Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Facebook is thinking of rebranding itself with a new name. What should it be?
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) October 20, 2021
FUNOPTICON https://t.co/E80HF4bm1R
— kilgore trout, never attended a decision-point mtg (@KT_So_It_Goes) October 20, 2021
FaceBorg Open Thread: Markus *THEE* FunopticonPost + Comments (133)
A personality in search of a cult https://t.co/hom3hTkz94
— zeddy (@Zeddary) October 1, 2021
I try to avoid sexist metaphors, but let’s be honest: At this point, Sinema’s publicly demonstrated her vote is for sale; now she’s just negotiating a price point.
“But on Saturday, she is also scheduled to attend her political action committee’s “retreat” with donors at a high-end resort and spa in Phoenix, three different sources confirmed, including an attendee. The hotel also confirmed the event”https://t.co/lpMHKWTznC
— Chad Yeager (@ChadYeager7) October 1, 2021
Did dalmatians kill your mom because we already tried Girlboss Joker this summer. https://t.co/etWdxp73Dt
— zeddy (@Zeddary) October 1, 2021
as I’ve been saying abt the insider pubs, folks 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/tMU00X5C0n
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 1, 2021
I genuinely do not understand framing the fate of legislation that will affect millions of people as the subplot of a story about an individual senator’s self-actualization. https://t.co/AzD45JzZhu
— Adam Serwer ?? (@AdamSerwer) October 1, 2021
What is the appeal of this shtick? 80% of 'wine-drinking triathletes' want medicare expansion and to tackle climate change with WW2-scale mobilization. The rest are into Qanon.
— zeddy (@Zeddary) October 1, 2021
Axios: LOL at the WOKE Democrat Party
Also Axios: "This obstructionist conservative senator beholden to wealthy special interests is something totally new and refreshing because she's a bisexual who dresses unconventionally" https://t.co/HfHlemK84H— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) October 1, 2021
The best way to get a fawning profile from the Politico/Axios axis is to take policy stances that favor the material interests of editors at Politico and Axios as opposed to your typical constituent…
Epik CEO eventually responded to the breach of his web hosting company in a 4+ hour long live video conference, where he prayed, rebuked demons, & warned that the hacked data had been cursed and could cause hard drives to burst into flames.https://t.co/iN06y6IGU6
— Mikael Thalen (@MikaelThalen) September 29, 2021
One tweet in a long thread. From what I can tell, the EPIK user base seems to have been divided between grifters and would-be domestic terrorists — with considerable overlap between the two groups.
I don’t pretend to understand the techwork TechRadar presents here, but I grasp that it’s not looking good for Mr. Monster:
Hacktivist group Anonymous has shared server disk images extracted from controversial web hosting platform Epik, according to reports.
The latest leak compliments the 180GB of Epik’s data the group had shared earlier this month, in order to express its displeasure with the hosting provider serving as a refuge for hate mongers and extremists.
“A security researcher who was able to verify the extent of the leak to me described it as “a complete own.” At over 300 gigabytes worth of data, this leak is larger than the first,” tweeted Journalist Steve Monacelli, who broke the news of the first data release.
In a followup tweet, he added that the latest data dump is made up of fully bootable disk images of Epik servers, which also includes a wide range of passwords and API tokens…
Fame, of a fashion: “2021 Epik data breach” now has its own Wikipedia page.
Friday Evening Schadenfreude Open Thread: Further EPIK FailurePost + Comments (43)
“Musk thinks Peter is a sociopath, and Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart.” https://t.co/40tK77p8KA
— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) September 20, 2021
Max Chafkin’s book The Contrarian seems like an excellent read, if bad for sane readers’ blood pressure…
… Thiel doesn’t control Zuckerberg, and their relationship is complicated, to say the least. Thiel unloaded most of his stock as soon as the company went public. (The shares were falling and morale was low. To rally the staff, Zuckerberg invited Thiel to an all-hands meeting at headquarters, but he just ended up insulting them. “My generation was promised colonies on the moon,” Thiel told them. “Instead we got Facebook.”) But in the years since, Thiel has remained a trusted confidant to Zuckerberg — despite personally cultivating Facebook antagonists, including James O’Keefe, the right-wing provocateur who produced undercover videos attempting to expose Facebook’s supposed bias against conservatives, and Charles Johnson, who helped start the face-recognition company Clearview AI…
In 2019, while on a trip to Washington to answer questions from Congress about his digital currency, Thiel joined Zuckerberg, Jared Kushner, Trump, and their spouses at the White House. The specifics of the discussion were secret — but, as I report in my book, Thiel later told a confidant that Zuckerberg came to an understanding with Kushner during the meal. Facebook, he promised, would continue to avoid fact-checking political speech — thus allowing the Trump campaign to claim whatever it wanted. If the company followed through on that promise, the Trump administration would lay off on any heavy-handed regulations.
