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virtualboyCOLOR posted:The Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 provides that: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed." I just typed up a big legal explanation about whether this qualifies as a bill of attainder or not, but I realized there's a much more fundamental question here: What, exactly, do you expect the Supreme Court to have already done about a bill that passed literally yesterday and doesn't take effect until July? The fact that the law has gone a whopping 24 hours after passage without being struck down by the Supreme Court doesn't mean the Supreme Court is deliberately ignoring it.
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Mar 26, 2022 18:47
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Yinlock posted:I notice you conveniently omitted the part of the post where I said I was trying to reason out why someone would support sanctions despite their proven ineffectiveness. There's plenty of people on all parts of the political spectrum who support policies despite their proven ineffectiveness. When someone's belief in a policy is rooted in ideological reasoning in the first place, they can't really accept that the policy could actually fail, because doing so would imply that the underlying ideology has flaws. So if the policy does fail, they just go into denial, and fall back on all kinds of excuses to explain why it isn't the policy's fault that it failed, why it might not actually qualify as a real failure, why it wasn't a good example of a proper implementation of the desired policy, and so on. When someone comes into politics as an ideological crusader, facts and evidence take a backseat to theory. If the real world ends up not lining up with the theory, then it's the real world's fault for being wrong, because there certainly can't be any issue with the theory! Gumball Gumption posted:Those polls on what people are concerned about is a good example of how nonsense voter concerns can be and how much media/politicians themselves lead those sentiments. There is no reasonable reason to be less concerned about the virus. We're still in a pandemic, it's going to require another booster, the biggest change recently is that we stopped talking about it. Politicians and the media have stopped worrying so voters stopped worrying. And really we saw this effect across the board. Republicans never worried because the people they trust told them to not worry. Everyone else has stopped worrying as the people they trust toss out the science and decide this is all over now. According to the US Government's COVID data tracker 7-day averages, the case count is down to less than 1/20th of what it was during its January high, hospitalizations are at 1/10th of what they were in January, and the death count has gone below 1/3rd of what it was in January. OEven if people have to get COVID boosters every few months, that's still an improvement over when there was no booster and just lots of scary headlines about vaccine effectiveness. Given those numbers, it's not shocking that general public concern about COVID might have dropped somewhat, especially with other issues climbing way up people's priority lists - cost of living was ranked a lot lower in January, and the Ukraine war is of course a completely new issue.
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Mar 27, 2022 17:11
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BIG-DICK-BUTT-gently caress posted:c'mon, do you think people are checking the covid numbers and setting their concern level accordingly? It's not a concern bc it isn't framed as a concern by our media and elected officials. Regardless of whether people are checking the COVID numbers personally or having the general COVID situation reported to them by someone else, it's hard to believe it's a total coincidence that this chart of COVID cases from January to now correlates so well with the change in people's COVID concern levels between January and now.  (from here) BiggerBoat posted:But...I thought the economy was BOOMING and all that poo poo? I never bought it and never feel it. I have a general sense of the things they use to calculate "the economy" but it never really seems to gel with what I see with my own eyes and the things I hear from the people I speak to. If this is an up and booming economy right now then this country is in worse shape than I thought. The unemployment rate has actually returned to pre-pandemic levels, and wage growth in 2021 actually was well above pre-pandemic levels. By those metrics, the current situation is nothing like (for example) the 2008 recession. It's just that prices are also shooting upward at rates not seen in decades, especially the prices of basic goods like food and gas, with no particular policy response beyond "wait for the supply chain to untangle itself". And with the events happening in Ukraine, it's only going to get worse.
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Mar 27, 2022 19:13
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Kind of interesting to see a poll directly test the NIMBY vs. YIMBY housing questions against each other. It's worth noting that this is a openly Republican polling firm, whose co-founder Patrick Ruffini spent more than a decade working for the GOP and Republican candidates before departing to create polling firms that he himself called "right-of-center". I don't have many specific complaints about the methodology, because as far as I can find, the polling methodology isn't explained anywhere at all. The closest we get to details is that it was drawn from a "web panel" which they applied a "Likely Electorate" weighting to. It doesn't explain what a "Likely Electorate" screen is at all, except to say that it's different from a likely voter sample (and it doesn't explain exactly how it's different). But while their methodology isn't clear, the results are quite something.    This is a sampling that skews quite heavily conservative. A majority of respondents are age 50 or older, the retirees almost outnumber the workers, and the South seems rather overrepresented. Naturally, the political self-ID question comes out pretty much like one would expect given those demographics. 
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Mar 28, 2022 21:40
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:NY Magazine has a long piece about how many of the biggest parts of MAGA world and the non-MAGA donor/professional class aren't sure if Trump will run again and are going all in on DeSantis. It's too early to say anything for sure, except that 2024 is going to suck no matter what, but at least there's a chance of it being funny. That article's narrative of "he's an absolute black hole of charisma who refuses to interact with human beings, but he checks all the right boxes, our loyalist media loves him, and party officials are excited for his middle-management energy" sounds eerily similar to what was being written about some of the more obviously sideshow candidates in the 2020 Dem primary. But if DeSantis ends up underperforming, he's going to flame out a lot more entertainingly than the likes of Buttigieg or Harris did.
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Mar 29, 2022 17:57
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:The Russian Defense Ministry held a public briefing today with claims that, if true, would take the Hunter Biden story to a new level. As far as I can tell, all the article says regarding Hunter's involvement is that he "played an important role in creating the financial possibility to conduct work with pathogens on Ukrainian territory" by "[seeking] investments for the bird scheme". If there's any claim that Hunter influenced US government policy, I don't see it in the article as it's written right now. Though it might be an error on the site's end, since the link that looks like it would contain more details about the supposed evidence instead goes to a story from three weeks ago.
