Schadrach

Pretty sure there’s at least one quote of Davis himself using the n-word to refer to federal agents before describing how bright they glow…

but they come after watching Trump receive 34 felony convictions with no actual punishment for those convictions

Yeah, well, blame the courts for sentencing him to “Never mind, we cool bro.”

any consequences to him for Jan 06.

That gets tricky. The core argument would be that Trump’s speech before the attack is firmly within his 1A rights (and it almost certainly is, 1A speech rights are extremely broad and anything short of a direct call to immediate lawless action is usually protected) and that his not doing anything to stop it once it started is him doing a shit job, but not technically illegal (but hypothetically impeachable, if both houses would agree to it which was never going to happen).

You’d have to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he planned for J6 to happen the way it did in a fashion that is definitely not attached to his duties as president in any even vaguely reasonable way to have anything to hang on him at all without an impeachment. Something like hard evidence of him coordinating specifically the attack on the capitol (as opposed to the rally or march to the capitol steps) with the people entering the capitol or their leadership and not merely an otherwise legal protest/rally. Which is a high bar to reach.

I mean, except of those with agoraphobia or those who are incapable of leaving their residence due to physical infirmity of some kind.

I just want to point out that there were text generators before ChatGPT, and they were ruining the internet for years.

Hey now, King James Programming was pretty funny.

For those unfamiliar, King James Programming is a Markov chain trained on the King James Bible and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, with quotes posted at https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/

4:24 For the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to.

In APL all data are represented as arrays, and there shall they see the Son of man, in whose sight I brought them out

3:23 And these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, and all the abominations that be done in (log n) steps.

I was first introduced to it when I started reading UNSONG.

My cat figured out the dog door by watching the dogs. She’s inside 80% of the time but prefers to do her business outside if the weather’s clear and goes out for an hour or so about twice a day besides that.

Of all things, my part basset hound mix is a bird killing machine despite the stubby legs, broken hip and arthritis. I don’t know how she manages to do it, but lots of half eaten bird corpses started showing up in our yard right after we got her, but only in the back yard which she could reach via the dog door. Starting before the cat started using the dog door.

You’re also, in my opinion erroneously, subscribing to the notion that there are “absolute best” applicants rather than “best fits”.

I’m not, there’s not some sort of generically absolute best applicant, there’s only ever best fit for the given position. Unless you are implying that being a specific demographic or demographics makes one a better fit inherently?

Fourthly, your example of blind hiring is a very good example as to why it’s not a fix: it doesn’t take into consideration “invisible labor” women are subjected to. Etc.

Explicitly not being able to make a decision based on race/sex/etc because you do not know the race/sex/etc of the applicant and thus it cannot be a factor is itself not a fix for racist, sexist, etc hiring practices because it does not allow you to give members of certain races or sexes additional consideration because of their demographic membership? And proof of this is that not knowing candidate’s race/sex/etc doesn’t necessarily increase the likelihood that you will pick women, non-white, etc candidates?

This actually demonstrates the point though - it’s not about removing discrimination in the hiring process, it’s about targeting a specific mix and coming up with whatever policies help you approach that desired mix without doing anything explicitly illegal (like outright saying only to hire [or not hire] a certain race/sex/etc for a given position). It’s the difference between saying “we want to hire a black person for this job, if possible” and heavily emphasizing that your institution is a historically black college and the “need to fit in with the college community” when hiring for this position. I’m not saying but I’m saying and all.

Generally ad companies want to sell space to the highest bidder that won’t cost them more money than they’d make. They only bow to foreign Nazis when foreign Nazis are the most efficient way to make money, and that is more about bowing to money than bowing to Nazis.

You can never trust a salesman. And ad people are salesmen selling you buying stuff from other people. Politicians are salesmen selling that they should be in charge of you.

You mean a thin skinned narcissist? Yeah, but there are lots of thin skinned narcissists who aren’t also Nazis.

When I was a hiring manager the DEI directives I received weren’t “pick a minority over a more qualified person” it was “be cognizant of your biases and consider the benefits a different perspective will bring to your team when making a hiring decision”. I had to take a training course that exposed me to some things I hadn’t really taken into account before and I found it to be beneficial.

So, care to give an example, how that example is executed in policy or decision making process and how that results in more women, LGBTQ or POC being hired? “Consider the benefits a different perspective will bring to your team when making a hiring decision” certainly sounds an awful lot like corp-speak for “consider how being a member of a demographic underrepresented in your team is in itself a qualification and should be treated as a point in their favor over other candidates who are not.”

Like repeatedly mentioning that the institution is a historically black college and emphasizing a “need to fit in with the college community” as code for “we want to hire a black person” or companies listing literally impossible job requirements as a pretense for getting H1B visas (because “we want employees we can abuse because we can threaten to deport them if they don’t play along” doesn’t technically fly as opposed to “we cannot find qualified employees domestically” because all applicants are either under qualified or lying because the qualifications are impossible).

I was never forced to make a decision in a particular way or questioned after the fact.

