Probably your dog's dream, too, only it doesn't know it yet.
I hope this gets the lowest views of any debate.
Starting off in a good position, since there won't be a studio audience.
I bet they don't even do the national anthem before the presidential debate
(or do they? I don't know)
I'm looking at doing a double feature of Al Jazeera's The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza, which I'm hoping will be something I can push on the maddening collection of people in my life who agree that Biden is committing genocide but think they have to vote for him anyway,
and Satyajit Ray's The Adversary:
>Siddhartha (Dhritiman Chatterjee) is forced to discontinue his medical studies due to the unexpected death of his father. He has to now find a job instead. In one job interview, he is asked to name the most significant world event in the last ten years. His reply is 'the plain human courage shown by the people of Vietnam', instead of the expected: man landing on the Moon. The interviewer asks if he is a communist. Needless to say, he does not get the job.
Phew, thanks. I knew it was presumptuous but this is something I have to be proud of, even granting that most of my success in avoiding them is because of luck.
I was maybe the last person to get a smart phone. It was probably 2016.
Nope, that's me. Never had one. 
Generally I have less problem with the yutes than I do with my own age cohort. Most of my contemporaries have let life and circumstances beat them into submission and now they care about property values and are aghast at the very idea of public transportation. Kill the suburb inside your head, late-30s people!
The only effective protest I have ever witnessed was when chuds in my neighborhood picketed the local recycling center, which they said was causing crime. The landlord of the shopping center in which it was located shut it down by the end of the day.
Not sure if that one's covered in If We Burn but I'll keep reading.
That's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!
"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" (alternatively "How many angels can stand on the point of a pin?") is a phrase that, when used in modern contexts, can be used as a metaphor for wasting time debating topics of no practical value, or on questions whose answers hold no intellectual consequence, while more urgent concerns accumulate.[1]
The phrase was originally used in a theological context by 17th century Protestants to mock medieval scholastics such as Duns Scotus[2] and Thomas Aquinas.
They couldn't google how to do it because their screensaver had a password
Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly. Thereafter the officials were all terrified of Zhao Gao. Zhao Gao gained military power as a result of that.
Thou shalt be known as SuperZutsuki the Callipygian.
Janssen Pharmaceutica, a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Beerse, Belgium, and wholly-owned by Johnson & Johnson.
LebensBraun!
Everyone knows that Eva Braun died in Hitler's bunker. What this book presupposes is . . . maybe she didn't?
I wouldn't say it approaches the mystical, but I think you might enjoy James Bridle's New Dark Age. Here's a series of his essays where he attempted to photograph every surveillance camera in London.
Maybe you'll find some interesting (and some too-far-gone) stuff at /r/sorceryofthespectacle?
I had so many arguments with people in 2021/2 after we started socializing again where they'd do the classic "The kind of thing that's probably happening in China" and I'd say "You mean the kind of thing that's definitely happening in America", and they'd say, "Damn, that sounds like something that would happen in China."
Conversations with nearly 2,000 voters showed a small number had changed their minds about Donald J. Trump. Here’s what a few said about why.
https://archive.is/MLLyS
For years, Hexbearians have wondered - "Who is the type of guy who has supported Trump for years, but will refuse to do so a bad paperwork conviction?"
>A New York Times/Siena College Poll study of nearly 2,000 voters found modest good news for Mr. Biden. While the vast majority of people had not changed their position on the two men, more voters moved away from Mr. Trump than toward him.
>Follow-up interviews with these post-verdict switchers offer a window into the minds of still-persuadable Americans.
The best they can do -
-
A small business tyrant who's pro-choice and doesn't seem to have voted for Trump in the past (he may now go for RFK Jr.)
-
A tech guy who voted against Trump twice but is pissed at Biden for not forgiving student loans
-
Someone who "volunteers with people trying to rebuild their lives from addiction and prison sentences" and never would have voted for Trump in the first place (but may still vote for Biden despite the genocide)
-
An account executive who voted for Biden but "watched Mr. Biden perform the job as president and could not envision voting for him again."
