Dreading how this could end

It feels like it’s going to drag on forever.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, the official GOP Twitter account is blasting out the idea that good Republicans will die fighting to overthrow the rule of law in their state.

Fine. Die, then. Hold your breath until you turn purple. Kick and scream on the floor. Having a tantrum won’t change the fact that Biden won. I’m also kind of pissed off that it’s Biden, rather than a real progressive Democrat, but I’m prepared to work through the process.

By the way, we’ve run into this @Ali character the Arizona Republican Party is re-tweeting. The last time I heard of him was when he and Jacob Wohl toured downtown Minneapolis trying to smear Ilhan Omar, unsuccessfully, and made a false report of a crime. He has a history that wobbles around silly and ugly.

After one of the first 2020 primary debates, Alexander went viral claiming that Kamala Harris wasn’t an “American Black,” because she was of Jamaican and Indian heritage, instead of descending from African-Americans who had been forced into Antebellum-era slavery. Alexander was convicted of two felonies in 2007 and 2008, and has a track record of publicly noting people who are Jewish. He made a sensationalist video with right-wing snafu generator Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer, the Islamaphobic failed Congressional candidate, wherein Wohl seemingly fakes the group receiving death threats during filming.

If you aren’t willing to die, at least continue to entangle yourself with the Rabid Right.

Back of the line, MAGAts!

After months of dragging their heels and opposing pandemic control efforts, our Republican representatives are making a rush for the front of the vaccination line.

Republican leaders of the Minnesota Legislature suggested Friday that state lawmakers and the staff who work for them should be among the early recipients of a COVID-19 vaccine when it is available.

“I’m encouraging the vaccines, as one of the priority groups after elderly and some of our front-line workers, that we think about the people that have to be essential at the Capitol,” Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, R-East Gull Lake, said at a forum with other legislative leaders.

No. If Republicans all got sick and had to stay home for a month, ending their obstructionism, we’d make better progress. All Republicans should be sent to the end of the queue.

Front of the line: health care workers. Right behind them: public school teachers. Then, if there were any justice in the world, we’d do a rational risk assessment and distribute the vaccine to those communities with the highest mortality from the disease, which would be the black and Latin communities in our cities.

Aww, but get real. This is America. It’s going to go first to the already wealthy people, because it’s going to be sold on capitalist principles, which means the actual beneficiaries will be those with the least need.

Don’t let the Republicans escape the Trump taint!

We’ve been watching the death throes of a banana republic for the last month. We have a president who wasn’t fit for the job in the first place thrashing about in a panic to deny the election results, and we have a couple of embarrassingly stupid “lawyers”, Sydney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, making a spectacle of themselves with a string of barely literate lawsuits, all failing. I am not a lawyer, and even I can see the ineptitude on display. It’s not just incompetence — these wackaloons are demanding that Trump throw out the election results by fiat, cancel Biden’s inauguration, and basically rule as a dictator.

None of that is going to happen. The dangerous part is that there are tens of millions of deluded citizens who think it should happen.

The interesting part is that right now, there are some cunning Republicans who enabled this whole catastrophic mess who are skulking away, trying to distance themselves from the consequences of their actions, thinking they can come back in 2024 and pick up the pieces. One of the most delusional is Mike Pence, a rat who is at least aware that he’s on a sinking ship. He’s been trying to crawl out from under the baggage of being Trump’s servant, hoping to avoid being slimed with the garbage the president is throwing around right now.

Vice President Mike Pence has been a go-to fundraising draw for the president’s campaign, and since October, no more than a day passed without his name emblazoning a fundraising email for the Trump reelect.

But that changed late last month. Since Nov. 25, not a single fundraising email from the Trump campaign or its Republican National Committee fundraising account has featured Pence’s name in the “from” field. And this week, that Republican National Committee joint fundraising committee, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, made another subtle change: a handful of its emails swapped out the official Trump-Pence campaign logo for one featuring just the president’s name.

