Any numbers to back up your hand-waving about the CO2 from the volcano? I know cars alone aren't the biggest source of greenhouse gasses but a while back I thought I'd read they were responsible for over 20%.
If for the sake of argument you grant that global warming is a serious long term problem and the switch to electric cars would make a dent in that problem, I'm making the point that the switch to electric cars is going to happen anyway. The advantages are too significant for it to not happen. So this wouldn't have to be some horrible inefficient free market destroying thing. Yes, it would be government interference in the free market but this is the sort of situation that even libertarians, the sane and reasonable libertarians, should agree that interference is preferable. We can wait 30-100 years and the electric car revolution will happen. Gradually, very gradually. And at the end of it, we'd all benefit from significantly lower transportation costs because once you get reasonable cost/performance out of your batteries, electric really does kick the crap out of ICE.
Or (in a perfect world) we could turn it into a political project and patriotic+green social movement and I think in less than a decade new electric cars could be outselling new gas cars. (Of course It would take another decade or two for the majority of used gasoline cars to disappear.) The data I've seen (not looked at in great detail) implies those missing decades would make a difference. And my point is it wouldn't just be ecological; not only that, but we'd benefit from the reduction in transportation costs much sooner.
To clarify, I am not really in favor of taxing gasoline car or subsidizing electric cars at the consumer level; I think this is horribly inefficient and ends up being just a symbolic gesture. I'm in favor of tech and supply improvements (e.g. perhaps getting a megascale lithium refinery built, funding research into nanowire batteries, getting enough people and companies to invest in Tesla so they could rapidly expand production.) I think the electric car will ultimately sell itself, but sitting back and letting the unguided free market work is magic is going to take quite a few decades.
I actually rather doubt that the volcano would add up that much--a few hundred million cars is quite a lot of CO2, is it not? Let's say the average exhaust pipe is 2 inches in diameter and there are 100 million cars being driven every day. According to the back of my napkin, that's the equivalent of a single exhaust pipe ~950 feet in diameter. So imagine an exhaust pipe three football fields wide pumping out exhaust gasses at the same rate that a typical car does. Imagine it does that for a year. Seems to me that be more than a single volcano eruption, but I don't know. I need to find a reliable, unbiased place that gives best estimates for not just projected temp changes but the projected effects of removing all cars, removing all coal plants, etc. so these debates can go smoother.
I should have been more clear that I don't let Musk/Tesla leadership off the hook by ANY means, but it was a long enough post as it was. (And Musk criticism is usually heavily modded down around here.)
The economy of batteries is the bottleneck and also the big question mark... I don't know what the bottom line is there. Prices have fallen significantly more than I would've expected, so future Li Ion battery prices might depend entirely on lithium mining and refining. I think I heard most of the word's lithium comes from a desert in Chile or something? Too lazy to look it up. But it MIGHT be that we don't *need* a battery revolution; what we have now might be fine, we just need for the economies of scale to kick in.... we may just need someone to build a huge enough mining/refining operation. The other (non-mutually exclusive) option is tech like nanowire that's supposed to be ZOMG amazing but has been vaporware for decades.
But either way, it's something that could benefit from a huge hype campaign. And I blame Musk, Tesla leadership, the politicization of Tesla (and the accompanying lack of rah rah rah patriotic politicization), etc.
The issue of batteries, and any other electric car hiccups, are things that could likely be solved with major business partnerships, major investment based on perceived mass demand, governmental involvement (grants to refine nanowire tech, whatever). I think best case scenario, we could have made waves and get people buying more new electric than gas cars in a matter of perhaps 10 years. (But the way things are going now, I can't imagine electric outselling gasoline within the next 30 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if it takes more than 50.) Re: global warming, those decades could make a difference! And as I said in my original post, there are a bunch of other economic benefits that electric cars should bring, particularly in a country like America with its suburban sprawl.
Tesla isn't what it could be; that's really all I was saying. The ingredients are all there for it, but no one is pulling really hard for it to be revolutionary or patriotic or inspiring and that's a HUGE shame. Musk pisses me off to no end because he pisses away his free media spotlight time on his least-important ideas (Hyperloop, underground roads, and yes SpaceX to be pretty non-revolutionary in the big picture.)
I didn't "blame" anybody. I said that liberals were "stupid" for doing something counterproductive.
Liberals have the power to change how they do things and perhaps win battles instead of losing them. The preaching to the choir is so dull, so pointless. The lines can be redrawn; parties can be redefined and red states can flicker blue (or maybe another color entirely) if you catch people off guard and hit them with something they weren't expecting to hear.
I don't care who is more to "blame", and neither does mother nature. Only "productive" and "counterproductive" matter in the end.
It's surreal how bad and stupid political polarization has become, that we could have right wingers shunning and harassing Teslas and Tesla owners to make an anti-Democrat statement. It's not about being anti-science; it's just anti-Democrat, anti-left.
This is an AMERICAN car company that's spearheading this revolution. I happen to think that Elon Musk is annoyingly overrated, but I can't deny that he is basically the embodiment of every single pro-entrepreneur, pro-privatization, American dream cliche. American jobs. American pride. He's the same guy sending our satellites into space now; so why can't someone just drape an American flag over his shoulders and run with it?
I say this through grit teeth... personally, the hero worship of this guy really gets under my skin, sometimes it's even worse than Jobs, but that's just a pet peeve... from the standpoint of ushering in this revolution why aren't they calling Musk the next Henry Ford? It's in America's best interest for him to be leading this charge.
And yes, I said revolution. This SHOULD be a big deal, far exceeding its ecological implications. This really should be the biggest thing to happen to cars since the Model T. If battery technology can significantly improve and/or existing batteries come down in price a lot more, electric cars would offer huge advantages over the vast majority of diesel and gasoline vehicles on the road today. Electric cars should be significantly cheaper to build and maintain: lower operating temps, simple transmission, just fewer moving parts across the board.... I wouldn't be so surprised if in fifty years time we had electric cars capable of going millions of miles without needing a total rebuild.
And Tesla is also leading the charge with the other major automobile revolution--autopilot--which some day is going to lead to safer and much more efficient (i.e. fast) roads Which is a really big deal in a country as sprawling as America.
Also: the less the world relies on oil, the less money and power OPEC has. Aren't there still millions of voters out there who remember the oil crisis in the 70s? Is no one concerned about the prospect of the Salafi government in Saudi Arabia pulling even more money out of the ground? I for one wouldn't shed a tear if the wealth and power of the OPEC countries diminished. A couple years back even ISIS was managing to get their hands on oil money for a while there. Why can't oil independence be spun as a national security issue? So-called "Islamophobia" harnessed for a good cause, you might say.
But no... this would-be pride of American capitalism and security and optimistic futurism is instead just another pawn in the cultural proxy war.
