Open Mic for the week of 8/5/2024
Happy Birthday, Neil Armstrong!
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
The United Kingdom spent the weekend in the grip of Far Right riots directed against immigrants. The kick off seems to be a young man, who was born in the United Kingdom to Rwandan parents, ran amok and stabbed several children at a kiddie activity in the town of Southport. This attack left three children dead. Then news of the incident with the resident provocations spread over social media and the Far Right erupted in violence.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/05/uk/uk-far-right-protests-explainer-gbr-intl/index.htmlReport
Not terrorism. No known motive.
17 year old male. Way to bet is he’ll fit the profile of our school shooters, loser committing suicide to get fame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Southport_stabbingReport
Definitely seems to be a school shooter/stabber situation. That didn’t prevent nation wide riots by the Far Right from erupting.Report
Hey Lee, I have a professional question, if I might bend your ear for about five minutes. Probably easy for you. Would you mind shooting me an e-mail at [myname] at gmail?Report
Sure. I think my brother has your email, so I can see if I can get it from him.Report
Email sent.Report
This is related:
Kamala Harris has MAGA world freaking out about demons and the apocalypse
From comparisons to biblical spirits to accusations that she’s an “extinctionist,” top pro-Trump voices see a Harris presidency as the end of the world.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/kamala-harris-maga-jezebel-apocalypse-rcna164922
From the article:
In just the past week, popular MAGA pundits warned that Harris is “Hitler and Stalin combined but times 200,” and also a “commie” who will choose a running mate who supports “allowing men to beat up women in the Olympics.” They also expressed outrage over the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics as the end of “Western civilization,” and singled out one woman on a Zoom fundraiser call for Harris’ campaign as another harbinger of end times.
Then there was the billionaire Trump supporter who finally freed himself from the burden of pretending he’s not MAGA, Elon Musk, bringing back one of his favorite apocalyptic buzzwords, “extinctionist,” to describe Harris. (And because he’s a serious adult, he called her “Shamala.”)Report
Golly, if that’s true, then this is the most important election of our lifetimes!Report
“Shamala” reminds me of “Shambhala”…
…which reminds me of the Three Dog Night song of that title…
…which leads me to notice that the refrain of that song can be re-written as “EV’rytime he speaks, Elon Musk turns 12 years old! EV’rytime he speaks, Elon Musk turns 12 years old!”
Your mileage may vary.Report
So there’s people saying:
* Harris is “Hitler and Stalin combined but times 200,”
* Harris’ yet-to-be-named running mate will support “allowing men to beat up women in the Olympics,”
* Saw the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics as “the end of Western Civilization,”
* And see Harris fundraising Zoom calls as a “harbinger of end times” (as opposed to, say, a prodigious use of bandwidth).
Well, whatever you do, don’t call these people “weird!” We shouldn’t upset anyone.Report
Nobody in their right mind should believe any of these points, especially the first one, but there are millions or tens of millions of Americans that do. This is a bad situation.Report
I connected it to the rightwing thuggery in Britain because in both cases, there is a determined effort to whip up a panic and culture war with ethnic cleansing as the goal.
Brown skinned foreigners coming to ravish our wimmen, (((elites))) who are either complacent or complicit in the downfall of Western Civilization.Report
A 19-year-old male was arrested yesterday outside Vienna for planning an attack on a Taylor Swift concert. I’m told he was a youth.Report
Speaking of 12-year-old boys like Elon Musk…
Reading the wild generalizations ideologues make about the people they see as their ideological opponents can be like listening to pre-teen boys talk about women.Report
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/08/harriss-vp-pick
Oh look, people suddenly noticed Trump was really old and perhaps mentally unwell after the media could no longer report on Biden being old, even his own supporters.Report
Saul, is the URL you posted meant to be connected to the text you wrote?
You might have meant this one?
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/08/the-waters-around-you-have-grownReport
Suppose, purely hypothetically, of course, that journalists are not, in fact, a bunch of crypto-conservatives. How might we explain this behavior?
Well, maybe they wanted Biden out of the race and replaced with a younger candidate because they were concerned that the thing that actually happened might happen before the election, leading to a Trump victory. With Biden out, they could then focus on Trump’s age without it backfiring due to Biden being even older.
Again, that’s purely hypothetical. I’m sure that the NYT and NPR really are staffed with crypto-conservatives. Their plan to put Trump back in the White House by harping on Biden’s age really blew up in their faces, didn’t it?Report
Imagine, if you will, a universe in which you are completely right, all of the time.
Now imagine someone disagreeing with you.
