I suspect his(?) position is that if it had been a private university rather than a (public-funds-dependent) public one, it wouldn't have been in a position for the withholding-of-funds pressure to be put on it in the first place, much less have felt the need to succumb to that pressure.
I'm not sure how independent-of-government-funding many private universities really are, but the idea doesn't seem as inherently backwards as you seem to have read it as being.
> My only hope is that the current sideshow gets people motivated enough to vote out enough Republicans in 2 > years to get some form of balance in Congress so he has to fight for the worse stuff.
My understanding is that this is extremely unlikely, regardless of what level of voter activism there is at that point, simply because of which Congressional districts are up for re-election in that cycle; IIRC (from a source I no longer recall), there is at most exactly one such district which is neither held by a Democrat nor a near-100%-"safe" district for the Republican incumbent.
It really looks as if the "permanent Republican majority" strategy/initiative, from a decade or two back, of focusing heavily on gerrymandering "safe" districts on a per-state basis may be paying off...
Re: Re: Re: Don't why even have even customs checkpoints. Every person in the world has a right to come here and stay.
Sadly, the Trump brigade (and I wish I had a better term for the group of people I'm thinking of than that, I just haven't been able to think of one) have already been pointing to that as support for the idea of _excluding_ some people.
Specifically, I've seen it argued that the qualifier "yearning to breathe free" means that only people who come here because they want freedom are covered by that exhortation - usually with the understanding, and often the explanation, that people who want to import the culture of the place they're coming from rather than adopting our culture ("of freedom") aren't coming here because they want freedom.
The people who argue this usually seem to be the same people raising the specter of sharia law being imposed in (parts of) the USA, and that gets pointed to as an example of importing restrictive native culture rather than adopting freedom-loving American culture.
Trump wasn't my first pick, its just that Hilary was my absolute last.
That's interesting, because Hillary Clinton wasn't my first pick - it's just that, out of those whose names were in the field (at any point over the entire campaign), Donald Trump was my absolute last.
After the election of Obama, I saw the writing on the wall about Hillary Clinton being the next Democratic nominee for the Presidency, and I decided that I would vote third-party rather than support her - despite the worse-than-useless nature of third-party votes in a first-past-the-post system - no matter how bad the opposing candidate was. (I had considered that for previous campaigns, and decided against it at the time.)
By the time the 2016 election came along, I was actually looking forward to voting for Hillary Clinton.
Part of that is because of shifts in her positions on things that matter to me, largely due to the influence of Bernie Sanders - but most of it is simply because it was already clear that Donald Trump is that bad.
Donald Trump almost singlehandedly converted me from disliking Hillary Clinton enough to throw away my Presidential-election vote by making a statement about the two-party system and the first-past-the-post voting model, to looking forward to voting for her just to help ensure that the abhorrent views he was espousing would not get into power.
He got into power anyway - largely, I suspect, because of the relentless decade-plus-long demonization campaign against Hillary Clinton - and now we're starting to see the consequences. (And so is he; word is that morale in the White House is low and falling, from the top on down. I rather expected that he would be gravely disappointed by the actual job of the Presidency, if he found himself in it.)
When only one forum (or set of forums) matters, preventing you from speaking there is effectively the same as preventing you from speaking at all. Thus, the term "silenced" is entirely appropriate.
In most cases, you have the option to seek or create alternative forums, and make those other forums matter - so "silenced" would not be an appropriate term in those cases. In this case, however, the only forum that matters is the Senate itself, because of its exclusive role in the decision at hand; there is only one forum where the decision will be made, and there is no realistic possibility of transferring that decision elsewhere.
Re: Re: Cheering one asshole when they hate on another...
Nonsense. Saying that everything is a shade of gray ignores all the wonderful blues, purples, oranges, and greens out there. The world is not a continuum between only two poles.
> Sorry, but Google is pretty much telling us that. They > actually say you can search a server, but the data may or > may not be there from the time you request the data till > the time you search it. They've hidden the pea, and they > are telling you they can't find it.
The difference here is that in a shell game, the pea is only moved when the operator intentionally moves it, and the only reason why the operator does so is to prevent the mark from correctly identifying the location.
In the case at hand, the data is moved around automatically all the time even without the operator's intervention, and this serves a valid purpose completely unrelated to preventing government from accessing that data.
> When every indication that if the owner of the pea asks > for it, I absolutely assure you that Google will present > it to them.
The difference here is that the owner of the data has the legal right to access that data regardless of jurisdiction, whereas the US government does not have the legal right to access data that is not within US jurisdiction.
It's not about whether Google can _find_ the data in order to present it; it's about whether the party asking for the data has the legal right to access the data in the location where it is stored.
