John Caveson

Managed it before the new year!

Eh, someone's gotta support our local stores. Especially this time of year.

I think that's what makes Negan an interesting character, though. He truly believes that his actions are justified because he's rebuilding civilization, and he believes in certain standards that need to be upheld, while not being able to recognize how his abuse his power and sadism are also ruining what he's trying to accomplish. 
 
He claims to only kill was a means of controlling people through fear, and he enforces a "kill as few people as you can" rule with his underlings, but he clearly enjoys killing. He strictly enforces a "no rape" rule, but he has multiple wives that are arguably forced into a relationship with him because of the power dynamics of their society.  He's deeply fucked, but he's also managed to get results and create one of the most well organized, well protected societies we see on TWD. In a lot of ways his goals are the same as Rick's, which makes him a little more interesting than some tactlessly brutal nutjob like the Governor.

I don't know why it took me so long to do this...
 

"We vote red, you vote blue" is missing crucial context. "My family votes red even though we're in a solid blue state on the west coast, while your family votes blue in a solid red state on the east" is not saying "We vote red (because we are better), you vote blue (because you are worse)" it's simply going for the "we're both strangers/outcasts" theme, especially because the very next line is "A strange coincidence we have". If what you say is true and he is saying "we vote red because we're better and you vote blue because you're worse" then what the hell is the coincidence he mentions?

This type of discussion is, incidentally, why shitposts by people with anime avatars unironically have a greater rhetorical power in the realm of politics than actual discussion of the issues.

There's not enough common ground between people for them to come to any meaningful sort of consensus, and even if there were most people (even most intelligent people) aren't moved by dialectic argument anyway (as even Aristotle observed over 2000 years ago).

I'm disappointed, reading the responses I thought Cave's comment was going to be more like "If you make less than $100,000 per annum you should be thrown in the fucking electroshock chamber" or "I bottle the tears of poorfags and drink them with my caviar-encased filet mignon" instead of the extremely mild-mannered (and lame) "Most people can escape poverty if they really try and make good decisions, although some of course never can and I feel sympathy for those people." You can argue that he's clinging on to a relic of the past and that things have changed (which to a certain extent is true) but damn he's basically just being a well-meaning dad. And at any rate "You can escape poverty if you try" is monumentally better life advice than "Give up, you'll never make it."

Personally, I think that the current political framework of "liberty and equality" as opposed to "authority and duty" naturally leads to a form of ingrained sociopathy.  The only question is which form it takes.  More specifically, liberty and equality are incoherent notions on a grand political scale; absent an anarchy a government must always take some action which restricts someone's liberty (and even in an anarchy powerful thugs can do much the same thing), and perfect equality is neither obtainable nor desirable.  But if you have those goals as your basis for your political thought you can't admit this, and thus must pretend that things which would seem to be unliberal or unequal actually are liberal and equal.
 
Individuals will resolve the paradox by making unprincipled exceptions, but they will do so in different places.  And when people who have made disagreeing unprincipled exceptions encounter each other, they will not be able to interact beyond calling the other a monster or an asshole.  You can't have a pleasant conversation where you reason through positions that have buried logical inconsistencies, after all.

fixed

1 hour 14 minutes marker. 

