you discover your 4 year old can access and take the lid off the cookie jar
This is kind of not the topic, but apparently I used to open kitchen drawers to use them as stairs to reach the cookies.
the remaining uninformed, unconcerned mass of citizens drive me crazy
See, that's how I felt back you when you were blithely measuring your pantsuit 20 months ago.
Linked comment in 2:
Good and terrifying podcast on the Russian hacking campaign. Worst part: some jurisdictions don't have hard-copy voters' rolls anymore. Delete a swathe of Rs somewhere, everything blows the fuck up after the election. For extras, there's still an empty chair on the SCOTUS. It's way past time for Obama to call a national emergency here.
In all fairness, your third sentence reveals that you also thought Clinton was a sure thing.
ALSO! If you think I'm unconcerned, you should totally meet my brother and work-partner, both Mr. Both-Sides-Do-It. (Also, it's hard to pluralize "Mr." It feels like there should be a girl-power meme about how Mrs means the strength of multiple "Mr"s or something.)
3: Yes. Also in fairness, you did eventually put that link on the front page. But if I'm not particularly well-informed, and you're trailing me by a year (have you listened to that podcast yet, btw?), and you're better-educated than the average voter, that indicates how little this news matters in terms of actual elections. These facts aren't going to get into the median voter's consciousness for years or generations, probably in fact never. As CharleyC keeps telling you all, only actual campaigning is going to change anything. (Partially pwned on preview.)
But if I'm not particularly well-informed,
Yes you are!
(have you listened to that podcast yet, btw?)
No I haven't!
(I don't listen to anything upsetting anymore. I read upsetting stuff where I can control the pacing and switch tabs and read it in bite-size pieces. Just a boundaries thing to keep from feeling flooded. If there's a transcript, I'd totally read it.)
And in even more fairness, all non-niche media outlets are profoundly culpable for not covering this wall-to-wall as soon as it emerged in mid-2016. That doesn't at all change 6 last, though.
What's the opposite of a canary in a coal mine? Our media is like a robotic canary in a coal mine that miraculously keeps robo-chirping long after the explosion.
7.1: Thank you, but really I'm not. I intermittently read 1 or 2 sites, which are analysis rather than news, and are themselves shoestring semi-volunteer operations.
and I want them desperately to admit I'm right
I think it is more likely that even if they come to agree with you, they will never admit that. They'll seize on some total piece of trivia, say the release of a pee tape, instead of the obvious signs that there there from the start, and act like it provides a rationale for changing their vote.
3 last: And actually, I thought Clinton was the likely winner but not a sure thing.
What's the opposite of a canary in a coal mine? Our media is like a robotic canary in a coal mine that miraculously keeps robo-chirping long after the explosion.
Sounds like you want a cockroach species that stridulates.
Our media is a thrumming cockroach.
Someone (John Oliver?) had a bit about Trump being waist-deep in dead canaries.
It is, but I'm not finding it.
Bono hasn't found what he was looking for either.
18: Here you go. "Stupid Watetgate" from May 22, 2017.
19: I just found it! It was underneath the couch cushion all this time!
I am genuinely surprised that Bono has, to my knowledge, survived the #MeToo era unscathed. Maybe I missed it, though.
Let's all list our SAT scores and Irish pop musicians we think most likely to be still-hidden sexual predators.
I guess maybe that's more of a holiday thing.
Precisely one of the Jedwards, but which one no one will ever know.
She got rich and then bought a huge castle. How can you not trust that?
all non-niche media outlets are profoundly culpable for not covering this wall-to-wall as soon as it emerged in mid-2016
I think this undermines 6.last more than you think. All-out media blitz coverage matters so damn much. Not even going there with h*r e****s, but look at the ebola scare (that ended the day after the midterms), or even coverage of the GOP attack on Obamacare last fall, which did incredible damage to Trump's (and Congress') ratings, in a way that the same facts, but different coverage, simply wouldn't.
