Open Mic for the week of 5/27/2024
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 Memorial Day!
(Featured image is “Burgers and hotdogs flaming on the bbq grill“. Attributed to “Luke, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)
Out and about running errands yesterday and so I wasn’t keeping up with the goings-on. But I saw this this morning and immediately thought “oh my gosh… it must have been awful.”
Report
According to NPR, victims were burned alive in their tents by the attack. Seems to me that Israel really, really needs to rethink its strategy here. Because continuing to kill civilians in places where Israel has told them to take shelter is not going to stop looking like genocide anytime soon.Report
Israel’s reply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B23hnCTfPPk
Includes a lot of raw military footage. They’re not sure what happened. They may have accidently set fire to a weapons depo.
The overall numbers don’t suggest “genocide”. Calling it “genocide” is emotionally satisfying but a misuse of terms.Report
One incident – sure its not genocide. But as EVERYONE around here keeps crowing, you can’t just look at the one incident. You have to look at the incident in context. And the context is one of what appears to be a growing amount of indiscriminate killing INSIDE places Israel has told refugees to go.Report
Philip: And the context is one of what appears to be a growing amount of indiscriminate killing INSIDE places Israel has told refugees to go.
We have vast hunger. They’re one month away from starvation. And have been one month away from starvation for the last six months.
We have the deliberate targeting of women and children… except that seems to have not been a thing. The UN revised it’s numbers a day or so before South Africa claimed in court that all the numbers were of “named” people.
The number of dead aid workers is roughly the same as the number of Israeli soldiers killed by friendly fire.
We have Israel’s claims that about half the dead people are military. I think there are some other claims that it’s more like a third. For perspective the expected result is about a fifth.
I look at these numbers and don’t see genocide.
This is a brutal urban war combined with anti-war hysteria.Report
Mississippi forces a 13-year old rape victim to carry a child to term: https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/13-year-rape-victim-baby-amid-confusion-states/story?id=108351812Report
“Ashley qualified for an abortion in Mississippi under the law’s exception for cases of rape”Report
Yeah which makes it all the more weird she didn’t just go down to the friendly neighborhood Abortions-R-Us and get one, amirite?
Where is the nearest abortion service provider, I wonder?
Oh wait:
But amid confusion over what abortion care is allowed in Mississippi, Regina says she was unaware Ashley qualified for an abortion in Mississippi under the law’s exception for cases of rape. Yet, even if she was aware, it’s unlikely Ashley would have been able to get an abortion in Mississippi; with heavy restrictions in effect and the high penalties on physicians who violate the abortion ban, it is unlikely she would have found a doctor willing to perform a procedure.
Every time this happens, there are wails from conservatives “B-but this isn’t what we intended!”
Yes, you did intend this, you effing did. And if you think to yourself that you didn’t, then just look up the phrase “Depraved Indifference” and meditate on that a while.
Own it, carry the picture of this 13 year old rape victim around your neck like a ceremonial necklace, conservatives, this is what you have been screaming for for 50 years.Report
Honestly you folks are so deranged on this. An OBGYN can perform a legal abortion, if needed. An ‘abortion clinic’ isn’t needed in any way shape or form.
“Regina and Ashley reported the rape to law enforcement ”
2010 Mississippi Code
TITLE 41 – PUBLIC HEALTH
Chapter 41 – Surgical or Medical Procedures; Consents.
41-41-45 – Abortion prohibited; exceptions.
(2) No abortion shall be performed or induced in the State of Mississippi, except in the case where necessary for the preservation of the mother’s life or where the pregnancy was caused by rape.
This is a sad story about a girl who was raped in her yard by a stranger … there’s no real legislative matter at issue here.
You can keep trying to play the ‘golly gee willicker, how can MD’s possibly understand this complex Legal terrain’ but no one is buying it once you get past the bad advocacy journalism.Report
Do you know any doctors in Mississippi or any other restrictive state? Or any other medical professionals? No? Do you live in Mississippi? No? Then why exactly do you feel the need, much less the right, to comment?
Doctors – likely on the advice of their lawyers – are refusing to do the procedure locally. That’s why the girl was told by the OB-GYN on duty in the hospital (where they are no doubt able to do such a procedure) to go to Chicago. 3800 to 4 in two years. That’s the outcome conservative lawmakers wanted. Its the outcome they got. Rail all you want against the media but you will STILL be wrong.Report
These women never thought the leopards would come for their faces: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/us/abortion-women-tfmr.htmlReport
“Peanut” breathed today. I won’t feel bad about that.Report
The CSM is writing articles about the house hearings as well: A House committee set out to investigate COVID. Surprisingly, it’s making headway.
