Even though I hate you all I give this gift to you. Britten is good.
Saturday, August 17, 2019
Saturday Saturday
I don't like most people who write about Trump's melon, because most of them don't start from the obvious premise that it is made of custard and rusty nails.
Friday, August 16, 2019
Get Out The Vote
There's a weird contradiction between the generally accepted Dem view that GOTV operations are important and necessary and that people who don't vote are stupid assholes we should yell at on the internet.
My centrist take: people are stupid assholes but probably yelling at them on the internet doesn't help.
My centrist take: people are stupid assholes but probably yelling at them on the internet doesn't help.
The Left
I am sure that if The Left ever had any power outside of the mythical Oberlin Student Council which according to our elite media runs the world I would have some objections to its agenda of [whatever its agenda is]. But my response to all critiques of The Left is, basically, THE LEFT HAS NO POWER COME BACK TO ME WHEN THEY DO.
Who hurt you in college, Bret and Conor? Show me on the doll of someone else because obviously you were never hurt.
Who hurt you in college, Bret and Conor? Show me on the doll of someone else because obviously you were never hurt.
So Many People To Pin It On
Epstein was murdered by (point at random unsympathetic felon) this guy. So easy!
Thursday, August 15, 2019
When The Innovation Stops
We are all used to buying new "tech" frequently. Those PCs really did get better every couple of years, and for awhile the phones did too. And nothing lasts forever of course. We accept some degree of things just wearing out, or being dropped in the toilet, or whatever. Still some of the purchases have long been driven genuine improvements. My 2nd "smartphone" was certainly better than my first, and my third one was a bit better than the 2nd...but... not sure what the next improvement will be?
Better battery life and easier for old people. But, nah.
Better battery life and easier for old people. But, nah.
The Aunt Sally Problem
A good explanation of why self-driving cars, even a parking lot app, aren't gonna happen.
A Little Thing Called The General Election
If you're working for a candidate to beat Trump and your thought is "well, you see, we gotta hide him because the more people see him the less they like him" consider what you are planning to do to the country.
In it to win it...
In it to win it...
Meatloaf Remainers
It's the joke that might actually save the country, pointing out very simply that the group of people who have made their entire political raison d'etre opposition to Brexit were, in fact, just using it as one more thing to use to complain about Corbyn with. They dislike Corbyn more than they dislike Brexit, and "Corbyn isn't doing the right thing to stop Brexit!!!" has almost always been stupid and disingenuous and just a way to try to undermine him. The Lib Dems, the upChuks, the Blairites, the other "Labour Centrists" have been full of shit for years and as is always the case the "crazy" people who pointed this out are now being greeted with "of course you idiots this was true all along."
I would do anything to stop Brexit, but I won't do that...
(title fixed)
Jeremy Corbyn has written to MPs inviting them to install him in Downing Street, having deposed Boris Johnson with a vote of no confidence. His tenure would, he promises, be “strictly time-limited” – long enough to call a general election and seek the necessary article 50 extension to conduct a ballot.No man is perfect, but the truth is Corbyn has handled the "stop Brexit" movement about as well as possible, given the electorate and the intra-party coalition he has had to work with. It is true that he'd probably be fine with a "soft Brexit" and even prefer it, but it's also true that a "soft Brexit" would be a reasonable outcome. The people undermining the stop Brexit movement have been its leaders, because it's really been a Stop Corbyn movement all along. All of their "stop Brexit" ideas were truly stupid and unworkable and now they admit they never really cared.
...
But in the minds of scores of MPs he is not. His past equivocations over Europe are not the reason, or at least not the only reason. Pro-European Tory rebels, Liberal Democrats, the rag-tag platoon of independents and semi-autonomous tribes of Labour MPs have spent months fretting about ways to thwart a hard Brexit, apparently ready to pull every procedural lever and contemplate all manner of unorthodox coalitions. Not much has been excluded from those considerations, except for a tacit prohibition on any route that makes a prime minister of the current Labour leader. Their horror of Corbyn is equal to – or greater than – their horror of Brexit. That has been so well understood by the participants in the discussion that few have felt much need to articulate it. Corbyn’s letter now obliges them to spell it out.
