Open thread, don’t be an asshole, thanks. Previous Thread.
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Open thread, don’t be an asshole, thanks. Previous Thread.
Open thread, don’t be an asshole, thanks. Previous Thread. You can read more about Despotism 1946 at the Public Domain.
Oh the young people! They will be the end of every society ever, you bet.
Open thread, don’t be an asshole, thanks. Previous thread.
© Brett Lamb.
We have CNS News editor-in-chief Terry Jeffrey and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, having a chat about this net neutrality business. Like most of the altwhatthefuckever, they are thrilled by the rollback. Their little discussion runs off onto quite the side road…
Yesterday on “Washington Watch,” Jeffrey joined host and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins to discuss why he believed rolling back net neutrality rules was a good decision. Like many of his right-wing counterparts, Jeffrey argued that net neutrality never really existed because tech giants like Facebook and Twitter have suppressed conservative voices. He went on to draw out an analogy to self-driving cars.
Okay, all of you fucking idiots out there – net neutrality is not about your personal sense of persecution. People will still be able to shun you. They’ll still be able to ban you. That would be because no one likes you. Go eat worms.
“This may seem an odd comparison, but I think it’s a real one, that we’re moving, Tony, toward automated cars, for example. And in the regulatory world, there’s the debate over how they’re going to regulate these automated vehicles. But you can imagine the control over our lives the government would have if they could remotely control our vehicles, which they may in fact someday be able to do and I think we have to think about that,” Jeffrey said.
“It doesn’t get discussed a lot but it’s going to happen,” Jeffrey said. “Down the road at some point automobiles are going to be automated and someone is going to be in control of the infrastructure that directs how those automobiles move.”
Jeffrey then painted a scenario where the government takes control of self-driving cars to prevent anti-choice activists from being able to transport themselves to protests.
“Imagine that the government is doing something outrageous like legalizing the killing of unborn babies and a lot of people want to go down to the Washington Mall one day a year and make it known they’re sticking up to the right for life, but the only way they can get through to that Mall is by getting on a transportation system that’s controlled by the government,” Jeffrey said.
Last time I looked, Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land, which means abortion is legal. Supposedly. As for the rest of your moronic scenario, Mr. Jeffrey, what is it we have now? There’s no governmental oversight of roads; there’s no licensing system for driving; there’s no speed limit; there are no regulations in place concerning automobiles; no one regulates trains, planes, subways, or traffic, and so on, right? Right? Oh, wait. Yes, there’s a fucktonne of regulation in regard to transport, that’s why transportation has its very own department in the government! Golly, guess you learn something new every day, don’t ya, fellas? So far, transportation systems don’t seem to have interfered with you nosy, judgmental assholes in the least. Pity.
And then we have self-styled “prophet” Sundar Selvaraj, who is still on Jim Bakker’s show, who has come up with quite the tidbit:
Selvaraj recounted how, a few years ago, “the Lord Jesus appeared to me about the False Prophet who is mentioned in Revelation, chapter 13 and then very simply and very clearly he said, ‘The present Pope Francis is the prophesied False Prophet.’ And then he went on explaining to me the many things the false prophet will do, and then later on, I did some research and I found that whatever the Lord Jesus told me what what exactly Pope Francis has already begun to do.”
Selvaraj said that on the day that Pope Francis met with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli president Shimon Peres in 2014, “a meteor flew very close by earth and NASA nicknamed the meteor ‘The Beast.’ So that confirmed what the Lord revealed, that the False Prophet—the beast that is mentioned in Revelation 13—is the Pope.”
So, NASA has confirmed Selvaraj, who confirms Jehovah, who confirms that Pope Francis will lead the world into worship of the antichrist, if that lazy dude ever shows up. If Lance Wallnau hears about this, it just might wreck his little crush on Steve Bannon.
Via RWW: Oooh Scary Cars of the Future! The Pope is Evil, a Meteor Said So!
Hedgehog from David Ritchie on Vimeo.
Open thread, don’t be an asshole. Thanks. Previous thread.
Retrospace.org. Creepy as fuck.
Now that the ‘war on christmas’ has been won, the conservachristians have a new complaint. You just knew this was coming, right? Life is no fun for conservachristians unless they can gripe and whine. Fox News host and Trump cheerleader Laura Ingraham is concerned about women. She’s concerned that women, those awful killjoys, might suck all the fun out of christmas parties, because what else so typifies christmas as the drunken office party?
