I mostly agree with that. However, I think that GOP policies, in the long run, are bad for businesses in the US. When the inevitable economic decline comes and/or other countries start to ignore and dominate the US in the global economy, things are likely to swing back the other direction. Might take a while.
They don’t give a shit about long-term viability of the businesses & jobs. Get in / get yours / get out before the crash.
Diego
More like:
Get in / Get yours / Crashes are now an opportunity to profit since you’re now rich enough to survive them
This is when you take advantage, declare them in rebellion, and start Reconstruction part 2, but this time no mercy.
Just a shitty thing that I thought I’d mention:
Early voting is happening right now here in Virginia. It’s loosened a great deal from previous years in that you can pretty much just say “I’m gonna be busy on Election Day” and that’s considered a valid excuse. In previous years you effectively had to get a note from your doctor/boss/mommy explaining why you wouldn’t be able to vote normally.
Anyway, just like we do with the day-of polling places, the local Dems are there to hand out “Sample Ballots” so that if you’re not too well-informed but want to vote the party line you have a guideline (ours also has a justification on any ballot issues). The Republicans are there too, handing out their own ballots.
Now, you can use whatever color paper you want to for your sample ballots, except for yellow, which is reserved by the State. Typically, the Dems use blue and the GOP uses red, but that’s actually a tradition only a decade or so old.
This year, the low cunning of the GOP brain-trust came up with a brilliant plan: They’d print off TWO sets of sample ballots, one on red-colored paper and one on blue. The blue-colored sample ballots would still urge people to vote for the Republicans, but wouldn’t actually put a “D” or an “R” on the paper. They then instructed one of their minions to stand a little ways away from the obviously-GOP guy handing out red-colored ballots and hand the clue-colored ones to anyone who looked like they were obviously shying-away from the table.
You’d HOPE that most voters would catch on, but in a state where control of the legislature literally ended up being decided by pulling a chit from a bowl, one or two votes matter. So our Dem folks have to hand out the sample ballots as normal, but then ALSO have to keep an eye on the faux-Dem blue-paper person and make sure that anyone who takes a paper from her knows that they just got a Republican sample ballot, not the Democratic one that they may have been expecting.
Ugh. Turns out that fighting Evil is tedious.
Along similar lines, here’s Ben Sasse setting up the excuse to ignore any and all video or audio evidence of Trump’s crimes:
He’s not wrong though. The technology to produce very authentic-looking videos or audios that can’t really be disproven without forensic tools/skill not available to most laypeople is not too far away.
But surely governments can produce higher quality. Besides that was only a few minutes of a major Hollywood production. A couple million in budget at most. For what the government pays for one VA hospital they could easily pay for a better quality render. And at the end of the day isn’t making sure that the Republicans maintain power more important than one VA hospital? It’s all about protecting the troops after all.
This is a rapidly evolving area. They probably decided on the tech for Rogue One more than 3 years ago. If they did it with state of the art tech, it would be a lot better. If they do it with the tech that will be state of the art in a few years, it will be better still.
I’m sure you’re right. Just having a bit of fun.
So essentially the right is laying the epistemological framework in which truth does not exist, and then technology will seal the deal.
On the upside, maybe then I’ll get to be a pirate. Arr!
There’s been alarms sounded about “deepfake” video for years now. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s unlikely to be imminent. The techniques for disproving fakes advances nearly as quickly as the fakes. Of course, people have to believe it when they’re told that something is fake, and that’s not exactly a guarantee in today’s fake news environment.
Deepfakes are likely to be the new Facebook meme - it won’t make a splash among respectible journalism but a good 20-30% of the electorate will eat it up and also be unable to tell the difference and swear up and down it’s true.
In this particular case, that’s quite literally true, since the tech is Generative Adversarial Networks, where the generative bit only gets better by going up against a better discriminator. But if you have to rely on experts to tell you whether a video is fake, and the experts disagree, then you get to believe whatever you want. The tech doesn’t have to be ready for people to start claiming that real videos and audio clips are actually fakes. That’s why his examples of “stuff liberals would be destroyed by” are disingenuous. On the GOP side, you have a bunch of things people are fairly sure happened because there’s significant but circumstantial corroborating evidence and constantly shifting stories by the people involved. On the Dem side, you have a bunch of things that people believe are true despite circumstantial contradictory evidence and consistent explanations, because the Clintons must obviously be shady so it doesn’t matter if this particular thing is true something else probably is anyway. Only one of those situations needs support from hard evidence, so the ability to throw away which ever hard evidence you don’t like does not have a symmetric effect.
This formulation seems to be haunting the 21st century in general.
There are too many talking heads, period. That’s the problem with much of “news” right now. The actual facts get lost in the people talking over them.
Jeff Flake, international man of principle.
Upon his demise, may Jeff Flake’s resting place be visited annually by Armando.
Also, dude, you’re gonna need to do a Patreon or something for the travel expenses for all that. You’re going to have a very long list.
My god I would like to see that Patreon page.
My colon is ready!