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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Idiocracy wasn't meant to be a roadmap... The president in Idiocracy was a better president than Trump. Sure he was stupid but he wasn't maliciously stupid. He was just incompetent.
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Mar 19, 2019 00:42
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The Drumpf thing was meant to separate Trump the person from Trump the brand. For some reason a lot of people see the Trump name as a seal of quality (literally the only good investment Trump ever made was in hiring whatever PR firm is responsible for convincing the public that he's a good investor), so the point was that he should be evaluated based on his actual record, rather than the fictional brand persona he's invented for himself. This was of course way too high concept for people so instead it just became "let's call him the wrong name because it annoys him, probably".
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Apr 7, 2019 21:44
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Considering one of the primary facets of leftism is solidarity among the working class, online leftists sure do seem quick to denounce people as enemies of the revolution for not being leftist enough.
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Apr 9, 2019 01:00
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I wonder if the shift from trailer-style to house-style mobile homes was driven specifically by the desire to gouge tenants more effectively. The former were quite a bit more “mobile” so if rent became unreasonable then people could pretty easily just leave. The “move once then settle” style meanwhile seems deliberately designed to create a captive market. The house-like designs probably are nicer to live in, but “let’s make this low income housing nicer to improve living conditions for the poor” is not a motivation you’re likely to find among landlords.
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Apr 9, 2019 15:56
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SlothfulCobra posted:A good bit, but after that joke about Wallace Shawn looking like a baby, all I wanted was for Wallace Shawn to be one of the actors they got to reenact court documents with. Yeah I had the same thought. It seemed like such a setup for a callback when they starting bringing out the other actors.
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Apr 17, 2019 03:22
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Senor Tron posted:That seems bizarre, don't you have professional sports on free to air? I would expect that sports are probably grandfathered in since they predate television.
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Apr 18, 2019 23:37
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pwn posted:Also networks cover sporting contests, they don’t originate them; these games would occur whether or not they were being photographed and transmitted. Which is pretty distinct from a show being performed especially for broadcast. I'd imagine that yeah, this would be perfectly legal, but of course the Broadway producers would never agree to it because it would tank the value of those tickets.
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Apr 19, 2019 00:03
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banned from Starbucks posted:Do you deserve death if you shoot up a school full or 3rd graders? Anders Breivik is still alive and somehow there have been no mass shootings in Norway since him. Almost like mass shootings are a systemic problem that have nothing to do with how a society chooses to punish its murderers. Snowglobe of Doom posted:And then add to that the facts that many prisons are privatised and are putting pressure on the state to supply more inmates in order to maximise their profits, plus most state attorneys campaign on being tough on crime and push as hard as they can for the maximum sentences possible in as many cases as they can ..... Yeah the US has a lot of really perverse incentives to increase the incarceration rate that have nothing to do with how much crime is actually happening. Fun fact: the 13th amendment specifically still allows for slavery as punishment for a crime. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 00:04 on May 10, 2019 |
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May 10, 2019 00:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:I can't hear John Oliver talking about the Green New Deal without remembering Andy Zaltzman's joke about FDR getting a stripper for his bucket of lobsters. The thing I've seen is that basically all this poo poo is deliberately intended to get challenged in court. They know it's all blatantly unconstitutional. They're hitting a bunch of states at once so that the odds are better that one of them will escalate to the supreme court and they can finally overturn Roe v Wade.
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May 15, 2019 03:51
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The weirdest thing about the whole FDA Approved vs. FDA Cleared process is that you can get something Cleared based on something else that has only been Cleared. Like I would have assumed the rule would be written so you can't Clear something based on similarity to something else that has been Cleared. You should have to base your "existing design" on something that has been Approved. Having these huge crazy family trees of inventions that trace back to one root Approved thing seems like an exceptionally weird process to have, especially in a medical context where like, you KNOW they took basic biology and they are aware of how much things can change over time through seemingly small generational mutations.
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Jun 5, 2019 03:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:It was so English for a while there, I thought John was gonna get his green card revoked. The supreme court would still probably be a problem given the magnitude of the badness of the opinions of the people it's being stocked with (I mean Scalia was a supreme court justice and interpreted the "everyone has equal rights" amendment as "well not EVERYONE has equal rights"), but yeah the problem is certainly exacerbated by how much wiggle room they've been given.
