[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day.

Exactly this. The right have successfully ensured that facts and evidence have no weight in politics so while impportant the end result of this will have no affect on politics as far as the right are concerned.

Docjoe wrote:

And I think the game of “who is the more serious offender” shouldn’t be played. It’s OK because it was a long time ago and he wasn’t a Senator? Same argument could be made for Moore. It’s OK as long as there hasn’t been a more recent string of events showing a pattern? Well, there was the bit about the skit he wrote where a woman gets raped. And again, same argument could be made for Moore.

To me its 1) Is it repeated behavior? and 2) how serious is the offense. E.g. if its not repeated behavior, but the one offense is rape/attempted rape, then it is obviously more than serious enough for it not to matter that it "only" happened once. But if it is other forms of sexual harassment, it might becomes more relevant whether there is a long history or not.
I hope I would have the same response if it was a republican. It really shouldn't be about politics, but whether there is a lower limit on what wrongdoings should bring people down, no matter their job.

No matter what politically its bad for Franken, and maybe he should step down for political reasons. That is different from forcing him out though.

I don't think what we did merits him stepping down at all. I really am having trouble grasping all the rage directed towards him for what was ultimately a bad gesture. People should direct that rage to someone that actually has a massive history of assaulting women, like, y'know, the sitting president of the USA. Franken has apologized. He has called for an investigation into himself. He has taken responsibility for his actions. It's one thing if this was a pattern of behavior for him, but as far as it looks, it is not. It was a mistake and people shouldn't be made into pariahs over small mistakes.

Democrats will bend over backwards to crucify themselves over the smallest things while Republicans will keep doing whatever they want while weaponizing the things they do against others.

I don't want people to think I take sexual assault or harassment lightly. I do not at all. I simply feel that no one in this world gets out of it without some skeletons in their closet. And holding people to their worst mistakes in life is a shitty way to be. If someone admits to their mistakes and genuinely acts in good faith to rectify them, there should be some understanding. It isn't all-or-nothing. It's utterly silly to hold Franken to the same treatment as someone like Moore, a serial predator.

I've done a lot of shit in my life I regret. I've been racist, I've been sexist, I've been homophobic. I still think I'm a piece of shit, but I'm less of a piece of shit than I ever was before. And lumping me now in with the person I was back then is just silly. The person I am now would want to punch the person I was then. It would be the same for anyone that actually tries to grow from their mistakes. People should be able to grow, even politicians.

Great posts, Boog.

BoogtehWoog wrote:

I've done a lot of shit in my life I regret. I've been racist, I've been sexist, I've been homophobic. I still think I'm a piece of shit, but I'm less of a piece of shit than I ever was before. And lumping me now in with the person I was back then is just silly. The person I am now would want to punch the person I was then. It would be the same for anyone that actually tries to grow from their mistakes. People should be able to grow, even politicians.

I completely agree with everything you've written there....with a but....

Some people aren't going to grow. Roy Moore is not going to stop being an utter shitbag at this point - he's been pretty clear about that. Those people need to be swept away.

I recently noticed that I exclusively give buddy hugs to men. One of my female coworkers called me out on it

Conservatives Attack Starbucks Holiday Cup's 'Gay Agenda'

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/l9XdRXD.jpg)

Yep, I can already feel myself wanting to grab a man's butt.

BadKen wrote:

Yep, I can already feel myself wanting to grab a man's butt.

No, that was the McDonalds' from last year.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/REV7GT2.jpg)

Paleocon wrote:

I recently noticed that I exclusively give buddy hugs to men. One of my female coworkers called me out on it

I somehow knew you were a hugger.

Attacking the Starbucks holiday cup is pretty much a holiday tradition at this point.

Shifter wrote:

Attacking the Starbucks holiday cup is pretty much a holiday tradition at this point.

Yeah, but with the Keurig thing conservatives have to up their protest game.

Maybe buying like twenty bucks of lattes a day from now through Christmas and then just throwing those gay-themed cups on the ground will properly express their moral superiority and hetroness.

Shifter wrote:

Attacking the Starbucks holiday cup is pretty much a holiday tradition at this point.

