Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Not all heroes wear capes.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Everybody saw this coming.

T R E 4 5 O N

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

The willow is too close to the house.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Wednesday Afternoon Open Thread

Wednesday Afternoon Open Thread

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Open thread.  Looks like we need one!

And a rebuttal from Jamie Raskin.

And a short ass-kicking from AOC about Twitter changing their policy so that Trump wouldn’t be in violation of it.

Talk about whatever you want.

Reader Interactions

93Comments

  3. 3.

    Math Guy

    Fixing Asian style ribs over steamed rice for dinner. Needed to get rid of some leftover odds and ends in the fridge and this is what happened.

  4. 4.

    Barbara

    I’ve been obsessively following the seditious conspiracy trial and there are some darkly comedic moments, like the following Telegram chat recovered by the FBI:

    Side chat between Tarrio & Jeremy Bertino 11/7/20

    B: bro. Wtf happened.

    Tarrio: ?

    B: they called it. now we have to mobilize. should we roll out to state houses?

    T: yes. i’ll be available after sunday

    “I’ve got civil war planning penciled in for Monday.  Does that work for you?”  Almost as good as making the members of your coup planning group sign a nondisclosure agreement.

  8. 8.

    scav

    All the same, it’s somehow so nice to see when two lonely gas bags finally find each other.

     

    (actually, a bit of a relief as it might get them off the general market.)

  12. 12.

    Ken

    Fascinating twitter thread (found via Derek Lowe’s blog) on how ChatGPT makes up fake academic papers — not the content, the citation.

    I am particularly impressed by the step where, having decided on the fake title of the paper and chosen an author, it decides a second author is needed, because most papers have more than one.

  17. 17.

    WaterGirl

    @zhena gogolia: Did you see the one up top, too?  Where she asks questions in sequence that showed that twitter literally changed their policy document so Trump wouldn’t be in violate of it?

    She definitely does her homework.

  20. 20.

    Qrop Non Sequitur

    @Baud: When will Balloon Juice incorporate AI?

    First we have to attract some organic intelligence, then whatever entity provides this can program the AI.

  21. 21.

    David 🎈🕵️The Establishment 📸🛩 Koch

    If you can’t stand the lettuce stay out of the kitchen: England’s PM blames demise on cutting liberal humor (photo)​
     

    Long live Larry the Cat (photo)

  23. 23.

    zhena gogolia

    @WaterGirl: Oh, when I first looked at this post, I only saw MTG with a balloon. I didn’t see the other videos. But I did watch that one at the link patrick gave.

  27. 27.

    Gin & Tonic

    Has anybody (in the USA) noticed that there’s no variety anymore in supermarket oranges? They seem to be sweet, sweeter, sweetest. Mandarins, “cara cara,” navels, perhaps blood oranges, that’s it. Used to be you could get bags of not very attractive juice oranges, valencias, that sort of thing. Now they are all cosmetically enhanced and loaded with sugar.

    Is it just me?

  29. 29.

    twbrandt (formerly tom)

    Meanwhile, over at the Muskified twitter, users are unable to post more than one tweet per day. Anymore than that and they get a message saying they “are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”

    Things are going great over there.

  30. 30.

    Ohio Mom

    @lgerard: I think Raskin’s bandanna brings to mind pirates. Looks like he took off the big gold hoop earring, gave a shipmate the parrot to watch, and threw on a suit.

    I hope his treatment continues to allow him to work and is successful.

  33. 33.

    Jeffro

    I’m trying to think of the last time that

    • the GQP actually made sense to those outside of their (dis)info bubble
    • the GQP managed to land an actual punch, instead of pantsing themselves, with their craziness
    • the GOP offered anything to the American people except performative flexing on/in front of/in the general direction of ‘the libs’

    Nope, nothing, still thinkin’…

  34. 34.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Anoniminous:

    ChatGPT successfully automates Dunning-Kruger.​

    And it’s Mansplaining As A Service:

    A service that instantly generates vaguely plausible sounding yet totally fabricated and baseless lectures in an instant with unflagging confidence in its own correctness on any topic, without concern, regard, or even awareness, of the level of expertise of its audience.

