Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

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

“But what about the lurkers?”

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

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

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

Joe Biden can go out like FDR, not by dying in office, but by crushing the fascists.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Another Hard-Earned Weekend

TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Another Hard-Earned Weekend

by | 229 Comments

This post is in: , ,


 
Anyone wants to bitch and/or moan about TFG, the RNC, and last night’s debacle: Please check the post immediately before this one. You can work out your feelings there, and leave this post for the sane people rest of us, okay?

Summary of the last post, for the (understandably) squeamish:

Reader Interactions

229Comments

  1. 1.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Anyone wants to bitch and/or moan about TFG, the RNC, and last night’s debacle: Please check the post immediately before this one. You can work out your feelings there, and leave this post for the sane people rest of us, okay?

    Thank you Anne.

  3. 3.

    zhena gogolia

    Thank you, AL! I have to go out now, but this post is just what I need. Will study later. You are a treasure.

  4. 4.

    SiubhanDuinne

    “If you want the polls to go up, then hell, go out and talk about Joe Biden! Talk about the good that he has done for this country and have his back like he has had our backs for these past four years.”

    QFFT

  5. 5.

    mali muso

    Got a notification that my postcards are on the way from the Postcards to Voters Etsy store.  Just got my stamps delivered from USPS the other day.  I’m ready to get busy!

  6. 6.

    WereBear

    The people really did speak out.

    Many of us called. I did my federal senators, since I have NY’s VP Hopeful, Stefanik.

    She has the worst, snotty, disinterested staffers I don’t bother.

  7. 7.

    UncleEbeneezer

    Pasting from another/dead thread:

    What I don’t understand are the people who have been lecturing us for years about $ In Politics and Backroom Deals being the worst evils in the world.  With all this news coming out that this whole thing is nothing but big donors and Media elites trying to push Joe out, you’d think they’d be the first ones to say “Fuck that!  We’re not letting some fat cat elites erase our primary: I’m with Biden!”  If you’re so against letting billionaires manipulate rig our Democratic process, pick our candidate and take over our party, the obvious move is for you to stand up unapologetically and with your whole chest, FOR BIDEN!!!

  8. 8.

    satby

    You can work out your feelings there, and leave this post for the sane people rest of us, okay?

    Oh fuck yeah!!! Kudos AL!

    And the outpouring of support for Joe plus the incandescent RAGE of all the people who voted for him in the primary, and appreciated the great job as President he’s still doing, on Twitter was a joy to behold.

  12. 12.

    Starfish

    Oh well. We had a good run of 6 comments before someone started that nonsense again.

  13. 13.

    Jeffro

    We are gonna win this thing!

    OT but worth a read: Danielle Allen’s latest in the Post: trump speaks of unity.  Here’s how to pave that path

    …we must see each other not as enemies but as civic friends, all of us whole people — who laugh and love; despair and fret; aspire, struggle and pass away. We should be curious about the texture of each other’s experiences. We should commit to active listening, a practice in which before one responds to another person’s argument, one first repeats back what one has heard, to check that one has heard correctly. To call ourselves to such mutual respect across political lines is to exhort us to moral revolution. We should embrace this.

    A spiritual reorientation will not come overnight and never fully. We need crutches. This is actually what government is for. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” The entire purpose of the design of our political institutions is to channel our disagreements into productive negotiations among people with competing interests and imperfect characters.

    Right now, however, our political institutions don’t reward our federal elected officials for acting on the better angels of their nature. The combination of our state-funded party primaries and partisan gerrymandering mean that too many of our politicians owe their jobs to small slivers — 3 or 5 or 8 percent — of the electorate. Those who participate in party primaries typically hold their political commitments fiercely. Elected officials must be responsive to those voters to keep those jobs. The result? Nuanced negotiation is out, ritual performance of ideological purity is in.

    To unite the country, we need institutions responsive enough for us to have our arguments inside of them. We need institutions that incentivize politicians to negotiate. I’m convinced that the solution is the new Alaska model for elections: abolish party primaries and let all candidates, identified by self-selected party labels, run on the same unified ballot in a state-funded primary. Then take the top four or five vote-getters forward to a final round and use an instant runoff with a ranked ballot. The first candidate to rack up more than 50 percent, via first, second, and if necessary third choice votes, wins.

    The next part made me chuckle a bit…

    The Republican Party seems at last to be coalescing anew around a concentrated set of cogent arguments. These arguments differ from those that organized the party prior to 2016, and generally assert that the cumulative result of serious, ideologically driven error by Democrats — on regulation, public safety, the family, immigration, trade and other areas — has left the country weak internally and externally, and less prosperous than it might be. The solution, Republicans argue, is to reverse each of these errors.

    aka, “Democrats made us WEAK…want STRONG!”  LOL

    There is a potential counter-thesis from the Democratic side, but it is not currently or not yet the party’s argument and would require Democrats to break out of group-based identity politics. That counterthesis runs something like: The effort to force everyone into a single way of life is undermining freedom, dividing us and weakening our beloved country. We will be strong through being confident pluralists — people who can appreciate the full diversity of identity and ideology in this country and work confidently to negotiate, compromise and find ways of accommodating one another. Government, right-sized, is a tool that lays the foundation for entrepreneurship, innovation and shared problem-solving. Good negotiations across interests can deliver that right-sizing for us. We can lead the world by our example of domestic peace and prosperity delivered through strong democratic norms and civil strength.

    (not crazy about “right-sized” but whatevs)
    Good stuff!

    So let’s win this election big time, and then let’s get busy doing all the structural, rules-changing things we can to shore up our creaky democracy!

  14. 14.

    Suzanne

    One thing I want to throw out there, because I think k a lot of people aren’t aware: Nate Silver is no longer at 538, and the new leader, Elliott Morris, models things a bit differently. So direct ire accordingly!

  15. 15.

    WereBear

    Corporate is in trouble. Right now huge chunks of the US are having serious issues as a software update fell into the Elon Musk tradition of company management.

    They probably fired the people who knew how to do it right.

    As an genre movie fan, I am shocked — shocked! — that fabled studios are falling down on the job.

    While Jason Statham made a really good prehistoric shark movie.

    Let the people who know how to do things, do things. Instead of the people who only think they do, and want to pretend.

    THAT is our most important difference between the two parties.

  16. 16.

    japa21

    I am going to make one of my fearless predictions. Trump will not get a post-convention bounce. That would normally spell doom for a candidate, specially since the media would talk about it day after day.
    Next fearless prediction. Media will mention it once and then ignore.

