Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[sluissa]

You've also got the people in safe districts that will probably never flip who are protected by the party preventing any primary challengers from uprooting them because hey, as long as they're voting with the party, why kick them out? A good chunk of congress falls into this group.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

America's gerontocracy is an extreme incarnation of the standard reasons for gerontocracy: All money and power is concentrated among the elderly, and those elderly realize that none of their successors will manage to carry on their ideology. A good deal of the reason that the "Gen Z is the New Right" meme got started, aside from one badly-conducted study refuted by all others since, was because they're the last shot at Boomer Restoration.

Sadly for the boomers, despite the name zoomers are closer to Mao than they are Reagan. Knowing that their political project is fucked, which they've known in some incarnation or another since the moral panic at Gen X's disgustingly modernist tastes, they resort to the only other available strategy and go all in on holding pattern. Much of the concessions to the left in the culture wars are the result of boomers realizing they needed to give up something at this point lest OWS grow to 100 million members and conduct bloodless revolution, and so they gave up that which was least material to them and decided to get by on facebook conspiracy groups about Obama's gay marriage instead.

This strategy only becomes more frantic as the greatest generation backing now descends into political irrelevance, and the boomers are left with a need to cheat more and more blatantly with every passing year in order to keep rolling. Trump is one such element, and the blatent disregard of the law in Trumpism yet another (taken straight out of Reagan's response to Iran-Contra, for the record).

Get ready, because once Sanders wins the election and succdems coup the DNC I don't think the boomers will have the political or physical strength left to do anything but enter their final death rage period.

[scourge728]

Get ready, because once Sanders wins the election and succdems coup the DNC I don't think the boomers will have the political or physical strength left to do anything but enter their final death rage period.

God I hope so

[da_nang]

Impeachment deposition delayed after Republicans storm proceedings

Oh boy.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yeah, he's getting crazy degrees of capitalist support compared to his general support. Personally, I hope he stays in just for the shit he says during debates. During the last one he almost admitted the Saudis did 9/11 for a second, and I'm pretty sure he's going to issue a veiled death threat on Beto any day now.

(Obligatory reminder that Sanders is the only candidate who will not take dark money before, during, or after the primary. Biden is doing all three and Warren is only abstaining for the duration of the primary.)

[nenjin]

Democrats leading the impeachment inquiry have been gathering evidence for the probe behind closed doors, asserting that secrecy is paramount in order to protect the integrity of the investigation. Republicans have said the depositions should be done in public.

Hrmmm.....

“They basically ran over a member of the staff” to get in the room, said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). “They just came into the room and started shouting about the president. Literally some of them were just screaming … saying that the process is wrong.”

Gee, maybe that's why the meetings are secret. Because elected officials who can do no more than scream and be disruptive can't, ya know...do that.

[Doomblade187]

I would personally not pay attention to the Republican political posturing. It's very obviously trying to say "look at us, we care about transparency also don't think about yesterday's testimony." Let the proceedings continue, let us not encourage them.

[smjjames]

Democrats leading the impeachment inquiry have been gathering evidence for the probe behind closed doors, asserting that secrecy is paramount in order to protect the integrity of the investigation. Republicans have said the depositions should be done in public.

Hrmmm.....

“They basically ran over a member of the staff” to get in the room, said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). “They just came into the room and started shouting about the president. Literally some of them were just screaming … saying that the process is wrong.”

Gee, maybe that's why the meetings are secret. Because elected officials who can do no more than scream and be disruptive can't, ya know...do that.

I'd rather it be transparent too, but I can understand why they might edge on the side of not doing wanting to because it inevitably turns into a circus. I'm sure there are plenty that don't, but the high profile ones and the heavily televised ones usually end up that way.

No idea how much the Watergate and the Clinton hearings stuff turned into a circus. Though I've heard that the Watergate largely didn't because it was done by staff and lawyers who knew what they were doing.

[Egan_BW]

(Obligatory reminder that Sanders is the only candidate who will not take dark money before, during, or after the primary. Biden is doing all three and Warren is only abstaining for the duration of the primary.)

Could you elaborate on this?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

(Obligatory reminder that Sanders is the only candidate who will not take dark money before, during, or after the primary. Biden is doing all three and Warren is only abstaining for the duration of the primary.)

Could you elaborate on this?

Not that much more to it, really.

Warren has been pretty shockingly forward about her future strategy if you listen to how she defends this policy and how she seems to envision the general election. Combined with her insistence on things such as  "Medicare for All as an ideal, but we won't raise anybody's taxes" instead of a concrete plan, well...she clearly signals her intent to pivot, and she'd have to! Certainly the insurance and pharmaceutical donors wouldn't part with their money otherwise. Although recently it looks like she might just be pivoting during the primary outright. Warren has also been working overtime to try and dodge having all this ascribed to her too, for example trying to pledge against fundraiser dinners specifically since they're so optically bad while leaving all the other dark money doors open.

