Ten Second News Links and Open Thread for the week of 11/28/2022

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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136 Responses

  1. Philip H says:

    An NPR analysis of this fast-changing landscape found that over the past two years, state lawmakers introduced at least 306 bills targeting trans people, more than in any previous period. A majority of this legislation, 86%, focuses on trans youth.

    While not every proposal has succeeded — about 15% of the bills have become law — the surge of legislative activity reflects what many advocates see as an increasingly hostile environment for LGBTQ rights in statehouses across the country and even some corners of Congress.

    https://www.npr.org/2022/11/28/1138396067/transgender-youth-bills-trans-sportsReport

    • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

      On a scale of -5 (most liberal) to +5 (most conservative), from what perspective do you think this article was written?Report

      • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

        Zero to minus 1.Report

        • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

          How do you feel about this section:

          “Some of the new laws have been temporarily blocked by the courts. But legal challenges have done little to slow the pace of new proposals, according to Katie Eyer, a professor at Rutgers Law School. It’s an echo, she says, of the period after Brown v. Board of Education, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down segregation in schools, but many states kept trying to pass laws to obstruct the ruling.

          “‘This phenomenon of states just…churning out legislation as it’s struck down is one that has a long history in civil rights,’ says Eyer. ‘And it can really stymie efforts for people to actually experience what the courts have said should be their constitutional rights.'”

          There wasn’t a recent major decision by the Supreme Court that invalidated current law, resulting in states proposing laws that they know are unconstitutional, was there? I don’t know how many of the current batch have been struck down – information the article should have provided if they wanted to make the claim that the new laws are legislative whack-a-mole. Would you agree? It seems to me that new laws are being challenged, and I’m not even sure if any have been found unconstitutional yet, but that does happen when legislators start using new language.Report

          • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

            They are being challenged, and none as of yet have been ruled on. Much like the Dobbs decision, however, many of these proposals are aimed squarely at getting to what these legislators believe is a sympathetic court.

            Her characterization is drawing a historical contextual analogy however, which is appropriate in that this is a civil rights issue which appears to be following a similar playbook – albeit more open and more voluminous – to the battle for African American civil rights.

            You see it as biased reporting I take it?Report

            • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

              I’d put the article overall at -5. This particular excerpt was telling, as was your analysis of it. I think you’d agree that the analogy was one that would be accepted by about half the country and rejected by the other half, and that as an analogy it’s grounded in interpretation rather than fact.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

                as an analogy it’s grounded in interpretation rather than fact.

                so you see her interpreting the current slew of legislation on a civil right battle – legislation that exists and is thus “fact” – as somehow not analogous to the historical fact of the slew of legislation passed by many states during the civil rights era to blunt off the Supreme Court and Congress.

                Fascinating. though unsurprising if you start your analysis from the place of civil rights for African Americans is not the same thing as civil rights for LGBTQ+ persons – many of whom are also people of color.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

                However fascinating you may find it, you’d agree that the country is split over the validity of this analogy, right? And that the article presents your side and not my side? If that didn’t leap out at you when you read the article, it’d indicate that you’ve only been receiving information from one side of the divide. So can I at least talk you into a -2?Report

              • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

                No, you won’t get me to -2. Your side was presented – in as much as they cared to say anything:

                Supporters of these bills, like Republican state Rep. Scott Cepicky of Tennessee, say their efforts have more to do with fairness in competition than with gender identity. Earlier this year, Cepicky sponsored legislation that says student-athletes can only compete in sports under the gender they were assigned at birth. The bill was signed by Gov. Bill Lee in May.

                “The whole premise behind the bill was to separate out the politics from this, because sports is about competition,” Cepicky says. “It’s about everybody having an equal opportunity on the playing field to compete. And we want to make sure that females were competing against females and males were competing against males on the athletic fields so that the opportunities for competition were balanced, the opportunities for scholarships and awards were balanced.”

                awmakers who have sponsored these bills say they’re needed to protect the rights of parents in raising their children, or to help uphold their religious beliefs.

                “Parents need to know what’s happening with their kids when they’re at school,” says Jay Richards, director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family at the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank. “Parents have the primary responsibility and prerogative to educate their children. They may delegate that to schools, but they don’t give up their rights.”

                Richards also says he does not think “children can consent” to such consequential medical decisions as gender-affirming care.

                As to the validity of the anaology – its only invalid IF you believe that LGBTQ+ persons don’t deserve civil rights protections. Which yes a vast swath of Americans do believe. But on the facts of how this is playing out, it matches the factual historical record. Which you appear hellbent on ignoring.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

                If you believe a trans female athlete gets no bonus from previously being male, then it’s purely the GOP stepping on trans rights.

                If you believe a trans female athlete does get a bonus from previously being male, then the GOP is supporting women’s rights.

                The last time we looked at this we found multiple female trans athletes who massively increased their relative performance. That’s not exactly evidence, but it’s suggestive.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Dark Matter says:

                And so the solution is outright bans? Good to know.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

                And so the solution is outright bans?

                In theory we try to figure out if there is a bump, and if so why. However if we start with the conclusion that there’s not and proclaim that anyone saying/observing otherwise is an anti-trans scumbag then that’s hard.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Dark Matter says:

                tell that to all the legislators who have thrown these bans on the books with precisely zero data or discussion. Your preferred horse is long out of the barn and may well have jumped the pasture fence.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

                tell that to all the legislators who have thrown these bans on the books with precisely zero data

                Zero data?

