…as @bryanlsplinter mentioned yesterday…when you have a brand so well known that you enter regular parlance
…changing out your letterhead is…well…there’s a reason when google decided to employ their umbrella they didn’t tell people they needed to start alphabetting their search queries
The platform’s about page hasn’t yet been updated, but Ms. Yaccarino repeatedly referred to X in a series of tweets outlining the company’s ambitions. Expect X to more fully pervade the company: Mr. Musk described an internal message to employees over the weekend as the last he’d send from Twitter, and he told a user that a post should be called an “x” instead of a tweet.
Mr. Musk was very clearly behind the makeover, having long been fascinated by the X identity. His second start-up was X.com, which eventually became PayPal. (The writer Walter Isaacson shared tantalizing snippets of his coming Musk biography about that.) Mr. Musk incorporated “X” into the name of SpaceX and Tesla’s first car model, and he recently named his new A.I. start-up xAI.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/business/dealbook/twitter-x-musk.html
[…]
The billionaire has long dreamed of creating a super-app that could serve as a platform for everything users could do online, much as WeChat does in China. But as third-party data suggests user numbers are falling, it’s not clear how much runway Mr. Musk has to get a reborn X airborne.
…so…there’s different ways to look at the future
Americans agree that the present doesn’t measure up to the way things used to be. In April, the Pew Research Center reported that 58 percent of respondents to its survey said life for people like them is worse than it was 50 years ago.
There’s some debate over what accounts for this sentiment. One school of thought holds that economic trends amply justify the public’s sense of decline. According to this view, wages have stagnated for decades, making it harder for young people to marry and to start families. But the best evidence contradicts this story. The Congressional Budget Office reports that households in the middle of the pack had income growth of 26 percent from 1990 to 2019 — and of 55 percent if you count taxes and government benefits.
[…]
I have a tentative theory about the hold the “good old days” seem to have on us. Yes, we have more material possessions, more wealth, more access to medicine and more educational opportunities for our children than we did 50 years ago. But living standards were rising more rapidly back then. And that steady upward movement is a large part of what we miss — even those of us with no personal memory of it.This idea of progress was not merely material. The civil rights revolution was making our society more just. Most Americans trusted the government to solve problems and work in the public interest. During the 1960s and 1970s, that confidence cratered. (It partly recovered in the 1980s and early 1990s and then resumed its downward trajectory.) Even if that confidence was misplaced, as it certainly was in the 1960s, it’s understandable that we would regret losing it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/24/nostalgia-is-about-losing-confidence-in-future/
[…]
If I’m right, then convincing Americans that we were poorer than we remember in the old days will not suffice to change our mood. We will have to find a way to recapture yesterday’s way of looking at tomorrow.
…sometimes yesterday’s way of looking at tomorrow…is unhelpfully rose-tinted
Guardian Australia asked seven leading climate scientists to describe how they felt as much of the northern hemisphere is engulfed by blistering heatwaves, and a number of global land and ocean climate records are broken.
What is playing out all over the world right now is entirely consistent with what scientists expect. No one wants to be right about this. But if I’m honest, I am stunned by the ferocity of the impacts we are currently experiencing. I am really dreading the devastation I know this El Niño will bring. As the situation deteriorates, it makes me wonder how I can be most helpful at a time like this. Do I keep trying to pursue my research career or devote even more of my time to warning the public? The pressure and anxiety of working through an escalating crisis is taking its toll on many of us.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/25/northern-hemisphere-heatwaves-europe-greece-italy-wildfires-extreme-weather-climate-experts
…it’s…well…it’s all a lot to wrap your head around
It is hard to come to terms with the sheer scale of space: hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and, at a minimum, trillions of galaxies in the universe. But to a cosmologist there is something even more intriguing than the boggling numbers themselves, which is the question of how all these stars and galaxies were created over a period of 13.8 billion years. It’s the ultimate prehistoric adventure. Life cannot evolve without a planet, planets do not form without stars, stars must be cradled within galaxies, and galaxies would not exist without a richly structured universe to support them. Our origins are written in the sky, and we are just learning how to read them.