Well, first off, my mother chose to keep me instead of aborting, since she got pregnant at 18, accidents are fun - but I wouldn't really call that something done to "give me a better future", especially since - in a way - keeping me negatively impacted her future. My father is from a family of nurses and doctors - your typical Asian family - so he didn't grow up even remotely poor. My mother was never "poor" but was most certainly not well off either, I think she was squarely in the lower-middle class, not quite poor, but still not enough to sustain a family, especially in today's economy.
My parents divorced when I was around 7 or 8 because they weren't happy with their marriage, my mom got custody of me. My father's side of the family kicked the two of us out of the townhome we were living in shortly after, forcing us to move in with my grandparents. It was their townhome, they were certainly within their rights to evict us. My father didn't do much to try and maintain a relationship with me, nor did I actively seek one out when I disliked how he sometimes would treat his then-girlfriend's daughter better than me, eventually I told him I didn't want to see him anymore. I have cut off my father's side of the family entirely, so he's done nothing to "give me a better future" except not be a dick when we needed to file papers allowing me to move out of state as I was still under 16 at the time. My mother's side of the family wasn't particularly there for us much either, aside from when we had to live with my grandparents. I only ever saw my cousins, aunts, and uncles during Thanksgiving and Christmas, and after we moved out of my grandparent's home, that list included my grandparents as well. My mother's side of the family has pretty much let us go since we moved states. The only thing my mother has done to "give me a better future" has been to provide for me as best as she can as she always has, even though it was difficult then, and difficult now that she's providing for me and her disabled fiance, as well as two cats. We have always just gotten by in life, we've never had the opportunity to make any kind of investment into our future. Seeing how I have a possibility of requiring disability in the potentially near future - I am at risk for two kinds of arthritis, and I may already be exhibiting early onset - my prospects for jobs has diminished severely as I cannot be on my feet for more than 2 hours at a time before I need to sit down for a while. These questions aren't hard to swallow, they're just simply the facts of my life, and none of this can be attributed to simple laziness or being unwilling to work. 

Don't project your family's success story on anyone else, for every anecdote of someone making it big, there are more than plenty to match of someone struggling or just barely getting by in life even though they too work hard and are just as determined, maybe even more.

I don't know why you guys do stuff like this. Just say the discussion is dumb if you want to. Posting a bunch of meme images after serious posts just makes you look like asshats. If you don't care about the discussion then don't say anything.
 
You guys are good posters on topics you care about but you then have to become ironically detached from discussions that other people care about that you don't. Maybe I'm the only one annoyed by this. If that's true then I guess I'll shut up.

What part of
do you not understand, Caveson?
It's not "months" of saving, it's almost always years. If it takes you mere months to save up enough cash to move to a new fucking state, you're obviously not doing that bad in life to begin with.

I'm going to be extremely blunt - and in doing so be an asshole - but I don't give a damn about your father's story and I sure as hell didn't ask for it. Because it's exactly the same kind of bullshit that I've been hearing everywhere else about why "The left just wants everything handed to them" "Millennials are so entitled" "Kids these days want the world for nothing". It's always "My parents grew up poor, but they worked and reaped the benefits of their hard work and blah blah blah blah blah" with words like "personal responsibility", "dedication", and "determination". Caveson, you're not this bloody stupid, the entire environment of the United States was vastly different than what it is now, it's why your father was able to actually accomplish that. I don't give a damn what you believe, lack of money is precisely the reason to not move, coming from someone who is currently in a situation where moving is impossible due to financial reasons, you're looking through Red, White, and Blue filtered lenses.
Thanks for dropping the pretenses.
Fuck the "Free Market".
Actually, this more falls into "The internet is a utility - akin to electricity, water, gas, etc. - and should therefore be treated as such instead of letting corporations have unabated control over the internet", nowhere did I ever mention the internet as a "right".
Except the states won't be able handle it!
The moment a state - and, let's face it, it's going to be California - attempts to actually enact and enforce their own form of Net Neutrality, one of the major ISPs is going to sue that state. And the courts will have no choice but to side with the company because if the FCC repealed Net Neutrality, that means they obviously intended for corporations to be able to do what they're going to do, and therefore the states have no right to try to stop them. 
It's better than the complete clusterfuck you're asking for.
You're assuming a lot about what kind of pricing they're going to offer. Things that use less bandwidth will not necessarily cost an appreciable amount less, and you'll still potentially be making internet access unaffordable for people who regularly use the internet for both "low-bandwidth" and "high-bandwidth" purposes.
Gee, gotta love how you immediately jump to some kind of negative assumption of me just because you can't think of a reason so I must be lazy and don't want to do any work.

I've already been impacted by differing standards across state lines. Technically I failed the 10th grade according to Georgia's standards, even though by Florida's standards I passed. In the grand scheme of things, it's rather insignificant - that could be said about just about anything - but I remember seriously questioning how and why the standards of education varied enough just across a single state border.

