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[Basileus777]

This was fucked after the TPP got derailed by populists on both sides of the aisle.

Yep, the TPP was dead even if Hillary won.

 

[Prof. Bathtub]

Imo, because we haven't faced a major crisis (that wasn't of the admin/GOP's own making), people can afford to Pangloss about the situation.

 

[royalan]

It's not just TPP, though.

Backing out of Paris paved the way for China to become the green energy leader. Not to mention soured our allies on us in a way that might not be immediately repairable.

 

[kirblar]

It's not just TPP, though.

Backing out of Paris paved the way for China to become the green energy leader. Not to mention soured our allies on us in a way that might not be immediately repairable.

At some point the right wing populist bubble had to burst, and it looks like that's what Trump did given the election results we've seen since.

Unfortunately, Brexit happened first.

 

[Goodstyle]

Linda Sarsour goes to war with Jake Tapper on twitter.

Linda Sarsour

.@jaketapper joins the ranks of the alt-right to target me online. Welcome to the party.

And then Jake clapped back in another exchange they engaged in later.

All this started when Tapper called out Women's March and Linda Sarsour for honouring Assata Shakur, a revolutionary figure in the BLA movement, but also a murderer who escaped justice and is hiding in Cuba. Murky stuff all around.

 

[IggyChooChoo]

A Clinton presidency wouldn't have destabilized our government though.

Or removed a shit-ton of common sense regulations by way of executive order.

Single mothers wouldn't be getting round up to be deported while walking their kids to school...probably.

We'd still be in the Paris Agreement and have the general trust of our allies.

We'd have blocked China from becoming the next global-economic center, something we might not come to appreciate for another decade or so.

Public schools wouldn't be under as much threat.

Net neutrality would be relatively safe.

Even talking about criminal justice wouldn't have amounted to one big "LOL your best bet is waiting 4-8 years before coming back to this one."

And there would be the chance that whatever juju makes her likable while actually holding an office would have kicked in.

I mean, I do agree that Hillary losing might have better positioned us long-term. But Hillary in office would have definitely saved us from some of the shit we're going through now.

All those things are probably true, but a Hillary win might have set up the GOP to be able to pass *constitutional amendments* come 2020.

 

[Basileus777]

It's not just TPP, though.

Backing out of Paris paved the way for China to become the green energy leader. Not to mention soured our allies on us in a way that might not be immediately repairable.

China was already going to become the green energy leader. These are all larger trends that have been building for many years, it's not about Trump propelling China forward.

 

[AntraxSuicide]

It's not just TPP, though.

Backing out of Paris paved the way for China to become the green energy leader. Not to mention soured our allies on us in a way that might not be immediately repairable.

We've got time though, and foreign countries have always been pretty understanding about our electoral system; they get that it can swing wildly, and as powerful as the US is, they can't really take a 4 year period and sever ties to a large degree.

I do wonder if we ever went full Reagan again what would happen.

 

[TiredofWinning]

Linda Sarsour goes to war with Jake Tapper on twitter.

Linda Sarsour


And then Jake clapped back in another exchange they engaged in later.

All this started when Tapper called out Women's March and Linda Sarsour for honouring Assata Shakur, a revolutionary figure in the BLM movement, but also a murderer who escaped justice and is hiding in Cuba. Murky stuff all around.

The evidence against Shakur is weak, she's a political exile from the COINTELPRO Era of the FBI.

That being said, I'm glad this whole spat on Twitter is bringing attention to her case, because I truly believe she's innocent.

 

[whyamihere]

Linda Sarsour goes to war with Jake Tapper on twitter.

Linda Sarsour


And then Jake clapped back in another exchange they engaged in later.

All this started when Tapper called out Women's March and Linda Sarsour for honouring Assata Shakur, a revolutionary figure in the BLM movement, but also a murderer who escaped justice and is hiding in Cuba. Murky stuff all around.

*BLA

 

[cooljeanius]

Dems won a special election for a state rep seat that's local near me: https://twitter.com/TheDLCC/status/887458560992579585
I met her; she's really nice and knows her district well.

 

[Slizeezyc]

Dems won a special election for a state rep seat that's local near me: https://twitter.com/TheDLCC/status/887458560992579585
I met her; she's really nice and knows her district well.

Cool, good to hear.

