• 2 Posts
  • 665 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • Do you think that source contradicts what I said?

    Mr. Miranda asked Ms. Wasserman Schultz whether they should call CNN to complain about a segment the network aired in which Mr. Sanders said he would oust the chairwoman if he were elected. “Do you all think it’s worth highlighting for CNN that her term ends the day after the inauguration, when a new D.N.C. Chair is elected anyway?” Mr. Miranda asked. Ms. Wasserman Schultz responded by dismissing the senator’s chances. “This is a silly story,” she wrote. “He isn’t going to be president.”

    Shocking. She didn’t speak kindly of a person who publicly attacked her, and opted to leave the story alone instead of doing anything.

    Same information, but cast with additional context

    Most of the shocking things mentioned in the emails were only mentioned, and are then dismissed.

    Your mistaking opinions and preference bias, which all people have, for unfair bias. Do you actually expect that the people who run a political party don’t have an opinion about politics?

    The coin thing didn’t happen.. At best she won six out of a dozen, which is what you would expect. The reality is more complicated.

    You grossly mischaracterize the agreement.
    From the article:

    This does not include any communications related to primary debates – which will be exclusively controlled by the DNC.

    Nothing in this agreement shall be construed to violate the DNC’s obligation of impartiality and neutrality through the Nominating process. All activities performed under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the General Election and not the Democratic Primary. Further we understand you may enter into similar agreements with other candidates.

    HFA will be granted complete and seamless access to all research work product and tools (not including any research or tracking the DNC may engage in relating to other Democratic candidates).

    In other words, her campaign agreed to give the DNC money to prepare for the general election, and in exchange they got to look at those preparations.
    This was definitely the Clinton campaign assuming she would be the candidate, but it’s not exactly a smoking gun for financial impropriety regarding the primary.

    Honestly, if your campaign can’t find a lawyer or accountant who can understand campaign finance management, you probably actually shouldn’t be in charge of a country. The financial arrangements weren’t particularly obtuse or obfuscated for moving millions of dollars between multiple political entities in multiple states.


  • Quoting a phrase from an internal email out of context makes you seem disingenuous. The emails that were stolen show people being mean, but it also shows that they were consistently not rigging anything. Or does someone making a shitty suggestion and then a higher ranking member of the party saying “no” not fit the narrative your drawing? Or that the only time they talked about financial schemes was after the Sanders campaign alleged misconduct?

    In context, Sanders told CNN that if he was elected, she would no longer be the chair person. The internal comment was “this is a silly story. Sanders isn’t going to be president” at a time where he was already loosing.

    Debbie Wasserman Schultz has to resign.

    She did. Eight years ago.

    Tldr, party leadership preferred Clinton over Obama. Turns out that preference without misconduct doesn’t have much impact.

    you refer to a 76 year old career politician like Sanders as a new person.

    Oh please. It’s even in the bit that you quoted: new to the party. I act like he was new to the party because he was, and his campaign was run by people who didn’t know the party structures. When their inexperience with the party tools led to them not taking advantage of them, they cried misconduct for the other campaigns knowing about them.



  • So what were the advantages? The usual one I hear listed is superdelegates, which doesn’t matter if more people voted for the winner, or that they didn’t proactively inform his campaign about funding tricks that the Clinton campaign already knew about.

    Are you saying that Clinton was an independent who just happened to align with the party for her entire political career?

    I’m not sure you know how political affiliation or “people” work. Being a member of the party for decades vs being a member for months matters. Those are called “connections”, and it’s how most politicians get stuff done: by knowing people and how to talk to them.

    The point of a primary is to determine who the candidate is, not who the party is more aligned with. Party leadership will almost always be more aligned with the person who has been a member longer, particularly when that person has been a member of part leadership themselves. It’s how people work. You prefer a person you’ve known and worked with for a long time over a person who just showed up to use your organization, and by extension you, for their own goals.
    We have rules to make sure that those unavoidable human preferences don’t make it unfair.

    The Obama campaign is a good example. He didn’t have the connections that Clinton did, so party leadership favored her. Once they actually voted, he got more so leadership alignment didn’t matter and he was the candidate. He then worked to develop those connections so that he and the party were better aligned and work together better, and he won. Yay!

    So what rules did they break for Clinton? What advantages did she have over Sanders that she didn’t have over Obama?
    Which of those advantages weren’t just "new people to the party didn’t know tools the party made available?”



  • George Washington eschewed political parties because he didn’t want to establish a precedent where his choice as first president set the standard everyone else had to conform to, and there’s a little irony in people holding him up as an example in that light more than 200 years later.

    He, and the other founders largely, disliked political parties in their entirety, not just having some specific number of them.
    They also built the system that enshrined the two party dichotomy as the only option, actively sought to ensure that the “right” people could override the will of the people if needed, and founded the parties they had previously argued against.
    They are far from infallible bastions of correctness in this matter.


  • Dude, have you actually read vermin Supremes platform, or rather his actual political philosophy and beliefs?

    I read through some of them once, and had the horrifying realization that the contemporary political figure that I think I agree with most closely is:

    • unelectable
    • best known for wearing a boot on his head

    I couldn’t find where a lot of his actual opinions got discussed a bit more formally, but this random video snippet from 2008 does a decent job capturing it.

    If I had (got? Got. I’d love to need to make the choice) to pick between a democratic socialist or a social anarchist, I think I’d honestly lean towards the social anarchist, all things being equal.



