gdp's Comments

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Mon, 27 Jun 2016 16:48:41 +0000

They were certainly a core vote in this election, though, in which the same people who were defecting from the Democrats in the 60s p much burned the Republican party down over the lack of non-neoliberal options

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 20:15:59 +0000

I think assuming that the average voter is both repugnantly stupid and informed solely by the propaganda of your preferred party is neither a good tack to take morally nor strategically. In a year when the civil rights of potentially millions of Americans are on the line, and where Democrats are relying on the perception they stand against that to win a number of key elections, they have decided to throw their weight behind the creation of a secret government blacklist of second-class citizens whose rights can be stripped at will comprised of mostly those same people; with an enthusiasm they never had for proper healthcare reform, or against the Iraq war, or for that matter for non-horrifying gun control policy. I think people will remember that; I know it's certainly clarified where things stand for me. I fail to see what Machiavellian strategy could be served by an unforced error abandoning any moral high ground from which to object when the Republicans try something similar on their wedge issues in the year of Trump, except in that people are scrambling for some way to tell themselves they are secretly cheering for a circuitous political strategy they don't fully grasp themselves and not simply direct and unsecret evil.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 18:48:44 +0000

Don't wait for a maybe; go out and try to get something better now. With any luck, in six months they really will come calling but you'll have landed in a so much better place that you won't be interested anymore.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 18:39:52 +0000

Jurors get paid, but they also don't get the option to forgo the paycheck and the jury duty, and their decision comes after the fact with their compensation already established (and they still strongly side with the folks signing their paycheck). Witness' testimony isn't guaranteed the same way; they have agency to just not testify and the option for their testimony to be cut from the case if the lawyers don't like what they're hearing. The jury in this increasingly threadbare analogy would be the readers, looking at the testimony of the subjects having already committed to reading the story and forming their opinions from there. Newspapers would fucken love to bribe their audience to read them but it doesn't work that way. Mainstream journalistic ethics are by no means flawless, and the whole pretense to objectivity IMO does more harm than good, but I appreciate that at least some field reporters really make the effort to keep a hard line between events and people as they appear on their own and the Narrative some guy at the Times wants to tell everyone. Giving someone false hope that your presence there might cause somebody to give a shit strikes me as the least harm a reporter can possibly do and still, y'know, show up.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 18:15:03 +0000

it's absolutely convenient and feigned concern on their part, and by the same token the notion that Democrats only support unaccountable beltway star chambers stripping people of their full citizenship in secret because doing so will totally rustle Republicans' jimmies is laughable. Trying to make this all about the party that isn't trying to expand the no-fly list to apply to Constitutional rights really shows where your priorities lie IMO If you're willing to support secret courts and random suspension of peoples' rights with no recourse because you imagine it'd fuck with your political enemies a little, you're just plain willing to support secret courts and random suspension of peoples' rights with no recourse. That's not 'them', it's you.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 18:08:26 +0000

Warrantless surveillance has been a bipartisan winner that both parties heavily support in practice, and love trying to pin on the other party afterwards when the voters realize wait that's awful. There's a reason everyone inside the Beltway was so aghast at the Snowden leaks, they weren't afraid it'd embarassingly reveal to the voters how great and in tune with the American peoples' interests their policies secretly are. The no-fly proposal and sit-in, if anything, create for the first time in 15 years a genuine rift on security-state issues between the parties for the Republicans to position themselves as the civil libertarian populists battling against a totalitarian Democratic cabal out to eliminate the Bill of Rights, starting with the most vulnerable minorities and working from there. They won't be wrong.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 18:00:39 +0000

you probably don't want to say either three times, just to be on the safe side.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 17:58:16 +0000

The ACA was their replacement for healthcare reform until those big poopyhead Democrats came and stole it. I waver between the charitable interpretation that they're lovin' it and deliberately throwing match after match in order to (successfully!) shift all attempts at real healthcare reform towards getting the blue team to ferociously defend red team's bill for them, and the more probable interpretation that they really don't have any plan and just instinctively make tantrum noises about anything a Democrat does and entrenching the Heritage Foundation as the far left of the Overton window on healthcare is a lucky coincidence they haven't even noticed.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 17:44:24 +0000

Yes, it's unethical for the same reason that a defendant paying witnesses for the 'emotional labor' of testifying in their favor in court would be, and casts a pall over the entire resulting work. Whatever reasons people believe they have to tell their stories are meant to be their own, and the journalist is (ideally, hypothetically, never in practice) simply the invisible eyeball there to record it without tainting the scene. There's other schools that acknowledge that tainting the scene is inevitable and journalists are active participants in their own stories (which is the sort of thing Hunter S. Thompson was originally notable for, before fratboys latched onto all the drugs), and other roundabout ways of buying stories from people that're more accepted, but if you're gonna go down the road to just buying the quotes you want you might as well stay home and make the whole story up Stephen Glass style.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 17:36:12 +0000

I've encountered in person the phenomenon of rich people who whine to significantly less rich people about not being rich enough and expect actual sympathy, and I still don't understand it, but I feel like a guillotine in the public square might cure it

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 17:32:53 +0000

stay ma dabby?

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 17:31:39 +0000

I can't say for certain but based on what I know of its left equivalents I'm reasonably certain you don't get to be an anti-abortion robocaller unless that is something you have specifically sought out and have the ideological credentials to be selected for. Those folks aren't selling people fake cruises or dodgy insurance, they're crusading for the Cause.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 17:27:16 +0000

The Dems picked the No Fly list specifically to get proactive about because many Democrats, especially in the federal party establishment, have vocally wanted more and more far-reaching things like the No Fly list for a very long time. Feinstein was in love with it long before anyone thought to tie it to a wedge issue like guns. There's no 11-dimensional chess strategy going on here, it's exactly what it appears to be.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 17:23:52 +0000

I wonder if you could even sell a good-tasting health food; I'm p sure they take stuff that'd be perfectly normal and add dirt and lawn clippings because people won't believe in it unless it feels like penance.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 17:21:36 +0000

facebook politics haranguers aren't really capable of being friends anyway; it's like iguanas, they don't have that instinct like mammals do.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 17:17:58 +0000

it makes the repetition make sense, too! that is one big f******* giant

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 17:14:32 +0000

There isn't a referendum process, it always has to go through some type of legislature (the founders in the US were very particular about only the right kind of person having political power), and it'd lose abysmally anyway. The NRA is chump change as far as lobbying groups go; its influence doesn't come from promising candidates money, but from promising them its huge support base of highly proactive single-issue voters.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 17:03:56 +0000

this'd be plausible if the Democratic establishment had done basically anything at all to oppose the no-fly list in the 15 years it's been around, during which they've had ample opportunity, and if the same people calling for its application to common rights of citizens now had not in fact been enthusiastically cheerleading it from the start. Diane Feinstein doesn't ironically love the no-fly list, she just normal loves it, she thinks it's great and wants it expanded.

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 16:58:36 +0000

The CDC's been able to study gun violence for a while now, the studies they've been releasing jut haven't been one magical study prophecied to totally put an arrow through the tiny undefended patch over the NRA's heart that the politicians using that as an outrage email forward hoped for, so they just pretend nothing's happened and nobody fact-checks them

The Toast : Link Roundup!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 16:53:48 +0000

Certainly this will be the bill to convince a skeptical public that 'gun control' is not a Democratic codeword for suspending the Bill of Rights at whim