 

[whyamihere]

Dems won a special election for a state rep seat that's local near me: https://twitter.com/TheDLCC/status/887458560992579585
I met her; she's really nice and knows her district well.

Dem hold.

 

[Goodstyle]

*BLA

My bad, edited it. Way too used to typing BLM lol.

The evidence against Shakur is weak, she's a political exile from the COINTELPRO Era of the FBI.

That being said, I'm glad this whole spat on Twitter is bringing attention to her case, because I truly believe she's innocent.

That's a fascinating wrinkle to this case.

 

[cooljeanius]

Dem hold.

Oh right, forgot to mention that part. Still, the margin increased!
(The previous rep resigned after just 3 weeks in office because he was an old retiree and wasn't physically up for the task of going to the State House so much)

 

[Autodidact]

Oh right, forgot to mention that part. Still, the margin increased!
(The previous rep resigned after just 3 weeks in office because he was an old retiree and wasn't physically up for the task of going to the State House so much)

But can't you get across New Hampshire in, like, ten minutes?

 

[whyamihere]

Oh right, forgot to mention that part. Still, the margin increased!
(The previous rep resigned after just 3 weeks in office because he was an old retiree and wasn't physically up for the task of going to the State House so much)

I love the New Hampshire House so much.

@electionwatchus
Full Results from NH House Merrimack 18
Kris Schultz (D): 284 (78%)
Michael Feeley (R): 82 (22%)

This is a +30 swing from Nov. for @NHDems

 

[cooljeanius]

But can't you get across New Hampshire in, like, ten minutes?

I think he had to walk or something; he lived in a retirement home and I don't think he had his own car...

 

[Holmes]

The Shadow Primary for the Indiana GOP senate primary is getting FUN

Yeah Messer will have a hard time recovering from the attacks he'll be withstanding on this

 

[theprodigy]

I love the New Hampshire House so much.

Why are there so many seats in the NH house lol

 

[Slizeezyc]

I love the New Hampshire House so much.

As in 284 votes to 82 votes? Man, democracy is rather awesome sometimes.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

So this scenario is total bunk correct? They can't even get a motion to proceed on a straight repeal, correct?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph...d4a0ae-6be4-11e7-9c15-177740635e83_story.html

This is really sad to read

Not in a "omg, this might work" sort of way. It won't.

But in a "for pity's sake, someone just touch Mitch on the shoulder and tell him it's dead"

This is pathetic

 

[pigeon]

This has about as much of a chance of happening as US adopting MMT economics.

Then I guess the GOP had better get used to voting to raise the debt ceiling. It's always been the majority party's job!

 

[Ernest]

White House version of 2nd Trump/Putin meeting:

"Just a brief conversation" is their official storyline.

Putin's translator alone was enough to translate orders from Putin to Trump and "yes, master" from Trump to Putin.

 

[Holmes]

Mmm, that's not a 30% swing. It's a 44% swing. From a 12% win in November to a 56% win tonight.

 

[ShadowSwordmaster]

Idaho won't comply with Trump voter panel request

 

[Autodidact]

Idaho be like Ida-NO.

 

[Snowman Prophet of Doom]

Here's why it doesn't make any sense: Gene Roddenberry.

See, after TOS became an actual hit, Roddenberry started to think he was as smart as L. Ron Hubbard.

So, Gene proclaimed that in the future humanity would have no conflicts whatsoever, not even between individuals. And Starfleet would exist mainly to go around lecturing lesser races about how they should become more like humans or humans would be dicks to them.

After Gene was shuffled off for being incompetent at his job, Rick Berman was insane enough to keep this edict in place, though the entirety of the DS9 staff pushed back enough against him and he had Voyager to distract himself with that Gene's rule was allowed to bend in DS9. Enterprise worked around the rule by saying "we're in the past and also...we literally can't do anything else since this is an Earth ship with two alien passengers" and also Scott Bakula invoked his powers as the sexist man to ever live to get Braga and Berman fired.

Also, when aliens appear once a season it's way easier to portray them as ALL THE SAME and thus stand-ins for Russkies or what have you. When they're regulars, nobody buys that every Cardassian agrees on everything Gul Dukat says or that all Romulans are suspicious xenophobes. (Which is one reason the Borg and Dominion were so tasty to writers as enemies. They avoid this problem.)