If CNN and all 3 networks had gone all-out on the election hacking story starting in the summer of 2016, with interviews with local election officials (who would be either terrifyingly terrified or terrifyingly blithe), plenty of air time for actual experts (who would have been running around with their hair on fire), plus plenty of air time for Democrats to push a narrative (and, to be sure, plenty of airtime for Republicans to say, "there's nothing to see here", like Frank Durbin), then Americans would have had a profoundly different attitude about the whole thing, with profound suspicions if/when* the Russian-supported candidate won with 90k votes in 3 states or whatever.
I completely agree that people basically ignore everything unless there's huge press, but I think huge press really does make a difference. I think that the lesson of the late '60s/1970s was that if something genuinely catastrophic (Vietnam, Watergate, oil crises, swimming rabbits, Iran hostages, even through Iran-Contra) happens, then you can tell by the news coverage. But two things changed: CNN started treating everything as a Big Wall-to-Wall Story, and also actually overplayed stories that were plainly not crises (Whitewater/impeachment most obviously, but also various illness outbreaks). That, plus having Fox willing to break the previous unanimity of news orgs about what's Important News, has led to a situation where it's hard for things to rise to the level of Crisis. But it still happens.
*if the press goes full-court press on Russian interference in the summer of '16, Trump probably loses, simply because that would completely change the balance of coverage that IRL was so anti-Clinton
I don't deny that press is important, anything but. My point was that, just as you say, the press can't be relied upon to cover things responsibly. That makes campaign organization even more important than it otherwise would be.
28: but look at the ebola scare (that ended the day after the midterms)
Right. That was so fucking awful. I've been dreading what this year's Ebola will be. Other than some as yet unknown bullshit I'm thinking it will be NFL players kneeling.
God, that really was infuriating.
I think the equivalent of the Ebola scare will be pedophiles. A basically apolitical friend on Facebook posted some bizarre crap last week warning everyone about pedophiles rebranding themselves as something else. The right-wing conspiracy theories suddenly are virtually all connected to pedophiles somehow, and Ted Cruz, among other people taken seriously by the media, is actually Asking Questions and Showing Concern that this might be based on fact, and over the next two months somehow every Democrat is going to be on camera explaining that the reason they seem to not care about the murderous ring of pedophiles that 75% of Republican voters and 45% of independent voters now believe exists is that it doesn't exist.
On the other hand I thought Al Franken being pressured to resign and be replaced by a Democrat was going to be followed by a half dozen other Democratic Senators being pressured to resign for similar reasons and be replaced by Republicans, and that didn't happen.
The pedophile thing sounds like yet another I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I moment. It's like Donald Trump calling Hillary "crooked," and a million other incidents of that type. Pretty much all of the recent crop of political perverts and pervert-enablers are Republican (or Catholic).
(Am I wrong to put the Men of MeToo* in the non-pervert category. Mostly they aren't politicians, anyway.)
*Worst calendar concept ever.
Sen. Mark Warner's policy whitepaper on regulating tech platforms is good.
I usually thing of him as an annoying centrist Democrat, but the man knows a thing or two about tech and its bullshit. He came out of that world, after all.
I tried to post a comment this morning, but then the website went a little 404 for a while, so I'll try again.
I think it's fine to make a reasonable inference that, because there has been successful hacking of voter rolls, that it's entirely possible that vote systems have been hacked, and that we need to to more to prevent both of these things. The problem is that the article that got pulled didn't do that. It completely conflated the two things, and said that evidence of voter roll hacking WAS evidence of vote hacking, and SOUNDED THE ALARMS that the "Soviets" (yes, that word was used multiple times) definitely stole the election through vote manipulation, and not only ...voter manipulation.
It also had a bunch of other factually problematic items, like using problems from a decade ago with voting machines that are no longer in use because of said problems, to claim that those machines (again, not in use for a decade!) were definitely hacked in 2016.
