The Left: Robespierre did nothing wrong

Discussion in 'The Mainboard' started by bricktop, Jan 17, 2017.

  1. Prospector

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    Entergy Arkansas announces plans for 100-megawatt solar facility in White County


    Electric utility Entergy Arkansas and NextEra Energy Resources LLC, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Inc., plan to build a 100-megawatt solar energy facility in White County near Searcy. The companies announced the project Monday (March 18). Pending approval by the Arkansas Public Service Commission, it would be the largest utility-owned solar facility in the state and feature a battery for storing solar power.
    This will be Entergy’s third large-scale solar project in Arkansas, and with a combined capacity of 281 megawatts of solar energy, they can power about 45,000 homes. The Searcy solar facility is expected to begin operating by 2021, and it will be designed and built by a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources. It will be built on about 800 acres east of Eastline Road near Searcy, and Entergy Arkansas will purchase the facility when it’s completed.

    The project is expected to be filed with the Arkansas Public Service Commission by mid-2019, said Kerri Case, senior communications specialist for Entergy Arkansas. A timeline for commission approval or when construction will start has yet to be set. Entergy Arkansas declined to disclose the project cost but noted the costs and benefits for customers will be in the filing. Customers are expected to see economic and environmental benefits as a result of the project, she said.

    “As the largest solar provider and a leader in renewable energy in Arkansas, Entergy is proud to bring a third large-scale project to the state that will allow our customers to benefit from the economic and environmental advantages of renewable energy, while at the same time learning about the benefits of battery storage,” said Laura Landreaux, president and CEO of Entergy Arkansas.

    The Searcy project will include an array of lithium-ion batteries capable of storing up to 30 megawatt-hours of electricity. The stored energy is expected to be charged and discharged daily to maximize the value of solar energy. The city of Fayetteville, Ozarks Electric Cooperative and Today’s Power Inc. recently broke ground on a 10-megawatt solar facility in Fayetteville that will include 24 megawatt-hours of battery storage. The $23 million system is expected to be completed in late summer 2019.

    Entergy Arkansas has been purchasing 81 megawatts of solar energy from NextEra Energy Resources at a solar facility near Stuttgart. Entergy Arkansas also will purchase another 100 megawatts of solar energy from NextEra Energy Resource’ Chicot Solar project at Lake Village when the plant starts operating in 2020. The construction of the Stuttgart Solar Energy Center created nearly 200 jobs, and Chicot Solar is expected to employ a similar number of workers. Combined, the projects are expected to generate $900,000 annually in property taxes.

    Also, Entergy Arkansas is seeking additional renewable energy projects through a request for proposals.

    “Our customers want to see solar in our resource portfolio, and we are listening and responding,” Landreaux said. “We want all of our customers to have the benefit of solar energy, and we also want to help individual customers meet their renewable energy goals. In addition to adding solar to our generation mix, we’ve also received approval of a Solar Energy tariff from the Arkansas Public Service Commission, which will give our customers the option of purchasing solar power to help meet their renewable energy objectives. It’s really an exciting time as we look to meeting the future energy needs of our customers.”

    Entergy Arkansas and NextEra Energy Resource will host a public open house from 5 to 7 p.m. April 2 in Cone Chapel at Harding University’s American Heritage Center at 915 E. Market St. in Searcy. Attendees of the open house can learn more about the project.

    Entergy Arkansas, a subsidiary of Entergy Corp., provides electricity to nearly 700,000 customers in 63 counties. Entergy owns power plans with nearly 30,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity, including almost 10,000 megawatts of nuclear power. Entergy has more than 2.8 million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
     
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  2. Prospector

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    from dk
    How, Since Reagan, Republican Administrations Always Lead To An Economic Meltdown--in 10 Easy Steps


    The Neverending Story of Republican Economic Incompetence

    Here's the standard Republican Economic Playbook ever since Reagan took office in 1981:

    Step 1: Republicans get into power and then cut taxes as much as possible on the rich and big corporations.

    Step 2: Republicans brag about how the economy has improved on essentially borrowed money since reduced tax income means that more money must be borrowed to offset the loss in taxes. Interest will then have to be paid on that borrowed money for a long, long time, thus reducing the ability of the government to invest in people and programs.

    Step 3: Republicans suddenly notice that less tax money is coming in, and cut government spending on programs for the poor and middle class.

    Step 4: Republicans undermine unions as much as possible to try and help their corporate friends pay as little as possible in wages. Over the long term, this results in regular people having very little money. Republicans also resist raising the minimum wage and resist all wage increases as much as possible. This also results in the poor and middle class having little money over the long term. Income inequality expands. The well off get richer, and everyone else gets poorer.

    Step 5: Republicans avoid much-needed infrastructure spending programs, which would help the nation by providing jobs, growing the economy, and increasing the amount of taxable income which could help pay off debt. Republicans tend to avoid big infrastructure programs because they have convinced themselves that, in general, Government Spending Is Bad—except on certain things like expensive military weapons, in which case, they seem to believe that one can never spend too much.

    Step 6: Republicans watch in total surprise as businesses start collapsing, and more and more regular people start defaulting on their mortgages, bank loans, and credit cards. Since most businesses cater to the poor and middle class, when regular people do not have any money, most businesses end up with fewer customers, and thus, little money. Welcome to another Republican created recession.

    Step 7: Republicans do little to fix the recession, since fixing the economy would involve reversing what the Republicans actually did while in office. Eventually, voters put Democrats back into power, hoping that the Democrats will be able to fix the bad economy. The Democrats increase Government spending with an infrastructure program to counteract the economic slowdown caused by the Republicans. Republicans scream bloody murder about how the Democrats are creating government debt with their spending. As Republicans do this, they ignore the huge amount of government debt which was created by 1) Republican tax cuts, 2) the economic slowdown caused by Republican cuts in spending to pay for their tax cuts, and 3) the economic slowdown caused by Republicans fighting unions, fighting wage increases, and fighting all efforts to implement big infrastructure programs.

    Step 8: The economy slowly recovers due to measures which were both pushed for by Democrats and fought against by Republicans every step of the way.

    Step 9: After years of economic improvement under Democratic leadership, Republicans spend countless millions of dollars trying to convince voters that they will do a better job with the economy than the Democrats did. Voters eventually vote the Republicans into power.

    Step 10: Go to Step 1.
     
  3. brolift

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    Don't forget the massive asset transfers out of the poor and middle classes when they're forced to liquidate to survive after step 7.
     
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  4. Can I Spliff it

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    guess the patreon alternative failed
     
  5. Can I Spliff it

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  6. Name P. Redacted

    Name P. Redacted I have no money and I'm also gay
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    Gravel Gang squad up
     
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  7. naganole

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    Nordic capitalism.
     
  8. ~ taylor ~

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    This reminds me that the "Western Civilization" chodes are all about Western European influence, but only with respect to skin color and specific sections of christianity.
     
  9. brolift

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    They think Robert Clive is a good guy
     
  10. brolift

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    https://splinternews.com/mike-gravels-viral-2020-campaign-is-the-brainchild-of-a-1833434906
    Mike Gravel's Viral 2020 Campaign Is the Brainchild of a New York Teen

    Late last night, 88-year-old former senator Mike Gravel started posting tweets. Or, an account under his name did. The tweets, for the most part, were about Gravel running for president, something he has not done since 2008 (he hasn’t been a senator since 1981). They were clear that any candidacy would exist solely for the purposes of pushing the other Democratic candidates to the left on their handling of foreign policy and the military-industrial complex.







    Outstream Video















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    That in and of itself is... weird, and kind of cool, but the story gets stranger. Gravel’s account is being run by a “group of students” in Westchester, New York who, as one of them told Splinter in an interview, convinced the former senator to think about running again. This has caused a substantial amount of confusion, as the teens have spent most of the last 24 hours furiously shitposting under Gravel’s name and doing memes with people who were still on Twitter at 1 a.m. last night.


    Splinter reached out to the email address on the Gravel campaign/ committee website and heard back shortly after from a high school student named David Oks, who said he was the one behind Gravel’s fire tweets. Oks said the exploratory committee sure is real, and Gravel is on board with it. (Gravel said the same thing to a Politico reporter on Tuesday night.)

