Open Mic for the week of 1/15/2024 (belated)
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.
Dozens of Jewish families are pulling their kids from the Oakland City public schools, basically because of the seemingly spontaneous decision for Oakland City Schools to be against Israel during the Israel-Hamas War and double down when told to stop it.
https://jweekly.com/2024/01/11/citing-safety-dozens-of-jewish-families-are-leaving-oakland-public-schools/?mibextid=2JQ9oc&fbclid=IwAR3e6J2UAieFb7TpLq-YvhhQwWircfSIEFW7XzdlRw-ctV3eR63ESkR6LSU
What I find interesting about the Oakland school teacher’s statements is that the claim the “illegal military occupation” of Palestine started 75 years ago, that would be in 1948, rather than in 1967. Their message is completely clear, every configuration of Israel is per se settler-colonialism rather than just the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. I realize that these are just small numbers of politically impotent people but they still get under the skin because it is basically totally dismissive of how Zionism emerged, what caused Zionism to emerge, and the Jewish experience of persecution. I’d really like to ask one of these people what would happen to all the “settler-colonialists” if they stayed in Europe between 1918 to 1948.
There are some other interesting things that we talked about on this blog before coming up with this. One of these is that whether teachers could be activists in terms of fighting for social change among students or whether they are simple public servants that need to stick to the plan. This is usually in regards to LGBT issues or things about race. Now we have one of the most divisive issues in international relations coming up and the activist teachers in Oakland are pretty much Israel delenda est.
The other interesting issue is that at least a chunk of the Diversity Coalition (TM) decided that they really don’t need to include the Jews at all. We have White supremacists to our right saying that Jews are bad because we are a bunch of subversive Communist Revolutionaries and the anti-Semites of the Left arguing that we are bad because we are privileged colonialist wypipo. This is why you have weird things like LGBT people ardently seeking acceptance by very socially conservative Muslims who hate them and would persecute them in a Muslim majority country but reject Jews despite the more liberal dominations of Jews being some of the most openly pro-LGBT on the planet.Report
Headlines to look for next year: “White Flight increases in Oakland”Report
Count me in the group “simple public servants that need to stick to the plan”. My tax money should not be supporting your advocacy. You do that on your own time.Report
This is where I am, and the apparent opposition to in some places is what I find incomprehensible. On the one hand, any given incident needs to be measured against the fact that there are around 100k public schools in the US, which is more than enough for a weird, viral controversy to occur every day of the year without necessarily being remotely representative of the whole. At the same time it seems straightforward to say that if you want to be an activist, be an activist (or do it on your own time), and if you want to be a public servant be a public servant.Report
What is the point of lower education?
If you talk to a bunch of parents, they’ll probably mention stuff like “college prep” or “free lunches” or whatever. “Reading.”
When the teachers show up and start talking about Palestine, there’s going to be a whole bunch of confused parents out there. (Well, not the ones who were complaining about various books in the library. They’re already prepped for this sort of thing.)Report
Well, one person’s activist is another person’s public servant. What then?Report
I’m half joking when I say this but I think anyone who has to ask that question probably doesn’t have the right mindset for public service. Again, joking of course. But only half.Report
I will note that the news I’ve read states that the Oakland Unified School District bureaucracy is really against the Pro-Palestinian teach ins and is trying to stop it. The Oakland teachers aren’t having anything of it and are doubling down.Report
I’m not talking about the public servant. I’m talking about the public response.
If folks are motivated to, they can label anything they don’t agree with as a form of activism.
My two cents are that teachers should work within school/district/state policy within the walls of the building. If they want to advocate for changes in those areas outside of school, they ought to. If they are so moved to act within school because they feel policies are unjust, they should make that determination for themself and be prepared to accept the consequences.
What I’m trying to get at with Lee here is that I imagine he’d side with the teachers if they were advocating a different policy… one that he agreed with. It’s not the tactic he has an issue with, but the ideas behind it.Report
“What I’m trying to get at with Lee here is that I imagine he’d side with the teachers if they were advocating a different policy… one that he agreed with.” Won’t speak for him here, but I’m not advocating that.
“My two cents are that teachers should work within school/district/state policy within the walls of the building. If they want to advocate for changes in those areas outside of school, they ought to.” 100% agree.
“If they are so moved to act within school because they feel policies are unjust, they should make that determination for themself and be prepared to accept the consequences.” No, they should try to work it from outside, unless the teachers union is willing to get involved.Report
“No, they should try to work it from outside, unless the teachers union is willing to get involved.”
I’m thinking of a situation where someone feels so strongly and wants to engage in certain action as a form of civil disobedience. For instance, if a school set a policy that demanded teachers segregate their students in some way and a teacher wanted to buck that policy and was willing to be fired as a result of doing so, I’d be okay with that.
Now, the presence of the union might complicate that. I can’t speak to that as I’ve never worked in a union.Report
If the Oakland public school teacher were pushing a heavily pro-Israel advocacy, I’d also consider it beyond their jobs.Report
Part of the Pro-Palestinian teach in was asking young students to draw the “Zionist Bully.”
The Daily Mail, yes I know there is a certain amount of unreliability here, has more details about what is causing the Jewish families to take their kids out of Oakland public schools.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12966149/Jewish-families-Oakland-public-school-district.htmlReport
How would you feel about teachers in Florida continuing to talk with students about LGBTQ+ topics despite the laws/position of their school boards?Report
There is a difference between that and telling kindergarten students to draw pictures of the “Zionist bully” and other barely concealed acts of anti-Semitism.Report
Fun fact: The people making a lot of the anti LGBTQ laws are claiming exactly the same thing, that their laws are needed to stop anti-Christian sentiment.Report
So… when MY side violates policy, it’s speaking truth to power.
When the other side violates policy, it’s bigotry in action.
Got it.Report
From what I remember, Third Republic France and other countries used to have rules against civil servants participating in political organizations of any type out of a belief that any active interest in politics would make it impossible for them to serve the elected politicians. The US military used to informally observe this. Many officers before the second half of the 20th century just refused to vote so they could be politically neutral.Report
I don’t have any problem with civil servants voting or engaging in political expression when off the clock.Report
And, again, I feel this is the point I must ask, ‘Do you know what happened in 1948?’
Good job trying to narrow the force to whether the events of 1948 were ‘settler-colonialism’ instead of the actual question of ‘Were those events a horrific wrong done to a lot of people?’
It really is amazing how what has happened to the Jewish people somehow justifies some of them doing things to people completely unrelated to any of that.Report
Adding to the above what really gets to me about the above situation is that many of my fellow Jews refuse to get this. They really don’t understand that Jews are alone in this world and without allies. There are only 15 million of us and we are not necessary for the Left or the Right and easily thrown away. Instead they would rather continue a miniature civil war among their fellow Jews than unite in communal self-defense or have no answer to the danger Jews are in but kumbaya harder. This time with more folksy feeling. The worst of this treacherous bunch are the radical Ashkenazi anti-Zionists who would leave their Mizrahi brethren to the tender mercies of the Arab Nationalists and Political Islamists to sooth their anti-imperialist consciousness.Report
The good news: I have some strong Jewish allies over here. They’re also big fans of Israel.
The bad news: They’re low status.Report
Idle observation. I had mentioned various tweets in the various posts about the backlash to the various open letters written following the October 7th kinetic decolonization incident and two people have written me privately asking me to remove their names from the post after the tweets in question had been deleted.
I have, of course, removed those names.
The second one was earlier today (which is why I bring it up).Report
It isn’t like the other Bay Area cities have residents more sympathetic to Israel but all of them seem to not be having the same issues that Oakland is having with Pro-Palestinian residents and teachers trying to use the public bodies to push their message. My guess is that this is about gentrification politics on a certain level and activists trying to protect Oakland’s reputation as a radical community.Report
My theory and it is mine is that there are tens or hundreds of millions of people who aren’t necessarily anti-Semitic in the Jews control the world sense but do believe that Jews take up way too much oxygen even though there are only somewhere between 15 to 17 million of us. They don’t like it or think it is just that despite our low numbers that you have many people that can rattle of many famous Jews despite our small numbers. There are ideal world is where Jews are just way under the radar and widely distributed, being at best 2% of the population of any country where we live if not much less. We get the basic citizenship package but no special minority rights and if we feel alienated from the national culture, so fishing what because we are only one half of one percent of the population. This is the type of world that most of the anti-Zionists want, total Jewish alienation and silence.Report
P.D.Q. Bach has diedReport
Oh, he was great. We sang his The Art of the Ground Round in high school. There will never be another like him.Report
Florida bill could lead to ban on pride flags in schools, government buildings
Florida lawmakers are mulling legislation that would ban gay pride flags and flags representing other political movements from flying on public properties, including schools and college campuses.
An initial House panel advanced the bill in a party-line vote this week. The move is the latest as Florida already has sought to rein in pro-LGBTQ efforts and displays.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4415582-florida-bill-ban-pride-flags-schools-government-buildings/
B-but but but I was told they only object to bad DEI and trans athletes!
Oh, and notice the wording?
“gay pride flags and flags representing other political movements”
Gay people are a “political movement”.
Not just regular folks entitled to respect like everyone else, but their very existence is “political” and open to debate.
Oh, and notice also- a “party line vote”.Report
The problem that liberals have is that even if we defeat Trump, we really don’t have any idea of how to cool down tens of millions of Americans into something calmer and more sensible. They are in control of several states and are implementing their beliefs along with measures to ensure changing them in the wake of defeat will be very hard. The Secret Disney Liberals sees everything as an education problem and believes we just need to make the right argument and the fever will break. I don’t think this is the case.Report
Continuing to send Trump’s allies to prison for their roles in January 6th will help, as will sending him to prison for his various crimes.
