BootmanLA

Perhaps it's because you don't live in the US, and have not (I assume) experienced what those of us who pay attention recognize as ongoing effects of past actions. Chattel slavery existed for 250 years, more or less. Not only was the labor of those individuals stolen, they were deprived of any ability to acquire wealth (minor or not) to pass down to their descendants. They weren't even allowed an education, for the most part, so that their descendants could do better than they (the way most white people could). Their children, their descendants, were literally *property* that could be, and were, bought and sold between and among other slave owners. Emancipation was followed by roughly 100 years of de jure discrimination - not just bad treatment by individuals, but unequal treatment UNDER the law and BY the law. That was in forms as blatant as woefully underfunded black-only school systems and barring them from better, white-only ones (and that's not ancient history; there are still school systems TODAY struggling to integrate the remnants of their separate and decidedly not equal school systems), and as subtle as undisclosed redlining that meant banks would refuse to lend money to people looking to buy houses in black-majority neighborhoods (which kept those houses owned by white absentee landlords). THAT practice went on until the 1980's and is still subtly practiced today. My white great-grandfather was able to send his six daughters (including my grandmother) to higher education, with the result that all six had careers (although one who married quit once she started having children). And he wasn't rich; but he had opportunities open to him (and his daughters did, too) that no black person of his era did, here in Louisiana. Each subsequent generation has benefited from the fact that prior generations were able to give them a boost. That's something my great-grandfather got simply because he was white and the black men who worked under him where they all worked did not, because the system was set up to prevent that. The fact that I own a house today is largely due to my mom's inheritance from HER mother, which allowed her to gift me the down payment, and I'm about to start major renovations on the house that I can afford only because of my share of her inheritance, now that she's gone. These are all things that white privilege provided my family over the last 160 years or so. And even for people who arrived here from Europe in, say, 1910 or 1930, they STILL benefited from a system that privileged whites over blacks for decades after their arrival. About the ONLY people who haven't benefited dramatically from our long history of racism are immigrants who got here, say, after 1970 or so, when we'd finally STARTED (but by no means finished) dismantling the racist systems that benefited people like me. So this idea that we have to trace things to specific individuals' actions and tax THEM with the reparations is bogus. We all benefited from the unjust system. That alone is reason we should all share in the cost of rectifying it.

I didn't say he got his ideas from Russia. Please re-read what I wrote and actually reply to it, instead of twisting my words so that you can attack something I did not say. I said he got PAID by Russia - the government thereof, specifically - to do what he does. Those payments are facts. Not "bogeymen".

According to the Supreme Court, that's not the law, at least in the United States. The law is that obscenity, for one thing, is not protected speech at all, despite the fact that it's unquestionably speech of a sort. Other categories of speech that have no protection, or limited protection, include fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and defamation. All of these can be proscribed by government and punished. Some other forms of speech, including false statements, may receive some but not unlimited protection. The "crowded theater" line is a throwaway piece of dicta that was not, and is not, what the Supreme Court itself said. And the distinction you're trying to draw misses the point entirely. What the Court has held (in its most recent case on the issue) is that speech which is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action" and is "likely to incite or produce such action" is not protected. As for using speech to plan murders, etc.: if the speech is integral to the commission of the crime, then it can be punished, even if the person did NOTHING but speak. For instance, a lookout who only telephones someone "the coast is clear" so that they can commit a robbery can be punished for saying that, because it was integral to the commission of the crime.

That's possible. It's also possible that with a different candidate on the ballot, his efforts would be more fruitful. But hey, if you want to relish the notion that the GOP is going to run things for a while and are glad Obama's sidelined, in your view, more power to you.

PEP is generally considered effective ONLY if started within 3 days at the max - and the closer to right after potential exposure, the better. PEP is extended for 28 days because unlike with PrEP (where the sex occurs with a baseline level of antivirals already in your system), PEP is trying to kill off the infection AFTER you've been exposed but hopefully before it takes hold in your system. With PrEP, taking it for 2 days after (in addition to the larger dose earlier on the day of, or as part of a daily ongoing dose) is enough because the virus hit the antivirals in your system immediately. But with PEP, the virus has already had some number of hours or days to start its work, so a much longer treatment to prevent it taking hold is required.

80% is not the turnout number. Granted, I think that it's a sign of how poorly thought out the decisions of that 20% were, but so be it. Harris still got a much larger portion of the black vote than Trump got of the white vote. Her message is clearly more appealing to black voters than Trump's was to white ones, if we look at things strictly through a racial lens - which is, after all, what you're advocating about Obama.

