Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

By the way, if you really want to scare the daylights out of your healthcare provider, eat beats before giving the stool sample.

I am sorry, folks, I did not think that one through.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I can normally ignore your hyperbole, but “Trump soiled the office?” How about “wanted/s to end the entire concept of how this country runs, and not in a good way?”

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

iPod?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I like using words like soiled in regard to him. "He left a grease slick all over the office" also works. I'm still unable to view him with earnest dread, and it feels wrong to have serious concern about him, as he's too comically imbecilic to receive that kind of respect.

There are times I recoil. His desiring to make our libel laws like Great Britain's, and his professed intent to apply the death penalty to drug dealers sends shivers down the spine. But then one has to stop and recall, This man is an idiot. He said he'd do a million things, and had majorities in both houses for a time, and in the end all he did was pass a tax cut.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Isn't it pretty to think so? I'm not engaging in this beyond pointing out he tried to steal an election and then start an insurrection and has already stated if he gets back in he will change stuff so he doesn't have to bother doing it again next time.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

One should be concerned about his most ardent cult member followers. But the belief he can make himself a dictator is beyond overwrought.

But if the Democrats truly do believe that he can become a dictator, the strategy of cornering him so he has no choice but to run is an enormously dangerous one.

A Trump Biden rematch is the thing that scares me. Whoever wins that, the polarization in its wake is terminal. His conviction or banning from the ballot via 14th Amendment will also create terminal polarization.

He needs to be offered an off ramp he can’t refuse and openly accepts, throwing his endorsement to a normal candidate, and that takes bipartisanship.

Or the CIA needs to kill him.

(By all this, I mean, it’s the very race in which Biden and Trump are engaged that will damage the republic irreparably. Worrying about what Trump would do if he won is a secondary concern. The cancer becomes incurable the minute these two become nominees.)

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

You're not really talking about authoritarianism at all, you're just making hyperbolic claims about it to set up your usual beefs about free speech.

I don't think that's a very good description of what's motivating the people on either side about whom you're talking, but you're doing your hyperbole think. Complaining about accuracy here is like complaining that Dali isn't a realist.

I think you are using lazy versions of the terms "zero sum" and "Orwellian," and I choose to honor Orwell's memory by asking for more precision and care in politics and the English language. Hi Hank!

No, that's hyperbole, and isn't responding to my point.

You're not even talking about laws. You just want to live in a world where there are no consequences for what you say?

It's not really much of a thing anywhere, tbh. The story is that it doesn't actually change much of anything.

Sure. Meanwhile, politically, the fraction of the country that feels differently has taken over the GOP as the wedge for its grievances.

I think you keep using the term "authoritarianism" to get a rise out of me. A-ha! Subtle authoritarianism! The kind no one notices! Like Mussolini, but nudging the trains imperceptibly in the direction of being on time.

The urge for false equivalence is so strong in you. One cannot imagine Trump every doing what the kids at the US Open did, for so many reasons, but here you insist that they have the same "mindset."

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

He's a narcissist and a consummate bullshit artists who says whatever he wants to say in the moment to get what he wants. Not sure why you believe that he believes what he says -- that seems like an obvious category error, like you haven't been paying attention for seven years.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Smith wants to get a trial before the election. Willis can be less worried about that, in part because there's nobody to pardon Trump for her charges.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

OK, I give up. It's their date night?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Yeah, I used the wrong spelling of beets.

According to my docs, I've now outlived my life expectancy on three occasions - six months ago I was given a diagnosis that gave me an 80% chance of being gone in 6 months. But when I'm doing infusions the drugs mess me up on such things all the time, so fuck spelling. And if they'd bring back the i-pod, yeah, I'd happily eat the beats. Sunsetting the ipod is the craziest product decision evah. I still have an operative 120.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

So glad you're still here.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Do not get the decision, other than Steve died and whoever has the wheel ain’t Steve? I run every day with a shuffle.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Thanks.

You all should know you're part of the support network that makes it happen. A big piece of fighting this stuff is staying engaged and vital, and frankly while I joke about it getting called out on spelling goofs caring about that stuff and mixing it up over trump or bush or whatever is part of staying vital. So thanks for giving me shit.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Please keep proving them wrong.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

These aren't mutually exclusive things. You credit him more agency than I would. He is not right upstairs. The DSM-IV will be expanded in the future when assessment of his behaviors is fully studied.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

If you think that Trump will face a criminal trial in GA if he's elected President, you're daft.

