crumbsroom wrote:

Nice to see how Hope Hicks was worried about how January 6th would effect employment opportunities. Or that it looked like they had instigated a domestic terrorist attack.

The most garbage of people.
 

All of that caked make-up can't begin to hide the meanness in her face.

Cassidy Hutchenson, on the other hand, I've spent some unhealthy amont of time imagining photographing by the pool in a one-piece bathing suit.  Don't judge me.

Jinnistan wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

Nice to see how Hope Hicks was worried about how January 6th would effect employment opportunities. Or that it looked like they had instigated a domestic terrorist attack.

The most garbage of people.
 

All of that caked make-up can't begin to hide the meanness in her face.

Cassidy Hutchenson, on the other hand, I've spent some unhealthy amont of time imagining photographing by the pool in a one-piece bathing suit.  Don't judge me.

Hope Hicks is one of those clearly attractive people I feel blessed to feel zero attraction to. Not my type, even if she wasn't a stinking pile of garbage.

Cassidy Hutchenson would be fine any time of day, even if she wasn't testifying against that Dingus McGee of a president you used to have. It certainly helps the sexy though when she is effectively curb stomping the (once) most powerful man in the world. And all he can do is just sit in florida somewhere farting into his underwear as she tells on him

There was one Joe Rogan clip I had to click on a couple of weeks ago.  The title was "Primates Evolve In Real Time", and the thumbnail has Rogan looking "Huh?" and his guest looking "D'oh?"  So I'm thinking, hey, maybe.  So in the clip Rogan's thinking out loud, "Dooode, in, like, a milllion years, what if chimps just start talking?  Do you think....people will start marrying chimps?"  And the guest goes "Oh, bro!" and they're heads both go "Bwooosh!"

So, question answered.  These primates did not evolve in real time.
 

Jordan Peterson has called Putin a "bulwark against Western Woke-ism".  Since Peterson is pretty strongly opposed to anything he perceives as "woke", we can assume that this is a form of praise.

But what is "woke".  The answer is pretty simple: the gays.  People like Putin and Peterson are scared of the gays.  "Who is fighting against us? People who say that their God is Satan. Satanists are at war with us. People who insist we attend LGBT parades."  The term "desatanification" has replaced "denazification" as the primary purpose of the invasion into Ukraine.  "'The overthrow of faith and traditional values' amounts to 'pure Satanism,' the Russian president warned."  "In Ukraine, even in wartime conditions, they are holding gay parades to show that they share Western values", says Russian Orthodox Archpriest Svyatoslav Churkanov, and Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has appointed Putin as "Chief Exorcist" in this fight against the fabulous powers of Gay Satan.

But let's get real crazy.  Let's talk about the supposed man-snake who is said to be giving Putin his powers from "a grotto beneath the Kremlin".

The self-described Siberian “Shaman-Warrior” Sasha Gabyshev claims he’s spent a lifetime struggling against a demonic entity that haunts the Russian president, the fabled Russian villain Koschei Bessmertny—also known as The Immortal and The Walking Skeleton. In the autumn of 2019, the Shaman-Warrior of Yakutia his followers set off on a two-year, 5,000-mile march to Moscow, where Gabyshev vowed to use his magic sword to slay the beast beneath the Kremlin and exorcise its terror from Putin’s soul.

Picking up supporters and news conferences along the way, Gabyshev’s soothsayers were at first attacked by a coven of pro-Putin shamans in the city of Ulan-Ude. Battling on, the sorcerer and his apprentices made it as far as Lake Baikal, where their arrest was televised. Gabyshev was carted off to a mental hospital.

“Putin is scared,” was now jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s response to the mystical melee that put Gabyshev behind bars. “Putin is already stomping his feet and shouting, ‘God save me from this shaman. What if he really does banish me?’”

Moroz says Navalny’s question remains valid. “I’m sure Putin was terrified,” Moroz says. “He staged a major police operation against Gabyshev. The shaman had nothing against Putin. His goal was to remove the demon from beneath the Kremlin and free Putin’s stolen soul. It’s a powerful and accurate metaphor that resonates with all Russians.”

