Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[dmjalund]

3 hours ago, Starlord said:

Summoning and control of Pay Walls should be in the Champions Powers book.

See Financial Barrier

[Cygnia]

Leaked Video: Dark Money Group Brags About Writing GOP Voter Suppression Bills Across the Country

[Cygnia]

Pelosi calls for investigative probe into Marjorie Taylor Greene's history of harassment after AOC attack

[TrickstaPriest]

24 minutes ago, Cygnia said:

Pelosi calls for investigative probe into Marjorie Taylor Greene's history of harassment after AOC attack

 

 

This is what's come of decades of openness and tolerance from people like me 😕

[Old Man]

2 hours ago, TrickstaPriest said:

This is what's come of decades of openness and tolerance from people like me 😕

 

The one thing that a tolerant culture cannot tolerate is intolerance.

[Ragitsu]

Just dropping in to voice my disgust with how the United States' government is responding to the Israeli violence.

[Twilight]

3 hours ago, Ragitsu said:

Just dropping in to voice my disgust with how the United States' government is responding to the Israeli violence.

I'll second that disgust and add some disgust toward the people who're acting like Israel is the victim, when they're shooting civilians.

[DShomshak]

A Palestinian professor and Israeli political reporter discussed the situation on All Things Considered. They agreed how... remarkable it is that this conflict has saved Netanyahu's political future after four inconclusive elections and failures to form a government, with likely jail for corruption once he's out of office.

 

Though it's been good for Hamas, too. All the Palestinian groups have lined up in shared outrage.

 

A nasty, suspicious person might suspect collusion. Or at least a recognition of reciprocal interests.

 

But I am not sure what the US government *can* do about this, that would be politically possible, meaningful and effective.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Pariah]

From our old friend Bunneh:

Quote

Q: How many Republicans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

 

A: All of them. No one wants to be left out if someone is getting screwed.

 

[Twilight]

8 minutes ago, DShomshak said:

A Palestinian professor and Israeli political reporter discussed the situation on All Things Considered. They agreed how... remarkable it is that this conflict has saved Netanyahu's political future after four inconclusive elections and failures to form a government, with likely jail for corruption once he's out of office.

 

Though it's been good for Hamas, too. All the Palestinian groups have lined up in shared outrage.

 

A nasty, suspicious person might suspect collusion. Or at least a recognition of reciprocal interests.

 

But I am not sure what the US government *can* do about this, that would be politically possible, meaningful and effective.

 

Dean Shomshak

There might be things that the US government can do about this, though I'm not quite certain what they are at the moment.  The question is, in my opinion, what are they actually willing to do about this? Nobody in the government has been willing to call out Israel on it's BS, possibly because the whole conflict is a cash cow for the military industrial complex.  Pro Israel groups are going around trying to silence people who speak out against them, as they did with Sami Zayn when he made some comments on Twitter about the conflict and they're only to happy to spread Israeli propaganda whenever they can.  They've hopped into bed with the Israelis by this point and nobody seems to have the moral strength to change that.

 

As for the notion of collusion between Netanyahu and Hamas, it wouldn't exactly surprise me.  He doesn't exactly strike me as a person with a strong moral center y'know?

[Normthebarman]

10 hours ago, Cygnia said:

Pelosi calls for investigative probe into Marjorie Taylor Greene's history of harassment after AOC attack

I try to stay out of US politics, especially when US folk are discussing it, but is there some kind of Freaky Friday thing going on with Greene? 

 

Seriously, she comes out with stuff I'd expect from a high schooler in some shitty teen movie. Is there a chance one of her kids is currently acting like an adult and confusing everybody as they smash it in their push for class president? 

[BoloOfEarth]

4 hours ago, Normthebarman said:

I try to stay out of US politics, especially when US folk are discussing it, but is there some kind of Freaky Friday thing going on with Greene? 

 

Seriously, she comes out with stuff I'd expect from a high schooler in some shitty teen movie. Is there a chance one of her kids is currently acting like an adult and confusing everybody as they smash it in their push for class president? 

 

Are you sure it's a teen and not an elementary school kid?  Just sayin'.

[Lord Liaden]

Very interesting perspective from the viewpoint of possible Republican strategy. (And it's fairly short.)

 

 

[megaplayboy]

To be blunt, the Republican party "strategy" is to suppress the vote enough in 2022 to win back the House and maybe the Senate, and then in 2024 if Biden still wins, including in a few key red states, reject the results and install the Republican nominee as president.  There's no plausible scenario where a Republican House and Senate will accept the legitimacy of a Biden win in 2024.  What's sad is that this reality won't dawn on a majority of citizens until after it actually happens.

