So if you think Gail Slater is a good pick for the DOJ’s antitrust division, that’s tantamount to pedophilia and Naziism? What did Gail Slater ever do?
No, I think a guy doing a Nazi salute on TV, twice, at an official ceremony, that's tantamount to Nazism. And the fact that everyone who identifies with his side of the isle tries to deflect and excuse and explain how the Nazi salute he didn't wasn't actually a Nazi salute only helps with that. And frankly, anyone associated with Nazi salute guy and those who defend him... is associated with Nazis, which isn't a good thing.
I’m skeptical that multiparty systems actually fix anything. Even when they work, it’s because poorly unaligned parties form coalitions on a largely unpredictable basis, and the only hard and fast rule is that the largest minority party gets to choose the chancellor or PM, just like you would get with FPTP. In the worst cases, like in Israel and Belgium, it becomes impossible to form a stable majority coalition for years on end no matter how many snap elections you call.
Also, the US has had a two party system for a very long time, and not all of that time was characterized by moralistic screeching whenever someone praised the “wrong” party on something like antitrust policy.
You can be skeptical, they're still a viable alternative to the non representative duality the US has spiralled into.
> Also, the US has had a two party system for a very long time,
No doubt, that's one hallmark of that long slow spiral into a non representative deadlock.
You likely recall the US founding founders opinions on political parties .. not a lot of fans as I recall (although admitedly I'm not a US citizen).
The current voting system of the US has a tendancy to iteratively approach bad two party standoffs that better represent small powerful minority groups rather than the nations demographic as a whole.
> just like you would get with FPTP.
That's good to mention again; multiple parties and a change to one of the preferential ranking voting systems.
There are multiple examples about the globe, some don't have deadlock issues .. and a stable majority coalition isn't a requirement to representationally vote on policy, and once passed, if passed, policy falls to the civil service in carry through.
And I’m confused why instead of discussing anything in the article, you chose to derail the conversation with an unrelated grievance over antitrust policy.
I appreciate you expressing this concern. Now I realize the connection might not be clear to everyone.
The article is about Proton "is now the resistance tool of choice in authoritarian regimes trying to control the internet". IMO such position requires Proton to be politically neutral so users have more confidence for the service.
I did read the article in depth and I have the same question. Aside from wanting to let people access the complete uncensored internet even when their government would prefer them not to, which seems to be their entire mission in the first place.
I mean there’s two sets of social norms here, right? Set one is that whenever you see the first person advocating or starting to break windows or start fires or do something else illegal, you all point at the guy and chant “fed, fed, fed” until he slinks away in shame or maybe shove him out of the crowd and into the police lines and let the cops handle him. The other set of norms is that when you see people do those things, you don’t snitch. Various protesters will adopt either set of norms.
Maybe you’d argue that the second set of protesters are actually feds; I won’t argue the point because I prefer the first set of norms myself.
There’s some strategic ambiguity going on here. If you’re going to a protest that looks like the Women’s March on Inauguration Day of 2017, you don’t have to worry about this kind of thing. If you’re starting fires or breaking into the Capitol building, you definitely do have to worry about this sort of thing. And just to make things even muddier, the exact same protest can radically change from one to the other based on specifics of time and place. In the summer of 2020, Seattle and Portland had mostly peaceful and uneventful protests by day in the exact same places where shootings and arsons would break out after dark, while on January 6th, just as some of the rioters were trying to force their way through the windows on one side of the Capitol building and clashing with Capitol Police, on the other side of the Capitol they were peacefully walking through wide open gates and doorways and milling around in the hallways as the Capitol Police looked on. And yeah, the peaceful ones get prosecuted sometimes too.
I think the "strategic ambiguity" here is ethics. Civil rights protestors were clearly breaking the law when they sat at diners that wouldn't serve black people. But who today thinks they were wrong? When I was a kid, students protested at Universities to divest from Apartheid era South Africa.
People can agree on what the law is, but they don't always agree on what is right. Sometimes a democratic government will zealously defend a law, war or principal that later generations of the same government will disavow.
> Civil rights protestors were clearly breaking the law when they sat at diners that wouldn't serve black people.
Sure, and then they let the police arrest them because the sight of peaceful people being hauled off to jail for sitting at the wrong diner or on the wrong seat on the bus is the statement. It’s called civil disobedience; Thoreau both practiced it and wrote about it a century before the civil rights movement. What none of those people did was try to obscure the fact that they were breaking the law or evade the consequences. Their plan was to go to jail over and over again to make the injustice of the system constantly manifest. So how does this even remotely apply to the article, which is about trying to avoid legal consequences?
I think you misunderstood me. My point is not that the law should align perfectly with my morality, it’s that in a functional democracy, there will _always_ be parties that have a moral position that does not align with the law. I believe it should be legal for them to protest, but in many cases it is not (speaking globally, not just in the USA). So I think it is good for protesters to be able to protect themselves, because my aspiration is that anyone who disagrees with the state should be able to make their voice heard.
So yes, to answer your question, I think my political opponents should be able to protest. If the state doesn’t allow them to, I am fine with them using tools to protect themselves legally.
The line I draw this at is violence and looting from innocents.
It seems you phrased your response as a “gotcha” but I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make?
It’s probably a little self-aware but what he’s describing is a lifestyle attainable by people with similar jobs and qualifications as what Arsenal is asking for, and it’s reasonable to expect it if that’s what you can get from other employers.
Also, housing in much of the US is criminally expensive, and some people have unreasonably snobby attitudes about what constitutes a “decent area” in the US. Or maybe he was just making an understated and backhanded joke about the London housing market, which I’ve heard to be similarly absurd.
I live in NYC, on the UWS, in a nice (but not extravagant) 2 bedroom apartment. It’s about 1000 sq feet, and I pay $5k per month in rent. Buying a similar place in my neighborhood would cost me literally double that per month, after putting down $300k or more. My neighborhood has hundreds of thousands of people in it, all paying similar amounts (or much much more). My building has about 60 units, and I live in one of the smaller ones. Almost half of the units rent for $12k-15k per month. This is just one of hundreds of buildings in my neighborhood alone, one of thousands in Manhattan.
Of the ~350 apartments with at least 3 bedrooms for sale right in my neighborhood, only 77 cost less than $3mm. There are 52 for sale for more than $10mm, and those will almost all sell.
> The average price for a terraced house in london zone 2 is £1.7 million
I have a feeling that data is wrong. If it's accurate it's definitely been pushed up by huge outliers on the top end (like £50+M properties in Chelsea and west ken that are zone 2)
I think the median zone 2 terraced house is more like £1m, can't find a statistic but I just bought a £1.5m house in hackney and there were 10 £1-1.3m properties for every £1.7m+
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