Since you already know that you are right, you’re in a place where the main thing you have questions about is *WHY* is this other person disagreeing?
Are they mistaken?
Are they evil?
They probably have access to the same information that you have so “mistaken” is off the table.
So *NOW* what?Report
The new Batman animated series on Amazon is okay. The animation is gorgeous but seems a bit more stiff than fluid. The voice acting also seems somewhat non-expressive but technically well done.Report
It seems that Israel’s leaders really do want to eliminate Palestinians, not just Hamas:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/06/middleeast/israeli-minister-smotrich-starve-gazans-intl/index.htmlReport
*shrug* Seems like that’s the game Hamas wanted to play, so, now they’re playing it.Report
From the “You Can’t Make This Up” files:
Elon Musk tells advertisers to f*ck off.
They proceed to f*ck off.
Now he is suing them for f*cking off.Report
Pro-Peace, Anti-Genocide, Pro-Palestinian, and/or Pro-Hamas protestors showed up to protest Kamala.
“I’m speaking” worked fairly well against Mike Pence.
Maybe it’ll work well here.Report
Good news! She issued a press release:
Report
I unironically applaud this series of toothless platitudes. Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others.Report
If she can avoid journalists until November, she’s got this in the bag.
Press release, press release, press release.Report
As I’ve said, if she wants to decisively win she will at some point have to expose herself to that.
But I also don’t think this should be that hard. American politicians have been talking simultaneously about the right of Israel to defend itself and the right of Palestinians to peacefully have a state or their own for decades, totally agnostic to the question of whether these goals are compatible with respect to the actbelligerent and actions of the belligerents involved. People participating on this blog get tougher questions about their stances than anything typically asked of a mainstream politician.Report
I’ve seen a few comments that Harris can afford to blow off the NYT and WaPo because the persuadable voters aren’t reading legacy media but are on social media.Report
I’m not ready to go full Jaybird yet on Harris’ press exposure or lack thereof until, at least, after the convention.
I do think this also speaks to my point elsewhere and earlier that Harris is currently operating, largely, with a campaign team she inherited from Biden.
Pros: They’re professional, seasoned and highly capable. They’ve been running a tight ship and they’ve guided her pretty well so far. They probably have their own gravitas so if she is, as was alleged in 2020, a boss-zilla it’s harder for her to bulldoze them or drive them off.
Cons: Path dependency is a thing and this team has for reasons both merited (the mainstream media’s BSDI inclined and horserace fixated bull) and unmerited (they were afraid of their candidate fishing up with unscripted media) this team instinctively wants to keep their candidate away from unscripted journalist encounters.
It’s only been a few weeks so changing the course of the campaign on that will take a bit of time, but I think they need to do so. Is Harris at serious risk of blowing a hole in her own campaigns hull in interviews? I mean sure everyone is. Is she more at risk than her boss was? I’d say assuredly not. Is she more at risk than an average politician would be? Remains to be seen- there’s arguments for and against. Still, I think she ultimately will have to get out there and engage. HRC, for very justified reasons, loathed the media and they reciprocated in many ways that hurt her badly. Harris has far less reason to avoid the press and far less justifiable reasons to do so.
As for Israel/Palestine? As long as she sticks to nostrums nothing that either side slings is going to sway the voters who’ll decide this thing.Report
JB is doing is troll thing where he feels so good about himself for his concern trolling and calling out what he views as hypocrisy. It is very tiring.Report
Was I concern trolling when I said that they should replace Biden?
I’m trying to get a calibration for what “concern trolling” consists of.
Because, from here, you use “concern trolling” the way that I would use “prematurely correct”.Report
I’ve said it before, I think every discussion about your comments should begin with a public reading of the description of the INTP.Report
These days I think “concern trolling” means “it’s true but you shouldn’t say it”.
aka “in The Emperor’s New Clothes, the little kid was the bad guy”.Report
“Why Shaming Naturists is Problematic”
by
The Crown’s Chief SartorialistReport
I try not to psychoanalyze people. I’m not a psychologist and I find the output kind of boring.Report
I’m not psychoanalyzing him. I’m calling him out on a tiresome schtick.Report
Yea, I think there is still plenty of time to do it. If suddenly we’re deep into September and no one has seen an unscripted interaction I think that’s a bad sign but we aren’t there yet. She doesn’t get any points for declining an opportunity for an off script conversation in this particular scenario but I’m not docking her any either.Report
I mean she’s still planning to show up to the next debate. TFG is apparently not. YMMV on the meaning of that, but I take it as her being entirely willing to put herself out there.Report
I’d take the fight to him by doing an hour unscripted live press conference if he no shows, and even be ready to take his debate offer on Fox News.
