Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025
On this day in 1803, Marbury v. Madison established Judicial Review.
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.
“This isn’t the Trump administration I voted for”:
https://wtop.com/virginia/2025/02/this-civil-servant-and-veteran-voted-for-trump-now-hes-out-of-a-job/Report
Something something g leopards eating faces something something.Report
Joy Reid is out at MSNBC. Variety has a breakdown of how she let down her queer audience down.Report
In case you thought Gamergate was (thankfully) dead, think again.
https://www.salon.com/2025/02/24/what-elon-musks-on-workers-owes-to-gamergate/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3vgEbIUyGo97txIyYIeIhVlMPo0INU7lur473GMFAWaNrucatby5P5Ul8_aem_nnTTyw26XnS0x8tZaA1oDwReport
What if we thought that Gamergate was a failed run on the part of a particular social movement that telegraphed all of the coming drama and showed the playbook that the future political fights would be using and, as such, gave away how to fight against this social movement in the future against such movements as the one pushing Harris for president in 2024 thus making Trump 47 possible?
Oh, it’s Amanda Marcotte.
Not even.Report
It’s highly unlikely sane people would have conceived that such a conspiracy theory would signal a mass political movement, yet here we are. I mean, where do you even begin to try to counter such a nonsensical thing?Report
Your definition of “sane” is too narrow.
“where do you even begin to try to counter such a nonsensical thing?”
I’d definitely support going out of your way to trying to think nonsensically as a first step. “Sense” may be holding you back as much as “sane” is.Report
Take me through that, man. I wouldn’t even know where to start.Report
Eh, it’s no so difficult to wrap your head around the meta.
Imagine two football teams. One has a coach that learned football back in the 1920s as an assistant to Knute Rockne.
Another has a coach that learned football back in the 1990s as an assistant to Marv Levy.
The coach who learned under Knute is likely to think that the coach who learned under Marv was insane and running plays that didn’t make *ANY* sense. Pure madness.
If you have a narrow window, there’s a lot of stuff that just won’t make sense to you and will strike you as nuts.Report
I know what I know from reading the Wikipedia entry, so let’s go with your football analogy instead of talking about the actual people. Are you claiming that Marv’s disciples behavior towards Knute’s is forgivable because Marv’s playbook is different?
My narrow window, as you put it, is the golden rule.Report
My experience of Gamergate isn’t from someone who read the wikipage but from someone who thinks that the argument dates back to Mass Effect 3.
So, from my experience, there was a *LOT* of interaction between the disciples of Knute with the disciples of Marv for years and years.
And one of the criticisms levied against Marv’s disciples is that they stopped buying tickets to the games.
All in all, the analogy breaks down quickly.
I mostly wanted it to get you to say “yeah, ‘sane’ and ‘sense’ are socially constructed and my assumption of their definitions may not match those from other societies or even those from different parts of my own”.Report
I’m talking about a group of guys who mounted an online harassment campaign against a woman who developed a game they didn’t like. A harassment campaign that included threats of death and rape, and apparently enough of them to make the news. If your definition of sanity and good sense include that then I’m not sure what to think about the values you uphold. Am I missing something?Report
Yeah, quite a bit.
If I wrote an essay, would you read it?Report
I would be anxious to read a defense of that reprehensible behavior.Report
That’s the only essay you could comprehend a pro-GG person writing about Gamergate? “Why it would be okay to send threats to Zoe Quinn”?
If that’s the only essay you can imagine being written, I imagine that the other side strikes you as not only crazy but downright evil.Report
If there’s another angle, by all means have at it. As I wrote above, my knowledge is extremely limited, so enlighten me.Report
“If”
How often do you find situations where there is only one side of the story and that one side is captured accurately by Wikipedia?Report
I’d be interested to see an aside describing the role Candace Owens played in it.Report
She didn’t really have a role in GamerGate. Her Social Autosy project site was set up in the very recent aftermath of GamerGate, and it probably is something that exists because of it, but I’m not aware of her being relevant _in_ GamerGate, just sort of imploding in the _aftermath_.
Basically, for those who do not know, Candace Owens had a somewhat bad idea that seemingly would seemingly involving doxing people on the internet (What it would actually do and how it could work without doxing was very vague.) So everyone (And I really do mean everyone, left and right.) objected to it, including Zoe Quinn, who was talking about it because she herself had been the target of massive harassment and it theoretically existed to help people like her.
Zoe Quinn also warned Candace that if she did it, if she didn’t back away from it, the same people who came after Zoe would come after her.
And sure enough, people did come after Candace. Including with very racist stuff.
The people doing the harassment presented themselves as right-wing, sometimes even as Trump supporters, but Candace decided this was being lead by Zoe Quinn because…she’s kind of gullible and dumb, honestly there’s not a lot more than that.
I mean, here: https://quillette.com/2018/05/08/problem-candace-owens/
I’m actually kinda wondering if the GamerGate-gullible people on this site actually believe Zoe Quinn sent an army of harassment against Candace. On one had, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Zoe had anything to do with it. On the other hand, [insert conspiracy]Report
Randi Lee Harper bragged about getting Social Autopsy shut down. From the horse’s mouth:
Randi Lee Harper may have been lying, of course. If she is, she’s one of the people in on the conspiracy.Report
You do understand the conspiracy Owens has is about the harassment, right?
It is not about who pointed out to Kickstarter that the project violated Kickstarter’s terms of service by, essentially, being designed as a dox tool. That was reported to them by, at minimum, Randi Lee Harper. (Although it probably was reported by like half the damn planet, because her Kickstarter was being read as ‘We will track down people saying stuff people don’t like and dox them’ by _everyone_. We can argue whether Owens meant for it to say that, but that’s how everyone read it.)
Those two things are, uh, not at all the same things.
If I’m throwing a party with loud music, and someone reports me to the police, and someone drives by taking shots at me…that doesn’t make them the same person. Especially if my loud music has angered half the town.
For people who do not understand what happened here, this article is illuminating: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/04/how-social-autopsy-fell-for-gamergate-trutherism.html
(I cannot believe I just linked to a Jesse Singal article. The phrase ‘newcomers wander into the weirder, angrier corners of the internet without first reading a tour guide or two.’ is honestly so hilarious and said without the slightest self-awareness of what happened to him later on.)
And a lot of the illumination reading that _now_ is that it now is 2025 and we now actually all know how these sort of explosive harassment campaigns start and exist and things they do. Owens…didn’t. Yes, that’s right, she was proposing her tool with literally no context of any this, because her experience was basically ‘Some people sometimes said mean things on Facebook under fake names’, not the absolute meltdown of GamerGate that was still sputtering along.
So she wandered into a situation she didn’t understand at all, almost everyone got horrified at the idea of what she was trying to do (I cannot emphasis enough how no one, on any side, liked the idea.), Zoe Quinn reached out and tried to reason with her, pointing out it not only was a bad idea, but also that she needed to brace herself for when everything started, 45 minutes later the hate started, she decided that was Quinn, and everything from there on was just a gibberish conspiracy, eventually slipping into the conspiracy that Quinn was faking all the harassment to start with and that Social Autopsy would have exposed that.
I’m now actually interested if you believe _that_ conspiracy theory.Report
The conspiracy theory that *I* believe is that Owens tried to get in on the whole “Team Good Anti-Harassment” train, instead of being welcomed with open arms, she had her stuff shut down and Randi Lee Harper bragged about shutting it down in an open post to freakin’ everybody.
From there, she assumed that she’d never get into the grift via Team Good and, to her surprise, found a home on Team Evil where she managed to Thrive, thus cementing the idea that it wasn’t Team Evil that was opposing her but the very people who bragged about doing so to her very face.
And Randi made the unfortunate mistake of saying “it was us” instead of “it was me” and so Zoe got swept up into it.
“No, not *THAT* conspiracy theory… *THIS* one!”
I’ve told you the conspiracy theory that I buy into and posted links to it.
If you’d like to explain to me that “but what they did was good, though”, that’s fine. Feel free.Report
The actual story: Person with no experience in something attempts to start a project in that field that might be incredibly dangerous to both herself and others, sparking a lot of discussion about this.
A person with experience who currently works in an non-profit in the field contacts her and tries to explain the bad aspects of this and various concerns people have. This attempt does not work.
The person with no experience in the community then has something happen that causes them to invent a conspiracy theory where the person who just talked to her, and in fact everyone around that person, were part of a conspiracy attacking her.
Where in this story, exactly, do you think ‘open arms’ should have been? There was a single failed conversation, and then a conspiracy started.
What is this, ‘Zoe did not immediately manage to convince Candace of everything, ergo, everything after is their fault.’? I don’t think that’s how that works.
And why exactly do we think things would have turned out differently if they _had_? There still would have been the racist emails and harassment immediately after that, and for all we know Candace would have blamed Zoe _anyway_.
It was good, because it was an incredibly stupid project that would cause tons of harm because she didn’t understand very basic things about how harassment worked on the internet. In fact, there was supposedly harassment _from the sample data_, that’s probably what got Kickstarter to shut it down.
Here is someone talking about it in a very neutral way, staying out of conspiracies, _back then_, before Owens moved rightward: https://www.dailydot.com/irl/online-bullying-database-doxing-kickstarter-suspended/
To quote that article: Owens promised not to publish any addresses, emails, or phone numbers. In an interview with Vocativ, she said that the site would only collect accused harassers’ names, locations, employers, social media links, and current and former school information.
This is of, to be clear, anonymous accounts. We can, in retrospect, see how _astonishingly_ stupid her plan is.
I don’t know what the doxxing rules exactly are on this site, I’ve never wanted to come anywhere close to them, but I’m pretty sure linking people’s username here with their real names and employers would count as doxxing here. It certainly makes doxxing a lot easier. And ‘Social media’ links is just insane, because most people have _some_ social media under their real name and others under pseudonyms.
This is because, again, Candace Owens basically understood _nothing_ of what she was talking about. Her idea of the result of ‘doxxing’ appears to be ‘the person might get some spam calls’, not ‘swatting’ or ’employer gets harassed until they are fired’.
But I don’t really know why I’m having to explain this, because _absolutely no one defends her project_. At all. This isn’t some political question, where there are differences of opinion.Report
…Do you read what I said above (or below) as a defense of Owens?Report
Then why are you calling what you believe a ‘conspiracy theory’?
‘Person tries to launch a very stupid project that also incidentally violates Kickstarter TOS, has people try to convince her not to do it, she refuses, and her Kickstarter get, correctly, shut down due to complaints it violates the TOS.’ is not a ‘conspiracy theory’.
There’s no conspiracy at all. Every part of that happened fully in the public. It’s just stuff that happened.
This is like me talking about a conspiracy theory about the moon landing, and the conspiracy is: We put some people in a rocket and they landed on the moon on July 20, 1969.
That’s not a ‘conspiracy theory’, that’s the generally accepted thing that happened!Report
Then why are you calling what you believe a ‘conspiracy theory’?
Would you mind if I quoted you directly from above?