    Oks, a high school senior who has previously run for mayor of his small New York town, told Splinter that he and several friends are avid listeners of the Chapo Trap House podcast, which mentioned Gravel in a recent episode. About a week ago, he and a couple friends reached out to Gravel and asked if he would consider making another run for president. Their pitch was clear. “My friends and I were encouraging him to consider running for president with the idea being that he would not try to contest any primaries, he would just try to get into the Democratic debates,” he said.

    Oks and his friends were clearly inspired by Gravel’s performance in the 2008 debates, where he delivered a searing indictment of the vast majority of his fellow candidates for their support of the Iraq war and their continued commitment to American interventionism in the Middle East.

    “Senator Gravel is kinda unique in the fervor of his views on foreign policy,” Oks said, mentioning Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders as other candidates who were outspoken, but could still be moved further left.

    “Our goal is to push the rest of the Democratic field toward policies, especially on political reform, climate change, and foreign policy, that, for the first time in decades, will truly challenge the American plutocracy and military-industrial complex,” Gravel’s website reads.


    But first they had to convince Gravel to get on board.

    “He’s a busy guy, he’s got family life, he’s writing a book,” Oks said. “But we decided we’d start an exploratory committee, and plan a sort of digital-first campaign” involving media appearances from Gravel himself.

    Oks said Gravel basically handed over responsibility for the Twitter account and digital campaign, but that they speak a couple times a day and keep in touch about any specific policy issues that the former senator hasn’t commented on (Oks said he’s currently waiting to hear back from the senator on a question about reparations).

    “It’s awesome because Senator Gravel is a wonderful, wonderful man,” Oks said. “Talking to him is like talking to few others.”

    The exploratory committee’s launch, of course, has been a bit chaotic. Oks said they were working with Democracy Now for a full campaign announcement in the coming days, but that they didn’t expect this much attention this fast. “We did not expect people to be looking at the FEC filings,” Oks laughed. Gravel still hasn’t fully committed to a run, but Oks said “given the reception that this weird launch has had, things look favorable.”

    If he does make his way into the debates, it’ll be a hell of a thing to see.
     
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  11. Mister Me Too

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  12. Can I Spliff it

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  13. Bruce Wayne

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  14. Bruce Wayne

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    The more I hear Krasner talk the more I like him

     
  15. Pile Driving Miss Daisy

    Pile Driving Miss Daisy It angries up the blood
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    I've briefly read about him and all his supposed controversies, but I've never heard him in an interview and holy lord was that a good one.
     
  16. Prospector

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    very long, but interesting. From DK
    The inevitable backlash of the Alpha Boys and White ISIS

    [​IMG]
    Because the subject has come up several times with a variety of 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls, two weeks ago I wrote a long discussion on the need for and difficulties involved with implementing reparations for several of America’s past and current mistakes, and sins against its people.

    So in summary, we’ve had 250 years of chattel racial slavery, followed by 100 years of racial terrorism and lynchings, sharecropping, black codes, Jim Crow, segregation, poll taxes, literacy tests, and the denial of voting rights. This was followed by another 50 years of a racially biased police and criminal justice system; red-lining; housing, lending, and job discrimination; voter suppression; white-flight; re-segregation; and a rapidly increasing wage and wealth gap.

    And frankly, as bad as this is, the injustice and crimes that America rendered upon our Native American population is actually far, far worse than any of this and certainly should be addressed as well.

    Reparations aren’t just about slavery itself (which again, didn’t technically end in 1868). It’s about all of this, all of these various issues of continued racial injustice and violence which have spanned more than 400 years.

    Many people pointed out that this would likely spark a major backlash and that pushing this issue would likely guarantee a second term for Donald Trump. In reponse, I wrote a piece on the history of affirmative action, which documented how insufficient it has been as a form of reparations. Still, affirmative action has generated its own fairly rabid backlash and resistance during the past 50 years.

    This week I will examine how even the smallest attempt to balance the scales, or even the most minor public statement by either a lawmaker or a movie star, can spark a virulent backlash—or white-lash if your prefer—of anger, umbrage, and outrage, which is completely out of all reasonable whack.

    If they’re going to distort your position and come after you for being too #woke; being openly in support of #Black Lives Matter and #MeToo; admitting to being a #Social Justice Warrior (SJW); or supporting reparations, you might as well get ready for the white-lash and buckle up.

    It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
    In the last few weeks we've had a massive right-wing attack in progress against freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar, for what was a supposedly “anti-Semitic” tweet that she posted. But almost no one has reported the full context of the tweet.

    On Sunday night, Omar was responding to a tweet from prominent journalist Glenn Greenwald, who said, "Equating [Omar and Tlaib's] criticism of Israel to Steve King's long defense of white supremacy is obscene (McCarthy said it's worse). In the US, we're allowed to criticize our own government: certainly foreign governments. The GOP House Leader's priorities are warped."

    In response to Greenwald's post, Omar tweeted, "It's all about the Benjamins baby," followed by a music emoji, which suggested that money was calling the tune for McCarthy.

    When asked to explain where the money she was referring to came from, Omar tweeted: "AIPAC."

    An Omar spokesman said the tweets "speak for themselves."

    Rep. Omar was quite literally responding to a post that specifically said that criticizing a government for its policy is vastly different from being a bigot, and the issue of the “GOP Leadership priorities being warped.”

    When she said, "It's all about the benjamins, baby,” she was saying why those priorities were warped. Later when she was asked who specifically was "warping priorities” in regard to Israel, she answered "AIPAC," which is quite frankly true. The entire point of lobbyists is to warp policy toward the goals of their clients. Saying this in public doesn't at all seem controversial; if she was asked who is warping policy in regard to drug prices, the obvious answer if PhRMA. But since AIPAC’s clients are largely Jewish, this suddenly became an anti-Semitic trope and critics called for Omar to be thrown off her committees just as Rep. Steve King was thrown off of congressional committees, even though what he said was “When did white supremacy become a bad thing?”

    Like, since always, man.

    Pardon me while I digress into pop-culture parallels, because after this there was an enormous backlash when actress Brie Larson had the temerity to express an opinion.

    The Oscar award-winning actress advocated for more diversity during a speech given at Wednesday night’s Women in Film Crystal + Lucy Awards in Los Angeles by citing data from USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. According to the study, in 2017, only 2.5% of top critics were women of color, while 80% of film critics who reviewed the year’s top box-office movies were male. To highlight her point, Larson referenced A Wrinkle in Time‘s critical reception.

    “I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time,” Larson said. “It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color.”

    For the record, Brie Larson wasn’t even in Ava Duverney’s (Selma, 13th) science fiction/fantasy adventure A Wrinkle in Time.

    She clearly wasn’t saying this about her own new movie, Captain Marvel. She was simply saying that widening the pool of reviewers, from being 80 percent male to include some women of color on a movie that features Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Resse Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling might be a good thing.

    Totally and deliberately misunderstanding her point (just as Rep. Omar was misconstrued), a gang of trolls descended onto Rotten Tomatoes before Captain Marvel’s premiere to argue how they now didn’t want to see Captain Marvel because Brie Larson said “she didn’t want white guys” to see her movie, even though that’s not even close to what she said about having more female and POCs review movies that feature mostly females and POCs.

    Even though Larson went on a short “apology tour” to explain that she didn't hate all white men, for some people it was already far too late. Conservative publications like the Washington Examiner were more than eager to twist her words.

    As the actress embarks on a publicity tour for the first female-led Marvel movie, Brie Larson has a message for white males: Move to the back of the line.

    The Oscar winner said she picked Keah Brown to interview her for a recent Marie Claire profile because the journalist has cerebral palsy and is a woman of color. That’s commendable. Less so is Larson’s posturing.

    “About a year ago,” Larson explains in the interview, “I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male.”

    Yes, I think 80 percent would be overwhelming.

    And then you have people who had to run up and defend this wrong-headed attitude by claiming that those who had noticed and were complaining about the troll comments were “exaggerating” or somehow “lying” about the film being “review bombed” on RT.

    People like Gary Beekler of Nerdrodic.com.

