Can you expand more on Kavanaugh? I know very little, I just heard from word of mouth that he was moderate. What do we know of his record?

This.

Being smug about the importance of politeness seems to come across as less obnoxious than being smug in your own beliefs about this or that (Then again, for some reason politely spoken British people usually get cast as arch-villains in all the blockbusters, so go figure.)

Wait a second, am I to M as Reid is to 007? Oops.

I thought the Daily Show served a real purpose during the Bush years. In many ways, Stewart was truly incisive. He was often able to cut through a lot of the kabuki theatre of politics and all of the spin and the cynicism and get to something that was really true.

I think, though, that one of the reasons why he was in a unique position during the Bush years was because there was no other medium through which it was appropriate to criticize the media other than comedy news shows. It was really criticizing the news rather than criticizing Bush that was Stewart's hallmark. And at that point, in the mid 2000s, journalists who reported on the media weren't yet pervasive and social media didn't yet exist. Once media journalism became more common, it got to a point where the stories themselves became the story: where journalists began to report on stories, and criticism of the news itself became part of the news. Somehow it seemed more productive when Jon Stewart was the only person doing it. But it seems also to have something to do with the moment we're in, where discussions about what's appropriate to talk about are inseparable from the discussions themselves.

Like, Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and other IDW people seem to have built their entire careers on talking about talking about things. It's really obnoxious, but it seems that most conversations now either begin that way or end that way.

It's like there's an oversupply of brains connected to the Internet but nothing else! People talking about talking about talking about [...], without ever asking why...

Perhaps if we expand those ellipses infinitely, we get back a reflection of our primitive tribal selves. Memes on 4chan are a new form of primitive human culture (and not a good one)!

I'd have never thought about it that way. It's an interesting thought though: all of this human intellectual processing power, and nothing real to direct it towards.

I'm more inclined to see it as a kind of economy of agitation, where people are getting agitated and passing on their agitation to other people. Or whatever else. Attention, too. But it's all feeling, and not at all intellect, despite the fact almost all of it is happening in a medium that seems to be without direction human connection (viz., text), and therefore seems like it ought to be devoid of emotionality, because expression is so limited in text compared to speech.

If you ever find yourself bored and trapped somewhere, you could try reading Neil Postman. It was Postman's view that we've made a mistake as a society by moving from written forms of communication to visual forms of consumption, like television (the book was written in 1984). Whimsically, Postman bolsters his point by citing the Second Commandment of the Old Testament! [quote=Neil Postman]In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. “Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth.” I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became a blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations”[/quote]

All I'm saying is it took Xzero like three posts to tire of Eversor's posting style.

It baffles me that being "tired of someone" on the Internet could possibly be a problem for anybody.

Where'd you discover all of these deep thinkers on media?

Alan Kay cites Marshall McLuhan influenced writers a lot in his talks (in the book Postman makes clear that he was a student of McLuhan, and takes after his ideas).

Yes, this is a thing. And it's getting worse (Flynn effect). This is exactly the sort of thing I've been talking about this whole time. Do I even need to say more?

Capital doesn't know what to do with an educated, creative, intelligent workforce. They aren't even capable of acknowledging that the people they exploit are such.

Apparently over the weekend, Maria Butina (aide to a Russian senator) was quietly arrested in the US and charged with conspiracy to act as a foreign agent. Maybe not quietly, but the media seemed to have buried the story in favour of the larger indictment.

Highlights:

Worked with “US PERSON 1” to establish a communications back-channel to many influential members of “POLITICAL PARTY 1” through “GUN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION”.

Acted as intermediary to ensure Rex Tillerson became Secretary of State, on request of the Kremlin.

It would be both funny and sad if the present-day NRA turned out to be front group for the Kremlin. (Apparently the Russian government funds extreme political organizations in the US in order to destabilize the country.)

I don’t know about being a front, but they’ve been plowing Russian money into the GOP and have been caught illegally coordinating with their congressional campaigns. (Campaign coordination is the red line for Citizens United/PACs.)

What in retrospect maybe shouldn't have been surprising is that all that patriotic Jeffersonian talk about refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots would be just as appealing to foreign agents of sedition as it is to Y'all Qaida. Actually, if memory serves, that situation wouldn't be different than 1776 (or any number of revolutions throughout history).

Putin offered access to the 12 indicted Russian intelligence officers in exchange for access to (read: freedom to assassinate) Bill Browder. Trump called it an incredible deal.