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Mar 31, 2022 20:50
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BiggerBoat posted:This is the sort of thing I'm speaking to when I discount the measures by which the economy is booming. The traditional measurements aren't bullshit. Unemployment has dropped, and wages are up. It's just that prices are up even more, with particularly high price growth among inelastic goods like food, fuel, and rent. Nominal wage growth is actually pretty good, and Biden boosters are happy to point to it as evidence of how great the Biden economy is going. But if price growth is higher, then people's purchasing power has dropped and real wages are down, and that's something you won't hear from the people talking about how great the economy is. We haven't seen inflation this bad since the Reagan Recession. Wages going up by 5-6% isn't gonna leave people thrilled when price increases of major goods/bills look like this:   (https://www.realtor.com/research/august-2021-rent/)  (https://www.gasbuddy.com/charts)
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Apr 3, 2022 17:56
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Yawgmoft posted:There is no way eggs under 2 dollars a dozen are not flavorless nutritionally void factory farmed eggs. According to the CPI data, the average cost of a dozen large eggs nationwide is usually less than two dollars, except during recessions, bird flu outbreaks, and other anomalous events such as the COVID supply chain shocks. The especially cheap eggs in recent years were the result of a market failure, not extreme corner-cutting. After the 2015 bird flu outbreak devastated the poultry industry, egg costs shot up to roughly $3/dozen, which encouraged a lot of farmers to invest very strongly in replenishing their supply of egg-laying hens. Once those eggs started hitting the market, it turned out that too many farmers had bought too many hens, and in short order the egg supply was exceeding egg demand and driving prices back down to levels not seen since the mid-00s. Of course, in addition to the inflation and COVID market disruptions that have been generally driving food prices up already, a bird flu outbreak has been picking up steam the past few weeks and is showing no sign of stopping, so I'd expect egg prices to keep rising. Given the amount of poo poo that was hitting prices even before the bird flu outbreak, I'd expect this to send egg prices even higher than the 2015 outbreak.
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Apr 3, 2022 23:30
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Jizz Festival posted:So fascinating. This was indeed an event that happened, and is current. I'm curious, though, what is it that you find interesting about this story? Are you actually surprised that a supportive crowd went along with something even though it was stupid? I think it's interesting because the conventional wisdom is that politicians have to be in tune with all these little local things, and doing a faux pas by eating a specialty local cuisine wrong or mis-pronouncing some beloved regional business name would devastate their chances in the area. Like so many other conventional political wisdoms, though, it's something that Trump is barging straight through without a problem. Is it a special Trump thing? Or is it another manifestation of the "all politics is national" trend of the 21st century, with these big country-level partisan politics increasingly wiping out that kind of local/regional flavor? Or was it just always bullshit invented by the political media to drive controversy, and no one dared to challenge it until now?
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Apr 4, 2022 16:59
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BiggerBoat posted:That's what I keep hearing, even from a lot of people in this thread. Who are we to believe? The charts and graphs or our drat lying eyes that look at our bank accounts? Let's cede for a second that by all traditional measures "the economy" is on loving fire. What does any of that mean or amount to when the only thing burning for 3/4 of the population is their loving money? There's charts and graphs for the actual economic issues people are facing right now too, y'know. The reason politicians keep saying the economy is good is because, as politicians in power during an election year, they're emphasizing the numbers that look good and avoiding the numbers that look bad. Instead of dismissively assuming the data is lying, try getting takes from sources who don't have a clear stake in the interpretation of the data.
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Apr 4, 2022 23:48
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The biggest problem with the "Dems aren't talking about inflation or high prices" narrative is that they are talking about inflation and high prices. https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1491868921879740420 https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1491926713252691973 https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1498848538108833800 https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1501959821368737792 This is a good learning moment to be aware of the way that news media, popular media, and social media all work to filter our awareness. Just because you haven't seen or heard people talking about something doesn't mean that it's not being talked about at all - it typically just means that the media sources you choose to follow haven't bothered to put much focus on it.
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Apr 5, 2022 21:48
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selec posted:I think this in the end comes down to a question of faith: If that's the case, then why even bother following politics news at all? Why are you spending your days reading discussions about what the Democratic legislature is doing? You're already convinced you know the outcome of any potentially-progressive bill, to the point of constructing a worldview in which that outcome is the only possible outcome, regardless of conditions. Why bother following the actual bills, their actual course through the Senate, or the actual votes?
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Apr 6, 2022 00:01
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Mellow Seas posted:Yeah, there's basically no question that the pollster in question is ideologically centrist, and they were looking for this result. The poll was done by Schoen-Cooperman Research. He wants to be perceived as centrist, but that's not really where he stands nowadays. Although he came up through the Clinton camp, he's one of those HillaryIs44 types who spent 2008-2016 opposing Obama at all costs, only to end up so deep in bed with his right-wing allies of convenience that he wouldn't back Hillary in 2016 because she was too far left and would cause too much partisan division (though after being somewhat disappointed with the Trump era, he seems to be all-in on Hillary 2024). His "Democrat who opposes the Democratic Party" branding has been useful to his career ever since he joined Fox in 2009, but his time as a Dem consultant is long in the past, as he's spent the last fourteen years as little more than right-media's token Democrat. Frankly speaking, Doug Schoen is not someone I'm gonna take ideological advice from, nor is he someone I'm gonna trust polls from. After all, here's his ideological advice for the Dems back in 2017, in the wake of Trump's election: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/opinion/why-democrats-need-wall-street.html quote:Why Democrats Need Wall Street Not exactly someone who seems to be in tune with the electorate.
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Apr 7, 2022 15:56
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Harold Fjord posted:It might be if you are safe in your home and feel unsafe due to a disconnect between your claimed compassion and your actual perception of the people around you who need it. I don't really get what you mean by this. Should compassionate people not lock their doors at night? What does one's "actual perception of the people around you" have to do with it? I don't really understand how this all fits together - it feels like an incomplete argument, like there's something being left unsaid.
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Apr 7, 2022 19:22
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:"there will always be someone who wants more" is a far cry from "there are conceivable circumstances where you do not need to broadcast how defended your home is." Just to be clear here, George Zimmerman saw a black youth walking down the street, called the police, then actively pursued and violently confronted him, and shot him. You're going to have to elaborate a bit more on how a yard sign is in any way comparable to that, because I don't really see that.