  18. 18.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @SiubhanDuinne: What a novel concept!  Whining about the polls is not how you move them upward.

    It’s striking how so many people want Dems to win as long as they don’t have to actually get their hands dirty.  And even more disturbing how many see supporting great Dems as some terrible, dirty chore and burden.  “Wait, you want me to say something good about Biden?  Or even just to stop bashing and doubting him?  Oh this is all so unfair!  Poor me, POOR ME!!!”

  19. 19.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @UncleEbeneezer: What I don’t understand are the people who have been lecturing us for years about $ In Politics and Backroom Deals being the worst evils in the world. With all this news coming out that this whole thing is nothing but big donors and Media elites trying to push Joe out, you’d think they’d be the first ones to say “Fuck that! We’re not letting some fat cat elites erase our primary: I’m with Biden!”

    The Democrats and affiliates who made that argument are with Biden, see the Squad and Bernie. Those inclined to support the donor order are breaking with Biden or being maliciously silent; your red state centrists plus somehow Schiff and Pelosi.

    Nothing is a bolder counter-cultural choice than supporting Biden right now.  We know what we need to do, find whatever way you can to get your fellows on board.

  22. 22.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @WereBear: I sent an email to Schiff’s campaign telling them I will support a primary opponent for him next term.  Of course I’ll vote for him in November, because f*** Garvey, but after that I’d like a loyal Dem to represent my great state of CA.

  23. 23.

    moonbat

    AL, you are a treasure! THIS is exactly what I needed to read this morning!

    Eyes on the prize.

  24. 24.

    Starfish

    So I am supposed to fly home from this vacation tomorrow. How messed up will the airport computers be?

  25. 25.

    Mousebumples

    Happy Friday! What are we all doing this weekend?

    I’m out of town tonight thru late tomorrow but hoping to do more postcards when I’m back home Sunday.

    Looks to be nice weather this weekend in Wisconsin. Hope for good fortunes for WisDems canvassers!

  27. 27.

    Viva BrisVegas

    Probably the biggest IT failure so far this century is ongoing right now. It looks like yet another giant corporation run by MBAs has had its wheels fall off. Once more, profit over product somehow fails to deliver.

    I can see this story pushing Trump’s performance off the front pages for a few days, after which the speech will be old news.

    There’s many ways that you can describe Trump, but unlucky is not one of them.

  28. 28.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @The Kropenhagen Interpretation: As I told my wife yesterday “The vast majority of the people who have bought into this shit (referring to regular people, not media elites or Anonymous Dems) are all gonna vote for Biden in November.  That’s part of what is so enraging about all of it.”

    It’s all been just a dumb temper tantrum over the fact that they’re mad that they aren’t getting some fantasy candidate and frustration/anxiety over the fact that it’s gonna be a close election (no matter who is at the top of the ticket).  But they aren’t gonna write in other candidates.  They’re not that stupid.  They’ll come around once Biden is officially the nominee and they realize that our coalition is going forward with or without them.

  29. 29.

    satby

    @Jeffro: “The Republican Party seems at last to be coalescing anew around a concentrated set of cogent arguments.”

    Yeah, NOPE. Unless xenophobia, anti- knowledge and racism are “cogent arguments”. Pure twaddle.

  30. 30.

    WereBear

    @UncleEbeneezer: My voicemail for Schumer was about “What are you doing, going along with this uncertainty and making ourselves look stupid? What is the plan? You look clueless. This house wants Biden all the way.”

    Etc. Reasonable. Under the circumstances :)

  33. 33.

    Ken

    @WereBear: I noticed recently that despite all the talk about ChatGPT replacing many workers, no one has discussed using it for executive-level jobs, up to and including the CEOs. Yet that’s perhaps the best match for its dubious talents. Consider:

    • It doesn’t actually create anything, just takes other people’s work, rearranges it, and takes credit without acknowledging the original creators.
    • It has a tendency to just make up stuff that sounds good, with no connection to reality.
    • When challenged on its errors, it often digs in and refuses to acknowledge its mistake.
    • If you do manage to get it to admit error, it comes back with an equally-bad answer that shows it doesn’t really understand the problem.

    And of course the main executive qualification:

    • Since all the systems are scraping the same original sources, they exhibit a lemming-like tendency to group think, where they all start talking about whatever new thing is dominating the news.
  34. 34.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @WereBear: As an genre movie fan, I am shocked — shocked! — that fabled studios are falling down on the job.

    As a hardcore cinema junkie, I was both exhilarated and depressed by Godzilla Minus One.

    I was exhilarated because it was a good movie with sympathetic characters and a compelling storyline that only cost $15 million to make.

    I was depressed because Hollywood will learn nothing from this. (There’s rumors the budget for the next Mission: Impossible movie is 400 million fucking dollars. That’s a lot of money to watch Tom Cruise act out his midlife crisis.)

  35. 35.

    MinuteMan

    The Plutocrat$ $trike Back: Soft Coup 2024

    The buzz has even reached the Normally Polite Republicans (aka NPR): the soft coup is all about the donors and their money plus the Democrats who have been selling the party out to mammon for decades. That’s not only counter to democracy it’s plain nuts. I think these fat cats have been watching Biden’s administration with a jaundiced eye and seeing his pro-labor, anti-tax dodger/cheater, pro-enivronment, etc., policies and have been waiting for a chance to end all them all with a knife in the back as soon as they could manufacture an opening. Just as with the GQP donors (there’s probably a lot of intersection between the two groups) getting pro-plutocrat policies implemented is their One Ring and they really don’t care much whether they get their way from a Democratic administration or a Trumpist one.

    These are people cut from the same cloth as Howard Shultz, Andrew Yang, Ross Perot, etc., except that they feel that running for office is too tedious. Because they’re rich, they think they are smart enough and entitled enough to run the entire country although by proxy. But their ideas a gravely unsound as the “open convention” mechanism they’re proposing. Can you see their minions roaming the convention hall doling out bags of cash and gold bars? It’s probably not even really illegal.

    These folks aren’t much different from those running around wearing “Joe and the Ho must go” buttons. We laugh and glare that the button wearers but supposedly Democratic insiders appear to be welcoming them with open arms and bent knees while making “Democrat” an oxymoron.

    Joe, just say no—hell no!

  36. 36.

