Ten Second News Links and Open Thread for the week of 11/28/2022
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 Ten Second News.
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 on the Sidebar 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.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/28/1138396067/transgender-youth-bills-trans-sportsReport
On a scale of -5 (most liberal) to +5 (most conservative), from what perspective do you think this article was written?Report
Zero to minus 1.Report
How do you feel about this section:
“Some of the new laws have been temporarily blocked by the courts. But legal challenges have done little to slow the pace of new proposals, according to Katie Eyer, a professor at Rutgers Law School. It’s an echo, she says, of the period after Brown v. Board of Education, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down segregation in schools, but many states kept trying to pass laws to obstruct the ruling.
“‘This phenomenon of states just…churning out legislation as it’s struck down is one that has a long history in civil rights,’ says Eyer. ‘And it can really stymie efforts for people to actually experience what the courts have said should be their constitutional rights.'”
There wasn’t a recent major decision by the Supreme Court that invalidated current law, resulting in states proposing laws that they know are unconstitutional, was there? I don’t know how many of the current batch have been struck down – information the article should have provided if they wanted to make the claim that the new laws are legislative whack-a-mole. Would you agree? It seems to me that new laws are being challenged, and I’m not even sure if any have been found unconstitutional yet, but that does happen when legislators start using new language.Report
They are being challenged, and none as of yet have been ruled on. Much like the Dobbs decision, however, many of these proposals are aimed squarely at getting to what these legislators believe is a sympathetic court.
Her characterization is drawing a historical contextual analogy however, which is appropriate in that this is a civil rights issue which appears to be following a similar playbook – albeit more open and more voluminous – to the battle for African American civil rights.
You see it as biased reporting I take it?Report
I’d put the article overall at -5. This particular excerpt was telling, as was your analysis of it. I think you’d agree that the analogy was one that would be accepted by about half the country and rejected by the other half, and that as an analogy it’s grounded in interpretation rather than fact.Report
so you see her interpreting the current slew of legislation on a civil right battle – legislation that exists and is thus “fact” – as somehow not analogous to the historical fact of the slew of legislation passed by many states during the civil rights era to blunt off the Supreme Court and Congress.
Fascinating. though unsurprising if you start your analysis from the place of civil rights for African Americans is not the same thing as civil rights for LGBTQ+ persons – many of whom are also people of color.Report
However fascinating you may find it, you’d agree that the country is split over the validity of this analogy, right? And that the article presents your side and not my side? If that didn’t leap out at you when you read the article, it’d indicate that you’ve only been receiving information from one side of the divide. So can I at least talk you into a -2?Report
No, you won’t get me to -2. Your side was presented – in as much as they cared to say anything:
As to the validity of the anaology – its only invalid IF you believe that LGBTQ+ persons don’t deserve civil rights protections. Which yes a vast swath of Americans do believe. But on the facts of how this is playing out, it matches the factual historical record. Which you appear hellbent on ignoring.Report
If you believe a trans female athlete gets no bonus from previously being male, then it’s purely the GOP stepping on trans rights.
If you believe a trans female athlete does get a bonus from previously being male, then the GOP is supporting women’s rights.
The last time we looked at this we found multiple female trans athletes who massively increased their relative performance. That’s not exactly evidence, but it’s suggestive.Report
And so the solution is outright bans? Good to know.Report
In theory we try to figure out if there is a bump, and if so why. However if we start with the conclusion that there’s not and proclaim that anyone saying/observing otherwise is an anti-trans scumbag then that’s hard.Report
tell that to all the legislators who have thrown these bans on the books with precisely zero data or discussion. Your preferred horse is long out of the barn and may well have jumped the pasture fence.Report
Zero data?
Out of the box, we assume the larger stronger person is larger and stronger and you have to do the heavy lifting to prove they’re not.
With our multiple examples of athletes seriously jumping ahead in their relative ranking in the sport, I think that will be hard. The efforts I’ve seen seen to claim that it doesn’t make a difference don’t even attempt to use relative rankings, probably because that gives an unacceptable answer.
I’m 6’8″ and played sports in high school where being larger is an advantage.
Make me female in HS and I’d be much bigger than the 2nd biggest female in the school and stupidly bigger than the average athlete.