With Biden, well, what's there even to say? He's a man with deep pockets, good friends, and no forced busing. He's pretty honest about how utterly committed to the old rot of the American political system, hell, in terms of Democratic politicians he's pretty much the patriarch of the old rot. He might have actually been around in a smoke-filled room at some point in his life. Taking dark money is something he probably sees as a win-win.

It is vital to know and remember who the billionaire class would like to see replace Trump.

And it is arguably more important to know who they would not.

[wierd]

Isn't globalism great?

[Frumple]

Prob'ly better than most alternatives, but it gots its probbums.

[wierd]

Inefficiency is not a universal bane, contrary to what economists want to assert.

Loss of agency, due to the interdependence of the globalist system (which causes situations like this one) is a serious bad that can only be effectively solved by inefficient implementation. (EG, either redundant industry on the planet, OR, less efficient local industry being held up as a failsafe, even though it would need subsidization to survive in the face of the global competitor.)


Failure to retain such alternatives (and thus to retain inefficiencies these alternatives imply simply by existing) is how you end up with a country like either ours, or China, flexing its muscle, and making the world into its bitch.


In order for that to happen, massive super-monopoly corporations inevitably become dominant, with all the horrors that causes.


Capitalism *NEEDS* inefficiency to function correctly. Without it, there is no "Invisible hand", and the notion that they (huge megacorps, and or, global superpowers) will self-regulate is laughably absurd.

[ggamer]

laughably absurd, yet once you argue with a lot of folks and get down to brass tacks it tends to be what they genuinely believe.

For the democratic primary i'm obviously rooting for sanders, since at the very least i'd love to see some personal enemies of mine die from shock. Tulsi Gabbard seems decent enough to me too, though since I'm unfortunately registered republican I can't vote so i don't know much about her.

Speaking of which, I have no fucking clue who i'd vote for in the gop primary, if any of the peripheral republicans who don't suck trumps dick to keep the kiddy diddling coffers full even decide to run. I'd be a lot more relieved if more congressman would go the Justin Amash route and strike out on their own. My senators in GA would make decent(?) picks, but they're too old to want to rock the boat and risk losing their seats.

[Reelya]

I'm a bit torn.

Not in candidate, because the legality of me doing anything campaign-related is dubious enough that I avoid any of it as much as possible (in reading apparently I legally can donate specifically due to my greencard, but that's too tenuous to trust).

As it's been known for a while now, I'm very anti-monopoly, and find that the tech sector has a serious monopoly problem. Their defense has always been that "with us gone China will fill the void", and on thinking on it, they're not entirely wrong. Chinese companies have already demonstrated their willingness to get involved in any economic venture that they can, and their general allegiance to China. Any destruction of US monopolies would have to coincide with protection against foreign monopolies from shoving their way in.

That, or whatever force that takes out US monopolies has to take out China too.

So... stuck with US monopolies, stuck with Chinese monopolies, or global societal collapse? I suppose if I'm leaning towards the latter, that I'm better off learning to stop worrying and love the US tech industry. At least, as a means to an end.

It's all in how you bring in anti-monopoly laws. For example you could crush Facebook so that there are lots of little unconnected Facebooks each with their own user-base, which would indeed allow foreign monopolistic versions to compete strongly against them.

Or, you bring in transferrable accounts, which I believe Andrew Yang might have raised. This fights the monopoly in a better way, since the transferable accounts could be made preferable to being locked in to a closed network.

There are some arguments that this could never work - who owns your comments on a Facebook article for example, but this is still stuck in "Facebook" thinking. The trick is to split the concept of "accounts" from "content". Facebook and Co keep you locked into their platform because the content is locked in with them. Transferrable accounts aren't about "moving" between Facebook A and Facebook B which is run by a "rival facebook", it's about creating an open platform where the content itself isn't centralized in a walled garden.

Here's a possible outline:

- Have social media "account vendors" who work like email providers. But the key difference is that the accounts would be transferable between vendors, in the same way that domains are transferable. Similar to email you have a contact list, and the contacts aren't in any specific "facebook", they can be across different vendors. This solves the "transferring and keeping my friends list" bit.

- Have third-party "content vendors". This would be a network of third party vendors who have things like news feeds etc. Similar to Disqus, the content vendor would be the ones hosting the posts, videos, games etc. So the question of "who owns my posts if I move away from Facebook" is solved too. The post is owned by whoever is hosting the thread its in. So for example Ars Technica would have their own social media feed, curated by Ars Technica, and a layer of third-party content hosting companies would spring up too, and Ars Technica would be free to move between a number of hosting companies for their "openSocial" compatible content, who could provide paid services such as forum moderation and management.

So, the way to realistic break up giant social media isn't in fact that technically complex. Just have light-weight "account providers" similar to email providers and have a layer of third-party "content hosters" / newsfeeds and the like which are compatible with the hosting. The best advantage is that you'd no be longer stuck in some asinine walled garden like Facebook with their shitty set up.