    Origuy

    @Starfish: Very, although they were some of the first to be affected so hopefully they are among the first to be fixed.

    There was a change sent out to a cloud security program called Cloudstrike that broke Windows. It affects corporate computers worldwide. I haven’t turned on my work laptop yet this morning and I was planning to take the day off anyway. But I’ve been reading the IT support Slack channel on my phone.

    The fix as I understand it is to log into Windows in Safe Mode and delete a certain Crowdstrike file. But if you have Bitlocker encryption enabled, as most corporate IT departments require, you may not have the authority to do that.

    This is an enormous mess.  Microsoft is getting heat, but Crowdstrike is a third party.

  37. 37.

    Eolirin

    @Ken: Your first point is… Not actually true, unless we want to say the same thing about humans and learning. It doesn’t really work like that.

    And they definitely don’t do the last thing, since the models take like 6 months to train and usually have a year ish gap in their knowledge unless they’re using additional techniques to pull in more recent data

    Basically, it would actually be an improvement.

  38. 38.

    Mousebumples

    @mali muso: glad to hear it! Happy postcarding!

    Other postcarding news – I am working with WaterGirl to update the postcard page for Balloon Juice. I currently have 4 postcard groups (Postcards to Voters, Postcards to Swing States, Activate America, and Center for Common Ground, I believe). We’re happy to add more if people have other groups they’ve enjoyed working with!

    Write on!

  40. 40.

    Tony Jay

    Since the Glibertarian donor-class behind the DumpBiden effort haven’t exactly come to the point and said who, exactly, they want in his place come November, I think it’s probably best if everybody in the country writes an open letter to them (c/o The FTFNYT) explaining that you personally will not be pursuing the Democratic Party’s nomination.

    I sent mine earlier today, and although I was firm in my renunciation of their financial and (im)moral support, I confess I did leave the door open slightly in case of a genuine emergency. In which case you should all be prepared for the Re-Education Camps to be fully-staffed and unionised, a bounty of $100 billion to be placed on Coldplay (Dead or Alive), and an explanation to be forthcoming about what, exactly, happened in that secret base in the Adirondacks back in late summer 1945.

    But everyone else can just keep it to a big, fat, “Get fucked and back Biden”. For simplicity.

  41. 41.

    Ken

    @Starfish: How messed up will the airport computers be?

    Depends. Crowdstrike has released a fix, but it doesn’t help computers with the bad version because they can’t boot to download it. The fix there is to boot it in safe mode, then remove a file from the crowdstrike directory.

    So, how many airline (bank, government, …) workers are going to be able to do that correctly? For that matter how many are going to be able to receive the instructions, with their work computer down?  And then there’s all the servers that don’t even have keyboards or monitors.

  43. 43.

    coin operated

    @satby: It was an update pushed out by cybersecurity firm CloudStrike. I got called in to deal with this last night

    ETA: it hit systems around the globe. Bad patch brought down half the MS servers on the planet

  45. 45.

    hueyplong

    @Tony Jay: “… a bounty of $100 billion to be placed on Coldplay (Dead or Alive)”

    Pretty sure it wouldn’t require that much financing.

  46. 46.

    Torrey

    @Ken: ​
     

    I am certificates from three doctors that say I’m completely sane. Not many people can say that, you know.

    Well, anyone can say it.

  47. 47.

    Ken

    @Eolirin: I admit that I may have added some corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

  48. 48.

    Jeffro

    @UncleEbeneezer:It’s striking how so many people want Dems to win as long as they don’t have to actually get their hands dirty.

    “I like Democratic policies, mind you…it’s just that I don’t want to be seen associating with the dirty hippies/those people/tree huggers/soshulists/(insert casual insult here) ”

    “also…I’m kinda lazy…”

  56. 56.

    Harrison Wesley

    @satby: Nothing says “cogent argument” like “MASS DEPORTATION NOW.”  Pithy and penetrating.  Or pissy and enervating.  Or something.

  59. 59.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @WereBear: You can’t. Worse, back in the day, studio blockbusters would finance smaller oddball films that producers felt deserved to be made. These days, it’s almost impossible to greenlight a project that isn’t a prequel, sequel or reboot. And they wonder why audiences aren’t going to the theaters anymore.

  60. 60.

    Torrey

    @Tony Jay: ​
      Oh, Tony, Tony, Tony! Your refusal to accept the nomination can be, at best, performative. The President must be a native born American citizen.

    On the other hand, the first seven were actually born British subjects, so I suppose you can always claim to be a true originalist in the tradition of George, John, Tom, Jim, Jim, John and Andy.

  62. 62.

    Eolirin

    @Citizen Alan: The argument being presented as the cogent argument, that the regulatory state has made us economically and internationally weaker is also provably false. So it’s got that going for it too. 

  65. 65.

    WereBear

    @The Thin Black Duke: It’s all because they don’t know how. And won’t admit it. I gather it’s lots of nepo babies infesting the suits now.

    I do prefer the scrappy Sammy Glick types, more. They understand how things work.

    My partner has been quoting Frank Zappa on the decline and fall of the music business as a parallel to our current state, who pins the problem on how the “new bunch” think they know everything.

    And his “guy with a cigar and a crappy office” didn’t have such pretensions. They would put it out, and see if the kids liked it.

  68. 68.

    kindness

    Increasingly I’m finding I agree with Will Rogers:

    “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

  69. 69.

    Eolirin

    @The Thin Black Duke: Yeah they can. High end blockbusters that are really successful can pull in a billion or more in ticket sales. Then they get to license it to Netflix for multiple tens of millions, and there’s physical media sales which still aren’t dead.

    The problem is not enough of the high end blockbusters succeed to make that sustainable. And the margins end up still sucking compared to smaller budget films. But since they use losses to avoid needing to pay things like royalties, maybe that’s not as much of a problem as it otherwise would be.

  70. 70.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @WereBear: I love that Franz Zappa story. He also understood that “You don’t need a huge audience. Just a loyal one.”

  73. 73.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @The Thin Black Duke: TV has been amazing. You will get no arguments from me.

    I was looking at Three Body Problem. My list is intractable, though. Right now I have active seasons on House of the Dragon, My Adventures with Superman, and The Boys.

    I’m also stoked for the new Batman show coming out, The Caped Crusader.

  74. 74.

    Eolirin

    @WereBear: I’m not saying they’re doing it right. They’re not. But there’s room for a few 400 million films. The problem is they only know how to do one thing and have no idea how to evaluate quality within that one thing.

