It doesn’t get much more absurd than this.
Who is Brian Piddick? Profile: Lib Dem Spokesperson on Home Affairs in House of Lords. Ran for Mayor of London 2008 & 2012.
He’s a politician. That’s what he does. Politicians engage with lots of people; that’s what they do. It’s the nature of the work: engaging with lots of people. Yet here he is complaining because lots of people are talking to him.
Maybe he identifies as a recluse?
Originally a comment by Artymorty on THIS is the culture war.
Latsot, you’ve really nailed it here. It’s all about narratives now. People want a tidy story to explain things, not the complicated, underivative truth. A tidy and familiar and comforting story. This is dangerous because sometimes the truth doesn’t have a precedent to model itself on; we can’t just rely on pattern recognition and narrative familiarity to figure out what’s real and true versus what’s illusory and untrue.
It’s pattern recognition and narrative familiarity that has led everyone to treat gender identity ideology like it’s just as simple as Gay Rights 2.0. It’s also what’s behind the cringeworthy line “my truth” that I hear all the time among certain people. What they’re saying is, I’ve made sense of something complex by making it comfortable and familiar and digestible to me, and that’s what truth means to me: comfort and safety.
It’s probably also behind the fact that the entertainment industry only wants to reboot and repackage old familiar “media properties” these days: they treat entertainment consumers (a creepy way to describe what are otherwise known as people) like they don’t have the energy to invest in entirely new stories — new ideas — anymore.
If we take it a step back and speculate about why this is happening now, I guess the primary culprit has to be information overload due to social media and the internet? We have access to everything and everyone all the time now, and social media algorithms have eroded our attention spans to the point that it feels too exhausting to sort the truth out, so we just seek comfort instead. It’s quite depressing.
More and more I feel like civilization can’t survive the Internet age unless we start formally teaching everyone how to manage our lives in the digital age. Maybe the Three Rs of elementary school should become four: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Reason(able thinking in the digital age).
Last year was New Zealand’s hottest year on record, according to the country’s National Institute of Water and Aeronautic Research (NIWA), and seven of the past nine years are among New Zealand’s warmest ever. The country’s steadily rising temperature brings increased risk of major floods, bushfires and storms.
And – surprise! – that’s not going to change.
The increases won’t end anytime soon without significant action on climate change, said Victoria University of Wellington’s Dr Nathanael Melia. “Every year we spin the roulette wheel of weather variability; however, like a casino, we have rigged the game, and the hothouse always wins in the end.”
…
In July 2021 heavy rain engorged the West Coast’s Buller River, accelerating its flow to 10 times its normal rate – the highest recorded in a New Zealand river since 1926. The resulting flood devastated the town of Westport. Many residents had to be evacuated after hundreds of houses were inundated, causing an estimated NZ$132m in damage. Development West Coast’s chief executive, Heath Milne, expects the rebuild to take up to two years.
Meanwhile in the Pacific Northwest a fire destroyed a British Columbia town. Tomorrow is today. Next year is tomorrow.
Washington state now appears to allow minors to undergo life-changing gender reassignment surgery without parental consent.
Under a new law, health insurers must cover “gender-affirming” care, including surgical treatments that were previously denied coverage. Democrats rejected a proposal to apply the new law to patients over 18 years old.
So young Billy age 13 can get his penis lopped off and present his parents with a fait accompli? Seems a bit rash.
Up until this law, gender reassignment surgery and other procedures like facial reconstruction or laser hair removal were considered cosmetic by health insurance companies. Due to its classification as cosmetic, health insurers did not usually cover the procedures, even when doctors medically recommended them.
If only it were just “cosmetic.”
The source self-identifies as “conservative talk radio” but…sometimes the other team has its head up its ass.
Tennis coach Judy Murray is not convinced that trans women should compete against women.
[Murray] told Radio Times magazine: “It could be really off-putting to female athletes to feel you could train for years to get to whatever level and then be knocked out or beaten by someone born with a physical strength advantage.”
To say the least. I would use words stronger than “off-putting,” myself.
“I don’t know enough about it and it’s incredibly complex but it’s important there’s a lot of research into creating a fair solution. Where there are clear physical advantages, (for) governing bodies involved in creating the rules about the point at which there is too much of a disadvantage, it’s really important they get that right.”
