Iconochasm
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Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1yr ago
That despair in the face of megacorp dominance takes on entire new dimensions when the CEO is a millennia-old Literal Fucking Dragon that knows ancient lore beyond space and time and can cram new research faster than any metahuman.
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1yr ago
I have a couple friends who enjoyed it. The way you could build out gear/cyberwear/magic let you have really customizable builds and loadouts for an FPS. Kind of a waste of the IP though.
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1yr ago
I can tell that subconsciously I'm much more dismissive of men 5" shorter than me, than men around my own height.
Note, this does not apply to short men who are visibly jacked. Take the dwarf pill. Clangeddin be with you.
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1yr ago
Don't you find the lack of detail from Musk to be suspicious?
Not particularly, he seems to be slow-rolling this whole thing. And my point was that I think Baker needs to do a lot to justify himself even in the event that he did literally nothing wrong, due to the conflict of interest. I would say that Baker could offer some transparency on his end too, if he really had a good reason to insert himself into the vetting anyway, but I guess there is probably a lot of potential problems for him there as a lawyer.
General but relevant question, does confidentiality cover the reasons your client fired you?
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1yr ago
I keep wondering why my position is apparently so inscrutable to people because I never said that conflict of interest doesn't exist. I already said above "I think it's plausible that Jim Baker would at least have a strong motive to conceal things that would impugn the FBI which is his previous employer, but motive is not the same thing as commission." I think the pushback I'm getting on this issue is maybe that "I don't have enough evidence to believe Baker was acting in bad faith" is being interpreted as having a silent "therefore, he acted in good faith" follow-up.
For myself, I'm essentially taking the conflict of interest as a strong signal of probable bad faith, as in, a good faith counsel would have noticed the conflict, and assigned the task to someone else. Baker obviously did not, and that's the sort of thing that seems like it should need a very good justification, which inclines me to believing Musk (because the world of bad justifications is much larger than the world of good ones). And frankly, I'm pretty used to unconvincing, bored, boiler-plate denials from spooks, who often seem to kind of suck at advanced lying.
And generally, the context of Musk's takeover really seems like the sort of thing where Jim Baker in particular ought to have gotten a new waiver about this topic in particular. OTOH, it's not unreasonable to ask why Musk didn't think of this angle beforehand. On the gripping hand, Musk is doing a ton of shit, it's understandable if he drops a ball occasionally.
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1yr ago
(2) there is a significant risk that the representation of one or more clients will be materially limited by the lawyer's responsibilities to another client, a former client or a third person or by a personal interest of the lawyer.
Do you think Baker had a waiver in writing from Elon Musk?
You used to work for the ACLU, right? Imagine you had inserted yourself into a controversial ACLU case that blew up, during which a coworker was caught forging documents submitted to court. Years later, you go to work for a different client with some tangential relations with the ACLU, and the aggrieved party in the controversial case. A new case comes up in the new company that has implications for the ACLU, and directly involves people who were directly involved in that previous controversial case.
Would you, as a lawyer, be comfortable sliding yourself into a "vetting" position for the new case? If you were, would you really be surprised if many other people were unwilling to give you a blank benefit of the doubt?
I worry I lost the analogy here, but the core question is, isn't CoI about the appearance of possible impropriety? I seems crazy that we would need direct, actionable evidence of malfeasance to allege a conflict of interest. Was Baker the only general counsel for Twitter?
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1yr ago
but I just don't get how throwing high fantasy into the cyberpunk future wouldn't detract from both...
No, it adds to it. Shadowrun is a hilariously awful hellscape that merges the alienation of cyberpunk with the sheer danger and wonder of urban dark fantasy, against the mundane reality of A Boring Dystopia. Imagine being a wage mage whose day job is just walking a perimeter around some megacorp chip factory, casting the same ward against nature spirits every 6 minutes. Being in the poor part of town and hearing there are literal flesh-eating ghouls in the sewers. Or seeing an entire assault helicopter full of a Fast Response Team crash and burn because some teenaged punk had a dream where Dragonslayer taught him Lightning Bolt, and told him to go rage against the machine.
like you can't dispatch the kill teams after the players for doing something dumb
Noooo, Shadowrun has kill teams a plenty. On top of the cyberwarriors and elite hackers, they also have combat mages who can track you through the astral based on blood traces you left at the crime scene, and then levitate invisible snipers into overwatch positions.
