Rov_Scam
11mo ago
The introduction of the Do Not Call List more or less ended "legitimate" spam calling in the US. The remaining spam calls are almost all scams, which would be illegal regardless of the medium of communication. The reason they are so prevalent here is that VOIP technology has made it extremely cost-efficient for foreign actors (mostly in India) to operate outside the reach of US law enforcement. If someone tried operating these kind of boiler rooms inside the US using a POTS system they'd be shut down pretty quickly. Overseas with Google Voice there's little the FTC can do but warn people.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
As an aside, here's one thing I noticed about the Bud Light boycott: A lot of people here have pointed out that the similarities among major brands of light beer have made it a relatively easy thing to boycott since alternatives are readily available. I was already inclined to agree with this sentiment, precisely because it underscores why this boycott hasn't seemed to have much of an effect in my neck of the woods. A lot of products are popular by default, and they're usually the products that are marketed by major brands and have a ton of advertising. You don't need to know a lot about soft drinks to know that Coke is popular and that most people will find it an acceptable beverage; if you're having a party and serve Coke and someone doesn't like it, they'll at least understand why you chose it in a way they wouldn't if Cheerwine was the only option. In certain areas Bud Light is like this for beer; it's not so much a choice but the lack of a choice. Drinking Bud Light is staring into the void.
But where I live, in Western PA, it isn't. Among light beers, Miller Lite is clearly number one, followed by a tie between Coors Light and IC Light, the local option. Bud Light is a distant fourth, at least according to my own totally unscientific observations. Actually, fourth might be too generous as Busch Light is pretty common and Keystone and Natty are the go-tos for poor college students. What this means for Bud Light is that drinking it around here is a conscious choice. You don't select it by default, you select it because you've tried the other options and prefer Bud. This means three things. First, the boycott is more something that is on the news than something people are actively participating in, since they never drank Bud Light anyway. Hence, there seems to be little social pressure to jump on the boycott bandwagon, since there is none. Second, Bud Light drinking here is more of a personal thing than a cultural thing. Drinking Bud Light never signaled anything about you other than that you liked Bud Light, so there's no cultural associations with continuing to drink it despite the boycott. Finally, it's much harder to switch to a competitor because drinking Bud Light means having consciously rejected the competitors in the past; you're less inclined to switch if it's a beer you know you don't like.
So I still see people, even those I know or suspect to be conservative, drinking Bud Light in numbers roughly equivalent to what I saw before. As one conservative friend told me today: "I've drinking this beer since I was sixteen. I'm not going to stop just because some guy wants to wear a dress."
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
The word "necessarily" is doing a lot of work here. A guilty plea in and of itself doesn't waive all rights to appeal, but the defendant can still waive specific grounds for appeal. There's a lot of debate on whether this is proper, but appeal waivers are still a thing. In Class, the defendant never specifically waived his right to appeal the constitutionality of the statute, so that case doesn't answer the question of whether a waiver that included constitutionality would be valid.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
But is DeSantis more popular with the general electorate? There was a time when this would have seemed plausible, but the headlines he's generated since he became the media's golden boy have all been related to whatever culture war bullshit he's promoting in his state. He painted himself into a corner and now he finds himself running to the right of Trump. Had he focused his campaign on administrative competence that vaguely hinted at effective implementation of MAGA-adjacent principles, I'd say he has a good chance of winning the general election. But the hasn't done that. He's publicly waged an all-out war against wokism and LGBT stuff, not to mention his quixotic war against Disney and the stunt where he sent immigrants from Texas up north. If he'd done these things quietly it may have provoked some kind of backlash but not nearly as much as centering his entire public persona around them. Plus, he seems unwilling to give interviews to anyone who will do anything other than lob softballs at him. It's nice work if you can get it, but he can't do this all the way through a fucking presidential election and expect to win. Remember, he needs to convince people in swing states who voted for Biden that he's the more reasonable candidate than Trump, and those states have all either stood pat when it was expected they may shift right a bit (Nevada, Arizona) or decisively shifted left (Pennsylvania, Michigan).