Report
“I know what I know from reading the Wikipedia entry”
so, you don’t really know anything, then?Report
Maybe you and Jay could collaborate.Report
Don’t hold your breath.Report
Why waste our time? You clearly have a much more comforting version of the story in your own head, and you obviously aren’t interested in hearing anything that challenges your worldview.Report
Gamergate did provide a really nice example of what the anti-“woke”, anti-“CRT,” and anti-“DEI” movements would look like conceptually, and even a hint about what sorts of people would be pushing these movements.
I suppose it says something positive about our society that we’ve reached a point at which misogynists and racists have to wrap their bigotry and hatred up into packages that they can, at least among themselves, argue is about something other than what it’s clearly about.Report
“If you don’t believe what I believe then you are a racist” is not very convincing, nor is it an answer for the legit criticism about those ideologies.Report
This is also a helpful way of painting over socially unacceptable beliefs: convince yourself that the reason a person thinks your a racist or a misogynist is not because you’ve been openly misogynistic or racist, but merely because they disagree with you.Report
Sure.
Maybe someone is motivated by racism when they say they think Obama’s children don’t need affirmative action.
However if that accusation is the only way to defend that result, then you have no argument. Ergo racist or not, they’re correct.Report
I’m not sure how I see the connection to Gamergate with this criticism.Report
He’s claiming that to be [anti-“woke”, anti-“CRT,” and anti-“DEI”] you have to be pro-GG or look like that.Report
All right, I’m just about as befuddled as a man could be. You and Jay seem to think there’s a defense of the perpetrators of Gamergate to be made that would be understandable to someone coming in with zero knowledge. As a person who fits that description, I’m anxious to read it.Report
I’m not defending GG.
I’m suggesting that there are legit problems with DEI (etc) and one can reasonably have problems with those ideologies.Report
I think there are three main groups of “Anti-DEI” folks:
1) Racists and misogynists, which comprises the bulk of the right wing anti-DEI block.
2) People genuinely concerned about both the optics and the actual bad programs, which comprises some or perhaps most of the centrist anti-DEI camp.
3) Anti-woke leftists, who were under a previous terminology, anti-identitarian leftists, who are comprised of about 25% people who actually feel like identity obsession leads to division within the working class, and this limits class solidarity and action at the class level, and 75% racists and misogynists.
The genuinely concerned centrists and genuinely concerned leftists are outnumbered by the ones on the right, by a lot, and the ones on the right have pretty much all the power now, which means, in effect, that the centrists (less so the leftists, because there are so few of them that they’re not culturally or politically relevant in anyway) have just been carrying water for the racists and misogynists. To me, this makes the differences in reasons behind their anti-DEI stances irrelevant, because the end result is always racists and misogynists winning.Report
I have often asked the empirical question of how many folks fit into your second category, how many of them voted for Trump or stayed home, rather than vote Democratic, and how many of them would swing to vote Democratic if the Democrats presented a nipped, tucked, and cleaned-up version of DEI? And kept it a back-burner issue, which actual, flesh-and-blood candidates generally did. (This assumes that what the Democrats do, short of curb-stomping DEI entirely, would protect them from Republican lies — a questionable assumption.)
My belief is that the numbers are politically trivial, but if there is evidence that I am wrong I am eager to see it. I don’t suppose, though, that asking again will make a difference.Report
I think most of #2 are anti-Trump enough not to vote for him. These are people like Chait and Noah Smith, who probably vote Democrat at the state and national level pretty consistently. I mean, I’m sure some of them were angry enough at DEI to vote for Trump. But even if they didn’t vote for Trump, they’ve contributed to his win rhetorically.Report
But even if they didn’t vote for Trump, they’ve contributed to his win rhetorically.
Yes.
Oh, yes. Let’s hit them with Article 58.Report
Since you are someone who has repeatedly argued that progressives have rhetorically contributed to Trump’s win with things like defund and trans stuff and DEI, I assume you realized how silly it was for you, specifically, to post this, and left it up out of principle, for which I applaud you.Report
Say what you will about defund, trans stuff, and DEI, you certainly can’t make the accusation that they’re “counter-revolutionary”!
Something that you *CAN* say about Chait and Noah Smith.Report
OH! I think I see part of the problem.
You see “Gamergate” as “that time that a bunch of guys told Zoe Quinn to kill herself”.
And that’s what “Gamergate” is to you.
You can’t imagine someone looking at Gamergate and seeing something else.
So let me draw another analogy.
How fair would it be for me to call you an ally of Tommy Crooks? And so whenever we’re discussing Trump, I bring up how I’m not a big fan of Tommy Crooks or his methods.
Or Luigi, for that matter. Heck, let’s put Luigi in the same bundle of The Resistance.
Even as a 3rd Party Voter, I can’t align myself with Tommy Crooks or Luigi and I don’t see how you can and do so enthusiastically.
What am I missing?Report
Let’s run with that. The woman game developer develops and gets published a game that doesn’t appeal to the usual audience for video games. Said audience claims that the only reason she got it published was because she’s a woman. Absent that, a game as sucky as the one she developed never would have seen the light of day. Am I on the right track?Report
It was a free game that was published to a free game distribution site.
There are literally tens of thousands of games (and “games”) that are downloadable from this distribution site.
I don’t know if that fact means that we’re on the right track or the wrong one, though.Report
Well, that just muddies the water a little more. Write that piece! It’ll get a million comments.Report
Does it muddy it enough to make you say “huh… it makes absolutely *ZERO* sense that their complaint would be what I said it was…”?
From there, which of these do you go to next?
1. “That just goes to prove how awful they are.”
2. “Maybe they had a different complaint. One that was (marginally) less silly? Maybe? I mean, just as sexist and racist, of course… but one that would make more sense in context.”Report
In answer to your preamble, of course! It was a self-published free game. What possible beef could there be?
As for the next branch, I would have a strong preference for choice 1, but I would be interested in hearing your thinking behind 2. Bearing in mind, however, that you’re asking a layman to understand the context of what appears to almost any lay reader choice 1.Report
If you think that it’s obvious that they were ticked off that she self-published a homemade game via the self-publishing homemade game distribution website to the point where you think that any lay reader would agree with you, I’d ask you to step back and consider, just consider, that maybe their complaint was something else.
It wasn’t that she made a game.
It wasn’t that she published it on the website made to distribute homemade games.
It has to do, among other things, with The Zoe Post and the information contained therein.
But once you acknowledge *THAT*…
Well, there’s a *LOT* of stuff that gets reframed even if you believe that 90% of the info in that post is obvious self-serving pap.Report
Before I read that post, did she ever publish a rebuttal?Report
To what part?
The cheating on her boyfriend? I believe that she never did. It was mostly of the form “Mistakes may have been made but it was abusive of him to talk about it in a public forum” and that sort of thing. If you’ve ever witnessed a bad breakup, it was rebuttals of the form “maybe I did a small bad thing but he did a large bad thing by reacting poorly to my small bad thing”.
She also wrote a book called “Crash Override” but that was more about the aftermath than the whole “mistakes were made” thing.Report
I’m going to read it. I got a couple of paragraphs in before I posed my question. I dearly hope it’s a little more than a bitter rant about a romance gone south.Report
It’s a different perspective. Nothing more.Report
“To what part? The cheating on her boyfriend? I believe that she never did.”
That was one of the most interesting parts of the thing to me, that she (and everyone else) agreed that she did indeed have sex with a bunch of people and the anger was over the accusation that she’d gotten some benefit in exchange for it. “We agree that she’s a slut but how dare you call her a whore,” sort of thing.
That, and a healthy dose of “yeah sure maybe she gaslit her nominal boyfriend into staying celibate while she fucked her way through the Seattle gaming-journalism scene, and maybe she spun that into multiple glowing reviews of her walking-simulator game that had nothing to distinguish it from a thousand others, and maybe she’s a graduate of the Something Awful Being A Piece Of Shit Online Forum and she’s putting those skills to good use, but he’s the real jerk here because he told everyone about it“. A real mid-2010s approach, same deal as Clinton’s Emails; the rebuttal being not “that’s a damn lie” but “you’re a sneaky snoop”.Report
Here’s my take after reading that essay and doing a little digging on Reddit. What a wild story!
Guy meets girl. Guy falls for girl. Girl likes to get around. Guy is heartbroken and writes a long blog post about it. Gaming magazine gets involved for some reason and does some journalistic stuff that ain’t quite on the up and up. Gaming community takes umbrage to that and does stuff it really shouldn’t have. Gaming community, despite probably being right about journalistic malpractice, wonders why it’s being portrayed as the bad guy. Fair?Report
Okay. Yeah. That’s the starting point.
Where it starts to get really interesting for the crazy people is that discussion of the incident starts to get censored. Threads get locked and deleted. Threads asking “why can’t we talk about this?” get locked and deleted. Threads that want to discuss the meta-issues get locked and deleted. Threads that want to talk about the issues without naming names get locked and deleted.
Not just on the respectable sites.
Stuff got locked and deleted on *4CHAN*.
“But, wait!”, you may be saying to yourself. “I thought that 4chan was a cesspool of unmoderated adolescents that posted vile stuff without worry!”
That’s what the people at 4chan thought too… and they started getting *REALLY* interested in why they couldn’t talk about it.
And so they started going to places where it was possible to talk about it… and talk about why they couldn’t talk about it elsewhere.
And people started digging up that a lot of the people involved in the malpractice knew each other and had known each other for a long time.
And then, on August 28th, there was the famous “Gamers Are Dead” media blitz.
Nine different popular media outlets all posted stories about how “Gaming”, as an identity, was done. How the old audience was passe and the new audience is the one that game developers should target games to in the future.
Over the next few days, more of these articles showed up.
The response was not something like “holy crap, I guess gaming as a hobby has changed” but “THESE GUYS ARE COORDINATING STORIES NOW?!?!? HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE INVOLVED IN THIS?!?!?”
And the gamers in question really started digging and digging and digging even more.
At this point I’m more than happy enough to pause and ask
“Do you see why some people might see Gamergate as a precursor to what happened with Trump?”Report
Would I put it past people who think there is some vast overarching conspiracy against them based on video game magazine and chatroom behavior to vote for Donald Trump? Of course not. There’s always someone controlling things one would think are uncontrollable. There’s always the omnipotent “they” to point the finger at.Report
Well, I’ll continue with my little tale, then. As it turns out, there was an email list called “GameJournoPros”. It had about 150 members of various game journalists from dozens and dozens of game sites.
The accusation was that the journalists used this group to coordinate and collude and put together narratives and, yes, say stuff like “let’s all put out similar editorials over the course of a couple of weeks!”
Of course, the defense is something like “friends are allowed to talk to each other”.
As if that were the criticism.
Slate’s David Auerbach was enough of an outsider to look at the campaign and ask “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” and, for this, he got pilloried.
This stuff is all flying around while threads and being locked and closed for anything even *TOUCHING* on the topic.
This is happening while gaming journalism sites everywhere were making sure that people weren’t talking about this.
Well, that they weren’t talking about this on *THEIR* sites, anyway.
It had stopped being anything about Zoe Quinn’s wandering eye but about the weird ecosystem that was preventing discussion while, at the same time, complaining about the audience.