I would do anything to stop Brexit, but I won't do that...
(title fixed)
Little England
What a disaster.
Hoyle was really responding to the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, who regularly denounced Hoyle as a secular atheist on radio and had written his own science fiction novel, That Hideous Strength, a decade before. The villain of Lewis’s book was a sinister institute called NICE, which Satanic aliens wanted to impose contraception, lesbianism, secularism and surrealist art on an unsuspecting Britain. Lewis wanted to preserve old Britain against the filthy tide of modernity.
Hoyle riposted with a novel where rational and benevolently ruthless aliens used an organization called ICE to pull the priest ridden republic next door into the technological age. His satirical portrait of Ireland told British readers that the world was being transformed around them, and that even their most backwards seeming neighbor would outstrip them if they didn’t embrace modernity.
The irony of history is that Hoyle’s parody is now the truth. Today’s Ireland has its highways and its contraceptives. The referendum for marriage equality passed in a landslide, and the Taoiseach is a gay man. Ireland’s voters have embraced modernity with enthusiasm and a barely tolerable degree of self-congratulation. Irish Catholic reactionaries are a tiny, bitter minority.
...
Now it is Britain that has fallen back into the nightmare of history. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson models himself on Winston Churchill, while Jacob Rees-Mogg, that ungodly hybrid of Bertie Wooster and Roderick Spode, pines openly for the Victorian era. Pro-Brexit conservatives want to reverse the last few several decades, and return to a better era for Britain. They think of the Republic of Ireland as a joke or a historical mistake. They cannot understand why it is still committed to Europe and indeed now standing in Britain’s way, by refusing to capitulate on the “backstop.”
Because We Agree With Them
A perfect distillation of "we must obey critics on the Right, and get VERY VERY MAD AT CRITICS ON THE LEFT."
In regard to the debate on how to cover race, some staffers inside The Times agreed wholeheartedly with Baquet's approach. "Using that language is a turn off to some readers," one said. "And there are a lot of people that think The Times is too liberal, and when you start throwing words like that around, people will accuse us of editorializing."I spent too many years buying this argument but it doesn't make any sense. Journalists who say these things aren't scared of conservatives. They agree with them. Left wing criticism makes them mad because they don't agree with left wing critics. It's that simple. They aren't worried that they're "editorializing" the other way.
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Why Can't Good People And Bad People Find A Compromise?
Of course there are good and bad people across the political spectrum (well, bad people, at least) but so much of our mainstream political discourse is like this. Should we put poor people in the chipper or not? [Serious Centrist Voice]: How about just some of the poor people?
For a long time there was this myth that people on the Left and Right (mainstream Ds and Rs anyway) mostly agreed about the ends we were just fighting about the means of getting there. Or, at most, the Ds were a bit more inclined to smooth of the rough edges, but basically "we" "all" wanted equality of opportunity! And prosperity! And justice! And ponies!
And we've had decades of the best possible political approach being conservative means to liberal ends, and they mostly haven't worked out very well, in part (but not just) because conservatives never really agreed on the liberal ends and do their best to sabotage, when they can, programs they offered up as distractions.
It's fair (if a bit more complicated than some people make it out to be) to say that the ACA is an example of this. It's fundamentally a conservative approach to providing "better" health care, even if there are some liberal sweeteners to make it better than that. Though an example of why this whole thing is hilarious is that one of the liberal sweeteners - the Medicaid expansion - also exists largely to meet the demands of conservative/mainstream budget politics which required finding ways to make the ACA cheaper. Even the liberal stuff is conservative, or at least there to meet the ridiculous demands of conservative politics.
But, really, the conservative political movement, if not all conservative voters, are quite happy to put all the poors into the chipper. "We" should stop pretending otherwise.
For a long time there was this myth that people on the Left and Right (mainstream Ds and Rs anyway) mostly agreed about the ends we were just fighting about the means of getting there. Or, at most, the Ds were a bit more inclined to smooth of the rough edges, but basically "we" "all" wanted equality of opportunity! And prosperity! And justice! And ponies!