But to use Pinky’s personality type analysis, the one time a company made me do one of those things I got ENTJ. So of course I’d say that.Report
Mmmm I don’t think the Fox offer is a good idea. It is Fox after all.
A) Rewarding/giving air to Fox at all is an awful idea all by itself.
B) Being in a studio debate with Trump with Fox media sock puppets ostensibly moderating it in front of a screaming mob of Troompaloompas would be a huge challenge for even the greatest politicians in history to try and come off looking good. That’s just begging for a disaster for Harris.Report
I know it would never happen and you certainly wouldn’t agree to have it moderated by Greg Gutfeld or whoever in front of a hooting live audience of MAGA nation. But you can find all kinds of live spots of Mayor Pete making Shannon Bream look… not compelling in a normal interview setting.
And I mean, imagine for a minute it went well. Fortune favors the bold.Report
Trump 2024 is not Trump 2016. Hell, he’s not Trump 2020. (Old people running for president, etc.)
But if they set it up so that Kamala gets favorable ground, Kamala needs to *NOT GET A TIE*.
Biden got a tie at his last debate, remember, and it was not to his benefit.Report
Sure, imagine it went well. It’d be nice. Now imagine they rigged her mic so they could selectively cut her off and let Don run rampant over her bellowing while his audience cheered and the moderators clucked. I know which outcome I think would be more likely.
Pete goes on and does well from time to time but this would be entirely different motivations, stakes and incentives.Report
I wouldn’t go into it blind or without negotiating the details, which my understanding is the norm for the campaigns to do. And if they cant get you satisfied there wont be shenanigans then you dont do it. Maybe I’m being naive but I also think Fox News has its own incentives not to engineer some blatant act of sabotage like that. I remember when Bernie Sanders did the town hall thing there and everyone thought something like that might happen but it didn’t.
Anyway I wouldnt treat it as totally out of the question.Report
It’d be a pretty shaky hook to hang ones hat on. Fox News’ business risk is not that it’ll lose viewers to mainstream media but that it’ll lose them to the even nuttier wingers to the right. So, to be the network that lured Kamala in and cold clocked her would be a pretty alluring thing for them- and they’d simply deny they did anything wrong and the rest of the media would, eventually, temporize and talk about how awful MSNBS is anyhow. The downside risk seems to massively outweigh the upside risk. And that’s ignoring that Fox hasn’t done anything to merit such a debate in the first place so why reward them?Report
Seems moot tho, word is Trump’s agreed to the original debate. Good news I’d say.Report
Yea, I was googling out of curiosity as to where things stood and saw that too. And agree, absolutely better to do another round on ABC.Report
She isn’t going to debate on Fox and is sticking to September 10, 2024 on ABCReport
E?
What the hell are you doing here?Report
Have smart phone and boring, mostly solitary job, thoughts need to come out whether someone is around to hear them or not.Report
Well, thanks for hanging out with us here instead of going to make-out parties.Report
There is a debate scheduled for September 10th, apparently.Report
During a press conference today, Trump said (referring to Kamala):
She’s not doing any news conferences. You know why? Because she can’t do a news conference.
She doesn’t know how to do a news conference.
She’s not smart enough to do a news conference.
And I’m sorry we need smart people to lead this country.
Anyway, Trump answered questions, failed to answer questions, answered his own questions instead of the questions that were asked, and otherwise lied for an hour in front of a bunch of journalists.
The journalists, apparently, were out of practice.Report
I appreciate Trump lowering the bar for her. He’s not exactly brilliant and has gotten less so.Report
One wonders if she’ll take the bait.
Maybe she could somehow arrange for a softball interview from George Steph… Stephan… from Lawrence O’Donnell or something.
Jon Stewart! The kidz still like him, I hear.Report
Don’t hold your breath before the convention. I think she and her team want a clean vibe sweep through to the end of that.Report
If the best way to get a clean vibe sweep is to keep her in scripted situations, we may have ourselves a problemo, as the LatinX say.Report
Per WaPo she has said she will do a ‘sit down interview’ before the end of August and stated that she is willing to do more debates against Trump in addition to the one scheduled. So keep your calendar open.Report
“Jon Stewart! The kidz still like him, I hear.”
Ditching the entire US press apparatus and going with Jon Stewart would be an extremely GenX move, so I support it.Report
This is one of the areas where she is much better off for not having had a primary.
So much of the primary dynamic involves activists trying to get candidates to commit to positions that are going to be unpopular with the general electorate ahead of time, and Harris [1] just got to totally skip it.