It once seemed that, for all its immensity, the cosmos could be understood through the application of a small number of rigid physical laws. Newton encapsulated this idea, showing how apples falling from trees and planetary orbits around our sun arise from the same force, gravity. This kind of radical unification of earthly and heavenly phenomena survives in modern teaching: all the innumerable molecules, atoms and subatomic particles in the universe are expected to obey the same set of laws. Most of the evidence suggests that this assumption holds true, so it should follow that perfecting our understanding of these laws will resolve any remaining questions about cosmic history.
Yet this is a logical fallacy. Even if we imagine that humanity will ultimately discover a “theory of everything” covering all individual particles and forces, that theory’s explanatory value for the universe as a whole is likely to be marginal. Over the course of the 20th century, even as particle physics revealed the secrets of atoms, it became clear that behaviour at the macro level cannot be understood by focusing exclusively on individual objects.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/24/the-big-idea-why-the-laws-of-physics-will-never-explain-the-universe
[…]
To human eyes, the collective behaviour of the ants might suggest that an executive within the nest formulates strategies to reach prey efficiently, but there is no such decision-maker. There are just lone ants, following simple unchanging rules, such as joining an ant-bridge if there are many individuals pushing behind, and leaving the structure if no others crawl over. The sophistication emerges from the sheer number of individuals following these rules. As the physicist Philip W Anderson put it: “More is different.”
[…]
Solar system simulations disagree because no calculation can perfectly account for all the influences, and even the tiniest disagreement about the individual nudges leads eventually to a completely different outcome. It is an example of the phenomenon known as chaos, and it is simultaneously exciting and worrying. Exciting, because it shows that planetary systems can exhibit much richer behaviours than the cold, lifeless law of gravity might suggest. Worrying, because if even the solar system is chaotic and unpredictable, we might fret that attempting to understand the broader universe is a doomed enterprise.
…”if you can’t beat them, join them” might work…but…it says a lot when you can’t beat the lowest common denominator
The recent Turning Point USA conference brought thousands of young conservatives to Florida and there was no doubting the main attraction: former president Donald Trump, who made a glitzy entrance accompanied by giant stage sparklers. In a less than rigorous poll, 86% of attendees gave Trump as their first choice for president; DeSantis, who polled 19% last year, was down to 4%.
Events and numbers like this are cause for sleepless nights among those Republican leaders and donors desperate to believe it would be different this time. The Never Trump forces bet heavily on DeSantis as the coming man and the premise that Trump’s campaign would collapse under the weight of myriad legal problems.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/24/never-trump-republican-presidential-candidates-polling-desantis
[…]
“They’re experiencing a brutal wake-up call that the party is not interested in hearing critiques of Trump,” said Tim Miller, who was communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign. “The Trump challengers’ candidacies have been astonishingly poor and learned nothing from 2016. When the leading candidate gets indicted and all of his opponents besides Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson just echo his fake persecution complex talking points, it’s going to be hard to beat him.”
[…]
Indeed, criminal indictments in New York and Florida have led some voters who were entertaining an alternative to return to Trump’s fold while handing him another fundraising bonanza. His campaign announced that he raised more than $35m during the second fundraising quarter, nearly double what he raised during the first three months of the year and well ahead of his competitors.
[…]
Walsh, who challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican primary, said: “They all bet on DeSantis without knowing who the fuck he was, without understanding that he’s really bad and weird with people and also mean and cruel, even more so than Trump. They put all their chips on DeSantis before they knew who he was. That was a mistake because they don’t have an alternative.
…something something…”not sending their best”
But if Republicans did not wake from their slumber after the first impeachment or the second, after a jury decided he had lied about sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, after an indictment accusing him of obstruction and violating the Espionage Act (set out in shocking detail), and after replete evidence of his alleged role in an attempted coup, it is hard to imagine what would bring them to their senses. There is scant evidence that Trump would flee the race to focus on his legal defense; to the contrary, the worse his legal position, the more desperate he becomes to regain power.
[…]
This is what results when a party, its pundit class and millions of followers cut themselves off from reality, fall into a world of paranoid conspiracies and refuse to simply acknowledge they were very, very wrong to side with him.
And, frankly, the mainstream media has made it that much easier for cowardly Republicans to stick with Trump. Rather than challenge Republicans at every turn to defend their embrace of Trump or even to examine seriously the historical origins of toxic racist, xenophobic and delusional beliefs, the mainstream media largely sticks to horserace politics. (How disagreeable to grapple with the deep pathology in American politics and abandon false equivalence between the parties.)