Still with me?Report
I think you just restated what I had summarized above. Is it bad journalistic practice? Of course. Is it a straight line to electing Donald Trump president? Let your imagination run wild. If that’s all it takes, you had one foot over the cliff already.
This smacks of “Look what you made me do.”Report
We’re not to Trump yet, Slade. We’re still in 2014.
Trump hasn’t even headed down the escalator yet.
This smacks of “Look what you made me do.”
My goal isn’t “I want you to sympathize with MAGAts.”
My goal is to get you to say “wow… there were a lot of things that happened.. there was a lot more going on than just a couple of people calling Zoe Quinn names.”
I mean, we haven’t even gotten to Zoe Quinn speaking at the UN yet either.Report
I think I’ve demonstrated my understanding of that. Keep going, if you will, this is fascinating.Report
Well, for a year, there were a bunch of places that did their best to gatekeep conversations and threads and kept locking down conversation and there became two different online universes.
1. Places where you knew you wouldn’t have to worry about talking about unpleasant topics
2. Places where you were free to talk about double plus ungood thoughtcrime
Pretty much all of the respectable outlets were under #1. This includes all of the gaming sites that participated in the “Gamers are Dead” media blitz but also major sites like Reddit. (There is, to the best of my knowledge, one single subreddit on reddit where you’re allowed to be pro gamergate. They police the heck out of themselves so they can pull the whole “WE’RE FOLLOWING THE SITE RULES!” thing.)
On twitter, there was a movement started by the anti-ggs to put together a blocklist of everybody who followed a handful of prominent accounts.
Mass blocking then became a thing. The argument was that the most blocked accounts should be de-boosted (or shadowbanned) in an effort to make Twitter less “toxic”.
There were a handful of prominent people who were swept up in this who argued that following accounts was not an endorsement of the account and they shouldn’t have been added to the blocklist and there was a *LOT* of drama over it.
(If we wanted to fast-forward a couple of years, we’d reach the point in the story where Candace Owens shows up trying to create a website called “Social Autopsy” that would help link online bullies (like the gamergate types) to offline identities so companies would know if vicious trolls were working for them. Zoe Quinn and the creator of the blocklists hounded Candace Owens off of their turf. Owens went on to greener pastures.)
And a bunch of the folks online who weren’t knowledgeable enough to be pro or anti gamergate started hearing rumors and asking questions like “what’s this thing we’re not allowed to talk about?” and finding themselves de-boosted, shadowbanned, and so on.
The tools intended to contain Gamergate had started containing people who weren’t even gamers.
I suppose it’s right around here that Trump came down the escalator.Report
I’d be entirely willing to accept moderation decisions of “this is a Mega Shit Starting Subject that will destroy the forum and we will not have that happen here”.Report
There are a handful of places that closed forums entirely to avoid discussions of such topics.
Bioware is the one that comes quickest to mind.Report
Hell’s bells, it happens here once in awhile.Report
I’m saying the way GG played out, and who was part of it (demographically, but also specific individuals), looks a lot like the way anti-DEI has played out. Hell, at this point, Mar-a-Lago face is like the real life version of female characters in games having to have a certain look.Report
Chris: I’m saying the way GG played out… looks a lot like the way anti-DEI has played out.
I never followed GG so I lack the references.
However thus far I don’t see DEI being defended on it’s merits. Worse, from the times we’ve talked about it here, I don’t think it can be.
That suggests we should simply get rid of it, no matter how many claims of “back DEI or you’re racist” there are.
If that’s the strongest argument, then it indicates that there is no actual argument.Report
I don’t feel the need to defend any one of the three concepts that makeup DEI. I suppose we could quibble about specific programs, if there are ones you have concerns about. I think they’re pretty basic societal values, the sharing of which are necessary for the common ground required for conversation and in fact the basic fairness and justice, from a liberal (broadly construed, not the American political version) perspective. Hell, back when libertarians existed, one of their claims was that you got those things through markets, so when I say liberal broadly construed, I mean to include the folks who used to call themselves classic liberals, may they rest in peace.Report
I know that I preferred when classical liberals were still around.
They were polite, well-read, used proper punctuation, and lost graciously.Report
Chris: I think they’re pretty basic societal values, the sharing of which are necessary for the common ground required for conversation and in fact the basic fairness and justice,
The conflict is over whether or not group rights are more important than individual rights.
If you believe that a group has the “right” to be successful according to it’s percentage of the population, then for you justice and fairness include being ok with quotas and such.
Thus opposing quotas is racist even though quotas means checking someone’s skin color before deciding if they’re going to go to college and so on.
This handwaves cultural impacts and individual responsibility as unimportant because the group is what matters.
If your definition of “basic societal values” is individual rights being more important than group rights, then you create a “fair” process that will have “unfair” group results.Report
While I think the idea of group rights vs individual rights is a straw man, I do highly recommend reading Iris Marion Young on the sorts of things you’re trying to get at. For example.Report
Chris: group rights vs individual rights is a straw man
I disagree. The entire “structural injustices” ideology, which includes Young’s work, has gotten into measuring oppression by looking at group outcomes.
They even have vast amounts of work trying to justify why they mostly can’t point to individual discrimination anymore.
So we’re supposed to believe Red Lining still has massive ongoing effects even though it was outlawed in 1968, however parental marriage and other cultural issues are to be ignored.Report
I mean it is a straw man in that very few liberals actually want “group rights,” in the sense that being in a group entitles one automatically to something. Even the pre-DEI racist bugaboo, “Affirmative Action,” didn’t involve “group rights” in this sense.
The question is, rather, are their historical disparities that we can take steps to make up for, or should we let them just disappear very slowly over time. Even the libertarians, when they still existed, tended to admit the disparities existed, but believed that the market would get rid of them, and if left alone (to a reasonable extent), it would get rid of them quickly. The anti-DEI folks seem to fall into two camps, those who deny any racial or gender-based disparities still exist, and those who think that we should just let them die on their own, slowly, and painfully for those still subject to them. Pro-DEI folks want to try to alleviate, if not eliminate, the disparities now.
By invoking an individual vs group rights framework, you elide all of those questions entirely, which is awfully convenient.Report
Chris: By invoking an individual vs group rights framework, you elide all of those questions entirely, which is awfully convenient.
My framing cuts through the self serving nonsense. “Fair” should be defined at an individual level, not at a group outcomes level.
Chris: The anti-DEI folks seem to fall into two camps…
Put me in camp 3 then. Disparities exist, but that’s fine and expected if they’re the result of a fair system.
Different cultures have different levels of parental involvement. It is expected for the children of involved parents to do better. That’s why various ideologies need to exclude cultural effects.
Similarly a gender pay gap is unacceptable if it’s the result of pay discrimination but acceptable if it’s the result of free choices.Report
Put me in camp 3 then. Disparities exist, but that’s fine and expected if they’re the result of a fair system.
Well, at least we don’t have to worry about them being the result of a fair system.
More seriously, I used to do disparity studies looking at racial access to various things, like contracts, credit, etc., and one of the most consistent findings is that, even if you hold all of the things that lenders say they look at constant, black people are approved for credit at a much lower rate. You can throw in zip code into the model, and still, being black is a huge impediment to getting credit. Other researchers have shown this with housing, hiring, etc. The system isn’t fair, so we don’t even need to think about what we’d do in a fair system.Report
Chris: black people are approved for credit at a much lower rate.
Serious question, why is that? Modern credit practices are likely run by robots. I’d hope no one put “race” into the math model.
If I’m wrong and someone did put race in there, then that’s great news because we have an easy solution
Another possibility is there is a flaw with the disparity studies.
Oh, and please source this. My one minute internet search found lots of studies but they all seemed to have the flaw that they weren’t adjusting for anything.Report
Personally I think you’re talking about the motte, which has never been without it’s critics, some pretty nasty ones, but the battle over the last decade and a half or so has been all out in the bailey.
I think the real beef for those who see good in ostensible DEI isn’t the centrists, classical liberals, or even conservatives, no matter how reactionary. It’s with the people who insisted that, I don’t know, MLK day, and black history month, and celebration of the contributions of minority groups needed to be conflated with stuff like:
-disastrous and divisive wastes at universities (see the article on University of Michigan’s program)
-implicit bias trainings that prove counter productive whenever objectively scrutinized
-illegal admission methods and almost certainly soon to also be illegal hiring practices and
-any number of embarassing and racist cultural moments like plastering Tema Okun’s work all over all kinds of materials.
The MAGA a*shats and equivocating moderates have done a lot of dumb things but not those.Report
What sorts of DEI initiatives would you be in favor of?Report
Historically I was a subscriber to pre-woke NPR style diversity. I thought it was a good idea to go out of our way to make sure we were celebrating the contributions of women and minorities to American culture and success. I also saw nothing particularly wrong with being conscientious about visible representations, or for a general toleration of groups designed to do things like help black people in particular adapt after admission to college. Certainly I thought and still think overt racism and sexism should be stigmatized and if a business or the government discriminates on those basis they should be sued into oblivion.
Today though I’m against all DEI and oppose anything that brands itself that way. It’s obviously all a cynical bait and switch by people who can’t be trusted. Let them go and the next thing you know they’re building arcane bureaucracies designed to discriminate or even crazier setting up racist identity tests for air traffic controllers and smuggling the answers to minority candidates. At a certain point the issue becomes not what DEI is but what DEI does and I have personally seen enough.Report
Take admissions to, say, elite colleges: do you think grades, GPA, school, and, say, extracurricular activities are the only things that should be taken into account, or should factors outside of the students’ control that impact those things also be taken into account (poverty, discrimination, etc.)?Report
The way my thinking has evolved I’d limit it to GPA, SAT, with some maybe limited accounting of extra curricular and selection of major.
I used to be more open minded about trying to account for more than that. It’s just become clear that left to their own devices admissions offices are apt to decide all of the Asian American students have boring personalities and should be docked while then giving a big boost to the children of well off immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, because on a power point no one can tell them from a descendant of slaves. They’re also still treating women as disadvantaged even as the ratio approaches 60/40 women to men. The former strikes me as very ugly and un-American, the latter as a sign of a worldview stuck decades behind the times that would rather move goal posts to keep discriminating than take the W.
I am more open to ideas like top 5 (or 10 or whatever) percent of high school grads are guaranteed a spot in a state college as long as the criteria is clear and easy to apply.Report
Seems to have worked for the TX university system, though I’m sure Chris has a better take since he’s a resident.
https://news.utexas.edu/topics-in-the-news/top-10-percent-law/Report
I don’t like it. It makes a lot of sense in theory, but in practice has pretty significantly reduced the diversity of the undergraduate population.Report
Fair enough. The top 10% originated at UT-Austin, I believe (the % has since varied based on the size of the student body and the number of applications; I believe it’s at 5% now), where it has seriously reduced the racial and ethnic diversity of the undergraduate population.
I understand that college administrations tend to move at a glacial pace, so, e.g., gender-based factors in admission are ridiculous in 2025 (with some possible exceptions based on major), and they still tend to miss underprivileged black kids entirely despite having programs that are supposed to help them. I’m perfectly willing to say we should be working on programs that actually help people who are at a disadvantage through no fault of their own.Report
IMHO elite colleges should be stripped of the ability to set racial quotas and we should stop pretending they don’t. We outlawed this sort of thing for good reason.
