Useful how? Be specific. And after that, demonstrate how this usefulness supersedes any consideration of whether palling around with a bunch of insane, fascist clowns -- whom you have routinely normalized in your work for years -- is morally justifiable.
Feels kinda silly to say that rich people from the center to left of things politically can’t build a successful media environment when the onion is doing it basically using donations from semi-employed forum goblins
i think it goes under-analyzed the extent to which tech bros and finance bros effectively merged around the start of the 2020s
and, as a result, a lot of the tech industry has muscled out actual tech—or even technical knowledge—in favor of wall street douches, but with silicon valley flavoring
and they have the gall to call the democrats out of touch
That darned polarization, always polarizing us. If we could just defeat polarization, we’d be ok. But polarization is a mighty and wicked foe. It comes out of nowhere and just makes everybody all polarized.
dems created an expanded 'covid' welfare state under trump, republicans strangled it under biden
swing voters credited trump & blamed biden for that respectively
there's a moral here, of a sort
By the way, the point isn’t to *call them* moral failures and dimwits, it’s to avoid pretending that they’re not, or that they can be persuaded away from being those things by someone beseeching them on the internet.
Amazingly, though few knew about it, for a few years, Facebook had by far the best newsreader via its “interest lists.” At enshittification set in, they made the feature increasingly cumbersome. Then they killed it.
The way the reporting for this piece has ruined my algorithms I can't even tell you.
My feeds are now all bald dudes in backwards baseball caps in front of large mics, hyping their "living like elite athletes" when they don't believe in leg day. www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...
All right y'all: On Tuesday, I am talking with Tom Steyer, who is rather suddenly & unexpectedly the frontrunner in the California governor race. I want to get his thoughts on climate & clean energy policy, in CA & nationally.
Got questions?
Gil Duran tweet: TLDR: Fascism in response to Palantir's long fascists screed on X.
"Your Account is Suspended" Message on X
The CEO of Palantir posted a fascist manifesto on X.
I pointed out that it was fascist—which resulted in a permanent suspension from X (my second time!).
So, when you hear the tweeters complaining that BlueSky is intolerant, remember why many of us came here in the first place.
To a certain type of person politics is outside of reality and inhabits a realm of ideas and make-believe
It's a weird feeling, watching all the stuff I spent my life observing -- thus getting myself yelled at for my "intolerance" -- coming to its unholy fruition.
I *changed my behavior* because of all that yelling. I decided (e.g.) that maybe most conservatives weren't as bad as I had thought.
We've sacrificed the notion of making money from something in favor of doing it *purely* or *primarily* for the money. Unless you're actually forced to think that way (in order to survive and be secure) there's no excuse for it. When rich people do it, it's an abomination.
Right on cue. The Who's Moonless albums had some good stuff on them (and also, bad stuff) but that stuff could still have been done as solo material or whatever. And the live shows kinda sucked. Without Moon, it wasn't the Who. They continued *purely* for the money.
It's sort of like all the rationalizing of Trump voters' behavior. And it's like those columns people wrote in 2017 suggesting which books on foreign policy Trump should read.
We're not going to Darts & Laurels our way out of the media's catastrophic dysfunction. The whole thing needs to fall.
"C'mon Rob, do better!"
One of our biggest challenges is that even people who recognize the failings of the media don't recognize the nature or severity of the problem. People like Stelter and Tapper are lost. They're total moral failures, and they're dimwits.
bsky.app/profile/jfal...
Similarly, I am disappointed in Rob Schneider for making a bad movie.
bsky.app/profile/did:...
Yep! I used to get yelled at on The Well for making fun of, like, Pete Townshend for selling his songs to dumb TV shows (I have always been a huge fan of Townshend). The people doing the yelling were, or had been, mostly hippies. They reacted like I had said something bigoted.
A package of bills in the Minnesota Legislature would loosen local zoning rules in hopes of encouraging home construction.
Lakeville, a booming Twin Cities suburb, is weighing a one-year housing moratorium in part to counter the “Yes to Homes” legislation.
A huge swath of the American middle class rationalized its way into evil, a decades-long process that began in the '80s. Defending vile corporate acts by citing "shareholder value." Journalists defending "sponsored content." Pundits finding "valid" reasons for why people went MAGA. It's a long list.
My “I am a toadying lickspittle” sweater is raising questions answered by my sweater
www.wsj.com/tech/silicon...
Articles about Jared Kushner's diplomatic role with Iran that mention Kushner has received billions from the Saudi government (2/28-4/19):
NYT: 5 of 58
WashPost: 1 of 43
WSJ: 0 of 40
AP: 0 of 26
CNN Wire: 0 of 18
NY Post: 0 of 17
Chicago Tribune: 0 of 4
LA Times: 0 of 4
Boston Globe: 0 of 2
They're able to say stuff like this because so many of the rest of us believe it. It's the Law of Large Fascist Numbers: If millions of people believe something, that means it can't be wrong.
Millions of young people are, in fact, following a fucking Nazi.
Before I stopped listening to NPR because of the Trump-normalization, StoryCorps was my biggest beef with it. Some rando crying with her once-estranged brother, plopped there in the middle of the news.
Here again: a company did something so they could put "technology" in a press release.
If things go the way they should (not a given) in another 100 years, we'll look back with amused wonder and contempt on sports where the object is to physically injure your opponents, the same way we look back on gladiator fights now.
"Farrah Fawcett. You remember her kids? She was a complete fox. Anyway, I pinched her ass. Can I say that here? I suppose I can't say that here folks..."
d
The kind of thing I think about when people say Trump has “gone nuts” just in the past few months.
