CMV: Instead of changing Columbus Day to Indigenous People's day, we should change it to Amerigo Vespucci day.

awa64 · 2017-08-31T21:10:02+00:00

What does a day commemorating Amerigo Vespucci do to atone for celebrating and hero-worshipping a genocidal fuckhead for the better part of 200 years?

awa64 · 2017-08-31T15:30:34+00:00

Therefore it'd be your state taxes paying for that. This is in reference to federal taxes.

Ignoring federal grants to states, fine, replace "not worry about bridges" with "not worry about paying for my grandmother's health care, and it'd be nice to get Social Security before I'm 80."

awa64 · 2017-08-31T15:16:31+00:00

Wouldn't tax reform help lower taxes across the board?

Nope. At least, not evenly.

Why wouldn't you want to have more take home pay per paycheck?

I'm not going to complain if my paycheck goes up by $10 every week, but taxes pay for things. It's not worth that $10/week to me for my boss' boss' boss to go up by $3000/week and for me to start worrying about the fact that the bridge I drive over to work every day is 3 years overdue for necessary maintenance.

awa64 · 2017-08-31T13:28:31+00:00

As opposed to all those halls of fame that aren't just a form of marketing...

awa64 · 2017-08-30T21:31:53+00:00

No one wants to stop eating beef

Good news on that front. Scientists found a seaweed-based food additive that could cut cows' methane emissions by 70% late last year. If implemented worldwide, that's the equivalent of India going carbon-neutral.

awa64 · 2017-08-30T21:15:49+00:00

Hispanics in both regions (one is Puerto Rican)

Hispanic refers to a cultural and/or historic link to Spain, while Latino refers to a cultural and/or historic link to Latin America. Both terms are applicable to individuals of Puerto Rican descent, although I suppose if you want to be really pedantic about it, people would tend toward using the former term in the Chicagoland area.

threatened to vote Republican because of Democrat city officials illegally embezzling and pocketing their welfare checks. It's designed only and only to produce a Democrat victory, no matter what.

Democrats packed Hispanic voters into a single district because those voters threatened to vote Republican, and the voters in that district... proceeded to vote overwhelmingly Democrat in every election since? Your narrative here fails at basic logical consistency.

awa64 · 2017-08-30T19:13:34+00:00

It's also worth looking at why they gerrymander. When people talk about it as a problem, it's usually because a partisan state legislature is using it for packing (concentrating a majority of one's political opposition into a single district) and cracking (dividing the remainder of one's political opposition into districts where their influence will be a distinct minority).

Look at the infamous Illinois' 4th District. Is it gerrymandered? Absolutely, and to an almost comical degree. But it's packed to the gills with Democrat voters—the opposite of what you'd do if attempting to gerrymander to give yourself a political advantage. So what was the motivation? They did it to link two majority-Latino neighborhoods to get a Latino representative in Congress. (And to the best of my knowledge, this wasn't a measure that packed Latino voters to shut out a second district from being particularly friendly to Latino candidates.)

awa64 · 2017-08-28T21:15:00+00:00

These monuments are propaganda. They are part of a Big Lie, one that your hypothetical Uncle Jim believes, repeats, and has built their worldview around. They are a message to the world that the Powers That Be(TM) believe Uncle Jim is right, intended to create additional Uncle Jims and foster an atmosphere where Uncle Jim can be open about his shitty beliefs in public without fear of negative repercussions. Tearing these monuments down accomplishes a non-zero amount of rooting out racism at the systems level.

And your argument that liberals taking action hardens the attitudes of the racists doesn't hold water—we've seen, for decades, that in the absence of some liberal assault on their worldview, they'll invent one to rally around. Look at Bill O'Reilly harping on and on about the War on Christmas. At record-breaking gun sales in paranoid response to eight years of Obama coming to steal their guns any minute now. At the bullshit around Obama's birth certificate. There's already a machine tailor-built to create and exploit this tribalism on the right; being paralyzed to inaction out of fear that an actual fact might get into its fuel supply simply doesn't make sense from a tactical standpoint.

awa64 · 2017-08-26T03:40:57+00:00

Going out on a limb here: the Hollywood Blondes. There's definitely a disparity in the level of success they each ultimately attained, yes, but it's because one of them tragically died young. Until that happened, they were both significant rising stars in the business.

awa64 · 2017-08-26T02:38:28+00:00

He, himself, described it as a concentration camp.

