Tuesday, September 04, 2018
Monday, September 03, 2018
STEVE BANNON CENSORED BY INTOLERANT LEFT, ((NEW YORK)) ELITE MEDIA
Remnick changed his mind after everyone started dropping out of his shitshow festival.
And no we shouldn't be thankful when rich white assholes get pressured into doing the right thing (sort of) after doing the obvious wrong thing. Supposedly doing the right thing is what they get paid the big bucks for! Most of us are one wrong thing away from tragedy, not just people saying mean things about us on twitter.
Almost too inside jokey even for this blog, but...
And no we shouldn't be thankful when rich white assholes get pressured into doing the right thing (sort of) after doing the obvious wrong thing. Supposedly doing the right thing is what they get paid the big bucks for! Most of us are one wrong thing away from tragedy, not just people saying mean things about us on twitter.
Almost too inside jokey even for this blog, but...
Somewhere in Australia, Bari Weiss’s delicately filigreed hebrew nameplate necklace just started pulsing a pure white light against her clavicle
— your friend Helen (@hels) September 3, 2018
Gonna Burn My Nikes To Own The Libs
Gramps is obviously having a shitty week already (why? maybe we'll find out soon!) so this will make for some most excellent presidential tweeting.
Nike revealed, through ESPN’s Darren Rovell, that it is making Colin Kaepernick the face of its “Just Do It” 30th anniversary ad campaign.
The initial image, announced through Rovell, has a close up of Kaepernick’s face with the caption: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
Trolling With Nazis
The New Yorker Festival, a hive of scum and villainy, the Aspen Ideas Festival for people too lazy (but not too poor!) to travel to Aspen, has decided to be controversial by having Steve Bannon be their headliner.
I cancelled my New Yorker awhile ago because of an incredibly racist piece on immigration - way to read your supposed audience in these times - but I suggest you do the same. If you want!
I cancelled my New Yorker awhile ago because of an incredibly racist piece on immigration - way to read your supposed audience in these times - but I suggest you do the same. If you want!
NeverTrumpers
Just a shadow cabinet of "bipartisan" elites (fake centrist conservatives and right wing nutcases who pissed off Trump) awaiting their return to power, when we put all of these troubles behind us and continue with the same troubles fronted by a different figurehead, with a different set of snouts in the trough.
Not Our Fault
Programming these cars to obey they laws, drive cautiously, and to not run into things (though this last one seems to be not quite as easy as people think at higher speeds), is the easy(or easier) part. The "oh they'll be safer than humans!" (not necessarily true, but ok) crowd has to grapple with the idea that they can be technically safe and legal themselves but cause chaos around them. It's rarely your fault, legally, if you get rear-ended, but it doesn't mean it wasn't actually your fault.
I don't like that first paragraph. "Caused" is complicated. Throwing a bunch of these things on the road which behave legally but not necessarily like humans and sometimes not sensibly is a bit like throwing a lot more Vespas onto the road (though not for precisely the same reasons). I'd expect a lot more accidents to happen then, too, even if those Vespa drivers all behaved perfectly legally. That doesn't mean "ban Vespas" or "ban self-driving cars," it just means that even if they behave safely and legally, they can still complicate the system.
The first car crash experienced by Apple's fleet of self-driving vehicles happened just last week and it was apparently caused by a human driver — not Apple's own technology.
...
Apple's vehicle was merging onto the Lawrence Expressway and was moving at less than 1 mph, according to the report, and the Nissan was moving at 15 mph when it hit the self-driving car. The self-driving car's speed seems quite slow for merging onto a high-speed expressway, but details are sparse in the report so we don't know for sure if its speed was reasonable — the only information we get is that the vehicle was "waiting for a safe gap to complete the merge" when it was struck.
I don't like that first paragraph. "Caused" is complicated. Throwing a bunch of these things on the road which behave legally but not necessarily like humans and sometimes not sensibly is a bit like throwing a lot more Vespas onto the road (though not for precisely the same reasons). I'd expect a lot more accidents to happen then, too, even if those Vespa drivers all behaved perfectly legally. That doesn't mean "ban Vespas" or "ban self-driving cars," it just means that even if they behave safely and legally, they can still complicate the system.
Sunday, September 02, 2018
Put An Asskicker In Charge
It's a fairly common desire, even by people who you would think should know better. The asskicker is going to kick the asses of all the right people, you see. My ass certainly won't get kicked! Of course even an asskicker motivated only by the purest desire to kick the right asses might not always know which asses they are. Also, too, asskickers generally aren't known to be particularly enlightened and benevolent types. They'll leave the authoritarian bootlickers in place and kick the asses of everyone else.
A Winner Needs A Loser
That's all Trump understands.
*some crap he saw on Fox and Friends.
“The White House approach to every country now is that we want you to cave on these random issues we have chosen, which are prioritized by nothing more than presidential whim*,” said Michael Green, a top Asia adviser to President George W. Bush. “And you have to visibly lose on them. There are no win-wins.”
*some crap he saw on Fox and Friends.
