HOW THE FUCK ELSE WOULD AN ISSUE LIKE CIVIL RIGHTS BE RESOLVED IF PEOPLE DIDN'T PURSUE IT.
You've asked this question three times now and I've given you multiple examples of ways in which you could pursue it and ways in which is has been persued poorly with negative consequences. I gave you the hypothetical soup kitchen example, which can be broadly adapted to many situations, in which the problem is addressed without discrimination and in which inequality decreases as a result. This is not purely hypothetical, incidentally, soup kitchens are a real thing and this happens every day. The only hypothetical part is applying this method to other problems. I've given you the real-world civil rights example, which was discriminatory enough to not only cause these women to quit but to found their own movement in response. I've given you the network neutrality model, which... apparently you disagree with? You seem to think that promoting something does not mean diminishing something else? You're okay with fast lanes, or you just think that's different... somehow?
Don't answer that, I don't care. If you're just going to ignore me and keep asking the same question over and over again, as though I hadn't responded, then yes: I guess we are done.
For the record, I criticized the civil rights movement. I didn't say that it was bad, or that it was all bad anyway. Obviously there are a lot of positive changes which can be attributed to that effort. The real question is: Could the civil rights movement have been better?... Maybe. As I have already said, there's a question of whether they could have achieved what they did if their focus had been broader. Sometimes changes have to be incremental. So that's an argument in favor of it exactly as it was, in which it ignored the civil rights of women and everyone else. On the other hand, if we look at the Black Lives Matter movement - almost all of the very significant pushback is stemming from their decision to focus solely on the racial aspect, and not on the more general topic of the militarization of our police force. If they had been more inclusive from the start I do think that they could have achieved more than they are achieving, both in their narrow goal of addressing the treatment of black people by our legal system and in the broader goal of addressing the treatment of everyone by our legal system. (This is an application of the soup kitchen example, which you apparently never read.)
But, seeing as we're not talking anymore anyway: what the hell? How is it that I have to explain in such detail that explicitly discriminatory behavior is anti-egalitarian?
A: "We're here to help people."
B: "Great. I'm a person in need of help."
A: "Ha ha, no. You're a B. Fuck you."
This is exactly the opposite of what egalitarianism is supposed to be. Sure it can potentially have positive results, two wrongs do sometimes make a right. I said that way up at the top: "The argument is usually made that women are disadvantaged and so promoting them increases equality, and while this may be true in some contexts..." So what? That changes nothing.
Whatever. You know I put a fair amount of work into writing this shit, only to have you ignore it. I'm glad we're done. Trying to have any kind of discussion on the internet is a huge waste of time.
How would you respond to this: "Net neutrality advocates are dumb. No we don't want ISPs slowing down some traffic, that would be censorship and anti-competitive and wrong. But those idiots keep complaining about fast lanes. Going fast is good! Fast lanes are just fine." ?
Egalitarianism is specifically about people, so I can't call net neutrality egalitarian, but the idea is the same: equality is good and it is the opposite of promoting one group (of internet traffic) while excluding others. There's very little difference between promoting group A exclusively, and inhibiting everything that isn't in group A.
So you bring up civil rights and the civil rights movement, and there's an interesting feminist angle there. Civil rights, of course, are for everyone - not black people exclusively. But the civil rights movement, at least in the United States, was pretty much exclusively about civil rights for black people. There were a couple of women, civil rights activists, who felt disenfranchised and ultimately quit the civil rights movement for this reason. But not before writing a fairly famous memo (here) which is considered one of the founding documents of second wave feminism.
In other words, a couple of women quit an exclusionary movement for being excluded, only to inspire their own exclusionary movement. I wish I could say it was surprising that they would just perpetuate the same problem, but this is a common reaction to being mistreated.
