Saturday, August 31, 2019
Which Type Of Flame Warrior Is Bret Stephens?
We’re watching a middle aged man go through his first forum flame war on the grandest possible stage. Like any first flame war it’s 100% just a guy digging in and saying progressively stupider things with ever greater gravity
— ~Swinton (@Basic_Chunnel) August 31, 2019
Obviously he's Newbie but also Filibuster and Ideologue.
Friday, August 30, 2019
And You're Surprised By This????
It's maybe the most annoying response on the internet, communicating that You, Observing A Bad Thing, are stupid for Being Surprised By Something Not Surprising.
Me: Wow, a mass shooting. Bad.
You, Wise Person: And you're surprised by this? Don't you know about all the guns???
No most of the time this stuff is not surprising. It's also the twin of "that's just the way the system works." Well maybe it shouldn't?
Me: Wow, a mass shooting. Bad.
You, Wise Person: And you're surprised by this? Don't you know about all the guns???
No most of the time this stuff is not surprising. It's also the twin of "that's just the way the system works." Well maybe it shouldn't?
Bret's Safe Spaces
People have said most of what I would've said about Bretbug, except maybe one thing. There's a reason Bret went after Karpf, a professor, and not some random shit talker. Karpf is lower in the hierarchy than Stephens, which is why Stephens tried to assert his AUTHORITAH, but he's still in the hierarchy. Karpf is supposed to know the rules. The peasants outside the castle are allowed to get drunk and talk shit because who cares about the peasants? Well unless they get too annoying and then you just shoot some arrows at them. But Karpf was violating the rules of the court.
Gotta Play The Game
One can complain (and I do, justifiably) that the political press shouldn't mostly be about Republicans kicking the soccer ball and then all of their little 5-year-old selves chasing it around, but still politics is inevitably part theater, even though it shouldn't be the worst of Vaudeville (the best of Vaudeville would be fine). And if the Dems don't even show up to the stage...
Sternly worded tweets don't count.
Sternly worded tweets don't count.
Wow Who Told Him
Tory MP. Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union.
People have been saying this for years...
The car industry’s ‘just in time’ supply chains rely on fluid cross-Channel trade routes. >1,100 trucks filled with car parts cross seamlessly from EU into UK each day. We need to start talks now on how we make sure this flow continues if we leave without a deal. /4
— Steve Barclay MP (@SteveBarclay) August 28, 2019
People have been saying this for years...
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Anybody Who Will Love Us
I really don't get the establishment liberal fondness for any conservative grifter who suggests they might not love Trump all that much, even when they are, obviously, grifters.
As for why posh liberals seem to feel more personal affection for Joes Scarborough and Walsh than they do for, say, the young liberal people who are actually in their employ, there’s no need to psychoanalyze it that deeply. They are flattered by the approval-seeking of Republican men, and annoyed by the upstart left-wingers who insist that they live up to liberal ideals these same elites find inconvenient or unprofitable. Should Walsh find himself with an MSNBC contract at the end of all this, he will make few demands of his new audience, except that they forget how he got there.
Oft is Seen The Wicked Prize Itself Buys Out The Law
Someone said (sorry, forget who, internet brain) that basically the Democrats wanted a spy thriller instead of a boring corruption story, as if the former would have magically solved their problem (HE WOULD SELF-EVIDENTLY HAVE TO SELF-IMPEACH AT LONG LAST), while the latter would actually require that they Do Leadership and take care of the problems themselves, aside from sending sternly worded tweets.
An alternate, if not entirely contradictory, theory is that one must be careful before one starts turning over rocks. Never know what might be under them, and whose name is on them!
An alternate, if not entirely contradictory, theory is that one must be careful before one starts turning over rocks. Never know what might be under them, and whose name is on them!
Pretty Big Letdown After That Exciting Cliffhanger
If Democrats aren't going to use what power they have to deal with Trump, they'd better get better at faking it. Voters might conclude that the guy isn't so bad after all.
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Neato
I've been staring at this self-driving car issue for years without having any clue how people could imagine it's going to work. It just isn't a problem that can be solved by making it incrementally better, especially when the fantasies are about "robotaxis," the hardest possible application. I suppose it's somewhat of a function of the roads that you are used to. Newly developed suburban road systems in areas of CA and AZ "seem" like solvable problems, but I can't picture these things traveling half a mile here in the urban hellhole, and not because the urban hellhole is hard driving for human drivers.
Mountain View-headquartered Waymo wants to expand the rideshare with its advanced self-driving taxi service. But if San Francisco test riders have anything to say about it, the previously Google-owned company still has a long way to go if its executives plan to compete with Lyft and Uber.That they work as well as they do is genuinely neato. But neato doesn't mean useful.
Sorry, David
Final wish not granted.