Gene's economic views were tied up in this and thus he made the proclamation early on in TNG about the whole no money thing and the Ferengi were the villains as evil capitalist Jews. Which then other writers had to go and figure out how to explain this, especially with replicators, so somebody fixed it by making certain things unable to be replicated, which completely undermines Gene's Federation requiring it to trade or be surpassed quickly so TNG/DS9/VOY just has the Federation bartering while Picard lectures people about how they've evolved past money because money is evil corrupting Jew blood.

Quark and others in DS9 regularly poke at this for the writers:


Libertarian writer/law professor Ilya Somin once wrote a series of blog entries about Star Trek where he posited that the Federation may be some form of a fascist society especially considering the high place humans exist in nearly every position of power relative to other races, to which some other writer pointed out that the show is pretty much only shown from the point of view of the Federation and could be almost entirely propaganda produced by the Federation for consumption by non-aligned races.

There's also the fact which I've argued many times before (though not alone) that Voyager makes infinitely more sense and is vastly more interesting if you watch it from the premise that Janeway is the villain or at least antagonist of the series. (Especially her future self in the finale.) She employs a twisted authoritarian viewpoint, that the rest of the crew submits to with minor protest, that justifies all actions up to and including murder, genocide, near annihilation of the galaxy, and reigniting ended wars in the name of "Federation rules" and she's even entirely arbitrary in her punishment and reward system. All things common in totalitarian states like North Korea or the USSR.

And of course, upon her return to the Alpha Quadrant, she's promoted into a high position of Starfleet Command.

AbramsTrek's universe was created by a 9/11 Truther and the first two films are so poorly produced in all areas they make literally no sense. Their politics seem to be based around a massive future warship destroying two galactic powers for a quarter of a century with nobody caring until Vulcan gets blown away and then those crushed galactic powers immediately preparing for war against one another with massive unprecedented weaponry that even the future ship didn't have until the franchise was saved by Justin Lin and Simon Pegg creating maybe the best film since The Undiscovered Country.

This is an absolutely massive response that I did not expect. I was more asking about breakdowns of the specific ways in which Star Trek's economics and politics violate credulity relative to real-world understandings of those concepts, rather than the more behind-the-scenes take on the matter, as I'm well familiar with Roddenberry being clueless, but your manner of phrasing things is endlessly entertaining, nevertheless.

I've always thought the "Janeway is secretly evil" stuff was massively overblown and requires doing quite a bit of contorting (and ignores the ways in which Mulgrew's stellar performance leavens some of the inconsistencies of the writing.) 99% of the time, she's a pretty typical Federation captain, for better or worse, and I'd argue that, in terms of having the chutzpah to take necessary risks in hostile situations with a ton of unknowns, she's arguably the #2 captain, behind permaking Kirk. She flew into a fucking star to get the alien scientists to stop experimenting on her crew!

 

[gaugebozo]

she's arguably the #2 captain, behind permaking Kirk.

 

[RustyNails]

Linda Sarsour goes to war with Jake Tapper on twitter.

Linda Sarsour


And then Jake clapped back in another exchange they engaged in later.

All this started when Tapper called out Women's March and Linda Sarsour for honouring Assata Shakur, a revolutionary figure in the BLA movement, but also a murderer who escaped justice and is hiding in Cuba. Murky stuff all around.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a vile, lying harpy. With that being said, poor choice of words from Linda. However it does not diminish her work in unifying voices against Trump.

 

[Box of Kittens]

I love the New Hampshire House so much.

New Hampshire House of Representatives: 400 Seats
New Hampshire Senate: 24 Seats

 

[Poodlestrike]

Agreed, that ranking is nonsense.

Sisko
Picard
Kirk
Janeway and Archer battle to the death for 4th.

 

[Box of Kittens]

Agreed, that ranking is nonsense.

Sisko
Picard
Kirk
Janeway and Archer battle to the death for 4th.

Archer is pretty clearly last IMO. Janeway had a personality and did things. Archer is like if Harry Kim was given command of a starship.

 

[Poodlestrike]

Archer is pretty clearly last IMO. Janeway had a personality and did things. Archer is like if Harry Kim was given command of a starship.

Yes, but the things she did were often incredibly terrible. I'm not sure that's a point in her favor.

