State of the Discussion

Bipedal humanoid robots are being allowed to run in a half marathon in Bejing.

The Rules:

Rules for humanoids running the Beijing Half-Marathon are announced:
⦿ Only bipedal robots (no wheels) - remote-controlled or autonomous
⦿ Height: 1.6 ft to 6.5 ft
⦿ Time limit: 3 hours and 30 minutes
⦿ 10-minute penalty for each battery swap

This is from back in 2023. (Jump down to where it says "sabotage" if you want to get straight to the thread.)

Here's one of the points I made in the middle of the thread:

If what you are saying is true, would it be possible to submit low-effort crap and accuse anyone who doesn’t like it as being “anti-woke” instead of “anti-low-effort crap”?

Because, lemme tell ya, I have definitely seen some seriously awful media that shoveled on the “woke” crap and accused anybody of not liking the media as being against the “woke” and not against the “crap”.

And this is from back August of last year where we discussed, among other things, Zeigler posting about Palestine (you may recall that Gal Gadot did her stint in the Israeli army). I recapped the drama for Kazzy here.

I do hope that Kazzy comes back and gives a comment about how much (or whether is an option, I guess) his kiddos liked the movie.

As for my take on Ziegler, I'll take the liberty of quoting myself:

Now beauty is subjective and we shouldn’t say whether one person is more attractive than another and the very idea of a magic mirror being able to tell who is and who is not better looking than another person is silly… but I can totally see how someone might prefer to look at Gal Gadot when given the choice between Gal Gadot and Rachel Ziegler.

“So you’re saying that Rachel Ziegler is *UGLY*?!?”
“No, I’m not saying that. They’re both good looking.”
“So you agree that Rachel Ziegler is better looking but you just don’t think so because you’re racist against Latinx Actresses!”
“No, I don’t… erm… I’m not sure when we got allowed to say that one woman is better looking than another but I am saying that I understand how someone might think that Gal Gadot is better looking, in the trailer, than Rachel Ziegler is.”
“So you’re saying that Rachel Ziegler is hideous.”
“No.”

And so on.

I don't think so? When was it?

I was here when a certain former front-pager argued that casting a black actor as Indiana Jones would be bad because if he'd been a kid and Indiana Jones had been black he wouldn't have gone into archaeology. That was also inarguably racist.

What other reasons, that exclude any reference to her race, ethnicity, or skin tone, might there be for opposing her casting on grounds that it is "woke."

Generally when you have a protest like that, you don’t let counterprotesters in.

From what I understand, the protest wasn't a four hour thing where they had one guy give a forty minute speech to introduce a guy who gives a thirty minute speech to introduce a guy who gives a twenty minute speech to introduce a guy who comes out and speaks for ten minutes with a whole bunch of songs praising peace and justice sprinkled among the speeches but was, instead, an encampment.

If they had a four hour thing and said "no Israelites except for Black Israelites", I'm pretty sure that everybody would have rolled their eyes and gone around the long way.

Such is the nature of four hour protests.

But an encampment? Why, I'd hate to have to argue that point in front of a judge.

Look, I think there's some wiggle room in anti-wokism that makes it difficult to call everyone who's anti-woke racist/misogynistic/anti-LGBT, but the only reason for being upset about this casting decision is racism.

Yes, not left-right but still Dem-Rep. At least at a high level, the Democratic brand is now basically associated with the elites and the republican brand is very much associated with the rabble along with a few distasteful billionaires.

Are you asking for the "For Real According To A Definition That You, Personally, Use" definition or the legal one that they're going to be using as justification?

Well, yesterday the judge gave them until Monday to release already incurred costs.

https://apnews.com/article/usaid-trump-foreign-aid-funding-freeze-02e8ed553e55c79c43fe8811de952d02

Let's see if they manage to hit the deadline.

Also, the judge has has asked questions that indicate he thinks the government's case is incredibly weak, and that it does not have any authority to cut off specific appropriations like that.

I think the Trump Administration accidentally wandered into the wrong battlefield here. It is one thing to pretend that you are simply cutting back unneeded things, spending less money while continuing its mission. It is another thing to walk in and announce are fully dismantling an organization that exists by law, and by law was handed money that it is supposed to give to explicitedly-listed other organizations.

Ie, if an appropriation bill, aka the law, says that USAID is to pay X million dollars to the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition a year in return for specific services, the executive cannot just refuse to do it and dismantle the agency.

There might be some certain level of fudge around appropriation, some fudge of which exist by law, some of which is perhaps even more malleable than that, but that is so for outside of it that the judge isn't going to go for it.

One can imagine a universe in where a different Administration was canny and sort of tried to work its way up to that point.

Meanwhile, in other news, the executive has announced that it is going to try to start prosecuting U SAID workers. 'Why' appears to be unclear except that, you know, the poem 'First they came for' needs a couple of stances, and 'foreign aid worker' should fit quite nicely in there.

I immediately panicked when I read Phil's accusation. "Did I miss that this was satire? Am I so poisoned that I read that and thought it was real?"

I am not too proud to say that I felt relief after I spent a few moments googling and confirming that, yes, it's real.

But I had to double and triple check first because, you know... you read that and you realize that it could very well be actively making fun of how people used to talk in 2017.

Man, wouldn't *THAT* be nice? I think you're thinking of The Babylon Bee which is, indeed, satire.