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Apr 7, 2022 20:51
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Harold Fjord posted:Fish have no word for water. Can you explain what you mean by this? We're humans, so we can use words to explain what the hell we're talking about, instead of dropping cryptic remarks and one-liners. E: Personally, I think the claim that home security signs are actually representative of vigilante fantasies seems like it needs some backing. If anything, it feels like an extension of "paranoid NextDoor poster" stereotypes, extended to assume that literally everyone who has a home security system is exactly the same as those few weirdos whose "saw a black person walking down the street on my doorbell cam, should I call the cops????" posts always show up in NextDoor mock tweets. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Apr 7, 2022 |
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Apr 7, 2022 21:08
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selec posted:Crime is racialized in America. “Tough on Crime” is recognized as a racist dogwhistle. Crime messaging is often racialized in America, but crime itself is an actual thing that actually exists, y'know. There are very few things in the US that can be successfully disentangled from race, but that doesn't mean that everything is always about race all the time. It means people have to approach poo poo with eyes wide open and pay close attention to the nuances, instead of making wild sweeping statements. White supremacists rely heavily on false narratives about crime as an excuse to justify racist, segregationist, and oppressive behavior toward minorities and poor people in general, yes. Ideological tales about "the criminal element" have been constructed to justify all kinds of discrimination, going back to the early days of policing. Even in the modern era, plenty of racist assaults have been committed under the pretext of a fearing that the black victim was a potential criminal. But on the other hand, poor people and minorities are far more likely to be the actual victims of actual real crimes that happen. Not just white supremacist crime, either - plenty of standard-rear end violent crimes like armed robbery or murder! In particular, African-Americans are much more likely to be victims of violent crime. In a given year, about half of homicide victims are black, despite the fact that only 10-15% of the US population is African-American. Moreover, poor and minority neighborhoods in general tend to be more heavily targeted by crime - not to the level imagined by suburban white flight folks who act like you'll get shot instantly if you take one step into the neighborhood, but still a pretty noticeable increase. As such, minority communities often have some very real concern of their own about crime. It doesn't get the same media coverage or the same political influence as white concerns about crime, but it's there and it's real. Finally, "Tough on Crime" rhetoric is a narrative that's fundamentally about oppression. It's not about safety or about protection, it's about oppression - about using authoritarian state power to harshly penalize people who've been accused of crimes, and doing its utmost to ruin people's lives. Comparing that to a yard sign is a bit wild.
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Apr 7, 2022 22:56
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Rather than going back-and-forth about our feelings and whether the data is trustworthy, I think it's probably better to search for better info and sources about FL's nursing home response. On the pro-DeSantis side of things, we have a softball interview from the editor-in-chief of the National Review, in which he praises DeSantis for his "flexible" COVID response and talks about how DeSantis will soon be lifting what few restrictions were put in place. And most importantly, that article was published on May 20, 2020, or around the bright green line I drew on this chart.  A little early to be declaring COVID success or cheering the wise intervention of Governor DeSantis! But was it really so bright as that? Let's take a look at what the Jacksonville Times thought of DeSantis' nursing home victories five days later: https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/coronavirus/2020/05/25/state-missteps-failed-frail-in-floridarsquos-nursing-homes/41751079/ quote:As coronavirus deaths increased exponentially in elder care centers, Gov. Ron DeSantis took a victory lap. Well, I'm not completely sure about some of those criticisms. After all, it doesn't really criticize DeSantis's quarantining measures themselves, just attacks the timing. But wait, I have here another article that finds issues with the quarantine/isolation policies! It seems that although the measures were strict on paper, in reality the state was shoveling money to designated COVID nursing homes without actually caring much whether they were any good at actually containing COVID, and the approach didn't scale well when COVID cases really spiked in the summer. https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2020/09/18/florida-picked-nursing-homes-spotty-records-covid-isolation-centers/5814498002/ quote:In the days before COVID-19 pounded Florida with the power of Thor’s hammer, Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly bashed New York for sending elderly coronavirus patients from hospitals back to nursing homes. Let's jump forward a year or so in time and see how Florida's nursing home policies worked out in the long-term. Let's check in on things in August-September 2021 - well after vaccines became available. https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2021/09/15/florida-leads-nation-in-nursing-home-resident-and-staff-covid-19-deaths/ quote:More nursing home residents and staff died of COVID-19 in Florida during a four-week period ending Aug. 22 than in any other state in the country, according to an AARP analysis released today. Huh. Kinda seems like maybe DeSantis didn't do all that great in the long run. In particular, because DeSantis eagerly pushed to start lifting restrictions and opening everything up as early as fall 2020, as soon as the first wave passed, Florida was hit extremely hard by Delta. And by mid-2021, Florida's nursing homes had the highest COVID death rate in the country, as the new and even-more-deadly variant swept through poorly-vaccinated nursing homes. And of course, no lessons were learned, leading to case rates going even higher when Omicron hit. And as the final blow against DeSantis's brilliant nursing home policies, he just signed the "No Patient Left Alone Act", a new law he'd championed which not only bans healthcare facilities and nursing homes from preventing in-person visitation if the patient is lonely or unhappy, but also prevents them from denying entry to unvaccinated people.
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Apr 9, 2022 01:19
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As it happens, I agree with "legislation isn't enough". But the answer isn't revolution or passing more left laws or anything like that. The answer to fixing America is changing people's opinions. Large-scale political and community organizing at a low level. Not led top-down by politicians, but bottom-up by folks like us on the ground. Not in favor of political parties or political movements, but in favor of political positions. Basically, people need to stop treating politics like sports-team bullshit that they're mere spectators for, and start organizing independently of political parties to focus on supporting their communities and getting mass public support behind the policies they want. Less "well  according to this set of polls, the people already support my chosen policies" and more getting people to really genuinely push for change. Stop expecting politicians to lead the charge for change, and start working to create a situation where the public is dragging those politicians kicking and screaming toward change. Yes, sometimes that means building an actual mass movement, not just pointing to a poll that says 60% support among respondents or whatever. It's not just about getting people to hold an opinion, it's about getting them to Care.Even at times like this, political power fundamentally flows from the bottom up. Legislators and presidents do have influence over public opinion via control of messaging and media, but they aren't all-powerful totally unaccountable dictators who rule over the hapless masses and tell them what to think. Even the largely-unaccountable Supreme Court has limits to how much it can really ignore public opinion, as the Taney Court once learned the hard way. Regardless of whether your chosen political path is electoral, judicial, or revolutionary, you're not going to get anywhere without building public support. And instead of helplessly depending on The Democrats to do that work for us, the left needs to get started on doing that ourselves. That goes for the GOP, too. Whether it's Trump's antics, the anti-democratic measures like election-rigging and coup attempts, or bigoted attempts to roll back basic rights like new abortion restrictions or the "don't say gay" bills, it's only succeeding because a very significant portion of the electorate is perfectly fine with it. And the right clearly understands that, which is why they've spent more than half a century sharpening their knives, building their movements, and waiting to take revenge for rulings like Roe v Wade and Brown v Board. Yes, I know all about the silent majority and how the majority of the US populace doesn't vote, and so on. But despite all that, 30% of eligible voters turned out to VOTE for Donald J. Trump in 2020, after four years of TRUMP and McConnell, and in the middle of a historic pandemic.
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Apr 9, 2022 17:46
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Bishyaler posted:Capital makes sure this will never happen through control of the media. Political commentary is carefully tailored to pit working people against each other and to never allow left-leaning answers to common problems. So unless you have a way to shut down the corporate media, revolution is still the answer. If you don't have wide public support nationwide for your movement (and I'm not talking "well polls show they agree with my policies", I mean real "people will take to the loving streets by the tens of millions in support of our specific political movement") and you don't have the strong and enthusiastic backing of the military, revolution is nothing more than a cheap fantasy.
