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You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Glibertarianism

Glibertarianism

Yo bum rush the show

by DougJ|  February 13, 201812:17 pm| 212 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism

The Washington Post just hired Megan McArdle.

Let’s review some of her greatest hits:

(1) Shooter-rushing as a way to minimized casualties in mass shootings.

(2) Not admitting she fucked up her estimates of the costs of the Iraq War as percentage of GDP by a factor of ten.

What else?

I think that, as with Stephens, her derp-fu is too weak even for the Post’s totebag-adled readers. So this is harmless. I’m disgusted but I’m also amused.

Yo bum rush the showPost + Comments (212)

Repub Venality Open Thread: Paul Ryan Is Not A Serious Person…

by Anne Laurie|  February 3, 20186:11 pm| 183 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Ryan Lyin' Weasel, Assholes

Ryan pitches cutting Medicaid benefits this year by calling it “Finding Fulfillment.”https://t.co/nX2aAZ9teA pic.twitter.com/dAaLIt3pGu

— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) February 2, 2018

But he’s very much a serious threat to those of us not in the top 0.1%…

They dropped this at height of the #NunesMemo. These so-called GOP leaders, who should be working across the aisle to strengthen these key initiatives are: 1) hoping you‘re distracted; and 2) plotting to destroy your Medicare, Medicaid & Social Security.https://t.co/b1F4gXmvx6

— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) February 2, 2018

Good news, the Kochs can cover their Costco memberships for 14.2 million years! pic.twitter.com/UveEdxGoYl

— Schooley (@Rschooley) February 3, 2018

Hey Paul! Going to need an extra nine cents! pic.twitter.com/zAtC18Rffv

— Gus Ironic Colonialist™ (@Gus_802) February 3, 2018

$1.50 a week for 52 weeks equals $78 per year, times 125 million workers that equals $9.75 billion a year.

Yet the tax cut costs $1.5 trillion — with a t — over ten years.

Where’d the money go? https://t.co/RQKEPM75GC

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 3, 2018

Paul Ryan is bragging about giving public school employees $1.50.

These 6 jaw-dropping charts show just how much rich people will gain from the GOP tax bill: https://t.co/gaQjGNfI1R pic.twitter.com/wAx0H7DX2I

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) February 3, 2018

Moments ago, @PRyan deleted this tweet after we told him just how out of touch he was. Show Paul Ryan what you think of his tax bill. Chip in $1.50 now to help us repeal and replace Ryan permanently this November.https://t.co/c3Fii4Q0Jn

— Randy Bryce (@IronStache) February 3, 2018

Repub Venality Open Thread: Paul Ryan Is Not A Serious Person…Post + Comments (183)

Blog Chewtoy Long Read: “Does This Man Know More Than Robert Mueller?”

by Anne Laurie|  January 22, 201810:15 pm| 141 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Readership Capture, Russiagate, Assholes, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To

I care if the President of the United States has a corrupt relationship with the Russian government. https://t.co/ajT8ys9xgN pic.twitter.com/A8v89BcZe1

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 21, 2018

What committed activist could resist the lure of a long-form profile in a glossy NYC-based magazine, nestled between full-page ads for Rolex watches and Broadway hits? Unfortunately, despite Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s best beat-sweetening efforts, Greenwald’s logorrheic arrogance and simmering resentment of all the mundanes who fail to appreciate his brilliance make him sound less like Andrew Sullivan and more like Ted Cruz:

It’s 10:45 p.m. Rio de Janeiro time. Glenn Greenwald and I are finishing dinner at a deserted bistro in Ipanema. The restaurant, which serves its sweating beer bottles in metal buckets and goes heavy on the protein, is almost aggressively unremarkable (English menus on the table, a bossa-nova version of “Hey Jude” on the stereo). Greenwald avoids both meat and alcohol but seems to enjoy dining here. “I really believe that if I still lived in New York, the vast majority of my friends would be New York and Washington media people and I would kind of be implicitly co-opted.” He eats a panko-crusted shrimp. “It just gives me this huge buffer. You’ve seen how I live, right? When I leave my computer, that world disappears.”

