Commenter Archive

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.

"I know what I know from reading the Wikipedia entry"

so, you don't really know anything, then?

I'd be interested to see an aside describing the role Candace Owens played in it.

So don't answer!

"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?

What's going to happen is that HELLO WORLD will become a 37-Megabyte file filled with boilerplate and exception-handling, but nobody will care because an injectable personal-fitness tracker the size of a zit will have a 32-bit processor and a terabyte of storage memory.

proposal: Gamergate wasn't a sign of infection, it was an inflammatory immune response.

"I mean, it’s the equivalent of telling someone to learn Latin."

Or telling them to learn to drive a stick-shift car. It's certainly a skill, but things have gone from "maybe someday" to "you need to actively search for a situation where you'll need it".

(using a clever euphemism so you don't Say The Naughty Word gives further emphasis and attention to the Naughty Word)

"Of this specific incident – probably not. "

ahahahaha you didn't read the article before you posted it, did you

...do you actually think someone here would be in support of this?

I mean, nobody was going to accept a coffin with five pounds of sand and a "DO NOT OPEN" note...

"He’s one of the best talkers the Dems have. He’s a McKinsey Consultant to the bone. That appeals to a great many of the elite within the Democratic party and his ability to talk to them on their level and gently explain that stuff didn’t work."

Also he's queer, and that really matters to a lot of them, that someone with the right personal-life credentials have this opinion, instead of Just Another Cishet White Dudebro.

"I don’t have an opinion about the rules of a club of which I am not a member."

It must be nice to have the privilege of not caring about politics.

Even reacting to the critics is admitting that, in some small way, they had a point.

Seems she hasn't learned the lesson of recent years that you Never Apologize For Anything.

Someone described modern existence with the media/social-media/Online power as like having a conversation with the Fae. Never apologize, because that means you agree that you did something wrong, and the people you're dealing with have a bottomless hunger for appeasement when wronged.

It's like the thing about the Barbie movie having the Nine Dash Line...but doing it wrong.

I mean, they're not wrong to say that this is going to very quickly stop being about "congestion reduction" and start being a source of revenue that the government depends on staying at a consistent level, and whoops that level's gone down...

(Pigouvian taxes work great until you realize that you've eaten all the pigs but you're still hungry for bacon.)

That said, I think this is the kind of thing the country needs. Fuck You, Make Me in response to Trump or his butt-boy making some crazy decision. Not a Strongly-Worded Letter Of Resignation in response to some perfidy but "hell no, I ain't doing that, and if you want to fire me you bastards are gonna need the riot squad with power tools to get me out of this office!"

I'm...yeah bro maybe you want to examine your emotions on this one a bit.

This is hardly anything libertarians would want. This is keeping the structure and stricture of government in place but taking away the labor that actually made the machine go.

I think it's legit to look at the apparent waste and mismanagement of government activities and say "this is happening because they're mostly dumb people doing dumb things, and they got hired to fill out an org-chart and as a jobs program for the Professional Middle Class".

The thing is, the solution is not just a private-industry style "clear out the dross and let your top performers do what they were hired to do", because in a lot of cases there's valid reasons for those dumb wastes of time and money, those are in fact rational responses to the requirements that have been levied against the organization. Here's an example of something apparently dumb and stupid and wasteful that was in fact an entirely appropriate response to information-security regulations.

saul you're literally doing the thing where you make up a guy in your head and get mad at him

*shrug* I've been pointing out all along that "okay I'll hire my OWN cops" is a valid response to "if you didn't pay taxes there wouldn't be any cops".

And "there's more poor people than rich people, so the rich people better watch out" yeah but there's more bullets than poor people, and bullets are cheaper than welfare.

"And if that’s the case, we then have to deal with the truly unpleasant tasks of means-testing, lifting caps, making cuts, and maybe considering offering euthanasia to unproductive eaters."

I remember our big Health Care Reform discussion where I was assured that it's okay to decide that it would cost more to keep people alive than they're worth, so long as it's the government doing the deciding.

I'm not sure how "conflicts of interest" could even exist for federally-funded research, but this is probably going to end up being "you now have to fill out and submit a form saying that no such conflict exists", and if someone later thinks there's a problem now they can hang that form around your neck and call you both a cheat and a liar.

"thus is extremely obvious that the decision to remove those videos was an entirely correct interpretation of the EO"

You're going awful hard at this for someone who insists that this is not malicious compliance but that the direct and knowing intent of the Trump Administration was to delete all mention of the Tuskegee Airmen from the history of the United States Air Force (which makes it doubly odd that as soon as the administration learned this had happened they ordered the information restored.)