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softlynow

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Posts posted by softlynow

  1. 3 hours ago, VivaNaranja said:

    Said it on the other thread. The solution is to increase the size of the House with every census. Which we did every census until 1920. Congress passed a 1929 law fixing the House at 435. Repeal it. Supremes can't do shit (to be fair being originalists they shouldn't do shit about the Interstate Compact, but of course they would).

    While the House is a problem, the Senate is the bigger one.

  2. 53 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

    This completely ignores the original premise of my post/idea. You're focused on the disclaimer when you should be concerned with the meat of the issue - distinguishing between fact and opinion. That is the goal here. Feel free to offer better solutions, but to just outright dismiss the idea means you aren't serious about solving the problem. Perhaps that problem benefits you in some way. I don't know, but I don't envision this being a big hand of the government type of thing. Let's focus on the industry I know best: architecture. My license is regulated by an independent, not-for-profit entity that sets standards for public safety. Explain to me how this model cannot work for the press. I'm genuinely interested in how that magically shifts to "thuh govmint is thinking for me!"

    You're better than this. So I don't like your idea, so what? Now I'm the problem? Calm your tits.

    Ok, now about self-censorship. At least the 1A isn't implicated. But let me know when you think the Boads of Directors of Fox Corp., News Corp., Comcast, National Amusements, Disney, the NYT Co., Nash Holdings, Naspers, Thompson Reuters, Warner Bros., Nexstar IACI, Sinclair, etc. etc., are going to see an increase in their bottom lines by agreeing to stop feeding their consumers the shit content that keeps the quarterly profits coming in.

    The key difference between self-regulated industries like Hollywood and the news media is that Hollywood knows that steady and predictable profits are more certain with regulation than without it. They also know that D.C. would get involved if they didn't label the films that run afoul of puritanical sensibilities (there's enough gray area under the Miller test for the feds to act). The news media would almost certainly NOT profit by what you propose, and know that politicians are constitutionally unable to intervene. Any variation of what you're talking about would likely be considered prior restriant or impermissible viewpoint discrimination.

    Find a way to make the truth profitable, and misinformation unprofitable, and to do it either without government intervention or with it in a way that clears 1A scrutiny and you're on to something. I won't hold my breath. 

    Again, you need to focus on what is harder, but also more vital. Changing our culture. We once valued truth-tellers. We could do so again, with work. Sorry that's not a blueprint, or a 5-step plan or 1 simple trick, but that's the answer. Keep insisting on the truth, even from your allies and friends. Do it with your voice and your pocketbook. Get others to do the same. Convince leaders to carry that torch. Try to build a movement.

    This is an aside, and not really that important:

    As far as I know, the Texas Board of Architectural Examiners is a state agency. Is there some other agency you're talking about that governs standards in addition to those that the state regulates? I'm not really all that familiar with that industry.

  3. 20 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

    I said nothing of the sort. Maybe reread what I wrote and try again.

    I read it.

    "EVERYTHING else is media and is given all the appropriate disclaimers and such as you would say, South Park."

    Maybe it sounded more substantial in your head.

     

  4. 23 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

    I'm revisiting this: I think you completely mistake the intention of the disclaimer I conceive. I jokingly referenced South Park and the disclaimer before its shows, however. that's not really what it would be. it would be a few lines stating that the following information is unverified and should be considered opinion until reported by THE PRESS. Until information is verified by professionals, it's only chatter and cannot and should not be trusted. I don't get this reticence to quit watering the truth. Either you want truth to matter again or you don't. if you do, then let's yield the greatest weapon we have - one that at best we are just letting rust in the boneyard - and revive journalistic integrity by giving it a status it deserves and all the scrutiny that goes with it.

    Also, what's a stamon?                                                     

    You want the government to be the arbiter of truth? Sounds great when the government believes the truth you believe. How about the next GOP administration. You want them labeling all the critical nightly shows as subversive? Censoring NPR? Announcing that what CNN just aired was a lie and go tune in to OANN for the real truth? What you want to do runs afoul of the 1sr Amendment. Community notes are a fine way for the people to add and point out a possible lie. Compulsory Government notes would be an expansion of the state’s propaganda power. 

    I never said do nothing. I said don’t do counterproductive things. Pee color charts in the locker room, kicking guys off the team just to show off you mean it with no regard for your core mission, runny eggs to instill toughness. At its tamest, that’s the effect your “unverified facts ahead:” warning. At it’s worst, and with a friendly Nine, you’re just adding to the fascists’s took kit.

    Culture change is slow and difficult. For even small changes it’s often a multi-generational effort, and it happens in public fora. The same ones you’d invite the government to comment on. I’d rather government not put their thumb on that scale, and instead give the  coming reaction to Boomer excess room to breathe. 

    Stamon is typo. Typo is stamon. 

