The "service" is irrelevant. I think most people would trust Porno Hub to be discreet about their visits. That's in their business interest. But now they have to tell your government about all the times you're visiting Porno Hub.
And nobody should trust their government.
Also, keep in mind that western governments share with each other. There will come a time when Australians will try to enter USA but they'll get flagged at the border because the AUS government shared that this particular individual visited Porno Hub and a few other age-restricted websites 7,000 times in the last 30 days. Red Flag!
Nobody should trust a billion dollar corporation, that's why we have democratically elected governments. All these power hungry fucks counter balance each-other, to some extend at least.
To be entirely fair, a government that would abuse your vague "am I allowed to access porn" history seems well into the territory of a government that would just make it up. A nefarious, powerful entity has no real requirement to be honest in their maliciousness.
They also have more direct means of accessing more specific data via ISPs, audits, banks, etc.
I think the government making stuff up is worth considering, but isn't it a kind of different threat model?
The hypothetical government isn't going to make stuff up about me, some nobody, on a flight to the US to be a tourist or something. They statistically don't care about me. However, the US morality police might decide to statistically care about everyone who watches porn.
But if I'm a somebody, say a former or potential whistleblower, or a local politician, etc. then a government might have a specific motive to do me dirty and not care about being honest.
I guess there's a wide and blurry line between being a "nobody" the government has no motivation to lie about and being a "somebody" that deserves special malicious treatment.
The moral outrage crowd in the US have no power. The people who can and will act against you will only use morality as an excuse, not a cause. Being some nobody, the government has no interest in you anyway. You can watch porn, they can know it, and nothing changes, because you're still a nobody.
(If you watch porn online, you can be pretty sure they already "know" it, because you're not doing it in the privacy of your own home, you're doing it on a public network with next to no secrecy about who you are or what you're doing).
That is an assumption. The games the powerful play leverage truth and provable things. I think there is a lot of need for privacy and abuse of dragnet information before you get to the government framing people.
You mean like Epstein? We've got a bunch of truths about rich people and nothing happens.
The fear of an evil government misusing something, more often than not, is a thought terminating cliche. It means we cannot regulate, or create any laws about anything, because evil people could abuse those laws. In reality, evil people do evil shit, irrespective of the laws available for abuse.
Like January 6th and vaccines causing autism and climate change denial and election rigging and Haitians eating dogs and Venezuela drug boats?
Are you and I living in the same reality? They're constantly just making things up out of nowhere from nothing and refusing to back down. Now to the point of arresting US citizens with a secret police and committing international war crimes in open waters.
> Like January 6th and vaccines causing autism and climate change denial and election rigging and Haitians eating dogs and Venezuela drug boats?
That you categorize all of those things in the same boat is very partisan. And it is exactly why a government controlling access to information is a very bad idea. Some of those things aren't real phenomena, others are just over hyped and some are real and very much proven. The news sources you got those opinions from are highly partisan but you trust them implicitly even though you have access to the Internet and can cross check many of them. That you can make such blind mistakes is exactly why elected officials should never control the flow of information. And to give you an example of an opinion that very much matters, consider is nuclear power green or not? The wrong answer about that is doing more damage than your most hated official could ever do.
Does the Democratic party actually have a platform capable of beating the incumbent Trump Republicans? Or is it just this kind of stuff? Ban kids from YouTube?
It's interesting, because quite a lot of the pornography ID laws are passed by Republicans and popular among Republicans. I don't mean this as a "both sides" sort of argument, but rather that modern tech seems to be unpopular among all constituents, even if different groups have their preferred villain.
I feel like those laws are different because they specifically target pornography, which is seen as an evangelical moral sin. They would prefer to ban it completely, but that most likely runs afoul of the Constitution. So their next best bet is just to try to limit it to over-18s.
Obviously the end result is the same, but I think the motivation is different.
Maybe. Most of the debate that I hear feels similar to social media commentary -- teen boys getting their brains fried by constant access to stimulus. I don't hear anything about onanism or sinning.
