NevermindNoMind @ NevermindNoMind @lemmy.world

Posts

38

Comments

365

Joined

2 yr. ago

This was the top story on NPR's up first podcast today. They didn't exactly blame Isreal directly, but they also didnt defend Israel and suggest this is somehow justified. They stuck pretty close to here is what is happening on the ground, here's voices of those affected, this is a humanitarian tragedy and will only get worse. They mentioned a woman in Gaza rationing milk for her baby due to the food shortage, that stuck with me. So I guess #notallmedia.

The coverage on the NYT The Daily podcast was spot on what I would expect from the outlet that cheared us into invading Iraq. Trash podcast, I don't know why I'm still subscribed. Should have dumped it after they spent a whole episode making a martyr out of the praying football coach.

I agree with everything you said about Isreal, and even that violence from Palestinians is expected given the circumstances. But I'd ask, what is Hamas goal? To free the Palestinians or to entrench their political power within Gaza? If their goal is the former, this attack seems entirely counter productive. Bibi led a fractured government engulfed in protests over his reforms to the supreme court, with reservists promising not to show up for duty as a result. Hamas just cured that problem, Bibi's government is united and reservists are showing up in record numbers. In America, there was a growing political movement for recognizing the vast problems and human rights abuses in Israel, to the point where Biden didn't invite Bibi to the Whitehouse given progressive pressure and the pro Israel lobby starting to freak out. That's gone, killing civilians at a festival, including American citizens, just snuffed out whatever political resistance to the Israel orthodoxy that existed in America. Bibi now has the political freedom to engage in a ground invasion, if not all out genocide in Gaza, and anybody who calls it out will be forced into a position of answering for the murder and rape and other attrocities carried out by Hamas. Nobody is going to go out of their way to defend terrorists who target civilians. If Hamas wanted liberation of Palestinians, they did that cause immense violence this weekend.

If, on the other hand, Hamas wants to secure power, to keep the people in Gaza angry and looking to Hamas for revenge, then this assault and the predictable Israeli response will do that cause wonders.

Israel has turned Gaza into an open air prison. Today Bibi announced the blockade would become total, including food, water, and medicine, which sure sounds like a path to genocide, but I'll save that criticism until it actually plays out. In general, Israel is an apartied state. Hamas is a bunch of murderous terrorists committing war crimes, doing far more harm to their supposed cause than good. This attack will result in far more of their people suffering. But they count on that, hate within the Palestine community in Gaza is what gives them political power, so the civilians Isreal is currently killing will just continue to fuel the cycle of violence.

Everyone sucks here, Hamas sucks way way way more, but that doesn't make Israel "good". If you compare Nazi Germany to apartied South Africa, the former is going to win the evil country contest everytime. But that doesn't make apartied South Africa good. If it wasn't for the Book of Revelations, America (it's government and it's people) would care as much about this conflict as it does about various civil wars and genocides happening all over the world, which is to say not at all (unless oil or other natural resources are imperilled).

The author of the article determined that these ads are coming from the trashy ad networks that brought you such classic clickbait ads as "Doctors hate this one weird trick" and "[Current President] has slashed auto insurance rates in [your state], here's how" that you see at the bottom of low quality news articles. So, it's not just that X has spam ads, but they aren't even directly selling them, which the article summarizes is a sign of desperation to get any ads, no matter how shit in quality, no matter how low paying to X they are, on the platform. At least the low tier news sites have the decency to identify them as ads and label the ad networks that is putting them up.

Watch Gaetz run for governor (and then president?). Run, Gaetz, run. Most old school Regan Republicans would never go for this stuff. Limiting their own terms? Banning donations from lobbyists? Limiting SCOTUS terms and risk losing the theocratic supermajority? Gudouttahere.

Gaetz knows this. He also knows the establishment right wing media (Fox) is trying to make him the villain, "It's not that Republicans can't govern, it's just that this one guy is an asshole."

When Gaetz does shit like this, it makes him sound almost reasonable, right? Republican voters say, ok I think all that stuff would be good, so why won't the rest of the party go along with it? Hmm, maybe Gaetz is right about House Republicans being part of the swamp. Maybe Gaetz is a true fighter for America and not the asshole that blonde lady on Fox said he was.

That's the game. Gaetz is building some serious media coverage and name ID. I have to admit, the shit heal is making the most out of his time in the spotlight.

McCarthy gets ousted by his own party, somehow manages to blame Democrats. Speaking to the press just now:

“I think today was a political decision by the Democrats. And I think I think the things they have done in the past hurt the institution,” he said.

