[y66]

re: trolls

Ideally, forum software would support delegating mod authority to thread starters. A reasonable alternative would be to ban posters who don't respect requests from thread starters to please stop sh*t posting.

[kenberg]

I have been busy but I have to take a moment here. I think in some circumstances posters should be banned but I think it should be very rare. Nothing I have seen here, at least for some years, remotely qualifies. Not all discussion here go as I wish they would. Yep, that's so, but I don't want anyone banned.

[pilowsky]

Water cooler rules: Do no evil?
The 2nd pinned post made in the water cooler by Rain March 4 2006.

Quote

This is meant to be a place to engage in dialogue, share your views and perspectives on global events, anything that can't fit into the other forums. However, we'll still follow some basic rules:

1) No personal attacks. Insults are a No-No. You can have issues with someone else's opinion and attack that (in a civilised manner hopefully), but don't go after anyone personally.

2) No advertising, no spam.

3) No obscenities.

Posters who engage in hateful, vulgar, threatening, knowingly illegal and inaccurate posts may be suspended not just from forums, but also our related websites.

In general, please follow this rule of thumb (which is a good rule I've picked up from another forum): If you aren't comfortable emailing a post to your grandmother/mother/colleague, then it probably shouldn't be posted here.

By posting in this forum, you have also agreed to the terms stated here.

Ok?

Whew!
Lets keep the posts flowing. On Behalf of BBO and BBF, Thanks!

[Chas_P]

hrothgar, on 2022-September-16, 04:19, said:

Stupid stupid little Chas

Can't even remember what he writes from day to day

Well, you're in your 80s
Alzheimers is probably setting in

Quick reminder

You started out by claiming that I am a legend in my own mind
I responded by pointing out that my claims are actually well in accord with the opinions of folks on forums
MULTIPLE people label you as a racist

Saying that you stand alone doesn't refute my basic claim
Indeed, you're conceding the point

As Mr. Shakespeare said, "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

[kenberg]

pilowsky, on 2022-September-16, 18:20, said:

Water cooler rules: Do no evil?
The 2nd pinned post made in the water cooler by Rain March 4 2006.
[/color]

The grandmother rule is reasonable, at least metaphorically. I couldn't stand my maternal grandmother and the other one was dead long before I was born. So if we go by what I would write to my grandmother I will never post again.

We post opinions. Of course we do. I loved high school geometry where every assertion came with a proof but that's not real life. So we post opinions.

As to obscenities, I favor reasonable tolerance. I watch modern movies and find far more casual obscenity in them than I use in my own speech. When I was a high school Sophomore I went on a binge of obscenities, double negatives etc. "I ain't got no effin interest in poetry". I grew out of it. But occasionally a mild obscenity seems to fit. I think we can all survive it.

"Do no evil" is reasonable except that we do not all agree on what constitutes evil. The Dems spent a lot of money helping Trumpees to win in the recent Republican primaries. That was both evil and stupid in my opinion. Not everyone agrees.

I try to be as honest as possible and as clear as possible about my thoughts. That's the best I can do.

[Gilithin]

It seems to me that whenever a mass of negative press surrounds Donald Trump, certain conservatives come here and launch trolling posts that attempt to bury any discussion about the current scandal. If you look back through the history of this thread, you can see this pattern repeating itself endlessly. At this time it seems much more fitting for this thread to be discussing why "someone" at Mar-a-Lago stole over 10000 government documents including 2-300 with confidential markings than to go over Chas's racist posting history yet again.

[Winstonm]

Gilithin, on 2022-September-17, 09:52, said:

It seems to me that whenever a mass of negative press surrounds Donald Trump, certain conservatives come here and launch trolling posts that attempt to bury any discussion about the current scandal. If you look back through the history of this thread, you can see this pattern repeating itself endlessly. At this time it seems much more fitting for this thread to be discussing why "someone" at Mar-a-Lago stole over 10000 government documents including 2-300 with confidential markings than to go over Chas's racist posting history yet again.