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Apr 9, 2022 18:17
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World Famous W posted:Is a grassroots effort (that can actually get systematic change done) managing to not get coopted or strangled in the crib by the capital controlled media and political parties also not a cheap fantasy? It's certainly possible. If grassroots movements could be so easily defeated just by media pressure, then white supremacists and the FBI (but I repeat myself) wouldn't have needed to assassinate so many leaders of major grassroots movements back during the heyday of community organizing. The media is powerful, but its power against organizing from within the community has traditionally been kinda on the weak side, which is why various religious-political communities have been able to so powerfully resist media influence. The trick is to have someone that people trust more than the TV. That's why media pressure usually focuses outside the community in question, seeking to demonize the community in question and turn other communities against it. If anything, I'm more concerned about the growing influence of the internet in replacing that kind of stuff. Existing community entities like churches are increasingly taking marching orders from internet stuff, while people who lacked community in the first place are being lured into filling that void by becoming politically-useless podcast bros or Twitter reply guys.
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Apr 9, 2022 21:00
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Willa Rogers posted:^^^ The strategist in the story thinks so too! That seems like rather a significant misreading of the article. Rather, it's the reporter who sought to draw a connection between Biden's approval ratings - a connection that the strategist who specializes in youth voters specifically rejected as incorrect and irrelevant. quote:But if operatives are just focused on who’s in the Oval Office, or on Biden’s approval ratings, they’re “not looking at the right data,” Della Volpe said. He pointed to the third of young Americans who said they still planned to vote in 2022, according to his December Harvard Youth Poll. That’s equal to what participants told him in spring 2018, ahead of the midterm when Democrats flipped the House. Since then, they’ve formed a voting habit over two elections, another indication that youth turnout might be higher in 2022. That's a pretty far cry from your original claim that "the youth vote looks to be dropping off". In fact, of everyone quoted in the article, Della Volpe is by far the most optimistic about Dems' chances with young people. He points out that Dems can't simply take the youth vote for granted, sure, but he seems to think that the Dems will be fine if they just remember to keep communicating and reaching out to young people. In particular, although he highlights the importance of issues like climate change and student debt, he doesn't insist on the Dems prioritizing actual policy gains there - he simply tells them to keep "extending the conversation" to remind youth voters that Dems are "not finished": quote:It starts with communication, Della Volpe said, suggesting regular “check-ins” to update them on policy progress and citing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) disciplined cadence of Instagram posts as one example of this in practice.
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Apr 10, 2022 22:58
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Willa Rogers posted:Great point about the writer (as well as others quoted in the piece) being more negative about the youth vote than the guy Biden hired to hone messaging that convinced young Bernie supporters that Biden would work on their concerns! That's an oddly pessimistic take on Della Volpe for someone who was citing him with such confidence (almost as if you were appealing to his authority) just a bit ago. Willa Rogers posted:I linked a story about a Dem strategist who's advising Democrats on obtaining & retaining the youth vote, which strategist has noted that it's slipping, after I was challenged for a source. Willa Rogers posted:^^^ The strategist in the story thinks so too! Willa Rogers posted:But I wasn't the "convinced" one; the political strategist was! That said, when your other sources are people who seem intent on comparing turnout in 2020 (a presidential election year) to turnout in 2021 or 2022 (an off-year and a midterm year), Della Volpe comes out looking like the best of the bunch even if you don't want to credit his specific area of expertise. It's only natural for Democratic strategists to be pessimistic about youth turnout, because youth turnout is always low, and especially so during midterms. Even in 2018, where 18-29 turnout rose by 16 percentage points, 30-44 and 45-59 turnout both rose by 13 points, and only the 60+ group didn't keep pace (but they also had the highest turnout to begin with, so they stayed in the leading position by a fair margin). Anyone who's making youth support a significant part of their campaign strategy can't ever forget them for even a moment.  Besides, who else are you gonna ask for advice on youth turnout? The progressive strategists who were convinced that Sanders' progressive promises would activate youth voters well beyond normal levels and carry Bernie to the nomination on the shoulders of millennials? Clearly they don't have the full story on what'll get young people out to the polls.
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Apr 11, 2022 00:44
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indeed!
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:The NYT's new project to do monthly focus groups of random Americans is a journalistic treasure. Sometimes, it is very interesting and sometimes it is very hilarious. This one leans a little towards the latter. Really? A racially-diverse lineup of well-off retirees and white-collar workers seems like exactly what the NYT Opinion section would aim for. It's the perfect demographic spread to portray a sympathetic view of the group to the NYT's primary audience. That said, it's still basically bringing Trump Safari in-house. So while it's pretty funny, and it's a good reminder that voters are often more ideologically chaotic than we tend to give them credit for, I'm still annoyed at the NYT about it.
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Apr 12, 2022 21:20
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Willa Rogers posted:What was particularly "sympathetic" about the conservative participants' replies? Sympathetic to the NYT's core audience of affluent and highly-educated centrist-liberals, I mean. The typical Trump Safari article goes to a 99%-white town far from a city to interview random older blue-collar workers and retired blue-collar workers, playing into the typical "wealthy Northeastern liberal" idea that most conservatives are just uneducated white rednecks. By contrast, this article selected a majority-minority grouping composed almost entirely of white-collar jobs, many of which require a college degree. That's a grouping that appeals a lot more to the sensibilities of the NYT's traditional audience. And frankly speaking, I don't trust the motives of the NYT Opinion team, and that includes Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Hawley, author of articles like A Republican Leader's Idea For Our Supply Chain Crisis (which is just a multi-paragraph lineup of excuses for letting Josh Hawley write an article for the Opinion section) or How Conservatives Think About George Floyd’s Death and BLM. The guy loves focus groups, certainly, but a newspaper's Opinion section running focus groups just to print transcripts as Opinion pieces raises some concerns about the methodology.
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Apr 12, 2022 23:13
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Seems like the Biden administration has come up with some new messaging on inflation. https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1513989086947721221 I'm not shocked they tried to pin the blame on Russia, but the phrase "Putin Price Hike" is gonna get old so fast, and I seriously doubt that any of the people getting hit by inflation cares whose fault the price rises are anyway. I guess it's a good chance to see how much reach the Dem messaging machine these days, since "Putin Price Hike" is so obviously trying to force a narrative.