I don’t think it’s all that complex. I think it’s just obvious that men shouldn’t do it, at all, ever, no matter how intensely they feel “like women.” They have the male bodies. They shouldn’t use them in that way.
That reply is garnering a lot of laughter. Not a tennis coach’s area of expertise? Really?
Well, let’s think about it.
Is it controversial to say that white people and black people have distinct but overlapping experiences of oppression, or is that standard intersectional anti-racism?
I suppose one answer is that it’s not exactly controversial to say that, because hardly anyone does say it, so there’s no fuel for controversy. But if white people did say that? A lot, and noisily, and with menaces and insults? Yes I think we can surmise that would be controversial.
Sorry we missed your call, we were busy playing Pokémon.
Two Los Angeles police officers were fired for chasing Pokémon rather than fleeing robbers, court documents show.
So the robbers caught them?
No no don’t be silly, the BBC means they were chasing Pokémon rather than chasing fleeing robbers.
The pair were parked nearby when a radio call came in for officers to respond to a shop robbery.
But a review of their in-car camera footage showed they had been playing Pokémon Go and chose to pursue a nearby Snorlax – a relatively rare catch – instead of providing back-up.
Air Traffic Control to pilot: I wish I could deal with your questions but I can’t right now, there’s a Snorlax down the block.
Eric Trump, Constitutional scholar.
Eric Trump has called New York Attorney General Letitia James the “most unethical prosecutor in the history of the United States” while saying her office’s investigation[s] into his father’s business practices are unconstitutional.
No, hon. He’s not president any more. He’s just a shameless crook, and the law can touch him.
Donald Trump’s son made the remarks on Monday during an appearance on Sean Hannity‘s Fox News show more than a week after it was revealed James had subpoenaed two of the former president’s adult children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, as part of the inquiry.
Chronologically adult. Intellectually, morally, psychologically, not so much.
James’ office is looking into allegations Donald Trump fraudulently inflated the value of assets to get better loans from banks and undervalued them to reduce his tax bills. James began the investigation after Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress in 2019.
It’s her job.
“You have Letitia James out there, probably the most unethical prosecutor in the history of the United States, who literally said on video ‘I’m going to go into office every single day and I’m going to sue Trump and then I’m going to go home,'” Eric Trump said.
We’re all really fascinated to hear what Eric Trump thinks is unethical.
“She ran on the campaign promise of suing my father because she didn’t believe in his political party, because she didn’t like us, because the people of Washington, D.C. told her to do that. It violates the Constitution, it’s unethical, it’s wrong.”
That might be a little more credible if Trump were in fact not a crook, but since this is the real world and not a fantasy, it’s not.
In December 2021, Donald Trump sued James while arguing that the inquiry violates his constitutional rights.
“The investigations commenced by James are in no way connected to legitimate law enforcement goals, but rather, are merely a thinly-veiled effort to publicly malign Trump and his associates,” the lawsuit filed in New York court reads.
“Her mission is guided solely by political animus and a desire to harass, intimidate, and retaliate against a private citizen who she views as a political opponent. James has deprived, and will continue to deprive, Plaintiffs of their rights under federal law, state law and common law by virtue of her callous acts.”
Goodness. That doesn’t sound like lawyer-speak, it sounds like Trump-speak. I guess he doesn’t let his lawyers re-write his rage blurts. “Callous” is a nice touch – what, she’s supposed to have sympathy for the pack of filthy rich crooks?
I don’t even recognize this world.
Who are these people they’re talking about? Nobody I know.
Originally a comment by latsot on “Mass formation psychosis”.
Ah that word narrative – be very cautious around anyone telling you something is a “narrative” when it bears no resemblance to a story. It’s a favorite of bullshitters.
That’s partly because to many, many people ‘narrative’ is the same thing as ‘evidence’. I mean this in the most literal sense; I come across many people, especially on social media, who seem to sincerely believe that being able to tell a story about something – even if that story doesn’t really seem to explain the facts – is the same as providing huge great chunks of evidence of something being true.
In fact, they feel it gives them license to dismiss evidence, because to them, that evidence belongs to a different story so just isn’t valid. They’re happy to cite ‘evidence’ when it appears superficially to support their story but they’re unable or unwilling to distinguish between what is evidence and what is not.