Yes, it is frustrating that a federal judge has in essence installed herself as Trump’s defense counsel but all the networks want to do is frame it as a both sides dispute and allow GOP to spread their lies unchallenged.

[y66]

Matt Yglesias (Sept 17, 2022) said:

I'm a proponent of free speech broadly construed so I think we moderate the Slow Boring comments with a pretty light hand.

But freedom to boot people on occasion is critical to making it functional and appealing.

It's not just the water cooler apparently.

[kenberg]

Gilithin, on 2022-September-14, 20:28, said:

This seems like an appropriate time to post an article about what has gone wrong with BBF.

The article illustrates a problem. It is written by Film Crit Hulk. At least I am kenberg although since I have, afaik, never met any of my fellow posters f2f this doesn't matter much. When I was young calling someone an obscenity-laced name was apt to lead to a fistfight, so you learned not to do that. At least in St. Paul, if someone called you an MF SOB they could not have you arrested if you punched them in the nose. You couldn't shoot them. At any rate, there was some deterrence for the language used.

I don't regard myself as a Rightie, but not as a Leftie either. In WaPo I read George Will and I read E. J. Dionne. Neither of them is a troll, neither of them is a god. They are both intelligent and interesting.

As to problems with BBF, I regard the lack of diversity, or the lack of surprise, as the biggest problem. In the last five years have I said anything that surprised anyone? Has Winston? We all know each other's views. It's true that I avoid lunch with Trumpees or with those who think vaccines make you radioactive, but I like chatting with those whose views are more conservative than mine.

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2022-September-18, 08:21, said:

The article illustrates a problem. It is written by Film Crit Hulk. At least I am kenberg although since I have, afaik, never met any of my fellow posters f2f this doesn't matter much. When I was young calling someone an obscenity-laced name was apt to lead to a fistfight, so you learned not to do that. At least in St. Paul, if someone called you an MF SOB they could not have you arrested if you punched them in the nose. You couldn't shoot them. At any rate, there was some deterrence for the language used.

I don't regard myself as a Rightie, but not as a Leftie either. In WaPo I read George Will and I read E. J. Dionne. Neither of them is a troll, neither of them is a god. They are both intelligent and interesting.

As to problems with BBF, I regard the lack of diversity, or the lack of surprise, as the biggest problem. In the last five years have I said anything that surprised anyone? Has Winston? We all know each other's views. It's true that I avoid lunch with Trumpees or with those who think vaccines make you radioactive, but I like chatting with those whose views are more conservative than mine.

I like to think of myself as convincible. This is not the same as gullible. Neither is it the same as unbendable. I like to keep in mind and be a proponent of the words attributed to John Maynard Keynes: When the facts change, I change my mind; what do you do, sir?

That idea should have neither a liberal nor a conservative bias. That it does is the problem.

[y66]

Blake Houndshell at NYT said:

https://messaging-cu...f6-f2df3c2f0ab2

In a sharply written open letter to Congress published on Monday and shared in advance with The New York Times, the scholars tell lawmakers, “It is clear that our winner-take-all system — where each U.S. House district is represented by a single person — is fundamentally broken.” They call on Congress to “adopt inclusive, multimember districts with competitive and responsive proportional representation.”

The list of signatories includes nine of the 18 living U.S.-based winners of the Johan Skytte Prize, a prestigious Swedish award that has become a kind of unofficial Nobel for political science: Robert Axelrod, Francis Fukuyama, Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert Keohane, David D. Laitin, Margaret Levi, Arend Lijphart, Philippe C. Schmitter and Rein Taagepera.

“Our arcane, single-member districting process divides, polarizes and isolates us from each other,” the professors write. “It has effectively extinguished competitive elections for most Americans, and produced a deeply divided political system that is incapable of responding to changing demands and emerging challenges with necessary legitimacy.”