[1] Who just totally flubbed specifically this part of the her 2019 primary run!Report
To me this issue is the longer term challenge for the party at the presidential level. It needs to get a healthier relationship with its donors and left of center activists. Maybe some of it was just the general insanity of 2020 but they can’t be allowed to force candidates into a contest of trying to take the craziest possible stances that have no real popular constituency (or at least not one that maps well to the electoral college).
I still think we got really lucky that the center lane consolidated behind a dinosaur no one believed was particularly radical at heart and with an opponent facing a combination of unique unfavorables and a freak national crisis.Report
The Assistant to President Biden and National Security Advisor to Vice President Harris has released a statement:
Report
What should have Harris done? The only answer that the protestors would find acceptable is that if Harris is elected President, America would end it’s relationship with Israel and will send the army to take all the Jews away. This is obviously a non-starter. Telling the protestors to shut up and that the choice is between her and Trump is the right thing to do.Report
RFK Jr. has just qualified for ballot access in Texas.
THIS MEANS THAT HE HAS A ROAD TO THE WHITE HOUSE THAT DOES NOT DEPEND ON WRITE-IN VOTES!Report
I’ll be shocked if he clears 3%Report
He pulls more votes from Trump so I hope he gets 5% or more.Report
A short, informative analysis of the Ukrainian incursion into Russia by Danish military analyst Anders Puck Nielsen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4mg1ZUb-7sReport
It’s an interesting topic but that guy took 15 minutes to say something that could have been relayed in 3 or 4 sentences.Report
Yet another YouTube video that could have been a Tweet.
Or a Xeet.
Or whatever the heck we call them now.Report
Pretty much.Report
Maximizing viewing time must be related to how much money people make for videos, because this things to be a more and more popular way of doing videos on TikTok, IG, and YouTube. I find it incredibly annoying, and will just turn videos off the first time they repeat themselves now, but I’m old and probably not the target audience.Report
That’s entirely possible.
At the same time I regularly interact with people who provide hundreds of words in response to a yes or no question without actually answering it.Report
50 years ago today, Nixon resigned rather then face impeachment. Ford then pardoned him, confirming that if the President does it, its not a crime. Which the SCOTUS has now mad a legal precedent.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/08/opinions/richard-nixon-resignation-50th-anniversary-watergate-trump-hemmer/index.htmlReport
Those were the days when a politician could be shamed and the parties would unite on a matter of national honor.Report
The shame lasted exactly 1 month. Ford granted Nixon a pardon on September 8, 1974.Report
You’re confusing shame with being out of office and potentially being charged.Report
I’m going to disagree with some of this. FWIW (not much) I was in Journalism School in 1974 and paying close attention to the whole mess. I doubt very strongly that Nixon ever felt any real shame — just anger at the unfairness (to him) of it all. I truly don’t think Ford’s pardon was to confirm the President’s (any President’s) invulnerability — the country was in a hell of a turmoil at the time (different than today’s turmoil in its particulars, but no less intense), and Ford faced the choice of letting it all go to trial and further tear things apart, or just pardon the SOB and let the hubbub slowly die down. Right choice? I certainly had mixed feelings at the time (Viet Nam vet — both Nixon and Kissinger should have spent the rest of their lives in prison), but for the sake of the country’s health? I dunno. The pardon may have been the right choice.
re: Pinky comment — National Honor? In 1974? Not much of that to be found.Report
I used to think this, but have come to reconsider.
Re: “tearing the country apart” implies that it would have been so traumatic that the country would be irreparably damaged.
But…consider the events of the past decade. We have seen an insurrection and attempted overthrow of an election, the election of a man who promises to be a dictator, and several other events which would have seemed in 1974 unimaginable and traumatic.
Yet America survives and we carry on as normal. I think now that having a former president put on trial and even going to prison would be shocking but not traumatic, not something we couldn’t deal with and heal from.
Seeing a president as being above the law? No, the republic can’t recover from that.Report
New term: “Tonic Masculinity”:
I’d like to note something else: The vast majority of the memes circulating this week are in praise of Walz’s masculinity. Stereotypical masculinity, even. The kind conservatives perpetually worry that Democrats are trying to erase — the kind classically defined by such traits as stoicism, reliability, leadership and physical strength.
The Tim Walz of these memes is not, say, bingeing “Bridgerton” episodes, or dancing at a Taylor Swift concert, or buying you a Stanley. He is instead offering to snowblow your walkway, map out the best driving routes to the airport and wait in the car until he’s sure you got inside safe.