    Yes, technically these weren't reviews, because the film hadn’t been released for review yet. These were comments and posts about whether people wanted to see the film, and a surprising number of people got that simple fact wrong. However, the argument that none of the posts were bigoted or sexist is also just as wrong because some the examples Beekler included above were some of the following, which he totally denied are sexist. But they absolutely are.

    nigel b — as a white male I don’t think Brie would want me watching this movie.

    Sara p — Marvel execs are bragging that Captain Marvel is “the most powerful Hero” in the Marvel Universe. [They said “Cinematic Universe” and technically that’s true because there are stronger heroes who are still only in the comics, but not that many.] This guarantees that she's going to be a total Mary Sue. Disney already killed the Star Wars movie franchise. This looks like this will be the fist [sic] nail in the Marvel Coffin. Not interested in seeing anther SJW propaganda film. Hopefully, Captain Marvel doesn’t take down Avengers 4 with it.

    — Tired of all this SJW nonsense.

    — Not interested in supporting Brie Larson’s agenda.

    J P — I somehow feel that the Skrull is not the enemy. I am sine Brie Larson has been careful to state she doesn’t want the Press Tour to include guys like me.


    She didn’t say anything like that.

    Joseph U — Larson has made it clear, men need not attend this movie.

    Kevin P — Brie Larson has already said this isn’t for me. I’ll spend my money elsewhere.

    She was talking about reviewers for a Wrinkle in Time, who also represented the voice of the main characters of that film, not Captain Marvel.

    Here are some of the top Ccmments from Beekler’s YouTube page.

    Darryl Hamlin 3 weeks ago
    Brie Larson doesn't want white males to see it and I was taught to respect women so I'm going to respect her request and not see it.
    flik221 3 weeks ago
    I think I'll just see Alita again
    Lord Alroy 3 weeks ago
    So the people who watched Wonder Woman but don't want to watch Captain Marvel... Sexist. This is our reality now. This is it. Thanos save us.
    big p 3 weeks ago (edited)
    I've been taught as a latino never to look down on someone because of race or sex. Brie Larson is both racist and sexist at a disgusting level. I'll never watch anything she is in.
    ben31uk 3 weeks ago
    If they leave politics out of it would probably be a good movie. I couldn't care less if there's a female lead role. I just hate politics in Hollywood
    LXKEEM 3 weeks ago (edited)
    marvel looks and sounds boring. But, rotten bananas will give it a 100% score, while audience's score will be around 50-60%.For example, Alita Battle Angel's AUDIENCE's score is 94%, because it's a good movie.
    43 one 3 weeks ago (edited)
    Alita Battle Angel..Awesome Movie according to AUDIENCE (female lead)! Attacked by critics and above all things jealous feminists complaining about her android body having breasts!! smh Lets be real....Its gotten to the point that if a movie is not about, girl power, man bashing, subservient weak males, borderline lesbian, sjw and feminist rhetoric, the movie gets attacked by rotten tomatoes and angry feminists, EVEN IF THE MOVIE IS GREAT! What has this world become!!
    Rant the Retort 3 weeks ago
    In true SJW fashion, Capt Rich White Woman asks other people to pay for her activism.
    99IronDuke 3 weeks ago
    Men and boys need to boycott this film. Hit Hollywood where it hurts them, in the Wallet.
    TrooperJoe73 3 weeks ago
    Let's see.. men are the majority of comic buyers, are upper 30 to mid 50s, have expendable income, watch these movies, take their families... let's run them off.
    Following this, Rotten Tomatoes completely removed the "Want to See" comment feature from their entire site. It was a fairly drastic move—but it didn't help. It just made the haters spin a big corporate conspiracy theory about the “access media” that would give positive reviews and spin to studios who have a corporate connection to their publication. For example, CBS owns TV Guide, so that automatically makes any TV Guide review of CBS programming, like Star Trek: Discovery, suspect of simply being shill work. The same goes for professional reviewers who work for other companies that want to maintain their access to early premieres and so on. You see, it’s all one big corporate conspiracy.

    That perfectly explains why Captain Marvel has a professional reviewer Rotten Tomatoes score of 79 percent, and a public review score of 62 percent. Or maybe it doesn’t.

    I see this entire false narrative of pitting other female-led action movies—such as Alita or Wonder Woman—against this one as a fairly familiar defensive trope for bigots. It’s divide-and-conquer, pitting one woman against another. “Why can’t you be more like Bethany, she doesn’t complain?” “I don’t hate all women leads in every movie, I like these over here—see?” And if they could just have Lynn Patten stand behind them while they said it, that would be perfect.

    This next video takes that trope to Warp Factor 10, even if sardonically.


    As you’ll notice, he uses examples from Aliens and Terminator 2. Those are both sequels to previous films where the lead female actress spent the entire movie running away from the deadly antagonist like a scared rabbit, only to just barely survive after all the male leads had already been killed by finally pulling herself together and reaching depths she didn't believe she was capable of. They were plucky and all that.

    The second parts in both of these movie series show that, eventually, they've embraced that inner confidence and power in a new, fully formed way (and not exactly without some considerable PTSD). In Aliens, Ripley steps up big time after all of her Marine Security team is killed in order to save a young girl who reminds her of her own daughter who, as shown in a deleted scene, has passed away from old age while she slumbered in hyper-sleep, so she grabs some of their weapons and goes after the aliens in a way that the first film couldn’t have conceived, and wouldn't have been believable. Sarah Connor, who spent the first Terminator movie as a frightened waitress in Los Angeles, has practically turned herself into a human Terminator in the second film, sacrificing everything—even some of her emotional health—in a mad plan to save, protect, and train her son John Connor, who is reportedly destined to save humanity in the future.

    Further, both of these movies were made by James Cameron. Like George Lucas before him with Princess Leia, Cameron did have an agenda of trying to highlight and portray strong women as action heroes. He basically did it again with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in The Abyss; to some extent with Rose in Titanic;, with Jamie Lee Curtis, who goes from a housewife to a secret super spy like her husband in True Lies; and obviously with Zoe Saldana as the lead Navi character in Avatar.

    Lucas and Cameron largely planted the seed, but it’s also true that the Red Sonja movie wouldn't have happened without the success of Conan: The Barbarian, and Xena Warrior Princess wouldn't have been on the air if she hadn’t been introduced in Hercules.

    Creating a strong female super anti-hero was exactly the entire point of Kill Bill, which you will note doesn’t openly reveal the main character’s real name until the second movie and actually names a guy—Bill—in the title and not her. Tarantino also did this sort of female anti-hero again with Jackie Brown.

    All of these films were part of exactly the agenda that these guys are now saying shouldn't be allowed today.

    However, the real truth of all this is that it’s not really about female or POC lead characters. What all of this noise is about is that white guys are feeling threatened. White guys are losing their shit because they feel dissed and dismissed. How dare anyone make a movie like A Wrinkle in Time, where the white guy demographic honestly isn’t the target audience?

    How dare someone do any movie at all that doesn’t have an Awesome White Man—let’s just call them AWM for short—in it somewhere? Having a strong female—an Awesome White Woman (I'm an idiot)—or an Awesome Black Woman (ABW) if you want to add a little spice and cayenne pepper to things, or even an Awesome Black Man (ABM) is just fine with these guys.

    They don’t really mind if the lead character is an I'm an idiot, ABW or ABM. That’s totally okay. Honestly, it really is. What’s really getting their goat is the idea that in order to promote any of those other guys and gals and make them look good, you have to do a movie without any AWMs in it. They figure that means that you’re putting white guys down in order to build other people up. You gotta have an AWM to keep things “balanced,” otherwise it’s a sign that you must be afraid of “toxic masculinity” and just can’t stop yourself from constantly flogging a gender agenda. If you don’t have a least a single AWM in the project, it's obviously suspect. If all the white men in the project are weak, stupid, incompetent, generally awful, or just too Beta (BWM), then these guys will grow livid with outrage.

    How dare you make white guys look bad!

