… *Much* more will have been said, than done — it’s a Trump trademark! Took that graph from this story:
BREAKING: Federal judge blocks Elon Musk’s DOGE team from accessing Social Security Administration personal information for now. https://t.co/VQJ7LN7iTQ
— The Associated Press (@AP) March 20, 2025
A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from Social Security systems that hold personal data on millions of Americans, calling their work there a “fishing expedition.”
The order also requires the team to delete any personally identifiable data in their possession.
U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander in Maryland found that the team got broad access to sensitive information at the Social Security Administration to search for fraud with little justification…
The order does allow DOGE staffers to access to data that’s been redacted or stripped of anything personally identifiable, if they undergo training and background checks.
“To be sure, rooting out possible fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the SSA is in the public interest. But, that does not mean that the government can flout the law to do so,” Hollander wrote.
The Trump administration says DOGE is targeting waste in the federal government. Musk has been focused on Social Security as an alleged hotbed of fraud, describing it as a “ ponzi scheme ” and insisting that reducing waste in the program is an important way to cut government spending.
The ruling, which could be challenged on appeal, comes in a lawsuit filed by labor unions, retirees and the advocacy group Democracy Forward. They argued that DOGE access violates privacy laws and presents serious information security risks. The lawsuit included a declaration from a recently departed Social Security official who saw the DOGE team sweep into the agency said she is deeply worried about sensitive information being exposed…
Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, called the ruling a “major win for working people and retirees across the country.”
Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, said that “the court recognized the real and immediate dangers of DOGE’s reckless actions and took action to stop it.”…
Hollander, 75, who is based in Baltimore and was nominated by President Barack Obama, is the latest judge to consider a DOGE related case.
The team has drawn nearly two dozen lawsuits. Earlier this week another Maryland judge found that DOGE’s dismantling of United States Agency for International Development was likely unconstitutional.
While other judges have raised questions about DOGE’s sweeping cost-cutting efforts, they have not always agreed any risks are imminent enough to block the team from government systems.
Too many lives and too many systems will be broken, but let’s not panic just yet.
On The Road – arrieve – South Georgia, part 3
Spanky
Who’s enforcing all of these court orders?
Jeffg166
Krugman on the mood in Europe.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/is-the-sleeping-giant-awakening
Baud
Do what you can, but we’re out of power so don’t take responsibility for anything they do. My motto, at least.
Spanky
Calling Geminid. Reuters reports:
Spanky
Other tidbits reported by Reuters:
lowtechcyclist
@Spanky:
Nobody, of course. Just whatever reluctance Trump still has to openly defy a court order. I don’t expect that to hold up much longer.
On a totally unrelated note, if you’re looking for something to do tonight or tomorrow night, the New Direction Community Theatre is performing a play called “Crossing Over” tonight and tomorrow night at 7pm at the Long Beach Community Center in St. Leonard. My wife and I saw it last weekend and really enjoyed it. It’s a comedy about supposed psychics in a house where a murder supposedly took place, trying to communicate with the participants.
lowtechcyclist
@Spanky:
Good! At least some people who still want Teslas will buy used instead of new, which means Tesla, Inc. will sell fewer cars. Keep knocking down that stock price – maybe even take it all the way down into realistic territory, which would probably be about $10 per share.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I picked up my first set of hearing aids at CostCo yesterday. I just put them in for today. I hear my hair brushing against the mic. Supposedly, if I wear them, my brain gets used to ignoring sounds like that, the way it ignores the sight of your nose.
They sync to an app on my phone. From there I can turn them up or down, and set them to pick up general noise or just what’s coming from the direction I’m looking in. That last one is for places like restaurants where I might want to shut out the background noise so I can talk to people
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@lowtechcyclist:
Keep knocking down that stock price – maybe even take it all the way down into realistic territory, which would probably be about $10 per share.
I was back east last week and while on the Jersey Turnpike saw a Lucid. Don’t see many but then again one doesn’t see a lot of Lamborghini’s either and each brand runs in the same, very expensive price range.
Then looked up Lucid’s stock price: $2.50/share last week.
Just now looked up Rivian’s share because while still an expensive brand and hemorrhages money, it’s not a niche vehicle per se plus they build electric delivery vans for Amazon: a shade over $10/share.
GM’s around $50/share and if Tesla can get down to that, now we’re talking!
Their sales report at the end of the month will be interesting because that’s when GM will release their quarterly sales and it would be great if Tesla models dropped behind.
Soprano2
I heard the press secretary complaining about how FFOTUS has the most court challenges of his EO’s of any president. I wish someone had said to her “Yes, that’s because he’s issued the most illegal EO’s of any president, so of course they’re being challenged in court”.
Soprano2
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Tesla stock is way, way, way overpriced for what it is.
MazeDancer
Still can’t get over the Paul Weiss surrender.
I think of them as a Dem Bastion. Jeh Johnson and Loretta Lynch were partners.
A Ghost to Most
Talkers talk. Doers do.
JML
went back to work yesterday for the first time after surgery. totally fried afterwards. Hoping today is a bit better? (It’s not helped by the fact that work is a shit show, my office has become super toxic and I want out) I took the full 2 weeks of recovery time recommended by my surgeon, but still don’t feel up to speed. Sigh.
You know what would make me feel better? WI voters destroying Brad Schimel. GOD I hate that guy.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Soprano2:
Somebody here recently called it a “meme stock” for good reason. It’s still over where it was a year ago so the invisible hand of the market still has some work to do. ;)
The company, and Edolph, still treat the org as a meme stock well after it’s turned into a viable automaker. As such, they have no clue how to run is as a viable automaker. That in itself is another reason their sales are tanking.
Many of us in Bolt world have turned into EV geeks so follow the industry writ large rather closely although usually from a technical perspective.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@JML: Take it easy on yourself. Recovery from surgery takes longer than you think.
WereBear
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I really hope that works for you. I know how socially awful it is to have hearing issues.
Helen Keller said, “Blindness cuts me off from things. Deafness cuts me off from people.”
NotMax
@comrade scotts agenda of rage
Tesla primed to learn the invisible hand has a middle finger?
;)
prostratedragon
Borowitz, of course:
Bonus: The Ossipov Balalaika Orchestra, Vol. III
Matt McIrvin
@JML: When I got my knee replaced, I tried to get back to work as early as I could (and it was still deep in COVID shutdowns so I was still working 100% remotely and didn’t have to go to an office–should have been as easy as possible to do that).
My productivity was shot for months. To the point that it became a problem. Couldn’t get my mind to focus on anything other than physical recovery. I wasn’t really at 100% for a year.
TBone
Three weeks ago feels like forever:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/letitia-james-celebrates-legal-win-over-elon-musks-doge-keep-fighting/ar-AA1zzc25
“Keep fighting.”
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WereBear: I had some minor age related hearing loss, but last summer, I woke up one morning with my left ear feeling like I just got off a plane. It’s felt that way ever since. Hitchkiker on here said the same thing happened to them.
Finally, the ENT guy said I probably should just get hearing aids. So that’s what I did.