Mind you, I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but just that most of the arguments I hear are saying "we think this is an identifiable and secular harm."
> They would prefer to ban it completely, but that most likely runs afoul of the Constitution. So their next best bet is just to try to limit it to over-18s.
They dont care about constitution. And they are in position to reinterpret it however they want to, regardless of its text and meaning.
If that was actually true then states would have banned or blocked already. This is not a new issue and it has been challenged unsuccessfully many times.
depends on how or who you poll. I dont think it is popular. It's just that there's a lot of stigma when you try to argue against "saving the children" type policy - which is why this gets used to pass laws that otherwise would be difficult to pass if the true intentions were revealed.
The pitch of the centrist/“3rd way” wing that’s still, incredibly, ascendant even after the massive party shift on the other side that was teed up in the late ‘00s and realized in 2016, is basically “we’re just like Reagan but we like the gays and abortion a little more, and like guns a lot less”.
It’s a shit message, but they’re apparently permanently damaged by the 1980 landslide re-election loss to Reagan and incapable of moving on. IDK if liberal democracy will survive here long enough for us to see if another wing of the party can ever get those folks to let them try something else.
[edit] not for nothing, Obama lightly hinted at a move away from that in his campaigning (if not his governing) and it seemed to work pretty damn well. Why they didn’t double down on that is anyone’s guess, but I’d suppose it rhymes with “bobbying”.
1984, not 1980, FWIW, and the Democratic Party old guard had been pretty badly beaten up by the 1968 and 1972 conventions. Tip O'Neill was one of the last of that group to really hold power.
1980 was the famous almost-every-state-is-red presidential election map that scared democrats shitless and convinced (enough of) them the way forward was shifting much closer to Reagan on many issues (including, notably, joining the Republican neoliberal movement). But yeah it took an election cycle or two to stabilize after that.
[edit] I mean yes 1984's map was even worse, but 1980's was reeeeeal bad. Six states won in 1980, versus one in 1984. And we have a guy who won a pretty ordinary split of states and less than a majority of votes-cast calling his win in 2024 a "landslide", lol. No, Reagan's elections are what a landslide looks like.
[edit edit] I mean I don't really want to quibble over the details, it probably was the one-two punch of those that really set the direction and we seem to agree on the basics that it was Reagan's crushing electoral success that set the tone for Democrats for up until... well, still today, largely.
Trump won during a time where incumbents lost by ~10 points. He narrowly beat a candidate that lost their only primary run by <2 point.
Trump's very vocal minority is very good at making people think there is a silent majority.
However, the democrats have been elected quite a lot this millennium and they've fully shown they're incapable of making necessary reforms so there's going to keep being populist candidates until there's new blue blood.
That would require making positive, pragmatic suggestions that could improve the lives of the average person, rather than moralizing and kowtowing to the special interest groups and wealthy donors who have captured the party. Good luck with that.
As it is we now have two parties obsessed with “regulating” the morality of citizens while bleeding them out financially.
No, it would require overcoming a shameless demagogue and enablers who have no problem blatantly lying about everything to everyone.
Democracy has been known since its invention to be extremely vulnerable to such actors. It's vulnerable to it because it's nearly impossible to counter.
Your critique is valid to some degree, but Trump won simply because he had the shamelessness to lie over and over and over again that he'd bring prices down. That's it.
No "positive, pragmatic suggestions" are electorally stronger than simple untruths stated with confidence ad infinitum.
Good luck with that. This was the message of the consultant class in 2016 and 2024 and it’s why Dems lost both of those elections. Biden, for all his flaws, actually did attempt to articulate and focus on a positive message and actively reached out to struggling workers. And he won.
No, the message was that winning was about “overcoming a shameless demagogue and enablers who have no problem blatantly lying about everything to everyone,” plus shallow pandering to diversity, rather than delivering tangible benefits to Americans. In both 2016 and 2024 the Dem message to voters was that everything was fine, no radical economic change was needed, vote against orange man and all would be well. This was a losing position against a populist. Biden called on his long record of support for labor and proposed investing in American manufacturing, which was a winner in swing states especially since the economy was hurting due to the pandemic.