  79. 79.

    Omnes Omnibus

    I called Mark Pocan’s and Tammy Baldwin’s campaign offices and urged them to support the Biden-Harris ticket as our best hope for keeping the White House and having Dems win further down ticket. If you have Dems representing you, I suggest calling them. Let them know what voters think.

  80. 80.

    WereBear

    @Eolirin: I must say I was never a fan of George Lucas, but he sure knew how to do it. I have never seen so much money spent on so fruitless a task.

    That incredible world is just being shredded. We’re going to have to wipe the whole mess as a house of horrors.

  81. 81.

    Ken

    @The Kropenhagen Interpretation: Rumor has it that The Boys is not in fact a celebration of fascist vigilantism, despite what a certain segment of viewers apparently believe. So it’s possible The Caped Crusader will also disappoint in that regard.

    (“Has to keep his identity secret so criminals won’t attack his friends and family.” Right, now pull the other one, mister “commits ten felonious assaults every night”.)

  82. 82.

    Eolirin

    @WereBear: Lucas made way more on the merchandising than the films.

    But also the prequel films did plenty of shredding on their own. And his proposed sequel trilogy sounded very bad. 

  83. 83.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @Eolirin: The problem is they only know how to do one thing and have no idea how to evaluate quality within that one thing.

    Yep.

    For all the pissing and moaning about superhero movies, the suits are praying that Deadpool and Wolverine takes off, because the sugar buzz from Barbie/Oppenheimer is gone, The Killers of the Flower Moon bombed, and there’s nothing on the horizon that looks like an ATM for the studios.

  85. 85.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Ken: I’m not saying the the notion of superheroes is without problems. And the Boys is emphatically not supportive of the fascist elements it depicts.

    Batman? I love it most for the villains. I also find their motivations and methods fascinating. Also, the archetypes are broad enough that you can have many, many valid interpretations.

  86. 86.

    WereBear

    @Eolirin: Merchandising is what they are after. Filling the theme parks with plushies and toys.

    But people have to love the movie. That is the most important part, and they make it the least.

  89. 89.

    Soprano2

    So, the vet gave my cat more fluids and said the X-ray showed there isn’t more fluid build up. He said my cat was dehydrated, and that the fluids should help encourage him to eat again.

    The Crowdstrike fuckery took down our major database that we use for everything, so I may be on here more today.

  93. 93.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Jeffro: Allen is the real deal. She was exploring a run for the governor of MA a couple of years ago and she called me because I was one of the voting delegates at the state convention. We had a good long conversation about the needs of my small western Mass town. I liked her a lot. I hope she runs for elected office.

    She dropped out once Maura Healey threw her hat in the ring.

  95. 95.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @Omnes Omnibus: Exactly.

    As Jeff Daniels said, “I do one for them, and then I do one for me.”

    In Out of Sight (one of my favorite movies), big name actors like Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson worked for scale because they loved the screenplay.

  96. 96.

    Eolirin

    @WereBear: Batman isn’t bad or anything, but this is a universe in which Sandman exists. :p (Along with a ton of truly fantastic independent work)

  98. 98.

    Steve LaBonne

    So it turns out that the private polls that started the Chicken Little behavior came from David Shor (one of them purportedly showed Biden in danger of losing New Jersey, LOL). Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Let’s let the rich fucks and the consultant class know that they don’t run the Democratic Party any more.

  99. 99.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @schrodingers_cat: ​
      Yes, if they have been good, reward them. Let them know that you appreciate what they are doing. FWIW I got voicemail at Pocan’s office, but the young lady who answered at Baldwin’s office sounded happy to hear from me.

  100. 100.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @WereBear: Comic books are morality plays.

    Exactly. Filled with people with distinct sets of morals and even the good guys usually take it too far. In an age where most of us have grown up with these stories, the people trying to handle them seriously have given us some real art.

    As much as I loved the Dark Knight Trilogy, The Batman is my new favorite. Leaning more into the detective aspect is something I’ve been dying for. And the moral of the story was Batman was doing it wrong and he had to learn. Brilliant.

    This new Caped Crusader show is bringing in a 50s crime noir aesthetic. I can hardly wait for August 1.

  104. 104.

    Kay

    We have no rebuttal to that disastrous Trump speech from our candidate. Unless Harris does it, it won’t get done. They never even scheduled a Biden appearance to rebut it. They really think they can win this without the candidate campaigning.

  106. 106.

    Steve LaBonne

    @schrodingers_cat: Everybody’s gotta eat, and being a charlatan is his line of work. I put most of the blame on the idiots in the party who think he’s someone to listen to.

  107. 107.

    S Cerevisiae

    Think of it like the Super Bowl; it’s the late first quarter and our team has been playing terribly but somehow the score is still tied and some people are screaming to pull Tom Brady because he threw a couple interceptions. He may be old but he has the experience to win and there’s three quarters left to play, let’s get some better blocking and get back to our game plan.

  109. 109.

    Princess

    If I wanted one word to describe Harris, it would be dignified. I really like that. It’s rare and precious.

  111. 111.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Kay: Biden is making appearances. Whether we choose to pay attention is our…choice.

  113. 113.

    moonbat

    @The Thin Black Duke: Yeah, everything has to be a previously purchased intellectual property, because dog forbid anyone PAY writers to come up with something original. I wonder what will happen when they run out of movies and sitcoms the movie executives watched when they were growing up. Will Hollywood just collapse in on itself and become a black hole?

  115. 115.

    Chris

    @The Thin Black Duke:

    (There’s rumors the budget for the next Mission: Impossible movie is 400 million fucking dollars. That’s a lot of money to watch Tom Cruise act out his midlife crisis.)

    While we’re at it, can I talk about how tired I’m getting of blockbusters that 1) are just “part 1” of a two-parter and 2) cannot limit themselves to being a normal two-hour action movie, and keep pushing their runtimes into Classic Hollywood Epic territory?

    Because the last Mission: Impossible did both.  When the second part (the one you’re referring to) comes out, it’s going to add up to one five or six hour movie.  For God’s sake, this genre isn’t supposed to be Lawrence of Arabia.

  116. 116.

    Eyeroller

    @Steve LaBonne: I’d heard the name but didn’t know who he was. Wikipedia says he is a “political data scientist.”  I wondered whether he was yet another Obama alum — those guys have been at the vanguard of the “replace Biden” movement — at first he seemed too young but he joined the 2012 campaign at age 20.  So yeah, another O-boy.