The best solution is daylight.
Have colleges come up with a point system and publish it. If they want to include a “poverty” category in there, then fine but they have to document what they’re defining as “poverty”.
If they want to include a “discrimination” category then that needs to be “proven discrimination against that person personally” and not “group membership”.
An example of what’s unacceptable is Harvard’s subjective “personality” test which magically all Asians don’t do well on and all Blacks do.Report
Consumer revolts, man.
If we’ve learned anything, we’ve learned to have the modern audience in place *BEFORE* we abandon the old one.Report
Hoping for some induced demand.
(I realize I’m using this term figuratively.)Report
“Gamergate did provide a really nice example of what the anti-“woke”, anti-“CRT,” and anti-“DEI” movements would look like conceptually, and even a hint about what sorts of people would be pushing these movements.”
You mean, the same people running both sides as a joke?Report
proposal: Gamergate wasn’t a sign of infection, it was an inflammatory immune response.Report
Yeah. I see it as dating back all the way to Mass Effect 3’s horrible ending when the player base got really upset about the game/ending and Bioware had to start really locking down their comment threads and eventually shut down their forums in order to avoid the toxicity of the fanbase.
And Inquisition sold like hotcakes despite all of the chuds who said that they’d never drop another cent on Bioware.Report
and as with most inflammatory immune responses, the response was mostly just a bunch of individuals competing to see who could most loudly and angrily declare that they were The Best And Most Moral Participant In This Activity.Report
Since we live in a post-truth world I guess we shouldn’t care that one of the foundations of “chain saw the federal workforce” is a lie.
https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-employees-work-from-home-trump-myth?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1oAYrquiqesLGxAh3VAY7B4R9ZtDEqkUgjG4B36ePe7OrbEB7hQV3_-xo_aem_Buqfh4ntGjdAOW6gZpdGkAReport
54% of the federal workforce was required to show up at an office every day. According to the study, just 10% of federal employees worked exclusively from home. Those allowed to have hybrid schedules ended up spending an average of 60% of their work time at federal offices.
Man, hybrid schedules are where it’s at. If you wake up at 4AM, you should be able to start working on the stuff you can and then get dressed and go into work at 8 and show up for your scrum saying “my day is half over, here’s what I’ve got”.Report
The Administration has taken away that option for us. As have a number of private corporations these days.Report
That really sucks, man. It’s total B.S. I hate that I have to put pants on now.
You have my sympathies.Report
Well, given that I have personal knowledge of individuals who worked for (one of the 3 lettered departments) who were sent home during covid and could not work remotely, and were still paid their salary, I wonder where those folks fall into the above categories…..Report
“I remain on standby per the direction of my direct supervisor Supervisor Smith under the approval of my manager Manager Jones. See attached.”Report
How long did that last though? My navy colleagues got about 10 days off before retooled schedules and social distancing had many of them back at a desk.Report
6 months at least. Might have been nine.Report
If they needed a SCIF or encrypted hard line to do their jobs, paying them to sit might have been cheaper.Report
This person was an accountant. Now, given what the agency did, it’s possible. It’s also possible that the gov’t took the action as a temporary policy until they figured out how to deal with the various conflicts of working remotely, the clearances, etc. I can’t say much more than that.Report
I tend to believe that what happened in early stage COVID shouldn’t be held against any employer, nor is it indicative of employee value now.Report
My company tried to force everyone to go back to the building then they realized the building wasn’t big enough to hold everyone.Report
Part of the irony is that there really is a lot of efficiency to be gained and money saved from remote (or at least more flexible) work, including from the government. One thing they should be doing is shutting down a lot of the buildings and selling off the property. My company found it was cheaper to maintain a small HQ for meetings and do short term rentals for big training and/or collaboration sessions than to get stuck on a bunch of long term leases.
To the extent there are problems with the federal workforce I think it’s more of a management issue, and probably an over protection of employee issue, than anything else.
The backlash from guys like Trump and Musk isn’t about discipline or realism, it’s a backwards looking cultural thing.Report
My company had to bring a bunch of people back because in their contracts with the government they had overhead costs (including building percentages), but the government pushed back that if people were working at home the building overhead should not be applied.
Result, All gov people were sent back to the office.Report
This.
I had an interview with the president of a company that sent all her employees home to work during covid. She was very concerned that DCAA would disallow her office building rent (@ 1m dollars a year) from her incurred cost submission. She was reaching out to our states congress critters to lobby for some help.Report
In general, I would agree. However, The companies that I worked for during this time had their “stuff” organized VERY quickly. Private companies, gov’t contractors, etc. are one thing. Gov’t employees not doing their job at all, and still being paid from our tax money is another thing.
It’s been a while, but the last time I went to get fingerprinted, I walked into a high rise building in a major city (gov’t offices), with @ 10 stories, all empty. Everyone was remote and the only people in the building was the guy at the door, and two fingerprint folks. This was years after covid hit. Gov’t still paying for that space.Report
A lease is a lease, man. Landlords don’t care who’s there. (The company I work for is in the same boat.)Report
I agree…..but at some point you decide not to renew the lease. Somehow I doubt the gov’t is locked into 50 year leases.Report
If DOGE can show evidence of lease renewals for buildings that have no employees in them, I’m all for doing something about that. Absent that, we’re just calling normal business practices fraud.Report
I think most federal buildings are owned and would assume Congress needs to authorize a sale.Report
I don’t think this was a federal building. I’m aware of a number of rented buildings in another county, where I used to work, that were in the same state–no one in the office, everyone home, etc. back when I had to get fingerprinted the first time. However, I could be wrong.Report
The federal government owns 6.8 million square feet of building space in Colorado. It also leases another 4.1 million square feet. Here in Fort Collins, the feds own about 50,000 ft2 and lease almost 850,000 ft2. The leases are almost all buildings on the Colorado State University campuses.Report
At the start of this regime, GSA leased 149.49 million square feet of office space nationally. The total federal government owns 500
Million square feet – a good bit of which is on military installations. Other agencies execut leases as well. My space is currently leased directly by my agency but our entire floor is Feds.Report
Spmeone hacked TV’s at HUD with some really interesting AI graphics. Consider this your trigger warningReport
This was brilliant.Report
It was never about individual performance. All about data mining.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/federal-workers-agencies-push-back-elon-musks-email-ultimatum-rcna193439?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_ma&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&_branch_referrer=H4sIAAAAAAAAAwXBSQ6CMAAAwN94EyRGjSbEyIElBrCERXppaGlZqi2WynLx7c60Wg%2FjxTQFJoLOo1ENg%2FHqBDfXOGbNd2%2BxBF8ZJq%2ButoMZPtsdbqIWFjsnBDfHB0wEU6UXSDiaPnl%2FliHWUXaS72Q5UjfVRICoDK1jktbF1plwv%2FYLRB5AFX0j3yv5o7g3ZU2WIcgOecCBP29%2BijKqVCcahJWcR6pstyIUS8n%2FohAwnK8AAAA%3D&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0BMQABHQfnIvatxZck_vqVj9oMbtNU7omRx6eFTtcnQNYM16RTdW-BvbjyjxZ_GQ_aem_HGYkPWKgYdcxpIU5VIkQHw&_branch_match_id=1281224086309622960Report
U.S. Attorney Ed Martin announces that he is President Trump’s lawyer:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:clxs5bimkdx2zvxzrbs6v3pw/post/3lix7gevpgc2s?ref_src=embed&ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%252F2025%252F02%252Fas-president-trumps-lawyersReport
Rep, Mark Alford tells pissed off and fired federal workers in Kansas City that “God has a plan.”
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article300885874.htmlReport
Antonio Delgado, the NY Lt. Governor, has announced that he’s going to run for Governor.
Governor Hochul has totally ripped into Antonio Delgado and she publicly announced, via her communications director Anthony Hogrebe, that she’s looking for a new running mate when she runs for Governor again.
Delgado is probably better at complaining about crime that Hochul will be, but it’s not like either will be able to run as an outsider.
NOT THE WAY THAT CUOMO WILL BE ABLE TOReport
Lee Zeldin goes for the deep cuts: https://bsky.app/profile/maxkennerly.bsky.social/post/3lixlyduyus2gReport
Unknown illness kills people in Congo basin with record speed:
https://apnews.com/article/congo-mystery-unknown-illness-cd8b1fdcb3b2ed032968b2c6044dc6db?fbclid=IwY2xjawIp-eFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHW_FVJmnenzZCy-RP-9RQVk3n9nK-ewKb67agqknJBk91jLZCf7OAk3_3g_aem_I4qrG588u4H9S54cgyEqrQReport
This is the leader of the second largest party in Germany’s Parliament:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Weidel
This is her grandfather:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_WeidelReport
Worked for Goldman Sachs. Not a wonder.Report
Welp, Buffet took Berkshire Hathaway from a 14 percent cash position to a 33 percent cash position, this means he thinks the stock market will likely crashReport
The storm clouds are definitely gathering.Report
It looks like the results of the German election are going to be…the same unstable coalition with the CDU taking the Chancellorship instead of the SDUReport
It’s going to keep getting worse until the normal parties get serious about immigration. They’ve got about 3.5 million people in some kind of indefinite status, many from Muslim countries and with no interest in assimilation into the West.
The only way to start dealing with their political crisis is to eliminate their protected status and start repatriating as many as they can, and to stop letting more in. Unfortunately the mainstream parties have gone the other way by trying to ban citizens from even talking about the issue. This has the effect of making AfD appear as brave truth tellers when they’re actually shambolic bufoons.
But make no mistake, the way to save democracy and western norms there, here, everywhere is to just take the L on mass, illegal and/or irregular immigration.Report
You realize that many people see being illiberal to save liberalism as a contradiction in terms and that xenophobic immigration policy is part of that. There is also strong evidence that prohibitions on immigration are about just as effective as any other prohibition and if people want to come for economic or other reasons, they will come.
I agree that there is basically a bad tendency to just look the other way when it comes to illiberalism in Islam compared to basically everybody else on the planet though in many quarters.Report
xenophobic immigration policy
“What does ‘xenophobia’ mean?”
“You know open borders?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s being opposed to those.”
“Oh. I guess I’m xenophobic.”
“Yeah, most people are.”Report
I don’t think restrictive immigration policy is inherently illiberal in the sense you are using the term. Some of rhe most liberal things that have ever happened in the United States occurred during more restrictionist periods. It’s just a policy choice and in a democracy it’s one that can be revisited down the road.Report
Just to further elaborate on my own point the idea that mass immigration is a core tenet of liberalism without room for much (if any) compromise is younger than my elementary school aged son. In very recent memory the larger political left was at best conflicted and circumspect on this point. Certainly I would say there has been a championing of ethnic diversity in the specific context of the United States since the second half of the 20th century, and a greater consideration of humane treatment towards people in weakened and vulnerable situations.