I said that there's no "pragmatic, positive message" that overcomes simply lying and having an entire media and political apparatus that supports it.
Biden's primary advantage was running against a guy who was demonstrably a complete shit show as an actual incumbent. That was memory-holed by the same shameless lying (e.g. ask Republicans who they think "locked people down" during COVID).
Biden (and Harris) then had a similar disadvantage going into 2024.
It's extremely, extremely silly to act like voters were looking for pragmatic messages lol. Simply no evidence for that.
They were primarily looking to get rid of the incumbent, as was the trend across all democracies during a period of extreme inflation.
That’s a common refrain, especially among the media (ironically, as they are blaming themselves) and the professional-managerial class, who seem to have a blind spot for labor needs. Voters facing hardship have agency and vote for who they believe is aligned with their needs. In 2020 Biden’s union support was key to his victory in the rust belt states, which carried him to victory. Harris didn’t have the same background and didn’t make a serious effort to reach those people, and lost a percentage of union votes at a time when the number of union voters actually increased. So she lost. But it’s true that inflation didn’t help.
One reason that incumbents are doing so poorly is that they promise nothing, and deliver it. Nations are in decline across the West, and all that candidates are allowed to offer is more of the same neoliberal pablum. Anyone who attempts to offer something different faces a coordinated attack from the media and incumbent political class, and the only ones seemingly able to break through the resistance are dishonest right-populists. The left has to come up with a solution other than dismantling (excuse me, “fortifying”) democracy, which appears to be the EU solution.
Can you tell me which Trump policies were pro-labor, pro-union, pragmatic, positive visions of the future?
There was none.
It turns out that actually you don't need pragmatic, positive visions of the future to win. In fact, we have plenty of evidence that pragmatic policies at all are a massive electoral liability when facing someone who is, again, willing to simply lie about everything.
In Trump, you have clear evidence that people do not need pragmatic solutions to anything. Somehow you are pulling from that the conclusion that Democrats are not pragmatic enough.
What makes you believe there is public appetite for pragmatic solutions? Enough to win a national election?
Trump does not offer real solutions, except as a sound bite in passing (to be later ignored). But in the absence of pragmatic policies that voters can get behind, the winner will always be the candidate who offers to tear down the system that has failed the people. Mark my words.
The reality is that sound bites have an intrinsic advantage over real solutions. Real solutions to complex problems are by their nature complex and uncertain (else the problem would've been solved already).
"Immigrants are the problem" or "I will bring prices down on day one" have a fundamental memetic advantage that, in a lazy and unengaged populace, will win in 100% of scenarios.
The real issue here is the GOP not holding themselves accountable to something better than suicidal demagoguery. The opposing party cannot prevent this from being successful. That's why it's a known, fundamental flaw of democracy.
Again: you haven't actually provided any evidence of what the 2016/2024 strategy was, why 2020 was different, etc.
You're doing the far lazier, "ascribe all failures to the thing I do not like, and all successes to the thing I do like." Evidence should be trivial to produce but you cannot.
And yes, a major faction electing a demagogue is a real spot of trouble. It has been known as such literally since the invention of democracy.
It wouldn't be considered a known vulnerability because it's solved by "well just talk about a pragmatic, positive vision for the future!" lmao
Evidence: I was there, do your own research if you care so much. This isn’t a formal debate, and anyone who has eyes, ears, and a brain can figure it out.
You keep shouting demagogue, demagogue! As if anyone outside of the political class cares. Solve the people’s problems or there will be more (and worse) demagogues. It’s your only option.
We don't disagree that that's my (as someone on the anti-Trump side) only reasonable option.
Where we disagree is your assertion that that is the necessary and sufficient solution.
Those are entirely distinct claims.
People have won elections for a long long time without pragmatic solutions to real problems (case in point: 2024). You have basically zero evidence this is even a relevant point in elections whatsoever.
