State of the Discussion

We'd have to figure out the equivalent to Harry Sisson back in the AOL days.

Ashton Kutcher? Lemme google.

Okay. Okay. Okay... The best thing I can say is that it's not particularly Gen Z.

Thank God for that.

There was this party I had at my house senior year when my parents were out of town when those cheap little disposable cameras were all the rage. Of course my folks left a camera of their own laying around and some sort of intermingling seems to have occurred. Oh the looks I got when that film was developed.

Remember back when we were discussing the Kennedy Assassination classified files? Here was the definition of Secret that I lifted off of Wikipedia:

"Secret material would cause 'serious damage' to national security if it were publicly available."

Pretty straightforward, right?

I mocked the idea that any given file in the papers would, in the current year, cause serious damage to national security and called for the papers to be released pretty much solely on that judgment.

And you know what? I went through a bunch of the papers and, yep. They were all dregs from the Cuban Missile Crisis and a bunch of other Cold War debris and precious little stuff having to do with stuff that would cause any damage at all to national security (and, indeed, it doesn't strike me that it would have back in the 90s though I could see having an argument over some of the Cuban Missile stuff).

What we have here is stuff like:
The current time.
Stuff that's going to happen over the next few hours.
Acknowledgment that we have eyes on the ground over there and giving reports to us.

Holy crap! The only thing in there that wouldn't potentially cause damage to national security is the current time!

The Jeffrey Goldberg/Atlantic/Leak thing: Everybody involved in the group chat said "it wasn't classified stuff!" and the Atlantic said "you sure about that?" and everybody said "yeah!" and so Goldberg published the group chat and...

Hoo boy. Specific equipment, times *BEFORE THE FACT*, techniques, and a tidbit that indicated that we were getting updates on the ground.

This ain't even in the ballpark of "maybe they deliberately leaked it to see how gullible Goldberg was".

Just that. From the article at the end of the first paragraph where he shifted to talking about the gay angle. "Gay men didn’t start acting straighter; straight people started acting like us."

Looks like the only connection is that the author is gay and is comparing how straight dating has become more like gay dating- whether women acknowledge that or not.

Reading that article, I have no idea how gay people are involved in this. Normal people, and I include straight people in that, have conversations about and general understandings of their level of a relationship.

This is not a new thing they need to start doing. Hell, the article talks about Sisson _literally explaining_ things to them. This is just some subset of women who willfully ignored it.

And I actually have a theory here: I suspect it's because he's an influencer, and that they have a obvious parasocial relationship in _addition_ to talking to him personally.

We've long had a problem with people thinking parasocial relationships are real and the people on the other side are in love or good friends with them, despite the celebrity not actually knowing their names. This is the same thing, except the celebrity does know the person's name and like to talk to them..but that person still has hallucinated a huge aspect of their relationship.

Some sort of blending, in their head, of the stuff he puts out publicly, blended with their conversations, to make them imagine he's spending _way_ more time with them then he is.

It's like they've discovering the guy who says he won't commit but has been living in their house and spending almost every waking hour talking with them...has been doing that with several other women. I think that would, reasonable, upset a lot of people, even with clearly explained relationship rules.

Except they just hallucinated the 'he's living in my house and spending every waking hour with me' because they're watching his tiktok a lot, and in reality they're just chatting like thirty minutes a day.

How I feel about this is incredibly complicated, I actually completely agree it's a bad choice, not because it is wrong, not because it is counterproductive, but because it is _not needed_. Let me just walk though it:

First, the use of fire:

NO.

Just NO. Do not start fires except under the specific circumstances that the fire will be controlled. Like a fireplace, or a specifically designed campfire or bonfire. And, once started, it is your job to control it. Not sure why I have to explain this to human being who have, presumably, lived on this planet and know how fire works. Pretty basic human knowledge we've all been known about for hundred of thousands of years, if not longer.

Second, the damage of specific individual property:

Is this person, in some manner, harming you? Is what you are doing proportional to this harm? The answers to attacking someone's individual Tesla are: Probably not, and certainly not. Arguably, they gave money to Elon. Individually, it's not a significant amount, and we don't generally think it's proportional to cause them that much harm in retribution.

Third, the damage of Telsas at dealerships (in a way that does not involve uncontrolled fire):

Let's pretend, for a second, that Elon is a wealthy person doing everything he's doing (For those who just said 'He is that, right?' hold on.) Elon is part of an presidential administration that is literally renditioning people without trials to a foreign gulag. He doesn't get to participate normally in society anymore, sorry.

If some people have decided that means damaging his stuff, I'm not going to oppose it. That feels like an entirely reasonable level of political pushback to an actual fascist government, which is what we have right now. Assuming, of course, they damage _his_ stuff and not other people's, and also do not idiotic use fire.

Except we don't really need to do that. Why?

The protests themselves are enough.

Which is a strange thing for me to say, because protests and boycotts of companies like this almost never actually work, and the way that they do work is usually by forcing the media to talk about wrongdoing or getting other people uncomfortable. And the media is going to keep talking about the Trump administration exactly as much as it already was, no more and no less, and the protests certainly aren't going to stop or change Elon, who is a drugged-out manic lunatic. So in theory, this protest is pointless.

Except the 'get other people uncomfortable' is tanking the stock price. Which will destroy Elon.

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.

I think every Democratic incumbent should face a primary challenge. If for no other reason than to serve as a "shot across the bow" and remind them that their constituents want someone who is going to fight for them. The ones that have the voters' favor will retain their seats.

The deadweight should be jettisoned.

Ganz covers the Atlantic debacle well: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-worst-and-the-dimmest

"My high-level takeaway is “what you see is what you get. These guys might look like idiots, and talk like idiots, but don’t let that fool you: they really are idiots. I suppose there is a small possibility that this was some kind of “op” — an intentional leak to Goldberg and the Atlantic — but to what end? It makes them look amateurish and bad at their jobs. To a president obsessed with image, this is even more important than the actual national security implications. ....We can finally put to rest all the hypotheticals and theories about Trump’s governance: There’s no 4D chess going on here; the administration is very reactive and tactical; they are not prone to complicated or detailed considerations. They barely even deliberate at all: they do what Trump wants and rationalize it ex post facto."

The idiocy is somehow a superpower for them because they just turn into full-speed ahead bulldozers

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.