“Is the #MeToo movement becoming a spoiler for this season’s Christmas parties?” Ingraham asked Friday evening during a segment on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle.
Speaking with comedian Jimmy Failla, Ingraham said she was worried that women who feel empowered to report sexual misconduct might ruin the holiday season by making office Christmas parties less festive.
“I can see this year it might be — a little less festive, let’s say that. No alcohol and no fun and no lampshades and, I don’t know, maybe that’s better,” she said.
“Is this just killing all the fun of Christmas?” she wondered absurdly.
Maybe that’s better? Unbelievable, especially coming from the SHN (Sexual Harassment Network). If your party hits the lampshade point, you’ve gone too far. Seriously. The next day will be flashes of very embarrassing behaviour, always remembered by at least one person, who will spread it all over the place, massive headaches, and someone will get stuck cleaning up all the pools of vomit. If you want to do that sort of thing in your own house, go for it. When it comes to office parties, which many people feel obligated to attend, having a lower key affair will come as a relief to many a person.
As for killing the fun of christmas, gosh, I thought your celebration was supposed to be Christ centered, and you all should be getting pickled in Jesus juice. Ah well, the truth always outs – christmas, it’s about being a drunken lout!
Failla and Ingraham then turned their attention to Vox, which they ridiculed for imposing a two-drink limit at this year’s office holiday party in an effort to keep things under control.
Limiting the alcohol limits the fun, Failla argued, offering an enthusiastic endorsement of drunkenness at office parties.
“I’m pro-holiday Christmas party,” he said. “I think it serves a purpose, which is to build camaraderie over someone getting trashed. You know, you get that one night a year to be like, ‘Simmons took his shirt off and jumped in the the water fountain.’”
The reason so many people get wasted at office parties is anxiety and nervousness. That kind of ‘camaraderie’ always comes at someone’s expense, so it shouldn’t be that gosh darn hard to dispense with it.
Via Share Blue.
Envisioning Chemistry: Metal Displacement II from Beauty of Science on Vimeo.
Open Thread, don’t be an asshole. Thanks. Previous Thread.
Let’s see:
Using “badge politics”, censoring those who don’t worship twitter’s liberal dictator, & implementing procedures to annihilate conservatives from the Internet?
Sounds like twitter is carrying out its own “final solution” for conservatives.
And so it begins. Twitter is quick to call me and others Nazis, but they are literally trying to eradicate my presence. Just like Hitler.
Twitter is uh, cracking down on hateful tweeters (not the Tiny Tyrant, natch), by removing their little checkmark. Yeah, that will show them. While I can’t say I think much of this ‘action’, it’s certainly upsetting the conservanazi crowd. Laura Loomer says Using “badge politics”. If that little checkmark didn’t mean anything to you Ms. Loomer, why on earth did you pursue it so hard? You claim Twitter is ‘annihilating’ conservatives, literally trying to eradicate your presence. Going by your checkmark free tweets, that has not been accomplished in the slightest. Perhaps you should save your hyperbole for a time when Twitter actually does something, like ban your account.
All the checkmarkless nazirati are having fits, as if this truly impacts their ability to spread their bigotry, hate, and fear. Perhaps it does, and if so, good. You can read many of the linked tweets of the nazirati at RWW.
m&m’s Dissolving in Water – 4K from Beauty of Science on Vimeo.
We dropped m&m’s chocolate in water and discovered something really wonderful!
This 4K time-lapse video was shot with a Sony A7R M2 camera to capture the beautiful details of m&m’s dissolving. High-resolution stills:
Oh, I must get M&Ms! I have to do this myself.
Open Thread: don’t be an asshole. Thanks. Previous thread.
Sarah Wasko / Media Matters.
Something else I had never heard of at all, and I don’t spend much time on Twitter, certainly not enough to be aware of AppSame, which has an influential twitter account (1.1 million followers). Of course, this leads to the same old question: why is Twitter ignoring this? They certainly have a way of turning their heads to obviously fake bullshit and abuse when it’s convenient for them.
Despite what its wildly misleading name might suggest, AppSame is not an application. Based on the biographical details its social media accounts provide, AppSame is “a conservative political marketing firm helping America back to its greatness.” While publicly available information does not clarify what exactly, if anything, this firm does to help MAGA, its impressive Twitter presence (1.1 million followers as of this writing) invites some questions — about its tactics, its actual impact, its role in the spread of fake news purveyor-generated misinformation into influential right-wing Twitter networks, and whether its influence could become a case study in the way Twitter enables unknown entities to have a disproportionate impact in politics.