Those who jobwise Putin for Western intelligence agencies are hardly a bunch of humorless stiffs. “But when we stopped laughing,” says one, “we concluded that Putin’s fear of Gabyshev was palpable.”

Afraid of having your secret man-snake powers rendered impotent?  Pretty gay, dude.

Bill Maher sure is getting more insufferable.  He's leaning pretty heavy into a number of conspiracy-adjacent areas.

Obviously, his covid-denialism is a huge issue, but as little as I respect Maher as an intellect, I was still stunned to hear him try to pass this off as an acceptable piece of thought: "A lot of people did die with covid.  That doesn't mean a lot of people died from covid."  I would think that this mainstream injection of idiocy would have gotten a lot more backlash, but I guess most sensible people have tuned him out already, and his fanbase has shifted to the FOX crowd who see him as their 'reasonable liberal'.

This "liberal" continues to support DeSantis' anti-woke culture war moves, aiming weekly at targets such as transpeople, critical race theory, police reform.  In his "chill" podcast, Club Random, where he gets to play Joe Rogan by getting stoned and talking over his various guests, a number of other issues have emerged.  I don't really watch the latter (he's truly an obnoxious high), but there was some mild coverage after Maher got into an argument with Bryan Cranston over critical race theory in schools.  Basically, Maher accused Cranston of having been conformed into the 'Hollywood Woke' crowd because Cranston stood his ground that the painful history of our country needs to be taken seriously.  And Maher just straight up lied, claiming that "5-year-olds" are being taught that they're racist.  There is no evidence that CRT is taught in fucking kindergarten.  Maher says, "What does critical race theory even mean?  It's just a nebulous term."  Because Maher can't be bothered to read any of the books by Derrick Bell or Richard Delgado who founded, and defined, the area of study.  But it is true that, as far as conservatives (and Maher) are concerned, it only means what they want it to mean, which is any education about racism in America that might be critical of white perpetuators.  And, again possibly trying to imitate Joe Rogan a little too closely, Maher claimed, to Sean Penn, that schools were being forced to recognize children who identify as trees.  I could not find a single actual incidence of anything like this on a cursory Google search.

About the only thing I can find myself agreeing with Maher recently is his call for an investigation into fraudulent use of the covid bailout money.  I'd rather see that investigation over ones looking at Hunter Biden or Dr. Fauci's Wuhan ties, but for different reasons than Maher (who assumes the bailouts weren't actually necessary).  And in his libertarian-leaning concern over his tax dollars, I wish one of his guests might ask him about those foreign aid and military subsidies to Israel, just so I can see the look on the face of this would-be atheist.
 

Just had a big whole post eaten up.  So I'll try to keep it brief.

There's an important SCOTUS hearing going on at the moment, Gonzales v. Google, that will have some potentially significant impacts on social media.  The two main issues under discussion involve the portion of tech-law regarding legal liability, known as Section 230.  The principle here is whether a platform should be liable for content posted by individual users, as long as the platform makes a good faith effort to moderate their content with clear and precise guidelines and terms of violations.  The second, and far more intriguing, aspect involves to what degree should a platform be liable for content that its algorithm prioritizes to direct into users' feeds.  In this case, Youtube (owned by Google) has certain terrorist-related content on their platform.  It's up for debate whether they should allow this, monetized or not.  But the more incendiary issue is to what degree this terrorist-related content was fueled by its algorithm, potentially radicalizing users who would not have normally have sought this content out.

The reason why I'm posting about this case here is because its implications have everything to do with how disinformation is allowed to spread, and how social media algorithms, programmed to maximize engagement through increasingly provocative material, could be liable for its spread.  And this case actually taps into a broad range of implications along the political spectrum if we look at a variety of opinions on the subject, both of the technology, the "public square" question of free speech and so-called censorship, the likely demise of online anonymity (and whether that might be a good thing or not) and the larger epistemic breakdown of accepted facts in a post-truth world, and obviously how both conservatives and leftists are eager to exploit this denial of shared truth for their own propagandist purposes.