The owner has that right no matter where the data is. (Unless the laws of the jurisdiction where the data happens to be disagree with that, but presumably Google would not set up a data center in such a jurisdiction.)
A government does not have that right unless the data is within the jurisdiction of that government.
I'd guess that the "jointly and severally" is meant to refer to the fact that Twitter is both a single entity (the company) and a collection of entities (the people who make up the company) - i.e., this is an attempt to pull in the actual people behind the decisions she's objecting to, in addition to the company whose name is on those decisions.
>Racism in the USA is as dead as disco. Now, lest you misunderstand, remember that disco is not 100% extinct. There > are still a few people around with horrible taste who think it's cool, but that doesn't mean it's not something that everyone knows is a relic of the past. And so it is also with > racism.
That's only true for a very narrow and limited definition of racism.
By my analysis, the core idea of racism is the idea that the ill-defined collection of characteristics which we label as "race" is an appropriate basis for categorization.
_That_ idea is still going strong - and as long as we _think_ in terms of those categories, we will never be free of racism.
Even if you think that definition is overly broad, there are plenty of other possible definitions in the range between that one and any definition by which racism is "something that everyone knows is a relic of the past".
The manufacturer can still sell to whomever they want. They've just contracted to only sell to this one company, for purposes of the US market.
If someone else wants to start manufacturing it, they aren't prohibited from doing so - it's just that they also have to get separate FDA approval for what they produce, unless they can prove that it's chemically identical to what the existing manufacturer produces.
That separate-FDA-approval requirement seems like the real root of the problem, in this and similar cases where all applicable patents are expired; it imposes a barrier to entering the market, thus restricting the number of potential competitors.
There's room to argue that it's necessary from a public-safety perspective, and I'm not entirely sure that that argument doesn't hold up - but the result is highly unfortunate and undesirable.
I imagine the reasoning is based on the assumption that they didn't get _access_ to the relevant systems, to be able to start creating the relevant accounts, until Inauguration Day - because before that point, Obama was still President, so those systems were still under his authority.
That assumption makes a certain amount of sense on a superficial level, but gets considerably shakier once you dig beneath the surface and start looking at practicalities rather than partisanship and abstracts.
I think the claim is that claiming that they're "using private email accounts for work related things" is premature, given the short time elapsed so far - i.e., that they haven't had time to transition to non-private accounts yet, and that it's not reasonable to ding someone during the transition period for not having finished the transition. (With the assumption apparently being that the transition period didn't begin until Inauguration Day, rather than beginning the day after Election Day.)
I'm not at all sure whether that claim holds water, either in terms of what their actions so far show about intent (or lack thereof) to switch away from the private accounts or in terms of whether the transition period is still ongoing, but it's at least not entirely illogical on its face.
Maybe I'm (badly) misreading the reports on this, but where is Trump threatening to place police departments under federal oversight?
What I've gotten from the reports on this, including this very article, is that Trump is threatening to crack down on those who accuse police officers of doing bad things, and to defend police officers against all attempts to rein them in.
Literally _nothing_ about that says "oversight" to me.
And it's entirely possible that crime _in Chicago_ is getting worse, and that special action _in Chicago_ is necessary to counter or combat that.
IIRC, there are a handful of major cities around the nation where crime (especially violent crime) has spiked significantly, enough so to make a visible change in the national averages - but that crime everywhere else is continuing to fall, or at worst is remaining level.
If Chicago is one of that handful, the anecdotes given would make perfect sense, while still not coming close to justifying action on a national level.
I don't think this is a case of "your privacy isn't violated unless you know you're being watched".
I think the logic here is that knowing where the cameras are will reveal who the FBI is looking at, that this in turn will reveal that the FBI thinks those people did something worth looking at, and that that revelation - in the absence of enough evidence to bring charges, and especially for people who didn't actually do it after all - is a violation of those people's privacy.
So by keeping the locations of the cameras the FBI is using to watch these people secret, the FBI is protecting these people from the public opprobrium which would come from its being known that the FBI suspects them of something.
...or something like that. The logic is twisted, but _might_ be considered internally sound.
(It doesn't make the FBI's own surveillance any less of a privacy violation, but this case wasn't about stopping that anyway - so the comparison is between privacy violation by both the FBI and the public, vs. privacy violation by only the FBI.)
Or else is presuming that it will have become great (again) by the time he wants to use the phrase he's currently attempting to trademark.
Given that he apparently trademarked "Make America Great Again" shortly after Obama's (second?) election victory, the idea that this is preparatory for the 2020 campaign is not at all implausible, and it would make perfect sense in that context.