In simple terms, what these professors are proposing is a shift from …

Districts where voters in each of the two major parties first choose their representatives through partisan primaries, then select a single winner during the general election

… to:

A system in which voters choose multiple members to represent the same area, with votes allocated proportionally to the population.

Quote

In the United States, changing the federal election system nationwide would require an act of Congress.

It would be politically tricky to pull off, to put it mildly. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution grants states the authority to set “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives.” But it also gives Congress the power to “at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.”

That ambiguity means there’s ample room for dispute about whether Congress or the states are the appropriate decision maker.

[kenberg]

I read the letter. Consider:

Quote

The effects would be far-reaching and salutary. Proportional representation would render gerrymandering obsolete and help ensure that a political party’s share of votes in an election actually determines how many seats it holds in the House.

Maybe just a technicality, but I vote for a person, not a party. Ok, that person belongs to a party. Well, sometimes. People do run as independents. If we have a conservative independent running and a liberal independent running and, taken together, they get a good number of votes do we then somehow say that "independents" got enough votes so one or the other of these very opposing guys gets a seat based on the combined vote total for independents? Or maybe a Democratic Socialist gets a lot of votes from Democrats and a Democrat gets a lot of votes from Democrats. Maybe this all works out, maybe not? Also, the Constitution, afaik, doesn't envision people voting for parties.

I'm thinking that this plan might need a little more work. I'm not dismissing it, but I am having trouble seeing just how it would work.

[pilowsky]

Any proposal that has the support of Francis Fukuyama is worth opposing.
The 'multi-member system' is a recipe for a lawyers picnic where everyone gets a sandwich with nothing in it.

[Winstonm]

It sounds to me as if the idea is to change the US to a quasi-parliamentary system. It will never happen. The US is too broken.
The US is not so very different in 2022 as it was in 1922 or 1862.

[Gilithin]

kenberg, on 2022-September-19, 18:45, said:

I'm thinking that this plan might need a little more work. I'm not dismissing it, but I am having trouble seeing just how it would work.

Consider the German system then, where you have a certain number of Representatives based around physical areas/seats and a top up pool that can be fine-tuned to make sure that each party winning at least 5% of the vote ends up with a number of seats proportional to their vote share. The result is more or less the best of both FPTP and PR systems in one tidy package. Probably the best nation-building the US has ever implemented in its entire history.

[cherdano]

kenberg, on 2022-September-18, 08:21, said:

I like chatting with those whose views are more conservative than mine.

That would really add to the discussion, but many of the conservatives on here turned out rather implicitly or explicitly r*ist.
And I think that's really the issue. So much of the conservative movement has turned into either pure identity politics ("Look how much I deplore Nancy Pelosi!! Do I need to say anything else?") or "own the libs"-for-its-own-sake politics that it takes someone genuinely independent to advocate a conservative vision with dignity, judgement and intellectual coherence. And Ben Shapiro-style shallow talking points to win you a timed debate won't fly in here when people have time to draft a response or cite, uhm, facts.

I follow a bit of politicsy accounts on twitter. In the US, I'd find it difficult to follow conservative accounts. In the UK, there are quite a few that I do follow. Sometimes they irk me, sometimes I think they are wrong, sometimes I think they are right. Much more interesting following them then someone whose opinions I can predict, or that I automatically discount.

[thepossum]

I don't think racism has much of a political orientation, Maybe it does. I wonder who some of the worst are?

[pilowsky]

Here's an interesting article on the long history and development of racist politics in America by Princeton Professor Douglas Massey.

[y66]

NY attorney general Letitia James said:

It was a scheme that by its very nature became more profitable over time, and it is all in stark violation of the law.

https://www.nytimes....awsuit-ny-james

[pilowsky]

So, suppose one or more of the three Mr Trump's +- Mrs Kushner have to go to prison.
Does that mean they get a Secret Service detail in the cells with them?