Mar
5
2024

When Did the Babylon Bee Start Doing Straight News Reporting?

I kid, of course.

The "Democracy Dies in Darkness" newspaper's headline, as I type, is:

Supreme Court ballot ruling darkens critics’ hopes for a judicial curb on Trump

Critics "hopes" were that the least democratic branch of government would put a "curb on Trump."

And the New York Times:

Supreme Court Ruling Settles Ballot Questions, but Hardens Political Divisions

Those robed division-hardeners! Tsk!

Jeff Maurer is gloating just a bit: Everyone Drop What You're Doing and Acknowledge How Right I Was About the Trump 14th Amendment Case. And (indeed) he predicted that SCOTUS would "probably" use Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment as an "escape hatch" to save Trump from disqualification.

Today, the Supreme Court shimmied their 18 buttcheeks through that escape hatch. The conservative justices cited Section 5, while the liberal justices found their own loophole (which I’ll talk about in a bit). In the first unanimous Supreme Court ruling since Og v. Mastodon in 10,000 B.C., all nine justices found a way to sidestep the monumental-if-possibly-legally-required step of allowing states to strike Trump from the ballot.

The Supremes found for Og in that case, by the way.

I also recommend Katherine Mangu-Ward, who notes: There Are So Many Ways the 2024 Election Could Go Wrong.

This is from the print issue of Reason, and KMW doesn't even mention the Fourteenth Amendment being invoked by partisan state officials. After looking at some depressing polls about the electorate's mood:

All of this adds up to a worrying situation, especially given dozens of newly constructed off-ramps on the road to a peaceful transition of power. Americans—including our politicians—are hyperalert for misconduct on the part of those who disagree with them politically, thanks to dramatically increased affective polarization. The proliferation of state-level voting laws and regulations could generate a cascade of legal and partisan challenges regarding voter eligibility, ballot access, and counting procedures. Newly appointed state election officials might introduce errors into the counts, either through guile or incompetence. Mail-in ballots might be counted too early. Mail-in ballots might be counted too late. A real cyberattack might raise concerns about the integrity of electronic voting machines. A fake cyberattack might do the same. Partisans might engage in voter intimidation. Partisans might allege voter intimidation where none occurred. Election workers might commit fraud. Election workers might not commit fraud but be accused of doing so anyway by prominent figures in a defamatory way. A sitting president might attempt to bully state election officials into finding "lost" votes. Never mind the Electoral College, which has been bonkers from the start. And that's all before we get to the legal challenges that both parties have promised to file after the fact.

Many grim scenarios are plausible. But <voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">good news, everyone!</voice>: only one of them will actually happen.

Oh, wait: all of the things KMW lists could happen, and probably will.

Also of note:

  • Magic 8-Ball says: "Don't count on it". Noah Rothman looks at the Veeps verbal stylings over the weekend, and wonders: Does Kamala Harris Know the Administration Needs an Israeli Victory?

    The Biden administration’s hopelessly confused approach to navigating the domestic politics of Israel’s defensive war against Hamas was reflected in Vice President Kamala Harris’s equally confused remarks on the subject over the weekend. In a speech that touched on the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip, Harris tried to please all sides of the issue — and succeeded only in irritating all parties equally.

    In calling for an “immediate ceasefire,” Harris first put the onus on Hamas. “There is a deal on the table,” she observed. “Hamas needs to agree to that deal.” That outcome would allow the reunification of “the hostages with their families” and “provide immediate relief to the people of Gaza,” Harris noted. Fair enough. But following this throat-clearing exercise, Harris devoted the remainder of her speech to castigating Israel over its conduct of the war that erupted with the October 7 massacre. In the process, the vice president strongly suggested the true obstacle to peace was not the terrorist entity that inaugurated this war but its victim.

    That link in the first quoted paragraph goes to the official transcript. And "hopelessly confused" is, if anything, a mild description. Israel is causing a "humanitarian catastrophe"… which will continue as long as Hamas refuses to accept the "deal on the table."

    Kamala managed to irritate "all parties", including those who find it massively irritating that people with no skin in the game are trying to micromanage Israel's response to atrocity.

