There was a book out called "Liberal Facism" and it put into print the conservative misunderstanding/revisionism that the National Socialists of Germany were actually socialists (they've got the word right in the party name!). From there it is a short leap to treating all leftism as nascent totalitarianism, and treating true rightism (not that uniparty BS, mind you) as leading inevitably to a global Galt's Gulch.
There is a lot of that on/., and unfortunately in the hinterlands of MI, WI, PA, and OH.
"Presidents don't make tax law. They give a suggestion to Congress, and Congress does whatever the hell it wants."
CITATION NEEDED-Don't look in the Constitution, or the news, neither will be helpful.
The Republicans regularly threw hissy fits and shut down the government because Obama (and Clinton) wouldn't do whatever the hell they want.
I think I can be convinced, but offhand I'd say that there are a lot of local offices that should be winnable without corporate money. Third parties aren't doing much to get them.
CA has a top 2 ostensibly nonpartisan election system for many statewide offices. The goal is to weaken party power by stripping away the power of R & D primary voters: everybody votes for whomever they want in the "primary," and in the general election everybody votes for their preferred top-2 candidate.
I don't know how effective this will be. The political parties have not just corporate money, but flesh and blood partisans and donor networks. So even if my politics align Green, I may sit with the big-tent Ds to try to get money. I think this siphoning is more damaging to third parties than the state funded primary funding (which I had never heard of). CA's new rules have not had much time to work, so we'll see how powerful the parties are in the future.
Only 2 get to be on all 50 state ballots because only 2 got their shit together to do it.
The problem third parties have is that their most popular issues are regularly co-opted by the major parties, stripping off their support. There is nothing to be done about this, except run a better candidate—and good luck on that one.
Third parties also seem to only run for president, and that is a dumb way to engage people since few people want to enlist for certain defeat. I seldom see third party candidates advertise in my local races (or even nonpartisan races—to the extent you can tell what party they are from). Some have a chance at winning, or they would if they were really running as anything but a placeholder.
I suppose that words mean what we mean them to, and the dictionary is correct to include the imprecise definition number two. But that doesn't make the usage correct.
I did not bribe 7-11 $1 to give me a Big Gulp. My boss does not bribe me to come in to work. One does not bribe a horse to gallop faster with a whip. Magnetic fields do not bribe a compass needle. And Samsung did not attempt to bribe an unfortunate phone owner.
It isn't a matter of being smart enough to figure out the meaning; I think the intelligence that the GP petulantly called for was to recognize that words have shades of meaning and that "bribe" was not chosen for accuracy.
Using the word "bribe" to describe the behavior does equate "bribing" a public official with giving a private citizen money to keep their mouth shut. The headline used the word "bribe" to make it sound nefarious and get clicks. Samsung's preferred headline "Company supercompensates customer for minor glitch" would be equally misleading.
Regardless, the owner of the BBQed phone had no obligation to anyone to disclose or hide the video, so nobody could "bribe" him to violate such obligation.
The U.S certainly throws is weight around, and threw it more freely when Putin's former employer was still kicking. But Russia's current distemper has a lot less to do with the Bay of Pigs than Ukraine and Syria (and Estonia and Poland And Latvia and . . . )
Exclusivity is so beside the point that I'm not sure why you mentioned it. I would not be better disposed to a thief who claimed: "but after this I'll be a messenger!"
I concede that the Russians have long complained that we encourage western-style democracy in their former satellites, and there is nothing hypocritical about it. Nor for that matter is it hypocritical for Putin to attempt to install (by hook and crook) a poor man's Putin as President of the United States. But neither the thief nor the messenger is actually interested in advancing democracy, so the people calling them out on their agenda re neither hypocritical nor whining.
Mike Pence is blaming the Russians now too. And he may be in a better position to know, since Roger Stone (Trump campaign bigwig) has copped to coordinating with Wikileaks.
Trump is a menace, but happily the government cannot ban anyone from being president (except through impeachment) and I think the same goes for Senators, House Members and the Federal judiciary. The reason is that you do not want the current government to be able to easily render segments of the population déclassé.