    Consequently, they happen to like Wonder Woman just fine and don't feel threatened because it had an AWM: Chris Pine as Steve Trevor. Black Panther had an AWM: Martin Freeman as CIA Agent Everett Ross. Alita: Battleangel has two AWMs: Dr. Ido (played by Christolph Waltz) who recovers and restores her abandoned cyborg body and brain in a junkyard, and her boyfriend Hugo (played by Keann Johnson) whom she spends most of the movie trying to protect and save. (Lois Lane much?) Even Green Book has an AWM: Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip, the driver and protector for Mahershala Ali’s character Dr. Donald Shirley.

    They had a problem with Rogue One because it didn’t have a single AWM. The closest it had was Captain Cassian Andor (played by Diego Luna), but he is actually Mexican so he doesn't count. They tolerated Star Wars: The Force Awakens because it had AWM Harrison Ford as Han Solo, but since he gets killed and Luke Skywalker gets turned into a grumpy jerk during most of The Last Jedi, there aren’t any AWM good guys for that movie. Finn is sometimes a little goofy (and he's also played by English actor John Boyega, who is black). Poe Dameron is played by Guatemalan actor Oscar Isaacs, who despite his awesome flying skills gets talked down to and woman-splained by General Leia Organa and Vice Admiral Holdo. Then there are Kellie Marie Tran and Benicio Del Toro, who are hanging around taking up space that any decent AWM could have easily filled up.

    Obviously Ghostbusters 2016 did not have an AWM in it, not even Chris Hemsworth as their dumb-as-a-post receptionist. (Which was actually funny as hell since we all know Hemsworth isn’t dumb, he’s doing a role for cryin’ out loud.)

    Heaven forfend we have one movie that doesn’t have an AWM in it somewhere, even if we have to put them in red face, black face, or under a latex mask. If there's no AWM, the project is clearly a bogus unbelievable piece of SJW propaganda. How are all these women and minorities supposed to get anything done if they don’t have a handy AWM around to make sure things work right?

    I mean, what's the point of even making the movie if a white guy doesn't have a reason to come see himself getting praised and fluffed by it?

    Of course perpetrators of these tropes will deny any of this is the case. They will argue that the problem with SJW movies and shows is that they’re just plain “bad.” They have weak scripts. They have weak characters who aren’t relatable, aren’t likeable. They’re too emotional, when they aren’t being emotive enough. They’re aren’t like all the movies (which coincidentally happen to have white male leads) that we’ve been seeing for basically the last 100 years of cinema.

    They’ll tell you It’s not that these guys hate women, or gays, or black people, or Muslims, or Jews, or Mexicans. They’re all good with people of color (POC) as long as they don’t get mouthy like Brie Larson or forget their proper place. They just don’t want any of their AWMs disrespected and not represented in their full Awesome/Alpha White Guy glory.

    They don’t even see color unless the project is completely devoid of a heroic white guy. This is proven by the fact that they’ve gone apoplectic over the announcement that one of few AWMs on another of their target shows, Anson Mount on Star Trek: Discovery, will be leaving at the end of Season 2.

    Now the show is just plain ruined—ruined, they say.

    The problem here, besides the fact that this is just as much of a bigoted heavy-handed trope of tokenization as what they claim to hate, is that this is the same argument you’ll get from the current Imperial Wizard of the KKK, who says that they aren’t a racist organization: they're just trying to protect themselves and white western culture.

    We do not hate anyone,” said Frank Ancona, the imperial wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. “The true Ku Klux Klan is an organization that is looking out for the interests of the white race. It is a fraternal organization, and we do good works.”

    [...]

    "We look out for the interest of our family first, I feel that other races feel the same way - it's a natural instinct, " he adds.

    [...]

    Jesus Christ is our criteria of character. If you look at Romans 12:1-2, that is how Klans are supposed to live, that is the standard, " he explained. "We do not burn the cross, we light the cross to show that Christ is the light of the world."

    [...]

    The situation that existed in the 1950s and '60s simply does not exist. The white supremacists are no longer in charge. They are now fighting for the very survival of the white race, and they have to fight to protect," said Pitcavage. "This is a fundamental difference of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and today in the 21st century.”


    So the Klan are environmental activists now, and these guys are just as not-racist as the KKK. Swell. I’m not calling AWM promoters “Nazis.” I’m just saying they think alike and kinda talk alike. A lot.

    The United States is diversifying, but it remains 77 percent white. White supremacists, however, have long contended that the country’s demographic changes will lead to an extermination of the white race and culture.

    The “alt-right” – an umbrella term describing modern online white supremacist movement – uses the same language. And it has expanded this 20th-century xenophobic worldview to portray refugees, Muslims and progressives as a threat, too.

    Alt-right leaders like Richard Spencer, extremist Jared Taylor and the Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin also use social media to share their ideology and recruit members across borders.

    They have found a global audience of white supremacists who, in turn, have also used the internet to share their ideas, encourage violence and broadcast their hate crimes worldwide.

    “The hatred that led to violence in Pittsburgh and Charlottesville is finding new adherents around the world,” Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, a civil liberties watchdog, told USA Today after the New Zealand attack.

    There is a White Isis out there, and they’re growing in number.

    I confronted some of these SJW critics on YouTube with the idea that considering the near century it took between the 14th and 15th Amendments, before the Civil Rights and Voting RIghts Acts were implemented to actually provide what those amendments promised, progress simply doesn’t happen magically on its own. Someone has to push the issue and make it part of their agenda, or else things either stagnate or slide backward. I got this response back.

    Except that it WAS happening up till about ten years ago. The stats prove that race relations in the United States were improving steadily over time, since the 50s, until 2009. Some of the improvement was nudged by law, but most was by simple natural evolution of our society. But it all began to regress about 10 years ago... prompted by the Treyvon Martin case and the Furgeson riots which began under false pretenses. [No, neither of those cases were false!] In both cases, the leadership in our country - Federal, local, and civil - had an opportunity to return us to our previous path. But instead they saw an opportunity and thus decided to make it worse, to abide their own political agenda, or to increase their industrial base. And so here we are today... race relations have gone absolutely backwards, and none of it for natural reasons.

    Obviously, I think that’s a load of crap, but it is illustrative.

    There was a good long time were the issues of race relations essentially dropped from the radar. Some people did feel “better” about it, but then that’s because it was “out of sight, out of mind.” The Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases brought the issue back as clearly as it had been during the Rodney King Riots or the OJ Simpson cases 20 years earlier. This highlights my counterpoint that as far as police and criminal justice was concerned nothing had changed in all that time.

    Nothing had gotten better, nothing had improved. People just didn’t think about it much, and that ignorance is what they thought was “improvement.”

    The Trayvon case had apparently triggered this guy. Well, it also triggered Dylann Storm Roof.

    "The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case," Roof wrote in the racist manifesto he published online, a cached version of which was saved to Internet archive sites.

    Roof was 17 years old at the time, the same age Trayvon Martin was when neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman shot and killed the unarmed black teenager in 2012.

    "I kept hearing and seeing [Martin's] name," Roof wrote, "and eventually I decided to look him up." Roof wrote that he "read the Wikipedia article" about the shooting and came to the conclusion that Zimmerman was not at fault.

    "But," he continued, "more importantly this prompted me to type in the words 'black on White crime' into Google, and I have never been the same since that day."

    What Roof found on the internet were doctored and falsified stats—or fake news— from the CCC (Council of Conservative Citizens), which grossly exaggerated crime by African Americans, painting them as inherently violent and dangerous. Armed with that (false) information, Roof felt justified and emboldened to take “defensive” action against the bible study group at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, ultimately killing nine people who had welcomed him and offered to pray with him.

    And please recall that Roof not only had black friends at the time, he told them what he was going to do ahead of time. They just didn’t believe him.

    Almost immediately following the heinous killings, a white acquaintance, Joey Meek contacted the FBI and told reporters that Roof, also 21, was looking "to start a civil war." He said in the weeks preceding, he and Roof drank vodka together while Roof complained that "Blacks were taking over the world" and that "someone needed to do something about it for the white race," CBS News reports.

    Another classmate described him as a "pill popper" who "told racist jokes."

    Scriven didn't experience that. "Everybody's making him out to be racist but here I am in front of you today as a Black man and telling you that I look at him no different today than what I looked him last week because he never said anything racist to me," he said.