Taking this quote at face value is weird. It sounds like something you’d hear in the 90’s.Report
They aren’t trying to settle the lab leak theory – they are trying to cover their butts by raking civil servants over the coals. You may still consider that a win, but it’s not the same thing.Report
If a handful of civil servants conspire to shield their emails from FOIA requests, isn’t that worth raking them over the coals for?Report
This will probably shock you, but civil servants shield their emails from FOIAs all the time. Sometimes its because there’s a law telling them they have to. Sometimes the FOIA officer decides they are not germane to the request. Sometimes the civil servants don’t think they are responsive. FOIA isn’t a blank grab everything card. And those emails may not actually say what you think they say.
But keep beating the “Civil Servants are evil and it was a lab leak” drum if you must.Report
I’m talking about hiding them from the FOIA officer too.
Were you not aware of that wrinkle in the story?
This may be another issue where we have different facts.Report
That’s not a matter for Congress. The FOIA statute already covers that. Its a disciplinary issue for the agencies.Report
I see. And Congress has no jurisdiction to investigate?Report
Congress can do what it wants. And after it does it has two options – refer to the DoJ for prosecution or pass new legislation.
There’s no need to refer for prosecution because the FOIA statute already lays out how agencies are to handle this – and it’s not in a criminal fashion. Congress could certainly pass new laws but the current House has shown an abysmal record when doing so.
And again – this won’t “solve” the origin issue. Nor will it rebuild trust in the federal government – since Republicans and their conservative media henchmen have been trying to tear down that trust regularly for 3-4 decades.
Like so much the House does this is arm waving for cheap sound bites. Its not about anything substantive.Report
It’s a pity that the Democrats are playing along.
Do you think that they’re actively trying to undermine Biden or do you think that they just don’t understand what they’re doing?Report
“Sometimes its because there’s a law telling them they have to. Sometimes the FOIA officer decides they are not germane to the request. Sometimes the civil servants don’t think they are responsive.”
And all these actions are fully DOCUMENTED yes? You know, so there’s an audit trail, or if Congress subpoenas documents, or to cover the employee’s own ass?Report
From the story:
“I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d but before the search starts.”
I wonder if the FOIA lady is the FOIA officer.Report
They sent them to their private gmail accounts then deleted them from the government servers?Report
It’s not enough to delete the incriminating emails.
You have to delete the emails that say “I deleted the incriminating emails.”Report
I’m stuck on the whole idea of deleting them at all.Report
Until right before the pandemic, emails were not legally considered government records unless you physically printed them and put them in a file folder with a topic label. Which is one reason why Sec. Powell and Sec. Clinton didn’t get in much trouble placing their emails on private servers. We don’t have to do that now, but backing it all up is costing more and more money. That aside, many types of government records – including emails – can be deleted after 7 years depending on the records management category they fall into. We get annual training on all this.Report
I’d expect that violates the code of conduct. As a civilian contractor for the federal gov’t I can tell you what would happen if I did that and it came out. Loss of employment would be the LEAST of my worries.Report
Depending on the category of government record they become, the legal retention period might be as short as 7 years, subject to your contract clauses. NARA makes this all quite plain if within a web presence that is lacking in the modernity of its GUI.Report
This appears to all be in reference to coronavirus inquiries, so the material was probably less than 7 years old.
ETA: Oops, that should probably be a reply to an earlier comment, but it applies here.
ET also A: Does this sound like recommended conduct as per the training?
“i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe. Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”Report
This is an inductive argument and not a deductive one so place take it as an inductive argument and not a deductive one.
But I’ve never wanted to destroy evidence that makes me look good.
I’ve only wanted to destroy evidence that makes me look bad.Report
No. If they actually did that they would e well out of bounds for many things.
Again, however, the laws in question and agency policies derived from those laws already prescribe how to handle this.Report
There you go. If this actually happened, it would be at least unethical, potentially illegal. That’s all we were looking for.Report
That’s all you were looking for? That’s funny. Like belly laugh achingly funny. In a completely “what rubes” sort of way.
Because it was true before the committee came into existence. It will be true after the committee is dissolved. And no one needed hearings aimed at discrediting the federal civil service to know or understand that.
Of course, determining that something is unethical or illegal is the LAST thing the GOP wants to do here. Because after failing miserably to impeach Joe Biden, they are now flailing around for some other way to make government look bad as part of their campaign strategy.
Such a knee slapper that one.Report
I’m sure you believe that good cops need to call out bad cops. You’re a government worker who has said that government work is a noble calling, and that means you need to call out bad government workers. But every statement you’ve made on this subthread has been a deflection. You see that?Report
No every statement I have made has been about correct what might most charitably be described misunderstanding how the process works. I have no faith that this committee- or any other – will desire, much less succeed at correcting federal employee behavior over this. I have no faith it will restore anyone’s trust in government. Because the hearing in question is not designed to achieve those changes. The Committee in question is not designed to achieve those changes. If it were about correcting the government’s response to a pandemic then it would be investigating the is steps and intentional misdirection of the whole administration in place at the time, not just a few NIH people it has decided were and are the only villains.Report
“I’m not saying that I approve of the cops pepper-spraying a handcuffed 9 year-old girl in the back of a police cruiser. I am saying that we don’t have all of the facts and the union has a process to deal with this and so it’s premature to virtue signal how much we’re opposed to the so-called ‘torture’ of children.”Report
Bingo!Report
I have spent all of my 23 year federal career watching good people raked over the coals for doing nothing more then their jobs. I have watched Republican after Republican campaign for the job of my boss on a platform that includes me and my co-workers being the enemy of the state. I have spent a great deal of time here calling out bad behavior by my colleagues when necessary.