Beyond that, Democrats need to start playing the political game across all 50 states the same way the GOP has.Report
You can’t jail tens of millions of people.Report
I agree, they aren’t secret liberals, and in fact have mentioned several times that around 40% of the American electorate fully embraces some variation of Christian Nationalism.
This is why I think it is so important to call it out and not allow it to be concealed under euphemisms.Report
40% of the American population translates to around 134 million people. That is a tremendous number of people even if it isn’t the majority of the population. The rest of the 60% doesn’t consist of stalwart liberals, making some variant of Christian Nationalist the ideology with the plurality.
Secret Disney Liberals are my short hand for people who see everything as an educational problem. That is very few people actively believe in this malicious stuff and they mostly haven’t been exposed to the right arguments. When you expose people to the right arguments and the power of folk songs about healing than the love will come out. It also describes their basic ideal society since their ideal society seems to look like something from a live action Disney sitcom. Affluent, tame, and EPCOT multicultural. They can’t imagine why anybody would prefer going to a dank sex dungeon or a casino than a wholesome Disney Broadway musical.Report
Hey, speaking of that, Rufo just announced a new paper from Michigan State!
He didn’t write it. The professors at Michigan State did.
I do not know whether the paper involves plagiarism. I hope not.Report
So Rufo is using academicians to crow about getting the policy outcome he wants. Fascinating.Report
His measuring stick measured something, I guess.
To what extent should Michigan State have lied to prevent giving Rufo a win? Personally, I think that this information should have been withheld from all of us.
That would make it an even bigger surprise.Report
Not sure if we should applaud someone crowing about the end of public education.Report
If we can get enough people to boo, maybe he’ll end up being wrong.Report
But I appreciate them admitting that it is in fact, their goal.Report
There is an acronym that resurfaces periodically: POSIWID.
It stands for “the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does“.
What’s the purpose of lower education? Well, if there is too much disconnect between the parents and the teachers, we’re going to find out that some parents will exit to a different system that actually does something else.
(Granted, sometimes the parents will even try to change the existing system.)Report
“Something else” being “practice segregation”.
I mean, you said so yourself remember?Report
Among other things, I guess.
Algebra might be another.Report
No, they are quite clear that they have no desire whatsoever to make universal literacy a goal.
The goal is to withdraw to schools without black kids and have taxpayers fund Christian Nationalist madrasas.
Those IQ tests, and the bell curve, Jewish superintelligence, banning Pride flags and all that.
Sorry, they are willing to say out loud what you are too embarrassed to whisper.Report
The Right wants to destroy public schools. They are aided by the fact that many people within the Democratic coalition are not terribly impressed with public schools either. Many African-American parents like charter schools because they see the results as better. Jewish parents in Oakland are withdrawing their kids because certain activist teachers are trying to use their classroom to create new anti-Zionists.Report
The difference I see is Democrats are much more receptive to arguments in favor of improving low performing schools and making education universal.
Republicans are just very explicit about their belief in a segregated hierarchical society where some are just better than others.Report
much more receptive to arguments in favor of improving low performing schools and making education universal
POSIWID.Report
I’ve heard it theorized that in practice the school choice/neoliberal reformists and left wing activist theories of education in practice act as a pincer movement towards the same end. The goal from the right has been pretty clear and unapologetic. Harder to tell how intentional the left pincer is but at the end of the day the goal of these ideas is deconstruction and it shouldn’t surprise anyone when that’s what happens to an institution its unleashed upon.Report
Now if you just had some support for this idea, that would be grand.
Like, show us which “activist theories” of the left want a segregated hierarchical world.Report
You’re asking for motivations in a thread that discusses POSIWID?
The beauty of POSIWID is that you don’t have to dig around for “activist theories”.
You just have to show failing proficiency tests.
Or, you know, Algebra.Report
Again, segregation academies aren’t interested in algebra, you’ve said so yourself when discussing white liberal snobs.
“Algebra” is the fig leaf like “state’s rights”.Report
Depends on whether Algebra is testable.
If memory serves… it is.Report
“I’m a liberal, who just wants good schools for my kid and um, algebra or something.”Report
You had seriously start workshopping better counter-arguments to that statement than “you’re a white supremacist”.Report
It wasn’t so much that the activist left wnated a “segregated hierarchical world” but that they distrusted the way public school were traditionally organized because it didn’t give communities in big cities enough control over their schools but made them very bureaucratically run.Report
“We should tear down the schools to make them more equitable” seems a lot different than “we must tear down the schools to make them more inequitable”.Report
It may be different in intent, the point is that in practice it may be the same in outcome.Report
Politics makes for some strange bedfellows. Even if the goals are radically different, there have been action together.Report
Again, can someone name these people, like provide links to their legislative proposals or something?
How do we even know they exist?Report
There was a book published in September 2023 by Basic Books about this:
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Public-School-Conservatives-Education-ebook/dp/B0BP2JPCG9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=UWRF5W1RTUBL&keywords=public+school+basic+books&qid=1705626323&s=books&sprefix=public+school+basic+boo%2Cstripbooks%2C179&sr=1-1Report
This is where POSIWID comes in handy.
Those schools that don’t have a single proficient student?
What’s the purpose of those schools?
I submit: Something that you, too, would move your children away from.
For, among other things, Algebra.Report
If the purpose of an institution is what is does, then you are just confirming that the purpose of vouchers/ choice is to create segregation academies funded by taxpayers.Report
And, among other things, Algebra.Report
Here’s an example of a Republican who really cares about, among other things, algebra:
Arizona lawmaker: Let kids drop out of school after 8th grade
“Maybe we’d value education more,” he said, seeing it as a privilege instead of something for which there is no choice.
https://tucson.com/news/local/education/arizona-lawmaker-let-kids-drop-out-of-school-after-8th-grade/article_f4f2f29c-3969-5624-a108-475c5f75a23e.html
A privilege. Education is, for conservatives, a privilege reserved for the few, not something universal and compulsory.Report
It obviously *IS* a privilege, Chip.
Compare yourself to, for example, those students in schools that fail to bring a single child to proficiency.
This whole thing where we get pissed off at people describing the world as it actually exists is exhausting.Report
Yes it IS exhausting to keep having to point out that conservatives want a hierarchical segregated world, only to be told, “No, we really really care about, among other things, algebra!”Report
So you don’t think that conservatives care about algebra?Report
Not for anyone other than the in-group, no.
This is what Jaybird and Dark Matter and every other conservative keep saying endlessly, that conservatives care about their own kid and to hell with anyone who is underperforming.
I’ve asked about a dozen times “What is the conservative plan to help low preforming students?” and the answer is “Let them rot!”
And then we add to that, Jaybird’s endless reply of “Well, the world really is hierarchical and segregated!” it adds up to my statement, that conservatives want a hierarchical segregated world, and “but algebra!” is just the fig leaf they use to sound polite.Report
I’ve asked about a dozen times “What is the conservative plan to help low preforming students?” and the answer is “Let them rot!”
No, it’s not.
It’s Hauptschule. (There’s also a handful of policy changes like “phonics” and whatnot. We’ve gone into this before.)
What’s funny is that the question “What is the liberal plan to help those kids in Baltimore?” is “more funding!”Report
No, the conservative plan is NOT “Hauptschule”- we’ve discussed this, remember?
Hauptschule is solely the idea of Mr. Jaybird of Colorado Springs.
All other conservatives couldn’t care less about
The actual conservative plan is “Let them rot!”Report
Oh, jeez. I keep forgetting that you’re playing “hide the ball”.Report
The plan now seems to be “Put them to work!” They want more kids working in poultry processing facilities.Report
This is why POSIWID comes into play.
Wanna look at a list of the most segregated US Metro areas?
Before you click through: How many out of the 10 are Biden states, do you guess?
Did you guess “eight”? Because that’s the answer.
Hey, Colorado Springs made the *LEAST* Segregated list!
That means that I live in one of the least segregated metro areas and you live in one of the most segregated metro areas!
Wacky.
Anyway, please continue.Report
I’ve started to think that what has been holding it together up until lately has been that the varying purposes have been pretty compatible with each other. There’s no serious tension between a school that focuses on excellence, and college prep, and basement level 3 R’s, and for those that need it, daycare. You just separate people into different rooms, and throw together some nice sounding euphemisms, and it can function at a reasonably acceptable level. However there are a lot of other concepts you could throw in like ‘equity’ and various social or political ends, that suddenly make it unworkable, and not just in the sense that the contradictions can’t be papered over but that the places start to lose their legitimacy as they undermine the wishes of the median parent, voter, taxpayer, whatever.Report
If parents want X and teachers want Y, teachers can get away with teaching X+Y.
Even if Y is a little loopy and only crazy parents would care about it.
But if X starts to falter? (While other schools are still doing X?)
Well, you’re going to find yourself reading a paper from Michigan State talking about Universal School Choice.Report
Put that problem on top of the foundational tension of teaching as public service versus teaching as jobs program.Report
I don’t think this is right. Teaching as a jobs program would be an improvement. The problem is that teacher pay and benefits are generally so low across the board, in public and private schools, is that many of the people who go into teaching are going to be really idealistic types because they see this as a chance to shape the future. Get them young. Raising the pay of teachers immensely, and this is a big political lift, would attract more careerists who just want a job.Report
He’s making reference to something slightly different, I think.
