American Democracy

Highly doubt that Kasich will be talking about Women’s rights in his speech. All the Republicans/former Republicans will be using their time to Attack Trump.

Hey, I’m just glad he’s using up valuable time we could be giving to the rising stars of the party, say AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley, or Primila Jayapal. Wouldn’t want to give them more than a minute of time, could be another Obama 2004 disaster!

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AOC (who did get a speaking slot at this convention, one of 8+ speakers from the Left wing of the party) will be getting a nice speaking gig at the 2024 convention :-p 20 years since Obama when she’s running for an open NY seat and on her way to running for president in 2028 or 2032 depending if Harris gets one or two terms :-p

If “center” Republicans actually join the Democrats and expand the party to the point that the real GOP is irrelevant (outside of state politics), that gives more room for the left to primary and push for serious reform. A left-wing equivalent of the tea party caucus could thrive in that environment when the existential threat of the real Republican party is gone.

It’s not fast progress. But it’s the kind of progress that saves lives.

Nothing matters if Trump is re-elected. Nothing.

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I’m sorry but this is just completely devoid of any real political analysis. Somehow structuring the party around a suburban, republican base is going to make it easier to push left? Bull fucking shit. Voter bases decide the platform. Building a base which is reactionary at it’s core means the policy will be reactionary at its core. Sure, they’ll throw you enough scraps to somehow think “well at least things are getting a little better” while wealth extraction continues and the planet burns up.

You want to make real change? Ignore the democrats, unionize your workplace, join dual power organizations.

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Who said anything about “Structuring the party” that way? You’re the one putting words in the DNC’s mouth, not me.

Only if “ignore the Democrats” also means “vote for every Democrat in every race post-primary.” Anything less is national suicide.

“Join and expand the party” means exactly this, and it’s been an explicit goal of the party since Hilary’s 2016 campaign.

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And? Most Americans are really ignorant and centrist and you have to play that game in the swing states until we can enact real voting reform (which requires taking all three branches).

Cool, have fun playing that game. I’m done with it, I just cannot stand side by side with people who have been at the core of all the neoliberal damage over the last forty years, and who set the stage for Trump. They’ll do the same to the Democratic party too eventually.

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Expanding your voter base is ALWAYS the goal during an election, how else do you gain a majority to govern? You know how you get targeted for outreach you always come out to vote, the more unreliable your vote is the less you get targeted. because frankly it costs a lot to push a unreliable voter/nonvoter to vote. It’s even worse today, because they can’t do the in person voter work you’d normally be doing. So you wanna change the party and feel you have the majority you gotta get those folks to actually vote. Sign up and vote for things every election cycle and get others who believe your way to do it.

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Burn everything down rather than mitigate harm and save lives while we try to enact moderate reforms?

Is that what you are actually arguing?

Because I’m inclined to lock this thread so you can go have that argument somewhere else.

There is no path to electoral majorities in current-day America without centrist coalitions. That’s the sad reality. There’s no short-term path away from that. Be pragmatic.

Who said burn everything down? It’s already on fire. Like I said, join organizations outside of the Democrats, unionize, and support direct action.

My argument is y’all are letting the wolves in the hen house, under the guise that somehow this is the best way to beat Trump. It’s not, and it sets the stage for us to lose in the long run. You cannot incrementalize your way out of neoliberalism.

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There is literally no path forward but incremental reform under the current electoral system.

I’m closing this. There is no productive conversation happening and I’ve already had to delete comments.

If you want to have a political blog, go host one yourself. If you want to have an actual discussion here, by all means do so. But since that’s not happening, this is locked until further notice.

The GOP is orchestrating a literal coup. Vote accordingly, and be prepared to protest.

Finally we get at least something from the court relating to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

I’m not sure how lawyers see this law, but this opinion gives us some insight into that. I read the whole thing, it was pretty short, and a significant portion of it was a semantic debate. This forum will love it.

The way most computer people I know, self included, see it, is that the law is overly broad and dangerous. Every day computer usage is technically criminal under this law. Someone found guilty of violating the law could face severe federal penalties. We’re talking like, felonies, jail, etc. It’s a huge problem that everyday activities could technically be interpreted as heinous crime.

The good news is that up until now, prosecutors have not going around charging every day people with violations of the CFAA for these technically illegal every day activities. But when they have charged people with it, sometimes the cases are quite questionable. Most notably in Aaron Swartz vs. US. There were also many times, such as the one relating to this opinion, where someone committed another crime, and prosecutors decided to tack on a CFAA charge.

This supreme court opinion released today thankfully pulls the law back in the right direction a little bit, but not nearly enough to fix the whole problem. Here’s the story.

A police officer had access to the license plate database. They were allowed to login to it, and do lookups. However, they did a lookup in violation of policy in exchange for money. A crooked cop, surprise! The argument here is that the computer let him access the information because he was logged in with legit credentials and was the true owner of those login credentials. However, he access information he was not supposed to be accessing. The government says that was a violation of the CFAA, his defense says no. The lower courts agreed with the government, and thankfully the supreme court did not.

This is good. It means that, for example, if a bug in this forum gives you admin access, and you decide to look at other people’s private messages or delete posts or whatever, that’s not a crime. Before this opinion, it may have been a crime! We weren’t sure. The justices correctly pointed out, that had they ruled otherwise it would mean that lots of every day activities would be technically illegal, like using a work computer to send a personal email.

However, it’s not good enough. There are still plenty of scenarios where a person doing something that I believe should not be a crime, but still probably are. And a good portion of those are things that a federal prosecutor might actually try to press charges for.

For example, let’s say I start an online game of Root. I put a password on this game. The password is the letter “s”. Someone accidentally clicks our game, or has a cat on the keyboard, and joins our game uninvited. Technically a crime?! What if I share the password publicly, but I specify who may use it and a person I did not specify ends up using it? What if a system is broken and lets me in with any old password?

Imagine a web site called sellingsomefiles.com. When you visit it, there’s a login page. The login page is just html and javascript. The username and password are hard-coded in the javascript. You can see them if you view source. Typing them into the form simply uses css to un-hide a div that has links to files. The urls to the files are publicly accessible. If you had visited this site with curl, or with javascript disabled, you would see the urls of the files. If anyone at all sent a GET request to the urls of the files, the server would send them the files. Now imagine a webcrawler like Google comes along. It’s probably going to download those files while crawling! Is Google violating the CFAA?

TL;DR: Today’s opinion is correct and moves things in the right direction, but not nearly far enough.

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Thread unlocks

Just meme-ing I expect this to be reclosed by Rym in N minutes.

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I think I have frightened the shittiest takes out of the GeekNights community by this point.