Greenwald, now 50, has seemed to live in his own bubble in Rio for years, since well before he published Edward Snowden’s leaks and broke the domestic-spying story in 2013 — landing himself a Pulitzer Prize, a book deal, and, in time, the backing of a billionaire (that’s Pierre Omidyar) to start a muckraking, shit-stirring media empire (that’s First Look Media, home to the Intercept, though its ambitions have been downgraded over time). But he seems even more on his own since the election, just as the agitated left has regained the momentum it lost in the Obama years.

The reason is Russia. For the better part of two years, Greenwald has resisted the nagging bipartisan suspicion that Trumpworld is in one way or another compromised by a meddling foreign power. If there’s a conspiracy, he suspects, it’s one against the president; where others see collusion, he sees “McCarthyism.” Greenwald is predisposed to righteous posturing and contrarian eye-poking — and reflexively more skeptical of the U.S. intelligence community than of those it tells us to see as “enemies.”…

Thanks to this never-ending hot take, Greenwald has been excommunicated from the liberal salons that celebrated him in the Snowden era; anybody who questions the Russia consensus, he says, “becomes a blasphemer. Becomes a heretic. I think that’s what they see me as.” Greenwald is no longer invited on MSNBC, and he’s portrayed in the Twitter fever swamp as a leading villain of the self-styled Resistance. “I used to be really good friends with Rachel Maddow,” he says. “And I’ve seen her devolution from this really interesting, really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack.” His view of the liberal online media is equally charitable. “Think about one interesting, creative, like, intellectually novel thing that [Vox’s] Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein have said in like ten years,” he says. “In general, they’re just churning out Democratic Party agitprop every single day of the most superficial type.” (Reached for comment, none of these people would respond to Greenwald.)

All this has led to one of the less-anticipated developments of the Donald Trump presidency: Glenn Greenwald, Fox News darling. For his sins, Greenwald has been embraced by opportunistic #MAGA partisans seeking to discredit the Trump-Russia story. When alt-right ringleader Mike Cernovich sat for a 60 Minutes interview last year, he praised only one journalist: Greenwald. “My opinion of Glenn ten or 15 years ago was entirely negative,” says Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who now heralds him as one of the “clearest thinkers” in media.

This, by the way, is the reason we’re eating dinner so late on a Tuesday: Greenwald has to be at a TV studio in a few minutes to be interviewed by Carlson. We leave the restaurant and head across the street to the garage where he parked his Mitsubishi Outlander. Unexpectedly, the gate to the entrance has been shut and the attendant is missing. Mild panic sets in. Greenwald begins rattling the gate. Even if we catch a cab to the studio, his TV clothes are in the car, and he is currently wearing shorts and an old polo shirt. “How,” he frets, “can I go on Fox News dressed like this?”…

show full post on front page

Greenwald’s home is located on a dead-end cobblestone street, under a thick canopy of trees, a few miles inland from Ipanema Beach. The grounds are large enough to comfortably accommodate Greenwald; his husband, David Miranda; their two recently adopted children; household staff; 24 formerly stray dogs; and some dog poop, which, when I visit the day before his appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, I step in.

Greenwald greets me in his cathedral-like living room dressed in his usual shorts and polo. When I joke that he lives in a gated community — a guard in a booth controls access to the street — he seems wounded and explains that he could afford the place only because the recent Brazilian recession had devastated Rio’s housing market. He plays coy when I ask him who owned the house previously. “I think it was some hedge-fund pig,” he says…

Greenwald grew up near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was closeted in high school and cultivated a rebel iconoclasm to cope. “One of the strategies you can develop is, I’m never going to be weak,” he says. “I’m always gonna be smarter and stronger and more aggressive.” Comparing himself to the titular character in the mockumentary American Vandal, he says he once prompted a schoolwide investigation by spray-painting the walls with “extremely offensive profanities about individual students and teachers.” “He was always warring with the administration, warring with teachers,” says his friend and former classmate Norman Fleisher. Instead of schoolwork, he devoted himself to the competitive-debate circuit and, in his senior year, to a failed bid for the Lauderdale Lakes City Council. He squeaked into George Washington University, where he majored in philosophy — Nietzsche — and again poured all his energy into debate…

[I wonder if he and Ted Cruz ever crossed paths on the competitive-debate circuit?]

