TGIF! [DOT 18/10/24]

18/10/24 MegMegMcGee 43
man throwing paperwork in the air and quote "looks like it's fuck this shit o'clock"

Hope everyone had a great week. My friends wanted their kitten back (rude, frankly) so I had to give her back last night.

Israeli military says Hamas leader Sinwar may have been killed in recent operation

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/17/israel-iran-lebanon-war-news-gaza-hamas

haha their faces

Aww that’s way too young.
From One Direction to solo stardom: Highlights of Payne’s career
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2024/10/17/liam-payne-one-direction-career-highlights

Yikes!
A 911 caller said a camper was killed by a bear. Police say it was murder.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10/17/911-call-bear-attack-murder-montana

This looks fun as hell.

Have a great weekend!

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43 Comments

    • …that NBC thing from the other day about the “storm [4-digits]” outfits that churn out the seed material for disinfo stuff & the mills that keep it churning & the nodes on “the socials” might have been describing a new release/generation of the stuff that made cambridge analytical famous rather than being some sort of revelation…but it seemed like a useful exercise in walking through the process & seeing the rest of the iceberg instead of just the part after one gains traction

      …& the mental decline thing is kind of my litmus test these days for how far from fine I think I’m feeling on a given day…because it feels like the inverse of how that disinfo thing works?

      …instead of a 100% bullshit “whistleblower” saying something that would be a massive problem if it were true…like kamala went to africa & shot a baby rhino in the face & laughed about it or whatever…you have any number of people who’ve spent time around him saying…when he was a term younger & less visibly unhinged…that he was an inattentive mess of deranged narcissistic impulses…& however much he keeps talking the same bullshit line about how they got nothing & the man is just picking on him because he threw himself on the grenade so it wasn’t “you”…he knows better than most how the find out bear is sniffing at his heels & he can’t run like he used to…he never really contemplated taking an honest run at the thing so he’s on the final straight & it looks a whole lot like he hasn’t got the legs…both in the sense of needing assistance walking down a shallow incline ramp…& in the cognitive capacities department

      …but even awash in the sort of “viral on the socials” fodder of him stumbling over his steps or his words or concepts or the question or where he is & who he’s talking to…honest brokers galore caveat their assessment by distinguishing it from “a medical diagnosis that comes with a bonus bonanza of medical ethics issues & malpractice to go with the nuisance civil suits about imagined cases for the truth being libel” & “an observation based on decades of professionally observing this sort of thing” when they say stuff like “he’s a nearly 80 year old man in at best average health with a diet & exercise regimen that is known to be insufficient to mitigate those factors & who has been campaign-financing his way (with the odd emolument & a bunch of direct charges invoiced to the federal government) through the dual process of hemorrhaging cash in pursuit of propping up his image as a man of vast wealth by staying ahead of his creditors or getting them to cut his losses by taking one for the team…&…hemorrhaging cash on increasingly shit lawyers willing to walk all over the disbarment line making political statements in lieu of fighting cases like a rearguard action bringing up the ass-end of a routed army…& even if most of any given day wafts past him in one indistinguishable senior moment…that’s got to be a high stress deal for an almost-octogenarian

      …especially an almost-octogenarian whose daddy was diagnosed in his early 80s with a degenerative condition that’s known for being potentially inheritable

      …who sounds like he can’t navigate to the end of either a sentence or a thought coherently…& seems to want to rest his case before we get to cross the finish line

      …but it would be irresponsible to draw an adverse inference from any of that…& also if he wins it would retrospectively be in line for a charge of election interference & he’d have you deported or murdered or both in either order…but for preference murdered first & displayed “pour encourager les autres”…maybe in an actual gibbet…before making some shit hole country pay to have your remains shipped home to burn or bury or build houses out of or however you benighted savages do things when you’re not breaking into houses to murder americans at their breakfast tables or lying in wait to cut their throat as they reach for a loaf of bread in the grocery store

      …sigh

      …& today only scores somewhere in the middle on that how-gone-do-I-feel scale based on the extent to which I lean deliberate-conspiracy over conglomerated-clusterfuck for most likely explanation of how these insanely disparate things are the two sides of a binary question that is “too close to call”

      …still…in anecdata terms…I’m nearer to half his age than I am to being as old as him…& just by-standing these last few years has been fucking exhausting for me…I’m no wellness guru but I’m fairly confident I take better care of myself than he does…although I’d expect to discover that he’s getting a lot of the sleep I don’t seem to have had a full share of for a while…& I’m not under multiple indictments or in debt by more than a lot of people earn in a lifetime to a range of increasingly less savoury & more murder-y people

      …so if you told me people on his campaign would like to put him into a medical coma & try to treat him like the scientologists treat hubbard’s sci-fi dreck…that’d be a fake-whistleblower disinfo bait I’d swallow without breaking stride at this point?

