ricecake

"these days"? I take it you weren't paying attention during the whole "explorative credit" thing? We had to make the consumer financial protection bureau to, amongst other things, make them be a little less shitty? The bureau they've been desperately trying to get dismantled because it moderately limits their profits?

Have they ever been better than "kinda bad" at best?

Anyway, I didn't specifically decry credit issuers. I implied that spammers are shitty, which I stand by and is far from a new sentiment.

By who? And under what authority?

The rules governing international conflict either aren't ratified by the US, or allow the UN security council to declare a war illegal. Given the US has a permanent veto, it's shockingly unlikely the security council would ever do that.

It's a shorthand for all those other legal arrangements, in a pragmatic sense. You can build the same thing with documents that confer the different legal relationships, or you can use the pre-packaged bundle. A lot of the one-off arrangements require a lawyer and filling fees for each document, where the bundle can be done for a $25 or so fee, and a judge or the clerk who collected the fee, depending on your jurisdiction.

There are also social and relationship perks to a public declaration of commitment. It doesn't change anything, but a public declaration can make things explicit on all accounts.
Rings are just a social shorthand to communicate that to others passively

They also don't actually need to be expensive. They became expensive because people are usually willing to shell out a little more for a special occasion, and a lot of people wedged themselves in and argued that without them it wasn't really special. If you can't put a price on love, then how can $10k be too much?

If you've decided to make a public commitment, a little party to celebrate is legitimately fun. You just need to separate what you need for the party to be fun and feeling like the scale of the party is a testament to your love or sincerity.

When I got married the ceremony was five minutes and done by a friend of ours, we had our friends and the closer circle of relatives as guests and we didn't need to save up for things because we only got what would make us happy for our party. Our rings were cheaper than most because we talked to a jewler and had them make something according to our designs, and neither of us like diamonds. (Mine is a metal reinforced piece of a beautiful rock we found while rock hunting at a favorite camping spot, and hers is her favorite color, laid out well to avoid snagging on clothing.)

They're not mandatory if they're attached. It's not gonna jump out and douse your butt without you asking.

Feh, you vastly underestimate how crap I am at plumbing.

Like the comic relief janitor of old, I have a gift for picking up every wrong part before I find the one I need.

But they also work for the bad company, so my sympathy is limited. Not super limited, else I wouldn't point out that they're inevitably hourly employees, and a long day cleaning glitter creates an annoying backlog that creates even more overtime.
Punishing the worker for working for spammers, but also putting money in their pocket at the cost of the people making choices.

Biggest issue is the cost of glitter. Easier to get dirt or rocks.

Cool. We've entirely stopped talking about what I cared about, which was "man, this article sure has a misleading headline", so you can keep sharing your feelings about different Democrats if you want but I honestly don't really care.

I can definitively tell you that anyone I know who I could ask that question of would be able to say Richard, George or Luis with a random number afterwards, at least knows king George due to musical theater, and would be able to give a more detailed breakdown of the factors behind the revolution than the vaguely conceptual, although I'm not sure what level of granularity you need for it to be the "real" reasons. (You'd get taxation without representation, quartering troops, Boston massacre, and probably some that i can't recall and a "the rich white ruling class resented being governed and seized an opportunity for justifiable rebellion and the cause was just pretext")

My brother in law would be the most uncertain. He almost certainly doesn't know what an oligarch is, but he has enough 'murika to him to be resentful of royalty. From the kids most royalty he could name would be animated I think. Probably hand wave the essentials of the revolution without getting names right, and I have a sneaking suspicion he'd call the Boston tea party a cause.

There's a lot of variety in what you find in people.

that's what the lady in the article talked about the whole time.

No, that's what this article quoted her about for their entire article.
Clearly my first statement didn't land the way intended, since you missed me calling it "silly" immediately afterwards.
Criticizing you for failing to talk about policy in a conversation that isn't about that is silly. Much like I think it's silly to criticize someone for not talking about policy because in a particular context they're talking about something else.

Did she call it "the plan", or was that the article, which is an article about an article about an interview about an upcoming speech?
From the actual interview, she refers to a set of speeches directed at party volunteers and organizers as a "war plan", and indicated they will cover many topics, including messaging. Not quite the same as "the plan" being a change in messaging.

They're perceived as all talk because that's all most of them do

That's what politicians do. Most of the politicians you went on to say you liked just ... Talk. They talk until people do what they're talking about.

I feel like the thread of this conversation has been lost. I don't actually care to have a referendum on the Democrats or their strategy, and I'm relatively neutral towards slotkin.

I still disagree that saying Democrats have a perception problem they need to work on is being a "Republican lite", and think it's odd to criticize both for being passive and not doing anything, but also for saying they should stop being passive and do something.

It really feels like you're just looking for a reason to be angry, and it doesn't actually matter if it's here or not, since you already have a notion of what you're angry about.

Clearly you think it's a perception problem, since all you're doing is talking about perception. Why haven't you been talking about policy this entire time?

Isn't that a silly statement?

Making a statement about messaging isn't the same as saying the only thing that matters is messaging.
I think that there is a perception problem, but that doesn't mean I think that there's nothing else. And weirdly, I can talk about the one without denying the other exists.

For context, it was part of a speech to party volunteers , so it follows that it would be more "method" than "content". She also said that we should start picking the 2028 candidates and having that conversation now rather than waiting until 2027 since it will plainly be a very contested primary.
That part wasn't able to be construed in an unflattering way though, so it didn't make it into the headline or conversation.

Our country was also founded on saying fuck off to a king. It's part of the foundational mythology of the country. To a lot of people the word oligarchy means precisely nothing.
Rule by powerful elites isn't unamarican. It's actually kinda the opposite, given the caveats on our democratic system and it's history.
A king however is actually one of the few unambiguously unamerican things out there.

This is not to disagree with your point, but more to say that it's not without room for debate.

As for the "weak and woke" bit, I'm gonna disagree. That one read to me as a need to address public perception, not criticism from the right. Backing down from a bully is different from trying to change public perception. I didn't see it as a statement of needing to be less woke, but of needing to be perceived as being effective and concerned about things other than the most pejorative senses of the term woke.
That political parties need to be viewed in a positive light by the public to be effective is inescapable.