Trump was able to win in 2016 largely because he was a totally unknown entity running against a lousy Democtratic candidate. Once people knew what to expect, he lost. DeSantis doesn't have that advantage, and simply being a Trump who can wage the culture war better provided he has a compliant legislature isn't going to convince moderates and independents that he's much of an improvement.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Having had to secure an erosion and sedimentation permit, there's good reason for treating sand and gravel as waste. It may not kill fish the way a more traditional toxin will, but it can seriously gum up an ecosystem enough to have the same effect on the health of a stream or lake. There is a whole host of Federal regulations concerning how much fill you can dump into a lake.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
I do not think the EPA knows what navigable means. A plain language reading would be a waterway that you could travel along by boat.
Plain language is irrelevant when the term is defined by statute. The CWA defines navigable waters as "waters of the United States", and gives the EPA authority to define that further, pursuant to their usual rulemaking authority. So the relevant definition here isn't of "navigable" but of "waters of the United States", and those are defined pretty thoroughly in the regulations as well as by at least three supreme court decisions. Even if I took your definition at face value it woudn't make sense considering the purpose of the act. The stream closest to my house definitely isn't navigable by any plain language definition of the term, but it feeds into a major navigable river only a few miles downstream, where it flows across the property of a steel mill. To say that the mill could avoid the need for an EPA permit simply by dumping into the stream instead of the river itself would completely subvert the purpose of the act. So the definition naturally includes any waterways that connect to actually navigable waterways.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
They did. Dick Yuengling invited Trump to speak at the brewery during the 2016 campaign, which underscored his history of working to prevent his employees from unionizing. Several members of my own family said they were going to permanently boycott Yuengling for this. That boycott lasted only a few weeks, though Yuengling is a unique beer that isn't easily replaceable by competitors. I mean what exactly are its competitors anyway? The closest national brand I can think of is Michelob Amber Bock, and you don't really see that much anymore. Dos Equis Amber, maybe?
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
He's not the media golden boy in the sense that they like him, necessarily, but in the sense that, up until relatively recently, they acted like he was the future of the Republican Party. They've backed off this pronouncement in recent months as Trump's enduring popularity has made it clear that this isn't true, but that's just because all available evidence suggests that it isn't.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Yes how could a candidate win without just getting softballs from the media. Wait, every single democrat successful presidential candidate from recent memory.
When conservatives talk about bias in the mainstream media, they're referring to any media that isn't specifically right-leaning. And the only kinds of people who regularly watch (and not hate-watch) specifically right-leaning media are people who aren't going to vote for a Democrat anyway, so there's no need to, though most Democratic candidates usually will throw a bone to mainstream right-leaning outlets like Fox. Republicans don't have that luxury. Yeah, you can dodge MSNBC but probably not regular NBC or CBS or even CNN. Fox news averages fewer than 2 million daily viewers while the big 3 networks combine for about 20 million for their evening news broadcasts. 60 Minutes alone averaged over 8 million viewers this past season, and that number would probably top 10 million if a major party candidate were interviewed. Their interviews with Trump and Biden ahead of the 2020 election drew around 17 million each. One simply can't get that kind of "earned" exposure by sticking with pliant conservative outlets, and these numbers obviously don't include the people who read articles summarizing the interviews. And does he plan on skipping the debates, too? A guy like Trump can get away with that since he has a comfortable lead, but DeSantis doesn't have that luxury. It's hard to make the case that Ron's a fighter if he isn't even willing to throw down with fucking Lesley Stahl.