                Out of the box, we assume the larger stronger person is larger and stronger and you have to do the heavy lifting to prove they’re not.

                With our multiple examples of athletes seriously jumping ahead in their relative ranking in the sport, I think that will be hard. The efforts I’ve seen seen to claim that it doesn’t make a difference don’t even attempt to use relative rankings, probably because that gives an unacceptable answer.

                I’m 6’8″ and played sports in high school where being larger is an advantage.

                Make me female in HS and I’d be much bigger than the 2nd biggest female in the school and stupidly bigger than the average athlete.

                For perspective, in 2016 (what I could find) the tallest girls on the US Olympic volleyball team were 6’4″.Report

              • Burt Likko in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Please remind me — do cisgendered women athletes generally mind competing against transgendered athletes? We oughtn’t expect unanimity, of course, but is there information indicative of majority and minority sentiments? This also isn’t exactly evidence, but would be useful information in considering the degree to which these women are being treated unfairly.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Burt Likko says:

                I can find the numbers from the national opinion polls but I can’t find the numbers from the athletes themselves. All the links coming up are from the people who demonstrate that there is not unanimity.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Burt Likko says:

                We know that that in virtually every sport, the average male can outperform the average female, and the top male can outperform the top female. Individual awards and scholarships are given out to athletes based on performance. So the only question with regard to performance is how unfairly the women are being treated, not whether they’re being treated unfairly. The question of locker rooms goes beyond that though.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

                So you’d agree the bathroom bills and their locker room counterparts are a bridge too far legislatively?Report

              • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

                The opposite. It’s a higher order of unfairness.Report

              • Burt Likko in reply to Pinky says:

                Does this mean if some of the competing athletes themselves do not believe they are being treated unfairly AT ALL, then they are mistaken? Does this mean that their opinions are irrelevant or entitled to no more weight than yours or mine?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Burt Likko says:

                Wait, do you have the numbers? I’d be interested in seeing them.

                If we’re pivoting to what some of the competing athletes themselves think, this will be much easier to google.Report

              • Burt Likko in reply to Jaybird says:

                No, Jaybird, I don’t have the numbers on that. And that’s really the point I wanted to make here. This is data that’s woefully — and shamefully — absent from this discussion.

                Respectfully to Pinky, I do not think this is like a spousal abuse situation where there has been grooming and gaslighting and other psychological conditioning to blind the victim to an unfair situation — I think a lot of these student-athletes are powerfully driven by a battery of competitive pressures and their coaches and parents and teammates will be quick to point out things that they dislike, things that break the rules, things that seem to give them a disadvantage.

                I do have another number, though: thirty-two. That appears to be the total number of trans athletes playing in all intermural sports in the NCAA. Of those thirty-two (32) athletes, exactly one (1) has achieved a consistently high degree of success, namely Penn’s Lia Thomas, a swimmer. Such is the scale of this issue.

                As I suggested above, were we to gather quantitative data about the competitors’ spectrum of opinions, that would not end the discussion. Pinky may have a point, albeit one that I think is a bit forced, that perhaps student-athletes would be under various kinds of pressures to give answers they thought would please people rather than expressing their opinions honestly, if there were a difference. Also perhaps we should expect that students, who are drawn from larger society, will have a spectrum of opinions representative of their age group and educational levels of that larger society, a society which I’ve noticed is still not particularly comfortable with the questions raised by the emergence of openly trans people. And no, students aren’t the only people with stakes here because the model of athletics will be looked to for other kinds of issues in other forae later. No, the as-yet-unmeasured opinions of college athletes on this issue isn’t dispositive.

                But their opinions do hold special significance because they are the ones being identified as “victims” by those seeking to exclude trans athletes from competing in the ranks where they feel like they belong. If they don’t feel like victims (at least for the most part), that seems highly relevant.

                So far as I can tell, no one who’s been active in expressing opinions and advocating policies or laws on this issue, on either side, seems to have bothered to ask the people who allegedly are getting the short end of the stick here. Anecdotes and testimonials are not data. There doesn’t seem to be any data. That bothers me.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Burt Likko says:

                Generally when a conversation involves rights, we don’t take “probably not that often” for an answer. I’d have to assume that the number of young people identifying as trans is increasing, and I’d be surprised if 32 stands as the all-time high.

                But also, I can’t even imagine what the data you want would look like, where it would come from, what kind of units it’d be measured in. If we can’t act without the data, I need at least some idea of what you’d accept.Report

              • Burt Likko in reply to Pinky says:

                I’m looking for a survey of student athletes, particularly of women student athletes.

                I agree with you that questions about rights ought not be driven strictly by the number of people involved. The fourth paragraph of my comment above is me elaborately agreeing with that proposition.

                We do, however, measure political activity based on the number of people that it affects. There seem to be a lot more people politicking about this issue than there are people who are personally affected by it.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Burt Likko says:

                This is where the “nobody wants these laws” narrative bumps into the “politicians going after low-hanging fruit” narrative.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Pinky says:

                If nothing else, the actual data studied so far suggests that the effects of gonadal testosterone exposure during adolescence take quite a while to fade, although there’s always the question of “how does that translate to athletic performance” (which at competitive levels is as much about technique and training as it is about basic characteristics)Report

              • Pinky in reply to DensityDuck says:

                Maybe if we made them wear really thick glasses that weren’t their prescription, or chopped off a toe or something. Maybe the big toe for the men, and the pinky toe for the stronger or taller women. Anything to maintain the spirit of sport.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Burt Likko says:

                This is data that’s woefully — and shamefully — absent from this discussion.

