Post a controversial opinion

iatee is going to be pissed

the USPS is not currently serving some areas of southern california due to the fire. i guess fire is not part of the creed, though.

Gross is a bad word when Americans use it

However shall we describe our income before deductions?

Or a dozen dozen?

but the big fire extinguisher order! xxpost

"I'm not really clear on what would change if English were to be an official language in the US."

"Thirty-one states have adopted English as their official language, most (27 of these 31) since the 1980s. This tally includes both “blue” and “red” states, and stretches from coast to coast."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/06/18/when-and-why-do-u-s-states-make-english-their-official-language/?utm_term=.19f3ecde666e

Cheering someone's suicide is nagl

depends on the someone

hitler just needed the right mental health treatment amirite

suicide isn't a homogeneous set of acts

hitler/nazi controps are not controps bc every1 anticipates sum1 saying them bc its the go2 controps

I'm not really mad about net neutrality because anything that ruins the current internet and our dependence on it is actually a net positive.

Everyone's argument against it that "you'll have to pay for everything differently" is entitled and shitty.

And though, yes, a free internet IS really good for giving voice to the disenfranchised, we already found too many ways to just funnel things into the pockets of a smaller and smaller consortium of white tech bros

i agree that "paying for everything differently" is the main argument that everyone makes about net neutrality, and that it's a shitty argument.

YouTube: $2.99
Netflix: $4.99
Candles $3,600
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

maybe buy less candles

the problem with rolling back net neutrality isn't that we'll all have to start paying a middleman ISP a few dollars a month so that netflix will stream at an acceptable level. (although obviously that sucks, and that's what everyone is focusing on).

the problem is giving ISPs the power to grant easier or more difficult access to certain kinds of information. i can't believe i'm making an analogy to a parallel universe with shitty public libraries for the second time within a month (actually, i can believe it - i'm falling apart tbh), but imagine a library where all the great literary heroes are put on a really high shelf in a dusty old hallway that requires a ladder to access. meanwhile, all the eye-level shelves are stuffed to the brim with michael crichton and tom clancy novels.

Can't wait until I see which 300 websites I can access through my new Comcast package (hint: 50 of them are just King of Queens fan pages)!

it'll look like this in 5 years:

do you want high speed access to the entire internet? great, it's only $149 a month for the Blazing Access plan!
buuuuuut we also offer an amazing $49/month TV lovers plan! you'll get the standard quality Comcast internet that you've come to love, along with FREE intense high speeds for Netflix, HBO, Hulu, and your choice of the History Channel, Lifetime, or HGTV!

which one do you think people will choose

It's equivalent to taxing the press in that sense - don't know how that works in the US but has been thought of as unconscionable censorship in the UK for at least 100 years or so

but imagine a library where all the great literary heroes are put on a really high shelf in a dusty old hallway that requires a ladder to access. meanwhile, all the eye-level shelves are stuffed to the brim with michael crichton and tom clancy novels.

This sounds like Netflix vs FilmStruck in our current world, though.

(...shortly after)

- hey check out this web series starring my friend Tony who farts a lot!
- yeah i tried to check it out but it kept lagging really bad. the farts were funny but they kept getting split up into separate farts because of the lag. i'm on comcast's TV Lovers plan so unless it's on Hulu it usually lags really bad unless i turn the settings way down
- aw man, now my friend Tony will never be famous

I mean, it's all gonna be fucking annoying and stupid, but everything is already fucking annoying and stupid

Can't believe we're going to live in a world where people are going to choose garbage immediately instead of great things that require some effort, that's nothing like how we already process film and music and shopping already on the internet

ya

this is bc everyone is cordcutting

its gonna be like $50 for basic slow plan and limited sites

$10 for specialty social media access

$10 for fast internet but youre required to get the social media package first

$5 for more sites w above requirement

so p much poor people cant use the internet. only library style access

I will say that the problem this creates for poor people is a legit problem, but maybe 15% of the ant-net neutrality arguments I see are about poor people, and there's also, like, other ways we should be clamouring to help them, like providing a living wage or raising the minimum

why should be worry about providing a living wage if there are poor people starving in africa

everything is bad, it makes no difference

i've heard a couple people making a good point, but since it was less than 20% of the arguments i've heard in total, i'm not gonna worry about it that hard

we got problems, people

^uncontroversial

Scott Ferrall is extremely wonderful

Whitney do you know any schooltechers

God nevermind

are people really encountering anti-net-neutrality arguments in the wild? I haven't seen ANY and I've seen quite a lot of chatter on the subject

I've seen it from some Facebook libertarians in friends' comment sections.

Internet chicken licken arguments have ruined the world

THE WORLD

This is the first remotely convincing anti-net neutrality thing I've seen: https://thetrichordist.com/2017/12/01/thoughts-on-net-neutrality-from-down-here-in-the-coal-mine-guest-post-maria-schneider/

(Guy who shared it is m/l a socialist btw.)

Can't believe we're going to live in a world where people are going to choose garbage immediately instead of great things that require some effort, that's nothing like how we already process film and music and shopping already on the internet

must be cool to live in a world where the internet is just another entertainment hole and not a ubiquitous entity telling millions of people they had to vote for Donald Trump because Hillary Clinton killed four people in Benghazi and then sold all of our uranium

are people really encountering anti-net-neutrality arguments in the wild? I haven't seen ANY and I've seen quite a lot of chatter on the subject

― Simon H., Thursday, December 14, 2017 7:36 PM (thirty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know a libertarian (""""anarchist""""") trans woman who is celebrating the end of net neutrality and the likely passage of the tax bill, who's legitimately confounded that no one in her Facebook feed seems to understand these are entirely positive things

I assume Whitney is only pushing back on this bc ppl on Reddit are passionate about it.

lol whiney

I'm not really pushing back on the idea of ending net neutrality, just I think that A) most of the arguments I come across are pretty weak and entitled, though that may just be who I choose to follow on Twitter B) The internet is already pretty bad

I feel like the lesson of the last couple years is It Can Always Get Worse

Not that I'd argue with either of those points really

love to counter the claim that something is bad with "well it's only a little more bad, and the whiners hate this, so I'm for it"

I've decided retroactively that the citizens united supreme court ruling did, in fact, totally own