Before going down the road to political doom, Republicans should understand how refusing to jettison Trump as their standard-bearer would play out. The so-called E. Jean Carroll II trial is scheduled for January. The Manhattan criminal trial is set for March, but even a conviction there might not move the GOP primary electorate. (Trivial! Set up!) The Mar-a-Lago documents case won’t begin before May. (All are subject to delay.) Meanwhile, the GOP presidential primary will have gotten underway in January and will run through March. Republicans might crown a presumptive winner by early May (as happened in 2016), even before the Mar-a-Lago trial concludes.
Without verdicts in the Jan. 6 cases and with appeals pending in any others (e.g., New York, Florida), the chances that a Republican National Convention in July filled with Trump-pledged delegates experiencing a spasm of buyer’s remorse (and overturning the primary winner) are slight. (Think of that being as probable as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy growing a spine or the party rediscovering the charms of moderate governors).
The GOP could very well be saddled with a nominee who has been indicted multiple times and perhaps convicted more than once. They would be betting that millions of voters who didn’t vote for him last time would vote for an indicted or possibly convicted nominee who spends most of his time railing about his plight.
And, keep in mind, even without the legal baggage, Trump would face an uphill climb to match his 2016 results. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and documentary filmmaker Mac Heller recently wrote for The Post that “between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people.” Put differently, the 2024 electorate will be younger and more Democratic — by a lot — than the electorate that chose Trump in 2016. The GOP will be pleading with a less Trump-friendly electorate to ignore his alleged crime spree and reelect the Jan. 6 instigator.
If it seems fantastical, even unimaginable, that a party would put itself in such a position, remember this is a party that obsesses over Hunter Biden, elevates to prominence Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and still won’t admit that Joe Biden won the White House in 2020. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, barring an epiphany, the GOP’s self-delusion is risking a political wipeout that will take out more than its disastrous nominee. And it won’t be able to claim it wasn’t warned.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/25/trump-nomination-gop-doomed/
…them…as they say…are the breaks
The report in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine underscores the partisan divide over coronavirus vaccines that have saved lives but continued to roil American politics even as the pandemic has waned.
Yale University researchers found that registered Republicans had a higher rate of excess deaths than Democrats in the months following when vaccines became available for all adults in April 2021. The study does not directly attribute the deaths to covid-19. Instead, excess mortality refers to the overall rate of deaths exceeding what would be expected from historical trends.
…it…probably doesn’t take a study to figure out the rough shape of the lines on that chart
The excess death rates between groups could be affected by other factors, such as differences in education, race, ethnicity, underlying conditions and access to health care, said Wallace, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health and the lead author.
“We’re not saying that if you took someone’s political party affiliation and were to change it from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party that they would be more likely to die from covid-19,” Wallace said.
…but…if you were affiliated with the party busy denying the efficacy of measures you refuse to take…like vaccines…or wearing masks that are better at protecting others than yourself…I’m going to go with a combination of “forgive them lord, for they know not what they do” & “reap what you sow”
In a nationwide survey published in March by the University of South Florida, only 49 percent of Republicans said they were “very” or “somewhat confident” that coronavirus vaccines are safe, contrasted with 88 percent of Democrats. Stephen R. Neely, a professor at USF’s School of Public Affairs who conducted the survey, said the Yale study was important because it highlighted how sharply partisanship over coronavirus vaccine safety and efficacy has led to unnecessary deaths.
“It’s one of the most telling metrics I’ve seen in how the politicization of the pandemic has played out in the real world,” Neely said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/07/24/covid-vaccines-republicans-deaths/
…&…frankly…if you’re busy making out you’re the big man driving that bandwagon
“Russia hit another Ukrainian grain storage overnight,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, wrote on Twitter, without identifying the location of the target.
“It [Russia] tries to extract concessions by holding 400 million people hostage. I urge all nations, particularly those in Africa and Asia who are most affected by rising food prices, to mount a united global response to food terrorism.”
Commenting on the attacks, the governor of Ukraine’s Odesa region, Oleh Kiper, told Ukrainian television: “Russia is trying to fully block the export of our grain and make the world starve.”