Journalists with significant credibility in the subject area, like Jessica Huseman at Pro Publica (who has spent the last several years reporting on Kris Kobach's attempts to suppress voter rights), raised holy hell about how misleading and potentially dangerous the article was. That's why it got pulled.
I'm pretty confident that it is going to turn out that votes were monkeyed with, just as I am very confident that if, inter alia, overvotes in Duval County Florida were properly accounted for, Al Gore's 2000 victory would be beyond question.
These beliefs, which have a much stronger factual foundation that notions like the trinity, or even the virgin birth, are utterly meaningless today. A couple of centuries hence, it will be perfectly clear to aliens of whatever world are sifting through our wreckage that the Rich cheated, and destroyed the planet.
Can't spend much time on that. I'm thinking, though, of responding to every person who says some variation of 'Democrats don't have any positions other than Trump is bad' with a simple, 'hey, ask John Lewis if he has any views on any issues.' That does seem a little more polite than 'you're too stupid to live, aren't you?'
This might just me my all purpose comeback. Asswipe says 'Democrats are in thrall to Mensch and her troll army' with 'you're saying John Lewis is in thrall etc' and get back 'well, actually, I just meant generic commenters on twitter threads . . . and thus my assertion was completely devoid of the substantive content advanced therein.'
I'm going to go with:
High School Wresting Behind the Scenes, by Speakers Hastert and Jordan.
39. To be fair, whatever Democrats' positions are, collectively or individually, nothing but "Trump is bad" makes it to the collective consciousness. The media don't seem to think anything else will sell papers/commercials/clicks.
I agree that generic or non-generic commenters on all comment threads, not just Twitter's, spend all their time performing content-free yelling. I think most posters think of comment threads as a game, like Fortnite, but with less (more?) violence. (Present company excepted, of course.)
Democrats don't have any positions other than Trump is bad
This is so false. My local Democratic candidate for Congress's position is that he can work with Trump.
What's his position on naked Bigfoot drawings?
44: Hasn't even take a position on the paramount moral issue of our times!
The media don't seem to think anything else will sell papers/commercials/clicks.
I don't think there's any disagreement here that the decision process underlying this judgment is neither objective nor benign.
By this point in the Bush administration:
- Bush had invaded Afghanistan.
- Bush had passed a massive tax cut that did away with the Clinton surpluses.
- Bush had placed massive tariffs on steel and softwood lumber.
- Bush had withdrawn in part from our commitments under the Geneva conventions vs. the Taliban.
- Bush had directed the CIA to kidnap people and take them to foreign countries to be tortured.
- John Yoo was drafting his torture memos.
- Dick Cheney was war profiteering off Halliburton, as he had refused to divest his holdings in Halliburton stock upon becoming Vice-President.
- Gitmo had been established. As of 2018, 41 prisoners remain at Gitmo. They have all been there more than 10 years.
- The Democrats were about to be creamed in a midterm election (which featured, among various gems, Max Cleland being called soft on homeland security).
Yes, Trump is vulgar. Get a grip.
||
Sky poll shows majority support new Brexit vote|>
GLUM AND DIVIDED:The survey, which was conducted among the TV network's subscribers, said that 51 percent of Brits thought leaving the EU would be bad for the country
I wonder if Sky subscribers are disproportionately likely to be Leavers? Satellite users are because they're likely to be rural, but of course Sky comes over cable too.
50: I assumed so. Sky is Murdoch, yes?
Did they have an editorial position on Brexit?
I think the equivalent of the Ebola scare will be pedophiles.
I didn't take this seriously when you said it, but according to Vox that is a thing.
... Accusations of pedophilia aimed at celebrities, companies, and politicians are a critical part of QAnon.
Roseanne and others have tweeted that the purportedly "unprecedented" increase in sex trafficking arrests taking place under the Trump administration is the direct result of Trump working with Mueller to arrest pedophiles nationwide. (For the record, there has not been an "unprecedented" increase in sex trafficking arrests.)
