randomtask

The author of the blog post is being sincere; he speaks on behalf of three key executives that helped found the Fox Broadcast Network, in the early 1990s, not the spinoff channel Fox News. They are repentant about how the actions they took to breathe life into Fox eventually led to the creation of a disinformation machine that’s been at the jugular of American Democracy for the better part of the past decade.

I will say, it’s easy to excoriate these guys for having their lame mea culpa this late in the game. Their original motivations for creating the Fox network are unclear at best, and they were all almost certainly more concerned with making money over anything else moralistic. But if you think about it, in the early 90s it was kinda easy to underestimate Rupert Murdoch’s amorality and tenacity when it came to pursuing a right-wing audience. Yes he had a bias in his media empire at that point, but Fox News very quickly became a platform for petty name calling, denialism, and outright hate beyond anything we’d seen before in a television network with significant reach.

Requiring remote federal workers — emphasis on federal, as in people who work for the United States government writ large — to report in to their home office twice a pay cycle is laughably small-minded. It would seem the undertone of this is two fold:

1. It keeps workers planted to specific office complexes, which has tangible benefits to the local economy that complex is located within. This means that the politicians responsible for that area can claim credit for jobs where those complexes are located, even if the job responsibilities have little to do with that specific area.

2. It keeps liberally minded workers from moving out of cities and into exurban or rural communities that typically vote for conservatives. This kind of movement, writ large, has the potential to really shake up national politics, arguably for the better. And we can’t have that now can we?

In both cases, this is a naked attempt to artificially control the federal workforce to benefit the status quo and keep harmful, self-serving politicians in power.

It doesn’t. Public transportation only really works in dense environments. The rub is that the default mode of development across the US has been suburban sprawl, which basically makes the “last mile” - from the bus/train route to your house / business / shops - impractical.

Best we can do given this state of affairs is build good transit and densify around the stops with infill development. Continuing the pattern of sprawl just makes every problem related to transportation harder - longer commutes, more traffic, higher amount of energy consumed to get from point A to point B.

Anyway, hope this battery tech works out because a lot of us are stuck with expensive personal vehicles as our only viable option given the way our cities are laid out.

Ok this is the line. This is where we will clearly be able to see if the media chooses to uncritically prop up an old guard power player for ratings and clicks. Proposing any sort of restriction on abortion will demonstrably harm people and should be the definitive end of this man’s campaign — but I’m betting it won’t be. Remember when the 2016 Libertarian candidate (Johnson) didn’t know what “Aleppo” was and his campaign ended right then and there because he said something demonstrably stupid? That should have happened to Trump and it didn’t. That should have happened to RFK with his vaccine trash and it didn’t. The fact that he hasn’t been laughed out of the room by the media already does not say good things about the 4th estate, much less the critical thinking skills of the average American voter.

“Whataboutism” is a logical fallacy that presents a counter-accusation in lieu of the question being discussed. What you present here is a textbook definition. The topic is the US’s involvement in supplying Ukraine with a specific type of munition, and not the broader question of how the US allocates its money generally.

It’s an Albany excretion.

Rightly so. While the state has a right to prohibit individual actions that cause harm, such as hate speech or incitements to violence, it would be a massive human rights violation to ban access to platforms generally, as it would silence a space where constructive dissent is organized.

Why, exactly, should abortion be regulated separate from any other medical procedure? I would guess the vast majority of answers are based in an ideology with patriarchal underpinnings, where the fate of women is the business of the male-dominated state.

The vast majority of abortions in the 3rd trimester are medically necessary, often heartbreaking affairs. Roe was an antiquated compromise decision and should not be seen as a template for what is acceptable in a supposedly pluralistic society that honors the freedom of individuals to make their own decisions about their own bodies.