I’m a bigot against those Andromadans.
But is it because he’s gay, black, or because he ate Dionne Warwick?
Ha. Okay, that made me laugh. 😃
I’m lemonading.
I’m a bigot against those Andromadans.
But is it because he’s gay, black, or because he ate Dionne Warwick?
Not sure why Top That! is in this thread, but I’m pretty sure I saw it in 1989.
You are cooler than me.
You haven’t lived until you’ve heard the Teen Witch rap.
Or, to be more accurate, you’ve never wished you were dead before you heard it. Same difference.
Looks like Zombie Trumpcare 3.0 has shambled into the open. Anyone got a Lobo?
I’ve actually heard this a lot, and a knew a possible Trump supporter who generally followed this same line of reasoning.
What if everything Trump says he’ll do is a lie? What if all the evidence indicating he’s been a petulant, self-absorbed racist, sexist man-child his entire life is wrong? What if he’s not as unqualified as all the evidence indicates? Plus, I read on Facebook he’s actually secretly pro-LGBT! If so, there’s a chance he could make a pretty good President.
Followed shortly by:
What if everything Hillary says she’ll do is a lie? What if all the evidence indicating she’s been a well-informed, capable, politically savvy leader her entire life is wrong? What if she’s not as qualified as all the evidence indicates? Plus, I read on Facebook she murdered Seth Rich! If so, her election could spell disaster for the nation!
So basically take everything you know about a person, turn it on its head, and vote pretending they’re actually the opposite of this person. If this truly represents the thought processes of a large percentage of Trump voters, they voted for President of Bizarro-land. Which kinda explains where we are today.
I wish I had more time. Now that I am researching a bit more, I can see the problem of gerrymandering being more of an issue than I’d identified, even with my previous statement in this very reply. But, as you suggested that we can alter the law to more easily remove senators, could we not also alter the law to minimize gerrymandering?
You’re right – what we could really use right about now is a Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 😉
I don’t see a way that a party in power could twist the laws to maintain minority rule. If I am wrong in my information, please correct me.
North Carolina has had a hell of a time with its general assembly district maps regularly having a heavily partisan bias. The current one that hasn’t been struck down yet is awful too. I can’t speak for all states, but my state legislature also periodically redraws its own district maps. Demographic change and population growth make that a necessity, and gerrymandering typically comes with the package.
So if the North Carolina general assembly chooses a Republican Senator and the voters prefer a Democrat, the voters have little recourse. As of the 2016 election, the current North Carolina gerrymander gives the GOP a 10% boost in terms of seats in the Assembly, so unless more than 60% of North Carolinians oppose, they really can’t do anything about it. And that’s with the gerrymander that wasn’t struck down as unconstitutional. And they’re always devising “better” maps, too.
Yes, that does mean there need to be gerrymanders of both state and federal districts to make this happen, but that’s already in place. It is not safe to assume state legislatures represent the will of the voters of the state, or that voters can simply vote them out if they do something the voters don’t like.
Only statewide offices can’t be gerrymandered. Governors, Attorneys General, Secretaries of State, US Senators, those sorts of offices. That’s it.
Who the heck is a regular American?
Well, in this context, I was referring to denizens of North America who are qualified to vote in elections but not particularly concerned with lefty activist political scheming.
That’s me! I mostly stopped being concerned with lefty activist political scheming when the political left ceased to exist in my country approximately thirty-five years ago. I am always hoping for signs of its revival, though, so maybe that qualifies as concern.
I am in favor, however, of repealing the 17th Amendment.
After reading your arguments, I think there’s another fundamental philosophical chasm at some more basic level. Generally speaking, I don’t trust people with power to do the right thing. Senators, Presidents, whoever. Elections, while imperfect, are a means of keeping those in power from straying too far. Not the only means, but a critical one – and the one that must be used to some degree to qualify the nation as a democracy. I’m also a big fan of the separation of powers – if you have to give a bunch of people power, use the power of petty infighting to help keep them in check.
Due to some already-long-discussed issues (gerrymandering, the EC, etc), it’s become clear over the years that it’s possible for a minority of voters to retain control of the House and the Presidency indefinitely – the only question is how far a political party would go to implement this sort of minority rule. A system where the votes still happen, but one side is guaranteed to win regardless of the outcome. The Senate, for all its other faults such as its baked-in bias in favor of smaller-population states, cannot be gamed to the same degree as the House and the Presidency. Statewide elections cannot be gerrymandered. I feel it’s only because of this we haven’t seen people take full advantage of the politically-unpopular legal loopholes that could win them the House and Presidency regardless of the vote totals (because the whole concept of “politically unpopular” becomes irrelevant once you no longer rely on vote totals for your wins). There are worse things than gerrymandering floating around in the dark corners of the political world.
Thus, I don’t see the Senate as a less-democratic chamber that moderates the democratic excesses of the House at all. To the contrary, I see it as the nation’s only backstop (albeit a rather weak one given its baked-in bias and limited authority) against any plan for permanent minority rule in the US a la South Africa, which, given recent events, seems to clearly be the plan of far too many. Repealing the 17th would remove that backstop, and nothing else in the Constitution would prevent the sort of minority rule that is technically easily doable within the constraints of the rest of the Constitution – the literal end of American democracy – but for the conscience of politicians, in which I don’t place a great deal of trust.
