Out of all the things to name your fledgling Covid testing company, SalivaDirect seems particularly gross.

Kevin Drum makes the point that Fox News is vastly more powerful than Facebook or social media at propagating conspiracy theories and bullshit. This relates back to what someone's daughter - maybe Stormcrow? - said on Election week: there is no way to beat the Republicans without taking on Fox News. The Democratic party has to put Fox News in their crosshairs.

The thing is - and I've posted on this multiple times so now I'm repeating myself - I don't understand the game plan to take down Fox News. Even what a hypothetical best case scenario would be. We discussed how the Fairness Doctrine can't really be reinstated, but there wasn't much more to it than that, iirc.

I remember, pre-Obama, people posting and discussing a roadmap to socialized medicine - the incremental policy changes and PR campaigns that could be implemented to get from 2006 to not-2020. Surely there must be wise people trying to game out the strategy for how to end the opinion side of Fox News? And I'm thinking private citizens or groups, who are more single-minded and willing to fight for government policy, but aren't expressly tasked with upholding 1st amendment rights themselves.

I guess this is the crux of the problem: must we support Fox New's right to wreck democracy as an expression of first amendment rights? In which case it calls for a private solutions. How does a private group destroy a company? Out-competing it doesn't seem to be working very well here. Or is there a way in which a government policy can co-exist with the 1st amendment, and still ferret out Fox New's Achille's heel? Even if it's a complete political nonstarter, is there even an opening for it?

1. Apparently Parler requires a verified phone number to set up an account. What an amazing cell phone list of deplorables that must be.

2. I do feel a bit bad linking to the NYT, but this fake face scroll-through is really amazing. It's basically the end of the Michael Jackson Black Or White video, but you can slow down and detect the precise frame where the race or gender or salient feature becomes intermediate, and then tips towards signalling the other.

...let us remember.

1. In the Activism thread, Megan posted a link to a video of a guy talking about how a white woman pulled over to record him at a routine traffic stop, just in the course of being a racial ally. I have also had the experience where I make sure that I have my phone in hand, ready to record, in case anything looks like it's going to start happening. There was even an app for awhile that was like a big green "Emergency" button that would start your phone recording and uploading to the cloud, IIRC.

Having your finger on your phone is not at all like having your finger on the trigger of a gun for protection, because it's not a delusional cowboy fantasy for starters, but there are some parallels:
- the sheer sensation of adrenaline and having a magic weapon in your pocket that can give you more power as a bystander, and putting your hand on it in advance, to be ready on a dime
- the belief that you personally are not in danger, because either you're not the target of the violence or you have utter faith that your gun makes you safe
- the knowledge that if you pull your device/gun out visibly and obviously, it changes the dynamic and escalates things the situation, and you have interjected yourself into the charged situation.

I guess what I'm saying is that in those instances where I've made sure I've had my phone nearby, the feeling of an "itchy trigger finger" really does fit. As well as the tense understanding that if I were to start recording, it's going to be taken as an adversarial act, and I should be prepared for confrontation.

HOWMEVER, I am not feeling any sort of allegiance with dumb pricks who bring guns to public places. I hope it's clear that I'm saying that phones ought to replace the functionality of guns in these situations. The major difference is a grounded understanding of how the device/gun will serve a role in justice as the conflict draws down.

2. Obama talks to the YouTube music twins. It's very sweet.

3. I had a post about how now that there's a vaccine on the horizon, it's easy to get senioritis about staying safe. How jailbreaks tend to happen in the last month before release, which may be a total myth but is definitely something that I've heard stated authoritatively. That the problem facing the world is just convincing people to hang on a little longer. Don't ease up now, now that the finish line is visible.

However, it was so patently false that I couldn't even write the damn thing all the way through. Clearly the promise of a vaccine has very little to do with the atrocious lack of compliance and utter death wish that we're witnessing.