you have to report for work. People are going to lose their jobs over this and have no way to pay bills.
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EPT