Last edited by Jinnistan (2/21/2023 1:11 pm)

A further complication is the possibility of SCOTUS taking up challenges to laws in Texas and Florida which, rather than attacking Section 230 protections, holds these platforms liable for the removing of any content based on "political ideology".  Anyone slightly younger than 80 probably understands that the internet doesn't exactly abide by state boundries, but the more asinine issue is this nebulous "political ideology", which, you might notice, happens to encompass things like terrorism.  What we're seeing more frequently is a conservative defense of disinformation itself.  Maybe it's telling that conservatives increasingly believe that anti-disinformation efforts are overwhelmingly putting their voices in peril.  Even many conservatives, who clearly know better, have been trying to defend some of the nuttier viral ideas as merely differences of opinion and similar equivalencies.  As vividly illustrated by last week's release of communications at FOX News concerning the fatuous election fraud conspiracies, there's a pretty deep capacity among right-wing media to tolerate demonstrable falsehoods.  Disinformation (as opposed to misinformation) is after all inherently a tool of political ideology.  They can try and both-sides with Russiagate or Hunter's laptop, but the observable fact is that one of our major political parties, and the massive media apparatus that supports it, is actively claiming to have the civil right to deny what they know to be true.  The imperative distinction with those FOX emails and texts is this willingness to court and spread untruth for profit, even if that untruth happens to incite a violent riot that puts at risk the institution of democracy.  This is not a matter of "opposing views" or a "difference of opinion", this is weaponized, demagogic propaganda.

But the real key to those FOX communications is that they show, beyond doubt, that these hosts and producers meet the "actual malice" standard under New York Times v. Sullivan, and it's under this standard that they should lose their defamation suit against Dominion Voting Systems.  Maybe this will finally be the straw, maybe not.  I find it interesting in this context that the two SCOTUS justices most vocally opposed to Section 230, Thomas and Gorsuch, happen to also be the two justices who have suggested revisiting New York Times v Sullivan.  Interesting timing.  DeSantis, who signed the Florida social media law that will inevitably be heard by both Thomas and Gorsuch, has also been vocally antagonistic over NYT v Sullivan.

The WaPo published an op-ed last month, "Beyond Objectivity" that serves as mirror-image of this bullshit.  The piece starts by stating the definition of Objectivity ("expressing or using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice") and immediately proceeds to distort this definition, saying "the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality"; "the standard was dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly White newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world"; "pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading 'bothsidesism'".  Writer Len Downie (a white male, mind you) again redefines objectivity as "mostly unquestioning news coverage of institutional power" (why wouldn't objectivity require questions?), and then remarkably admits "I never understood what 'objectivity' meant. I didn’t consider it a standard for our newsroom. My goals for our journalism were instead accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth."  Well, I agree.  Downie has absolutely no understanding of what objectivity means, and, bizarrely, seems to think it means the opposite.  This is a pretty astonishing admission for someone who was the executive editor for WaPo for two decades, but maybe it might explain why mainstream corporate media has lost so much respect during that time.

Noteably, it wasn't objectivity that prevented the old-school "white male" newsroom from reporting accurately on issues concerning minorities.  In fact, it was precisely their subjective bias that prevented them from considering the worth of those communities.  The fact is that they failed to be objective enough.  It's quite a semantic feat for Downie to try and use this historical institutional bias as an excuse to further erode objective integrity in journalism.  Everyone in this story is confused.  Bret Stephans claims to be pro-objectivity, but then claimed that only op-ed pundits like himself, as opposed to journalists, should be responsible for determining "truth".  Michael Gartner, former head of NBC News, says "Objectivity is in the mind of the beholder".  No, Mike.  That's the definition of subjectivity.  Everyone has lost their goddamn mind.  Downie wants to "replace outmoded 'objectivity' with a more relevant articulation of journalistic standards".  Oh, relevant articulation.  So this is just pure semantic garbage then?  Well, that is subjective after all.