Instead of something positive and bipartisan-y, liberals invariably lead with the negatives: First, by making some lazy and crazy comments implying human extinction (Don't go wildly exaggerating something that ordinary people already have a tough time perceiving! Sure, many species will go extinct, maybe some cities go underwater and we may have to switch crops and maybe worst case we lose a lot of seafood, but we're obviously never going to see mass starvation and human extinction unless something really far-fetched happens, like an extreme version of the clathrate gun effect or some other deadly positive feedback loop that for some reason was never triggered in past epochs.)
Second: the liberals will whine about America's sins and the sins of those running her. I know it's depressing, I know it is, but I really don't give a shit what Trump said. I don't need to see dozens upon dozens of posts trying to single out American carbon emissions as being particularly bad. I don't care if that's true or not; nobody needs to see that shit. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual solutions. Nobody wants to hear you whine abou
Again, I not only read it but I was the one who submitted it (along with an associated response video) to slashdot two years ago. You can see my user name attached to that article. It received 920 comments, none of which provided any evidence to the contrary, whereas plenty of slashdotters looked at the same articles and watched the same videos and came to the same conclusions I did.
It is common knowledge that Youtube's policies changed as a direct result of this incident. But please, don't let that stand in the way of your own brainless shitposting.
Specifically--and I just remembered this--one of the reporters bragged about it with additional details on Twitter. Just remembered that. He was really quite candid in his comments and overall gung-ho attitude. There are also a couple other relevant WSJ articles around the same time period that *are* paywalled that I have saved somewhere. I don't remember what was said where, exactly. Other people have it all cataloged, I'm sure. Two years ago plenty of other slashdotters checked the links and chimed in with their astonishment and agreement. If you cared to check.
Meh. It doesn't matter, though. None of it does. Just running low on drugs tonight and accidentally started thinking too much again. Blinked and two years slipped by. I mean it is pretty funny on one level... how we can be in exactly the same place, how Trump can say the mainstream media was fake news and that's reason enough for everyone to believe that anyone who calls out the mainstream media on anything is a lying conspiracy nut. Governance by reverse psychology. Although the evidence is all right there, right there in the open for anyone to pick up and put together with only a very very small amount of deduction required, there's no way of actually getting any significant fraction of people to go to all that trouble.
Ha. If you felt like checking, you might notice that I'm the submitter of that the story from two years ago with 920 comments. No worries; I know reading is hard. Like I told the other guy, I guess we've gone from RTFA to RTFS to RTFP now. I even commented in the post that shorter would've been better but I just don't know how to make it short any more, not when the ignorance is so deep and the nonsensical propaganda replies are so well-rehearsed.
It's been well over a year since I read that stuff but read it I did. (I didn't include *all* of the relevant links because I figured the post would probably be little-noticed. I didn't expect to get mistaken for a spam bot, though, I must admit.) The Wall Street Journal was all very open about this, the reporters all bragging about what they'd done. Youtube's crackdown happened immediately afterwards and was also very public and open about it. For those who were paying attention, it was and is common knowledge that this event was one of the major catalysts for Youtube's policy shifts. But you can go on and believe it's a conspiracy theory if you must. I did use a lot of words after all. All the conspiracy nuts like words, therefore, etc.
Good to know even 5 and 6 digit slashdotters don't fucking read what they're replying to any more. It was the next logical step in the progression-RTFA, RTFS, now RTFP. If you care to check the article I linked to, you'll see that I was the submitter of that story from 2 years ago.
I even commented in the post that the length was a negative, but if I didn't cover several of those points, it was just inviting the same tired shitty anti-communist replies that usually get modded up to +5.
I don't have the time or energy to craft a short-enough-to-be-easily-readable-but-still-pertinent post these days. Brevity is hard when you know the morons are right around the corner with their non-sequiturs unholstered.
Remember that this did not just randomly or organically happen. This was openly orchestrated. And everyone let it happen because they were too busy tweeting about Trump's moronic sound byte of the day to care.
Never forget how the Wall Street Journal freely admitted that they hired three people to spend weeks mining and deceptively editing PewDiePie's content, then sent it directly to Disney for the express purpose of starting a controversy where none existed. Never forget that mainstream media organizations like Wired and The Independent (along with a few "new media" news organizations, such as The Young Turks) parroted this story uncritically and did not truthfully describe the video in question (which showed a closeup of PewDiePie's face looking shocked and then saddened after the words "Death to Jews" actually appeared on the screen). Never forget that none of them followed up to tell their readers that the Wall Street Journal not only edited his videos to remove all of the context indicating that it was comedic satire but even edited a shot of him pointing at something off-screen and implied that it was a Nazi salute.
Like I said time and time again when this happened two years ago, this is not about "forcing" Youtube or other corporations to host content, though partisans will always still seek to end the conversation by saying "free market at work; nothing to see here." Corporations like the Wall Street Journal were able to do this by leveraging the fears of advertisers, fears that are ultimately rooted in the desires and actions of consumers like you and me. We aren't just a part of this ecosystem; we are its keystone species.
So please never forget that this was not a natural or organic or grassroots thing that happened. Never forget that controversy was artificial, was intentionally created and cultivated by large corporations for cynical purposes. Never the day the tail wagged the dog and then bragged about doing it. Understand that this is NOT a shining example of free market supply and demand harmony. Understand how viewers and content producers were ignored in favor of what old media wanted to see happen.
This is not a fluid or free market sort of thing. This is monolithic and dictatorial. There is no fine-grained option (from my understanding) that allows individual advertisers to opt-in to specific videos that Youtube has deemed not politically correct enough, not vapid and conventional enough. And nobody (be they advertiser or producer or viewer) has the clout to roll their own competitor to Youtube. Anyone who doubts this doesn't understand how the Millennials, how these "Digital Natives" have grown up to think about technology. For them, Youtube IS online video (other than porn) and there is very little incentive for them to poke their heads outside of that walled garden.
Once again, there will be replies accusing me of being not just Trump apologist but a paid troll. I wish I didn't have to say thi
Translation: Democrats still refuse to admit that they have a problem getting their own party members to give a shit about them, insist that fake news is the only possible explanation for Trump. (Despite numbers clearly showing that it was a lack of turnout among Ds that screwed Hillary, not a surge in the Pizzagate swing vote.)
Oh yes, and I'm still interested in knowing what Facebook plans to do the next time the New York Times, The Guardian, and others do something like fraudulently insert the words "without consent" in their paraphrase of the contents of the Pussygate tape while excluding the words "and they let you do it." If the answer is 'nothing', where exactly is the line going to be drawn?
(Blah blah blah, anti-Trump disclaimer, Republicans are worse in almost all respects than Democrats, etc.)
Witness the modern American liberal, supporting centrist masochistic dogshit just because the Republicans hate it, instead of supporting something that would actually help workers.
We live in a capitalistic society. You cannot just randomly hurt corporations and expect workers to automatically benefit. Taxation and redistribution should in theory be a more left-wing thing to support, but no, since it would benefit the corporations as well (vs. the minimum wage status quo), we can't have that. Better that all should suffer.
