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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30744 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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What I don't get is why Reds aren't better at punishing blue dominated industries when they get power, copyright reform that drastically shortened copyright terms would be a good way to threaten a rich industry dominated by the other sides donors, and could have made a lot of normies happy during the napster/you wouldn't download a car era.

Our institutions weren't polarized like this when George W. Bush was in power, and the only Republican president who has taken office since then was Donald Trump.

So basically another way of phrasing your question is: Why was Donald Trump so incompetent? And the answer is that he's a narcissistic flake.

I think it's a bit of a mistake to blame Donald Trump for this. The capture of institutions by woke ideology took pace under Obama's reign. Trump took advantage of a party that had already lost support among the intellectual and creative classes. In addition, the shift of college-educated professionals to the left has occurred in most western countries, not just the United States.

The President does have significant executive authority, and it can be used to advance an agenda even in opposition to the legions of bureaucratic lifers in DC. DeSantis does this in Florida on the regular; it can be done, but it's hard, and Trump didn't do it.

More like why isn't congress passing copyright reform and daring a Democratic president to veto it instead of passing the 74th repeal of the ACA only to not pass one when there was a president who would repeal it.

Copyright reform seems like it would be pretty popular and mostly harms industries that are heavily aligned with the other party. It should be on the chopping block whenever the GOP gets power, both as direct you oppose us and as a threat to all the other industries out there.

If you're arguing that they should do copyright reform because it "hurts people on the other side more", then you're arguing for copyright reform as not being a terminal goal for whoever is doing this, and they'll always lose to people for whom it is. Namely, the corporations who, without any reference to politics, will pay large amounts of money to persuade politicians against this idea.

Most people don't give a fuck about copyright reform. Go on Youtube and you can easily find clips of movies floating around that the channel uploader most certainly does not have permission to upload, but they do it anyways. Twitch streamers steal hundreds of thousands of dollars of copyrighted content and no one has gone after them, even when they do it to mainstream TV shows like Master Chef.

There are better ways of fighting the Democrats and their supporters than trying to do copyright reform.

Hey, I'm with you. Thirty years ago I was complaining online about the Copyright Term Extension Act and was devastated by the result in Eldridge v. Ashcroft.

But you need a strong and charismatic GOP leader to reorient the coalition in that way. The issue hasn't been polarized. The GOP electorate needs to be persuaded to support a term restriction.

Why was Donald Trump so incompetent? And the answer is that he's a narcissistic flake.

Shouldn't Trumps competence be judged controlling for the much higher level of polarisation, and the media and cultural headwinds against him?

Why should it? He doesn't seem like the kind of person to take anything seriously in the first place.

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