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Jun 11, 2019 04:46
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tarlibone posted:And if there would be no negative fallout after a failed attempt to remove Trump from the White House, then I'd agree. But failing to remove Trump would have negative consequences for those who tried to remove him. It would bolster his position and allow him to plausibly say that he was vindicated. I don't think this is strictly true, because ultimately it's the thing where regardless of what the senate says, it's really going to come down to the court of public opinion, and a house impeachment hearing is not going to bring up a lot of information "vindicating" Trump. As mentioned in the segment, public opinion on Nixon was very much against impeachment at the start. The big problem with the Democrats strategy has been that they seem to believe that public opinion is just a weathervane that must be followed rather than something that can be influenced by new information and political events. Like the clip from the segment of the lady who only watches "conservative news sources" being surprised that there was anything negative in the Mueller report. The Mueller report is something that Fox News could conceivably ignore as something their audience wouldn't REALLY care about. Impeachment hearings less so. They would obviously spin as hard as possible but at the end of the day the information will be out there and extremely public and even the most right wing sources are going to have to talk about it. It would, at the very least, put them on the defensive. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Jun 19, 2019 |
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Jun 19, 2019 23:00
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tarlibone posted:The only thing that would make me say yes is that Pence, for all his faults... and there are a lot of them... but for all of his faults, he's a politician. He might like to say he isn't, but he totally is. I think there is a point here, which is that while Pence would be a terrible president and bad for a lot of very vulnerable groups of people, he would be less of an existential threat than Trump is because he's not the kind of person where he would "joke" about serving more than two terms. Pence would likely not be promising pardons to people who are willing to commit crimes for him. Of course, on the other side of things there's the argument that allow Republicans to continue to slowly erode democracy is still going to cause more long term harm because while Trump is dangerous, he is also incompetent. The fact that he is SO offensive to the "decorum" crowd might be enough to actually start paying attention to the damage the Republican party is doing to the system as a whole, whereas someone like Pence they would accept as legitimate and go back to ignoring all the gerrymandering and voter suppression that allow Republicans to continue to hold power despite their shrinking base.
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Jun 19, 2019 23:28
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Saucy_Rodent posted:Yep! You don’t have to run your business at a profit if you have enough investors to keep you running forever. Youtube’s a black hole financially, but where else are you going to upload a video and expect anyone to actually watch it? It's the Venture Capitalist model and Silicon Valley is loaded with it. Basically the whole SV ecosystem is one giant ponzi scheme.
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Jul 5, 2019 03:40
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Azhais posted:I'm pretty sure the largest customer is the government. They have a mandate of some variety to use prison labor Yeah a ton of stuff for the military is made with prison labour. Uniforms and so on.
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Aug 6, 2019 21:16
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So you vote for the candidate you actually like in the primary. If they don't win, well, in the general you vote for whoever won the nomination anyway, because what you are saying by not voting at all is "I'm privileged enough that I know I won't actually feel the consequences if the Republicans win again but I'm painting it like some kind of moral high ground".
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Aug 21, 2019 01:40
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DC Murderverse posted:japan has a similar population of disaffected young men but they just hole up and get body pillows, which is really the best case scenario This is basically what they did in the US too until white supremacists decided that it would make for a good recruitment pool.
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Oct 8, 2019 01:54
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Craptacular! posted:You get a screen showing everything you voted for and telling you to carefully look it over and make sure it’s everything you wanted. Then a printout appears behind a plastic window showing you the paper copy and asking you agree that what is on the paper matches what is on the screen. I’ve never had it not match, so I’ve never voided a ballot just for fun to see how it does it. Yeah this is kind of the fundamental issue. There's a reason why all the states with the heaviest use of "no paper trail" electronic voting machines are all Republican dominated.
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Nov 6, 2019 00:36
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Does the US not have laws for branding people vexatious litigants if they repeatedly file SLAPP suits? From the segment it sounds like even the states that do have anti-SLAPP laws only make people pay their opponents attorney's fees if they lose, without restricting their ability to file suit again in the future.
