TheFooder
1mo ago
Really...Hanania said that? Another reason to dismiss him as a fool. It should have been obvious from the start the bromance would sour over time. Had it been a prediction market (I was aware of...) I would have definitely taken that bet, though I must admit the honeymoon laster longer than I expected.
TheFooder
1mo ago
Isn't that the general precedent? Top-level big thread, keep it out of CW thread? My $0.02 = no reason for a ban.
TheFooder
26d ago
That was my tactic with the Anthrax vaccine back in the 90's. It was double-plus hard because I was in the military, but I dodged it anyway. No regrets.
TheFooder
3mo ago
Ooof two paragraphs in and I remember exactly why I stopped reading Meskhout's blog. All heat, no light.
So Trump says the government can't work with some firms and their security clearances are revoked. And...So what? Oh one of the firms sued and one caved. Ok...Some lawyers are only interested in money? Some guys who don't look cool also happen to be lawyers who don't roll over for Trump?
If this is supposed to tell me something bigger about how the government interfaces with civilian law firms I missed it. Is the problem that now the people in the government who hired the law firms to prosecute J6 (and Trump too?) have to work with what they got? That other law firms won't want to work with the USG because they might someday get hamstrung by not having security clearances? That uh....conservative lawyers, er...um, are going to be more in demand?
I honestly can't figure out what the claim is in the article, but I'm also too hung up on the shite writing to really try and dissect it. ELI5 please.
TheFooder
26d ago
In the story the journalist wasn't a lib, just playing the role. The joke is that she was more conservative or based or w/e than the Bannon-ites. My read: the purported beliefs of most MAGA types, or typical young conservative, aren't anything beyond memes that make them feel good about themselves and the real ubermensch have no respect for them and will take them down too.
TheFooder
26d ago
I, for one, enjoyed it. But I don't think I'm in the same solar system as anyone you might be aiming this at.
TheFooder
3mo ago
Becky Burke, British Comic Book person returns home after 11 day ICE detention https://comicscene.substack.com/p/becky-burke-returns-home-after-us
The link isn't the best link, just the first. I googled the story and found dozens of articles that all say the same basic thing.
- 28 yo travels America since January; ~50 days on a 90 day visa
- At some point she tries to cross into Canada to go to Vancouver; The Canadians say no--you have the wrong visa and send her back
- Upon returning to the other side of the border, the Americans say, "You were working on a guest visa, that means jail and deportation." Becky + Lawyers claim she was only doing 'chores' with a host family. 'Chores' are never defined, detailed or discussed.
- 11 days in an ICE detention center; trauma for life and some great comic book material.
- Red, red meat for Europeans looking to make hay with Trump. This story is (apparently) all over the UK right now.
I'm having a hard time establishing some of the facts, primarily, what comic works has Becky created. I can't find anything and none of the articles I've looked at link to anything. The closest I saw was that she has an Instagram account. So, is she a comic creator or just someone who lists it as her profession? I have no idea.
Secondly, What are these 'chores' and how is there a debate about whether it was work or not? How does ICE even know that said 'chores' even happened?
I'm confused by this. On one hand, Trump wants ICE to be extra hard-core and now naive Zoomers are getting swept up with bad Visas. Ok, that sucks. Shit happens. Perhaps in a kindler, gentler America we would have given them a tongue lashing and sent them home, now we jail them for a week and a half. Seems...unnecessary, but I guess the message is sent: don't come here and try to get away with doing work. Very bad!
On the other hand, how did she set trigger ICE in the first place? I don't understand how doing 'chores' even registers unless she's been watched the whole time with an eye to catching her in the act of 'doing work.' I've heard of this happening with musicians or DJs who fly into Canada as tourists only to play a gig and get busted for working. I don't think it's great, but I get why it happens. Was Becky sketching the family as part of her 'chores'? Was she doing farm work? Was she cleaning dishes and sending Instagrams about it? Did she tell ICE she had been working? Like, what the heck happened? Is this another case of "lying to cops is the only rational response," and she got swept up in a dragnet fishing for gormless fools?
A separate article mentioned this recently happened to two other people (both females...coincidence?) who were arrested because they were possibly working on travel visas. One was a German tattoo artists, who, based on the scant evidence provided in the article, seems to have been travelling with her inking gear and also worked on a prior trip to the US. The third lady is an actress who somehow didn't have the right visa either and ended up in ICE detention for a few weeks. For some reason, my mind automagically starts wondering if perhaps these artists (that's a dogwhistle for lefty activists, btw) had some Interwebz posts that somebody didn't like.