On the post: Pro-Marijuana Student Organization Wins Court Case Over Using School Logos
Re: Re: Privatization
I'm not sure how independent-of-government-funding many private universities really are, but the idea doesn't seem as inherently backwards as you seem to have read it as being.
On the post: Trump Tops Obama, Hands Over Full Torture Report To Court Previous Administration Refused To
Re: Re: Re:
> years to get some form of balance in Congress so he has to fight for the worse stuff.
My understanding is that this is extremely unlikely, regardless of what level of voter activism there is at that point, simply because of which Congressional districts are up for re-election in that cycle; IIRC (from a source I no longer recall), there is at most exactly one such district which is neither held by a Democrat nor a near-100%-"safe" district for the Republican incumbent.
It really looks as if the "permanent Republican majority" strategy/initiative, from a decade or two back, of focusing heavily on gerrymandering "safe" districts on a per-state basis may be paying off...
On the post: Court Unanimously Keeps Lower Court's Injunction Against Trump's Immigration Order In Place
Re: Re: Re: Don't why even have even customs checkpoints. Every person in the world has a right to come here and stay.
Specifically, I've seen it argued that the qualifier "yearning to breathe free" means that only people who come here because they want freedom are covered by that exhortation - usually with the understanding, and often the explanation, that people who want to import the culture of the place they're coming from rather than adopting our culture ("of freedom") aren't coming here because they want freedom.
The people who argue this usually seem to be the same people raising the specter of sharia law being imposed in (parts of) the USA, and that gets pointed to as an example of importing restrictive native culture rather than adopting freedom-loving American culture.
On the post: President Trump's White House Reaching New Lows In Accountability And Transparency
Re: Re: Re: Re: 10 steps to Fascism..
That's interesting, because Hillary Clinton wasn't my first pick - it's just that, out of those whose names were in the field (at any point over the entire campaign), Donald Trump was my absolute last.
After the election of Obama, I saw the writing on the wall about Hillary Clinton being the next Democratic nominee for the Presidency, and I decided that I would vote third-party rather than support her - despite the worse-than-useless nature of third-party votes in a first-past-the-post system - no matter how bad the opposing candidate was. (I had considered that for previous campaigns, and decided against it at the time.)
By the time the 2016 election came along, I was actually looking forward to voting for Hillary Clinton.
Part of that is because of shifts in her positions on things that matter to me, largely due to the influence of Bernie Sanders - but most of it is simply because it was already clear that Donald Trump is that bad.
Donald Trump almost singlehandedly converted me from disliking Hillary Clinton enough to throw away my Presidential-election vote by making a statement about the two-party system and the first-past-the-post voting model, to looking forward to voting for her just to help ensure that the abhorrent views he was espousing would not get into power.
He got into power anyway - largely, I suspect, because of the relentless decade-plus-long demonization campaign against Hillary Clinton - and now we're starting to see the consequences. (And so is he; word is that morale in the White House is low and falling, from the top on down. I rather expected that he would be gravely disappointed by the actual job of the Presidency, if he found himself in it.)
On the post: The Biggest Advocates For An Imperial Executive Branch Are Suddenly Freaking Out Over Trump
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: FBI Changes FOIA Policies, Tries To Route More Requesters To Fax Machines, Mailboxes
Re: So. It has come to this.
On the post: GOP Senate Streisands Elizabeth Warren And Coretta King In Attempt To Silence Her
Re: Re:
In most cases, you have the option to seek or create alternative forums, and make those other forums matter - so "silenced" would not be an appropriate term in those cases. In this case, however, the only forum that matters is the Senate itself, because of its exclusive role in the decision at hand; there is only one forum where the decision will be made, and there is no realistic possibility of transferring that decision elsewhere.
On the post: New FCC Boss Decides It's Cool If Phone Monopolies Want To Rip Off Inmate Families
Re:
On the post: San Francisco Police Department Kicks FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force To The Curb
Re: Re: Cheering one asshole when they hate on another...
On the post: Pennsylvania Court Shrugs Off Microsoft Decision; Says Google Must Turn Over Emails Stored At Overseas Data Centers
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Filing Cabinets
> actually say you can search a server, but the data may or
> may not be there from the time you request the data till
> the time you search it. They've hidden the pea, and they
> are telling you they can't find it.
The difference here is that in a shell game, the pea is only moved when the operator intentionally moves it, and the only reason why the operator does so is to prevent the mark from correctly identifying the location.
In the case at hand, the data is moved around automatically all the time even without the operator's intervention, and this serves a valid purpose completely unrelated to preventing government from accessing that data.
> When every indication that if the owner of the pea asks
> for it, I absolutely assure you that Google will present
> it to them.
The difference here is that the owner of the data has the legal right to access that data regardless of jurisdiction, whereas the US government does not have the legal right to access data that is not within US jurisdiction.
