Good take on new NRA ads targeting NYT, WaPo, and the "media machine." Post-Obama, NRA needs a new enemy. @pbump https://t.co/uHshL9RvJf
— Stephanie McCrummen (@mccrummenWaPo) August 4, 2017
.@DLoesch has a message for the @nytimes: “We're coming for you.” One
non-#fakenews story is not enough. #NRA #ClenchedFistofTruth pic.twitter.com/Hm1QkJi5Tp— NRATV (@NRATV) August 3, 2017
Well, she seems to have clenched something pretty tight…
.@DLoesch seems like the fragile one in this commercial tbh. https://t.co/fG7PBCBZk5
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) August 4, 2017
This has NOTHING to do with guns; the NRA and Dana Loesch want a culture war to sell guns because there's no boogeyman in the White House. https://t.co/hGdLqnaIEd
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) August 4, 2017
With entirety of federal gov in hands of the right, interesting to watch NRA convert to just pure culture war org rather than gun rights
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 4, 2017
Does Fox News and the NRA hold high level joint retreats on scaring the shit out of old white people?
— Schooley (@Rschooley) August 5, 2017
Speaking of highly excitable Wingnut Wurlitzer cheerleaders, whatever happened to Michelle Malkin?
Shalimar
Eventually the paranoid collectors they are selling this insanity to have to reach their limit, right? Either stroke out from the constant fear, or realize that they can’t simultaneously fire all 30 guns they already have and stop buying more.
Peale
Look, we’re trying to disable your children as quickly as possible with our mandatory vaccinations, converting your sons to homosexuality as fast as we can become Boy Scout leaders, and if we can’t do that, we’ve released our Guatemalan horde to prescribe you OxyContin. What more do you want from us to keep your paranoia alive? To start sneaking into your houses a night to kill your family if we not find organic kale in the fridge? We’ve tried avoiding your homes since you started wearing maga hats and driving around with tattered flags on your car. Don’t make us come in there.
NotMax
Can’t spell rancid without n-r-a.
Major Major Major Major
Nope, not getting out of the boat.
The newest kerfuffle in my neck of the woods is some Google engineer who wrote a ten-page, anti-diversity, r/mensrights-esque, libertarian techbro manifesto masquerading as concerns about HR policy, and then distributed it internally.
I have also mostly avoided discussing that topic on social media. Libertarian engineers gonna libertarian engineer, people shouldn’t be fired for political views, but people should definitely be disciplined for circulating manifestos. You can probably guess the contents, and guess how it made the women and POC in the office feel. And christ, what an asshole for putting HR in the no-win situation they are now.
Anyway, totally OT, here’s a panel from my comic I drew tonight of the main character in a situation that will be familiar to many of us.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Just curious. No pinky fingers for a reason?
West of the Rockies (been a while)
Victoria Jackson disappeared, too. When Palin has been relatively quiet of late.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: I find four-fingered hands much easier to draw.
Mnemosyne
@NotMax:
Mickey Mouse also lacks pinky fingers, as do most animated characters. As Major^4 says, it makes them easier to draw.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: I think most anime characters have five fingers.
bago
imdb.com/name/nm0000352/
Vincent is one of the few people that can deploy the word “Fisk” with any gravity.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Ditto for Schulz’ Peanuts gang, and many others.
(Poor Schroeder couldn’t handle Mozart with only 8 digits!)
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Peale: As always, the problem with the left is that we break into factional infighting over small details and become too distracted to break into the homes of RWNJs. I’m going to take you and your fucking organic kale and throw you in a re-education camp.
Ruckus
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
You do know that if you want to be lefter than thou you buy that fucking organic kale and you cook it with fucking organic virgin olive oil because that makes it slide out of the pan and into the trash very easily. But you look seriously lefty at wholepaycheck when you buy both of those.
gene108
Gun sales are way, way down. The NRA, a gun manufacturer lobbying group, has to try and boost sales somehow.
As fewer and fewer people own guns, the gun manufacturers have to figure out how to get the remaining gun owners to keep buying products.
Villago Delenda Est
The NRA is a terrorist organization. Plain and simple.
Frankensteinbeck
@gene108:
I think they’ve also swallowed the Kool-Aid. They’re shills AND deranged, conspiracy-theorist racists! It’s amazing how assholes can find ways to profit off of their malignant beliefs.
sharl
@Major Major Major Major:
The techbro’s manifesto was leaked, and based on my quick and partial scan of it, the content is pretty much what you’d expect if you’ve already seen such crap from people like that.
