Month: March 2018

 
From The Onion:

FAIRFAX, VA—In response to the March For Our Lives protest led by student activists who survived the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the National Rifle Association reportedly issued a statement Monday calling for more common-sense gun deaths. “Now, more than ever, what we need are more shooting deaths resulting from defending one’s family from home invaders or getting revenge—the types of clear, logical gun deaths with widespread approval,” said NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre…

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Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

 
From CATO’s Julian Sanchez:

As anyone who’s uploaded an ill-advised photo from a college party knows, Facebook is where your old mistakes come back to haunt you years later. That turns out to hold just as true for the company itself — a fact executives at the behemoth social network have been discovering to their chagrin this week, amid international furor over the political strategy firm Cambridge Analytica’s illicit access to a vast trove of Facebook user data.

Facebook’s mistake, in this case, was a classic case of taking a good idea too far. The idea was that the company’s massive map of users’ social connections could be put to innovative uses if that data were opened up to outside developers — allowing all sorts of third-party apps to painlessly add a social component.

Unfortunately, the company also made a critical misjudgment: It assumed that if users were willing to share personal information with their friends, they were also willing to let their friends re-share that information.

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From Tommy Christopher:

Republicans are desperate in their attempts to silence young people who protest gun violence. But the kids just fight back twice as hard.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) stepped in it on Sunday when he suggested that young people “learn CPR” rather than petition their government for stronger gun laws. On CNN’s “New Day” on Monday morning, Parkland survivors Lauren and David Hogg reacted to tape of Santorum’s remarks.

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From Michael John Scott at MadMikesAmerica:

There are millions of them; the anti-science, anti-climate, pro-Trump anti-intellectuals. The second class minds of America, those who embrace their god and their guns, but eschew everything meaningful in these changing fortunes of time. In 2016, they demonstrated an anti-intellectualism never before seen on such a large scale. They voted for Donald Trump, a man without class, or appeal to the rational, intellectual minds among us. They voted for the winner of the trophy for crass, setting the stage for an uncertain future not only for America but the world.

If you are looking for clues, historian and author Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962) offers them because Trump’s crassness has a definite appeal to the ever-growing anti-intellectual strain in American culture. In so many ways Trump epitomizes this frightening aspect. His global-warming denials and appointments of so many second-class minds like that of Energy secretary Rick Perry, who insists that “the science is still out” on climate change, are just two indications of Trump’s attack on rationality. As conservative columnist David Brooks has written of Trump,

“He has no . . . capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out.”

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From author John Scalzi at Whatever:

A few thoughts on the March For Our Lives, in no particular order:

1. I personally didn’t expect it to be as large as it turned out to be, with 800,000 protesters in Washington DC and hundreds of thousand more (at least) across the country. There were even several hundred marchers in Dayton, the largest city near me:

Dayton #marchforourlives https://t.co/RLTBjJLTwY pic.twitter.com/OxkfnTnKE8

— Steven Saus (@uriel1998) March 24, 2018

I had honestly thought the school walkout earlier this month was going to be the crescendo of the protests. Clearly, this shows what I know. If there were indeed 800k marchers in DC, it’s one of the largest one-day protests in history, and that’s not chicken feed.

2. And it’s also clearly terrifying the NRA and its selected quislings, who have been reduced in the last couple of days to mocking the teenagers at the center of the protests, because nothing makes grown adults look more in control than making fun of children half to a third their age, whom have lost friends and schoolmates due to gun violence. What makes them angrier is that the kids are having none of it; I suppose when you’ve seen your friends murdered, being mocked by an NRAtv apparatchik or a Twitter “personality” is not nearly as devastating as those latter folks would hope it is.

The NRA was clearly hoping to do what it’s always done, which is to ride out the immediate outrage until it was over, with the tried-and-true one-two punch of “thoughts and prayers” and “it’s too soon.” But again, the kids weren’t having it, and unfortunately for the NRA, a bunch of well-spoken, laser-focused teenagers with a legitimate grievance regarding gun violence plays better than a bunch of screaming, angry guntoters who want to sell the idea the way to solve the problem of people shooting up schools with assault rifles is to force teachers to arm themselves.

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Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

 
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

And in a fascinating, almost lifelike, Rubio sort of way, he then repeated practically verbatim what he said in his Facebook post from earlier in the day:

“You know we have a basic responsibility to protect people’s data and if we can’t do that then we don’t deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.”

Faceberg wants to be clear that that sort of thing could never happen today, thanks to the altruistic work of his engineers to twiddle dials and whatnot so that the flashing Come and Get It sign is turned off over user data.

You trust him, right?

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From Frances Langum:

This is not some low-level paperwork, this is from the law firm of one of Donald Trump’s earliest allies, Rudy Giuliani, addressing one of Trump’s biggest donors and his future campaign manager and the now suspended CEO of this controversial firm and let me show you what we got.

He warned them, this firm, not to do something that the whistleblower told us they went on to do. Anna Scheckter obtained this memo and she pointed out that the lawyers directly advising Mercer, Bannon and Nix, right there in 2014, telling them that Nix should avoid the possibility of breaking US law and thus recuse himself of management of these American campaigns and clients involving these elections. Also warning him that the analysis of Cambridge’s trove of data should be conducted by, wait for it, US Citizens.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

The president of the United States is one of the most powerful people in the world. Yet his private conversation with the Russian president this week did not stay that way because underlings objected to what he decided to say:

President Trump did not follow specific warnings from his national security advisers Tuesday when he congratulated Russian President Vladi­mir Putin on his reelection — including a section in his briefing materials in all-capital letters stating “DO NOT CONGRATULATE,” according to officials familiar with the call.

It’s certainly true that this White House leaks far more embarrassing and humiliating things about the president than any other in anyone’s memory; just take a look at Dan Drezner’s epic thread of White House staff talking about the president as if he was a toddler. It’s also true that leaking is a symptom, and the president himself is the cause. But it’s a bit more complicated than one might think.

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