… In 2014, Omidyar, the founder of eBay, poured $250 million into a news organization called First Look Media and handed Greenwald the keys. One of Greenwald’s collaborators on the Snowden story, the documentarian Laura Poitras, made a movie about the experience, Citizenfour, in which Greenwald was something of a second star. In 2015, it won the Oscar for Best Documentary, which Greenwald says he could not enjoy because host Neil Patrick Harris joked that “Snowden couldn’t be here for some treason.” At an after-party that night, a BuzzFeed reporter asked him about it. “I’m like, ‘I’m really trying hard not to say anything about it,’ ” Greenwald recalls. “And they’re like, ‘No, but you must have an opinion on it,’ and I was like, ‘Neil Patrick Harris is a fucking moron, and that joke was completely idiotic and offensive.’ ” (For the record, Snowden thought it was funny.)…

The week I visit Greenwald in Rio, the news out of the D.C.-Moscow gyre is the indictment of three Trump-campaign aides: Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, and Manafort. Sitting at Greenwald’s dining-room table, as a little dog named Kane molests a bigger dog named Enzo, I make the mistake of suggesting this is a “huge” development. Greenwald is ready for me before I finish my sentence.

“Have they been huge?” he pounces, answering his own question. “I mean, I guess they’ve been huge in the sense that Donald Trump’s former campaign manager was indicted on multiple felony charges, right? That’s inherently huge, but it’s not particularly huge for the Russia story, because all the charges leveled against Manafort were unrelated to questions of collusion with the Russians.” Fair enough, but Papadopoulos’s arrest was in fact related to the question of collusion. Greenwald waves this away. “They had all these kind of losers who weren’t even in the Trump campaign,” he says. “You know, these charlatans who were constantly puffing up their résumés, who come from the shittiest schools and have no significant experience.” He continues: “What happened this week, for me, is exactly what I’ve been expecting all along.”…

Greenwald’s half-a-million-dollar Intercept salary reflects his role as the founder and figurehead of the organization. But since the Snowden revelations, Greenwald hasn’t done much original reporting, and he has lately repositioned himself as a bomb-throwing media critic. This is in some ways a natural role for him, one that harks back to his early blogging days. “His general default position is that we shouldn’t believe anything the elite Establishment politicians are saying without fact-checking them,” says Jeremy Scahill, his Intercept co-founder. “We certainly shouldn’t believe the anonymous proclamations of CIA, NSA, FBI officials.”…

To listen to intelligence veterans, there is also a defensive aspect to Greenwald’s collusion skepticism. “You really cannot dismiss as part of his motivation the way in which this new story is undermining the very things that he made his reputation on,” says cybersecurity expert Stewart Baker, a former NSA general counsel. “Which is: embracing WikiLeaks and Snowden and a hostility to the idea that there are national-security threats the U.S. has to respond to.”…

Which makes his lack of interest in a report the Intercept itself produced all the more curious. In June, it published an explosive story that Russia had attempted to infiltrate voter-registration systems days before the election by sending phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials. The information came from a leaked NSA report; shortly before the Intercept published its story, a Georgia NSA employee named Reality Winner was arrested on espionage charges. Almost immediately, the Intercept was accused of exposing Winner with its own sloppy methods. But the scoop itself represented one of the first credible claims that, more than trying to influence American voters, Russia may have been directly targeting election technology. Greenwald distanced himself from the bungled leak at the time and now says he doesn’t buy the story outright. “I never liked the story. I thought it was bullshit and knew it was going to be huge in a way that was totally unjustified in what it actually revealed,” he says. “I think it tried to overstate the importance of what that document was.”…

To be catty: Glenn Greenwald has a vast sympathy for willowy young men with sensitive mouths. Square-jawed frauleins in hiking boots, not so much. (To be fair, many extremely heterosexual civil-libertarian men tend to prefer the company of their brothers — misogyny is gender-neutral, in that sense.)