  5. 1 hour ago, pyrohornIII said:

    Yes, some standards need to be set.   But I think something like the Hays Commission would ensue.  They tried to clean up Hollywood and in so doing they set up their own propaganda machine, which in turn stifled a lot of artistic talent and concepts.   So, it has to be done right.

    The problem is Trump has made even facts questionable.   And a sizeable chunk of people look to the Bible as the only fact.  Yeah, there's a lot to untangle here.  But then we do it in a lot of other things like football and business, so just nut up and put groups in categories and have them abide within a set of rules to stay in that category.  That would separate ONN and Fox from actual news reporting agencies.  And once those standards are set, then maybe MSM starts to lean harder back into the facts and away from the MTG type carwreck sensationalistic reporting they feel they have to provide to compete with Fox and that ilk.  

    I think back to the day when you stood in line at the grocer and could choose from Time, or LIFE or tabloids.  We used to thumb through the tabloids for the amusement and take home a Time of Newsweek for the real truth.   Somehow, we need to bring back that basic knowledge of truth from bullshit.   Why is Snopes so highly regarded?  How do we bottle that?  

     

    What you're talking about is reputation. Reputation is like culture, in the sense that it is organic and resistant to the stifling hand of regulation or inartful leadership. Many of our journalists have spent the last 2-3 decades chasing soundbytes, headlines and clicks. They're not interested in reputation, because they answer, more and more, to the MBAs looking at the next quarter's earnings.

    As with so many things these days, the problem is the primacy of capitalism in every aspect of our culture.

     

    51 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

    I said it a while back on the previous scat site and got laughed out of the room, but we need a distinction between press and media. Press is a protected class by the Constitution (that darn thing again) and should be treated as such. Real journos have to go to school and be trained for their craft - make it a profession that requires licensing just as you would an architect, doctor, lawyer, etc. Make continuing education part mandatory, enforced by a regulatory board that creates standards and practices. Just as with any professional organization, if you do your job poorly enough, you can no longer hold a license. That's The Press. EVERYTHING else is media and is given all the appropriate disclaimers and such as you would say, South Park.

    Disclaimers would only amplify the appeal of the bad actors in media. A stamon media as "bad for you" would work the same way a warning label on cigarettes or the parental advisory on an album, game or tv show. Hell, water in a can called Liquid Death sells for precisely because it has a dangerous sounding name.

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  6. You didn’t need to clarify anything. You are in favor of violence if it sates your lust for it. We get it. You might want to figure out why you have that desire. It’s not healthy. Put another way, your position tells us much about you and fails to convey a coherent policy regime w/r/t criminal justice.

    We aren’t where we are because the system is designed to rape and otherwise brutalize inmates. We are here because it’s cheaper to look the other way when it happens. If we really thought pound-me-in-the-ass was the right policy, victims and victim groups would be allowed to do the brutalizing. Rationalizing the existence of a policy out of the mere by-product of a penny-wise/pound foolish scheme is telling on yourself.

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  7. 25 minutes ago, Hate said:

    Wouldn’t it be implied that if you are willing to grant freedoms to a violent criminal that you are more tolerant of that offender than someone unwilling to grant that freedom? 

    No. I'll grant that a person who is uninformed or unwilling to consider the problems being addressed could infer it. But that's their problem.

    My sympathies aren't with the animal going into prison, but with the people harmed when we choose to harden that animal rather than tame it. That isn't tolerance, it's learning from the copius amounts of data we have.

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  8. 7 hours ago, Hate said:

    Maybe if some of the people in prison had abstained from rape and violence when they were free they wouldn’t be subjected to the cruelty of our prisons. Fuck any violent offender. I don’t give a shit how cruel their prison is. 

    A whole bunch of violent offenders get something like 10-15 years prison and parole out in 5-7.5 years. I've pled guys down to as few as 2 years and had the "aggravated" tag dropped in the deal, meaning they were parole eligible in 6 months in Texas. You really like that we traumatize them and make them more likely to re-offend?

    I'll grant that many would do it again even if rehabilitation is really attempted. However, there is a significant non-zero amount that would lean into the life course-correction and not hurt someone again. You are saying that other people getting hurt is fine because of your feels. You might want to reconsider.

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  9. Just more confirmation that Maher is neither a serious person nor all that funny anymore. There are never Trumpers out there who have actually disavowed not just Dotard, but Dotardism as well. Nicki is not that. She would run the same plays any GQPer would, and probably more effectively than the Dollar Store fascist himself.

    I would’ve been surprised by something as breathtakingly idiotic as this from him a couple years ago, but this seems to be his new normal. Covid must’ve really broken him. 

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  10. 1 hour ago, BeardIP said:

    Who here remembers that multi-cultural (black) room when you enter Jester East on the south side, I believe it was, next to the cafeteria?