So they get to tell their lovely story and cite any willy-nilly thing as evidence because the story is always so meandering and vague. And they also get to dismiss our evidence because they believe it belongs in another, nastier story they want nothing to do with.
Meanwhile, we are explaining what our evidence says and why it says what it says (and doesn’t say) and it’s being entirely ignored.
This is the culture war.
We’ve only spelled out our goals eleventy billion times.
Policy goals – not allowing trans ideology to erode women’s rights and women’s prizes, set-asides, honors and the like. I think we’ve been very clear and very forthcoming about it. Where’s he been?
The replies are uniformly nuts.
“the genocidal” – yes sure, plus we’re vampires and that thing from Alien.
Creepy shirtsleeves guy defies the law:
The Ohio Republican Jim Jordan is the second sitting congressman to refuse a request for cooperation from the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack.
In a Sunday night letter to the committee chair, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the Trump ally accused the panel of “an outrageous abuse” of its authority.
Sure, it’s “outrageous” for the House to investigate a violent attack on the Capitol and Congress. BLM protests are of the devil, but actual violence inside the legislative building is fine.
In columns for the Guardian, the former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal has laid out Jordan’s extensive contacts with Trump before and on 6 January, throughout legalistic efforts to throw out results and the Capitol riot itself.
…
On Sunday night, a spokesperson said the committee would respond to Jordan soon and “consider appropriate next steps”.
“Mr Jordan has admitted that he spoke directly to President Trump on 6 January and is thus a material witness,” the spokesperson said. “Mr Jordan’s letter to the committee fails to address these facts.”
By this time next year he could be holding hearings on why there were hearings on the insurrection at all.
Oh give it a REST.
Narcissist comes out as first openly self-involved twerp shock-surprise.
American figure skater Timothy LeDuc is set to become the first openly non-binary athlete to compete at an Olympic Winter Games.
They might as well say he’s the first openly breathing athlete to compete at an Olympic Winter Games. He’s the first openly two legs-having athlete to compete at an Olympic Winter Games. He’s the first openly anthropoid ape athlete to compete at an Olympic Winter Games.
Unfortunately he’s not the first person or athlete to seek extra attention by claiming to be the first ever something or other, even if the something or other is of absolutely no consequence or interest to anyone at all.
“My hope is that when people see my story, it isn’t focused on me and saying, ‘Oh, Timothy is the first out non-binary person to achieve this level of success in sport,'” LeDuc said during a news conference Saturday, according to NBC Sports.
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha no it isn’t. That isn’t his hope. His hope is the opposite of that. He’s non-binary-publicity-seeking.
“My hope is that the narrative shifts more to, queer people can be open and successful in sports. We’ve always been here, we’ve always been a part of sports. We just haven’t always been able to be open.”
If he means lesbian and gay that’s true; if he means “non-binary” it’s just hot air-attention seeking.
Our friend latsot has signed up for various wheelchair distance events in 2022 including the Leeds and Sheffield half marathons, the Middlesbrough 10k and (fingers crossed) the Great North Run.
He’s raising money for nia, a women-led, women-only, secular, rights-based registered charity which has been delivering services to women, girls and children who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, since 1975.
His crowdfunder for the Sheffield event (in March) is here.
He urges you to donate if you can and share the link if you like!
Liberal shmiberal – union-busting at the NY Times:
Last April, 650 tech employees at the New York Times announced that they were unionizing. Rather than applauding them and proceeding to negotiate a contract, the company instead refused to voluntarily recognize the union. This is despite its own editorial board supporting a bill that would have made it legally binding for employers to voluntarily accept union requests when they are backed by a majority of the staff.
As the paper’s own editorial explained: “Under current law, an employer can reject the majority’s signatures and insist on a secret ballot. But in a disturbingly high number of cases, the employer uses the time before the vote to pressure employees to rethink their decision to unionize.” Now, this is what the New York Times company is accused of doing to its own employees.
Since last year, the Times has been accused of trying to scare workers into changing their minds – to sow division among the employees, divide the unit, and erode support for organized labor. Last week, federal labor regulators claimed that the company had broken the law by telling large swaths of employees that they were actually “managers”, and that they were therefore prohibited from publicly supporting the union.
“Liberal” is often used as a synonym for “left-wing” or “progressive” in the US, but they’re not really the same. Unions aren’t really a liberal cause these days. Not sexy enough…as well as of course having to do with redirecting a little of the wealth from the bosses to the workers, when lots of liberals are bosses or allied with bosses.