Instead, you were taught essentially what was expected of you draped in corporate sensitivity speak, and expected to do your job as intended. Had you not in a broad sense started hiring more in line with whatever demographic alterations the training was meant to get you lean more in favor of (for example, if it was gender-focused and you were not broadly speaking hiring more women than before) there would have been further training. No direct calling out of specific hiring decisions for being the wrong race/gender/whatever. Because the layers of indirection and “awareness building” and “implicit bias training” and the like is done the way it is because a direct corporate mandate to to hire a specific number of a specific demographic would be illegal discrimination so instead you have to walk around the subject until you’ve worn a “hire more of this demographic” shaped trail.

So what’s your definition then? What is the difference between hiring in accordance with DEI and merely hiring the best candidate available regardless of race or sex?

You can’t claim to be actively trying to increase representation of some demographic in hiring without biasing the process specifically in their favor, which requires at some level treating membership in that demographic as a positive qualification. The farthest from doing that you can meaningfully get is doing something to increase that demographic in the pool of candidates

You might point to something like blind hiring, in which those doing the hiring don’t get to know the race or sex of candidates, but whether or not that’s a valid DEI policy depends entirely on outcome (for example a public works department in Australia took up blind hiring as a means to improve gender equality, then cancelled it because not knowing which candidates were women was causing them to hire fewer women). Because that’s at the very heart of what DEI is - attempting to engineer a specific demographic distribution as a final outcome and whether or not a given policy is a valid DEI policy is about whether or not it helps approach that goal demographic distribution.

No, it’s not. Because he’s not hiring competent people that are the right race over equal or better candidates that are some other race - he’s hiring based on being in his circle, regardless of competence. We wouldn’t be calling out his picks nearly so much if he was picking someone qualified and white over someone potentially more qualified and black rather than picking someone totally unqualified because he knows them.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Trump picks people from a few lists:

1. Republicans with a strong presence on social media.
2. Whoever wrote the relevant bit of Project 2025.
3. People plausibly accused of being Russian assets.

Not at all. The difference is that DEI puts race/sex/etc before merit (e.g. hiring the best person of a target demographic you can find rather than the best person in general, which may or may not be the same person) while old fashioned nepotism ignores both merit and demographics entirely and picks based solely on connections with the boss.

In other words, it’s even worse but since Trump is generally going to pick mostly white dudes and the occasional white woman MAGA will eat it up.

He’s in about as safely a blue state as they come, his circle is generally very progressive, and he works for a liberal/progressive leaning employer. He’s about as safe as he can be, all things considered.

I however live in the reddest of red states that used to be safely blue and would consider leaving if it weren’t for my folks and my wife’s folks being here and needing help.

At least we’re probably pretty safe from the worst of it until the targets get down to people with medical issues.

Yeah, well, the geese have it coming. They know what they did. At least branta canadensis, I don’t necessarily have anything against other species of goose.

Ducks are rapey as hell, but they haven’t done anything to me or mine in particular, so that’s between them and the other ducks.

That seems like a good reason to feed geese entire loaves of the stuff. Geese are fucking assholes.

Don’t you know - mass death caused by nanotech in the vaccines is just around the corner! At least that’s what all the anti-vax Xitter weirdos say. Probably with a something something Jews in there too.

Either that or the vaccines tell the body to make spike proteins but not to ever stop and the spike proteins cause damage which is going to cause the aforementioned mass dying from vaccines. Hence the spike protein removing supplements being shilled by someone I saw on another thread on here, with the logo that’s supposed to be a stylized W but looks like saggy tits.

Yes, that the account has paid Elon for a blue check. Originally it meant that the user was in fact who they appeared to be. Then it became a status symbol, then Twitter removed it on a couple of occasions for saying something they disagreed with, then came the accusations of Twitter admins being capricious about the whole process and essentially taking personal bribes in exchange for checks, then Elon bought it and made it a paid feature.

The grey check indicates the identity of an government or non-profit has been verified and the account is who it says it is.

DOGE?

Department Of Guzzling Ejaculate? Explains why they’ve got Big Balls working there. Somebody’s got to be the supply side.

My understanding is that constitutional amendments also take a high bar to pass with 2/3 of states agreeing to the proposal and 3/4 ratifying. Given the issues getting even more basic things through the Senate/House I could definitely see this getting blocked by red states.

Two routes to amend the Constitution.

1. Both houses of Congress pass a proposed amendment by a 2/3 majority. Then 3/4 of states ratify that amendment in their state legislatures. This is how every amendment to date has occurred.
2. 2/3 of state legislatures call for a Constitutional Congress, during which any number of changes may be made, but any changes must be agreed to by 3/4 of the states. Congress gets no say in this process. Congress getting no say in this process is the point - it exists so that if there’s an issue with the Constitution that Congress is unable or unwilling to resolve (for example if Congressional power needs to be curtailed in some fashion), it can be fixed despite them.

Note the key thing here: Republicans have been pushing hard at the state level for decades, and 2 is why. If ever 38 state legislatures are red, they can more or less arbitrarily rewrite the Constitution to their will regardless of what the remaining states or anything at the federal level has to say about it.