May
29
2024

What the Hell is Wrong With This Guy?

David Burge responds eloquently to a Truth Social post by you-know-who:

I admit I was only three words into that Truth Social post before getting massively irritated. "Happy Memorial Day"?

But Iowahawk's comment is on target and devastating, much better than anything I could say.

If you need additional words, though, Nick Catoggio has them at the Dispatch: The Main Character. Excerpt:

This must be the first presidential campaign in which both candidates have the same strategy.

For one it’s a matter of deliberation and for the other it’s a symptom of narcissism, but they end up in the same place: Each wants the race to be a referendum on Donald Trump.

Trump’s advisers surely would prefer to make it a referendum on Joe Biden. The president has a job approval of 40.3 percent, an age problem that gets worse every day, and an albatross in the form of persistent inflation that he can’t shed. All Republicans need to do to win is clam up, lie low, and let political gravity do what political gravity does.

In the last week alone, Trump has attacked the Hispanic judge in his criminal trial by calling attention to “where he comes from”; appeared onstage at a rally with two men charged with conspiracy to commit murder; seemed to discourage Russia from freeing Evan Gershkovich, the imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter, unless and until he’s reelected; and celebrated Memorial Day by blaming his troubles on “the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country.”

Meanwhile, his effort to convince Americans that the election will be illegitimate if he loses is way, way ahead of the pace he set in the 2016 and 2020 cycles. To reassure wary swing voters, he should be doing everything he can to demonstrate that he’s no longer the maniac they remember from his final weeks in office. Instead, he’s done the opposite.

Trump's campaign song: "Still Crazy After All These Years".

Among the morning's other junk mail, I received a plea for a campaign donation from the National Republican Congressional Committee. Which included a letter from Donald Trump Jr., under an "Official Team Trump" logo (you can see that here). The letter begins:

Dear Fellow Patriot,

My father and I both want to know:

HAVE YOU OFFICIALLY JOINED TEAM TRUMP?

No I haven't, Junior. And will not.

I considered mailing back a non-donation, attaching a printed copy of…

… but the small satisfaction I'd get is not worth the postage.

Also of note:

  • Still woke enough for government work. Elizabeth Nolan Brown recounts Google Gemini's Black Pope and Asian Nazi Debacle. Pretty amusing, if you're amused by wokesters being hoisted on their own AI petards. Is Gemini "fixed" now? Well…

    Maxim Lott runs a site called Tracking AI that measures this kind of thing. When he gave Gemini the prompt, "Charity is better than social security as a means of helping the genuinely disadvantaged," Gemini responded that it strongly disagreed and "social security programs offer a more reliable and equitable way of providing support to those in need." Gemini also seems programmed to prioritize a patronizing kind of "safety." For instance, asked for an image of the Tiananmen Square massacre, it said, "I can't show you images depicting real-world violence. These images can be disturbing and upsetting."

    It's from Reason's recent AI-focused issue, where they've reproduced AI output in blue. The link goes to Maxim Lott's X thread, where he demonstrates that Gemini's responses to political queries are pretty standard lefty-Democrat.

  • One must have a heart of stone to read about the job woes of David Austin Walsh without laughing. Noah Smith investigates The case of the angry history postdoc.

    Today’s Twitter contretemps involved one David Austin Walsh, a history postdoc at Yale. (For those who don’t know, a postdoc position is a sort of low-paid purgatory where people with PhDs get sent to keep doing research when they can’t immediately get jobs as professors.) Walsh is the author of a recently released book, Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, but he’s best known as a vocal and highly opinionated commentator on Twitter. When my podcast co-host Brad DeLong declared in 2019 that it was time for neoliberals like himself to “pass the baton” to their colleagues further to the left, it was a tweet thread by Walsh that he cited. In recent years, Walsh has spent much of his time attacking Joe Biden from the left; these attacks have become more strident since the start of the Gaza war.

    But that is not what got Twitter — or X, as it’s now officially known — in a tizzy today. Instead, it was Walsh’s declaration that his failure to get a tenure-track academic job is due, at least in part, to the fact that he is a White man[…]

    Smith reproduces some of Walsh's tweets—can we still call them that?—and you can imagine why he got so much, um, pushback.

    Speaking of AI, Smith's illustration is a GPT-4 illustration prompted by "an angry mob of history postdocs battering at the gates of an ivory tower". You'll want to click over for that too!

  • I never metaphor I didn't like. Zachary Faria reports at the Washington Examiner: Biden’s Gaza pier debacle is representative of his presidency.

    Parts of President Joe Biden’s Gaza aid pier are now adrift at sea, making it a perfect symbol of his presidency and reelection campaign.

    Two of the vessels being used for the pier became unmoored and drifted away, washing up on the coast of Israel. The damage has caused a temporary suspension in aid, which sounds worse than it is because, according to the Pentagon last week, it wasn’t likely that any of the aid that arrived through the pier had even been distributed to civilians in the first place.

    Good for a chuckle, as long as your eyes don't happen to stroll down a couple paragraphs to read "Evidently, $320 million in taxpayer dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to."

  • A question I've been asking for years. Jeff Maurer looked in that the LP convention over the weekend, and came away determined to vote for their nominees!

    Ha, just kidding. He came away wondering: Why Can't the Libertarian Party Be Normal?

    The Libertarian Party just had their convention. They chose a presidential nominee — Chase Oliver — who called Israel’s war in Gaza “genocide”, wants to abolish the Federal Reserve, and refers to taxation as “thieving”. Oliver’s closest challenger was Michael Rectenwald, who took a weed edible shortly before he addressed the convention, which may have hurt his chances (or may have helped them). Donald Trump addressed the convention in person, and RFK, Jr. addressed it via video, but on the first ballot, both barely outpaced candidates including Stormy Daniels, early 2000s one-hit wonder Afroman, and that perennial candidate for all offices: Ben Dover. On the seventh ballot, Oliver finally beat “no candidate”, with “no candidate” getting a respectable 40 percent of the vote. Which means that Libertarians came within a stone’s throw of basically having Ben Dover be their standard bearer this fall.

    Maurer uses "abolishing the Federal Reserve" as an example of a wacky, dangerous idea; but—sheesh—Milton Friedman thought it would be perfectly practical, and beneficial, to "replace the Federal Reserve System by a computer".

    But, yeah, Oliver is stupid on Israel, and other foreign policy stuff. I guess I'm still on target to write in Nikki Haley in November, or just skipping over that space on the ballot.


Last Modified 2024-05-30 5:12 AM EDT