***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[IATT]

 

[p0tat0 5alad]

I've lived in Alabama for almost a decade now. Conservative southerns are not tripping about COVID/mask mandates or unemployment benefits being revoked. Any opportunity to go against the federal government (and ultimately society) is a show of strength and a rallying cry (except when it's minorities). I've seen it too many times. These folks are passionately stubborn and don't care.

 

[aepps20]

I've lived in Alabama for almost a decade now. Conservative southerns are not tripping about COVID/mask mandates or unemployment benefits being revoked. Any opportunity to go against the federal government (and ultimately society) is a show of strength and a rallying cry (except when it's minorities). I've seen it too many times. These folks are passionately stubborn and don't care.

Yet these southern states are the biggest takers of the government system.

 

[blastercombo]

Yet these southern states are the biggest takers of the government system.

And give the least back

 

[IATT]

 

[mplsdunk]

Minneapolis got rid of the requirement for builders to have off street parking for their apartments.

not sure how I feel about that. You already have to walk 4-5 blocks to park a lot of places and it’s a fire hazard in the winter with snow.

on the other hand da free market.

All it really does is give the builders the option to be cheap and f over everyone in the area.

 

[RustyShackleford]

It's good, imo. Parking requirements undermine density. They have generally been a disaster.

Minny did the right thing

 

[mplsdunk]

It's good, imo. Parking requirements undermine density. They have generally been a disaster.

Minny did the right thing

yeah it doesn’t really matter to me, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I moved to St. Paul anyways.

all the places with really tight blocks are old buildings with no parking anyways and I don’t think it will change much.

I guess they could market it towards people who don’t drive too.

i’m going to have a hell of a time bringing in bulldozers and what not to these places. had a dude chuck a beer bottle at my dome for ripping a dozer down his street at 4am last year.

 

[storm2006]

My girls friend just got got by an enterprising young scammer.


On IG, an attractive man slid into her DM's, kicked game to her for about 2-3 weeks.
it's going great, he wants to meet, he just wants to get vaccinated first.

but first he just needs some help with something.

he says "i got some money I wanna convert to bitcoin",
im gunna e-transfer 3k to you. just head down to the bitcoin ATM.
and convert the 3k to bitcoin and send it to my wallet.

she says cool no prob, she receives the 3k, withdraws the cash from the bank
heads down to the bitcoin ATM and sends him the money.


couple days later, an additional 3k gets taken from her account,
the banks says the 3k you withdrew was transferred from fraudulent accounts,
so we are are taking 3k back from you.



this is all to say, Bitcoin has unleashed a golden age for scammers,
look at the rise in ransomware attacks...


at what point does the US government make it illegal to convert bitcoin to cash. or make it illegal for banks to hold bitcoin?

and at that point doesn't that instantly decimate the value of bitcoin?

I just don't understand how it's 2021 and people are still being tricked by strangers regarding money.

apparently another version of this scam,
a fake employer hires you, gives you employment contract, but they say they pay in bitcoin so they need you to set up a bitcoin wallet.

they e-transfer you "a signing bonus" and tell you to withdraw it and send it to you bitcoin wallet address they've set up for you.

once you do it, you lose access to the wallet and your bank takes back the money withdrew from your account.

I literally got hit with one of these this morning from a fugazi employer

I'd like to think of myself as an upstanding and honorable citizen but a company worth $2.1B enlisting a "stranger" to handle their money for a 2.5% commission is extremely comical. Unfortunately, I see folks getting caught up in this on some "They're providing the bank account! What could go wrong?!" not realizing it'd be in their name and they'd be liable when the company bails

 

[Fozz]

If you can't beat them, cheat them. Terrible.

 

[RustyShackleford]

Joe Manchin is one of the GOP's best weapons against voting rights.

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

 

[RustyShackleford]

Stephen Breyer is another old white dude, who is acting like an idiot. He is signaling he might not retire, stay on the court, increase the risk of a Republican replacing him, to make the court appear nonpartisan.

After watching what McConnell did to Obama, this ************ wants to give the GOP's thieving cover to push back on liberals wanting to add judges to balance the court.

Meanwhile, Kavanaugh and the Conservative judges are signaling they are ready to mount a conservative revolution...

Brett Kavanaugh’s latest decision should alarm liberals

The Court’s new median justice really doesn’t care about precedent.

www.vox.com

If they really enforce the "only state legislators have the right to decide election laws", what is left of US democracy is dead. Because it means that GOP state legislators will be able to lock in minority rule with impunity.

But Joe ******* Manchin wants 10 white supremacists to agree to give up a structural advantage for anything to be done about it.

 

[RustyShackleford]

The way Kavanaugh moving. I am expecting the full ACA repeal to happen.

 

[IATT]

 

[RustyShackleford]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/18/stephen-breyer-danger-deluded-institutionalist/

Opinion: Stephen Breyer and the danger of the deluded institutionalist

Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer sits with fellow Supreme Court justices for a group portrait at the Supreme Court Building in Washington. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

Opinion by
Paul Waldman

Few among us want to be insulted by people who are instructing us on what to do with our lives. But that is the situation Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer now finds himself in. At the age of 82, he is besieged by liberals pleading with him not to repeat Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s mistake, to retire now while he can be replaced by someone of a similar legal outlook.

In response, Breyer could become the most dangerous version of himself: the solitary institutionalist, so convinced that he alone can save the body to which he is devoted that he blinds himself to reality and helps those who would undermine everything he supposedly stands for.

Breyer’s situation has a disturbing parallel in Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) who is as eager to protect a Senate that now exists only in his imagination as Breyer is to safeguard the fiction of an apolitical Supreme Court. The damage the two could do, each guided by what they consider the noblest of motivations, is utterly frightening.



