From Pine View Farm

May, 2022 archive

The Grift of Grab, a Fairy’s Tale 0

Images of fairies in flight, each labeled with a governement benefit for businesses:  $700 billion in defense spending, $2 trillion in tax cust, the Wall St. bailout, fossil fuel subsidies, and so on.  One that looks like a Republican Elephant sasy,

Via Job’s Anger.

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Settle disputes with politeness.

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Twits Own Twitter, Reprise 0

Man says,

Click for the original image.

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Twits Own Twitter 0

Jason S. Sexton is skeptical that Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter will have beneficent effects. He remarks that

. . . to suggest that this move of Musk owning Twitter provides any kind of transcendent hope, or rational object of belief is — in a term of the majority of the world’s religious believers from the great faith traditions — idolatry.

Follow the link for his reasoning.

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QOTD 0

Henry A. Wallace:

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.

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Cawthorn v. Hawthorn 0

Via Yastreblyansky, who has penned a tune on this subject.

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Twits on Twitter, Dis Coarse Discourse Dept. 0

At AL.com, Cameron Smith argues that Twitter is not the “public square.” A snippet:

Twitter is largely voices screaming into the digital void. Some are echoed by others. A few include cute dog videos. Occasionally, the shouts result in dialogue. Mostly, the platform is a jumbled chaos we directly or indirectly curate for ourselves.

We have far more control over our social media world than the real one. We follow what interests us, tell platforms that we’re not inclined toward certain topics, and we’re even able to block or mute individual voices. All the while Twitter’s algorithm observes our interaction with the platform and feeds us content that it expects we’ll want to see.

I’ve been to plenty of public spaces discussing the issues of the day. None of them function like that.

He may be right. Twitter may be more like Speaker’s Corner (where I once listened to a man rant passionately that toilet paper is the root of all evil) than Plato’s school.

Nevertheless, as long as persons, both on and off Twitter, act like it is a place of legitimate discourse, his point is moot.

We are a society that has sacrificed its soul for clicks and likes.

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Facts Are What People Think 0

David and a caller discuss why so many persons disdain scientific fact.

Aside:

I think the caller gets it right. The effects of global warming are near and will be dire.

And I think we are well past the tipping point.

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Still Rising Again after All These Years 0

Honest to Betsy, this is just mean for the sake of mean.

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Muskrat Love 0

Badtux explains why he disdains Elon Musk.

Methinks he makes some valid points.

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The Crypto-Conspiracist 0

Alex Jonesing for Bit-Coin.

This truly puts the slush in slush fund.

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What’s the Opposite of Woke? Asleep 0

At the Idaho State Journal, Chris Huston skewers the duplicity and under-lying bigotry of Florida’s “anti-woke” law. Here’s a bit;

Florida’s new law also makes illegal any statements in the classroom or employee training that people are oppressed (or privileged) based on their race, gender or national origin. This provision may make it tough for teachers to talk about the Civil War, unless you want to suggest that Black enslaved humans actually enjoyed their all-expenses paid cruise ship voyage to America to be sold on the auction block, thereby qualifying for a lifetime of free room and board, along with cool custom branding.

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QOTD 0

Thurgood Marshall:

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

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