SHANGHAI—In an offer promoted heavily on banner ads across the internet, Chinese e-commerce platform Temu began selling Uyghur Muslims for $1.49 each this week. “The special price available during this lightning deal will lower the barrier to Uyghur ownership for consumers everywhere,” a Temu spokes...
>SHANGHAI—In an offer promoted heavily on banner ads across the internet, Chinese e-commerce platform Temu began selling Uyghur Muslims for $1.49 each this week. “The special price available during this lightning deal will lower the barrier to Uyghur ownership for consumers everywhere,” a Temu spokesperson told reporters, confirming that more than 100,000 of the subjugated ethnic and religious minorities from the Xinjiang region had been sold so far on the discount marketplace. “You won’t find prices on forced laborers this low anywhere else. When we tell our customers to ‘shop like a billionaire,’ we mean it.” Approximately 90% of Temu users reached for comment complained that the Uyghur laborers they had purchased arrived in such damaged condition that they no longer worked.
Israel must stop pretending it is a nation like any other
Quite a beginning:
>When my parents moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1974, they were young idealists trying to foment Marxist revolution.
>Having kids and getting a mortgage mellowed their radical views substantially, but I still grew up marinating in progressive ideas. One such idea was that nationalism was a great evil that had caused Germans to hate and murder all of my mother’s aunts and uncles in Poland. Another idea was that private schools should not exist, a noble notion which lasted until we realized I was going to finish the math offerings at our small-town New Hampshire public high school before starting ninth grade. That’s how I ended up at Phillips Exeter.
Naturally, it was the insufferably anti-colonialist atmosphere of Oxford that changed this guy's course.
>It was at Oxford, after having one too many chats over a glass of port with a fellow Oxonian who seemed way too interested in the Jewish influence on the American political process, that something shifted in me. The place was so fully blanketed by the fumes of post-colonial theory that Zionism (and its inherent criminality) was a constant subject, which made me wonder more deeply about it all.
Which leads us to:
>Ben Yochai witnessed the Roman annihilation of Judea. He understood that the way your enemy fights a war affects the definition of the righteous way to fight back. In other words, his recommendation was calibrated to the assumption that if the Jews are fighting a war, then their own future survival (and flourishing) is a nonnegotiable goal of the war. Thus, a Jew living by the Torah and confronted with an enemy armed with a human shield must ask: What does God want me to do now, given what I face? And how might I figure that out by studying the Torah?
>As Abraham learns when arguing with God about Sodom, the ultimate decision about who lives and who perishes in calamity is the Creator’s choice, and while you can plead with God to spare the righteous, you must also have the moral humility to trust that He knows what He’s doing.
Thus:
>Instead of bragging about the extra danger our soldiers experience for the sake of sparing enemy noncombatants, we should reject the premise that we Jews bear any responsibility for protecting the human shields employed by our enemy.
. . .
>If our own, unsurpassably subtle ethical tradition guides us to these policies, then it is only our lingering ideological subjugation to the Western tradition that makes them seem scandalous. Like the Jew among nations, Israel constantly struggles with its half-successful attempt to blend in with the crowd and pretend to be a member like any other, and it is time to put an end to this paralyzing charade. We did not stick to our Law through 3,000 years of human civilization to continue national life as the perpetual defendant. It is our job to know that Law, to teach what we know—and, most of all, to live by it.
>As the nation finally turns to the difficult work of doing with Amalek what our Creator has long been asking of us, we can be newly confident He is with us.
>About the Author Jeremy England is physicist, biologist, and machine learning researcher who also has received ordination as an orthodox rabbi. Previously a physics professor at MIT, he now resides in Israel and loves exploring the Torah’s commentaries on scientific reasoning.
The move, expected on Tuesday, would allow the president to temporarily seal the border and suspend longtime protections for asylum seekers in the United States.