It dates back to the whole “what is the point of education?” thing and the discussion of whether really bad teachers/administrators ought to be fired. There are arguments, for example, that the teachers/administrators of schools without a single freaking proficient student shouldn’t be fired.
Like… the only reason that it makes sense to *NOT* fire these teachers is if the point of having teachers in that school is to pay them to show up.
If it ain’t about getting students to learn, then it’s about providing middle class jobs to people who go on to not do them.
That’s what I think he means by “jobs program”.Report
Yes, this is what I mean by jobs program.
But to Lee’s point I think looking at salary alone is the wrong way to understand how teachers are compensated. Their paychecks may not break the bank but in the big jurisdictions at least they also have public sector benefits, better retirement programs, get raises by seniority rather than performance, have union protection and after a probationary period become virtually unfireable. All that stuff isn’t free, it is a significant benefit, and it’s a benefit that barely exists anymore in the private sector. So there’s a trade off but not an obviously unfair one.Report
At least one reason why charter schools started to become a popular thing was that big urban schools with large African-American and Hispanic populations did not separated the college prep kids, regular students, and “daycare” kids into separate rooms or classes but kept them together. What you write might have been true in suburban schools but it definitely wasn’t true in the big city or rural areas.Report
Sure, where you can’t do separate class rooms you end up with pressure to create separate buildings. That’s my understanding of what, with some exceptions, they’ve tended to do in practice.Report
People who install fire alarms are no better than arsonists.Report
Huh?Report
Naw man, if anything that was too on the nose.Report
Tell me you support authoritarianism without telling me you support authoritarianism.Report
“These people are screwing up.”
“YOU’RE A FASCIST!”
Eventually you’re going to look at the issue and see how someone else might see a problem. No, not agree that there’s a problem! I wouldn’t dare suggest that!
But you might see something that someone else might see was a problem.
At which point you will have a problem of your own. You’ll be forced to choose between suggesting a change or clapping even more loudly.
But not today.Report
“Eventually you’re going to look at the issue and see how someone else might see a problem.”
That other person is racist. “Yeah but–” no, there’s no buts here, they’re racist. Even if they lie to you or to themselves about having some other reason, they’re racist. Because there’s no such thing as “a little bit” racist, either you’re racist or you’re not and if there’s any bit at all of Fear Of The Other in your reason for not wanting to be somewhere or do something or put your children on any particular altar of Baal then you’re racist and everything you do is racist and we can call you wrong and ignore you because you’re racist.
I mean, you claim to be an intellectual person, don’t you understand how the only moral position for intellectually-developed persons is to have an instinctive allergic reaction to racism, to abandon thought and act on pure lizard-brain stimulus-response because allowing racism to enter your mind in any way is like figuring it’ll be okay to only just drink a little bit of rat poison?Report
Part of the problem with that is that it doesn’t overlap with the whole “everybody who happens to be white is racist” thing.
I suppose the whole “but I don’t consider myself to be white!” thing might act as a psychological defense mechanism for that…Report
It’s Occam meets Godwin. Start with the assumption of racism. Anything that can be explained by racism – no matter how extreme or invisible – needs no further explanation. A Kansas farmer supports a candidate who supports farmers? Racism. This assumption can properly be understood to explain everything done by white people. (Well, homophobia et cetera too.) Similarly, anything done by an oppressed group can be justified as a moral response to the presence of racism. It’s Occam’s Razor, but you never need more than one assumption.Report
” It’s Occam’s Razor, but you never need more than one assumption.”
Occam’s Racism.Report
So you agree with Nicki Haley that the US was never and is not a racist nation.
Good to know.Report
That’s what he said. That’s not even a paraphrase of what he said. That’s a direct quote, and you should feel right about making it.Report
LOL, i saw this in SOTD out of context and was very confused for a couple seconds.Report
Who’s Nicki Haley?Report
Even you can’t be that dense Density.Report
No, seriously; who’s Nicki Haley? Nobody named “Nicki” has been in the news lately.Report
I sometimes wonder if Rufo is a deep cover liberal plant:
Liberals: “Conservatives are secretly motivated by white supremacy.”
Conservatives: “That’s a dirty smear!”
Rufo: “Hey y’all, here’s a bunch of white supremacists who support our efforts!”
Liberals: “Conservatives want to end public schooling.”
Conservatives: “That’s a lie!”
Rufo: “Hey lookit this article talking about our efforts to destroy public schools!”Report
He would be deep, deep, deep cover.Report
Sort of like the theories that Ayn Rand was a Communist trying to create an argument for capitalism that even Americans would find repellant?Report
Probably more likely that we’ve reached the “mask off” moment when they no longer feel the need to pretend.Report
“Tell me you support authoritarianism without telling me you support authoritarianism.”
public education is entirely dependent on an authoritarian structure, so, I guess you support it too?Report
To the extent that this is a policy choice, it strikes me as a bad one.
REI to close only Portland store, citing break-ins, theft
Others claim that REI shut this store down because the workers were unionizing.
Seems like this is an opportunity to take over a great storefront and sell hippie stuff and hire a bunch of talented and enthusiastic workers.Report
“The company added that it has “outgrown” the Pearl District store and that the building needed “significant investment” to address unspecified “issues.””
“Cody Bowman, spokesperson for Wheeler’s office, said the mayor’s staff and PPB worked directly with REI to find ways to address crime in the Pearl District, including more police patrols in the area and focused efforts on designated days to intercept and arrest shoplifters.”
Between needing a different space and a police force willing to do their jobs only on pre-selected days, I can see why doing business in downtown Portland is less than desirable.Report
Jaybird, why should I believe you are anything but a right-winger when all you do is post link after link about stores closing in blue city downtowns and taking their word at face-value as to why they are doing it? For all your talk on how the Democratic Platform should just be nothing but marijuana legalization and your alleged disliking of the police, you sure seem to take a stance that police are good when it comes to blue-city downtowns.Report
Saul, I believe that the police need to be reformed.
I do not believe that the police need to be abolished.
Part of the point of having police is for them to enforce laws and, ideally, create an environment where police are needed less. Why? So stores can do stuff like “sell you hippie crap so you can go for a hike in $65 socks”.
If you slaughter the goose that lays golden eggs, you might get a nice meaty meal or three…
But then you have neither goose nor egg.
taking their word at face-value as to why they are doing it
I covered this with my last sentence!
If the store was lying, THIS IS A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY, SAUL!!! Buy it for ten bucks, sell it for $45, have a stable clientele (apart from the occasional death from exposure to the elements), and listen to good music while people scuttle in, buy some Tevas, and leave!
If you know someone who knows how to make granola, you can make EVEN MORE MONEY. Seriously, it costs pennies to make and you can just throw some craisins in there, call it “organic” and charge people out the nose!
Do your hiring just right and be surrounded by chicks who go rock climbing in their spare time!
I don’t see a downside!
Assuming the store is lying, of course.Report
Donald Trump the very stable genius, a continuing series: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/trump-immunity.jpegReport
HOLY CRAP!!!
Note: This doesn’t ban *CONTENT*. Just *PROMOTION*.Report
Earlier alarming reports proved unfounded, however, as Musk reiterated his acceptance of white supremacist content.Report
Like, among other things, Algebra.Report
The New York Times Magazine has a piece titled: Black and Jewish Activists Have Allied for Decades. What Now?
You won’t want to miss this one. My favorite section:
Hey. Black Lives Matter. Say it back.Report
On the other blog there is a poster, who sometimes posts here, who has a theory that many humans are suffering from what he calls cognitive overload these days. There is just so much complexity in the modern world that it is simply too much for many humans to handle. Rather than men being men and women being women, you have all sorts of configurations and possibilities and thanks to science people who previously could not give birth in many ways can now give birth. Then you have challenges like climate change, etc. The global turn to authoritarianism or fascism is because authoritarians make things clear.
Another issue is that resource limitation is a thing. Even if money is no object, space and time are limited. You can’t include everything in the canon. Choice need to be made. Issues need to be prioritized. Some people and groups are going to be left on the out and nobody wants to be willingly left on the out.Report
I don’t think it’s cognitive overload. I think it’s people gaslighting themselves into thinking that misery is morality, and that if they aren’t miserable then it’s their moral duty to make themselves so.Report
The Israeli government is still saying the quiet parts outloud:
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/19/1225574007/netanyahu-says-he-told-u-s-that-he-opposes-palestinian-state-in-any-postwar-scenReport
Here’s another Republican who really cares about algebra:
Lawmaker JJ Humphrey seeks punishments for ‘acts of terrorism’ and defines terrorist as ‘any person who is of Hispanic descent’
The Republican state representative JJ Humphrey introduced the bill, HB 3133, which seeks to combat problems in the state, such as drug and human trafficking, and lay out punishments to those who have committed these “acts of terrorism”.
The punishment for such a crime would be forfeiting all assets, including any and all property, vehicles and money.
In addition to “a member of a criminal street gang” and someone who “has been convicted of a gang-related offense”, the bill defines a terrorist as “any person who is of Hispanic descent living within the state of Oklahoma”.
Humphrey apologized but then doubled down.
He said: “I apologize for using the word Hispanic, but I was not wrong. Again, these are Hispanic. Reality is they are Hispanic. There’s nothing to be ashamed with.”
Humphrey said he will go back to the bill and amend the language from “Hispanic” to “undocumented here illegally, or something like that”.