The New York Times gets away with a lot. They are the journalism equivalent of the supreme court. They offer prestige, big budgets and job stability at a time when those things are in short supply in this industry. The half of our country terrified by Trump sees them as an army of truth, and everyone in media wants to work there. (Call me!) But let’s be honest: the people who control the New York Times company are acting like real weasels.
It’s not just that they are hypocritical, yammering about the public good while acting from pure selfishness – it’s that they want to have it both ways. While more outwardly evil media bosses like Rupert Murdoch may be proud to embrace their Ayn Randian reputation, those who lead the Times want to be accepted as good people on the Brooklyn-brownstone cocktail party circuit, even as they quietly try to stop those who work for them from having an equal seat at their tastefully appointed table. Screw that.
I think Hamilton Nolan is exaggerating the keenness of Times people to be seen as liberal. The news side is keen to be seen as non-partisan, and the editorial side is very mixed – there are plenty of conservatives and “centrists” along with some a little more leftish. The Times is more establishment than it is liberal.
I have covered hundreds of anti-union campaigns. No matter where they happen, they are all based on lies and fear. Whether they happen at an Amazon warehouse or at the New York Times, they are a demonstration of contempt for the idea that an employee may deserve to be treated as someone whose humanity is just as real as that of an employer.
Respectable people don’t engage in union-busting. People who run anti-union campaigns are not Good Liberals. Hundreds of workers raising their voices have not been enough to convince the New York Times executives to act right. Maybe it’s time to stop inviting them to the cocktail parties.
Ok, but I think it’s either naive or hyperbolic to say the Times sees itself as composed of nothing but Good Liberals.
The questions around Trump’s encouragement or otherwise of the insurrection are boiling down to: was he evil or just stupid? Did he deliberately delay telling the insurrectionists to go home, or was he just having too much fun watching them on tv to get off his ass?
Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Illinois who sits on the committee, underlined the laser-like focus of the investigation on Trump’s potential complicity.
Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, he said the key question now was: “What did the president know about 6 January leading up to 6 January?”
Kinzinger added that the panel wanted to know why Trump failed to take any action for almost three hours while the violence at the Capitol was unfolding on his TV screen. Was it a sign of weakness or complicity?
The answer is in the question – the violence at the Capitol was unfolding on his TV screen. He was watching. He was busy, dude. You don’t just stop watching a great show like that to do your job.
“It’s the difference between, was the president absolutely incompetent or a coward on 6 January when he didn’t do anything or did he know what was coming? That’s a difference between incompetence with your oath and possibly criminal.”
It will be very easy for his lawyers or just his press people to convince relevant parties that Trump is just too stupid and self-involved to get up off the couch and tell insurrectionists to stop.
Politifact has more on this Robert Malone fella:
Video of Spotify host Joe Rogan’s controversial interview with a doctor known for making false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines was removed from YouTube, just days after Twitter banned the doctor’s account for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policies.
Dr. Robert Malone, who gained hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers in recent months as he promoted anti-vaccine falsehoods, drew a comparison in the interview between COVID-19 vaccination efforts in the U.S. and the environment in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Nazi party rose to power.
I’m not seeing it. Not seeing the similarity between Weimar Germany and the effort to vaccinate populations against a dangerous virus. Also not seeing how the effort to vaccinate populations against a dangerous virus is likely to lead to Nazism. That’s especially true since the authoritarian types are on the anti-vax side rather than the pro-vax side. I get that they portray mass vaccination as itself authoritarian, but that’s bullshit, and apart from bullshit, the comparison makes no sense.
Twitter also booted Marjorie Taylor Greene, but she’s a good deal more ignorant and stupid than Malone.
But unlike Greene, Malone has a medical degree. He bills himself as the “inventor” of mRNA vaccines and has leveraged that title to push one false claim after another.
Not the inventor; a major contributor.
Even as Twitter and YouTube sought to stem the spread of Malone’s claims, videos highlighting various segments from the doctor’s hours-long conversation with Rogan continued to circulate on both platforms and others such as Facebook and TikTok. They’ve been shared by the likes of Seb Gorka, a radio host and former Trump adviser, and Dr. Simone Gold, the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that has fought restrictions to curb the virus’ spread.
