631–640 of 696 posts
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Is he taking a break from being a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda?
Can you make an example?
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Sorry, name's taken. I know you're making a point by linking it to 1984, but Oceania is a real name for a continent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania
The most bootlicking anglos in the world are the Australians , despite the extreme competition that NZ and the UK give them. The Orwellian definition IS the real name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country
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That's not an aside. The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben . People invoke it without ever asking themselves if its true because they think of it as the hard won wisdom of a great man.
> The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben. It's not pernicious for any reason because it's absolutely true in general, Franklin was simply using a general piece of wisdom to justify particular government actions. Yes, using it that way was an improvisation and a bit of a stretch, but the real issue here is why he needed to resort to it - that's a rabbit hole that pretty much goes to the bottom of to…
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This dynamic always happens with quotes and attempts to deploy the founding fathers in arguments. Most of the founding fathers (except Thomas Paine) were terrible, horrible, no good people. I’d have been a loyalist in that era.
Maybe I'm just America Pilled but I'll support almost anyone against a hereditary monarchy. The idea should be fundamentally disgusting to any self-respecting human being.
If our democracy is sufficiently broken, if supermajority voter policy preferences continue to be dismissed by both parties, it might be that we just cannot survive under the old Constitutional order. The Right's open move towards a post-democratic future, and the proceduralist Center's continued failure to fully utilize their popular mandate to fix things that need fixing, implicitly authorizes a Left to develop that is more obsessed with expression of the popular will and with good governance, than it is with a 250 year old bureaucratic structure and "norms". Norms of restraint are a consensual exercise, and cannot persist unilaterally.
The way things are going, the trajectory, make even most 20th century hereditary monarchies look pretty decent. Especially ones that devolve most power to parliamentary bodies.
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> " Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety " -- Benjamin Franklin The key phrase is "a little temporary safety". 250 years ago people understood that the "security" gains were small and fleeting, but the loss of liberty was massive and permanent.
FWIW, the context of the Franklin quote is him defending the ability of the legislature to tax a family that was trying to bribe/lobby the governor to do otherwise. The quote is in defense of the government: WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying bu…
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> when they were willfully obstructing federal agents from doing the job they were assigned. Even if one assumes that to be true: there might have been a case for an arrest, but not for firing into a moving vehicle that is forbidden even under ICE guidelines, and certainly not for unloading a whole magazine worth of ammunition into an unarmed person. I stand by my judgement: both cases were extrajudicial killings and…
Good hit him with her car and he is law enforcement. She should have put her car in park and surrendered to the officers as they were instructing her to do. The agents and the Goods both didn't appear there in the street out of a vacuum, clearly she was there to obstruct. Seemed like Good was afraid and chose to flee consequences. Pretti may have had an accidental discharge of his gun, which he took to a confrontatio…
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Approval voting seems to me to be worse on all counts that the previous commenter was levying against ranked-choice. To your point, the spoiler effect seems like it would be much worse with approval than with a ranked ballot, since highly partisan voters would have little reason to approve of any candidate other than the single candidate they want in office. Approving of anyone else lessens their candidate's chance o…
>A ranked choice ballot at least requires you to assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot: you can honestly rank your second choice without being concerned that doing so undermines your first. That's highly implementation dependent. Where I live we have ranked-choice ballots for local primary elections, while the local general elections are FPTP. State and Federal elections are all FPTP for primary and…
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> Regarding conservatives/MAGA, if you're saying the US hasn't changed dramatically since 2016 then I don't know what to say to you. That is precisely why I didn't mention these. > Regarding the latter, police used to widely behave like ICE; now it's anathema - at least in cities. None of them help ICE afaik. They still kill people en masse [1], still overwhelmingly non-White people, and the number only increased ove…
To say there are still problems doesn't mean there isn't significant progress. Otherwise, there is no significant progress anywhere in anything. > what should have happened in response to metoo and George Floyd/BLM was action that went beyond symbolism. There was and is: Laws have been passed in many places protecting rights. Oppressive systems like bail have been reformed in many places. Progressive prosecutors were…
You do have a point in there. The problem IMHO is communication: silent progress just isn't enough with such glaring abuses of power.
> Maybe the last reminder in DC, which I doubt. I see plenty of BLM signs (and LGTBQ+ pride flags) in cities.
That's private persons that float these. The DC mural was a public admission by a government entity that they don't stand for such behavior, and that is what made ripping it out so powerful symbolically. The teardown was a very public symbol of "we shit on anything DEI".
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Even in the EU we can't use a lot of "society important" smartphone apps without Google Play or the Apple Store. I can get a physical key thing for my national digital ID, but I can't get anything for my bank, my healthcare (which is a public service in Denmark) or any of our national digital post services. You can apply to get exempt from the digital post services, and they do have a website sollution, but still. Do…
> Even in the EU we can't use a lot of "society important" smartphone apps without Google Play or the Apple Store. Install GrapheneOS on a Pixel. Most Android apps just work, and unlike the stock OS, it does not spy on you.
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Snowden is currently more or less trapped in Russia, and therefore unable to expose overreach of authoritarian governments without immediately fearing for his life. The US has lots of issues but at least it doesn't toss you out a window when you cross Fearless Leader. Maybe you get ICE'd, but Russia's kill rate of people Putin doesn't like is 1000x Trump.
Well, not yet anyway:
> Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...