I’m pretty certain that compromise isn’t “I’ll end-run your talking points and adopt them for myself in hopes that you can’t get your shit together to come up with new ones and your voters will become my voters too.” I’d call that triangulation.

Great book review IMHO. You’ve put your finger on a fundamental reality of the situation that has seemed nearly impossible to rescue from the garbage flames of this election — that both these things are true:

a) Hillary Clinton has been unfairly attacked, treated misogynistically, and demonized beyond reason. For…

The history of the tactic of black bloc is actually pretty interesting - http://www.portlandoccupier.org/2012/02/16/black-bloc-a-brief-history/

You’re right, we haven’t talked much. But odds are I understand your point of view well enough because it’s almost definitely not as original as you think. I am interested in all ideas about the world, but the truth is that most people are defined by their values and having read a number of your comments I perceive…

Thank you. It’s amazing how people like these folks can’t see themselves at all. It’s sad, actually. But they’re the ones who’ll spend the rest of their lives shaking their fists at clouds while the rest of us enjoy Full Luxury Queer Space Communism.

Totally agree, bettering ourselves is our best impulse. Actually doing it though? Fuck that shit. These millenials, taking us seriously about our high-minded “bettering ourselves”. So sad!

I believe the crux of our disagreement is the quality of phones at the time. I was without cash at the time too, I had the fortune of being able to find discarded pocket PCs in yard sales and the closets of wealthier friends’ parents. IIRC most (if not all) Windows CE devices were actually dialup oriented, rather than…

Did you own a smartphone before the iPhone was released? Did you ever use one? They weren’t the same thing in any way. They were just stripped-down versions of other platforms, except for Palm who set an extremely low bar and hadn’t truly attempted to make something that could have become the tool that modern…

Gross. The n-word and what you hear in rap are not the same word. Not only is it explicitly understood to be different, it’s spelled differently. Not only is it spelled differently, some people are entitled to remix the n-word and some people aren’t, for obvious reasons. Maybe before you try to use the language of…

Lol, no. This is a super violent country — not just in terms of how much criminal violence there is, but in how we think of ourselves, how we think of each other, and how we conceptualize the use of violence and accept it in the fabric of virtually everything. We’re downright barbaric, and the fact that we tolerate…

What? No. You need to take legal action. That’s literally the one instrument you have to hold them accountable for harming you and your rights. Trust is not an instrument of accountability.

So the outlier areas that are otherwise the same as the ones around them have got to have VPN nodes in them, right?

I’d guess the same about Vermont, since culturally there is little reason why it would make sense for it to have so many more trolls than neighboring states. Maybe there’s a glut of Vermont-assigned IPs…

Wow, that’s a great point. Thank you. I’d probably have worded it in reverse to apply it to liberals: contempt for poor people who also don’t enjoy being shuffled around by an inhuman bureaucracy. Common theme is exactly what you just said: poor folks don’t get solidarity or dignity, and complaints that middle class…

Crickets on my reference to conservative principles- amazing how they’ve just drained away in the era of Trump, leaving only the politics of hate, selfishness and being a clueless douchebag.

Nothing like a sneering contempt for people who don’t enjoy being shuffled around by an inhuman bureaucracy, but are also poor, to reveal a conservative’s intellectually dishonest hypocrisy.

The way polls about bipartisanship are commonly read by people who are stuck on the mythos of centrismism is frequently frustrating to me. People will always big up the idea of people working together — as they should. That doesn’t mean that they want people to compromise even when they’re right — it means that they…

Yeah that’s a really good point. Here’s to us all finding the points of unity we need to push as one and stop this nightmare. 🍻

Gotcha. I think winning arguments through the demonstration of leadership and conviction is good for winning elections, because people will vote for figures that inspire them to believe in the possibility of things getting better. Ideology just means so much less than that, to most people.

TBQH, I think it’s the other way around completely. Among Democrats, it’s the liberal elite that are the least interested in publicly-managed health care. I have seen no evidence, electoral or otherwise, that single-payer health care or other smart socialized programs that have a ton of evidence to support them and…

You’ve nailed it. This is exactly how “centrism” pushes the Overton Window to the right while temporarily benefiting only the small number of elite Democratic politicians who actually manage to put toes on the center — before it slides out from beneath their feet. Moderation fallacies will be the deaths of us all,…