  117. 117.

    Omnes Omnibus

    This isn’t about the RNC, but it is about Milwaukee.  This is a really good non-commercial radio station.

  120. 120.

    WereBear

    @Chris: I noticed this tendency in junky thriller series, which don’t bother making each book an actual book, just a series of cliffhangers like the children’s serials of yesteryear.

  125. 125.

    Eyeroller

    @Steve LaBonne: Oh yes, there are a lot of rumors.  People get mad, though, if one throws shade at Obama and Pelosi.  Of course since so much really is just rumor and gossip, we can’t know for sure what’s going on.  One thing that did occur to me is that both of them would be very plugged in to the big-donor network.

  128. 128.

    Steve LaBonne

    @UncleEbeneezer: All I can give you is the information that it was the Wall Street Journal (which I don’t read) that outed the private polls and their source.

  129. 129.

    NeenerNeener

    I’m guessing the Crowdstrike problem is what has my Wayfair order stuck in North Carolina. Bummer.

  130. 130.

    moonbat

    @The Thin Black Duke: I predict D&W will take off, but the suits will ignore why. Reynolds and his writers and directors all work super closely together together to make something people haven’t seen 20 times already.

    I must be the only comic book fan who remembers how boring the whole cycle of origin story, to greatest villain challenge evah! to death, to not really dead! became after a while.

  131. 131.

    WereBear

    @Eyeroller: I also think they can panic just like anyone else.

    I don’t think this was some kind of “let’s throw the election to Trump,” and I have yet to see SOMETHING that sources anyone starting it.

    DC will train you to react to the MSM as helplessly as a pithed frog. So I’m told.

  132. 132.

    Ken

    @Chris: While we’re at it, can I talk about how tired I’m getting of blockbusters that 1) are just “part 1” of a two-parter and 2) cannot limit themselves to being a normal two-hour action movie

    Can we extend that to books? I am getting rather tired of browsing the “new arrivals” section and seeing a six-hundred-page tome subtitled “The Stone Crag Unicorn Trilogy, Book One”. I want to read a story without worrying if I (or the author!) will live to finish it.

  133. 133.

    Captain C

    @WereBear:

    This is indeed how I took it, but don’t you realize we can now easily create CEOs?

    Think of the $millions$ saved.

    I always wondered, back when they were cutting jobs by the thousands in the ’90s and ’00s, claiming that those jobs could be done cheaper overseas, why some stockholders didn’t demand that their $50 million CEO who was basically looting the company for short term numbers and his bonuses couldn’t be replaced by a competent European or Asian CEO who would gladly do a bang-up job for less than a tenth of that.  Yes, I know, captured boards and all that, but still…

  134. 134.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Kay: The DNC is soon. That is the most direct equivalent. Not everything requires an immediate direct response. Particularly not mindless blather.

  135. 135.

    Captain C

    @UncleEbeneezer: I hope this is true, and I hope at least some of the people with subsequent egg on their face will grow both a clue and a spine.  Or retire.

  137. 137.

    Ken

    @moonbat: I predict D&W will take off, but the suits will ignore why.

    They’ll come up with some bogus explanation, and start greenlighting treatments based on that.  “Must be because Deadpool had a partner… Coming Summer 2025: Deadpool and Barbie!”

  138. 138.

    Chris

    @WereBear:

    Say what you want about Lucas, he knew spectacle very well.

    I would never saw the prequels were as good as the originals, but I remember some pretty fantastic action sequences there.  Even the podrace, as pointless as it might’ve been, is still a cool sequence, even for people like me who don’t get much out of car racing.

  139. 139.

    Dave

    @WereBear: And the big donors who have their ears are probably even more likely to panic then Joe and Jill Random.  When you are used to having events work out for you and people always reinforcing your opinions (earnestly or not it doesn’t really matter) there is a tendency to utterly lose it when something seems to wrong.

  141. 141.

    Captain C

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Do you think I should call McGovern and my senators too. They have been good on this.

    Absolutely.  That kind of tangible support gives them all the more reason to keep being good.

  142. 142.

    Ken

    @moonbat: Yeah, I was joking about the remake, but it could be done. We’ve got under a minute of these people getting on and off the train; who were they, and what happened after this moment? Follow a couple of those stories.

  143. 143.

    moonbat

    @Ken: Exactly! It’s like that cartoon of a line of students copying off the paper of the student sitting next to them. By the time it gets to the last kid, it’s absolute gibberish.

  144. 144.

    Captain C

    So, serious question for the lawyer and media ethicist types here.  If Biden wins his second term, would he be legally and morally OK to just revoke the FTFNYT’s press credentials and boot them from the White House press pool on the grounds that they’ve basically made themselves into Trump Pravda?  Because unless I see nearly 200 stories in the next week on how TCFG is both dangerously unhinged and falling apart, it’ll look like not only their thumb but their whole bare ass is on the scales.

  146. 146.

    Eyeroller

    @WereBear: Donors donors donors.

    They are/were both massive fundraisers.  It’s probably hard to turn up that kind of money without the whales, especially if one is no longer in office (Obama) or does not have a direct national constituency (Pelosi).  Pelosi in particular seemed to be disturbed well before there could have been any polling reaction to the disasterdebate and I’ll bet some donors were calling.

  147. 147.

    WereBear

    @Dave: There’s definitely something off in this plan to let zillionaires reshape society as they wish.

    Sometimes you get Hearst Castle. Sometimes you get John du Pont.

  148. 148.

    Chris

    @Steve LaBonne:

    @schrodingers_cat: Everybody’s gotta eat, and being a charlatan is his line of work. I put most of the blame on the idiots in the party who think he’s someone to listen to.

    I just wish more charlatans would bilk their side instead of ours.  Heck, their side has more money.

  149. 149.

    Eyeroller

    @Dave: I’m betting that some of these donors never liked Biden anyway.  Pelosi may have a lot of techbro donor contacts (not necessarily crypto) given the area she has represented for so long. They don’t want regulations on AI, for one thing.

  151. 151.

    Captain C

    @Steve LaBonne: Obama has an extremely spotty hiring record.  Biden was a fantastic hire, as were Clinton and Kerry for Secretary of State.  Some of his others…weren’t.  And some of them have proven to be mealy-mouthed corporate centrist stooges (looking at you Dave Axelrod).

  152. 152.