The real "trick" of doing shadowruns is that the world is a nightmare of jurisdictions, so if you can evade or hold off pursuit long enough to get extra-territorial, you can probably dodge consequences for the time being. But over time, every team will build up a list of corps and governments that want you dead, so that gets harder and harder, unless you take active measures about it.
And that's why it's so fun that it's based in the real world. There is so much real history, that hundreds of writers have built on over decades of the game, so that most stuff actually is pretty nailed down. You can do a run in a new city, and look up which corps or governments control which areas, then bring up Google Maps and plot out your getaway route on real highways.
But because of that, Shadowrun really only works super well if you have a whole group of mega-nerds who want to learn deep lore on top of intense crunch.
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1yr ago
Assuming this is the Liriel Baenrae trilogy, I think I only read the first one, and she was a wizard, not a priestess. But in the rest of the dozens of realms books about drow priestesses, mostly by Salvatore, Llolth is fairly active in the form of empowering/depowering priestesses she favors/disfavors. As one element, they all have multi-snake-headed whips, where the number of heads indicates favor.
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1yr ago
Just because Brinton dresses like a walking freakshow is not sufficient evidence
It is not sufficient evidence to say with certainty. It is sufficient evidence to elevate the probability of some weird sexual fetish several orders of magnitude above the baseline, possibly even into the realm of being the most likely cause.
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1yr ago
Perpetuate the thrill for a time, falsely believe this would give plausible deniability, basic convenience.
I think we're past the point of presuming rational explanations.
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1yr ago
Do lawyers have any professional standards for conflicts of interest?
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1yr ago
After all, the "Soviets only won because of lend-lease" narrative never really caught on, giving the Soviets at least a roughly equal share at the table of WWII winners in the public mind, thus not on its own really painting America as exceptional.
I actually just had to explain to my boomer dad the other day that the USSR was on our side in WW2. I'm honestly not sure how much credit they get in the view of the general public.
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1yr ago
It's also possible that his extensive drug use caused functional brain damage.
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1yr ago
The first thing you need to understand about RRR, is that it might be the first major Indian blockbuster that situates entirely within the context of India.
Any recommendations for works like this (strong preference for books, but maybe movies)? One of my favorite things about the new Chinese fantasy novel's I've read was the genuinely alien baseline cultural assumptions. I've long had a fondness for India, but I have no idea what might function as a decent inroad work.
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1yr ago
Ironically, this seemed like a bot post. ChatGPT has a certain verbose "five paragraph essay" style that functions as a moderately strong tell. Real people don't "Step 5: Restate the conclusion in slightly different phrasing." unless they are padding sentence requirements in a high schol class.
Not a claim I made.
Did not quite say you did. What I am claiming is that it is a very common understanding of events, and the first comment of yours that I replied to was in that ballpark.
I don't see how that is relevant to the issue
I think we're into 3 or 4 different issues, talking past each other, and I have a feeling that if I go into responses for a bunch of the parts of the next two paragraphs I have problems with, it's going to keep happening.
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1yr ago
trans men are pretty new to a lot of people's radars.
There's a darkly humorous irony there. Transmen hitting the point where they're completely ignored and no one acknowledges their existence is a big sign that they've made it and are passing. Welcome to manhood, brother, no one gives a fuck, have a beer and deal with it.
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1yr ago
I said that it plummeted in 1964, which is exactly what happened; it dropped from the 25-30 pct it had been from 1936-1960 to something like 5% in 1964
That brings the interesting question of what did cause that drop. The usual answer I see is the Nixon's Southern Strategy, but this is too early for that. The CRA is an obvious thing to look at, but Republicans voted for it in significantly higher margins than Democrats, albeit as the minority party in both chambers. Is it something plausibly chalked up to the 64 election being Johnson vs Goldwater, and then lock-in effects from there?
