Amergin posted:

You still keep using this word "hate" as though it's just an agreed-upon and accepted fact. Republicans don't just want to get rid of things, and the things they want to get rid of tend to be things they think are unconstitutional rather than they simply "hate" it.

It's easy to belittle a large group of people if in your mind you boil their complex thought processes to "Oh you just hate X" probably followed-up in your pretentious mind with "... because you're too ignorant to see why X is good."

Progressivism is constantly trying to throw things at problems, usually money. Conservatism is thinking twice before you throw those things and trying to find out exactly who is throwing what for how much cost and at whom. There's no hate involved other than what you dream up to help you validate your own political convictions.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Honestly at this point there both 'united' by a hatred of the other. If the one splintered, progressives/tea partiers would split off from the third wayers/establishment pretty quick imo.

mdemone posted:

Amergin posted:

Republicans are united by a common hatred?

Republicans are united by a desire for efficiency, autonomy and morality. Democrats are united by the same thing, they just see different paths to those end goals.

Amergin posted:

That's growth in spending, not spending itself. Considering Obama's growth in spending is > 0 then yes, he is the biggest spender.

Who What Now posted:

When has a republican ever been moral?

Fried Chicken posted:

today the republicans are fast tracking a repeal of net neutrality. Which Obama will promptly repeal

quote:

This isn't the only Republican effort to overturn the FCC's net neutrality rules. Another, titled the "Internet Freedom Act," would wipe out the new net neutrality regime.

Amergin posted:

That's growth in spending, not spending itself. Considering Obama's growth in spending is > 0 then yes, he is the biggest spender.

DaveWoo posted:

Oh, those Republicans and their bill names.

Talmonis posted:

Roosevelt.

greatn posted:

No, you sell the memorial and the buyer has to pay for their own bulldozers. You liberals can't even destroy government right.

Quidam Viator posted:

Meanwhile, Americans are able to continue to sit back complacently for almost another decade, split by deliberate polarization to fight with each other over the medical benefits of murdering cops' wives, lament the facility with which the Koch Brothers take over everything from university economics programs to whole states, and the terrible destruction of the environment, warmongering, and destruction of workers rights STILL HAPPENS JUST AT A SLOWER PACE, so that your average American can still be consoled by a media that presents "both sides" of these issues.

quote:

"There is a considerable likelihood of warming reaching 4°C above pre-industrial levels within this century... Crop yields are expected to decline by 30 percent with 1.5-2°C warming and up to 60 percent with 3-4°C warming.
...
We face an avalanche of global disasters during our lifetime, and unless we slam the brakes on carbon pollution fast, the global economy will collapse to boot.

Quidam Viator posted:

Very well, I'm off again then. It doesn't hurt to be polite.

quote:

An Arkansas lawyer is seeking sanctions after his computer expert found malware on an external hard drive supplied in response to a discovery request.

Lawyer Matthew Campbell of North Little Rock says he became suspicious when he received the hard drive by Federal Express in June 2014 from a lawyer for the Fort Smith Police Department, the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette reports. Previous evidence in the police whistleblower case had been provided by email or a cloud-based Internet storage service, or had been shipped through the U.S. Postal Service.

“I thought, ‘I’m not plugging that into my computer,’ ” Campbell told the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. “Something didn’t add up in the way they approached it, so I sent it to my software guy first.”

The technology expert found four Trojans on the hard drive. “These Trojans were designed to steal passwords, install malicious software and give someone else command and control of the infected computer,” Campbell says in a brief supporting his motion for sanctions (PDF).

The security expert said in an affidavit that the Trojans were in a subfolder rather than the root directory, indicating they were “more likely placed in that folder intentionally with the goal of taking command of Mr. Campbell’s computer while also stealing passwords to his account.”

Campbell says he doesn’t know who placed the malware on the hard drive, according to the Democrat Gazette. He represents three current and former police officers who contended they were subjected to multiple investigations after revealing improprieties in the department.

The motion for sanctions says malware is not the only discovery problem. Campbell alleges entire email accounts were deleted, emails that could have been recovered were purged from the system, and emails that were previously provided in response to freedom of information requests had improper deletions.

The sanctions brief adds that the police department’s information technology specialist attended a convention 10 days before the court granted Campbell’s motion to compel evidence. The expert took classes on secure data deletion, whistleblower investigation and monitoring employee activity, Campbell wrote. He did not take classes offered on e-discovery and preservation of evidence, Campbell said.

