Open Mic for the week of 4/8/2024
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.
Happy Eclipse Day!
“Tesla scraps low-cost car plans amid fierce Chinese EV competition”
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-scraps-low-cost-car-plans-amid-fierce-chinese-ev-competition-2024-04-05/
Entry-level Tesla car won’t be built, three sources tell Reuters
Tesla to focus on self-driving taxis instead, sources said
Strategy shift comes as Tesla faces competition from China EV makers including BYD
“The stark reversal comes as Tesla faces fierce competition globally from Chinese electric-vehicle makers flooding the market with cars priced as low as $10,000”
I wonder if these Chinese cars are even legal in the states.Report
I don’t have the link handy but it appears the NYAG has rejected TFG’s surety bond. Anyone got better eyeballs? And what’s next?Report
The judge has scheduled a hearing for April 22. The two sides will argue over a number of things, including whether the contract is actually a surety bond at all.Report
So Trump tried to waffle on abortion, and the base said “No Way- We want a national ban on all abortions!”
So just like the old riddle of “Can God make a rock so large even He can’t lift it?” we have “Can Trump build a base so radical even he can’t accept it?”Report
Heh, sure, so he says he could be persuaded for 16weeks including Rape/Incest/Health exceptions… maaaaaybe 15 weeks… ‘The Base’ goes wild for 15 week NATIONAL BAN on 0% abortions.
It’s the scenario I pointed out years ago… Team Red enacts 15 week ‘Eurpoean like’ *ban* and claims victory while Team Blue wails and gashes teeth at total victory while claiming Handmaid’s tale defeat.
*The Base is always those voters whose support our need to make our point.Report
A proposed “European style abortion law” exists no where.
Arizona style total bans, yeah, those are the stuff of Republican dreams.Report
Why would the pro-life crowd accept a 15-16 week ban, especially one with exceptions for dire medical conditions? Over 90% of all abortions occur within 13 weeks. Very few women who get later-term abortions have just made their minds up that they wanted one. That late in the process, there is usually a serious medical issue.Report
Arizona is curious because the AZ supreme court (just TODAY) ruled that the *existing* 1864 law is still on the books because after Roe in 1973 there was no reason to do anything with it.
And, what further makes this not really any sort of test case is that the 2022 15-week law signed by Republican Gov. Ducey is on the books and the court simply says that the 2022 law was written in such a way that it operated under Roe and didn’t (re-)authorize abortions post Roe.
So… I’m not sure anyone can make of this as a test case for anything. Likely it results in a 24-week ‘viability’ law that seems to be working its way through referendum process. The difference between 15-weeks and 24-weeks in terms of the # of abortions? None.
¶1 We consider whether the Arizona Legislature repealed or otherwise restricted A.R.S. § 13-3603 by enacting the abortion statutes in Title 36,2 namely A.R.S. § 36-2322, the statute proscribing physicians from performing elective abortions after fifteen weeks’ gestation. This case involves statutory interpretation—it does not rest on the justices’ morals or public policy views regarding abortion; nor does it rest on § 13-3603’s constitutionality, which is not before us.
¶2 We conclude that § 36-2322 [The 2022 15-week Law] does not create a right to, or otherwise provide independent statutory authority for, an abortion that repeals or restricts § 13-3603, but rather is predicated entirely on the existence of a federal constitutional right to an abortion since disclaimed by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215, 292 (2022). Absent the federal constitutional abortion right, and because § 36-2322 does not independently authorize abortion, there is no provision in federal or state law prohibiting § 13-3603’s operation. Accordingly, § 13-3603 is now enforceable.
https://www.azcourts.gov/Portals/0/OpinionFiles/Supreme/2024/CV230005PR.pdfReport
Its just another data point in the category of “This is the consequence of voting Republican.”Report
And once again we see that the rich care not one wit for the rest of us.
“Speaking at a meeting last Thursday, Rita Palma first checked to make sure there were “no Biden voters in the house” before telling her audience that her “No. 1 priority” is to ultimately take electoral votes away from President Joe Biden.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/rfk-jr-trumpReport
We see that women care not one wit for the rest of us. (I mean, that’s the game, right? Take one example and judge everyone in the same demographic?)Report
That’s a weird takeaway from that article, but I suppose that when seething resentment of (((people who make more money than you))) is the foundation of your political ideology, you’ll get there however you can.
That aside, I think the reasonable take on this is that she was making the best pitch she could think of to get blue-state Republicans to vote for her boss. This isn’t a leak of some top-secret conspiracy that she chose to discuss in a huge auditorium. Presumably the actual plan, in the extremely unlikely event of RFK getting the entire blue-state Republican base and enough Democrats and independents to vote for him and thereby winning some blue states and throwing the election to the House, is to turn on Trump and try to cobble together a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans to choose him over Trump.
It’s just crazy enough not to work.
Also, why link to the Infowars of the left when the CNN article it was cribbing from was better?
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/08/politics/rfk-jr-new-york-biden-trump/index.htmlReport
I put my sales cap on and thought, if I had to sell a turd like RFK2 in NY, I’d probably do it like that. Basically anti-Biden at all costs for left/right … where it ‘resonates’ is that for an NY Republican, voting for a guy who (theoretically) might get a plurality of disaffected Blue votes? Good gambit.