…
I’d been trying to think of a better descriptor than Midwestern Dad to get at the aura Walz projects. After all, not all good men are Midwestern or dads. Soon I realized the perfect term had already been coined. “Tim Walz has tonic masculinity,” I saw several fans write online.
Yes. That. Tim Walz has tonic masculinity. Confident. Decent. The kind of man who, as another user joked, would start his job at the White House “being asked about national security and the tax code and end with him wearing a headlamp up in the attic fixing some old wiring.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2024/08/08/tim-walz-midwestern-dad/Report
And I thought “would you want to have a beer with him?” misunderstood the relationship.Report
The conservatives have defined themselves as the standard bearers of “tradition” and “masculinity”.
Which leaves them vulnerable to a guy whose definition of those terms more closely matches what ordinary American think it is, rather than say, Andrew Tate.
Personally, I don’t care if Tim Walz is masculine or not. But he is connecting with people on that basis more than his conservative counterparts.Report
Hey, it’s good that we’re back to a place where masculinity is not, itself, a criticism (I put it in the same category of “White Dudes for Harris”… hey, it’s finally okay to be white!) but the whole “Dad” thing is where the relationship gets strained.
That’s not the relationship we have to government.
Though I sure as hell would understand why government would want you to think that you do.Report
it an error to read Hesse’s essay as seeing the government as a parent.
Government officials are given vast powers up to and including the nuclear button.
It is a good test of character that people like Walz demonstrate that they can wield power in ways that are sober and responsible.
If Trump is the abusive toxic male who views himself as The Boss, Walz is the safe responsible male who leads.Report
I’m not reading the essay as seeing Hesse arguing that the government is a parent.
I’m arguing that the memes that he’s seeing are playing the “dad” thing up.
Would you like me to quote the article that you posted to you? I can do that.
“Midwestern father figure”.
That’s not something that I’m injecting into the WaPo article that you posted.
That’s something that was in the WaPo article that you posted.Report
People vote for different reasons. Some people voted based on the “Would want to have a beer with him” metric. Some are single issue voters. Hell, some vote based on height (I think the taller candidate has won every or nearly every Presidential election?).
IF someone is a “would want to have a beer with him”-type voter, it would seem that Walz would pass that test.
Then again, he’s the Veep, so who knows.Report
I saw a tweet that said “I’m not voting for Kamala Harris because she’s a woman; I’m voting for Kamala Harris because *I* am a woman!”
And it was quote tweeted by someone who said: “I agree 100%. I’m not voting for Kamala Harris because she’s a woman”.
People do have different reasons, that’s for sure.Report
It’s funny that HERE you are saying, “People do have different reasons” when just above you said you thought people with a particular reason “misunderstood the relationship.”
Hard to know what you actually think there, buddy.Report
I think that it’s possible to hold these two thoughts at once:
1. People have reasons
2. Some reasons are badReport
Sure.
However…
#1 is objectively provable. Just ask people if they have reasons. Maybe ask them what their reasons are to determine if folks do indeed have different reasons or people somehow all have the same reason.
#2 is entirely subjective insofar as everyone is going to have different ideas about which reasons are “bad.”
So, my question for you is, do YOU think “Would want to have a beer with them” is a BAD reason to choose one candidate over another?Report
I wasn’t aware that #1 was ever in dispute!
As for whether or not it’s possible to judge whether a reason can be good or bad… well, I’m one of those who thinks that a reason can be good or bad and it’s possible to argue that a reason is a good reason or that it’s a bad reason.
It’s not, like, ice cream flavors.
I see a politician’s job as being like an accountant or, as Jane Coaston put it very eloquently, an offensive coordinator.
Whether or not they are a cold fish or a guy you’d want to have a beer with strikes me as being secondary to having the accounting done or having the offensive line actually open a hole for the running back (or whatever the hell it is that offensive coordinators do).
“But isn’t it important that a coach have charisma?”
“If he’s winning, sure.”Report
So, my question for you is, do YOU think “Would want to have a beer with them” is a BAD reason to choose one candidate over another?
Best I can tell is you offered that you consider it to be secondary to other factors.Report
You can only choose to have beer with Republican daddies. Liking a Democratic candidate for vibes is verbotten.Report
So many memories…
Report
It depends on why you’re getting a politician.
Are you getting one to drink beer with? If so, that’s a *GREAT* reason to vote for a politician.
If you’re not, you may want it to be secondary to other factors.Report
Why is this so hard… I’m asking what YOU, JAYBIRD, think? Do you think it’s a good reason?Report
Well, there are lots of ways to take “like to have a beer with”.