The actual necessary solution is entirely on the GOP's side. So long as they're in the throes of a cult of personality, then a sufficiently large part of the electorate will be immune to logic.
And yes: this is very bad. It is a deeply inconvenient fact, but the inconvenience of it does not render it less factual.
I don’t know what to tell you if you require research to explain that the intended function of the government is to serve the needs of the people, that this is the right thing to do, and that voters will respond positively if it looks like you will make an honest effort to do this.
It sounds like you would rather claim a lack of agency (it’s all up to the big bad Republicans) rather than even attempt to implement a pragmatic, common sense strategy. And this is why the Democratic Party finds itself rudderless.
I don't know what to tell you if you don't think there's a divergence between what gets people put into power and what role they're supposed to play with that power. Again: we are currently living a live, empirical disproof of your position, as you have already acknowledged.
> It sounds like you would rather claim a lack of agency (it’s all up to the big bad Republicans) rather than even attempt to implement a pragmatic, common sense strategy. And this is why the Democratic Party finds itself rudderless.
Huh? No. It sounds like instead of reading the words in front of you, you're just arguing against the claims you want me to be making.
Harris was a terrible candidate, we don't disagree there.
Again: We disagree in your assertion that pragmatic policies on the oppositional side are all that's required to win against a demagogue.
If that's true, please tell me why demagogues have long been known to be a real vulnerability in democracies?
Answer directly: If that's all that's necessary, then why did the Founding Fathers even bother to write extensively on this problem?
> Again: We disagree in your assertion that pragmatic policies on the oppositional side are all that's required to win against a demagogue.
I never said that this is the only thing you need. You need other things as well, including a modicum of charisma, a good network on the ground, and solid fundraising to support the efforts. And a party that won’t fight its own candidate after the primaries (oh, and you should actually hold a primary).
Demagogues are a problem in every kind of government when the quality of governance declines. You just don’t often hear about it in dictatorships because the demagogues are either killed or they flee to another country. But demagogues are a sort of release valve for public frustration that’s grounded in material reality, and if you suppress their rise long enough then you eventually get a civil war, collapse, or revolution. The only solution is to fix the problems that lead people to seek out radical change.
Anyway, it’s clear we’re talking past each other, I have no desire to continue this thread further.
Can we back up and just recognize how insane North Korea is? I think that future generations will look back on our history and wonder why nobody ever did anything about the incredible atrocities that took place in that country for decades.
I will get buried for saying this, but DPRK survived as a people, investing everything into a nuclear program to survive. The reason nobody did anything is they firmly built a defense against intervention, and given how the korean war went, how various US interventions looked after that, it was the correct thing to do. The most the US could do to them in recent years was murder some innocent fishermen. It has tried to starve them and failed.
If anybody gave a fuck about the Korean people they wouldn't have split Korea up to start with, they wouldn't have stopped the reunification of Korea, and they wouldn't have bombed millions of civilians to death.
Any proof of your emotional statements? Order of scale of those civilian deaths contradicts literally every public statistics out there.
You seem to have... very strong while also contrarian opinions in this thread to be polite, leaning heavily into apologist position for North Korean government
The North Korean government is trash, but that doesn't mean I gotta ignore the plights and opinions of Koreans 75 years ago or pretend that bombing them to rubble was somehow a good thing because today they are lead by a despot. Millions of people didn't deserve to die just because the US had a dumb ideological crusade against communism when the vast majority of people in Korea supported it.
At least NK's human rights abuses are contained within their borders. I hope future generations will look back on the many US invasions of foreign countries over the years and all the war crimes that took place during those invasions with the scrutiny they deserve.
Except we aren't blameless either for the state North Korea ended up in. We leveled nearly every building in the country, we even targeted rural thatch huts with bombing runs. We dropped so many bombs on North Korea that the bombers started dropping bombs on thrice bombed rubble and open land because they couldn't find any targets left to attack. Why should we be surprised that a strong arm authoritarian leadership rose up among the chaos and put every effort towards military power and obtaining nuclear weapons at the expense of everything else?