Then I thought, what if I were in a Red state and I said to the crowd, ‘there are no Trump voters here, right?’ (basically anti-Trump at all costs) and made a pitch to Dem voters to not ‘waste’ their vote on Biden but to vote RFK2 who (theoretically) might get a plurality of disaffected Red votes? Same pitch, deny Trump a path to 270 — but you have to drop the Congress picks a winner kicker. Or, as BB says above, you cobble together some sort of story about winning NY and NC (and others) that RFK becomes the ‘consensus’ candidate.
Sure, it’s all a little preposterous… but all third party bids in a FPTP duopoly are a little preposterous.Report
CNN isn’t the Infowars of the left?Report
No. This has been episode 5673 of short answers to stupid questions.Report
Let’s not get carried away, and I say that as someone who mourns the disappearance of CNN as a news channel.Report
Because I was posting in Madrid at 6AM. I went with what I had. That other outlets you disrespect at least as much covered that same story is just a bonus for me I guess.Report
A friend was there last year and fell in love with it.Report
I did as a kid, and I go back whenever I can. You’d probably love it as well.Report
My wife and I honeymooned in Spain 30-ish years ago. In Madrid, she was startled by the armed guards at public buildings. How things have changed.Report
They are still there – on account of a history of actual domestic terrorism by Basque Separatists . . .Report
I’m sure they are. Now we see them here.Report
Though I will sadly report that the Guardia Civil no loner wear their black hats with the cooly funny upturned rear brims.Report
…you’re on vacation in spain and the only thing you can think of to do is post here?Report
Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that. You go out and you do your thing and now you’ve got 5 minutes to yourself?
Hey. Where are my homies? What’s up with them? Is anything going on?
That is a perfectly fine response.Report
One thing I’ve now learned is that there’s a big difference between a total eclipse and one that leaves even a sliver of sun exposed.Report
We had 30%. Pretty shadows on the ground.Report
87% just north of DC. Not really any darker than some clouds going passed. Looked cool through the glasses though.Report
Didn’t even notice it….Report
This comic prepared me for that: https://xkcd.com/2914/Report
Sitting at 90% totality is a wonderful lesson in how your eye dynamically adjusts to brightness levels.Report
The Trump bond saga seemed to be over last couple of weeks when appeals courts reduced the amount of a bond Trump had to post to 170 some million and then Trump got one from a Ca company. This week, however, it looks like the whole thing is blowing up because the “bond” Trump posted was more like a bunch of legalese written on a napkin saying “Trump is totally good for this money and no we won’t pay if he renegs” so it’s going back to court again and Trump getting his assets seized by the NYAG still seems on the table. What a clusterfish.Report
Its becoming clear that the seed germ of fascism is misogyny.
Example:
The deeply silly, extremely serious rise of ‘Alpha Male’ Nick Adams
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2024/04/09/nick-adams-alpha-male-trump-campaign-surrogate/
They use the word “silly” but reading it, a better description of these young men is that they are deeply sad, riddle with a sweaty anxiety and insecurity and inchoate rage.
One time, he told me, Adams swapped his Jaguar for an Infiniti; when Fischer asked him why, Adams showed him an email that Jaguar had sent wishing him “Happy Holidays” (instead of “Merry Christmas”).
Imagine being so fragile, so riven with fear that a simple corporate holiday card can trigger such rage.Report
Imagine having so much money you can frivolously swap out one luxury car for another. I think if given the choice I’d have kept the jag.Report
I’m happy with my Chevy and find luxury cars a waste of money.Report
(He didn’t own either car. He rented them.)Report
Heh fair enough. I can never get through these kinds of pieces.Report
‘
With anti-Semitism as a close second.Report
Not an inconsiderable humans are like this but the exact thing that sets them off varies a lot.Report
“It’s bad to blow a big story. What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media….
“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”
https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trustReport
Right, because Christian Nationalist opinions buttressed by Russian propaganda deserve “equal” coverage.Report
Read the article – well, actually, of course not, go hang out in Madrid, but read the article when you get back.Report
got back last night – and read the article this morning before I came here. His great lament is that there aren’t enough old crusty conservative white guys in the room any more and so there aren’t enough articles highlighting the views of old crusty white guys on NPR.Report
There’s nothing in the article about the skin color of the staff. You get what that means about you, right?Report
He keeps referring to the lack of viewpoint diversity in the news room, and based on NPRs currently available public data – and his own words – what he’s referring to is a loss of conservative white male view points. Its quite plain in his wording, especially his dismissive attitude regarding DEI and its changes to the space where he works.
This isn’t that hard, unless you purposely want to avoid the subject.Report
I have listened to NPR for years.
When Trump was elected NPR was filled with news about immigration and how hard their lives were.
That wasn’t news before he was elected and it wasn’t news afterwards, even though Obama’s and Biden’s policies are the same.
FAICT, all news is going through a “will this be helpful to getting a Blue President in the WH” filter.
I doubt that it’s a conscious choice by NPR as a corporation. My expectation is it’s the choices of various news people who just all have the same political leaning.Report
From that link, they have 87 Democrats and 0 Republicans in the news room.