                I was able to find polling for the general population. I can understand why we might not want to use that, though. This primarily impacts the athletes, maybe their opinion should be primary and the opinion of the hoi polloi should be secondary (if addressed at all).

                If they don’t feel like victims (at least for the most part), that seems highly relevant.

                If they do, does the relevance change at all? Because if that’s an opportunity to talk about how they should feel differently, I’m going to guess that that’s going to go about as well as the last million times we told chicks that they should feel differently about stuff.

                “That doesn’t matter. We’re right and they should be more logical.”

                “THAT’S WHAT I TOLD THEM BURT! THAT’S WHAT I TOLD THEM!!!”Report

              • Burt Likko in reply to Jaybird says:

                If they do [feel like victims], does the relevance change at all?

                No, of course not. Indeed, if a large majority of these athletes feel like they are being treated unfairly, that ought to give people pushing for inclusion of trans athletes pause to reconsider what they’re asking for and why they’re asking for it.

                There’s a lot of speechmaking and not a lot of listening going on with this issue. (And yes, I realize, it’s not just with this issue. Just seems particularly poignant here.)Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Burt Likko says:

                Well, I’d be very interested in what the numbers look like.

                And whether the numbers are different if the votes have names attached versus if the votes are anonymous.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Burt Likko says:

                Of those thirty-two (32) athletes, exactly one (1) has achieved a consistently high degree of success, namely Penn’s Lia Thomas, a swimmer.

                For perspective, there are… 170k athletes (I think). One person out of 32 being successful is unusual, we’d expect zero if we’d picked randomly.

                Especially since when she was a man, she wasn’t successful. As a man she was 554th place, as a woman she was 5th in the 200 freestyle. Similarly she went from 65th place to 1st in the 500.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Burt Likko says:

                That’s an interesting question. The first analogy that comes to mind is spousal abuse. A woman might be afraid to recognize it for what it is, or even have convinced herself that it’s not unfair. I don’t know if it’s possible to prosecute without the wife’s testimony. But spousal abuse isn’t fair.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Burt Likko says:

                Speaking as a large athletic guy who was on High School teams and had a number of large girls who have done the same: I have always thought that an extra strong kid on the team is a good thing for the team and me/my kid.

                However my experience is a stupidly high percentage of parents think their kid can reasonably get an athletic scholarship. People I respect for their sanity thought that for their 3rd fastest girl on the not-strong swim team.(*)

                My expectation is this issue is a lightning rod of emotional reasoning just for that reason. Some people are going to care a lot. It’s especially going to be a thing for the girl one step short of getting a serious scholarship… but lots of parents think that’s their kid.

                As for what the general masses of girls think, I have no idea.

                But it does stand out that when we were going over this, we couldn’t find any female to male athletes that got serious bumps to their relative positions.

                (*) On a side note imho some of my girls had the bodies for getting those scholarships but there’s no way we’d allow the time/money/focus that is also required.Report

              • Burt Likko in reply to Dark Matter says:

                [I]t does stand out that when we were going over this, we couldn’t find any female to male athletes that got serious bumps to their relative positions.

                I agree, that is pretty relevant. We can surely stipulate that biologically male bodies have the potential to be stronger and faster than biologically female bodies, at least with the caveat that as to the general population, we’re talking about overlapping bell curves. Hopefully we can also agree that’s a potential. Part of athletics is how a given athlete develops that physical potential. As you point out, reaching the highest levels requires extraordinary effort, time, money, and focus (and even then it doesn’t always yield the degree of success that was hoped for).

                If more data were to accumulate about what happens during and after hormone therapy given during puberty, it’s plausible that we’d find that in a few cases it might help a trans male become a young adult with a high degree of athletic prowess, competitive with cis males in his age cohort. But the universe of people who are both trans males and whose focus, effort, and resources for athletics would enable a reach for that elite level of achievement, particularly when combined with other stresses and foci, like dealing with being trans in the first place, may function to create another barrier to that level of success. Hard to say, particularly when we haven’t yet resolved the issue of whether administering such drugs constitutes misguided-at-best child abuse or controversial-but-beneficial therapy.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Burt Likko says:

                (If I were to look for top males being beaten out by top female-to-male athletes, I’d start with rock climbing. There might be some gorilla index issues where genetic males might have a leg up, but gorilla index issues aside, that’s the sport that I’d look at first.)Report

              • Burt Likko in reply to Jaybird says:

                Seems plausible. Something that put a high premium on endurance and agility as opposed to strength and speed. Athleticism comes in a lot of forms. Not mine, sadly.Report

              • Greg In Ak in reply to Burt Likko says:

                In extreme long distance running 100+ up to 200 miles there have been women who beat all the males. Small pool and limited sample but it appears that at those distances women can be directly comparable. Those races are mostly endurance and mental.Report

              • Greg In Ak in reply to Jaybird says:

                Not sure how well threading works in these long threads so i’m sort of repeating what i said to Burt. In extreme long distance running 100+ miles some women can beat all the guys. There does seem to be something to women in that weird niche being competitive with men. There are plausible theories about why this is but no answer.

                Rock climbing require a lot of upper body strength which puts women at a disadvantage in general.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Greg In Ak says:

                Well, now we just need a large enough pool of people to measure.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Burt Likko says:

                …it’s plausible that we’d find that in a few cases it might help a trans male become a young adult with a high degree of athletic prowess, competitive with cis males in his age cohort.