For perspective, in 2016 (what I could find) the tallest girls on the US Olympic volleyball team were 6’4″.Report
Please remind me — do cisgendered women athletes generally mind competing against transgendered athletes? We oughtn’t expect unanimity, of course, but is there information indicative of majority and minority sentiments? This also isn’t exactly evidence, but would be useful information in considering the degree to which these women are being treated unfairly.Report
I can find the numbers from the national opinion polls but I can’t find the numbers from the athletes themselves. All the links coming up are from the people who demonstrate that there is not unanimity.Report
We know that that in virtually every sport, the average male can outperform the average female, and the top male can outperform the top female. Individual awards and scholarships are given out to athletes based on performance. So the only question with regard to performance is how unfairly the women are being treated, not whether they’re being treated unfairly. The question of locker rooms goes beyond that though.Report
So you’d agree the bathroom bills and their locker room counterparts are a bridge too far legislatively?Report
The opposite. It’s a higher order of unfairness.Report
Does this mean if some of the competing athletes themselves do not believe they are being treated unfairly AT ALL, then they are mistaken? Does this mean that their opinions are irrelevant or entitled to no more weight than yours or mine?Report
Wait, do you have the numbers? I’d be interested in seeing them.
If we’re pivoting to what some of the competing athletes themselves think, this will be much easier to google.Report
No, Jaybird, I don’t have the numbers on that. And that’s really the point I wanted to make here. This is data that’s woefully — and shamefully — absent from this discussion.
Respectfully to Pinky, I do not think this is like a spousal abuse situation where there has been grooming and gaslighting and other psychological conditioning to blind the victim to an unfair situation — I think a lot of these student-athletes are powerfully driven by a battery of competitive pressures and their coaches and parents and teammates will be quick to point out things that they dislike, things that break the rules, things that seem to give them a disadvantage.
I do have another number, though: thirty-two. That appears to be the total number of trans athletes playing in all intermural sports in the NCAA. Of those thirty-two (32) athletes, exactly one (1) has achieved a consistently high degree of success, namely Penn’s Lia Thomas, a swimmer. Such is the scale of this issue.
As I suggested above, were we to gather quantitative data about the competitors’ spectrum of opinions, that would not end the discussion. Pinky may have a point, albeit one that I think is a bit forced, that perhaps student-athletes would be under various kinds of pressures to give answers they thought would please people rather than expressing their opinions honestly, if there were a difference. Also perhaps we should expect that students, who are drawn from larger society, will have a spectrum of opinions representative of their age group and educational levels of that larger society, a society which I’ve noticed is still not particularly comfortable with the questions raised by the emergence of openly trans people. And no, students aren’t the only people with stakes here because the model of athletics will be looked to for other kinds of issues in other forae later. No, the as-yet-unmeasured opinions of college athletes on this issue isn’t dispositive.
But their opinions do hold special significance because they are the ones being identified as “victims” by those seeking to exclude trans athletes from competing in the ranks where they feel like they belong. If they don’t feel like victims (at least for the most part), that seems highly relevant.
So far as I can tell, no one who’s been active in expressing opinions and advocating policies or laws on this issue, on either side, seems to have bothered to ask the people who allegedly are getting the short end of the stick here. Anecdotes and testimonials are not data. There doesn’t seem to be any data. That bothers me.Report
Generally when a conversation involves rights, we don’t take “probably not that often” for an answer. I’d have to assume that the number of young people identifying as trans is increasing, and I’d be surprised if 32 stands as the all-time high.
But also, I can’t even imagine what the data you want would look like, where it would come from, what kind of units it’d be measured in. If we can’t act without the data, I need at least some idea of what you’d accept.Report
I’m looking for a survey of student athletes, particularly of women student athletes.
I agree with you that questions about rights ought not be driven strictly by the number of people involved. The fourth paragraph of my comment above is me elaborately agreeing with that proposition.
We do, however, measure political activity based on the number of people that it affects. There seem to be a lot more people politicking about this issue than there are people who are personally affected by it.Report
This is where the “nobody wants these laws” narrative bumps into the “politicians going after low-hanging fruit” narrative.Report
If nothing else, the actual data studied so far suggests that the effects of gonadal testosterone exposure during adolescence take quite a while to fade, although there’s always the question of “how does that translate to athletic performance” (which at competitive levels is as much about technique and training as it is about basic characteristics)Report
Maybe if we made them wear really thick glasses that weren’t their prescription, or chopped off a toe or something. Maybe the big toe for the men, and the pinky toe for the stronger or taller women. Anything to maintain the spirit of sport.Report
This is data that’s woefully — and shamefully — absent from this discussion.
I was able to find polling for the general population. I can understand why we might not want to use that, though. This primarily impacts the athletes, maybe their opinion should be primary and the opinion of the hoi polloi should be secondary (if addressed at all).
If they don’t feel like victims (at least for the most part), that seems highly relevant.
If they do, does the relevance change at all? Because if that’s an opportunity to talk about how they should feel differently, I’m going to guess that that’s going to go about as well as the last million times we told chicks that they should feel differently about stuff.
“That doesn’t matter. We’re right and they should be more logical.”
“THAT’S WHAT I TOLD THEM BURT! THAT’S WHAT I TOLD THEM!!!”Report
No, of course not. Indeed, if a large majority of these athletes feel like they are being treated unfairly, that ought to give people pushing for inclusion of trans athletes pause to reconsider what they’re asking for and why they’re asking for it.