Lawyers like to think the code of the law is paramount. It isn't. It's at its best an attempt to put all men on equal footing, a leveler against the organic and ever present law of power. At its worst, which it more frequently is, the law is an enabler of those who seek to use the law of power without suffering the opprobrium or risk that comes with its traditional brute applications. (That's why the federal law in this country favors property rights above all else.)

I don't know how the law of GA will knuckle under to the law of power in the event Trump should win, but it will. Maybe it'll be a delay of the case until his term is done, a defunding of Willis, Smith losing on appeal to SCOTUS and Willis' case being deemed double jeopardy... It may be novel, or it may be a boring. But the President will not be subjected to trial by a state prosecutor while in office. Ain't gonna happen. Too destabilizing and too many constitutional crises in such a thing. Power will be brought down at state and fed level and Willis will either drop or delay.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

[QUOTE=Tyrone Slothrop;533921]These are interwoven. Just this week, the 5th Circuit ruled that the Biden admin was likely violating the First Amendment by leaning on social media companies to squelch certain speech. In the case of what DeSantis is doing in FL, there is no doubt - he is acting as an authoritarian, banning free expression.

I think it absolutely is because what I see at the extreme poles is delusion, religion. MAGA thinks they're in a fight for the soul of America. Their counterparts on the extreme left believe that the country must be reinvented down to its plankings. Neither is at all realistic or living in anything close to reality.

When you seek to create a society in which there is correct-think and wrongthink and wrongthink is banished, you're in Orwellian waters. And that is a zero sum game, as it insists on the opponent not having a voice.

The first rule of Authoritarian Club: Stifle dissent.

It is absolutely not hyperbole. Behind the scenes, most people roll their eyes at the ESG and DEI compliance nonsense, and all the idiot virtue signaling of corporate America. They think it's a fad. And they'll tell you so over drinks. But they genuflect dutifully because he who does not can get himself in a career pickle.

No. I want to live in a world with reverence for facts. Where people who offer facts are not pilloried, from either side. Where kids in FL or anywhere can read and learn about LGBTQ issues. Where a person can assert as we all now know that a virus started in a lab and not be silenced or ludicrously deemed, by a coven of narrative-fixers in govt and media, as a racist.

I do not defend the sorts like Alex Jones. Those people should be mocked and abused for stating the grotesquely false. But if you don't find the squashing of the Hunter laptop story disturbing, or worse, the letter, offered with knowledge of its falsity, by 50 ex-intel officials, calling it Russian propaganda, you don't really care much about freedom of expression.

That's just not true. These things have created a society in which certain silly pieties are compelled to be observed. And if you think I'm wrong, look up how lucrative DEI consulting has become in the past decade. And this ESG nonsense has cost real people real money, and burdened the bottom lines of corporations for no defensible reason.

ETA: A school I attended just lost a bunch of money over "inclusion" policies. Donors got into a battle, pitted themselves at the extremes of right and left, nobody in the middle was heard, and who lost? The kids.

As have their doppelgangers on the left in the Democratic party.

Were it only so nudging, Mr. Sunstein. But it's not. It's a silly new form of religion, just like MAGA.

I can. I saw him do it on January 6, and many times before and after. There are about 500 hours of him throwing tantrums and insisting someone hear his grievances about his election loss and how he was treated in office. Yes, climate change is real, and Trump's claims of election theft are false, but a tantrum is a tantrum.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Since I am allergic to beets, red velvet cake will have to do.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Praying for you, bud.

OAN I have an iPod classic still sealed in the box. Waiting for it to attain some value.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Apple stills supports the software to register it? Not much value as a paperweight: 1) lightweight and 2) most offices paperless now.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I see very little evidence that you have any contact with even the moderate left, much less the extreme left.

Yes, most people with whom you interact are just fine with the status quo. I wonder why?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

You do realize DEI is designed to protect the class/money and nepotism systems that favor the status quo. Why do you think so many moderates can’t abide Barbie Sanders? He talks about class and money. The focus of “inclusion” based on race, sex, sexual preference, ethnicity is to a great extent an effort to pre-empt examination of the real drivers of inequality and lack of inclusion:

Money
Class
Connections

Notice “the poor” are never part of the DEI push? You think that’s mere oversight?

One can hire from his alma mater, from among people like him, at will, and use the conspicuous public adoption of inclusion policies to defend the “it’s who you know” system.

Learning and parroting the curricula of inclusion consultants is a new class badge. You demonstrate you’re in on the trend that protects your privilege.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I assume the first acronym has to do with sustainability? As lawyers we really can't reduce our noxious emissions.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

He certainly doesn't meet the requirements for an insanity defense, so I'm not sure why you are talking about his mental health in this context -- it only serves to excuse him.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Because he is nuts. Does anyone disagree with this:

“Donald Trump has mental problems.”