And here I am pointing out that these people – who appear to have gone off some serious rails – can and should be dealt with from within the existing federal statutes that Congress has already passed to address this. Congress weighing in is not about accountability.Report
It appears that the government workers went off the rails and weren’t investigated for it before Congress got involved. I understand that you’re upset and probably not deliberately trying to deflect the conversation, but a good cop has to call out the bad cops, whatever the perceived motives of Internal Affairs.Report
I have spent all of my 23 year federal career watching good people raked over the coals for doing nothing more then their jobs.
Can you imagine a police chief saying this after a black kid was shot running away from the cops?
If you can’t, please tell me. Because, if you can’t, you won’t understand my immediate response to reading those words in your comment.Report
Do you value the federal civil service?Report
Do you value the federal civil service? = motte
Congress should not investigate federal civil servants = baileyReport
I have not said that Congress should not investigate federal civil servants. I have said and will say again that Congress should not substitute it’s desire for sound bites against a particular political party for statutorily defined discipline processes.Report
“Do you value the police?”, the police chief asked at the press conference.Report
So no you don’t. Got it.Report
Can you comprehend how someone would prefer cops who do not shoot black children in the back to cops that do?
Or is that thought incomprehensible to you?
“Cops are what cops are. You either accept them or you don’t.”Report
Can you comprehend that cops shooting black children and NIH employees flaunting administrative rule are not on the same plain of existence? And can you comprehend that comparing my federal colleagues to murderous racists in uniform is not going to get you anything but my derision? Cause you keep pushing a button you don’t need to push. And you need to stop.Report
I’m not comparing someone conspiring to destroy evidence to someone murdering someone, Phil.
What I am doing is comparing the leadership in both cases. Specifically, leadership opening their remarks with “I have spent all of my 23 year federal career watching good people raked over the coals for doing nothing more then their jobs.”
When I said “If you can’t, please tell me. Because, if you can’t, you won’t understand my immediate response to reading those words in your comment.”, I was being serious.Report
Yes you were. Still are. Get a new analogy.
Putting my very personal words in the mouth of a person covering for murderous racists wins you precisely no points. I’m not in federal leadership. Again, get a new analogy.Report
I didn’t ask you to consider the cops who shot the kid.
I asked you to consider the police chief standing in front of the podium saying “I have spent all of my 23 year law enforcement career watching good people raked over the coals for doing nothing more then their jobs.”
Can you imagine a police chief saying this?
If you can’t, please tell me. Because, if you can’t, you won’t understand my immediate response to reading those words in your comment.Report
Your analogy is still deeply, probably irrevocably flawed. Because those words – my words, my VERY PERSONAL WORDS – in your analogy would be inside the head of the desk sergeant standing 4 people to the right of the chief. When you get to an analogy at that organizational level then maybe you can redeem yourself here. Maybe. Its becoming very clear however you have no interest in doing so.Report
I have no doubt that every cop up there on the stage would be thinking that exact same thought, though. This is not surprising, at all, to me.
I am asking you whether you can imagine a police chief saying such a thing and you still haven’t answered whether or not you can.
I’ll assume that you don’t want to answer because the answer is “yes, of freaking course I can imagine the police chief saying that”.
Okay, good.
Now let me continue with the analogy.
Can you imagine a reporter saying “Chief, this isn’t asking you a question about your career or about good people being raked over the coals… it’s about what happened with these very particular members of your fraternity who actively engaged in a VERY BAD ACT. Hell, I’m not even calling them bad people. I’m saying that WHAT THEY FREAKING DID WAS BAD. And here I am seeing you change the subject to the difficulties of watching good people in your profession criticized unfairly.”
Because it’s very important that you can imagine a reporter saying that.Report
And I’m saying – apparently to the wind – that the reporter is asking the wrong question. And expecting an answer regarding process that’s not in the purview of anyone in the room being asked.Report
So the police chief is saying the right thing by responding to questions from the public by talking about Policing Theory In General?Report
You’re completely wrong here, Jaybird. Analogy comes from the Greek “analogia” which means “two things that are identical in every way”. There’s no way you can compare a person reflexively defending someone who may be guilty of a crime on the basis of respect for his own profession.Report
The Hill is running an op-ed piece called “Why the public thinks the country is in recession“.