Did you miss the part where I am in favor of DIRECT GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE TO WORKERS including, but not limited to, wage subsidy/reverse income tax and government-provided universal health care (more or less)?
Corporate personhood should be abolished, corporate political contributions outlawed, etc. That's all well and good. All that happy horseshit? I'm for it. What I'm against is punishing corporations for hiring American workers. That's not pro-corporate; that's anti-masochism.
We can't let corner cases like that dictate our entire economic policy. He already has incentives in the form of OSHA and employee lawsuits. If it turns out those aren't enough, well, we can enhance the power of either or both of those things.
Yeah, like the other person said, whatever the situation you were in, there was clearly a lot more to it thay you being a contractor situation. Some weird shell company game they were playing for tax reasons, employee leasing, head hunting fees... I don't know exactly what it was you saw, but there was clearly more to it than just you being a contractor.
In one of my first jobs, our company transitioned us all from employees to contractors, we all received an immediate 33% pay rise and I was told that the company was still paying less per employee. I don't think there are any hidden fees involved in hiring contractors unless something else is going on. And yeah, a good old boy scheme of one sort or another is a pretty good starting assumption.
Yes, there's a certain degree of sense in having employers share the cost of injuries so that they'll be motivated to build safer workplaces with safer practices. But I'm not sure that forcing them to pay for worker's comp is a particularly efficient way to do that. Insurance companies do in theory offer lower rates if you can prove you're safer than average but after shopping for car and homeowners insurance, I've noticed that this is often an unreliable, haphazard, inefficient method of interest alignment. I think OSHA plus lawsuits are probably good enough. I don't know precisely how the system is set up now, but we could even allow the worker's comp insurance provider (with a premium paid for by the government, let's say) to sue the employer if their negligence caused a costly injury. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is basically how no-fault car insurance works... your insurance company pays to fix shit up immediately, but they reserve the right to sue the other person on your behalf to recoup their costs (or you can sue yourself, but in the insurance contract they reserve the right to deduct their expenses from any damages you win.)
So yeah, interest alignment for safe workplaces is all well and good but I think there are plenty of ways to do that without inflating the cost of hiring additional employees. Companies should want to hire more employees. There are many, many ways to help workers without discouraging employers from hiring them in the first place. And if we ever do manage to significantly raise the demand for labor, suddenly all kinds of other problems could begin to solve themselves, like the trade deficit or immigration woes. (Well perhaps not solved, but at least leftists could point a little more confidently to figures showing clear benefits of increased immigration.)
Falling production costs for food, consumer goods and a lot of other stuff over the past 50+ years has masked a lot of stuff. A lot of those countries that are "working" so wonderfully have massive unemployment, particularly in the younger generations. And if we look at specifics, it's fairly obvious that third party health insurance (such as our system or Switzerland) has not worked better.
The damage being done is gradual and long term, but it's staring us in the face for anyone who cares to look for it. Employers can't drop employees overnight after a minimum wage or health insurance cost hike, but more and more effort is being devoted to fleshing out the alternatives to hiring Americans (or Europeans) directly as employees. This shouldn't be a controversial thing to say. This is Economics 101 and the signs are all around us that this is happening. Employment for life used to be a thing in a lot of countries. Now it isn't. Youth unemployment of over 40% in Western Europe used to be (I think) rather unthinkable. Now, it isn't.
Just because there aren't riots in the streets doesn't mean we should continue to allow the damage to accrue. Support sanity. Support real compromises that don't pit American employers and American employees directly against each other. It's not less capitalist; it's MORE capitalistic to let the government handle the cost directly. We do have to be careful that taxes don't rise so much as to scare companies overseas but I can't see how a centralized approach could possibly cost more in corporate taxes than they're already being forced to pay out of pocket now.
Who woulda thought that if you impose multiple and ever-increasing burdens on employers, that they'll start to hire fewer people as employees?
I'm left-leaning in a hell of a lot of ways but no one should have supported these horrible centrist compromises that both the Democrats and the Republicans (moreso the Ds in recent years), have been led into in these past few years. Worker's comp, heath insurance, minimum wage, and all other things that society needs to function better, so its work force can remain kinda healthy and agile and productive, should be provided by... SOCIETY. By the government. Directly. (In the case of minimum wage, I'd be in favor of reverse income tax subsidy approach, not a universal basic income.) Not by employers. Asking employers to pay for it directly is the most anti-capitalistic 'compromise' imaginable, partially due to inefficiencies but mostly because fails to ensure or preserve the welfare of workers. Because employers will always be trying to figure out ways that they can dodge it, starting with the obvious solution of hiring fewer employees. If it's not contractors, it'll be outsourcing. Or robots. Or spinning off and moving entire sections overseas where there are shit labor laws. It'll always be something.
None of this is a capitalist-socialist compromise, none of it is centrist, none of it is moderate. In practice, it is the worst of capitalism wedded to the worst of government meddling and barrier-imposing. If you consider yourself a leftist and you support stuff like huge minimum wage hikes and forcing employers to buy insurance for employees please, for fuck's sake... just stop it.
Weirdly enough I haven't grown bored of this quite yet.
I am sorry that you don't understand what it means to give someone rope to hang themselves. Maybe English isn't your first language. You see, it means to not only be passive but to even tacitly encourage someone forward, going with a strategy of letting your opponent damage themselves (in this case with a strong taking the high road implication.) Which is bedrock of everything I've said, going back to the original point about unhealthy obsessions with political correctness.
Obama was passive, and you agreed with me. I explained WHY, and had written proof that this mind-rotting philosophy was present in the D party and observed that he said it in his own words if you listened to his verbal statements after Trump was nominated. You not only didn't responded to the argument, you haven't even bothered explaining the passiveness that you yourself agreed with.
Obama did it for eight years, and it more or less backfired for eight years. In retrospect, it even turned out to be mistake for him to intentionally milk the birther thing, though at the time I thought it was brilliant of him. People don't need condescension, however well deserved; they need results.
There only error here is that you seem to think that agreeing with half of my argument somehow invalidates the other half. Obama was passive and image-obsessed for 8 years. He and the Ds most clearly revealed the strategic thinking behind this passiveness in their reaction to Trump.
Again, just Trumping your blessed little heart out. Go little Trumpeteer, go! Don't bother actually addressing the real black and white facts you were given or assert an alternate explanation/interpretation of Obama's behavior and statements or anything. This is definitely you winning the argument here, you just stubbornly saying "Nuh-uh!". This is a great and noble victory.
Again, swinging wildly at nothing. The paper I linked clearly describes a strategy of giving someone extra rope so that they can hang themselves. I'm not going to explain common English idioms to you or do any more Googling for you showing how Obama's policies and attitudes and quotes were entirely in line with that paper produced by the Democratic Party establishment.
Your refusal to admit to simple facts is quite Trumplike.