On just a surface level, no. I don’t think it’s a good reason. You’re not going to be having a beer with this guy. You’re not in his circle and he’s not going to be playing cards in your garage.
Using it as a proxy for a handful of other things, it might not be a bad reason. Part of the art of politicking is the art of making deals with people who have their own agendas and own deals that they want to make. If “would have a beer with” means “he seems like a warm and friendly guy that would be able to make deals with others” (or, I suppose, be able to amicably *NOT* make bad deals with people offering bad deals), then “would have a beer with” is probably not a bad reason.
But if the main reason you’re voting for a particular politician is, say, “I want Policy X passed”, the main thing that you should be looking for is whether the particular politician has made noises about passing Policy X.
If he’s given speeches about how Policy X is a bad policy, voting for the politician because you’d like to have a beer with him (“maybe I could convince him that Policy X is a good policy if we sat down and had a beer and that’s what I look for in a politician!”) then, yes, that’s a *BAD* reason.
All in all:
If you hire an accountant, what are you hiring an accountant for?
“Because he’s a guy I could have a beer with”?
That’s a *BAD* reason to hire an accountant!
It’s also a bad reason to vote for a politician.
(That said, I’ve also seen “have a beer with” used as a proxy for “would be capable of making deals that benefit me and mine” and, as reasons go, that’s a pretty good reason to vote for a politician.)Report
I think the steelman version of the “have a beer with” criterion is: this person is going to be responsible for a ton of decisions in many different areas and is going to have access to way more info than I do about them. So rather than trying to figure out which one agrees with me the most as of right now, the best thing I can do to distinguish between them is to see which one seems to understand my life and my struggles the most — that way at least I feel like people like me will be considered in the decision-making.
In a similar vein, my wife has generally chosen her healthcare providers based on bedside manner (“I’m never going back there, everyone at the office was kind of rude”), and I used to point out that having a pleasant encounter is not the primary reason to go to the doctor. But she would point out in return that it’s pretty difficult for a non-medical person to assess relative differences in doctoring ability, so she falls back to a metric that she does have an opinion on.Report
I wouldn’t want to be in a room with any of the four.Report
OK, anyone: top three politicians you’d want to have a beer with? For me, Cruz, Rubio, Ryan.Report
Jeb Bush. Larry Hogan. Michael Steele.Report
Kucinich, but he can’t talk about anything but UFOs.Report
I picked the three I’d be most inclined towards. Kucinich was never going to make my list. Though I can see having a bourbon with Liz Cheney as a bonus if you want.Report
Sec’y of the Interior (whoever); Director of the CIA (get him/her drunk enough to be talkative); Poet Laureate (politics adjacent).
Elected officials? Their “used car salesman” persona would never succumb to anything as weak as a beer. Politicians gotta politic, and I support that completely (beats fistfights and wars) but sitting across a table, talking to one? Nah. Even I have more class than that.Report
That tells us a lot.Report
agreed – he likes trumpism but not trump per se.Report
Cruz, Rubio, and Ryan represent Trumpism?Report
Have you seen their speeches, endorsements, and how they voted after he got elected?Report
By those standards, every Republican is a Trumpist. But maybe those are your standards? Even then, it’s hard to depict Ryan as one.Report
At the national level, those holding office sure are. They have to be to keep their jobs.
Paul Ryan voted for Trump’s policies and legislation 95.5% of the time while still in office – when he voted at all since as Speaker he didn’t often vote. Which is nearly identical to Liz Cheney in the 115th Congress and slightly ahead of her in the 116th. Do note that wasn’t good enough for the base, who ran both of them out of politics at Trump’s behest.
(https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/paul-d-ryan/).Report
Do you acknowledge that there are differences among Democrats who nevertheless vote similarly to each other?Report
Sure – and they get lumped as a unison set by the GOP all the time. Voting for the Guy’s policies is one way to be a Trumpist. Voting for them and supporting him in speeches is another.
See, you have to remember that Trump – whatever else he may be – is a symptom of the GOP’s disease. He didn’t cause, he just capitalized on it and was then aided and abetted by everyone in the party who preferred power to integrity. Sadly for them, some of those aiders and abetters were not sufficiently loyal in Trump’s eyes and got discarded by the party.Report
A former Minnesota politician, Al Franken, once said about Ted Cruz that he liked Cruz more than most of Cruz’s Senate colleagues did — and he couldn’t stand Ted Cruz.
