The part that really gets me is the news media taking him seriously.
I keep waiting for a moment when some reporter is going to start talking about Trump's latest, then just stop in the middle and say, "You know? That's it. I just cant do it any more. This guy is a blithering lunatic and I'm done pretending he's not."
Not like I actually expect that - I'm much more cynical than that. Still though...
I would assume then that the effect is somehow tied in with the fact that the light is diffused and relatively dim, since it's simply a fact that the blues and greens are the colors that pop. Possibly there isn't enough light to show up orange or red - effectively, everything is sort of in shadow?
And by contrast, as I write this, it's very smoky where I am, and yes - the light is notably orange. And I've noticed before that when it's like this, shadows have an obvious blue tint.
This is an example of a thing I've said repeatedly about Trump - I'm willing to bet that he's 100% sincere about this. He's not dissembling or diverting - he actually, sincerely believes that he had every right to interfere in whatever ways he wanted.
Why?
Because he's a near-total sociopath. I don't think that concepts of truth and falsehood or right and wrong are even coherent to him. I think his entire measure of everything is wholly personal - if he wants it, then it's right and if he doesn't, then it's wrong, and if he believes it, then it's true, and if he doesn't, then it's false. And it really is that simple. It's not that he lies, but that he lives in a fantasy world in which whatever he believes is true and whatever he wants is right.
Don't get too hung up on the name - it's just a personal bit of shorthand. What I'm talking about is the actual phenomenon. Parrish's paintings are just the closest popular representation I've seen of it.
It seems to happen most often in late summer, when (in my area at least) afternoon thundershowers are relatively common. There are times when the clouds will roll in, but they're not dense enough to bring rain, and just at dusk, the light through those clouds is diffused but oddly clear, so in spite of the fact that the light level is low overall, colors, and especially blues and greens, really pop.
In HSL terms, it's essentially 100% saturation but only maybe 30% light, and since the light shifts toward red/orange, the blues and greens are the colors that stand out the most.
What I call Parrish light - the distinctive tone that's prominent in Maxfield Parrish's paintings.
It's a relatively subdued but clear reddish orange that I see most commonly with relatively uniform but thin thunderclouds at dusk. It makes blues and greens much more vivid, in spite of the fact that the overall amount of light is relatively low. And it's glorious.
If he’s trying to say “Biden wanted this but Trump already started it”
Which "he?"
Zuckerberg blames it exclusively and entirely on the Biden administration.
that tells me BOTH parties requested it. Hence, if you don’t like Biden because of this, you don’t want Trump either. And of course, vice versa. In short, this policy is not unique to either party or administration.
Exactly, but that's explicitly not what Zuckerberg is saying. He's saying that it was entirely and exclusively Biden, which is a lie.
Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play?
There's actually a tidbit that the author notes that points at the obvious reason for it.
In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.
In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content...
The author then goes on to say though:
A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier.
What's significant about that? Trump was president then.
So Zuckerberg is rather obviously trying to pin entirely on the Biden administration a set of policies that were already in place under Trump.
To what end? Obviously to do the same thing he did in 2016 and 2020 - to overtly promote Trump.
This particular one certainly not coincidentally plays into the whole Republican narrative that the Democrats are oppressive and dishonest, which in turn is meant to provide a context for their intention to dispute the election results when Trump loses. Zuckerberg is simply doing his part to further that narrative.
Just the opposite. I'm the one who goes off to do something else at family gatherings because they just talk and talk and talk.
Though it's not so much that they talk so much as that it's just the same stuff over and over - alternately, my brother slavishly regurgitating right-wing techbro quasi-libertarian bullshit and my mom reciting in excruciating detail some anecdote that's maybe vaguely related to the topic at hand and that she's told countless times already, because it's her go-to every time something in that vicinity comes up.
And what I wouldn't give to know them less well...
Why do you people RANDOMLY scatter ALL caps words through EVERYTHING you write?
Is it SOME sort of Pavlovian THING? Like you see a SENTENCE with a random assortment OF all caps words, and THAT says to you that IT'S the kind of FAKE truth you PREFER?
It's astonishing how completely and thoroughly fucked things are right now.
Think about it - the measure of how damaging a story might be to a deranged convicted felon presidential candidate is the eagerness with which a social media site owned by a billionaire troll and self-professed "free speech absolutist" tries to censor it.
How is that even possible? Does no one else recognize how jaw-droppingly insane these people are?
I think there are two different things at play there, and both have been mentioned, so all I can add is that it's not one or the other but both. (Well - that and a song)
Partly it's the common human need to feel that we matter - that our lives are in some way significant.
And partly it's the fear of death and the resulting desire to believe that we'll "live on" at least figuratively.
And the song is from Shriekback and is directly on topic - Dust and a Shadow
Because the DNC has no principles. It's nothing more than a money-making machine, and the Clintons are enormously successful money-makers, and nothing else really matters.
Airbnb is a fine example of a sort of variation on enshittification.
The way it works is a new company with a new and notably cost-effective way of doing things comes along and is unsurprisingly wildly successful. And then, inevitably, that leads to them hiring a whole raft of executive parasites who all have to be paid obscene salaries for doing nothing of any real value, which means the company needs to raise prices and cut back on services in order to generate more profit to pay those salaries. And meanwhile, the new executives, with nothing of any note that they actually need to or even can do, but with a need to create some illusion that they're necessary, have pointless meetings in which they propose and wrangle about and eventually approve and implement new policies and new plans that are generally awful.
And pretty quickly and not coincidentally the new company ends up at least as bloated, mismanaged, overpriced and under-performing as the companies they so recently replaced.
See also: Uber, DoorDash and the entire streaming industry.
Broadly because the entire dynamic of left-wing partisanship in the US - both for the politicians and for the voters - is built around the binaristic idea that the only alternative to supporting the Democrats is supporting the Republicans, and that doesn't work if they admit that there are more possible positions than just those two.
Probably an odd take, but this is actually something I sort of like about this timeline.
I keep getting this amusing visual image of actual people tiptoing away and giggling and shushing each other, as somewhere in the background, the site they used to be on is nothing but corporations showing ads to bots posting to bots.
D and D got a lot of heat for the last season of Game of Thrones, but I've never thought they were entirely, or even chiefly, to blame. Most of the problem really is that GRRM obviously desperately needed an editor to rein him in as the series went along, but for whatever reason, that didn't happen. So now he has this huge, sprawling mess of a story that's going in eighteen different directions at once, and just as D and D couldn't manage to tie it all together, neither can he.
The part that really gets me is the news media taking him seriously.
I keep waiting for a moment when some reporter is going to start talking about Trump's latest, then just stop in the middle and say, "You know? That's it. I just cant do it any more. This guy is a blithering lunatic and I'm done pretending he's not."
Not like I actually expect that - I'm much more cynical than that. Still though...