    Another Scott

    @WereBear:

    Mastodon.social:

    LittleAlex
    @[email protected]

    Too funny: In 2010 McAffe caused a global IT meltdown due to a faulty update. CTO at this time was George Kurtz. Now he is CEO of #crowdstrike

    ZDNet.com
    [image]

    ZDNET · Apr 21, 2010
    Defective McAfee update causes worldwide meltdown of XP PCs

    By Ed Bott

    Something something people are policy!

  154. 154.

    different-church-lady

    Can I just ask why we’re running the entire goddamned world on top of a consumer general-purpose operating system?

  161. 161.

    Eyeroller

    @different-church-lady: Some of this is due to Microsoft’s Azure servers being bricked, and they run the server-grade version of Windows.  My coworker said he was unable to use his XBox due to the Azure servers being down.

  162. 162.

    Chris

    @WereBear:

    @Chris: I noticed this tendency in junky thriller series, which don’t bother making each book an actual book, just a series of cliffhangers like the children’s serials of yesteryear.

    Television, too.

    I’m convinced that a big part of the reason the NCIS and Law & Order franchises have endured for so preposterously long is that they refuse to do this.  They stubbornly cling to the twentieth century television model: an episode every week, and a complete story in each episode.  Sure, the seasons might end on cliffhangers, but that still leaves you with at least twenty complete stories every year.

    And it turns out a lot of people like the twentieth century model!

  163. 163.

    M31

    @moonbat:

    I am sick to freakin’ death of Batman and Spiderman.

    Please, dog, give us something else!

    ok hear me out, there’s this bat who gets bitten by a radioactive spider, and this spider that gets bitten by a radioactive bat, and at first they’re at odds but they team up for the best buddy movie EVAR to protect Gotham from the dreaded ManSpider

  164. 164.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @moonbat: I will say Batman and Spiderman get way more play than others. I don’t complain, though, because they have consistently provided some of the best offerings.

    One issue, I think, is people tiring of “origin” stories.  Those get stuck seemingly in one gear.

  165. 165.

    Captain C

    @WereBear: Oh, god, I’d forgotten about Charter School Standardized Test Duncan.  Ugh.  It’s like he did some of his hiring by listening to the worst NPR and Oprah guests and saying, “Hey!  They’d be good for my administration!”

    ETA:  @Omnes Omnibus: too caught this particular snake.

  167. 167.

    Ken

    @Another Scott: In 2010 McAffe caused a global IT meltdown due to a faulty update. CTO at this time was George Kurtz. Now he is CEO of #crowdstrike

    So he’s done “happenstance” and “coincidence”.  Next time we get to say “enemy action”.

  168. 168.

    Kay

    REP. POCAN (D-Wisconsin) REP. VEASEY (D-Texas) REP. GARCIA (D-Illinois) REP. HUFFMAN (D-California) Call on Joe Biden to step out of the presidential race

     

    Veasey – Congressional Black Caucus. Bold move. Bravo.

  172. 172.

    Eyeroller

    @WereBear: Most people don’t realize this, but there is a server-grade version of Windows.  However, it does share many basic libraries with consumer Windows, so the CloudStrike bug affected all versions.

  173. 173.

    M31

    and then there’s this radioactive spider that’s bitten by another radioactive spider that was already radioactive

  174. 174.

    Dave

    @Eyeroller: Techbro’s hate them.  My brother is firmly in the tech bro group and you can see it infect his thinking even if he isn’t fully gone down that path

    They seem to universally dismiss the extreme religious authoritarians as not real whereas your tik-tok leftist crystal chick is both real to them and an existential threat.

    They are convinced we really do have a meritocracy and to the degree we don’t it’s almost entirely because of leftist DEI type stuff and “equality of outcome” which is not really a thing anywhere in our society except perhaps the very top.

    Their conception of liberty is either less fleshed out than I’d expect from someone who took a philosophy 101 course or basically means exactly that THEIR liberty the unwashed masses must of course be controlled for their own good.

    A sort of millennialism/cycles of history/all is doomed attitude that doesn’t survive even a cursory examination but because they have so much wealth and influence may become self fulfilling (that last one really chaps my ass).

    The inability to recognize you can smart and a complete dumbass at the same time and that this absolutely applies to them; basically a total lack of epistemic humility.

  176. 176.

    moonbat

    @M31: Okay, hear me out. Bring back Cronenberg’s The Fly and in this version the teleporter is nuclear powered and Boom! radioactive Flyman to fight radioactive ManSpider!

  177. 177.

    zhena gogolia

    Anyone wants to bitch and/or moan about TFG, the RNC, and last night’s debacle: Please check the post immediately before this one. You can work out your feelings there, and leave this post for the sane people rest of us, okay?

  178. 178.

    Tenar Arha

    @WereBear: I can highly recommend The Big Sick, the 2017 movie that made Kumail Nanjiani more widely known, than as a comedian. I laughed, I cried, I can’t believe he got Holly Hunter & Ray Romano, Bo Burnham, & Zoe Kazan.

    just watched it, because I’ve been on a FilmJoy ie Movies with Mikey deliberately entered rabbit hole since last Saturday or Sunday. It’s just a really well done romantic comedy, with strong emotional content. It’s how Kumail met his wife, how she got sick, and how he met her parents. Which is probably why I never watched it in 2017, that year my father was dying or recently dead. I’d cry at the drop of a hat, & anything with dads in it was just—way too many feelings, and I also I had to be really careful restricting anything partially set in a hospital, or dealing with sickness, even if it was made clear it had a happy ending.

    But I digress, it’s a great little movie. Here’s the FilmJoy on it in the 2017 round up.

  179. 179.

    Soprano2

    @WereBear: I found him last night sitting on the landscaping at the house two doors down from us. I think he had been under their house because the crawl space vent behind where he was sitting was partly open. I’d looked for him once before, and had been calling and calling him. He was down to 4lb 6 oz at the vet this morning. He was 8 lbs a month ago!

  180. 180.

    WereBear

    @Chris: That’s why you have a central “pod” of characters who roam the earth and meet interesting people.

    But arcs are great, too. We still rewatch Sopranos and The Wire.

  181. 181.

    Kay

    @zhena gogolia:

    How many clap louder/dear leader threads do you need?

    I’m sorry reality keeps intruding on this fantasy site. I’ll stop and then you can have 300 comments about “psyops” – like a warm bath of groupthink.