Suzanne
Cars are such a image/fashion-influenced purchase. It blows my mind that Elmo is dumb enough to damage his image amongst the sector of the car-purchasing market that actually has the money and desire to own an EV. He’s obviously hoping that a rich MAGA market arises to take its place. Good luck with that, asshole. Being good-looking and cool has been left-coded for a while.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@TBone: I’m really infuriated that I have to care whether Elon Musk doesn’t like a judge’s order. Unelected and not in charge of anything, says Trump. And yet, I do have to care
Soprano2
@Dorothy A. Winsor: It’s the wealthy person’s response to anything they don’t like – “that’s illegitimate, get it out of my way”. They don’t have a concept of there being something they can’t do or can’t have.
TBone
@Dorothy A. Winsor: it’s our job description because, as always, if we do not do it, no one will.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: There is a rich MAGA market for them; it’s just not as large. I know committed Elon fans who were on the waiting list to buy a Cybertruck. Don’t know if they ever took possession of them.
Melancholy Jaques
@Spanky:
And how will we know if they are being obeyed?
Baud
@Suzanne:
Ever since I crawled out of the womb.
Suzanne
Saw an interesting discussion yesterday — not here — about tattoos/piercings on women specifically being left-coded, and conservatives just loathing it. That’s interesting to me. Tattoos and piercings on men are extremely bipartisan, IME. Remember the meme about “Men want debt-free virgins without tattoos”?
I have long suspected that the aesthetics that each side is adopting are an aspect of our polarization, and that much of why people have positive or negative views of the parties is because of our views of those parties’ members that we know IRL….. much less so about the actual electeds. Basically dumb popularity contest image stuff. I have a feeling that this dumb style-based stuff deeply influences some people about who they want to be associated with, even in something as extremely loose as political alignment.
Baud
End of a reddit comment
MagdaInBlack
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I find it helps if I flip that: I don’t give a rats red ass if elon doesn’t like the judge’s order. It’s a court order. Deal with it, elno.
😉
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Women with unnaturally-colored hair are a huge trigger for right-wing guys for some reason. They want bottle blondes with a lot of cosmetic surgery, not a “natural” look at all, but blue or purple hair disgusts them.
It’s some kind of tribal feedback loop where the fact that they don’t like that then means that women getting that color hair signals that the women are not trying to attract them, and they just get madder. But the loop had to start somewhere.
Geminid
@Spanky: There are big demonstrations happening in Istanbul over Imamoglu’s detention; in Ankara and other major cities as well.
Ragip Soylu has some interesting commentary on his Twitter account. Soylu is Istanbul bureau chief for London-based Middle East Eye and they might post an article by him.
I’m not sure these demonstrations will have much effect. Imamoglu is the CHP party’s top politician and was expected to their presidential candidate in 2028, but while CHP is the largest opposition party it’s not the only one. A lot might depend on the attitude of the,Kurdish-based DEM party, which is the second largest opposition party.
DEM may be more interested in the peace opening between the government and PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan in which DEM has played a key role. They might not want to sacrifice that progress for Imamoglu’s sake.
But as Ragip Soylu points out, these are the largest anti-Erdogan demonstrations in 12 years so we might not know where this is going for a few days. And Imamoglu could be released this weekend in which csse this might just turn into a protracted court battle.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Well, yeah. The size of the market matters. And a Cybertruck is useless except as a style statement now. It’s no longer an aspirational purchase for as many people. That’s damaging to a brand like that. Well, we’ll see. Usually, companies that produce aspirational products, as opposed to mass-market brands or commodities, are incredibly risk-averse with their image.
But….. please proceed, Elon.
u
@lowtechcyclist: Yes, good. Although Elon is so obscenely wealthy that he could lose 99% of his wealth and still be a multi-billionaire. Maybe a plummeting Tesla stock price would hurt his tender feelings a little bit though.
MagdaInBlack
@Matt McIrvin: Oh, let me count the ways women’s appearance is and always has been policed, by both men and other women.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I saw an immigrant to the US talking about this kind of thing on Mastodon recently, and observing that even she felt isolated from the administration’s totalitarian moves by the federated nature of US government. She said that Europeans, say, wondering why we’re not all in the streets breaking things don’t get that there is no singular “the government” you have to deal with here. There’s the local government, the state government, and the federal government, and if the federal government goes insane it won’t affect you until the moment you have to deal with some aspect of it, and then you may realize how far gone it is.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Oh my God, yes. “Your annoying niece at Oberlin with the blue hair and the nose ring” is loathed by the right wing and honestly, this kind of misogyny is, IMO, one of the biggest factors in our polarization.
Women existing in a world where they aren’t conforming to my tastes and preferences! HORROR.
WereBear
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Alternately, we put Mr WereBear on a low oxalate diet for kidney stones… kidney function improved. We’re both still on it, because that wasn’t all.
His upsetting hearing distortions went away (he’s a musician.) The same crystals that make kidney stones can form in other parts of the body. When I tried it, the arthritis in my hands shrank to a shadow, now many days with no pain at all.
It would be wrong not to share this information with a friend. It is a medically approved therapeutic diet. Blew Mr WereBear’s mind!
gene108
@Suzanne:
There are plenty of rich MAGA’s out there. Outside of a few buying Wankpanzers, they are not the typical EV buyers.
Using the latest styles usually doesn’t appeal to conservatives, who dislike change.
@Suzanne:
I’ve seen bunches of comments online by what I assume are conservative men bitching about women getting tattoos and piercings, and how the past used to better because women didn’t have tattoos.
Comments have a really creepy controlling stalker vibe with these men wanting to control how a woman dresses, and appears to the public.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Were you the one saying a while back that the fat-acceptance movement being coded left had a huge polarizing effect on men? I also think it was a huge deal that kind of went under the radar. Women in ads and such are no longer as uniformly rail-thin as they were, say, back in the 1990s, and it seems to have the same kind of rage-triggering effect for meatheads as that of interracial couples in Facebook ads.
Suzanne
@gene108:
Disagree. Conservatives are often very style-conscious. Those $90K extended-cab pickups and boat-size SUVs are absolutely style statements. Those blonde highlights and black eyeliner and orange nails are 100% style statements. Exurban McMansions with fake stone and “faux wood beams” are style statements.
But they’re different style statements, different aspirations.
Ohio Mom
@JML: I don’t know what kind of surgery you had but it can take months to get back to feeling 100%. It’s a vague memory now but it took me something like three months to feel strong again after my mastectomy.
Try to eat lots of protein, your body has lots of knitting itself back together to do. And cut yourself lots of slack, for example, too tired to cook, order out. Say No to anything you can say No to.
And if anything seems hinky with your body, complain to your doctor. That is their job, to take calls from you.
You’ll feel better eventually, good luck in hanging in there.
raven
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’ve had mine from the VA for about 7 years. I didn’t wear them during covid because I didn’t talk to anyone! I went to an event where the head of the Speech and Hearing Program at the University of Georgia had a booth. I chatted with her and she asked if I wore them all the time. I said “nah, I just wear them when I need to”! She admonished me and said what you did “you hear with your brain nit with your ears”. I have worn them all the time since them and they do help. My theory of why veterans don’t wear the VA hearing aid is that they are free and they don’t make an astounding difference so they just say the hell with it. Mine really magnify bird noises and paper rustling but I have gotten used to those sounds.