It lists:
Savings are gone.
Credit card debt is way up.
Living paycheck to paycheck.
Inflation lives.
It includes the penultimate paragraph:
Report
Right. Those first three were economic facts for a significant number of Americans before COVID. The last one has also changed but isn’t moving the needle much – especially since the Fed WANTS inflation annually at 2%.
Then again, all the angst may not be as it seems:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/economy/us-economy-job-market-may/index.htmlReport
This month’s improvement was the first improvement since January?
Huh.Report
Timing is everything.Report
Indeed. If it keeps going up, that’ll be great.
It’s hard to believe that it was going down since January, though. I mean… the S&P has never been higher!Report
Do you really find it hard to believe, given what you yourself would insist upon as an accurate account of human nature, or are you just trolling?Report
I’m mocking the whole “things have never been better” drumbeat that has been incessant since the first rumblings of “this inflation is transitory”.
The inability to say “yeah, this is kinda bad…” means that when things get better, you’d best hope that nobody remembers you arguing that things were great before.
You know “the boy who cried wolf”?
I don’t know what this would be. Crying “sheep”?Report
I’ll be happy to say “This is bad” when someone can show me “what is bad”.
“Consumer confidence” is literally just a measure of vibes. Like, that’s the literal definition of it.Report
Does “good” or “bad” even exist external to human definition of same?
The lamb may well say that the lion is “bad”, but does the circle of life not include carnivores?Report
The “things have never been better” drumbeat resonating in your head must come from one (or more) of the deceased Spinal Tap drummers. No one worth taking seriously has said that. And inflation, which was, as you surely remember, a world-wide phenomenon, has come way down without a recession, so “transitory” or not is a question of a few months at most, when many serious people were predicting earlier this year that only a long, sharp recession would bring it down.
So although things have been better, they’ve also been much worse, even in times we think of as better. (My first home mortgage carried a 14.5% interest rate. But employment was high, though not as high as now.) They’re kinda good now by any reasonable measure, prospects for improvement are looking pretty good, and, apparently, people are starting to notice.
But if mocking helps with the drumbeat between your ears, good luck with that.Report
No one worth taking seriously has said that.
Whether or not they’re worth taking seriously is part of the point, though. The whole “things aren’t as bad as you’re saying” argument morphs into “things aren’t bad” and that becomes a discussion of what things were like when Reagan was president.
Why, my grandparents grew up in the Great Depression! This is Easy Street! It’s a lead pipe cinch! If you need a job, you just need to get out there and knock on some doors and shake some hands!Report
Here is a Ted Talk going over this year’s good news. It’s stupidly massively good in many ways, and I haven’t heard the main stream media mention any of it.
https://www.ted.com/talks/angus_hervey_the_good_news_you_might_have_missed?language=enReport
Sure beats dealing with present facts.Report
That’s the wacky thing about facts. People might say something like “My savings are gone. My credit card debt is way up. I’m living paycheck to paycheck. Inflation is still hammering my grocery bills!”
And someone else will point out the persistent fact that the S&P is up and higher than it’s ever been. “Look at the NASDAQ!”, they can say.
Facts, facts everywhere.Report
One of the fascinating facts here is that credit card debt increasing is a direct and predictable result of the Fed’s fight against inflation. Because the fed uses interest rate increases to cool the economy, it makes credit card purchases more expensive. Which means that if we as a nation want the change in inflation rate to keep going down, this is a consequence.Report
You’d think people would be more reasonable about such things.
Maybe we should point to the S&P again.Report
If you want to argue with the voices in your head, knock yourself out. It’s always easier when you get to take both sides of the argument. Beats dealing with reality.Report
Reality doesn’t exclude inconvenient facts. That’s the inconvenient thing about reality.Report
There’s no point squabbling now about who resides in the reality-based community and who are the heirs of Karl Rove. People who care can look at the record for themselves.Report
I wasn’t going to hop back into this discussion but saw the below come across my Facebook feed and thought it may be relevant to the perceptions of the economy. Similar to the Big Mac Index I posted about last week:
https://www.fox5dc.com/news/nearly-80-americans-now-consider-fast-food-luxury-due-high-prices
I’m getting more and more convinced that this sort of thing is where the negative sentiments are originating.Report
McDonald’s used to be a good compromise. The McDouble Bundle? A burger and fries for $3.50? Dang! I mean, I used to make fun of McDonald’s but you could get two of those and a drink and it was a darn good lunch. Rarely did those burgers survive the drive back to the office.
Now? Those deals are gone, replaced by a “buy one, get a second one for a $1” deals.
The good compromise is now merely a compromise.
I suppose that it’s good for my health that I no longer idly wonder whether I should grab something when I go past “my” McDonald’s.Report
A vast majority of Americans are concerned because 50% of the federal budget (amounting to some 2 Trillion dollars) is allocated as aid to Israel.