…I just can’t buy that “know not what they do” thing
The drone attacks follow a rise in Russian strikes on infrastructure associated with Ukrainian grain exports in the last week. There have been daily attacks since Moscow withdrew from the Black Sea deal, including on the key port facilities in Odesa, which had been central to the agreement.
Reni is situated by Lake Cahul, a few miles inland on the Danube, which has become the main shipping route for the export of grain from Ukraine since the collapse of the Black Sea deal on 17 July.
Apparently conscious of the profound impact of rising food prices in the developing world, Moscow has attempted to deflect blame, with Russia’s ambassador to Kenya, Dmitry Maksimychev, writing an editorial for two of Kenya’s largest newspapers blaming the US and EU for “weaponising food”.
The Russian attempts to hinder export via the Danube route would leave only EU-backed “solidarity lanes” for grain export, rail and road transit through Moldova.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/24/russian-drones-destroy-grain-warehouses-ukraine-danube-ports
…but…when the lesser evil is…well…not that great when you boil it down
New oil and gas licences for the North Sea that the UK government has approved in the past two years will produce as much carbon dioxide as the annual emissions of nearly 14m cars, or the entire yearly emissions of Denmark, analysis has shown.
This amount – about 28m tonnes of carbon dioxide over the lifetimes of the fields – will be increased more than eightfold, if potential licences under consideration are also granted, according to data from public sources analysed by Greenpeace.
Three large oil and gasfields have been approved since the International Energy Agency warned in May 2021 that no new developments of fossil fuels could be constructed if the world was to limit global temperature increases to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. The IEA report was conducted at the behest of the UK government, which was preparing to host the Cop26 climate summit.
Since then, the government has put in place a “climate checkpoint”, assessing potential new licences before drilling can take place. But the checks focus on the greenhouse gas emissions associated with exploring and operating new fields, rather than taking into account the emissions – known in climate jargon as “scope 3” emissions – that are generated from burning the fossil fuels produced from the fields.
[…]
Greenpeace will argue in the judicial review hearing that the government is reneging on its climate commitments by giving the green light to new oil and gasfields in the North Sea.The three largest approved since the IEA report are Jackdaw, Abigail and Talbot, the emissions from which are the equivalent of seven coal-fired power stations, according to Greenpeace.
If Rosebank and Cambo, two other large fields under review, are approved the total will rise to about 240m tonnes of CO2, equivalent to running 64 coal-fired power plants for a year, or the annual emissions of Spain.
Evans said: “Rishi Sunak’s government seems to have stopped listening to the experts on climate. Instead, they are bending over backwards to promote the interests of the fossil fuel industry, at the expense of bill-payers and the climate.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/24/new-north-sea-oil-and-gas-licences-emissions-greenpeace-government-uk
…friends like these & all that sort of thing
The US biofuel program is probably killing endangered species and harming the environment in a way that negates its benefits, but the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is largely ignoring those problems, a new federal lawsuit charges.
The suit alleges the EPA failed to consider impacts on endangered species, as is required by law, when it set new rules that will expand biofuel use nationwide during the next three years, said Brett Hartl, government affairs director with the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), which brought the litigation.
The agency has twice ignored court orders to study the impacts and is probably dodging the requirements because ethanol production “props up” the corn industry, which has a politically powerful lobby, Hartl added.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/24/lawsuit-us-epa-biofuel-production-harm
…I mean…sure people probably laughed at noah’s approach to being told the flood was coming…but…is building a giant boat on dry land really greater lunacy than putting your faith in the rising waters agreeing to trickle down on your say so?
Members of Congress have redirected roughly $2.3 billion in federal water funds toward political pet projects over the past two years, cutting at times into the money that could have been made available for poorer, needier communities.
As a result, 38 states and territories have been shortchanged about $660 million in federal water aid, according to data obtained and analyzed by The Washington Post, illustrating how the system often has rewarded politically well-connected lawmakers in some of the wealthiest areas nationwide.
The problem is expected to worsen in the coming fiscal year, as House Republicans eye a $1.7 billion cut to the overall funding that Washington sends states for their water needs. That could complicate a new national push to replace lead pipes, repair wastewater facilities and improve other aging infrastructure — an urgent task at a moment when the United States is grappling with extreme heat and other consequences of a fast-warming planet.
