I went upstairs to tell Maribou about this and opened with "Do you know who Harry Sisson is?" and she got really apprehensive when I started talking about the Gen Z Sex Scandal because, well, it's a potential minefield, right? Maybe he abused someone. Maybe he hurt someone.

Halfway through my explanation, she started googling and asking "Why in the hell is the Hindustan Times talking about this?" and the realization that "OH HE'S AN INFLUENCER!" and I started telling her some of the pickup lines that Harry used and telling her that I was going to start incorporating them into my repertoire and she told me that she thought I was kidding or exaggerating for effect because as a Geriatric Millennial, she has a *COMPLETELY* different definition of "sex scandal" and while it has room for yoga pants and selfies, it doesn't rely solely on them.

Anyway, I'm glad I got married back in the 90's. I feel like I got on the last chopper out of 'nam.

Young Democrat Harry Sisson has reportedly been dropped by Palette Management following what might be the most Gen Z sex scandal to have ever happened.

Jonathan Chait has an article in the Atlantic (reprinted here at AOL): Why the COVID Reckoning Is So One-Sided

From the middle:

Yet in general, the information ecosystem in liberal America has proved itself to be, well, liberal. Allergy to dogma and an openness to reason are the very core of the creed. (Read John Stuart Mill.) Liberals got some things about the pandemic correct and other things wrong, and over time, many of them have disavowed or at least moved away from their wrong beliefs.

He also points out that conservatives got a lot of stuff wrong too.

You had two that auto-trashed. I fished them out.

Her resume includes a lot of work for Media Matters.

A wise lord?

Mike Waltz is married. The woman to whom he is married has a sister. This sister is married to Scott Stapp, lead singer of Creed.

Edit: Never mind. They got divorced last year.

In defense of the Democrats in power at the time: it's 2023 and coming up on the most important election of our lifetimes and they didn't want to just walk up to Donald Trump and hand him the biggest W they possibly could.

Okay, that's good to know. When I'm in your group chat and you add a third party, is there a ding and a little message at the bottom that says "Joe Schmoe has been added to the chat?"

It does that for Teams.

When there is this much of a opposition to power over this long of a period of time, the calculus seems to shift to it being a question of whether it'll happen before the guy dies (maybe *VERY* shortly) or after. I don't think that Erdogan can survive a second Ankara.

Ahura Mazda seems like a pretty wise guy.

How was the food?

The minimal example of this is showing somewhere where people with the wrong politics got punished for those politics. (Which doesn’t have to literally be the thing punished, we understand pretense.)

OH!!! Then we're back to the punishment that happened under Covid. Seriously, there were years of people being banned and censored for having bad opinions (and, yes, it happened under Trump too).

It includes stuff like the Joe Rogan thing where there was a push to have him shut down. Remember Psaki talking about that? I can find you the discussions we had here at the time, if you want.

Would the Oath Keepers who got busted for "seditious conspiracy" despite never crossing the threshold count?

Huh. He's on Twitter.

Hasn't tweeted since yesterday.

Probably busy.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.

Michael Waltz.

I'm a Teams user, myself. I have to go up to the "view and add participants" button, scroll down to "add people", click on "add people", type the first part of the guy's name in the chat, then scroll down and find the guy and add him and *THEN* he's in the group chat.

I'm wondering if Signal is something around as onerous or if you'll accidentally do it by typing with all of your fingers one key to the left or right.

Do we have any Signal users? How easy is it to add someone to a group chat?

Hey, if you're having a blast, you can't ask for more than that from a video game.

Graphics good? Mechanics fun? Familiar and different at the same time?

Great! Glad you're having a blast with it. As a fifty-something, I keep looking for a new game that will capture the magic of, oh, 2011 or 2007 (even as I know we'll never have 2010 ever again).

Are we talking about power responding to insults to power and limiting ourselves to that?

Because, if that's the case, I suppose I can point to Trump in general, including the part where he was president for a while, and how The Deep State (the *REAL* power) responded to this grave insult of Trump being President.

Well, if stuff like that doesn't count either, I'm going to be stuck talking about prosecutions of people who participated in J6 but never made it inside of the building and were prosecuted anyway.

"Sedition isn't free speech"?

Is censorshp for stuff like "Fauci funded the labs that leaked Covid 19" considered "prosecution" or is it merely censorship?

Is lèse-majesté being defined so narrowly that it only applies to stuff like this or does even stuff like that not count because it's not an example of criticizing *BIDEN* and, anyways, it didn't stick?

"The ones about how Covid was a lab leak?"

"Bingo."

I believe that that is the joke.

The humor comes from imagining that someone on the other team is so dumb that they'd believe that this is true.

Then you share it with your like-minded friend and you both laugh because ingroup/outgroup.

He went to jail for it. Not banned. Not ratioed.

Oh, and here's part two: Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook to ‘censor’ some COVID-19 content during the pandemic.

There is an old joke. "Republicans vote on Tuesday, Democrats vote on Wednesday!" is one formulation (but I have seen the vice-versa before).

Doug Mackey went to prison for making a variant of the joke by creating a meme that said Republicans have to vote in person but Democrats can vote by text.

Seven months in prison.