As for anti-wokeness, I think it does play well with independents and probably most Democrats. I'm a Democrat who wishes this shit would just end, and a lot of my friends who are otherwise a lot more liberal than I am feel the same way. Ron's problem is twofold. First is that his solutions are more heavy-handed than a lot of people are comfortable with. If his "war on wokism" or whatever were limited to making arguments about how intellectually bankrupt and incoherent it is and refusal to play games in the name of whatever, then I think it would be palatable to independents. If it means enacting legislation to do things like curb private speech (e.g. restricting corporate DEI initiatives) then it's a totally different ballgame. The second problem is that even though a lot of people are annoyed by wokeness it's not necessarily something that's high on the priority list. Most people have no personal experience with the more egregious examples floated in the media, and even those who claim specific knowledge that isn't widely reported have, in my experience, mostly heard it second and third-hand. Like the guy at the bar who was claiming CRT material was being distributed in a nearby school district to where we live—he doesn't have kids or grandkids in school and is relying on reports from his cousin's son's friend or whatever. For most people the most they see is the occasional pronoun in an email signature, and while that's irritating it probably isn't something you're going to change your vote over. One thing the most recent two midterms taught us is that bread and butter issues win elections. The Democrats who flipped seats in 2018 did so on the backs of Republican threats to healthcare, and the Republicans who flipped seats last year were milquetoast moderates. The culture warriors did miserably. That's what it's going to take to flip D votes R, and I don't know that DeSantis really offers that kind of thing. I'd say his chances were better if he ran culture war to boost his chances in the primary but backed it up with solid moderate stances on mainstream issues, but I haven't seen that from him yet, and I think it's too late for him to change tracks now, especially since, at least so far, he's making Trump seem like the moderate option.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
I think DeSantis has more appeal for moderates than Trump, but I doubt it's enough to flip very many Biden votes. You say that you'd pick DeSantis over Trump yourself but unless you voted for Biden in 2020 your opinion doesn't really matter; it just means that DeSantis might do about as well as Trump did in 2020 while Trump himself would do worse. Last I checked that wasn't the goal of the candidacy.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
It's more of a celebration than an activist event, so it's going to exist as long as there are gay people around. The same reason there are still Italian festivals, and Polish festivals, and Rusyn festivals. And most people haven't even heard of the last one (most people think they're Russian), so it's pretty hard to claim that they're still experiencing significant discrimination—though there was a time when all "hunkies" were lumped together and discriminated against—but that doesn't change the fact that they're proud of their culture and want to celebrate it. When the various Byzantine Catholic churches in the coal patches and mill towns around Western Pennsylvania stop having Carpatho-Rusyn festivals, you might be able to say that pride festivals will become "unnecessary" in the future.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
RFK Jr. has been publicly known as a crackpot for several years now, and everything he says should be taken with a huge grain of salt. He's essentially a left-wing version of Alex Jones, but with a smaller audience that would be nonexistent but for his family legacy. I can't comment on specific claims, but I'm sure a little poking around online will answer your questions.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
- How viable is Dr. West as a third-party candidate?
He isn't. As you admit yourself, the man isn't particularly well-known outside of intellectual circles, and even within them he's revered not so much for his specific politics but for his ability to communicate his opinions in a way that's interesting and engaging, not just about politics but about anything from religion to jazz. The great mass of left-leaning minorities aren't the kind of people who are going to listen to Dr. West engage in a 2-hour long discussion with Andrew Sullivan; like the great mass of people in general, they're the kind who are likely to not pay much attention to specific politics at all but know they always vote for their party, and know that third parties don't have a chance.
- Are viral speeches still the greatest arm in an Outsider Politician's arsenal?
Maybe, but only if they're running in an established primary. Sanders was. Nader wasn't, but he was already famous before he ran for president (he appeared on Sesame Street, of all things, in 1988, singing the classic "A Consumer Advocate Is a Person in Your Neighborhood). Perot was the exception, but he wasn't so much an inspiring speaker as he was a policy wonk who had a lot of charts and graphs and who had the novel strategy of running campaign infomercials on leased-access channels. Trying to get a YouTube clip to go viral isn't exactly a novel strategy. Perot was also unique in that he appealed about equally to Democrats as to Republicans, while it's hard to see many Republicans voting for West. I don't think a few clips of good oratory will be enough to catapult a third-party bid to relevance.