Melancholy Jaques
@Suzanne:
Agree about the aesthetics having more impact. Back in 2016, before I quite facebook, rage about aesthetics & other things not related to government was two to one more common than policy complaints. And all of it was the fault of Democrats & Liberals; the terms are used interchangeably.
The success of right-wing propaganda has been to convince their audience that everyone & everything that upsets or annoys them is the fault of Democrats & if they vote Republican, all those the people will be made to suffer & all those annoying things will go away.
Their votes are almost completely unconnected with things the government actually does.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Incidentally, does anyone know a reputable operation that sells the bumper stickers that roughly go “I bought it before I knew”? Asking for an extended-family member who leases a Tesla, crunched numbers, and realized that the course of action that would be least beneficial to Musk would be to keep the leased car. There are a bunch of Teslas around here, including a few doing duty as medallion yellow cabs, but something tells me that Tesla sales are going to drop off a cliff here if they haven’t already. (No Incel Caminos, though. They’re not street legal anywhere in the European Union because of how many EU safety regulations they violate.)
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: The gigantic pickup-truck front grills that you can’t see over as you mow down pedestrians… not even the most jacked-up, Dixie-flag-sporting redneck-mobiles had those back in the 1980s, and there’s been this escalation that is purely aesthetic and right-coded.
narya
@Suzanne: And I am once again reminded of Pierre Bourdieu’s book, “Distinction.” I wish I hadn’t got rid of my copy somewhere along the line. It’s fascinating to me–it’s a whole language that we’re speaking without being fully conscious of it.
no body no name
@Suzanne:
That’s generational. It’s not really the case now. Liberals are firmly not cool now. Haven’t been since the wars on video games and explicit lyrics by HRC and Liberman in the early 2000s and late 90s. Karen is a liberal white woman.
Male fitness, flashy dressing, proper grooming are firmly right coded right now. As is freaky and kinky sex. BDSM, not for prudish liberals. Even the next big sexual freakout of furies is right coded. That community has long had a fascist problem. Lots of electronic music is associated with the right as is other underground stuff.
There’s a reason the right is so much more popular online. This is not the sixties or the seventies. Liberalism is firmly the frumpy, fun hating, censorship crazed, uncool establishment. The exceptions are the DSA and Sanders + AOC types.
We’re the dorks for the younger generation.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m not opposed to protests and that may be the only thing we can do for a while. But I also think people keep telling themselves that the act of protesting in itself is some sort of a holy grail. IMHO a protest has to be part of some larger context to not end up purely performative.
frosty
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I got mine from the audiologist for a lot higher price than you spent. I hope you have better luck in restaurants- not much improvement for me.
I find that walking through dead leaves is LOUD!
Matt McIrvin
@no body no name: Fear of furries is ALSO right-coded, though. Remember the rumors about schools providing litter boxes for the furry kids?
chemiclord
@Suzanne: Ya know, I honestly don’t think he cares terribly much about his image at this point. He just wants revenge on the people who called him “weird” or support his daughter’s desire to be… well… his daughter.
He wants to be a feared sire of many manly sons, and figures he’ll get all his wealth back as people bend their knee to him.
Baud
@no body no name:
All the anti-porn stuff is coming from the right.
ETA: Also the censorship.
ETA2: But if the kids find the right cool, then so be it. I’m not the culture police.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: There’s a BIG gender split. Young women keep moving further left. The fascist cool is all boys.
…But, yeah, there’s this big anti-porn and even anti-masturbationist streak there.
I would say that on the left, liberalism is nevertheless not cool. You have to be some kind of Marxist or socialist to be cool.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, I was. Women having the audacity to think well of themselves and not be thirsty for male approval is, IMO, deeply triggering to some trash men.
Recently saw some discourse about “would you settle for a 170-lb wife?”. I will note that the median American woman is 5’-3″ and weighs right around 170 pounds. I remember reading a great piece some years ago about the sitcom depictions of average-looking, maybe overweight men with thin, beautiful wives, and how the real purpose of that is to make people think it’s normal, so that women will agree to it. I think “reduced sexual and marital access to women they find attractive” is a huge part of men’s discontent right now.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WereBear: Interesting. I looked up what foods are high in oxalates. Lots of stuff that I eat.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: As someone else said, it’s the idea that there are attractive women who aren’t trying to attract them that makes them so angry. I know conservative women who have tattoos, so it’s not just the tattoo itself.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Sure. But the reality isn’t what the commenter laid out. Obviously, people can like to themselves about the reasons they prefer the right, but I’m not going to pretend we’re worse than the right on specific issues.
p.a
It’s absolutely necessary currently, but don’t think Germany lifting military spending restrictions won’t tighten some sphincters outside of Russia too. Euros don’t have the “history, WTF is that?” attitude of ‘Murcans.
no body no name
@Suzanne:
A huge amount of this is pissing off the libs. A lot of the hottest underground music is right leaning or extreme right and the women there dye their hair and have piercings and tattoos. Freaky conservatism is huge.
Young hip conservatism is nothing like the stuff conservatism of older generations. Who’s in the hip counter culture has been largely reversed. I find a huge part of our politics who’s on what side of your generation. When you look at the younger generation the censors, the fun haters, the prudes, the lecturers, the class rat, the annoying assholes are the liberals. The wilding free spirits are the conservatives.
Go to a kink convention. The politics does a complete age flip between different generations. It’s very interesting.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I agree. That’s why I think that’s a dead end, despite the best efforts of many good people to bridge that divide.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I have also noticed that if you look at actual voting behavior, it appears to me that even the “young men going fascist!!” trend is really “young men are getting so fascist, they’re almost as fascist as 55-year-old dudes!!”
Baud
You do have the freedom to hurt more innocent people as a right winger. We’re sort of prudish in that respect.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@raven: If I’d just continued to have gradual hearing loss, I might not have been so eager for the hearing aids. But I really noticed how little I heard from my left ear and was so happy to hear on that side again.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Right. The problem is a lot of people pinned their hopes on younger generations being better people. But they’re not good enough.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@frosty: Yeah, when I put them in yesterday, the whole world was LOUD
WereBear
@gene108: Welcome to the conservative dating pool. Funny thing is, they hate each other.
No one gets treated with respect, that’s why.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: Oh yeah, they don’t want it to be socially acceptable for women to be heavier. What’s weird about that is I’ve heard all my life that men aren’t attracted to rail-thin women. *shrug*
ETA – I think this is part of their horror at transgender people. The conservatives I know on FB often post pics of gender non-conforming people who look “weird” to them, and talk about this being awful and horrifying. They really don’t like anyone who they believe doesn’t conform to how they think people should look.
raven
@frosty: Case in point.
Suzanne
@no body no name: That might be true. But there’s still a lot of “left-coded” stuff out there that is depicted as deeply cool. Street style and multiracial models and the like.
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: Truck nuts.
