Not to mention the "all in one single dense paragraph" thing, which while not enough on its own (or a universal signature of that particular commenter) does contribute to the overall picture.
Re: Re: better representation of the American people
While true, that's irrelevant to the question of how good a mirror of America he is.
Part of the design of the system was to help make sure the people elected to high office were better than the population which elected them; if nothing else, that's part (if not all) of the purpose of the Electoral College.
If historically the system has generally been achieving that, but failed in the case of Trump, then Trump may be a better mirror of the country (past as well as present) even without having been elected by a majority of that country.
I don't necessarily agree with the argument (from/underlying) that article, mind. But it does make a certain amount of intuitive, or possibly poetic, sense.
The thrust of the argument is that in all of Trump's faults, he perfectly represents many of America's faults - both current and historical - and so may be a better representation of the American people than any president before him.
Re: Re: Re: Supreme Court repeal or undo every law
I've considered that same question myself, in the context of wondering how the terms "liberal" and "conservative" came to be applied to the political factions.
How I think it came about is as a way of describing those factions' (then) attitudes towards expenditure of resources.
One faction took a position of "spend our resources freely, to produce positive results". This position came to be described as "liberal", in a sense of that word meaning "unstinting; without restraint", such as is used in "spread butter liberally over the toast".
The other faction took a position of "conserve our resources, so that we have them available for later use". This position came to be described as "conservative".
Everything else that's attached to those adjectives in a political sense came about later, by association. (And of course, to some extent, the factions later shifted away from the positions those adjectives originally described.)
I have zero historical evidence to use to back that up, but it's the only way I've been able to reconcile the political meanings of those words with their more ordinary-English meanings.
My idea of the least-resistance way to get ranked-preference voting (especially the forms with the least remaining susceptibility to things like strategic voting and the spoiler effect) implemented is to start from the bottom up.
In a smaller-scale election system, such as one for school board or city council, there are fewer people who need to be persuaded, so it's easier to meet with enough of them and explain the matter well enough to convince them on an individual basis.
Once the system is in use at that lower level, you have something to point to as a reference, in trying to convince people at the next level up - county elections, for example.
Then as the system expands at lower levels, use that as support to argue for implementing it at the state level.
Then once enough states are using it, use that as support to implement it for federal elections - which, by the way ranked-preference voting functions, would probably require eliminating the electoral college. (And therefore would require a constitutional amendment.)
That way, even if the attempt to push it up the stack fails (whether permanently or temporarily) at some point in the process, in some part(s) of the country, you still have some of the benefits of ranked-preference voting within those smaller scopes.
It's not "more justice" or "less justice"; it's "people from group X should get something as close to true justice as do people from group Y".
In many cases, it can be prohibitively difficult to completely guarantee that justice has actually been done. All we can practically do is come as close to that as possible. However, past a certain minimum, trying to come closer to a certainty of true justice requires disproportionately more effort.
The concept of "equal justice" is about making sure that society puts in the effort to come equally close to true justice regardless of who is involved, rather than putting in more effort in cases which involve the privileged or not-socially-disapproved-of.
I think that was a hint at the effect which the fact that the conversation has become so deeply nested that each new reply (in the deepest parts) now has one word per line has on the experience of trying to read those replies.
In the last such conversation you and tp constructed (I hesitate to say "engaged in"), that was eventually mitigated by someone doing a "reply" with the comment box at the bottom rather than clicking "reply to this" on an actual comment.
For myself, I honestly don't understand how either of you can stand to continue the conversation with that one-word-per-line effect in place, or - if you don't actually see that effect - how you avoid it. I've tried editing the page source on my end (using Firebug, with an eye towards eventually Greasemonkey) to expand the available column width to postpone the problem, without satisfactory success; the only other way I can think of to avoid the problem would be to use "flat" rather than "threaded" comment-display mode, which would make sustaining a meaningful conversation - especially one with as many branches as this one has - even harder.
(That lack of understanding or of successfully devising a workaround doesn't seem to stop me from reading it, though what that may say about me is an unresolved question.)
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding
As I mentioned in the comments on another article recently: anyone who uses the term "member of Anonymous" seriously has failed to understand what Anonymous is.
No, trademark is not designed to "protect brand" in anything like that broad a sense.
Trademark is designed to prevent people from being tricked into thinking they're buying from you, when in fact they're buying from someone else.
Or that's the only purpose of trademark I've ever encountered a sufficiently satisfactory justification for, anyway. If you want to argue that trademark has another purpose, you'll have to explain why that purpose is justified.
