zoogs

Another normal conservative bites the dust, and for that, a poem:

It seems strange that clearly abusive and coercive NDAs such as this are possible. I get NDAs with respect to protecting company IP. This is something else.

Republican voters actually love this. The defining characteristic of all these campaigns is probably how blatant they were, right? They knew exactly what to sell and didn’t bother cloaking the message in the usual norms of political speech. 

@BigRedBuster, I was under the impression we had opposing opinions about this thing they're doing with Dodd-Frank.

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I wonder how many of the people here hitting the Democrats for things like not trying hard or not being appealing enough to them are the ones that want Dems to stay in the center or move further to the right, as opposed to to the left.

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To frame the same point another way: Air quality regulations serve as a downward redistribution of wealth, out of the pockets of industrialists and into the pockets of ordinary Americans, particularly the poor and vulnerable Americans (African Americans and Hispanics in particular) who tend to live closest to pollution sources. They shift costs, from the much higher health and social costs of pollution remediation to the comparatively smaller costs of pollution abatement. 

And therein lies the source of industry and GOP rage toward EPA.

 

Great article, dudeguyy. Let's be super clear about this. Conservatives hate downward wealth redistribution and could give s#!t all about costs borne by the poor, whom they think basically deserve it anyway. 

To ascribe all this to Trump would be blind. Trump doesn't know anything about anything. This is core motivation of the Good Conservative, the Bus#!tes whom conservatives are happy to see out-of-touch liberals pining for these days, the estimable policy wonks at conservative think tanks and the editors at journals of the conservative literati, the global warming denialists of the world, formerly employed by the Wall Street Journal and to whom today the current New York Times editorial room loves to give a platform.

This is their fundamental morality and philosophy. You're taking money from rich, successful people who worked hard, out of a misguided sense that the good it causes is merited.

Something I'm thinking about in regards to the "resilience" of American institutions -- well, to an extent, but we're losing a lot. This is inevitable when you are under attack, you take hits. Like maybe we'll stay standing in the sense that Republicans will prevent Trump from starting pointless trade wars with our European allies. They'll act here, while endorsing the MS-13 ads and the rest of his f'd up agenda. Things like basic rights for LGBTQ were hard fought, but sadly, obviously peripheral to most of us. These things are not resilient and may not stand; indeed, they will be the first to really fall. And losing those gains is not OK.

44 minutes ago, dudeguyy said:

An illustrative example of what zoogs mentioned above, about whittled-down bills: The ACA. There's a very pragmatic argument it would be a much better law if it had included a public option. But it didn't have one because thatr was a bridge too far for people Rs and Joe Lieberman.

Yeah! And imagine being dissatisfied that the Dems weren't sufficiently to the left on healthcare, for example, and having that translate to electing Republicans in office at every level of government instead. 

Except don't imagine.

If this is someone's actual position, for example, I would make the argument that it's extremely clear they don't actually care about healthcare. They have a "I want to complain about the Dems" policy preference, not a "we need to move healthcare to the left" policy preference.

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I think society and the university system would benefit far more from more subsidizing of scholarships and grants for poor kids boys and less subsidizing of scholarships and grants for people good at obscure sports almost all female athletes, and some male athletes too

Moiraine, you're being too vocal here, pipe down. Leave the speaking up to men who want to gut Title IX.

I would expect that if you think the regulations went "too far" and that a lighter hand was needed in the form of "tweaks" then these words have some actual meaning.

If you're arguing that they went too far as a result of being hurried, what was it that was hurried? If you have no clue what was even in it (and OK, none of us are deep in the industry here), then why the uncritical conviction that it was "too far"? Why the statement that "regulations obviously don't work"? If you're going to fully believe in something, doesn't it need to be moored to the specific realities both of what has transpired and what is being proposed?

I can see how if you axiomatically hold the idea that regulations always need to be scaled back from their excessive impulses, you'd be fine with what is happening. But what about the possibility that any regulations that actually made it through were whittled down by corporate lobby intransigence and Republican resistance? Or that even the Democratic Party has had a reasonable corporate-friendly arm? What of the possibility that the regulations, which naturally have been undergoing refinement and development, need to be firmed up but instead have been facing the threat of being gutted their entire lifetime? Or that they never even went far enough in the first place, and fundamentally need to go much further? 