This perception, correct or not, adds fuel to the campus protests when people look at their weekly paycheck and realize that fully half of their withholding is going to purchase bombs.
Further, it creates the impression of elites who are out of touch with popular sentiment, when those elites keep insisting there is no crisis in the federal budget.Report
The article isn’t about Israel, Chip. The article is about people finding Fast Food expensive enough to consider it a luxury.
Is your argument that they are wrong to consider it a luxury, as wrong as the assumption that trillions are sent to Israel as aid?Report
Centrist argument:
From what I have been able to see, workers have seen their wages increase in recent years especially during the pandemic worker shortage, in many cases outstripping inflation.
Meaning a Big Mac is actually cheaper than it used to be.
Leftist argument:
Food is growing more expensive! People have a right to Big Macs and the government must immediately institute wage and price controls to make Big Macs affordable to everyone!
Conservative argument:
[Not submitted]Report
From what I have been able to see, workers have seen their wages increase in recent years especially during the pandemic worker shortage, in many cases outstripping inflation.
Wage increases strike me as being unevenly distributed.
The guy over there who was making 10 bucks an hour before the pandemic can now command 14 bucks an hour. HOLY COW THAT’S A FORTY PERCENT RAISE!!!
The guy over there who was making $50,000 a year got a 4% raise and is now making $52,000 a year. Heck, let’s give him another one a year later. Now he’s making $54,080.
The pain from inflation will also be unevenly distributed.
Perhaps we could do the thing where we point at the guy no-longer-making-minimum-wage when we talk to the guy who got the maximum raise available in his department and explain that, no, “workers have seen their wages increase in recent years”.Report
Wage increases have always been uneven. Economic impacts have always been uneven.
These things do not explain our current situation.Report
Perhaps we could do the thing where we point at the consumer enjoying low cost items from globalism, and when we explain to the formerly middle class manufacturing worker now working as a WalMart greeter that “Capitalism has lifted billions of Chinese people out of poverty and made tee shirts super cheap!”
Its weird how often conservatives try to take the left wing populism road, only to find out it leads to New Deal liberalism.Report
You may enjoy this article from 2011 from The Heritage Foundation:
Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?
It explains that 99.9% of the population has a refrigerator.Report
From the articles I’ve seen the majority of wage gains have actually gone to working class and lower income families, with the gap betweem top and bottom closing for the first time in decades. The complication is (a) by definition you’re dealing with lower income people with less margin for error to begin with and (b) just because they are making more doesn’t mean they aren’t still net paying more than they used to. The people making more working at McDonalds are also paying more eating at McDonalds. So while growth is outpacing inflation generally and in the aggregate it may in fact not be for large groups of people, which in turn has resulted in lower purchasing power.Report
Isn’t this the exact argument liberals made about globalist?
That the rewards and costs were unevenly distributed?Report
So the underlying survey is fascinating to me from a statistical standpoint:
But nothing in the poll description about the economic status of the respondents, nor how they were chosen beyond “an internet survey.” Plus, non-probability distributions appear to have some bias issues
Call me skeptical.Report
More on non-probability sampling can be read here – https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/edu/power-pouvoir/ch13/nonprob/5214898-eng.htmReport
Maybe it’s a flawed poll. All I know is that this kind of sentiment keeps popping up and it would be beneficial to try to understand why that is instead of rationalizing it away.Report
I’m not going to try to understand alleged sentiment that is not based in any sort of connection to reality The appearance here is the websites wanted a story line and got a polling organization to give it to them. This is, and remains, a narrative issue, and for the good of the nation I am focused on getting to an accurate narrative.Report
While it’s true that the map is not the territory and that all models are wrong (but some are useful), I’d say that the best indicator of an accurate narrative is whether it explains, not whether it consoles.Report
What’s happening here is the same thing that happened in 2016, where everyone confidently explained that all those people worrying about the economy were idiots because the line has never goed-up more and anyone who’s losing their job deserved it and was going to lose their job anyway, so therefore anyone who said they were voting for Trump due to economic concerns you was a racist liar.Report
Why does it strike you as so implausible that (i) the stock market could be good, (ii) employment numbers could be good, (iii) inflation is trending towards the target but (iv) sizeable numbers of people have experienced a very noticeable decline in purchasing power?