I think you mean a Christmas tradition, thank you very much.

WP: The publisher of AL.com blasts back at legal threats from Roy Moore

Turns out Moore was also concerned about a media outlet closer to home. Moore’s camp has twice threatened the Alabama Media Group, home to AL.com, according to a letter from a lawyer for the company. “You have accused AL.com of making ‘false reports and/or careless reporting’ about multiple subjects related to your clients,” reads the letter from John Thompson of Lightfoot Franklin White LLC. “Your letter demands that AL.com retract and recant its prior stories and that it ‘cease and desist’ from any further reporting about your clients,” reads the letter.

“AL.com hereby rejects your demand,” it continues.

IMAGE(https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/files/2017/11/amgnew2.png)

AL: AL.com: We will not be silenced or slowed by Roy Moore's threat

OG_slinger wrote:
Shifter wrote:

Attacking the Starbucks holiday cup is pretty much a holiday tradition at this point.

Yeah, but with the Keurig thing conservatives have to up their protest game.

Maybe buying like twenty bucks of lattes a day from now through Christmas and then just throwing those gay-themed cups on the ground will properly express their moral superiority and hetroness.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/VV4dWbk.png)

You can either be conservative or love coffee. But not both.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Shifter wrote:

Attacking the Starbucks holiday cup is pretty much a holiday tradition at this point.

I think you mean a Christmas tradition, thank you very much.

2010 Trump disagrees

Chairman_Mao wrote:

2010 Trump disagrees

THERE'S. ALWAYS. A. TWEET.

Not that it matters, but still.

Prederick wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

2010 Trump disagrees

THERE'S. ALWAYS. A. TWEET.

Not that it matters, but still.

Remember the quaint olden times when people used to say that Millennials would have trouble getting elected because their social media history would disqualify them?

Gremlin wrote:
Prederick wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

2010 Trump disagrees

THERE'S. ALWAYS. A. TWEET.

Not that it matters, but still.

Remember the quaint olden times when people used to say that Millennials would have trouble getting elected because their social media history would disqualify them?

It's hard to remember those days, they were so long ago, back in early 2016.

Also, Charlie Manson's dead.

Prederick wrote:

Also, Charlie Manson's dead.

I can't decide if i might have been a morbid child, but at 35 Manson was pretty well before my time. However, my reaction to all the "He is largely forgotten, let us remind you about him" coverage is "Are you nuts? who doesn't know about this guy?!"

I have been thinking about the whole Al Franken thing a lot lately.

I used to play hockey in a co-ed adults league. It's true what they say about hockey players. Every bit of it. We play hard, we drink hard, and we push a lot of boundaries at the after parties. This applied to both the men and the women.

I have been at parties where female players were grinding on men. Men were grinding on women. And generally, when random hookups would happen, we would just chuckle. When things went into creepy territory, we said something and did something.

Occasionally, after a bad breakup or a nasty foul on the ice, folks would bring up relationship drama or decide that what happened between two consenting adults in an environment full of pubescent hi jinx was not cool in retrospect. Or that a line crossed once out of misunderstanding and never again was a much more serious thing than it was at the time.

Leean Tweeden made a living out of grabbing men's crotches. And precisely what she accuses Al Franken of is evident in videos of her sexually assaulting the late Robin Williams.

Perhaps she didn't invite Senator Franken's behavior and for that he has apologized. And from all descriptions, this was a single incident, not repeated, and not a pattern of behavior. Moreover, it is one in which the context can make misunderstanding very, well, understandable.

Context matters here. And to equate Sen. Franken with a serial pedophile like Moore is more than a bit disingenuous.

Bad news another groping allegation leveled at Franken in 2010. Picture was taken at the state fair and woman said he grabbed her butt as he pulled her in too close for a photo.

How technology's built in "engagement maximization" destroys mental health in the Trump age, and what to do about it

We live in a weaponized news-cycle, a political moment in which a cadre of ruthless looters are destroying the world, magnified by technology's design ethic that uses experimental methodologies to maximize "engagement" (that is, how much attention you give to a tool or application), without any regard to whether your "engagement" is driven by pleasure or anxiety.
My Trumpism survival strategy is to only engage with the news and politics when I can be reflective -- when I can look up the backstory, connect it with other ideas, and write things on Boing Boing or make notes to myself, putting myself in charge of the news-cycle -- and to never engage with media when I'm reactionary, that is, when I can't stop, research and consider the nature of the news.