Then why the hell did he nominate a moderate like Merrick Garland and then refuse to raise hell after the Republicans refused to do their job? You characterize that as some sort of a proactive fight, do you?
What of compromises offered to the Republicans in 2011 (and his refusal to push back with tactics like the trillion dollar coin threat after they began to seriously threaten to actually default on the debt)? What of unwillingness to be proactive and open about his support gay marriage (Biden had to drag him into it with his big mouth), his refusal (like Hillary) to consider used Trump's election to be used as a springboard for electoral college reform (or conceivably even a revolt), etc. I don't know what universe you come from but our Obama was not a fighter; he opted at all times to try for compromises and then quietly complain when the Republicans spat in his face. He was not proactive; he was reactive and image-oriented instead of results-oriented. His message: All we need to do is show we're better people than the Rs and we'll win!
Again, this is isn't a theory; it's what he actually said. Go listen to his reaction to Trumps' nomination; he is clearly saying that nothing needs to be done, the Republicans are beyond the pale, the battle is already won, all we need to do is sit back, virtue signal to remind people that we're not asshat racists like he is, and reap the easy victory. And you can set those words next to the Pied Piper memo which shows, in clear black and white, an explicit Democratic policy based on encouraging Republican nutbags (such as Trump) in the primary because they would surely end up hanging themselves. The memo may have been Re: Hillary's campaign but it was part and parcel of the same D-establishment strategy that Obama subscribed to, as evidenced by those comments after Trump was nominated if nothing else.
That is only a tiny piece of BLM's stated agenda. Again, an important macro point thesis statement: the American left (or leftists talking in American forums, I suppose) can't get away with being sneaky, sloppy or tolerant of partisan nonsense like the American right can.
I believe I already acknowledged that our left wing politicians were very moderate indeed, but the far left (the same far left you guys have, more or less) DOES exist over here and is politically active, and this is a huge liability in ways that it is not over there in part because the distance between it and our mainstream left is so much larger than the distance between it and your mainstream left.
There's some other stuff going on here complicating things but yes, the horseshoe is unbalanced and no, nothing I said applies to the UK. Y'all got your own distinct issues.
Actually, following through with the political dogma of the right's simmering outrage was what Trump used, not that it really helped him achieve his much-touted landslide
Which was my very thesis to begin with: the right can manage manufactured outrage politics just fine. The left sucks at it. When the left tries, it just energizes the right because it lets them double down on charges of hypocrisy. But that's ok though; the American left has other weapons at its disposal that the right lacks.
What illness do you have that is causing you to come up with these ideas? Obama did more to excuse the GOP and take the blame on himself and the Democratic Party. He was absolutely TERRIBLE at being anything but the scapegoat.
That's what I just said, or rather, that's the exact and obvious implication of what I just said. How many hours, no, how many MONTHS of your life have you wasted away as a faceless AC, pounding out replies reflexively without even noticing when people agree with you? I hope you're being paid for it because clearly, you aren't getting anything of substance back out of it.
Yes, that is exactly right. Obama tried the passive, nice guy approach as part of his "hey let's give enough the rope to the Republicans to let them hang themselves so they look stubborn and insane and I look reasonable and awesome" approach (most famously he did this with his Supreme Court nominee, but he also did it with the 2011 budget crisis and at other point.) And he was repeatedly steamrolled and ignored for his trouble. That is MY point; thank you for helping to flesh it out. And you just implicitly advocated for a continuation of this abysmally passive policy: "You're wrong / don't worry / we don't need to change! The Democrats will finally win now that the Republicans have all the power and will show themselves to be incompetent asshats". yeah, sure. Except they've managed to dodge responsibility for a very long time already and now they have Trump, whom they will not hesitate to throw all their sins on the instant he's out of office.
why do you admit they so easy to outrage over it?
Because leftist partisans, like right wing partisans, are not average people. The things that outrage them do not equally outrage average leftists. Average right-wingers ARE much more easily outraged, and they tend to be older and have more free time on their hands to ruminate in their echo chambers and work up a good frothing rabid rage over non-issues like, say, Benghazi.
I'm not worried about proving myself to anyone. The voting numbers speak for themselves (hey look, Trump got more Latino votes than Romney! I guess you just needed to scream that he was a racist nazi 200 more times and THEN the Latinos would've voted against him, right?); the attitudes speak for themselves, opinion survey results speak for themselves.
You have nothing whatsoever to support the continuation of this laughable, fratricidal masochism of the left. All you have is 1) misunderstanding me continually and 2) an laundry list of irrelevant talking points you keep trying to jam into everything.
This isn't an argument any more than it's an argument that the world is round. I don't engage in protracted, point by point debates with flat-Earthers. This is just me reminding people like you that reality does exist, and that everyone with a microgram of objectivity has already seen that this is not a cause that has helped liberalism grow or win.
Yet all your exhortations continue to give short-shrift to it, you pretend to be concerned about the left, but after months, you continue to fail to make a convincing show because all of your phony hand-wringing is directed at the left.
I lost interest in mindlessly bitching about the right in November of 2004. Not sure which universe you've come from or what cave you've been hiding in for the last 15 years, but dissecting the right's bullshit is CLEARLY not a strategy that actually delivers electoral results.
Don't worry, you'll be ignored, and the left will win because it turns out Republicans can't govern.
With a whipping boy like Trump still around? No. This is a horrible idea. EVENTUALLY it will work, sure, but the GOP establishment has tons of momentum and distractions left in it before the chickens come home to roost. Giving the GOP enough rope to hang themselves was Obama's standard operating procedure for 8 years and how did THAT shit work out for him?
I'm not advocating masochism or meekness. Since you are quite the busy beaver little anon coward, if you care to, you could verify that I repeatedly spoke out in favor of an electoral college revolt against Trump. And there are a hundred other ways the democrats could toughen up, get people interested, fight back.
An emphasis on political correctness (not anti-racist policies but anti-language stuff) makes the democrats weaker, not stronger. It is inherently divisive, corrodes the base and makes the overwhelming majority of fencesitters say "jesus fucking christ, are we STILL on this shit? Can we please talk about the economy or healthcare or something?" It's weak sauce. It's a non-issue for the overwhelming majority of Americans. And it's hitting the Republicans where they're strongest.
Just close your god damned eyes and try to picture an electoral outcome where political fucking correctness (not fighting against overt discrimination, but language police and senseless identity politic divisiveness) wins elections. It will NEVER win an election in America; at best it's an irrelevancy in areas that were blue to begin with. It's a distraction. It's a parasite sucking up sound bite time that could better be spent on shit that people actually care about.
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Any numbers to back up your hand-waving about the CO2 from the volcano? I know cars alone aren't the biggest source of greenhouse gasses but a while back I thought I'd read they were responsible for over 20%.