"Trust" is an important buzz word here.  Stephens claims that using both-sidism is a "critical way to build trust".  Downie's larger piece for the Cronkite (RIP) School of Journalism is called "How to produce trustworthy news without Objectivity".  I wonder why all of those FOX hosts continued to push election fraud theories they knew were false?  Because their audience trusts them?  Like Trump, "they'll believe anything I tell them".    What both Stephans and Downie are doing is patronizing their audience, much the same as FOX.  Both-sidism is useful because you don't have to have a critical standard by which to compare those sides and make a determined judgment, because that risks alienating the half of your audience who might get their feelings hurt by the outcome.  "You can trust me, I won't apply critical standards to your point of view."  And for Downie to use the sheep's clothing of social justice for this mission of his is the insulting cherry on top.

Is it a coincidence to see such a blatant distortion of objectivity, in terms of journalistic ethics, at the same time that we're seeing a parallel effort to tolerate disinformation as a valid viewpoint?

Last edited by Jinnistan (2/21/2023 3:49 pm)

Late night rabbithole....

I wanted to dig up my lab leak theory from movieforums when I discovered that I should probably save all of my stuff from that Conspiracy Theory thread (why let it go to waste?):

___

There's a very good introductory essay at the beginning of Robert Anton Wilson's Everything Is Under Control, an amusing but perfunctory encyclopedia of online conspiracy theory in the late 90s. It deals with the psychology of conspiracy theory, which can manifest as 'conspiracism', which some consider to be a mental illness but is actually a form of other illnesses through the filter of conspiracy beliefs. I enjoy conspiracy theories, whether as intriguing alt-history or as feral entertainment. Going down a rabbit hole is great fun as a creative exercise. And, obvious to anyone with a basic standard of literacy (ie, Machiavelli), there have been and are conspiracies in our midst.

But I think we all probably know somebody who we may call a conspiraholic, someone who simply can't handle the intoxication of revelation. There are those who simply have never met a conspiracy theory that they're capable of disbelieving, and this usually produces some wildly convoluted mega-theories which are also fun in a mad-libs kind of way. (ex: Obama being a subject of a CIA Martian teleportation study in college.)

I think that the optimal approach to conspiracy research is to avoid belief at all cost. Not that you wouldn't make truth-value assessments at times (another ex: I'm currently inclined to believe the WIV leak theory), but that in such scenarios, we should avoid any absolute convictions. This is not only important in cases where further information may embarrass your premature judgment, but also to prevent the kind of "I Want To Believe" enthusiasms, a zealotry that rivals religious fervor or tribal identity, from taking root. Too many conspiracy theories are engined by such motivated certainty that it's all too easy to dismiss. But good conspiracies are like successful lies, they tend to have a percentage of truth within them, and all too often, in a parallel fallacy of binary absolutism, many people will see a BS shell and discount the authentic kernal.

I wish more people were more wise.

____

I became intrigued by the theory of the lab-leak with the release of two State Dept. cables, reported by Josh Rogin in the Washington Post. Here's the best rundown of Rogin's reporting. When it became clear that Pompeo had deliberately leaked these (incomplete) cables, as a way to shift blame from Trump's horrendously botched response to the outbreak back to the CCP, many in the mainstream were content to ignore it. However, two things can quite frequently be simultaneously true: the cables have been shown to be authentic, and Trump still, through a combination of arrogance, inepitude and deceit, greatly exacerbated the pain and death the Americans suffered from the virus. (And, ironically, the portion of the cables that Pompeo chose not to release show that the Trump admin refused WIV's request for additional funding and training for the safety protocols that could have prevented the leak.)

What we can determine as fact is that the CCP engaged in a massive cover-up, restricting acess to the patients and their medical records, engaging in mass cremations of victims, shutting down any media access to the area, and arresting any medical professional who spoke out against the party narrative. As we've seen in other conspiracies, the cover-up itself allows room for the kind of vacuous ambiguity that enables speculation to thrive. But the fact is that due to this cover-up, we may never have the evidence necessary to confirm what actually happened.

