Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
Public assistance is just a crutch. It only will drive him to drugs and a life of dependency. He’ll be fine once he gives up all that Starbucks and avocado toast.
Indeed. We need a new version of Godwin’s law. Something like
The odds of xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, or antisemitism appearing in a conversation is directly proportional to the number of conservatives participating in that conversation.
Godwin’s law was always more harm than good. Basically stating that despite a long history with fascism, it was inappropriate to compare Republicans to fascists/Nazis. Sure not everyone who votes Republican is a fascist. They’re just okay with fascists. But if you are a fascist or modern Nazi, if you vote you vote Republican and always have.
What you’re putting forward is much more like a razor anyway. See Occam’s or Hanlon’s.
…my dude, the only people who are okay with fascists are other fascists. Like, that’s not even a debatable question.
Godwin didn’t say it wasn’t okay to call Republicans Nazis, he warned that one shouldn’t make such comparisons lightly because it risks desensitizing everyone to the atrocities the Nazis committed and numbs the impact being called a Nazi should have. And to an extent he’s still correct, as much of the Republican party thinks the issue with Nazism is branding (The Boys summed it up perfectly when Stormfront said "People love what I have to say, they just don’t like the word ‘Nazi’ ".)
I agree with you. Though perhaps I was being too subtle. Yes, if you are okay with fascists and fascism then you are one of them. The whole point was that it isn’t better to support it than it is to outright claim to be it.
As the proverb says, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. That may have been what Godwin intended. But that wasn’t the result. The result was we were loathe to even discuss the Republican party’s enduring fascism problems In general. Especially in recent times. Because someone would shout out “Godwin’s law!” as a discussion-ending cliche. Simply because Republicans hadn’t slaughtered millions recently.
We lost all focus on how it starts, over defference with how it ended. Leaving many many people to wonder where the fascism that has existed for most of the last 100 years suddenly came from.
Look man, I’m gonna need you to stop being so reasonable and polite when debating on the Internet, or I’m gonna have to call your ISP and get your internet privileges revoked.
The reason housing prices are out of control is because investment firms are gobbling them up with cash, yet you’re blaming it on boomers staying in their homes.
Boomers are staying in their homes BECAUSE the housing market is out of control. Stop blaming older people and start blaming Wall Street.
Exactly. Where will they move to? Most older people want to stay in the neighborhood that they grew up in. It’s not like an 80 year old will be selling their house in suburban Long Island to find a cheap room in rural Alaska.
This point is literally in the article, almost word for word, and it’s being upvoted as a defense of them against this article that’s allegedly trying to blame them.
Fucking hell, it never ceases to amaze me that people will be so up in arms against something they didn’t even bother to read.
Also blame shit like Silicon Valley for coming up with these new things like Airbnb and not putting it through a proper checkpoint on how it impacts the world. Like surely that could have had some foresight on the housing shortage it was going to cost the moment people got dollar signs in their eyes.
There was another aspect to this video, which was that when Somerset actually did try to write some of the material himself, it was complete garbage.
For example, he completely plagiarized from a book about Disney, but then, he had to transition between one plagiarized book and a different plagiarized article, and in that transition, he presented some facts about Disney organizing gay events at their park, and it was all outright lies. Disney did not actually have any official LGBTQ events at their parks until far after that.
There was a different YouTube video that came out the next day, from this musician who listed all of the outright lies that he discovered while watching Somerset’s channel.
I think the plagiarism displayed by Somerset is atrocious, but personally, I find lying and spreading misinformation to be even worse.
I think the Todd in the Shadows video was the nail in the coffin. He might’ve been able to slither back by saying he didn’t realize he was attributing incorrectly (like Internet Historian fans are screaming), but he can’t come back from outright lying the times he wasn’t plagiarizing.
I have no issue with the content provided, but I wanted to give a little constructive criticism on the structure of your writing. Real small. When you say,
There was another aspect to this video, which was that when Somerset actually…
When you say there is a thing, the reader is going to assume the next thing you write to be that thing. So you don’t need the “which is that.” You can just launch right into what you’re going to say, you already set it up. You basically said “I have a thing to say. The thing I have to say is this:”
Everything else is informative and well presented. No other notes.
I don’t know that you need a semicolon but you could definitely use one, and that would probably be the best way. Semicolons are for when two complete sentences are related. But they can still be formatted as two sentences, or even the same sentence with a comma. Many sentences contain parts that could be standalone sentences. But reading back over the original sentence again I would probably say it can just be rewritten to be more straightforward.
“Another aspect to this video is that Somerset, when actually trying to write some of the material himself, produced complete garbage.”