Chip: Conservatives want a hierarchical segregated society
Conservatives: That’s a ditrty smear!
Other conservatives: Hey, here’s a bill defining Hispanics as terrorists, allowing the government to seize all their cash, property and cars! Yee haww!Report
I await the first such bill in a Republican controlled legislature referring to liberals.Report
A guy born in 1966 in Oklahoma is about as destined to be right-wing as it getsReport
Even more than a guy born in 1946 in South Carolina?Report
A little over a month ago, Pinky pointed out that Sports Illustrated was caught having published AI generated articles.
Well, it’s a little over a month later.
Report
Oh, and here’s where we were discussing the Burkini back in 2019.Report
Can’t blame that silliness on AI.Report
SI commits microaggressions by showing a woman wearing a burkini.
Conservatives cancel SI.Report
Conservatives cancel SI.
SI less able to make fee payments.
SI less able to make fee payments.
SI misses fee payment.
SI misses fee payment.
Authentic Brands Group threatens to terminate contract for SI brand.
Authentic Brands Group threatens to terminate contract for SI brand.
SI has mass layoffs.
If only mass layoffs could have been avoided!Report
I really have no way of knowing if the conservative cancelling of SI has anything to do with their financial troubles.
But it seems fair and accurate to characterize conservatives as embracing cancel culture for microaggressions.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
But it confirms my observation that the debate in America today is not between free speech and censorship, but over where to place the boundary between freedom and censorship.Report
I’m pretty sure that “I’m not going to purchase that product” isn’t the same thing as “censorship”.Report
Chip didn’t say censorship. He said cancellation. Different thing there Jay me boy.Report
Allow me to copy and paste: But it confirms my observation that the debate in America today is not between free speech and censorship, but over where to place the boundary between freedom and censorship.
Emphasis added.Report
What is the correct term for “I refuse to patronize a business which features people I find objectionable”?Report
“Choice”?Report
Yes, choosing to not patronize a business because the hire the sort of people you find objectionable.
You and I are not disagreeing here, you realize that. We’re just searching for the right word to describe it.Report
“Censorship” is when I tell you that you can’t patronize it.
Not when I stop going.Report
Why is it “censorship” when Colorado Springs Man tells me not to patronize something? I can always tell Colorado Springs Man to pound sand and then patronize what I damn please. Unless Colorado Springs Man can prevent me from patronizing something or make it noticeably more difficult to patronize something, he is just flapping his gums. What in some circles is known as free speech.Report
You’re absolutely right, CJ.
It’s only censorship when I am preventing you from patronizing it.
If all I’m doing is saying “don’t buy it”, that’s not censorship either.Report
So lets call it a boycott.Report
I don’t think that that’s accurate either.
I mean, remember the Bud Light thing? That was a boycott. We had people calling for a boycott, for example. We had people shooting up cases of Bud Light.
Sports Illustrated? Now, I’m not tuned into every controversy on the planet but I do keep my thumb on the pulse of the culture war and the closest thing to culture war that I’ve seen on the whole SI thing is that they’ve been putting plus-sized chicks, old chicks, and transchicks into the swimsuit edition.
Now, the last time I remember looking at a swimsuit edition, it had Paulina Porizkova on the cover.
Hurr. Stampa stampa. Awoooga. Hubba hubba.
But, even so, do you know how many issues of Sports Illustrated that I have purchased? I can give you an exact number for the last 1, 5, 10, 25, and 50 years:
Zero.
Why? Because I am not a sports guy. I watch the occasional Superbowl, when the Broncos are in it, and sometimes I watch one of the other ones but, for the most part, I don’t keep up. When Colorado Springs had a AAA baseball team, sometimes I’d take the missus to a game and we’d enjoy the 50 cent hot dog night or the fireworks show.
But, like, I didn’t KEEP UP with them. I just rooted for them when I was there and forgot what happened in the game the moment I left the ballpark.
I doubt that we would say that I was “boycotting” Sports Illustrated. I just wasn’t in the target audience. It wasn’t for me.
Over the past few years, it seems like Sports Illustrated has changed in its quality. Remember when we talked about ESPN a while back? Well, it seems like Sports Illustrated did something similar in that it changed what it was serving up to its audience and gave them something that, meh, they didn’t care about. Was it necessarily politics? I don’t know. I don’t read it. But, when I googled “sports illustrated diminished quality”, this was the first hit. Apparently, SI has been getting crappier since getting let go by Time, Inc and getting picked up by The Arena Group.
And, slowly but surely, that diminished quality has resulted in diminished readership.
And now SI is missing payments.
AND THAT’S NOT THE FAULT OF THE READERS.
I cannot overstate this: Blaming the readership for not reading after quality going downhill is such a bad argument that you’ve already been defended against the scandalous charges that you’re making it.
A boycott? Hardly. It’s a shrug.Report
Like I said, I have no idea if people are not reading it due to crappy writing, AI or culture war microaggressions.
What I do know if your first go-to comment was about the microaggression of them showing a woman in a burkini, linking it to an OT article about how mad conservatives were. Over burkinis.
So I don’t know. You tell me, is this a case of culture war over microaggression, or just a magazine losing its way?
I mean, if I were to take away from this, the idea that its a perfectly fine business decision to feature women in burkinis just as long as the writing is good, would that be accurate?
Or would you point me to a conservative article that says “Go Woke, Go Broke”?Report
I think that if there is a list of reasons that your audience purchases your magazine (and, therefore, your advertisers purchase ads in your magazine to reach your audience), and you start devaluing those reasons, you’re likely to lose readership.
There’s a phenomenon when it comes to, ahem, “gentlemen’s clubs”. Occasionally, the women who, erm, perform at these clubs buy it from the dudebro who owns it and they create a co-op.
Finally! Owned by women! And they change the basic idea of what the gentleman’s club is and does. Instead of offering the old, sexist, services, the new co-op offers *BURLESQUE*. And, you know what? They’re going to celebrate the multitude of beautiful facets on the gem that is the female form.
And they, slowly but surely, lose their old audience that was willing to spend cash and fail to gain a new one that replaces the old one.
And, for some reason, this gets blamed on the guys who don’t show up anymore as well.Report
OK so it wasn’t the burkini or wokeness after all, it was (if I understand your analogy) that SI just didn’t deliver the consistent quality they used to in terms of writing and sports analysis.
Which seems to match the standard analysis I’m seeing across the internet.Report
“Oh, good. That means that the audience wasn’t morally inferior to me for not reading the thing that I also didn’t read. They were merely being smart like me for not reading the thing that I didn’t read.”Report
Yes, but that would be dull.Report
As has been pointed out many times, the white cultural conservatives are in an existential crisis.
They know they have lost dominance and are unfashionable, so they are furiously trying to regain status by showing the power to inflict pain on their enemies.
Whether it is Disney, Bud Light, Sports Illustrated, Oreos cookies or whatever, they need to claim a win, some way to show that they have the upper hand and are in control.
This is what’s behind all the claims of “rot” and corruption and “wokeness” in academia, Hollywood, the military and corporations.
The idea of a pure society corrupted by degenerate inferiors is the foundation of fascism because it is based on the premise that these people are not legitimate holders of power and must be put back into their rightful, subservient place.Report
The readership for Sports Illustrated extended far beyond white dudebros, white dudebro.
Or it used to.Report
https://jabberwocking.com/why-sports-illustrated-failed/
Sports Illustrated — like almost every print magazine — was torpedoed by the internet. This isn’t rocket science.Report
SI’s problem was that the market for weekly, high-quality, thoughtful sports journalism disappeared. Fans wouldn’t wait a week for sports news anymore. The writers of well-crafted, original longer-form sports features wouldn’t work for peanuts and were replaced by the print equivalent of sports talk radio yakkers. Some of the established quality sportswriters have found other venues for their talents, but from what I can tell there are fewer of them than there used to be, and fewer young writers who aspire to that kind of sports journalism. I could probably count on one hand the current writers whose stories I would read because they wrote them. They don’t work for SI anymore.Report
Also just the internet killing print in general. There are a couple sports substacks I follow that mimic some of the long form stuff (House of Strauss is the notable one, which also bleeds into culture), plus the blogs. But yea, hard to imagine waiting a week for commentary and if you really want the quality of old SI something like the Athletic completely eats its lunch, and while paywalled it is of course online.Report
The death of print media also corresponds to the collapse of the gatekeepers.
There was a time when the gatekeepers of American culture, whether at the NYT, Time Magazine, or Sports Illustrated, could dictate what was fashionable and what mattered.
This is what got the right so infuriated with SI, is that by posting a Muslim or transwoman on the cover, it was an obvious signaling that the elites were bestowing status on a previously marginalized group.Report
Schrödinger’s audience.
Are they quitting in droves due to the elites screwing up “their” magazine?
Are they quitting in droves due to getting better product elsewhere?
It’s both!
It’s neither!
The waveform has not collapsed yet so we just don’t know!Report
I’m cool with “we just don’t know” as long as people who don’t know do what people who don’t know normally do about things they don’t know. But that would make things a lot quieter here and in other places.Report
Beware isolated demands for ignorant people to remain silent.Report
Does it really merit the kind of complete cultural meltdown it can provoke in certain conservative circles? Probably not. Is featuring a symbol of conservative Muslim modesty forced on women, or a man pretending to be a woman in a bikini for that matter, in what is supposed to be softcore titillation for American men so self evidently ridiculous that it would probably be too on the nose for a South Park joke? Oh yea.