There’s a lot of speechmaking and not a lot of listening going on with this issue. (And yes, I realize, it’s not just with this issue. Just seems particularly poignant here.)Report
Well, I’d be very interested in what the numbers look like.
And whether the numbers are different if the votes have names attached versus if the votes are anonymous.Report
For perspective, there are… 170k athletes (I think). One person out of 32 being successful is unusual, we’d expect zero if we’d picked randomly.
Especially since when she was a man, she wasn’t successful. As a man she was 554th place, as a woman she was 5th in the 200 freestyle. Similarly she went from 65th place to 1st in the 500.Report
That’s an interesting question. The first analogy that comes to mind is spousal abuse. A woman might be afraid to recognize it for what it is, or even have convinced herself that it’s not unfair. I don’t know if it’s possible to prosecute without the wife’s testimony. But spousal abuse isn’t fair.Report
Speaking as a large athletic guy who was on High School teams and had a number of large girls who have done the same: I have always thought that an extra strong kid on the team is a good thing for the team and me/my kid.
However my experience is a stupidly high percentage of parents think their kid can reasonably get an athletic scholarship. People I respect for their sanity thought that for their 3rd fastest girl on the not-strong swim team.(*)
My expectation is this issue is a lightning rod of emotional reasoning just for that reason. Some people are going to care a lot. It’s especially going to be a thing for the girl one step short of getting a serious scholarship… but lots of parents think that’s their kid.
As for what the general masses of girls think, I have no idea.
But it does stand out that when we were going over this, we couldn’t find any female to male athletes that got serious bumps to their relative positions.
(*) On a side note imho some of my girls had the bodies for getting those scholarships but there’s no way we’d allow the time/money/focus that is also required.Report
I agree, that is pretty relevant. We can surely stipulate that biologically male bodies have the potential to be stronger and faster than biologically female bodies, at least with the caveat that as to the general population, we’re talking about overlapping bell curves. Hopefully we can also agree that’s a potential. Part of athletics is how a given athlete develops that physical potential. As you point out, reaching the highest levels requires extraordinary effort, time, money, and focus (and even then it doesn’t always yield the degree of success that was hoped for).
If more data were to accumulate about what happens during and after hormone therapy given during puberty, it’s plausible that we’d find that in a few cases it might help a trans male become a young adult with a high degree of athletic prowess, competitive with cis males in his age cohort. But the universe of people who are both trans males and whose focus, effort, and resources for athletics would enable a reach for that elite level of achievement, particularly when combined with other stresses and foci, like dealing with being trans in the first place, may function to create another barrier to that level of success. Hard to say, particularly when we haven’t yet resolved the issue of whether administering such drugs constitutes misguided-at-best child abuse or controversial-but-beneficial therapy.Report
(If I were to look for top males being beaten out by top female-to-male athletes, I’d start with rock climbing. There might be some gorilla index issues where genetic males might have a leg up, but gorilla index issues aside, that’s the sport that I’d look at first.)Report
Seems plausible. Something that put a high premium on endurance and agility as opposed to strength and speed. Athleticism comes in a lot of forms. Not mine, sadly.Report
In extreme long distance running 100+ up to 200 miles there have been women who beat all the males. Small pool and limited sample but it appears that at those distances women can be directly comparable. Those races are mostly endurance and mental.Report
Not sure how well threading works in these long threads so i’m sort of repeating what i said to Burt. In extreme long distance running 100+ miles some women can beat all the guys. There does seem to be something to women in that weird niche being competitive with men. There are plausible theories about why this is but no answer.
Rock climbing require a lot of upper body strength which puts women at a disadvantage in general.Report
Well, now we just need a large enough pool of people to measure.Report
With the underlying issue being size and strength, we’re probably limited to sports that doesn’t use those. For perspective, female gymnasts aren’t as good as males.
So… precision shooting? Do we have a distance endurance sport that is well beyond Boston Marathon? Maybe rock climbing?Report
Hey, not knowing what women think is kind of my thing. But I’m pretty sure that in any other context we wouldn’t be saying “maybe they won’t mind if men take away what women have earned”.Report
“Do cisgendered women athletes generally mind competing against transgendered athletes?”
Here’s an example of their thoughts. Caster Semenya is intersex, not trans, but this was the best example involving actual named persons I could find on short notice; and it does address the question of “should persons with testes-like gonadal hormone profiles be allowed to compete in groups where it’s assumed that athletes have ovary-like gonadal hormone profiles?”