I mean I am not an economist but it sounds to me like this narrative thing is a form of denial.Report
You’re assuming that he thinks this combination of facts is implausible. He hasn’t actually denied any of them. But only the fourth is part of his consoling narrative, so he ignores the other three.Report
We could start with the fact that every time someone talks about purchasing power, the retort is the economy is in the toilet. Which it isn’t. One part of the economy is still having issues. The rest isn’t and it serves no useful purpose to focus on that as the whole story. Yet here we are.Report
What is wrong with this headline, a continuing series:
“Trump Leans Into an Outlaw Image as His Criminal Trial Concludes
Preparing for a potential verdict in Manhattan, the former president has increasingly aligned himself with fellow defendants and people convicted of crimes.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/us/politics/trump-criminals.htmlReport
He and his supporters know which side of the Wilhoit line he is on.Report
Well, the ones who can attribute it to the correct Wilhoit probably think they do..Report
In other economic news, the WaPo has finally agreed that Americans don’t know what they are talking about regarding the economy, and ascribe it to three reasons: the vast difference between what terms mean to economists and the regular person; the failure of the media to explain this stuff properly; and the failure of Americans to overcome their inherent bad news bias. Read more here –
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/28/economy-gloom-voters-inflation/Report
Texas Republicans continue to push the envelope:
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/25/texas-republican-party-convention-platform/Report
If they really don’t like America that much, they ought to leave.Report
The Texas platform people think they can still win on a national scale. If you read the comment threads at LG&M, there’s a lot of left-of-center people there who also think the Texas platform people can win. If you think you can win, why would you leave?Report
That’s disturbingly funny. They aren’t going to win a single blue state with that platform. And that’s half the country.Report
I would agree with you about funny, except that a number of LG&M commenters believe — or at least say they believe — that a Republican President and six votes on the Supreme Court are enough to invoke the military and run something like Reconstruction in the blue states.
A decade ago the rest of the commentariate there uniformly made fun of such suggestions. Yesterday, Memorial Day, there was much less making fun and much more “of course the military and civilian police will side with the red states” and “I’m planning on how to obtain citizenship in country X and emigrate”.
Full disclosure: Yes, I’m the person who believes in an eventual partition of the states, or at least a significant devolution of power to regional authorities, as part of trying to deal with the consequences of climate change.Report
The Texas Platform is a lot more in line with how state politics worked in much of the United States before the 1960s.Report
No matter how much conservatives want to stuff that genie back in the proverbial bottle, its not going back in.Report
Here’s another reason to vote for Joe Biden:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/climate/energy-grid-modernization-biden/index.htmlReport
We need congress to pass a series of laws allowing power to be shipped over state lines. That will require preventing NIMBYs from preventing infrastructure from being build, preventing local/state power companies from holding their local market hostage and so on.
Green energy is mostly created in places were people don’t live and it needs to be transmitted to places where they do.Report
The article makes that very point. Which is why the Administration is doing what it can to enable permitting and construction. That 21 states – including several red states – signed on is notable.Report
Texas GOP Platform Endorses Death Penalty for Abortion Patients
https://jessica.substack.com/p/texas-gop-platform-endorses-death
This is who they are and exactly what they want.Report
The first of many such endorsements I fear.Report
And we can point this out and nobody will believe us.Report
If the GOP were not Christian Nationalists, they would not be making legislative attempts in the states to elevate Christianity into a state supported religion. Which is now happening in Louisiana where the legislature has sent the governor a likely unconstitutional law requiring the posting in public school class rooms of the Ten Commandments. Assuming Gov. Landry signs it – and I expect he will – my home state will become the first in the nation to endorse a state religion.
God help us all if that is the case.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/louisiana-become-1st-state-require-ten-commandments-displayed-schools-governor-signs-billReport
I am trying to determine why people who are so incredibly smart with other forms of racism can get so incredibly stupid when it comes to anti-Semitism. Like they can pontificate at great length and detail why Black people in France find “Our ancestors the Gauls” not really that moving or about whiteness being an unmarked category in the United States but when it comes to Jews feeling alienated as a minority people, especially in the context of Muslim majority places where everything has to be defined under Islam, they go “no, no. Jews don’t find this alienating at all” with the most disgusting smiles on their faces. It is vile.Report
Because they’re not interested in condemning or ending racism; they’re interested in the power to define racism. At least the leaders are. The rest are like Animal Farm’s dog pack. As you close in on a year of considering this question, try considering an answer that contains no praise for the people who are doing vile things.Report
Yea I don’t understand the confusion either. This stuff is designed for status jockeying in the rarefied confines of academia and its administrative bureaucracy, not a useful or sound way of analyzing or accomplishing anything else in the world. There’s no real mystery here, or at least shouldn’t be.Report
It has escaped containment.
It’s all well and good for these little status games to be played by really, really smart people in really, really tight bubbles.
But when it gets out into normieland where merely average people are invited to play… well, you’re going to find out that there are a *LOT* of emergent properties and and a small group of players will discover ways to munchkin that were considered impolite when the game took place in the bubble.Report
You think lab leak rather than germ warfare?Report
I think exposure to oxygen is already starting to kill it. The articles I see suggest that the private sector version is already well into the ‘So, what would you say you do here?’ phase. We all know what comes next. It will live longer in the NGO world where there is more inherent sympathy and fertile ground, but if the stories of infighting and institutional paralysis it causes are to be believed I doubt it lasts a lot longer there either. Eventually even the most sympathetic donors will ask what has been done with the money. Not that anyone will ever officially apologize or anything. Just amnesia.