The reason I'm making this argument is because the United States has hardly changed over the decades, even centuries. We're still trying to govern on a system that worked perfectly okay in the US' infancy and for some time after its formation. But we've grown tremendously since then, we're now 50 states and ~323 million people strong. Our system of governing has been showing cracks and faults for decades now, and yet, year by year, the wedges keep being driven deeper and we keep adding more wedges. At some point - be it in the near or distant future - those wedges are going to get hammered all the way through the foundations and everything's going to crumble. 2016 was a rather brilliant display of how the low the general landscape the US has reached.
You can't always say no to a corporation. For example, I don't really like doing my grocery shopping at Wal-Mart, they're not the greatest company. But there's no place around me that has prices as low as theirs, or a wide enough selection of goods my family either needs or would be willing to buy. There's a Publix closer to my house, but they're typically more expensive on just about everything my family needs and uses. There's an ALDI somewhere around here, but it's far enough out and out of the way enough that we'd be spending every potential penny we saved on gas. So I bite my tongue and get my groceries from Wal-Mart, because they're cheaper and we can save that money in case something happens. Corporations don't need to outright force you to buy their products, they can still get you to buy their stuff in a number of indirect ways.

And I'd thank you to not make such generalizing statements about my life when you know nothing about it. Disconnecting from the internet entirely would likely drive me to suicide - I'm an introvert and suffer from anxiety, I don't want to go out and meet with people, I dislike being alone in large crowds, so I don't want to go "experience the real world", whatever the fuck that means, and certainly not for any lengthy period of time - the "simpler things" in my life are chatting and gaming with friends I've made across the globe online. I don't have "my friend"s outside of the internet anymore - I don't have anyone I can call up or text and say "Let's hang out" or "Mind if I come over?" - I have "our friend"s, and even then I see them about once a month now. As edgy as it sounds, I don't have anything out there for me aside from some leisurely stuff I can't do at home. As pathetic as it sounds, my life is online. I already suffer from depression and feelings of loneliness, I don't need my one connection I feel the most comfortable with fucked with by some greedy conglomerate that's only interested in money I don't have.

I mean, the same goes for government. I'm a "member" of the EFF and even though support is currently for the Title II classification to remain, just a few years ago they were bringing the FCC to court over their previous attempt at the "Open Internet Order," claiming it was too overreaching. I support net neutrality, and also the Title II classification, but people have a legitimate argument when they express fear of potential regulatory misuse. 
 
Maybe it's an argument that's mostly relevant in the US. 

The reason that I've largely stopped caring about these net neutrality discussions is how apocalyptic the discussions are.  I mean that both in the sense of how overblown the predictions are for what will happen if it net neutrality vanishes, but also in how frequently it is presented as a final battle between good and evil which will determine the ultimate fate of the internet.  It's like if Wagner was still around he'd be writing about this instead of the Goetterdaemmerung.
 
Rather than dealing with specific pieces of legislation or specific historical precedents, the conversation all too often turns to hypothetical dystopian scenarios gleaned from cyberpunk novels.  It also all too often becomes a melodrama with one side full of mustache twirling villains who want to destroy the internet for laughs, and the other side a bunch of shining cavaliers making a brave last stand to save the internet. 
 
The reality of the situation is that we are largely dealing with a power struggle between various factions of large corporations and the government, each of which have shown that they are more than willing to fuck over the common internet user if they can get away with it and each of which stands to personally benefit quite a bit should their preferred set of regulations go through.  It's also clear that the reality of the situation is that there is nothing final about any of these conflicts.  No matter which way the matter is decided during the current conflict, it will inevitably be challenged a few years down the road.
 
In the end I don't think that we're really discussing any course of government action (or inaction) so much as we are discussing the extent that we like the status quo of the internet.  Thus the discussion actually becomes something along the lines of "do you want the status quo, or do you want horrible dystopian internet or no internet at all?"  Of course everyone's going to say the former, and anyone who disagrees is going to be mocked.  But at that point I don't see why it's worth having the conversation.