From reading other articles the general attitude seems to be “if I have an espresso the morning before a race they won’t let me run, meanwhile here’s someone who’s basically been on testosterone supplements for most of her life including today and somehow that’s okay?”Report
If I counted correctly, the article has 47 paragraphs. You quoted from the first mention of a conservative position, paragraph 24. There are 9 paragraphs that contain some depiction of the conservative position. I’m including paragraph 35, which mentions a group then denounces it as a hate group, so no, those 9 paragraphs aren’t right-wing propaganda.
PS – We’ve discussed the issue before, so I’d rather not go in-depth on it. That’s why I’m not trying to address the analogy, only pointing out the function it performs in the article.Report
Xi for a variety of reasons is a combination of unwilling and unable to ease off of COVID zero policies: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-25/china-iphone-factory-tensions-flamed-by-xi-jinping-s-covid-zero-policy?leadSource=uverify%20wallReport
This is, at it’s heart, what happens when you build your entire political ethos on never being wrong.Report
Are there politicians and political parties anywhere that are in the habit of admitting they were wrong?Report
Twitter staff cuts enabled spam porn deluge that drowned out China protest news
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/china-bots-flood-twitter-with-porn-spam-to-drown-protest-news/
Apparently news and updates of pro-democracy, anti-COVID lockdown protests in China were drowned out in a sea of pornography and escort service ads with names of cities where protests were occurring were mixed in, to prevent protestors from using Twitter to reach out and attract sympathetic people to join them protesting the government. Lots of these seemed to come from long-dormant accounts.
Query if a) pre-Musk Twitter could have stopped this any better than today’s Muskified Twitter; and, b) whether this was simply a round of Social Media Abuse Whack-a-Mole in which government-sponsored tech trolls were able to get the upper hand on The Ostensibly Good Guys. Many of y’all are tech people yourselves, so I suspect you may have some insights on this that are beyond me.Report
Before addressing whether pre-Musk Twitter could have addressed this, I’d need to know more about how Chinese twitter moderation worked.
If, before, the pro-democracy, anti-Covid lockdown protest tweets would have been deleted outright, then this is (marginally) less bad.
How did Chinese moderation work when Jack was in charge?Report
Musk could use his immense platform to amplify the Chinese protesters or speak up for them. He is a big freedom guy i’ve heard. Today he has tweeted about crap on his nightstand and a couple straight up neo nazi symbols.Report
Here’s what’s going on with Apple.
I suspect that there are a lot of shenanigans when it comes to how tech and China interact. Doing a deep dive on it would probably result in people demonstrating a lot of Sinophobia, though.
Report
I think what we’re seeing here is the ultimate repudiation of Clinton’s insistence that money would make the world progressive. That’s how he sold populist Democrats on the notion of NAFTA and trade-liberalization, on giving China MFN status, on the idea that “everything’s cheap and we’re all on welfare” was preferable to “everything’s expensive but everybody’s employed”.
As it turned out, China managed to keep its own identity, aided by the Asian racist xenophobia that nobody much wants to talk about since it’s not white people being racist, and now they have our money, and our factories, and us by the nuts. (They’ve also got our dirt and pollution, but they don’t care about that as much as we do because they lack the Puritan-theological reverence for healthy bodies and clean worlds. I mean, they’d be happier if it wasn’t so smoky all the time, but they don’t see emitting pollution as a sin against god.)
And now Apple hasn’t really got a choice. If they say “screw you, Pooh, we’re gonna keep AirPlay open”, suddenly FoxConn is out of business but there’s a new retailer selling iPhoones for a hundred bucks each.Report
Does apple bend the knee to china? I would guess they do. Which would make more sense for a The One True Free Speech Defender to speak out about that. But he isn’t. Musk’s knee seems just as bent cause he doesnt’ seem to be using his megaphone to support Chinese in the streets.
Pointing apple sucks in response to Musk doing nothing isn’t defending musk.Report
I’m not defending Musk.
I’m pointing out that I suspect that there are a lot of shenanigans when it comes to how tech and China interact.
If the question is whether companies should stand up to China, we seem to have the belief that it’s perfectly understandable that they don’t. Hey. China has a lot of money.
The question seems to be whether the guy who says he believes in free speech should do more to censor bots who are bigfooting the Chinese protests and, no, we don’t know what moderation in China looked like before he showed up a couple of months ago.Report
Leaving aside moderation Musk could be using his voice and twitter to build up the protesters. Is he? No. Why? He’s prattling about fighting for civilization yet appears silent on an actual authoritarian gov he is in bed with.
I expect most of tech is bad on china. Musk being just as bad is enough to call BS on his self righteousness and claims of being a freedom fighter.Report
Well, Burt’s original comment was about moderation.
But, sure. This appears to be an issue of meta-ethics.
Have *YOU* built up the protesters to the degree that you’d like Elon to emulate? Neither have I.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that either of us is particularly *BAD* for doing this. We don’t think it’s bad of Tim Cook to not have done this either.