:brump:
>President Biden is expected to sign an executive order on Tuesday allowing him to temporarily seal the U.S. border with Mexico to migrants when crossings surge, a move that would suspend longtime protections for asylum seekers in the United States.
. . .
>The order would represent the single most restrictive border policy instituted by Mr. Biden, or any modern Democrat, and echoes a 2018 effort by President Donald J. Trump to block migration that was assailed by Democrats and blocked by federal courts.
We may be months away from the greatest crisis the liberal state has known since the Civil War. How come it’s so hard to say what we’re defending?
This is the guy who 100% didn't realize he was playing a parody of himself in the opening scene of Tár.
>Still, this is how the good work of governing gets done, by those who accept the weight of the world as they act to lighten it. Obama’s history—including the feints back and forth on national health insurance, which ended, amid all the compromises, with the closest thing America has had to a just health-care system—is uninspiring to the idealizing mind. But these compromises were not a result of neglecting to analyze the idea of justice adequately; they were the result of the pluralism of an open society marked by disagreement on fundamental values. The troubles of current American politics do not arise from a failure on the part of people in Ohio to have read Rawls; they are the consequence of the truth that, even if everybody in Ohio read Rawls, not everybody would agree with him.
. . .
>What’s curious about anti-liberal critics such as Gray is their evident belief that, after the institutions and the practices on which their working lives and welfare depend are destroyed, the features of the liberal state they like will somehow survive. After liberalism is over, the neat bits will be easily reassembled, and the nasty bits will be gone. Gray can revile what he perceives to be a ruling élite and call to burn it all down, and nothing impedes the dissemination of his views. Without the institutions and the practices that he despises, fear would prevent oppositional books from being published. Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran. Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life—which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be.
>The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg. After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? “Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!” they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear—where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic, and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down. At least the band will be playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which they will take as some vindication. The rest of us may drown.
Accused of violating antitrust laws, Live Nation Entertainment faces a fight that could reshape the multibillion-dollar live music industry.
Full article
By David McCabe and Ben Sisario
David McCabe reports on tech policy from Washington. Ben Sisario reports on the music industry from New York. May 23, 2024Updated 11:11 a.m. ET
The Justice Department on Thursday sued Live Nation Entertainment, the concert giant that owns Ticketmaster, asking a court to break up the company over claims it illegally maintained a monopoly in the live entertainment industry.
In the lawsuit, which is joined by 29 states and the District of Columbia, the government accuses Live Nation of dominating the industry by locking venues into exclusive ticketing contracts, pressuring artists to use its services and threatening its rivals with financial retribution.
Those tactics, the government argues, have resulted in higher ticket prices for consumers and have stifled innovation and competition throughout the industry.
“It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster,” Merrick Garland, the attorney general, said in a statement announcing the suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit asks the court to order “the divestiture of, at minimum, Ticketmaster,” and to prevent Live Nation from engaging in anticompetitive practices.
The lawsuit is a direct challenge to the business of Live Nation, a colossus of the entertainment industry and a force in the lives of musicians and fans alike. The case, filed 14 years after the government approved Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster, has the potential to transform the multibillion-dollar concert industry.
Live Nation’s scale and reach far exceed those of any competitor, encompassing concert promotion, ticketing, artist management and the operation of hundreds of venues and festivals around the world.
According to the Justice Department, Live Nation controls around 60 percent of concert promotions at major venues around the United States and roughly 80 percent of primary ticketing at major concert venues.
Lawmakers, fans and competitors have accused the company of engaging in practices that harm rivals and drive up ticket prices and fees. At a congressional hearing early last year, prompted by a Taylor Swift tour presale on Ticketmaster that left millions of people unable to buy tickets, senators from both parties called Live Nation a monopoly.
In its complaint, the Justice Department refers to the many add-on fees as “essentially a ‘Ticketmaster Tax’ that ultimately raise the price fans pay.”