This is just people calling for an investigation of something we already knew happened. It is less newsworthy than the daily doc dumps from Wikileaks—and to its credit Slashdot has refused to do posts for most of those announcements.
If it is something earthshaking, like Hillary calling voters "little SOBs" then great. If it is mildly amusing, like Trump thinking Bitbleach is an expensive chemical process, then wonderful. If it is people calling for an investigation into whether Hillary illegally dumped $100,000 worth of used bitbleach into the Potomic after using it to erase her "little SOB statement", then it isn't news for nerds and doesn't matter.
So I guess we Assange will have to release 2,000 emails every two or three days to keep this going until the election. Is Slashdot going to run one of these stories every two days?
According to the Arstechnica article, which I have not read, the company would edit ads to make sure they complied with the law/posting rules. This suggests that there was a sort of "coded" language which was in use. For example, in the context of Backpage "companionship" might be understood to mean sex. The prosecution has to prove all this beyond a reasonable doubt, but it doesn't look frivolous or like a shakedown. This is an ostensibly legit businessman with the resources to defend himself so a conspiracy/shakedown would need to include an cut-in too people to make the crime worthwhile (purely my guesstimate, of course).
Well facts is facts and that is all a jury is supposed to decide—I didn't mean to imply that a juror who didn't care about prostitution would vote Not Guilty because of it. But jurors are regular people and there is a sliding scale when it comes to the evidence required for things they care about and things they don't. There is actually less documentary evidence in the Lauria case than I would have thought, supporting your skepticism—but the case is 50 years old.... Results may vary in Texas. http://www.leagle.com/decision...
Literary critics want their work to be relevant to society at large or to their discipline, so they praise books that address contemporary issues or the issue of writing as writing. Science Fiction and Fantasy are seldom about contemporary issues and seldom concerned with dissecting the conventions of the novel. A Handmaid's Tale is socially relevant and the prose is great, so it has praise heaped upon it. Implied Spaces has interesting ideas with scant social relevance, invisible prose—and space ogres, so it won't get any attention in English class.
Add to this Sturgeons law, and the fact that genre conventions make a lot of non-crap genre fiction look like a paint-by-numbers exercise, and the answer to the question posed is (predictably) NO.
Who cares though? People read books they've heard about, and talk about books they've read. Nobody talks about who won the Booker Prize in 1977.
This would likely work to the CEO's advantage because most people really don't care about prostitution unless it is a streetwalker outside Chuckie Cheese.
There is an ooooold case where a guy who ran an answering service was convicted of pimping, and the appeals court overturned the conviction because there was nothing about his business that specifically turned on whether the phone calls were for legal or illegal purposes. This CEO has the same defense: I think of Backpage as being geared toward adult entertainment—but adult entertainment and prostitution are not synonymous so the DA will have quite a job to prove intent.
The media act like Trump's taxes should be open records because every candidate in living memory (except Romney) released their tax returns. It isn't really about how much Trump pays, it is about how he gets there. Does he claim a farming subsidy for his hobby ranch (while decrying such subsidies)? Does he donate to the Church of Two Corinthians? Does he owe Goldman Sachs half-a-billion dollars? All of this info would provide a window into how he runs his businesses and his life.
Based on what we know about his business and his life, it seems he is leveraged to the gills and needs lots of offshored and minimum-wage labor to keep his businesses afloat. Make of that what you will--since neither he nor wikileaks is going to release his tax returns.
There is really no upside to releasing them. If they don't have anything damaging, people will say she edited them before release. What damaging info they do contain will be used against her. There are apparently 50k emails, and I'm sure the worst is yet to come.
And no one seems to have noticed that Trump has completely owned the media for the weekend up to this point!
No, the news cycle has completely owned him, everybody noticed, and 14 sitting Republican senators have asked him to step aside. Further, Trump's 16-dimensional chess move stepped on the latest Wikileaks nothingburger (or the nothingburger was served to distract from Trumps implosion, I'm not sure of the timing).
It also deprived Trump of a public appearance/reconciliation with House Speaker Ryan.
I'm far more troubled by Trump's continuing belief in the guilt of 5 men exonerated of rape after years in prison. But he is a parade of deplorability and people can only focus on so much.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a lot of that on /., and unfortunately in the hinterlands of MI, WI, PA, and OH.