WE WILL FIGHT FOR YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUU
.@amyklobuchar on @MeetThePress shows regret for Senate Dems going nuclear for most noms in 2013: “I don’t think we should’ve made that change when we look back at it.”
— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) September 2, 2018
Saturday, September 01, 2018
Coverage
In very broad terms, the difference in how the political poll/voter focused press covers Obama versus Trump is telling.
In Obama's case, the press felt "the story" was always that Obama was not popular, even though he was never really that unpopular (nor was he super popular!), so they focused on all the voters who hated him.
In Trump's case, they feel "the story" is that Trump is popular, even though he is not very popular (though not super unpopular!), so they focus on the voters who love him.
Sure some of this is the usual "must prove we aren't liberal by slanting our coverage towards conservatives," but I think it also does betray, to some extent, the biases of the press corps. While the myth of the liberal media is indeed a myth, both in terms of what's in their hearts and how that "bias" shows up in the coverage, in ways large and small I think it was obvious the press didn't dislike Obama (despite the coverage) and the press does dislike Trump (again, despite the coverage). I mean you can't be sentient, not on the take, and be vaguely aware of how politics is supposed to work in this country and not be horrified by Trump. These people aren't all stupid and whatever his faults and mistakes, Obama was good enough at presidenting and Trump is horrible at it.
But this coverage doesn't please anyone, because despite the obsessive and overly generous coverage of the Tea Party (then) and the Trump Cult (now), it's obvious that reporters saw/see these people as sort of weird. The uncritical nature of the coverage makes it condescending. Reports from the land of the weird. It reinforces the idea of 'the liberal media' while also pissing off liberals who rightly don't think conservatives are the only voters in the country.
In Obama's case, the press felt "the story" was always that Obama was not popular, even though he was never really that unpopular (nor was he super popular!), so they focused on all the voters who hated him.
In Trump's case, they feel "the story" is that Trump is popular, even though he is not very popular (though not super unpopular!), so they focus on the voters who love him.
Sure some of this is the usual "must prove we aren't liberal by slanting our coverage towards conservatives," but I think it also does betray, to some extent, the biases of the press corps. While the myth of the liberal media is indeed a myth, both in terms of what's in their hearts and how that "bias" shows up in the coverage, in ways large and small I think it was obvious the press didn't dislike Obama (despite the coverage) and the press does dislike Trump (again, despite the coverage). I mean you can't be sentient, not on the take, and be vaguely aware of how politics is supposed to work in this country and not be horrified by Trump. These people aren't all stupid and whatever his faults and mistakes, Obama was good enough at presidenting and Trump is horrible at it.
But this coverage doesn't please anyone, because despite the obsessive and overly generous coverage of the Tea Party (then) and the Trump Cult (now), it's obvious that reporters saw/see these people as sort of weird. The uncritical nature of the coverage makes it condescending. Reports from the land of the weird. It reinforces the idea of 'the liberal media' while also pissing off liberals who rightly don't think conservatives are the only voters in the country.
Friday, August 31, 2018
Federal Employee Raises
I've noticed two things about my extremely scientific completely anecdotal reading of a valid survey sample of opinion the tweets of DC journalists and other related insiders about Trump's cancellation of them.
1) This seems to be a bigger deal to them than other similar things.
2) The concern is about more elite civil servants because they might get mad and leave the government and we not have their expertise.
In other words, "this is a big deal for the top levels of the civil service, especially our neighbors and sources."
But of course most federal employees aren't the top civil service. They're just grunts who work in various federal government offices, and who get paid less than the elite ones.
This might be unfair, as I suggest in my first sentence, but federal civilian employees are mostly not the people at the top of the pay scales.
1) This seems to be a bigger deal to them than other similar things.
2) The concern is about more elite civil servants because they might get mad and leave the government and we not have their expertise.
In other words, "this is a big deal for the top levels of the civil service, especially our neighbors and sources."
But of course most federal employees aren't the top civil service. They're just grunts who work in various federal government offices, and who get paid less than the elite ones.
This might be unfair, as I suggest in my first sentence, but federal civilian employees are mostly not the people at the top of the pay scales.
Lawyering
One thing which has started to bother me lately is the acceptance of lawyers as part of legal-PR-private detective-brand management-client protection-lobbying-borderline extortion regime. The legal profession has an important role in that, you know, even accused child molesters deserve to have proper representation, but this is not the same role as "you are going to use your legal degree and respected position in society to send a 360 degree shitstorm against anyone who threatens your rich clients." You're a shit person crossing ethical if not legal lines to get rich, and no one should respect you because of what others in your profession do. You're getting rich by using the power of other rich people to be assholes which makes you, if anything, a bigger asshole. An asshole force multiplier.
As The Daily Beast reports, “According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, NBC News general counsel Susan Weiner made a series of phone calls to Farrow, threatening to smear him if he continued to report on Weinstein.” A spokesperson for NBC News, speaking off the record, denied the allegations. “There’s no truth to that all,” The spokesperson told NBC News. “There is no chance, in no version of the world, that Susan Weiner would tell Ronan Farrow what he could or could not report on.”
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