It's not about whether Google can _find_ the data in order to present it; it's about whether the party asking for the data has the legal right to access the data in the location where it is stored.
The owner has that right no matter where the data is. (Unless the laws of the jurisdiction where the data happens to be disagree with that, but presumably Google would not set up a data center in such a jurisdiction.)
A government does not have that right unless the data is within the jurisdiction of that government.
On the post: Recent Law School Grad Sues Twitter Because Someone Made A Parody Twitter Account
Re:
On the post: Our Humanity
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
> are still a few people around with horrible taste who think it's cool, but that doesn't mean it's not something that everyone knows is a relic of the past. And so it is also with
> racism.
That's only true for a very narrow and limited definition of racism.
By my analysis, the core idea of racism is the idea that the ill-defined collection of characteristics which we label as "race" is an appropriate basis for categorization.
_That_ idea is still going strong - and as long as we _think_ in terms of those categories, we will never be free of racism.
Even if you think that definition is overly broad, there are plenty of other possible definitions in the range between that one and any definition by which racism is "something that everyone knows is a relic of the past".
On the post: Turing Pharma Boss Martin Shkreli Defends Massive Price Increase As A Good Thing For Patients
Re: Distirubution Rights -- IANAL
If someone else wants to start manufacturing it, they aren't prohibited from doing so - it's just that they also have to get separate FDA approval for what they produce, unless they can prove that it's chemically identical to what the existing manufacturer produces.
That separate-FDA-approval requirement seems like the real root of the problem, in this and similar cases where all applicable patents are expired; it imposes a barrier to entering the market, thus restricting the number of potential competitors.
There's room to argue that it's necessary from a public-safety perspective, and I'm not entirely sure that that argument doesn't hold up - but the result is highly unfortunate and undesirable.
On the post: Lock Them Up! Trump Staff Still Using Private Republican National Committee Email Accounts
Re: Re: Re: Re:
That assumption makes a certain amount of sense on a superficial level, but gets considerably shakier once you dig beneath the surface and start looking at practicalities rather than partisanship and abstracts.
On the post: Lock Them Up! Trump Staff Still Using Private Republican National Committee Email Accounts
Re: Re:
I'm not at all sure whether that claim holds water, either in terms of what their actions so far show about intent (or lack thereof) to switch away from the private accounts or in terms of whether the transition period is still ongoing, but it's at least not entirely illogical on its face.
On the post: Do You Want A Police State? Because This Is How You Get A Police State
Re: Re:
Maybe I'm (badly) misreading the reports on this, but where is Trump threatening to place police departments under federal oversight?
What I've gotten from the reports on this, including this very article, is that Trump is threatening to crack down on those who accuse police officers of doing bad things, and to defend police officers against all attempts to rein them in.
Literally _nothing_ about that says "oversight" to me.
On the post: Do You Want A Police State? Because This Is How You Get A Police State
Re: Out of site out of mind
IIRC, there are a handful of major cities around the nation where crime (especially violent crime) has spiked significantly, enough so to make a visible change in the national averages - but that crime everywhere else is continuing to fall, or at worst is remaining level.
If Chicago is one of that handful, the anecdotes given would make perfect sense, while still not coming close to justifying action on a national level.
On the post: Court Says Location Of FBI's Utility Pole-Piggybacking Surveillance Cameras Can Remain Secret
Re: Gotta love the classics
I think the logic here is that knowing where the cameras are will reveal who the FBI is looking at, that this in turn will reveal that the FBI thinks those people did something worth looking at, and that that revelation - in the absence of enough evidence to bring charges, and especially for people who didn't actually do it after all - is a violation of those people's privacy.
So by keeping the locations of the cameras the FBI is using to watch these people secret, the FBI is protecting these people from the public opprobrium which would come from its being known that the FBI suspects them of something.
...or something like that. The logic is twisted, but _might_ be considered internally sound.
(It doesn't make the FBI's own surveillance any less of a privacy violation, but this case wasn't about stopping that anyway - so the comparison is between privacy violation by both the FBI and the public, vs. privacy violation by only the FBI.)
On the post: Trump Campaign Wants To Trademark 'Keep America Great'
Re: Re: pre-emptive sloganeering
Given that he apparently trademarked "Make America Great Again" shortly after Obama's (second?) election victory, the idea that this is preparatory for the 2020 campaign is not at all implausible, and it would make perfect sense in that context.
On the post: Software Copyright Litigation After Oracle v. Google
Re: Re: Re: And what about Alice?
The original, with "Who the Hell":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os3mzI8LKBQ
My preferred version, with "Who the Fuck", although this instance may be truncated:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BAzXh7Etxo
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