No. They *can* be an adjustment in response to inflation, but they can also *surpass* inflation and they can *cause* inflation. In fact, one of the primary drivers of inflation in this last economic cycle was wage inflation caused by companies desperately trying to staff up following Covid layoffs and shutdowns. They're certainly not the only possible cause, of course. But they certainly can be a significant portion of the problem.

I don't have the apparent disdain you have for CNN, but my job actually has had me in regular contact with a metric fuckton of journalists, from the AP to local papers to the New York Times and Washington Post. My employer assisted with research to a wide range of news organizations, and reporters *on the ground* in Alabama were reporting what the farmers themselves were saying. The numbers were corroborated by the reporter covering the story by contacting some regional temp workforce agencies. I'm well aware. I also know that the vast majority of those undocumented workers aren't the ones on those six-figure machines; and moreover, there's a lot of stuff that can't be harvested by those machines because it's too fragile. So two points: those machines are part of why there aren't as many good paying jobs in agriculture as there once were (because invest in the machines for the crops that CAN be harvested that way and you eliminate a lot of labor and potential WC claims and the like); and the remaining jobs - the really backbreaking manual ones for the more fragile crops - are things a typical American teenager or young adult simply will . not . do. No one is saying "open the borders to ever increasing numbers of economic migrants". Putting words in my mouth and pretending I said them is a one-way ticket to me pointing out that making shit up is a pretty shit way to argue a point. As for demeaning: I happen to believe that all work is honorable. Many people probably think they believe that. But the attitude that some labor is beneath the dignity of the person observing it is well-established in America, right down to parents and teachers telling kids to study so they don't have to ask "Do you want fries with that?" for a living. I'm observing the attitude toward manual labor (broadly speaking) when I say that many Americans find it demeaning. As for generational change: Of course each generation wants its subsequent ones to do better and the subsequent ones often hide their humble origins. Mary Trump, Hair Furor's mother, was a chambermaid when she arrived in this country, and by the time her oldest child was of age to marry, she turned down her nose at his bride because she was a flight attendant and not worthy of her exalted son's attention. Again, I'm well aware. But the greed among the investor/owner class gutted that, starting early under Reagan, and it's never recovered. And too many of those whose incomes did not keep pace with inflation over the last 45 years or so, thanks to a massive change in government policy to favor the rich, aligned themselves with those same rich rather than those who were even worse off than themselves. It's the old cartoon where the laborer has a cookie on a plate at the table, and the rich guy (factory owner, whomever) has 99 cookies on HIS plate, and he's warning the laborer that this other guy - the immigrant, the welfare recipient, the poor black guy, whoever - is trying to steal his cookie. Divide and conquer has worked for the rich for millennia.

Tim Pool was (unknowingly, he claims) funded by the Russian FSB to sow dissention in American politics. If he's too fucking stupid to know where the enormous checks he was getting for spewing his garbage opinions were coming from, I don't put ANY stock in his ability to know who the snowflakes are.

Obama urged black voters to vote for Harris. Over 80% of them did. Yes, that's down from Biden in 2020, but it's still a trickle of a change. Won't have "any sort o [sic] influence or sway"? Mary please.

Funny how nobody thinks that when they get a raise, but a raise is, in essence, just inflation of wages. Trump is part and parcel of the system that oppresses people. His father scammed the US government for millions of dollars building an apartment rental empire that gifted hundreds of millions of dollars to Donald and his siblings over the decades, money that Trump in turn squandered in attempt after attempt to become a major player in the real estate world. Any one who thinks he's going to do anything to relieve the pressure on the poor and working class is a fool; to him, they are marks, easily conned people who have spent millions and millions of dollars directly into his pockets for red hats, fake gold sneakers, NFTs, and all sorts of other worthless crap. That's it. Alabama farmers were, at one point, so desperate they were offering $20/hour for manual labor harvesting crops. That is not "shit wages" for an unskilled job that requires no education or training whatsoever. Yes, it's hard, backbreaking, demeaning work. But unless you want to pay $20 for a head of lettuce or a basic hamburger at McDonald's, those jobs aren't going to pay the kind of wages you can support a family on in the United States. They just aren't.

