Weekend Vibes [DOT 21/9/24]

21/9/24 MegMegMcGee 18

Whatcha got Deadsplinters?

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18 Comments

  1. …what have we got?

    …I dunno if I know, really…but…to take a couple of things I suspect might turn into things I’d just as soon not…on the one hand there’s this gem

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/19/earth-temperature-global-warming-planet/

    …with people’s capacity to miss the point I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s only a matter of time before I encounter a take that tries to make out global warming can’t be a worry if the earth is still down in the coldest part of the chart that goes back nearly half a billion years…rather than compare the part 250 million years ago when the temperature rose 10°C over 50,000 years & it was the biggest extinction in the fossil record…to the part where in terms of geological time the temperature rise since there’s been people…which happened at one of the lowest points the chart gets to…has a steeper gradient than that

    …&…the whole thing with the pagers exploding & how israel views it as a thing to brag on in a few ways…I mean…I’m not good at the military calculus stuff outside of the realm of fiction…but…as has come up a few times from a few people in the last few days

    While it is considered a terrorist group by the United States and its European allies, Hezbollah is able to draw on a deep well of support in Shiite parts of Lebanon by delivering jobs and services that the country’s decrepit government is unable to provide. In the suburbs of Beirut and across the south, the group runs hospitals, social welfare institutions, unions and construction companies. Hezbollah and its allies control 40 of the country’s 128 seats in parliament.

    …when you consider the thing

    Experts estimate that Hezbollah has up to 50,000 active fighters and tens of thousands more reservists. The pagers were widely distributed among the reserve corps, according to the individual close to Hezbollah, and would be used to call them up for service — whether to fight, treat the injured or perform other duties.

    “This category is the most vital in the ranks of Hezbollah, which consists of people who have jobs but are on call when needed,” he said.

    Communication among the group’s most senior members, and with front-line positions along the Israel-Lebanon border, takes places on a hard-wired network, the individual added.

    …I dunno where the line is drawn…it’s not like there weren’t people you’d expect them to think of as legitimate targets

    But prominent figures were also provided with pagers. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, sustained injuries to his face and hand in Tuesday’s attack, according to a regional official briefed on the incident, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. And Mohammed Mahdi, the adult son of Ali Ammar, a Hezbollah member of parliament, was killed.

    …but…hospital orderlies? …are there just tunnels & terrorist enclaves buried under all of those per IDF doctrine, now? …or the ones that left the things at home with loved ones while they went to do their non-hezbollah day job…finding it hard to see how that whole thing doesn’t fit the definition of terrorism like a glove…&…if the objective deemed to be worth the candle is this one

    Bahout said the attacks have left Hezbollah exposed, as open source information about those killed and injured is swept up by foreign intelligence networks.

    “It’s not the first time that they were penetrated,” he said, referring to reports that a compromised communications network led to Israel’s killing of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in late July. “But in terms of magnitude, this one is different.”
    [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/19/israel-lebanon-pagers-attack-victims/]

    …I…might be feeling nostalgic for the cold war…at least everyone agreed that mutually assured destruction was a deterrent back then?

    • What helped me reframe it more effectively was listening to NPR in the car the other day and them talking about how the thing we don’t understand is that groups like Hezbollah and Hamas started as terrorist groups and now are functioning political parties.

      Like sure, still terrorist groups with terrorist goals, but also many rank and file members are just doing their thing with basic aligned ideological goals.

      THEY’RE THE FUCKING MAGA PARTY of their respective countries.

      Think about all the people who we think are average normal people, you know who work at a doctor’s office or are teachers or whatever, but then you find out rabidly endorse Trump. They’re happily in his cult. They wouldn’t ever go to DC on Jan 6 and participate in the coup, but they sure do believe in the overall goals.

      That’s the people who are the reserve Hamas members who got targeted.

      • …given how some of those people feel about jewish people…they should maybe think very carefully about where they purchase consumer electronics on that basis

        …but…seems a decent enough analogy to me?

        • Yeah, similarly as @miluly has joked for years, at some point the MAGA twits are going to learn the MyPillow guy’s products have given them cancer and they should be more careful about purchasing shit their dear leader shills.

  2. So I’m at the gym where they always have Fox on one of the TVs, because it seems Republicans are the main client here. Anyway I look up and see “Kamala Harris’ Word Salad.”

    Uh huh. Sure. Keep up with that fucking projection assholes.

    • You need another cup of covfefe. In the meantime, God bless the Deadsplinterite that dropped this a few days ago.

  3. …ok…so I don’t love the part where mostly I throw out this or that thing that makes me sigh to see…& this seems like it’s far enough in the other direction to be worth offering the whole thing

    Uncovered forum posts by Tim Walz could shake up race [archive.ph of a WaPo column by alexandra petri]

    …bit like if this recent masterpiece had flipped to an account posting about how to repair moisture farming equipment & be nice to the sand people while mostly clicking thumbs up to anything with blue milk in it where blue milk is a substitute for IRL recipes that have buttermilk…so a few bits made me smile…not just the username being “DarthTater”

    …but, honestly, the part I did not see coming that genuinely did put something on the pro-faith-in-humanity side of the scales was this

    Update: The website HotOrNotDish.net did not actually exist at the time of publication but has since been set up by an anonymous hot-dish fan to redirect users to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign website after first showering them with Tater Tots. The Post is not responsible for the website — not even, alas, the tots.

    …it’s true…& while you get redirected there’s a little bit of text visible that says

    Redirecting you to kamalaharris.com…

    Are you registered to vote?