    Seriously ChatGPT is an impressive achievement and is good for some uses — I’ve heard of fiction writers using it as inspiration to get out writers block (obviously they don’t use it verbatim, it’s more about the idea generation), as well as using it to create plausible descriptions of background details, like the contents of a shop, or descriptions for minor characters. But factual accuracy is definitely hit and miss, and more often miss. The problem is that one needs to know the topic well enough to know when ChatGPT is just making shit up.

  35. 35.

    Gin & Tonic

    To those who might be regulars in the nighttime Ukraine thread – a russian dude named Igor Mangushev, who a few months back appeared on stage somewhere holding a human skull, which he said belonged to a Ukrainian soldier, was himself shot in the back of the head the other day, as was mentioned by Adam. While he did not expire immediately and was taken to hospital, the expected conclusion arrived today.

    I will refrain from further comment.

  41. 41.

    Gin & Tonic

    So Sy Hersh, who used to be somebody back in the day, has Substacked an extremely thinly-sourced piece laying the Nordstream explosions plainly at the US’s feet. So far, so normal for Hersh and Substack. Now comes reputed US Senator Mike Lee retweeting that trash. No, I won’t link. But boy, is Lee a loose cannon or what?

  46. 46.

    kindness

    We can all be proud that our side’s Representatives are kicking butt.  Unfortunately, none of these things will be shown on Fox News, and very little of it will be shown on any of the network news shows.  Fox will only show Republicans questions/accusations and the network news shows will both sides the whole thing.  It’s going to end up like tik-tack-toe with no winners at all.

  49. 49.

    Ken

    @Baud: Soon, women won’t need men for anything anymore.

    Not even opening the pickle jar?

    EDIT: Dang, Suzanne got there first, and with a better one.  I’ll just note that we haven’t quite worked out parthenogenesis in humans yet.

  50. 50.

    Baud

    @kindness:

    I’m not sure why you discount clips on our social media.  That’s how our side tends to get news nowadays.

    And MSNBC talking heads are still occasionally good for something.

    I can’t speak to podcasts.

  56. 56.

    Suzanne

    @Ken: Now I feel like making Mr. Suzanne a Valentine that reads “You’re my favorite person to get stuff down from that weird cabinet over the fridge”.

    ETA: He knows who he married.

    E once again TA: He married an asshole. It’s his own damn fault.

  59. 59.

    scav

    @Suzanne: It would be both fun and classically inspired to use men — the former masters of the universe — as stepstools.  Flirtatious is a new one for me though.  It’s good for me to keep up: Thanks!

  60. 60.

    Leslie

    @Sister Golden Bear:

     

    I’ve heard of fiction writers using it as inspiration to get out writers block (obviously they don’t use it verbatim, it’s more about the idea generation), as well as using it to create plausible descriptions of background details, like the contents of a shop, or descriptions for minor characters.

    Yes, I know a lot of authors who are using it in these ways. They’re finding it very helpful for getting unstuck. It’s like having a never-fatigued friend to bounce ideas off of.

    However, the (extremely low-paid) people in other countries who are keeping Chat GPT “appropriate” have already killed a lot of its creativity, basically because of those people, who want to have it riff on the kinds of things people should get arrested for, versus what happens between consenting adults.

  62. 62.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Suzanne:

    Roses are red.

    Violets are blue.

    When I’m looking for my favorite person to get stuff down from that weird cabinet over the fridge,

    That would be you. 

  64. 64.

    Suzanne

    @scav:

    It would be both fun and classically inspired to use men — the former masters of the universe — as stepstools. 

    I wish this was my kink.

    Actually, I wish “financial domination” was my kink. Lord. What an opportunity I missed.

  65. 65.

    Anyway

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Has anybody (in the USA) noticed that there’s no variety anymore in supermarket oranges? They seem to be sweet, sweeter, sweetest. Mandarins, “cara cara,” navels, perhaps blood oranges, that’s it. Used to be you could get bags of not very attractive juice oranges, valencias, that sort of thing. Now they are all cosmetically enhanced and loaded with sugar.

    I look for Meyer Lemon in January. While not an orange it gives me that sour citrus hit. I made an upside-down citrus cake last week with blood oranges, navel and Meyer lemon and it was a welcome bitter note to balance the sweetness of the other oranges.

  67. 67.