So this is a criticism of the civil rights movement, but there's a question of whether they could have achieved what they did if their focus had been broader. And if you compare to the Black Lives Matter movement, going on right now, well... there are some positive and negative things to be said about that comparison, but this is now meandering. (I wrote two more paragraphs here before I realized that this was a dumb tangent.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "individual" agenda, but it is the agenda that is the problem. So... yes? I gave you an example above (the soup kitchen) of a way to pursue an agenda (mitigating hunger, particularly the greater hunger of group A) without excluding anyone. It's just a matter of identifying a problem and helping with that, rather than identifying a group of people and helping them.
I don't know how AMD structures their EULAs, but they also have a line of professional cards, distinct from their consumer cards (and more expensive).
Matrox used to be the good one for this. They didn't make that distinction and as a result the Parhelia retained a lot of its value for a long time, despite the fact that it was never that impressive a card in the first place.
Okay, maybe it's my turn to link the dictionary then. I explained above, in this post, why I think those ideas are contradictory. I didn't go into great detail, since it all made sense to me, but I will go over anything that you don't follow or disagree with.
By your reasoning one could never support anything
... What? How? I think you may not have thought this through, not every cause champions one group to the exclusion of others. How about, just throwing something out there, a soup kitchen? Very few soup kitchens say that they'll only give soup to members of group A, perhaps quoting some statistics which show that members of group B are less likely to be hungry. A real soup kitchen might end up serving group A more often for this statistical reason, but they're not leaving hungry B's out in the cold.
So this soup kitchen promotes equality, because it serves group A more often and thus reduces the imbalance of hunger. And it accomplishes this in a non-discriminatory manner, because it also serves group B when members of group B need it.
This is just an example off the top of my head, but... come on. I'm sure you could have come up with an example like this for yourself if you had tried.
A Cubox is not substantially different from a Raspberry Pi, it's just slightly more compact and comes pre-assembled. You can put Kodi on it, though it looks like that might be installed by default now.
Just bear in mind that it has the same limitations as a Raspberry Pi: it can be a fine media player, but it won't handle the DRM'd stuff. So no Netflix or Amazon Prime, but it does have a Youtube plugin (unless the situation with Netflix has changed?). It's also more expensive than a Raspberry Pi, but not if you get it used off of Ebay like I did.
If a person, conservative or otherwise, espouses clearly racist ideals on the internet, does that make even that one person racist? The point that I was making in my second paragraph is that I think the answer is: not necessarily.
Your link has two definitions. The first is the milktoast definition that you give above, the second rings truer but I'd consider carefully whether there's nothing bad there, as you claim. Promoting one group over others is an explicitly anti-egalitarian stance. The argument is usually made that women are disadvantaged and so promoting them increases equality, and while this may be true in some contexts... that isn't how advocacy works. There's no one counting equality points, ready to turn off feminism once it has filled it's quota.
There's also a matter of discrimination: it isn't specifically related to egalitarianism but if we take it as a rule of thumb that reducing discrimination generally has a positive effect on equality (call it "good vibes" or something), then advocacy through promoting one group to the exclusion of others is discriminatory and counter to that goal.
Anyway, this has gone long for a response to a single sentence. Maybe I'm in internet loudmouth. (I'm not in real life)
Virtually no one will come out against equality between the sexes, if that's all that it took to be a feminist then the word would be useless. Whatever the word may mean, it's more specific than that.
I think what the parent is complaining about is what I call "internet feminism," which is very much like "internet political commentator" or "internet expert on [foo]": it's a sort of perversion of an otherwise rational person into... something else. I think Penny Arcade had a strip about this. The trouble is that as people spend more and more time yelling at each other on the internet, that internet personality starts to bleed over into their regular personality...
Hitler explicitly hated communists. One of the concepts in fascism is that the state, the country, is all-important, and individuals are not. Communists subscribe to a notion of a sort of universal proletariat brotherhood, where nationality isn't important.
This is not a small difference, nationalism is really central to fascism, it is the core principle. Calling Hitler a communist is just wildly inaccurate. You could call him a jew-lover and be no more wrong.