Preventing someone from using a mark that you yourself no longer willingly use is not within the legitimate scope of trademark.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Espionage Act, and EFF time
I read him not as suggesting that you didn't sign the comment, but that what you should have signed it as is "QED", with the implication that you had just demonstrated something and so QED as a sign-off would have been appropriate.
I don't think I agree with the conclusion (that's not what signatures are for), but I think that interpretation makes more sense.
Nah. That would involve admitting that the rule changes were made in order to clear the way for the Sinclair merger, rather than being unrelated actions which simply had the effect of removing obstacles to that merger.
And paying to develop them yourself, rather than waiting for others to come up with them, has the benefit of making it more likely that you'll be able to to standardize on the way you think things should be done - which is probably the way you're already doing things - rather than have to change your practices to match the new standards.
Because it A: is intentionally trying to be offensive, and B: by the way its (presumably singular) poster posts much the same thing in nearly any thread where one might guess out_of_the_blue to have a relevant interest, is at least nearly as much trolling as anything out_of_the_blue posts.
(And C: is not actually true in any non-metaphorical sense, at least as far as any meaningful known evidence goes.)
Closer to the latter. It meant "the means of publication".
Today, although access to and use of literal physical printing presses would still be covered, the primary means of publication is *the Internet* - which would seem to imply that laws which impose "being kicked off the Internet" as a penalty for violation are in violation of the First Amendment.
Even offline publication, on non-industrial scales, has long since seen the printing press superseded by these computer-accessory devices called "printers".
Re: Re: Re: Re: "More than anyone in the presidency before him"
No, I certainly won't excuse that.
If you genuinely can't see nothing more important than one's own personal income - to the point that you can't think of things which obviously fall in that category without having someone else point them out to you, even with the hint of "damage to this country's budget and economy" as a starting point - then you would appear to be an exceedingly self-centered, narcissistic sociopath, and it's not worth trying to convince you of anything.
I suppose it was too much to hope that you might actually engage on an intellectually honest level.
(FWIW, I'm neither independently wealthy, nor do I have my expenses paid for by some outside entity, nor am I paid by Techdirt. In fact, IIRC I've paid Techdirt - in the form of donation - at least once, and I certainly expect to do so in the future.)
Re: Re: "More than anyone in the presidency before him"
Speaking as (to use your term) "an employed American", I don't appreciate "paying less tax" in regards to the tax cuts the current Republican Congress managed to push through (although I question how much Trump actually had to do with that).
Yes, to the extent that they actually do mean having more money in my pocket, that's nice - although I haven't noticed any change in my take-home pay which could be because of those tax cuts, nor do I expect to.
But my personal income is not the only part of the picture, and I think that those tax cuts do far more long-term damage tot his country's budget (and, thus, economy) than their benefit to my personal income can possibly justify.
Duh. Do I believe MS-13 is real? Yes, I saw it on Tucker Carlson, he showed a bunch of them.
That wasn't the question he asked. He asked whether you believe Trumps "claims of MS-13 no-go towns" - which I think would mean claims that there are towns in the US so overrun with MS-13 that it's not safe for some other group (maybe ordinary non-gang-member citizens as a whole, maybe just law enforcement) to go there.
Personally, I think it's unlikely that such towns exist, for the simple reason that there aren't enough MS-13 gang members in the US to make it possible without also making MS-13 a purely local problem.
Report after report cites the statistic of "no more than 10,000" MS-13 gang members in the country; while it's possible that those reports are all drawing on the same source, and that that source may be wrong, I'm inclined to stick with it until some plausibly-sourced competing numbers are presented.
Re: Re: A press fundamentally at odds with politicians
There's no such thing as a "Democrat partisan", for the simple reason that "Democrat" is not an adjective. By using it as one, you betray your right-wing bias.
On the post: Court Rejects Evidence From Warrantless Search Of Phone Six Years After The Gov't Seized It
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Trump Throws His FCC Under The Bus For Pointing Out Sinclair May Have Lied During Its Merger Sales Pitch
Re: Re: better representation of the American people
While true, that's irrelevant to the question of how good a mirror of America he is.
Part of the design of the system was to help make sure the people elected to high office were better than the population which elected them; if nothing else, that's part (if not all) of the purpose of the Electoral College.
If historically the system has generally been achieving that, but failed in the case of Trump, then Trump may be a better mirror of the country (past as well as present) even without having been elected by a majority of that country.