I think I tried explaining this in another thread, but I'll reiterate for clarity:
 
http://www.billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/bill-of-rights/
 
The whole point of "states rights", a.k.a. the 10th Amendment, and really, the Bill of Rights as a whole, is to limit and decentralize federal power. The 10th Amendment helps accomplish this by making sure that States by default have natural autonomy over there territory, unless otherwise outright prohibited by the Constitution or its additional amendments. This hearkens back to one of the main reasons for the American Revolution, that is legislation without representation by a central power an ocean away. This provides numerous benefits:
 
1.) It ensures politicians are physically closer to their constituents....
 
2.) ...Which allows for more efficient governing and experimentation of laws at the state levels before being proposed to the federal level, with the added side effect of...
 
3.) ...That if an experimental law goes wrong or becomes tyrannical at the state level, the damage will be contained within that state's borders, and while it would suck if you were in that state, at least the rest of the country doesn't have to share in your suffering (would you really want the possibility of Texas's laws to run your life? I know I don't want California's laws nationalized). Which leads me to.....
 
4.) ....The fact that you can move to a different state if you really can't stand how that state is run, which a lot easier and less time-consuming than moving to a different country altogether. This freedom of choice of where you want to live without being subject to the same laws is one of the greatest attributes the country has going for it.
 
As for having fewer states, on the contrary, I say the more the merrier. For example, there have been multiple proposals to split California into multiple state, and I'm all behind it, since that would benefit:
 
1.) Me personally, since I won't have to move since I might be able to stay in a state that actually knows what it is doing.
 
2.) The balance of the electoral college, since that means no more free 55 electoral votes for whichever party happens to run the state (in this case, Democrats)
 
3.) The American people as a whole, since it means even more choice in where to live.
 
 
I won't deny that there is a certain cost to these freedoms, namely the responsibility needed to study other state's laws before moving, and staying up to date with your own state, and weighing your options. For example, I am seriously considering moving out of California one day, however I realize that there are disadvantages to leaving:
 
1.) Most of my family lives here.
 
2.) The diverse climate and living environments make it feel like a mini country in itself.
 
3.) Cali makes up most most of the west coast, thus, has most of the tourist attractions are within easy traveling distance.
 
4.) If I do decide to move to a red state like say Texas, the minimum wage is lower, which means I would be making less, however, everything would be cheaper, so I guess that one balances itself out.
 
These are all very serious considerations to take into account. Thankfully it'll be a couple years before I'll have to cross that bridge. But, the point is, I would rather deal with this hassle then not having the choice at all aside from renouncing my own citizenship from the country that I love, all because of some stiffs a thousand miles away from me got their panties in a bunch.
 
 
In which case if it bothers you so much, then I'm sorry, then you would just have to move to a different state. And yes I know, it is a hassle, but compared to renouncing your citizenship, I'd recommend the former option. And besides, if Net Neutrality is thrown out, then it's thrown out federally, as it affects everyone. If you want your state to keep NN, then I;m not against that. Which is why I oppose the notion that states can't make their own NN laws, which thinking on it now, seems unconstitutional.
 

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that. In which case a good compromise would be to repeal Net Neutrality at the federal level, allow states to implement their own NN laws and outlaw those territorial agreements. I think could both agree to that.
 
 
That again.
 

Agreed on the anarchy statement. It is fundamentally Utopian, however, they do raise a fair point that time and time again, the state, more often than not, tramples on liberty whenever it gets involved with the free market, whether here or around the world. On the other hand, law and order is needed for protection for consumers, such as anti-trust, no false advertising, scams, etc., in which case, government is a necessary evil.
 
Call it my biases getting in the way of rational thought, but when I see something that is universally supported by everyone, seemingly immediately, for the federal government getting involved, or in this case staying involved, in an economic industry that is a crucial part of the modern economy, I think you can forgive me for being a wee bit suspicious and try to find the merits of the other side.
 
 
The concept? No. Title II? Cautiously yes, if only to uphold free speech.
 
If net neutrality was handled at the state/local levels and not the federal level, then I'd have even less of a problem with it.

It's at a point where government intervention of some kind is necessary either way, yeah.
 