My instinct is that these are the horrifying yet rare circumstances that sell news copy but don't really say much about American immigration and customs enforcement. At the same time, I dunno...Trump, man. Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs. Are we just busting foreign activist-artists but no one is saying that part out loud? The information I accessed is so vague and so focused on the 'horrible treatment' I can't really get a picture of what happened, so I presume there's more going on and that if I knew what it was it would make me less sympathetic to the victim.
TheFooder
2mo ago
Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams.
I see you there, trying to put Scantron out of business.
TheFooder
3mo ago
Something I can't identify sticks in my craw. I think it's the "interests of Americans and the United States" bit.
Like, what even is that? Who could possibly agree on what it is? I think by your definition we'd be deporting (non-citizen) supporters of Israel too.
Frankly, I thought coming to the US and saying whatever hot garbage you wanted to say was part of the allure. I am finding it impossible to see this issue as something that we can somehow carve out from the broader mission of liberty. I think people are just mad they can't punch college students in the face for being wankers.
Why is speech the problem anyway? Isn't the actual problem that there is criminality--vandalism, attacks, things that clearly counter school policies. Why not focus on that?
TheFooder
2mo ago
I was surprised by this as well. All he had to say was, "I'm not familiar with Cooper's work." Heaven forbid Douglas Murray not have an opinion on something. My weak-man take is Murray made an ass out of himself, but I only watched snippets and reactions. Rogan is too long and meandering for my tastes.
TheFooder
2mo ago
400 is such an outrageous timeline why would they bother? Was it a joke? Was there one or two certain tasks that sucked up most of the timeline?
TheFooder
4mo ago
Wholeheartedly agree. I don't know what happened but I can barely even finish an article these days and I stopped paying him after the first year was up. It seems like there's a lot of "own-side" bias creeping in but also just some amount of laziness. Your point about straw-men hits, that's something I see a lot of lately. Maybe it's bad incentives? A different type of audience and audience capture? I'm really at a loss, but I've definitely lost a lot of interest in what Scott has to say these past few years.
TheFooder
8mo ago
I'm going to add a second comment that's different and much more spicy.
For a while now, I've had this growing knot in my guts whenever these types of things happen and the bad guys end up being women. I hate the knot because my brain says it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame for the increased pressure to root out anyone who's doing something wrong somewhere. But the knot keeps growing. I can't resolve the conundrum.
With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right? Or is there something darker in here. Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate? Why did that lady at the Harris rally scream about Palestine at a baby? What's with all the, "I'm speaking," moments? Do the ladies have more power and authority than they can handle?
I don't consider myself a woman-hater. Hell, once upon a time I considered myself a feminist. Is it just my imagination or has something in our national psyche gone and unleashed the worst aspects of womanhood upon the land? The puritanical hunt for all that is good and fun in life can't just be a female thing. Can it? Or is it that safety-ism causes men to operate in a different, more narrow theater (ex. geopolitics) leaving women to police the margins (ex. protesting pussy-grabbin' presidents and yelling at babies)? I really don't want to become a Trad Chad who wants to put the ladies back into some parochial 17th century box. But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?
TheFooder
29d ago
With decades of seeking I've yet to find a group anywhere close to the Motte for interesting and thought-provoking conversations. Substack is a watered-down version that I don't fully appreciate. I've learned more and seen more in this forum than any other. All else is tribalism.
TheFooder
3mo ago
No Culture War articles today? Have we achieved Culture Peace?? No one wants this!
TheFooder
3mo ago
While agree there must be some level of incompetence or just a screw-up, I really don't see which of the various chat apps would be better than Signal. AFAIK, it's the most secure almost to the point of being a problem for things like FOIA, as once the app is deleted all the message history is gone.
Anyway, I"m not sure I agree with the 'bad ops-sec' here and tend toward 'if you message the wrong person, you can't claw it back.'
TheFooder
3mo ago
Yeah, this seems to be largely the case. As a fin-tech worker, the idea of job security is one I can hardly process, but I've been told that easy job and lifetime job security were top reasons for moving to DC. I think also, "there's not actually much work for a PhD in linguistics," is up there. I'm sympathetic to the claims of being terrorized--it seems like the firings are extra confusing and malicious--but I'm a little-shoulder shruggy in terms of losing one's job. It makes me seem like a demon around here. I have to keep up the pretense that I'm sorrowful for all the people. That said, I don't know who's getting fired, so I don't know who to call to make a big scene about how terrible it all is. I've been accused of not being 'curious enough.'
TheFooder
3mo ago
Demanding rigor in a rhetorical cage match is a fatality. OP's statement was clear and google-able at a copy/paste, first-result level. The off-handed claim about Alabama sucking didn't help either, some around here might call it a dog-whistle. Anyway, save your battles.