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Apr 13, 2022 14:20
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Sharkie posted:Do you think using federal troops to support the Little Rock 9 was martial law or a bad thing to do? The federal troops were dispatched to enforce a court decision and uphold the laws. Eisenhower didn't describe his dispatch of federal troops as being justified by moral considerations, he described it as “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of the courts”. He wasn't sending in the troops because he supported racial equality (something he was reluctant to take a public stance on), he was sending them in to enforce a court order and prevent the state government from defying that court order. And even then, the lawsuits and legal wrangling continued for years afterward, including one year in which the public schools were shut down completely in order to evade the requirement to integrate public schools. If the Texas law were to be appealed up to the Supreme Court, and then the Supreme Court clearly struck down the law, and then the state not only refused to abide by the court ruling but actually sent in the National Guard to block local governments from following the court ruling, then we could start making Little Rock Nine comparisons. Bishyaler posted:So the argument is that fascists should be allowed to exist in society, hold positions of power, harm vulnerable communities until a lengthy legal process ostensibly forces them to stop; because using force against them is a small part of the definition of fascism? Who decides who qualifies as a fascist and deserves to be summarily removed from power by military force? What kind of process is going to be put in place, and what kind of oversight? Are we just going to declare that the president of the United States has unlimited authority to overrule any state law he doesn't like and unilaterally oust any elected official at any level of government? Are we gonna let some executive official or agency run the political purge-and-imprison list the same way they run the no-fly list? Or should we endow a House committee with the power to investigate these kinds of Un-American Activities? Without real answers to these questions, all this talk is just pointless fantasy - or worse. After all, there's an ongoing humanitarian disaster right now involving someone who claimed the authority to send in the military to purge fascists from a government, and then used that power to massacre Nazis and non-Nazis alike.
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Apr 13, 2022 21:45
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Bishyaler posted:The government is currently applying this very process to remove extremists from the military, a model already exists. You have a million questions about how this can be done fairly, what will the rules be, unfair comparisons to witchhunts for groups who weren't trying to overthrow the government. At some point liberal handwringing and demands for bureaucracy are legitimizing fascists and the positions they hold: "It would be too complicated to identify or dislodge them so we shouldn't try." or "Someone did this in bad faith, so we can't attempt this in good faith." Yes, I have questions about how "this" can be done fairly, what the rules will be, and so on. It'd be nice if you could actually answer them, instead of accusing me of "liberal handwringing" and "demands for bureaucracy". See, we're talking about "this" here, but the "this" in question involves using military force to conduct political purges on state governments, ousting elected officials at gunpoint and banning them indefinitely from politics. When you're proposing something like that, it's kind of important to have answers for at least basic questions like "who decides what qualifies as purge-able" (because it sure as hell isn't going to be you), "is there an appeals process", or "what kind of oversight will be in place to prevent abuse and corruption". If you really sit back and think seriously about it, you're basically proposing that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and a 50-50 split Senate engage in a nationwide unilateral political purge at a scale not seen since the end of the US Civil War. Saying "fascists" a bunch isn't a magic spell to make the considerable practical and political difficulties disappear, and you really ought to know better than to assume that these powers will unerringly be used only against people you personally disapprove of.
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Apr 14, 2022 02:21
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BiggerBoat posted:NPR did a local segment on this yesterday and reminded me that the party in power gets to draw their own district maps, which is completely nuts. That's like the home team appointing their own umpire to call balls and strikes. I don't know what sort of independent third party you could get and, honestly, I expected DeSantis' map to have a lot more really bizarre shapes. I was listening to the show though and wondered why they simply can't just define districts by county until I realized there are 67 counties in the state. The bizarre shapes are usually around urban areas, since that's where you're more likely to see clearly Dem-leaning neighborhoods and clearly GOP-leaning neighborhoods in close contact to each other. It's hard to see on that map with the numbers in the way, but if you look real closely around Miami, you'll see some pretty funky shapes. Not only is District 20 extending a tentacle into District 25, but it's also squeezed a couple bulbous growths along the line between 21 and 22 to gobble up a couple small areas. I'm not familiar enough with South Florida geography to know exactly what's going on there, though. Meanwhile, in the case of Jacksonville and Tallahassee, the lack of funny shapes is probably good for Republicans as well. Those two cities have relatively large numbers of African-American residents, and by splitting those cities across a couple of large districts, the map dilutes the Dem-leaning urban black voters in a sea of GOP-leaning suburban and rural whites. That's one of the trickier problems in redistricting: Florida has a significant African-American population, but in any individual geographic area, black voters won't make up enough of the population to really make a difference in voting for a representative. As a result, black voters will have essentially no influence on House race results there unless some districts are drawn up specifically to include more black areas and exclude white areas. But on the other hand, packing more black voters into one district means removing black voters from other districts, making them whiter. The line between "ensuring African-Americans have some impact on the selection of the state's representatives" and "packing all the black voters into one ultra-gerrymandered district to create one safe Dem district and a bunch of leans-GOP districts" is one the Florida legislature has been feuding over for decades.
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Apr 14, 2022 16:34
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Slowpoke! posted:So are there any laws that prevent Elon Musk from buying 9% of Twitter, then publicly offering to buy the entire company outright at a premium, thereby driving up the price, then selling his shares for a quick windfall? Oh, it's definitely very illegal. But Elon's been flaunting the SEC for years at this point, it's no surprise he doesn't fear them. The SEC sued him in 2018 over his "taking Telsa private at $420" tweet. The suit was ultimately settled with a $40 million fine, making Elon step down as chairman, adding more independent members to the Tesla board, and requiring him to have tweets containing "material information" about Tesla pre-approved by Tesla's legal team. In 2019, he tweeted out more material information without approval from the lawyers, so the SEC tried to get him held in contempt of the agreement. But the judge just told them to "put on their reasonableness pants" and "work it out" with Elon. This resulted in an amended settlement which clarified the conditions under which he needed approval (which was necessary since Elon himself claimed the right to decide whether or not a tweet needed approval from Tesla's lawyers). The SEC subpoenaed Tesla again in November 2021, seeking more info about Elon's Twitter oversight after he tweeted that he was considering selling some Tesla stock (which raised concerns about insider trading). Musk responded in early 2022 by complaining about "endless harassment" from the SEC and seeking to have a judge terminate the settlement, saying he was "coerced" into it. So far there hasn't been any real legal movement on this front; I assume Musk is showboating and feeling out the judges, while the SEC is going to take their time and build up an especially solid case before they drag Musk back to court. Aside from that, he's also facing a March 2021 lawsuit from a Tesla investor mad about his erratic tweets, and a couple of Twitter shareholders have already sued him over the late disclosure on his Twitter stock purchases. He's definitely flaunting laws and court agreements, and the SEC is definitely gunning for him, but who knows how long it'll take for the richest man in the world to face consequences, or how many consequences a judge will actually allow?