But the technology defaults of "engagement maximization" run directly contrary to this tactic, by jamming reaction-inducing headlines in your eyeballs at every conceivable moment, for the express purpose of diverting you from the task you're completing and hooking you into an anxious set of taps, clicks, likes and arguments.

For example: the Android home screen search bar. By default, tapping in this bar drops down a list of top searches from this moment. Inevitably, these are searches that portend catastrophe, e.g., "trump nuclear war threat." That's because Android's algorithm for choosing top searches has maximized engagement, and these are the kinds of searches that drive further searching.

But you don't go to a searchbar on your pocket-computer to find out about current affairs. The very nature of search is task-oriented. This top searches "feature" exists solely to derail you from your search, because search is not an "engagement" activity: by its nature, it is a closed-loop activity. You want to know a fact. You look up the fact. You leave the search box. The only way to "improve search engagement" is to hijack the user's attention.

Here's the straw that broke the camel's back: I was out for dinner with a friend. We were looking at the menu and spotted an unfamiliar sauce. The server was busy, so I took out my phone and tapped the search-box to look up the sauce's ingredients. Tap: trump nuclear war threat. Zomgwereallgonnadierunhide. I looked up the sauce, put my phone back in my pocket and tried to resume my conversation. The whole dinner, though, was derailed by my thoughts returning, over and over again, to the deliberate anxiety provocation Android had punched me in the face with. Will we be dead before dinner is done?

Once you recognize this pattern, you'll see it everywhere. The Android weather app does it, because it is "weather and news" and tapping the weather icon in the morning to find out if I needed to remind my kid to bring a jacket to school meant being punched in the face with at least five variations on trump nuclear war threat. Our morning school walks went from being a sweet 15 minutes of daddy-daughter time when we told stories or talked about homework or upcoming family activities to a sweaty race to drop the kid off to find out if we'd all be dead by lunchtime.

It turns out that there's a deeply buried preference to turn off suggesting "top searches" in Android, but there's no way to get the weather app to stop punching you in the face. You can turn off all the headline categories in "News & Weather" except "Top headlines," which is a euphemism for trump nuclear war threat.

I've reclaimed my search bar and replaced the weather app. We can't afford to disengage from the news in the Trump era, because we need to seize this moment of dislocation to smash Trumpism and begin the urgent work of saving our planet, species and society. But there's a difference between reflection and reaction, between engaging on your terms and being repeatedly punched in the face by an algorithm.

I was about to post that. I was talking with a friend today, and we agreed that, at this point, we all need to be prepared for the possibility of some shit coming out about Mr. Rodgers.

Prederick wrote:

I was about to post that. I was talking with a friend today, and we agreed that, at this point, we all need to be prepared for the possibility of some shit coming out about Mr. Rodgers.

Yeah because we'd all expect it from someone with a name like Mr. McFeely but not Mr. Rogers

Prederick wrote:

I was about to post that. I was talking with a friend today, and we agreed that, at this point, we all need to be prepared for the possibility of some shit coming out about Mr. Rodgers.

That'd make the next PBS pledge drive really awkward.

Prederick wrote:

I was about to post that. I was talking with a friend today, and we agreed that, at this point, we all need to be prepared for the possibility of some shit coming out about Mr. Rodgers.

Ehhhhh, I get the sentiment, to a degree, but the stories I've heard about Mr. Rogers over the years (like just sitting down with strangers who need him to literally be their neighbor for a few minutes no matter what he was about to go do)... That would be like the one public figure I just can't imagine anything coming out on like that because I just can't believe he'd ever do that. Possibly naive of me, but I suppose we'll see.

This sort of thing coming out about Mr. Rodgers is probably one of the few public personalities that would genuinely shock and upset me. By everything that's ever come out about him* his persona on the show wasn't an act.

*so far