Voters in Phoenix have soundly rejected a proposal that would have halted the expansion of the city’s light rail system — a proposition that had the backing of dark money linked to the notorious anti-transit Koch brothers.
In a 62-to-38 percent vote, residents turned aside Proposition 105, which would have redirected a previously passed tax away from light rail towards other transportation improvements. It would also have required “terminating all construction, development, extension, and expansion of” light rail.
Christ, What An Asshole
I suppose we should end Bretbug Day with the foul insult wielder himself.
But here’s what still bothers me as this strange episode recedes from the news cycle: Bret Stephens seems to think that his social status should render him immune from criticism from people like me. I think that the rewards of his social status come with an understanding that lesser-known people will say mean things about him online.
Stephens reached out to me in the mistaken belief that I would feel ashamed. He reached out believing my university would chastise me for provoking the ire of a writer at The New York Times. That’s an abuse of his social station. It cost me nothing, but it is an abuse of his power that would carry a real penalty for a younger or less privileged academic. The Times should expect more of its writers. Stephens should expect more of himself.
Time For Some Sternly Worded Tweets
Maybe some sassy clapping.
The president has told senior aides that a failure to deliver on the signature promise of his 2016 campaign would be a letdown to his supporters and an embarrassing defeat. With the election 14 months away and hundreds of miles of fencing plans still in blueprint form, Trump has held regular White House meetings for progress updates and to hasten the pace, according to several people involved in the discussions.Mueller is coming.
When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable, Trump has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead, aides said. He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying “take the land,” according to officials who attended the meetings.
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
Tenure
An important thing is that while tenure generally protects a tiny number of people from assholes like Bret Stephens, most people certainly can face consequences from having the manager called on them for being mean to Bret Stephens on twitter.
David Karpf: The two things that stand out are that it’s entertaining, and distracting. It does keep occurring to me the reason why this is actually pretty fun for me is that I’m a white guy with tenure, which means that—if he had sent this to me before I had a tenured job, that would have been a powerful and terrifying message, and I’m 100 percent sure that that’s what he expected it to do. When he writes a message where it says, “From Bret Stephens, New York Times,” from his New York Times account, it means that he’s trying to indicate that he’s above me in the social hierarchy. But I’m a professor of strategic political communication, and I have tenure, and I really didn’t do anything wrong. That makes the entire thing bizarre and fun. If I was pre-tenure or I was a woman and had to deal with harassment on Twitter all the time, then I imagine this would be a lot less fun.
They All Told Me He Would Be An Asshole... And He Is
If only we could make Bret wake up every day to repeat Bretbug Day.
News and Opinion Are Separate
This used to be a thing that opinion people would say when readers would get mad at them for being "biased" or similar. That made some sense. Now I see journalists expressing it regularly as if to say "those people aren't my problem." That is dumb. The political desk isn't responsible for the Arts section either but it is all one product ultimately.
(hazards of posting from a phone)
(hazards of posting from a phone)
America's Most Ridiculous Humans
Bret Stephens.
Combined Bret Stephens on TV this morning vs. his anti-safe spaces speech from 2017. Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/qCvXjkDhmX
— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) August 27, 2019
Who Cares
The thing with Bretbug isn't just that he's a conservative baby man behaving like a big baby. Nothing new there. It's that he is one of the prominent "COLLEGE LIBERALS HATE FREE SPEECH" conservatives, which is a tough trick because they're all on that beat. Bret's on that beat more than most because he only has 3 column ideas that he cycles through. Summer - a quieter time on college campuses, so to speak - must be hard for him if he doesn't at least get July off. He writes stuff like this all the time.
What a shitty person.
The signature move in each of these instances (and there are so many more) is to allege an invisible harm in order to inflict an actual one. In place of an eye for an eye, we have professional destruction for emotional upset. Careers and reputations built over decades come to ruin, or nearly so, on account of a personal mistake or a disfavored opinion.And then tries to get a guy in trouble with the boss for calling him a bedbug on the internet.
All of these struggle sessions play to the sound of chortling twenty-somethings, who have figured out that, in today’s culture, the quickest way to acquire and exercise power is to take offense. This is easy to do, because the list of sins to which one may take offense grows with each passing year, from the culturally appropriated sombrero to the traditionally gendered pronoun.
What a shitty person.
A Piece Of Work
Bretbug's email to the professor would have been just stupid and funny. Mockable, but not much more than that. But that he actually cc:'d the provost - close enough to being your "boss" when you are tenured faculty - shows what a demented authoritarian he is. What's the point of being a Pulitzer Prize Winning Columnist for an elite newspaper if *just anybody* can say mean things about you? That's blogofascism!!! What a fucking wanker.
