Masculine Policy: The GOP’s Plan To Outlaw ‘Porn’ And Suspend The First Amendment
Lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and legal experts have since called for Roberts to face a subpoena that would force him to answer for Supreme Court corruption.
Stop talking about it and do it. Each day the issue goes unaddressed, the public's confidence in the court decays. We're at the point where in a normal political arena, there would already be an impeachment investigation in play. Roberts is betting on either Trump winning or having a divided legislature in 2024 so that everything can be swept under the rug.
This is not going to stop porn. All it will do is criminalize the actors, producers, and viewers.
I'm reminded of the drug war, where they took a relatively harmless narcotic used disproportionally by minority populations at the time (Marijuana), and used it to criminalize and imprison large swaths of the population, especially within the black community.
It's no coincidence that most of the folks targeted by this effort are women and sex industry workers, which skew liberal by a large degree. Note I'm not just talking about prostitution or porn actors, but the entire sex industry, including toys and books.
The GOP is scared shitless of the rising power of women in modern society, and being able to criminalize and consequently attack the revenue stream of sex industry workers is a way to blunt it. There's also an element of class warfare involved, as OnlyFans or similar sites are often the most economical way for a young woman to lift herself out of poverty if she has no other marketable skills.
Agreed again. If I wanted folks IRL to know what I post, I'd be on Facebook. Reddit's value to posters was its anonymity. Without it, there's no reason to use it over its centralized competitors in the social media space.
I totally hear you there and agree with you re: the business choices Spez made. Reddit lost a 20 year contributor when I walked away, and even if they rolled back all the changes, I won't be returning.
I was more looking at applying your suggestions to a fresh publishing model, as your ideas intrigued me (having run a publishing forum in the days of the early internet). I want to have a space on the internet where content creators can keep ownership of their content and get adequately paid for publishing - I think properly run, it could become a vital hub for our cultural legacy (as Reddit was, albeit clumsily and destructively). The incoming revenue is the biggest challenge, which is why I focused on that element.
Some users will pay if you have a paywall, but only if you already have a substantial amount of content they want to access. This works for a search engine crawling pre-existing content, but not so well for a forum style site like Reddit, where most of the content creation is driven by engagement with other content. If you reduce the engagement rate (aka through a paywall), you're actually reducing your incoming content in the long run (something we're seeing on Reddit after the blackout).
I don't know what the ultimate solution here is, but I really do like your payout concept with Monero. If I did build another publishing attempt, it's something I'd try to implement if I could get the incoming revenue to support it.
This reduces the minuscule interest I had in replaying Paladins to a negative number. Smite's been nothing but frustrating garbage, but I thought that with a bit of polish and a lot more character development, Paladins had promise when it came out. Starting a labor dispute to begin a practice that will degrade the overall quality of the game means it's not worth my hard disk space to install their products - it's clear things are only going to get worse for Hi-Rez titles from here.
Excellent points. That being said, Reddit will never pay contributors. They have never had interest in quality of the content on the platform, only it's engagement rate - the years of publishing subs like jailbait and TheDonald speak to that. Engagement, now that they've got a critical mass of users and 20 years worth of content, can be maintained with bots, sockpuppet accounts, and reposts (all of which have become the course du jour for the front page and /r/all since the API revolt began)... at least until they go IPO, after which it's not their problem anymore.
The biggest problem with online publishing is that without that critical mass of readership, it's very difficult to become profitable enough to pay your contributors. Reddit's never gotten to this point, even with millions of users. It's my hope that with contributors moving off of Reddit, we'll see new publishing models appear that utilize some of the excellent ideas you've outlined above. I particularly like the suggestion of using Monero as a currency to ensure anonymity.
Tying voting to currency is an interesting idea, but I think that voting should be free, as my experience running forums is that only about 10% of your viewers will care enough to vote, and maybe 10% of those choose to post actual content. Putting a paywall in front of voting will kill engagement. However, limiting the number of free votes an account gets per day, then allowing people to buy more votes with currency, and earn currency for posting content could work very well if run correctly. The trick is balancing the actual profit you make off of the contribution with the need to pay your contributors, and here it becomes a question of determining the proper margins and payouts.
The other problem is that the only real revenue source outside of the users of the site is going to be Google Adwords or a similar platform (unless you go for ancillary streams of revenue, like attaching an e-commerce store to the site). If you charge for access to the content, you're killing your engagement. I haven't used Adwords for awhile now, but when I did the payouts were absolutely abysmal (like less than a penny per click). They were so bad that it wasn't even worth dedicating the visual real estate to put up the ads.
Ultimately, this is the same challenge traditional publishing has had for a long time. It's generally unprofitable unless you have a runaway hit or ancillary streams of revenue (like syndication deals with other media types) - most of the actual content almost never makes money, which is why so much of our traditional media is paid for by advertising and subsequently controlled by corporate interests.