But that’s not what’s killing SI. It’s just the internet doing that.Report
I agree that SI was killed by mundane business decisions, not cultural backlash.
Whether it was ridiculous or not is a personal opinion one can have or not.
But the vast majority of people, just don’t care, we see five ridiculous things before breakfast every day. Most people just shrug and go on with things.
The political movement founded on a platform of self pity and belligerent grievance can’t shrug because it needs outrage like it needs air and is constantly seeking for any excuse to stoke it.Report
I haven’t looked at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition since I was in high school in the mid/late 1990s and it is certainly easier to find hardcore porn better suited for erotic excitement than the SI swimsuit edition.
However, I wouldn’t really call the changes to who gets depicted a decline in gatekeepers. It is more like a replacement of one type of gatekeeping, we think this is what red-blooded cis-gender American heterosexual men should find appealing, with another type of gatekeeping, the standards of who is a woman and what should be considered beautiful are broad and expansive. The complaints of the Barstool Conservatives, that everybody knew Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition was by heterosexual men and for heterosexual men and the changes were a type of take your medicine are not unfounded. See it as a heterosexual men’s safespace being opened up against their will.Report
Even this I think makes it seem more like a top down thing than it really is. Standards of hotness certainly evolve over time in a similar way to fashion but there are no gatekeepers ‘telling’ heterosexual men what they should and shouldn’t like. Or to the extent there’s influence from mass media it’s going to be influenced as much if not more by reflecting what men like, calculated on the basis of what sells. This is probably me being way more pedantic than necessary but the theories that lead to the silliness at issue all seem premised on the idea that there is and always has been, somewhere, out there in the ether, some ministry of hot chicks with a top down authority deciding what men do and don’t like and which all men are in complete and enthusiastic thrall to. As if all you need to do is make that ministry pull a few levers and you could have dudes liking anything.
Except we all know that’s stupid. Fashion changes but one thing that doesn’t is men’s deep interest in women behaving and dressing quite immodestly, and by women I of course mean women, not ‘womxn’ or whatever as defined by the gender studies professors at, I dunno, Harvard. Bottom line is it’s a lot like putting a sermon in a nudie magazine.
But again, not what’s killing SI. That’s just the internet.Report
…but there are no gatekeepers ‘telling’ heterosexual men what they should and shouldn’t like.
Hugh Hefner’s ghost would like a word.Report
Heh, I hear what you’re saying Michael, but this is where I feel compelled to point out that there is cave art that archeologists believe had an erotic purpose. Hugh Hefner didn’t invent anything. He just took the next natural step of commodification.Report
I remember the casting director for The Witcher said that she intended to “challenge” the audience by casting Anya Chalotra as Yennifer.
I am unchallenged, lady. I assure you.Report
And now, dear horny male fanboy viewer, I will challenge you and your superficial western notions of hotness by presenting you with…. a sultry olive toned brunette.Report
FWIW, when I said “gatekeepers” I should have been more clear.
I didn’t mean that the gatekeepers conjured up sexiness.
What I meant was, by selecting WHICH women, out of the vast range of women that men find attractive, the traditional gatekeepers could nudge fashion in one direction or another.
The evolution of beauty standards- from plump in the 19th century, to thin in the 1920s, to curvaceous again in the 1960s- didn’t just happen by accident, they were nudged by the gatekeepers of culture.
More to the point, I was thinking more of that thing we call cachet, hipness, where certain cultural symbols are considered better than others.
LeeEsq gets at it, where lets say, a cosmetic company decides to feature a woman with a hijab wearing their skin cream.
This is viewed by our dominant culture as “hip” and cool, it has cultural cachet.
An Orthodox woman, a Mormon woman in a prairie bonnet?
Not so much!
Cultural cachet is constructed, the way brands are built, the way a soda pop becomes cool, then is discarded.
Traditional gatekeepers of cachet are increasingly being replaced via social media by freelance influencers.
And, to come to my original point, this is what terrifies the MAGAs because the influencers are from the hated outgroups.Report
Is it possible for influencers to fail? Like, they push a particular idea of beauty and then the magazine starts missing payments?
Or is this a completely unfalsifiable hypothesis?Report
You mean, if the writing was still good, and no other sources of content were easily available in your handheld device, could we attribute the missed payments to the influencer instead of just evolving business climate?
Sure.Report
So, it is impossible for the influencer to be a contributing aggravating factor?
Yeah, if I were an influencer, I’d probably push that too.
“Pay me and *AT WORST* I will be completely ineffective. At best, you’ll go viral!”Report
Is there some way to determine which factors and by how much, caused the loss of readership?Report
There sure as hell seems to be some way to determine which factors had nothing to do with it.
SI fell off. We’ve covered a lot of the reasons here in comments.
Remember the AI scandal? That was Sports Illustrated.
There’s the whole “timely” thing. It used to be important to run to the mailbox on Wednesday or Thursday and get the issue and see what the stories were. And the photography! Now? The game was on Sunday afternoon. Why in the heck do I need to wait until *WEDNESDAY* to read about it?
The swimsuit edition was the ultimate in “safe horny”. What the Dallas Cowgirls were to the 70s, the swimsuit edition was to the 80s. And, yeah, that turned into a South Park sketch.
Out of curiosity, the editorial judgment that resulted in the swimsuit edition changing drastically… do you think that that judgment for what was newsworthy appeared elsewhere in the magazine? Or do you think that it only showed up in that one issue?
Personally, I think that the swimsuit edition was representative of the editorial judgment.
Like we’d probably also find a hell of a lot more stories dedicated to:
The WNBA, Women’s Soccer, and so on.
“It’s a sport! This is a sport magazine! Are you saying that the readership wasn’t interested in basketball?”
My argument is not “the swimsuit edition caused the downfall!”
My argument is “this is yet another example of an established winning formula changing to something closer to a sermon and then the old audience wanders away to a product more to their liking and the new audience never shows up.”
And this gets blamed on the old audience rather than the new formula.Report
Your examples point to mundane business mistakes, rather than the cover models.
As to the question “do you think that that judgment for what was newsworthy appeared elsewhere in the magazine?”
I think its a question you need to answer, since you are the one fervently devoted to the assertion that it was sermonizing rather than just crappy writing etc.
But it might be difficult for you, since the most common comment I’ve heard here and elsewhere is “Man, I haven’t read a copy of SI in ages!”Report
mundane business mistakes
Yes. Mundane business mistakes. Change the formula and, suddenly, the dog doesn’t eat the dog food.
I submit: Making the swimsuit edition into a South Park joke was also a mundane business mistake.
you are the one fervently devoted to the assertion that it was sermonizing
Yeah, among other things, it was.
I am arguing that editorial started serving up stuff that the readership didn’t want *RIGHT AT THE SAME TIME* that it became more important than ever to staunch the bleeding of the old audience.
Remember when ESPN got all “political” and then ESPN did this thing where they polled their audience and reported their findings? “The network also says its research finds that fans, regardless of political affiliation, do not want to hear about politics on ESPN.”
Do you believe that ESPN’s research found this to be true?
If you do, do you believe that there is significant overlap between the audience for ESPN and Sports Illustrated?
For the record, I think that there is significant overlap between these two audiences.
And, over and over again, we see examples of Editorial Judgment changing the formula of the dog food and then being surprised that the dogs stop eating it.
ESPN turned around.
Sports Illustrated started missing payments.Report
Before pivoting to ESPN, what are some examples of SI “serving up stuff that the readership didn’t want”?
And is this some objective fact that a disinterested party can attest to, or just Jaybird saying so because it fits your priors about wokeness?
Because everywhere I’ve seen, people are just talking about the crappy writing, and ease of other sports news and the general death of print media.
The only people talking about burkinis are you, Gateway Pundit, and some other rightwing folks. It really seems like you are starting with what you want to be true, then shoehorning any available facts into that narrative.Report
Before pivoting to ESPN, what are some examples of SI “serving up stuff that the readership didn’t want”?
How’s about the fact that the magazine lost enough readers/subscribers that they lost enough advertising money that they started missing payments?Report
Sure, if by “serving up stuff readership didn’t want” you mean “crappy writing a week later than it is available elsewhere”.
Which is what everyone else seems to be saying.Report
You also seem to disagree that the stuff that people loudly complained about should count as stuff that readership didn’t want.
Personally, I think that the stuff that people loudly complained about might be a good example of the stuff that readership didn’t want.Report
No, it really isn’t.
You really don’t see the logical fallacy here?
“What people loudly complain about online”=/= “What the actual readership is upset about”.
SI’s readership peaked in the late 80s and has been on a downhill trajectory ever since, which is pretty much the same story with every print magazine.Report
While it may certainly be true that what people loudly complain about might not be the only thing that is upsetting them, I think that the argument that we just can’t know whether the stuff that they were loudly complaining about was a contributor to them leaving is a level of weaponized deliberate ignorance that cannot possibly be overcome.
“What was the readership upset about?”
“Maybe what they were complaining about?”
“YOU DON’T KNOW THAT THAT’S A LOGICAL FALLACY”Report
Again, “Readership=/= “People who are complaining”.
But lets assume there is some number of readers who stopped reading due to the burkini issue.
What we don’t know is how large that number is, or if it was even a negative number since its possible they picked up a few readers due to the Streisand Effect, getting people talking about a magazine no one has talked about in years.
But in any case, the factors which seem most reasonable are cable sports news, internet sports news, and a lack of writing talent to keep readers.