It shouldn’t be surprising that they’re suffering from group think.Report
Everyone knew that NPR leaned left. I stopped listening over a decade ago, or more, when it became clear that they stopped paying lip service to impartiality. They never were, but that had plausible deniability back then.Report
The bit I learned from this was that post Trump, even many normie liberals have been giving it up. The rest is not surprising, though backroom info is always a little interesting.Report
It’s an interesting piece. I’m one of the former listeners in question. My departure from it was mainly due to the lost credibility from the pivot to reporting post modern fairy tales. However I think it’s a mistake to look at that as something that happened in 2020. It goes back further, maybe to the late Obama administration. Of course adding Republicans to the staff wouldn’t be much of a corrective, as the author seems to suggest, nor would more sympathetic coverage towards the conservative stance on partisan political battles.
The strength of NPR was being pleasantly boring and (to use the authors word) dorky, in a Lisa Simpson kind of way. I always thought nothing was a greater example of how hilariously distorted conservative media was than turning on NPR. If you listened to them you’d expect to hear impassioned defenses of the Cuban healthcare system or fiery defenses of Trotsky speeches or something. Instead it would be a story about some obscure, often technocratic development or dispute that you’d have never otherwise heard of in a form way longer than regular soundbite news radio, and in a tone that I can only describe as low key Sesame Street for grown ups. More than anything else that’s what they ruined.Report
I have to admit, I’ve never left. Nor have I heard the extreme leftward tilt other people are hearing. That said, I appreciate the level of introspection Mr. Berliner demonstrates.Report
There is no accounting for taste and I have more sadness about losing something I liked than a grudge.
If I had to show you an example of what finally made me decide it wasn’t worth my time it would be something like this story.
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1026183914/new-dna-analysis-finds-1-000-year-old-warrior-remains-may-be-non-binary
I happen to have a BA in history with a concentration in western Europe, and a citation (they didn’t do minors when I was there) in Germanic Studies. In layman’s terms, I learned German and also bolstered my history BA with a lot of classes about Viking era stuff. Point being I happen to have a bunch of substantive knowledge about the time period. To say that the story is misleadingly framed wouldn’t do justice to how totally off base and ahistorical it is. People are literally dumber for being exposed to it, which to me is the most un-NPR thing I could ever have imagined. Anyway it’s become impossible for me to sustain what I have heard called the Murray Gell-Man amnesia.Report
So you disagree with the framing that genetics can offer important clues for the past? Or that a person with the described syndrome might not have presented a certain way, especially in line with the dress and artifacts at the burial? Or is it just the word non-binary that turned you off?
I happen to think as a great description of how modern tools are expanding what we know about the past and about humans.Report
When a news article headline points out that an accused criminal is black, do you think that’s because the people presenting the story think that’s the most important thing about them?Report
yesReport
On TV and in many newspapers, there’s often a picture. It usually speaks for itself.Report
If you really think that then, as I said, you were made dumber by the article.
They drew a highly speculative, broad conclusion about the culture of a time period based solely on a tenuous test suggesting that the person may have had a rare generic disorder. That’s not good history. That’s not good journalism.Report
But the important question is, is it good business?Report
If the article is to be believed, no, but I am not sure it makes too many firm claims on that point.Report
I’m with you. If anything, NPR remains as close as we can get in the modern landscape to Walter Cronkite.Report
Which is why so many people here dislike it.
1960’s national news broadcasts didn’t give a fair view to segregationists either, but somehow, we aren’t sad about that.Report
BingoReport
Yeah. I stopped donating around 2010 when one of the hosts, during a fundraising week, said something to the effect of “isn’t it great to have a place where there aren’t any teabaggers?” and I thought “Oh. Well. I guess this place ain’t for people like me.”
I pretty much stopped listening entirely about 2 years after that. You know. The radio button was still there just used less and less.Report
Yea, my listening slowly plummeted to virtually never by the mid teens. But I would still every once in a blue moon check back in, only to be rewarded with something totally nonsensical.Report
I can’t find it now but probably a dozen years ago here I’d mentioned my experience with NPR — I used to not notice the liberal bias, but after my own views started to moderate, I could never not notice it. It was like coming back into a smoke-filled room, noticing how smoky it was, and realizing that it must’ve always been this smoky but you just didn’t realize it because you’d been in it so long.
But I had attributed this more to my own shift than to any change at NPR, so I find it interesting that NPR itself has since also moved farther away from even where I used to be.Report
Warning, long response.
I have tried not to get overly bogged down in the existence of biases in themselves. On the one hand it frustrates me when it seems like there is a failure to really scrutinize something to the level it should be. But on the other, you know what the most unhealthy and dangerous media for me would be? One that I always thought got everything exactly right and was completely consistent with all of my priors. If I was being smart, and holding myself to the standards to which I’d hold others, I’d say something is very wrong with this. Hopefully I’d ask, what am I missing?
So I try to worry less about bias in itself and worry about whether whatever media I’m exposing myself to is healthy with questions like am I actually learning something from this? And does this have at least some semblance of intellectual honesty to it? And is there some minimal level of credibility, and logic to what they’re saying? Do they even acknowledge the existence of other views and counter arguments and if they do are they dismissed not just as wrong but evil?
My favorite show on NPR was a now defunct program on the local affiliate. It came from a place culturally to my left. But it was always respectful and upbeat, eclectic in its topics, and willing to give a fair hearing to at least some debate and counter arguments. Even if it was never going to involve a hardcore interrogation of certain assumptions it was well worth my time. Similarly I still read the Economist periodically, despite the fact that you can be sure it’s never going to come at anything questioning certain neoliberal assumptions from a place of sympathy. I read all kinds of substacks I don’t always agree with (Andrew Sullivan, Freddie, Matt Yglesias, etc.) where I have all kinds of fundamental disagreements, and at times see what are IMO failures to apply their own stated beliefs in a consistent way.