The Sacramento Bee is a newspaper that has Pulitzers and everything. While you may read the above and think "Jeez Louise, that's gotta be freakin' satire" (AND I SYMPATHIZE WITH THAT KNEE JERK RESPONSE!!!), sadly, it appears to be entirely in earnest.

You should have stayed at home yesterday
Ah-ha, words can't describe
The feeling and the way you lied
These games you play
They're gonna end in more than tears some day
Ah-ha, Enola Gay
It shouldn't ever have to end this way

The Sacramento Bee has an opinion piece that I'm sure you'll enjoy: California needs Newsom to be a leader, not another mediocre white man with a podcast

Who, exactly, was the audience for this conversation, anyway? Because it sure wasn’t the people of California.

I’d rather listen to Chico State frat boys debate their favorite IPA than spend a single moment listening to Newsom and Kirk.

I already know plenty of boring men who want to mansplain politics to me, thanks.

Now, I’m no fortune teller, but even I can see that Newsom’s little podcast project will soon crumble under the crushing weight of lackluster listenership — like so many other puffed-up would-be podcasters who have gone before him. I’m putting the over-under at 10 episodes. Any takers?

This podcast of Newsom’s is platforming people who make their living off of temper tantrums and mass-produced hatred.

The people are speaking. Is Newsom listening?

In case anyone is wondering what eliminating DEI actually means, it means searching through your files and finding ones that have the word gay in the name.

https://www.oregonlive.com/nation/2025/03/photo-of-enola-gay-aircraft-among-26000-images-flagged-for-removal-in-pentagons-dei-purge.html

And yes, this is stupid, but I want to take a step back and let's pretend that they're correctly eliminating photos that refer to someone being gay. This does appear to have just been a preliminary search, presumably they would be smart enough to ignore things that were not actual references...to....homosexuality. huh.

Wait. This removal doesn't seem to be eliminating any sort of bias in employment or giving preferential rights to certain people over other people which is, I am told, the thing we're trying to get rid of. It doesn't seem to be about any indoctrination or thought policing, these are just pictures. An extremely wide search of all pictures, including ones that are just historic pictures.

The military used to bar gay people from joining it, and then it stopped doing that. And if some member of the military talks about the fact he was only able to join after that ban went away, or how he was in the closet until it did, and that ended up on a military website in some speech he gives for a medal that he got, is that DEI? Is a picture of him with his husband DEI or not.

That is not a rhetorical question, I want someone to legitimately answer whether such a quote and photo of someone should be removed from the military's website because it is DEI, yes or no.

If your answer is no, then you have to admit what is going on is not merely the removal of 'DEI', it is just bigotry.

If your answer is yes, if the mere mention of the existence of gay people is what you have been wanting removed, well... I don't even think I need to say anything there.

Hey, I wonder if people here are also going to call this one malicious compliance. I wonder if at any point this stops being malicious compliance and just _is_ the system that has been set up.

Alito: The executive can make 'regulations' all they want, but Chevron is dead, we will no longer defer to to those regulations. Instead, the courts themselves will look at the law, the actual code passed by Congress and signed into law., which the executive has to follow, without paying much attention to 'regulations' that the executive has invented to go on top of that.

This will result in a lot of people (including the most important people, corporations) that are bound by those regulations suing, to try to get them overturned. And if this happens, the court will direct the executive to stop enforcing those regulations and do something else.

This is clearly what we want and understand will happen.

*one year later*

Alito: Yes, the executive has chosen to do things that appear in violation of the plain letter of law, and court decided that it was in violation.

But, like, let's ask ourselves, what are we really talking about here: Does that court even have the _jurisdiction_ decide something like that? Do we, as the courts, even have a right to comment on how they understand the law with regard to themselves? That seems like an internal matter for the executive branch.

--

I guess it's not really the same thing, in that DOGE is operate entirely outside the entire regulatory system set up by law, and moreover is operating in complete violation of basically every law and even the constitutional 'advise and consent' clause. (Is Elon in charge of this thing, or not?!). Instead of Congress explicitly delegating power by making a law that says 'Hey, Executive branch, we want you to enforce rules to accomplish X, a thing that is way outside our scope of knowledge, so we won't make the specific rules. Instead, here is a system for that that will take people with expertise and a bunch of outside comment to make some regulations regulating X in a long careful process. Do that, and then enforce those regulations'.

The Executive coming up the exact amount of fire resistance a building needs, and requiring that: Conservatives on the Supreme Court say no, only _they_ get to decide how much a building needs.

The Executive driving down the road shooting off shotguns and hurtling Molotov cocktails at buildings: Conservatives on the Supreme Court say 'Are we really allowed to say they can't do that?'

Authoritarianism continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/us/politics/trump-perkins-coie.html

With the order, Perkins Coie becomes the second such firm to be targeted by the president. Late last month, he signed a similar memorandum attacking Covington & Burling, which has done pro bono legal work for Jack Smith, who as special counsel pursued two separate indictments of Mr. Trump.

While the Covington memorandum sought to strip clearances and contracts from that firm, the Perkins Coie order goes much further, seeking to also limit its lawyers’ access to federal buildings, officials and jobs in a way that could cast a chilling effect over the entire legal profession.

The president’s animosity toward Perkins Coie dates back eight years, to when two lawyers at the firm, Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann, played roles in what eventually became an F.B.I. investigation to determine if anyone on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign conspired with Russian agents to influence the outcome of that election. Both lawyers left that firm years ago.