No. No one could or would. Do they rise to the level of an insanity defense? I’d say no. But there is definitely a level of mental disorder there. And it’s not just narcissism. He’s in old school terms, fucking crazy. We just don’t have the clinical term for someone of his unique brand of batshittedness yet.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

No. I would just say he soiled the office.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Thank you, Comrade, but I think you have more reading to do.

ETA: To be less flippant, yes, that phenomenon happens. The opposite also happens. (White) brosocialists frequently use class as an excuse to wave away their own prejudices (which we all have). Which is why it is so important to listen to other voices.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

If we all just accept that by "authoritarian" you mean "interested in restricting expression" then, sure, whatever. The point I was making is that you are using the word "authoritarian" in a different way than the rest of the English-speaking population, which causes friction for the rest of us in trying to understand what you are saying.

Also, the Fifth Circuit's decision is a little loopy. I don't believe the Biden Administration was coercing anyone by asking social-media networks to abide by their own rules concerning misinformation and disinformation. (I certainly don't think the Biden Administration is "authoritarian" -- you do, but because you are doing violence to that word.)

Your profound commitment to both-sidesism is so, so tiring. For one, when you talk about MAGA, you are talking about the dominant faction in the GOP, and its likely presidential nominee in the next election. When you talk about the extreme left, you're talking about a couple of hemp enthusiasts on Twitter. Equating the two sides is myopic, but you insist on your hobby-horse myopia.

I just said that ESG and DEI isn't really changing anything, and you seem to agree ("idiot virtue signaling"). The number of people who get in a "career pickle" over this stuff is pretty small.

Who is "silenced" as a racist, and how? It's not like there's a shortage of people pushing the narrative that COVID started in a lab.

How did the government "squash" the Hunter Biden laptop story? We have all heard far more about that story than it merits. It's the opposite of squashed. And why are you trying to silence the 50 ex-intel officials -- you authoritarian! They are just trying engage in speech about a vital issue of the day, and you want to silence them!

We have always lived in that sort of society, because that's what people are like. It's just the silly pieties in vogue keep changing.

My point is that it isn't changing much, and you don't seem to disagree. You are just butthurt that people are making money telling corporations how to sound more inclusive.

My company has paid money to DEI consultants. We did it in response to demand from employees. We didn't spend a lot of money, and I can't point to any way in which it has changed anyone's behavior. No one in the company has ever been in a "career pickle" for anyone relating to DEI. I know that doesn't fit into you preferred narrative at all, so I'm sorry if that is squashing your speech.

OK. So what's your point? We should all be blessed with a better class of donor.

Who is the MAGA-doppelganger on the left who has taken over the Democratic Party as a wedge for their grievances? Names. You are just so full of shit with this both-sidesism that you say things that are patent bullshit. The GOP and Democratic Party are fundamentally different in important ways, and this is one of them. The Republican Party is led by a grievance-spouting reality-TV star, and the Democratic Party is led by Joe Fucking Biden, who wouldn't know a grievance if he tripped over it and who has been a Senator or Vice President for something like half of his life.

I know you like saying ridiculous things for effect, but I don't even understand what you are saying here.

The reason we're talking about the kids at the US Open is not that they threw a tantrum, it's that they disrupted the US Open. You wouldn't have even noticed, or cared, if they threw a tantrum somewhere else. You so desperately want to "both sides" Trump and those protestors that you are saying truly stupid things.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Agreed on ETA point. But as an experiment, talk about Bernie with some upper middle class decently educated folks you know. There's a sharp recoiling. They'll argue he just isn't realistic, or he can't win. This translates to, "I'm all for forced social change, but not the kind that will impact me."

The same people we all know who will talk up these "efforts at equity" are the same people who'll ask you to write a letter to help their kid get into a school. "You know a guy on the alumni board, right?" The same people who hire SAT tutors for their kids. The same folks who pull up all the ladders behind them, but excuse all of that by observing the catechism of "equity policies."

And their MAGA opponents are almost identically similar. Singing you an endless song about the forgotten rural "left-behinds." Hillbilly Elegy fans. But then ask them, "Where were you folks for the last hundred years while poverty raged in the inner cities?"

It's all the same song: "Equity forced on thee, but not upon me."

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

DEI is a form of speech. Why are you trying to silence it? I wish you were more tolerant of the free flow of ideas.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

He's a narcissist, but I don't think most people would say that's a mental problem.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

You have figured that many people can be selfish.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I posted a long DEI thing about my firms successes and the frustration with how some people try to wield the efforts they wanted whether they make sense or not. But then I deleted it because I didn't want the post seen beyond here.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

No, I have cited that people who are selfish use/co-opt benign or even laudable sounding notions to protect their own selfish interests.