But when it comes to this currently (and hopefully fading) set of fashionable, weak tea, identitarian stuff? Well there’s just no point in reading or listening to any of it more than once. Because after you’ve heard it once you know exactly where it’s going to go, without fail, every time, and on everything. There’s no room for learning, no room for new insight, no room for exploration, no room for anything except a boring restatement of everything we’ve already heard a billion times by now. So I generally don’t bother with it. But I also think if I couldn’t make peace with any sort of bias ever I wouldn’t be able to read or watch or listen to anything.Report
Sure, I don’t disagree and I read a diverse set of folks too — as long as they’re usually interesting and/or thoughtful, I’m fine to account for their POV. It’s the predictable ones that I avoid — I don’t like to be bored, even if I agree with them.
The irritating thing specifically about an organization like NPR though is that there’s an implicit claim of authoritativeness. It’s fine that Slate & MSNBC do their partisan thing, but “National Public Radio” really ought to be speaking to a wider audience.
Anyway, luckily these days we have plenty of media choices. That’s the real reason I stopped listening to NPR many years ago — I just got used to getting my news quickly online.Report
If I had to actually guess, the actual reason for the shift in NPR isn’t some devious plot to go ‘woke.’
It’s just that’s where the employees are – especially if you’re not going to have a disproportionately white employee base anymore.
Now I know what your response to be – that NPR in what one could describe as a form of affirmative action, hire a bunch of less qualified minority conservative reporters and such, no matter how out of step they are with their wider
Even as late as 2000, Bush & Gore ran even w/ young voters, and I’m guessing Bush might’ve even won college-educated young voters, thought it was pretty close.
By 2024, it’s not that way at all. Especially people willing to work for probably low wages as all media is, at this point.
Now, I’m not a surprised a new generation of more diverse staff is interested in other stories and viewpoints than aging Gen X men. In the end, aging conservative-leaning people are always going to be driven off when a younger, more diverse base of reporters don’t care to appease your biases anymore.Report
“Now I know what your response to be” — pretty clearly you don’t. But it’s always pleasant to assume that the people who disagree with you have only bad reasons for doing so.Report
Heh, the young, diverse people who…. will earnestly tell you that there were totally non-binary identifying warriors of great prestige prancing about Scandinavia in the 11th century. Next: tantalizing evidence that the Goths wore black eyeliner and fishnet shirts when sacking Rome!Report
Makes perfect sense to me!
To be fair though, this kind of journalism has always had a problem with going too far to what the reporter thinks would be interesting as opposed to what’s really justified — it’s just that these days the specific manifestation of it is “wokeist”. My first Gell-Mann experience was from a few decades ago when I was studying linguistics and the Atlantic published an article “The Quest for the Mother Tongue”. Pretty much any working linguist knows that the “Mother Tongue” is not even a well-defined concept, and that in any case the tools we have for reconstruction will never take us back confidently more than a few thousand years, much less all the way back to the beginning — but the journalist wanted the sexy headline and found some random grad student who was layering reconstructions on top of reconstructions and was just sure he was cracking the code.Report
Oh for sure. And it’s a similar kind of thing with the time period at issue in that article I referenced. The first thing you learn about the people in question is that they were non-literate, still mostly tribal people that left very little accounting of themselves. Most of the (still very few) contemporaneous primary sources are from encounters written by clergy or Muslim traders. The others are oral traditions written down hundreds of years after the events they depict, post major cultural shifts, conversion to Christianity in particular. Historians endlessly debate how reliable any of these sources are and we will probably never have more than a hazy idea of who they were and how they lived.
Anyway I agree there have always been errors, overstatements, sensationalism, etc. I think what sticks in the craw is the cumulative effect. You can only flip from the non-binary nordic warrior story, to the deeply racist history of bird watching story, to the story that uses the word LatinX over and over again before you wonder if the source can be taken seriously or of it has morphed into some kind of bizarre agitprop.Report
I’ve been told that gender identity has nothing to do with biology, so *every* 1000-year-old warrior may have been nonbinary.Report
Tell it to the Spartans.Report
Who says the new staff is more ethnically diverse? Nothing in the article.Report
I assume it must be. They’re Progressive!
So I did a quick google of “NPR Personalities” and, yep, they’re diverse:
Ailsa Chang, Audie Cornish, Ayesha Rascoe, Jane Arraf, and Sylvia Poggioli are all People of Color and Kai Ryssdal looks white but, seriously, has a *CRAZY* name.Report
Sylvia Poggioli is a person of color.
Her color is white.
Both parents were Italian (antifascist refugees).Report
Both parents were Italian
That’s what I said.Report
Hamas has admitted that it can’t release it’s female hostages.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/10/middleeast/hamas-israel-hostages-ceasefire-talks-intl/index.htmlReport
Waiting to see this be spun as something like “Israel is holding out for something that cannot happen which is, by definition, unreasonable… therefore they should have a ceasefire without having the hostages released.”
Maybe if Biden yells at Israel more, Hamas will seem reasonable by comparison.