My counter to the claim that the only authoritative source is a college, is to reference a college.
If you are claiming that the Oxford English Dictionary is a non-authoritative source for what words mean, when it is in fact the most authoritative source... I can't help you. You are a lost cause.
The parent didn't say "agreements." The only agreements that you could be talking about here deal with infrastructure, and eliminating them would just lead to redundant infrastructure. Woohoo.
There is a solution to promoting competition which doesn't involve this problem, it was implemented in 1999, but it's only ever applied to DSL because in 2002 the FCC decided to classify other ISPs as "information services" rather than as "telecommunication services."
In other words, this is one more way in which the current FCC's decision has screwed us.
Fascism is neither good nor bad, it's just a way of doing things. It's pretty effective at it's primary goal: preparing a country for war. Not so great outside of war.
Nationalism, expansion of government, free healthcare, and regulated jobs are all consistent with fascism. (Healthcare? There are only a few countries where that's argued as a left/right issue. Just for example: Cuba (left) and Saudi Arabia (right) both offer free healthcare.) The only really left-wing thing on your list is minimum wages. Hitler was not explicitly fascist, but he was an admirer of fascism. Have you heard of the Beer Hall Putsch? That was an attempt to imitate Mussolini.
There are a couple of ACs who have explained this already. I'll just link this one, since it seems as though he mistakenly replied to me instead of you.
... Where does this come from? Judging by the comments that I read on Slashdot, no one knows what fascism is. Which is not that weird. The weird thing is that everyone thinks that they know what fascism is (conveniently, it's the political philosophy of whoever they disagree with). But, come on, Nero? You could describe the Romans as fascistic in general, but Nero not more so than his contemporaries.
Here's the wikipedia page on fascism. Here's the first paragraph from that page:
Fascism/fæzm/ is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism,[1][2] characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce[3] that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.[4] The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I before it spread to other European countries.[4] Opposed to liberalism, Marxism and anarchism, fascism is usually placed on the far-right within the traditional left–right spectrum.
I don't know where you're getting your definition of fascism from, but... Well, I'd be interested in knowing that.
Oh for gods' sake... communism is left, fascism is right. Here. You can't just take everything that you don't like and declare that the outgroup represents all of it.
but they are not obligated to do anything like that per the US Constitution
No one has claimed that they did something illegal.
I think you may have missed the point here. Yes, the ACA was introduced and then discussed for six months before it was passed. Thus, people had six months to scrutinize it in detail before the vote. It was a large and important bill, with much to go over. This is the expected procedure.
For the tax bill that we're discussing, it was introduced in the house and then voted on two weeks later. It was introduced in the senate (with many amendments) and then voted on two days later. This is not enough time. That is the problem.
His powers are in no way unilateral. Setting aside his four fellow commissioners, they can only implement what congress gives them. If the courts decide that they're not doing what congress told them to do, their rules get struck down (this is what happened in 2010), if congress decides that they're not doing what congress wants them to do they can be replaced (this is what happened in 2017), and if congress decides that they're still not getting in line then they can be overruled directly (ideally, this is what will happen in 2018).
I don't mean to pick on you, but there's this wholly inaccurate trend to blame everything on Pai here and doing that will get us nowhere. Pai is congress' stooge and fall guy. If we fail to hold congress accountable for this then they have won.
The tax bill that the parent was talking about was not handled the same way. That was kept under wraps until the last minute, so that the public wouldn't find out about it and wouldn't have enough time to organize opposition.
It's similar to how the TPP was handled, and much of the reason why people got so angry over that. It's not business as usual. (Though I think it's a little less uncommon for an international treaty than it is for a domestic bill.)
It is not at all absurd to require you to put money aside to ensure that you can fullfill your obligations in the future.