That and many, many, many other things, but I decided to focus on the kids in cages for this particular argument so that I didn't end up writing 20 pages.
It matters as a gauge of popular support and perceived legitimacy of the President, which affects their ability to get legislation passed. You'll note I didn't argue for a pure majority vote, but rather an adjustment to the system to make it more representative.
You really need to work on your reading comprehension skills. You just demonstrated the same unreasonable hate as the woman in the article, and it's led you to completely misinterpret what I'm saying, as other commenters have pointed out.
Because you let your hate drive this misinterpretation, none of your points were valid, and you come off looking like an idiot who can't read.
On top of which, attacking my race and my family's personal experience is the worst kind of straw man gatekeeping possible. Normally I wouldn't downvote someone disagreeing with me, but straight up fuck off - you have no idea who I am or what my experience is. I engaged your comment in good faith, and you decided throw insults. Grow up and learn to act like an adult.
I would, many of them are my ancestors (both sides of the conflict, and some freed by it). And the results were horrifying, even if the means were justified by the evil of slavery (which was a far greater evil than what was inflicted on the Confederates).
Sherman's march made martyrs of the Confederate cause, and those that weren't martyrs turned around and started the KKK, using Union brutality as a rallying cry, and the political backlash derailed Reconstruction with Jim Crow laws.
The means defined the end result, which we're still dealing with today in the form of MAGA.
This is the dynamic I speak of. I don't believe fighting evil is the wrong decision, but per Sun Tzu:
To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
Had a peaceful solution been worked out, or a surrender negotiated before the razing of the Georgia countryside, I believe that Reconstruction would have been a success. Needless to say, those were unrealistic options at the time, so I do not fault my ancestors (those that fought on the winning side) for the choices they had to make. But those destructive actions led to more evil - driven underground - hiding until recent years, and still potent enough to affect our political discourse today.
Every time I come upon that dynamic in real life, it's always turned out to be the wrong decision. The ends may justify the means, but the means defines the ends.
Was Obama a dictator?
Clearly not from the context of the article you provided, as they describe how the cages were part of an expansion to a larger facility that corrected a worse detention situation at the border, where there was no air conditioning. Do I think this was a humane design choice? No, but it was an improvement. At the time they were built, family separation wasn't performed except in extreme circumstances. Nor do I think that Obama was personally involved in the design decisions.
Trump undid that policy, and filled the cages that Obama built. Family separation was the point. And again and again he bragged about it. He was personally involved in the decision, and lauded it.
The Biden administration is still detaining children, but they've drastically reduced the number (see the graph on the article provided), and no longer enforces family separation to my knowledge. More work needs to be done here, I agree, but ignoring the scope to say both he and Trump are the same is lazy thinking.
From a purely leftist standpoint (far left in the US), you're right - the electoral process and two party system as they currently exist will never allow a true progressive to set policy, and we're stuck in a cycle of choosing between bad and worse. It's my hope ranked choice voting starts getting some real traction as a counter, but I'm not holding my breath.
So why should you care?
Because in a choice between bad and worse, if you don't vote, you end up with worse.
To be fair, I don't actually believe there are good and bad people (we're all a mix), and I agree with you that there are people who do good who are Trumpers (I'm a small town boy, so I grew up with a lot of them).
From a personal standpoint, the effect Trump had on California was significant and frightening, especially as a member of a mixed race family. It was real fun having to explain to my teenager why we were being followed by a Trump convoy on the freeway screaming the N word out the window. It fucking terrified both of us, as this had happened right after the bus got run off the road in Texas, and these guys clearly thought Trump had given the go ahead to go Mad Max on the libs.
From an economic standpoint, his immigration policies did real harm - my friends in the wine business had to leave grapes rotting on the vine because they were suddenly short workers (similar to what Florida is experiencing now). 70% + of international business on the west coast is with China, and he started a trade war that benefited no one, which really pissed off my techbro colleagues in e-commerce. The reason your taxes and mine went up this year is because of the package he passed while President, while permanently cutting taxes for the ultra-wealthy.
On top of that, the evil bastard put over 500,000 kids behind bars - many of whom are the extended family of my neighbors and co-workers, just trying to escape the cartel violence in Mexico.
So yes, there was a significant negative effect on California when Trump was elected. And while I can accept that people who support him are capable of good things, their support of him is definitely not one of them, and more than worthy of derision. Not murderous hate, however.
Dictators get elected all the time, Hitler being the one most historians refer to. It's the policies they implement after election that define them as dictators. Trump began the process while in office, but was horribly incompetent at it, as demonstrated by his flailing coup attempt. Moreover, he didn't have Hitler's popular support, effectively getting into office on a technicality.