I don't necessarily agree with the argument (from/underlying) that article, mind. But it does make a certain amount of intuitive, or possibly poetic, sense.
On the post: WhatsApp Rightly Refuses Indian Government's Silly Demand To Break Encryption
Re:
I think you misread the sentence.
It doesn't say anyone regrets the crimes being committed.
It says that the fact that WhatsApp has not "adequately addressed" the cited factors is regretted.
Only with an additional layer of passive voice, and a dollop of structurally-complex sentence on top of that.
On the post: Trump Throws His FCC Under The Bus For Pointing Out Sinclair May Have Lied During Its Merger Sales Pitch
Re:
Reminds me of a recent opinion article entitled "Trump is America's Greatest President".
The thrust of the argument is that in all of Trump's faults, he perfectly represents many of America's faults - both current and historical - and so may be a better representation of the American people than any president before him.
On the post: Trump Throws His FCC Under The Bus For Pointing Out Sinclair May Have Lied During Its Merger Sales Pitch
Re: Re: Re: Supreme Court repeal or undo every law
How I think it came about is as a way of describing those factions' (then) attitudes towards expenditure of resources.
One faction took a position of "spend our resources freely, to produce positive results". This position came to be described as "liberal", in a sense of that word meaning "unstinting; without restraint", such as is used in "spread butter liberally over the toast".
The other faction took a position of "conserve our resources, so that we have them available for later use". This position came to be described as "conservative".
Everything else that's attached to those adjectives in a political sense came about later, by association. (And of course, to some extent, the factions later shifted away from the positions those adjectives originally described.)
I have zero historical evidence to use to back that up, but it's the only way I've been able to reconcile the political meanings of those words with their more ordinary-English meanings.
On the post: Senators Wyden & Rubio Ask Google And Amazon To Bring Back Domain Fronting
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Ron Wyden gets it
In a smaller-scale election system, such as one for school board or city council, there are fewer people who need to be persuaded, so it's easier to meet with enough of them and explain the matter well enough to convince them on an individual basis.
Once the system is in use at that lower level, you have something to point to as a reference, in trying to convince people at the next level up - county elections, for example.
Then as the system expands at lower levels, use that as support to argue for implementing it at the state level.
Then once enough states are using it, use that as support to implement it for federal elections - which, by the way ranked-preference voting functions, would probably require eliminating the electoral college. (And therefore would require a constitutional amendment.)
That way, even if the attempt to push it up the stack fails (whether permanently or temporarily) at some point in the process, in some part(s) of the country, you still have some of the benefits of ranked-preference voting within those smaller scopes.
On the post: No Matter What You Think Of Julian Assange, It Would Be Harmful For Press Freedoms For The US To Prosecute For Publishing Leaks
Re: within is one word
It's not "more justice" or "less justice"; it's "people from group X should get something as close to true justice as do people from group Y".
In many cases, it can be prohibitively difficult to completely guarantee that justice has actually been done. All we can practically do is come as close to that as possible. However, past a certain minimum, trying to come closer to a certainty of true justice requires disproportionately more effort.
The concept of "equal justice" is about making sure that society puts in the effort to come equally close to true justice regardless of who is involved, rather than putting in more effort in cases which involve the privileged or not-socially-disapproved-of.
On the post: Appeals Court Won't Yet Review Awful District Court Decision That Says Embedding Could Be Infringement
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Everyone agrees"?
In the last such conversation you and tp constructed (I hesitate to say "engaged in"), that was eventually mitigated by someone doing a "reply" with the comment box at the bottom rather than clicking "reply to this" on an actual comment.
For myself, I honestly don't understand how either of you can stand to continue the conversation with that one-word-per-line effect in place, or - if you don't actually see that effect - how you avoid it. I've tried editing the page source on my end (using Firebug, with an eye towards eventually Greasemonkey) to expand the available column width to postpone the problem, without satisfactory success; the only other way I can think of to avoid the problem would be to use "flat" rather than "threaded" comment-display mode, which would make sustaining a meaningful conversation - especially one with as many branches as this one has - even harder.
(That lack of understanding or of successfully devising a workaround doesn't seem to stop me from reading it, though what that may say about me is an unresolved question.)
On the post: New York State Threatens To Revoke Charter's Cable Franchise For Bullshitting
Re: Re: Re: I've actually had decent luck...
On the post: Appeals Court Won't Yet Review Awful District Court Decision That Says Embedding Could Be Infringement
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding
On the post: University Of Illinois Bullies Alum Out Of Making 'Make Illinois Great Again' Shirts Through Tiny Settlement
Re: Re: Re:
Trademark is designed to prevent people from being tricked into thinking they're buying from you, when in fact they're buying from someone else.