Every year, Congress appropriates money for two key federal water funds that are overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, which then distributes grants to states. Since 2022, the federal allocation has totaled roughly $5.5 billion, amounting to a literal and figurative drop in the bucket for a nation with an estimated $625 billion backlog in projects just to provide cleaner, reliable drinking water.
Before states receive any money, however, members of Congress can skim off the top of the funds. Using a legislative tool known as earmarks, lawmakers can reserve federal water aid for specific projects in their home communities. Only after that does Washington divvy up and distribute a smaller pool of remaining cash among the states. In some parts of the country, the result of that congressional meddling is a net cut in funding — creating, in effect, a system of water winners and losers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/24/water-infrastructure-congress-earmarks/
…some might call that sort of thing hubris
At Tesla, Musk would insist on a model lineup that spelled out the word “sexy”, even after there was no chance of Ford relinquishing their copyright on the Model E (so he ended up with Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y). At SpaceX, an uninventive moniker in itself, he named his rockets like an improv audience member shouting out random words to inspire a comedy scene: Grasshopper! Merlin! Starship! Musk’s failure of a tunneling concern, the Boring Company, shows he also flair for lame puns that don’t quite land.
Bad names run in his family, too. X is how Musk referred to the son he had with the musician Grimes after the child’s original name – X Æ A-12 – was rejected for flouting a California law that limits birth certificates to “the 26 alphabetical letters of the English language”. Grimes said the X took inspiration from algebra’s “unknown variable”, while Æ (a diphthong that echoes the long Iin mostEnglish dialects) referred to the “elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence)”. Musk tacked on the A-12, the label for Lockheed’s mold-breaking spy plane (“the coolest plane ever,” he gushed to Joe Rogan).
…of which more, anon
Musk’s love of the letter X is particularly uninspired. In the days of Descartes, X was the preferred letter to symbolize the ineffable – a kiss, a signature, the place on a map where treasure is buried or the eyes of the dead in drawings. But in the tech world, X has become a nothing letter, used to name everything from operating systems (Mac OS X) to gaming consoles (Xbox) to the telecom company Comcast, which changed names to Xfinity in hopes of escaping its overwhelmingly negative consumer reputation. (Time magazine called it one of the worst corporate rebrands of all time.) So it fits that the first letter companies turn to when they want to sound “with it” is Musk’s absolute favorite.
Musk named his first company X.com, an online bank. In 2000, it merged with a competing software company co-founded by Peter Thiel – who promptly replaced Musk as the CEO of X.com and renamed the new conglomerate PayPal. (The rest is IPO history.) In 2017, Musk bought the X.com domain back from PayPal, hinting at bigger plans. Three months before purchasing Twitter, a user asked Musk if he had considered creating his own platform. “X.com,” was his reply. At a Tesla shareholder meeting that same month, he revealed “a pretty grand vision” for X that “would be very useful to the world”, a one-stop shop to rival WeChat – China’s all-in-one messaging, social media and mobile payment service. X was the name used in the three Delaware-registered holding companies Musk used to buy Twitter for $44bn. Today, the company is worth less than a third of that, proof that Musk isn’t much better with numbers, either.
Musk has had a considerable hand in immolating much of that equity – doing away with character limits, hate speech protections and other features that made Twitter special and safe. Reports say the conference rooms at Twitter HQ were changed on Monday to include the letter X. New names include “eXposure”, “eXult” and – once again – “s3Xy”.
X marks … what? Elon Musk proves once again he’s incredibly bad at naming things [Guardian]
…bruised egos lash out in strange ways, I guess
A Tennessee high school student posted three memes last year to Instagram making fun of his principal’s “overly serious demeanor.” One superimposed the principal’s face onto an anime cat wearing a dress and surrounded by pink hearts.
The principal’s response: to suspend the student for five days, according to a recent lawsuit.
Now the 17-year-old student, with the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, is suing Tullahoma City Schools. He alleges that then-Principal Jason Quick and Assistant Principal Derrick Crutchfield violated his free speech rights by punishing him for social media posts he published off campus. In a 48-page lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Tennessee, the incoming Tullahoma High School senior seeks to have the suspension expunged from his record. He also wants the court to prohibit the school from enforcing an “unconstitutionally vague” policy that bans students from posting videos or images that are “embarrassing, demeaning, or discrediting (to) the reputation of any student or staff.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/07/24/tennessee-meme-lawsuit-high-school/
…but…when you insist on picking the wrong (massive) tool for the job
ARK’s writedown gives Twitter an implied value of $23bn and comes after Musk told staff in March the platform had lost more than half its value, while the asset manager Fidelity has written down the value of its stake to about $15bn. Musk paid $44bn for Twitter in October 2022.