But regardless of how soon or how thoroughly his hand-waving dismissals of Russian election tampering are debunked, this profile makes it seem like Greenwald will never return to the United States. He’s got a nice life and a happy family in his walled compound, and presumably he’s tucking a chunk of those Omidyar dollars away against a change in the prevailing political winds. And as a libertarian, isn’t that all he really ever wanted?

Betteridge's law of headlines definitely at play here. ?? pic.twitter.com/YeiXeREYei

— Smelodies (@SmelOdiesOG) January 21, 2018

Betteridge’s law of headlines is one name for an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, although the principle is much older.

Blog Chewtoy Long Read: “Does This Man Know More Than Robert Mueller?”Post + Comments (141)

Late Night Open Thread: On the Lighter Side…

by Anne Laurie|  January 18, 201810:45 pm| 39 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome

Some people just make a farewell phone call to their loved ones, but…

Pornhub traffic before, during, and after the Hawaiian Missile Crisis.

After notification of the error, "Hawaiians collectively breathed a sigh of relief. Those seeking further relief headed back to Pornhub where pageviews surged +48% above typical levels at 9:01am." pic.twitter.com/vrwzNdMamv

— Ian Frisch (@IanFrisch) January 17, 2018

Fun fact: #MissileWarning babies will be born around September 11, 2018

— Jennifer Victor (@jennifernvictor) January 18, 2018


.

And a reminder (via Josh Marshall) from one of this blog’s forgotten chew toys, someone so lightweight I suspect she needs to be securely tethered on windy days…

It seems to me that if you believe that men can be educated into not pursuing self-centered sex, you should also believe that abstinence education could be a very effective way to curb teen pregnancy.

— (((Megan McArdle))) (@asymmetricinfo) January 18, 2018


To save you reading her self-defence: As a devout Randroid, she still doesn’t understand the concept of consent. Best I can tell, McArgleBargle figures that all sexual contact is a matter of “self-interested exchange”… insert your own “free hand of the market” snark below…

Late Night Open Thread: On the Lighter Side…Post + Comments (39)

Bitcoin: Beanie Babies for Techno-Libertarians?

by Anne Laurie|  December 11, 20175:16 pm| 308 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Grifters Gonna Grift, Decline and Fall, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All

Bitcoin now at $16,600.00. Those of you in the old school who believe this is a bubble simply have not understood the new mathematics of the Blockchain, or you did not cared enough to try. Bubbles are mathematically impossible in this new paradigm. So are corrections and all else pic.twitter.com/go9v0w92zk

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) December 8, 2017

I’ve got nothing against collectibles, and I have the Franklin Mint plates to prove it. But most of the little I know about economics I got from reading J.K. Galbraith, so whenever people start talking about Free money — guaranteed to appreciate!, the alarm bells go off. From the Washington Post:

Bitcoin soared past the $17,000 mark on Thursday, a dizzying run for a digital currency that was worth less than $1,000 at the start of the year and was once largely the preoccupation of technologists or those looking to avoid scrutiny to launder money or buy drugs and weapons online.

The fast rise — it has gone up more than 40 percent this week alone — is creating a buying frenzy among eager speculators around the world and helping push bitcoin into the mainstream. And it is also forcing U.S. regulators to grapple with whether to legitimize a product that operates outside the control of any government or financial institution.

The run-up in price comes as bitcoin enthusiasts prepare to reach a new landmark. On Sunday, a bitcoin product will trade for the first time on a U.S. financial market, making it almost as easy to bet on the virtual currency as oil, corn or the euro…

Uhhh… about bitcoin… it's actually ruining the planet.

The bitcoin computer network currently uses as much electricity as Denmark. In 18 months, it will use as much as the entire United States.