Both its massive following and its clout among right-wing Twitter hubs like #TCOT (an acronym that stands for “top conservatives on Twitter”) earned AppSame the top spot in Brandwatch’s 10 most influential Republicans on Twitter rankings in 2016. AppSame’s Twitter behavior is practically indistinguishable from that of hard-core supporters of President Donald Trump: The account frequently retweets the president and his family (once earning a magnanimous mention from Trump) as well as memes featuring right-wing narratives, churning out more than a hundred tweets or retweets per day. But despite its impressive following, AppSame’s original tweets barely register any viral attention, which might be evidence of a heavy fake account presence among its followers. A Twitter audit report confirmed as much in 2015, finding that 45 percent of @AppSame’s followers are suspected fake accounts.
@AppSame’s social media habits also include disseminating fake news and conspiracy theories into right-wing Twitter networks. On Twitter, @AppSame has shared links to fake news purveyors like TruthFeed and True Pundit, and its tweets have on occasion been featured in items written by fake news purveyors. Inmultipletweets, AppSame either suggested or explicitly claimed that Hillary Clinton was responsible for the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.
Cristina López & Natalie Martinez at Media Matters have the full investigative story.
The Apprehension Engine from Mark Korven on Vimeo.
The Apprehension Engine featured in Into the Veil:
OPEN THREAD.
Previous thread. Don’t be an asshole. Thanks.
© C. Ford.
Oh, the right wing. So very gullible. You can make up anything, and they will swallow it whole so quickly, you wouldn’t have time to blink. There is such a twitchy desperation to believe anything negative about their self-defined enemies, they lie in wait, ready to pounce, on anything.
An anonymous but popular comedian on Twitter who tweets under the username “Krang T Nelson”—an homage to a cartoon character in “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”—was suspended from Twitter after posting a satirical status mocking conservative fearmongering around a series of demonstrations organized by Refuse Fascism, a group separate from Antifa, scheduled for November 4. The user tweeted:
Screengrab.
Twitter suspended the Krang T Nelson account after the post was reported by conservatives who believed the tweet was serious. Fellow Twitter comedian Tom Bloke then copied and pasted the since-removed tweet to his own profile to show solidarity. It didn’t take long for the worst right-wing pundits to seize the opportunity to embarrass themselves.
The Gateway Pundit’s White House reporter Lucian Wintrich reported on the satirical tweet reposted by Bloke as if it was a serious threat of “anti-white racism” against “white parents” and “small business owners.” Wintrich also identified Bloke as “one of the leaders of the domestic terrorist group ANTIFA,” which is a lie.
The Gateway Pundit went on and on about Antifa, not caring one whit that they were taken in. They have a graphic comparing Nazis to Antifa, and note:
Primarily comprised of white, pale-skinned, stick-thin men, and obese pimple-ridden women, Antifa hide behind masks to both disguise their grotesque appearances and to feel “united” with the others in their group.
Not only gullible, ignorant, and mis-informed, but so very juvenile, too.
Pro-Trump sycophant radio host Bill Mitchell shared the Gateway Pundit article with his followers:
Screengrab.
Ian Miles Cheong got in on the re-tweet panic, too, and defended his panic when he was informed he was panicking over nothing at all. You can read about the whole mess at RWW, and they also provide a link to the new account of Krang.
Robert Galbraith/Reuters.
Reddit announced on Wednesday evening that it was shutting down several neo-Nazi forums that promote violence — just hours after it was revealed that a Trump-loving Redditor had fatally stabbed his own father.
In an announcement posted on its website, Reddit said it was cracking down on violent content in a way that it hadn’t done before.
“Going forward, we will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people,” the website wrote. “Likewise, we will also take action against content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals. This applies to ALL content on Reddit, including memes, CSS/community styling, flair, subreddit names, and usernames.”
Among other neo-Nazi communities, Reddit has shut down /r/pol,/r/nazi, and /r/DylannRoofInnocent.
Reddit didn’t discover their ethics until after the Daily Beast exposé, so it’s a bit difficult to give them so much as one point for doing the right thing. They have had one very long time indeed to clean their forums up; they’ve certainly received enough complaints over the years from users as well as outside criticism. It will be interesting to see if they actually follow through this time, and stand against their former stance of ‘hey, sewers are alright, we’re making a lot of money!”
Via Daily Beast and Raw Story.