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anvilwalrusden.bsky.social
Cranky Canuck Torontonian. Failed repeatedly to get a job as corporate philosopher. Internet smarty-pants. These opinions are mine and not someone else’s.
1,491 posts 1,072 followers 767 following
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Someone was yelling at me on here the other day for hurting Democrats’ feelings by pointing out that the party is in constant cave-in mode against R positions, and arguing that now is the time to reform the party since it’s in disarray. I am pleased to see real live politician Chris Murphy agrees.
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Correct response. Easy for me to toss off, though, since I spent the previous 6 years explaining this sort of thing to legislators of every stripe all over the world. We unfortunately didn’t get to Canada before the Minister started talking (after which they can’t change direction, I guess).
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What exactly is the step past “ignore the constitution” that is needed, then?
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Why prosecute? Why not just lock them up? After all, the rallies never called “prosecute her!” or “try her!” or any of that. It was just, “Lock her up!” And the support T is currently enjoying for manifestly unconstitutional acts shows that none of those people care about rule of law.
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Naw, they’re going to come up with the New Improved American Translation where the word “equity” is re-translated as “shut the f*** up you stupid n***** b**** f****** r***** [etc etc].” Jesus is love my ass.
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I agree. The NYC subway (also, the London Underground and a couple other systems I can think of) are like a kind of inheritance of the cities where they are, and they’re practically miraculous. We should be grateful people had such vision.
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Well, they have the food rule precisely to make fun of NYC for the number of rats 😃 But to be fair, the Metro did get better after the year where the main goal was “no fires”. (Now if only the TTC would embrace that slogan “Back to good” for a year or two!)
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That none of the target companies were stealing anything is nicely shown by Meta’s conformance with the ONA: they blocked news links on their platform, and so instantly complied with the legislation no matter how the CRTC proceeded. The Internet Society predicted just this outcome.
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… it is the story of a fat, contented industry that has been showing serious signs of trouble since at least the Kent Commission, whose final report came out before the fundamental protocol that makes the Internet was deployed to the former ARPANET (i.e., before the Internet existed). …
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…the news media had more than a century head start on how to monetize news. Somehow, when Google and Meta came along, the news people were totally surprised by them. That isn’t the story of content theft, then (compare this with Google’s earlier vacuuming up of actual book texts). Rather, …
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…take anything. On the contrary, they gave something: exposure. Google didn’t copy articles or control them at all. They simply put a link to them. Now, what they _also_ did, and what papers were mad about, was figure out how to make that into a means to deliver advertising dollars. But …
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… Online News Act says the mechanism should function, but instead creates a single fund into which Google just pays. So, Google ended up spending exactly what it was prepared to tolerate to keep the peace. But it’s large nonsense because, in these cases (and unlike some others), Google didn’t …
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This is nonsense both large and small. It’s small nonsense because the deal that Google eventually reached with the government (and not, it should be noted, the CRTC, which is what the legislation says should happen) was exactly what they’d put on the table at the outset. It does not work as the …
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The mitigation is that he probably already had it anyway.
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I have a certain amount of sympathy with this. I was particularly vexed by the Liberal policy that, effectively, raided Google’s pocket to pay (in one case) US-based vulture capitalists while freezing out the new, creative outlets that produce more interesting stories and that have a strategy.
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Almost, except it would appear we remembered none of it and then blamed the Internet for the fact that the actual _newspapers_ failed to notice the Internet coming for them. Everyone else noticed. We used to talk about it all the time in the late 1990s!
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Oh, yeah, I vaguely remember this now. Thanks for the reminder!
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…before the deployment of TCP/IP, which many (of us) nerds think was the necessary piece that made the Internet an internet (capital letters are significant here). I think the Kent Commission is pretty strong evidence the failure of news media in Canada is not just the Internet’s fault.
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I don’t think I understand your post, sorry. What do US indictments have to do with Canadian media outlets (even ones I despise)? I think there are definitely big problems with compromise of the news in Canada. But it shouldn’t be news: the Kent Commission returned its report in 1981. That was, btw…
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… want to illustrate the exact risk he was talking about, which is that there comes to be a content litmus test instead. This takes an already bad policy and makes it worse.
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I am not particularly convinced that it was “primarily left wing media.” For instance, last I looked Postmedia corp and whatever Bell is calling itself these days were both eagerly at the trough. The main thing I saw was that this benefited old-time corps over new outlets. PP seems to …
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Wait a minute, isn’t he the one who’s always on about how dangerous and threatening it is that the government is buying off the news media? So his solution is to buy off more of them? It’s like Canadian villains don’t even know how to villain correctly.