"Presidents don't make tax law. They give a suggestion to Congress, and Congress does whatever the hell it wants." CITATION NEEDED-Don't look in the Constitution, or the news, neither will be helpful. The Republicans regularly threw hissy fits and shut down the government because Obama (and Clinton) wouldn't do whatever the hell they want.
I think I can be convinced, but offhand I'd say that there are a lot of local offices that should be winnable without corporate money. Third parties aren't doing much to get them.
CA has a top 2 ostensibly nonpartisan election system for many statewide offices. The goal is to weaken party power by stripping away the power of R & D primary voters: everybody votes for whomever they want in the "primary," and in the general election everybody votes for their preferred top-2 candidate.
I don't know how effective this will be. The political parties have not just corporate money, but flesh and blood partisans and donor networks. So even if my politics align Green, I may sit with the big-tent Ds to try to get money. I think this siphoning is more damaging to third parties than the state funded primary funding (which I had never heard of). CA's new rules have not had much time to work, so we'll see how powerful the parties are in the future.
Only 2 get to be on all 50 state ballots because only 2 got their shit together to do it.
The problem third parties have is that their most popular issues are regularly co-opted by the major parties, stripping off their support. There is nothing to be done about this, except run a better candidate—and good luck on that one.
Third parties also seem to only run for president, and that is a dumb way to engage people since few people want to enlist for certain defeat. I seldom see third party candidates advertise in my local races (or even nonpartisan races—to the extent you can tell what party they are from). Some have a chance at winning, or they would if they were really running as anything but a placeholder.
I did not bribe 7-11 $1 to give me a Big Gulp. My boss does not bribe me to come in to work. One does not bribe a horse to gallop faster with a whip. Magnetic fields do not bribe a compass needle. And Samsung did not attempt to bribe an unfortunate phone owner.
It isn't a matter of being smart enough to figure out the meaning; I think the intelligence that the GP petulantly called for was to recognize that words have shades of meaning and that "bribe" was not chosen for accuracy.
Using the word "bribe" to describe the behavior does equate "bribing" a public official with giving a private citizen money to keep their mouth shut. The headline used the word "bribe" to make it sound nefarious and get clicks. Samsung's preferred headline "Company supercompensates customer for minor glitch" would be equally misleading.
Regardless, the owner of the BBQed phone had no obligation to anyone to disclose or hide the video, so nobody could "bribe" him to violate such obligation.
The U.S certainly throws is weight around, and threw it more freely when Putin's former employer was still kicking. But Russia's current distemper has a lot less to do with the Bay of Pigs than Ukraine and Syria (and Estonia and Poland And Latvia and . . . )
And Cuba is next! Good times.
Exclusivity is so beside the point that I'm not sure why you mentioned it. I would not be better disposed to a thief who claimed: "but after this I'll be a messenger!"
I concede that the Russians have long complained that we encourage western-style democracy in their former satellites, and there is nothing hypocritical about it. Nor for that matter is it hypocritical for Putin to attempt to install (by hook and crook) a poor man's Putin as President of the United States. But neither the thief nor the messenger is actually interested in advancing democracy, so the people calling them out on their agenda re neither hypocritical nor whining.
When people talk about the Russians, they are complaining about the thief, not the messenger.
Maybe Equador just decided to turn Assange over after seeing him tweet an implied blackmail threat.
Mike Pence is blaming the Russians now too. And he may be in a better position to know, since Roger Stone (Trump campaign bigwig) has copped to coordinating with Wikileaks.
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/...
Trump is a menace, but happily the government cannot ban anyone from being president (except through impeachment) and I think the same goes for Senators, House Members and the Federal judiciary. The reason is that you do not want the current government to be able to easily render segments of the population déclassé.
This is just people calling for an investigation of something we already knew happened. It is less newsworthy than the daily doc dumps from Wikileaks—and to its credit Slashdot has refused to do posts for most of those announcements.
If it is something earthshaking, like Hillary calling voters "little SOBs" then great. If it is mildly amusing, like Trump thinking Bitbleach is an expensive chemical process, then wonderful. If it is people calling for an investigation into whether Hillary illegally dumped $100,000 worth of used bitbleach into the Potomic after using it to erase her "little SOB statement", then it isn't news for nerds and doesn't matter.