In recent months, the calls for Breyer to retire — such as this one or this one or this one — have gotten louder and more frequent, and are no doubt deeply offensive to him. They imply that his usefulness is at an end, when he considers himself vigorous and engaged. They insist that he must make a decision guided by crass, distasteful politics, which would violate everything he believes about the role of the judge.

It’s entirely likely that all the discussion about his possible retirement will make him only more insistent that he should stay on the court for longer, to strike a blow against politicization. The New York Times reports:

“My experience of more than 30 years as a judge has shown me that, once men and women take the judicial oath, they take the oath to heart,” he said last month in a lecture at Harvard Law School. “They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.”
In the speech, a version of which will be published in September as a book called “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics,” Justice Breyer said that the odor of partisanship damages the judiciary.
“If the public sees judges as politicians in robes,” he said, “its confidence in the courts, and in the rule of law itself, can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power.”

That’s perfectly true. The problem is that Republicans have already politicized the court. Breyer couldn’t stop it when it happened, and he can’t reverse it now.


Perhaps Breyer noticed that after Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held his seat open for nearly a year so it could be filled by a Republican president. Perhaps Breyer noticed how virtually every Republican in the land supported this unprecedented perversion of the process. He may have noticed how after Ginsburg’s death, Republicans rushed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett with the urgency of MacGyver defusing a ticking time bomb. He might even remember a case called Bush v. Gore.

The impulse to say I will not be a party to any further politicization is an understandable one. But the trouble is that Breyer is a party to it whether he wants to be or not. He can retire while Democrats control the Senate and the presidency and see a qualified jurist who shares his general outlook take his place. Or he can wait until illness or infirmity makes the decision for him, in which case it could well happen that Republicans will again refuse to allow a Democratic president to fill that vacancy, for their own political reasons.

Make no mistake: If they can, they will. If, for instance, they take control of the Senate in the 2022 midterms, then Breyer retires in 2023, they will do exactly what they did in 2016. McConnell will not say, “I was so moved by Justice Breyer’s commitment to an apolitical court that I will allow President Biden’s nominee to receive a vote forthwith.” The reality of what Republicans have done to the court is not under Breyer’s control; he has to make his decision with that reality in mind.


But he’s not inclined to do so, and I would guess that ego has a lot to do with it. Not because Breyer has a self-regard any greater than anyone else in his position, but because everyone who holds that kind of position believes themselves to be a figure of unique consequence and efficacy. They go through life surrounded by tributes and obsequiousness, with a staff to cater to their every need; eventually it gives you a particular view of the world and your place in it.

When you tell someone in that position that they must change their own behavior and decisions to align with a reality they find abhorrent, don’t be surprised when they say no.
The same is true of Manchin, who also seems to consider himself the guardian of an institution that has shifted around him. Even more so than Breyer, Manchin holds on to a view of his institution that is completely antiquated. Rather than grapple with what the Senate is today and how he can operate within that reality to do the most good, Manchin seems to believe he can single-handedly make it into something it hasn’t been for decades.


Breyer may still conclude, as his former colleague Anthony M. Kennedy did, that it’s better to leave the court when you can effectively name your own replacement; Kennedy was succeeded by his former clerk Brett M. Kavanaugh, and among the leading candidates to be Biden’s first nominee is Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former clerk of Breyer’s. But time is short.

As the saying goes (perhaps uttered by the Greek statesman Pericles, or someone else clever), just because you don’t take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you. The worst thing is to imagine yourself above it all, with the ability to protect institutions that have shifted and changed over the course of decades, solely through the power of your example.

It’s a dangerous delusion. And Republicans are crossing their fingers, hoping that Breyer and Manchin hold on to it until it’s too late.

 

[RustyShackleford]

Old white people thinking they must protect the status quo by being the safeguard against a growing diverse coalition trying to make these institutions truly democratic. And in turn, make it inevitable that the fascist anti-democratic racist coalition captures these institutions.

 

[combo gd]

In the year 2050... in social capitalistic schools regulated by blockchain technology... young children are going to write essays about how the capitalistic success of men like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates actually made them unhealthy in the year 2021... due to the fact that they consciously used their capitalistic success to seek and perpetuate more capitalism... rather than consciously using their capitalistic success to END any and EVERY capitalistic social issue.

 

[Wargames]

The craziest part of this or the sanest part of this (iykyk) is that it is supported by a bipartisan group of politicians.

 

[Wargames]

Old white people thinking they must protect the status quo by being the safeguard against a growing diverse coalition trying to make these institutions truly democratic and in turn, make it inevitable that the fascism antidemocratic racist coalition captures these institutions.

Its anti-capitalist. Capitalism doesn't care about identity. So every time they are outright racist, they are saying **** you to America.

 

[rexanglorum]

Old white people thinking they must protect the status quo by being the safeguard against a growing diverse coalition trying to make these institutions truly democratic. And in turn, make it inevitable that the fascist anti-democratic racist coalition captures these institutions.

Manchin and Breyer are the political equivalent of white Boomer dads who tell their grandkids that you can get any job as long as you hand deliver your resume to the CEO.

They really want pretend it’s 1972 and nothing will change their mind.

Whether it’s getting a job in the age of online applications and digital tracking or getting 10 GOP Senators to consider your point of view, all you need is a firm handshake.

 

[RustyShackleford]

Its anti-capitalist. Capitalism doesn't care about identity. So every time they are outright racist, they are saying **** you to America.

Stephen Breyer would happily hand down decisions that capitalists hate if liberals were in the majoirty.

It is just this weirdo thing that some older liberals have about some institutions.

They care more about the reputation than they do function

 

[IATT]