If for the sake of argument you grant that global warming is a serious long term problem and the switch to electric cars would make a dent in that problem, I'm making the point that the switch to electric cars is going to happen anyway. The advantages are too significant for it to not happen. So this wouldn't have to be some horrible inefficient free market destroying thing. Yes, it would be government interference in the free market but this is the sort of situation that even libertarians, the sane and reasonable libertarians, should agree that interference is preferable. We can wait 30-100 years and the electric car revolution will happen. Gradually, very gradually. And at the end of it, we'd all benefit from significantly lower transportation costs because once you get reasonable cost/performance out of your batteries, electric really does kick the crap out of ICE.
Or (in a perfect world) we could turn it into a political project and patriotic+green social movement and I think in less than a decade new electric cars could be outselling new gas cars. (Of course It would take another decade or two for the majority of used gasoline cars to disappear.) The data I've seen (not looked at in great detail) implies those missing decades would make a difference. And my point is it wouldn't just be ecological; not only that, but we'd benefit from the reduction in transportation costs much sooner.
To clarify, I am not really in favor of taxing gasoline car or subsidizing electric cars at the consumer level; I think this is horribly inefficient and ends up being just a symbolic gesture. I'm in favor of tech and supply improvements (e.g. perhaps getting a megascale lithium refinery built, funding research into nanowire batteries, getting enough people and companies to invest in Tesla so they could rapidly expand production.) I think the electric car will ultimately sell itself, but sitting back and letting the unguided free market work is magic is going to take quite a few decades.
I actually rather doubt that the volcano would add up that much--a few hundred million cars is quite a lot of CO2, is it not? Let's say the average exhaust pipe is 2 inches in diameter and there are 100 million cars being driven every day. According to the back of my napkin, that's the equivalent of a single exhaust pipe ~950 feet in diameter. So imagine an exhaust pipe three football fields wide pumping out exhaust gasses at the same rate that a typical car does. Imagine it does that for a year. Seems to me that be more than a single volcano eruption, but I don't know. I need to find a reliable, unbiased place that gives best estimates for not just projected temp changes but the projected effects of removing all cars, removing all coal plants, etc. so these debates can go smoother.
I should have been more clear that I don't let Musk/Tesla leadership off the hook by ANY means, but it was a long enough post as it was. (And Musk criticism is usually heavily modded down around here.)
The economy of batteries is the bottleneck and also the big question mark... I don't know what the bottom line is there. Prices have fallen significantly more than I would've expected, so future Li Ion battery prices might depend entirely on lithium mining and refining. I think I heard most of the word's lithium comes from a desert in Chile or something? Too lazy to look it up. But it MIGHT be that we don't *need* a battery revolution; what we have now might be fine, we just need for the economies of scale to kick in.... we may just need someone to build a huge enough mining/refining operation. The other (non-mutually exclusive) option is tech like nanowire that's supposed to be ZOMG amazing but has been vaporware for decades.
But either way, it's something that could benefit from a huge hype campaign. And I blame Musk, Tesla leadership, the politicization of Tesla (and the accompanying lack of rah rah rah patriotic politicization), etc.
The issue of batteries, and any other electric car hiccups, are things that could likely be solved with major business partnerships, major investment based on perceived mass demand, governmental involvement (grants to refine nanowire tech, whatever). I think best case scenario, we could have made waves and get people buying more new electric than gas cars in a matter of perhaps 10 years. (But the way things are going now, I can't imagine electric outselling gasoline within the next 30 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if it takes more than 50.) Re: global warming, those decades could make a difference! And as I said in my original post, there are a bunch of other economic benefits that electric cars should bring, particularly in a country like America with its suburban sprawl.
Tesla isn't what it could be; that's really all I was saying. The ingredients are all there for it, but no one is pulling really hard for it to be revolutionary or patriotic or inspiring and that's a HUGE shame. Musk pisses me off to no end because he pisses away his free media spotlight time on his least-important ideas (Hyperloop, underground roads, and yes SpaceX to be pretty non-revolutionary in the big picture.)
I didn't "blame" anybody. I said that liberals were "stupid" for doing something counterproductive.
Liberals have the power to change how they do things and perhaps win battles instead of losing them. The preaching to the choir is so dull, so pointless. The lines can be redrawn; parties can be redefined and red states can flicker blue (or maybe another color entirely) if you catch people off guard and hit them with something they weren't expecting to hear.
I don't care who is more to "blame", and neither does mother nature. Only "productive" and "counterproductive" matter in the end.
He's also an American citizen.
It's surreal how bad and stupid political polarization has become, that we could have right wingers shunning and harassing Teslas and Tesla owners to make an anti-Democrat statement. It's not about being anti-science; it's just anti-Democrat, anti-left.
This is an AMERICAN car company that's spearheading this revolution. I happen to think that Elon Musk is annoyingly overrated, but I can't deny that he is basically the embodiment of every single pro-entrepreneur, pro-privatization, American dream cliche. American jobs. American pride. He's the same guy sending our satellites into space now; so why can't someone just drape an American flag over his shoulders and run with it?
I say this through grit teeth... personally, the hero worship of this guy really gets under my skin, sometimes it's even worse than Jobs, but that's just a pet peeve... from the standpoint of ushering in this revolution why aren't they calling Musk the next Henry Ford? It's in America's best interest for him to be leading this charge.
And yes, I said revolution. This SHOULD be a big deal, far exceeding its ecological implications. This really should be the biggest thing to happen to cars since the Model T. If battery technology can significantly improve and/or existing batteries come down in price a lot more, electric cars would offer huge advantages over the vast majority of diesel and gasoline vehicles on the road today. Electric cars should be significantly cheaper to build and maintain: lower operating temps, simple transmission, just fewer moving parts across the board.... I wouldn't be so surprised if in fifty years time we had electric cars capable of going millions of miles without needing a total rebuild.
And Tesla is also leading the charge with the other major automobile revolution--autopilot--which some day is going to lead to safer and much more efficient (i.e. fast) roads Which is a really big deal in a country as sprawling as America.
Also: the less the world relies on oil, the less money and power OPEC has. Aren't there still millions of voters out there who remember the oil crisis in the 70s? Is no one concerned about the prospect of the Salafi government in Saudi Arabia pulling even more money out of the ground? I for one wouldn't shed a tear if the wealth and power of the OPEC countries diminished. A couple years back even ISIS was managing to get their hands on oil money for a while there. Why can't oil independence be spun as a national security issue? So-called "Islamophobia" harnessed for a good cause, you might say.
But no... this would-be pride of American capitalism and security and optimistic futurism is instead just another pawn in the cultural proxy war.
Instead of something positive and bipartisan-y, liberals invariably lead with the negatives: First, by making some lazy and crazy comments implying human extinction (Don't go wildly exaggerating something that ordinary people already have a tough time perceiving! Sure, many species will go extinct, maybe some cities go underwater and we may have to switch crops and maybe worst case we lose a lot of seafood, but we're obviously never going to see mass starvation and human extinction unless something really far-fetched happens, like an extreme version of the clathrate gun effect or some other deadly positive feedback loop that for some reason was never triggered in past epochs.)