    Rep Veasey isn’t willing to gaslight the public. He’s right. It’s dishonorable to do that.

  182. 182.

    moonbat

    @Tenar Arha: I loved that little movie. I also love how he allowed his X-Files freak flag fly. ;)

    *sigh* I miss Amer Khalid

    (I hope I remembered the proper spelling of their name.)

  184. 184.

    Dave

    @Chris: It does work best for the set up you find in a Murder She wrote type of show.  Works well for supernatural mystery type stuff but they seem to have a bad habit of always needing to escalate by the time your protaganists have killed Satan and God it doesn’t leave a lot of room for future stories.

    Also why I’m entirely over the world/galaxy/universe/mulitverse are under threat.  It’s genuinely ok if all you are trying to save is town or city or classroom.

  186. 186.

    Kay

    How many forbidden subjects are we up to on this site? Is any actual “news” acceptable? No Gaza, no polling, no mention of the continuing defections from the “clap louder” caucus in Congress…

    Pretty much down to pet pixs.

  187. 187.

    Chris

    @WereBear:

    I’m still convinced that my youth in the nineties and 2000s was the golden age of television because it was right in that sweet spot between episodic and serialized TV.  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Stargate SG-1 (still two of my faves) had long-term story arcs (and shorter term story arcs) and character arcs that rewarded watching the series in order.  But they still knew how to write episodes well enough that you could put any random one on and get up from the couch 45 minutes later having watched a complete story and not a trailer for the next story, and if you were trying to get caught up on reruns you could do that without getting hopelessly confused.

  188. 188.

    WereBear

    @Chris: And now… it’s a lost art? Please.

    Suits are butthurt about the strike and will now hire non-writers. And when the bosses lose their jobs over it, things will change.

  189. 189.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Kay: I and The Squad are with you on Israel/Palestine.  Our opinions on other fraught matters right now might also be worth considering.

  190. 190.

    Torrey

    @Ken: ​
      If you prefer the British version, you really should go with the actual song. (Which, by the way, is a pleasant little ditty designed to lift the spirits–especially if you don’t have to live under the reign of most of these folks.)

  191. 191.

    Chris Johnson

    @Eyeroller: I mean, I worked for Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire. Turns out Bernie is completely solid and an unshakable ally of Joe Biden and the democracy he stands for. But some of the other people who worked for Bernie are sketchy as fuck, and I was there to see them.

    I see no reason to doubt that Barack Obama is completely solid and an unshakable ally of Joe Biden who stood by him for YEARS… and that the occasional other person who got swept up in Obama’s historic presidency is sketchy as fuck.

    Anytime you have a wild groundswell political movement you’re going to have interested parties embedding people in there to twist it in a desired direction.

  194. 194.

    moonbat

    @Chris Johnson: This. This. A thousand times this.

    I’ve said it before, but what the hell: the O Bros are desperate to remain relevant and have forgotten that they only worked for a once in a lifetime candidate. That however did not make them once in a lifetime political savants.

  195. 195.

    Soprano2

    @Another Scott: Wow, that cannot be a coincidence. Our database is still down, I check it periodically because it often comes up 15 or 20 minutes before IS e-mails us to tell us it’s back up. I’m not kidding, 95% of my job is stuff I do on it.

  196. 196.

    Cacti

    @Kay: Obama wouldn’t have wasted a moment jumping all over that stream of consciousness nuttery from the R candidate.

    But Joe is content to just hang out at his beach house in Rehoboth.

  197. 197.

    Chris

    @Dave:

    Also why I’m entirely over the world/galaxy/universe/mulitverse are under threat.  It’s genuinely ok if all you are trying to save is town or city or classroom.

    I think people who do this miss the whole point of having a huge world/galaxy/universe/multiverse for your characters to play in.  It’s not so that you can have a bigger setting to threaten and raise stakes with, it’s so that you can tell a million different little adventures in a million different settings.  Think of them as RPG settings.

    Star Wars was full of this when the expanded universe exploded in the nineties; you had the “main” story following the movie characters’ stories, but you also had a million books and short stories and anthologies telling you stories about a bunch of different people having a bunch of different kinds of adventures.

  199. 199.

    Eyeroller

    @Chris Johnson: Then I wish Obama would come out with some strong public support rather than allowing all these whispers and rumors to percolate and just make vague comments that don’t clearly deny them.

  200. 200.

    Chris Johnson

    @Captain C: Biden’s already cutting them dead informally.

    As far as dealing with obvious treachery from the NYT etc. you have to take the broad view: newspapers have been failing for decades now, as the age of the internet and cellphone took over their place in the world. That can’t go back. So the important thing is for the Biden team to understand what they’re looking at. You can’t make errors in an attempt to appease the unappeasable, but it’s a public relations problem, not a policy problem.

    So in the absence of proof that these fuckers are literally being directed by the Kremlin (and we’re not formally in a state of war), you cannot simply punish them, you have to work around them.

    And if you DO have proof of exactly that, you still don’t publically punish them. Instead, you have private knowledge that they are compromised, so you privately apply counter-pressure. That’s how the Beltway works, that’s how reality works.

    You never get to issue the thundering denunciation and then have the cheering public go yay. It’s all about pressure and counter-pressure, and in recent weeks, LOTS of mainstream media has acted like Russia had a gun to their heads, very likely because Russia has never been this desperate to drag their guy across the finish line however unlikely that may be.

    Biden’s team are actively helping Ukraine fight Russia, you think they don’t know this? It is surely a kind of confirmation that their tactics are working really well.

  201. 201.

    Cacti

    @Kay:  BJ is full of commenters in the Biden age cohort.  No real surprise that the level of denial and defensiveness is so strong on the topics of lost vitality and cognition.

    And as Ice Cube once wrote:  Regret it? Nope. Said it? Yep.

  202. 202.

    Ken

    @Torrey: Cool, thanks. Is there a UK equivalent of the “Fifty Nifty United States” song, to help you remember the counties of England? (Although I understand there are certain technical difficulties with coming up with the list in the first place.)

  203. 203.

    Kay

    @Eyeroller:

    Do you wonder why he hasn’t? Hmmm. A mystery. Psyop, do you think?

    He hasn’t endorsed Biden because he’s working behind the scenes to get him to withdraw. He’s done everything but hit you over the head with it. Obama’s the best political talent of his generation. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

  204. 204.

    moonbat

    @Soprano2: ​
    I’ve tried to keep my critiques of modern music under control because I recognize in myself the “These young whipper snappers don’t know what’s what!” (shakes fist at cloud) tendency.