      • One of the things about misinformation that I think is often broadly lost or not really considered enough is that it’s not necessarily about misinformation at all, at least not in the “fake news” way I suspect most people tend to think of it.

        It’s can be as much — or sometimes even more — about just making an issue noisy enough that it either becomes the narrative or deflects something else from getting a deeper look from the media and/or the public. There’s a lot of right-wing noise that exists not just to hook the rubes deeper but also to make sure that other stuff doesn’t get oxygen.

        • The YouTube video I posted below makes much the same point. She points out that the “misinformation” is actually a psyop, designed to make MAGAs think they have the upper hand and obscure the truth in a fog of bullshit. That way, when they lose, they’re perfectly willing to accept that they were “cheated” because they’ve been in the lead all along so it has to be rigged.

          The diabolically clever part is that the bigger the opposition victory, the more likely the minority party is going to scream “we were robbed.” Because of all the claims that Trump and Harris are tied, if Harris scores a complete blowout, MAGAs are going to lose their shit because they’ve been convinced there’s no way that’s even possible.

          The difference (hopefully) this year is that MAGA isn’t in the White House and they don’t hold the vice-presidency and Biden’s’ already taking steps to head off any more Jan. 6 shit.

          • And also, even if it’s not savvy enough to be a psyop — they’re also taking the lead from their leader, who might be the whiniest baby in recorded history about literally every last thing. So they’d kvetch even if there was no alternative universe of “facts” they think they can call upon.

        • NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has written extensively about flooding the zone. He talks about it in this interview:

          https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21495104/donald-trump-media-2020-election-jay-rosen

          One important point is that flooding the zone will be effective as long as journalists stick to old models for covering candidates. But there’s nothing sacred about those old models.

          Rosen has also written extensively about alternatives, both at the top level of philosophy and getting down to the details of reporter assignments and daily editorial focus. He’s a great example of how there is so much criticism of the press which is not vague “NY TIMES BAD” stuff but which digs into how the press determines narratives and what drives bad writing.

          But what’s happened in the Trump years is a doubling and tripling down of defenders and apologists for the press that tries to boil down all of the serious diagnosis into nothing more than whiny liberals being mad again. They simply refuse to accept that there can be any serious analysis at work.

          There was the recent interview of Maggie Haberman by veteran Philadelphia reporter Dave Davies where she insisted that it was impossible to cover Trump except under standing rules of engagement, and that meant treating him like a normal party leader. There was simply no acknowledgment that if he did things like flood the zone with BS that broke the rules of engagement, that the rules needed to change.

          The political press has had years to do it. The leadership is institutionally incapable of even beginning to engage with its serious critics.

    • “Meandering” “scattershot style” “publicly hone his message.”

      Right, it’s style. Harris is just using this for political purposes, Trump’s team says he needs to focus his attacks on Harris more.

      Is there any truth to be told? That’s not what reporting is for!

      “If Jimmy Allred says it’s raining, and W. Lee O’Daniel says it isn’t raining.” Mewhinney wrote. “Texas newspapermen quote them both, and don’t look out the window to see which is lying, and to tell the readers what the truth is at the moment.”

      https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/11/14/rain-look

      I’m sure the Times will try to defend Bender by saying he did mention a raindrop here and a raindrop there. But put them together to be the storm everyone can see all the time? No, let’s give the lead quote to a Trump advisor trying to call it a bit misty out there.

      One of the ways propaganda works is by projecting your own real faults falsely onto your opponents. Horse race reporters will treat false attacks as real and soften reality to your benefit in order to maintain the illusion of objectivity.  But there’s a storm out there, and there’s no way to finesse it.