This is a straw man. The parent didn't say anything about the rational behind putting money aside or planning for the future, the parent was talking about the fact that the post office was given ten years to fund seventy-five years worth of retirement benefits. It's the extreme nature of the requirement that's the issue, and not the idea that planning ahead is somehow bad. You are deflecting.
Yeah the big blockbusters aren't the real money-makers for theaters, as I understand it. Because of the week-by-week nature of the revenue split, it's the sleeper hits that do really well for them. I've been told that There's Something About Mary saved a lot of franchises, thanks to its longevity.
I keep saying "I'm told" or "I've heard" - I'm getting all of this from a hazy memory of a conversation that I had with a friend of mine who worked as a projectionist. I'm just hedging in case someone comes along to correct me: I am not claiming expertise.
The revenue split is complicated. Studios take something like 90% of tickets sales for the first week, 80% for the second, etc. (I don't know the actual numbers, but it's something like this). I've been told that it averages out to something like a 50/50 split most of the time, but Disney has leveraged their position to force theaters to agree to something closer to a 60/40 split in some cases.
This is one of the criticisms of the Disney/Fox merger, incidentally. It would give Disney control of roughly 40% of the film industry, and allow them to do a lot more of that sort of thing.
Historically, contributions by the communications industry [opensecrets.org] has favored Democrats
Did you look at your link? They're grouping communications and electronics together. If you pick out just the communications companies - AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Cox - all favor Republicans. Be careful about how you use the term "fake news," it doesn't mean what you think it means.
Most criticism of Bush 2's science record was climate change, the stem cell business, etc. He also supported that "teach the controversy" BS, in schools. These are things for which his record is demonstrably poor. Spending more money in other areas does make up for suppressing research.
What your link tells me about print industry lobbying, is that the print industry doesn't spend money on lobbying. Compare to your link for communications lobbying - there's an order of magnitude difference there. (I was going to offer an alternative theory to your one about Fox News, but it doesn't seem necessary...)
Given that the person you were replying to was only claiming that the two parties are not the same, this seems to be born out by your links.
Slashdot Mirror
HOW THE FUCK ELSE WOULD AN ISSUE LIKE CIVIL RIGHTS BE RESOLVED IF PEOPLE DIDN'T PURSUE IT.
You've asked this question three times now and I've given you multiple examples of ways in which you could pursue it and ways in which is has been persued poorly with negative consequences. I gave you the hypothetical soup kitchen example, which can be broadly adapted to many situations, in which the problem is addressed without discrimination and in which inequality decreases as a result. This is not purely hypothetical, incidentally, soup kitchens are a real thing and this happens every day. The only hypothetical part is applying this method to other problems. I've given you the real-world civil rights example, which was discriminatory enough to not only cause these women to quit but to found their own movement in response. I've given you the network neutrality model, which... apparently you disagree with? You seem to think that promoting something does not mean diminishing something else? You're okay with fast lanes, or you just think that's different... somehow?
... Maybe. As I have already said, there's a question of whether they could have achieved what they did if their focus had been broader. Sometimes changes have to be incremental. So that's an argument in favor of it exactly as it was, in which it ignored the civil rights of women and everyone else. On the other hand, if we look at the Black Lives Matter movement - almost all of the very significant pushback is stemming from their decision to focus solely on the racial aspect, and not on the more general topic of the militarization of our police force. If they had been more inclusive from the start I do think that they could have achieved more than they are achieving, both in their narrow goal of addressing the treatment of black people by our legal system and in the broader goal of addressing the treatment of everyone by our legal system. (This is an application of the soup kitchen example, which you apparently never read.)
Don't answer that, I don't care. If you're just going to ignore me and keep asking the same question over and over again, as though I hadn't responded, then yes: I guess we are done.
For the record, I criticized the civil rights movement. I didn't say that it was bad, or that it was all bad anyway. Obviously there are a lot of positive changes which can be attributed to that effort. The real question is: Could the civil rights movement have been better?