We think that Elon, however, is bad. Not because he’s different than Tim Cook but because he’s *NO* different from Tim Cook.
The problem seems to be that Elon is getting *CLOUT* for his stance on “free speech” or whatever it is he’s doing this week and we think that it’s not fair that he’s getting clout. So he needs to be taken down a peg from how high he’s climbed from his ill-begotten clout.
The Chinese? Who gives a crap? Not us.
We just showed up and asked why Elon hasn’t done anything with the moderation over in China and then quickly changed the subject to “leaving aside moderation”.
Are there any other things we should be asking Elon to talk about?
Marijuana legalization, maybe?Report
That is a lot of meta stuff i’m not thinking about nor do i think is relevant. It’s about musk not being who sells himself as. He is using the “free speech warrior” mode to sell himself when he is nothing of the sort.
Space X is right there to do good stuff with but rockets/space are hard and dont’ give that endorphin rush.Report
It’s about musk not being who sells himself as.
See? It’s not about the Chinese at all.
The Chinese are just being used as a tool.
What is he doing for Ukraine? Oh, Starlink? Well. What has he done for *CHINA*?!?!? WHY ISN’T HE DOING MORE?!?!?
Bezos? Who gives a crap.
Periodically I link to the The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. Let’s link to it again.Report
Ugh. What does any of these mean? Clear statements about musk and now we’re in Copenhagen talking ethics. It’s like saying I like burgers then getting a speech about animal rights and the nature of sentience.Report
What’s weird is that we started with clear statements about what Musk needs to say to support Chinese dissidents.
And it quickly came out that “It’s about musk not being who sells himself as.”
So now we’re talking *NOT* about what ought to be done in the situation, but about Elon Musk, personally, not aligning with what we think ought to be in alignment due to his opinions on other stuff.
Again: It’s not about China. It’s about Musk not being who he sells himself as.
And, personally, I find that less interesting than, say, China.
Which, I’ll point out, neither you nor I care about enough to talk about.Report
I’ve got to ask. Are you counting the “3 unread messages” tweet as neo-nz? And what was the other?Report
Musk tweeted and retweeted about “14” and “88” both numbers have been used by nazi’s as under the radar signifies. Tried to find them briefly but couldn’t. To much out there to weed through. No it wasn’t the pigeon tweet.Report
I’m going to need more than that.Report
Elon Musk is finally up against people powerful enough to say no thank you to him and he hates it. Apple was the largest advertiser on twitter or one of the largest ones. He hates that they can look at his antics and state “no thank you” Musk would rather everyone just be a sychophantic cryptobro who makes absurd statues in his honor.Report
“Query if a) pre-Musk Twitter could have stopped this any better than today’s Muskified Twitter”
welp
you posted the headline, so, I guess we know how you’d answerReport
I do not know the answer. I wondered if someone here would. Thanks for your help.Report
Musk bought twitter for ideological reasons and he has clearly made a hard right turn and is trying to turn Twitter into 8chan meets Truth Social in order to own the libs. I don’t know how else to analyze the situation. He hates that there are companies powerful enough to tell him that his antics are not appreciated and that they do not want to associate with him.
There is always someone in a high school year book (usually a dude) that likes to use “it is better to be feared and respected rather than loved and disregarded” as his quote. Many grow out of it. Some do not. Everyone forgets that Machiavelli also cautioned against being hated after this famous quote. Musk is one of those guys who did not grow out of it. The dirty secret for these guys is that they really do want to be loved but do not know how to get it through normal means so they use fear to inspire love, or try to.Report
Well. THIS is interesting to see:
Ye says ‘I see good things about Hitler’ on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140218872/ye-antisemitism-alex-jones-podcast?sc=18&f=1001
But I thought Elon was going to bring in a new era of free speech on Twitter! (Spoiler: there is no freedom of speech implicated here because speech on Twitter is not “free” because neither Twitter not Musk are the government but we’ve been over this endlessly already.)
Sarcasm aside, what I really see here is Musk starting to work through the same kinds of issues Twitter’s previous owners and executives did, which were the same kinds of issues Facebook did and America Online before them and in fact every administrator of every open electronic forum (including here, as I have previously written to much wailing and gnashing of teeth in response) has since the late 80’s: it might not be you saying it, but it is you giving it your forum and your name gets attached to it, so at some point you need to become a censor.
Here’s an indication that Musk has begun to realize this, and I am glad of it for him and his company and its users.Report
I’m not paying attention to Trump stories, but it’s pretty interesting to see Milo, Jones, Trump, Kanye, and Fuentes alternatingly playing rats and the sinking ship.Report
LOLReport
Okay, so… like the DOE’s deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition is accused of taking a suitcase from an airport.