As has been pointed out to me by conservatives in this forum: America is not a pure democracy. We are a Democratic Republic.
That is a stupid GOP argument in favor of the College.
It’s also factually wrong. Yes, we are a democratic republic, but that is completely unrelated to the existence of the Electoral College. The House of Representatives is pretty much entirely what makes us a democratic republic. Many democratic republics around the world are perfectly functional without anything resembling an electoral college – in fact, the EC makes us less of a democratic republic than they are. The EC is derived from an early attempt at resolving federalism with a basic distrust of democracy, and you can have federalism without it.
Everybody says ‘Bernie would have won’ or ‘Bernie wouldn’t have won,’ but I won’t really believe either until I see some polling data.
I think the DNC as a whole is partially to blame. The very fact that there is a superdelegate system, disproportionally and undemocratically favoring the voice of the elite, allowed Hillary to grab the nomination when the more likable Bernie Sanders might have defeated Trump.
While there is no way to prove that he would have won, I feel he easily could have better united the Democrat Party and that his supporters were far more passionate than Clinton’s. Heck, Jeebus here protest voted against Hillary. I doubt there would have been much of that against Bernie, even among Hillary supporters. I’ve no doubt most would have gone ahead and voted for Bernie as their number two pick.
I think the unification problem had more to do with Bernie’s supports (and to some extent Bernie himself) than Clinton herself.
As documented earlier, Bernie’s supporters notably moved to support Hillary at higher rates and faster than Hillary’s supporters moved to support Obama eight years earlier. While there are always some holdouts in any primary race, the 2016 Democratic Party was notable for its lack of a unification problem, at least when compared to prior years.
The account has his name on it. It is his account.
Sure. And it’s his face on the billboard, and so on. When your name and face are regularly handed off to others to create a message to associate with it, sometimes the best you can do is pull the offending material after-the-fact and presumably identify/deal with the person who created it. If you consider Twitter passwords to be sacrosanct things only to be given to people with the highest vetted clearance, you would be (perhaps properly) horrified by how it works every day in much of the world, where the intern gets handed it on day 1.
If it is the case that any new intern gets handed the password on day 1, I would suggest changing the name of the twitter account. Maybe change it to “Ted Cruz campaign” or “The Office of Ted Cruz” or “Ted Cruz INC” or “The Staff of Ted Cruz”. Something that indicate it is a twitter account belonging to his group(what it is called), and not his own private twitter account.
But, politically, he can’t. Cruz represents about 28 million constituents (which is appalling but true). And yet people who go through the trouble of writing to (or e-mailing, or tweeting, etc) their Senator want to feel like they got a one-on-one exchange with a US Senator, where their opinion was, at least temporarily, given the undivided attention of someone who could actually help. Which is ridiculous even for a decent Senator, let alone the likes of Cruz.
If you get a response back from “the office of Ted Cruz”, or “one of about twenty interns who just started working this month for Ted Cruz” – yes, it’s honest and accurate, but it’s politically counterproductive. It gives the voter the (probably accurate) impression that the Senator most likely will never set eyes on what most people write to them, which doesn’t exactly make you have good feelings about them come re-election time. So they keep up the facade of “oh yes, you’re really communicating with me personally” because it makes them seem like the sort of Senator people want to have.
It’s not just social media. Write a letter, and you’ll get a letter back signed by the Senator (well, with a printed image of the Senator’s signature). The return address will say the office of so-and-so, but the letter itself will look personal. I’m dating myself here, but I wrote a letter to the newly-elected Bernie Sanders when he was in the House, and when he actually wrote back it was like Christmas. OMG! Mr Smith goes to Washington WORKS! Woohoo citizen democracy! But seriously, upon reflection, it was just a form letter.
Showbiz and politics. Not so different after all.
The account has his name on it. It is his account.
Sure. And it’s his face on the billboard, and so on. When your name and face are regularly handed off to others to create a message to associate with it, sometimes the best you can do is pull the offending material after-the-fact and presumably identify/deal with the person who created it. If you consider Twitter passwords to be sacrosanct things only to be given to people with the highest vetted clearance, you would be (perhaps properly) horrified by how it works every day in much of the world, where the intern gets handed it on day 1.
What are you talking about? It it his account, and he was the staffer’s employer. Of course he had control of that.
I don’t know if this is the case here, but in at least a few cases, a political person with staff does not create social media accounts, post anything to them, write speeches or press releases, or read or respond to e-mails. And while they may theoretically have some sort of editorial veto over content associated with their name, it’s logistically impossible for them to review everything. Hell, they don’t even read the legislation they vote on. Trump is fairly unique in that he writes his own covfefe.
There’s a bomb scare going on at the Santa Monica pier out here today. And the usual A-holes on twitter are dragging their political sewage into it.
Who knew the quality of American public dialogue would be foreshadowed by YouTube comments?