Chief Oshkosh
@TBone: It’s great that the decision went that way, too bad that it’s about 20 days too late to prevent actual harm.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: If you just look (not that I recommend it) at the variety of creepy comments on videos of women etc., you can tell that in fact there are a lot of dudes who don’t go for rail-thin women, and I don’t think they’re faking it, because if they were trying to signal virtue they wouldn’t be so damn gross. But there’s this political/tribal divide.
raven
@Dorothy A. Winsor: My hearing hasn’t been great for a while. I don’t know if it is from gunfire or the Grateful Dead or a combination of the two. I still can’t hear my wife and, like frosty said, they don’t overcome crowded restaurant noise but they do help in normal conditions.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah this. Thank you. If you look at the vote breakdown by age cohort….. the youngest age cohort was the most Dem-voting of them all.
Steve in the ATL
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I have that issue as well. My solution is having my wife sit to my left.
prostratedragon
PBS Ameican Experience is running a fascinating doc “Fly with Me” this week, about the history of flight attendents and their labor struggles. Much discussion of the often racialized attention paid to women’s appearence and deportment which, as you know if you remember the 50s and 60s, bled into society in general. The link is to PBS’s own ytube playlist of supporting videos. The broadcast program should be at their site or on Prime I think.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Media reports of worrying or even heartening social trends always have this “relative to what?” problem, especially if you only read the headlines.
Steve in the ATL
@raven: what are you going to do with your free time since March Madness is over?
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: Geez, just today I saw an article about a legislator in Arkansas who is introducing a bill that makes it illegal for kids to identify as anything other than human in schools!
Gretchen
@Suzanne: I think that’s a big part of why Elon is so toxic. He desperately wants to be good-looking and cool, and all the money in the world hasn’t bought that for him, and he’s furious about it. That’s why he hangs out with the DOGE boys – only 20 year olds think he’s cool, but it’s all he’s got so he takes it.
Baud
@Soprano2:
That’s cool!
Soprano2
Ding ding ding ding ding! I read once that women don’t think they’re good enough for most men, while most men think they’re good enough for all women. They’re insulted that there are women who don’t want to date them.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: The “this is the future liberals want” photo, showing what was either a trans woman or someone in drag sitting on the subway next to a woman in a burqa, just minding their own business as they rode the train?
I remember the responses from liberals being uniformly along the lines of “yeah, so?” but the original intent was that you were supposed to be just automatically, viscerally repelled.
Gretchen
@Suzanne: I think that’s a reflection of conservatives thinking that they own their women, and particularly their women’s bodies. How dare she permanently alter her body without their permission, and particularly how dare she alter her body with a tattoo before she’s even met him and gotten his permission?
Baud
Liberals weren’t cool in the 80s either. Reagan got a lot of mileage out of that. At the end of the day, however, it was regular folks who paid the price.
Shalimar
Love the Luckovich cartoon, but Elon really should have a chainsaw rather than a bat.
Baud
@Gretchen: Agree.
@Soprano2:
This is their problem with the idea of consent. Consent allows women to be completely arbitrary in who they have relations with. The right wing mind can’t accept being the losers of someone else’s arbitrary decision, especially someone below them in the social scale.
TBone
@prostratedragon: thank you, Mom was a stewardess on T.W.A. in the early 60s, and so was my first Barbie (in uniform). Fascinating in every sense for me.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/fly-with-me/
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Right. Like people should only exist in public spaces if they conform to the aesthetics they personally find acceptable.
Gretchen
@Matt McIrvin: Yes, those guys find it infuriating that a woman doesn’t care if he finds her attractive or not: he doesn’t find blue hair and tattoos attractive and tells her so, and she says “so what?” And he just can’t believe that she honestly doesn’t care. How dare she?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Steve in the ATL: My mother was deaf in her right ear, and we all learned to run around to her left side if we wanted her to hear. It was great for her when she drove the car pool. She couldn’t hear the kids rioting in the back seat.
Spanky
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Chocolate, tea, coffee. NOOOOOOOOO.
Steve in the ATL
@Shalimar: Mike Luckovich is a national treasure.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Spanky: Yeah, I know. Chocolate and coffee are two of the basic food groups.
different-church-lady
@lowtechcyclist: cents. You meant 10 cents, right?
WereBear
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I discovered there was lots of things in the American diet my body — at least now — does not have the wherewithal to handle.
In any case, monitoring food toxins and getting enough protein has been invaluable. Since my symptoms don’t fit into a neatly bundled syndrome, both my old and new GPs are reluctant to prescribe the usual drugs, which come with heavy side effects.
It turns out low oxalate can be a therapeutic diet for many conditions. Including kidney issues. After six months, Mr WereBear’s numbers jumped in double digits, getting him closer to normal. We look forward to the next test, because we want good news like that.
no body no name
@Suzanne:
Kinda and kinda not. Look at Andrew Tate. He’s a Brit with a black dad and a white mom. He’s obviously biracial from one look and he’s got high style, style, and street style. Being a hot biracial model with street style isn’t truly left coded outside of moderate liberals who desperately want that to be so.
I grew up with house music. It wasn’t really coded back then. When I go out now that crowd is just as wild and diverse but it’s often right coded especially among the beautiful and fashionable.
The situation is much more complex than what’s on Fox News or what actors the Democrats trot out. We’ve tended to ignore it’s not the situation it was back in the 60s and hasn’t been for some time now.
Matt McIrvin
@Gretchen: He’s managed to date or marry a whole succession of incredibly attractive young women, some of whom are movie actresses or rock stars, and he’s fathered fourteen children with them, which he seems to mostly have fuck-all to do with–it’s an unbelievable fantasy life by any regular-dude standards.
But he’s still mad that he’s not loved. By everyone.
WereBear
@no body no name: White and Christian STILL the default in their minds. It’s like thinking FOOD is merely Wonder Bread.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I listened to the first episode of the Know Your Enemy podcast about Elmo. They loathe him and so it’s enjoyable. I learned a great deal about his early life and his weird marriages, before he got famous, and the dude is clearly even more fucked-up than I had imagined.
WereBear
@Soprano2: You are missing the arrogance.
EVERYTHING they don’t like is wrong. That’s why contradictions mean nothing. They revolve around themselves.
And then outer appearances don’t mean anything, when they certainly did in the 60’s.
Spanky
@raven:
Ah, the info I was looking for. At this point that’s really the only place my hearing is a problem. In the quiet woods I can hear very well (but not high frequency).
Of course, ears are not all the same, etc, so I should see an ENT nonetheless.
WereBear
@p.a: To be fair, they have lots more history. And a third of ours was from Hollywood, which plays up myth and legend, in part because so many early studio owners and players were Jewish.
Because immigrants loved nickelodeons, and they knew it could be big. Bankers and artists alike scorned it from their establishment perches.
So, a lot of Hollywood was about sucking up and perpetuating conservative values. On overdrive again.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: It was aesthetically different though–the high-profile “cool” conservatives in the ’80s dressed like car salesmen or evangelical preachers (but I repeat myself).
The emphasis on the coolness of being able to tell racist jokes was there though.
Leto
Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat answers questions regarding fascism/authoritarianism/dictatorship. Wired partnered with her to answer questions from the internet about this stuff. Good refresher for some, maybe a way to pass information to normies in our orbit. 32 mins long.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Sure. Every iteration will be aesthetically different. Just like on the liberal side.
Also agree that racism and misogyny are common links through the generations.
WereBear
@Soprano2: They have to know at a single glance which one of two boxes this creature is, and how they can treat them.