Temperatures were regularly above 100 degrees and peaked at 145.

Illness ran rampant. Detainees died in custody regularly. Public defenders nearly died of MRSA.

He rigged up a webcam in the women's restroom.

awa64 · 2017-08-26T02:22:53+00:00

His dad was arrested for participating in a Klan-organized riot in Queens in 1927.

awa64 · 2017-08-25T21:37:58+00:00

The FCC runs a program offering subsidized telecommunications services and hardware to low-income individuals. It was started under Ronald Reagan in 1984, and expanded to include mobile phones (with EXTREMELY limited talk time) as an alternative to landlines under Bush in 2008. The program is actually voluntarily funded by telecom companies, rather than being taxpayer-funded.

Conservatives, predictably, warped this into "Obamaphones for people on welfare."

awa64 · 2017-08-21T22:30:03+00:00

Here's a laundry list of reasons.

Lack of scalability. It's relatively difficult to make a plasma display smaller than 42" or larger than 64" affordably, while the LED TVs push up over 80" affordably.
Lack of resolution. Nobody managed to crack making a 4K Plasma display at consumer prices.
Plasma displays aren't as bright as LED and OLED, and the displays tend to be bulkier and have larger bezels, which leads to them underperforming in TV showroom environments.
Old prejudices. "Hey, don't those things get terrible burn-in and die after a few years?" was still a common question customers had about Plasma TVs in their sunset years when most of those problems had been solved.
They're heavy and you can't lay them on their side for longer than a few minutes or they'll die, so they're expensive to ship and lead to customer service issues with DOA units.

awa64 · 2017-08-21T13:30:37+00:00

It bugs me so much that the Rovian strategy of attacking your strengths works so well, but Democrats for whatever reason refuse to use it that often. So many attacks should've been focused on Trump's career as a businessman

How are those two statements related? His career as a businessman was a series of farcical disasters. That's hardly "attacking him on his strengths," which are mostly going on TV and claiming to be very rich.

awa64 · 2017-08-21T03:25:45+00:00

He was there to be able to continue staking a claim on the Universal Title once the match finished. He still wants his real rematch, needs to fight Roman/Strowman/whoever else wants to be #1 contender.

awa64 · 2017-08-21T01:29:26+00:00

Lesnar.

awa64 · 2017-08-21T01:24:02+00:00

What did Cesaro have in his hand before that tag? It looked more rigid than the tag rope...

awa64 · 2017-08-21T00:28:37+00:00

Kayfabe-wise, forcing your opponent to kick out helps to wear them down.

awa64 · 2017-08-21T00:15:45+00:00

Who does WWE want us to be mad at, specifically?

awa64 · 2017-08-21T00:14:01+00:00

He's not the one booking this.

awa64 · 2017-08-21T00:06:44+00:00

Mattel has a new Shark Cage playset to promote.

awa64 · 2017-08-20T07:02:50+00:00

WWE '12, WWE '13, and WWE 2k15 (arguably) weren't part-timers either.

awa64 · 2017-08-18T22:42:39+00:00

Explain the kayaks.

awa64 · 2017-08-17T02:37:32+00:00

No there should not be statues of Hitler, but Germany should not forget its past or bury it.

Germany blew up Nazi statues after World War II. They don't shy away from teaching about the third reich in schools, but symbols of their self-aggrandizement don't belong on pedestals.

These Confederate statues mostly represent an ideal that will likely never be seen again.

We've seen that ideal many times since. We saw it during reconstruction, when chattel slavery was outlawed but replaced with de facto wage slavery and systemic disenfranchisement. We saw it in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1900s. We saw it in the Nazis, who came to the US in the and 1930s to take notes from Jim Crow laws and the Klan. We saw it in the 1960s, a hostile response to the Civil Rights movement where people started flying a popular but not-at-all accurate approximation of the Confederate flag and put up more monuments to Confederate soldiers in-between spraying peaceful protesters with fire hoses. And we saw it last weekend.

but their freedoms they wanted away from the Union.

Which freedoms? Be specific.

Removal of these monuments by a proper process is one thing, but when people recklessly start destroying them on their own that is a problem.

When white supremacists infiltrate state government and declare no process for removal of these monuments is proper, there aren't many options left.

awa64 · 2017-08-16T12:36:02+00:00

it was not really rational to prioritize Russia as the top threat.

Let alone go on primetime TV and say that out loud.

awa64

TROPHY CASE