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Apr 14, 2022 17:33
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Velocity Raptor posted:I've seen this mentioned a few times, but how does Iowa passing a state law allow them to dictate what another state can and can't do? How does that prevent RI from going first? It doesn't dictate what other states can do, it dictates that Iowa's state parties have to pick a primary date that's earlier than any other state's primary. As I understand it, if Rhode Island decided to hold their 2024 primary on January 1st 2024, then Iowa Dems would be legally required to schedule their 2024 primary in 2023 or earlier. Here's the actual legal text in question: quote:43.4 Political party precinct caucuses.
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Apr 14, 2022 22:12
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:If you want to get philosophical about it, technically there is no such thing as “justice” under a capitalist society and certainly not in the US since it is an oligarchy. The use of multiple shooters in firing squads is, I believe, meant to emphasize and reinforce the authority of the system. It demonstrates the power of the authority carrying out the sentence by showing that it can command multiple people to carry out the execution, rather than just a single professional executioner. Additionally, for much of the gunpowder era, firing squads were largely a method of military execution, and therefore demonstrated the authority of commanding officers by allowing them to force soldiers into the role of executioner. There were also various tie-ins to the conceptions of militaristic culture and old concepts of honor, though with factors like the increasing use of military force in colonial expansionism (since firing squads were also extremely convenient for a military force to use out in the field), they were largely a mockery of such concepts even before firing squads made their way back into civilian law. Of course, there's also the widely-repeated explanation that it allows soldiers to disperse the guilt of execution by preventing them from knowing who fired the fatal shot, but I suspect that's a more recent addition that came long after the introduction of multi-person firing squads. Though I can't find any documentation on how old the practice is, I'd be rather surprised to see it be much older than the late 19th century. Gumball Gumption posted:Fanboy posting from any political tendency is what kills the thread. Sometimes that comes from loud and unreasonable arguments about doing things that are impossible. Sometimes that comes from people who don't want the possible to happen screaming very loudly about how actually that's impossible and we can't do it so stop whining. The issue comes when people stop discussing verifiable facts and sourceable info and instead just start screaming at each other. For example, in order to discuss potential cases in which the government could force states to do things, we could draw parallels to previous periods in which the federal government attempted to force states to do things. We could look at what the government was able to get away with, as well as where it faced either legal or practical limitations. There's actual historical events we could reference and compare conditions to, and it would make for a more interesting discussion than simply speculating might. In particular, it's worth noting that posts in this thread have no impact on the real world. Arguing in this thread for something to be done will not cause that something to happen. Similarly, arguing in this thread that something is impossible will not cause that thing to not happen. What actually causes things to happen or not happen are various real-world factors that are not affected in the slightest by any posting that happens here. So if someone says that something is impossible, I think it could be cool if instead of accusing them of being "people who don't want the possible to happen", we could assume that they're talking about their honest assessment of those real-world factors. We may believe that their assessment of those factors is incorrect, or we may believe that they're making incorrect comparisons or applying the wrong factors, and I think discussion would generally go more smoothly if people could keep their objections and counterarguments in those kinds of vein - instead of just throwing ideological labels at them and telling them to shut up.
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Apr 15, 2022 20:42
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LegendaryFrog posted:The proximity of the assertions about “basically every elected official in both parties qualifies as a fascist because fascist enablers are no different than fascists themselves” and “fascists should be put to death” is pretty 👀 Personally, I'd be shocked if these theoretical anti-fascist purges stopped at just elected officials. After all, no matter what kind of number games you play with polls and no matter how much influence you think party machines have, it's pretty hard to deny that both Republicans and Democrats currently have a lot more public support - and all the policies being decried as fascist have a fair amount of public support as well. What happens if you oust the fascist candidates, and then their districts just vote the fascists back into power by overwhelming numbers? What happens if you ban the fascist candidates/parties, and their districts just vote new fascist candidates/parties into power? What happens if you take away those districts' ability to elect their desired representatives, but then they don't stop wanting fascists even after four years or eight years or twelve years? Are you just gonna put somewhere between 40% and 90% (depending on how broadly you define "fascist") under permanent military rule? I can't see how something like that doesn't end in bloodshed - and I don't see how the left as it currently stands has any chance of coming out on top after that bloodshed. Seriously, historical lessons are important here. The South revolted in an actual traitorous revolution, and was defeated in an actual loving shooting war in which a quarter-million Confederate soldiers died and the political rights of leading white supremacists were revoked, and then the South spent over a decade under military rule (during which soldiers had to be dispatched several time to drive out white supremacist militias that conquered state capitols by force and ousted the Reconstruction governments). The Constitution was amended more than once to add anti-discrimination clauses. And all of that still didn't stop Southerners from instituting effective apartheid basically the instant cracks appeared in the North's political willingness to completely exclude Southerners from government. In the end, this regime of official apartheid endured for nearly a century before finally being switched to plausibly-deniable unofficial apartheid, which still endures to this day. And let's not forget that even before all of this, the anti-slavery movement was dominant enough in national politics that the anti-slavery Republican Party was able to win the presidency. So when someone proposes that leftists will conduct a far greater and more-enduring purge despite having far smaller numbers than the Union Army and far less public support than Lincoln and the Republicans, it's hard to see how that would actually work. This entire conversation from both sides appears to be assuming that this anti-fascist purge will only have to revoke the rights of a few thousand people (mostly politicians). But in 2020, 81 million people voted for Joe Biden and 74 million people voted for Donald Trump. Combined, that's 155 million people, or over 60% of eligible voters. Even if you only define Republicans as fascist, those are some pretty unfavorable numbers, which only get worse if you include Democrats in your definition of "fascist". For comparison, the current prison population in the US (one of the most incarceral states in the world) is roughly 2 million people, the US military has roughly 1.4 million active-duty personnel, and the total membership of DSA is around 92,000. Josef bugman posted:How does this prevent large scale voter suppression? Does this also prevent things like blue state legislatures maybe beignf flipped red at some point, do you believe that votigg alone will change things for the better? You're correct here, but there is one extremely important caveat that you're missing: both voting and violence require a large amount of strong public support to be effective. What moved the needle on things like civil rights and labor rights were large-scale movements that had the numbers and reach necessary to seriously upset things across the country if they wanted to. The implicit threat of "if you don't let us get what we want through fair voting, we'll get it by whatever means necessary" only works when a movement can muster a large amount of people in the first place. And when I say "strong public support", I don't mean that people will say on a poll that they support the issue position or movement. I mean when people consider the issue a major political priority, to the point where they're willing to become a single-issue voter over it or even get arrested over it. If your movement is actually pretty small and has very little strong public support, then you're gonna find that violence is no more effective than voting. That's why the number one thing, fundamental and foundational to all political action inside or outside the system, is to win either the support of the public or the support of the military. Not by making empty promises about what you'll do once your movement gains political power, but how you're going to help them now and how you're going to fight for better things now. Stop talking about the federal government and start talking about how you're going to help communities. If the people at the top are corrupt (they always are), start from the bottom. Grassroots, community activism, stuff like that. You need to win wide support and build a movement, and only then can you start talking about voting or violence as if either one is a viable path to power.