Something's gotta give. This simply can’t continue.https://t.co/KSmaCZLXh7

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) December 5, 2017

McClatchy:

…Much of the computer power sustaining bitcoin occurs at massive complexes – or farms – in rural China running on electricity from coal-fired generating plants in Sichuan and Inner Mongolia. Reporters from Quartz and Bloomberg visited one of the massive farms in August, and said it had eight warehouses containing 25,000 processing machines, or about four percent of the global bitcoin network.

show full post on front page

As bitcoin prices soar, more processing machines are likely to be added.

The complexes earn money by solving cryptographic puzzles that permit bitcoin transactions in a block, vying for a block reward that is currently 12.5 bitcoins, or $212,487 at the valuation at 2 p.m. Thursday. Competition is fierce between mining operations…

From the Atlantic, “Bitcoin Is a Delusion That Could Conquer the World“:

… If every currency is a consensual delusion, then bitcoin, a digital cryptocurrency that changes hands over the internet, feels more like a consensual hallucination on psychedelic drugs. The concept of bitcoin was born in a detailed white paper published in late 2008 by a pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto.” By 2013, one bitcoin was worth $12. As of this writing, it’s worth more than $10,000. Its value has doubled in the last two months alone. For any currency’s value to increase by 100 percent in eight weeks is, to use a technical term, bonkers. If the Japanese yen or American dollar did the same, their economies would plunge into an infernal deflationary spiral…

Nobody knows for sure whether the blockchain will transform the economy of the future, as Andreessen foresees. What’s clearer, however, is that it has not transformed the economy of today. While the number of bitcoin transactions is growing every year, it’s nothing close to a mass-market consumer technology, like Google, or Netflix, or even PayPal. Bitcoin remains cumbersome to use (the typical transaction can take up to 10 minutes) and the price is extremely volatile. It is, for now, a frankly terrible currency built on top of a potential transformative technology.

Which leads to perhaps the most obvious question: If bitcoin appears to have flopped as a mass-market currency, why has it so suddenly succeeded as an investment vehicle?…

Even if one buys the argument that blockchain is brilliant, cryptocurrency is the new gold, and bitcoin is the reserve currency of the ICO market, it is still beyond strange to see any product’s value double in six weeks without any material change in its underlying success or application. Instead, there has been a great and widening divergence between bitcoin’s transaction volume (which has grown 32 times since 2012) and its market price (which had grown more than 1,000 times).

Surveys show that the vast majority of bitcoin owners are buying and holding bitcoin to exchange them for dollars. Let’s be clear: If the predominant use case for any asset is to buy it, wait for it to appreciate, and then to exchange it for dollars, it is a terrible currency. That is how people treat baseball cards or stamps, not money. For most of its owners, bitcoin is not a currency. It is a collectible—a digital baseball card, without the faces or stats…

Maybe the solution to the Fermi paradox is that significantly advanced civilizations discover crypto currencies and then furiously burn through all available energy sources until they go extinct https://t.co/gdQgfthNp8

— Simon Willison (@simonw) December 6, 2017

Given what we know about how efficient and leveling and inherently self-regulating the free market is, it's weird that bitcoin would instantly turn into Pogs. https://t.co/lCg6b7svmy

— David Roth (@david_j_roth) December 11, 2017

Bitcoin 10,000 is gonna be more fun on the way down.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) December 8, 2017

hmm a bunch of techno-libertarian dumbasses ruining something nice for everyone, a bit of a recurring theme these days

— Suburban Yeti (@shavedbigfoot) December 10, 2017

Bitcoin: Beanie Babies for Techno-Libertarians?Post + Comments (308)

Profits Uber Alles

by John Cole|  November 21, 20176:19 pm| 313 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Free Markets Solve Everything, Glibertarianism, Assholes

There are so many reasons to not use Uber or Lyft, and here is another one:

Hackers stole the personal data of 57 million customers and drivers from Uber Technologies Inc., a massive breach that the company concealed for more than a year. This week, the ride-hailing company ousted Joe Sullivan, chief security officer, and one of his deputies for their roles in keeping the hack under wraps.

