192
   

monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

 
 
oralloy
 
  -2  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 07:52 am
@hightor,
hightor wrote:
I see people attacking others on this thread for providing links to articles, studies, and essays and insinuating that only a lazy stooge without an original thought in his head would do this. But on a site like a2k where responses quickly get buried when a thread heats up it would be a waste of time to compose, research, and post an original piece of any length or substance. It's easier, more efficient, and more helpful to give a short review with a quote and provide a link. I don't know why this is seen as something to criticize

Linking to articles is not in itself bad. But with Blatham it's part of an attempt to feign intellectualism. And another part of that feigned intellectualism involves rather vile personal attacks against people that Blatham is not smart enough to converse with. Those vile personal attacks make the entire thing much more distasteful.

As for composing one's own thoughts for a thread, I always do it.

Usually not in a lengthy post though. I find that I can express my thoughts much more concisely than that.
blatham
 
  1  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 07:54 am
Quote:
Republicans are now paying the price for a years-long campaign of Obamacare lies
They promised better insurance. They can’t deliver. Now the jig is up.
...Policy-minded conservatives have serious criticisms of President Obama’s health care law. They think it taxes rich people too much, and coddles Americans with excessively generous, excessively subsidized health insurance plans. They want a world of lower taxes on millionaires while millions of Americans put “skin in the game” in the form of higher deductibles and copayments. Exactly the opposite, in other words, of what Republican politicians have been promising.

And this, more than tensions between the conservative and moderate flanks of the caucus, is why the prospect of actually legislating has brought the GOP to a crisis point. The chasm between what they’ve been saying they want to do and what their policy ideas actually do is simply much too large to be bridged.
http://www.vox.com/2017/3/8/14843762/ahca-republican-lies-obamacare

Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein, both now at Vox, have been covering the healthcare story for years. Which now makes Vox a pretty good place to go for discussion and analysis on the subject.
layman
 
  -2  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 07:58 am
@oralloy,
Cheese-eaters like to write pretentious pseudo-intellectual sophistry which they claim explains and justifies their "complex" ideology in nuanced and subtle fashion. Nice try, cheese-eaters.

Trump aint that complicated. His "philosophy" can be summed up in three words:

America First, Baby!
0 Replies
 
oralloy
 
  0  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 08:01 am
@blatham,
Quote:
Republicans are now paying the price for a years-long campaign of Obamacare lies
They promised better insurance. They can’t deliver. Now the jig is up.

How odd. And here's me thinking that they just unveiled a major piece of legislation about it.
blatham
 
  2  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 08:04 am
James Baldwin recalling a school teacher
Quote:
She gave me books to read and talked to me about the books, and about the world: about Spain, for example, and Ethiopia, and Italy, and the German Third Reich; and took me to see plays and films, plays and films to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a ten-year-old boy…. It is certainly partly because of her…that I never really managed to hate white people—though, God knows, I have often wished to murder more than one or two….

From Miss Miller, therefore, I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason, and I began to try to locate and understand the reason. She, too, anyway, was treated like a nigger, especially by the cops, and she had no love for landlords.
NYRB

If you've never read Baldwin nor heard him speak, you've been missing out on one of the brightest minds of America's last century. This man is one of my heroes.
0 Replies
 
layman
 
  -1  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 08:18 am
I think good ole Davy Hume got it right when he said:

Quote:
“Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”


Especially the "and ought only to be" part, ya know?

As Mencken said:

Quote:
“Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.”
camlok
 
  1  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 08:50 am
@layman,
Mencken also said,

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
H. L. Mencken
layman
 
  -1  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 08:57 am
@camlok,
camlok wrote:

Mencken also said,

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
H. L. Mencken



True dat. Obama and Clinton done proved that beyond any doubt, eh?
camlok
 
  2  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 08:58 am
@layman,
We don't have to look that far at all, layman.
0 Replies
 
farmerman
 
  3  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 09:03 am
@oralloy,
Quote:
As for composing one's own thoughts for a thread, I always do it
Hows that going for you?
farmerman
 
  3  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 09:06 am
@oralloy,
The truth is that the "legislation" is obviously an11 oclock effort. As recent as two weeks ago, they had not a golfers putt about it.
McGentrix
 
  0  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 09:07 am
@izzythepush,
izzythepush wrote:

Or Alexei Sayle.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA8Uav7EPlQ[/youtube]


Look a that. Something we have in common... I mean that is if you find he and The Young Ones funny.
edgarblythe
 
  2  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 09:11 am
400 marines have landed in Syria. Good to know Trump is a negotiator who makes deals in foreign affairs.
camlok
 
  -1  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 09:21 am
@farmerman,
Quote:
@oralloy,
As for composing one's own thoughts for a thread, I always do it


Quote:
Hows that going for you?


Huh hm, you've nailed each other, farmerman.
0 Replies
 
camlok
 
  0  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 09:23 am
@edgarblythe,
But the US has definitely not been trying for the last number of years to overthrow the Syrian government.