Get this conflict over with before the election, please.Report
Perhaps the Israeli’s will run their reputation through a shredder a bit more. Alienate some more foreign voters or blow up some more foreign nationals. Boy howdy that’ll sure show Hamas (who’re monsters of course- big surprise they behave monstrously) what for!Report
Well, back in October, I remember posting this tweet from Scott Adams:
Text follows:
That looks like a really prescient post now.Report
I’d have said something similar. Hamas doesn’t care about helping Palestinians- just hurting Israeli’s. The Israeli overreaction was their goal and they got it in spades just as the American overreaction to 9/11 was OBL’s goal. The TSA and the Patriot act are monuments to the man.Report
I have math from serious people who claim the Palestinian casualties are made up.
Statistics Professor talking about Hamas Gaza casualty reports
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyfDp8BE9Yg
The “Israeli overreaction” may just be “it’s a war and Hamas lies about how & how many of it’s solders are dying”.
BTW, we have lots of examples of them doing exactly that so it’d be odd if they’re not doing it now. We might find out after the war the real civilian death toll is one to two dying for every militant.
I have another link to an expert in Urban Warfare who claims Israel is winning and doing a really good job both ethically and practically.
Gaza had 24 brigades of Palestinian troops and Israel thinks it’s killed 19th.Report
I mean, even the most pro-Israeli people put the ratio at 1.5:1 and you only get that if basically, you have every able-bodied male who has been killed is a Hamas fighter, but even then, you get to tens of thousands of women and children killed, and it turns, a lot of people don’t think a liberal Western democracy gets to do that, no matter what happened to them.Report
How do we know there are tens of thousands of women and children killed?
That specific point is covered in the link.
Hamas’ numbers for women and children aren’t related to each other. So you’ll have a day where vast numbers of children are killed and another where vast numbers of women are killed. This is weird because you’d think they’d die together.
Far as he could tell, Hamas moves most of their “dead solders” numbers into the “dead women” column one day and “dead children” the next.
That’s over and above the issue that if Hamas is hiding in a hospital or some other civilian area, Israel has to go after them there. Hamas is deliberately trying to get it’s own civilians killed for PR purposes.Report
Is no one going to mention the source of the above link?
ETA: I’m kind of sick and tired of every online forum I read being used as a propaganda vehicle for the combatants in the Gaza war.Report
RE: Link Source
If you want to criticize the source you should talk about the Professor (who did the work) and not the interviewer.
RE: Every online forum
This is a current news thread, the war is in the news. I wouldn’t post that in the OJ thread.Report
We just had a discussion re: NPR and slanted journalism. How is this different? I’m sure a pro-Gaza news program could find another statistician.
Re: every online forum
Maybe I just need to be a little more selective about what I read, but then where am I? As far as what goes on in the Middle East, that backwater could not interest me less.Report
I’m sure a pro-Gaza news program could find another statistician.
Another statistician would tell us there are lots of reasons for bombs to magically kill lots of children (but no women) one day and then lots of women (but no children) a few days later?
The pro-Gaza news programs I listen to mostly pretend Israel is bombing random people and Hamas doesn’t exist.
It’s weird how they’ll talk about a siege of a hospital as though the Israeli army is being held off by the medical staff.Report
I saw a post recently mentioning that many (if not most of) Hamas leaders stepped down, took vacations, left the country for sudden urgent reasons, or just plain disappeared in the two-week period before 10/7/23. So if you’re wondering “how did Hamas just all of a sudden go crazy”, it’s because that’s exactly what happened–all the stable people got purged out and their replacements were crazy, to the point that they honestly expected that Gaza would be the anvil and Iran would be the hammer.Report
Well, I don’t know how much they thought stuff like “Iran will help. We can count on the Taliban trekking over here. I know that Egypt has our back…”
If they did think that, that would explain a lot about it.
The theory that they did this in order to get Israel to spend all of their Moral Capital accumulated in the 1930s and 1940s strikes me as… well, it’s too pat. Remember how Hamas denied having anything to do with 10/7 for about 20 minutes? How the general thought was that the attack was *TOO* successful for a week or two there?
I mean, *MAYBE* they have some 13-dimensional chess going on but it strikes me as somewhat more likely that they have religious assumptions that most of us don’t share and assumptions about the trustworthiness of their allies that didn’t work out.
I mean, it makes a lot more sense to me that they were thinking “we’ll attack, we’ll get our brothers to join in, and Israel will finally get the finish that we failed to deliver during the six day war!” than that they were thinking “well, think about the third order effects… they include BLM and college campuses in America.”Report
Well, this comment has aged poorly.
Iran is helping now, because Israel stupidly bombed their embassy.Report
Iran has already said that it’s done helping.Report
It’s done helping if Israel stops attacking it.
Guess what Israel is politically incapable of doing at the moment? Stopping or in any showing restraint.
Literal top headline on CNN as of this moment: Israel will ‘exact a price from Iran,’ war cabinet minister vowsReport
It’s done helping if Israel stops attacking it.
Iran is done supplying it’s various Proxies? It’s done telling the Houthis to attack shipping?
My strong expectation is what Iran wants is more… “don’t kill our people and we’ll not attack you directly, but we will continue to pay other people to do so”.
Israel is treating the people paying for and organizing terrorism on it’s territory as legit targets. Sort of like we went after OBL.Report
There are any number of possibilities here.