He probably has lousy taste in beer, too.Report
Your paragraph 1 seems like an admission that you’re participating in an unfair game. Your paragraph 2, I just disagree with, or Trump wouldn’t have stood out from the crowd so much.Report
Yup. I created content for a discussion.Report
A good term for a set of virtues and practices associated with roles and functions traditionally, though not exclusively, associated with men.Report
Can any legal eagles offer insights into this: https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/09/tech/elon-musk-garm-advertisers-lawsuit/index.html
My primary question is basically what grounds Musk/Twitter/X has to sue? Aren’t companies fully within their rights — both individually and to whatever degree they work together collectively (e.g., conspire) — to determine where they advertise?Report
It may be an attempt at some sort of breech of contract approach.Report
Yea, that was all I could think of. If they had agreed to a certain amount of advertising, they can’t just pull those dollars unless they do so with a contract. But here they went after what I understand to be a 3rd party adviser and not just the companies themselves. It seems like the lawsuit is based on the idea that a collectively-planned boycott is somehow illegal.Report
Tortious Interference used to be a thing.
Maybe it still is.Report
If you’ve never seen “The Insider”, starring Russell Crowe, it’s worth checking out.
It gets into the whole issue of “tortious interference” and uses the backdrop of a tobacco executive telling the truth on 60 Minutes, back when everybody knew what that was.
The argument that 60 Minutes couldn’t run the story because of tortious interference was hammered out to be a specious argument.
Is it specious here? I dunno.
I do know that The Insider was, at some point, recommended to be used in legal ethics courses (North East Journal of Legal Studies article recommending it be used that way).
It’s a Michael Mann movie so you’re probably already pretty sure about whether you’ll like it or not. (Keep an eye out for Hallie Kate Eisenberg in a non-Pepsi role!)Report
The lawsuit says it’s a per se violation of Sherman Act Section 1, as a concerted refusal to deal.It lays this out (pdf), particularly in (7) in the Nature of the Case:
I am not a lawyer, so I have no idea whether this suit has any legal merit, but that at least gives you the basis of the lawsuit.
It is perfectly representative of OT’s current commentariat that you asked for legal experts to answer, and 3 (including me) non-experts weighed in, with two just pulling it out of their asses.Report
In defense of the experts, I have had it explained to me (at length) that if they aren’t getting paid for their opinions, they are under no obligation to provide it.Report
I mean, the actual lawyers may be working mid day on a Friday.Report
Yes, I was more commenting on the fact that the two people just threw answers out there despite an ignorance of both the law and the actual case. I figured experts would pop in eventually.Report
If there are actual experts on the legal issues involved in this case, I’m sure they will weigh in eventually. Lawyers, some may be surprised to learn, are not fungible. Most know a lot about a few areas of the law and can give useful guidance on those areas based on what I call their “walking around knowledge,” not requiring extensive research. Many know enough about some areas of law outside their expertise to make an intelligent contribution to a discussion among lay persons on the same basis. But on many areas, they know too little to pipe up based on their walking around knowledge, or even based on a few hours’ research. Em, for example, knows a lot about criminal law and can talk intelligently about it without doing the kind of work she would have to do in representing a client with a truly complicated criminal law issue. But I’d be shocked if she knows anything about admiralty. (Few lawyers know anything about admiralty, or have any reason to.) If someone demanded her views on a truly complex criminal law issue, or on anything about admiralty law, she would be well within her rights to decline unless someone compensated her for the time it would take for her to get up to speed. Based on what I’ve seen from the other lawyers here, no one has the kind of expertise that would permit them to opine responsibly based on their walking around knowledge.
As for Musk’s case, I know a little about antitrust law, which is the only plausible line of attack, but my walking around knowledge isn’t sufficient to say anything useful about concerted refusals to deal, conscious parallelsim, or the like. I think if I devoted a full day of library work to it, I could come to the point where I’d be able to discuss it intelligently, though not expertly, but I can’t steal that kind of time from the work I know how to do and am paid to do. Indeed, even in my own areas of expertise, I’ve sometimes been asked here to provide, in effect, a fully footnoted version of what anyone in my line already knows as the ABCs of the specialty. That’s the kind of thing clients are entitled to ask for if they are willing to pay for it. They’re usually not because they have engaged the lawyers they have hired precisely because those lawyers can just tell them what the ABCs are and, having done that, put the effort and expense into the truly complicated stuff. For example, if someone who was caught in traffic because some private citizens blocked a bridge came to me and asked if he could bring a Section 1983 action against them, I would tell him “no,” maybe give him a paragraph-length explanation of the color of law requirement, and send him on his way at no charge. If he insisted on arguing with me and demanded a full-blown, footnoted memo explaining why he didn’t have a case, I would respectfully decline. Unless he wanted to pay me and I had a few spare hours.Report
1. The lawsuit is risible on its face but probably a good look into the mindframe of an authoritarian who thinks he is always entitled to things;
2. It was filed in Texas so a Trump Judge and 5th Circuit can f around for a while before the Supreme Court intervenesReport
The dog won’t eat the food? We’ll see about that!