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I don’t know that I have enough info about white nationalist men in general (I mean, I sure got a working hypothesis! But I’m prepared to accept more data). But _that_ guy is too emotional to cross the street unsupervised. Can we just rename him Shouty McShoutface so that people are warned?
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It’s in their mouth, and it’s disguised as a tongue! 😆
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A wall MX and CA might actually chip in for!
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If you look at most Tee Vee weather maps in the U.S., it certainly does. In fact, weather _disappears into another dimension_ when it gets to the U.S. border!
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But think of the patriotism of going down in the Golf of Americaland!
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And yet it was totally predictable and the so-called opposition all voted to confirm. Fine, they were confused at the beginning 🙄. But now everyone knows the implications. If the Ds do not go all McConnell on every single thing henceforth, we should demand to know why. And then replace them.
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I might try it again, but my previous experience was that it was nowise as simple as I wanted. I did an analysis of them all some years ago and concluded that nothing was as simple and plain as the built-in client. But now that isn’t true, so time to try again. I hate admitting Doctorow is right.
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You don’t need to convince me that Nazis use the Internet to recruit. But having been an undergraduate when mere undergraduates didn’t qualify for access to the Internet, I can testify that Nazis will recruit however possible. I remember them at my school, with surprising success. Stop Nazis.
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Oh, no, I certainly am not.
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For whatever it’s worth, I have just about equivalent complaints about certain parties here, and I have many long wonky criticisms of the way Canada does its health care.
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I’m tempted to ask how exactly that is my fault, but I doubt we’d agree. I wish you long life and good health.
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Oh, for heaven’s sake. The ACA was a half measure that owed its tortured way of dragging the U.S. into the 20th (not a typo) c to Obama’s own baseless belief in bipartisan compromise with a partner that wasn’t going to dance. It’s def better than nothing. But a better party would have done more.
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Respectfully, I think this places the burden of proof rather the wrong way about. But it is plain this will not yield much in the way of result, as you already noted, so I’ll wish you good luck.
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No, I judge the Democratic Party by results. The results are bad, and the party keeps chasing the Overton Window as though it is a fact of nature rather than a creation—mostly of the other party. There is no better time than right now to face deficiencies and try to address them urgently.
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I really, really do not think that “speaking out” makes the slightest difference here, and your charming faith in that sort of performance is, to be honest, exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. The Rs have organized since Goldwater to take over. The Ds make speeches. And we know who won.
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Oh, and to be clear, I watched the video. But I looked up her voting record too. Votes are what counts.
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It’s not a myth. I don’t especially care about Sen. Hassan’s speechifying. I care how she votes. And she’s voted to make this administration successful in its goals. Her website is all about how bipartisan she is. I understand why: I lived in NH. But Ds are losing to more organized and evil foes.
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Biden’s nominees were not all swearing fealty to a guy who had promised during the campaign to be a dictator on his first day (and indeed gone through with that) or to someone who had incited rebellion against the elected government.
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Only if it lands in a controlled way, though. Let’s not give the administration ideas that there’ll be Mandatory Clapping whenever a plane touches the earth no matter what was intended!
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I can’t tell whether these videos are supposed to be evidence for my point or against. If for, I’m not sure I need more depressing evidence. If against, I’ll note that Sen Hassan has voted to confirm 9 cabinet appointments so far. Only 4 fewer than Mitch “no to everything” McConnell.
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It is also infuriating beyond belief that the Ds have consistently pretended or somehow believed that the Rs are doing anything at all in good faith. There hasn’t been a good-faith R move in any public debate that I can recall since Reagan was elected. Ds now get beaten by tricks they invented.
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All I meant was that even tiny improvements in the timeline (please don’t mistake me for some Hillary fan) could have produced radically different (I like to suppose “better”) outcomes.
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Dammit, another way the world foils me. I’d suggest that what we need is simplicity, and politics that promises to give it to us, but I heard Wisconsin already tried that. Along with some other government or other. Oh well.
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But, but…Cheddar is taken. By a place named Cheddar. In the country you all threw off. I mean, not all PDO or anything. But still. So, there’s an opening. And Canada, I am reliably informed, can’t fill it because marketing boards make cheese a logical impossibility.
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I think I don’t understand the question. Probably, because nearly everything I type these days has some strange mangling of meaning in it.
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Sure, but even, “What if the reports about Alfa-bank had been even 10% as aggressive as the horseshit about the emails?” Dunno about Alfa-bank? Exactly.