      • …he calls it “the weave” sometimes…& it’s made of whole cloth…of a blend of different flavors of bullshit…so I’d almost give him the textile analogy

        …but it’s all warp & no weft?

        …also…always makes me think of bill hicks saying “I am the weaver”…&…orangeboi does not come off well in that stage presence comparison

        …hell, compared to even a mediocre stand-up’s command of the call-back it’s only an accurate descriptor in bizarro world

        • For more on this last gasp sanewashing, Politico is now attributing Trump ducking out of so many interviews at the last second to “exhaustion.”

          You get exhausted when you’re working 18 hour days seven days a week. He’s not exhausted, he’s lost it.

          I’m sure they’re rationalizing behind the scenes that that even broken brains can be exhausted, which I guess is technically true. But they’re trying to find a glide path into next month to get past what they can’t admit they’ve been covering it up for a long time.

          Whether Trump loses or wins, when the details come out in full we’re going to get a lot of “well, the fact is we never said water temperatures were 72 degrees and we did provide indications there was a degree of frozen water at various points during the leadup to the events of the night of April 15…”

          • …plenty of younger & ostensibly healthier people check in for a stint at the priory or the betty ford clinic…sometimes mid-tour…because of “exhaustion”

            …as a term offered to imply something approaching a medical judgement but short of any sense of panic or urgency or threat to life…it’s been known to cover a pretty broad spectrum from substance abuse to crippling mental health adjacent collapse of things like “executive function”

            …if their spokespeople were from the right generation it’d probably come with a winking-face emoji?

            • Right, and when it’s 2002 and it’s People Magazine reporting on Roseanne Barr using terms like “exhaustion” is fine.

              With so much hanging in the balance – not just for the election but what his breakdown would mean for years – they’re thinking like People Magazine.

              Except that’s not really fair to People. After a few months of deflection by PR people, they’ll typically start digging. Politico has had 10 years.

               

      • Just in case you don’t click through, because it’s pretty awesome.

        “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”

        That’s what a federal judge wrote Thursday as he sided with local TV stations in an extraordinary dispute over a pro-abortion rights television ad.

        • And he’s the guy the conservative pundits were pushing as a sensible, reasonable politician who would appeal to “moderate” Republicans.

          They tried to frame his fake “anti-woke” campaign as being pro-free speech, but ended up blowing more and more smoke to try to hide who he really was.

          • He’s also scared. I mean, the dude is a lawyer. Probably a shit lawyer, but even so — I know they cover the First Amendment.

            He’s throwing tax dollars and monkey shit at this amendment because it stands a very good chance of changing the electoral face of Florida.

            It’s pretty much the same strategy that Republicans are following on the national level. They’re hysterically scared that they’re about to become obsolete.

            • Thom Hartmann was talking about how he thinks that DeSatan is going to just ignore the will of the people & say that the initiative was not valid & the signatures were all fraudulent.

              • I would place a large bet on DeSantis trying exactly that. They’ve tried to discredit signatures already, except they did it long after the dispute deadline has passed.

                A lot is going to depend on how the Democrats perform, both statewide and nationally. If for some reason the orange pile of shit wins, DeSantis will go full fascist. No question whatsoever. There’s a reason he’s built this personal Praetorian Guard. Florida will be ground zero for detention camps.

  6. God bless YouTube and its Trump-level algorithm spiraling into incoherence. It decided to offer me this. Notice how there are no Black people involved, let alone sub-Saharan Africans. This looks like a PBS fundraiser, although somehow even more cringey.

    I am not a white supremacist but nor am I embarrassed or regretful or guilt-ridden about being white. Until I stumble across things like this. I can’t wait for lunchtime. I will show this to Better Half. He will say to me, as he has done many times over our decades-long relationship, “You white people are crazy.” In revenge, I will trot out

     

  7. I know that surf coaches voice!  That is my friend Raimana.  The greatest surf coach & dude in the Pacific.

    when I first met him, he made us check out of our hotel & stay at his house where we drank beer w/ his grandpa & his grandma cooked for us.  Now he is the main man at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch.

    • Maybe that fucking clown’s military can justify all the goddamned medals they gave themselves…

      They haven’t fought in combat since 1968 aka the ‘2nd” Korean War which was a series of border excursions that didn’t end well.

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