Crunchbang was such a good distro! I ran linux for about seven years. Ubuntu and then Crunchbang. Had my 2012 MacBook Pro dual boot into Crunchbang. Battery life was awful. It had no automatic fan control, so the laptop got so hot I could barely touch it. I ended up writing a bash script to manually control the fans using function keys https://gist.github.com/nwjlyons/b29ee6f7e26595f55a2a
As cool as it was, I can't be bothered with any of that these days. Just give me a Macbook Pro, as I know it will work and have amazing battery life!
I think the issue is that when people are desperate (lost job, can't pay for needs, etc) critical thinking can be limited to just short term survival mode. Even if it doesn't make sense big picture wise.
Democratic party needs to listen and at the very least fluff up a response that people in this situation feel heard. Even if there nothing they can really do. It's all about appeasing emotions.
I'm a little confused here and I'm sure I'm missing the point. This article seems to argue (and some comments here) that being rude should be normal? Why? Why wouldn't we be nice to customers for their business?
On the other hand, hasn't bullshit/passive-aggressiveness/etc been always called out?
I think the author is just not very self aware. The rules of communication do change, but they probably weren't aware of the unwritten social cues that they picked up earlier in life. Cues that probably were equally annoying and frustrating to someone a generation earlier.
I think lots of people would be a bit more at peace once they start embracing the fact that language and culture are always going to be moving and changing. Thing are going to feel awkward and forced until they feel normal and you'll continue to be expected to adjust to the norms. Some of those norms will suggest that you've been doing certain things 'wrong' all your life and it's gonna be hard to swallow, but everyone will always go through this stuff and this is why you can probably find some rants against political correctness for as long as there have been columns in newspapers.
It's a complete waste of energy, I hope the author found some peace in the 22 years since this article.
> This article seems to argue (and some comments here) that being rude should be normal? Why? Why wouldn't we be nice to customers for their business?
The difference is intent. Being polite to someone to put them at ease in a difficult situation, to give them a better experience of their day, or to lubricate an awkward interaction, is a good thing. Relentlessly and deceptively framing yourself and your actions in the highest possible light is selfish and corrosive. There is overlap, such as greeting somebody in a cheery way as they enter a business. But where there is overlap, the selfish intention corrodes the positive one. When somebody greets me as I enter a store, I can't help seeing them as a worker who is forced to perform emotional labor on behalf of a business that wants to extract maximum economic value from me. It doesn't feel personal.
Likewise, when a customer service rep on the phone expresses positivity and a desire to help, I'm aware that they may be instructed and empowered to solve customer problems as well as possible, but they also may be following a script to guide me towards the cheapest outcome for the company, and their apparent compassion and helpfulness might be calculated to engender feelings of trust in me, so that I feel like I'm in good hands and allow them to guide me towards an outcome that is less than I'm entitled to. Their tone may even be being graded and used to evaluate them.
> hasn't bullshit/passive-aggressiveness/etc been always called out?
When something becomes normalized, it doesn't get called out. In the context of economic competition, it even becomes excused as mandatory.
> This article seems to argue (and some comments here) that being rude should be normal?
No. The article is not talking about ordinary courtesies between individuals (those are mentioned briefly, but only to contrast with the article's main subject). It is talking about a tactic used by organizations.
> Why wouldn't we be nice to customers for their business?
Being nice as you and your company solve the customer's problem is great.
Being nice as you and your company epically fail to solve the customer's problem, and continuing to talk as though everything is just dandy even though it is nothing of the sort, is not great--but unfortunately it is a common tactic that organizations use and train their customer support representatives to use. That is what the article is talking about.
> hasn't bullshit/passive-aggressiveness/etc been always called out?
Not when it is cloaked in a veneer of seeming niceness, no.
I share the confusion, that the article seems to bash at nice, everyday phrases without giving the same nice kind of alternatives to lubricate communication, but rather it gives irony and satire, which are of the other end.
The point of the article isn't about rudeness but making a meaningful conversation, and that passivity and talking from rulebooks doesn't really help from the author's point of view.
I’m not sure where you got that idea from. The thesis is that there is a distinction to be made between ordinary civility and “nicespeak”. The distinction is that the latter is insincere, and serves the interests of a corporate power structure.
Very interesting! If you're willing to share, I'm hoping you can elaborate a bit more. Do you make apps/games that you want? Or do you target specific genres? How do you choose?
No. That's a temporary status. They went out of their way to ensure that a nationwide abortion ban was still 'constitutional' but the nationwide right to one was not.
The Supreme Court didn't fix a damn thing. They made bodily autonomy subject to majority votes in state legislatures. Bodily autonomy is too important to be trusted to a majority vote, and Democrats failed the country miserably by not pushing to amend the Constitution to guarantee the rights of all Americans to ownership over their own bodies.
But amending the constitution is also done by majority vote. There's nothing about legislating at the federal level that makes it more likely to produce the right laws than at the state level. For example, there's the federal marijuana ban, sending countless non-violent drug users to prison.
It's this way by design. In retrospect, we could have probably avoided the problem of the party in power trying to appoint 'their' judges by requiring a three-quarters majority in the Senate for appointments, but that didn't happen and never will.
> The Supreme Court is an unelected political entity. Can this be fixed?
Not really. The Senate and possibly House are expected to flip this fall. Our supreme court is taking a crack at reducing civil liberties and empowering conservative culture war positions. Precedent doesn't matter apparently. Only literal, conservative-justice interpretations of the constitution matter now. They're unqualified and unfit to run our nation's highest court. Radical and idealogical. Libertarians should be angry about this development of encroachment upon personal liberty and rights.