1. One is that neither side really wants escalation, but internal politics demand a response.
2. Another is that they both want escalation.
3. Another is that one side or the other wants escalation to full war.
Its hard for me to figure out why either side would want an escalation into full scale war; I can’t see a good outcome for either Iran or Israel in such a scenario.
So the first possibility seems the most likely.
One option being talked about is that the Iranian attack was deliberately done so as to fail, allowing them to save face at home without escalating beyond comfort.
This seems like it matches the facts I’ve seen.
The big exception to the above is Netanyahu’s need to stay out of prison which appears to be driving most of his decision-making.
Escalation to a full fledged war would very much be in his favor right now.Report
RE : the Iranian attack was deliberately done so as to fail, allowing them to save face at home without escalating beyond comfort.
That was my conclusion as well after I heard that everything had been shot down.
RE: internal politics
Very much so.
Netanyahu’s need to stay out of prison which appears to be driving most of his decision-making.
It’s fun to think this but I’m not sure if it means anything in practice.
Put a dove in charge, and they’d still be at war in Gaza because the Israeli public is insisting that Hamas is handled now. This means they’d be pretty much ignoring the hostages.
This also means they’d be committing what we’d call war crimes in other situations. Those “crimes” are a combo of “Hamas is lying”, “you need to commit war crimes to fight Hamas”, “Hamas deliberately gets civilians killed”, and “Israel is not mentally in a good place”.Report
“How China could paralyse Britain and kill thousands by hacking into your electric car – locking you inside and creating deadly traffic jams. As cheap Chinese EVs flood Britain, EDWARD LUCAS raises a terrifying possibility”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13292973/China-paralyse-Britain-kill-hacking-electric-car-deadly-traffic-jams-EDWARD-LUCAS.html
“Tens of thousands of Chinese cars will be sold in Britain this year. This doesn’t just create an economic bonanza for Beijing, it gives it a geopolitical advantage too. For modern electric cars are computers on wheels. To function properly, they must be constantly connected to the internet, so that they can receive, gather and share data on their performance and surroundings.
“This is a recipe for mayhem. Hackers demonstrated years ago how easy it was to remotely disable a single vehicle. With the full weight of a state cyber-warfare agency behind it, such attacks would be far more devastating and widespread.”
What seems missing here is that those non Chinese cars have the same vulnerability and could be affected those those in OUR gov’t. Nah, that’s crazy talk.Report
Well Elon seems to have proved this with the growing body of stories about bricked Teslas and increasing charges for updates. But since that’s good old fashioned capitalism I guess its ok.Report
Yeah, funny how that’s not mentioned in the press is it? Didn’t we just have a convo about NPR and reporter bias?Report
We are in “preparation for war” territory. Tesla going to war with America seems unlikely.Report
No one else seems to be covering this either. Not even Fox . . .Report
Of course not. It doesn’t fit the “narrative” of either side of the sided media wants to go with. Not the short term or the long term.Report
Interestingly the hacking side of the story has been well covered that last few years. WSJ, Forbes, even NPR. Always nefarious actors though, not governments . . .
sighReport
” the hacking side of the story has been well covered that last few years. WSJ, Forbes, even NPR.” I must have missed that.Report
https://www.google.com/search?q=EV+hacking&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS1021US1021&oq=EV+hacking&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDM0NDRqMGoxqAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#ip=1Report
Oh, again?Report
OJ Simpson, Hertz spokesman, has passed away after a battle with cancer.
Report
OJ Simpson, wife beater and murderer, has passed away after a battle with cancer.Report
TSN post up on this topicReport
TSN post up on this topicReport
Philly Inquirer is reporting: All three of John Fetterman’s top communications staffers have resigned in the last month
Has he picked up any righties to replace the lefties he’s alienated?
The story doesn’t say.Report
Good news, I guess. We’re officially moving from “Latinx” to “Latine”.
(I’m still going to use Latinx, though.)
Report
There is no “officially.” We don’t have an equivalent of the Academie Francais. Things either catch on or they don’t. I’m perfectly happy to wait and see how the search for a gender-neutral version of Latino works its way out. It seems presumptuous in the meantime to weigh in.Report
If “seeming presumptuous” is something we’re hoping to avoid, I’m afraid that I have some bad news.Report
Americans telling Spanish speakers that they know better than us how our language should be spoken IS presumptuous. Latine is as stupid and as insulting as LatinX.
Aren’t they worried that in Spanish eagles, otters, bees, whales, turtles, snakes, panthers, palm trees, grape vines, and many other creatures are grammatically feminine. Who is out there speaking for the insulted and diminished male whales?Report
I heard stories about various coaches opening lockerroom speeches with “OKAY, LADIES! LISTEN UP!” and the response to this was never “oh, good… now the jocks know what it’s like to be part of a group of women with *ONE* guy in it”.
Maybe it should have been.
Maybe that coach was expanding horizons.Report
A few years back the LA Times didn’t want use Latinx, so conducted a poll among their readers to see what was preferred. About 75% of the fill-in-the-blank responses were “Mexican-American”.
When I was a lad I lived in NW Iowa, in the days when a large amount of the population were descended from the Great Northern Railway’s recruiting grain farmers in northern Europe to move to America. There were seven Lutheran churches in town. Once you found out which of the Lutheran churches someone attended, you had their grandparents’ country of origin pinned down.Report
The gender-neutral version of Latino is Latino.Report
Used to be the gender-neutral third person singular was “he” or “his ” or “him.” Neither of us gets to prescribe. Language will do what it does.Report
Also, what we nudge it to do. We may not have an Academie Francais, but we do have an Academie Justice Sociale.