Is it even fair to call this "ongoing improvement"? The Crapo bill seems like a straightforward rollback of as much as they could muster support for.

We made a colossal mistake in Nov. 2016.

The very obvious remedy right now is not a good one, because Mike Pence, but *clearly* Trump needs to be impeached. 

Btw, these Democratic Senators joining hands with Republicans to gut Dodd Frank. That's shocking to me, how many there are. They should all be primaried out. Sorry, guys. Maybe join up with Evan McMullin and be who you really are.

And let's remember who these Democrats are. These are the "reasonable" ones -- the ones who aren't so liberal, can talk a fiscal conservative game. These are the Democrats who Republicans dissatisfied with their own party's branding think of when they say "I believe there are moderate Democrats", and those to their left are what is meant by "there are crazy ideologues on both sides". 

The Democratic Party writ large is moving away from these guys -- they are not the establishment wing, which under Obama ushered in Dodd-Frank and are gnashing their teeth at this development. This movement should accelerate. And liberals should keep in mind that conservatives, who hit "Democrat establishment" and their Wall St-cozy ties with glee, actually think these are the only kind of Democrats who aren't crazy. For them, "the establishment left" is nothing more than a useful partisan dividing line. It's highly disingenuous. Get out of here with your "Hillary gave speeches at Goldman Sachs, LOL corruption; by the way Dodd Frank should be gutted and only the socialist cranks of the left can disagree" doublespeak.

I wouldn't bet on that. The law is blind to utility, or at least, it should be. We have a sound conservative majority on the Supreme Court. One of them, Clarence Thomas, has recently been taking his colleagues to task for not taking the same interest in holding accountable laws that step on the 2nd Amendment as laws that step on other rights. The SCOTUS precedent in Obergefell, opposed in incendiary terms by most of their conservative wing and which will now be gleefully applied in service of the gun lobby, asserted that state-level bans on gay marriage infringed on the equal protection clause under the 14th amendment.

If we are to hold that the 2nd amendment delineates a right to have guns, as (disappointingly, to me) seems to be a prevailing bipartisan consensus, then if not this particular case there will be something like it, right? One of these cases is going to go somewhere. And as far as the retailer policy goes, they seem good results but it's not as clear to me that they're legally airtight in this insane gun rights world of ours.

The 2nd Amendment is the problem. As long as it stands like this, America is a free-wheeling firearm paradise. A Supreme Court that loves guns as much as it loves the idea that gay people are also people, under an administration with the same qualities, could take a major interest in overturning any law or policy restricting gun sales or ownership. And they might succeed.

Yeah, it seems along the lines of all the non-specific statements that seem based mostly on the conviction that, fundamentally, the government is "too big". I'm all for environmental "tweaks", but these regulations go too far. I'm all for everyone paying their fair share but the wealthy and big corporations are being taxed too much in America compared to the rest of the world (n.b, not objectively true). I'm all for sensible gun regulations, but don't you know that they're actually called "suppressors" and and the almighty anti-gun lobby is running amok here? 

This is meant to cover a broad spectrum of conservative arguments -- I'm not making the claim that all conservatives align with every single one of these statements. The larger point is to be specific. "Tweaks" or "Don't go too far" is a nebulous catchphrase, and it's often used in service of the above while presenting itself as uniquely moderate and reasonable.

What about the possibility that the status quo baseline is the extreme position, but in the other direction? Knowing our history, this should be seen as, obviously, the far more likely case.

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Sort of relatedly, let's talk about WV and the teacher strike, which should one of the biggest national stories of the day. 

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“They’re saying we can’t afford it,” Ted Boettner, director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, said of legislators. “Well, we can’t afford it because we’ve done these large tax cuts.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-tax-cuts-led-to-west-virginias-massive-teacher-strike_us_5a99bde9e4b0a0ba4ad3513b

Democrats run too much to the center. It was under a Democratic governor in 2006 -- Joe Manchin, currently Democratic Senator from WV -- and I believe even a Democratic legislature that they pursued this corporate tax cut agenda, with the idea that it would create all these new jobs. If that sounds familiar, it's the same argument made in KS, and frankly it's the same argument made by every Republican and Reasonable Conservative: corporate tax cuts yields growth. It'll pay for itself!

Going on a decade later, well, it turns out it didn't create all those jobs. But the hundreds of millions in annual corporate tax cuts made some people pretty happy, I'm sure.