What ended up being more persuasive for me is when I looked back at the little-noticed but still very publicly available news surrounding the WIV's efforts in the years prior to the outbreak. Shi Zhengli was an internationally recognized WIV scientist studying SARS-CoV for a decade. In 2017, WIV scientists released a paper (here's the layman article at the time, and here's the full paper) which noted that they had extracted up to 15 variations of SARS-CoV virus from a bat cave in Yunnan, and that these samples were being held at the Wuhan lab (note the use of 'WIV' as individual viral prefix identifiers). (fwiw, Yunnan is nowhere near Wuhan, being some thousand miles away in southwest China). The actual paper is pretty dense for someone (like me) who doesn't hold a degree in virology, but it does have a couple of important quotes which stand out: "In this cave, we have now obtained full-length genome sequences of additional 11 novel SARSr-CoVs from bats"; "In addition, we have also revealed that various SARSr-CoVs capable of using human ACE2 are still circulating among bats in this region." So WIV had a dozen strains of coronavirus from bats who were 1000 miles from Wuhan on the other side of the country, and that at least some of these strains already showed a possible capability of direct human infection, via the ACE2 lung receptors. (In addition, the wet market in Wuhan did not sell bats; it was a seafood market.)

The primary rationale for shooting down the lab-leak theory was that the virus' genome showed no evidence of laboratory manipulation or tampering. But the stated purpose of the research involved "monitoring of SARSr-CoV evolution", not genetic engineering. (For the record, we should throw the entire 'bioweapon' theory out for complete lack of evidence.) Did this research involve exposing these SARS samples to the DNA of other animals, or, possibly, human cellular tissue in order to monitor its natural mutations? Does the use of 'chimeric viruses' to augment the proteins of SARS-CoV amount to what's called 'gain-of-function'? I've seen arguments on all sides of these questions, but I haven't seen much in the way of consensus. And with the omission of any actual WIV documentation, it's unlikely that we'll have any. But, long story short, the excuse that the genome showed no evidence of laboratory engineering is now shown to be irrelevent given the fact that the research was designed to look as natural as possible (which is the only way it would be beneficial for the purpose of studying how it would naturally mutate).

One other thing that I will weigh in on, which is that I think that the recent attempt to paint Dr. Fauci as some sort of diabolical villain in all of this is so obviously erroneous that this alone should be an effective metric for whether to take anyone's theory seriously. All of the Rand Paul's and Scott Atlas' of the world are just sore about Fauci proving their feeble and cruel notions of herd immunity patently false, and, for them, this is their paleocivic version of payback. As Steve Bannon said, Fauci didn't "get with the program".
 

Re: Jack Ruby and JFK

The more plausible explanation is that Jack Ruby's club was 'protected' by Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, who had been contracted by the CIA to help with the assassination of Fidel Castro. (These details would remain largely unknown until the Church Committee amd Rockefeller Committee over a decade later.) Whether or not Oswald acted alone is irrelevant. The fact that he definitely knew and intimately interacted with people involved in this CIA-Mafia-Cuban exile triage would be sufficient enough to have him silenced, and the CIA deliberately used the Warren Commission to specifically obfuscate this relationship from becoming public. Of course, all three of these principals had some amount of their own separate motives to assassinate Kennedy, and also Oswald had a certain narcissistic grand delusion about his own mission in history and likely thought that these connections would give him cover. But as far as Ruby is concerned, he simply did what he was told.

_____

Re: MK-Ultra, and the Counterculture = CIA Psy-Op

The worst kept secret about MK-Ultra is that it was a complete failure at mind control. It fried a lot of unfortunate minds, but it never produced a Manchurian Candidate. The documented history of its failure won't stop youtube sophomores from associating it with every twitch from normality that has occurred in the world since then. It's up there with Mandela Effect, and I'm sure someone has found a way to rope in both as some sort of temporal CIA hack gone wrong. You might as well try staring at a goat.