Given that West has no chance, the final two questions are moot.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Challenging Biden doesn't do anything. anyone considering voting for Biden isn't doing so for the reasons outlined in the piece, and Biden makes no attempt at acting like an Alpha male.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Probably anyone except Kamala Harris. If it was some guy you'd never heard of who had an impressive foreign policy resume then no one would think twice about it. That being said, retired political figures are usually a good bet for these kind of projects, like when James Baker unsuccessfully tried to resolve the mess in Western Sahara. Obama was beloved in the Caribbean and elsewhere so he'd be an obvious first choice, but he's a bit too high-profile. Someone like Samantha Power if she weren't already head of USAID. Or hell, throw Hillary Clinton at it.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
It's pretty straightforward:
The kids want the treatment
The parents want the kids to have the treatment
The doctors are recommending the treatment, or are at least willing to administer it
The overall medical consensus isn't firmly against the idea of administering treatment
So we have a situation where all the relevant parties agree about a personal medical decision, but politicians should be able to override this decision and have the final say? I'm sure you can find studies suggesting this kind of treatment is a bad idea, but I'm sure you can find studies suggesting that a lot of common treatments are a bad idea. If this were the standard for politicians to cut across the grain of medical consensus then I'd expect legislators to propose banning a lot more procedures. But the reason I can't take any of these politicians seriously has little to do with the science; it's because they haven't demonstrated that they are acting in good faith. If a politician is proposing to ban transgender therapy for minors, I'm probably not going to find a history of statements and actions supportive of trans people in general but expressing concern about this particular thing. No, I'd bet dollars to donuts that if such a politician made statements about trans people in the past they were in support of, say, NC's "Bathroom Bill" and other policies directed primarily at trans adults. If a politician has a history of jumping on every bandwagon that's commonly labeled as anti-trans, I have no reason to take them at their word when they say that this is a legitimate concern that can be distinguished from a dislike of trans people or the "woke agenda" in general.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
As much as I dislike Reddit's own apps myself, I understand their position. If Reddit has a large userbase whom they aren't making money off of because these users are using third-party apps that fuck up their monetization strategies, then I don't see how Reddit has any obligation to facilitate this kind of evasion. All they're saying is that if you want to do something that costs us money then at least reimburse us for the privilege. I understand the concerns of mods but this is a red herring for the overall argument, since most people making this argument aren't mods but merely want to use the argument to keep the status quo intact. If the mod thing was really the concern then a workaround similar to the Pushshift workaround should satisfy everybody, where mods get special access to use tool that help them moderate their subs only. But I doubt such a compromise would satisfy most people.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
The distinction is that we're not talking about sex. Or cigarettes, or tattoos, or lottery tickets, or any of the other things that kids want to do that have laws preventing them from doing, with or without parental consent. We're talking about medical treatment that a large part of the medical establishment believes is necessary. When it comes to age of consent laws, the state's interest is that young people are susceptible to being abused by older people due to the inevitable power dynamic between children and adults, and even if we were to grant that there were some situations where a fourteen year old would be able to have a sexual relationship with a 35 year old that wouldn't be abusive, that wouldn't be the case in the vast majority of situations where that happens. So given that the high likelihood of abuse and the strong state interest in preventing child abuse, the laws can be justified.
The most prevalent argument I hear against allowing teenagers to transition before 18 is that such transitioning can lead to irreversible changes that will have a permanent effect on one's body, and that teenagers are notoriously emotional and fickle and may come to regret making such a drastic decision with regard to what may turn out to have been simply a phase, in the same sense that most adults wouldn't want the clothing and hairstyle decisions they made at that age to be permanent. I'm not unsympathetic to that argument. The problem is that, unlike most phases, this isn't something you can just wait out to see if it goes away; the consequences of not taking any action are similar. If going through puberty as the undesired sex or staying on puberty blockers too long also causes irreversible effects, then the decision to transition has to be weighed in consideration of these effects. If subsequent data shows that a large percentage (i.e. at least 50%) of those who transition as young teenagers go on to regret their decision or retransition as young adults, then the argument for state involvement becomes much stronger. But I'm not aware that any such data exists apart from anecdotal examples, and that's not enough for me to think that the state should be interfering with a personal medical decision.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