                With the underlying issue being size and strength, we’re probably limited to sports that doesn’t use those. For perspective, female gymnasts aren’t as good as males.

                So… precision shooting? Do we have a distance endurance sport that is well beyond Boston Marathon? Maybe rock climbing?Report

              • Pinky in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Hey, not knowing what women think is kind of my thing. But I’m pretty sure that in any other context we wouldn’t be saying “maybe they won’t mind if men take away what women have earned”.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Burt Likko says:

                “Do cisgendered women athletes generally mind competing against transgendered athletes?”

                Here’s an example of their thoughts. Caster Semenya is intersex, not trans, but this was the best example involving actual named persons I could find on short notice; and it does address the question of “should persons with testes-like gonadal hormone profiles be allowed to compete in groups where it’s assumed that athletes have ovary-like gonadal hormone profiles?”

                From reading other articles the general attitude seems to be “if I have an espresso the morning before a race they won’t let me run, meanwhile here’s someone who’s basically been on testosterone supplements for most of her life including today and somehow that’s okay?”Report

              • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

                If I counted correctly, the article has 47 paragraphs. You quoted from the first mention of a conservative position, paragraph 24. There are 9 paragraphs that contain some depiction of the conservative position. I’m including paragraph 35, which mentions a group then denounces it as a hate group, so no, those 9 paragraphs aren’t right-wing propaganda.

                PS – We’ve discussed the issue before, so I’d rather not go in-depth on it. That’s why I’m not trying to address the analogy, only pointing out the function it performs in the article.Report

  2. Saul Degraw says:

    Xi for a variety of reasons is a combination of unwilling and unable to ease off of COVID zero policies: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-25/china-iphone-factory-tensions-flamed-by-xi-jinping-s-covid-zero-policy?leadSource=uverify%20wallReport

  3. Burt Likko says:

    Twitter staff cuts enabled spam porn deluge that drowned out China protest news

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/china-bots-flood-twitter-with-porn-spam-to-drown-protest-news/

    Apparently news and updates of pro-democracy, anti-COVID lockdown protests in China were drowned out in a sea of pornography and escort service ads with names of cities where protests were occurring were mixed in, to prevent protestors from using Twitter to reach out and attract sympathetic people to join them protesting the government. Lots of these seemed to come from long-dormant accounts.

    Query if a) pre-Musk Twitter could have stopped this any better than today’s Muskified Twitter; and, b) whether this was simply a round of Social Media Abuse Whack-a-Mole in which government-sponsored tech trolls were able to get the upper hand on The Ostensibly Good Guys. Many of y’all are tech people yourselves, so I suspect you may have some insights on this that are beyond me.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Burt Likko says:

      Before addressing whether pre-Musk Twitter could have addressed this, I’d need to know more about how Chinese twitter moderation worked.

      If, before, the pro-democracy, anti-Covid lockdown protest tweets would have been deleted outright, then this is (marginally) less bad.

      How did Chinese moderation work when Jack was in charge?Report

    • Greg In Ak in reply to Burt Likko says:

      Musk could use his immense platform to amplify the Chinese protesters or speak up for them. He is a big freedom guy i’ve heard. Today he has tweeted about crap on his nightstand and a couple straight up neo nazi symbols.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Greg In Ak says:

        Here’s what’s going on with Apple.

        I suspect that there are a lot of shenanigans when it comes to how tech and China interact. Doing a deep dive on it would probably result in people demonstrating a lot of Sinophobia, though.

        Report

        • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

          I think what we’re seeing here is the ultimate repudiation of Clinton’s insistence that money would make the world progressive. That’s how he sold populist Democrats on the notion of NAFTA and trade-liberalization, on giving China MFN status, on the idea that “everything’s cheap and we’re all on welfare” was preferable to “everything’s expensive but everybody’s employed”.

          As it turned out, China managed to keep its own identity, aided by the Asian racist xenophobia that nobody much wants to talk about since it’s not white people being racist, and now they have our money, and our factories, and us by the nuts. (They’ve also got our dirt and pollution, but they don’t care about that as much as we do because they lack the Puritan-theological reverence for healthy bodies and clean worlds. I mean, they’d be happier if it wasn’t so smoky all the time, but they don’t see emitting pollution as a sin against god.)

          And now Apple hasn’t really got a choice. If they say “screw you, Pooh, we’re gonna keep AirPlay open”, suddenly FoxConn is out of business but there’s a new retailer selling iPhoones for a hundred bucks each.Report

        • Greg In Ak in reply to Jaybird says:

          Does apple bend the knee to china? I would guess they do. Which would make more sense for a The One True Free Speech Defender to speak out about that. But he isn’t. Musk’s knee seems just as bent cause he doesnt’ seem to be using his megaphone to support Chinese in the streets.

          Pointing apple sucks in response to Musk doing nothing isn’t defending musk.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Greg In Ak says:

            I’m not defending Musk.

            I’m pointing out that I suspect that there are a lot of shenanigans when it comes to how tech and China interact.

            If the question is whether companies should stand up to China, we seem to have the belief that it’s perfectly understandable that they don’t. Hey. China has a lot of money.

            The question seems to be whether the guy who says he believes in free speech should do more to censor bots who are bigfooting the Chinese protests and, no, we don’t know what moderation in China looked like before he showed up a couple of months ago.Report

            • Greg In Ak in reply to Jaybird says:

              Leaving aside moderation Musk could be using his voice and twitter to build up the protesters. Is he? No. Why? He’s prattling about fighting for civilization yet appears silent on an actual authoritarian gov he is in bed with.