 

The Republican party has given up on democracy and they've given up on governance.  All they want now is to rule.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Well. . .

 

In February of 1951, Senator Joe McCarthy, riding high after he was perceived to have been behind several Republican come-from-behind Senate victories in the Midwest in the 1950 midterms, secured Senator Margaret Chase Smith's removal from a key Senate committee membership. A liberal GOPer from Maine, Smith's 1 June 1950 "Declaration of Conscience," in which she condemned McCarthy and his methods (without naming the Senator) was part of a Never-McCarthy effort in the Senate, to use some anachronistic language, which had, by January, obviously collapsed. McCarthy was by this time issuing threats against all of them, and financed a primary challenger to Smith in 1952. And by "financed," I mean, since McCarthy never had two nickels to rub together because there was still booze and male prostitutes unpaid for, that he diverted some of his copious fundraising flow to the effort. 

 

It failed, of course, along with all McCarthy's other efforts against "Snow White and the Six Dwarfs." By 1952, people were talking about Smith as a vice-presidential candidate on Eisenhower's ticket. Eisenhower, interestingly enough, had defeated "Mr. Conservative," Senator Robert Taft, in the 1952 convention, causing such acrimony that a number of young Republicans ran off to found National Review to save real American conservatism. (Two of the founders having previously been behind a book length defence of McCarthy, McCarthy and His Enemies. 

 

By 1954, Smith had the pleasure of joining the rest of the GOP caucus in voting to censure McCarthy. Bill Buckley, one of the coauthors of McCarthy and His Enemies never exactly came clear on his position on McCarthy, but he is famous for reading the John Birch Society out of the Republican Party after determining that they were just too crazy for the GOP to safely associate with. And by crazy I should take this moment to point out that some of the prominent leadership of the rightmost fringes of the GOP in the early Fifties were dabbling in death squad talk, which seems at least as bad as refusing to register election returns, at least to me. 

 

I could talk about Charles Lindbergh, but the point here is that the GOP has gotten itself embroiled in the right wing fever swamps before, and the playbook that works is to play dead until the movement runs out of steam and then stab it in the back, and certainly not to get out in front of it. 

[Ragitsu]

I saw the video of Greene. I literally felt shivers knowing that people such as her - and those canny enough to still their tongue while in the grip of delirium - have the power to effect changes in national policy.

[Twilight]

Just dropping in to express more disgust over President Biden standing with Netanyahu and failing to denounce Israel's terror attacks in Gaza.

[archer]

Sad that I have to put this in the political discussions but

 

https://act.moveon.org/survey/covid-vaccine-sticker/? -fill out the form to get a Free Pro-Science, Pro-Health, Pro-Vaccine Sticker from MoveOn.

[Matt the Bruins]

SCOTUS Rules Police Cannot Search Homes Without Warrants in the Name of 'Community Caretaking'

 

This is the first unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court that I've heard of in ages.

[L. Marcus]

"Community caretaking"? That sounds like a real weasel phrase. What does it mean in actual life?

[archer]

2 hours ago, L. Marcus said:

"Community caretaking"? That sounds like a real weasel phrase. What does it mean in actual life?

 

In this particular case, "community caretaking" meant that if you voluntarily consented to having a mental health exam done to yourself, the police were taking that as consent for them to do a warrantless search of your house and confiscate any firearms which were in the house (whether the guns were yours or not). 

 

That's not all that much different from a person who consents to an eye exam having their car confiscated from them, in my opinion. (Hey, you don't want blind people driving cars around do you? Hey, you don't want crazy people owning guns do you? Because having an eye exam proves that you're blind just like having a mental exam proves that you are crazy.)

 

Even setting aside that this behavior by the police was outrageous just on the surface, you wouldn't want potentially mentally ill people from putting off getting themselves checked out because of worries that their guns will be confiscated.

 

If someone does prove to be mentally ill, there'll be opportunities for treatment, for them to voluntarily give up their guns, for their family to convince them to give up their guns, or for the courts to order the guns to be confiscated.

 

Having the police jump straight to punishment without any due process isn't how the legal system is supposed to work. And I'd imagine that's why the Supreme Court unanimously said the police's actions were wrong.

[TrickstaPriest]

Unrelated but shared here because.

 

We have found it.  The worst cybersecurity take.  Here's thinking of you, Dan Simon

 

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/553891-our-cybersecurity-industry-best-practices-keep-allowing-breaches

[archer]

17 minutes ago, TrickstaPriest said:

Unrelated but shared here because.