Exchange Monitor seems to be one of those little niche websites that devotes itself to a really weird niche topic: Radioactive Waste. Hey. I get it.
Well, they are reporting that the DOE spent fuel chief Sam Brinton has been charged with felony theft in Minnesota.
Is that sort of thing something that gets a clearance yanked?Report
Yes it generally would – and you will note the DAS is apparently effectively suspended from work.Report
Qatar has officially acknowledged more deaths in the construction of the stadium than before:
When I originally heard the rumors, the rumors were somewhere around 2000 and Qatar’s official denials were something to the effect of “while it’s true that there have been workman deaths, these workmen tragically died on worksites that were *NOT* the stadium.”Report
Carpet baggers gonna carpet bag:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/29/politics/georgia-senate-herschel-walker-texas-kfile/index.htmlReport
Carpet baggers gonna carpet bag, and reporters gonna sit on stories until a week before a runoff.Report
Hardly:
https://www.13wmaz.com/article/news/local/can-herschel-walker-run-for-georgia-office-while-living-somewhere-else/93-089eec5d-85ff-4f73-9755-2ac0a2efcbfe
And that’s just one of dozens of stories run at the time he declared. That he hasn’t changed anything since then is an issue.Report
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution ran a story yesterday about it, then CNN followed up on it, and you posted it. Why do you think those things happened the week before the runoff, if it wasn’t emerging news?Report
because the AJC like all good news outlets, was trying to generate traffic. Like I said, if you google it, you will find its been well covered for some time, including by Texas outlets.Report
And why did CNN put it out? And why did you post it here? Traffic?Report
We don’t have a thread on the Walker-Warnock runoff for me to post it in. He’s also an abysmal candidate emblematic of the GOP’s decline in willingness to engage honestly in policy debates, which they hope they can paper over with celebrity candidates. But I would think the GOP – who have spent most of my life positioning their party as the law and order party – could, ya know, find candidates who aren’t flouting if outright breaking the law.Report
Don’t fall for Pinky’s dodge. Mr “I don’t have a dog in these fights, I just call balls and strikes” is doing overtime in demonstrating his ideological bias.Report
Oh I know he is. So does anyone reading this. Just like Jaybird is “only asking questions” because he thinks he’s an epic level troll.Report
Eh, my questions are mostly either trying to get me to information that I didn’t have or information that I suspect that you (the generic “you”) are deliberately ignoring.
I’m not a “I don’t have a dog in these fights” as much as “there are a lot of dogs we seem to be ignoring.”
And when the bodies of various dogs get pointed out, this gets called “trolling”, for some reason.Report
I don’t always just call balls and strikes. Sometimes I make an ideological point, sometimes a non-ideological. In this case, I was mocking Philip/CNN for what looked like a political ploy, and I’d probably be more likely to mock it when done by the left, but we don’t have many cut-and-pasters on the right on OT. It’s important to be able to separate analysis from advocacy though.
As for a dog in this fight, I haven’t followed the particular race, and while I’d like to see the Republicans have the Senate, that’s not up for grabs, but Walker looks like a terrible candidate, and I hate to see terrible candidates win elections. But the results of this race (likely a D win) won’t affect me at all.Report
Also, I probably wouldn’t have commented on this but the site’s been boring lately. I managed to stir up a hornet’s nest by replying to Philip’s NPR story, but otherwise it’s Clare Briggs, murder robots, and that jerk in Mar-A-Lago. Some weeks you just tread water.Report
Blake Masters given sinecure to determine what went wrong for the Republicans in 2022: https://twitter.com/metzgov/status/1597574237296132097?s=20&t=Kk_LlJfbi5TO5u9aO9ntJgReport
I’ll save them the trouble:
-Bad Candidates
-Running with no plan to address issues
-Fronted by an open authoritarian who dines with anti-Semites.
That about covers it.Report
Sometimes government actually works for the people:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/29/politics/same-sex-marriage-vote-senate/index.htmlReport
This kind of thing is really the best way to approach a an apprently stare decisis hostile Supremr Court, especially for rights that are popular. Find the highest possible basement with the broadest appeal and pass it. Good on all of the Senators who voted for it.Report
It also shows that democrats and lead on bipartisan issues if they choose. And that Republicans can follow with little determent – provided the election is over.Report
I think that’s right, and it’s good for the Democratic brand. And I mean, how embarrassing for the 36 Republican Senators who voted against it. There’s no way to defend it without looking like a pedant, an asshole, or a pedantic asshole.Report
Except to your base who seem to revile in this sort of stuff. My senators probably get a boost from opposing this sort of thing, even though its a decent percentage of marriages here.Report
Mitch McConnell, who is in a mixed-race marriage, voted against the bill to safeguard mixed-race marriages.Report
The law protects but does not bind him remember. Or so he thinks.Report
CNN is announcing more layoffs.Report
Christie McVie of Fleetwood Mac fame is dead at 79: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/arts/music/christine-mcvie-dead.htmlReport
Ouch. This one hits hard.Report
RIP, Songbird. You are missed already.Report
We need some lighter fare.