Do note that Stephens is now aware that the entire Internet thinks he’s a bedbug. “He wrote a followup email to me after seeing this go viral, which just said, ‘Dear Dr. Karpf, you’re a real piece of work,’” Karpf said. But not as much work as bedbugs, which take multiple visits from a pest control operator and a small lifetime of laundering to eradicate for good.
On Tuesday morning, Stephens appeared to concede that he’d lost the argument, announcing that he was getting off Twitter forever.
Monday, August 26, 2019
Monday Night
Hilarious.
Rhymes with "Bret Stephens" who, of course, is very concerned with snowflake lefties suppressing free speech at universities. So concerned he contacted a provost because a professor made fun of him.
This afternoon, I tweeted a brief joke about a well-known NYT op-Ed columnist.
— davekarpf (@davekarpf) August 27, 2019
It got 9 likes and 0 retweets. I did not @ him. He does not follow me.
He just emailed me, cc’ing my university provost. He is deeply offended that I called him a metaphorical bedbug.
Rhymes with "Bret Stephens" who, of course, is very concerned with snowflake lefties suppressing free speech at universities. So concerned he contacted a provost because a professor made fun of him.
St. Rudy Of Seven World Trade Center
The worshipful myth creation of this hideous human after 9/11 was, like so many things then, well, hideous.
Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani promoted discredited conspiracy theories about murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich on Twitter early Monday morning, further fueling the baseless speculation that has anguished Rich’s grieving family.
Or You Can Vote To Defund ACORN
Journalists (some) do have these weird and dumb notions of JOURNALISM but the issue about bad faith (as opposed to good faith and correct or even good faith but misguided and wrong) attacks on you and your employees is that is shouldn't be that hard to figure out if it is actually in bad faith or even in good faith but wrong or who cares. If your employees do "bad things" whether that's bad tweets or trying to ruin the careers of colleagues who won't sleep with them, it is up to you, the boss, to decide whether you need to back your employees (because they deserves to be backed) and then explain that to the rest of your employees.
An under appreciated thing is that there is so much bad management in our dumb society. Not just bad management in the broad abstract sense of "badly running a company." Bad management in the sense of being just being bad at managing employees and employee issues.
An under appreciated thing is that there is so much bad management in our dumb society. Not just bad management in the broad abstract sense of "badly running a company." Bad management in the sense of being just being bad at managing employees and employee issues.
You're Our Only Hope (Checks Notes), Joe Walsh
There's just something off when the entire Dem structure, from Nancy Pelosi to cable news hosts to think tank presidents to random person on twitter, is looking for Republicans to Do The Right Thing and save us. Whether it's NeverTrumpers or Mueller or that One Good Senator, or some disgusting grifter doing an obvious grift, focusing on those agents rather than what is "our" own agency is both misguided and pathetic. I often blame the media for making the Republicans the protagonists in The Story of Politics, but sadly I have to admit that Democrats are more than happy for them to do so.
A grifter ex machina isn't going to bring this story to a happy conclusion. Use the damn power and money and activism that you have available to you.
It's so depressing.
A grifter ex machina isn't going to bring this story to a happy conclusion. Use the damn power and money and activism that you have available to you.
It's so depressing.
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Oh, Elon
What a silly man.
In June 2014, SolarCity bought Silevo, a solar-panel manufacturer that had struck a deal with New York to build a factory in Buffalo. On a conference call, Musk boasted that the deal would enable SolarCity to install tens of gigawatts of panels every year—far beyond the company’s peak annual run rate of about one gigawatt. He spoke as if the technology were already proven. On its website, SolarCity predicted it would “achieve a breakthrough” in solar-power pricing thanks to “massive economies of scale.”And I mean Cuomo. Gotta respect the con. The marks, not so much.
“It was shoot first and aim later,” says the former senior employee. “There was a lot of machismo going on: bigger, better, badder, faster.”
By the time Cuomo visited the site three months later, Silevo’s smallish deal had metastasized. The state promised to spend $350 million to build a factory and another $400 million on equipment specified by SolarCity. The company would get a 10-year lease on the facility—for just $1 a year. In return, it promised to employ at least 1,460 people in “high-tech” jobs at the factory, hire another 2,000 to support the sale and installation of solar panels in New York, and help attract an additional 1,440 “support jobs” in the state. Once it achieved full production, the company pledged, it would spend some $5 billion in New York over the following decade.
“It was sold as a perfect marriage,” says the former senior employee. “The area around the factory is terrible, and I remember thinking: Wow, we are going to save the town where steel was made.” Cuomo too was hooked. “He was enchanted with the idea of Elon Musk in Buffalo,” says a longtime lobbyist in Albany. “I think he actually thought Musk was the next Dalai Lama.”
Everybody's Working For The
Was busy with various things this weekend. It's the weekend! Nice weather, at least.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)