Trump isn't good at making deals.

God damn, what a traitor. And people still like this guy? He's literally a traitor. This is treason. Not wacky technical treason, we're talking public hanging treason. Him and a whole bunch of GOP congressmen. You guys literally voted for treason. Treason with a >45% approval rating.

I think the only narrative which makes sense of how he acts is that the Steele dossier or worse is true, and Putin has some deep, life-wrecking **** on Trump.

I just went to foxnews.com, where the top headline is, "Mueller probe has driven 'wedge' between Russia and US, Trump tells Hannity, revealing Putin's response". I am wondering what Wookie must think of that. Who the heck are the opinion makers of the conservative world that are creating these narratives where (apparently) we are subservient to the interests of Russia (look at the phrasing of that headline again), where are their loyalties, and what the heck happened to the party of Reagan? Who the heck are these new guys?

One theory could be that the present-day Republican party is a 'zombie' party that is so ideological in nature after suffering decades of 'RINO drain', that it is incapable of recognizing that it has aligned itself with a foreign power. It would be funny if it weren't scary.

Like, isn't the point of political parties that they can deliberate on rational decision-making as a collective body? Perhaps this is what was so damaging about the Tea Party: it made such collective intelligence politically untenable, since daring to go against the grain of Fox News meant being thrown under the bus by Sarah Palin.

I'm looking forward to when we have hindsight and there's an uncontested understanding that the dude was bad for the country. Maybe we'll get there, someday. If it could happen with the Bush administration, it can happen with this one.

This moment in the Trump-Russia saga reminds me of the moment in the movie Get Out

When the protagonist walks down the stairs, now almost certain he's trapped by enemies, saying "please open the door, let's go".

it seems like the mask is about to fall completely, Although it will probably take years to get the full picture of how deep this goes, even beyond Trump.

I'll admit to being out of the loop on this one. What did Trump and the gang do that was treasonous? Treason has a pretty narrow definition, relating specifically to war-time activities.

Trump and other GOP members solicited electronic attacks against the United States to gain an electoral advantage, in exchange for advancing the goals of the Russian state (repealing the Magnitsky Act).

US-Russia electronic warfare may constitute a state of war, depending on the interpretation of a judge. If not that, then the economic sanctions, and if not that, then being directly opposed in an armed conflict (Syria). A state of war is required, not a formal declaration. There’s also an argument to be made that they’ve been making war upon the United States by means of sabotage.

Remember back in 2016 when all of those statisticians were sounding the alarm about suspicious patterns in the margins of victory in certain swing states?

Well, ES&S just volunteered today that the systems they delivered to those states had remote administration software installed on them that wasn’t supposed to be there.

Me introduces Trump and G.O.P. to one another Huckster, meet bootlickers. Bootlickers, meet huckster. Like treason on first sight.

Meet Cute for conspiracy to commit capital offenses

It puts into relief the legal consequences of comparing X, Y or Z event in the Trump-Russia scandal to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. I'm sure in some cases when talking heads say this sort of thing they're being hyperbolic and sensationalist, but I suppose that selling the narrative to the public that Russia's actions amounts to an "act of war" also helps build a legal case for charging Trump with treason-related charges.

Oh man. So now Trump is saying that his original remark about the cyberattacks, where he said, "I don't see any reason why Russia would have interfered in our election", was actually a slip of the tongue, whereas he actually meant to say, "I don't see any reason why Russia wouldn't have interfered". But anybody can see then that the sentence doesn't make any goddamn sense in context, since it's uncharacteristically harsh a thing for Trump to say, especially sitting right next to Putin, just after having sucked up to him. Trump's just a loser and a classroom cheat.

I believe him.

What I meant to say was that I don't believe him.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/us/politics/irs-will-no-longer-force-kochs-and-other-groups-to-disclose-donors.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

This is a bad thing.

IRS will no longer require political groups to disclose a list of large donors. That will be very convenient for political organizations that spend large amounts of foreign money to influence elections, like the NRA.

Edit: yoooooo ^

It's also not even a particularly slick dodge that even saying "I don't see any reason why Russia wouldn't have interfered" isn't positively assenting to the view of the IC that Russia interfered. Like in this clip:

https://twitter.com/ABCPolitics/status/1019296352679944192

He says that he agrees with the consensus of the IC, but then he indicates that he actually doesn't, when he says, "it could have been Russia, but it also could have been other people."

stack overflow (too many double-negatives)