    In the late 90's we weren't as progressive as we are now and I remember feeling like that was weird, but they seemed to like it. I had a black friend from h.s. who hung out in there all day it seemed, and we grew apart as he grew closer to others in that multi-cultural space, so I guess it worked out well for him. 

    I am assuming that those sort of enclaves are shuttered with the new anti-DEI legislation?

    You're supposed to brag about having a black friend, not having had one. Bragging that you used to be less racist is a weird flex.

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  11. 2 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

    Imagine living in world where you need Mitch McConnell, holy shit but here we are. 

     

    1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

    This.

    Some of y'all seem not to realize that whoever replaces Mitch, it will be worse, and will leave us longing for the kind, humane, even-handed leadership of Mitch.

    Remember how many of us thought Rick Perry was a shit governor.....and now, we'd trade him for Abbott in a heartbeat?  Never forget the GQP rule: it only gets worse.

    When Stephen Miller is president we will look back fondly and with longing at the Trump Administration.

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  12. 4 minutes ago, Zonahorn said:

     

    Reality starting to crack through the media bubble

    Boring. Doesn't drive clicks. I'm sure a new bad-for-Biden narrative about something that registers no more than a blip in the numbers will take hold soon.

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  13. 3 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

    Been avoiding this thread. Just dropped into the last page. Yikes. ‘Bout what I was expecting. Just curious. Has anyone brought up the anthropic principle yet?

    Smart. Introducing that theory inevitably leads to a discussion of WAP, which could mistakelnly move this thread to another board and a quick death.

  14. 20 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

    Haley supporters are burning money.

    200w.gif?cid=6c09b952dvoavpuw5edfagmo5e6

     

    The GOP needs gutting. We used to have wild swings to the composition of Congress. The winning party used to be able to give its agenda a try. Considering the major issues facing us, Christofascism and Climate Change the foremost, maybe we should have a do something Congress this go 'round.

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  15. 7 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

    I really don't mean to be cunty. I love these freshman year type bull sessions, but I'm really here so Huckleberry can tell me I'm stupid. That's the good stuff.

    That he doesn't do it with advanced statistics anymore is the real sign of decay of our community.

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  16. 2 minutes ago, troph said:

     @softlynow

    This is provocative and intriguing. Because if legal rights are superior to natural rights then no wonder our planet is burning and we are careening toward a great mass extinction. 

    I'm glad someone engaged on that point.

    I tried to find spirituality. I tried and found myself totally disinterested in those thoughts, techniques, teachings, and so on. But I know myself to be very empathetic and also know my many limitations. Sprirituality does not speak to me. The call to natural order or of its rights does not give me solace or ring true with my experience and knowlegde of the present or past. For any that it does, I only hope that the practice of spiritual thought gives them insight into the needs of others. I believe it does for you. I believe it is the justification of evil thoughts and deed in others.

    I do not take issue with your conclusion. We will end ourselves. I'm not sure Hollywood has showed us how yet, but it would probably make for a good epic trilogy for a successor sentient being.

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  17. 24 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

    Seems that a good number of posters fundamentally disagree with this statement?

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

    Yep. Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something. 

  18. 1 hour ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    I think you’ll find a lot of bare, unsupported assertions in this thread and the ones you choose to fix on reveals more about the biases you’re bringing than the rigorous justifications you see:

    I think it’s interesting you fixated on the articles of secession.  Have you read through them? If you add up the appeals to natural rights to keep humans in bondage vs. positivistic appeals to the founding legal documents (excluding the Bill of Rights) of the United States and/or utilitarian appeals to its importance and centrality, which do you think take up more space? Which arguments did the abolitionists refer to more often? 

    Fix on? Fixated?

    Mentioned once. But, OK.

    You, though, are quite obsessed with your white whale of positivism. As someone who lacks the rigidity of philosophical thought to be such an adherent, and who has made no assertions here holding me in that camp, I suggest that you find someone else on whom to fixate.

     

    What concerns me more than this spiritualism of natural rights is the strength of our legal rights. I'm happy that there are multiple ways to convince folks to preserve and strengthen them, whether it is by an appeal to God, an emotional appeal to something innate in carbon based life, an appeal to the utility of the happiness they bring to many, or an appeal to the pocketbook if that is what it takes.

    What good is a natural right or natural law if the default setting for humanity is to violate them with impunity? History tells us that violating every natural right anyone has concocted is just about our favorite pastime.

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  19. 26 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    The conversation meandered a bit in the intervening six hours or so. My first posts did focus on the perils of taking a hacksaw to the framework and were not focused on proving the framework existed or whether it was the right one to build. 