Second: the liberals will whine about America's sins and the sins of those running her. I know it's depressing, I know it is, but I really don't give a shit what Trump said. I don't need to see dozens upon dozens of posts trying to single out American carbon emissions as being particularly bad. I don't care if that's true or not; nobody needs to see that shit. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual solutions. Nobody wants to hear you whine abou
Again, I not only read it but I was the one who submitted it (along with an associated response video) to slashdot two years ago. You can see my user name attached to that article. It received 920 comments, none of which provided any evidence to the contrary, whereas plenty of slashdotters looked at the same articles and watched the same videos and came to the same conclusions I did.
It is common knowledge that Youtube's policies changed as a direct result of this incident. But please, don't let that stand in the way of your own brainless shitposting.
Specifically--and I just remembered this--one of the reporters bragged about it with additional details on Twitter. Just remembered that. He was really quite candid in his comments and overall gung-ho attitude. There are also a couple other relevant WSJ articles around the same time period that *are* paywalled that I have saved somewhere. I don't remember what was said where, exactly. Other people have it all cataloged, I'm sure. Two years ago plenty of other slashdotters checked the links and chimed in with their astonishment and agreement. If you cared to check.
Meh. It doesn't matter, though. None of it does. Just running low on drugs tonight and accidentally started thinking too much again. Blinked and two years slipped by. I mean it is pretty funny on one level... how we can be in exactly the same place, how Trump can say the mainstream media was fake news and that's reason enough for everyone to believe that anyone who calls out the mainstream media on anything is a lying conspiracy nut. Governance by reverse psychology. Although the evidence is all right there, right there in the open for anyone to pick up and put together with only a very very small amount of deduction required, there's no way of actually getting any significant fraction of people to go to all that trouble.
Ha. If you felt like checking, you might notice that I'm the submitter of that the story from two years ago with 920 comments. No worries; I know reading is hard. Like I told the other guy, I guess we've gone from RTFA to RTFS to RTFP now. I even commented in the post that shorter would've been better but I just don't know how to make it short any more, not when the ignorance is so deep and the nonsensical propaganda replies are so well-rehearsed.
It's been well over a year since I read that stuff but read it I did. (I didn't include *all* of the relevant links because I figured the post would probably be little-noticed. I didn't expect to get mistaken for a spam bot, though, I must admit.) The Wall Street Journal was all very open about this, the reporters all bragging about what they'd done. Youtube's crackdown happened immediately afterwards and was also very public and open about it. For those who were paying attention, it was and is common knowledge that this event was one of the major catalysts for Youtube's policy shifts. But you can go on and believe it's a conspiracy theory if you must. I did use a lot of words after all. All the conspiracy nuts like words, therefore, etc.
Good to know even 5 and 6 digit slashdotters don't fucking read what they're replying to any more. It was the next logical step in the progression-RTFA, RTFS, now RTFP. If you care to check the article I linked to, you'll see that I was the submitter of that story from 2 years ago.
I even commented in the post that the length was a negative, but if I didn't cover several of those points, it was just inviting the same tired shitty anti-communist replies that usually get modded up to +5.
I don't have the time or energy to craft a short-enough-to-be-easily-readable-but-still-pertinent post these days. Brevity is hard when you know the morons are right around the corner with their non-sequiturs unholstered.
Remember that this did not just randomly or organically happen. This was openly orchestrated. And everyone let it happen because they were too busy tweeting about Trump's moronic sound byte of the day to care.
Never forget how the Wall Street Journal freely admitted that they hired three people to spend weeks mining and deceptively editing PewDiePie's content, then sent it directly to Disney for the express purpose of starting a controversy where none existed. Never forget that mainstream media organizations like Wired and The Independent (along with a few "new media" news organizations, such as The Young Turks) parroted this story uncritically and did not truthfully describe the video in question (which showed a closeup of PewDiePie's face looking shocked and then saddened after the words "Death to Jews" actually appeared on the screen). Never forget that none of them followed up to tell their readers that the Wall Street Journal not only edited his videos to remove all of the context indicating that it was comedic satire but even edited a shot of him pointing at something off-screen and implied that it was a Nazi salute.
None of this is conspiracy theory. The Wall Street Journal was frank and open about their motives in helping to instigate this "adpocalypse". Just days later, they penned a story that basically explained how their intention was to not merely embarrass PewDiePie specifically, but to also start a moral panic amongst advertisers so as to compel Youtube and other new media giants to reel in ALL of this independent nonsense, ALL of this un-sanitized family-unfriendly content, all of this "let the viewers decide what they want to see" nonsense, all of this free speech nonsense.. They were so cheerfully open about this that they didn't even bother pay-walling that article.
Like I said time and time again when this happened two years ago, this is not about "forcing" Youtube or other corporations to host content, though partisans will always still seek to end the conversation by saying "free market at work; nothing to see here." Corporations like the Wall Street Journal were able to do this by leveraging the fears of advertisers, fears that are ultimately rooted in the desires and actions of consumers like you and me. We aren't just a part of this ecosystem; we are its keystone species.
So please never forget that this was not a natural or organic or grassroots thing that happened. Never forget that controversy was artificial, was intentionally created and cultivated by large corporations for cynical purposes. Never the day the tail wagged the dog and then bragged about doing it. Understand that this is NOT a shining example of free market supply and demand harmony. Understand how viewers and content producers were ignored in favor of what old media wanted to see happen.
This is not a fluid or free market sort of thing. This is monolithic and dictatorial. There is no fine-grained option (from my understanding) that allows individual advertisers to opt-in to specific videos that Youtube has deemed not politically correct enough, not vapid and conventional enough. And nobody (be they advertiser or producer or viewer) has the clout to roll their own competitor to Youtube. Anyone who doubts this doesn't understand how the Millennials, how these "Digital Natives" have grown up to think about technology. For them, Youtube IS online video (other than porn) and there is very little incentive for them to poke their heads outside of that walled garden.
Once again, there will be replies accusing me of being not just Trump apologist but a paid troll. I wish I didn't have to say thi
Translation: Democrats still refuse to admit that they have a problem getting their own party members to give a shit about them, insist that fake news is the only possible explanation for Trump. (Despite numbers clearly showing that it was a lack of turnout among Ds that screwed Hillary, not a surge in the Pizzagate swing vote.)
Oh yes, and I'm still interested in knowing what Facebook plans to do the next time the New York Times, The Guardian, and others do something like fraudulently insert the words "without consent" in their paraphrase of the contents of the Pussygate tape while excluding the words "and they let you do it." If the answer is 'nothing', where exactly is the line going to be drawn?
(Blah blah blah, anti-Trump disclaimer, Republicans are worse in almost all respects than Democrats, etc.)
Witness the modern American liberal, supporting centrist masochistic dogshit just because the Republicans hate it, instead of supporting something that would actually help workers.