But, seeing as we're not talking anymore anyway: what the hell? How is it that I have to explain in such detail that explicitly discriminatory behavior is anti-egalitarian?
A: "We're here to help people."
B: "Great. I'm a person in need of help."
A: "Ha ha, no. You're a B. Fuck you."
This is exactly the opposite of what egalitarianism is supposed to be. Sure it can potentially have positive results, two wrongs do sometimes make a right. I said that way up at the top: "The argument is usually made that women are disadvantaged and so promoting them increases equality, and while this may be true in some contexts..." So what? That changes nothing.
Whatever. You know I put a fair amount of work into writing this shit, only to have you ignore it. I'm glad we're done. Trying to have any kind of discussion on the internet is a huge waste of time.
How would you respond to this: "Net neutrality advocates are dumb. No we don't want ISPs slowing down some traffic, that would be censorship and anti-competitive and wrong. But those idiots keep complaining about fast lanes. Going fast is good! Fast lanes are just fine." ?
Egalitarianism is specifically about people, so I can't call net neutrality egalitarian, but the idea is the same: equality is good and it is the opposite of promoting one group (of internet traffic) while excluding others. There's very little difference between promoting group A exclusively, and inhibiting everything that isn't in group A.
So you bring up civil rights and the civil rights movement, and there's an interesting feminist angle there. Civil rights, of course, are for everyone - not black people exclusively. But the civil rights movement, at least in the United States, was pretty much exclusively about civil rights for black people. There were a couple of women, civil rights activists, who felt disenfranchised and ultimately quit the civil rights movement for this reason. But not before writing a fairly famous memo (here) which is considered one of the founding documents of second wave feminism.
In other words, a couple of women quit an exclusionary movement for being excluded, only to inspire their own exclusionary movement. I wish I could say it was surprising that they would just perpetuate the same problem, but this is a common reaction to being mistreated.
So this is a criticism of the civil rights movement, but there's a question of whether they could have achieved what they did if their focus had been broader. And if you compare to the Black Lives Matter movement, going on right now, well... there are some positive and negative things to be said about that comparison, but this is now meandering. (I wrote two more paragraphs here before I realized that this was a dumb tangent.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "individual" agenda, but it is the agenda that is the problem. So... yes? I gave you an example above (the soup kitchen) of a way to pursue an agenda (mitigating hunger, particularly the greater hunger of group A) without excluding anyone. It's just a matter of identifying a problem and helping with that, rather than identifying a group of people and helping them.
I don't know how AMD structures their EULAs, but they also have a line of professional cards, distinct from their consumer cards (and more expensive).
Matrox used to be the good one for this. They didn't make that distinction and as a result the Parhelia retained a lot of its value for a long time, despite the fact that it was never that impressive a card in the first place.
Okay, maybe it's my turn to link the dictionary then. I explained above, in this post, why I think those ideas are contradictory. I didn't go into great detail, since it all made sense to me, but I will go over anything that you don't follow or disagree with.
By your reasoning one could never support anything
... What? How? I think you may not have thought this through, not every cause champions one group to the exclusion of others. How about, just throwing something out there, a soup kitchen? Very few soup kitchens say that they'll only give soup to members of group A, perhaps quoting some statistics which show that members of group B are less likely to be hungry. A real soup kitchen might end up serving group A more often for this statistical reason, but they're not leaving hungry B's out in the cold.
So this soup kitchen promotes equality, because it serves group A more often and thus reduces the imbalance of hunger. And it accomplishes this in a non-discriminatory manner, because it also serves group B when members of group B need it.
This is just an example off the top of my head, but... come on. I'm sure you could have come up with an example like this for yourself if you had tried.
A Cubox is not substantially different from a Raspberry Pi, it's just slightly more compact and comes pre-assembled. You can put Kodi on it, though it looks like that might be installed by default now.