I think that Martin A. Lee and Bruce Sclain's seminal Acid Dreams book remains the definitive source on the subject. It's still respected enough to be frequently cited by MK-Ultra conspiracists, apparently under the assumption that their youtube dupes won't bother to read it, because it makes it very clear, using something called 'journalism' and FOIA documents, that MK-Ultra was a dud in terms of achieving any success in mind control, and really only managed to produce some highly unethical and illegal behavior by certain CIA agents ("Operation Midnight Climax") and, once these drugs began to circulate among the generation's more influential intellectuals, inadvertantly spawning the more libertine artistic renaissance of the 60s. And if you think that the CIA had intentionally designed the anti-war and free love cultural movements, whose leaders the CIA then deemed necessary to illegally surveil, well then you just might be an idiot.

It's striking that it's insufficient for the conspiracy-minded person to simply look at the facts of what is one of the most shameful programs of US government abuse, hundreds and maybe thousands of psychologically tortured and shattered individuals, and not consider that to be enough of an atrocity. Like maybe this wasn't an incompetent and sadistic excuse to find ways to torture people (and the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques are the true heir apparent of MK-Ultra), and that by releasing tons of evidence for this torture isn't enough of a stain on the American reputation. Oh no! Maybe the government must be hiding the totally not implausible truth that maybe they knew what they were doing the whole time and were actually highly successful at that! Because when I read about all of the hysterical shenanigans that went on during this MK-Ultra period, where CIA dudes were dosing each other unawares and shooting at cars in the street because they think the grills are teeth, obviously I think that these sound like the kind of competent people who can manage a secret army of automated assassins.

In the context of MK-Ultra, with their supposedly effective mind-control serum, it would seem that the suggestion is that if the CIA wanted to, let's say, control the thoughts and opinions, and maybe even the behavior, of those in these counterculture movements, that it would be through the use of these same psychotropic substances that had proven so successful in the MK-Ultra laboratory. Or maybe these substances may have had the opposite effect, which might be why MK-Ultra was a failure at mind control, and why the CIA felt the need to infiltrate those who were ironically being heavily plied with these MK-Ultra mind-control serums?

I didn't watch much of the Gutfeld one, but it speaks volumes that in what watched, yeah, Maher was the more insufferable of the two. He's just shockingly unpleasant to watch, which is what makes his podcast so fascinating. I thought I knew how much he could annoy me from his television show, but he's even worse when he's comfortable and at home.

The two parts I caught of it that stuck out though were

1) Him complaining about needing a diversity of ideas. That this is what is the most important thing in regards to representation. We need to tolerate different points of view. And yet, he's never been happier now that the handlers on his tv show have weeded out anyone who might dissent to what he has to say (and by dissent, were talking about anyone who doesn't laugh at his hack jokes....it's got to be all that wokeness that makes you unfunny, you putz).

2) Him mentioning how prescient Kubrick's 2001 was in predicting the horrors of our modern age. It was almost shocking to see him paying respect towards such a notoriously slow movie. I was sure he'd be the kind of guy who would pull a confused Matthew on that one....And of course, almost on cue, he quickly pivoted away from praise towards talking about how boring and slow it is. It sure is no Omega Man.

As for Brand, I didn't watch any of that one, but I did catch the Real Time he was on and, holy fuck, he's insufferable. I actually normally don't hate the guy. Even though he has every kind of personality trait lined up in a row that I should normally want to take aim at, he feels like a genuine idealist who wants the best for everyone. But him just drowning out everyone else talking with a bunch of empty platitudes about 'humanity deserves the best', all sure of getting him positive feedback, made it abundantly clear that Brand may have weaned himself off of heroin, but is still mainlining applause. Everything he said was nonsense, but it all sounded really good to people who like to clap along to good intentions. And so while at the root, I generally sympathize with a lot of his basic talking points, his type of rhetorical, hippy-dippy bullshit approach to applying these feelings to the real world does damage. It makes his criticism of the problem of money in politics, and corrupt pharmaceutical coporations, and lack of ideological diversity in the two party system, and distrusting government, and how broken the news system is (all things I am fundamentally in agreeement with), sound like utopian fantasies that cynics have every reason to not take terribly seriously. Because nothing Brand says should be taken seriously. He sounds like a 14 year old who suddenly found out the world is a corrupt and  horrible place and thinks he can save the world by yelling at his parents at the dinner table.