              I expect most of tech is bad on china. Musk being just as bad is enough to call BS on his self righteousness and claims of being a freedom fighter.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Greg In Ak says:

                Well, Burt’s original comment was about moderation.

                But, sure. This appears to be an issue of meta-ethics.

                Have *YOU* built up the protesters to the degree that you’d like Elon to emulate? Neither have I.

                For what it’s worth, I don’t think that either of us is particularly *BAD* for doing this. We don’t think it’s bad of Tim Cook to not have done this either.

                We think that Elon, however, is bad. Not because he’s different than Tim Cook but because he’s *NO* different from Tim Cook.

                The problem seems to be that Elon is getting *CLOUT* for his stance on “free speech” or whatever it is he’s doing this week and we think that it’s not fair that he’s getting clout. So he needs to be taken down a peg from how high he’s climbed from his ill-begotten clout.

                The Chinese? Who gives a crap? Not us.

                We just showed up and asked why Elon hasn’t done anything with the moderation over in China and then quickly changed the subject to “leaving aside moderation”.

                Are there any other things we should be asking Elon to talk about?

                Marijuana legalization, maybe?Report

              • Greg In Ak in reply to Jaybird says:

                That is a lot of meta stuff i’m not thinking about nor do i think is relevant. It’s about musk not being who sells himself as. He is using the “free speech warrior” mode to sell himself when he is nothing of the sort.

                Space X is right there to do good stuff with but rockets/space are hard and dont’ give that endorphin rush.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Greg In Ak says:

                It’s about musk not being who sells himself as.

                See? It’s not about the Chinese at all.

                The Chinese are just being used as a tool.

                What is he doing for Ukraine? Oh, Starlink? Well. What has he done for *CHINA*?!?!? WHY ISN’T HE DOING MORE?!?!?

                Bezos? Who gives a crap.

                Periodically I link to the The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. Let’s link to it again.Report

              • Greg In Ak in reply to Jaybird says:

                Ugh. What does any of these mean? Clear statements about musk and now we’re in Copenhagen talking ethics. It’s like saying I like burgers then getting a speech about animal rights and the nature of sentience.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Greg In Ak says:

                What’s weird is that we started with clear statements about what Musk needs to say to support Chinese dissidents.

                And it quickly came out that “It’s about musk not being who sells himself as.”

                So now we’re talking *NOT* about what ought to be done in the situation, but about Elon Musk, personally, not aligning with what we think ought to be in alignment due to his opinions on other stuff.

                Again: It’s not about China. It’s about Musk not being who he sells himself as.

                And, personally, I find that less interesting than, say, China.

                Which, I’ll point out, neither you nor I care about enough to talk about.Report

      • Pinky in reply to Greg In Ak says:

        I’ve got to ask. Are you counting the “3 unread messages” tweet as neo-nz? And what was the other?Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Greg In Ak says:

        Elon Musk is finally up against people powerful enough to say no thank you to him and he hates it. Apple was the largest advertiser on twitter or one of the largest ones. He hates that they can look at his antics and state “no thank you” Musk would rather everyone just be a sychophantic cryptobro who makes absurd statues in his honor.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Burt Likko says:

      “Query if a) pre-Musk Twitter could have stopped this any better than today’s Muskified Twitter”

      welp

      you posted the headline, so, I guess we know how you’d answerReport

    • Saul Degraw in reply to Burt Likko says:

      Musk bought twitter for ideological reasons and he has clearly made a hard right turn and is trying to turn Twitter into 8chan meets Truth Social in order to own the libs. I don’t know how else to analyze the situation. He hates that there are companies powerful enough to tell him that his antics are not appreciated and that they do not want to associate with him.

      There is always someone in a high school year book (usually a dude) that likes to use “it is better to be feared and respected rather than loved and disregarded” as his quote. Many grow out of it. Some do not. Everyone forgets that Machiavelli also cautioned against being hated after this famous quote. Musk is one of those guys who did not grow out of it. The dirty secret for these guys is that they really do want to be loved but do not know how to get it through normal means so they use fear to inspire love, or try to.Report

    • Burt Likko in reply to Burt Likko says:

      Well. THIS is interesting to see:
      Ye says ‘I see good things about Hitler’ on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140218872/ye-antisemitism-alex-jones-podcast?sc=18&f=1001

      Hours later, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced that Ye’s Twitter account was suspended. The move came after the rapper reportedly posted on Twitter an image of a swastika depicted inside a Star of David.

      But I thought Elon was going to bring in a new era of free speech on Twitter! (Spoiler: there is no freedom of speech implicated here because speech on Twitter is not “free” because neither Twitter not Musk are the government but we’ve been over this endlessly already.)

      Sarcasm aside, what I really see here is Musk starting to work through the same kinds of issues Twitter’s previous owners and executives did, which were the same kinds of issues Facebook did and America Online before them and in fact every administrator of every open electronic forum (including here, as I have previously written to much wailing and gnashing of teeth in response) has since the late 80’s: it might not be you saying it, but it is you giving it your forum and your name gets attached to it, so at some point you need to become a censor.

      Here’s an indication that Musk has begun to realize this, and I am glad of it for him and his company and its users.Report

  4. Jaybird says:

    Okay, so… like the DOE’s deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition is accused of taking a suitcase from an airport.