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Apr 16, 2022 20:37
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Harold Fjord posted:All of these are terrible events. I agree that it's a shame we didn't discuss them more. What if they have some kind of common root cause? Some sort of shared set of conditions which lead to these situations. Wouldn't that be a good topic for the current events thread If you want to propose that all current events have some root systemic cause, and constantly drag all current event discussion back to that root cause, then that might be better suited to its own thread. That way, people can discuss current events in the current events thread, and they can discuss your unified theory of politics in a thread about the total reform of our entire political system. Otherwise, we're just repeating the USPol mistake of lumping together all US politics discussion into a single thread so that a few posters' larger ideological theories are constantly drowning out discussion of day-to-day political events. Discendo Vox posted:
An excellent demonstration that just hiring more black reporters isn't going to fix things if the company culture itself is still hostile and discriminatory. Wish this would put an end to "pipeline problem" theories that it's just a matter of a lack of black employees. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 13:37 on Apr 18, 2022 |
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Apr 18, 2022 13:31
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Florida is returning 41% of their math textbooks and updating their curriculum to ban the use of those books in order to comply with the new law banning critical race theory in public schools. Well, this certainly isn't an encouraging preview of how the media's gonna cover the impending Education Wars. While "critical race theory" was one of the reasons that textbooks could be rejected, other reasons that fell under the prohibited topics category included "inclusion of Social Emotional Learning" and "mention of Common Core or adherence to the Common Core standards", both of which DeSantis has been trying to purge from Florida education. CNN is emphasizing the CRT part, presumably because it's the latest and greatest conservative bugbear (and even the original press release made sure to place extra emphasis on it), but it's likely that more of the rejections came from those other two groups. SEL isn't too difficult to integrate into math, since you can do things like ask students how they feel about math, or add social aspects to word problems, or encourage lateral thinking and alternate approaches to problems. And it's pretty easy to see how math textbooks might incorporate a lot from the Common Core standards that are currently used in thirty-something states (down from the 46 that initially adopted them before the conservative counter-push led to several states dropping it). The media hyperfocusing on CRT to the exclusion of the others helps to hide the fact that conservatives have been chasing education boogeymen for the entire 21st century, always finding a new one to attack as soon as they've defeated the previous one. The FL textbook purge just lumps all those boogeymen together into a single category as they seek to roll education standards back to what they were like a quarter-century ago.
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Apr 18, 2022 15:14
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Bottom Liner posted:This is 100% culture war posturing from Desantis so he can look like he's standing up to a "woke" corporation. The land sits on like 3 or 4 different counties and would be an absolute bloodbath of jurisdiction in-fighting on top of the economic implications of pissing off Disney. Yeah, it seems like DeSantis is going full culture war right now. He's also insisting that because Florida's pension fund owns some Twitter shares, Florida has grounds to go after Twitter for not letting Elon Musk take them over without the board's say-so. https://twitter.com/Gizmodo/status/1516532855479816195 quote:Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is upset at Twitter’s attempt to block Elon Musk’s $43 billion attempted hostile takeover of the company. It's hard to see this as anything but an early presidential campaign. And as a bonus, he's going after higher education too! With bonus corruption! https://twitter.com/TB_Times/status/1516549000836620292 quote:...
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Apr 20, 2022 00:26
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Since a lot of people were wondering, DeSantis' spokesman did post one (1) single example of what they're decrying as CRT in math education. Though it's not taken from a math textbook, or even from Florida. It's a printout from an online teaching documents site, which a Missouri Republican's wife got from a student and posted on Twitter two months ago. https://twitter.com/ChristinaPushaw/status/1515504832550944769 https://twitter.com/ChristinaPushaw/status/1515506932089511940 Of course, it's obviously not CRT, nor does it have anything to do with race at all other than being about a black poet. Apparently, using the three letters "s", "e", and "x" together is now considered CRT. To say nothing of scandalous words like "pimp" or "abuse"! https://twitter.com/CMartinForMO/status/1495939205511499777 So far, neither her nor DeSantis have given any examples of banned material in Florida textbooks. But just from this, we can get a sense of how widely they're casting the net and how far they're stretching the term. I'd guess that literally any content a hardcore conservative might find objectionable ended up covered under the CRT ban.
