Bay 12 Games Forum

From a tactical standpoint, it was the ultimate troll. It should (unless I'm missing some arcane backdoor option), kill their chances to do this with a budget reconciliation bill for at least another year. They can try it again next year, but it'll be in an election year and that should harden the moderates against killing it.

Eehh... it's been noted it may not be much of an actual troll at all. It was flashy, but much of the GOP seems very much aware actually passing an ACA repeal, or much of anything that intentionally hamstrung it in a way their constituents would feel, would probably be political suicide come 2018, and possibly 2020 and beyond, too.

Unfortunately (for the GOP in particular), a lot of those constituents also very much bought the anti-Obamacare rhetoric, so putting up much opposition to screwing it also was likely to screw them. Self-fornicated coming and going, basically.

So something like what happened, with a distracting spectacle (i.e. drawing attention away from the other sacrifices) hinged on someone that pretty literally has nothing left to lose politically (odds are good he'll be dead by the 2018 election, and real damn bad he'll be alive for the 2020), means a lot of potentially at-risk senate seats didn't have to contemplate committing no-seppuku to save the rest of the GOP from the spike they've jammed up their own arse.

There's been a good chunk of face lost, but far less than a lot of the alternatives that were on the table, with far more counterplay narrative wise to work with and notably less cost. Cynically, as much as this eggs the GOP's face, it can be read as one of the better outcomes they could have been facing. And all it took was a dead man walking actually living up to a reputation for opposition to his party, for one of the few times in his political career.

Thursday, actually, but whatever. And yeah, it's not that I don't think it's legit or somethin'. Just that I'd more not not think it's legit if there was something more solid. _{I think that's the right double negative construction anyway. Too out of it to really be sure, or care enough to try to be.}

Some mention of wozzname referencing the conversation, at least... like, I don't exactly doubt it, but at the same time there's that underlaying feeling of distrust when your sole source is an after-the-fact accounting by someone other than the primary actor.

Know what I'm sayin'? If you're going to reference a phone call to me, it's nicest when you have an actual recording of the phone call to offer. Or somethin' of similar weight, anyway. Scarburly* saying on record it's accurate or suchlike.

* I'll say it now, I'm going to be largely intentionally misspelling the guy's name if I speak of 'im in the future. Mostly because that's a lot easier than actually remembering what it is.

The 'skinny' one is either MK. VI or VII. I think. Nobody except the drafters have even looked at the bill I don't think.

More or less. Supposedly it kills the ACA's individual (and maybe employer?) mandate and little to nothing else.

For what it's worth (farcically little), if that is all it does, it's actually feasible it could have been written over a lunch break, and it's fairly likely there wouldn't be any unintended consequences involved because of it.* Effectively crossing out a section or five in another bill doesn't take much in the way of time or effort.

Probably could have done it in like ten minutes, taking up less than a page or so of text, basically. Truly indicative of the weight of seven or eight years of effort.

*Just intended ones, which is to say our healthcare system gets fucked back into the eighties/nineties and we all get fucked with it, either immediately or in a few decades when your young idiot ass that thought you could get by without insurance is faced with buying into the market :V

Pretty much. When you're effectively forcing the people you intend to implement something to go, "We didn't hear about this until now and have no idea what the hell they actually want done," it doesn't exactly look good.

Anywho, dunno if it already came up and I just missed, but apparently the military has more or less officially spoken on the state of their consideration of trump's tweets. For the click averse, one of the higher up generals (chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or summat) has wrote that nothing changes until implementation plans and junk actually show up front of 'em, put there by something other than twitter.

Stay tuned to find out if our current administration is or is not willing and/or able to follow through on the issue.

Eh, you're probably running into a language thing with that, scriv. Eurocentrism is used over here to describe a disproportionate focus on western culture in general. Not specifically europe, but more stuff with a historical connection to it. It includes america, and generally most folks using the term over here aren't really thinking much about actual european culture at all. Europe might as well not be a place on the map -- we're going to claim your pre-america(n superpower) accomplishments regardless and there's sod all you can do about it.

I'm glad I graduated when I did, because there is no way I would have put up with the environment that exists in many schools today.

Yeeaah, as someone actually on a campus in the last two or three years, chances are incredibly high you would have just never encountered the hypothetical environment you're talking about unless you were actively hunting for it. Hasn't been a point in the last decade or five that's been particularly different. Most small colleges it doesn't exist functionally or literally. Most bigger ones if it's there at all it's small enough relative to the campus there's been folks that have gone to and from class, on foot, and never noticed a "large" protest was going on. Lotta' people like to massively overstate how visible that stuff is; if it wasn't clickbait there's even odds most of it would make the local news at best.

Or to put it another way, you were probably in the same environment when you went to school as you would be, now, or close enough the difference barely matters. It just wasn't in a subsection of the internet and media's top five favorite masturbation material list, so people neither noticed nor cared. Least until protesters got shot or somethin', anyway.

Wasted your time, because you made the mistake of taking Mr. Trump at his word.

Pretty sure no one actually made that mistake, heh. Just addressing the talking point(s) until it became more clear how much of it was bullshit and/or lies or a half dozen other things.