    How much different is Roof from these guys who are raging about SJWs, and white men being diminished and demeaned all over the media? They say that they aren't sexist or racist. Okay, yeah, but some of Roof’s black friends continue to say the same thing about Roof simply because he wasn't racist to them.

    People like Permit Patty and Bar-B-Que Becky, who have been calling the police on black people for having the temerity to try to bar-b-que, sell lemonade, walk, talk or stand while black, certainly don’t consider themselves racist, either.

    They all claim they’re innocent of all this and that a large part of their anger at the media is because they feel they’ve been falsely accused of bigotry. Alright, fine. But if the people closest to Roof didn’t see it coming, even when he told them, how are we to tell who really is and who really isn’t a real danger in the near future? Who’s just a loud mouth, and who’s going to take real actions like trying to call the police on perfectly innocent people, comment bomb a new upcoming movie on Rotten Tomatoes that has gender politics they don’t agree with, or try to organize a mass boycott of “SJW” projects that they find offensive, like the entire Star Wars and Marvel franchises?

    I mean, it’s just idle talk, right? Idle talk where people foment greater and greater outrage about being “attacked and disrespected” by corporate entities that dare to remove AWMs by adding more stories featuring POCs, all because of an SJW agenda in a media that is owned and operated by corporate conglomerates. And they take pains to point out that those conglomerates are often headed and controlled by rich Beverly Hills Jews like Les Moonves, Harvey Weinstein, Harry Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Arnon Milchan, Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, Aaron Sorkin, Sue Kroll, Toby Emmerich, Judd Apatow, Robert Downey Jr., Amy Schumer, Akiva Goldsmith, and Bob Iger.

    It’s almost like “Jews will not replace us” isn’t it? By which I mean, exactly like it.

    Maybe these guys haven’t thought it through that far, but these kind of ideas about AWMs being overrun were part of the same argument found in the manifestos of mass murderers Anders Brevik and the Christchurch shooter in New Zealand.

    The alleged shooter posted the manifesto, along with a link to the forthcoming live stream of the promised attack, on 8chan, one of the main online homes of meme-loving right-wing extremists. In the post, he wrote that it was “time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort” — meaning, essentially, that it was time to stop fooling around on the internet and turn his extremist views into real-world action.

    Then, right before the starting the attack — which he live-streamed to Facebook as if it were a first-person shooter video game — the alleged shooter referenced the “subscribe to PewDiePie” meme. Additionally, the guns used in the attack were decorated with memes, mostly insider white nationalist references.

    The shooter appears to have been extremely familiar with extremist corners of the internet. The choices he made — to post a manifesto to a known radical community, and to carry out the attack as if he was doing it “for the lulz” — are unlikely to have been made at random.

    Instead, they were most likely designed to entertain his fellow extremists, and above all, to help them see him as someone to admire and even copy. The memetic elements of the manifesto were also most likely designed to provoke the media and the public into sharing it and debating the shooter’s actions — thereby increasing the amount of attention, virality, and public debate surrounding the attack, and further spreading the manifesto within the mainstream.

    Of course, there is a huge difference between being an annoying, whining AWM troll on the internet or being a Permit Patty and becoming a mass murderer who shoots up a black church, a synagogue, or a pair of mosques. Then again, in each of these cases, these individuals were mostly radicalized online after interacting with similarly minded “harmless” trolls. One thing does seem to lead to another, even if only in small numbers.

    Unfortunately, those numbers are growing worldwide.

    Despite President Donald Trump’s suggestion that white nationalist terrorism is not a major problem, recent data from the United Nations, University of Chicago and other sources show the opposite.

    [...]

    In researching our upcoming book on extremism – our joint area of academic expertise – we found that hate crimes have risen alongside the global spread of white nationalism. Racist attacks on refugees, immigrants, Muslims and Jews are increasing worldwide at an alarming rate.

    Scholars studying the internationalization of hate crimes call this dangerous phenomenon “violent transnationalism.”

    [...]

    The United States is diversifying, but it remains 77 percent white. White supremacists, however, have long contended that the country’s demographic changes will lead to an extermination of the white race and culture.

    The “alt-right” – an umbrella term describing modern online white supremacist movement – uses the same language. And it has expanded this 20th-century xenophobic worldview to portray refugees, Muslims and progressives as a threat, too.

    Alt-right leaders like Richard Spencer, extremist Jared Taylor and the Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin also use social media to share their ideology and recruit members across borders.

    They have found a global audience of white supremacists who, in turn, have also used the internet to share their ideas, encourage violence and broadcast their hate crimes worldwide.

    “The hatred that led to violence in Pittsburgh and Charlottesville is finding new adherents around the world,” Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, a civil liberties watchdog, told USA Today after the New Zealand attack.

    And being very familiar with how to make things go viral seems to be a common trait all around.


    In its first weekend and despite the sabotage campaign being run by AWM trolls, Captain Marvel made $153 million domestically and totaled $455 million, or almost half a billion worldwide. Also, about 65 percent of the audience were men. Imagine that.

    But of course, that made the AWM-lovers really, really mad.


    In its second Friday, Captain Marvel continued to do at least as well as most movies in its range have done historically.

    Captain Marvel topped the box office for the second Friday of its domestic run, earning $19 million and bringing its domestic cume up to $215m in just eight days. That's a 69% drop from its $61.9m opening day (including Thursday previews). Bawdy jokes aside, that's an exceptionally boring drop, neither a super-strong hold nor a catastrophic fall. It's exactly in line with most big-scale comic book movies and big-scale fantasy actioners these days, such as The Hunger Games (-71%), Rogue One (-65%), Logan (-70%), Venom (-69%), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (-70%) and Avengers: Infinity War (-70%). The likely $70m second weekend will be the second-biggest second-weekend in March, behind Beauty and the Beast's $90m second-weekend-gross in 2017 following a record $174m debut weekend.

    After the full weekend, Captain Marvel moved further up in the ranks compared to other Marvel movies.

    It’s become tradition for most Marvel movies to have no other competitors on opening weekend, which often leads to big debuts at the US domestic box office. With Captain Marvel only in its second weekend in theaters and having already crossed the $200 million mark in the United States, many might be wondering how its second weekend box office drop compares to other films in the MCU franchise. Well, we have the answer.

    Here's a look at which movies retained their audiences the most from weekend one to weekend two, ranked in order of the smallest drops to the biggest, with all the data pulled from Box Office Mojo. Did any of these surprise you?

    1. Black Panther (2018) - 44.7% drop
    2. Thor (2011) - 47.2% drop
    3. Iron Man (2008) - 48.1% drop
    4. Doctor Strange (2016) - 49.5% drop
    5. Marvel's The Avengers (2012) - 50.3% drop
    6. Thor: Ragnarok (2017) - 53.5% drop
    7. Captain Marvel (2019) - 54.8% drop (estimate)
    8. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) - 55.3% drop
    9. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) - 55.5% drop
    10. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) - 55.5% drop
    As of today the movie has generated $910 Million worldwide.

    In full disclosure, I have seen Captain Marvel. I thought it was great and it deserves all the viewers it’s had so far. I never felt the movie was cringe-worthy or preachy. It’s a basic superhero original story which comes across as stronger than Ant-Man and Spiderman:Homecoming, but not quite as good as the original Iron Man. It’s funny when it needs to be, heartfelt and dramatic when it should be. Which is to say: It’s fine.

    Let’s be real here: Tom Cruise is still making movies. So is Bradley Cooper. And Brad Pitt. Tom Hanks. Matt Damon. Jake Gyllenhall. Christian Bale. Matthew McConaughey. Russell Crowe. Tom Hardy. George Clooney. Johnny Depp. Chris Pratt. Ryan Gosling. The fact is that Leonardo DiCaprio is not hurting for work, either. But everyone else is in the industry is basically scrambling for the crumbs these guys leave behind, unless it’s a project that just doesn’t happen to focus on an AWM.

    Captain Marvel is the first female-led solo movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, out of 22 total films. That’s 4.5 percent. If you include a half point for Antman and the Wasp from last year, that’s 6.8 percent.