Primum non nocere.
Also in Y R people so dumb, a made-up mass delusion is made up.
An unfounded theory taking root online suggests millions of people have been “hypnotized” into believing mainstream ideas about COVID-19, including steps to combat it such as testing and vaccination.
In widely shared social media posts this week, efforts to combat the disease have been dismissed with just three words: “mass formation psychosis.”
Sounds technicalish and sciencey and psychologicalesque, doesn’t it. That was Freud’s way of bullshitting too.
The term gained attention after it was floated by Dr. Robert Malone on “The Joe Rogan Experience” Dec. 31 podcast. Malone is a scientist who once researched mRNA technology but is now a vocal skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccines that use it.
…
CLAIM: The concept of “mass formation psychosis” explains why millions of people believe in a mainstream COVID-19 “narrative” and trust the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
Ah that word narrative – be very cautious around anyone telling you something is a “narrative” when it bears no resemblance to a story. It’s a favorite of bullshitters.
“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or a series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere,” Malone said. He claimed such people will not allow the “narrative” to be questioned.
Uh huh. It can’t at all be a matter of on the one hand people with long careers in public health and on the other hand internet personalities and Donald Trump. It can’t possibly have to do with more reasons to trust public health experts than random shouters and ragers and makers up of stuff.
Crediting a professor in Belgium, Malone also said in a December blog post that this “mass hypnosis” explains millions of people becoming captivated by the “dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines.”
Or, there are two choices, vaccination or no vaccination, and given what we know about vaccination and what they’ve accomplished, we have pretty good reasons to think vaccination is better than no vaccination to avoid a serious disease. There are reasons life expectancy has risen dramatically since the 19th century, and successful vaccines are one of those reasons, a major one of those reasons.
The description of “mass formation psychosis” offered by Malone resembles discredited concepts, such as “mob mentality” and “group mind,” according to John Drury, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex in the U.K. who studies collective behavior. The ideas suggest that “when people form part of a psychological crowd they lose their identities and their self-control; they become suggestible, and primitive instinctive impulses predominate,” he said in an email.
That notion has been discredited by decades of research on crowd behavior, Drury said. “No respectable psychologist agrees with these ideas now,” he said.
They make such a good story though.
Back in 2014 local public radio did a story on The Little Street at the Bottom of a Landslide-prone Bluff aka Y R people so dumb?
It’s no secret that Western Washington is prone to landslides. The combination of glacial soils, steep slopes and water creates a risk that’s greater than in other parts of the U.S.
And it’s not just river valleys like the one near Oso: The region’s coastal bluffs are also danger zones that have experienced large landslides in recent decades.
But that still doesn’t deter people from living in those slide-prone areas.
Because people are just that dumb.
Ruth Trail has lived in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle for 23 years.
She said she loves it for the views. Standing in a park that sits atop a bluff overlooking Elliot Bay, Trail can see downtown Seattle, Mt. Rainier, West Seattle and the Olympic mountains.
The views are indeed nuts. That’s why I take my dog friend/client there often. The boulevard is neither straight nor flat so the vista changes as you go, and it’s all breathtaking. It’s just…don’t live at the foot of it, you know? Don’t put your expensive house at the bottom of a landscape-prone bluff. Put it at the top, a healthy distance back from the edge (all the houses on the boulevard are across the street from the edge). Safer.
It was here, 18 years ago, that a deep-seated landslide hit. During an especially wet winter, a big chunk of the bluff collapsed, wiping out five houses below.
From above, on the boulevard, you can see where it happened. You can go up to the fence and look down at the empty space.
Geologists consider Perkins Lane Seattle’s poster child for landslide risk.
“The Perkins Lane area has been failing back since the 1930s; and probably long before that,” said David Montgomery, a geomorphology professor at the University of Washington.
But there are houses on it. People live in them. People live in them and even stay in them after a couple of inches of rain fall in a matter of hours.
When the slope at Perkins Lane failed in the winter of 1996, residents were lucky in a sense: The slide moved slowly, and they were able to evacuate their homes. No one was killed.
This time not so much.
Now, the portion of the street where the big slide hit is closed off, and no new homes have been built in the slide zone. But many homes remain nearby, in an established and rather pricey community, perched between the steep bluff above and the water below.
One of which just got taken out.
