Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025
On this day in 1803, Marbury v. Madison established Judicial Review.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
“This isn’t the Trump administration I voted for”:
https://wtop.com/virginia/2025/02/this-civil-servant-and-veteran-voted-for-trump-now-hes-out-of-a-job/Report
Something something g leopards eating faces something something.Report
Joy Reid is out at MSNBC. Variety has a breakdown of how she let down her queer audience down.Report
In case you thought Gamergate was (thankfully) dead, think again.
https://www.salon.com/2025/02/24/what-elon-musks-on-workers-owes-to-gamergate/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3vgEbIUyGo97txIyYIeIhVlMPo0INU7lur473GMFAWaNrucatby5P5Ul8_aem_nnTTyw26XnS0x8tZaA1oDwReport
What if we thought that Gamergate was a failed run on the part of a particular social movement that telegraphed all of the coming drama and showed the playbook that the future political fights would be using and, as such, gave away how to fight against this social movement in the future against such movements as the one pushing Harris for president in 2024 thus making Trump 47 possible?
Oh, it’s Amanda Marcotte.
Not even.Report
It’s highly unlikely sane people would have conceived that such a conspiracy theory would signal a mass political movement, yet here we are. I mean, where do you even begin to try to counter such a nonsensical thing?Report
Your definition of “sane” is too narrow.
“where do you even begin to try to counter such a nonsensical thing?”
I’d definitely support going out of your way to trying to think nonsensically as a first step. “Sense” may be holding you back as much as “sane” is.Report
Take me through that, man. I wouldn’t even know where to start.Report
Eh, it’s no so difficult to wrap your head around the meta.
Imagine two football teams. One has a coach that learned football back in the 1920s as an assistant to Knute Rockne.
Another has a coach that learned football back in the 1990s as an assistant to Marv Levy.
The coach who learned under Knute is likely to think that the coach who learned under Marv was insane and running plays that didn’t make *ANY* sense. Pure madness.
If you have a narrow window, there’s a lot of stuff that just won’t make sense to you and will strike you as nuts.Report
I know what I know from reading the Wikipedia entry, so let’s go with your football analogy instead of talking about the actual people. Are you claiming that Marv’s disciples behavior towards Knute’s is forgivable because Marv’s playbook is different?
My narrow window, as you put it, is the golden rule.Report
My experience of Gamergate isn’t from someone who read the wikipage but from someone who thinks that the argument dates back to Mass Effect 3.
So, from my experience, there was a *LOT* of interaction between the disciples of Knute with the disciples of Marv for years and years.
And one of the criticisms levied against Marv’s disciples is that they stopped buying tickets to the games.
All in all, the analogy breaks down quickly.
I mostly wanted it to get you to say “yeah, ‘sane’ and ‘sense’ are socially constructed and my assumption of their definitions may not match those from other societies or even those from different parts of my own”.Report
I’m talking about a group of guys who mounted an online harassment campaign against a woman who developed a game they didn’t like. A harassment campaign that included threats of death and rape, and apparently enough of them to make the news. If your definition of sanity and good sense include that then I’m not sure what to think about the values you uphold. Am I missing something?Report
Yeah, quite a bit.
If I wrote an essay, would you read it?Report
I would be anxious to read a defense of that reprehensible behavior.Report
That’s the only essay you could comprehend a pro-GG person writing about Gamergate? “Why it would be okay to send threats to Zoe Quinn”?
If that’s the only essay you can imagine being written, I imagine that the other side strikes you as not only crazy but downright evil.Report
If there’s another angle, by all means have at it. As I wrote above, my knowledge is extremely limited, so enlighten me.Report
“If”
How often do you find situations where there is only one side of the story and that one side is captured accurately by Wikipedia?Report
I’d be interested to see an aside describing the role Candace Owens played in it.Report
“I know what I know from reading the Wikipedia entry”
so, you don’t really know anything, then?Report
Maybe you and Jay could collaborate.Report
Gamergate did provide a really nice example of what the anti-“woke”, anti-“CRT,” and anti-“DEI” movements would look like conceptually, and even a hint about what sorts of people would be pushing these movements.