Being turned on by a man’s long hair? Stuff might fall off. The all important stuff that exempts them from housework, child raising, and going to the doctor.
WereBear
@Gretchen: He can always rent a four year old.
Almost Retired
@prostratedragon: Oooh, thanks for the tip. I’m a labor and employment lawyer so this is red meat to me. Sara Nelson (flight attendants union prez) spoke at a legal conference I attended in San Francisco and she was brilliant. I wish she’d run for office.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: I think we don’t understand the role people’s disgust plays in politics. I see stuff like what you described from conservatives all the time, implying that liberals want to insist that everyone be like that. Lots of people are disgusted by that idea even if they don’t care about the actual people who look that way.
JML
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’m learning this. This is the first time I’ve had surgery since I was 8, so wasn’t entirely prepared for the experience. A relatively minor procedure that ended up being a little more extensive than normal.
It’s frustrating to get tired so easily. It’s annoying that if I don’t think my way through movement I might very well cause myself pain just by twisting or shifting “wrong’.
My surgeon was very good. The nursing team? Fan-freakin’-tastic. The anesthesiologist? Kind of a douche.
I also got my Explanation of Benefits this week, which shows how much everything cost, and how much I owe. Total cost: $32,266.21 Thankfully, I have excellent insurance, so my out of pocket was $63.21 (which included the prescriptions). But it reminded me how many people have trash health care and would have been out thousands for this surgery (which was necessary and will improve my quality of life and overall health substantially).
Omnes Omnibus
@no body no name: P.J. O’Rourke did this schtick in the Eighties.
Suzanne
@Soprano2:
This is a really good observation.
I try really hard not to stay in a liberal/left-wing media bubble — which means I sometimes read just these absolutely terrible people’s opinions, or listen to these focus group comments of people just being utter dumbasses and bigots. Disgust is definitely an underlying theme. You’re right.
Gretchen
@Soprano2: I saw another article about how a legislator in Arkansas wants to allow parents to sue a hairdresser who gives a kid a “gender affirming haircut: I was really curious how they define that. Imagine a whole state being like a 50s Catholic school, dictating how everyone should wear their hair.https://www.newsweek.com/arkansas-bill-targets-gender-nonconforming-haircuts-kids-2048152
meander
Related to the horrible Elon Musk: I was wondering the other day if any of my “sustainable” / “socially responsible” mutual funds hold Tesla stock. The answer was yes for the Domini Impact Equity Fund (DSEFX), which has 2.5% of its holdings in Tesla. One of its websites says that “impact investors seek to use their investments to create a more fair and sustainable world”. So I wrote them a letter asking to divest from Tesla. Address: Domini Funds, P.O. Box 46707, Cincinnati, OH 45246-0707
What other socially responsible funds hold Tesla? I started checking PAXWX, which used to be a small outfit called Pax World Fund, but now seems to be a collection of other mutual funds from Impax. (Yes, I’m not a very focused investor…)
Matt McIrvin
@Almost Retired: I think part of Sara Nelson’s potency as a labor leader, for better or for worse, comes from all the stuff we’ve been talking about in this thread–since she’s the leader of the flight attendants’ union, she ticks all the beauty-standard boxes we associate with conservatives. But here she is sounding like a Wobbly.
WereBear
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Milk chocolate is a better choice (dark for the antioxidants, dark for tons of oxalate, too.) Coffee is fine. Scientifically speaking, the idea of antioxidants being only in plants is untrue, and even what antioxidants ultimately do for us remains a theory which is not supported. It made my condition worse, for instance.)
There’s lots of misinformation, which is why I recommend the book Toxic Superfoods, by Sally K. Norton. She used her Master’s in Public Health from Cornell to research the matter, up to the present day.
It was top of the head for kidney specialists in Victorian times, but somewhat neglected since. So it is cutting edge stuff. And upsets some profitable enterprises.
TBone
https://www.commondreams.org/news/doge-social-security
(From yesterday)
meander
@Spanky: I’d like to see some additional anti-Tesla efforts related to parts and service. There should be robust offering of Tesla replacement parts that aren’t made by Tesla (“aftermarket”), and when you buy those instead of the OEM brand, you keep some $ out of Musk’s pocket. In most cases, there are no warranty issues to worry about (Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act).
no body no name
@Soprano2:
The incel movement was started by a woman and mostly women for a long time. The male movement was PUAs at the time. Of course that changed.
It’s still changing. The big movement now for men is just swearing off releationships and sex completely. It’s not just the right wing MGTOW movement either nor is it incels driving this. It’s plenty popular among men who do check all the boxes to get a date but do not want to anymore. It boils down to life is better without women and focusing on yourself and self improvement with your male friends is much better.
A huge reason for the natalist freakout is that young people just aren’t having sex or dating anymore. Let alone getting married. Of course the people freaking out over this don’t want to do anything about the reasons why people are deciding modern life isn’t conducive to that.
The incel freakout over men who could be having sex walking away from it has been fun to watch.
Matt McIrvin
@Gretchen: Yeah, and note that the anti-trans bathroom policing has also affected the ability of butch-looking cis women to use public restrooms without interference–it’s just an opportunity to harass anyone who they think steps outside the box.
Bupalos
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: it’s total market cap you want to compare, not price per share. Companies have very different floats.
no body no name
@Omnes Omnibus:
I see they have not changed then. I am not shocked. I guess it’s just like strippers and GRINDR at the RNC.
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear: Bullies love enforcing absurdities and contradictions, because they’re a sign that you’re in control of reality and logic itself. Yeah, 2+2=5, I’m going to hit you until you admit it.
Ohio Mom
@Baud: I agree, even as I get ready for the April 5 rally. Which is beginning to feel like a chore to me, a errand like a dental cleaning, that has to be crossed off the to-do list.
At this point in time, any donations I send to organizations that are directly fighting for us— thinking here of money sent to the Arc (disability advocate and lobbyist) and the ACLU — probably do more good even if I can’t see what it is doing directly.
I’d add my regular phone calls to my Congressmen but the Republicans aren’t going to bend and the Democrat is going to continue to do mostly the right things, all I can do there is say thanks.
Steve in the ATL
@Omnes Omnibus: he was the last funny conservative. And towards the end you could tell his heart was not longer in it.
@no body no name:
Yes, we remember Lysistrata!
Jeffro
yup
Gen Zers who grew up in far-right Gen Xer households are as brainwashed as their folks. Almost as fascist
Kristine
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Me, too.
I do take calcium supplements. I hope that balances them out.
Ohio Mom
@Steve in the ATL: That begs the question, Do you seat yourself so your hearing or deaf ear is next to your wife? And had a friend with a deaf ear, she was always telling her teens they were talking into the wrong ear, no matter what ear they aimed at.
Jeffro
@Omnes Omnibus: now there’s a blast from the past!
My kids have never read PJ’s work (and the only book of his I still have around the house is ‘Bachelor Home Companion’) but they HAVE heard me joking about the title of his most famous essay:
LOL
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: Exactly, and so much conservatism is hidden bullying.
They LOVE having hierarchies, because they always imagine themselves at the top. So they wind up suspicious of “we’re all in this together” if they perceive they can do better without cooperation.