One of the biggest errors one can commit is reading history through the lens of the present rather than through the lens of the past. Yes, we now know that the USSR became a military juggernaut in WWII and subsequently became a superpower at the head of an international league of communist states whose power only rivaled the US and the West more broadly. But things looked different in 1939. Sure, Stalin was a strongman and a thug, but so is Paul Biya, and most Americans haven't even heard of him, let alone are concerned about him. I'm not trying to equivocate the USSR in 1939 with Cameroon today, but if one were trying to evaluate international threats back then, it would be ridiculous to put the Soviet Union in the same league as Germany. Russia had always been a backwater, and Soviet attempts to industrialize and modernize hadn't really borne much fruit, resulting famines due to agricultural "reforms". Furthermore, Stalin's purges had left the military apparatus in complete disarray, and this is after they had collapsed in the first World War and not exactly had much success before that. At the same time, Germany was a historically strong power is intent on remilitarizing in contravention of the Versailles treaty, all the while spouting rhetoric that war was necessary for national hygiene and demonstrating that not only did it wish to annex heretofore independent countries that had German-speaking populations, but that it would invade other countries as well, even after it had explicitly promised not to. If Roosevelt had taken the same level of caution toward Stalin as he did toward Hitler, he would have been an idiot.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
In case you missed the point of my post, Hitler was the bigger threat. Roosevelt knew this—which is why he was so aggressive in his foreign policy—because all the evidence at the time pointed toward it. The "postwar mythos" you speak of is merely confirmation of this. You act as if Roosevelt was either entirely irrational or had some ulterior motive. And for what it's worth I trust Joe Kennedy about as far as I can throw his corpse. The guy was an egomaniac and an antisemite who made self-serving comments after the war to make it look like all the smart money would have backed him had it not been for that conniving Roosevelt. Even Chamberlain changed his tune when it became clear that Hitler had no interest in being appeased.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
If France and Germany stay out of the war, what alternative map do you think arises that looks better than the one we ended up with? An Eastern Europe dominated by the Soviets was bad, but it's a dream world in comparison to one dominated by the Germans. Considering that the non-Jewish Poles either executed or forced into labor by the Nazis during the relatively brief period of occupation numbers in the millions, being a Soviet satellite was a walk in the park in comparison. More likely, though, the Germans would have lost the war in a similar manner to how they actually did (no, I don't think there were enough troops defending the west to have made a difference), except the Soviet Steamroller wouldn't have stopped at the Elbe. Stalin would have taken all of Germany, plus Finland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Italy. And that's assuming that Hitler never pushed into Denmark or the Low Countries, which would have been easy pickings. I don't see how the US, UK and France all stay out of this war and the result is somehow better.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
I can imagine a dream world where the Soviets become the leader of a continental entente that includes Poland in the fold. Is the Warsaw Pact really any different than EU or NATO membership today? That is, I can if I pretend that the USSR wasn't a horrible state that killed millions and violated the human rights of everyone else. You can continue to play a game of "let's pretend" and claim that anti-German propaganda was merely post-hoc rationalization for the US getting involved in war, but it doesn't fly. The German state actually was that bad. Any "independent" Poland in such a system would only have been independent to the extent that the German transplants would have had some form of self-government after liquidating the native population. This isn't some wild speculation; it's what Hitler said himself, and what Hitler started to implement during the occupation.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
You're leaving out the part where the Nazis still control Germany and Eastern Europe. The situation today isn't what Hitler wanted because Poland and all the rest are actually independent countries run by their own people and not satellites settled with German transplants with the native population relegated to second-class citizens at best and exterminated at worst. They also have at least some semblance of modern democratic, liberal institutions that Hitler never would have tolerated. This is what the West thought was worth fighting a war over.
Except there are no sides, at least not in the traditional sense. I live in Western PA and coal mining had a brief resurgence in the mid '00s as oil prices shot up and "clean coal technology" became the new buzzword. We were the "Saudi Arabia" of coal. Turns out we were also the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, and as soon as the shale boom happened coal mines were closing left and right, and coal power plants were either converted to gas or razed completely. A lot of people tried to blame Obama and stricter environmental regulations for the closures, but long-term the economics were against them. Had the shale boom not happened the coal operators would have simply paid the costs of compliance, and had Obama declined to increase regulation the mines would have closed a year or two later, since cost wasn't the only consideration when it came to power plants switching to gas. The only thing that could have realistically saved the coal industry was increased regulations on natural gas development, but it's not like political alignments are set up as pro-coal anti-gas v. pro-gas anti-coal. It's more like pro-fossil fuels vs. pro-renewables, and this made the laid-off miners in PA, OH, and WV get pissed off at Obama but not equally pissed off at their respective state governments for not putting the screws to the gas industry. Quite the contrary; most of these people were in favor lowering the tax burden on gas development and minimizing regulation.
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