 

[skullmuffins]

(nobody called the dinner a secret)

 

[Snowman Prophet of Doom]

I vacillate because Picard is obviously the #2 best captain character, but he's more useful as a diplomat and military strategist, whereas I think Janeway, despite her writing inconsistencies, had more gumption and would be more likely to extricate you from a dire situation for which protocol is inadequate

Spoiler

as long as it's not one she's arguably responsible for, like stranding one in the Delta Quadrant

. Picard is Patton, Janeway is Dax from Paths of Glory.

Edit: Fuck Sisko. Not only the worst-acted captain in the series thanks to Avery Brooks' stiffness and inability to avoid hamminess (which was NOT a fit for Sisko like Shatner's subtler hamminess was a fit for Kirk), but his Space Jesus story sucked, his son sucked as a character and as a character motivation for him, his relationships with the crew were weak and largely underdeveloped, and his strategy for basically everything was "fly at it with a big-ass gun and hope things work out". How he got his little cult following I will never understand, because outside of "In the Pale Moonlight", "Far Beyond the Stars", and a few other episodes, he pretty consistently was not enjoyable to watch and had little dynamism as a commander.

 

[Plinko]

1h
Seth Abramson‏ @SethAbramson
BREAKING on MSNBC: Leaders of the G20 were "befuddled" at spectacle of Trump and Putin excusing themselves for a private, hour-long meeting.

 

[Random Human]

1h
Seth Abramson‏ @SethAbramson
BREAKING on MSNBC: Leaders of the G20 were "befuddled" at spectacle of Trump and Putin excusing themselves for a private, hour-long meeting.

[thinking emoji]

 

[Dubbedinenglish]

1h
Seth Abramson‏ @SethAbramson
BREAKING on MSNBC: Leaders of the G20 were "befuddled" at spectacle of Trump and Putin excusing themselves for a private, hour-long meeting.

Private 4K remaster of the P P 📼

 

[skullmuffins]

part 2

 

[PBY]

1h
Seth Abramson‏ @SethAbramson
BREAKING on MSNBC: Leaders of the G20 were "befuddled" at spectacle of Trump and Putin excusing themselves for a private, hour-long meeting.

Is there a better source for this? I'm sure it is the case, just want direct from MSNBC...

 

[Aaron Strife]

(nobody called the dinner a secret)

God just shut up

Btw Trump's approval took a hit the last time AHCA failed. Maybe it will this time too when his base realizes he's not getting anything done.

 

[skullmuffins]

Is there a better source for this? I'm sure it is the case, just want direct from MSNBC...

This squares with other reporting, like NYT:

But the intimate dinner conversation, of which there is no official United States government record, because no American official other than the president was involved, is the latest to raise eyebrows. Foreign leaders who witnessed it later commented privately on the oddity of an American president flaunting such a close rapport with his Russian counterpart.

“Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn’t care,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based research and consulting firm, who said he heard directly from attendees. “They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/world/europe/trump-putin-undisclosed-meeting.html

 

[Plinko]

But the dinner wasn't the issue--it was the secret meeting. Not the same thing.

 

[Random Human]

Germany has good intelligence agencies, right? God, let one of them have recorded that meeting...

 

[Dubbedinenglish]

I was surprised how quick Trump himself responded to this, now we know why.

 

[Autodidact]

Damn, he responded to this story quickly. I hope the press keeps poking.

 

[Beer Monkey]

Damn, he responded to this story quickly. I hope the press keeps poking.

And he's calling it a brief conversation when reports say it was an hour.

 

[Spoiled Milk]

Holy shit. If we're now a political party that falls over itself every time the president even looks in the general vicinity of Moscow, I will harakiri my testicles off with blunt force trauma. He's the head of state, let him do his job. When the Republicans accused Obama of islamofascist appeasement for engaging in the Iranian nuclear deal talks I nearly got severe gastroenteritis. Seeing the same nonsense here, except in a less relevant and completely inconsequential situation, is surely cancer-inducing.

Hopefully this serves as a lesson why you should never piss off the media establishment and make them your designated enemy. They will conjure up so much irrelevant yellow journalism that even your fresh laundry looks dirty.

Anyway, here's a real video I like of the president making secret dealings with the imperial Russians. Very candid.

 

[Bonen no Max'd]

New Hampshire's state house is super cool.

Idaho won't comply with Trump voter panel request

hell yeah we didn't fuck up for once even if we were super late