It makes them hate and love their Overlords, which is hella confusing.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro: There’s this myth of generational rebellion that I think misses continuities. The fictional poster boy for Reagan Youth back in the ’80s was Michael J. Fox’s character Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties, who was unaccountably rebelling against his hippie boomer parents. But I knew a lot of young conservatives in the ’80s and in my experience, they had conservative Silent Generation parents. They were going with the flow.
My mom had been the left-wing rebel, a few years too old to be a Boomer… and, guess what, I wasn’t a Reagan Youth and neither was my sister.
Gretchen
@Suzanne: Thanks for the recommendation. I’m always looking for new podcasts.
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: It’s natural for adolescents to challenge things, they are finding themselves and so much more of the world.
I think things have loosened up so that people can take different paths, more than they could before, and people who won’t grow up and do that gets completely lost.
They get a group where everyone thinks and does similar things but since half of them don’t want this choice, it is constant anxiety and stress, but then they can play Dominator.
Even rams only butt heads once year. They don’t make it a lifestyle,
Salty Sam
I’d bet foldin’ money that those meatheads porn consumption is heavily weighted to interracial hookups!
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear: I’ve always been a bit amazed at the libertarians who embrace the notion that “freedom” means “you should be able to buy ANYTHING with your money, do ANYTHING with your property… and nobody owes you anything” even though they’re poor. It’s that “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” thing. They think that they’d be rich if the government wasn’t keeping them down.
Bupalos
@meander: this isn’t specific to Tesla but rather all ev’s, but there is just a lot less to go mechanically wrong that would be addressed by “parts.” The regenerative motor is doing most of the braking, there is no exhaust system, all the things related to combustion are gone…
And the few things that can go wrong are super proprietary, the battery, motor, firmware, and electrical management system. It just doesn’t seem to lend itself to a robust aftermarket..
Jeffro
btw Ben Rhodes has an interesting piece in the NYT today: There Is a Way for the Democrats to Stop Trump and Save America (gift link)
(not all of it is Dem-scolding, or pablum, either…although it is a little rambly…)
(very pro-Wes Moore and pro-Andy Kim, too)
Matt McIrvin
@Steve in the ATL: James Lileks wrote some pretty funny stuff, but when 9/11 made him political, the funny leaked right out of his ears.
Bupalos
@Steve in the ATL: the “in” in incel is for “involuntary” though. In lysistrata the women are forcing the men into incel status.
frosty
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I decided to get them when the audiologist said if you’re thinking about it then better sooner than later. Once your brain stops processing the missing sounds it never comes back.
I also wanted hear better in restaurants. Like I said, not much better.
But I can hear all the high frequencies in the white noise now!
Gretchen
@Jeffro: O’Rourke also said that Italians park like he would park if he’d just dropped a beaker of acid in his lap.
Kristine
@Soprano2:
Substitute “jobs/promotions” for the first “men” and the third “women” (yes and tweak the overall wording) and you have pretty much the statement I’ve seen concerning self-estimation of qualifications (that women hold back applying unless they meet 100% of a job’s requirements while men apply if they meet only 60%).
So men take more risks, but as standards tighten and the options increase (wrt relationships, hiring), they miss the mark repeatedly and get more and more frustrated and angry.
Are we pretty much talking about white men here? I’m outside so many social loops and just don’t keep track.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: Anyway, the observation about disgust kind of plays into Jonathan Haidt’s “moral foundations theory” stuff, and liberals usually can’t stand Haidt but I do still think there’s something there.
Liberal values have this very Enlightenment focus on mostly emphasizing 1. personal liberty/autonomy/consent and 2. caring for people/preventing harm, and we mostly get bothered by the contradictions and tradeoffs between those two values when they clash with one another.
But conservatives also care a lot about in-group loyalty, purity/disgust and upholding “natural” hierarchies, as ends in themselves independent of liberty and care. Liberals do care about some of these things too. But not as intensely or as overriding concerns.
I used to think the enthusiasm for “natural” products and associated alt-medicine was an example of purity/disgust values having primacy on the left, and I think it’s fascinating that a lot of that is coded right-wing now.
Kristine
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Add in that I’ve just discovered Bean Club.
p.a.
@Bupalos: To get a fuller picture, one commentary I read on Aristophanes noted that in Lysistrata, for Greek males in Athens, the double-comedy of a sex strike for peace was 1) the degree of disturbance of the outraged horny men in the play, but 2) the meta-idea among Greek men that the idea Greek women would actually desire to give up sex with them was another source of humor/disbelief. Male egotism through the ages…
RandomMonster
Welcome to the club, fellow old…
TBone
New to me Substack titled MuskWatch:
https://www.muskwatch.com/p/the-schools-trying-to-teach-americas
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
Mainstream anything is inherently uncool.
Contra Huey Lewis, it never was ‘hip to be square,’ and never will be.
Suzanne
@Kristine:
That’s a good question.
Apparently David Shor is reporting that in 2024, 18-year-old men of every race other than white….. FFOTUS won a majority of their votes. Not linking because I don’t know if that’s confirmed…. but I will note that it matches my observations. Misogyny is by no means limited to white people.
Matt McIrvin
@no body no name: I think what this analysis misses is the trans/NB/genderqueer stuff, which is mostly left-coded, but not liberal–it’s socialist/radical-left.
Which is interesting to me because it seemed ten years ago like the radical left was moving in a culturally reactionary direction, possibly under influence from Russian propaganda. But those guys mostly flipped to being overtly MAGA sometime in the late 2010s.
zhena gogolia
@no body no name: I believe you have confused Hillary Rodham Clinton with Tipper Gore.
Matt McIrvin
@zhena gogolia: But Tipper was Al Gore’s wife, and together with his pro-science/technocrat/environmentalist attitudes he was actually all in on this stuff, all about “raising PG-rated kids in an R-rated world.” So there was this association between 90s liberalism and some culturally stick-in-the-mud attitudes.
The thing is, that was a while ago.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Bupalos:
EVs are a massive game changer in that way…and it’s a way most people don’t realize. They simply think “emissions reduction” as *the* game changer and nothing else.
The lack of massive after market *everything* when compared to the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicle has a ton of very powerful market/lobbying forces quaking.
We in the EV world see this at dealerships who’s bread and butter is the service department. Okay, ICE vehicles aren’t vanishing overnight so your standard dealer service department isn’t going away anytime soon. But you can tell the ones that hate EVs because they don’t sell them or make the experience poor for the customer.
And auto dealership lobbies are some of the most powerful at the state and local level, it’s another reason why you don’t see tons of states providing tax credits for sales like in CA or here in CO.
Then if we turn our attention to oil change places and car parts stores, another massive game changer that, like service departments, won’t go away anytime soon, but see what the long-term, strategic outcome of massive adoption of the EV model for automotive transportation can be.
Geminid
@Dorothy A. Winsor: A friend who has been a professional musician and singer for over 50 years told me that utilizing a hearing aid made a big difference in his ability to sing on key. He referred to Les Paul’s commentary on hearing aids, and said his own experience supported Paul’s findings.