Compromised data from the October 2016 attack included names, email addresses and phone numbers of 50 million Uber riders around the world, the company told Bloomberg on Tuesday. The personal information of about 7 million drivers were accessed as well, including some 600,000 U.S. driver’s license numbers. No Social Security numbers, credit card details, trip location info or other data were taken, Uber said.

At the time of the incident, Uber was negotiating with U.S. regulators investigating separate claims of privacy violations. Uber now says it had a legal obligation to report the hack to regulators and to drivers whose license numbers were taken. Instead, the company paid hackers $100,000 to delete the data and keep the breach quiet. Uber said it believes the information was never used but declined to disclose the identities of the attackers.

Why are companies not legally required to disclose data breaches?

Also, fuck all these glibertarian techbro companies, and you all need to stop with this uber/lyft, airbnb bullshit.

Profits Uber AllesPost + Comments (313)

Late Night Rude Speculation Open Thread: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, But Gated Communities Not So Much?

by Anne Laurie|  November 7, 20172:05 am| 53 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Both Sides Do It!

Just based on the time of year I'm betting this has to about leaf blowing

— Chris Railey (@ChrisJRailey) November 6, 2017

That was also my first reaction to the “brutal” attack on Rand Paul by his gated-community neighbor. Paul was in his yard, on his riding mower, wearing ‘ear protection’… that, to me, said: Entitled guy blowing his tree-garbage onto his neighbors’ property, at a high decibel level. If you don’t think such behavior is outside of possibility, you’ve never lived next to one of these jagoffs. Even letting his dog befoul your lawn is at least quiet.

Rand Paul and neighbor have been sparring over yard waste and leaves blown on each other's lawns for years, a neighbor tells @DrewGriffinCNN

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) November 6, 2017

… Mr. Paul, 54, has long stood out in the well-to-do gated neighborhood south of Bowling Green, Ky., that he calls home. The senator grows pumpkins on his property, composts and has shown little interest for neighborhood regulations.

But the spectacle of the incident — one former doctor attacking another in broad daylight — was altogether different. Competing explanations of the origins of the drama cited stray yard clippings, newly planted saplings and unraked leaves…

Matthew J. Baker, a lawyer for Mr. Boucher, called the matter “a very regrettable dispute” between neighbors over a “trivial” matter.

The incident “has absolutely nothing to do with either’s politics or political agendas,” Mr. Baker said in a statement on Monday. “It was a very regrettable dispute between two neighbors over a matter that most people would regard as trivial.”…

“They just couldn’t get along. I think it had very little to do with Democrat or Republican politics,” said Jim Skaggs, who developed the gated community and who lives nearby. “I think it was a neighbor-to-neighbor thing. They just both had strong opinions, and a little different ones about what property rights mean.”

Asked about long-leveled allegations that Mr. Paul had disregarded neighborhood regulations, Mr. Skaggs, who is also a former leader of the county Republican Party, said that the senator “certainly believes in stronger property rights than exist in America.”…

Okay, maybe he was just mulching those leaves with his mower, so that the pieces would be smaller, easier for the wind to distribute and harder for his neighbors to rake up…

Mr. Paul is a libertarian, and a dick (but I repeat myself). My bet would be he righteously ignored the ‘neighborhood regulations’ one time too often, because His Home Is His Castle, and They Are Not the Boss of Me. Violence is never the best solution, but to quote Chris Rock, “I don’t approve… but I understand.”

As a psychiatrist I can’t tell you how many times I have heard landscaping and fencing disputes get out of hand.

— Emily Deans MD (@evolutionarypsy) November 7, 2017


.

The politically interesting question: How long will his injuries keep Rand Paul away from the Senate? Not to underestimate the genuine suffering involved — broken ribs are the devil — but if *I* were a proudly independent sorta-Republican facing the goat rodeo that is the GOP tax bill in the making, I would not hesitate to seek any available excuse for staying away…

Late Night Rude Speculation Open Thread: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, But Gated Communities Not So Much?Post + Comments (53)

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