He’s got to be looking at the example of William Barr, though, who said that there was no evidence of significant fraud in the election, and now has Trump pissed off, considering firing him. Worse, I saw a bit of the Lin-Powell rally in Georgia, and the mob now hates Barr, and was raging about locking him up. Pence doesn’t want that. He’s daydreaming about a comeback, taming that mob to support him in a run for the presidency. So he’s walking a tightrope right now.

There’s no way a man who served as the vice president of a corrupt, treacherous regime could ever resuscitate their political career after this, is there?

Alexander Hamilton Stephens (February 11, 1812 – March 4, 1883) was an American politician who served as the vice president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865, and later as the 50th governor of Georgia from 1882 until his death in 1883. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented the state of Georgia in the United States House of Representatives before becoming governor.

Goddamnit, America.

Sean Bean did it

Those catastrophic hijinks atop the telescope, and the explosions, couldn’t have been good for the structure.

Seriously, and sadly, the Arecibo radio telescope has collapsed. It’s done.

A huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico that has played a key role in astronomical discoveries for more than half a century collapsed on Tuesday, officials said.

The telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform fell onto the reflector dish more than 400 feet below.

The US National Science Foundation had earlier announced that the Arecibo Observatory would be closed. An auxiliary cable snapped in August, causing a 100ft gash on the 1,000ft-wide (305m) reflector dish and damaged the receiver platform that hung above it. Then a main cable broke in early November.

Rather than blaming Sean Bean, though, I should note that this is another example of the decay of our scientific infrastructure on Donald Trump’s watch. You don’t he really cares about a radio telescope, or Puerto Rico, do you?

Wow. Kevin Sorbo is an idiot

I used to watch Hercules with my kids all the time, but then he made God’s Not Dead and demonstrated that he’s a world-class twit. Now you can read this interview with Sorbo and see for yourself. It’s a well-done interview: Marlow Stern just asks him question, and lets Sorbo hang himself with the answers. Normally I detest journalistic stenography, but they are very good questions. He also keeps pointing out where Sorbo is wrong, until Sorbo himself realizes he sounds like an idiot (while not admitting error) and ends it all whining about how it’s going to be a hit piece. Sure thing. Because of what he said, willingly.

It’s all the right-wing’s greatest hits. Venezuela! Bernie is a Stalinist! Hitler was a socialist! That woman who accused him of harassment was just trying to get rich (because accusing someone famous harassment always leads to fame and fortune)! Trump didn’t lose the election! Doctors are faking coronavirus deaths, and masks are no good! Yuck.

Cory Doctorow, +1, ☆☆☆☆

Doctorow makes a useful distinction I wish I’d grasped years ago, the difference between persuasion and targeting.

The problem is that we’re confusing automated persuasion with automated targeting. Laughable lies about Brexit, Mexican rapists, and creeping Sharia law didn’t convince otherwise sensible people that up was down and the sky was green.

Rather, the sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the racist, xenophobic, fearful, angry people who wanted to believe that foreigners were destroying their country while being bankrolled by George Soros.

Remember that elections are generally knife-edge affairs, even for politicians who’ve held their seats for decades with slim margins: 60% of the vote is an excellent win. Remember, too, that the winner in most races is “none of the above,” with huge numbers of voters sitting out the election. If even a small number of these non-voters can be motivated to show up at the polls, safe seats can be made contestable. In a tight race, having a cheap way to reach all the latent Klansmen in a district and quietly inform them that Donald J. Trump is their man is a game-changer.

Cambridge Analytica are like stage mentalists: they’re doing something labor-intensive and pretending that it’s something supernatural. A stage mentalist will train for years to learn to quickly memorize a deck of cards and then claim that they can name your card thanks to their psychic powers. You never see the unglamorous, unimpressive memorization practice. Cambridge Analytica uses Facebook to find racist jerks and tell them to vote for Trump and then they claim that they’ve discovered a mystical way to get otherwise sensible people to vote for maniacs.