Now higher ed, especially at the elite level may well have harmed itself in a much more lasting way, which is unfortunate (or depending on one’s perspective a long time coming!) but I doubt us out in the real world will be worrying much about this stuff a few years from now.Report
This analysis strikes me as about right. The retreat outside identarians incubating environments seems pretty widespread to my casual glance. Defund the police, for instance, has transitioned into “no one anywhere advocated that, you’re misremembering” for example.
I suspect it’ll endure longest in acadamia until the larger acadamie reckoning arrives as the endlessly bloating administrative element runs increasingly up against declining enrollments/revenues.Report
I’m not sure what we’re talking about. Equity takes a lot of forms and mutations. Some of it has been in college admissions for decades, other parts are rioting in the streets, or boring people in required HR presentations. It’s been written into official things like laws and Star Wars lore. Some of it may be in retreat but other parts of it have become second nature. I’m happy to see the pushback, but as a general rule, people are slow to give up on causes that make them feel righteous.Report
Sure, and some parts of “Equity” or “Identarianism” or “Social justice” or whatever name one gives it are righteous and thus their enduring is good, other parts are trivial and their remaining is irrelevant and some of it is genuinely harmful. I think the harmful and threatening parts are retreating or, at least, not advancing by and large anymore.Report
The most vile aspect of the Identarians is their utter denial of Jewish identity. I find that extremely more disgusting than their anti-Zionism. Sure, a state for the Jews might be a bad idea from a pragmatic standpoint but to say that we aren’t a real people with a culture of our own is unforgivable.Report
I can understand why you find that especially egregious.Report
These status games were fine before the Internet and social media but thanks to the Internet and social media they have entered non-academic or activist spaces.Report
And I’m really serious about my above post. Since the Simchat Torah massacre, I see a Western left utterly determined to seemingly destroy every Jewish institution and deprive us from any recognition as a real true people let alone have Jewish institutions get any sort of tax revenue or state support anywhere in the world. They want us to be, at best, a really weird sort of white people, and they are sticking to that no matter what. Yet at the same time, they have no sham in asking Jews to support them because of our history. It is absolute demand in one hand and complete denial in the other. There is a lot of white saviorism in activism and Jews are excluded from it.Report
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
My advice? Be twice as good.Report
This YouTube video is from last month but it talks about how video game publishers are moving towards mobile freemium games as the best way to make money rather than traditional video games that they are increasingly seen as an expensive one and done deal that may or may not make money. It brings up an interesting point to the debate of enshittification. The dedicated video game players might want their big massive JRPSs or platformers but the vast majority are fine with freemium games. If that is what makes money, that is what is going to be made.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wENqkbfa6M&t=467sReport
The main tool that individuals have is the whole “well, I just won’t buy it” thing.
Suicide Squad was supposed to be a GaaS moneymaker and WB admitted that they lost 200 million on it. Now, of course, they’re probably lying about that but even if they only lost half that much, they lost one tenth of a billion on a game that everybody said they didn’t want even as it was being made. “Make one like the last one!”, they said.
Anyway, one of the red flags to keep an eye out for is an argument that takes the form “you are only not buying this because it’s not pandering to you!”
It seems like such a silly argument but, believe it or not, it shows up from time to time.
All you can do is look at it and shrug and move on.
But if you happen to stumble across a good game? Shell out for it. If the game is a $20 indy game? Buy a second one and give it to a buddy that you know will enjoy it.
Maybe, eventually, an executive will mention, during a meeting somewhere, the need for dogs to eat the dog food.Report
There’s a parallel here for Hollywood of course. Look at all the post mortems on Furiosa for memorial day weekend. Yikes.Report
One of the odd things I’ve seen is the defense of Furiosa that takes the form “But it wasn’t even woke!”Report
Mad Max is a very weird somewhat niche property. It’s also by tradition R rated, meaning the accounting needs to consider that it won’t get much from the under 18 or family market like a super hero movie might.
Point being woke is not the only way to go broke. Trying to do a film for a cult franchise without the star character is just as good of a way, and yet someone, somewhere, talked themselves into it.
I myself am a big fan of the 80s films and saw Fury Road in the theater (I’d give that one C+ to B-). Tom Hardy is no Mel Gibson but I’d have been open to seeing him take on a new adventure as the titular character. And yet here they are making dog food that doesn’t even include the basic ingredient that everyone knows dogs love.Report
Exodus + Vehicle Combat + Post-Apocalyptic Setting.
IT WRITES ITSELF, PEOPLE!!!
Yeah, I enjoyed the heck out of Fury Road but I thought “it wasn’t as good as Thunderdome”. The Mad Max videogame that came out struck me as being the story that George Miller finally wanted to tell:
Mad Max. A cop from the beforetimes.