Musk said at the weekend that advertising on Twitter – the platform’s main source of income – had fallen by nearly 50% and the business remained cashflow negative, a useful measure for gauging whether a heavily indebted business like Twitter can manage its interest payments.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/twitter-investor-writes-down-stake-threads-elon-musk
…one thing they don’t appear to have got to grips with, though…would be the concept of a quaint little ol’ thing some folks like to call “due dilligence”
Billionaire Elon Musk’s decision to rebrand Twitter as X could be complicated legally: companies including Meta (META.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) already have intellectual property rights to the same letter.
X is so widely used and cited in trademarks that it is a candidate for legal challenges – and the company formerly known as Twitter could face its own issues defending its X brand in the future.
“There’s a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” said trademark attorney Josh Gerben, who said he counted nearly 900 active U.S. trademark registrations that already cover the letter X in a wide range of industries.
…&…there might still be ways of looking at the world that make the petulant pettifoggery of the platform’s permanent principle antagonist resemble the power-moves of the world’s wealthiest wanker…but…well…it’s worth bearing in mind that in platform terms…while he’s trying to be all sylvester to the tweety bird…he’s the little guy in that litigation equation
Meta itself drew intellectual property challenges when it changed its name from Facebook. It faces trademark lawsuits filed last year by investment firm Metacapital and virtual-reality company MetaX, and settled another over its new infinity-symbol logo.
[…]
“Given the difficulty in protecting a single letter, especially one as popular commercially as ‘X’, Twitter’s protection is likely to be confined to very similar graphics to their X logo,” said Douglas Masters, a trademark attorney at law firm Loeb & Loeb.“The logo does not have much distinctive about it, so the protection will be very narrow.”
https://www.reuters.com/technology/problem-with-x-meta-microsoft-hundreds-more-own-trademarks-new-twitter-name-2023-07-25/
…they might be grim chuckles…but…you gotta get your laughs where you can?
…what is it they say about one man’s misfortune?
…so…here we are & here we go…but…there’s only one more of these to go before I do from the point of view of things above the line hereabouts for the best part of a month…so…good luck with that?
The Covid death gap vis a vis party alignment is really the most on-the-nose political metaphor I’ve ever seen. It truly is everything about America wrapped up in one graph.
It’s a telling contrast to the pretty much meaningless Pew poll about nostalgia and the National Review dope’s column.
Right wingers are dying because their leaders tell them to. They hate the world and undermine its future — destroy its climate, attack democratic freedom — because that’s the message they’re getting. And when the wreckage becomes too hard to ignore, the inevitable followup message is that it’s the left’s fault.
Saying that people are pessimistic is meaningless unless you can meaningfully talk about why they think that, and writers dodge the whole issue of reasons when they want to deflect responsibility or avoid addressing ways out of it.
It’s the equivalent of going to a doctor with a broken arm, having the doctor ask you to rate your pain level over time. The pain level isn’t meaningful in isolation, it only means something when correlated to a treatment plan, and it isn’t necessarily even a dependent variable. A good treatment plan may result in more pain than one which simply amputates and treats with massive pain killers. Or a bad treatment plan can also result in more pain.
When people simply talk about one symptom, it’s a good sign they’re covering up a lot.