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Apr 20, 2022 06:16
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Mercury_Storm posted:Is the US legal system really so broken that the very moment some chud judge makes an unhinged ruling it takes effect until someone bothers to go through a process to challenge it? Is there no delay to allow for challenges? In reference to the mask mandate issue that the US government is just getting around to challenge apparently. If the loser expresses a clear intention to appeal, and the appeals court thinks the ruling is imminently important and has a fair chance of being overturned, a stay can be placed on the order pending the outcome of the appeal. But generally speaking, federal judicial nominees have to be voted on by Congress (unlike local judges, which can be some random yahoo in some jurisdictions), so there's a built-in assumption that they're not going to be completely unhinged most of the time. Moreover, if there is broad national sentiment about the issue, Congress can always pass a law to resolve whatever issue the court found. The system isn't really built to handle Congress using the courts as a proxy for ideological battles against the federal government like this. Most of the COVID-related measures being struck down by the courts are because, in the face of Congressional halfheartedness and inaction, executive agencies are interpreting their legislatively-defined powers extremely broadly in order to claim the authority to take the broad public health measures that Congress is largely neglecting. There's also a risk in appeal: the higher a court case goes, the broader the precedent becomes and the more difficult it becomes to overturn later. The current Supreme Court hasn't been especially friendly to executive agencies claiming broad authority for public health reasons; they already struck down both the CDC's eviction ban and OSHA's universal mask mandate. Since the transportation mask mandate is a short-term measure that the CDC claimed it was keeping in place just to buy time to study the current wave, it could be that the Biden administration wanted to get a clearer stance from the CDC on the transportation mandate's importance before taking the risk of another court battle.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:19
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Yawgmoft posted:Can someone explain to me, after Citizens United, how directly and purposefully punishing Disney for saying they disagreed with a bill isn't an infringement on free speech? Or how the government retaliating isn't cancel culture? I don't think a ruling banning campaign finance restrictions really has anything to do with this. Citizens United and other related First Amendment cases say that Florida can't pass a law saying that (for example) Disney would be fined a million dollars every time they issue a statement against bigoted laws. But there's no reason Florida can't respond to Disney's political speech by passing a law that hurts Disney's interests by revoking special treatment the state had previously granted Disney. Even if they openly admit it's retaliation for Disney's political stances, I can't really think of any specific First Amendment jurisprudence that would make this illegal. Maybe if it were something more impactful than just dissolving their special district. Now, there might be other reasons based in Florida law that this is actually illegal, but it doesn't really get anywhere near Citizens United. ReidRansom posted:Isn't it all rather questionably close to being a bill of attainder? Hard to say, but I think it's doubtful. A bill of attainder isn't just a bill that affects one entity or class negatively - it's a bill that brands them guilty of a crime and imposes the punishment for that crime. The fundamental nature of a bill of attainder is that it circumvents the judicial system, that it's the legislative branch taking it upon itself to impose crime and punishment on someone without judicial oversight. It's something we're not really familiar with in modern America, but originates from the much weaker civil protections back in medieval England. Back in those days, if you managed to tick off enough politicians and/or nobles, Parliament could just pass a law saying "ReidRansom is guilty of murder and treason and shall be punished by execution", and then you'd go to the hangman as a convicted criminal, no trial necessary. Probably the biggest example of modern bill of attainder jurisprudence in the modern-day US is United States v. Lovett, in which the House Appropriations Committee (at the urging of the House Un-American Activities Committee) held secret hearings to judge government employees accused of being communists, decided that three of them were potentially-disloyal subversives, and added a rider to a spending bill making it law that the government was not allowed to pay those three people anymore. The Supreme Court ruled that doing this was equivalent to declaring them "guilty" of "subversive activities" and "sentencing" them to permanent exclusion from government employment. Another bill of attainder that got struck down was a Congressional attempt to meddle in a high-profile DC child custody dispute, effectively overturning the family court's ruling by immunizing one side from contempt of court charges. The court ruled that the Congress' purpose in passing that bill was "to assume the role of judicial tribunal and impose its own determination of who was or was not a fit parent" in the dispute, and inflicted "extraordinary reputational damage" by effectively branding the other parent a child abuser by legislative fiat. On the other hand, corporations generally haven't had success pursuing that line of argument against adverse actions. For example, Kaspersky and Huawei both sued the Trump administration, claiming that moves to ban federal agencies from using their products were bills of attainder. In both cases, the court found their arguments unpersuasive, saying that the alleged punishment of "the government stops buying our stuff" was too weak, and that some individual legislators openly stating their intent to punish those companies wasn't enough to prove that the bill was based on intent to punish rather than the legitimate reasons given in the official bills.
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Apr 21, 2022 22:48
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Cimber posted:So someone explain to me why Florida Republicans are currently punching themselves in the dick over Disney and are about to eat billions of dollars in debt? They're betting they'll get more money from conservative megadonors than they'll lose from Disney cutting off their campaign donations, and DeSantis obviously has presidential ambitions so he doesn't expect to be sitting around dealing with Disney long-term. And it's not like the Magic Kingdom can just pack up and move to a different state. As influential as Disney has been over government policy, it's not like Disney is actually an unstoppable political force - it's more that politicians have been predisposed to cooperate with big business in the first place, and are generally pretty easy to buy off as a result. BiggerBoat posted:This is so loving weird with this obsession with gayness though. God drat, I keep thinking that battle has been settled. My whole life, it feels like we have to keep dragging these morons kicking and screaming towards anything resembling social and cultural progress. Gay marriage didn't destroy society and repealing Dont Ask, Don't Tell didn't ruin the military. Interracial marriage was a big thing when I was growing up (stick to your own kind) but we made it. I'm pretty sure the big lesson here is that these issues looked more settled than they actually were. The political and media elite shifted positions on LGBT rights, which caused the old positions to considerably retreat from public view even though there were tons of people who still held the old bigoted positions. And although the media shift did help pull some people toward the new, better position, the impact of that was much less pronounced in regional and cultural enclaves that were strongly attached to the old bigoted position. Just like how bans on interracial marriage were ruled unconstitutional way back in 1967, but national approval of interracial marriage didn't break 50% until 1997, and only 60% of Alabama voters voted for removing the interracial marriage ban from the state constitution in 2000. Approval for interracial marriage is now at 94%, but given that it's been nearly six decades since Loving v. Virginia, it's entirely possible that it's less a changing of opinion and more a dying off of the old people who remembered the pre-Loving days. Of course, it's not guaranteed that they'd fail to pass down their bigoted views to the next generation, so that's still somewhat of a victory, but no one wants to wait their whole loving lifetime for bigotry to go away. VitalSigns posted:It seems like the problem here is state laws (undoubtedly lobbied for by entities like Disney) that restrict local citizens' and their representative governments' ability to tax corporations and the wealthy appropriately, and the solution isn't to just put a corporate board that nobody voted for in charge of cities directly I think this is a completely reversed interpretation. It's not that the special district was put into place to prevent those issues, it's that those issues will be the result of suddenly tearing down the special district immediately. It's a common issue in local government: doing new stuff creates ongoing obligations that don't go away later. Those ongoing obligations fell on the special district (and therefore on Disney), and suddenly dissolving it meant that all those costs that were Disney's responsibility will instantly fall on counties. If the special district had never been created, then those obligations would never have been taken on in the first place. Disney overbuilt infrastructure beyond what the counties would have, because they knew they could afford to do it. Disney still paid taxes to the counties, but in addition to their taxes, they also paid for their own infrastructure. So if the special district is dissolved, then the counties don't get any more money (because the special district doesn't exempt Disney from taxes), but they get more expenses (because they're now responsible for maintaining the infrastructural and financial obligations Disney took on for themselves). Since it's unlikely that DeSantis and the Florida GOP are going to repeal state anti-tax legislation, I think we can safely condemn them for doing this and sticking counties with the consequences of their posturing. And even if DeSantis did repeal those laws so that the county could raise taxes, that's still pretty regressive, because the county would be raising taxes on everyone to pay off Disney's debts. It's just transferring money from taxpayers straight to Disney.
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Apr 22, 2022 19:26
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