So last week or so, I heard a BBC news story about Trump’s DACA decision. Although they included the fairly typical pro and con arguments from advocate for either side of the position, what struck me is that the “pro” argument came from a member of an SPLC-designated hate group, but one with a radio-friendly name (Center for Immigration Studies, so bland, so neutral-sounding). Furthermore, they didn’t indicate this for the listener as I think would be appropriate under the circumstances.
I’m sure they got a lot of flack from their listeners about this, and news organizations may have now started vetting their talking heads for white supremacists ties before airing them, or at least including the disclaimer “this person is a member of a known hate group” when they do. Or at least something like “BBC News tried to find someone supporting this policy who was not also a member of a hate group, but failed to find one,” which I think would be the most appropriate action for a news organization.
And now… FOX “News” is runs a hit piece on the SPLC:
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/09/08/splc-demands-correction-fox-news
Oh, I usually just time everything to match my English subtitles, which are pre-lengthened from your typical English subtitle. In fact, it’s kinda hard to manage multiple timings in the project, so I’d recommend it.
Personally, I think a football player sitting during the anthem is ineffectual. It’s less effective even than temporarily adding an overlay to your Facebook avatar after a crisis.
If the people who sit want to help the cause for which they protest, they should do so in a way that matters. You can’t show solidarity to the BLM community by sitting unless the camera notices you doing it and the media jumps up and down accordingly. So I think the people who sit should be ignored, because it deflates their method of protest entirely.
It’s similar to how Trump wouldn’t have won the primary had he not been given all the media attention. Just ignore them, and their opinion becomes moot.
A player sitting during the anthem is so ineffectual you think the media should ignore it (instead of jumping up and down accordingly) - so it will deflate their method of protest entirely?
Erm… what?
Well, I’ve been trying to stay out of this one so far, but I think I can translate. I think he’s saying it’s ineffectual in that it doesn’t communicate the message you’re trying to send, not that it doesn’t successfully grab media attention. i.e. the media ruckus becomes about sitting and flags and whatnot, and not about your actual grievances, therefore it’s ineffectual.
I haven’t actually formed an opinion on the concept of media grabbing yet. It does seem to be central to the “Stay Woke” thesis – that unless your reminders that racism and brutality exists are adequately loud and outrageous, your protests will eventually turn into background noise and the media (and therefore the majority) will tune them out, fall back into a slumber, and think everything must be fine now. BLM has embraced this and while they’ve clearly gotten some backlash, the media’s focus on police racism and brutality has definitely been longer and more critical recently than during any recent prior protest movement, and I’d say police racism and brutality is actually much less prevalent today than in the years past when it was barely covered at all. So did BLM succeed with confrontational protest tactics? Or is it the fact that almost every citizen carries around a video camera these days and stuff can’t be explained away as easily as it used to? Or a combination. I really don’t know.
Now’s your time to do the right thing, guys.
I’m afraid neither of them would know the right thing if it came up and bit them on the ass.
And I’m hoping it does.
Yeah, the Nordic languages in general are pretty much your subtitle timing torture test. That’s why “summarized” subtitles are so popular there, you condense and drop sentences wherever you can. On the other end of the spectrum, I think Project Threepio’s slower subtitles probably cause some head scratching with Chinese subtitles, which I believe can be read much more quickly. One size, or speed, doesn’t really ever fit all – but boy does it reduce overhead.
EDIT: I should also add that while the other Nordic language subtitles in Project Threepio are in the condensed form (straight from the GOUT), the Finnish ones have been redone in a longer, more accurate form, so it was probably the worst possible language to try to match to Revisited’s English subtitle timing.
Florida politics in the era of Trump.
“Why should I resign,” he asked in an exclusive interview from his $2 million beachfront condo. “I did nothing wrong and I was elected. This is just party politics.”
He already sounds like he’s channeling someone familiar. So what’s the story with this witch hunt he’s fending off?
Four months after 28-year-old Rupert Tarsey was elected secretary, party officials have found out the young philanthropist and supporter of President Donald Trump is really Rupert Ditsworth.
And a decade ago, the then-Beverly Hills teenager was charged with attempted murder in Los Angeles after hitting Harvard-Westlake School classmate Elizabeth Barcay over the head at least 40 times, splitting her skull open.
Oh, well then, nothing to see here. Fake news. So unfair.
Jesus Effing Christ.
What in hell is that?
It’s a documentary someone found in an unlocked time machine.
The hidden ironic subtext is I actually hate yams.
And you, sir, are worse than Hitler.
Mom?
FM, STMAO!
Seriously, though. This is stupid.
You may have a point.
Okay, other stuff, Nigel Farage of Brexit fame goes full fascist, neatly tying Putin, Brexit, Trump, white supremacist idiocy, and ongoing efforts to destroy all NATO countries (next stop, Germany) into a single package. They’re not even trying to hide the relationships anymore, which means they don’t think they have anything to fear, which means they may be right.
Speaking of what they may or may not fear, Mueller looks like he’s going after yet another obstruction of justice charge. How many is that now?