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Nov 12, 2019 01:51
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Alhazred posted:I know that in my country you have to pay your own court expenses plus the court expenses of the guy you're suing if you lose the lawsuit. Which I guess is a good deterrent against frivolous lawsuits. Between two parties of roughly equal means, sure, but the whole problem of SLAPP suits is that guys like Bob will happily piss away a few million dollars if it means they can keep a story out of the press for a year or longer. The cost is immaterial to them. It does at least mean that their target is not destroyed by the lawsuit even when they win, but they still have to find a way to eat those costs as the lawsuit is ongoing which might end up ruining them before they get an opportunity to get that money back. Groovelord Neato posted:Jack Thompson. Yeah Thompson was disbarred although bear in mind that being "disbarred" is not actually a consequence employed by the courts but rather something that the bar association will do if a lawyer professionally disgraces themselves in some way. It does prevent him from practicing law but it was a professional organization that did it to him rather than the legal system.
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Nov 12, 2019 22:56
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YggiDee posted:I used to follow the YouTube uploads at least but I guess Canadians aren't allowed to see them anymore. You can watch them if you go in through a proxy or VPN. I don't know why they've suddenly decided to region restrict them either - it might be because of Crave having the rights to HBO streaming content and maybe they've decided they don't want the YouTube uploads to be available.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:15
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Groovelord Neato posted:The president that gutted welfare lol Americans don't understand what socialism is.
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Apr 7, 2020 03:14
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Hey, it worked so well in 2016 that it looks like we're running it again! "No seriously, get a load of that guy!"
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Apr 15, 2020 04:06
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Milo and POTUS posted:I didn't value TDS as a news show half as much as I did as a meta commentary on the sad state of the media in this country at the time Yeah honestly the fact that it ended up as the most trusted source of news for so many people should really have been seen much less as a sign of how good the journalism TDS was doing was and more how bad the journalism was in the entire rest of the media. It really hasn't gotten any better, either.
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Apr 15, 2020 23:06
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's one of those situations where there's all sorts of laws and rules, but they all require somebody to move to enforce them, and it's not entirely clear whose duty that would be. If somebody just decides to entirely ignore the laws and rules, it takes effort to bring them back into line. It's not like anyone arrested Ted Cruise for illegally seeking the nomination for which he was not eligible. Which hey, we might be getting a test case of in the next 4 years. So that'll be fun.
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Apr 20, 2020 07:33
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Yeah this is why I'm concerned about the increasing number of prominent young conservative pundits and their following (like your Ben Shapiro types). The thing about the guys talking about trickle down economics in the 80s - they all knew it was bullshit. It was the lie that got them the thing they wanted, which was more money. They were lovely people but they would also know not to push the grift to the point of like, starting a nuclear war or something. The new generation of conservatives never got that memo. They were raised in an environment where all the grift was presented to them as just the basic truth as how the world works, and trained to ignore any evidence to the contrary. They will just keep doubling down because they are not in on the scam. They are true believers.
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Apr 21, 2020 23:13
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Lurdiak posted:It's easy to forget because it feels like Trump's been president 600 years, but there was a news item very early on back when there were still dipshits thinking that Trump would become more presidential and defer to the experts that the security council would literally have to shorten their reports to half a page and put his name in every sentence or he'd get bored and stop reading it. I feel like even people who always disliked him still underestimated how lovely of a person he is because they simply could not imagine a person being so terrible in so many different ways. Like of course he must keep up with the news, how could he not? He must have read something in his life, right? The bar cannot possibly be this low, right? I think they still want to cling to the belief of real life being at least the vaguest sort of meritocracy where sure, they acknowledge the huge leg up that inherited wealth gives you, but you still have to meet some kind of minimum standard to lead a successful career even with that advantage. They don't want to acknowledge that failure is literally impossible for the rich and Donald Trump is the hardest example to ignore.