If some legislation was made to break up the mafia-like territorial control agreements all the ISPs have FIRST, then repealing the Net Neutrality rules would make sense and arguments that the free market would sort itself out would hold weight. As-is most people have either no choice or a choice between at most two ISPs (here in Florida it's Comcast and Century Link with MAYBE Brighthouse/Spectrum if you happen to live in one of the like 3 cities they cover), so there is no market.
 
Making it fall under utility rules like light and power makes a lot of sense since that's pretty much the way ISPs have set themselves up. You have little to no recourse if Talquin Electric fucks with you because you have no other options, so it makes sense for them to be government regulated so they can't do that. Same here.

The problem with democracy is that everyone must have a correct political opinion on everything, even on things that they don't understand and can't actually change.

It's not about trust. These laws have a proven track record of working for the benefit of everyone. Repealing them has no tangible benefit in the current landscape of ISP semi-monopolies, and repealing them now can do nothing but harm.
 
Yes, it's all trendy and edgy to be like "Lel the government is evil they shouldn't touch or do anything" right now but fact of the matter is sometimes, as shown in this case, government regulation has a net benefit for everyone but the executives of these ISPs.
 
On the other side, yeah, no shit Amazon/Netflix/Etc. stand to gain from these laws staying in place and that's why they advocate for them. So? What's the issue with that? It's a win-win in that case, that's a GOOD thing.
 
Again, yeah, it's cool and edgy to bitch about corporations making money these days, but at least attempt to look at the bigger picture. Bad for corporations =/= good for everybody else and vice versa. If you want to talk about trust, can always trust a megacorp to do what's in their best interests and they have a lot of swing in that regard. Why be pissed when it swings in your favor because interests align for once? Just so you can shoot yourself in the foot to "stick it to the man"?

I only wanted to add that they can only if you get your internet from their Google Fiber service - which is only out in a few highly populated areas - but otherwise, I pretty much agree with this.

While Amazon, Netflix, and co.'s reasons may not necessarily be altruistic in nature - I don't know how they think, maybe it is for all we know - we've already seen ISPs do things against sites/services they don't like or that potentially cuts into their bottom line. 
- Verizon blocked text messages from pro-choice group NARAL, calling them controversial.
- AT&T limited its use of FaceTime to incentivize people to get more expensive data plans.
- AT&T apparently censored a portion of a live-stream of Pearl Jam's Lollapalooza set that contained criticisms of then-president Bush. 
- Comcast blocked BitTorrent, which was ruled illegal by the FCC at the time - now Ajit Pai says it wasn't a big deal
And there's still more!
And this is just some of the shit we know about, there could be many more instances that haven't been published yet.

Trying to compare ISPs to content producers and providers is stupid.
On the one hand, you have companies whose primary service is to sell you connectivity. They sell you access to the internet through their infrastructure.
On the other hand, you have companies who create content or provide services - shows, streaming, social media, online marketplaces, webcomics, art, games, etc. -  that are delivered to you through the internet.

While I won't discount that the potential for reduced revenue, lower sales/usage, and not having to pay out for "priority" or for higher bandwidth caps is a large driving factor in content providers' push to keep net neutrality, that's a pill I'm willing to swallow compared to letting our ISPs have the power to control what we see and do online. If our market for ISPs wasn't so monopolistic - with most places having only one or two, maybe three, ISPs to choose from - it might not be so bad, there would be some potential for The Free Market™ to finally do something useful. But we don't. So it won't.

The internet is a necessity at this point, even if you're just connected through your phone carrier's mobile network. We need to have some kind of protections in place to keep consumers safe from the predatory practices of the companies that control our ability to access the internet. Full stop. We are far beyond the ability of The Free Market™ to do anything useful in regards to ISPs, the only thing we have left is government regulation.

Call me crazy, but when all of the tech giants band together and demand that the .gov regulate them, color me suspicious on their motives. Net Neutrality is less about the potential of ISPs serving data ala-carte, and more about Netflix, Facebook, Google, and Amazon not paying more for the bandwidth their services use, and rather than charging their customers more for that service, passing it along to everyone who uses the internet, instead of just those users.

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