We live in a capitalistic society. You cannot just randomly hurt corporations and expect workers to automatically benefit. Taxation and redistribution should in theory be a more left-wing thing to support, but no, since it would benefit the corporations as well (vs. the minimum wage status quo), we can't have that. Better that all should suffer.
Did you miss the part where I am in favor of DIRECT GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE TO WORKERS including, but not limited to, wage subsidy/reverse income tax and government-provided universal health care (more or less)?
Corporate personhood should be abolished, corporate political contributions outlawed, etc. That's all well and good. All that happy horseshit? I'm for it. What I'm against is punishing corporations for hiring American workers. That's not pro-corporate; that's anti-masochism.
We can't let corner cases like that dictate our entire economic policy. He already has incentives in the form of OSHA and employee lawsuits. If it turns out those aren't enough, well, we can enhance the power of either or both of those things.
Yeah, like the other person said, whatever the situation you were in, there was clearly a lot more to it thay you being a contractor situation. Some weird shell company game they were playing for tax reasons, employee leasing, head hunting fees... I don't know exactly what it was you saw, but there was clearly more to it than just you being a contractor.
In one of my first jobs, our company transitioned us all from employees to contractors, we all received an immediate 33% pay rise and I was told that the company was still paying less per employee. I don't think there are any hidden fees involved in hiring contractors unless something else is going on. And yeah, a good old boy scheme of one sort or another is a pretty good starting assumption.
Yes, there's a certain degree of sense in having employers share the cost of injuries so that they'll be motivated to build safer workplaces with safer practices. But I'm not sure that forcing them to pay for worker's comp is a particularly efficient way to do that. Insurance companies do in theory offer lower rates if you can prove you're safer than average but after shopping for car and homeowners insurance, I've noticed that this is often an unreliable, haphazard, inefficient method of interest alignment. I think OSHA plus lawsuits are probably good enough. I don't know precisely how the system is set up now, but we could even allow the worker's comp insurance provider (with a premium paid for by the government, let's say) to sue the employer if their negligence caused a costly injury. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is basically how no-fault car insurance works... your insurance company pays to fix shit up immediately, but they reserve the right to sue the other person on your behalf to recoup their costs (or you can sue yourself, but in the insurance contract they reserve the right to deduct their expenses from any damages you win.)
So yeah, interest alignment for safe workplaces is all well and good but I think there are plenty of ways to do that without inflating the cost of hiring additional employees. Companies should want to hire more employees. There are many, many ways to help workers without discouraging employers from hiring them in the first place. And if we ever do manage to significantly raise the demand for labor, suddenly all kinds of other problems could begin to solve themselves, like the trade deficit or immigration woes. (Well perhaps not solved, but at least leftists could point a little more confidently to figures showing clear benefits of increased immigration.)
For sufficiently lazy definitions of "works."
Falling production costs for food, consumer goods and a lot of other stuff over the past 50+ years has masked a lot of stuff. A lot of those countries that are "working" so wonderfully have massive unemployment, particularly in the younger generations. And if we look at specifics, it's fairly obvious that third party health insurance (such as our system or Switzerland) has not worked better.
The damage being done is gradual and long term, but it's staring us in the face for anyone who cares to look for it. Employers can't drop employees overnight after a minimum wage or health insurance cost hike, but more and more effort is being devoted to fleshing out the alternatives to hiring Americans (or Europeans) directly as employees. This shouldn't be a controversial thing to say. This is Economics 101 and the signs are all around us that this is happening. Employment for life used to be a thing in a lot of countries. Now it isn't. Youth unemployment of over 40% in Western Europe used to be (I think) rather unthinkable. Now, it isn't.
Just because there aren't riots in the streets doesn't mean we should continue to allow the damage to accrue. Support sanity. Support real compromises that don't pit American employers and American employees directly against each other. It's not less capitalist; it's MORE capitalistic to let the government handle the cost directly. We do have to be careful that taxes don't rise so much as to scare companies overseas but I can't see how a centralized approach could possibly cost more in corporate taxes than they're already being forced to pay out of pocket now.
Who woulda thought that if you impose multiple and ever-increasing burdens on employers, that they'll start to hire fewer people as employees?
I'm left-leaning in a hell of a lot of ways but no one should have supported these horrible centrist compromises that both the Democrats and the Republicans (moreso the Ds in recent years), have been led into in these past few years. Worker's comp, heath insurance, minimum wage, and all other things that society needs to function better, so its work force can remain kinda healthy and agile and productive, should be provided by... SOCIETY. By the government. Directly. (In the case of minimum wage, I'd be in favor of reverse income tax subsidy approach, not a universal basic income.) Not by employers. Asking employers to pay for it directly is the most anti-capitalistic 'compromise' imaginable, partially due to inefficiencies but mostly because fails to ensure or preserve the welfare of workers. Because employers will always be trying to figure out ways that they can dodge it, starting with the obvious solution of hiring fewer employees. If it's not contractors, it'll be outsourcing. Or robots. Or spinning off and moving entire sections overseas where there are shit labor laws. It'll always be something.
None of this is a capitalist-socialist compromise, none of it is centrist, none of it is moderate. In practice, it is the worst of capitalism wedded to the worst of government meddling and barrier-imposing. If you consider yourself a leftist and you support stuff like huge minimum wage hikes and forcing employers to buy insurance for employees please, for fuck's sake... just stop it.
It is literally the worst of both worlds.
Weirdly enough I haven't grown bored of this quite yet.
I am sorry that you don't understand what it means to give someone rope to hang themselves. Maybe English isn't your first language. You see, it means to not only be passive but to even tacitly encourage someone forward, going with a strategy of letting your opponent damage themselves (in this case with a strong taking the high road implication.) Which is bedrock of everything I've said, going back to the original point about unhealthy obsessions with political correctness.
Obama was passive, and you agreed with me. I explained WHY, and had written proof that this mind-rotting philosophy was present in the D party and observed that he said it in his own words if you listened to his verbal statements after Trump was nominated. You not only didn't responded to the argument, you haven't even bothered explaining the passiveness that you yourself agreed with.
Obama did it for eight years, and it more or less backfired for eight years. In retrospect, it even turned out to be mistake for him to intentionally milk the birther thing, though at the time I thought it was brilliant of him. People don't need condescension, however well deserved; they need results.
There only error here is that you seem to think that agreeing with half of my argument somehow invalidates the other half. Obama was passive and image-obsessed for 8 years. He and the Ds most clearly revealed the strategic thinking behind this passiveness in their reaction to Trump.
Again, just Trumping your blessed little heart out. Go little Trumpeteer, go! Don't bother actually addressing the real black and white facts you were given or assert an alternate explanation/interpretation of Obama's behavior and statements or anything. This is definitely you winning the argument here, you just stubbornly saying "Nuh-uh!". This is a great and noble victory.