But liberalism in Germany does not rest on whether they allow a few million refugees primarily from the Syrian civil war to stay in the country indefinitely. That’s even moreso the case now that the war is over. Big picture we need to stop talking these crazy ways that assume everything good can be achieved by clinging to increasingly tenuous principles, regardless and in spite of clear political and factual realities.Report
Marcon gives a master class in rebutting Trump, right in front of his face: https://bsky.app/profile/fospheans.bsky.social/post/3lixklvkyn22fReport
Kathleen Kennedy will reportedly retire by the end of this year.Report
Reason prevails in Clarksdale:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/25/us/clarksdale-register-mississippi-lawsuit-dropped/index.htmlReport
Yes well reason is in short supply in mississippiReport
Is there any way to punish or reprimand a judge short of recalling her?Report
She’s a Mississippi state judge so a Mississippi lawyer should chime in. Generally, though, judges don’t get punished or reprimanded just for being wrong. They can be laughed at if they’re really or frequently wrong and, depending on whether they’re elected or appointed, not be re-elected or re-appointed. Whether they can be recalled is a matter of Mississippi law.Report
We have no recall statute. Though all our judges are elected.Report
The House manages to pass their draconian budget, 217-215. Massie votes no but probably because he thought the cuts were not draconian enough. My guess is that the Senate just goes supine and votes for the House budget on party lines or with 2-3 defectors (Vance as the tiebreaker) because having to deal with Democrats is a face worse than deathReport
I hope it’s as successful as Obamacare.
Wait, is this a *BUDGET* budget? Like not a reconciliation budget?!?Report
Obamacare was very successful but thanks for trollingReport
Yeah, I hope the budget is very successful.Report
If it is successful most federal expenses will stop. Including earned benefits.Report
Most? As in more than 51%?!?
Wow. Promises kept!Report
The House passed their version of a joint budget resolution. The Senate already passed something different. Reconciliation requires that the two chambers agree on a resolution. The next step is presumably a conference committee that attempts to iron out the differences, and then both chambers have to approve. Although it is possible, as you say, that the Senate Republicans will cave. Once there’s an agreed-upon resolution, both chambers start writing an actual budget.
All of this is FY2026 stuff. I suspect Johnson got the last few votes he needed by pointing out that this isn’t the budget, there’s lots of time to resolve things for FY2026, but they need to settle this temporarily so they can start figuring out how to avoid a FY2025 mid-March shutdown.Report
I have a lot of colleagues who expect to be shut down and then when the sky doesn’t fall immediately (because of all the people working but not getting paid) those of us not working and not getting paid simply won’t be recalled.Report
https://kyivindependent.com/breaking-kyiv-washington-reach-agreement-on-minerals-deal/
“The final version of the agreement, dated Feb. 24, establishes a fund to which Ukraine will contribute 50% of proceeds from the “future monetization” of state-owned mineral resources, including oil, gas, and related logistics. The fund will invest in projects within Ukraine.
The deal excludes resources that already contribute to Ukraine’s state budget, meaning it will not cover operations by Naftogaz and Ukrnafta, the country’s largest oil and gas producers.”
If this is accurate, Trump got played againReport
What does Ukraine get in exchange for signing over half of proceeds from some part of their mineral resources? Security? Weapons? No cease-fire negotiations that don’t include Ukraine and the EU?Report
Ugh. Sony just shut down Monolith Studios. You know the guys who made The Nemesis System? The system that was freakin’ amazing and only got used in two games? The system that they patented so nobody else can use it for free until 2035?!?
Yeah, well, that studio got shut down.Report
One of the unpleasant things about late-stage capitalism. A big company can offer the people that own a small company money in amounts that simply can’t be ignored. Then do whatever they want with the small company they now own. In the mid-1990s Microsoft was notorious in certain circles for buying up little companies with interesting video compression schemes. Not so they could incorporate the ideas, but so that the ideas weren’t used in products competing with MS’s own.Report
This was not on my bingo card for today:
https://x.com/JeffBezos/status/1894757287052362088
I’m not sure what to make of this. It could go well, but it could also go very badly if not done well. I wonder if Megan McArdle is on the shortlist.Report
Bezos, huh? Lemme see what he said… holy crap.
Oh, so he fired Shipley. Huh.
Huh.Report
Private companies can, mostly, do whatever they want. Freedom of the press is for those who own one. The rest of us can point and laugh.Report
My thought exactly.Report
Your old road is rapidly aging. Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand.Report
The interesting question is whether this is a reaction to Trump being more anti-market and just plain stupid than expected, or if “free markets and personal liberties” is just a euphemism for whatever Trump is doing today.Report
“Free Markets” == “More H1Bs”
“Personal Liberties” == “No Unions”Report
Someone should tell him about the Economist.Report
I’m thinking of “real” media places that put an exclusive emphasis on free markets and personal liberties and maybe WSJ is on there… maybe the Economist… Then I get to Reason Magazine and after that we’re in crazytown.
So while I might agree that the whole “free markets/personal liberties” thing is underserved, I have no idea what Bezos means when he says either of those terms and no reason to believe that he means what I mean when I say them.
But, gotta say, as platitudes go, I am 100% down with the platitudes.
“So you think that the people he’s going to fire shouldn’t be fired?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go *THAT* far.”Report
I think it is fair to assume it means whatever he feels benefits his business interests. At least until proven otherwise anyway.
I have a WaPo subscription so I guess I can be on the lookout.Report
So you didn’t have “another billionaire bends the knee” on your bingo card?
Me thinks you need a new card.Report
You assume he means the same things with Personal Liberty and Free Markets you think these words mean.Report
No I don’t. My initial comment expressed skepticism, and then I posted another comment, two hours before you posted this one, saying that it’s unclear what exactly he means.Report
Pathetic attempt to wriggle out of it through tricks like “basic comprehension” and “the arrow of time” — this Saul Degrae chap clearly has your number.Report
If there was any doubt whether Elon Musk bought himself a president for $277M – musk is attending todays cabinet meeting.Report
Of all the cuts recently made, seemingly doing away with the CFPB is the most befuddling. For a supposedly populist administration, one would think this one would be top of the list to keep, if not expand.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91283520/i-need-job-why-fired-federal-workers-struggling-replace-government-work
Report
No matter how much Trump likes to pretend he is on Monday Night Raw the GOP remains a plutocratic party in populist clothing.Report
Perhaps the more befuddling thing is the voters don’t see this.Report
They don’t want to see it. Trump supporters here in Mississippi are thrilled with his shafting of everyone they have been taught to hate. They genuinely don’t think any of this will hurt them.
The 36 million who didn’t vote were clearly unconcerned as well.Report
Also true. The level of vitriol is truly astonishing.Report
They live in a world where no one has been in their corner and they have been asked to swallow an ever larger sh!t sandwich. That they would eventually lash out should not surprise anyone.Report
Something I’ve thought about a lot over the last few months is the difference between the typical Trump voter in 2016 and 2020 vs the typical Trump voter in 2024. The hardcore MAGA have been there all along, and their ranks have swelled and shrunk and swelled again over time, their cult of personality turning people who, at least among those I know, had previously been pretty decent, into rolling balls of hate and cruelty, but most Trump voters aren’t MAGA. A lot of them felt completely abandoned by the last administration, for one reason or another, through the pandemic (with its uncertainty and its uptick in crime), inflation, etc.
What I wonder is, where do those voters go, when Trump policies start to affect their lives. Does cognitive dissonance cause them to go even deeper into Trump, maybe even become MAGA, and blame the Democrats for what their own (lyin’) eyes clearly see as Trump’s actions? Do they abandon Trump, and go to the Democrats, who have so far given them no reason to think they’ll work for them any more than they have in the last few years? Do they drop out of politics altogether?
Times like this, I wish we had an organized left.Report
Here here.Report
“Something I’ve thought about a lot over the last few months is the difference between the typical Trump voter in 2016 and 2020 vs the typical Trump voter in 2024.”
They’ve been the same people all along; they’ve just realized that they can stand up in public and say “I voted for Trump” and not lose their job over it.
The only demographic that didn’t vote more for Trump in 2024 than in 2020 (and more in 2020 than in 2016) was College-Educated White Males. Everyone else went more for Trump, both times.Report
Isn’t there some (possibly apocryphal) quote from Winston Churchill, that the best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter?Report
If he didn’t say it, someone ought to!Report
For the record:
Personal Liberty means the right of movement and protection for Trans youth, trans people in general
Free Markets means competition and no monopolies.Report
Well, you know the “Call Her Daddy” podcast? That’s the one that interviewed Harris.
Well, in the latest “Call Her Daddy”, Monica Lewinsky explains that Bill Clinton should have resigned instead of throwing her under the bus.
I mean, I’m sure she thinks that.
But can you imagine what the 21st Century would have looked like if he did?Report
I don’t know that things go that differently all things considered. Incumbent Gore loses to Bush 2, Hilary still moves to NY and is elected Senator and we’re off to the races.Report
Bush does? Huh. My assumption is that Clinton has a lot of baggage that weighs Gore 2000 down and does not weigh down Incumbent Gore.Report
Someone with better memory can (and should) correct me but my recollection of that election narrative was that it was something like ‘Is there a significant difference between these two politicians?’ Gore still has his odd persona to contend with, Bush gets the edge by way of SCOTUS, people thinking they’d rather have a beer with him, and general thermostatic forces against a party getting a 3rd term. Always worth remembering that Bush ran in 2000 as the compassionate conservative, moderate, pro business governor of Texas, who favored a humble foreign policy. Not the post 9/11 version from 2004.Report
Yeah, the general explanations for Gore’s “loss” in 2000 were:
1) Bush spoke in soundbites, while Gore gave lectures. In other words, one was good at messaging and the other was bad.
2) Gore failed to capitalize on the popularity of Clinton.
3) Nader and his voters stole Gore votes, ultimately costing him key swing states.
Coincidentally, liberals are still convinced that the main reason they lose elections is messaging, and especially that Republicans are better at it than Democrats. See, e.g., the narrative that voters were tricked into believing the economy isn’t perfect.Report
IIRC, Gore didn’t ask/specifically declined Clinton’s help on the stump. For all of Slick Willie’s failings, the guy was a master politician.Report
The way I remember it, he even got rid of most of the Clinton people in his campaign, and did so pretty early, as a signal that he was going to run a campaign independent of Clinton. I remember him dropping Mark Penn, which is an unqualified good thing, but as close as Penn was to the Clintons, that was a pretty clear sign of Gore’s intentions. Looking it up, I found this, which includes this bit revealing the mindset of the Gore campaign:
As political miscalculations go, thinking they had to distance themselves from a remarkably popular president turned out to be about as big as they get.
But to this day, liberals still blame the left and Nader.Report
It’s a lot easier for people to understand the proximate cause than the remote cause.Report
I suffer from this problem as well, so I can’t blame them too much, but as someone who voted for Nader (I don’t even like Nader; in fact, I really dislike him, but that’s how much I disliked Gore, and I’m from Tennessee), it drives me nuts.Report
Remember Gore’s concession speech?
The main thing I remember everybody screaming was “WHERE IN THE HELL HAS THIS GUY BEEN FOR THE LAST YEAR?”
Gore came across as genial, charming, genuine… not wooden at all.