In response to the suit, Live Nation denied that it was a monopoly and said that breaking it up would not result in lower ticket prices or fees. According to the company, artists and sports teams are primarily responsible for setting ticket prices, and other business partners, like venues, take the lion’s share of surcharges.
In a statement, Dan Wall, Live Nation’s executive vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs, said that the Justice Department’s suit followed “intense political pressure.”
The government’s case, Mr. Wall added, “ignores everything that is actually responsible for higher ticket prices, from increasing production costs to artist popularity, to 24/7 online ticket scalping that reveals the public’s willingness to pay far more than primary tickets cost.”
The company also says its market share for ticketing has decreased in the recent years as it competes with rivals to win business.
In recent years, American regulators have sued other major companies, testing century-old antitrust laws against new power wielded by major companies over consumers. The Justice Department sued Apple in March, arguing the company has made it difficult for customers to ditch its devices, and has already brought two cases arguing Google violated antitrust laws. The Federal Trade Commission last year filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon for harming sellers on its platform and is pursuing another against Meta, in part for its acquisitions of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
The Justice Department allowed Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, to buy Ticketmaster in 2010 under certain conditions laid out in a legal agreement. If venues did not use Ticketmaster, for example, Live Nation could not threaten to pull concert tours.
In 2019, however, the Justice Department found that Live Nation had violated those terms, and it modified and extended its agreement with the company.
The Justice Department argued in its lawsuit it provided to The New York Times that Live Nation exploited relationships with partners to keep competitors out of the market. It requests a jury trial.
The government’s complaint argued that Live Nation threatened venues with losing access to popular tours if they did not use Ticketmaster. That threat could be explicit or simply an implication communicated through intermediaries, the government said, adding it could also block artists who did not work with the company from using its venues.
Additionally, Live Nation has acquired a number of smaller companies — something Live Nation described in internal documents as eliminating its biggest threats, according to the government.
The Justice Department accused Live Nation of anticompetitive behavior with the Oak View Group, a venue company co-founded by Live Nation’s former executive chairman. Oak View Group has avoided bidding against Live Nation when it comes to working with artists and it has influenced concert venues to sign deals with Ticketmaster, the government argues.
In 2016, Live Nation’s chief executive complained in an email that the Oak View Group had offered to promote an artist that had previously worked with Live Nation. Oak View Group backed down, according to the government.
“Our guys got a bit ahead,” the company’s chief executive replied in an email, according to the government. “All know we don’t promote and we only do tours with Live Nation.”
The Justice Department’s latest investigation of Live Nation began in 2022. Live Nation simultaneously ramped up its lobbying efforts, spending $2.4 million on federal lobbying in 2023, up from $1.1 million in 2022, according to filings available through the nonpartisan website OpenSecrets.
In April, the company co-hosted a lavish party in Washington ahead of the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that featured a performance by the country singer Jelly Roll and cocktail napkins that displayed positive facts about Live Nation’s impact on the economy, like the billions it says it pays to artists.
Under pressure from the White House, Live Nation said in June that it would begin to show prices for shows at venues it owned that included all charges, including extra fees. The Federal Trade Commission has proposed a rule that would ban hidden fees.
A former chairman of the commission, Bill Kovacic, said Wednesday that a lawsuit against the company would be a rebuke of earlier antitrust officials who had allowed the company to grow to its current size.
“It’s another way of saying earlier policy failed and failed badly,” he said.
https://www.theonion.com/comedians-in-cars-getting-crucified-1851496256
The bipartisan border enforcement compromise, blocked by Republicans in February, is all but certain to be thwarted again. Democrats aim to tag the G.O.P. as the culprit in its failure.
>Mr. Biden, whose team helped hammer out the deal, urged support for it on Monday in a statement from Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, that said, “We strongly support this legislation and call on every senator to put partisan politics aside and vote to secure the border.”