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Apr 22, 2020 00:48
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SlothfulCobra posted:Theoretically, the electoral college, that archaic body of nobodies, could've declined to do the thing, but they didn't. The protests were mainly to register the masses of discontent with the system, and theoretically to inspire politicians to oppose the maniac, which sadly they've been abysmal at. The democrats' dedication to not raising a fuss and stopping "populist" movements in their camp for daring to appeal to people didn't help things at all. Yeah this is why the big phrase among the left over the past few years has been "general strike". Protests only work if you have political leadership that's at least willing to listen to public opinion and it's very clear that on either side of the aisle they are much more interested in what lobbyists think than mass movements. For most of the Trump admin the idea of actually pulling off a general strike was just kind of a nice fantasy of worker solidarity but the covid-19 lockdown has made a lot of people realize how much simply not going to work is able to make these people flip the gently caress out and it actually seems much more realistic than it did a year ago.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:08
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tsob posted:Yea, if Trump's term has taught me anything as someone not living in the US, it's that the various other bodies of the US government have almost no real power if the president wants to just straight up ignore them. The House of Representatives have "compelled" Trump and various people who served under him do to things numerous times, and none of it has meant poo poo because Trump just doesn't care, and so long as some portion of the public is on his side, he doesn't have to care and it doesn't matter, because the House can't do squat to actually enforce their decisions. Well, they can, they just don't want to. With Trump the problem is that the Senate is the governing body that actually has the power to remove the president, and they have absolutely no interest in doing so because as far as they're concerned he's doing just fine. So the house can make demands, but without the senate to back them up those demands are meaningless.
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Apr 25, 2020 20:38
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Josh Lyman posted:Couldn’t a lot of it be fear of being sued for slander and/or losing access? Well for LWT it's not like they have access in the first place - all their stuff is second-hand reporting. And comedy is usually pretty well insulated from accusations of slander because "it's just a joke, bro" actually holds up pretty well as a legal defense in the US (I mean that doesn't stop people from trying, like the whole Bob Murray thing, but that didn't exactly end his way).
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May 13, 2020 15:33
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SlothfulCobra posted:Oliver addressed this story up top and later recommended a reality TV show about sex that I'm tired of hearing about as something to watch when leading towards talking about sports. Yeah this is the big thing that really should be hammed on a lot more. This isn't some "look, nobody could have done better" situation. This is the natural end result of an ideology built around deliberately dismantling public institutions and that sees any kind of government intervention as a moral hazard. It's not by accident that the government response has been inept, it is entirely consistent with how they believe the government should be run. It's not even necessarily a "socialism vs. capitalism" thing either - Vietnam and South Korea both had some of the best responses to the pandemic and the former is extremely socialist and the latter is extremely capitalist. It's the very specific Reagan/Thatcher-esque style of conservatism that has been driving the right in the anglosphere for the last several decades. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 20:31 on May 19, 2020 |
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May 19, 2020 20:28
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Azhais posted:So what's the proper square footage required for dignity About the same as what everyone else has. It's all relative - if everyone lives in tiny bachelor apartments then that is just "normal" and there is no shame in having a small living space. But a tiny shed that is right next to a big house is clearly diminished status.
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Jul 4, 2020 23:43
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tsob posted:It's definitely too radical for me, because I literally have no idea what would even mean. I would assume it means something like "a house no longer has a value", but then, how do you even convince people to build and maintain them en masse, if doing so doesn't have any economic return? Why do people build roads they won't own?
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Jul 6, 2020 22:44
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tsob posted:Money, because the road is a commodity. The government earns money from road users, then uses that to build or maintain new roads, which is done by various contractors who all earn money for those jobs. If a house isn't a commodity, then there's no money involved, so that whole system goes out the window; at least as I understand it. Which is why I asked for clarification on what the original poster meant. If the process still involves money in some form, then it probably isn't that radical frankly. Roads are not a commodity though; you cannot buy and sell roads. They raise money because people use them to get to their jobs, where they earn income which is then taxed. The roads themselves are not raising money on their own, with the exception of toll roads which are relatively rare (and still don't usually fully pay for their own construction and maintenance, it's just an offset, so they would still not be profitable to own). Couldn't the exact same argument be made for housing? The government earns money from people living in houses, because by not being homeless they are more able to pursue lucrative work and build a stronger tax base. Decommodification doesn't mean "make it free", it means eliminating the idea of there being a "marketplace" for it. Public housing is the simplest form of this - the government just builds houses for people with money raised via taxes and then just.... lets people live there. The main obstacle to public housing in the US is the fact that private housing has to compete with it, which real estate developers and landlords don't like because it turns out that existing public housing is on land that has become quite a bit more valuable since that public housing was built, but because it's public housing they aren't allowed to buy it out and hike up the rent. It's a similar problem to the issue with healthcare in the US - the insurance companies hate the idea of a "public option" because they know they won't be able to compete, so they fight tooth and nail to prevent it from coming to be. If you want an example of decommodification, just look at healthcare in basically every other developed country. The specifics of how each country actually handles its healthcare varies, but the end result is that healthcare is not something you have to shop around for - it's just something you inherently have access to as a citizen, regardless of how rich or poor you are.