Somewhere there is a former frat dude who talked his way into a tenured position teaching a bullshit version of evolutionary psychology – someone like Seb Gorka maybe – who could smear enough lipstick on something like that manifesto to take in some credulous and lazy media people. At least the techbro didn’t think to do that.
It sucks for Google’s brand new VP for diversity issues, who won’t have any time to quietly settle in to her new job. Presumably she is at least paid well enough to keep Google out of trouble like this.
Noah Brand
I’m a gun owner, I enjoy recreational shooting, and I like knowing that I have a Plan B if my Plan A of “civilization functions enough that nobody tries to murder me” doesn’t work. And I fucking hate the NRA with… well, not every fiber of my being, but every one I can spare. I mean, I only have so many fibers. But they’re just goddamned awful on every level of policy, honesty, basic goddamned logic… there are sane arguments to be made against gun control, just as there are sane arguments for it. What we mean by the phrase “gun control” matters a lot as to which arguments are which, obviously. But the NRA doesn’t make any of them. They’ve just been an industry marketing mouthpiece since before I was born.
Sister Golden Bear
A very senior Googler, who recently left the compound, nuked the manifesto from orbit, then nuked it again just to be sure. Well worth a read.
medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788
As he implies, they’re not Gliberatian Masters of the Universe, they’re mediocre white (and possibly East Asian/South Asian guys*) who are hitting the ceilings in their careers because they’re not willing to up their game* because they feel they’re “entitled” to be in charge. Sadly there’s all too many brogrammers in the Valley who share that belief that half the population is biologically unsuited for tech jobs.
* Silicon Valley diversity… “We’ve both East Asian and South Asian men on our team.” (No, I’m not cynical after 20+ years in the industry, no not at all.)
** Aside from the value of “soft skills” (across many industries) as you move into senior positions, there’s plenty of business school research showing that diverse workforces are smarter workforces, if for no other reason because diversity forces people to think a little more when interacting with co-workers because you can’t default to shared assumptions and styles of communicating.
Citizen_X
Holy crap, that deranged Dana Loesch video. What a fucking loon.
Arclite
She appears if you say her name backwards three times. Just set the summoning candle within the pentagram so you may control her.
Patricia Kayden
@Villago Delenda Est: Racist as hell, also too. They went after BLM and Deray McKesson. Funny that I don’t recall them ever speaking out when Black men who were legally armed were shot down by the police (Philando Castile comes to mind).
OzarkHillbilly
@Noah Brand: I remember when they were a gun safety and hunting organization. I guess that makes me old.
sharl
@Sister Golden Bear: That Medium opinion piece was unsparing. The author gets a lot of push-back in the comments, and those are interesting in their own right. From the thirty or so comments I looked at, it looks like there is a significant male-female divide (using the commenters’ names and presuming gender on that basis), with women supporting the Medium author, and many (if not most) of the men either irked at the Medium author or supportive of the original manifesto (or both). Some said the Medium author mischaracterized the manifesto, an interesting viewpoint in itself, given the (mostly) women who concurred fully with the critique in comments.
Whoever runs HR training and compliance at Google – as well as other companies, tech or otherwise – should use this sort of thing – manifesto and the responses to it – to develop new training strategies, as well as provide guidelines on hiring and employee counseling criteria. Gonna be a slog…
Ken
I cannot believe Balloon-Juice let the “fist-fisk” scandal go unmentioned.
Central Planning
@Noah Brand: How exactly does Plan B work?
I have a RWNJ coworker who is ready for when society collapses. With his and his daughter and their shotguns, he thinks “I can protect my family when gangs of people attack my house.” to which I then ask: “Since there are more of them than there are of you and your family, how exactly does that work?”. You’ll run out of ammo, food, and you need sleep at some point.
There’s never an answer that shows anything more than “I have a Plan B”. So, how does it work?
daryljfontaine
@Central Planning: The unspoken Plan B in such circumstances is almost always to become the aggressive marauder of their terrified neighbors.
D
Lurking Canadian
@daryljfontaine: Best defense is a good offense.
Tenar Arha
@Major Major Major Major: It’s not politics. It’s big money.
He could have figured out how to post it to a Reddit forum anonymously w/o identifying his employer. Instead he put out proof of a hostile workplace in bold neon letters, & circulated it.
He needs to be fired and gone today, not disciplined.
1. Everyone who’s currently in any kind of harassment litigation with Google now has everything they need for their lawsuits. There’s going to be bigger judgements handed out based on this.
2. Google deserves every single new hostile workplace lawsuit that’s begun work this weekend. Not only he & anyone who’s stupid enough to write something in agreement with him must be fired for cause, but also all his teammates need to go through massive retraining in harassment.