  • See, you’re talking partisan politics, I’m talking “you literally have to pick someone”. We’ve had these candidates before. You already know which one you’re going to vote for. You picked your side four years ago when you were asked the same question.

    Beyond that though, there’s “parties” and then theirs “sides”. One side is xenophobic, homophobic and actively wishes harm on a lot of people. The other side doesn’t, for all their flaws.
    There are more parties than there are sides in the past few elections.

    By saying you think you should vote for someone who will be good for everyone, you’ve picked a side. The side that doesn’t want to do good for only the “right” people, or make sure only the “right” people get hurt.
    The only question is if you’ll vote for that side to win, or if you’ll let idealism or anger drive you to vote otherwise.







  • It’s a delightful PR gimmick by a most definitely not a tech company, since there’s not much cutting edge technology going on in the world of “flamethrowers are perfectly legal in America and that’s our business model”.

    In addition to strapping a flamethrower to a generic quadruped robot, they also strapped one to a drone.



  • CEOs of companies that are adjacent to technology desperately want to ensure that their company isn’t seen as “outdated”, almost more than they want to actually not be outdated.

    So when a technology comes that everyone in tech leadership is saying is the bestest, they want to make sure everyone knows they’re totally with it, whatever the cool kids are talking about.

    Hype train goes chugga chugga.

    As the hype train slows, they still need to be onboard, but they set expectations based on what their people are actually telling them.

    So this is the CEO yelling to do something, and then the news slowly percolating back from the tech people that they can, but only a handful of projects can do so in a way that makes sense, has impact, and doesn’t disrupt a timeline or budget in a way that requires shareholder disclosure.



  • So, I definitely think that society has a tendency to want to “fix” behavior traits that are difficult or annoying, but I think there are also a lot that are actually problematic.
    For example, with my ADHD, I get stuck doing stuff I don’t like doing at the expense of stuff I do enjoy. Just last night after my meds wore off, I got stuck watching YouTube videos of mediocre standup comedy instead of leaning over a bit and grabbing my book that I’m extremely into and very much want to find out what happens.

    The definition I like most, which isn’t out of whack with what the standards tend towards, is something that’s:

    • a measurable or observable set of behaviors
    • causing distress to the individual
    • or causing development difficulties in children
    • or causing objective material harm to the individual or others

    If it’s causing the individual stress, or it’s clearly causing problems in their life, it’s something that should be addressed. Sometimes the easiest way to address it is just an environmental accomodation, like self directed learning, a pair of headphones, or permission to excuse yourself for a moment. I had a workplace unknowingly (to me and to them) accommodate me by putting down some anti fatigue mats where I would pace to a comical degree every day.

    A big issue in my book is that disorder is an overloaded term. Colloquially disorder means “broken”, and it doesn’t mean that clinically.
    A person with a learning disorder who can be helped by putting them in a more self directed learning environment still has a disorder that needs accomodation because they’re not performing to the standards of their peers.
    There’s also a distinction between “mental disorder” and “neurodevelopmental disorder”, with the disorder of mental disorders being the biggest one associated with the word “disorder”.

    I think it’s good that people like you ask these questions, because that’s part of what helps push society towards an understanding that many of these disorders are really just a very wide spectrum of differences from a rough average, and that our world needs to just be a little more flexible for people who do it a little different. It’s caused a lot of more modern primary education systems to be more flexible and trained in the benign accomodations that some kids need, for example. (My nephew also has ADHD and he’s having a much better experience in school than I did, of only because they were like “some kids with ADHD just have terrible handwriting, instead of endless drills, here’s your Chromebook you do all your work on now”)

    In the end, I think we need to be able to categorize things in order to be able to know how to fix up people’s environments when that’s the right answer. We also need to be aware that sometimes the environment isn’t the best fix, and that a medication can be the best way to help a person.
    For your example, I would say the individual has “crazy tall disorder” which has some easy environmental accomodations (Padded corners on cabinets), individual accomodations (teaching them proper lifting techniques and posture early since height and bad backs go hand in hand), and occasionally medical intervention (gentle back strength exercises, back and knee braces, closer monitoring of cardiac function for the truly extremely tall).

    Categorization helps us better understand how things are related, what the bounds on the spectrum are, and what accomodations can be made that help the most people, and when it’s something that needs more focused attention.
    It’s not the categorization that’s the problem, it’s the stigmatization or inflexibility that causes issues.


  • Sure! Unfortunately, it was purely a joke and has no helpful qualities that I can think of.

    Your prefrontal cortex is the very front edge of your brain, and it’s (very generally because brains are complicated) responsible for problem solving, decision making and stuff like that.
    It’s the part of your brain that makes the call to actually remove the blanket.
    These are called “executive functions”.

    It’s also very associated with a lot of parts of personality expression, so while it’s not where “you” are, damage to it has a more pronounced impact than other parts of your brain, so sometimes people treat it like it’s “you”.

    It picks which tasks to do based on that reward system I mentioned in my original comment. It doesn’t directly control which task it’s pointed at trying to solve, so it can come up with a plan to do what’s needed, and then discover that the first step is “bad” and it should keep doing what it’s doing.

    That’s the little man sitting at a desk who knows it’s all fucked. Did all the work and then was directed to ignore it, knowing that was the wrong call. Something else is in charge of that reward process (kinda), and you can’t “reason” with that process.