The whole “messaging” thing might be superficially amusing but, honestly, Bill Clinton and Obama were both once-in-a-generation charismatic talents who were masters at, yes, messaging.
Now maybe any plan that has “we need someone as charismatic as Bill Clinton” is doomed to fail if you don’t have a Bill Clinton handy.
But I absolutely understand why, after Clinton and Obama, the thought is that the problem is messaging.
Of course, that may lead you to the conclusion that you need someone good at messaging to be running for the office…Report
I think people have forgotten how interesting Clinton was found simply because he was so young. Clinton was forty-six when he was elected. The last time we’d had a President younger than fifty was 1963. (The last time we’d had someone under sixty was Carter.)Report
And this past year we were told a 60-year old Harris was young. How times have changed.Report
Dude grew a beard and started writing, making movies, and talking about the climate, and suddenly seemed like a completely different person. I suspect he got a lot of bad advice during that campaign. Imagine how bad your advisers have to be for you to fire Mark Penn and then your campaign gets worse!
Coincidentally, I met Gore in the early 90s when I was in Youth Legislature, and he was still a Senator. He seemed like a perfectly nice and funny guy talking to us, but was stiff as a board as Vice President and then as a presidential candidate.Report
It was in many ways the opposite. By the election, Clinton was incredibly popular, but Gore’s team convinced him to distance himself from Clinton under the assumption that Clinton must be toxic because of the impeachment and the scandal around it (people were not yet all that worried about how he’d treated Lewinsky). Gore received a lot of criticism afterwards for not taking advantage of his association with a president who by then had approval ratings way higher than either Gore or Bush.Report
Without getting into the actual questions of right and wrong, or what should or shouldn’t have happened with Clinton, I think a lot of the modern conversation about that scandal is a retcon. If Wikipedia isn’t lying his popularity peaked at 73% approval after the impeachment and stayed in the 60s through all of the proceedings. I almost wonder if we’ve reached a point where it is so hard to imagine any president enjoying that kind of popularity that we assume it couldn’t possibly have been that way, yet it was.Report
What’s wild is he had approval ratings that high despite never winning a majority of the popular vote.Report
I remember the exhaustion. “Clinton Fatigue”. The whiplash from the Clarence Thomas hearings just a few short years prior (and this was back when people still had attention spans).
But maybe Gore still loses Florida under those circumstances… maybe he still loses Tennessee.Report
It wasn’t uncommon in 2000 to hear people say they’d vote for Clinton for a 3rd term if they could, which I think was a reflection of both how popular Clinton was and how unpopular his two potential successors were.
Hell, I think if he had been able to run in 2000, it might have been the first time he won a majority, and it may very well have been a Reagan-level landslide. For the last few years, the economy had been good, we hadn’t gotten into any real land wars, just bombing and No Fly Zones, and Clinton and tacked hard to the center after Republicans won Congress, so that even a sex scandal and impeachment couldn’t really touch him.
In hindsight, the groundwork for everything that came after was already there: The “War on Terror,” the bursting of the Dot Com bubble and the recession that followed (and the much bigger recession that would follow that), rising costs and inequality, resurgent far and religious rights, climate and energy battles, etc., etc., but if you were in the middle class and nearsighted, as we all are most of the time, things looked pretty damn good.Report
Obama 2016?Report
Obama was super popular among a certain type of liberal, but his approval ratings never rose far above 50% his entire second term, and were at times in the 30s. In fact, I think his approval ratings were in the mid-to-low 40s the entire lead up to the 2016 election. I’m sure a bunch of people wish they could have voted for him in 2016, and hell, maybe he’d have beaten Trump, but he was not popular, and I don’t remember many people saying they wish they could vote for him a 3rd time the way they did with Clinton in 2000.
I continue to believe Obama’s talent as a politician and his popularity among progressives convinced a lot of what is effectively the Dem base (white, educated, middle to upper middle class people) that everything was fine and dandy with the Democratic Party, even though he basically didn’t accomplish anything for the last 7 years of his presidency, and the Democratic Party as a whole was a rotten-to-the-core gerontocracy that no longer seemed to have any principles, messages, or really any ideas whatsoever, much less the hope that got Obama elected. This made both the rise of Bernie Sanders, someone who does have principles and a message (and remains one of, if not the most popular politician in the country as a result, even if centrists hate him for the same reason), and Donald Trump, a complete nihilist, possible.Report
The Republicans got busy in the state trenches during BHO’s 2 terms. I visited this site: https://www.ncsl.org/about-state-legislatures/state-partisan-composition to see what happened. There are reports going back to 2009 (very convenient!)
In 2009, Dems controlled the legislatures of 28 states. In 2025 Republicans control 28. In the U.S. House, Ds held 255 seats to Rs’ 179. Now we essentially have a tie. The D ground game totally went to shite in the intervening 15 years.
Obama didn’t get much done because he was stymied by an R minority in the Senate. If people are worried about what Congress is doing now, they’d really freak out if Rs ever got a filibuster proof majority in the Senate.Report
I just want to make it clear it’s _even worse than that_: The ACA existed solely because the insurance industry needed it. It wasn’t some last glorious grand thrust of ‘The last right things the Dems did’, it was ‘the system is so broken that even the people paying the lobbyists started worrying about things’.
It’s not just Obama, it’s all the way back to Clinton, too.
For the last 35 years, neither party has gotten elected by presenting useful political ideas to the American people. Neither of them. At all. This is because the Republicans do not have useful ideas (Well, they were no longer _allowed_ to have them or they would be primaried…before Trump. Now, the only ideas they are allowed to have is Trump stomping on a human face, forever.) and the decaying-and-molding Democrats will do everything in their power to stamp out the useful ideas that their individual members might come up with. 10% of Dems are allowed to have good ideas, sometimes even say them in front of cameras, but nothing can ever come from it, and it will never be used nationally.
Instead, every election, the most ‘charismatic’ person on the ballot got elected. There were only two exceptions…the first was Gore and Bust, one who presented as incredibly boring and the other who often couldn’t talk…and they, for all statistical purposes, _tied_. The other exception was when we got tired of the first term of Trump and elected Biden, but we weren’t electing him because of his policies either.
Thanks to the wealthy getting what they wanted from Reagan, and collecting enough money to purchase both the political system and the media, we sorta just…stopped doing politics ~35 years ago, if by politics we mean ‘actually electing people based on real things they promise and intend to at least attempt’. The system has been held in stasis, with Republicans unwilling to move, Democrats also unwilling to move but doing some performative struggling, and all of them just getting older because if you don’t allow new ideas into the system, you also end up not allowing new people.
Which is why what is happening right now is such a shock. It’s horrible and stupid, yes, but it’s also a shock because it turns out things actually can change.Report
I do hope that one of the lessons Democrats have learned from the last 5 or 6 weeks is that it’s actually possible to do things.Report
Hahahahahaha.
Right. Because performative reality TV substituting for actual politics is doing things.
HahahahahahaReport
Surprised to find you taking the Republican position that healthcare reform is bad, but *shrug*Report
It was a good thing. It was just a good thing that was pushed by an entire industry, the health insurance industry.
My point was that the only useful thing that the Democrats did was with full consent and at the _request_ of the industry they did it to. And any part of it that that industry would object to, like a public option, was off the table to start to start with.
—
I am, of course, exaggerating a bit by saying that it’s the _only_ thing Democrats have done. CFPB was a useful thing, and it really was done over the objection of the industry. There have been other smallish things like that.
But there have been massive problems that absolutely no one has tackled that would be incredibly popular, but there are large entrenched interests sitting opposed to.
And it’s easy to blame the Republicans for it, but the Republicans blocking the way cannot explain why they do not get out there and try, why Democrats do not come out with a comprehensive bill about, for example, stopping wage theft, and force the Republicans to stop it. Get on all the talk shows about this big problem, keep repeating it. Run against them next election on this failure to do it.
And the reason is: They do not actually want to do politics either.Report
“And any part of it that that industry would object to, like a public option, was off the table to start to start with.”
the public option was in the bill until they needed one more Democrat vote (Lieberman).
“But there have been massive problems that absolutely no one has tackled that would be incredibly popular, but there are large entrenched interests sitting opposed to.”
so healthcare reform was a massive problem that nobody had tackled that would be incredibly popular, but there were large entrenched interests sitting opposed to tackling it, and the Democrats under Obama finally got around to tackling it, and their method of tackling was to give the large entrenched interests a massive revenue guarantee, and you see that as a good thing? (Like, those were your words, “a good thing”, I didn’t make up that you said that.)
Or maybe I misunderstand who you think the “large entrenched interests” were in this case.
“[T]he Republicans blocking the way cannot explain why they do not get out there and try…”
Because they don’t think it’s a problem that doctoring costs what it costs.Report
I mean, as close as VP Gore vs Bush was in 2000 the idea that Incumbent Pres. Gore vs Bush would have had the same outcome strikes me as unlikely. Just the slightest nudge of incumbency advantage would have pushed Gore over the top.
Now whether Gore’s admin would have:
A- intercepted the Al’Queda hijackers or
B- not intervened in Afghanistan after 9/11 or
C- not intervened in Iraq or
D- headed off the subprime fiasco
Is a very difficult question. I’d say A: maybe they could have, B: probably not if 9/11 happened; C almost assuredly they wouldn’t have gone into Iraq; D- No they wouldn’t have Captain Foresight in their cabinet.
Gores VP was… (holy agnostic Jebus!), Liberman and Gore’d be term limited out in 2004 so… a Pres Liberman goes down to McCain after the Great Recession blooms in 2008? But no Iraq? And, good God(ess?) what the countries fisc would look like without the Bush tax cuts and Iraq war on the books?!?!Report
I’m pretty sure that if Gore had fewer than two years, he’d have been able to run again in 2004.Report
Fair point- then President McCain rolls in in 2008? I wonder if he gets an Obama sized trifecta in reverse? Probably too many butterfly wings at that point to even begin to guess but you can bet the Debt would be a lot fishing lower.Report
I’m not totally convinced Gore automatically inherits Clinton’s popularity. While I think Gore got an unfair wrap in a lot of ways I don’t think I’m being uncharitable to say he had voter connection issues. It’s an open question as to whether occupying the oval office fixes that or makes it worse.
Otherwise, excepting Kennedy whose circumstances of uh… leaving office were quite unusual, I believe you have to go back to the 19th century to find an example of 3 consecutive Democratic administrations. Maybe the dotcom boom and relative peace is enough to buck the trend. But that’s kind of my point. Him winning would have been against historical currents.Report
All I’m saying is that in 2000 the non-incumbent Gore got within a few hanging chads of winning Florida. It seems unlikely to me that an incumbent Gore would turn in a result that is the same or worse assuming economic conditions remained the same. Especially when we consider we’re talking about the turn of the century when all our assumptions about incumbency advantages were minted. I grant, readily, that Gore had connection and politician problems with the voters but let us not forget how gape jawed idiotic W was. An incumbent Gore would have gotten some “things are good- stay the course” low info votes. Maybe that’s not a lot of votes but, again, non-incumbent Gore tied W. Any little benefit flips it to Gore.Report
I don’t think it’s implausible or anything I just don’t think it’s a given. If it’s at all close it’s the same supreme court and same Nader factoring at the margins.