Claim: it's dangerous for different states to adopt different standards from each other.
- Would state A risk an invasion by an entire state-B population of underachieving morons--with no economic, political or militaristic boundaries between states as protection?
- When do states have the right to fight each other?
- Should we expect that all of our elites will eventually be foreigners because we've dumbed down our back bench?
- How do you prevent bad localized ideas, un-scientific methods, and fads from chewing through the populace?
- What are the controls?
- What happens to national culture?
- How will we get people to continue to drink milk?
- What will we do if we suddenly realize we've made a bad national decision? Dept. II: Edu-harder?
- How will we recognize or measure the impact of losing the department/relying on individual states?
- Is it all just money--or lack thereof?
- How will the universities--and by extension small communities supported by such schools--survive without a government college grants program? Is it like moving a highway?
- Does all of this work to raise the prestige of the Ivy's, Stanford, etc.?
- Will it be a boom-time for community colleges and State universities?
- Like...worst of all...what if it works?
TheFooder
3mo ago
I guess we're talking about state's rights here and it reminded me that by finally settling Roe v Wade and forcing it to the states, not only have we found most states are able to find a position fairly quickly (and I'd guess more favorable to the left overall) but it has completely annihilated it as a presidential campaign issue. I would expect that Education now moves off the table as something a candidate can run on...
UNLESS...people can tally the cost. This is hard because the data that tells us how schools are doing comes from Dept of ED and now those reports will just be gone. Or perhaps haphazardly and randomly tabulated by the states. Another pseudo-metric washed away into the swill bucket with CPI, Jobless claims and GDP.
The good news is that you won't even know if it fails.
TheFooder
4mo ago
I would have to imagine if they can apy 5 million dollars they will be relatively high quality.
That's funny because I would presume they're drug kingpins, grifters and mafiosos.
TheFooder
9mo ago
https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-probes-fcc-decision-to-revoke-starlink-funds/
“In 2020, the FCC awarded SpaceX’s Starlink $885.5 million through RDOF. Starlink ‘is the world’s first and largest satellite constellation using a low Earth orbit to deliver a broadband internet capable of supporting streaming, online gaming, video calls’ and more. On August 10, 2022, the FCC rejected Starlink’s long-form application to receive funding through RDOF on the basis that the FCC ‘cannot afford to subsidize ventures that are not delivering the promised speeds or are not likely to meet program requirements,’” Chairman Comer wrote.
“In December 2023, the Commission reaffirmed its decision to deny the award to Starlink. More specifically, the FCC again ‘determined that Starlink failed to demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service.’ Notably, however, FCC Commissioners Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington have spoken against the Commission’s decision […] Commissioner Carr has argued that the FCC is now among a ‘growing list of administrative agencies that are taking action against Elon Musk’s businesses.’ The FCC must ground its decision-making in law and not politics,” Chairman Comer continued.
Not sure if I have much to add, I didn't see anyone talk about this, but may have missed it.
I understand that a lot of people have it out for Musk, but this seems blatantly partisan and all culture war. Is there a not-culture war aspect to this? $885 million seems like small potatoes compared to all the other numbers that have been floated around lately. I have a hard time strong-manning the decision to not release the funds. It seems like another pebble in the bucket of reasons why Musk, for the sake of his ambitions and livelihood has to support Trump. People can get mad about it, but what else is the dude supposed to do with the power of the Dems fully against him?
TheFooder
3mo ago
Does anyone know, or have access to information about how many Federal employees have been furloughed? I'm hearing a lot about the Dept of ED because of my sister who worked there, and she has told me that everyone else she's talking to says they are going to be let go soon, but I can't tell if that's true or just people trying to make her feel better. For what it's worth, I live in an area replete with Federal workers--like every other person, it seems. There is a lot of anger and frustration, but not much clarity. So far, it seems like Dept of ED and USAID have had the most dramatic cuts, but people from DHS and Transport are claiming they will lose their jobs 'any day now.'
I presume the employees know more than me, but it also seems like most people don't actually know anything. I also have the sense that there is special malice being heaped on Dept of Ed people that the others aren't experiencing.
Curious if anyone has any good sources on the bigger picture of how many cuts there have been in total.
The thing that gets me--and I will admit my loss of facts over the years-- is there's no counterfactual for how effective the vaccines were. I presume the peak numbers would have come down a little, but vs. what? Overall, it doesn't seem to me there's much evidence that the vaccines did anything as the course of the covid outbreak followed every other pandemic just at a different scale. All I get is, "Of course they worked, it's obvious. You're stupid."
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