    I've literally seen people argue that the film Elektra from 2005 should count, even though it wasn’t by Marvel Studios and isn't part of the MCU. If you’re going to go that far, you're going have include that the total ratio for every Marvel movie is more like 55 to 2.5. That includes movies like Daredevil with Ben Affleck, all three Toby McGuire Spiderman movies, both of the Amazing Spiderman reboots, Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse, Big Hero 6, three Fantastic Four movies, all three Punisher movies, Howard the Duck, the Nick Fury movie with David Hasselhoff, six X-men movies, three Blade movies, three Wolverine Movies, two Deadpool movies, the original Hulk movie by Ang Lee, and both Ghost Rider movies.

    So that's like 4.5 percent of all their films. If you remove the ensemble films without a solo character in the title, it's 37 to 2, or just 5.4 percent. So either 95.5 percent or 94.6 percent of all Marvel movies, between ensembles and solo only, have had male leads. The world would start spinning in reverse if the rate of female leads ever reaches double digits.

    Skirt-pocalypse looming!

    And for lead characters that aren't white, it's still 1 to 22 for the MCU, or just 5 to 44—9 percent—for all Marvel movies ever made including Black Panther, Into the Spiderverse, and three Blade films.

    The fact is that white men are 38 percent of the population of America and only about 9 percent of the population of the entire planet.

    But these guys still basically have 90 to 95 percent AWM representation in all these movies, and that's still not enough for them. They really have to have absolutely 100 percent representation, and nothing less is acceptable. Sure, there can be some Beta Men or some bad white guys here and there, or a few women and POCs scattered about, but only as long as there is ultimately at least one AWM to “even it out.” Anything less is part of a diabolical plot against men and white guys. How are little white boys supposed to believe the best possible version of themselves exists and is attainable if they don’t see that represented every. single. time. in. every. single. movie?

    Anything less than 100 percent validation is obviously a justified excuse for a Righteously Indignant White Man Online Jihad on these projects, if not the entire franchise, and then maybe the entire Hollywood studio system (which is all run by Jews, homosexuals, and betas anyway, amiright?). Let’s not have anymore MCU, let’s not have any more Star Wars or Star Trek. Just burn it all down.

    These guys truly think they are basically the entire fan base for these kinds of movies and if they don't show up, then anybody else showing up really won’t matter much.

    But apparently despite all this Sturm und Drang, the AWM plan to scuttle Captain Marvel, the upcoming Avengers:End Game, and the entire MCU purely out of petulant spite has failed, just like the attempts to generate a false narrative about Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib being anti-Semitic have fallen flat—at least so far.

    I suspect that’s going to scare them even more than not being positively represented in 1 out of 40 movies.

    Regardless of the statistics, trying to implement basically any progressive and anti-bigoted agenda is going to generate an over-the-top white lash of outrage, wounded egos, and butthurt feelings.

    That’s a given. Whiners are gonna whine, and really that’s the bottom line.

    Advocating for inclusion, diversity, reparations, or remedial actions to fix the failures of the past and the present does not necessarily require attacking, demeaning, or denigrating others. It doesn't have to be seen as a threat.

    On the other hand, not doing the right thing and not fixing the problems is the reason we have only made small incremental improvements since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX half a century ago. Those who feel threatened by change are going to lash out even at things that have nothing to do with being “#Woke” or “#BlackLivesMatter” or “#MeToo” or “#TimesUp.” Even if we don't say it, they're going to re-imagine what we said in the worst possible light. Even if we don't do it, they're going to imagine that it’s happening anyway.

    So we might as well do what we can, and do as much as we should to make this world a better place anyway. Some people will never be on our side, even if in the long run we really should all be on the same side.
     
  17. Prospector

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    Alabama substitute teacher arrested after concealed gun goes off in room full of first-graders

    Whether Betsy DeVos thinks we need to arm ourselves against bears, or conservatives think that the answer to gun violence is more guns, one thing is for certain: Accidents and mistakes involving guns end badly. A 74-year-old substitute teacher is reportedly behind bars after a gun he was holding in his pocket went off in an Alabama first-grade classroom. Henry Rex Weaver was in a classroom at Blountsville Elementary School when the gun went off around midday on March 22. According to AL.com, there were students in the classroom, one of whom was struck by a bullet fragment. According to the reports, the child was checked out by the school nurse and released without any medical issues.

    WBRC in Birmingham, Alabama, reports that Weaver was illegally carrying a concealed weapon, and charged with aggravated assault, possession of a deadly weapon, and reckless endangerment. Let’s be crystal clear about this. The least problematic thing Weaver is being charged with is his unlawful concealed firearm. If he had the legal right to carry a firearm and it went off, it would not matter one bit why it accidentally discharged. In fact, according to the Gifford Law Center, Alabama seems to allow concealed firearms in school with a license. Blount County Sheriff Mark Moon told reporters that school officials detained the substitute teacher until authorities could come and arrest him.

    It’s hard to know what exactly happened or why someone might think they needed to carry a firearm into a first-grade classroom, but in any case, the results are the same. Whether it is a preschooler shooting mom by mistake in the car, or a mother accidentally shooting her child in the face when her purse drops on the floor with a gun inside, there isn’t much to say except that guns do one thing and one thing only—they shoot.
     
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  18. Prospector

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    holy shit! had no idea that big bidness had more power than the farming sector. must have been some impressive horse trading to keep farmers from fixing their shit
    Elizabeth Warren comes out in support of a national right-to-repair law for farm equipment
    15 comments
    The proposal focuses on farm equipment, but broader rules could have significant implications for Apple
    By Makena Kelly@kellymakena Mar 27, 2019, 12:08pm EDT

    Ahead of another weekend campaigning in Iowa, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) rolled out an extensive agriculture platform today that included a call for a national right-to-repair law, something that device makers have been lobbying against for years.

    Warren’s proposal explicitly addresses farming equipment like tractors, requiring manufacturers like John Deere and Case Corporation to make all diagnostic tools and equipment manuals easily available for consumers who would rather repair their own machines instead of needing an authorized repair agent to fix them.

    “I strongly support a national right-to-repair law”
    “That’s ridiculous. Farmers should be able to repair their own equipment or choose between multiple repair shops,” Warren said in the blog post. “That’s why I strongly support a national right-to-repair law that empowers farmers to repair their equipment without going to an authorized agent.”

    While Warren’s proposal focuses on farming systems, broader right-to-repair policies could have significant implications for electronics companies like Apple, which requires its devices to be repaired at an authorized retailer rather than an independent shop. Apple’s repair policy is often touted as the most aggressive, including physical mechanisms like proprietary screws and parts that only approved repair shops have access to. Apple has reportedly lobbied against state-level right-to-repair bills in the past.

    Warren suggested that the proposal could also lead to lower prices for equipment as time goes on by stimulating competition. “This will not only allow individuals to fix their own equipment ,” she writes, “ but it will also create competition among dealers and independent repair shops, bringing down prices overall.”

    Last month, Warren proposed aggressive changes to anti-trust law, with a specific eye to limiting the power of big tech platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. In an interview with The Verge, she said the same rules would apply to Apple’s App Store. “Either they run the platform or they play in the store,” Warren told The Verge. “They don’t get to do both at the same time.”

    Update 12:41 PM ET: Copy changed to clarify that the proposal will only apply to farm equipment.
     
  19. RSK

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    The "Am I out of touch? No it must be the children" should be the slogan of the democratic party



     
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    Fuck the DCCC. It can never be said enough
     
  21. CaneKnight

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    Cheri Bustos being an out of touch moron is the least surprising thing in the world.... So of course these dumb mother fuckers gave her power. She's on that whole "We need to try and win back these racist people" shit rather than cultivating new voters. Fuck her
     
  22. Mister Me Too

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  23. Pile Driving Miss Daisy

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    Good old fashioned classism.

     
  24. ~ taylor ~

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    I lived next to a homeless shelter for a while. Never had an issue.
     