After the dinner, Zuckerberg took a hands-off approach to conservative sites. In late October, after he detailed the policy in a speech at Georgetown, Facebook launched a news app that showcased what the company called “deeply reported and well-sourced” outlets. Among the list of recommended publications was Breitbart, Steve Bannon’s site, even though it had promoted itself as allied with the alt-right and had once included a section dedicated to “Black crime.” Facebook also seemed to go out of its way to help the Daily Wire, a younger, hipper version of Breitbart that would become one of the biggest publishers on the platform. Facebook had long seen itself as a government unto itself; now, thanks to the understanding brokered by Thiel, the site would push what the Thiel confidant called “state-sanctioned conservatism.”
Zuckerberg denied that there had been any deal with Trump, calling the notion “pretty ridiculous,” though Facebook’s actions in the run-up to the election would make the denial seem not entirely credible. During Black Lives Matter protests, Twitter hid a post by the president that seemed to condone violence: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”; Facebook allowed it. In the days leading up to the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Facebook mostly ignored calls to limit the spread of “Stop the Steal” groups, which claimed that Trump had actually won the election…
So clearly this happened, right? https://t.co/6J8mS1MbpH
— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) September 20, 2021
Tuesday Evening Open Thread: See, These Guys *Can* Be Correct!Post + Comments (118)
The New Yorker has a story on gun ghoul Wayne LaPierre’s botched hunting trip in which he murdered an elephant, but did so in the most incompetent manner possible, having to shoot it multiple times because he literally can not hit a fucking elephant at 15 yards with a rifle. The link is here, and there is video, but fortunately it does not autoplay.
I don’t care how good of a person you have been the rest of your life, if you kill an animal like this, for sport, for fun, to compensate for your small dick, you will be running in the evil section of the good to evil continuum for the rest of your life. Nothing can make up for this act of barbarism, and LaPierre was already well to the evil end to begin with.
He should be rolled up in a carpet and trampled by a herd of elephants.
One of the enduring lies of the last four years is that Trump speaks for the downtrodden and disfranchised. This has never been true. Sure, there are a lot of racist poor people who vote for him, but as the arrests are pouring in from the McRib Rebellion, you are seeing Trump’s true base. Middle and Upper middle class white people with means. Like this shitstain:
As insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol this week, a few figures stood out. One man, clad in a combat helmet, body armor, and other tactical gear, was among the group that made it to the inner reaches of the building. Carrying zip-tie handcuffs, he was captured in photographs and videos on the Senate floor and with a group that descended on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office suite. In a video shot by ITV News, he is seen standing against a wall adjacent to Pelosi’s office, his face covered by a bandana. At another point, he appears to exit the suite, face exposed, pushing his way through the crowds of demonstrators.
A day after the riots, John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School, notified the F.B.I. that he suspected the man was retired Lieutenant Colonel Larry Rendall Brock, Jr., a Texas-based Air Force Academy graduate and combat veteran. Scott-Railton had been trying to identify various people involved in the attack. “I used a number of techniques to hone in on his identity, including facial recognition and image enhancement, as well as seeking contextual clues from his military paraphernalia,” Scott-Railton told me. Brock was wearing several patches on his combat helmet and body armor, including one bearing a yellow fleur de lis, the insignia of the 706th Fighter Squadron. He also wore several symbols suggesting that he lived in Texas, including a vinyl tag of the Texas flag overlaid on the skull logo of the Punisher, the Marvel comic-book character. The Punisher has been adopted by police and Army groups and, more recently, by white supremacists and followers of QAnon. Scott-Railton also found a recently deleted Twitter account associated with Brock, with a Crusader as its avatar. “All those things together, it’s like looking at a person’s C.V.,” Scott-Railton said.