This is the rank BS at the heart of all these "we can't afford <public service>" arguments. Are you kidding? Of course we can. We just choose to spend money on tax breaks benefiting those who need it least instead of on...uh, living salaries for the people in charge of public education. If we could see these tax breaks as expenditures and hold their recipients to the same standard as we do food stamp recipients (let's make sure they aren't buying lobster, guys, it's really important that they eat like poor people), then we would only pass a fraction of the corporate tax cuts that we do.

The wealthy and powerful capitalize on an incredible ability to portray themselves as perpetual victims. Time to stop buying what they're selling.

2008?

OK, be specific. How did we “obviously” go too far? 

Don’t put GWB in the same sentence as Obama. The W days were stunning and awful, and so is our willful amnesia about it. No, it’s not disarmingly funny that W can muse about how his legacy is getting a PR bump in spite of the substance of his administration, and criticizing Trump does not a “moderate” make. If being moderate is accepting that Bush did a fine job, count me out. The standard cannot fall to “not being an openly racist, autocracy-minded fiend”. 

The time part is not unbelievable I guess — it’s the conflicts. How does the conservative, skeptical of government side want there to be so few limits on government oversight when they are in charge? Perhaps what they wanted all along was just a government that worked in full service to industry, free and unencumbered. 

Add to the absurdly long list of things to remember at the polls. It’s our country dang it, and we can do something about it.

"My god, these liberals and their PC culture are out of control" is a conservative rallying cry that seems notably absent when it comes to the need to denounce a (to be clear, very denunciation-worthy) brown man.

I often feel like we've already cemented our failure as a society just by treating all of this as still some matter of interpretation. No, no, no! Reasonable people cannot disagree about what Trump is and what he is doing. If that's where we are, if that's where we are stuck, then alas for America.

Cultural critic e working for esteemed serving-the-underserved anti-Trump kindly conservatives publication National Review. Hosts a movies podcast with Russ Douthat, one of many esteemed conservative voices at the paper of record. Theater critic for the stately, intellectual conservative journal New Criterion. Which by the way:

All of this is to say: there are endless ways smart people find to express a deep and fundamental racism in more agreeable terms. It is the task of the discerning observer to see it for what it is, and not to spend their own energies thinking up ways to tell themselves "actually, I just don't happen to like this particular [black/woman/etc/etc/etc] thing, and that's OK" over and over without seeing the pattern.

6 hours ago, Enhance said:

Also, for what it's worth, I'm a pure black coffee drinker. I use a press on the weekends and a keurig/drip maker during the week, depending on time and how much I want. I also grind my own beans. Occasionally, I may put a touch of cream into the drink, but not much.

Apostasy! Purge the heathen!  

Or — and hear me out here — maybe diagnosing the problem isn’t the problem. Maybe the problem is the problem.

Speaking of NRA TV ...

Eff these guys, seriously.

But, I think it's worth pointing out "Smile more" is not one particularly creepy NRA guy thing. It's not usually said or thought with hand on a gun, and honestly that's a really messed up version of it, but the sentiment is...everywhere. And the like. All the narrow, 1-D ways in which women are expected to be viewed, and punished if they go outside of the lines.

On 3/2/2018 at 9:03 AM, knapplc said:

 

New emoji!

There is no list. Everything you put on their is inherently something that excludes other genders; i.e. here is a trait, whether it’s computer programming or   athletic prowess, that distinguishes you from women, and is a proper and exceptional expression of your own gender. There’s too much variety for us to remain focused on things like this. At the same time we can celebrate all those things and more in people, as simply human characteristics.

Going to go off on a tangent, but did you guys know that women were the first computer programmers? It was considered women’s work and now it’s considered something women aren’t that interested in. It’s amazing how arbitrary this all is. Another example, I think it was ... knitting? That once used to be considered a manly skill. A common thread in both cases is how men’s views (which is to say society’s) of the high skilledness of these tasks evolved (and they share similarities! Algorithms and repetition, patience and methodical approaches ...) and consequently the way they are prized and the genders to which they are associated. Such is our world.

So here's my strong conviction, while I'm at it: feminism and empowering women is one of the big movements of our time, and it is for *every* body. The toxic and regressive elements of the standing patriarchy weren't good for men, either -- aside from the dicks like Trump and say, the Mooch, the kind of people it especially rewards. There's a better, more fully human way to treat ourselves and others.