TFGIF! [DOT 27/10/23]

27/10/23 MegMegMcGee 45

Sorry it feels like I’m just bombarding you guys with bad news all the time. You might have to tell me something good in the comments! My godson and his brother are coming over on Saturday to make cupcakes. They are 13 and 10 so I’m happy they still want to do this with me every year.

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens (The Onion)

At least 18 dead as manhunt for suspect continues
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/10/25/lewiston-maine-shooting-live-updates/

In other bad news…
Israel-Hamas war: more than 7,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli bombardments, Gaza authorities say
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/oct/26/israel-hamas-war-live-eu-leaders-to-call-for-gaza-humanitarian-pause-biden-redoubles-efforts-on-two-state-solution

And more!
Hurricane Otis kills at least 27 in devastating blow to Acapulco, Mexico, that tore through high-rises and inundated roads
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/26/weather/hurricane-otis-acapulco-mexico-impact-thursday/index.html

Sprots!

Stonks!

U.S. GDP grew at a 4.9% annual pace in the third quarter, better than expected
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/26/us-gdp-grew-at-a-4point9percent-annual-pace-in-the-third-quarter-better-than-expected.html

He fucked that pumpkin up!

Have a great day!

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45 Comments

  1. The new speaker has gone down the favorite road of apologists for authoritarians and bad actors:

    “The problem is the human heart. It’s not guns … this is not the time to talk about legislation.”

    https://nitter.net/atrupar/status/1717711644342599702

    It’s the old “root causes” dodge where people write off all of the problems caused by bad leaders as really the fault of average people.

    The point, of course, is to blow a smokescreen over all of the ways the system is gamed. Let’s pretend the network he’s appearing on has no role, that it has nothing to do with massive funding for propaganda and the election of horrible people — it’s “the human heart.”

      • …I don’t know if it makes me feel better or worse about the whole prospect…but I’d tended to agree with a few people who were of the opinion that a lot of the “see – he was the MAGA pick which proves dolt45 still has a death grip on the party” stuff seemed to be ignoring the part where he got a less fulsome endorsement from the former guy than jordan did before he crashed & burned

        …but at least one of those people did say something about how…in the event that somehow the plethora of other demonstrations to date had mysteriously failed to convince a person…the show of unanimity in the votes that seated a guy that’s this much of an illustration of the inmates in charge of their asylum seems like it proves beyond any reasonable doubt that even if the nut jobs remain a minority within the GOP whatever putatively less unhinged or potentially moderate majority might remain to represent voters who think their natural home is that side of the aisle…the party doesn’t represent them…it’s weaponized the term RINO the way it did CRT or BLM or woke to represent something near the antithesis of the original definition…& it wants to drive those people out the same way it turned on maccarthy

        …the only choir they preach to is one locked into a march to the right in the explicit direction of authoritarianism…& the fact that assholes like this new speaker can get there in large part by bypassing any genuine expression of democratic will or a genuine mandate ought to put the proverbial fear of god into anyone who believes their vote should matter…or indeed even be counted?

  4. Adidas knew from the beginning that Kanye West was a monster.

    This is an amazing piece in the NY Times by Megan Twohey with a ton of reporting to back it up.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/business/kanye-west-adidas-yeezy.html

    nothing they showed that day at the company’s German headquarters captured the vision Mr. West had shared. To convey how offensive he considered the designs, he grabbed a sketch of a shoe and took a marker to the toe, according to two participants. Then he drew a swastika….

    Just weeks before the 2013 swastika incident, The Times found, Mr. West made Adidas executives watch pornography during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment, ostensibly to spark creativity. In February 2015, preparing to show the first Yeezy collection at New York Fashion Week, staff members complained that he had upset them with angry, sexually crude comments.

    He later advised a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a picture of Hitler every day, and he told a member of the company’s executive board that he had paid a seven-figure settlement to one of his own senior employees who accused him of repeatedly praising the architect of the Holocaust.

    It goes on and on after this, and the willingness of Adidas execs to put up with him and subject their employees to him is stomach churning reading.

    • It would be one thing to draw a swastika in a board meeting in the US. But to do it in Germany had to have really made their jaws drop. However, one must never underestimate the corporate drive for money above literally everything else.

      • The article paints a picture of Adidas as both greedy and deeply incompetent. They depended so much on him because they were so bad at developing the rest of their business. At one point the CEO is cited as a huge cost cutter, and you can see all of the pieces of current big business brain falling into place.