And after the steaming turd that was Latinx, they’ve moved on to attempting “Latine”.
Do you think that Spanish speakers will pick this one up? Do you think that they *SHOULD*?Report
I know I’d love it if someone trying to describe my ethnicity went with a word that sounds like latrine.Report
The scene in Top Secret where Du Quois yells “LATRINE!” can send me into a fit even today.
Report
I have no basis for an opinion either way. It’s not up to me and I wouldn’t want it to be. I’m satisfied to await developments and not get my knickers in a twist in the meantime.Report
My opinion is some variant of “quit trying to make people better when you’re not obviously a moral authority”.
And if you want the answer to the question “why do you even care?”, it has to do with being allergic to self-selected moral authorities doing their best to improve others according to a non-legible set of moral principles.Report
This is why this is so existential for conservatives.
Culture and our social mores are changing, and it is being changed without the control or even the participation of conservatives.
Yet conservatives are being subjected to its dictates. In a few years, “Latine” may become the established standard, and conservatives will be forced to conform to this at the risk of social ostracism or worse.
Most conservatives can’t imagine how they would live in such a world and it terrifies and enrages them.Report
In a few years, “Latine” may become the established standard, and conservatives will be forced to conform to this at the risk of social ostracism or worse.
This strikes me as wrong. It strikes me as obviously wrong. It’s kind of funny how wrong it is.
This is pothead dormroom stuff that escaped containment.
It’s not terrifying. It’s, instead, funny. It’s somewhere between “someone laughing while drinking a seltzer and it coming out of their nose and they start yelling ‘it burns!'” and a poop joke.Report
Must be exhausting.Report
I admit: It was less exhausting when there were fewer people trying to change Spanish.Report
“Language will do what it does.”
This is like someone telling you that they have cancer, and you responding “well cells grow and die all the time.” It’s not that it’s not true at a high level, it’s that it entirely misses the point.Report
Conservatives are deeply anxious about this kind of stuff, where words change from “African-American” to “Black” or from “LGBT” to “LGBTQ”.
This is what I refer to when I say that conservatives find themselves outside of the cultural narrative looking in, being unable to control the course of language and mores.
Their favorite beer suddenly has a trans spokesperson, or their favorite hangout now has a Pride event or a corporate memo goes out that has sexual harassment guidelines.
They seem petty and the angry reaction seems comical but they all add up to the idea of a group of people who assumed they were at the center now being displaced.Report
Think what you want, just don’t say the issue is “language change” when it’s actually about one group trying to impose cultural change on the rest of society (whether you believe that change is good or bad or in between).Report
“one group trying to impose cultural change on the rest of society ”
Whole lotta that going on.
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked Florida education officials from enforcing a law requiring a transgender teacher to use pronouns that align with her sex assigned at birth, saying the law violated her First Amendment rights.
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2024/04/09/florida-trans-nonbinary-teachers-handed-win-in-anti-pronoun-law-case/73266758007/Report
(Is he deliberately using that example? Surely he’s not. But he did! Is he trying to undercut his argument? He’s brilliant at it. Maybe we should ignore it. But we can’t ignore it! Just leave a meta-comment. Okay.)Report
Yeah I was starting to think this is performance art too.Report
I picked it deliberately, to demonstrate my argument that activist groups are constantly trying, and sometimes succeeding in imposing cultural change on the rest of society.
My question for you: In the Florida example, which side is the activist, and which is “the rest of society”?Report
I know I’ve been out of the Chip Daniels business for a while, but…is he ok?Report
Conservatives are deeply anxious about this kind of stuff
Mexicans are too.
I mean, there’s a definite reason that we’re pivoting away from “Latinx” to “Latine” and it’s not because of people who look like you do.
(Also, we’re not using “LGBTQ” anymore. We’re now using 2SLGBTQI+. Try to be less bigoted.)Report
Again, you are either being a troll or you are being ignorant of the Spanish language. Out of the goodness of my heart I’m going to assume you are not doing this on purpose, so here’s some information you might not be aware of, once more:
Spanish speakers know the difference between grammatical gender and biological (whether in the brain or in the chromosomes, we can ignore that for now) gender. Everything in Spanish (even the words “every” and “thing”) has a male or a female grammatical gender that has nothing to do with their biological gender. Inanimate things also have a grammatical gender even though they have no biology: stones are male and rocks, are female but mountains are female and mounts are male. And please be informed that both vessels and cars are male, so stop referring to ships as her (see, I’m improving your language, you can thank me later),
And, by the way, you know what grammatical gender does not exist in Spanish? The neutral gender, we are not Dutch, thank you very much.
So we do not get confused, or offended, when the proper grammatical gender is used for things that also have biological gender. We understand the difference between male or female people (or male or female whales) and are cool about it. I’ve only heard the word Latinx spoken aloud in conversation once. It’s not a thing outside of the stoned college dorm community. Keep it there.
We don’t need well meaning Americans that want to improve our machista language (again, what about male whales, can we please talk about the ballenx or the ballene. These are very intelligent animals (oh, my goodness, animal is a male word! We can’t have that, let’s start talking about the animalxes)).