What a piece of shit, good riddance. The 45 daystop gap funding bill he put on the floor for a vote an hour after it was introduced, leaving Dems no time to read 77 page bill to see if it had poison pills they couldn't vote for. Classy guy. Just today it was reported he was refusing to postpone votes on Thursday so membera could attend Dianne Feinstein's funeral.

The new guy doesn't seem to be any better:

As one of his first acts as the acting speaker, Rep. Patrick McHenry ordered former Speaker Nancy Pelosi to vacate her Capitol hideaway office by Wednesday, according to an email sent to her office viewed by POLITICO.

“Please vacate the space tomorrow, the room will be re-keyed,” wrote a top aide on the Republican-controlled House Administration Committee. The room was being reassigned by the acting speaker “for speaker office use,” the email said.

Only a select few House lawmakers get hideaway offices in the Capitol, compared to their commonplace presence in the Senate.

The former speaker blasted the eviction in a statement as “a sharp departure from tradition,” adding that she had given former Speaker Dennis Hastert “a significantly larger suite of offices for as long as he wished” during her tenure.

Pelosi didn't even vote today, she was in SF with Fienstein. But don't let that get in the way of partisan bullshit. And she said she won't be able to pack up by Wednesday for the same reason. Fucking gouls.

Glad you enjoyed it! I just love the contrast. The shortest speaker was respected and honored and the house votes to put him in for one day like Rudy. It's a very sweet gesture. The second shortest speaker got knifed like Caesar by the crazies he helped to elect.

Theodore Medad Pomeroy was elected as speaker on the last day of the 40th Congress on March 3, 1869. It was a gesture of respect and honor ahead of his retirement. He served one day as speaker, basically an honorary role, speaker for the day and then congres adjourned for the year. He was the shortest serving house speaker in US history. The second shortest serving house speaker is Kevin McCarthy.

Yeah that was a great joke from a guy whose party was in the process of going to historic levels of effort to prove they are incapable of governing.

For sure, I feel the same. But I think part of the disconnect is around the word "need." Because there is "need" as in "I will not survive without this thing, or my life will be more difficult and unpleasant without it" and then there is "need" in the marketing sense, the desire to buy a thing that is fun and interesting and exciting. The consumerism desire to fill the whole in your life with that new purchase that you hope will finally make you happy.

For the latter definition of "need," smartphones used to do a good job of triggering it. Every year there was something new and a flashy about the latest batch of phones, some new must have feature. If you didn't get the new phone, and your friends did, you'd feel like your missing out, like your lugging around some obsolete junk.

In the last few years (or more), new smartphones have just been modest performance upgrades, slightly better cameras, and that's about it. The new iPhone 15 has an action button, neat. You don't "need" to upgrade from your 12 because you don't feel like your missing out on anything major, and your right.

It's less about the form factor itself, and more about the lack of innovation. Apart from foldable, there hasn't been something truly new and interesting is years. I think the idea here is, what if we (they) reimagined what a smartphone is, how you interact with it, what you do with it, and do that by making AI the center of the experience. I don't know what that looks like, and I hope it's more than "talk to your phone instead of touching it" because there is very little time during my day where I'd feel comfortable talking out loud to my phone, but it's still an interesting idea, and there's some smart people and big money that suggests this isn't just a pipedream. Basically, it could be the first major innovation in how we compute on the go in a long time. And if they pull that off, you will "need" it.

Welcome! Former long time Relay user, but I left reddit in June. For what it's worth, I like Thunder and Connect. They are both open source and add free (no offense to ad supported apps). Just thought you might like to know what a fellow Relay user settles on after months of trying them all out.

She might not have had that much money. She married a rich guy, but he's dead and left her with a trust, and some kind of evil stepdaughter situation is going on, that all went public when her bio child sued the trustees on Feinstiens behalf, accusing them of stealing from the trust and elder abuse. Feinstien still should have retired, but she might not be totally loaded.

I listened to the whole thing on the Decoder podcast feed. The verge is promoting it as "wild" and "contentious", and the latter is a little true, but overall id describe it as a cringefest. It was hard to get through, and I got the same sick pit in my stomach I did watching Scott's Tots. Not that I'm particularly sympathetic to Yaccarino, she took this job so that says volumes about her judgement. But she was just so incredibly unprepared to address the most obvious questions, it seemed like she had drank the coolaid (flavor aid) and was expecting to the interviewer and audience to be so amazed with how awesome X is, and how amazing Elon is, and she was totally surprised when she got obvious questions like, how is X's user engagement since third parties are reporting it's down, why did x fire all the election integrity people, how much is X going to charge users and isn't having a free option valuable to keep advertisers on the platform, and what's the deal with suing the ADL?

