DL Open Thread: Monday the Ides of March, 2021

“WAP” (an acronym for “Wet-Ass Pussy”) was performed on the Grammy’s last night by Cardi B, and Megan Thee Stallion. I’m not qualified to discuss the musical merits, but anything that triggers apoplexy in Tucker Carlson must have something going for it. Also, kudos to CBS. They’ve come a long way from not allowing the camera to show Elvis’ gyrating hips.

Fuck this insurrectionist who wants to be tried in Texas, not in the town she terrorized 

When conservatives trash  “big tech” they trash it for all the wrong reasons. The facts are in and they show that Facebook is a cancer relentlessly eating away at journalism and our democratic traditions.

How Facebook Is Killing Journalism and Democracy

At the heart of much of this bedlam are the deliberate actions of social media companies in general, which have broadly destroyed the revenue model for journalism–often through deliberate lies–and created engagement algorithms that incentivize hateful polarization and outright disinformation. And no social media has been more guilty of both than Facebook.

Two big stories dropped this week highlighting Facebook’s ongoing role in sabotaging both journalism and democracy in the pursuit of profit.

The last guy was intellectually lazy as fuck.  In that he was the ideal example of the modern lazy-ass conservative.

My First Draft colleague Cassandra had a piece this week about her Senator Manchin and how he and the Senate Dems played the Republicans to get the COVID bill passed by allowing the ludicrous charade of forcing a reading of the entire bill, then waiting till the Republicans had left the chamber while all the Demos stayed thus allowing Chuck “I’m Amy’s Cousin Not Her Uncle” Schumer to invoke cloture and move the bill, as well as Merrick Garland’s Attorney General nomination, to the floor for a vote.

In other words he used an old jujitsu move on them, allowing your opponent to be done in by their own innate nature.

And what is their innate nature? Very simply, conservatives are lazy. The inherent want of conservatism is for nothing to change because change requires work, sometimes hard work, to one degree or another. Conservatives want to take the easiest, simplest, path, the one that takes little if any work. The easy answer is always no. The hard is “let’s work to find a way”.

That’s all I’ve got. What what are you reading?