Just bear in mind that it has the same limitations as a Raspberry Pi: it can be a fine media player, but it won't handle the DRM'd stuff. So no Netflix or Amazon Prime, but it does have a Youtube plugin (unless the situation with Netflix has changed?). It's also more expensive than a Raspberry Pi, but not if you get it used off of Ebay like I did.
If a person, conservative or otherwise, espouses clearly racist ideals on the internet, does that make even that one person racist? The point that I was making in my second paragraph is that I think the answer is: not necessarily.
Your link has two definitions. The first is the milktoast definition that you give above, the second rings truer but I'd consider carefully whether there's nothing bad there, as you claim. Promoting one group over others is an explicitly anti-egalitarian stance. The argument is usually made that women are disadvantaged and so promoting them increases equality, and while this may be true in some contexts... that isn't how advocacy works. There's no one counting equality points, ready to turn off feminism once it has filled it's quota.
There's also a matter of discrimination: it isn't specifically related to egalitarianism but if we take it as a rule of thumb that reducing discrimination generally has a positive effect on equality (call it "good vibes" or something), then advocacy through promoting one group to the exclusion of others is discriminatory and counter to that goal.
Anyway, this has gone long for a response to a single sentence. Maybe I'm in internet loudmouth. (I'm not in real life)
Virtually no one will come out against equality between the sexes, if that's all that it took to be a feminist then the word would be useless. Whatever the word may mean, it's more specific than that.
I think what the parent is complaining about is what I call "internet feminism," which is very much like "internet political commentator" or "internet expert on [foo]": it's a sort of perversion of an otherwise rational person into... something else. I think Penny Arcade had a strip about this. The trouble is that as people spend more and more time yelling at each other on the internet, that internet personality starts to bleed over into their regular personality...
Hitler explicitly hated communists. One of the concepts in fascism is that the state, the country, is all-important, and individuals are not. Communists subscribe to a notion of a sort of universal proletariat brotherhood, where nationality isn't important.
This is not a small difference, nationalism is really central to fascism, it is the core principle. Calling Hitler a communist is just wildly inaccurate. You could call him a jew-lover and be no more wrong.
My counter to the claim that the only authoritative source is a college, is to reference a college.
If you are claiming that the Oxford English Dictionary is a non-authoritative source for what words mean, when it is in fact the most authoritative source... I can't help you. You are a lost cause.
The parent didn't say "agreements." The only agreements that you could be talking about here deal with infrastructure, and eliminating them would just lead to redundant infrastructure. Woohoo.
There is a solution to promoting competition which doesn't involve this problem, it was implemented in 1999, but it's only ever applied to DSL because in 2002 the FCC decided to classify other ISPs as "information services" rather than as "telecommunication services."
In other words, this is one more way in which the current FCC's decision has screwed us.
Fascism is neither good nor bad, it's just a way of doing things. It's pretty effective at it's primary goal: preparing a country for war. Not so great outside of war.
Nationalism, expansion of government, free healthcare, and regulated jobs are all consistent with fascism. (Healthcare? There are only a few countries where that's argued as a left/right issue. Just for example: Cuba (left) and Saudi Arabia (right) both offer free healthcare.) The only really left-wing thing on your list is minimum wages. Hitler was not explicitly fascist, but he was an admirer of fascism. Have you heard of the Beer Hall Putsch? That was an attempt to imitate Mussolini.
There are a couple of ACs who have explained this already. I'll just link this one, since it seems as though he mistakenly replied to me instead of you.
How about the Oxford English Dictionary? It's not a community college, but I'm told that they know a thing or two about political science.
Here's the wikipedia page on fascism. Here's the first paragraph from that page:
Fascism /fæzm/ is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism,[1][2] characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce[3] that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.[4] The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I before it spread to other European countries.[4] Opposed to liberalism, Marxism and anarchism, fascism is usually placed on the far-right within the traditional left–right spectrum.
I don't know where you're getting your definition of fascism from, but... Well, I'd be interested in knowing that.