Mostly I’ve just been reading a lot of philosophy recently which tends to run on a long and complex sentence structure that’s unnecessary and could be a lot simpler, so this kind of thing has been at the front of my mind lately. That’s probably the only reason I even noticed in the first place.
Eh doesn’t really flow compared to the original. I would have to reread to understand.
I’m all for omitting unnecessary words, but certain cliché connectors are so ubiquitous that they act as punctuation. You don’t notice them, but reading is less comfortable when they’re missing.
And this is the sort of legislation that should be passed by direct referendum, will of the people, and not by representatives who have been bought out by special interest groups. Desperately needed but unlikely to happen.
I non-sarcastically love your optimism. But part of me really believes that 50% of the country votes however their church tells them to. So I’m not sure it’d be better.
The founding fathers didn’t either that’s why they put a buffer in in case there was a nuance not under stood by the general public. The only problem is I don’t think they envisioned a party hell bent on the country’s destruction.
The greatest flaw in the founder’s reasoning was that they trusted public servants to fight for what’s best for the country. They expected public figures to always attempt to do what’s best for the country and their constituents and built our systems based on a lot of trust.
They never expected there to be half the country that doesn’t care about the rules and only works for their own benefit.
They didn’t really… there are a LOT of check and balances in the US constitution.
There were a few holes though. FPTP is possibly the biggest one, yet the easiest to forgive them for because they literally didn’t know any better, but FPTP causes bipartism which leads to line-toeing which necessarily weakens the “balance” part of check and balances.
Then there’s the almost complete immovability of the US constitution which gives enormous power to the SCOTUS and led to a whole lot of gaps being filled with fragile “tradition” or nefariously repurposed (2nd amendment, citizens united, executive orders, yada yada). This isn’t just on the founders for trusting states too much to continuously reform the constitution, but also lies squarely on this frankly insane cult around the revolutionary mythos which made it entirely taboo to reform anything the founding fathers ever did to the point that no meaningful amendment was passed in over a century.
Complain all you want about the founding fathers, but they aren’t to blame if a vast majority of Americans would almost certainly, in a hypothetical referundum, vote against even the smallest constitutional reform on the grounds that “it ain’t what the Almighty Fathers intended”. The very fact that you’re talking about the Founding Fathers’ intent as is if it has ANY BEARING on today’s politics shows just how deeply ingrained this personality cult is.
A two party system was one of George Washington’s fear. It breeds division while both sides occupy themselves making us emotional about how much the other side does wrong. Then they get more donations and more power. They don’t care if they aren’t effective because they know we won’t ever go to the other side.
… There’s a great Freakonomics episode on the duopoly formed by the Democratic and Republican parties and how they both benefit while stifling the competition from other parties that could provide more varied perspective.
My takeaway - support rank choices voting and elimination of closed primaries (which encourage extremism in candidates).
Bad example, Trump lost the popular vote both times. Dang electoral college was responsible for that travesty. Also George W. Bush lost the popular vote in his first election too. Thanks again, electoral college.
I don’t disagree, just saying it’s an instance where direct democracy would have been better than having this representative layer of the electoral college in between.
Stupid take. Nobody thinks rote popularity contest is a good idea. There’s too much to know. Too much to regulate. Have to employ experts.
If it were left to popular vote, do you think we would have the Exclusionary Rule? A ban on cruel and unusual punishment? A right to remain silent? Any criminal rights?
“Abstain from votes you feel unqualified for while the unqualified radicalized masses vote every time” isn’t exactly the winning strategy either. Fact is a large portion of the population has no problem voting incompetently and/or under the influence of malicious talking heads.
We have frequent ballot measures in California and as a voter I do a lot of work to understand those ballot measures that many do not have the time or the ability to do. California ballots may have 5-10 questions on them, and these things already take a long time to properly research and understand…Can you imagine the complexity when you’re talking about national issues and especially thinking of running the entire government that way?
It’s a full-time job. There’s no way it’s scalable to run a country this large with this many competing interests using direct voting. You’d spend your whole life voting on or researching on voting on things.
Ultimately, you’d wind up with industry writing all of the law proposals and a misrepresented version of those coming across some kind of voting device. We’d still continue our slow slide into some sort of industrial feudalism, just without the politicians to blame for it.
I think proportional representation and ranked choice voting are both better ideas.
A 1 year prison sentence for an attempted terrorist attack? WTF IS WRONG WITH LITERALLY EVERYONE IN THIS STORY? How is everyone talking about this like the guy made a racist joke, and should be forgiven just cause he’s old, and not like he literally just tried to murder 6 people because of their race?