    …&

    The Palestinian people have the right to self-determination and I call for all hostages to be released. Ceasefire now.

    …there was a really confused thing that “uncommitted” lot put out the other day…they anti-endorsed all the options that weren’t voting for harris but their whole raison d’être is to not endorse her which left that looking uncomfortably close to saying don’t vote which would go against the interest their protest is intended to advance…that redirect seems a lot like the same cause trying to do the exact opposite & feels like it might have a better RoI?

  4. I’m not worried about Kamala’s speaking ability. And neither are her donors. She’s outraising Trump 4-to-1. Now, money isn’t the only thing that wins elections but it’s a big part of the process.

    Kamala Harris posts huge cash advantage over Donald Trump

    Plus, she’s funding down-ballot races which is smart. 

    I suspect Trump donors are figuring out that he’s A. losing and B. pocketing their money.

    • I’m not worried about it either. What Fox calls “word salad,” people with brains call “policy proposals.”

  5. You love to see it.

    Judge Cannon Having a Bad Couple of Weeks

    I didn’t know about the Republican group that’s trying to get her removed from Trump’s case. That’s … interesting, to say the least. Feels like more and more Republicans are looking toward a post-Trump era.

  7. Maggie Haberman had a long interview on NPR, and she spent a lot of time attacking critics on the left.

    https://www.npr.org/2024/09/19/g-s1-23680/times-reporter-haberman-weighs-in-on-trump-the-media-and-the-turbulent-election

    The interviewer, Dave Davies, set her up quite carefully, asking her what she thought about critics in an open ended way. She launched into a long complaint about how hard it was to cover Trump and the system wasn’t set up to handle him.

    The interviewer then pretty intentionally played dumb and said

    DAVIES: Yeah. Well, I mean, part of the attacks are clearly are partisan. I mean, Republicans and Trump supporters are going to attack.

    HABERMAN: I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about…

    DAVIES: Yeah, well, who is the industry you’re talking about? Yeah.

    HABERMAN: I’m talking about criticism on the left.

    At which point she doubled down. We’re doing everything right, we made a couple of complaints about the right, blah blah, but then it’s clear from this whole exchange that all she and the Times are mad about is critics on the left, and she absolutely refuses to engage with any of the substance.

    One of the telling points she makes unintentially is that the press wasn’t set up in 2015 to handle someone like Trump, and they struggle to this day with him.

    An obvious point that gets made over and over by critics is that when a subject doesn’t fit a model, you have to come up with a new model. It’s been nine years, and Haberman can’t imagine another way to cover Trump. They’re just repeating the same failure.

    With the Vietnam War, the press intially followed a model in 1964 of largely covering the war by going to Defense Department briefings and repeating what officials said.

    By 1968 it was obvious this wasn’t working, so the press actually changed its model to reach out to a much more diverse set of experts outside of the Defense Department, and sending many reporters out into the field to get first hand looks at what happened, and also question what Defense Department officials was saying.

    What’s clear is that 50 years later the execs in charge have lost any such ability to evaluate and change. The only reaction they can imagine is double down and lash out.

    • Per wikipedia, journalism is ” Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the “news of the day” and that informs society to at least some degree of accuracy. ”

      Thanks for admitting that you can’t actually do your basic job, Mags.

    • That’s so bizarre. Trump is not some sort of complicated Gordian knot that has to be carefully untangled. He’s a crook, con man, and liar. The press has dealt with similar individuals for  … what, a couple of hundred years now? The process is established.

      No, what complicates the process is the fact that the “press” is highly partisan but feels compelled to hide it because they’re essentially supporting a crook, con man, and liar. So instead of accurately reporting his crime, grifting, and lies, they strain to portray all these qualities as positive things. Then they attempt to set up false equivalencies like Trump encouraging insurrection on Truth Social is exactly the same as Tim Walz posting on the Internet about hot dishes.

      Why they are supporting Trump is complicated, I think, but the fact that they are is not. The fact that they shouldn’t be is also not complicated. I will say that it seems like the narrative is shifting, largely because of the fact-checking that went on at the Harris/Trump debate. Muir and Davis did it and are more popular than ever, so others are starting to actually tell the truth, like Bash. But I think the watershed moment was the debate, and journalism is slowly realizing that’s how they’re supposed to do their jobs.

      Haberman never will, though. She’s irredeemable.

      • The thing that is so blindingly obvious is that reporting on the GOP is broken because reporters refuse to develop new sources for covering them. They thought the best way to understand Trump in 2015 was to listen to his speeches and then talk to Kellyann Conway on background to figure out what he was saying and in 2024 they still think that’s true.

        In the summer of 1972 the NY Times thought the best way to cover Watergate was to listen to Nixon’s public statements and then go to Kissinger on background for confirmation. Kissinger lied and they decided Nixon’s denials were right.

        It took them six months, but then AO Sulzberger Sr. and editor AM Rosenthal realized they screwed up. They canned the DC editor and brought in a new team of reporters to focus on Watergate with the specific perspective that it was a criminal conspiracy and that the old source network couldn’t be trusted.

        The Times then became a leader on Watergate and got major scoops along the way.

        AG Sulzberger and Joe Kahn, along with #2 editor Carolyn Ryan, look at 2016 and think it was perfect. Which is why Maggie Haberman is still on the job.

  8. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/21/middleeast/israeli-strike-gaza-school-intl/index.html

    welp…as expecting my government or any elses to say anything isnt going anywhere….. maybe i should communicate directly to the israelis?

    you know you done fucked up when the far right in europe is on your side right?

    you do right?

    right?

    ask your grandparents……if you still have them

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