I’m thinking about all those times I agreed to debates with creationists, and I’d show up at the venue to see church buses lined up outside and a crowd of people clutching Bibles filling the seats. There was no hope that I’d convince them (OK, maybe I deluded myself that I’d win over a few), and really, my role was to play the heel at a fixed match, to draw in the congregation to listen to the face, who got all the adulation. That really got to me at one event, held in a fairly swanky hotel ballroom, where afterwards the preacher who’d brought me in told the audience that my antagonist was staying in a suite there, that they were going to have a dinner with select donors, and that he’d be staying in town to speak at the church the next few days. Then he took me aside, gave me a check for $100, and told me there was a Motel 6 just down the road.

The creationists were smarter than I was. They knew these events weren’t intended to inform or educate; the debate was all about rallying a crowd, drawing in more true believers who wanted to see that university egghead taught a lesson — and it didn’t matter that I wasn’t crushed, because they’d gather together all the conservative Christians and they’d find each other. It’s both sides, too. Debates at atheist events are also a sham, primarily about grooming a particular audience rather than teaching anything new.

Doctorow is focused on politics and the media, but it’s the same old story. The goal isn’t to persuade, it’s to align people with a gang.

He also sees through the game of advertising. How often have you seen a stupid, repetitive commercial and thought to yourself, “What a waste of time, I’m too smart to be fooled by this BS.” Advertisers don’t care. They’re just trying to efficiently glean out the few who are fooled, and tools like Facebook are there to make it easier to sort the profitable wheat from the chaff (and in this game, you’re the chaff.)

It’s fashionable to treat the dysfunctions of social media as the result of the naivete of early technologists, who failed to foresee these outcomes. The truth is that the ability to build Facebook-like services is relatively common. What was rare was the moral recklessness necessary to go through with it.

The thing is, it’s always been obvious that by spying on internet users, you could improve the efficacy of advertising. That’s not so much because spying gives you fantastic insights into new ways to convince people to buy products as it is a tribute to just how ineffective marketing is. When an ad’s expected rate of success is well below one percent, doubling or tripling its efficacy still leaves you with a sub-one-percent conversion rate.

But it was also obvious from the start that amassing huge dossiers on everyone who used the internet could create real problems for all of society that would dwarf the minute gains these dossiers would realize for advertisers.

Now look at the recent elections in this country. Donald Trump didn’t persuade anyone — he can’t, because he’s a bumbling incompetent — he just used the tools provided by media like Facebook and Twitter to pick out and target the 70 million who could be fooled effectively and get them to think that Trump is the widget they must buy, and got them all engaged in a great big gang that would make Trump the focus of their identity.

Great.

We may have gotten rid of Trump, but those 70 million are still out there, and Facebook still has extensive dossiers on enough of them to steer them in whatever directions Zuckerberg feels is most profitable.

The plot of this drama is building rapidly to an obvious crisis

You know what the current, defeated president is watching right now? OAN. We should be concerned. That’s not a news network, it’s a propaganda organ for far-right lies, and they’re feeding his delusions.

We got through the election all right, but I worry about the spectacle that’s going to occur on 20 January. Trump believes and is loudly proclaiming that he won the election, and OAN is stirring up his angry mob. They’re going to show up for Biden’s inauguration, they’re heavily armed, and even if the Secret Service and the cops manage to winkle the wannabe-tyrant out of the oval office without needing to call in the marines, there may be blood in the streets.

We’re watching an irresponsible “news” network feeding the paranoid delusions of a madman. Are there no laws regulating the accuracy of journalism? Not that OAN practices anything remotely like journalism.

The only majority that you guys have is the numbers

Watch this MAGA loon try to argue that mathematically, he wins…without any math.

He also states that We [Republicans] have 40% of the population here, you’ve only got about 60%. I just wanted to slap him and tell him that acreage doesn’t vote, people do, and that 60 is bigger than 40. Math Time for Republicans, you ass.