*I feel compelled to say to Chris I don’t really blame Nader. He is simply part of the field. It’s like blaming a missed field goal on the uprights not being a couple inches further apart.Report
The Dems held the presidency from 1933-1953. Granted it was 2 men.Report
Students and Faculty at Columbia have taken over a building and are chanting stuff like “Globalize the Intifada”.
My main question: Does Tenure cover this?Report
Would it then also cover this then?Report
Is writing something the same thing as taking over a building?
To the extent that it is, I’d say “yes, of course”.
If it’s different for any reason, we’d probably want to explore those reasons.
If those reasons exist at all, of course.Report
Ah, so it’s the building, not the call for a global intifada, that you’re objecting to?Report
People call for global intifada all the time. What can you do?Report
Tablet does not represent majority Jewish opinion on this matter and you know it but you are engaging in nut picking because it suits your political purposes. There is an official international organization of Muslim countries called the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Most of which have Sharia law applied in some way or not or actually enforced blasphemy laws:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_of_Sharia_by_country
https://end-blasphemy-laws.org/countries/
But the revolutionary left is seemingly fine with this. You can come up with lengthy tirades on why the concept of a Jewish state is utterly evil and how bad non-Jews have it under the Jewish state but you think that Jews should find it honkey dorey to live under an official Muslim state that is part of an officially Muslim world without even acknowledgement that we are a minority.Report
The reasons why the vast majority of Jews do not believe the Further Left when you claim to be merely anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic is because it is evidentially clear to us that the Further Left sees and speaks about Jews very differently than it does other groups. You like to plead to Jews for help because our experience of persecution but at the same time do not see us as a real oppressed group who preserved our culture and identity under great threat and peril compared to the other minority but as bougie white people doing bougie white people things. It is absolute demand for support on one hand and a complete denial of rights on the other hand. That which you grant other oppressed groups, you would deny to the Jews. You love Pan-Arab or Pan-Islamic or Pan-whatever solidarity but you see Pan-Jewish solidarity as dual loyalty and international conspiracy.
It is extremely self-evidnet that the Further Left believes three things about Jews that are utterly hypocritical:
1. Jews do not get self-determination as Jews because that is evil settler-colonialism.
2. At the same time. the host nations where Jews live are under no obligation whatsoever to include their Jews in the political nation or formulate their national identity to include the local Jews. They just have to give them the basic citizen rights package and may otherwise treat Jews to benign or malign neglect. If it is necessary in the name of the Revolution (TM) and anti-Colonialism, than they may even exile the Jews from the nation even if the community is thousands of years old.
3. Jews may not be treated as a real true minority or oppressed group that is why.
Why should Jews trust anything the Further Cosplay Revolutionary Left says anything out of it’s moth in regards to Jews?Report
I am pretty sure that running with the whole “bougie white people doing bougie white people things” does a better job of undercutting the whole “people have the right to preserve their culture/identity” than anything the left could do.
What culture are you preserving in San Francisco, exactly?
Is it bougie?Report
Just to clarify, that’s not Columbia, that’s Barnard.Report
It’s always dismally amazing how your faction comes to the most technical defenses of the excesses of your faction.Report
“Well, ACTUALLY…”Report
The Barnard faculty and students did a good job of misdirecting with the documents that they put out. (Linked in original comment.)Report
I love how everyone has decided that my technical clarification is me making a political point in opposition to whatever Jaybird’s assumed political point was. Instead of just the clarification I said it was.
The events described are happening at Barnard College, not Columbia College. If you are unsure of that fact, you can look at the image in the linked xit, where the demands are to speak to the President and Dean of Barnard, not Columbia. Or you can just look at news reports.
The two colleges have a fairly complicated relationship to each other that no one understands, not even the two colleges. But they are legally two different schools, and two different locations, and as we are talking about people taking over a building, I feel it is important to distinguish where that building is, at minimum.
That is the entirety of the statement I am saying. I have said nothing else, either explicitly or implicitly. Nothing in what I said should be constructed to mean anything besides ‘The events described are happening not at the location said, but this other location’.Report
So, please, let me rephrase:
Students and Faculty at Columbia have taken over a building at Barnard and are chanting stuff like “Globalize the Intifada”.
My main question: Does Tenure cover this?Report
Looks like no flu vaccine this year: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/us/politics/fda-flu-vaccine.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0E4.BCg6.NQ9_8QTh2mFd&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShareReport
Trusk announces freezes to all civilian government travel and purchase cards for 30 days, and orders the review all contracts to see if they should modified or terminated “to reduce overall Federal spending or reallocate spending to promote efficiency and advance the policies of my Administration”
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/implementing-the-presidents-department-of-government-efficiency-cost-efficiency-initiative/
They are intent on completely destroying everything built up over the decades no matter what the cost.Report
In today’s flagrant violation of the law, a fellow immigration lawyer reported about winning asylum for a detained man from Guatemala. Rather than release him from detention as required, ICE just put him on a plan to Mexico and the Mexican government sent him back to Guatemala despite him winning asylum from Guatemala due to fear from his life. The Trusk administration is basically completely lawless and out of control but too many people refuse to recognize this or believe that we can just wait it out to the 2026 mid-terms and 2028 Presidential elections like all his normal and the mean time get into fights about DEI’s place in liberalism rather than see the bigger picture of encroaching dictatorship.Report
What is going on in Guatamala that merits an asylum claim?Report
A lot. The person could be a Mayan Guatemalan and they are heavily persecuted including being used on forced labor in coffee plantations, political corruption, etc. You do not need to be at Stalin level badness to get asylum from a place.Report
Is this nutpicking (i.e. in a large bureaucracy it’s expected that there will be miscommunications and dropped balls when dealing with large numbers of events) or is it Trump’s minions saying FU to the judge?
If it’s “completely lawless” then we should find lots and lots of this sort of thing.
If it’s nutpicking (or if you prefer, “never event picking”) then this sort of thing has always happened, even under Biden, but we haven’t paid attention to it because it’s rare.Report
There have been several reported similar incidents across the United States, so it is Trump’s minions saying FU to the judge among other things.Report
So it’s happening at about the same rate as the cops killing unarmed civilians?Report
That’s a curious thing to compare it to, though I do suppose they both fall into the category of things that should never happen.Report
Or more specifically, “several reported incidents” sounds a lot more like “reporting never events” than “FU judge”.Report
Hopefully Lee will report how quickly the “error” is recognized and he’s transported back to the U.S.Report
Not that it will happen but to me it just illustrates the need to clarify what ‘asylum’ is. Mexico I’m pretty sure is party to all the same international agreements we are and nevertheless also sent the person back. Which isn’t to say Mexico sets the bar for what we do in the US. But I will say to me asylum really is (or should be) situations like Lee’s example of Stalinist purges, or the Holocaust, or some kind of clear, organized, most likely state sponsored campaign against specific people. Maybe the Rohingya in Myanmar or Taliban reprisals against US collaborators are examples. I’m not convinced ‘life is really bad in parts of Central America’ reaches that, even if it is indeed horrific for a lot of those who live there.
Big picture what I’m curious about is the limiting principle. I think it’s a fair thing to request in light of how many places and people there are whose circumstances fall well short of US norms.Report
When did your ancestors come here? Why did they come here? How easy was it for them to come here? Why should it be more difficult for others than it was for your ancestors?
“You shall neither mistreat a stranger nor oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.Report
Why should it be more difficult for others than it was for your ancestors?
My ancestors risked everything and faced opposition from natives and the descendants of people who immigrated prior to them. There was no handout for my ancestors and they faced discrimination.
“Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger, as for one of your own country: for I am the LORD your God. You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the LORD your God.”Report
I mean, I can tell you my mom got here in 1955.
But that’s really all besides the point isn’t it? Do you have an answer to my question?
I don’t mind answering your questions because I have the courage of my convictions. I doubt you will answer mine because you’re too cowardly to state yours, which is that there should be no limiting principle, and that anyone who can make it to US territory should be immediately granted citizenship, on arrival, if they want it.
Or tell me I’m wrong! It would at least be interesting and maybe facilitate an exchange of ideas! But again, I doubt you will.Report
No, it isn’t and shouldn’t be.Report
You’ll note that Saul did *NOT* answer InMD’s questions despite InMD answering Saul’s questions.
This is because Saul believes that InMD has obligations to him but that he has no such reciprocal obligations to InMD.
He operates as if there is one law for himself but different laws for others.
Just notice this. That’s all you need to do.Report
Irony is dead.Report
“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”
Jeremiah 6:14Report
I don’t want to be too mean about it and I understand the point to a degree. My other potato snorting ancestors made the sign of the cross before boarding rickety ships going out of some God forsaken port in a few different old countries and on arrival I doubt they got much more than a prodding by whatever passed for a doctor in the late 19th century. The policy of the United States at the time was to allow that. I’m pretty sure they then mostly got shipped off to start farms in places with low state capacity only to have their children conscripted to go back over the ocean and fight their long lost cousin Fritz.
It’s all fun trivia but ultimately they had lots of policies that did or didn’t make sense. None of it is persuasive one way or the other as to what policy should be a century later.Report
I understand the argument that some of my ancestors had to stand in line at Ellis Island and have to have their last name changed by a guy who couldn’t pronounce sounds that weren’t standard American phonemes and so, therefore, that’s the only thing that current immigrants should have to face.
Sure. I’m on board.
But the problem with the last few years (decades?) or so is that there are a significant number of Undocumented Visitors who got here, some of whom work under the table for pennies in slave labor conditions, others of whom receive gift cards and free rent, and anybody who has a problem with this is a hypocrite if their ancestors came in legally.
And, lemme tell ya, as someone with Native American ancestry, I sympathize with folks who say stuff like “maybe we should put *SOME* limits on immigration? Or, at least, *NOT* feed them at cost to ourselves?”Report
To me it’s an even bigger picture question than the situation as it stands now, after 40 odd years of the government kicking the can.
There are probably 300 million people in India who could plausibly claim some kind of asylum, based on the loosey goosey way we are ready to define it. There might be a similar number in China. And maybe that number again or more across the globe. In the age of the internet and (relatively) cheap air travel I am pretty sure a lot of them could get here, and they could do it quite rapidly.
Neither that situation, nor the situation in modern, post war prosperous America, is comparable to the one that prevailed during the big waves of European immigration from, say the 1840s to the 1920s.Report
Here’s the form: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-589.pdf
There are 6 criteria. I don’t know if filing the form gets you an automatic hearing, but I’ll bet Lee does.Report
All we know is what Lee told us. A U.S. judge applied current American asylum law and granted Lee’s client asylum.
If we want to discuss the law, that’s fine, but it’s not at all germane to the current deportee’s plight.Report
Gene Hackman is dead: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cewkkkvkzn9oReport
Along with his wife and his dog (?).