    But I swear to god, they’re stealing from the older stuff because it has things like, I don’t know, melodies! Cool bass lines! Interesting vocalists!

    I live on a busy street with a lot of cruising traffic on it and the cars with the tops or windows down blasting out the tunes as they slide by are not playing new stuff. They’re playing stuff I recognize. Go figure.

  207. 207.

    Chris Johnson

    @Eyeroller: That would be dumb. All they have to do is keep doing the same thing they’re doing, because it’s not based on anything from him anyhow.

    And then he looks weak and out of control, unable to redirect the narrative.

    Politically the dumbest thing Obama can do is jump around going ‘now see here!’ when it won’t change any of the media stories, except that they’ll say he protests too much and then carry on exactly as they are doing. Politically, he’s gotta ignore them and work behind the scenes.

  208. 208.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Cacti: I’m 40 and I think you’re full of shit.  As I keep pointing out; in terms of elected people, it is mostly the younger set who is standing with Biden. Particularly women of color, but that group seems to be transcending the age trend too, they’re supporting him at all ages.

  209. 209.

    Cacti

    @The Kropenhagen Interpretation:  Check Biden’s approval ratings with young voters and circle back, mmmkay?

    As for the voters of color demanding Biden must stay, that one’s coming straight out of your arse. The polling shows that they’re split, but would be fine with Harris as a replacement.

    At this point I believe he’s purposely minimizing her public appearances because of how badly she outshines him in person.

    But keep clapping. It’s all probably just a psyop from the elites. 😒

  211. 211.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Cacti: I’m talking about public statements from elected officials, which I said very explicitly and you chose to ignore. The letter from 1400 prominent black women we were circulating last night. The Squad.

    Polls don’t vote and the voting says voters support Biden.

  212. 212.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    @Viva BrisVegas:

    I can see this story pushing Trump’s performance off the front pages for a few days, after which the speech will be old news.

    There’s many ways that you can describe Trump, but unlucky is not one of them.

    Comes with Trump being the anti-Christ.

  213. 213.

    Cacti

    @The Kropenhagen Interpretation: And I’m talking about the voters that he’ll need to win the election. His disapproval numbers with young voters are in the 70s. They don’t want to be genocidin’ with Biden. Extensive polling of all black voters across all demographics, not just 1,400 “prominent” ones says that they are fine with Harris as a replacement.

    Which part of this isn’t registering with you?

  214. 214.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Cacti: Harris isn’t fine with Harris as a replacement under these circumstances. How is that not registering with you?

    Man, it is so painful having this conversation with you remembering what a completely turd you were when there was any minor criticism of HRC 8 years ago. Really, you’ve always been turd.

    ETA: Way to excuse yourself, by the way, for not engaging my actual argument, then continue avoiding it.

  216. 216.

    Trivia Man

    @Ken: Best of all: even a 10% reduction in cost over a CEO salary + parachute is $$$!!!

    Wont someone please think of the poor shareholders? AI CEO is a good cost savings project – 10% reduction YOY for the next 5 years minimum!

  219. 219.

    Soprano2

    @Eyeroller: That could be why the cloud based database we use hasn’t been fixed yet. I’m thinking now it won’t be fixed until I come back on Monday. *sigh

  222. 222.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: I actually have respect for people who are willing to come out with this publicly. What I’ve hated hated hated is the drip drip drip of “anonymous sources” who were too cowardly to be public with their doubts. That’s poison.

    ETA – can you blame people for wanting to talk about something else? Some do, I know I do!

  223. 223.

    Soprano2

    @moonbat: But I swear to god, they’re stealing from the older stuff because it has things like, I don’t know, melodies! Cool bass lines! Interesting vocalists!

    You can come sit by me. I miss songs that actually have a melody and tell a story or talk about something other than wanting to get up in that thing. *sigh* I hate to be open about not liking rap or hip-hop because people will accuse you of being racist. That stuff is its own art form, but to me it’s not music! They’re not singing, they’re chanting with music and a beat behind them. IMHO it’s made it harder for real music to succeed.

  225. 225.

    Eyeroller

    @Soprano2: If your system runs a CloudStrike client you won’t be able to do anything.  CloudStrike seems to have pushed out an update to its server (that runs on Azure) that won’t talk to the Windows client.  So anytime you try to do something that would trigger a communication with the server, it will freeze or crash or something.  It’s antivirus, among other features, so lots of activities might cause it to try to initiate a scan.

  226. 226.

    Tenar Arha

    @Dave: I hope you can pry him away from that a bit, for your sake. I know it’s tough to handle a brother who somehow managed to grow up in the same household where their values have obviously diverged in adulthood, and you wonder why, what happened, or is it simply enculturation and birth order? Different experiences at summer camp and college?

  228. 228.

    Dave

    @Tenar Arha: He’s not particularly far gone and some of it is that there is dominant cultural paradigm on the West Coast that can be a bit stifling and illiberal.  So the sins of the modern left are amplified (and it’s very hard to make the point that the media is incredibly conventional with a veneer of social liberalism as opposed to actually liberally biased in most areas) and the excesses of what counts as the right are minimized or don’t seem as immediate or real.

    And tech people are super susceptible to being subject to the online fever dream where it is all to easy to begin to view the person on tik tok screaming at me that eating sushi is cultural appropriation as ubiquitous.

    The other challenge is he is genuinely very intelligent and it’s very easy to fall into hubris there.

    Mostly I think it’s a bit of myopia combined the sort of reflexive libertarianism of the tech set especially once you are fairly well off.  He doesn’t have a particularly ugly version of it and I do try to be open to his points as opposed to a one upmanship gotcha.

    Most aggravating belief he has absorbed is the AI will kill us all but since someone will make it some day it might as well be me; whereas I think there are a lot of unexamined assumptions included in that conclusion.

  229. 229.

    ChrisSherbak

    Thank you! Much needed restorative.

    p.s. one note to the otherwise excellent campaign ad – I may have missed it but I wish they had added some inclusion of immigrants in the ‘why are we doing this freedom stuff?’ listicle. My grandparents were immigrants and I’m working because of them and what they hoped for this country, along with working for all those coming to our shores someday “yearning to breathe free.” Dems have a patriotic message and we need to hammer it home just as hard as the GOP flag wavers who brought down Grindr in Milwaukee.

Comments are closed.