Thanks for popping in and the update from your corner of the world. I always look forward to your input and that of so many others that give a glimpse of what’s happening in other places. 
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I came of age in the 60s and 70s. So much of the animus towards the left/liberals/progressives was rooted in suspicion and hatred of “those dirty, effing hippies”. The Greatest Generation did not know what to think of long hair, recreational drug use and experimentation, our music, our dress, our protests against war, our liberated views of sex and marriage, and countless other generational changes and differences. But again, it all boiled down, at least in large measure, to those dirty, effing hippies. You look at Trump’s hatred of Portland, his lambasting of anyone not firmly identifying with classic party affiliation (Mamdani’s a Communist!!), his persecution of universities and other bugaboos. I think a lot of our problems trace back 70 years. Upwards of half the country is still pissed off it’s not 1957 anymore.
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He travels with his own World’s Tiniest Violin to accompany his sorrow as he guts the government, right, Mike?
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The sheltered existence of so many of these judges (save SS and KBJ, AFAIK) is a critical failing of the judiciary. They just have no idea what life is like for normal people, Kavanaugh least among them. “Free to go after the brief encounter”, my ass.
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Yes. Just like all of those classified documents, which Judge Cannon made the government give him back. Folks can go to Maralago to see ‘em!
We definitely need to do that. The US hasn’t used it since DJT squatted in the White House. I challenge all Democrats in Congress to put this forth as a bill. Make a big fuss, PR wise. Of course Little Mikey and Big John Thune would never allow it to the floor, but that isn’t where the value lies. See if any Republicans object to it, and how they rationalize their anti-immigrant stands.
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Many thanks for sharing. Made my day.
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Or the Louisiana Purchase, or Alaska to the Russians. It’s just being a good steward. s/
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I think she’s dangerously stupid, so convinced she’s right, and Christian, and rightly Christian, that she’s okay with obviously lying. It’s hard to believe anybody outside of Cirque de Soleil could twist themselves into so many knots.
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The current regime does not want huddled masses from shithole countries yearning to breathe free anyway. So send it back, melt it down, whatever.
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regardless of their lies.
When this is over, I want to see Trump’s and Vought’s balls cut off and proffered as burnt offerings.
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I definitely did not appreciate just how much of a bullseye was Adam Serwer’s “The Cruelty is the Point” back in 2018. “President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.”
It’s what this is all about.
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Buy our weapons and technology! We’ll provide support! We’ll even teach your civilian and military members English so they can understand how to operate and, critically, be able to communicate with the US during times of crisis. It’s been going on at Lackland AFB for nearly 70 years
But hey, we need to save money! So we’ll sell you this shit, but you’re on your own, folks!
This Air Force program forged ties with foreign militaries. Now it’s on the chopping block.
In classrooms on San Antonio’s Southwest Side, foreign military personnel study English so they can be trained to operate and maintain sophisticated aircraft and other U.S. military equipment. The stakes are high. If a pilot’s command of English faltered at an inopportune moment — if he couldn’t decipher a checklist for making an emergency landing, say — the results could be disastrous.
It’s called the Defense Language Institute English Language Center, and it’s critical to foreign sales of U.S. military hardware, which totaled $118 billion last year
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And damages to your property. I wonder how many doors were broken down in that apartment building in Chicago?
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I’m going to post this on this thread because it gave me something to ponder and helped me move towards understanding our current moment better. (Sorry it is long.)
A few things struck me as useful for looking at the moment:
The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals …[it] … can become “functional”, a feature of how organisations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences.
Arendt’s argument contained a glimmer of hope. Stupidity on a social scale had to be remediable, if only because it was no longer explicable as a mere cognitive deficiency among individuals. She believed that people – intellectuals as much as “the masses” – had stopped exercising their powers of judgment, preferring to mouth platitudes or simply obey orders, rather than think for themselves.
Over the middle decades of the 20th century, the neoliberal argument for markets, made most potently by Friedrich Hayek, always emphasised that their primary function was to organise a society’s knowledge. Where markets ran smoothly and prices were set freely, there would be no need for anyone to exercise judgment beyond their own immediate wants, desires and expectations. The “stupid” person has just as much potential to thrive in a neoliberal society as the “smart” person, because the price system will ultimately decide on collective outcomes.
In the early 21st century, similar arguments have been made for “big data” by Silicon Valley ideologue and former Wired editor Chris Anderson, and for randomised control trials by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Abhijit Banerjee: that they will happily render the theories, judgments and explanations of human beings – with all their biases and errors – redundant. Once everything is quantified, right down to nanodetails, not even measurement is needed, just algorithmic pattern recognition. You don’t need a concept of “rabbit” to identify the furry thing with big ears; you just design machines to identify which word most commonly appears alongside such an image.
It’s worth the read. Much of what Davies talks about here made me wonder about illusory truth bias and repetition bias in a world of advertising and social media bots. Were I truly a pessimist I would suggest that we’re doomed, due to our inherent cognitive flaws and the malevolence of greedy folks driven only by their lust for wealth and power.
But at the end Davies gives us an actual functional difference between us and the big data models and bots driving our age of unreason. Imagination, when confronted with novelty our AI systems create weird hallucinations, it’s not imagination or dreams, they’re more like nightmares of unreason. That is their weakness. The question that still niggles is “Can people inured to unreason conjure enough imagination to step out of this feedback loop?”
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Outstanding MM, @david_kurtz. And thank you for that lovely closing video–the brightest spot in a dark day.
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Another great idea hatched by a drunk at the department of war.
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It’s more likely MAGA will be thankful Trump fired them, impoverished them, took away their health insurance and generally steered their lives into the gutter. It’s what cults do.
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