…the truth is a fickle beast at the best of times…so I don’t claim to have the right of it where the group-think of the right is concerned…but few people are the villain of the story they tell themselves…so my guess is if you’ve successfully adopted the perspective from which those decisions are reached by those folks…they don’t see it the way you do…so it’d be less a case of dying because they’re told to than…call it death by misadventure…where the party line might be the proximate cause but the underlying mechanism relies…as does so much else…on the part where what counts is that they don’t know better
…in which regard the misjudgements & cognitive foibles hinted at by the misplaced & ill-considered inconsistency of a nostalgia-tinted view of what the world ought to look like in the days to come that pice seemed to be considering had me thinking of a different parallel to be honest
…it’s easy to point & laugh at people who appear to be willing to shill for the musks & putins & trumps we seem to be besieged by on all sides like so many runners & riders in the charge of a modern day light brigade
…but it’s not so very different from the way the majority of people are approaching the realities of the (literally industrial scale) shift in the status quo…& the inevitable upheaval that by definition seems impossible to prevent accompanying it…in terms of the climate/fossil fuel equation in a a globally capitalist context
…& despite the well-founded scorn with which the idea of trying to win the former sorts of acolytes over to the side of the angels is generally greeted…with the latter sort my experience has been that if you can provide enough first principles starting points couched in terms & idioms which have the comfort of familiarity to them to grease the wheels…they can come around…even when that means the sort of about face they start out considering a coward’s heel turn
…so…I dunno…I guess that had me thinking about what actually constitutes the courage of one’s convictions…rather than the currency of worthless fig-leaf shibboleths the horse-trading of which is functionally held to be their exercise
…but I’ll avoid trying to adopt a medical analogy…if the science would be the tests & scans & blood draws in that analogy…I don’t think my outlook’s likely to be improved by speculating about how a doctor might sum up the prognosis…it’s not lent or anything but I’m trying to cut back on the gallows humor quotient of my day?
It really does. That’s one of the most infuriating things about bothsiderism (I guess we’re calling it horserace reporting now, according to one of RIP’s bullets). There’s no anti-vaccination side. One side is literally choosing to die on the altar of stupidity.
It’s not a coincidence that Gen Z, which is much more Democratic, has increased by 52 million over Republicans since 2016. Republicans are killing themselves. And they’re doing it with a smile on their faces because they’re “owning the libs.”
See, RIP? I do try to read these.
Even broader than that: The idea that the future itself is meaningless if it can be leveraged into a short-term gain. It’s the underpinning of American capitalism now, and it could not be more of the right-wing mindset. The idea that sure, we can expand the tent with the woo-woo anti-vax crowd and if they die off, oh well, and if the idea kills other people, oh well again, but we got a few extra votes so it’s a win!
Meanwhile, the Black/Brown population continues to grow as does an entire generation of people mostly turned off by that way of thinking but that would require some long-term solutions and new ideas so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also the right-wing nutjob white supremacy isn’t doing them any favors demographically. There’s the idea of the mighty drop and there’s a decent volume of interracial relationships in the US. The conservatives default to “any visible nonwhite heritage makes the person not white” so like… Okay. There’s a lot of kids with a white parent and a black or brown parent and the GOP has essentially lost any chance of getting those future voters.
Exactly. But that’s a future problem, so right now, don’t care, we need the scared white vote so BORDER FENTANYL CARAVAN CHICAGO MURDER TIME
What is worrying is the GOP is clearly looking to authoritarian countries for ideas on how to maintain control over demographically diverse countries.
Saddam Hussein kept a lid on Iraq for decades by playing Shiites and Sunnis against each other, as well as Kurds and Arabs, alternately protecting and persecuting Iraqi Christians, demonizing Israel and Iran, and doing whatever else he could to always keep Iraqis looking elsewhere for the source of their problems.
They want to be him, but stop thinking past about 1979.
Good point. That sort of nihilism is behind the Republican push to eliminate environmentally conscious investing. (DuhSantis is big on this, which is telling, since he does have children — once again, I’ll remind everyone that he’s a sociopath).
Self-destruction is built into the Republican mindset.
Bothsidesism is the “intellectual” framework for horse race journalism.
Once political journalists establish (in their own minds) that both sides are riddled with corruption and cooties, then they move on to the decision that covering policies doesn’t matter and they can just talk about polls and whatever vibes they want to conjure.
…not to disagree exactly…but I can’t help but suspect that while the sort of lazy thinking you’re bemoaning in journalists is more than shared by their audience in the blame game stakes…it’s not altogether without a foundation that might hold enough water to sustain the baby after draining the dregs from the tub
…lazy thinkers make for lazy readers…& lazy readers demand (over-)simplification &/or comforting analogies that provide the limbic hit they’re looking for…& for just about any issue the simplest construction of it is reduction to a binary…once you pick that…or simply pick back up the fabric you previously wrought from whole cloth over generations & tease out your preferred thread…things tend to appear to self-select the side of the line they’re at home to…so you can whip up something that says so & so & this & that stand for option A while whoever & whatever are on deck for option B…& robert’s your mother’s brother…though…if he’s honest he’d probably concede that nothing in that model provides ground for any presumptions about the playing field being level or who stands where on how steep a gradient subject to what forces in terms of leverage &/or fulcrums…let alone anything else that might allow for a comforting assumption of implicit equilibrium making up as much of the context as it mostly tends to
…as frameworks go…I’d argue it’s not entirely without merit or virtue…albeit abused vastly more often than it is anything else?