Or this fuckknob:
A Texas-based lawyer is among those who have been terminated from their job after being identified as a participant in Wednesday’s riot on Capitol Hill.
“Paul Davis, Associate General Counsel, is no longer employed by Goosehead,” Goosehead Insurance, located in Westlake, Texas, tweeted Thursday.
That’s why the Trump boat flotillas were popular- his base is predominantly crazy white people of means. The poors don’t have 200k boats. Boats are fucking expensive to own and maintain. You weren’t seeing blue collar boys in their weekend bass boats at those things. These were expensive toys.
On top of that, truly poor people can not afford to fly or drive across country, dress up in expensive tactical gear, and riot. They don’t have the means or the money to fly across country on a private jet like this dumpsterfire of a person:
One Dallas-area woman flew by private jet to participate in the initial protest at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday that turned violent as the mob breached the building.
Realtor and radio host Jenna Ryan took a private jet with three others to Washington D.C. to protest the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump.
These people have never been disfranchised, they just don’t accept it when their candidate loses and they don’t accept minority voters as their equals. What has happened is the mainstreaming of the Birchers. Add in all the unstable nutjobs who follow conspiracy theories, opportunists and grifters, fascist groups like the Proud Boys and Three Percenters and militias, the Jesus freaks, and your friends on facebook who want their tax cuts and don’t give a fuck about anything else, and there you have the Trump base.
But it isn’t the poor and downtrodden who just want their voices heard.
According to the TSA, idiot nation is ignoring the plague and going home for turkey and to kill gram and gramps:
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recorded its highest number of weekend passengers since the coronavirus pandemic began in March, with over 3 million people traveling in the past three days. The surge comes despite Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance advising against Thanksgiving travel because of mounting covid-19 cases across the nation.
Sunday was the busiest travel day since the beginning of the pandemic in March, according to TSA spokesman Daniel Velez, with 1,047,934 passengers. TSA screenings surpassed a now-rare amount of 1 million screenings on both Friday and Sunday; Friday was a slightly lower travel day with 1,019,836 travelers screened. On Saturday, TSA saw 984,369 travelers.
Hospitals are already overwhelmed in many places, close in others, and the death rate is climbing as we all know that it is hospitalizations and deaths are lagging indicators. It’s going to be an awful couple of months, and there literally is no help on the way because the Senate is not going to do anything and the current administration is more worthless than breasts on men. So, yay.
The thing that bothers me the most about this is that the people traveling are all people of privilege. If you are flying across country for a three day holiday, you are de facto middle class or higher. Poor people don’t do this. So people who are already in a position of privilege are simply incapable of denying themselves the luxury of going home for the holidays, and their actions will, as always, wreak havoc on those less fortunate or who have no say. The virus will hit the old, the weak, communities of color, the immune suppressed, the medical community, and, of course, the working class.
The very same working class who, unlike those in the middle and upper middle class, won’t be getting to celebrate Thanksgiving Day with their families even without travel. Why? Because they are all having Thanksgiving today, or tomorrow, and likely early in the day or late at night, because they have eat before their midnight shift or after they get home from their swing shift. They’ll gather around the table at noon today and then head off to fucking Walmart or the gas station or the Walgreens or whatever restaurant they work at. Just like they fucking do every year.
And such that it is.
We’re a profoundly stupid and selfish and unempathetic nation, for the most part. Other than some masturbatory rhetoric early on about “essential workers” and “our heroes in the medical community,” we’ve basically done fuck all to make their lives easier. It was basically empty rhetoric, a sort of act of auto-erotic patriotism and the performative dance version of a war effort. None of this is surprising- it’s who we have been conditioned to be. In the last twenty years we’ve financed several wars and multiple tax cuts for the rich on the backs of the kids being crushed economically right now, and instead of being asked to sacrifice during wartime we were instead told to go out and shop. So it’s no surprise that asking people to turn down nonna’s cranberry sauce during a plague is just a bridge too fucking far.
We don’t give a fuck about anyone but ourselves, and the selfish pricks traveling this week and the assholes hosting them are the fucking worst of the worst.