        • …I had a niggling feeling that there was some considerable irony that I’d guess kanye was unaware of (along quite possibly with the addidas employees tbh) when it came to addidas having trouble getting a response to nazi references “right”…but I couldn’t remember the details so I skipped mentioning it earlier…I guess I’d rather think run DMC when I hear addidas than “founded by a nazi”…but…both things can be true in this strangest of all possible worlds, I guess

          https://medium.com/mind-cafe/puma-and-adidas-were-born-out-of-betrayal-by-two-nazi-brothers-b623f62ee43a

          …there’s lots of places that will tell the whole story…including wikipedia…so that might not be the best available write up…but for the sake of convenience it does get the nazi component into the URL?

      • Maybe things have changed, but I thought at one point it was illegal to possess or display Nazi symbols, flags, etc. in Germany. Seems like this might violate that law?

        Edit: Google tells me that yes, it’s still illegal to display or show the Nazi swastika in Germany (though the Hindu one is permitted). 

      • …pretty sure I’d be less qualified than you to be offering that sort of diagnosis but it surely does seem to fit the fact pattern remarkably if it isn’t true…& without wanting to sound like I’m making excuses for the guy…I can see how a dude high on his own supply of people telling him his every passing thought is a pearl of wisdom that further proves he’s a genius for the ages might take a shallow interpretation of the purpose of artists breaking taboos to jump to the conclusion that working exclusively with the biggest & most extreme taboos & always trying to “flip” them is the sort of thing that makes you a kind of walking zen koan?

        …black guy in a maga hat…forcing people “out of their comfort zone” in the crudest possible ways…emblazoning a german factory product with a nazi symbol…there’s a pattern of sorts there…or seems to be, to me?

      • I believe he was diagnosed as bipolar and disclosed that during his marriage to Kim Kardashian. Cause you can’t keep anything private in that family.

        • …makes sense…I confess at some point I made what amounts to a conscious effort to absorb as little information as possible about the whole bunch…they seemed to be in the business of making their business everyone else’s problem & somehow it making them stacks of cash…& nothing about that had any appeal to me

          …shame, too…once upon a time he really was a talented rapper?

        • Yep!

          Ye himself admitted it.

          Iirc, he *also* admitted back *well* before he & Kim split–before he got super into his religious phase a while back (a year or two before he started sleeping at *whatever* sports stadium it was mid-pandemic of so?), that he’d *also* stopped taking any meds for it,”Becausd they cut him off from the artistic process”…

          The ones in the whole mess I *do* feel sorry for, are their kids. They’re *never* going to have a chance to live *outside* the spectre of “fame” and they’ve got two parents and a grandparent who are *always* looking for an angle from which to profit, and who *aren’t* necessarily looking out for the *kids* best long-term interests–other than finances…

          They’re never going to *want* for anything in the material realm, but psychologically & emotionally? Growing up in that bubble, with the fact that *anyone*–including (if the rumors are true!), even your grandmother, being willing to sell you out to the media for a few bucks?

          That’d be a hellish prison, no matter how pretty the decor may be.😕

          • They really do.

             

            The “bigger” stories about him, and the ones the news covers typically seem pretty manic–there was the time he started that “church” mid-pandemic (around the time he rented out & was living in that sports arena), the whole thing where he and Julia Fox were dating for a couple weeks–he bought her *all* sorts of expensive stuff–i remember one story about him dropping the dough for a Birkin bag (it was Julia and her friends who ALL got Birkins, apparently!), then (or maybe simultaneously?) he was also harassing the hell out of Kim to get back together with him (according to Fox’s book, apparently, Kanye *also* offered to pay for a boob job for her)…

            There were his Flying Monkeys in the general public (his fans?) who he got to harass Pete Davidson off the interwebs, when Pete & Kim were dating–and then *while* Ye was still trying to get back together with Kim, he “married” (there are questions on the legal status iirc?) the employee he’s supposedly married to now…

            That employee–and Fox while they were dating *also* got “makeovers” and wardrobes chosen by Ye, which made them *eerily* reminiscent of Kim.

            Annnnnd then there’s his whole “Ye” moniker–which before was “Yeesus”…

            There’re been a *lot* of things over the last few years which I’ve seen (i end up over on Buzzfeed quite a bit, ngl!), which have seemed to show him being in fairly manic-seeming cycles.

    • …coming back around to that one about AI…there’s a link within the text to an interesting paper…it’s behind text that reads “understand human language”…which seems mildly mis-representative of a proposed assessment by which the big LLMs score below 50% on the “understanding” part

      …it feels like what we really mean when we talk about these things understanding stuff in conversational language is more along the lines of “superficially appear to be able to accurately parse linguistically” but the superficial aspect is belied by the apparent sophistication on the rhetorical level & implicitly equated with understanding “by the back door”

      …if the law worked like mathematics I could see how you could plausibly code for a system that colored inside the lines…but it feels like anything that leaves an interpretive judgement made by a system that isn’t a mind as the final word is going to be inherently flawed to the point I’d have a hard time trusting it was fit for purpose?

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