Or that's the only purpose of trademark I've ever encountered a sufficiently satisfactory justification for, anyway. If you want to argue that trademark has another purpose, you'll have to explain why that purpose is justified.
Preventing someone from using a mark that you yourself no longer willingly use is not within the legitimate scope of trademark.
On the post: No Matter What You Think Of Julian Assange, It Would Be Harmful For Press Freedoms For The US To Prosecute For Publishing Leaks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Espionage Act, and EFF time
I read him not as suggesting that you didn't sign the comment, but that what you should have signed it as is "QED", with the implication that you had just demonstrated something and so QED as a sign-off would have been appropriate.
I don't think I agree with the conclusion (that's not what signatures are for), but I think that interpretation makes more sense.
On the post: FCC Confirms Sinclair Misled Agency To Try And Get Its Megamerger Approved
Re:
On the post: Appeals Court Tells Lower Court To Consider If Standards 'Incorporated Into Law' Are Fair Use; Could Have Done More
Re: Re: View from Europe
On the post: Big News: Big Internet Platforms Making It Easy To Move Your Data Somewhere Else
Re: Re: Re:
(And C: is not actually true in any non-metaphorical sense, at least as far as any meaningful known evidence goes.)
On the post: If You're A Journalist Hiring Lawyers To Intimidate Publishers Into Killing Stories About Your Misdeeds, You're A Hypocrite
Re: Re: Re: Reading comprehension?
Today, although access to and use of literal physical printing presses would still be covered, the primary means of publication is *the Internet* - which would seem to imply that laws which impose "being kicked off the Internet" as a penalty for violation are in violation of the First Amendment.
Even offline publication, on non-industrial scales, has long since seen the printing press superseded by these computer-accessory devices called "printers".
On the post: Irish Lawmakers Realizing The GDPR's Consent Requirements Seem A Bit Onerous, Want To 'Infer' Consent
Re: Re: Voter registration is bollocks
And also so that you can choose which political party's members-only elections (i.e., primaries) you are permitted to participate in.
On the post: The View From Somewhere: The Press Needs To Be Anti-Partisan, Not Bi-Partisan
Re: Re: Re: Re: "More than anyone in the presidency before him"
If you genuinely can't see nothing more important than one's own personal income - to the point that you can't think of things which obviously fall in that category without having someone else point them out to you, even with the hint of "damage to this country's budget and economy" as a starting point - then you would appear to be an exceedingly self-centered, narcissistic sociopath, and it's not worth trying to convince you of anything.
I suppose it was too much to hope that you might actually engage on an intellectually honest level.
(FWIW, I'm neither independently wealthy, nor do I have my expenses paid for by some outside entity, nor am I paid by Techdirt. In fact, IIRC I've paid Techdirt - in the form of donation - at least once, and I certainly expect to do so in the future.)
On the post: The View From Somewhere: The Press Needs To Be Anti-Partisan, Not Bi-Partisan
Re: Re: "More than anyone in the presidency before him"
Speaking as (to use your term) "an employed American", I don't appreciate "paying less tax" in regards to the tax cuts the current Republican Congress managed to push through (although I question how much Trump actually had to do with that).
Yes, to the extent that they actually do mean having more money in my pocket, that's nice - although I haven't noticed any change in my take-home pay which could be because of those tax cuts, nor do I expect to.
But my personal income is not the only part of the picture, and I think that those tax cuts do far more long-term damage tot his country's budget (and, thus, economy) than their benefit to my personal income can possibly justify.
That wasn't the question he asked. He asked whether you believe Trumps "claims of MS-13 no-go towns" - which I think would mean claims that there are towns in the US so overrun with MS-13 that it's not safe for some other group (maybe ordinary non-gang-member citizens as a whole, maybe just law enforcement) to go there.
Personally, I think it's unlikely that such towns exist, for the simple reason that there aren't enough MS-13 gang members in the US to make it possible without also making MS-13 a purely local problem.
Report after report cites the statistic of "no more than 10,000" MS-13 gang members in the country; while it's possible that those reports are all drawing on the same source, and that that source may be wrong, I'm inclined to stick with it until some plausibly-sourced competing numbers are presented.
On the post: The View From Somewhere: The Press Needs To Be Anti-Partisan, Not Bi-Partisan
Re: Re: A press fundamentally at odds with politicians
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