Remember the propaganda, folks.
McGentrix
 
  0  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 09:31 am
@blatham,
blatham wrote:

I had not heard of this but I very much like it. Breitbart is, of course, an enemy of the people.
Quote:
Since the 2016 presidential election, more than 1,400 companies — and counting — have yanked their advertising from the right-wing website Breitbart News, where President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, was formerly the editor-in-chief.

The ad removals are the result of consumer backlash spearheaded by the Sleeping Giants, an anonymous collective of progressive activists who organize their protests on social media. The group has been urging people to blitz corporations with wake-up calls about the message the corporations are sending when they advertise on Breitbart, which is known for incendiary content that is frequently unsourced, false, and/or deliberately distorted.
http://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/8/14700772/breitbart-advertiser-backlash-sleeping-giants



I have mixed feelings about this. Briebart does what Briebart does. That's the beauty of freedom in America. I see it as everything else, if you don't like it, don't watch/read/whatever it. At the same time, I think people have the right to peacefully protest things.

However, now a group of anonymous twits (who are probably mostly bots) is trying to censor an organization through boycotting advertisers unless they stop their advertising on Briebart. I think that censorship in any form is wrong. Stop trying to tell other people that they need to think like you.

Now, imagine some whacked out religious organization with millions of worshipers were to tell advertisers that if they advertised on CNN they would boycott their goods. How would you feel if those advertisers capitulated?
maporsche
 
  4  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 09:31 am
@oralloy,
oralloy wrote:

My understanding is that they are replacing "subsidies for buying from the exchange" with "tax credits for buying from the exchange".

My understanding is also that they are ending the Medicaid Expansion.

So my question is: Does that mean that people who would have previously been covered by the Medicaid Expansion, will now start getting tax credits to help them buy from the exchange?


That is what it looks like to me. However, the tax credits are not enough to cover healthcare costs, for example, the maximum tax credit for anyone is $4000 (if you're older than 60) and someone who is 20 can only get a $2000 tax credit. It's not based on income at all.
camlok
 
  0  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 09:34 am
@McGentrix,
Quote:
I think that censorship in any form is wrong.


And you have no shame.
0 Replies
 
McGentrix
 
  -1  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 09:40 am
@blatham,
blatham wrote:

Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein, both now at Vox, have been covering the healthcare story for years. Which now makes Vox a pretty good place to go for discussion and analysis on the subject.


Yeah, as long as you don't care that it's a shitty news source that is often wrong about it's news.

Quote:
Vox has hired a number of Bright Young People—and is run by the Brightest Young People—and the house style seems to be, "Write as if you are an expert, in a tone assuming that everything one needs to know about a subject can be found in your article." These Bright Young People may well be near-experts on one or two subjects, or at least close enough to pass as such online, but Vox publishes at the same rapid pace as the rest of the internet, on an exceptional and ever-growing number of topics, and there's only so much authoritativeness to go around. It isn't merely that writers and editors have screwed up—though they have—but that the ingredients for disaster are hardwired into the site's design.

Even when Vox doesn't technically make mistakes, their model ensures that, far from explaining the news, they actively misinform readers. Here is Vox's foreign policy guy laying out an article titled, "Here's the real reason North Korea hacked Sony. It has nothing to do with The Interview." Never mind the tone (and headline) of utter certainty in the face of numerous computer security experts who are extremely skeptical of the government's story that North Korea hacked Sony. (Even Vox's tech guy—who didn't understand the problem with investing in bitcoins while simultaneously writing usually positive articles about them—thinks we need to hear both sides here.) Vox's foreign policy guy thinks he can explain the reason the notoriously opaque North Korean regime conducted a hack they may well not have actually conducted!
0 Replies
 
maporsche
 
  5  
Thu 9 Mar, 2017 09:44 am
@McGentrix,
McGentrix wrote:

blatham wrote:

I had not heard of this but I very much like it. Breitbart is, of course, an enemy of the people.
Quote:
Since the 2016 presidential election, more than 1,400 companies — and counting — have yanked their advertising from the right-wing website Breitbart News, where President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, was formerly the editor-in-chief.

The ad removals are the result of consumer backlash spearheaded by the Sleeping Giants, an anonymous collective of progressive activists who organize their protests on social media. The group has been urging people to blitz corporations with wake-up calls about the message the corporations are sending when they advertise on Breitbart, which is known for incendiary content that is frequently unsourced, false, and/or deliberately distorted.
http://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/8/14700772/breitbart-advertiser-backlash-sleeping-giants



I have mixed feelings about this. Briebart does what Briebart does. That's the beauty of freedom in America. I see it as everything else, if you don't like it, don't watch/read/whatever it. At the same time, I think people have the right to peacefully protest things.

However, now a group of anonymous twits (who are probably mostly bots) is trying to censor an organization through boycotting advertisers unless they stop their advertising on Briebart. I think that censorship in any form is wrong. Stop trying to tell other people that they need to think like you.

Now, imagine some whacked out religious organization with millions of worshipers were to tell advertisers that if they advertised on CNN they would boycott their goods. How would you feel if those advertisers capitulated?


I can't even begin to count how many times I've heard that boycotting something is not the same as censorship. It's repeated over and over and over.

Why does that not apply here? It's a digital peaceful protest.
 

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