I suppose it says something positive about our society that we’ve reached a point at which misogynists and racists have to wrap their bigotry and hatred up into packages that they can, at least among themselves, argue is about something other than what it’s clearly about.Report
“If you don’t believe what I believe then you are a racist” is not very convincing, nor is it an answer for the legit criticism about those ideologies.Report
This is also a helpful way of painting over socially unacceptable beliefs: convince yourself that the reason a person thinks your a racist or a misogynist is not because you’ve been openly misogynistic or racist, but merely because they disagree with you.Report
Sure.
Maybe someone is motivated by racism when they say they think Obama’s children don’t need affirmative action.
However if that accusation is the only way to defend that result, then you have no argument. Ergo racist or not, they’re correct.Report
I’m not sure how I see the connection to Gamergate with this criticism.Report
He’s claiming that to be [anti-“woke”, anti-“CRT,” and anti-“DEI”] you have to be pro-GG or look like that.Report
All right, I’m just about as befuddled as a man could be. You and Jay seem to think there’s a defense of the perpetrators of Gamergate to be made that would be understandable to someone coming in with zero knowledge. As a person who fits that description, I’m anxious to read it.Report
I’m not defending GG.
I’m suggesting that there are legit problems with DEI (etc) and one can reasonably have problems with those ideologies.Report
OH! I think I see part of the problem.
You see “Gamergate” as “that time that a bunch of guys told Zoe Quinn to kill herself”.
And that’s what “Gamergate” is to you.
You can’t imagine someone looking at Gamergate and seeing something else.
So let me draw another analogy.
How fair would it be for me to call you an ally of Tommy Crooks? And so whenever we’re discussing Trump, I bring up how I’m not a big fan of Tommy Crooks or his methods.
Or Luigi, for that matter. Heck, let’s put Luigi in the same bundle of The Resistance.
Even as a 3rd Party Voter, I can’t align myself with Tommy Crooks or Luigi and I don’t see how you can and do so enthusiastically.
What am I missing?Report
Let’s run with that. The woman game developer develops and gets published a game that doesn’t appeal to the usual audience for video games. Said audience claims that the only reason she got it published was because she’s a woman. Absent that, a game as sucky as the one she developed never would have seen the light of day. Am I on the right track?Report
Consumer revolts, man.
If we’ve learned anything, we’ve learned to have the modern audience in place *BEFORE* we abandon the old one.Report
“Gamergate did provide a really nice example of what the anti-“woke”, anti-“CRT,” and anti-“DEI” movements would look like conceptually, and even a hint about what sorts of people would be pushing these movements.”
You mean, the same people running both sides as a joke?Report
proposal: Gamergate wasn’t a sign of infection, it was an inflammatory immune response.Report
Yeah. I see it as dating back all the way to Mass Effect 3’s horrible ending when the player base got really upset about the game/ending and Bioware had to start really locking down their comment threads and eventually shut down their forums in order to avoid the toxicity of the fanbase.
And Inquisition sold like hotcakes despite all of the chuds who said that they’d never drop another cent on Bioware.Report
and as with most inflammatory immune responses, the response was mostly just a bunch of individuals competing to see who could most loudly and angrily declare that they were The Best And Most Moral Participant In This Activity.Report
Since we live in a post-truth world I guess we shouldn’t care that one of the foundations of “chain saw the federal workforce” is a lie.
https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-employees-work-from-home-trump-myth?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1oAYrquiqesLGxAh3VAY7B4R9ZtDEqkUgjG4B36ePe7OrbEB7hQV3_-xo_aem_Buqfh4ntGjdAOW6gZpdGkAReport
54% of the federal workforce was required to show up at an office every day. According to the study, just 10% of federal employees worked exclusively from home. Those allowed to have hybrid schedules ended up spending an average of 60% of their work time at federal offices.
Man, hybrid schedules are where it’s at. If you wake up at 4AM, you should be able to start working on the stuff you can and then get dressed and go into work at 8 and show up for your scrum saying “my day is half over, here’s what I’ve got”.Report
The Administration has taken away that option for us. As have a number of private corporations these days.Report
That really sucks, man. It’s total B.S. I hate that I have to put pants on now.
You have my sympathies.Report
Spmeone hacked TV’s at HUD with some really interesting AI graphics. Consider this your trigger warningReport