Libel by Label 0
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s David Mills argues that words matter and that using words loosely contributes to dis coarse discourse. Here’s a tiny bit of his article:
One of those words used all the time is “extremist” for someone you disagree with. (Also related words like leftist, rightwing, woke, fascist.) If you successfully label someone an extremist, no one has to listen to him or take seriously anything he has to say. Everyone should act as if he didn’t exist.
I think that a couple of times he tiptoes just a wee bit into the quagmire of what Driftglass refers to as “both-siderism,” but his article is well-worth the few minutes it will take you to read it.
They Were Zoned Out 0
Zoned right out of their home, that is.
Fly the Fiendly Skies 0
They explore new dimensions of fiendliness every day.
The Business Model 0
Jim Hightower is not impressed by Big Pharma’s hissy fit.
Unless, of course, you count executives of giant pharmaceutical corporations as human beings. Gouging patients is their preferred business model.
I commend his entire piece to your attention.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
And another responsible gun owner exercises politeness on the pavement . . . .
We are a broken society.
Twits on Twitter X Offenders
0
At the Bangor Daily News, Susan Young discusses Elon Musk’s sinister scapegoating. A snippet:
According to Musk, the company’s loss of ad revenue isn’t due to his mismanagement of the company. Or to the foolish renaming of one of the world’s best known companies or the firing of many of its competent employees. Or the platform’s alarming rise in hate speech.
No, it’s because Jews . . . .
I commend her entire article to your attention.
(Misplaced tag placed.)
The Disinformation Superhighway 0
If you edit it out of Wikipedia, why, natch, it must have never happened.
Playing by the Bookie 0
At my local rag, sportswriter extraordinaire Bob Molinaro looks at the gamboling gamblers in the game (emphasis in the original):
A look back: Evidence of how times have changed is that it wasn’t that long ago when Las Vegas was barred from even running TV ads during the Super Bowl.
Also: As if gambling isn’t prevalent enough, the Commanders are opening a sports book inside their stadium. When did buying a ticket to watch a game stop being enough?
Aside:
I suspect I’m not the only person sick of sports stars shilling for shysters commercials for online sports betting.
Geeking Out 0
One of my computers died of old age (stuff wears out), so I now have a new toy. It’s my third ThinkPenguin, and they fulfilled my order in a most timely fashion.
It is a very nice piece of hardware, thank you very much. As an aside, I am not a fan of touchpads, but it does have one of most functional touchpads I’ve yet encountered.
I ordered it specifying Ubuntu MATE as the installed distro (ThinkPenguin lets you pick your distro, within reason), but, as I’m not really a big fan of the MATE desktop environment (actually, that’s not quite correct–I really like Plasma, but I don’t like Kubuntu, primarily because I loathe their package manager, so I went with Ubuntu MATE because the guys at Going Linux recommend it and I’ve used it before and it works quite nicely), I’ve already installed the Plasma desktop and am in the process of tweaking it to my preferences.
Eventually, natch, I’ll put Fluxbox on it, because Fluxbox is the ultimate combination of light-weight, configurable, and eye-candiability.
Of course, after I’ve installed Fluxbos, I will still be able to use MATE or Plasma. With Linux, you can have multiple GUIs installed and switch among them as you wish, something you can’t do with Windows or iJunk.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
Farron discusses some textbook cases of psychological projection. (Warning: Mild language.)