Should we be afraid or VERY afraid? (Supreme Court Campaign Finance Decision)

Ah: I was thrown off by the "overlords" and "jews" angle. This being the case, I think you could've gone with something like "Carlos, you sound a lot like Mitt Romney railing on the 47% or something." Or "change 'dumb********s' to 'blacks' and 'asshole libertarians' to 'liberals' and you sound like The Guardian, Bialoczwhatever, or faceless" or something along those lines.

 

It was a rant but come on it's pretty true. Just yesterday, I saw a list of state minimum wages. A bunch of Southern states have none at all, or $5 per hour, stuff like that. Who votes for that? Wealthy whites. middle class whites, and whites. You can dislike them being called libertarian plutocrats and and puppets, but that is essentially the mix.

Meanwhile Germany with 5% unemployment, great benefits, great vacations is moving toward an $11.70 minimum wage. As our workers support politicians who are funded by the wealthy, who exist to cut tax rates on high marginal income/wealth, and who support policies that cut programs for the poor and keep wages low.

 

U.S. days of riots seem to be over. Not working class, but racial too. When was the last racial uprising in the States? Post Rodney King? Not that's not right, there was that Haitian guy in NY that the cops abused, that was more recent. Not happening much though.

 

In order to riot one probably has to turn off the iPhone. Not happening anytime soon.

 

Voila.

Take it for what it is/was. It wasn't a manifesto for a party platform or even a buzzfeed "how-to nudge some truth into your Fox News loving family addicted to truthiness" meme.

'Twas a rant. And it felt really, really good.

Why thank you JohnR. Oh, and a personal note to you and why I had you do my homework the other day: 2:15am, 5:30 a.m. wake ups last night. FML.

 

Young 'un at home?

 

Yup. It's in the faux twitter hashtag in the post where I asked for a link (Education thread).


So are you telling me faux hashtags are NOT an effective form of communicating???!!!111

 

If money is speech, how come voting isn't speech? Supreme Court has no problem with preventing people from voting.

 

I'd ask what a fox hashtag is but I need to figure out a regular hashtag first. Hash browns I know, dogtag I know, but this hashtag I do not know.

 

Hanged. He will be hanged.

People are hanged. Pictures are hung.

@American Brummie

 

Riddle: How is JohnR like a picture?

 

A picture of a naked JohnR was hung showing that...not so much!

 

Hanged and hung:

http://grammar.about.com/od/alightersideofwriting/a/hangedgloss.htm


What a great language we have, though!

 

OMG your son would be, like, sooooo embarrassed.

It has to do with The Twitter machines or something...

 

Oh my fooking gawd. I would so neg rep that show if it were possible.

 

I've watched some great programs on Vice. That show doesn't seem to rank among them.

 

He doesn't like Twitter. He claims college kids don't do Twitter, that it's an adult corporate thing.

 

Oh dear...

 

A recent study suggests... you are probably correct.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_worl...of_information_can_make_them_more_likely.html

I’ve written a bit before on this blog about the ineffectiveness of governments doing things like blocking Twitter or shutting down the Internet entirely during political crises. But in a new article for the journal Political Communication, Yale Ph.D. candidate Navid Hassanpour takes this further by arguing that information blackouts actually aid political protesters. “Disrupting media and mobile communications promotes local mobilization, helps empower the radicals, and increase the dispersion of protests,” he writes.

Some historical examples seem to bear this out. The largest demonstrations of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 took place during an information blackout caused by a journalists strike. Pamphlets and samizdat audio cassettes filled the vacuum. Newspapers in Petrograd also ceased publication for a week that corresponded with some of the earliest protests of the Russian Revolution in February 1917.

According to Hassanpour’s hypothesis, when normal methods of spreading information are cut off, it “forces citizens to rely on each other for gaining information about the political and social atmosphere, while the state is deprived of its direct and indirect propaganda and supervision tools. In such a situation, citizens are influenced by their peers including their radical neighbors in their local networks.” It also disperses people geographically. Individuals have to leave their homes to figure out what is going on or find family members, which can cause large crowds to assemble.

The central example of Hassanpour’s paper was Hosni Mubarak’s move to shut down Internet and mobile phone service entirely in Egypt on Jan. 28, 2011. Three days earlier a social media campaign organized by the April 6 Youth Movement had been instrumental in organizing large protests in Tahrir Square. But rather than stalling the movement, the government’s shutdown of the means of communications seemed to accelerate it. Partly, this was the result of activists figuring out ways to circumvent the ban. But partly, it was a result of people going out on the street and talking to each other.
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In short, so long as people have food and internet, the people served by these decisions don't need to worry that much.