No foul play is suspected.Report
Maybe a Gas leak?Report
This is exactly replicating the convo I had with my wife this morning.Report
Look who is coming back to the United States:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/27/europe/andrew-tate-romania-us-intl-hnk/index.htmlReport
The scuttlebutt is he’s headed to FLL. Pix with DJT at Mar-a-Lago upcoming, no doubt. Game knows game!Report
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/02/27/white-house-canadian-border-trump-trudeau/
A top White House official has threatened to redraw the Canadian border amid Donald Trump’s ambition to turn the country in America’s “51st state”.
Peter Navarro, one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, is pushing US negotiators to discuss reworking the border with their Canadian counterparts, The Telegraph can reveal.
“Navarro recommended revising the Canada-US border, which is just crazy and dangerous,” a source close to negotiations told The Telegraph.
Canada has now instructed its delegates to withdraw from negotiations with the US until Jameson Greer and Howard Lutnick, two incoming members of Mr Trump’s cabinet, are confirmed by the senate. Mr Greer and Mr Lutnick are viewed by Ontario as being less extreme.
“The Canadians have told their people to hold off negotiating with the US Government until Jameson Greer and Howard Lutnick are confirmed by the Senate and in post,” the source said.
Proposals also put forward by Mr Navarro include expelling Canada from the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, the most important intelligence-sharing network in the world.
Mr Navarro, whose close relationship with Mr Trump has afforded him ease of access to the Oval Office, is “ruling the roost”, insiders say, with some staffers left feeling unable to challenge him.
“Peter Navarro is in post, and he is taking advantage of being there by himself with no one else in post to challenge his extreme positions. This will change as soon as the many other trade and economic positions are filled,” the source added.Report
Some day I hope to write as well as Thom Hartmann.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thomhartmann/p/small-government-big-chains-the-lie-6cf?r=v677&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=emailReport
Trump and Vance tried to berate Zelensky. He left without signing the minerals deal.
I’ve never never seen an administration act so shamelessly and horribly.Report
It’s because Trump is in fact a crappy negotiator and doer of deals.
Edit to add the expression on Rubio’s face in the pictures say it all. He may be insufferable but unlike Trump and Vance he isn’t an idiot.Report
To think Rubio gave up a safe Senate seat for this sh*tshow.Report
Prostitution has a cost for the prostitute too.Report
This looks bad, because it’s in front of the cameras, but I suspect this is the way he’s been talked to by the U.S., maybe without the Trump histrionics (e.g., the Hunter Biden references and “Don’t tell me how we’ll feel!”), since he came into power. And I don’t think he’s the only world leader who gets talked to like this by us.
This might be the only time I will ever link to a Larry Summers tweet positively, but this sounds about right:
https://x.com/LHSummers/status/1646967949297700872?lang=enReport
Yea I mean our credibility has been in steep decline at minimum since we invaded Iraq.
I’m skeptical China’s is really that much better given the strings that come attached with their deals and the way the investments tend to collapse or just not pan out well for the host country. And they don’t even have anything like the cultural appeal American culture at its best can.
But we’re absolutely putting ourselves in terrible company with this kind of crap. We don’t look tough, and as bad as looking like a hypocrite is it’s looking like f*cking idiots that’s the killer.Report
It’s a good line. The Nation used it and attributed it to an African diplomat but the further back I go, it’s attributed to Kenya.
This is the earliest I can find:
That, famously, had this particular follow up:
Report
That’s awesome.Report
The answer to the lecturer’s question is that Kenya has extensive undeveloped mineral wealth, including rare earths. When the time comes that Kenya needs assistance developing those, China will be able to ask, “Who has given you a helping hand before? Sure hasn’t been those *ssholes at Rio Tinto, has it?”Report
The best bet is to hope that enough time has passed to get Kenya to say “Ah, but what have you done for me *LATELY*?”Report
China’s belt and road program gives loans, not grants. And you need to use Chinese labor and sourcing for your whatever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative#Debt_sustainabilityReport
Hitherto, U.S. aid had come, more or less, without strings. I imagine people looked on that a little more favorably than a Chinese loan with lots of them.Report
Some of the projects China has “invested” look pretty corrupt and/or poorly thought out where the West has refused to get involved because of poor previous performance.
And one of the typical conditions of a Chinese loan is that it gets paid back first. So if a country has serious fiscal issues and it asks for aid from the West, the West will probably refuse because it’d just go to pay off China.
Ideally we’d have general debt forgiveness from all interested parties, but as far as I know China has thus far refused to join that table.
At best some of this was poorly thought out. More likely it was self serving and we’ll see loan sharks-ish behavior.Report
I’m not saying we should throw our lot in with China. Far from it. But tying aid to rapacious terms, as the Trump administration has done with Ukraine, is hardly a better alternative for the aid recipient.Report
Trump hates Zelensky for not going along with the Hunter Biden entrapment and getting him impeached.Report
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c625ex282zzt
Fishing Vance, talking about Ukraine’s manpower difficulties during a press event. Everyone knows the issues they’re having with troops, but, for God’s sake, you don’t air your dirty laundry like that. Putin has a great friend in the White House right now.Report
I can remember, many times in the past, especially under Bush Minor, prophesizing that the day would come when the neocons would be extinct and here we are with that having very functionally come to pass and turns out it was a finger on a monkeys paw.
Sweet agnostic Jesus what a sh*tshow!Report
Now the neocons at the Bulwark are some of the sharpest Trump critics out there. Much better than soi-distant lefties who write about Trump believing in a multi-polar world in right-wing troll newspapers like the L.A. Times.
But yes, be careful what you wish for.
This was a disgraceful day for the United StatesReport
Might be time to revisit whether Israel shares its Iron Dome tech with Ukraine.Report
“This isn’t the President Trump I voted for. This isn’t the President Trump in my headspace.” It is dismally amazing that so many people are capable of creating their own reality in their headspace.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/1j0w1mo/but_sir_i_was_just_an_innocent_bystander/#lightboxReport
No flu vaccine for the 2025/2026 season:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/us/politics/fda-flu-vaccine.html?smid=nytcore-android-share&fbclid=IwY2xjawIwOI9leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHZMppzd0diXyQjtLE1z7VymddRymHBEM-mY_5tXT2kgjPa4UxWmomHYwaA_aem_jBS1sqaEutFC5Vg1pp08ZAReport
That’s basically a rumor. We don’t know what’s going on.
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-02-28/health-experts-sound-alarm-as-fda-cancels-key-vaccine-meetingReport
It’s a rumor I am totally fine with spreading if it shames these stable geniuses into doing the right thing.Report
The problem with false accusations is it says more about you than about them. It also detracts from the actual problems this crew will create.Report
We can make educated guesses at what is going to happen based on the ideology of the Trusk people and their current actions. You might call it a rumor, I call it an educated guess.Report
A new flu formula might require approval. Presumably last year’s formula is still approved, and the manufacturers could run off a new batch. It probably wouldn’t be as good as the guesses about which variants are likely to be common in 2025-26, but it wouldn’t be without value entirely.
It would be interesting to see the some group of blue states “approve” a vaccine and see if the manufacturers are willing to take a chance.Report
The World Health Org (which includes the US) already approved this year’s flavor(s) at a meeting last week. Manufacturer(s) are already starting the process to make it.
The way to bet is whatever caused the cancellation of this week’s meeting is much stupider and mundane than suggested.Report
The WHO makes a recommendation, which the FDA sometimes changes. The WHO can’t approve drugs/vaccines for use in the US. All of the manufacturers must seek a supplement to their FDA license to cover each years combination of virus types. The descriptions of the process don’t consider the possibility that the FDA won’t approve a virus combination.
You’re probably right on the stupid and/or mundane, though.Report
I’m still wondering what the breaking point is that will cause the bigger and wealthier blue states to start taking on responsibilities previously done by the federal government.Report
Like wildfire mitigation?Report
If Maryland is an example the answer is never. Wes Moore and the legislature have somehow turner a huge budget surplus into a huge deficit over 2 years. We can’t afford to do the stuff the state government wants to do, much less pick up federal responsibilities.Report
Road maint. has decreased dramatically in the last 20 years too.
Baltimore city has problems with pot holes….like so deep the vehicle falls so far that the suspension hit’s the pavement. Something like 60% of all triple A calls in the city are flat fire related due to potholes.Report
Road maint problems vary wildly by state. NY has massive pot holes that can’t be fixed. Florida does not.
At a WAG I’d guess this is some flavor of corruption.Report
If MD is anything like IL, it’s due to a legislature that wants to have European style social services, with an American style of taxation. That is, a lot and a little.
Plus, IL has an overly generous public pension obligation that is nearly impossible to get rid of.Report
I’m not sure there’s any clear vision and while not NY or CA there’s no fear of imposing taxes. The dynamic I perceive is a combination of super majority coalition, uncompetitive politics where nobody is ever willing to say no to anything and economic growth is never a priority, or at least not one that’s going to come before a favored interest or constituency.Report
“I’m still wondering what the breaking point is that will cause the bigger and wealthier blue states to start taking on responsibilities previously done by the federal government.”
Multiple Supreme Court cases have firmly established that doing this is very nearly treason, and certainly not something that a sensible Federal government ought to permit.Report
You just need to figure out how to best package it. “Federalism!” or something like that might gain a foothold somewhere.
But they should make it explicit that only blue states can do it. Not red ones. Red ones will probably reinstitute segregation in schools or something like that.Report
In today’s stupid battle of the Culture War, the Lt. Governor of Texas rallies against the NY Strip Steak because it is wrong to name a cut of beef after liberal New York.
https://www.chron.com/food/article/dan-patrick-new-york-texas-20196231.phpReport
Going by shape alone, that is clearly a reference to manhattan island. Texas = tbone obviously.Report
Most of the original names used for cuts of steak in the US go back to NYC butchers and/or restaurants before 1850. Legend has it that the t-bone cut itself originated with the Medici family in Florence.
The best cheap t-bone I ever had was in a dive in Austin, TX while I was in grad school 1976-78. It was down close to the lake/river, somewhere west of Congress Ave, you had to pick your way around the winos to get in. The only thing they served was t-bone, baked potato, green beans, iced tea. You stood in a short buffet line to get your potato and beans, then paid, then told them whether you wanted rare, medium, or well-done. They would pull an appropriate steak off the grill. Seating was long rows of picnic tables. Undoubtedly one of those places that disappeared long ago.Report
He only makes $7,200/yr. as Lt. Governor, so at least the TX taxpayers aren’t getting ripped off for nonsense like this.Report
DHS seeks information from the IRS on the addresses of undocumented tax payers despite this being specifically against the USC.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/us/politics/irs-immigrants-addresses.htmlReport
Jewish law makers in California, basically Democrats to a person, are advancing legislation to combat the Pro-Palestinian teach-ins in California schools:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/03/02/california-lawmakers-seek-to-rein-in-ethnic-studies/?utm_email=E44C64529562B4517574F44E7F&lctg=E44C64529562B4517574F44E7F&active=no&utm_source=listrak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3a%2f%2fwww.mercurynews.com%2f2025%2f03%2f02%2fcalifornia-lawmakers-seek-to-rein-in-ethnic-studies%2f&utm_campaign=bang-multi_pubs-pm_report-nl&utm_content=curatedReport
What could possibly go wrong?Report