At best she avoided every question with vague drawn out platitudes (elon is a genius, the employees at Twitter are brilliant, X is a transformative platform). At worst, she completely stepped in shit.

The two moments that stand out: first was when the interviewer asked about musk's statements/tweets about charging all users a fee. Yaccarino took a big pause, asked the interviewer to repeat the question, then asked the interviewer "did he say he was thinking about doing that, or that it's actually the plan?" The interviewer confirmed the latter and asked Yaccarino if Musk talked with her about that. Yaccarino says "we talk about everything." Like, big ooof. Girl, your only lieing to yourself.

The second was when she was asked about Musk being the head of product, and whether that meant she's not a real CEO. She defended musk being in charge of product because "who wouldn't want to be working with the genius musk?" The audience audibly laughs and a bunch raise their hands. Yaccarino tries to brush the audience reaction off like they were just joking or just didn't know Musk well enough. Lady, common, people hate musk, they know he's shit to work for, what reaction were you expecting? Are you in that much of a musk cocoon?

The last thing I'll say is that the former Twitter head of trust and safety, who left Twitter in protest a few weeks after musk took over and then musk called him a pedophile and he ended up having to flee his home because of the death threats, was added on as a speaker at the "last minute", and X defenders are claiming Yaccarino was "sandbagged" with him speaking a few hours before her. The reporting so far is that that's bullshit, she knew a few days in advance and was even offered the opportunity to speak before him. And he's been publicly saying the same shit for months now, there weren't any bombshells she couldn't have prepared for. Tried and true strategy, if you bomb an interview just blame the "lamestream gotcha press."

Overall, Yaccarino ate shit for 45 minutes. It's an interesting case study in bad PR. Id recommend listening, but if your a person with any amount of empathy, make sure your emotionally ready to handle a whole lot of second hand embarrassment.

Edited to add Casey Newtons succinct summary: Yaccarino fended off most of Julia’s excellent questions with GPT-2-level responses, punctuating her answers with dutiful praise for Elon Musk and the “velocity of change” he brings to the company. I’m grateful Yaccarino took a turn in the hot seat, but in the end she had little to offer — just some numbers that will never be audited, and explanations that don’t add up.

I would like to say the same, and I'm all for fighting corruption, but it's all so nakedly political as to be meaningless. What's the standard? Lying during a deposition about getting a blowjob? Impeachable. Pressuring the president of a foreign government to open an investigation into a political rival in exchange for weapons? Not impeachable. Lying about a stolen election and inciting a riot on the capital? Not impeachable. Having a fuckup as a son? Impeachable. Then there's Clarence Thomas - lying on federal disclosure forms for decades and receiving lavish gifts of travel, cash, home improvements for your mom? So not impeachable nobody even seriously considered it.

The point is, we all know Biden is getting impeached no matter what, it's all political bullshit. If he actually did receive bribes, that would just be a happy coincidence, because ultimately the evidence doesn't matter.

The first impeachment hearing is scheduled for Thursday, two days before the government shuts down. This is how House Republicans are spending their time, holding some dumbass hearings about how it still counts as a bribe even if no bribe is actually paid so long as we hate the guy. Meanwhile millions of people will lose paychecks, government assistance like fresh food for pregnant mothers and housing assistance, and the overall economy takes a kick in the teeth because of the shutdown. But don't worry America, Republicans are hot on the trail of public enemy number one Hunter Biden so it's definitely all worth it. And to think there are millions of Americans who will look at this cluster fuck and think "yup, I'm going to vote to put Republicans back in charge of Congress since they did such a good job last time".

Checks out! I know if I listen on a road trip with my wife, I put a piddlepad on her seat first.

You listen to No Dogs in Space, have several spooky/strange/macabre podcasts on your list, but not Last Podcast on the Left. Just curious if there's a reason.

Comedy Bang Bang

Hollywood Handbook

Hey Randy

Knowledge Fight

These are my "must listens" every week.

Honorable mention for another CBB Presents, Full Throttle! With Bob Ducca - extraordinarily brilliant, probably the hardest I've ever laughed at a podcast in my life. Limited run, so it's concluded. He tells a story about posing as a monkey in a traveling circus that is somehow both tragically beautiful, and snot running down your face funny.

Maybe if republicans actually passed a stop gap or something, even if it's bat shit insane. As of right now, it's all Republican infighting. The question right now is whether it's McCarthy or Matt Gaetz fault. Biden isn't even in the picture right now, it's not like Republicans can say Biden isn't giving into their demands or whatever. There are no demands, it's just Republican on Republican bickering.