Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

> You say "branding" as if the names of BOTH parties don't stretch back to the early days of our democracy

Unless you are referring to the fact that it borrowed the unused half of the Democratic-Republican Party’s name after the Democratic Party had stopped using it, the Republican Party and its name only stretches back to the early days of the Republic by a very generous interpretation of “early”.

>Mail in voting and thousands of in person voting booths across the state.

I dread the dystopia when you sent your party affiliation on your phone and you never even have to think about pesky things like engagement, and people, and politicians, and elections as your phone will be automatically be polled at election time for your vote.

This is a democratic dystopia.

To me, this is democracy: https://youtu.be/FRtp-ooeC3Q?t=139 - yelling, cheering, jeering, people in a common space, interacting with their neighbours, fired up!

> I personally guarantee to you that this is due either to a lack of experience in the struggle some Americans face, or to a lack of imagination.

Personally guarantee eh? I can personally guarantee you don't know what you're talking about. I noticed a tendency of a certain class of people, typically who grew up in an affluent household, who are deeply uncomfortable with making any statement that doesn't infantilize people of modest means or modest upbringing. Frequently they will also lecture others who are familiar with growing up poor, or in an immigrant ghetto in an immigrant household, as somehow ... not understanding what non-affluence looks like, perhaps because they themselves don't understand it and they lack the imagination to (as you put it).

I understand what growing up as a foreign-born immigrant in working-class immigrant household looks like, and it doesn't change my conclusion. If people, regardless of income, care about caucus they will make time. In fact, they will be happy to. Sacrificing a little for something you care about is a spiritual experience.

> but is your (more general) argument that CA was bad, or that precise, hidden information targeting based on a persons characteristics cannot be used in nefarious ways?

The only argument I made was that the impact of CA was overblown for political reasons. I don't have a well-formed opinion on targetted political messaging, except maybe that it is a reality and we should just get used to it - perhaps having some regulations may make sense (the way lobbyists are regulated) so that the entire industry doesn't go underground.

>Because if you aren't arguing the latter, I don't think its worth calling OP out on CA specifically.

OP was making a political point - that CA was uniquely bad or an example of the problems of the industry because they were tied to Trump's joke of a campaign. If you actually read what they did, they were clearly clowns and shysters - as in, they siphoned consulting money from the campaign by promising the moon, and couldn't actually deliver. Ironically, their promises were taken at face value after Trump's election.

>It's sits center-left in that study because the study centers around the center of US media coverage, not any principled definition of political center; the NY Times viewpoint is, and has long been, neoliberal corporate capitalist

Your contention is that the center is really defined by the progressive/Marxist/"democratic socialist" minority? In that case, I guess anything to the right of that minority (i.e. everything) would be see as right-wing. Unfortunately, that's not the actual center. A better descriptor for those groups is 'far left'.

>I strongly disagree with anyone who denies that the trade-off exists.

Well of course the trade-off exists. I never said it doesn't take effort to go out and caucus. It does. Having said that, there are many people with the time and means to attend a caucus (as you would define it), still don't attend a political caucus. Why is that? I'll tell you: because they don't care about caucusing and therefore the trade-off for them (as minuscule as it is) is too big.

So you aren't making any profound argument. What you're missing is the other side of the equation - it isn't just about the relative effort to do something, but more importantly the level of care that people have for that something. That is if people don't care about attending a political rally, they won't attend a political rally even if you remove every barrier you perceive there to be. We see it in elections all the time. For all the talk about structural barriers to voting, black turn out was a record high for Obama because black communities really cared about voting for Obama. Black turnout was not as high for Hillary, because she didn't have the same level of support from the black population.

When people care about something, they will find a way to engage.