Biden was elected by both the popular and electoral vote. His policies thus far, while centrist, have been built on bi-partisan cooperation where possible, and he's been as hands off as possible regarding the political elements of the court cases against Trump. He's also been supportive of civil rights, and has rolled back a number of Trump's crueler policies.
The same cannot be said of Trump, nor will it be. You can actually boil it down to one definitive action: Dictators lock children in cages.
Trump qualifies under this definition, having been responsible for the detainment of over 500,000. Biden doesn't qualify under this definition, nor any other. At worst, he's a middling centrist who is most concerned with keeping the country running, as a President should be.
As to the legitimacy of America's electoral process, I absolutely agree that it needs to be reinforced, but I don't believe that there was any substantial fraud in the 2020 election.
I would ideally like to see all voting machines require paper trails, and have universal mail-in voting, as it's been a resounding success in OR and CA. I would also like to see a restructuring of the electoral college that more accurately reflects the popular vote while still allowing rural areas to have a significant voice - after all, urban needs can easily override rural ones to the detriment of all citizens. In a perfect world, that balance would also be properly reflected in Senate seats, to more properly represent the country as a whole.
Good. This woman could have sickened not only her target, but anyone who came in contact with what she sent. While I share her politics, hate makes monsters of us all, and she crossed the line. While I don't think the "there are good people on both sides" argument holds much water, actions like hers remind me that there are definitely bad people on both sides.
If Trump takes office without winning the popular vote, it will very likely lead to civil war. Not because the people will rise up to defend Biden, but because his policies are simultaneously cruel, poorly implemented, unjust, and most importantly to the wealthy who run the country, unprofitable. There were a lot of people in the business community who haven't forgotten the China trade war of 2020. And the fact of the matter is that with climate change beginning to have a real affect on the economy, an unsteady hand on the wheel is the last thing Wall Street wants.
Dictators that successfully put such policies in place do so after the fascist state is established to quell dissent. Trump can't even establish a state of denial.
Could he win? Possibly on a electoral vote basis - I think the popular vote is far out of reach for him. But I don't see the country lasting for long if he does - he doesn't have the skill to run a fascist state, much less build one, and he'd be completely out of his depth confronting a real uprising. DeSantis, on the other hand, could build such a state and has been somewhat successful in laying the groundwork in Florida. I don't think Trump will chose him as VP, but if he does, that's a match made in hell.
As a Californian, this could be a welcome respite in the middle of fire season if it dumps enough rain.
That being said, it's not good. Rainfall this late is going to throw harvest all out of whack, particularly in wine country. I'm guessing there's going to be a lot of Central Coast sweet wine on the market after this season -Botrytis cinerea thrives on a wet fall harvest. In 2017 (similar rainfall conditions) it was even found growing on Cabernet grapes, which are usually much more resistant to it than the white varietals.
I'm looking for a rendition of the Sistine Chapel with God as Danny Devito and Christopher Lloyd as Adam, like it was in the Taxi days, ideally done in oils. All I've got is a buck, but my social account has followers. If I post it, you'll get exposure. What can you do for me?
NFT's were actually a very clever plot put together by us starving artists to combat the hordes of choosing beggars that infest the internet. We all knew it was a scam, just like limited edition glichee prints, but there hasn't been a time in history when artists made enough money not to have to scam folks to survive, so we figured we were more than justified taking the tech-bros for a ride.
This is poetry:
Trump
is gonna own you libs
this time just
you waitOur 4D chess GOD
has sat on this report
for yearsHe could have released it
right after the election
but you fools just don't
see the whole board
like
he
does!This is the perfect
time for it
so he can watch you
dummies!
seethe in rage
and
take back the countryI'm so happy to be
one of the God Emperor's
Chosen, I've donated all
I can
to his fundand you should
too
Uncle Magafash
Actually, when William Hearst originally started the campaign in the 20s to take out the hemp farmers that were competing with his timber business (he bought up most of Humboldt so he could corner the paper market), he targeted Hispanics (primarily Mexicans) with Marijuana in his articles about drug crimes and how they were ruining America. Henry Ansligner bought it hook, line and sinker, and he set the tone until the 40s, when hemp was briefly made legal for the war effort. Note that Jack Herer's The Emperor Wears No Clothes does an excellent job illustrating this historical relationship.
Once the Beats started smoking weed in 50s, hemp was criminalized again, and the prohibition was expanded to felony status as law enforcement started targeting the evolution of the Beat movement, the hippies.
The subsequent prohibition on cocaine products was targeted at black neighborhoods (as per the GOP intention during the Nixon/Reagan era), and was built upon the "successes" of the previous marijuana prohibition.
This is why I don't think they'll stop at porn.