Plodding Along! [DOT 26/10/22]

26/10/22 MegMegMcGee 14

Hi all! Hope your week is going well so far. Nothing too exciting going on here. One of my tires has a slow leak so I get to put air in it every day til they could see me at the tire shop on Saturday. So that’s fun!

Other than that, let’s see what else is going on in the wide world:

Good luck, PA peeps

It’s debate night in Pennsylvania, as Fetterman and Oz square off
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/debate-fetterman-oz-biden-vaccines/

Good sign?

1 million vote early in Georgia, a dramatic increase from 2018
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/georgia-early-vote-election-2022/

Stonks!

Alphabet misses on earnings as YouTube shrinks; company will cut headcount growth by half in Q4
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/25/alphabet-googl-q3-2022-earnings-.html

Sprots! (I’m sure you’ve all seen this by now, but I’m re-upping because I love it.)

Womp womp

Kanye West reportedly no longer a billionaire as companies cut ties
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/oct/25/kanye-west-ye-billionaire-companies-cut-ties-adidas

#RIP

Actor Leslie Jordan dies at 67 in car accident
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/oct/24/leslie-jordan-dead-age-67-car-accident

Hey you, have a great day!

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14 Comments

  1. Debates. Sadly probably meaningless, but still. Here’s an interesting bit from the DeSantis team after he debated Crist:

    Oopsy! Seems Rhonda Santis isn’t particularly good at thinking on his feet, even in a friendly forum with a Fox News moderator, and even worse, his campaign team are buffoons.

    Plus they aired the debate during Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune so they managed to piss off the old folks they were trying to reach. Crist was so pleased he’s trying to get Rhonda to agree to more debates. I’m sure that’s going to happen immediately after Santa Claus delivers my Ferrari F8 Spider.

    The Fetterman/Oz thing seems to be a bit more unbalanced. A lot of commentary says Fetterman shouldn’t have done it. I think his grassroots appeal won’t suffer, though. Let’s hope not.

  2. Well well, the RNC is getting a bunch of press over its lawsuit against Google for a garbage claim that they mark GOP email as spam, like here.

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republican-committee-sues-google-over-email-spam-filters/

    The main framing is from the GOP’s perspective, which is all the GOP wants.

    But the author of the study that the GOP claims supports them actually rejects their argument, and note that Google is right — as soon as users start receiving GOP spam, they mark it as spam. This was reported months ago, but still gets left out of pueces like this from CBS.

    The right framework for this for any reporter and editor would be headlines of GOP spams nation, blames Google when nation rejects them. But all the press does is see things through the lens of GOP persecution.

    • …I forget when but I threw something about this in a DOT a while back & yeah, it basically boils down to the GOP “fundraising” emails get mistaken for spam precisely because they’re built the same way using the same duplicitous markers…essentially they ARE spam in every meaningful way but they think they ought to be allowed to flout the rules simply by attaching the political label to them

      …or they don’t understand the first thing about it

      …but that’s why if google have to let them through it’ll most likely result in more malicious hacker-type spam also getting through which will piss off a lot of users & potentially cause google serious headaches

      …it’s bullshit from the ground up & is either a deliberate attempt (akin to what bryanl mentioned about facebook/twitter cutting staff) aimed at making life easier for malicious actors

      …or just so entirely fucking dumb it doesn’t even know how dumb it is or what questions they’d need to ask who to actually get the result they claim they want

    • The Ye deal shows the gross imbalance in the sympathies of the press for GOP talking points when compared to the Reverend Wright deal.

      Ye’s antisemitism is never linked to the GOP, even though Trump has not only embraced him but has made similar antisemitic attacks on Jews, and has maintained relations with flat out Neo Nazis.

      Meanwhile Obama denounced Wright and was never antisemitic, but the press accepted as a given that GOP attacks were legitimate.

      The excuse the press made was that periodically Wright would say something branded antisemitic, the GOP tied him to Obama, and therefore it continued to be Obama’s fault. But Ye has a long history of outspoken bigotry coupled with continued support from the GOP, and yet the press continues to dance around the connection.

      The reason is that GOP PR is seen by the press as inherently valid, while Democratic PR must be automatically discounted, even when it’s true, as in the case of Ye and Trump’s antisemitism.

    • Theoretically not, but people can’t control what delusions their illness puts in their head, and they don’t all have the capacity for reality testing.  If they could, we could get medicine into people whose illness tells them it’s poison and they shouldn’t take it.

      • I think it’s worth adding how the illness is organic but the manifestation of it often follows environmental cues. Part of his issue is that he’s surrounded with toxic people who encourage the poisonous part of his delusions, and these people tend to get let off every time he lashes out. His messed up political campaign involved recruitment and backing by GOP elites which fueled and channeled  his paranoia.

        But all of the recent reporting focuses on just him, without ever asking who is feeding his thoughts.

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