    Ken

    @Suzanne: get stuff down from that weird cabinet over the fridge

    That’s for storing things you never have to get down, like the pasta-maker your sister-in-law gave you for Christmas twelve years ago.

  69. 69.

    lowtechcyclist

    @twbrandt (formerly tom):

    Meanwhile, over at the Muskified twitter, users are unable to post more than one tweet per day. Anymore than that and they get a message saying they “are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”

    Things are going great over there.

    Earlier, today it wouldn’t even let me post one tweet today, saying I was over my daily limit.  I can’t remember what limit it said when I clicked on “Learn More” but it was in the hundreds.

    I complained, and I can tweet now.  But yeah, their systems are slowly breaking down.

  70. 70.

    Anoniminous

    @Sister Golden Bear: ​ Don’t need to define “mansplaining”. I have Ilona Baliūnaitė’s flowchart.

    ChatGPT managed to get Gary Marcus and Yann LeCun to agree on something for the first time ever. To wit: if AI is the goal chatbots are a dead end. The tl;dr explanation: Generative chatbots are based on (1) meaning is not an engineering concern and (2) the informal logical fallacy ‘The Territory is the Map.” In the ‘Chat-verse’ ​​words are ONLY a sequence of ASCII bit strings separated by the ‘space’ character with their arrangement based on: Given these three words what is the most likely – by Occurrence Count – next word. The “meaning” (sic) of the text output is constructed by the reader via anthropomorphism.​

  71. 71.

    Suzanne

    @Ken: I have this tiny kitchen (house built approx. 1920). Every cabinet is in use. At some point, I’m going to redo the kitchen, and I’m gonna get the oversized upper cabinets and take them up to the ceiling. Get rid of that dumbshit soffit.

  73. 73.

    tokyokie

    @twbrandt (formerly tom):

    Meanwhile, over at the Muskified twitter, users are unable to post more than one tweet per day. Anymore than that and they get a message saying they “are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”

    Things are going great over there.

    Actually, I got that message for the only tweet I’ve tried making today.

  74. 74.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Jeffro:

    I’m trying to think of the last time that

    • the GQP actually made sense to those outside of their (dis)info bubble
    • the GQP managed to land an actual punch, instead of pantsing themselves, with their craziness
    • the GOP offered anything to the American people except performative flexing on/in front of/in the general direction of ‘the libs’

    Nope, nothing, still thinkin’…

    If you include the RW SCOTUS majority as part of the GOP, they’re still landing some serious punches, unfortunately.

  77. 77.

    WaterGirl

    Sent to me just now by commenter Leslie:

    Wednesday Afternoon Open Thread 12

    Perfect.  Except, of course, that she is smart in some ways, but she is an awful person to be mocked mercilessly.

  79. 79.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Suzanne:

    I have this tiny kitchen (house built approx. 1920). Every cabinet is in use.

    Our kitchen isn’t tiny, but it isn’t particularly big either, and we’ve got more stuff that needs to be on low shelves that my wife can reach than we’ve got low shelves to put the stuff on.  So I still have my uses, apparently.

  80. 80.

    Kay

    Rick Scott
    @SenRickScott
    ·10h
    🧵 Last night, @JoeBiden rambled for a while, but it seems he forgot to share the facts:
    In my plan, I suggested the following: All federal legislation sunsets in 5 yrs. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.

    Imagine – at least 20 people were paid to come up with this insane plan. They sat around a table and designed it.
    “Let’s make it so they won’t know whether they get Social Security payments and retirement healthcare and then do that to them over and over, every 5 years”
    Sickos.

  87. 87.

    Anoniminous

    When I remodeled our kitchen I installed stainless steel Rev-a-Shelf and boy are those things nice. They are pricey but double the effective under-the-counter storage and you don’t have to get down on your knees and conduct an archeological dig to find stuff.

  89. 89.

    EarthWindFire

    @Kay: Not only that, what happens to FICA in the meantime? Did the brain trust even cover that part? Can’t pull down the great work so my guess is no.

  90. 90.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @scav:

    It would be both fun and classically inspired to use men — the former masters of the universe — as stepstools.

    Reminds me of the meme with a dominatrix sitting on a man on his hands and knees being used as a chair. The caption read: “He wanted a sandwich — so I made him a sub.”

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