Matt McIrvin
@Kristine: There was a move toward Trump among men of every race, probably inspired by misogyny and gender resentment, but for non-whites it was starting from a lower base of support.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
The fact that these people are going back 25 years to find reasons to hate us tells me that it’s pretext.
Matt McIrvin
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I’ve experienced that myself–car dealerships where they have EVs on display, but the salesmen are trying weirdly hard NOT to sell them and will freak out like you’re about to drink poison if you show interest. Like the car company is forcing them to put that thing there under duress, but they don’t have to like it.
raven
@Steve in the ATL: I’m a die-hard Illini AND a hoops junkie so “I’ve only just begun”!!!
NotMax
@gene108
Lydia excepted.
//
lowtechcyclist
@no body no name:
Liberals aren’t cool with the younger generation because of stuff that happened when they were in preschool? OK then.
@no body no name:
But the people who would legislate those ‘wilding free spirits’ out of existence are the conservatives. How does that work as a political alliance?
I’m not saying there aren’t conservatives at a BDSM convention; interest in kink doesn’t have much to do with political affiliation. But just one side of the political spectrum has an interest in suppressing it.
And I’m also not saying liberals are cool and conservatives aren’t. As I already said, mainstream anything isn’t cool. But which party is practically defined by its hatred for people different from them?
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Yep.
TBone
@TBone:
Soprano2
@WereBear: Did you have to completely eliminate all of those things from your diet, or just reduce them? I don’t think we could give up chocolate or berries or nuts. Might be worth trying, though, for hubby’s kidney problems.
cmorenc
@Matt McIrvin: unnatural hair color on women isn’t any sort of ideological sex-role trigger for me, but to my tastes it is not an attractive enhancement – but that is consistent with my preference for a natural no-makeup no-artificial enhancements, surgical or otherwise. Not that I have a crush on wnba star Caitlin Clark, but that sort of unadorned fit comfortable-in-her-own-skin look/vibe is the best look on women for my tastes. Not that women are obliged to fit my personal tastes.
Ruckus
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
That sounds like it’s a bunch better than the one I just got. I mean it works OK but it’s not at all fancy. Just a basic amplifier.
Baud
TBone
@Baud: he also had our new Commerce Secretary Lutnick tell all Fux News viewers to BUY!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/lutnick-s-pitch-to-buy-tesla-stock-is-unprecedented-and-alarming-historians-say/ar-AA1BldAd
Matt McIrvin
Personally, I think liberalism is dead and not coming back but there is the possibility of some sort of Communist revolution gaining traction, as people who remember the Cold War age out and die off.
With the values, oddly, coming not really from Marx so much as from 1990s-era Star Trek. Which was, itself, mostly created by Hollywood liberals, but liberals fantasizing about what someone better than themselves would believe and do. It’s complicated.
If it’s bloody and illiberal, which it could become, I’m not going to personally like it but I’ll probably be long dead before anything really happens.
Matt McIrvin
@cmorenc: I like it when my sweetie colors her hair weird but I also think that what turns me on is 100% irrelevant.
It’s like facial hair on me. Beards seem to come in and out of fashion I can’t keep track… right now they seem kind of MAGA-coded and that bothers me, but my wife digs ’em so I haven’t shaved it off entirely since I met her, which was close on 30 years ago now.
jonas
@Matt McIrvin: I’m reminded of the SNL sketch with Tom Hanks as the MAGA guy who somehow lands a spot on Black Jeopardy. The “answer” is: “Skinny girls can do this for me”. The MAGA guy buzzes in: “What is…not a goddamn thing!” The host and the two other contestants nod and clap in agreement.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
Do you think his majesty will have any concept of that upraised middle finger is pointed at him?
He is the epitome of wealthy jackass – his money makes him a better person, one to be honored, praised, revered at the highest possible level. Just ask him.
Soprano2
@WereBear: My experience is that it makes normies really uncomfortable when they can’t tell at a glance what gender someone is, because they can’t figure out how to treat them. That was the whole point of the SNL live skit “It’s Pat”. I always thought it made the people around Pat look bad, they were so hung up on it, but it was addressing something that’s real.
Soprano2
@Gretchen: I saw that too, and I wondered the same thing. Whatever happened to “parents decide for their kids” and “I don’t co-parent with the government”?
Ruckus
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
My right ear makes noise by its self. Either that or the fan motor in my brain has a bad bearing……
arrieve
@MazeDancer:
And Chuck Schumer’s brother is a partner there. As was Ted Sorensen and many others who fought for civil rights. (Including more recently bringing the Edie Windsor case to the Supreme Court that helped make gay marriage legal.)
I’m sick about this. I don’t even want to admit that I actually worked there.
Ruckus
@Soprano2:
We should never forget that this is not all rich people. I’ve known some with a fair bit of money when I worked in professional sports. None with shitforbrains senior money, but a lot more than most. They did not think their money made them special. It was just a bank account, not a concept of world power. And ownership.
pieceofpeace
@Suzanne:
Yes! And I believe it is the women who have more true “power” over men – we offer what they most want, need?, in our society. Women, speaking generally, can be and are terribly exploited in male-dominated societies. Even in the ‘free’ USA, men won’t pass the ERA, knowing it keeps women from their own freedoms.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
Ever seen a stupor truck in person?
I spent a large majority of my working life making things out of metal. Mostly tools that others used to make products. Most people would recognize at least some of those products. My last job as a metal worker had a tolerance of +/- 25 millionths of an inch. My point is that this thing he thinks is a wonderful product is, well, asinine. It’s not reasonable as an actual pickup truck, it’s fugly, it looks like it was made in a jr high metal shop (although most jr high students would design something far better), and the quality is no where near what it should be considering the cost. It is the result of a nightmare that the designer didn’t understand was a nightmare.
Kristine
@Suzanne:
Yeah. Misogyny (with a dollop of racism in the latter case) lost us two good presidents.
This conversation made me think of how the Democrats are considered the “mommy party,” and when you think about how little respect/ regard we have for mothers and women in general, and how many women buy into that…I honestly don’t know if this country will ever move on.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
The right is the “traditional” party. Men in charge, women in the kitchen. It was bullshit 100 yrs ago and it’s bullshit now. The right is of course the party of wealth. (not money – wealth, there is a difference) The party for which their money speaks and must be listened to. Which is the difference. Their wealth makes them better people. It can, it most often does nothing of the sort. As in this case.
But yes your comment is true as well. It’s not a one point situation.
Kristine
@Matt McIrvin: Well, that’s depressing. But when stop to think about it, not surprising.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: “Parental rights” and “putting parents first” movements in education always implicitly assume that the parent is a religious/conservative reactionary and the school is forcing radical-left ideas on the kid against the parent’s wishes. The views of any parent other than the most pinch-faced bigot in the district do not matter.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: I’ve seen ’em on the street on occasion, don’t get the appeal. Tesla Model Ses are far more common though.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: I remember thinking that the whole idea of normalizing broadcasting or asking for one’s pronouns, when it started to become popular, was a way to instantly defuse the whole “It’s Pat” dilemma. Is your gender presentation ambiguous in some way? Hell, just tell people. Is it not particularly ambiguous? Tell them anyway, to give cover for people who need it.