>Among other changes to immigration law, the measure would make it more difficult to gain asylum in the United States and increase detentions and deportations of those crossing into the country without authorization. It would also effectively close the border altogether if the average number of migrants encountered by immigration officials exceeded a certain threshold — an average of 5,000 over the course of a week or 8,500 on any given day. The bill also would give the president power to close the border unilaterally if migrant encounters reach an average of 4,000 per day over a week.
A cap on asylum is a violation of international law.
The college announced that it will phase out business ties with Israeli companies by March 2025.
It’s not the poll numbers that worry me, exactly. It’s the denial of what’s behind them.
There are the only mentions of Gaza:
>Voters think Biden is too liberal. The Biden administration has worried about shoring up its left flank, particularly since the war in Gaza. But the Times-Siena poll found that while Biden is losing only 2 percent of his “very liberal” voters from 2020 to Trump, he is losing 16 percent of his supporters who described themselves as moderate and conservative.
. . .
>In the Times-Siena poll, 21 percent of voters say the economy will drive their vote, while 7 percent say inflation is their top issue. By contrast, immigration is the top issue for 12 percent of voters, abortion is the top issue for 11 percent, the war between Israelis and Palestinians is the top issue for 2 percent and crime is the top issue for fewer than 1 percent.
Every major sub-!reddit-logo is getting hit with Reddit Cares automated messages because of !reddit-logo 's pathetic site moderation. I only read the NBA posts, so I've been seeing it lead to escalations in fights between people who think that Minnesota Timberwolves and Indiana Pacers fans are reaching new levels of depravity. But a search shows similar activity in other major subreddits, and everyone seems to think that their !eric-andre controversial and brave posts about Drake or Eurovision or !stonks-down are putting targets on their backs.
English Translation: "Born in Sorrow and Clothed in Disappointment" - by "Spice Girls" FALLEN LEAVES | A Film by Aki Kaurismäki Finland's shortlisted Best International Feature Film entry to the 96th Academy Awards. Winner of the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize 2023. Now streaming on MUBI. So g...
May 6, 1981....Bob Weir, "This one's for Bobby Sands." I do not own this music, all credit goes to the respected owner(s). Copyright Disclaimer: Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholars...
A new anti-terrorism bill would allow the government to take away vital tax exemptions from nonprofit news outlets and media organizations.
A bigger article about the motivations and implications of the bill originally discussed here. The bill has passed the House and is "likely to make its way to the Senate floor in another form soon."
>Funding terrorism is already illegal, but the new bill would let the government avoid the red tape required for criminal prosecutions or official terrorist designations.
>You might think actionable support of terrorism is limited to intentional, direct contributions to terror groups. You’d be mistaken. Existing laws on material support for terrorism have long been criticized for their overbreadth and potential for abuse, not only against free speech but also against humanitarian aid providers. A recent letter from 135 rights organizations opposing the bill highlighted efforts to revoke the tax-exempt status of, or otherwise retaliate against, pro-Palestine student groups.
. . .
>The letter also highlighted that “material support” for terrorist groups — both a federal and state crime — can include “writing and distributing publications supporting the organization.” It did not elaborate on what would be considered support, potentially chilling any reporting that does not unequivocally condemn Hamas or unilaterally support Israel.
. . .
>If there is any doubt about the nonprofit bill’s backers’ intentions, consider that five of its House sponsors also signed onto a letter to the Internal Revenue Service asking how it defines antisemitism and insinuating that the IRS should deny tax-exempt status to nonprofits that “promote conduct that is counter to public policy,” even if they’re not accused of supporting terrorism at all.
My local org uses Discord. What should I know about account security / op sec / settings I should immediately change before using it?
WASHINGTON—As mounting campus protests and arrests over the Israel-Hamas war threatened his fragile electoral coalition, advisors to President Joe Biden assured him Friday that this would blow over once all Gazans were dead. “Just lie low, let a few thousand more bombs drop on densely populated ...