Again, getting inflation under control is not the same thing as lowering prices. I don't know why that's so hard for people to grasp, but here we are. I'm not arguing that (some) people are not feeling an economic pinch (though blame for that pinch is, as usual, woefully mis-targeted. I'm pointing out the fact (not arguing) that the problem is not the one people are naming. We could reduce inflation to ZERO and yet beef would be the same price it is today.

As you noted, as a top-only guy, this may be enough to protect you. But it does require a great deal of planning ahead, knowing which days you plan to have sex. If you don't have at least four or five days' notice, it's impossible for this scenario to play out. If you're that sure that far ahead, more power to you.

The leopards are in for a feast, @PozBearWI. Faces galore.

That probably does happen, on occasion. But it's really about pointing out that 350 years of oppression - and the cumulative effects of that oppression in terms of things like generational wealth and advancement - are real things, and a bunch of snowflakes on the right thinking "he's blaming me for that". It's reached the point where one can't honestly point out that these problems existed for centuries and they're still having effects today without those fucking snowflakes screaming that you can't blame THEM for this and how DARE you think I should have to give up ANYTHING to make up for the way things are even if part of the reason those snowflakes aren't in the same boat is their ancestors benefitted from that oppression. Nobody I know is calling for "immediately" stopping anything of the sort. Again, that's the snowflake rightwing exaggerating a position in order to attack it. Google "strawman fallacy". All the left has to do is hint that maybe, just maybe, X or Y or Z is something we should work on reducing or phasing out, and the right immediately accuses the left of wanting to rip X or Y or Z out of their hands immediately, forever, and with no compensation whatsoever. Some burdens are rightfully the burden of the commons. The problem is that the right only wants the bare minimum of burden on themselves (ie through public levies) because they're perfectly comfortable ignoring people starving to death, freezing to death, dying of preventable diseases in the streets, etc. and don't want to have to pay a dime towards something that doesn't directly put at least 15 cents back into their own pockets. Most bigotry IS about "natural differences among individuals". The classic example is same-sex marriage: not one straight person has to give up a single fucking thing if straight people get married. Not ONE thing. And yet they opposed it, in big numbers, for decades. That wasn't because of individualized dislike of particular individuals. It was plain old bigotry. Pretending otherwise is ignorant. Again, the right thinks anything designed to ameliorate bad things that happened already is "punishment" for people today. They think all taxes are punishment. They think having to obey laws is punishment. It's a self-centered attitude that is hysterically hypocritical because those same people drive on publicly-financed streets and sue people in publicly-financed courts and use publicly-financed governmental agencies to vindicate what they see as their due.

So you're saying you don't expect him to keep his campaign promises? That he's a liar? Well, surprise. We knew that.

It already is under control. The problem is that too many Americans are so poorly educated that they think "getting inflation under control" means "bringing back prices to the levels they were before inflation". They did indeed. But the rich and powerful decided that a normal return on their investments that gave them enough income for a home, three or four cars, a summer place, and funds to travel wasn't enough. They wanted a place in Aspen and in Maine and in Italy and Hawaii, and fourteen cars including at least four or five six-figure Italian sports cars and enough money to support having three mistresses and all the cocaine they could snort up their fat noses. So they pushed for a multi-pronged approach: tax cuts that jacked up the deficit, union busting that decimated working people's wages vis a vis inflation, and all sorts of other things designed to funnel money and power up, rather than down. That's why families can't make it on those blue collar jobs any longer. I agree, except insofar as it's been well demonstrated that there are some jobs that people in this country will not do for any amount. Twenty years ago or so, Alabama decided to crack down on migrant labor (in a state with a substantial agricultural economy). Migrants wisely refused to go to Alabama to work for fear of being arrested and turned over to ICE, and farmers could not pay enough to American workers to get them into the fields to harvest things. Hundreds of millions of dollars of crops rotted and many a farmer went bankrupt because no one, other than migrants who came from places with even lower wages, was willing to work that kind of work. Even when the farmers were offering double and triple the minimum wage. Not surprisingly, who were the winners? The big giant agricultural entities, who could buy up the bankrupt farms and consolidate them and fake the payroll records to keep the undocumented workers from getting deported long enough to get the harvest in. Undocumented immigration probably DOES hurt job prospects for Americans in some areas, like construction - but again, talk to any contractor in the deep South and they'll tell you that it's almost impossible to find a good steady work crew, even at skilled labor wages. People THINK the immigrants are taking all the jobs, but it's largely (though not entirely) the jobs no one here really will do.

