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????
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
Gotta Play The Game
Sternly worded tweets don't count.
Wow Who Told Him
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
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
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
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Neato
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
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
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
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
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
News and Opinion Are Separate
(hazards of posting from a phone)
America's Most Ridiculous Humans
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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.”