I can't even say that they made the wrong decision either, North Korea still exists as an independent nation which is amazing in itself.
It will definitely go down as one of the biggest failures of mankind. Especially since it was so easily preventable if MacArthur was permitted to just take the whole peninsula.
China was already sending troops and material to the front lines when MacArthur was ordered to stand down. Pushing further would have meant a hot war with China.
There is no way we could match them in numbers on the ground. Such a conflict would have inevitably led to us nuking them as a result. Which is probably the reason decision makers chose not to.
And maybe that's really the humanitarian failure. That USA didn't nuke China in 1950 or 1951. Would have solved a lot of problems for generations of people.
Nukes usually don't wipe out entire countries, especially tactical nukes.
I'm far from convinced that using nukes in the Korean War would've been a good move, but equating it with "kill[ing] them all" is completely dishonest. What's your goal in this debate, and is it served by dishonest rhetoric?
USA dropping nukes would have prevented the convention against using nukes in wars from being started. I think there's a pretty good chance we wouldn't have any civilization left by now if we went down that fork in history.
How is nuking Japan different from nuking Korea? Everybody agrees that forcing Japan to surrender with nukes was much better for everyone involved than a ground invasion.
When Japan was bombed, nobody else in the world had nuclear weapons, the US only had 2, and there were only a handful of people outside of the US seriously researching nuclear weapons and were still years away from a test. By 1950 the USSR had working nuclear bombs, had proven so with a nuclear test, and a dozen other countries had started their own nuclear weapons programs.
Maybe the real humanitarian failure is that the US didn't nuke everybody and start over from the stone age. Can't any societal problems if no societies exist, right?
Does any serious historian believe that fully defeating the Soviet Union after WWII would have been possible? Even with the advantage of nuclear weapons, I doubt the US would have made it very far.
Grow an "ender" first. And when you do try - keep in mind that many tried before you. The Swedes. The French. The Germans. They all got their comeuppance, and so will you.
Or how about us not blowing them to bits in the first place? South Korea was on the very edge of capitulation before the US came in full force and even most South Korean citizens were in support of Korean unification at that time. The current state of North Korea would have never come to reality if they hadn't been blown to bits by the US because of big ol' scary "communism".
What makes 1950s Korea evil? You are equating North Korea today with Korea of 75 years ago, they aren't even remotely similar. You don't think your nation getting bombed to literal fields of rubble wouldn't change views and political stances afterwards?
Unification was supported by both sides among the people, most South Koreans supported communism and 70% of them supported unification with the North. South Koreans didn't even support their own government, they were dealing with internal insurrection from their own people. The North was an industrialized nation and the South was a poor farming country and their unification would of been hugely beneficial to both. The war would have been over in another 2 weeks without intervention and a minimal amount of casualties, and it had only been 3 months from the start of the invasion. The only people not in support of it at the time was the political leaders of SK at the time because it meant they personally as individuals would lose power and wealth, and the US who was on a crusade to crush and kill anybody who dared support communism. Korea never should have been split in the first place, but the US and USSR had to be little bitches and force their will upon these people.
Killing 5 million people, most of which were innocent civilians, in the name of "fighting communism" is evil, not the idea of a unified nation of people supported by those same people.
Soviet occupation. Korea was supposed to be unified and elect a government back in 1950, Soviets made sure it didn't happen because they had no chance of winning.
So it was evil because the soviets supported the North? Because communism?
Pretty sure the soviets were perfectly fine with the North taking the South considering the South was US aligned which gave the US a foothold right on their doorstep. And again, the vast majority of Korean people on both sides supported Korean unification. The South Korean leadership, which was basically appointed by the US for their pro-US and anti-communism stance, was so unpopular among South Koreans that there was civilian insurrectionists trying to topple it. The South Korean military upon invasion couldn't even keep its own troops from deserting in significant numbers, and they even blew up a bridge full of refuges to try and stop the advance which it failed to do.