People like Rupert Murdoch and Chris Licht made deliberate, conscious choices to deeply degrade public discourse, and failure to put the blame where it lies is not good thinking.
Audiences will never be perfect, but they can be made much smarter or much dumber. We have a long history of people in charge of huge outlets doing the second.
…which would bring me back to the part about not finding the claim that “they know not what they do” to have quite the same ring to it at the top as opposed to the bottom of the dogpile
…but doesn’t help me square the circle when it comes to going around & around on the part where all of us have to reap what that little lot are hell bent on sowing?
I think both sides are corrupt and full of cooties, and so should journalists. But to a wider lens, here: Horse race stories are easy and popular. Policy stories are hard and often unread. In the age of instant metrics, which one do you think political reporters are gonna gravitate toward, even if they personally don’t think both sides are equivalent?
I agree 100% that horse race reporting is easier, and as a result cheaper. I’d argue though that horse race reporting is deeply dull and a major reason why news ratings circle the drain.
Policy reporting suffers to a huge extent from the same problems as horse race coverage. So much is deeply boring because so much of it involves regurgitating studies and plugging in quotes from regular sources, instead of insightful and interesting coverage.
The irony is that a huge amount of the problems of present day reporting could be solved by better application of century-old AP stylebook advice. It’s amazing to read through old versions of AP wisdom and see how many warnings there are about favoring rote formalism over proper judgment, or choosing speed and neutrality over accuracy.
To a large extent it’s not a question of switching the balance of partisanship, it’s just about being better reporters.
The problem here hinges on what defines a “better” reporter. I know what that reporter’s bosses would ultimately say: more content, more clicks, more subscriptions. If you spend a month working on a great policy story and it gets a million clicks and 50 subscriptions, great, but if the horse race guy has produced 47 stories getting 5 million clicks and 30 subscriptions over that time, they’ve won the battle of who’s a “better” reporter in the eyes of the most important people in the equation.
Also, even if I generally agree with your takes on journalism here, the “The news would be better if it was more what I liked” is how we got Fox News, which is to say, you can take it in a lot of different and often unpleasant directions.
…there’s also the small issue of the part where all the made-perfect journalists in the world would still go broke before twitter absent a commensurate improvement in the calibre of their readers…the current crop being in the majority disinclined to give that definition of better the time of day…much less the time it would take them to “read, learn & inwardly digest” that kind of intellectual diet?
…always appreciate anyone willing to scroll along for the ride…but…I think what really wins me over is the rest of the reading folks hereabouts do…particularly the bits I fail to find the time for
…I’m keenly aware that I run on almost as much as a good many members of our merry band hold their tongue despite my fond but eternal hope that they might cast a few more pearls of their particular wisdom into the trough this particular glutton has a habit of sticking a snout into
…so…even if I do wind up dropping off the connectivity map for a stretch…I do plan to catch up on my deadsplinter homework as soon as I can…if this place is an echo chamber…at least it’s full of decent company & by & large the raised voices expansion pack remains uninstalled
…cheers, all?
On the one hand, convenient when the trash takes itself out. However, so much collateral damage thanks to asshole politicians and faux news destroying brains.
Totally, but like other preventable tragedies — and here I’m thinking of drunk driving as the example — it’s the collateral damage that everyone else has to fix when it’s really the fault of a relatively small number of people.
Man, that’s beautiful.
Thanks, I freaking love it.
That’s no mouse, that’s a rat!
https://www.levernews.com/the-magical-math-behind-disneys-content-purge/
So, we have to obey the laws you like from the Supreme Court but you are free to pick and choose? Got it.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/alabama-gop-refuses-draw-second-black-district-supreme-court-order-rcna94715
Shit getting pretty real in Israel!