The group, Global Alliance for Responsible Media, also known as GARM, is a voluntary ad-industry initiative run by the World Federation of Advertisers that aims to help brands avoid having their advertisements appear alongside illegal or harmful content. GARM confirmed it is still planning to defend itself in court.
The end of GARM marks a temporary victory for Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino, even though a judge hasn’t made a ruling yet.
“No small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized. This is an important acknowledgement and a necessary step in the right direction. I am hopeful that it means ecosystem-wide reform is coming,” Yaccarino posted on X Thursday.
However, the lawsuit could drive away even more advertisers from X, Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin, founders of watchdog group Check My Ads Institute wrote in an op-ed Thursday. “Everyone can see that advertising on X is a treacherous business relationship for advertisers,” they said.
The lawsuit claims GARM organized “to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising from Twitter” because the group was concerned that the platform had deviated from brand safety standards after Musk’s acquisition in late 2022.
GARM has over 100 members. Four of those members — CVS, Unilever, Mars and the Danish energy company Ørsted — were named defendants in the suit filed in federal court in Texas Tuesday.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/09/tech/elon-musk-garm-advertisers-lawsuit/index.htmlReport
It would be perfectly Musk of him to lose even more money this way.Report
There is a lot of ruin in what ever many billions he hasReport
Cognitive Decline? Experts Find Evidence Trump’s Mind Is Slowing
The health and science publication STAT spoke to several experts in memory, psychology, and linguistics about patterns in Trump’s speech, which seems to growing more incoherent. Comparing his speeches from this year to those from 2017, researchers discovered that Trump uses shorter sentences, confuses his word order more often, repeats words and topics, and frequently goes on tangents.
https://newrepublic.com/post/184690/cognitive-decline-experts-find-evidence-trumps-mind-slowingReport
I’m so old that I remember when this sort of at distance analysis of Donald Trump got tut-tutted by other psychologists.Report
I honestly don’t care for it, for the reason that experts are using the gravitas of their credentials to make pronouncements not supported by objective in person analysis.
Having said that- Something is obviously, very visibly wrong with the man and you don’t need any credentials to see it.
And I’m even supportive of a partisan (like me) declaring that even drooling in a cup their man is preferred to the alternative.
But lets just come out and say it.Report
They want to say it. They want to say it so very, very badly:
‘Hercules’ Star Kevin Sorbo Tells Kamala Harris to ‘Say the N-word’ If She ‘Really Is Black’
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-hercules-star-maga-troll-kevin-sorbo-tells-kamala-harris-to-say-the-n-word-if-she-really-is-blackReport
Republican Mayor of Mesa, Arizona endorses Harris and Walz. Says he doesn’t recognize his party and people in the middle owe the Republicans nothing.
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1822058848330641692?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1822058848330641692%7Ctwgr%5Ed4851f5978e8aa27df7bde55bef215e9dc134c13%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%2F2024%2F08%2Fthe-persistence-of-the-idea-that-the-default-american-belongs-to-a-political-party-that-has-won-the-popular-vote-once-since-1988-was-weirdReport
Taylor Swift’s organization cancels Taylor Swift’s Austrian concert after Austrian authorities foil a plot to bomb the concerts. Depending on your politics this is either a more spectacular version of lone gun man incel type incidents a la Elliot Rodgers or an ISIS style attack.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/3rd-teenager-arrested-foiled-attack-taylor-swift-concerts/story?id=112704414Report
From the reports I’ve seen so far, this had little to do with Taylor Swift herself. It seems that the concerts were a target of opportunity for someone who just wanted to kill a lot of people.Report
This is most likely correct. While I’m sure Islamists and incel types do not like Taylor Swift, the huge crowds that she attracts to her concerts are probably the most attractive factor to them rather than Taylor Swift herself. Ariana Grande also had Islamists try to kill at her concerts for similar reasons.Report
RedState is reporting that they’ve got LVPD radio reports from a medical event that Biden experienced in Vegas on July 17th.
Huh. So he might have experienced one.Report
Why are fascist states so bad at war? Historian Bret Devereaux explains it in a timely essay.
https://acoup.blog/2024/02/23/fireside-friday-february-23-2024-on-the-military-failures-of-fascism/Report