And we've had decades of the best possible political approach being conservative means to liberal ends, and they mostly haven't worked out very well, in part (but not just) because conservatives never really agreed on the liberal ends and do their best to sabotage, when they can, programs they offered up as distractions.
It's fair (if a bit more complicated than some people make it out to be) to say that the ACA is an example of this. It's fundamentally a conservative approach to providing "better" health care, even if there are some liberal sweeteners to make it better than that. Though an example of why this whole thing is hilarious is that one of the liberal sweeteners - the Medicaid expansion - also exists largely to meet the demands of conservative/mainstream budget politics which required finding ways to make the ACA cheaper. Even the liberal stuff is conservative, or at least there to meet the ridiculous demands of conservative politics.
But, really, the conservative political movement, if not all conservative voters, are quite happy to put all the poors into the chipper. "We" should stop pretending otherwise.
The Hard Problems
One reason I pick on Elon Musk specifically is that he obviously has absolutely no idea what the difficult problems of his pet project are. A good example is parking lots. Elon thought that even before he unleashed his "turn your car into a robotaxi with just a software update" onto the world that he could have a useful parking lot summons system. Basically you walk out of the Wal-Mart, hit a button, and your car pulls out of the spot and drives up to where you are waiting for it. Not all that useful of a feature, but ok it's "neato" and "neato" drives a lot of this stuff, so to speak. But parking lots are hard! Sure they have the slight advantage of (hopefully) only low speed driving, but they also don't have any consistent lane and sign markings or clear paths for pedestrians (though it's a parking lot, people not using the neato feature still gotta walk to their cars). They rely a lot on nonverbal communication (eye contact, waves, etc.) between drivers. Far from being the easiest problem, they're actually probably the hardest! And not only that, they're a *specific* hard problem. Solving that problem isn't going to help you all that much with all of the other ones. Not directly, at least.
A left turn is a tricky maneuver, but the driving environment itself is also a factor in what kind of obstacles the human—or the self-driving car—might encounter. A two-lane road on a sunny day with clearly painted lines and scant traffic offers an easy landscape. But an Ikea parking lot on a Saturday afternoon? Ouch.Waymo might not solve the problem, but at least they get that it's a *hard one.* Modern construction suburban Arizona and California driving is probably fairly easy by the standards of these things - certainly relative to here in the urban hellhole - but good luck navigating those parking lots!
In fact, parking lots are a distinctive enough environment that Waymo, the self-driving car company that’s a sibling to Google, specifically trains its vehicles to deal with them by setting up real-world scenarios in a controlled environment. We spoke with Waymo engineers to learn more about how.
Is Trump A Racist?
Honestly until he dies and we can extract brain tissue and test it we will never know for sure.
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Outrage Culture
Many people at the Times are even worse than we imagine.
Last week’s drama appears to have underscored a gulf between some veteran Times journalists and an increasingly influential and vocal cohort of typically younger, next-generation employees. To boil down the nuance as simply as possible, the former camp sometimes views the latter as hypersensitive and politicized; the latter sometimes views the former as blindly tethered to tradition. As a more traditional Times reporter put it, “The headline was inelegant, it missed the point, it was poorly written, but it was not a federal hate crime, as you would think based on reactions from some people in the newsroom. The bigger issue is the culture of outrage.”
Stars Of The Politics Show
Too much exposure to the internet occasionally leaves me with the worrying conclusion that too many people really just want the stars of this particular reality show to be pleasing and entertaining, to play their roles with appropriate gravitas. Or, for some of the population, something else (I didn't get why 20-year-olds I knew wanted to be Rush Limbaugh when they grew up when I was that age but I guess those are the people who think Trump is a role to be admired).
Primary season exaggerates this, as it's a beauty contest on "our side," and political journalists love to play up the stuff that shouldn't matter even if it does - theater criticism - and play down the stuff that should matter more than maybe it does.
Primary season exaggerates this, as it's a beauty contest on "our side," and political journalists love to play up the stuff that shouldn't matter even if it does - theater criticism - and play down the stuff that should matter more than maybe it does.