    Exchange Monitor seems to be one of those little niche websites that devotes itself to a really weird niche topic: Radioactive Waste. Hey. I get it.

    Well, they are reporting that the DOE spent fuel chief Sam Brinton has been charged with felony theft in Minnesota.

    Is that sort of thing something that gets a clearance yanked?Report

  5. Jaybird says:

    Qatar has officially acknowledged more deaths in the construction of the stadium than before:

    When I originally heard the rumors, the rumors were somewhere around 2000 and Qatar’s official denials were something to the effect of “while it’s true that there have been workman deaths, these workmen tragically died on worksites that were *NOT* the stadium.”Report

  6. Philip H says:

    Carpet baggers gonna carpet bag:

    Georgia Democrats have called for an investigation by state officials into Walker’s residency after CNN’s KFile reported last week that Walker was getting a tax break in Texas intended for a primary residence, possibly running afoul of Texas tax law and some rules for establishing Georgia residency for voting and running for office.

    “I live in Texas,” Walker said in January of this year, when speaking to University of Georgia College Republicans. Walker was criticizing Democrats for not visiting the border when he made the comments. “I went down to the border off and on sometimes,” he said.

    Earlier in the speech, Walker said he decided to run for Georgia’s Senate seat while at his Texas home after seeing the country divided.

    https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/29/politics/georgia-senate-herschel-walker-texas-kfile/index.htmlReport

    • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

      Carpet baggers gonna carpet bag, and reporters gonna sit on stories until a week before a runoff.Report

      • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

        Hardly:

        https://www.13wmaz.com/article/news/local/can-herschel-walker-run-for-georgia-office-while-living-somewhere-else/93-089eec5d-85ff-4f73-9755-2ac0a2efcbfe

        And that’s just one of dozens of stories run at the time he declared. That he hasn’t changed anything since then is an issue.Report

        • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

          The Atlanta-Journal Constitution ran a story yesterday about it, then CNN followed up on it, and you posted it. Why do you think those things happened the week before the runoff, if it wasn’t emerging news?Report

          • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

            because the AJC like all good news outlets, was trying to generate traffic. Like I said, if you google it, you will find its been well covered for some time, including by Texas outlets.Report

            • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

              And why did CNN put it out? And why did you post it here? Traffic?Report

              • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

                We don’t have a thread on the Walker-Warnock runoff for me to post it in. He’s also an abysmal candidate emblematic of the GOP’s decline in willingness to engage honestly in policy debates, which they hope they can paper over with celebrity candidates. But I would think the GOP – who have spent most of my life positioning their party as the law and order party – could, ya know, find candidates who aren’t flouting if outright breaking the law.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Philip H says:

                Don’t fall for Pinky’s dodge. Mr “I don’t have a dog in these fights, I just call balls and strikes” is doing overtime in demonstrating his ideological bias.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Kazzy says:

                Oh I know he is. So does anyone reading this. Just like Jaybird is “only asking questions” because he thinks he’s an epic level troll.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Philip H says:

                Eh, my questions are mostly either trying to get me to information that I didn’t have or information that I suspect that you (the generic “you”) are deliberately ignoring.

                I’m not a “I don’t have a dog in these fights” as much as “there are a lot of dogs we seem to be ignoring.”

                And when the bodies of various dogs get pointed out, this gets called “trolling”, for some reason.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Kazzy says:

                I don’t always just call balls and strikes. Sometimes I make an ideological point, sometimes a non-ideological. In this case, I was mocking Philip/CNN for what looked like a political ploy, and I’d probably be more likely to mock it when done by the left, but we don’t have many cut-and-pasters on the right on OT. It’s important to be able to separate analysis from advocacy though.

                As for a dog in this fight, I haven’t followed the particular race, and while I’d like to see the Republicans have the Senate, that’s not up for grabs, but Walker looks like a terrible candidate, and I hate to see terrible candidates win elections. But the results of this race (likely a D win) won’t affect me at all.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Pinky says:

                Also, I probably wouldn’t have commented on this but the site’s been boring lately. I managed to stir up a hornet’s nest by replying to Philip’s NPR story, but otherwise it’s Clare Briggs, murder robots, and that jerk in Mar-A-Lago. Some weeks you just tread water.Report

  7. Saul Degraw says:

    Blake Masters given sinecure to determine what went wrong for the Republicans in 2022: https://twitter.com/metzgov/status/1597574237296132097?s=20&t=Kk_LlJfbi5TO5u9aO9ntJgReport

  8. Philip H says:

    Sometimes government actually works for the people:

    “For millions of Americans, this legislation will safeguard the rights and protections to which LGBTQI+ and interracial couples and their children are entitled,” Biden said in a statement Tuesday evening after Senate passage, hailing it as a “bipartisan achievement.”

    While the bill would not set a national requirement that all states must legalize same-sex marriage, it would require individual states to recognize another state’s legal marriage.

    So, in the event the Supreme Court might overturn its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage, a state could still pass a law to ban same-sex marriage, but that state would be required to recognize a same-sex marriage from another state.

    https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/29/politics/same-sex-marriage-vote-senate/index.htmlReport

  9. Saul Degraw says:

    Christie McVie of Fleetwood Mac fame is dead at 79: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/arts/music/christine-mcvie-dead.htmlReport

  10. Burt Likko says:

    RIP, Songbird. You are missed already.Report

  11. InMD says:

    We need some lighter fare.

