a garbage can marked “no garbage”
we know so much less than we pretend we do but that’s no excuse to make shit up in order to justify your dickishness. regardless of whether you believe the shit you make up.
a focus on elite credentials and endorsements, while treating diversity as a matter of identity rather than ideology, yields a corporate-friendly monoculture among judicial nominees selected by Democrats. this should change. see @ddayen https://prospect.org/justice/2023-05-09-case-for-judge-tim-wu/
@kfury their search engines too…
the rich have no monopoly on the truth, but high quality disinformation and platforms to distribute it are goods and services that money can buy.
there are days when the fact the world has turned a very radioactive kind of stupid really gets to me.
"Democracy Is Our Hope For A Better Future" #EdWalker https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/05/09/democracy-is-our-hope-for-a-better-future/ #ViaRSS
@bobwyman tax excess margins! https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9416.html
imagine five years ago trying to explain that a significant faction would come to believe an American deep state runs high-stakes, elaborate psyops to deceive the public in favor of, um, trans people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N3N1MlvVc4
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Not really. I mean it's a click-baity headline, sure. But it's careful to say "in Ron DeSantis' Florida" rather than "by Ron DeSantis".
I think the implication is that he's reshaped what the state considers pornography, which is accurate, more than any claim about what Ron DeSantis as a person considers to be pornographic (which, of course, who knows?)
(gotta go help the kid with homework now! drably nonpornographic, i'm afraid.)
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I guess I have yet to see what I think is a misrepresentation of DeSantis here. I agree with you in general. I think lots of times partisans caricature and misrepresent their opponents in ways that ultimately discredit them. But DeSantis really did pass laws with these risk characteristics, and in response to criticisms about how those laws are playing out, he really does disingenuously conflate pornography with "inappropriate" material that could be anything.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Manatee teachers did that because Manatee County officials told them pretty directly to, based on the risks the new law created.
DeSantis claims that it's an overreaction, and most counties did not find the danger so great that they felt they needed to restrict access to all classroom books.
But it's also not a ridiculous reaction to a situation where you're a felon if, even inadvertantly, a book you leave around is deemed not "free of porn"!
https://www.bradenton.com/news/local/education/article271532722.html
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I haven't heard anyone claim that DeSantis is not, among the many, banning books many people would agree are pornographic. We are arguing that his dragnet is sweeping up a whole lot else as well. I guess I don't see it. You don't like that his critics really don't care about the so-called pornography-in-schools problem, so don't praise him or much acknowledge that he is also doing what he claims. 1/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock But that's because we don't see much value making a crusade of pornography in schools, even when it occasionally hits a valid target. No one denies that it sometimes does! But we argue, correctly I think, that the collateral damage vastly outweighs whatever benefit there is in that (and we see very little benefit in that, because we don't think porn in schools is a big problem). 2/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock It would be in bad faith to, say, claim that DeSantis is intentionally going after literature while trying to absolve porn. I've never heard anyone argue any such thing. We think (1) the porn problem is overrated; (2) lots of stuff DeSantis' base would consider porn has literary, political, or artistic merit, and DeSantis is unconcerned if his bans overreach into that stuff too, if it helps him politically. I don't think those are claims in bad faith. /fin
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I guess I'd submit to you that, living in Florida and having some connections here, there's a pattern to the choices our governor has been making recently that are not consistent with "a person trying to govern well who sometimes makes mistakes", but are much more consistent with "a person using state power to take extreme sides in certain kinds of controversies, indifferent to the harms that it causes". 1/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock This is relatively new — for most of DeSantis' first term, he did in fact mostly build support by governing pretty well, making common cause especially with municipal officials across partisan lines. The controversy that surrounded him was over COVID, where, rightly or wrongly, most Floridians thought he chose well by erring on the side of individual liberty rather than community safety. 2/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock But current DeSantis is, literally, looking for certain kinds of trouble. It does in a way play to him, to make so strong an issue of controversies over book banning, because he is trying to make himself a champion for social conservatives, and any press there is good press. He solicited, then signed a 6-week abortion ban, is effectively banning gender-affirmative care for kids, whatever their parents think, and putting severe barriers for consenting trans adults. 3/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock You can accuse me, correctly, of having a personal stake in this. He is destroying the experimental college that gave me the richest years of my life, overtly trying to remake it using a conservative Christian college as a model, on the theory that it is too "woke" (I'm sure there's some of that, but it's mostly experimental and transgressive.) 4/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock In my view, DeSantis is a person not without talents, but he is a person who has self-consciously decided to deploy those talents in a manner indifferent to what would have been his own conception of the public good until very recently, because he is trying to make a case for himself to a Republican primary base. In doing so, he is doing a very great deal of harm, but does not care. 5/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Sometimes it is wise to steelman. But as Dan Davies (quoted here on Mastodon today!) used to point out *ad hominem* argument is a bad habit, but so is credulously and laboriously taking at face value the arguments of people with a history of acting in bad faith. In my view, Ron DeSantis is a person who has demonstrated a very great deal of bad faith. (A year ago, I was interested in and somewhat open to him.) /fin
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock His law makes it a felony if any book kids can access at a school is *ex post* deemed not to be "free of pornography". There is, famously, no objective standard for what constitutes pornography. *Lady Chatterly's Lover* was widely considered pornography. A great many works of literature include depictions of sex. Most accusations that literary work is pornography won't have substance to it, but would you risk your freedom on what inherently is a matter of judgment?
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I am banning murder. Anyone whom anyone accuses of murder will be jailed. Are you opposed to banning murder? My critics are misrepresenting me. 😢
I won't block almost anyone (and certainly won't block you, you're a friend). I block spam, but other than that, I think there's real value in staying exposed even to what I find disagreeable.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock His critics are saying its bad that he's made a law that creates such risk of felony prosecution for schoolteachers and librarians that Manatee district officials advised shutting off access to all classroom books until they can be positively vetted. His critics argue that procedures that let any individual objecting parent eliminate books until some long bureaucratic rehabilitation is achieved are also bad. His critics are right.
don't erase the hardest hard drive. https://toot.site/@livingarchitect/110334464358011459
this page doesn’t exist.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock This is not a child. He's the governor of a state. If his response to being attacked and (they all feel) misrepresented is to simply ignore the flaws of his policies and the harms that they do, he has no business being anywhere near government.