  • "Postjournalism"? I see upsides. Andrey Mir has an intriguing article at Discourse: Postjournalism of Generative AI.

    The Google artificial intelligence (AI) program Gemini has recently sparked a massive reaction across the internet by “diversifying” the visual representations of the Founding Fathers, Vikings, popes and other historical figures who are known to be white males. Even when prompted to depict the soldiers of Nazi Germany, Gemini responded with images of Black and Asian people.

    Among all the reactions, perhaps the most interesting was that of tech website The Verge. A recent article stated that the “diversity error,” as the author called it, led to “conspiracy theories online that Google is intentionally avoiding depicting white people.” The Verge, however, sees Gemini’s failure differently. Journalists asked the AI app to draw “a US senator from the 1800s,” and Gemini responded with pictures of Black and Native American women, although the first female senator was elected only in 1922, and she was a white woman. The Verge concluded: “Gemini’s AI images were essentially erasing the history of race and gender discrimination.”

    After this “diversity error,” so visible on historical material, Google paused Gemini’s ability to generate AI images of people. According to Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president, “Our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range.” This “led the model to overcompensate in some cases.” The words imply that the idea of compensating for the wrongs of history was embedded in Gemini’s design. The issue was, in fact, that Gemini started fixing history itself, and it happened to be noticed and ridiculed. But generative AI is only following the path that mainstream media have already trod, showing its users what it thinks they should see.

    Mir notes that all the cool kid-journalists have eschewed "objectivity and impartiality", deriding them as “bothsidesism” and the “view from nowhere”. And the AI designers are simply following their lead. (We had a good exmple of that yesterday.)

  • Oh Lord, give me innovation, but do not give it yet. Or: The pigtailed redhead backs down, as reported by Peter C. Earle: Wendy’s Won’t Use Dynamic Pricing. But should they? There's a lot of data in Earle's article, but here's a general lesson:

    Whether the employment of dynamic pricing is, in fact, off the table or resurfaces at a later date, it’s instructive to view proposals embracing fluctuating prices alongside mounting accounts of shrinkflation. Both are responses to unanticipated changes in the cost of doing business and relatedly to pressures on profit margins. In the former case, prices are adjusted to reflect changes in demand that weigh more heavily on resources and generate opportunity costs. In the latter, the firms opt to change the packaging size or ingredients of a good or service to purposely avoid raising consumer prices. Both involve attempts to secure profitability and maintain competitiveness.

    In neither case are the two least desirable outcomes chosen: an across-the-board price increase, or the outright removal of the good or service from the market. While politicians offer their stock-in-trade — lies, evasion, and pandering — at increasing real costs to American citizens, actual producers are struggling to find ways to continue to serve consumers without losing their shirt — and being threatened for it.

    And yes, that last link goes to Senator Elizabeth Warren's plug for her "crack down on shrinkflation" bill.

    She really gets her jollies from "cracking down".

  • But why crack down when you can crack up? Our Google LFOD News Alert rang … well, actually sounded a death knell … for this Jacobin article: The End of the Future. It really is a hoot, an over-the-top jeremiad, a raging torrent of socialist tears. Skipping down to the LFOD invocation:

    MAGA world longs to go back — way, way back. It imagines a time untainted by the cultural inversions of the ’60s, one where the New Deal never got dealt, for some even one where the Civil War and Reconstruction were roads not taken. This is made plain in its racial and ethnic phobias, its sexual orthodoxy, its patriarchal sensibility and patriotic braggadocio, its evangelical piety, and its live-free-or-die antipathy to interfering government. MAGA is a magnet for all the anxieties unloosed by the decay of an antiquated industrial capitalism.

    MAGAites are resentful, and for many good reasons; they are the flyover, bypassed, disdained millions of the postindustrial order, living in the ruins. Their sense of the future is soured in the bile of their resentment. That past tense future is a gossamer prevision, a reincarnation of a past that never quite was.

    The author, Steve Fraser, isn't happy with the current state of Bernie-style socialism either. But what would you expect from a mag whose very name looks at the Reign of Terror with … nostalgia?

Recently on the book blog:


Last Modified 2024-03-05 8:40 AM EDT