I meant 50 ÷ 30. But thank god nobody reads the subjects.
So I guess we Assange will have to release 2,000 emails every two or three days to keep this going until the election. Is Slashdot going to run one of these stories every two days?
According to the Arstechnica article, which I have not read, the company would edit ads to make sure they complied with the law/posting rules. This suggests that there was a sort of "coded" language which was in use. For example, in the context of Backpage "companionship" might be understood to mean sex. The prosecution has to prove all this beyond a reasonable doubt, but it doesn't look frivolous or like a shakedown. This is an ostensibly legit businessman with the resources to defend himself so a conspiracy/shakedown would need to include an cut-in too people to make the crime worthwhile (purely my guesstimate, of course).
Ooops. He wasn't convicted, he was trying to get the case thrown out and lost the first time.
Well facts is facts and that is all a jury is supposed to decide—I didn't mean to imply that a juror who didn't care about prostitution would vote Not Guilty because of it. But jurors are regular people and there is a sliding scale when it comes to the evidence required for things they care about and things they don't. There is actually less documentary evidence in the Lauria case than I would have thought, supporting your skepticism—but the case is 50 years old.... Results may vary in Texas. http://www.leagle.com/decision...
OK, editing ads does it!
Literary critics want their work to be relevant to society at large or to their discipline, so they praise books that address contemporary issues or the issue of writing as writing. Science Fiction and Fantasy are seldom about contemporary issues and seldom concerned with dissecting the conventions of the novel. A Handmaid's Tale is socially relevant and the prose is great, so it has praise heaped upon it. Implied Spaces has interesting ideas with scant social relevance, invisible prose—and space ogres, so it won't get any attention in English class.
Add to this Sturgeons law, and the fact that genre conventions make a lot of non-crap genre fiction look like a paint-by-numbers exercise, and the answer to the question posed is (predictably) NO.
Who cares though? People read books they've heard about, and talk about books they've read. Nobody talks about who won the Booker Prize in 1977.
This would likely work to the CEO's advantage because most people really don't care about prostitution unless it is a streetwalker outside Chuckie Cheese.
There is an ooooold case where a guy who ran an answering service was convicted of pimping, and the appeals court overturned the conviction because there was nothing about his business that specifically turned on whether the phone calls were for legal or illegal purposes. This CEO has the same defense: I think of Backpage as being geared toward adult entertainment—but adult entertainment and prostitution are not synonymous so the DA will have quite a job to prove intent.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/stateroundup/bill-clintons-remark-on-release-of-tax-returns-is-a-bit-off/1244556
No source needed for the underwear bit, since it is too good not to be true.
The media act like Trump's taxes should be open records because every candidate in living memory (except Romney) released their tax returns. It isn't really about how much Trump pays, it is about how he gets there. Does he claim a farming subsidy for his hobby ranch (while decrying such subsidies)? Does he donate to the Church of Two Corinthians? Does he owe Goldman Sachs half-a-billion dollars? All of this info would provide a window into how he runs his businesses and his life.
Based on what we know about his business and his life, it seems he is leveraged to the gills and needs lots of offshored and minimum-wage labor to keep his businesses afloat. Make of that what you will--since neither he nor wikileaks is going to release his tax returns.
There is really no upside to releasing them. If they don't have anything damaging, people will say she edited them before release. What damaging info they do contain will be used against her. There are apparently 50k emails, and I'm sure the worst is yet to come.
And no one seems to have noticed that Trump has completely owned the media for the weekend up to this point!
No, the news cycle has completely owned him, everybody noticed, and 14 sitting Republican senators have asked him to step aside. Further, Trump's 16-dimensional chess move stepped on the latest Wikileaks nothingburger (or the nothingburger was served to distract from Trumps implosion, I'm not sure of the timing).
It also deprived Trump of a public appearance/reconciliation with House Speaker Ryan.
I'm far more troubled by Trump's continuing belief in the guilt of 5 men exonerated of rape after years in prison. But he is a parade of deplorability and people can only focus on so much.