Everything else just seems like trivia.Report
But lets assume there is some number of readers who stopped reading due to the burkini issue.
This is not my argument. My argument is that the burkini kinda thing indicated a lack of judgment on the part of editorial. Remember “mundane business mistakes”? My argument was that this was one of them.
But in any case, the factors which seem most reasonable are cable sports news, internet sports news, and a lack of writing talent to keep readers.
In addition to these reasonable reasons, I think that another reasonable reason would be the stuff that people were complaining about loudly enough that even people like us here heard about it.
“Maybe SI picked up a few readers because of the complaints!”
Sure. Did they pick up more than they lost?
Here’s one way to measure that: DID THEY GO OUT OF BUSINESS?!?!?Report
You keep making assertions and failing to support them.
You said “serving up things the readers didn’t want” but couldn’t provide any examples, other than some people on the internet yelling about the burkini.
Now you mention a “lack of editorial judgement” but again, offer no examples other than…people online yelling about the burkini.
But not to worry, guess what? There are a lot of comments here and elsewhere about both of those things.
Except…they don’t mention the burkini, not once.
You’re like the rooster who thinks that he makes the sun rise each morning by yelling about it.Report
You said “serving up things the readers didn’t want” but couldn’t provide any examples, other than some people on the internet yelling about the burkini.
I did provide examples up here. Did you not read it?
Here, I’ll list off the stuff I mentioned:
The recent AI scandal
The fact that the news was no longer timely (it went from being a weekly magazine to a *MONTHLY* magazine on top of the whole “game on Sunday, magazine on Wednesday” issue)
The editorial judgment that led to the changes in the Swimsuit Issue strikes me as likely to have bled over into other stories.
The “burkini” issue isn’t limited to the burkini issue. One could easily point at other examples of “provocative” model choices they made. You know your rant about how the dudebros resent the new gatekeepers? That. That exactly. Except I see that as a lapse in editorial judgment and not a fault on the part of the readership.
But if you want an article of someone complaining about the swimsuit edition and the “diverse” models… well, here’s CNN.Report
And as I also said, your own examples point to things entirely unrelated to burkinis.
If you want to say that choosing a burkini model was an example of poor editorial judgement, well that an opinion you can have, there’s nothing to prove one way or the other.
I think its pretty firmly established that this decision had very little, if anything, to do with declining readership.Report
As I said at the time, the deliberate choice of putting a burkini model out there was a provocative choice.
Yay! Provocative!
And we are all sophisticated enough to know that when something is provocative, only rubes get provoked.
But it strikes me as vaguely unsophisticated to engage in a provocative act and then be surprised that rubes exist.
I understand why you, Chip, would want to make fun of the rubes being provoked by the provocative.
I don’t understand why editorial would want to do that sort of thing… especially if there’s reason to believe that new paying customers ain’t gonna replace the old.Report
What other word can we use to describe someone who is provoked by seeing a woman wearing a burkini?
Like, lets ask LeeEsq what he would call someone who is provoked by a woman wearing Orthodox headscarf? Or Pinky what he would all a person who is provoked by a model wearing a small crucifix necklace?
I’m sure there are words, and “rube” is but one.Report
Ahem:
Report
Oh, you misunderstand.
I’m not making fun of those who are triggered by seeing a woman in a burkini. I sympathize with them, I really do.
Why, just the other day I was watching a football game and saw the image of a female celebrity.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/nancy-armour/2024/01/20/taylor-swift-chiefs-kelce-nfl-critics-dungy-thin-skinned/72272165007/
I was so provoked, so triggered, I spent the rest of the day in my safe space in a fetal position.Report
Hey, Sports Illustrated should have one of their writers do an entire story on Taylor Swift!
Oh. Wait. I just got a note about what happened to all of the writers at Sports Illustrated…
Well, maybe someone should have an AI out there throw something together.Report
If I remember correctly, there were lots of other hot women in SI’s burkini swimsuit issue. I don’t recall any SI swimsuit issue in which all of the women appealed to me, but I never thought they all had to. Or that SI was doing anything wrong by including some women who appealed to men whose tastes were not mine.Report
Also… people have been hooting and hollering about the Swimsuit Issue for decades. In fact, you had the option to skip it and have an extra week added to your subscription if you were somehow offended by such filth arriving in your mailbox.
Here ya go… from 2005: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/sports/othersports/swimsuit-issue-offer-invitation-to-opt-out.html
“There are, it seems, subscribers who dislike Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue.
They do not want to see it and they certainly do not want it sent to them.
They view the sensuous lounging of supermodels in expensive bikinis as alien to the mission of a weekly sports magazine.
The anti-swimsuit-issue backlash never developed into a mass movement of anti-bikinists burning the special winter edition in protest. But there have been letters, more in the past than now, saying that the pictorials objectify women.
And occasionally, there have been demonstrations outside the magazine’s office building in Manhattan. But now the magazine is inviting subscribers to say “no thanks” to Veronica Varekova, Carolyn Murphy and other models, including the one who will be the winner of a new reality show, NBC’s “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Search.”
The headline on a small box in two recent issues read “If You Don’t Want the Swimsuit Issue.” The notice provided a phone number (1-866-228-1175) for subscribers to request that the issue not be mailed to them. Those who make the request will have their subscriptions extended by one issue.
Terry McDonell, the managing editor of Sports Illustrated, said: “It’s my third swimsuit issue and I wanted to flag this, because I think it’s a good policy. I was thinking that if a family doesn’t want this coming into their house, with six boys between the ages of 7 and 11, we should show them that it’s our responsibility.”
The policy for the swimsuit issue has been quietly in effect for decades.”Report
Ooo…ooo… ask me! I’m a former Sports Illustrated reader/subscriber. ASK ME WHY THE WORD FORMER IS IN THERE!Report
Why did you stop subscribing to Sports Illustrated, Kazzy?Report
Because I could log onto the high speed internet connection I had for free in my college dorm room and read ESPN.com, SI.com, the NYTimes online edition, and pretty much everything else FOR FREE on my Dell Laptop. I could find game recaps minutes after the games finished. You also had ESPN Page 2, which was catering to a younger audience. I could goto the print lab in the library and print out articles to read on the toilet. And all of that was closer than the campus mail room that was all the way on the other side of campus and up several hills.
I *did* resubscribe because I wanted the special edition hardcover book they put out when the Sawx won the 2004 World Series but once that subscription lapsed, there was just little reason to pay for a print magazine that arrived days after online content was available. Also, SI was available for free online at that time.
I also gave up ESPN magazine around that time. In fact, when I signed up for ESPN+ or whatever the premium online content was I had the option to get ESPN magazine for free and declined.Report
So you could get a just-as-good product for free (and easier, sounds like) than the physical version. The bonus book kept you around for another year but then… kaput, it sounds like.
Looks like SI went biweekly in 2018 and monthly in 2020.
So this happened back when SI was still weekly.
Goodness gracious, I wish that it were easier to find subscription numbers. The best I’ve got is an article from 2022 that talks about how it had 3.2 million subscribers in 2007 but 2.75 million in 2017.
That strikes me as still having enough readers to make payments. Well, in 2017, it obviously was.
I can’t find subscription numbers for 2023, though.Report
I shared this earlier:
https://jabberwocking.com/why-sports-illustrated-failed/
I imagine not making payments speaks to some amount of financial mismanagement but I’ll let a business wiz weigh in on that.Report
Well, it’s not like Sports Illustrated was *NEVER* going to die. It’s just a question of how long it’d take and whether it’d be possible to extend it by another month or six or twelve.
Maybe they can sell ball caps and embroidered satin windbreakers for a while.
Ave atque vale.Report
I hear you. These things change, and get pushed and pulled by trends and fashion, and big money making enterprises are always trying to both ride the wave and be the trendsetter that hits on the next big thing. What I don’t think is that it’s endlessly mutable. The irony of the MAGA thing to me is more that they mistake clueless corporate misfires resulting from the kind of soulless corporate capitalism that conservative politicians have done more than anyone else to unleash upon us for some kind of woke conspiracy.Report
As you can see from these comments, it is very, VERY important to them that the downfall of SI be attributed to putting the wrong person on the cover than just mundane business trends.Report
I’m in general agreement but not entirely in agreement. What I think is causing a lot of the current cultural heat is that the Internet and social media is making people more aware of the criticism against them and what they like easier to find. A lot of stuff that was limited to activist circles and university departments can now be found in public. So rather than Yellowstone being a family soap set in Montana, you have a bunch of people dissecting it to see if it deals with the loses of the Native Americans during westward expansion. What was very light erotica for men and rather tame decades before the Internet became a thing, is now under new management that wants to change things rather than letting it be under the Barstool conservative brand.
Many people feel under assault these days. For groups like transpeople or Jews this feeling of being under assault is justified. For other groups not so much. This doesn’t change the feeling that they are under assault.Report
You must be 18 years or older to enter this cave.Report
There is also the fact that beauty and attractiveness are highly subjective things. Blonde hair doesn’t really doing anything for me. But there seems to be a whole cohort of mainly older men for whom it is a big deal and I have no idea why but they must have picked it up from somewhere at sometime and probably before I was born. It’s not surprising that TV wants attractive people on it. The Whole Fox News Blonde thing is interesting though because that feels like it is based on a lot of market research about what the men who watch Fox News wants.