3. Google, who is trying to recruit more widely won’t be able to recruit more widely. (Who wants to go work in a hostile environment in the first place?)
4. The PR damage will increase every day he remains at the company.
5. In the really long term consequences: this could end up costing lots more money, and lots of valuable time while they fail to create the next big thing because they have toxic software development teams. Because from every study I’ve read, their products will mostly suck, causing them to lose market share ignoring half the population and the new majority.
Starfish
@Major Major Major Major: I have lost my patience with the libertarian engineers. If you think taxation is theft bro, I want to see you report the tax man to the police and see how it goes for you.
Their indifference to issues that are not about them is amoral and selfish.
A Ghost to Most
@Noah Brand:
This. I’ve owned guns for almost 50 years, and hated the NRA almost as long. Rejected a life membership my father tried to give me.
They’re nothing but salesmen for the gun industry, drumming up business by playing on the fears of the willfully ignorant.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Shalimar:
That’s like telling the crazy cat lady she has enough cats in her house. Even sane gun collectors can have vast collections of them.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Major Major Major Major:
How so, politics, religion and sex are the three big no nos in the work place. They can flat outright call him on his unprofessional behavior.
But, it’s the Valley, it’s Google, by “engineer” you mean “programmer” or Dude Bro Prima Dona so likely HR will cuddle with him and his dude bro boss will go hide.
Matt
Fuck it – I say we ramp up the fear on these NRA assclowns. With any luck, they’ll wind up not voting in the next election – either naturally (stroke & heart attack), semi-naturally (excitedly inspecting loaded guns while looking down the barrel) or judicially (ain’t felony disenfranchisement a bitch).
Uncle Cosmo
@Starfish:
I lost miine 35 years ago when I joined a defense contractor & became one of two liberals in a pool of ~150 engineers. Engineers (especially EEs) and IT guys (which these days often come down to the same thing) are generally as intellectually arrogant as MDs but with slightly better rationale (a lot less rote memorization & a lot more creative thinking in their “professional training”). They demand respect for their “expertise” but routinely deny it to those in less quantitative fields – they fancy themselves as soooooo brainy that after 10 minutes’ cogitation on any such subject they know more & better than people with advanced degrees who’ve spent a lifetime working in it.
Some of them are actually fairly nice people. Some of them have actually done some things that are pretty impressive intellectually. (My former bridge partner, a full professor of EE, is the only person I know who’s read Finnegan’s Wake in its entirety, & mostly understood it. I nearly majored in English Lit instead of Physics, & I shurzell never managed that.) But so what? That shouldn’t get them a pass for pushing inhumane & self-serving philosophies.
J R in WV
@A Ghost to Most:
My Granma taught me to shoot her .22 rifle, along with my little brother and a bunch of cousins over 40 years ago – I spent the bulk of my allowance on ammunition, which we got at the grocery store, $0.79 a box of 50. I agree that the NRA are liquid waste from chickens.
I mostly shoot pistols, you don’t need as long a range to make it challenging. You need around 100 yards for a rifle range, but a pistol is typically shot at 10 or 20 yards. There’s some walking back and forth, and the longer range makes that walking take longer.
I have several pistols. I inherited two of them from a great-uncle (they’re interesting but no longer safe to shoot mechanically), was given two more older classics by a close friend who inherited several from his father, and have bought a couple of modern pistols over the past 15 years or so. Mrs J owns one also.
ETA: The dude-bro programmer at Google needs fired and sent to a re-education camp, both. What a waste of air! I read his screed – EEEWWWWWwwwww…… horrible. As if statistics conjured out of thin air can be meaningful !!!
BruceFromOhio
My hope is she dissolved completely in the bitter juices she stewed in.
@Arclite: LOL
BruceFromOhio
I remember when the NRA was the source of safety instruction and expertise. I recall a couple of guys from high school being very proud to have been certified as safety instructors, and if you really had the chops, you got certified to be a trainer of other safety instructors. These were just ordinary fellows who liked to hunt and target shoot, and wouldn’t think about carrying around in public – why would you do that unless you were planning to shoot someone? The gun is a tool, and unless you were a stupid shithead, you took the safety classes and learned how not to shoot the guy next to you at target practice.
When Heston showed up is when it seemed to go completely off the rails into whacko world, never to return.
HinTN
@Uncle Cosmo: As a EE who mostly can see the solution to the problem right there in the problem statement, I can identify with your assessment. I’m also almost the only liberal in the office, which makes for interesting times.