  25. DEAD7

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    [​IMG]
     
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  28. Prospector

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    Neil Gorsuch says no-one can sue to stop government establishing religion

    One inherent danger of allowing a religious minority to install a puppet controlled by religious fanatics in the White House is the now unfolding threat of government officially establishing religion – the Christian religion. Any American’s confidence that the U.S. Constitution is a protection against government establishing religion is grossly misplaced and, that belief is about to be disabused by the current religious conservatives responsible for adjudicating the law of the land.

    Because a nearly half-century-old Supreme Court ruling prevented the government from advancing religion, the wall of separation between church and state is almost certainly going to be eviscerated by the Christian conservatives on the current Supreme Court. The crusade to demolish the wall of separation is being advanced by one of the Heritage Foundation SCOTUS nominees confirmed shortly after Trump corrupted every aspect of the government his tiny little hands touched. However, it is noteworthy that Neil Gorsuch’s theocratic crusade is wholly supported by Trump’s other SCOTUS appointee, religious serial liar and sexual abuser Brett Kavanaugh.

    The reason the “Establishment Clause” is going to be found unconstitutional by the current Court’s Christian conservatives is crystal clear; they believe a 1970’s-era ruling prohibiting government establishment of religion adhered to the U.S. Constitution and is patently wrong. The prohibition on government establishing religion is appalling to evangelicals and the theocrats on the High Court are not going to tolerate it any longer.

    The High Court recently heard two cases, American Legion v. American Humanist Association and Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission v. American Humanist Association, brought by Americans who errantly believed the Supreme Court would rule according to the U.S. Constitution like lower federal courts; but that prospect is highly unlikely. Those Americans failed to comprehend that there are few conservatives who actually fulfill their oath to uphold the nation’s founding document and law of the land; this is particularly true any time the Constitution is at odds with the theocracy-minded Christian Dominionists. Christian Dominionists have lusted for the day the federal government will establish the Christian religion as the law of the land, and it is something Justice Neil Gorsuch contends cannot be challenged.

    Based on comments by Trump’s more vocal and radical theocratic justice, it is all but certain that the Court will uphold the so-called “Peace Cross” as the initial step in a long sought-after demolition of the so-called wall of separation enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s 1st Amendment. The case centers on a 40-foot tall Christian cross-shaped monument on government land in Maryland. The Christian cross, a well-known Christian symbol, was erected to honor fallen Christian soldiers from the First World War; as if no Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, or atheists sacrificed their lives for what they believed was a nation with a secular Constitution banning the government from establishing any religion.

    Trump’s theocratic Justice Neil Gorsuch proffered a truly radical position regarding the unconstitutionality of the government establishing religion, as if he was a hired lawyer and spokesman for the theocratic Dominionist movement. Although not going so far as asserting the First Amendment’s “Establishment Clause is unconstitutional” like former Attorney General J. Beauregard Sessions, he may as well have.

    Gorsuch did, in fact, claim that any plaintiffs who challenge government establishment and endorsement of one specific religion should be banned from suing the government to force it to uphold the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. According to Gorsuch, there is no situation that allows any American to have “legal standing to challenge” a Christian religious display on government property; something that is in fact establishing religion. He claims that because “their only injury is that they take offense” at the religious display on taxpayer’s land, in his theocratic mind being offended is not enough to demand the government abide by the law of the land - any more than expecting Christian conservative justices to support, uphold, and decide cases based on the Constitution.

    It is noteworthy that in Gorsuch’s Catholic mind there in no law, no part of the Constitution, or no civil rights protections that an evangelical extremist’s religious freedom cannot abridge. In fact, any time he has been involved with cases regarding basic civil rights, especially women’s and gays’ human rights, Gorsuch plays the religious liberty card – it is what his Catholic religious leaders taught evangelicals a few decades ago as an electoral tool to engender unwavering religious support for Republican candidates in the South.

    During the evangelicals’ argument that the Court has to tear down what Founding Father Thomas Jefferson labeled “a wall of separation between church and state,” Gorsuch condemned the High Court’s 1971 ruling in Lemon v. Kurtzman. In that particular case, the Supreme Court had to defend, support, and enforce the 1st Amendment’s “Establishment Clause” because malcontent religious freaks opposed the idea of a Constitution that prohibits theocrats from using the government to establish their religion. In that decision the Court ruled correctly.

    The nation’s laws must have a secular legislative purpose and a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion.”

    The Court also held that “the nation’s laws cannot foster government entanglement with religion.

    Gorsuch disagrees and complained bitterly about that kind of originalist argument he asserted was too confusing for judges in lower courts leading him to declare:

    It’s time to thank Lemon for its service and send it on its way.”

    Gorsuch’s arguments were aligned closely, and likely carefully coordinated, with one of three theocratic attorneys arguing in favor of the Peace Cross as a cudgel to tear apart the wall of separation between the Christian church and state. According to “archconservative lawyer” and theocrat Michael Carvin, any law that advances religion should be upheld by the High Court unless it coerces individuals into religious activity.

    It is noteworthy that all Americans are already “coerced” into providing tens-of-billions of dollars annually in free, tax-exempt welfare to churches, and that is on top of the several billions worth of tax-free faith-based initiative dollars to shove their religion down other Americans’ throats.

    There was a time, not so long ago, that the idea of a Supreme Court justice openly arguing that the government has a right to establish religion, and that no citizen has standing to sue to force said government to adhere to the law of the land, would be considered lubridious. However, that was before a fanatical religious minority seized absolute control of the federal government, including the federal judiciary, on the day of Trump’s poorly-attended inauguration. It is curious that religious extremists like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh claim to be devotees of “Constitutional originalist” Antonin Scalia, and yet they are staunch crusaders for violating the Founders’ original intent and support giving other Christian extremists the religious freedom to control all American citizens.

    Look, anyone who is remotely aware of world history, especially the bloody and brutal Christian world history, knows full well that these Taliban-ISIS-like fanatics will never stop until they rule with a theocratic iron fist. The Handmaid’s Tale was probably written as fiction, and possibly as a cautionary tale, but the fictional events that led to the overthrow of the democratic United States and creation of the “Republic of Gilead” are playing out before American citizen’s eyes – and people are still terrified of uttering an unkind word against the religious minority running America. Sadly, the same “who cares” attitude that allowed America to get to this extremely tragic situation will continue unabated until America is Gilead.

    The Republicans advancing the Dominionists’ agenda may not comport changing America’s name to Gilead, but they damn sure countenance America’s lurch toward theocracy. Moreover, they will continue unabated providing a vile group of “mean god” evangelicals with all the “religious liberty” they demand to control every aspect of American life. Even more tragic is that their first victims will be mothers, daughters, sisters, girlfriends and wives of the men who claim to love them while remaining silent and therefore complicit.
     
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  29. Anison

    Anison Fair and square
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    AP Stylebook is woke?
     
  30. Truman

    Truman Well-Known Member
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    Long, but worth the watch imo.

     
    #12936 Truman, Mar 31, 2019
    Last edited: Mar 31, 2019
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  31. jokewood

    jokewood Biff Poggi superfan
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  32. Eamudo229

    Eamudo229 Well-Known Member
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    Finally got a chance to watch this. I think his story is so similar to many of the disaffected young men and some women that make up a certain segment of internet culture that have become radicalized and have become a part of the alt-right. This is why it is so important to me in particular to push back against the seemingly “rational” thought leaders like Peterson and Shapiro. In their ideas there are structures underneath the veneer of rationality that that espouse which other far worse actors take and run with. Unfortunately there are not too many steps needed to go from them to start talking about race realism and full blown white nationalism. Their ideas are vehicles to smuggle in dangerous ideas that down the road can lead to people committing terrible acts like the Christchurch shooting.

    That’s why I am glad that there are people like Natalie from Contrapoints who understand the culture of online radicalism and speak to them from a position of understanding and empathy. Showing them that truth they have been peddling is a lie and giving them reasons to think about things differently. Spliff posted a video a few months back with a girl sharing a similar story and Contrapoints was one of the people that brought her into the light so to speak, from the darkness of the alt-right.
     
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  33. Prospector

    Prospector I am not a new member
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    We won’t get out of the Second Gilded Age the way we got out of the first
    A historian explains why we keep comparing today to the Gilded Age.
    By David Huyssen Apr 1, 2019, 8:30am EDT


    [​IMG]
    Political cartoon from the Chicago Labor Newspaper in 1894 criticizing the Pullman Company.
    Wikicommons
    [​IMG]
    First-person essays and interviews with unique perspectives on complicated issues.