All the complaints here are a bunch of complainy mechanics angry that there are women who look different than they do in their old calendars circa 1985-1993Report
I find it utterly ridiculous that people who see the hijab and other Muslim modesty clothing as diversity symbols, also rally against Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Jewish modesty clothing as being really oppressive for women. This is despite the goals and reasoning of both, and that Ultra-Orthodox men also wear modesty clothing ridiculous. This is one of the times where you really can’t have it both ways. Either both are diversity symbols or both are oppressive towards women.Report
In my neighborhood, I see both. Personally, I find the full-blown burka ridiculous, though it’s not really my business. A simple hijab barely registers. (I do have fond memories of a hijab-wearing woman whose clothing, though it covered just about everything but her hands and face, was tight enough to showcase a very fine body.) I react similarly to variants of Ultra-Orthodox clothing. I don’t know the people involved well enough to know whether they freely choose to dress this way or feel compelled, and I don’t know what I could or should do if I did know. It seems likely to me that many of them feel compelled, and that the practice is rooted in the desire to control women, but, again, I don’t know enough about particular women and their situations even to think about doing anything other than acknowledging the weirdness, going about my business, and letting those involved work things out.Report
That’s also my attitude. I operate under the assumption that this is America and anyone doing it is at least on some level choosing to. It isn’t like we have religious police or something out enforcing modesty laws. So weird but not my business.Report
This wasn’t exactly my point.Report
What was your point? That some hypothetical hypocrite exists that celebrates a burka but chastises Orthodox Jewish women for their dress?Report
In a country of 350-odd million people, some very odd indeed, there is probably somebody somewhere that matches that description, but I’m not aware of any significant tendency. I do know of cases where women in hijabs have been assaulted by people making specific reference to their being Muslims, and some decent folk standing up for the beleaguered hijab wearer. I am unaware of any similar incidents involving Orthodox Jewish women and their dress, but I see no reason to think they would not be defended as well.Report
Yes, exactly. That was my point. Jewish modesty clothing is seen as a tool of the patriarchy while Muslim modesty clothing is a diversity symbol. This is an area where I don’t think you can have a double standard. Either both have to be diversity symbols or both are symbols of the patriarchy.Report
Whatever it is it ain’t sexy.Report
Of course you go to the burkini.
It seems to be a payments issue with the brand owner: Authentic Brands Group, the company that licenses the Sports Illustrated brand, has warned the publisher that it may terminate its contract “absent a cure” after a fee payment was missed.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, publisher Arena Group said it did not make a quarterly payment of about $3.75 million. Arena has licensed the editorial operations of the venerable brand since 2019.
Authentic “issued the Company a notice of breach with the intent to exercise its right of termination,” Arena said in the filing, adding that they are “in discussion” with the licensor.
https://deadline.com/2024/01/sports-illustrated-brand-publisher-restructuring-1235696747/Report
Oh, so it’s that SI was not able to pay its bills!
That makes sense.
Yeah, I suppose bringing up the burkini is a distraction from the tangible issue of “not making enough money”.
It’s the age of the internet, after all.Report
You generally need to pay your billsReport
Like so many other things, this is a story of private equity bleeding something dryReport
So there’s no possible connection between giving the customer what they want and having money?Report
Well, they did give them Martha Stewart in last year’s swimsuit issue.Report
I have no idea how well the _rest_ of the magazine was doing, but the swimsuit edition was always ‘softcore barely-not-porn that married men were allowed to own’. That was the purpose.
And in this day and age, giving the customer softcore barely-not-porn, or even actual softcore porn, is a less and less workable business model with the actual internet (and private browsing) right there. Go ask Cinemax.
Hell, go ask Playboy about a print business model based in porn. Although, interestingly, they then realized their brand wouldn’t survive that and changed back because, contrary to claims of ‘reading it for the articles’, they had literally nothing else, and I think they’re going to try to turn themselves into a…upclass porn brand name, which they already halfway are, with a magazine more as incidental.
But I think Sport Illustrated actually _does_ have stuff besides the swimsuit edition. I think?
The reason SI changed the swimsuit edition was not to try to appeal to more people, it was to give their decades of publishing that the slightest veneer of respectability before they stopped making it, which I suspect will happen pretty soon…um, I mean, assuming they didn’t just die.Report
Although Jaybird is up there insisting that they _don’t_ have anything else and that quality has gone constantly down, which…I mean, that all makes sense. I guess? I literally have no idea.
But at some point, you have to put out things people want to buy, and the swimsuit edition stopped being that because _waves hand at internet porn_ and the rest of it stopped being that because of quality, and, like…what is left?Report
I am not insisting that they don’t have anything else.
I am up there insisting that people who read it are saying that the quality has gone down (and has been going down since they were sold off by Time, Inc).
I will say that if their philosophy toward the swimsuit edition matches their philosophy for football, I can see how people who buy the magazine for football might stop buying it without picking up enough new fans of the sport to make up the difference.
Not enough new fans to make the payments, anyway.Report
I mean, I think it’s sorta telling that basically none of us have any idea if the quality is any good, if it got worse, if it was better before, because _who the hell reads it_?
Like you said, literally none of us are boycotting it. We just…don’t read it. Never have.
Sometimes tastes of the public change, and honestly the most obvious thing about sports is ‘People tend to care about what is currently going on’, which makes a print magazine about a month out of date. Of all the print media to kill, it’s this sort of current events that is most threatened.
I am literally trying to imagine a Millennial with a Sport Illustrated subscription. Getting an actual magazine in the mail each month, talking about sporting events that happened _weeks_ ago and doing detailed dives on random sports individuals and histories that either they don’t care about, or already know cause they get news about that topic from other places.
The world changes.Report
I have to insist that I used to read Playboy mostly for the articles. There was better porn elsewhere, and more to my taste, of which I took full advantage, but Hef paid lots of great writers well and published a lots of great articles and interviews. I still remember many of them. The indistinguishable naked Barbies, not so much.Report
I never got the preference for Blondes which seemed prevalent from the Greatest Gen to Boomers. There is a reason Fox News Blonde is a thing but it seems very strong and bigReport
I finally read the small print:
“Earlier today the workers of Sports Illustrated were notified that The Arena Group is planning to lay off a significant number, possibly all, of the Guild-represented members at SI…”Report
While we’re waiting for the SCOTUS oral arguments in Feb(?) on DJT 14th amendment disqualification, two measured arguments pro / con
1. DISQUALIFIED
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/01/92349/
2. NOT DISQUALFIED
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/01/92428/
Still think #2 is better reasoned, and I’d wager that he get’s the SCOTUS prediction more right than wrong.Report
#2 gives SCOTUS more outs, and is certainly loaded with originalist hand waving. Unfortunately, it does no one any good to allow the campaign of a disqualified person. And once he is convicted for his role in January 6th, he will be over a bar for disqualification no matter what – since that one will be for the insurrection he called for and egged on. Painful as it is for a sizable chunk of the nation, their standard barer deserves no seat at this table.Report
Prepare for disappointment.Report
I’ve been disappointed with SCOTUS since the end of the Berger Court.
Its just that in this case my disappointment sets up the possibility of fascism actually coming to America. Which is something to be more then disappointed about.Report
This would be like the seventh thing the Court has done that creates fascism in America. And that’s not even taking into account that your current definition of fascism includes voters having more choice.Report
I’m curious to see whether or how many of the liberal justices also use their hand wavey living constitution jurisprudence to set up fascism.Report
Religion freedom under attack!
A story about how certain sorts of religious freedom are important, and other apparently not:
Anyway, so, Chris Avell, a pastor in Bryan Ohio, is facing criminal charges for a zoning violation (The church is in a business district) for ‘letting homeless people sleep in the church’. This is a constantly changing story (Because he flatly is refusing to stop doing it, so keeps being charges.) so I’m not going to link to anything, just google his name.
Now, this is an interesting religious freedom thing. The zoning law is, obviously, religiously neutral and not targeting, in any way, at the church. It seems constitutional at its face.
However, there’s the RFRA to think of. Ohio doesn’t have one via law, but it supposedly has one apparently added by the courts? Basically, these laws, and I assume Ohio is roughly the same, say that the government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability, unless the law is a furtherance of a compelling government interest and done in the least restrictive way.
Now, zoning laws are a compelling government interest, but…are they the least restrictive way of…wait, what is the government trying to do with businesses disallowing people to sleep in them? In fact, what’s the exact law there? I’m having trouble figuring it out.
One of the stories I read claims that the church does not have ‘bedrooms’, which is very obvious silliness as the basis for a law…there’s no requirement that places people sleep are legally ‘bedrooms’, at least as far as I know.
I know Musk got in trouble because he tried to set up spaces for employees to sleep, but I always assumed the actual problem there was labor violations, and possibly breaking the rental agreement for the offices, not zoning.
This sorta seems akin to the nonsense brothel laws that pop up, where it’s illegal for X unrelated people to live on the same property.
Anyway, I thought this was interesting because I don’t see conservatives flipping out over it, although admittedly I could have missed that.
A thing to consider: What if the people he were housing were people in the country illegally, instead of just generally homeless people who were freezing to death?Report
What we should do is just enforce the law but make exceptions for people who are doing things that we like.Report
I didn’t actually say he ‘should’ be able to do that, I just pointed out that him being charged with a crime is a pretty clear cut violation of how conservatives want religious rights to work…it’s a violation based on fricking _zoning law_ of all things, the sort of law that most of us agree are pretty unimportant (When we’re not arguing they are actively harmful) and get exceptions all the time.