And we also don’t need “conservative” (scare quotes intentional, I don’t see them conserving anything) keeping this silly debate ongoing, not out of respect for our language, but just so they have something to rant about. You know what these “conservatives” objection is,? It’s not the word LatinX. It’s the presence of Latinos in the USA (Go back to Canada, or to Cancún, Rafael Cruz, and get out of my city). The discussion about the word reminds them that we are here, and we aren’t going anywhere, and it pains them.
So now you know better, Jaybird. I trust you won’t stir this pot again in the future, with posts half of which argue for and half against the use of Latinx or Latinx or whatever stoned people will come up with next.Report
Again, you are either being a troll or you are being ignorant of the Spanish language.
“LatinX” isn’t Spanish. It’s English. If you come to this country, you need to speak English.
It’s not a thing outside of the stoned college dorm community. Keep it there.
You know, I have heard this multiple times about multiple things. Not all of them have managed to stay contained.
For example, Axios is covering it.
I mostly think that the debate is downright silly to the point where it should be mocked publicly. Like, it doesn’t even merit a counter-argument. Just leapfrog straight to a horselaugh.
And I find that the best way to mock it is to adopt the whole “LatinX” thing. My best buddy’s brother-in-law is an immigrant from Mexico. He thinks “LatinX” is downright *OFFENSIVE*. Like, it pisses him *OFF*.Report
“ I’ve only heard the word Latinx spoken aloud in conversation once. It’s not a thing outside of the stoned college dorm community.”
Why would you think your personal experience is representative of everyone’s? I know for a fact that Latinx went well beyond campus – my daughter is a social worker and is part of a team doing outreach and research in this community, and the whole department uses that term (and will now likely start switching to Latine). It’s become the norm in liberal-dominated institutions – generally people don’t feel they have permission not to use it.Report
I’ve definitely seen Latinx at work, and I don’t even work in education. I just checked my e-mail and more recently it’s been Latine, so we’re on the cutting edge, by private industry standards!Report
Oh that’s a good point, i didn’t even think about the stuff that gets sent out by corporate HR. I’m so used to the term now, I don’t think it would even catch my attention.Report
Anecdata… Comcast has sold Spanish-language packages all over the country for more than 20 years. They still use Latino as the designation.Report
It pays to speak Spanish to the Spanish speaking community, if you want them to buy your products.
As Jaybird pointed out, LatinX and Latine are English words, not Spanish.Report
I’ve heard it for years, but usually in similar circumstances: activist and organizing circles), progressive non-profits, etc. However, I’ve heard it much less frequently, in those spaces and online, in the last 3 or 4 years than from like 2016-2019, I think partly because the communities it was supposed to be for, communities that are large here, never adopted it, so the people working with those communities largely stopped using it.Report
In the you can’t make this stuff up because no one would believe it category we have a new entry.
https://www.wvtf.org/news/2024-04-11/hanover-county-supervisors-censor-commendation-for-girl-scout-who-fought-censorship
Good for her.Report
So, like, Iran sent missiles into Israel but then immediately went to the UN to say “That’s it. We got them back for bombing us in Damascus.”
So… yeah. The matter is now deemed closed.Report
No tagbacks.Report
It’s all kayfabe, babe:
Wait, what’s that?
Washington had conveyed to Tehran via Ankara that any action it took had to be “within certain limits”.
I’m guessing that it was.
Report
Nothing at this level is all kayfabe. Iran made two statements. First, they didn’t hide behind proxies, they launched from Iran. Second, they can afford to throw away 300 drones/cruise missiles to make a statement.Report
And the third: 300 drones/cruise missiles is “within certain limits”.Report
And the fourth: 300 drones/cruise missiles is not something Israel has trouble handling.
Which leaves me confused as to what the intent was. Are we supposed to take this as just a diplomatic message and not a serious threat? Because those things had payloads on board and were aimed at population centers, which seems rather more than just a message. But are we supposed to take it seriously as a threat? Because if your serious threat gets shot down in the post-boost phase, that seems to be neither of those two things. Are we supposed to see it as an escalation? Because I think the whole thing is pretty darn escalated if Israel is saying “any Iranian official within range of an IAF tactical fighter base is gonna die” and Iran is doing strategic weapon deployments.Report
On April 11, 2024, an Israeli Arab woman, Mouna Maroun, was appointed to be the Rector of the University of Haifa:
https://english.news.cn/20240412/827fa1d637f84d349d881124feb72dce/c.html#:~:text=JERUSALEM%2C%20April%2011%20(Xinhua),UH%20said%20in%20a%20statement.
One of the more frustrating features of the I/P debate online or in real life is how many Pro-Palestinian activists lie outrageously about Israel and do it a lot. The phrase “evil apartheid state” comes up a lot despite Israeli Arabs serving in the Knesset, being judges, civil servants, business owners, etc. Since the anti-Israeli forces are fanatical, using facts doesn’t persuade them at all. Israel is an “evil apartheid state” because they say so. Meanwhile, they ignore that at least some Palestinian factions like Hamas are very open in Jews having no place in their Palestine and pretend the Palestinians are all Western multiculturalists.Report
People who love people are stopping traffic for people who love money:
Not just Oakland. Chicago as well.
Seems to be a policy choice.Report
You just aren’t big on protests as a political tool are you?Report
Depends on if the cops are complicit.Report