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Jul 6, 2020 23:39
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SlothfulCobra posted:And then the widespread adoption of conspiracy theories reflects a lot of what has driven American politics wrong for a long while now, the fact that people will just shop around for alternative facts that tell them nicer things when the real facts get uncomfortable or demand action. There are so drat many stories out there that go "Covid is a hoax! I'm not wearing a facemask, and I'm going to hang out in small areas with many others!" "I think I got a flu or something, I'm having a hard time breathing!" "Man, having Covid sucks!" and then funeral. It is honestly so frustrating how common this story is. How many times do people have to put their hands on the hot stove before people stop thinking "I should put my hand on that stove"? It's like people have just lost their ability to learn from the mistakes of others and always think it will be different for them somehow.
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Jul 21, 2020 20:24
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STAC Goat posted:The thing is... sometimes I'm an idiot and doing 5 things at once and put my hand on the hot stove (or rather, grab a hpt handle/lid). Yeah that's a good recent example because didn't it turn out to be some guy who had pre-existing hate for that judge and wasn't related to Epstein at all? I do understand the instinct to see conspiracy in that kind of thing though, because combine that with a general mistrust of cops (which is completely warranted) and the initial explanation that comes out that seems to wrap everything up in a nice little bow just feels too convenient, like it is itself the "easier" answer. Humans do have a way of trying to find patterns in chaos though and sometimes something being convenient for powerful people doesn't actually mean they caused it to happen. Sometimes people just get lucky.
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Jul 21, 2020 21:00
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Azhais posted:I could sign my name on a piece of paper 50 times right now and no two would probably match Yes this is functionally the problem with signatures as identification, it's mostly a symbolic gesture rather than rigorous security. In fact one of the ways you can identify forgeries is when the signature matches too perfectly (because the forger traced over the original rather than doing it freehand). It's the kind of thing where the intent is really that it gives you the ability to dispute documents you didn't sign (by saying "that's not my signature"), it is absolutely not meant to give other people the power to deny your identity.
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Oct 6, 2020 05:47
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Raxivace posted:So does this all mean that the dude on Pawn Stars they bring in to "authenticate" celebrity signatures and the like is basically a fraud then? Probably, but also bear in mind that the value of these items relies entirely on the belief that the celebrity signature is authentic; whether it actually is or not doesn't really matter, it's not like the real signature has some sort of special mystical power that makes the item better. So in that sense, those authorities are doing exactly what they need to be doing, which is provide a sufficient level of trust in the authenticity of the item that it retains value.
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Oct 6, 2020 07:03
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:As an Australian I've only been finding out about the American electoral process in dribs and drabs over the years and every time I find out some new fact it's always some You can actually do even worse than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wC42HgLA4k It is extremely politically implausible just because the leanings of the states in question do not align this perfectly, but you can theoretically win the US presidency with only 22% of the popular vote.
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Oct 6, 2020 23:32
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coocoo crazy
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:These are the same people who unironically play Born in the USA as jingo-patriotism. Contemplation and discernment aren't exactly their strengths. They see 'murica blowing up the brownies and cheer like the soldiers in Jarhead: no nuance or understanding of what they are absorbing, just images of American power in which to revel. Remember that Paul Ryan said that Rage Against the Machine was his favorite band.
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Oct 31, 2020 05:58
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