    Deshone Kizer: Aaron Rodgers asked me if I believe in 9/11

    https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2022/11/29/deshone-kizer-aaron-rodgers-asked-me-if-i-believe-in-9-11/Report

    • Burt Likko in reply to InMD says:

      Methinks Rodgers was just effing with Kizer, but who can even say with that guy anymore?

      Jordan Love looked sharp in his series against the Eagles, so maybe this season will be a good time for the Packers to start seasoning Rodgers’ eventual-but-likely-also-imminent successor.Report

      • InMD in reply to Burt Likko says:

        Either way it’s hilarious.

        It does seem like he is nearing his end and I’ll be interested in how his legacy plays out. Up until 2 years ago I figured it would be something like ‘great player’s career wasted by franchise inexplicably continuing to employ Mike McCarthy.’ Now one has to wonder if there wasn’t a lot more going on behind the scenes, even if this one is a joke.Report

        • Slade the Leveller in reply to InMD says:

          A QB is as good as the people he’s throwing to. Davante Adams’ departure left Rodgers with no one on the other end. I do believe he’s guaranteed another $50 million next year, which means the Packers won’t be able to spend on anyone beyond him.Report

          • InMD in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

            That’s the situation this year but my criticism is really of the Packers organization. For having a talent like Rodgers 1 SB and 5 NFC championship appearances over a 14 year career as a starter is underachieving.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Burt Likko says:

        Rodgers seems like the perfect example of an athlete whom we projected so much on to because we wanted a certain mythos. He had a beard and played in Green Bay and excelled in the cold weather and we just sort of bought into the notion that he was this salt-of-the-Earth lumberjack type.

        Turns out he was a California whackadoo all along. They have footage of him back in high school where you could see he was a weirdo a-hole type.

        There were small signs along the way but eventually the cover blew and now there is no denying what a jackhole he is.Report

  12. Dark Matter says:

    Oath Keepers: Two members of far-right militia guilty of US sedition

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63802649?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA

    These would be the guys organizing the riot at Capital Hill designed to overthrow the election.Report

    • Philip H in reply to Dark Matter says:

      SOME of the guys doing it. Considering there is video showing them meeting with Roger Stone, I think the conspiracy runs deeper.Report

      • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

        I would hope we see some trading up/deal making. With convictions that just got easier.

        I also expect for some of them it’s less “conspiracy” than it is like minded individuals doing the same thing. We have various illegal acts that were organized and others that were not.Report

        • Philip H in reply to Dark Matter says:

          Stone is probably not capable of cutting deals – his ego is too big. Mark Meadows has been forced to cooperate in Georgia, which I would think would allow the DoJ to squeeze him a bit on the federal side. There’s still a Proud Boys trial on this to come – we will see what it reveals.

          And yes, its probably a combination of aligned acting and actual conspiracy.Report

  13. Jaybird says:

    CNN layoffs continue at Headline News and CNN.

    CNN will no longer produce live programs for HLN, according to one of these people, and will simulcast “CNN This Morning” in place of “Morning Express,” the A.M. news program that takes up most of HLN’s daytime schedule. HLN’s true-crime programming will be placed under the aegis of Warner Bros. Discovery executive Kathleen Finch, and made more a part of the operations of the company’s ID cable network.

    CNN executives were expected to inform staffers about layoffs at the network Thursday morning, according to these people. CNN correspondents Alison Kosik, Martin Savidge, Alex Field, Mary Ann Fox and Chris Cillizza are among the staffers who have been let go, according to two people familiar with the matter. A CNN spokesperson declined to comment.

    Report

  14. Saul Degraw says:

    Three very conservative judges from the 11th Circuit destroy Judge Aileen Cannon’s views on the Trump warrants and are taking no chances: “The district court improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction in this case. For that, reason, we VACATE the September 5 order on appeal and REMAND with instructions for the district court to DISMISS the underlying civil action.””

    There is no doubt that Trump will ask for an en banc hearing and then the Supreme Court and probably lose. The real question is how badly can Judge Cannon delay or distort a very explicit order.Report

  15. Philip H says:

    Something tells me this won’t end well for Florida’s economy or its current Governor:

    Spiking insurance costs are impacting the real estate market in south Florida, causing some developers to put major projects on hold – despite booming demand for residential and commercial property.

    The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that a number of developers behind high-rise buildings and apartment communities have pulled the plug on projects due to the sharp rises in insurance premiums, alongside the cost of inflation and higher interest rates.

    https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southeast/2022/11/30/696959.htmReport

  16. Pinky says:

    U.S. Air Marshals Planning Rebellion After Biden Orders Them To Southern Border: Report

    U.S. air marshals reportedly plan to “mutiny” against an order from the White House to leave their posts aboard commercial flights and take up posts at the U.S. southern border.

    Dozens of marshals have promised to disobey the order in protest, Air Marshal National Council President David Londo told The Washington Examiner. President Joe Biden has ordered U.S. air marshals to the southern border to make up for a lack of Border Patrol agents, a move expected to leave the marshals at one-eighth their normal coverage of U.S. flights.

    https://www.dailywire.com/news/u-s-air-marshals-planning-rebellion-after-biden-orders-them-to-southern-border-reportReport

    • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

      I wish them good luck. Federal Law enforcement personnel don’t generally get to ignore Presidential directives.

      That aside, the story lacks context as to why the BP is allegedly understaffed. If it had that context, it would note that CBP has been understaffed – by its own estimates – since 2018 and that Congress – which controls the federal purse – has yet to increase funding to fill staffing gaps during that same period.