Campbell is asking that a default judgment be entered in favor of his clients and that other appropriate sanctions be imposed.

SedanChair posted:

Oh my god guys, comity itself has sadly departed from us.

Fried Chicken posted:

http://www.abajournal.com/mobile/article/suspicious_lawyer_finds_malware_on_external_hard_drive_supplied_by_police_l/

Suspicious lawyer finds malware on external hard drive supplied by police lawyer in discovery

Elephant Ambush posted:

Accelerationism is dumb because things are slowly getting better, not worse.

Elephant Ambush posted:

Accelerationism is dumb because things are slowly getting better, not worse. Yeah there's a lot of bad poo poo happening and every tiny step forward gets fought tooth and nail, but we're making slow progress and slow progress tends to stick. I wish we could move things forward faster but the bigger and faster changes get fought even harder. The average human brain simply cannot handle fast, radical change. I hate incrementalism but it's all we have and it's been working since the 50s.

Instead of trying to make things worse for everyone so that they'll rise up in glorious revolution, let's use those resources and energy to prevent our small victories from getting overturned, and to keep pushing for more progress. We KNOW that will work because history has shown us that it does. We just need to keep at it. Tirelessly.

zoux posted:

While he's an obnoxious chicken little, I get why QV is so hysterical about the state of American politics, because I can't really see a way the status quo evolves back into a workable system without some sort of catastrophe. Between the nature of campaigning for national office and the way that political communications are done and the polarization of the electorate, I don't know how we get to a point where governing is possible.

SedanChair posted:

A certain kind of liberal (without value) cannot see this progress. To them, life is a vague, foggy assemblage of pictures on an MSF fundraising letter.

fknlo posted:

Seeing people posting a story on Facebook where a black judge sentenced some presumably black home invaders to some very minor time because "He felt the 3 year old white victim was racist". If this were real I assume it would be everywhere, provided left wing media isn't hiding it of course, so what's the real story so I can counter it? I'm really just assuming it's some bullshit to counter the thing where you can pay a police department to hunt unarmed black men.

MaxxBot posted:

Is there anyone here that doesn't think we're headed for some sort of civilizational collapse within the next century? I'm starting to feel like an outlier here.

Crowsbeak posted:

What does MSF stand for?

Radish posted:

If the police attorney was in on this (and it sounds like he or she was based on the irregular method of delivery) that should certainly be grounds for disbarment.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I was raised on global warming being a thing and I haven't seen anything to indicate that it's something we're going to be able to pull out of besides "the human race always thinks of something at the last minute!"

And that's besides the whole running out of fossil fuels thing.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I was raised on global warming being a thing and I haven't seen anything to indicate that it's something we're going to be able to pull out of besides "the human race always thinks of something at the last minute!"

And that's besides the whole running out of fossil fuels thing.

sillyloquy posted:

I don't understand how an anti-accelerationist can be so completely convinced that their prediction of the future is correct. How do you know for sure which outcome will lead to a smaller amount of future suffering?

sillyloquy posted:

I don't consider myself an accelerationist but the only argument I've heard against it that really jived me with was (paraphrasing from this thread) If catastrophe is inevitable it will be better to have someone like Hillary at the helm when it happens than someone like Walker, and by keeping the presidency. in the dems hands increases the likelihood of that happening.

I don't understand how an anti-accelerationist can be so completely convinced that their prediction of the future is correct. How do you know for sure which outcome will lead to a smaller amount of future suffering? Sometimes the counter-intuitive answer is more correct. I don't think it is in this case, but if you don't recognize that fact your argument will never resonate with someone like me or QV.

If you believe that catastrophe lies ahead, the feeling of needing to propose something ambitious can be overwhelming. making GBS threads on the whole premise of being ambitious and telling someone to leave the thread doesn't help. Repeating that the only thing to do is barely do anything because it will be less bad maybe doesn't help.

Maybe there's no way to talk about it constructively because we're hosed and there's nothing we can do about it. But without being able to know that for sure, the arrogance in some of the arguments is hard to swallow.

MaxxBot posted:

People have been predicting imminent collapse of civilization ever since it started and so far they have all been wrong, so I would be a lot more hesitant about predicting it than humans so far have been. I can understand why climate change would be a concern but the fossil fuels thing seems downright silly in light of how far alternative energy sources have advanced and how we've found even more relatively economical sources of fossil fuels. I mean the only reason at this point we haven't transferred over to more renewables is a lack of political will, not a lack of feasibility.