Depends on how you define "censored." If you mean "by the government": absolutely. But that's not really what the Reich Wing is concerned about. They're pissed off that companies don't want to advertise on a site that welcomes actual Nazis and White Supremacists, having their ads appear along side that disgusting trash. The other thing they're pissed off about is that some companies simply don't want that kind of garbage to appear on their sites, period, and as owners of those sites, they choose not to allow it. And that pisses off the Nazis and White Supremacists.

"To my knowledge". LOL This is something so readily discernable from, oh, I don't know, a thousand news stories over the past year that to think he has "yet to say" what he plans to do is a pretty enormous self-own. Sorry, but anyone who doesn't know what he said he was going to do about them has not been paying any attention at all to the world around themselves.

Away from name-callers? Did you actually hear anything that Trump said in the last ten years?

Which, of course, tells us nothing about why it's used as an epithet by the right. Unless it does (which would be my contention: that the right is simply opposed to treating people decently).

Oh, the stock market usually rallies when a Republican gets elected because they assume he'll cut business taxes (as they always do) and send more money to the billionaires who own most of the stock. If by BTC you mean bitcoin, well, garbage based on nothing more than a belief that it's worth something always soars right up until it doesn't. People who complain that the US Dollar is backed by nothing but governmental promises but praise Bitcoin because it's "decentralized" and thus think it's got any inherent value whatsoever should take note of all the other cryptoscams that have come and gone. Just because Bitcoin has managed to keep it going longer than most doesn't endow it with any value at all.

This is true. But even this Supreme Court has been reluctant, so far, to upend any significant First Amendment precedents. In the biggest case recently, NetChoice v Paxton (gee, imagine, Ken Paxton as the defendant AGAIN) the Court back in July unanimously vacated a Fifth Circuit cray-cray opinion that allowed Texas to control the moderation actions of sites like Facebook, telling the Fifth Circuit's nutsos (appointed by Reagan, Shrub, and Trump) to start over because they'd fucked up the case so badly. Today the Fifth Circuit returned that case to the district court saying "Ooops, our bad, y'all need to look at this case some more because the record we pretended to uphold isn't really complete enough to judge by."

There is no double standard. I do not believe those 83 people should be billionaires, either, even if I agree with their political stances in this election. Try harder.

For those following these attacks, a little history and a little procedural background: Texas passed a law that requires web site operators to confirm the age of visitors to the site as 18 or over, if more than 1/3 of the material on said site is deemed "harmful to minors" under some guidelines issued by the state. How that 1/3 is calculated is kind of unclear (is it number of files? How do videos compare with still images? What about written text? Word count or file count?). In any event: 1. A group representing adult web sites sued to block the law. 2. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction barring enforcement of the law on the basis that it likely violated the First Amendment. 3. The state of Texas appealed that injunction to the Fifth Circuit Court (which overseas federal appeals in TX, LA, and MS). 4. The appellate court held that the proper standard of review of the law was what's called "rational basis" scrutiny - if the state has a legitimate interest in the issue, and there is a rational connection between the goals (ie the interest) and the means (what the law does), then it's constitutional. 5. The problem is that First Amendment issues are almost invariably subject to a much higher level of scrutiny, called "strict scrutiny". Under that standard of review, required for fundamental constitutional rights (and in certain other cases), a law that interferes with a constitutional right is presumptively unconstitutional, and the state must show two things in order to overcome that presumption: that the state has a compelling interest (not just "any" interest) in the issue, and that the law is narrowly tailored AND is the least restrictive means possible to further that interest. 6. The plaintiffs (the web site operators) have appealed to the Supreme Court, which has agreed to determine the correct level of scrutiny. These are the oral arguments @rawTOP mentioned above, scheduled for January. 7. When the Court hears the case, it could do any of several things: -It could uphold the 5th Circuit finding that rational basis is the proper standard (under which the law would continue in effect); -It could hold that the proper standard is strict scrutiny, and remand (return) the case back to the 5th Circuit (which would then have further proceedings in accordance with that holding; or -Or it could take some other procedural steps (unlikely) that would further stall the case. I say "unlikely" because all indications are that the issue is relatively straightforward to decide. 8. This case concerns Texas, but assuming the Court rules one way or the other, that holding would apply to all similar laws. 9. But even if this case results in the law being permanently enjoined, or even struck down, that doesn't mean it's impossible to craft a notification law that complies with strict scrutiny. It just means that in all other cases, the lower courts would have to use strict scrutiny review to decide whether such a law violated the First Amendment or not. Clear? As mud, maybe?