      So once again a President is using the resources and authorizations he has to meet needs he is confronted with from within his Constitutional authority to take care that the laws are faithfully executed.Report

  17. Jaybird says:

    Report

  18. Jaybird says:

    Friday night news dump… twitter is telling the story behind the story of the Hunter Biden Laptop suppression story.

    Report

    • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

      We have the government regulate Twitter.Report

      • InMD in reply to Kazzy says:

        I got a pretty breathless notice this was coming from Taibbi’s substack yesterday evening. I actually think in light of intervening events, Musk’s purchase, etc. it weighs much harder against regulation. Previous management has been outed, as many suspected, as MSNBC, and that’s ok. Now maybe they will be something else under Musk’s leadership and that’s ok too. In the realm of speech and private actors Twitter is regressing to the mean, i.e. system working as intended. If anything its power as a medium appears to be in a relative decline, and there’s no need for the government to prop it up as some kind of neutral arbiter of information. It will never be up to that task anyway.Report

        • Kazzy in reply to InMD says:

          I was being sarcastic. If we’re okay with Musk et al. being in charge of content moderation as he sees fit (and Trump et al. being in charge of content moderation for Truth Social) then we can’t really complain about the previous Twitter people being in charge of content moderation.

          Either we think these private companies should be able to moderate content however they see fit or we don’t.Report

          • InMD in reply to Kazzy says:

            IMO to the extent there’s a question it’s more about monopoly than speech. As recently as a year ago I had a lot of bad feelings about these entities monopolizing online communications, especially to the extent they were going to do special favors for politicians or government agencies. Now I think there are real questions about whether any of the big social media companies will even exist in 10 years. If they aren’t there will still be questions, but I don’t think content moderation will be nearly as relevant to them.Report

            • Kazzy in reply to InMD says:

              I’m not sure how you even address monopolies in these industries. Limit how many subscribers they can have? You can’t “break up” Twitter like they did the phone companies.

              Regulation would be a step but I think that is worse than the downsides of a company having a de facto monopoly.Report

              • InMD in reply to Kazzy says:

                I think you could totally break them up and require some basic interoperability. But now that it looks a lot more like they could all fail on their own or lose major market share to upstarts due to branding I’m not sure it’s necessary.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to InMD says:

                How would that work in practice? How do you stop any particular one from just becoming dominant and a new monopoly?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

                Back in the 90’s when there was discussion of breaking up Microsoft, one of the big articles out there compared breaking it up to cutting a layer cake.

                You can split it into three companies by making cuts into the top of the cake to the bottom… ending up with three pieces of cake like that.

                *OR* you can cut horizontally. The top layer (“Internet Explorer!”) becomes its own company, the middle layer (“Microsoft Office Products!”) becomes its own company, and the bottom layer (“Microsoft OS!”) becomes its own company.

                They talked about the pros and cons to each.

                Instead, Microsoft started lobbying.Report

              • InMD in reply to Jaybird says:

                Here’s a totally random article (no idea about the source credibility so read with grain of salt) with similar ideas and proposals for where the natural fault lines might be for today’s big players.

                https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/business/heres-how-the-big-tech-breakup-should-go-down/amp/Report

              • InMD in reply to Kazzy says:

                Anti–trust is a never ending game. It’s certainly possible that in the long term you’d end up having to break up one or more successor organizations. But to Jaybird’s points there are lots of theories of how you could do it, and pros and cons to each. I hate ever saying ‘google it’ but plenty of articles and academic papers with different ideas come up if you do.Report

        • Chip Daniels in reply to InMD says:

          MSNBC was managing Twitter?Report

    • Greg In Ak in reply to Jaybird says:

      You know a story is going to be really super duper strong when they dump it on a Friday night. That is when all the really giant stories get spilled. Not like on monday morning so the news has all week to go over it. Clearly not 99% bs and silliness.

      Noted that Tiabbi even admitted the tfg campaign also had a channel to request stuff being taken down from twitter. The twitter files said that the prez at the time could ask for twitter to take stuff down but the story is what the D’s did which was mostly trying to get revenge porn and hunter doing drugs taken down.

      Why are 1st Am activists barely better then PETA?!Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Greg In Ak says:

        Yeah, it doesn’t have any mention on CBS, NBC, or ABC’s websites.

        A nothingburger, as they say.

        (I do think that the difference between “everybody suspects” and “it’s been confirmed” is not nothing.)

        Another, adjacent, story that I am surprised didn’t cause more a flap is the one about New Zealand.

        This sentence appears in the FOIA response:

        “Yes, the Department of Internal Affairs has access to Facebook’s takedown portal. Please
        note, we cannot advise if any other government agency has access to the takedown portal.”

        Huh. Facebook has a takedown portal and New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs has access to it.

        My guess is that they aren’t alone in having this access. But, you know, I just suspect it.

        It hasn’t been confirmed.Report

        • Greg In Ak in reply to Jaybird says:

          Maybe NZ is the super secret org that is controlling the web. They’re hiding in the southern hemi all quiet with all the secret backdoors.

          More seriously, there are real issues with gov interference in social media. That is Something. This kind of weak ass partisan silliness does nothing at all to control it. If anything it’s a distraction.Report

  19. Dark Matter says:

    Former President Donald Trump called for the termination of the Constitution to overturn the 2020 election and reinstate him to power Saturday…

    https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/03/politics/trump-constitution-truth-social/index.html

    And there we go, this nicely showcases why I can’t vote for this guy and why I think he can’t win.Report