Deshone Kizer: Aaron Rodgers asked me if I believe in 9/11
https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2022/11/29/deshone-kizer-aaron-rodgers-asked-me-if-i-believe-in-9-11/Report
Methinks Rodgers was just effing with Kizer, but who can even say with that guy anymore?
Jordan Love looked sharp in his series against the Eagles, so maybe this season will be a good time for the Packers to start seasoning Rodgers’ eventual-but-likely-also-imminent successor.Report
Either way it’s hilarious.
It does seem like he is nearing his end and I’ll be interested in how his legacy plays out. Up until 2 years ago I figured it would be something like ‘great player’s career wasted by franchise inexplicably continuing to employ Mike McCarthy.’ Now one has to wonder if there wasn’t a lot more going on behind the scenes, even if this one is a joke.Report
A QB is as good as the people he’s throwing to. Davante Adams’ departure left Rodgers with no one on the other end. I do believe he’s guaranteed another $50 million next year, which means the Packers won’t be able to spend on anyone beyond him.Report
That’s the situation this year but my criticism is really of the Packers organization. For having a talent like Rodgers 1 SB and 5 NFC championship appearances over a 14 year career as a starter is underachieving.Report
Rodgers seems like the perfect example of an athlete whom we projected so much on to because we wanted a certain mythos. He had a beard and played in Green Bay and excelled in the cold weather and we just sort of bought into the notion that he was this salt-of-the-Earth lumberjack type.
Turns out he was a California whackadoo all along. They have footage of him back in high school where you could see he was a weirdo a-hole type.
There were small signs along the way but eventually the cover blew and now there is no denying what a jackhole he is.Report
Oath Keepers: Two members of far-right militia guilty of US sedition
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63802649?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA
These would be the guys organizing the riot at Capital Hill designed to overthrow the election.Report
SOME of the guys doing it. Considering there is video showing them meeting with Roger Stone, I think the conspiracy runs deeper.Report
I would hope we see some trading up/deal making. With convictions that just got easier.
I also expect for some of them it’s less “conspiracy” than it is like minded individuals doing the same thing. We have various illegal acts that were organized and others that were not.Report
Stone is probably not capable of cutting deals – his ego is too big. Mark Meadows has been forced to cooperate in Georgia, which I would think would allow the DoJ to squeeze him a bit on the federal side. There’s still a Proud Boys trial on this to come – we will see what it reveals.
And yes, its probably a combination of aligned acting and actual conspiracy.Report
CNN layoffs continue at Headline News and CNN.
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In news no one but me could use:
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2022/10/model-railroading-gains-steam/Report
TIL, the Saturday Evening Post is still a thingReport
Three very conservative judges from the 11th Circuit destroy Judge Aileen Cannon’s views on the Trump warrants and are taking no chances: “The district court improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction in this case. For that, reason, we VACATE the September 5 order on appeal and REMAND with instructions for the district court to DISMISS the underlying civil action.””
There is no doubt that Trump will ask for an en banc hearing and then the Supreme Court and probably lose. The real question is how badly can Judge Cannon delay or distort a very explicit order.Report
They didn’t remand – they vacated, so its out of her hands.Report
Something tells me this won’t end well for Florida’s economy or its current Governor:
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southeast/2022/11/30/696959.htmReport
U.S. Air Marshals Planning Rebellion After Biden Orders Them To Southern Border: Report
U.S. air marshals reportedly plan to “mutiny” against an order from the White House to leave their posts aboard commercial flights and take up posts at the U.S. southern border.
Dozens of marshals have promised to disobey the order in protest, Air Marshal National Council President David Londo told The Washington Examiner. President Joe Biden has ordered U.S. air marshals to the southern border to make up for a lack of Border Patrol agents, a move expected to leave the marshals at one-eighth their normal coverage of U.S. flights.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/u-s-air-marshals-planning-rebellion-after-biden-orders-them-to-southern-border-reportReport
I wish them good luck. Federal Law enforcement personnel don’t generally get to ignore Presidential directives.
That aside, the story lacks context as to why the BP is allegedly understaffed. If it had that context, it would note that CBP has been understaffed – by its own estimates – since 2018 and that Congress – which controls the federal purse – has yet to increase funding to fill staffing gaps during that same period.
So once again a President is using the resources and authorizations he has to meet needs he is confronted with from within his Constitutional authority to take care that the laws are faithfully executed.Report
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The NYT and CNN are basically great international news staffs funded by selling mundane domestic liberal talking points. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is. The collapse of that model is going to hurt.Report
Craigslist, man.Report
It’s a contract dispute.Report
Friday night news dump… twitter is telling the story behind the story of the Hunter Biden Laptop suppression story.