Why Aren't You Talking About The Thing I Think Is The Most Important Thing
Fortunately that era mostly faded. Those of us who remember way back to [checks notes] 2017 remember the weird internet thing where every horrible thing Trump did or said was a DELIBERATE DISTRACTION from the other horrible thing he said or did which by some unquestionable metric was WAY MORE IMPORTANT. This was dumb because Trump is just a rage monster who doesn't give any thought to anything. Sure he has a bit of the instincts of a showman and I don't doubt that occasionally he does do a racism or similar to get attention, but even if WE SHOULD IGNORE THE DISTRACTION just talking about stuff on the internet or not talking about it sadly usually doesn't affect the world so much.
Still even in the Bush era there seemed to be moments when random distractions like "this is a fun TV show!" didn't seem inappropriate on this sucky blog or elsewhere. Not so much these days, and not because the Trump era is worse. Bush was bad. Don't forget.
Still even in the Bush era there seemed to be moments when random distractions like "this is a fun TV show!" didn't seem inappropriate on this sucky blog or elsewhere. Not so much these days, and not because the Trump era is worse. Bush was bad. Don't forget.
A Unique Nation Of Violent Sociopaths
This is what the "guns don't kill people" crowd is saying. It's an interesting argument, especially given the tremendous overlap between them and extreme "patriotism."
Shouting And Shrieking
Initial reports said he hung himself. In this context (not being dropped from a height) this means strangulation, not neck snapping. Dying from strangulation takes a long time. 4 minutes minimum if everything "goes right" which means no intervening wheeze. Needless to say if he was shrieking and shouting (this report does not make clear who was shrieking and shouting)...
CBS News has learned that the morning of Jeffrey Epstein's death there was shouting and shrieking from his jail cell. Guards attempted to revive him while saying "breathe, Epstein, breathe."
There Is No Such Thing As "No Deal"
There is, of course, in a way, but it doesn't really mean what it sounds like as commonly used. It means "we did not use the one method available to us to agree to a basket full of deals before the drop dead date, and now we have to scramble around trying to play whack a mole with the very problems this causes while struggling to come to some actual deals on numerous issues."
The real "managed Brexit" is actually "no deal Brexit" because while Brexit-with-a-deal, even a dumb one, doesn't require endless management, "no deal" does. And a bunch of Bertie Woosters with mean streaks run the government so those managers are not good at, well, managing.
Amber Rudd believes the risks of a no-deal Brexit are no more than a challenge that could be countered by government action, going back on her previous assessment in which she said it would cause “generational damage” to the UK.
The work and pensions secretary, who kept her job when Boris Johnson became prime minister by renouncing her previously resolute opposition to no deal, said she still believed this would be much less preferable than a managed Brexit.
Rudd told ITV News: “I can tell that a no-deal Brexit would be far worse than a deal Brexit, which is why the government is so focused on trying to get that. But we’re also putting in place a lot of preparations to make sure that should it come to that, we will have done all we can to mitigate against any difficulties.”
The real "managed Brexit" is actually "no deal Brexit" because while Brexit-with-a-deal, even a dumb one, doesn't require endless management, "no deal" does. And a bunch of Bertie Woosters with mean streaks run the government so those managers are not good at, well, managing.
Monday, August 12, 2019
The Moustache Of Empty Promises
This isn't even close to being Bolton's official job but lol whatever.
"Within a year" is at least a bit more realistic than the brexiteer cry of "eleventy zillion trade deals on day 1!" or whatever (and they say trade deals like Trump does, as if they're scoring a big sale, instead of just desperately trying to replace existing agreements with the EU).
But there's also a little thing called Congress and a big thing called "industry lobbyists" and trade deals are when everyone gets their snouts in the trough so, uh, good luck with that.
Breaking: US National Security Advisor John Bolton says the US and UK could do some mini trade deals, sector by sector, within a year of Brexit (1)
— Tom Newton Dunn (@tnewtondunn) August 12, 2019
"Within a year" is at least a bit more realistic than the brexiteer cry of "eleventy zillion trade deals on day 1!" or whatever (and they say trade deals like Trump does, as if they're scoring a big sale, instead of just desperately trying to replace existing agreements with the EU).
But there's also a little thing called Congress and a big thing called "industry lobbyists" and trade deals are when everyone gets their snouts in the trough so, uh, good luck with that.