Yes the North invaded which is generally bad, but they did do it with popular sentiment among the people, and they weren't attacking and killing civilians along the way.
And regardless of all that, none of that justifies the US response of bombing and killing millions of civilians and leveling entire cities. The Korean War is considered the most deadly war in Asia ever, and had far higher percentage of civilian casualties than WWII and Vietnam.
Funny you should ask, but yes, communism is evil. Whenever somebody promises a classless society you can be sure they're about to enslave, kill and torture people in great numbers.
I guess if I have to explain it I might as well not bother.
A key feature of liberal democracy over the pre-existing aristocratic oligarchies was providing a classless society (which, superficially, as classes were defined under aristocratic systems, it does.)
The entire analysis of capitalism which articulated the class system with which it replaced that of the pre-existing aristocracy and revealed the elimination of class to actually just be a switch in its structure and elevation of a new ruling class was by Communists.
Liberalism means no state-enforced classes but doesn't promise forcing everyone into the same class. Commies promise the latter, but in fact enforce a class structure of their own.
You might be referring to the remnants of broadcast television. I'm referring to the screen-based productions capturing the eyeballs of tomorrow.
One serious strand of America's whip of many thongs is the inability or refusal to acknowledge the rise in power and influence elsewhere.
As Gandalf - the last remaining talkshow host - gets pulled off the bridge into the abyss, he looks up to see a motley brigade of multi-cultural hobbits dashing for the surface with their wits and wallets thankfully intact.
Please excuse my excruciating reimagining of your wild fantasy metaphor.
The things China does strictly within the walls of its own insular society is a very far cry from representative of "global media culture and business".
It is very much dominated by American media companies at every level. Funding, development, production, distribution.
Something doesn't happen until it happens. And even when it happens, it might fail.
So far China hasn't broken down many walls, for example I'm fairly sure they can't do what TSMC does.
And for media... guess what, they need to open a lot of things up. There's a lot more freedom of speech in the US, so US media can be about a lot of things interesting to the rest of the world. The US even has a lot media catering to other countries (for example media targetting Chinese audiences).
I mean, China could try that, we have the examples of Japanese and South Korean media, but both of those are democratic, and even then, it took them a long time to develop. Plus neither of them are near the levels of influence US media has.
Almost definitely not this FTC. And I'm not sure the FTC would in general considering there is a plethora of mainstream streaming providers outside of just Netflix and HBO Max.
Apple, Amazon, Google, Disney all have their hands in that bag. Not to mention all the old cable providers are practically streaming services now too. I don't even use my spectrum cable box, I use the Roku app to watch live TV and access all their on demand library
Basically every Galaxy phone comes in two versions. One with Exynos and one with Snapdragon. It's regional though. US always gets the Snapdragon phones while Europe and mostly Asia gets the Exynos version.
My understanding is that the Exynos is inferior in a lot of ways, but also cheaper.
In the past using Snapdragon CPUs for the U.S. made sense due to Qualcomm having much better support for the CDMA frequencies needed by Verizon. Probably no longer relevant since the 5G transition though.
How can a VA health ID card be considered a valid ID? Maybe a supplemental ID, but I can't imagine it would be allowed as a primary ID for TSA screening.
A Veteran health ID card is a government issued photo id card used to prove your identity with the government to get health care, why wouldn't it be allowed for proving your identity with the TSA.
But the entire point of the law is to prevent you from pretending to be somebody you aren't. So this defeats the purpose, unless the whole thing is security theater... which it is.
The "service" is irrelevant. I think most people would trust Porno Hub to be discreet about their visits. That's in their business interest. But now they have to tell your government about all the times you're visiting Porno Hub.
And nobody should trust their government.
Also, keep in mind that western governments share with each other. There will come a time when Australians will try to enter USA but they'll get flagged at the border because the AUS government shared that this particular individual visited Porno Hub and a few other age-restricted websites 7,000 times in the last 30 days. Red Flag!
reply