"Most of the federal government’s authority over the economy derived from a clause in the Constitution empowering Congress to regulate interstate commerce, but the court construed the clause so narrowly that in another case that next spring, it ruled that not even so vast an industry as coal mining fell within the commerce power."
The "regulation of interstate commerce" now is a joke of a catchall which basically is modernly interpreted as "government can damn do what it pleases in every avenue of our lives" from its original interpretation which was "you can make sure horses can get from point A to point B".
The ruling with regards to interstate commerce was obviously correct. Local businesses even vertically integrated ones are part of a national marketplace
Many people disagree with that interpretation so its not at all obviously correct. It was not interpreted that way at all until FDR threatened to pack the court.
Courts should be the most liberal part of a government. Otherwise the will of the majority is total and the minorities get royally screwed. Now, the sc is looking like the least liberal part, dragging existing laws and precedents down. Will be ugly. And now, it’s fair game when things reverse to rule the shit out of the 2nd amendment. Sauce for gander.
The court interprets the laws. This was a bad ruling when it was made. If you want a law, then the legislative branch can try to pass one. That's how our government was setup to work.
> Want a gun, sign up for the militia.
All able-bodied citizens are already part of the militia. The Militia is just The People.
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The militia was what became the national guard. If you read the founding father's word on the subject that's clear. Any other reading of the 2A is wishful thinking and SCOTUS rulings on the subject are an example of judicial activism.
Liking it when good things happen and not liking it when bad things happen is not hypocritical. You can argue which decisions were good or bad, but you can't claim what's happening now is good while also acting like politics is an inconsequential team sport.
From a Christian conservative point of view the past 80 years were bad and the current polar opposite direction is good. Christian conservatives cheering for the current decisions after complaining about the previous decisions aren't hypocrtical either.
Not that "you're hypocritical" is even an argument. Even if it were hypocritical, so what?
Nominations of the justice is done by people who have been elected though. According to you, does that make them less legitimate that if they were directly elected?
Not OP, but yes, adding additional layers of indirection makes an election/nomination less representative of the will of the people and thus "less legitimate" if you think legitimacy is based on representing the will of the people.
Of course the bigger problem according to this perspective is that there are many more layers of indirection before it even comes to the point where "your" elected representative nominates a judge. Some of them are more prone to "shaping" than others (e.g. via gerrymandering, disenfrachisement, voter suppression in all its forms) but the goal is generally to generate "favorable" election results regardless of what the people currently want.
You can't vote them out. There are only two ways to get rid of a Supreme Court judge: they retire or they die.
As I assume you aren't asking for ways to bring about either of those scenarios in ways that would incur legal issues, the more appropriate answer is that the government can appoint additional judges, which I think is called "packing". Right now the general consensus among Democrats seems to be that they don't want to do it because it would set a precedent Republicans could exploit, although history has shown that the Republicans don't require precedents to "play dirty" (e.g. while Obama refused to appoint a replacement judge because he was on his way out of his second term, Republicans happily appointed replacement judges when Trump was on his way out, not to mention that a significant number of Republicans supported the claim that Biden "stole the election" and Trump was the real winner).
If you're asking for a systemic long-term solution: no, it can't be fixed. The problem is that the Supreme Court lacks a clear mission statement and effectively acts to reinforce whichever party is in power at the time. The current SCOTUS majority leading to these decisions are "constitutional originalists". While you can argue that this is bad (or that this is still relying on interpretation and inferrences), it's impossible to say that this is wrong because it's an entirely valid interpretation of what the SCOTUS is for.
If you want to "fix" the SCOTUS because it's undemocratic, the problem is that it's only one of many aspects of the structure of US government that's undemocratic. The system was never meant to allow all people to equally influence the government. The system exists as much to curtail the power of the ruling politicians as to curtail the direct power of the people.
In other words SCOTUS isn't broken, you just don't like the political system itself. That's fine, but it requires a different framing in order to understand your goals and options.
That would require them to have commited impeachable offenses. That bar seems to be extremely high considering the kind of conduct that doesn't seem to meet it.
Apparently the wife of one of them was instrumental in attempting to overthrow our Republic. Is that not an impeachable offense? How is fucking treason not impeachable? I feel like I am losing my mind here, people.
Well, if we go back to 2000, said justice refused to recuse himself from ruling on the presidential election despite his wife being on the winning candidate's presidential campaign and transitional administration.
Seems a fair reason for the house to conduct an investigation to decide whether to send the matter to the senate for trial. Note none of that actually depends on Gore having won the vote, BTW.
I'd also like to know more about said justice's wife's role in the last election and if she involved her husband in any way to prepare for yet another Supreme Court intervention.
That's what it was when they came down with Roe originally, they are just returning to NOT being a legislative body and returning this decision to where it belongs.... the legislature.
Like it or not, ever since SCOTUS seized the unconstitutional power to overturn legislation, they have been a political entity, effectively legislating.
The difference with recent rulings is that they've abandoned any pretense of political independence or legitimacy.
If that is your position, you think that when the came down with Roe V Wade that WAS political independence and legitimacy and when overturn it its not? You can't have your cake and eat it too. It's not "illegitimate" when they don't "legislate" the way YOU want.
To be clear I am very moderate on abortion, I believe in the first trimester. But this is a states right issue and is a made up constitutional right.
Acknowledging that SCOTUS has always been political is not controversial. But until recently, they "legislated" in a fair way, in order to maintain the appearance of neutrality. I am specifically objecting that change away from the appearance of neutrality, starting circa 2000 in Bush v Gore.
its fair when you get your way, its unfair when you don't? You think "Roe v Wade" is the appearance of neutrality but Dobbs isn't? What is your standard of fair vs unfair?
Roe was clearly a compromise, which was unsatisfactory to nearly everyone at the time. I don't like Roe, but it's better than what we have now, which is nothing.