Again, swinging wildly at nothing. The paper I linked clearly describes a strategy of giving someone extra rope so that they can hang themselves. I'm not going to explain common English idioms to you or do any more Googling for you showing how Obama's policies and attitudes and quotes were entirely in line with that paper produced by the Democratic Party establishment.
Your refusal to admit to simple facts is quite Trumplike.
Then why the hell did he nominate a moderate like Merrick Garland and then refuse to raise hell after the Republicans refused to do their job? You characterize that as some sort of a proactive fight, do you?
What of compromises offered to the Republicans in 2011 (and his refusal to push back with tactics like the trillion dollar coin threat after they began to seriously threaten to actually default on the debt)? What of unwillingness to be proactive and open about his support gay marriage (Biden had to drag him into it with his big mouth), his refusal (like Hillary) to consider used Trump's election to be used as a springboard for electoral college reform (or conceivably even a revolt), etc. I don't know what universe you come from but our Obama was not a fighter; he opted at all times to try for compromises and then quietly complain when the Republicans spat in his face. He was not proactive; he was reactive and image-oriented instead of results-oriented. His message: All we need to do is show we're better people than the Rs and we'll win!
Again, this is isn't a theory; it's what he actually said. Go listen to his reaction to Trumps' nomination; he is clearly saying that nothing needs to be done, the Republicans are beyond the pale, the battle is already won, all we need to do is sit back, virtue signal to remind people that we're not asshat racists like he is, and reap the easy victory. And you can set those words next to the Pied Piper memo which shows, in clear black and white, an explicit Democratic policy based on encouraging Republican nutbags (such as Trump) in the primary because they would surely end up hanging themselves. The memo may have been Re: Hillary's campaign but it was part and parcel of the same D-establishment strategy that Obama subscribed to, as evidenced by those comments after Trump was nominated if nothing else.
That is only a tiny piece of BLM's stated agenda. Again, an important macro point thesis statement: the American left (or leftists talking in American forums, I suppose) can't get away with being sneaky, sloppy or tolerant of partisan nonsense like the American right can.
I believe I already acknowledged that our left wing politicians were very moderate indeed, but the far left (the same far left you guys have, more or less) DOES exist over here and is politically active, and this is a huge liability in ways that it is not over there in part because the distance between it and our mainstream left is so much larger than the distance between it and your mainstream left.
There's some other stuff going on here complicating things but yes, the horseshoe is unbalanced and no, nothing I said applies to the UK. Y'all got your own distinct issues.
Actually, following through with the political dogma of the right's simmering outrage was what Trump used, not that it really helped him achieve his much-touted landslide
Which was my very thesis to begin with: the right can manage manufactured outrage politics just fine. The left sucks at it. When the left tries, it just energizes the right because it lets them double down on charges of hypocrisy. But that's ok though; the American left has other weapons at its disposal that the right lacks.
What illness do you have that is causing you to come up with these ideas? Obama did more to excuse the GOP and take the blame on himself and the Democratic Party. He was absolutely TERRIBLE at being anything but the scapegoat.
That's what I just said, or rather, that's the exact and obvious implication of what I just said. How many hours, no, how many MONTHS of your life have you wasted away as a faceless AC, pounding out replies reflexively without even noticing when people agree with you? I hope you're being paid for it because clearly, you aren't getting anything of substance back out of it.
Yes, that is exactly right. Obama tried the passive, nice guy approach as part of his "hey let's give enough the rope to the Republicans to let them hang themselves so they look stubborn and insane and I look reasonable and awesome" approach (most famously he did this with his Supreme Court nominee, but he also did it with the 2011 budget crisis and at other point.) And he was repeatedly steamrolled and ignored for his trouble. That is MY point; thank you for helping to flesh it out. And you just implicitly advocated for a continuation of this abysmally passive policy: "You're wrong / don't worry / we don't need to change! The Democrats will finally win now that the Republicans have all the power and will show themselves to be incompetent asshats". yeah, sure. Except they've managed to dodge responsibility for a very long time already and now they have Trump, whom they will not hesitate to throw all their sins on the instant he's out of office.
why do you admit they so easy to outrage over it?
Because leftist partisans, like right wing partisans, are not average people. The things that outrage them do not equally outrage average leftists. Average right-wingers ARE much more easily outraged, and they tend to be older and have more free time on their hands to ruminate in their echo chambers and work up a good frothing rabid rage over non-issues like, say, Benghazi.
I'm not worried about proving myself to anyone. The voting numbers speak for themselves (hey look, Trump got more Latino votes than Romney! I guess you just needed to scream that he was a racist nazi 200 more times and THEN the Latinos would've voted against him, right?); the attitudes speak for themselves, opinion survey results speak for themselves.
You have nothing whatsoever to support the continuation of this laughable, fratricidal masochism of the left. All you have is 1) misunderstanding me continually and 2) an laundry list of irrelevant talking points you keep trying to jam into everything.
This isn't an argument any more than it's an argument that the world is round. I don't engage in protracted, point by point debates with flat-Earthers. This is just me reminding people like you that reality does exist, and that everyone with a microgram of objectivity has already seen that this is not a cause that has helped liberalism grow or win.
Yet all your exhortations continue to give short-shrift to it, you pretend to be concerned about the left, but after months, you continue to fail to make a convincing show because all of your phony hand-wringing is directed at the left.
I lost interest in mindlessly bitching about the right in November of 2004. Not sure which universe you've come from or what cave you've been hiding in for the last 15 years, but dissecting the right's bullshit is CLEARLY not a strategy that actually delivers electoral results.
Don't worry, you'll be ignored, and the left will win because it turns out Republicans can't govern.
With a whipping boy like Trump still around? No. This is a horrible idea. EVENTUALLY it will work, sure, but the GOP establishment has tons of momentum and distractions left in it before the chickens come home to roost. Giving the GOP enough rope to hang themselves was Obama's standard operating procedure for 8 years and how did THAT shit work out for him?
I'm not advocating masochism or meekness. Since you are quite the busy beaver little anon coward, if you care to, you could verify that I repeatedly spoke out in favor of an electoral college revolt against Trump. And there are a hundred other ways the democrats could toughen up, get people interested, fight back.
An emphasis on political correctness (not anti-racist policies but anti-language stuff) makes the democrats weaker, not stronger. It is inherently divisive, corrodes the base and makes the overwhelming majority of fencesitters say "jesus fucking christ, are we STILL on this shit? Can we please talk about the economy or healthcare or something?" It's weak sauce. It's a non-issue for the overwhelming majority of Americans. And it's hitting the Republicans where they're strongest.
Just close your god damned eyes and try to picture an electoral outcome where political fucking correctness (not fighting against overt discrimination, but language police and senseless identity politic divisiveness) wins elections. It will NEVER win an election in America; at best it's an irrelevancy in areas that were blue to begin with. It's a distraction. It's a parasite sucking up sound bite time that could better be spent on shit that people actually care about.