Oh for gods' sake... communism is left, fascism is right. Here. You can't just take everything that you don't like and declare that the outgroup represents all of it.
Well... you can. I guess you did.
but they are not obligated to do anything like that per the US Constitution
No one has claimed that they did something illegal.
I think you may have missed the point here. Yes, the ACA was introduced and then discussed for six months before it was passed. Thus, people had six months to scrutinize it in detail before the vote. It was a large and important bill, with much to go over. This is the expected procedure.
For the tax bill that we're discussing, it was introduced in the house and then voted on two weeks later. It was introduced in the senate (with many amendments) and then voted on two days later. This is not enough time. That is the problem.
His powers are in no way unilateral. Setting aside his four fellow commissioners, they can only implement what congress gives them. If the courts decide that they're not doing what congress told them to do, their rules get struck down (this is what happened in 2010), if congress decides that they're not doing what congress wants them to do they can be replaced (this is what happened in 2017), and if congress decides that they're still not getting in line then they can be overruled directly (ideally, this is what will happen in 2018).
I don't mean to pick on you, but there's this wholly inaccurate trend to blame everything on Pai here and doing that will get us nowhere. Pai is congress' stooge and fall guy. If we fail to hold congress accountable for this then they have won.
So you didn't even read enough of the article to find out what the headline is. Nice.
Yes. Are you asking for a reference? If you just search for "Republican secret tax bill" you'll find plenty.
The tax bill that the parent was talking about was not handled the same way. That was kept under wraps until the last minute, so that the public wouldn't find out about it and wouldn't have enough time to organize opposition.
It's similar to how the TPP was handled, and much of the reason why people got so angry over that. It's not business as usual. (Though I think it's a little less uncommon for an international treaty than it is for a domestic bill.)
It is not at all absurd to require you to put money aside to ensure that you can fullfill your obligations in the future.
This is a straw man. The parent didn't say anything about the rational behind putting money aside or planning for the future, the parent was talking about the fact that the post office was given ten years to fund seventy-five years worth of retirement benefits. It's the extreme nature of the requirement that's the issue, and not the idea that planning ahead is somehow bad. You are deflecting.
Yeah the big blockbusters aren't the real money-makers for theaters, as I understand it. Because of the week-by-week nature of the revenue split, it's the sleeper hits that do really well for them. I've been told that There's Something About Mary saved a lot of franchises, thanks to its longevity.
I keep saying "I'm told" or "I've heard" - I'm getting all of this from a hazy memory of a conversation that I had with a friend of mine who worked as a projectionist. I'm just hedging in case someone comes along to correct me: I am not claiming expertise.
The revenue split is complicated. Studios take something like 90% of tickets sales for the first week, 80% for the second, etc. (I don't know the actual numbers, but it's something like this). I've been told that it averages out to something like a 50/50 split most of the time, but Disney has leveraged their position to force theaters to agree to something closer to a 60/40 split in some cases.
This is one of the criticisms of the Disney/Fox merger, incidentally. It would give Disney control of roughly 40% of the film industry, and allow them to do a lot more of that sort of thing.
Historically, contributions by the communications industry [opensecrets.org] has favored Democrats
Did you look at your link? They're grouping communications and electronics together. If you pick out just the communications companies - AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Cox - all favor Republicans. Be careful about how you use the term "fake news," it doesn't mean what you think it means.
Most criticism of Bush 2's science record was climate change, the stem cell business, etc. He also supported that "teach the controversy" BS, in schools. These are things for which his record is demonstrably poor. Spending more money in other areas does make up for suppressing research.
What your link tells me about print industry lobbying, is that the print industry doesn't spend money on lobbying. Compare to your link for communications lobbying - there's an order of magnitude difference there. (I was going to offer an alternative theory to your one about Fox News, but it doesn't seem necessary...)
Given that the person you were replying to was only claiming that the two parties are not the same, this seems to be born out by your links.