I think you misunderstood who was being quoted in the article…Marvin Dunn is the 83 year old historian and black man who was almost run over. He was the one calling for forgiveness and saying those things to the judge. I recommend you read it again with that perspective
No, I read it with that perspective and I stand by what I said. Marvin Dunn is probably a better human than me, since even though I’m fairly anti-carceral, I cannot fathom letting someone back on the streets a year after they tried to murder 6 people with a 4 ton piece of heavy machinery.
Oh cool, so you voted for and support better healthcare? Better pay for teachers? Allotting more tax money to support schools? An increase in WIC? Maternity leave? Paternity leave? Foster system funding? School lunch programs? Childcare/daycare programs? More funding for women’s health centers that provide STI testing and contraception? An increase to Medicaid’s asset limit of $2k that hasn’t changed since 1974? Mental health programs? An increase in SSI for disabled children/parents because no one can survive off $10.9k/year anymore?
No?!? Then shut up, you’re pro forced birth, not pro life.
Smells like a well oiled propaganda machine doing exactly what it’s supposed to. I don’t think this is desperation I think it’s theater and a lot of people are eating this shit up.
I can’t believe I’m being held responsible for my actions!!
If this were a case of a young driver who was driving irresponsibly fast and lost control of the car, killing their friends, that would be one thing. This is a 17 year old who repeatedly threatened her boyfriend with killing him while driving in the weeks before the accident, who made no attempt to avoid/stop ramming at full speed into a large building.
Yeah like, this wasn’t an accident. This was willfully killing someone. If she shot or repeatedly stabbed him, I don’t think you’d see the same sentiment. Something about hitting them with a mass of metal at high speeds is more sympathetic, because death by car strikes us at less violent.
…you don’t think she gave thought to the other people victimized? Even with one of the victims being her own child?
I’d bet my life that she’s put significantly more thought into this than either of us could possibly imagine, and that calling her a narcissist is simply closed-minded and pathetic. She’s a grieving mother ffs.
You should try to be a bit more empathetic. Always assuming the worst in people is no way to live.
And no kidding these people don’t get better in prison. That’s because our prison systems don’t rehabilitate - their only purpose is to punish and generate money.
She’s advocating for this person because she’s able to empathize with them. And her being able to do that doesn’t somehow negate any empathy she has towards the families of the victims - herself included.
Going to repeat this every time this creep comes up: Jesse Watters pursued his current wife while “happily” married to his previous one. His idea to get a date with her was to deflate her tires so she would be forced to get a ride home with him.
It also works really well because of the implications. She can’t walk home, so she has to ride with him. Then, you know… There’s only one tasty treat left on the menu.
Yea so… making fun of someone’s name is sophomoric. I’m sure some Trump folks love it but actual adults really don’t give a shit. I was even kind of annoyed years back when people were attacking Trump because of the Drumpf surname - as if half of America didn’t have their name butchered by Ellis Island.
The asshole doesn’t have any actual criticisms that will stick so he’s resorting to school yard bullying.
Not just sophomoric, as the article points out. Plain old bigoted.
“It’s one thing to mispronounce someone’s name on the first try, right? But to do it repeatedly and deliberately, it feels purposeful. It’s certainly done to make a point. It is othering, a way of saying you don’t belong here,” said Jean Sinzdak, the associate director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
“I would describe it as a racist and sexist attack on her because she’s been the vice president for three and a half years,” Sinzdak said. “It’s not hard to say her name. It’s not complicated.”
It’s a lot simpler than that for psychopaths like Trump: it’s a simple cut that’s dehumanizing. It’s an easy way to say, “You mean nothing to me, and I know this hurts you, so I will keep on hurting you as much as possible whenever I can because I can, and that gratifies me.”
It’s one of the most effective trolling behaviors there is, because, no matter how big a person you are, it will always cut a little. And it is also one of the most obvious signs that someone is a psychopath. Because they hurt someone just because they can.
You see it all the time from trolls on the Internet.
I have a very common American name, but with a very European spelling. I’m 41 fucking years old. It gets under my skin at least a little bit when I see it misspelled, regardless of how understandable it is…
Yeah, also, I know Germany is like the one “okay” group to rag on in the US because of historical reasons, but like, what’s wrong with having a German last name?
It’s not like you get to choose your ancestry.
You do, however, get to choose whether you try to be a dictator.
Holy shit, one of my old friends used to say “that’s gay… and not the good gay either” 20 years ago. I haven’t talked to that guy in forever, but every once in a while I’ll think of that and laugh. Can’t believe Eminem made that exact line a lyric.
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