Which is expected. People suck.

But it's important to note that these people are full of shit. To undermine the credibility of these people. That's where free expression becomes centrally important to the function of any properly operating society or state.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

He's way, way more than that. There are pathologies in that man's head that are beyond comprehension to rational thinkers.

By way of merely one of many examples, Why would any person in his position seek to keep those records in defiance of a subpoena? There was nothing to gain and everything to lose, and yet he did it. Inexplicable. A mere narcissist would seek to save his ass, act in self-preservation.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I'm not. It should be trumpeted as far and wide as those who like it want to spread it.

But to Hank's last point, those who seek to criticize it, or simply make fun of it, should also have a voice. Neither DEI, ESG, climate change, LGBTQ issues, or any other idea should be deemed sacred and beyond reproach.

Nothing is beyond fair skepticism.

But that isn't the rule. The rule is, certain views are right, and we can't have dissenting voices.

I think RFK is nuts. But a lot of people don't. The man fills the venues where he speaks. But there is a social media blackout on most of his stuff, on the basis it is misinformation. And when he is covered by traditional media, the slant is endlessly negative.

The mindset is, We Who Know Best Are Putting Our Thumbs on the Scale in Terms of Public Discourse. You will get in line. Hell, here's Larry Fink admitting he is going to "force behaviors."

Your definition of authoritarian is so narrow its useless. It misses the real authoritarians out there.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I am talking about most of academia, most of the media, and millions of corporate sorts going along with bullshit to get along.

Huh? ESG lost so many people so much money, corporations have had to walk away from it. But then, what's a few hundred billion here and there?

The Post had the laptop, and it was legit. A pack of ex-intel folks wrote a letter stating that the laptop was likely created by Russians. They knew when they wrote the letter that this was false. This gave cover to Twitter to shut down the Post's account.

Musk has since bought Twitter and dug up a ton of emails showing that FBI, CIA, and NSA folks were working with twitter for years not to avoid misinformation, but to massage narratives by blocking or shadow banning stories or facts that went against favored goals or messaging of govt officials. At the time, these officials feared (wrongly, I think) that the laptop story could cost Biden the election.

Right. But the cure for those pieties is mockery, abuse of them. By making them off limits, sacred, we've just created new secular religions for the credulous and the authoritarians that would those the credulous as useful idiots.

Nope. May they make more money than they could ever spend. My sole gripe is with the effort to place bullshit beyond critique. If I hear a MAGA nut tell me the election was stolen, I can tell him to fuck off. If I have to listen to some garbage about inclusiveness that's intellectually vacant and a waste of my time as a prerequisite for making money or being an employee (I have had to do so), I can't tell this person to fuck off. I must pretend their silly shit is real and important.

Quite literally the entire progressive side of the party.

Joe Biden doesn't know what day it is. He's a doddering old man in a centrist pose with a pack of progressives behind the scenes driving granular policy. A lot like Trump's administration in reverse. Trump blathered and grabbed headlines while Leonard Leo packed the Courts.

What they did was a uniquely lurid example of what tantrum throwers do all over this country. Yes, Trump enabled a lot of it. His fucking inauguration speech was a tantrum. I'd prefer all of it, from both sides, go back in the bottle.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

That wasn't my point

My post was quite long, now it is just a joke about lawyers and noxious emissions.

We struggled for years to recruit black clerks, and were frustrated. But understand we were very driven to get diverse. It strengthens the firm, besides being the right thing.

Then we came up with an explanation of what the challenge was and we addressed it and had great success. A client's DEI person sent out a detailed survey and when em heard what we had done had a long talk with me to compliment our approach. Em asked if em could share our approach with other affiliated firms (we said yes). Then the head of my little practice area at that client called me to talk about DEI efforts. The guy had not heard of the survey sitting on the DEI person's desk, not 50 yards away from his. Rather than talking to that person, instead he said he looked at our webpage and assumed no black people from that. We didn't put law clerks' pictures up until graduation. Looking at webpages and not asking for explanations is a very common compliant among people I know who are actually making the efforts.

Then the guy told me about an association that tries to match black law students with summer jobs at firms. I explained we were a small firm and if we brought a summer in we would be harming the 2 year round black law students we already had. He still urged me to check it out. I didn't.

But that type of experience from someone who is just blindly mouthing slogans without seeing subtle facts does cause eye rolling even among those of us who are actually making strides and progress.

Seriously, no one read it before I deleted it?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I read it. I was referring to your subsequent post about deleting it.