E. Jean Carroll won. I’m glad she won, but I’m still depressed. Why? Because a financial victory against Trump is not enough. As I said on the Nicole Sandler show on Thursday, we know how Trump responds when he loses, so we need to KEEP working to crush him especially after we win. He must be crushed legally, financially, politically and narratively. I could speak generically, “Here’s what we should do.” But I have experience in fighting the right financially, legally, politically and narratively. I think that experience can be applied to the situation now and apply it in the future. Recently I spoke on a panel about my wildly successful work to make the violent rhetoric, racism, sexism and religious bigotry coming from right wing media toxic to mainstream advertisers and less profitable to the distributors of RW media. It was a financial victory, but I kept working to make it a legal, political and narrative victory. I spoke about the narrative and messages that I used that people on our side could get behind and how I taught other groups how to use the Spocko Method.
Uncategorized
Via Josh Kraushaar in Axios: “The GOP’s shrinking Senate map.” One of the biggest immediate consequences if Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket in 2024: Republicans may campaign aggressively in fewer Senate battleground races. In an interview with CNN last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was cautious about the number of top GOP pickup opportunities — despite a historically favorable map giving the party a strong chance of ending Democrats’ 51–49 majority. “I just spent 10 minutes explaining to you how we could screw this up, and we’re working very hard to not let that happen. Let’s put it that way,” McConnell said. He only listed four Democratic-held seats as top opportunities: West Virginia, Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. If Trump’s endorsements of weak candidates hurt GOP prospects in 2022, it’s the prospect that Trump will lead the GOP presidential ticket that could jeopardize purple-state opportunities in 2024. Yep. It’s not a given that the GOP takes the Senate or keeps the House. Not at all.
Give me that old-time retribution Sublimation: a feature or a bug? One has to wonder with the obsessive attention Americans pay to the sex others are having, to gender nonconformity, and especially to extrajudicial punishment. Brandon Garrett and Gregory Mitchell ponder findings that suggest Americans’ adherence to Sir William Blackstone’s principle that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer” is slipping. If their faith in due process was ever there. Researchers asked if at trial it was worse if an innocent was convicted, a guilty person went free, or if both were equally bad. (Slate): Most respondents answered that the errors were equally bad. Our first results showing widespread rejection of the Blackstone ratio were so surprising and potentially disruptive that we tested their robustness multiple times, using a series of large samples drawn from the entire U.S. population and multiple measurement methods. Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we have found that a majority of Americans, more than 60 percent, consider false acquittals and false convictions to be equally bad outcomes.
“Not who we are” meets “who we are” Talking Points Memo reports that two staffers in Rep. Paul Gosar’s office have close ties to Nick Fuentes’ white-supremacist “Groyper” movement: TPM has uncovered an extensive digital trail of interconnected Groyper social media pages using variations of the “ChickenRight” and “Chikken” handles that can be linked to Wade Searle, who works as the digital director for Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), one of the most extreme, far-right members of Congress. ChickenRight’s posting on far-right websites and Searle’s alleged involvement with Fuentes occurred before and after he started working in Gosar’s Capitol Hill office. Gosar, his chief of staff, his press secretary, and Searle have not responded to multiple detailed requests for comment. Well. You could have knocked over MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan with a feather. Not to mention his being “shocked” by Sen.
I did research as part of my graduate work in human-computer interaction at Georgia Tech. I focused on incremental improvements to the Mastodon user interface to focus on personal relationships. I’m presenting the prototypes and data that I developed here in summary. There’s also a 45-minute video where I go over the research in detail … Continue reading Re-designing the Mastodon User Interface for Better Personal Relationships
As I say in the first video in this short series, “come for the clickbait, stay for the education”. No, this post is not money-making advice: it’s telling you how money is actually made, by both banks and the government, using my Minsky software. Firstly, here are the videos. If you’re a visual learner, you … Continue reading "How to Make Money"
Being whipsawed is tiresome Right out of the gate this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court will review a racial gerrymandering case out of South Carolina. BREAKING: U.S. Supreme Court will hear case arguing that South Carolina’s congressional map is racially gerrymandered. In the lower court, a three judge panel found that the state’s 1st Congressional District violates the 14th Amendment and must be redrawn. Politico: — If the Supreme Court doesn’t act on Moore v. Harper, a case before the high court that addresses the independent state legislature theory, which gives state courts little to no role in interpreting election laws set by state legislatures, some legal experts are warning there could be chaos heading into 2024. Our Zach Montellaro explains: The future of the case “in question because a state-level ruling could make it moot. The nation’s highest court has also signaled that it may skip out on issuing a decision.
People have been living together with the potential for someone to commit a violent act since the beginning of time. There is never a 100% certainty that something bad won’t happen to you. To sanction the “pre-preemptive” murder of an unarmed person who is having a mental breakdown just because it might get violent is anarchy. Have they lost their minds? This is the natural consequence of the whole “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” movement. Self-defense has been redefined to mean you can kill if you simply feel threatened. There’s no responsibility to retreat and there doesn’t have to be an actual threat. Kill first and ask questions later. It’s not the first time that vigilantism has become defensible in America. Like before, there is a real sense among a whole lot of people that they have the right to kill anyone who offends them and makes them feel insecure in their presence and there’s often a racist component to their “feelings.” It looks like we’re in for another round.
Daniel Penny joins Kyle Rittenhouse Being homeless and in mental distress is now a crime. One or more Twitter users have declared Jordan Neely, the street performer choked to death on a New York subway, a criminal. The online defense fund for his subway choker, Daniel Penny, quickly exceeded $1.6 million over the weekend. Neely’s death was not explicitly political violence, but Neely may have been a casualty in the cultural civil war waged by the right. Even as MAGA celebrates Ashli Babbitt as a Jan. 6 martyr, the right is lining up to celebrate Penny as a cultural civil war hero like Kyle Rittenhouse. Brian Klaas writes at his substack about the right’s open embrace of political violence: In Texas, Governor Abbott previously said that he was “looking forward” to pardoning a man who murdered a Black Lives Matter protester. The murderer, Daniel Perry, was just sentenced to 25 years in prison. He had previously texted a friend that he “might have to kill” some people on his way to work.
The DeSantis Trump Iowa race has begin. And it’s as absurd as you imagined. It was supposed to be the first time the two main rivals for the Republican nomination faced off on GOP territory at the same time and the media couldn’t have been more excited. Despite still being undeclared, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was making a foray into Iowa, the first Republican primary state, on the same day as former president Donald Trump. What was going to happen when these two manly pugilists finally entered the ring? Well, the big confrontation didn’t happen as planned. DeSantis threw on a crisp blue shirt with a button down collar and a pair of skinny jeans and hit the trail and Trump bowed out at the last minute. The New York Times declared that a big win for the Florida Governor describing DeSantis’ intrepid trek to the area where Trump had been scheduled to speak as a “clear rebuke” to the man who has been “tormenting him” — a brave move to ensure that he doesn’t suffer the same result as all the other Republicans Trump has destroyed: For the first time in months, Gov.