    “It’s useful to convince the rubes and get consensus” is interesting, but doesn’t really get us farther down the road of “why do they need to be convinced to comply.”  And we can talk about general definitions of rights but the fact is that the framers and the writers of our legal documents that protect rights treat them as “fundamental and inalienable” and not as though they are created by these documents. 

    Good for them. They knew you should use shared feelings to give weight to your document. Much like the legislatures used in secession documents when citing their citizens’ understanding of the moral imperative to maintain the legality of chattel slavery and codify the superiority of the white race.

    Who said we needed to get further down any road, other than the question asked? That question is yes/no, and the “yes” camp keeps spinning its wheels or relying on bare, unsupported assertion. 

  20. 18 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    My argument is that we’re mixing up the directional arrows. The experiment of society got off the ground in the first place as a method of humans seeking to (in a fumbling and incomplete way) secure the rights they felt they had. Whether due to evolutionary strategy or the divine spark is kind of irrelevant. It’s not that losing the framework would be catastrophic. It’s that the framework is what made human social interaction meaningful. 

    If that was your argument, then you weren't making it clearly. The following quotes do not support you currently stated thesis, but rather my interpretation:

     

    7 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    One of my least favorite recurring themes is how often well-meaning progressives placidly announce that naturalism vs. positivism has been obviously and definitively settled in favor of positivism; then react with utter horror when their ideological opponents immediately grasp the implications and eagerly implement. 

     

     

    7 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    Well, if you follow BrickHorn’s reasoning (rights only exist if the state enforces them or if we all “agree” to them), then if I am a Christian ethno-nationalist my ear perk right up.  What my well-meaning progressive opponents may mean is that the right to free speech can be constrained in ways to avoid harm to larger groups and people, especially if we can achieve consensus that we want to. And that works pretty well in high-consensus, cohesive societies.

    But what I mean is I am a Christian ethno-nationalist is this: You may think you have the right to contraception, but I disagree.  And I am going to display a stronger will to power and the state I will control will compel my opinion to prevail.  So let’s go at it and see who comes out on top, may the stronger of us rule and the weaker submit (this is fascism in a nutshell). You had a right, but it went away, I’m stronger. 
     

    To bring this back around, you can disagree with the founders that natural rights exist but the idea of natural rights basically underpins the entire concept of our Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, or even the idea of “limited government.”

     If all that preserves them is majoritarian consensus that thereby exercises power and maintains them, they hang by a pretty thin thread.  You’re better served by trying to keep the Christian nationalists paying lip-service to the idea of natural rights than talking them out of the concept. 

    In any event. I disagree with that thesis as well. Like most rheotorical devices, the concept of natural rights just made persuasion easier. 

     

    Now the next part:

     

    22 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    You can say that rights are meaningless without a human (social) enforcement mechanism.  Oh the flip side, it’s meaningless to talk about any social order or cooperation absent some form of recognition of rights.  It’s just who hits the other person with a rock first and hardest.  The fact that we innately do not have the urge to do that is pointing to a shared understanding of right and wrong that came from somewhere— again, there are lots options where.  

     

    Which leads us back to a definition of rights. You are, here, working with a different one than the generally accepted one. Your "right" is really just shared compunction. Does that exist? Absolutely. Does calling that a right make any sense? Yes, to the extent that it is persuasive to get societal buy-in to give force to others to cofiy that feeling with a mechanism to level the playing field at the level of the more temperate amongst us.

     

    And the last:

     

    22 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    Early Mesoamerica is a good example. SOME people absolutely had a right to life in that society, and many more rights as well.  There has never been a truly “no one has rights” society. 

     

    Cool. That doesn't seem to address anything I said. It may be pointed at DixonHur and his cite of Çatalhöyük (yes, I know it was in modern day Turkey, for those who would proceed to argue like my mother).

  21. Just now, 956 Worldwide said:

    You’ve gotten yourself ensnared in a discussion grounded in Marxist Theory. 
     

    It may be cold comfort to know that that each time the cage of bourgeois morality and ethics, the reptiles inside usually eat the theorists first. They’ve reasoned their way into this but the lizard-brained among us just FEEL it. 
     

    We can all concede that all of human interaction and society boils down to a biting contest but not many of us want to admit that the crocodiles always win that one. 

    This is coming across as resentment of your inability to defend your position. Just FYI.

    Your strongest point has been that jettisoning our framework for ordering society would be catastrophic. Unfortunately, that point only proves your opponent’s position to be true. Without human enforcement of rights, they are not operative. Meaning they do not exist, or they are meaningless.

    Also, saying “natural rights don’t exist” doesn’t (for all of us) mean that we want to ditch that construct as a call to action. Keeping it makes it easier to communicate with the masses and many decision-makers who lack the flexibility of thought to question the “truths” they’ve grown up knowing. I just think it’s best to not be deluded into thinking we don’t have to work at keeping and protecting those rights we hold dear.

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