And then, when I tried it, I discovered the hidden benefit of pronouns in bio: it brings all the assholes out of the woodwork so you know who to block! Funny thing is, I wasn’t even saying anything unexpected, I was just saying the pronouns I use are the same ones you’d expect from looking at me, and from my birth certificate, and from examining my junk if for some reason you had occasion to do that. But even saying that is too much for the chuds.
Ruckus
@raven:
I just got my VA hearing aid. Yes just one. And no, there is nothing special about it, it is minimal in today’s technology. Works. Free has a cost, it’s just not in the price.
TBone
Just found some great news!
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-uncover-lyme-diseases-hidden-achilles-heel-and-how-to-exploit-it/
Ruckus
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
I live in SoCal and have seen very few Incel Caminos. A couple in dealerships, one on the road. Uglier than a dog turd. Not as good build quality as one either. And I used to build industrial specialty tools, called molds, that make plastic items. Bottles, Barbie dolls, Cecile the Sea Sick whatever, and industrial items, and on and on. And on.
raven
@Ruckus: That’s interesting. They gave me one at first and I went back about a month later and said “I think two would be better”. They retested me and said “the bad news is your hearing hasn’t changed, the good news is that the criteria has and you can now get two”! Mine are Phonak and get good reviews.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Women were second class citizens in the lifetime of many alive today, such as me. (And yes I am an old fart…)
I had 2 older sisters, the oldest of which was a leader in the concept of fuck that housewife BS. She was a landscape architect and very good at it with a fair number of design awards. She taught the concepts at USC. Also an artist, as in pictures on a wall. She was no second class citizen there either and because she wanted more and went after it. And did well at it. Didn’t let anyone hold her back. Being good at anything takes effort and desire. Even if one is very good at something, it still takes effort and work. I learned and made metal parts and tools for most of my working life. Was also a mental health counselor for a few years. That was interesting.
You get one life. Find and use your talents, there are a lot of them. Some have few, some have many. Follow the one(s) you like, and like to do and if that isn’t the first one, find others. They are out there. Life is too short to settle on the first thing that comes along, unless you are lucky and that first thing is the one. I’ve built all my furniture. Haven’t built any for anyone else – till now, well into retirement age, my first and last project for anyone – else.
Soprano2
@Ruckus: I know, but it’s easy to slip into the idea that $20 isn’t much money, why can’t those people be responsible, etc.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: It’s also useful if you have a name that’s gender neutral (I have one of those names, although it’s more common now than it was when I was a kid so not as many problems). I knew a woman named Gene, I’m sure putting her pronouns in an e-mail would have been helpful to people. But they can’t think about it that way, all they think is “this is normalizing something I think is weird and wrong so it must not stand!”.
Soprano2
@Ruckus: I’ve always thought a lot of my husband’s talents were wasted with him being a printer, because he could do so much more. I can’t tell you how many thousands of dollars he saved that shop because he could machine parts for the presses at home. He also ran a successful business for several years when he was young; he had 4 print shops when he sold them in 1981 because he was tired of the 60 hour weeks. He made several pieces of furniture we have in our house, and did all the woodwork there too. He rewired all of the kitchen and bathroom when we remodeled the house. I think that was his way of using his talents outside of his job, because he enjoyed doing it. Makes me sad to think about it now.
WTFGhost
The judge is a goddamned moron. They should be ordered to delete all keyed/identifiable information in their possession. With your effing birthdate and zip code, they know it’s you, within tolerable differences. By comparing multiple other databases of “non publicly-identifiable-information” they can determine your unique identity, and fill in the personally identifiable information from the social security system.
In short, the judge said “delete the crap that’s obviously illegal, but keep enough to continue performing criminal conspiracies, and re-generating that data that’s obviously illegal.
ETA: my position as an ex-database expert makes me a bit better informed than the judge, but the judge should have called a competent DBA before issuing that order. Hence, “moron.” It’s okay not to know something – but call in an expert.
StringOnAStick
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: My understanding is TSLA’s continued ridiculous valuation has a lot to do with short dated options being used to support the price. Elon spends a few hundred thousand on those and lets them expire, making several billion in valuation for his efforts. It will work until it doesn’t.
Citizen Alan
@Suzanne: i disagree with your disagreement. I would say an obsession with mindless conformity, to the point that most republican women within the same age demographic look like clones grown in a vat, is the exact opposite of style consciousness.
Citizen Alan
That is because it is completely performative. Not a single beret-wearing, self-described Marxist clad in a Che Guevara t-shirt seriously thinks that capitalism will be replaced by Marxism in their lifetime, nor would they for one second actually enjoy living a society governed by Marxist principles.
frosty
@raven: Mine are Phonak too. Medicare/Medigap didn’t cover it and I paid out of pocket. A little pricey, but it included two years of free follow-up visits.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: i seem to remember the laughter at tipper gore when she praised the movie wayne’s world for showing teenagers enjoying classical music on the car radio because she did not recognize the song bohemian rhapsody by queen.
Citizen Alan
@no body no name: are you talking about Meme Karen? Because usually that kind of karen is a racist hag who more often than not, has a trump sticker on her car.
Citizen Alan
LIberalism won in 2008, 2012, and 2020, and nearly won in 2016 and 2024. And as much as it pains me to say it, i think liberalism would have won in those elections as well if the Dem candidates had been white males.
Citizen Alan
I agree. And i’m not even sure it made those people look bad, since most of the humor from those sketches arose from the other people’s desperate desire to not offend pat by misgendering them.
Splitting Image
@Matt McIrvin:
Oh, the pendulum will definitely swing back, although probably not until a lot of damage has been done.
Liberalism is like a lot of other things right-wingers don’t appreciate and aren’t going to realize how much they need until it gets taken away.
Most of these man-children would benefit by being kicked in the face every day just for appearing in public, but they don’t because of the prevalent “live and let live” attitude that characterizes liberalism.
Wait until that liberalism is completely gone.
Ruckus
@raven:
Same name, likely the same model, works well enough and my tinnitus has gone down significantly – to almost zero. And my hearing was only bad on the one side so didn’t need 2. You, if I remember correctly, were in an actual war zone and that can/does causes a lot of hearing issues.
Ruckus
@Soprano2:
Multi facetted is not as rare as some think. It is rare that many people actually attempt and succeed at multiple types of jobs. Thing is that many jobs are actually similar enough that and the differences are small enough that someone multi facetted can do them all well. I’ve done several different types of jobs, was just talking to a neighbor who was also in the USN and he had a completely different experience than I did, partially because we had far different jobs there. OK that and we were stationed in different oceans. Same time frame he served in the Pacific and got to go to Vietnam, I served in the Atlantic and got to stand on Antartica and the northern tip of Norway. Just slightly different experiences.
Matt McIrvin
@Splitting Image: Oh, I think the left is coming back. It just won’t be liberal.
In particular, I don’t think anyone under 40 thinks market capitalism should be allowed to exist in anything like its present form unless they’re a fascist.
WTFGhost
@WTFGhost: Updated – the order requires the deletion of all PII, and data that can be used to construct PII. I was wrong to call the judge an idiot, though, I think the judge would understand my concern (after I said I was sorry. Sorry judge!).
Kayla Rudbek
@JML: it can take up to a full year to fully recover from general anesthesia, I’ve heard