Acceptance
I am quite amazed that people in British public life have basically given up. Boris is driving us off a cliff and what else is there to say? There are barely even any "what is going to happen on Nov. 1?" pieces to prepare people. We're fucked. That's it. Good luck!
Rich People Like Trump
I won't link to reports of his rich people fundraiser, but the dirty little secret of America is that rich people are ridiculously stupid people who support the most ridiculously stupid president. And not in the "oh they just like their tax cuts" sense, which is how the press likes to portray them. In the "god I hope I get to shoot a round a golf with him" kind of way. Rich MAGAs are as absurdly stupid and gross as poor MAGAs, just with bigger credit lines.
They're All Just Quite A Bit Racist
Too much of what the objectitudinal press does is excused as a desire to placate rabid conservatives, instead of seeing it as just doing what they think they should be doing.
Tolerance of racism by conservatives (it isn't just Trump) isn't simply because they have appear to be Fair to Both Sides, it's because many in the press are just pretty tolerant of racism. Have you been paying attention to much of the coverage of, for example, poverty and crime over the last several decades? Or the general tolerance of "race science" by our glorious liberal editors? Have seen the "it's just science, stupid liberals" argument so many times by elite members of the press who think that believing black people are just stupid is the height of intellectual sophistication and bravery.*
We're not racist, we just speak perfectly for the guys in Ohio diners who are, from our 3 bedroom UES perches.
(The whole concept of "intellectual bravery" is hilarious. The bravery to say things which are disgusting and wrong which are basically conventional wisdom (and evil and wrong) for large checks in elite publications).
Tolerance of racism by conservatives (it isn't just Trump) isn't simply because they have appear to be Fair to Both Sides, it's because many in the press are just pretty tolerant of racism. Have you been paying attention to much of the coverage of, for example, poverty and crime over the last several decades? Or the general tolerance of "race science" by our glorious liberal editors? Have seen the "it's just science, stupid liberals" argument so many times by elite members of the press who think that believing black people are just stupid is the height of intellectual sophistication and bravery.*
We're not racist, we just speak perfectly for the guys in Ohio diners who are, from our 3 bedroom UES perches.
(The whole concept of "intellectual bravery" is hilarious. The bravery to say things which are disgusting and wrong which are basically conventional wisdom (and evil and wrong) for large checks in elite publications).
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Healthy Country
I really don't see a way forward which isn't "no deal Brexit" though no deal Brexit isn't a real thing. It just means "we didn't bother to solve all the problems we have to start solving piece by piece now."
Britons have spent £4bn stockpiling goods in preparation for a possible no-deal Brexit, new research suggests.Not entirely sure how "short-term supply problems" get solved.
One in five people are already hoarding food, drinks and medicine, spending an extra £380 each, according to a survey by the finance provider Premium Credit. The survey found that about 800,000 people have spent more than £1,000 building up stockpiles before the 31 October Brexit deadline.
If the UK leaves with no deal, businesses predict there will be short-term supply problems, which the government says it is mitigating.
The Intended Audience
While they want to sell to everyone, their imagined and target audience is a certain slice of wealthy New Yorkers.
The paper’s target audience explains everything from its bizarre fixation on elite private universities and the behavior of the students attending them to its unshakably windshield-obsessed perspective on transit issues, despite covering the only American city where a majority of households don’t own a car. It explains the entire real estate section, and “Vows,” and why a significant portion of the Gray Lady’s op-ed page is given over to people who only exist to troll a sort of imagined effete elitist caricature of Manhattan liberalism. It even explains the crossword puzzle.
True, this perspective doesn’t entirely explain why its coverage of the president regularly retreats into misleading euphemism, or treats him with a level of saucer-eyed credulity its top reporters know he has never earned. The explanation for this egregious failing is more about the pernicious elite media worldview that leads the paper’s deputy Washington editor to parrot racist generalizations because he believes them to be widely accepted common sense. But the paper’s reliable fallback posture of professional managerial entitlement does unlock one central feature of the Times worldview: It explains why the people who run the paper react to having this pointed out to them by people on Twitter with one or another variation of do you have any idea who you’re talking to?
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