His wife and child died because he wasn’t sufficient to protect them against the deluge.
Now he wanders the wasteland, making friends, allies, and enemies.
He encounters people who remind him of his wife and child.
Some of them die because he’s not sufficient to protect them against the deluge.
He kills a lot of enemies, though. A *LOT* of enemies.
He helps some of the remainder of the “innocents” that he finds. Helps set them up.
Like Moses, though, he can’t follow them into the promised land… but he is allowed to gaze upon it.
I understand why he’d want to write Furiosa.
“MIRIAM! THE MOVIE!!!”
It’s just that Miriam’s biggest fans aren’t likely to want to see an ‘R’ and Moses’s biggest fans were just fine with Miriam as supporting character.
“But this also gets into the backstory of how Ramses became Ramses!”
“I thought it was Amenhotep?”
“It doesn’t matter who it was. This is the backstory of the guy who it doesn’t matter who it was.”
“I’ll catch it on Netflx.”Report
“I’ll catch it on Netflx.”
Precisely.Report
Spin offs for franchises work better in book or comic form because the production costs are a lot lower than a full blown movie or TV series.Report
True. Also when children are a core part of the intended audience.Report
I suspect it’s because I came to the 80s films far far too late to be able to appreciate them but I very strongly enjoyed Furiosa and considered it both artistically strong and beautifully written. Also I loved Tom Hardy’s Mad Max but, again, I suspect this is because I was never a Mad Max fan to start with. So I’d give MMFR an A or even A+.Report
There are some serious gems in Thunderdome. It’s worth revisiting, if you’ve had a beer or two.
Report
I have watched it. Tina is something else! I just don’t think, I fear, that I have the right mindset for camp.Report
CAMP?!@?Report
This made me LOL.
Among the best things about these kinds of movies is that they play it so straight it’s hard to know how seriously you’re supposed to take it. One has to assume everyone involved understood at some level that it was (maybe more than) a little ridiculous. Or maybe they’re just Australian and there’s a weird cultural sensibility. Things were better when everything wasn’t so saturated in irony and wink wink nudge nudge that it killed all the fun.Report
I’m grading on a C’s get degrees scale. I saw Fury Road in the theater with a friend and do not at all regret it. I’d still be open to seeing a sequel on the big screen.
I’m too young to have seen any of the old ones on their original run in the theaters but my parents were never strict about what I could rent at the local video shop then eventually Blockbuster. Between that and reruns on cable I saw them quite a few times, particularly 2 and 3 (1 I think I had to rent on VHS and saw after the others). My guess is that to the extent the old ones have cache to be cashed in it’s mostly with middle aged dudes that saw them on the Sci fi channel in the 90s. We exist but not at anything close to to the massive market of Star Wars or comic book fans.Report
I’d go on at length about what I enjoyed about MMFR but Freddie wrote it better.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/max-isnt-marginalized-matriarchyReport
It’s interesting that they’re saying this Memorial Day weekend saw a drop of $100 million in ticket sales from last year. But that was almost completely The Little Mermaid, which opened that weekend but tanked afterwards and ended up losing the studio money and reputation.Report
Even with the Little Mermaid sucking it at least had a PG rating to fluff it up with entire families desperate to kill a couple hours with the kids.Report
More than one thing can make money. One of the reasons that markets are better than politics is that you don’t have to be in the majority to get what you want. As long as there’s enough of a market for a product to make it profitable to make and sell that product, somebody will do it, even if there’s a larger market for other products.Report
34 Counts. The MoFo is guilty, guilty, guiltyReport
I don’t want to distract from the conviction conversation on the dedicated posts but everyone here should watch this:
https://x.com/laurapoulter9/status/1796463890089558274Report
“Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/28/democrats-freakout-over-biden-00160047
“All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.”
Posted with no comment as I have no horse in the race.Report
Completely empty politico piece to take up space. The “freakout” dems quoted all remain anonymous. Pieces like this feel like they appear discussing both sides with monotonous regularity as far as I can tell. You gotta fill that webpage every day after all.Report
Yes, SOP for most reporting. Can disclose your sources or they dry up. 🙂 Assuming their ARE sources.Report
The Pride Parade in Philly was blocked by the End Genocide in Gaza people.
(If only the Climate Resistance folks could have showed up too.)Report
Translation: The month long celebration of ‘bisexual’ women in heterosexual marriages sponsored by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman was disrupted by a coalition of rich kids on break and their 10 disgruntled Muslim friends.Report
This one got pointed out to me yesterday:
You can see less and less of the rainbow, anymore.
I suppose that that’s good. The original rainbow flag being a white-supremacist symbol, and all.Report
This reminds me of the patch for the Nostromo from Alien.
https://www.magnoliclothiers.com/nostromo-patch-other-items-p-781.html
But hey, Weyland-Yutani would absolutely have a float in the parade so maybe it is fitting.Report