It's a huge thing on the weird pro-Trump "Christian" FB group from which a contact regularly shares posts (and I first saw QAnon quoted). The group owner also claims that migrant children must be detained separately for their own safety as otherwise they would be sex-trafficked. I keep going back because there's always something new at which to gape. A recent sample:
In this recorded live broadcast, I discuss how the elite, the globalists and those who are trying to build their new world order and how people in the mainstream media, Hollywood and in the government have degraded themselves to a reprobate mind in which there is no salvation for. These are the ones who have the corrupt DNA of reptilian seed who are possessed by demon spirits that are controlling the narrative of the mainstream media, who are dominating Hollywood and the movies we watch and who are the heads of human trafficking, child sex trafficking and the like. These people are not human! They have a human shell but they are possessed by something else.
Your crazy anti-Semites have a bit more David Icke to them than ours do.
The sex trafficking thing is big in wingnut circles. They are the dumbest, most credulous people ever.
My wife always reads some shitty FB group for lulz, and they are all terrified of trafficking. Somebody was talking about their kid going to Europe for junior year abroad, and the other people thought this was a terrible idea, and told her that before she let her kid go she really needed to watch "Taken". The idea that there are people out there who seriously think "Taken" tells you anything real about Europe made me laugh for like two minutes straight.
Liam Neeson totally comes from Europe.
One of the many bits I enjoyed from "Deadpool" is that the main character (a fairly amoral mercenary) has a recurring nightmare based on "Taken" in which he has accidentally kidnapped Liam Neeson's daughter and is being relentlessly pursued.
"There have been like three of those movies now. At some point you have to ask if he's just a bad parent."
59 is hilarious.
||
Potentially very good news, we'll see.
|>
I am wondering what other films you could suggest as cautionary tales for parents thinking of letting their children travel to Europe for a year abroad.
"Frantic".
"Don't Look Now".
"The Longest Day".
63: An American Werewolf in London.
Also, I'll see your The Longest Day and raise you A Bridge Too Far.
64: not Europe. We had a vote about it and everything.
So "Four Weddings and a Funeral" is out?
Blade 2. "If you go to Europe you might end up acting in a film as abysmal as this one. It happened to Wesley Snipes; it could happen to you."
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If he is a Liberal, he emphasizes his faith in the common cause of international capitalism, rebaptizing his properties with names like Java, Ceilan, Costa Rica, Brasil, Liberia, Arabia, remote countries which had also ascended, or were ascending, through coffee in the scale of a universal civilization.|>
The idea that there are people out there who seriously think "Taken" tells you anything real about Europe made me laugh for like two minutes straight.
Taken as gateway meme for QAnon!
57: Huh. I thought the pedo/trafficking fascination was enough for us, and that lizard people were entirely out of fashion. Guess I don't keep up with the crazies enough.
63: Hostel.
69: I refuse to watch Blade 2 not merely because it is bad but because one of the vampires in it is The Cat from Red Dwarf, and there's no way that could possibly live up to my imagination.
Schindler's List
National Lampoon's European Vacation
Wesley Snipes has to be the best B-movie star ever. He deserved more from the world.
His name is literally SNIPES, ffs.
Does it speak ill of me that I never pegged Thorn for a cheapo vampire movie fan?
My Greek prof's brother was in the first one, so it would have been churlish not to watch.
TBH 80 is not super convincing to me.
cheapo vampire movie fan
I am not a cheapo vampire movie fan, so take this with a grain of salt, but Suck was exactly what I would have expected (and wanted) of a low-budget indie Canadian rock-and-roll vampire road trip comedy.
74 is sincerely amazing. if I'd known that I would have watched it for more than three minutes.
83: Rotten Tomatoes doesn't like it (50%). Maybe there should be a thread for badly rated movies that are actually brilliant. My favorite example is Mars Attacks! (52%), which the critics didn't get at all.
The only thing I remember about Blade 2 is that at one point he starts doing straight up TV wrestling moves on the vampires.
See what I mean? The man should be president by now.
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