    Andrew Carnegie, steel magnate and one of the 19th century’s richest men, made an offhand remark while bragging about his wealth to a newspaper reporter in early 1892: “It isn’t the man who does the work that makes the money. It’s the man who gets other men to do it.”

    Several months later while on vacation in Scotland, Carnegie sent a telegram approving of his deputy’s decision to unleash a private army on strikers and their families at his steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, sparking a bloody gun battle that left at least 10 dead and dozens seriously wounded.

    Carnegie was getting other men to do the work.

    Accounts like these pepper tales of the Gilded Age, the period in US history roughly from the end of the Civil War to the start of the 20th century. They have made the term “Second Gilded Age” a convenient shorthand for affluent arrogance and economic inequity today.

    The term “Second” or “New Gilded Age” has been appearing in print for nearly four decades, describing everything from the junk-bond 1980s to the internet-bubble 1990s, and the Collateralized-Debt-Obligation 2000s to the top-1-percent 2010s.

    As a historian of US class relations, I understand the appeal. The comparison — though superficial — keeps working because economic inequality keeps growing, and most Americans associate the Gilded Age first and foremost with excesses and egotism of great wealth.

    But those who use the phrase “Second Gilded Age” to criticize contemporary inequality are also paying unintended tribute to Carnegie’s logic. They are trying to get a previous historical era to do the work of offering critiques and solutions for this one’s problems. Our grasp of both eras suffers for it.

    The Gilded Age comparison beguiles us — and not even as much as it could
    The temptation of the comparison is understandable on storytelling grounds alone. Gilded Age elites cut a detestably memorable and therefore useful profile, from shipping tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt spitting, “The public be damned!,” to financier Jay Gould boasting that he could “hire one-half the working class to shoot the other half to death.”

    Railroad sleeping-car king George Pullman knew how loathed he was: he arranged to have his coffin sealed with lead and buried at night in a steel-and-concrete vault 8 feet deep, lest workers desecrate his corpse in revenge for the way he exploited them in life.

    Even Gilded Age parties rankle democratic sensibilities. Amid a global depression in 1897, New York millionaires including banker J.P. Morgan and real estate heiress Caroline Astor spent several fortunes impersonating ancien régime royalty at a Waldorf Astoria costume ball while the unemployed huddled in the streets outside.

    The very phrase “Gilded Age” conjures cartoon visions of such individuals. They seem an ideal historical comparison for today’s “bailout billionaires” who purchase politicians, award employees accused of sexual harassment with rich exit packages, and spend millions to hire rock stars for birthday parties.

    Yet historians such as Steve Fraser and James Livingston have rightly objected to the notion that today we are in a second Gilded Age. They point to the stark economic contrasts in the two eras: industrialization, rising working-class wages, and violent class conflict in the first Gilded Age; de-industrialization, falling working-class wages, and what Fraser calls “acquiescence” to exploitation — including modern phenomenons like mass stock ownership, the gig economy, mass indebtedness, and more — today.

    Recent wildcat strikes and the election of democratic socialists to Congress have made this last claim somewhat less tenable than it was before 2016, but relative to the Gilded Age’s literal class war, the upsurge in resistance remains mild.

    Yet the problems with the “Second Gilded Age” idea don’t end with the flawed historical similarities. In some ways, those it omits are more telling.

    It was during the Gilded Age that African-American men — who had just secured voting rights in the 15th Amendment — were disenfranchised through legal chicanery and racist, state-sanctioned violence. The Supreme Court’s 1883 gutting of the first US Civil Rights Act opened the way for the subsequent consolidation of Jim Crow law.

    A hundred and thirty years later, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, enabling a flood of state-level Voter ID legislation targeting low-income voters of color. Meanwhile, the pairing of a wantonly violent and racist criminal justice system with laws that impede felon and ex-felon suffrage decimates the black vote.

    Soon after the Civil War, the US Army accelerated long-running efforts to expel Native Americans from ancestral lands across the continent, sometimes claiming to be fighting “barbarism and terrorism” as a pretext for Gilded Age projects of occupation and natural resource extraction.

    Such justifications for imperial military action echo from the 1870s to the 2000s, whether serving to target Sioux gold in the Black Hills or black gold in Iraq.

    The Gilded Age also included white nationalist, anti-immigrant movements. Their legislative culmination was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States.

    Last year, President Donald Trump succeeded in imposing restrictions on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. He continues, as he has since his 2016 campaign launch, to make political hay by demonizing migrants from Mexico and Central America.

    These surface historical parallels seem so obvious. Why don’t they tend to come up in columns decrying our “Second Gilded Age?”

    Solutions for Gilded Age inequality won’t work for ours
    It might have something to do with how the first Gilded Age ended.

    In the liberal historical imagination, the economic reforms of the Progressive Era and New Deal years in the first half of the 20th century — primarily higher taxes, stricter regulations of business and finance, and greater government investment in public enterprise — vanquished Gilded Age inequality.

    This happy version of the story has many heroes, most of whom tend to be middle-class intellectuals and technocratic politicians: muckraking journalists like Ida Tarbell who exposed robber barons, government appointees like Frances Perkins who fought to protect workers, and seemingly anti-laissez-faire presidents like Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts.

    Little wonder that the usual proposed solution for the “Second Gilded Age” is either a “second Progressive Era” or a “New New Deal.”

    But this understanding distorts the history of the demise of the Gilded Age’s inequality and misleads us today.

    Although middle-class philanthropists and technocratic politicians gave voice to policies that began to curtail inequality, they did not generate the conditions that made such policies either politically possible or effective. That took decades of widespread, sustained, and explicit anti-capitalist organizing from working people — in labor unions, youth groups, radical political parties, and coalitions of mass protest — from the 1870s through the 1940s. Cold War liberalism’s backlash against such radicalism was fierce and helped fuel the rise of the right.

    Progressives and New Dealers also achieved their reforms by reaffirming the Gilded Age’s ideological and legal commitments to white supremacy, imperialism, and xenophobia. The mainstream labor movement marginalized radicals and underwrote imperial nationalism. Signature New Deal legislation — the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act — discriminated against women and African Americans by excluding domestic and agricultural workers, valorizing the white male family wage earner.

    The “solutions” that ended Gilded Age inequality, in other words, became a crucial seedbed for our own era’s historically distinct expressions of inequality.

    The “Second Gilded Age” is a gilded analogy. We have not been through all this before. We won’t emerge from it by reanimating the politics of the past. New solutions are wanting.

    Unlike Carnegie, we don’t have the luxury of getting others to do the work.

    David Huyssen is the author of Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890-1920. He is working on a new book about the socialist who created the hedge fund, and teaches Modern American History at the University of York in the UK. Follow him on Twitter: @davidhuyssen.
     
  34. CaneKnight

    CaneKnight FSU Private Board's Fav Poster
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    I’m glad there are people like Nat as well, because people like me who they want to literally kill have zero patience or forgiveness for them
     
    #12942 CaneKnight, Apr 2, 2019
    Last edited: Apr 2, 2019
  35. Can I Spliff it

    Can I Spliff it Is Butterbean okay?
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  36. ElectricDreamMachine

    ElectricDreamMachine he was on the colgate comedy hour
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  37. Anison

    Anison Fair and square
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    jokewood, Prospector, blotter and 8 others like this.
  38. timo

    timo g'day, mate
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    Probably already posted in the Trumper thread but best discussed here.
     
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  39. Truman

    Truman Well-Known Member
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    My mom called me in a panic this morning. She DL'd an app that tells you what companies donate money to which candidates.

    She's devastated because she's a Home Goods junkie, but they donate lots of money to Ann Wagner. Pretty funny, but also pretty cool my mom is willing to go that far.

    "AND IM NOT BUYING CLARITIN ANY MORE EITHER!" :laugh:
     
  40. timo

    timo g'day, mate
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    App should be posted in the 1st post of this thread. :twocents:
     
    BellottiBold likes this.