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We have the government regulate Twitter.Report
I got a pretty breathless notice this was coming from Taibbi’s substack yesterday evening. I actually think in light of intervening events, Musk’s purchase, etc. it weighs much harder against regulation. Previous management has been outed, as many suspected, as MSNBC, and that’s ok. Now maybe they will be something else under Musk’s leadership and that’s ok too. In the realm of speech and private actors Twitter is regressing to the mean, i.e. system working as intended. If anything its power as a medium appears to be in a relative decline, and there’s no need for the government to prop it up as some kind of neutral arbiter of information. It will never be up to that task anyway.Report
I was being sarcastic. If we’re okay with Musk et al. being in charge of content moderation as he sees fit (and Trump et al. being in charge of content moderation for Truth Social) then we can’t really complain about the previous Twitter people being in charge of content moderation.
Either we think these private companies should be able to moderate content however they see fit or we don’t.Report
IMO to the extent there’s a question it’s more about monopoly than speech. As recently as a year ago I had a lot of bad feelings about these entities monopolizing online communications, especially to the extent they were going to do special favors for politicians or government agencies. Now I think there are real questions about whether any of the big social media companies will even exist in 10 years. If they aren’t there will still be questions, but I don’t think content moderation will be nearly as relevant to them.Report
I’m not sure how you even address monopolies in these industries. Limit how many subscribers they can have? You can’t “break up” Twitter like they did the phone companies.
Regulation would be a step but I think that is worse than the downsides of a company having a de facto monopoly.Report
I think you could totally break them up and require some basic interoperability. But now that it looks a lot more like they could all fail on their own or lose major market share to upstarts due to branding I’m not sure it’s necessary.Report
How would that work in practice? How do you stop any particular one from just becoming dominant and a new monopoly?Report
Back in the 90’s when there was discussion of breaking up Microsoft, one of the big articles out there compared breaking it up to cutting a layer cake.
You can split it into three companies by making cuts into the top of the cake to the bottom… ending up with three pieces of cake like that.
*OR* you can cut horizontally. The top layer (“Internet Explorer!”) becomes its own company, the middle layer (“Microsoft Office Products!”) becomes its own company, and the bottom layer (“Microsoft OS!”) becomes its own company.
They talked about the pros and cons to each.
Instead, Microsoft started lobbying.Report
Here’s a totally random article (no idea about the source credibility so read with grain of salt) with similar ideas and proposals for where the natural fault lines might be for today’s big players.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/business/heres-how-the-big-tech-breakup-should-go-down/amp/Report
Anti–trust is a never ending game. It’s certainly possible that in the long term you’d end up having to break up one or more successor organizations. But to Jaybird’s points there are lots of theories of how you could do it, and pros and cons to each. I hate ever saying ‘google it’ but plenty of articles and academic papers with different ideas come up if you do.Report
MSNBC was managing Twitter?Report
You know a story is going to be really super duper strong when they dump it on a Friday night. That is when all the really giant stories get spilled. Not like on monday morning so the news has all week to go over it. Clearly not 99% bs and silliness.
Noted that Tiabbi even admitted the tfg campaign also had a channel to request stuff being taken down from twitter. The twitter files said that the prez at the time could ask for twitter to take stuff down but the story is what the D’s did which was mostly trying to get revenge porn and hunter doing drugs taken down.
Why are 1st Am activists barely better then PETA?!Report
Yeah, it doesn’t have any mention on CBS, NBC, or ABC’s websites.
A nothingburger, as they say.
(I do think that the difference between “everybody suspects” and “it’s been confirmed” is not nothing.)
Another, adjacent, story that I am surprised didn’t cause more a flap is the one about New Zealand.
This sentence appears in the FOIA response:
“Yes, the Department of Internal Affairs has access to Facebook’s takedown portal. Please
note, we cannot advise if any other government agency has access to the takedown portal.”
Huh. Facebook has a takedown portal and New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs has access to it.
My guess is that they aren’t alone in having this access. But, you know, I just suspect it.
It hasn’t been confirmed.Report
Maybe NZ is the super secret org that is controlling the web. They’re hiding in the southern hemi all quiet with all the secret backdoors.
More seriously, there are real issues with gov interference in social media. That is Something. This kind of weak ass partisan silliness does nothing at all to control it. If anything it’s a distraction.Report
Former President Donald Trump called for the termination of the Constitution to overturn the 2020 election and reinstate him to power Saturday…
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/03/politics/trump-constitution-truth-social/index.html
And there we go, this nicely showcases why I can’t vote for this guy and why I think he can’t win.Report
Yeah, that ought to do it.Report