 

We have found it.  The worst cybersecurity take.  Here's thinking of you, Dan Simon

 

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/553891-our-cybersecurity-industry-best-practices-keep-allowing-breaches

 

I'd like to demonstrate the mentality of the target audience of that article so you can see exactly why it was written and why The Hill chose it to be good enough to publish.

 

This is a real exchange in the comments of the article.

 

 

Me: Doing the "holistic view" thing is highly needed. If you can't trust your IT guy to have access to your system, you aren't doing a good job of hiring IT guys. And they need to look at the system whenever and wherever they think there might be a need to.

 

On the other hand, blackballing someone from ever working again in the entire industry because they happened to work at a place which had a security breach is beyond stupid. The person you're interviewing likely wasn't in charge of implementing policy at his business. That's like refusing to ever hire a Volkswagen mechanic because the Volkswagen company for years covered up how much their diesel engines polluted. (The mechanic didn't set company policy, didn't participate in the coverup, and almost certainly had no idea that anything inappropriate was happening because there was no way for him to access that kind of information.)

 

Joe: Why on earth would you hire someone who already destroyed security somewhere else? This is a good suggestion.

 

Me: That "someone" will generally be working with a dozen or dozens of other people.

If they pin a security breech to George, don't hire George.

 

But if George is doing everything humanly possible at his task but someone else fails at their task, don't punish George for it.

 

Take this pipeline thing. Okay there's a breech. You fire all the people and they lose all hope of ever working at anything to do with computers ever again.

 

You hire a whole new staff.

 

There's another breech so you fire all of those people.

 

Who the hell is going to be willing to work for you regardless of what you offer to pay them? People who are so bad that they absolutely can't get a job anywhere else? People who are so desperate for money that they'll do anything (yeah, that's a good person to put in charge of your sensitive data). And geezers who are so close to retirement that if they lose all hope of ever working in the industry again, that it makes no difference (and good luck if they're at the top of their game rather than hopelessly out of date).

 

The pipeline HAS TO WORK. But you're guaranteeing that it's going to fail because they can't hire good people to work for them because working for the pipeline is a sure career killer.

Now let's look at the long-term effects.

 

Why would you go to college and study to get into that field when the first mistake by any of your co-workers will make you permanently unemployable? The answer is: you wouldn't.

 

People who were talented would avoid getting into that field because they could do literally anything else and have a better chance at a career. So the pool of people who would be willing to do that kind of work would keep shrinking from few new people wanting to get into it and from anyone with any sense trying to get out of it and do anything else before they get blackballed.

 

That's EXACTLY what you DON'T want to happen.

 

You need the best and brightest to be eager to get into the field rather than setting up the field to be so hostile that they want to avoid it at all costs.

 

Joe: Who cares about their schooling? If this profession is causing the problems why would you want to hire them anyway? Even if they have not caused a breach, they are a den of idiots. Why not go with engineers who know how to lock down systems?

[Old Man]

21 minutes ago, TrickstaPriest said:

Unrelated but shared here because.

 

We have found it.  The worst cybersecurity take.  Here's thinking of you, Dan Simon

 

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/553891-our-cybersecurity-industry-best-practices-keep-allowing-breaches

 

As a career IT architect and current cybersecurity analyst, that is definitely a pretty bad take.  It's hard to know where to begin, but suffice to say that cybersecurity "best practices" 1. rarely go far enough and 2. are usually sabotaged by senior bureaucrats through underfunding and lack of support.

 

As an example of 2., consider that my last supervisor directly asked that I falsely attest to our organization's PCI compliance status.  Hence, the new job.

 

 

[Old Man]

1 minute ago, archer said:

Doing the "holistic view" thing is highly needed. If you can't trust your IT guy to have access to your system, you aren't doing a good job of hiring IT guys. And they need to look at the system whenever and wherever they think there might be a need to.

 

So... yes, but at the same time, it is not good security to give any one person full access to all systems.  IT security does need to be able to see everything that's happening, but should not have access to make changes.  Conversely superusers should rarely have access to all things.  Role based access control has been a best practice for decades, and the industry is now moving toward zero trust.

 

Again making an example of my last organization, my predecessor there was removed when it was found that she'd lied on her resume (among other things).  Then she went home, logged in remotely as domain admin, and started deleting files, accounts, and logs.  It was a really exciting first couple of weeks there, I learned a lot about their backups.