The fact it _also_ is something with a boatload of actual Christian history, ‘caring for the less fortunate’ instead of ‘I get to fire gay people’ would also seem meaningful…except conservatives basically turned ‘religious belief’ into ‘whatever current prejudice I have’…but regardless, ‘God does not want people to freeze in the street and tells us to not let that happen’ is objectively a religious belief, and one that I certainly can believe this man holds. (It’s not like it’s some weird super uncommon one!) But, again, the threshold for ‘religious belief’ is so low that it literally doesn’t matter. It probably should, but it doesn’t.
My point is that there is a rather large subset of the ‘religious right’ that do not seem to care about this story and are not doing the same reactions that ‘Man is fired for religious beliefs [aka, fired for using homophobic slur towards customer]’ stories they like to spew.
Although there is a small subset of somewhat right-wing media covering it, the ones that I tend to classify as ‘actually religious’, not just ‘right wing using religious as a tool’…which you can easily tell apart because the ‘actually religious’ media covers a lot of non-political religious articles, too. For the people (on the left and right) who _genuinely_ care about religious freedom and take a somewhat absolutist position (Which I can respect as a principle even if I disagree with it.), what is happening here is an issue, whereas the ones that just just exist to give right-wingers talking points about the evil libs trying to kill God, this is completely ignored.
If you want to sort out the wheat from the chaff, right here is the time. Go check who is covering this story. As I said below, Fox at least gave it _some_ airtime, even if their talking heads aren’t screaming about it as far as I can tell. (I mean, I don’t watch Fox, but I haven’t seen any opinion pieces about it.)Report
Does Focus on the Family count?
Here’s CBN and The Christian Post.
That’s what I was able to find in the time between your comment at 6 minutes past the hour and now… whatever the timestamp of this comment is. And the time to write it, of course.Report
Heh, the Christian Post I literally almost listed as one of the ‘actually religious’ media. I guess I should have done that to clarify what distinction I was making. They also cover stuff that is just religious, not political, and it’s pretty rare they cover stuff that is not religious. Poking around, all I could find was a single article about Hunter Biden that didn’t have a religious angle.
CBN is pretty much the same thing.
Focus on the Family is…pretending to be that. I mean, reading their news, they seem to be. (But I know who they actually are, but whatever) And they also haven’t updated the story since the 4th!
Those are the people I was classifying as ‘actually religious [right-wing] news’, or at least ‘presenting news stories that are mostly religious’.
What this story has failed to do is _escape_ that into the echo chamber. Or even the media that feeds the echo chamber. If this was some nonsense ‘Christian fired because of his religious freedom to act like a jackass to a gay person’, it would be basically constant blast, and this is just some of the ‘Oh, hey, this happened, this guy is doing this, and…I guess that’s all’.
Like, where’s Breitbart? I just went there and checked their ‘religious freedom’ tag, and they had this story as the most recent ‘demonic American government attacks Christians’:
https://www.breitbart.com/faith/2023/11/25/barbadian-dance-group-unconstitutionally-banned-competition-christian-views-gender/
Breitbart also had an article about how a city in Wisconsin banned employees from hanging Christmas decoration, and an update on the professional scammer Joe Kennedy, the football coach who demands the right to force students to pray in a giant spectacle. Nothing about this, though.
Let’s check One American News Network. First, let’s check that it still exists and is maintained…yup, I see an article says that Alec Baldwin was just indicted. So let’s search for ‘Chris Avell’…literally no article. Or, rather, yes, one article, but not about that, or containing those words, so…search engine broke? Let’s try from outside, using site:www.oann.com and…Google says no. (Edit: Actually, I had mistyped site:www.oann.com in this comment, so i went back to check I hadn’t mistyped it in the google search, and I hadn’t…but I tried it without Chris Avell and it also turns out they basically don’t have their articles indexed by google because…I don’t know. But, anyway, I will only try for so long to try to hunt down articles on them. You’re supposedly a new organization, make it where I can find things on you!)
Daily Caller? Nope, nothing about this. They don’t have a tag for religious freedom, but you can search for ‘site:dailycaller.com religious freedom’ and discover it is something they are very concerned about…except here. (In fact, they also love Joe Kennedy.)Report
OH! I thought you were asking for the other thing.
Yeah, the post-religious right doesn’t give a crap about that sort of thing. Only uses it as a cudgel.Report
“I thought this was interesting because I don’t see conservatives flipping out over it”
orly? this is the law firm defending the pastor from criminal chargesReport
I literally said ‘I could have missed it’.
Although, the fact he has a lawyer is, uh, not really the same as conservative media caring about something.
I search for “Chris Avell”, and I see a bunch of generic news organizations talking about it, along with places like WNG and Christian Post.
What I don’t see is the right wing media…the closest is Fox News, and they have, at least, had him on TV once, two weeks ago, but…seem to have not really cared beyond that.Report
“I literally said ‘I could have missed it’.”
brother, you put a whole damn post up there based on Nobody’s Talking About This, you are not going to dig yourself out of the Idiot Hole by claiming that catty sarcasm was actually a disclaimer.
(I also like your reply to Jaybird where you explain that actually yeah there’s a bunch of news organizations talking about this and they were talking about it when you posted and a Google search would have found them right away but you didn’t count them or discuss them or even mention them on purpose so you’re not wrong…)Report
I’m seeing this in ‘conservative’ feeds as the story comes out. Heck, Fox News ran two stories the first week of Jan.
I don’t know anything about ‘Dad’s Church’ or ‘Dad’s Place’ — google turns up no website, just a facebook page (which also has no links to a website). So my initial thought is that this is a Church of One… and there’s no network for Dad’s Church. Which would account for no-one really knowing about the oppression of the Dad’s Church evangelicals. Maybe one of the Site’s evangelicals could add further information on how Dad’s Church fits in to the broader Evangelical network.
I suppose you think this is a ‘scissors’ issue where Churches don’t have interest in Homeless or Migrants? Do you think it will stand up when you broaden the enquiry beyond a thing called Dad’s Church?
Now, one thing I can say from speaking with friends who were CEO’s of Catholic Charities and who ran Homeless and Emergency Shelters for years is that there are really a *lot* of Secular State regulations on how you have to structure your shelters. A lot of the regulations make good sense; some are tedious; and some are petty. But, for folks who want and *do* run shelters, the state requires that you do lots of things in addition to simply being willing.
For example… in a story touting Mayor Adam’s outreach to Churches to help with housing, it mentions in passing:
“St. Paul and St. Andrew has served as home for several immigrants but it is not applying for the new program.
Rev. Lea Matthews, their associate pastor, said the church’s old building can’t meet the program’s requirements to have sprinklers, a centralized alarm system, showers and space for 19 beds.
“A great many of the ideas that birthed that program came out of our group, namely, out of this congregation even — and we wouldn’t qualify. So many others are having that same experience,” she said.
More than 200 houses of worship have applied for the program. But only two have been approved so far.
Gale Brewer, a city council member that represents parts of Manhattan, including the Upper West Side, said the problem is that the Fire Department is imposing standards that are tougher than for permanent shelters.
“The Fire Department — with all due respect — is putting too many roadblocks,” she said.
Mayor Adams’ administration and the Fire Department both declined to be interviewed for this story. “Report
A stance for why Biden is in a decent position despite allegedly poor polling and plutocrats at Davos working the refs and stating Biden will win: Trump did horribly in the suburbs and elections are won in the suburbs, not with the chronically online yute: https://twitter.com/SteveDeaceShow/status/1747991807340777748?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1747991807340777748%7Ctwgr%5E909e33a5ce592341b00b97fb091d8dae063b958b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdisqus.com%2Fembed%2Fcomments%2F%3Fbase%3Ddefaultf%3Dlawyersgunsmoneyblog-comt_i%3D13865420https3A2F2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com2F3Fp3D138654t_u%3Dhttps3A2F2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com2F20242F012Ftired-the-kennedy-failson-wired-whoever-that-guy-is-who-is-nominally-running-against-bident_e%3DTired3A20The20Kennedy20failson20Wired3A20Whoever20that20guy20is20who20is20nominally20running20against20Bident_d%3DTired3A20The20Kennedy20failson20Wired3A20Whoever20that20guy20is20who20is20nominally20running20against20Bident_t%3DTired3A20The20Kennedy20failson20Wired3A20Whoever20that20guy20is20who20is20nominally20running20against20Bidens_o%3Ddescversion%3Dcb3f36bfade5c758ef967a494d077f95Report
I would also [point to the down ballot races in 2022, 23, and flipping a legislative seat just a week ago in Florida that when faced with a MAGA and a Democrat, the Democrats do pretty well.
I’d still caution that the Presidential race will be a razor thin margin of victory no matter what, but I think Biden stands a good chance.Report
jesus christ dude what is that linkReport
Speaking of boycotts, #BoycottPizzaHut is trending on twitter as I type this.
Report
Is that Bam Margera delivering those?Report
Probably not. Bam’s looking *ROUGH* these days.Report
Never let them know your next move:
Report
Looking over the discussion from yesterday alone, I note that the “anti” fascists want control over who’s on the ballot, want to dictate your children’s education, and can’t distinguish between choice and censorship. So you probably have to be anti-Semitic to be on Harvard’s anti-Semitism board.Report
Welp, DeSantis just dropped out.Report
And the Lions are going to the NFC Championship?!?Report
I’m into it and have been rooting for them. Would be an awesome story for Jared Goff to go all the way after being the after thought of the Stafford trade with the Rams.Report
In-N-Out in Oakland to close over increase in crime, company says.
National numbers show that crime is, instead, going down.Report
Food for thought:
Report