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1yr ago
Well, that is not the story I told
Then we are watching two very different movies. That's the story I imbibed growing up and there may still exist the cringy teenaged political rants on LiveJournal to prove it. I get annoyed at this discussion because I'm coming with the embarrassed energy of the deconverted. More generally, I think if I rephrased it less snarkily, something like "After the CRA, basically all of the racists immediately switched to the Republican party and stayed there ever since", the median Redditor would agree, and further agree that all educated people know this is true history.
while in the past social conservatives were Democrats, that is obviously no longer the case, so, whatever the specific details, the claim that "Democrats are the racists because most racists were Democrats sixty years ago" is not a very honest claim.
At this point we're a little deep in the woods, in terms of multiple people jumping into a conversation. The "newest posts" feed is great for murdering time, but contributes to this sort of situation. To clarify, I'm not saying the quoted bit above, but I am saying that many of the racist Democrats from 60 years ago stayed Democrats in the wake of the CRA, and many who did switch did so more for other reasons ranging from religion to foreign policy, over the course of that 60 years. Hlynka, by contrast, was making a separate claim that Democrats are a party of public disorder and violent race baiting, and that this is core enough to the meme cluster "Democrat Party" to be common between old social-con Klansmen and new woke-prog antifa.
So, no, the party's history should not "damn them," because both parties have different compositions than they did in the past.
This is a very isolated demand for rigor. Dems damn the Republicans for the Southern Strategy and the United States in general for slavery and historical racism, but BlushingFlowerMeme.jpg regarding their own party's history as the party of slavery, the party of the Klan, and the party of Jim Crow. I'm certainly amenable to "the past is a different country" arguments, but the folks who toppled statues of abolitionists because they don't actually know who the person was don't get a free dodge for that accusation of hypocrisy.
Sorry, that is an annoying amount of imprecise language and memory drift on my part. The stat living in my head was "20 of the 22 Southern Democrat Senate seats stayed Democrat for 20 years after the CRA"; the bit about "voted for" is superfluous and doesn't even make sense. And of course, trying to look it up is hopelessly confounded by results for "2022 Senate election". So, doing this the awkward way and just looking up the maps for every Senate election from 64 onward, I think the general point weakly holds.
Georgia doesn't elect a Republican to Senate until 1980. SC elected a Democrat to Senate in 1964, then confirmed in a special election in 1965. Strom Thurmond won in 66 and stayed in office forever, but the other NC Senate seat was Democrat-held until 2004, the first time a Republican held that seat since Reconstruction.
North Carolina Goes Democrat in 66, 68, then a Republican in 72, and a Democrat in 74 (that seat flips in 80).
Alabama votes D in 66, 68, 72, 74, 78 (twice!), flips R in 80, but goes back to D in 84 and 86, 90, 92, before flipping R again in 96-98.
Mississippi votes D in 64, 66, 70, 72, and 76. Flips R in 78, but D again in 82. That D seat flips R in 88.
Louisiana doesn't send a Republican to the Senate until 2004.
Texas is split 1/1 until 1994.
Florida is D in 64, R in 68. The Democrat seat stays blue until 88. The R seat flips back and forth a few times until it stays blue for a 3 election stretch ending in the 00s.
Tennessee does some complicated flipping between both seats, but doesn't seem to settle on R until 94.
Arkansas doesn't elect a Republican to Senate until 1996.
Missouri elects it's first Republican in 76, and seems to lock into that side during the 80's.
Overall, it looks like the "switch" happens in the late 70s into the mid-90s.
In presidential elections, only a few deep south states vote for Goldwater in 64. 68 is hopelessly confounded by Democrat-cum-Independent George Wallace. 72 Nixon carries basically everything, but in 76 Jimmy Carter takes the entire South. Reagan only loses GA in 80, and crushes in 84, which Bush replicates in 88; these wins, like Nixon's are so generally decisive that it's hard to chalk them up to regional-specific trends.. In 92 and 96 Clinton is at least strongly competitive in the South, winning about half the Southern states each time, and coming within 5ish points for most of the others. The South only really locks in as "Red States" with GWB.
This article takes a deeper look. Some money quotes:
This is why we see such little change from the general trend post-1964, even with the end of Jim Crow's strange career. Republicans picked up a few Congressional seats. J. Strom Thurmond became a Republican, and a few other prominent Democrats followed suit. But the Southern Congressional delegations continued to be dominated by Democrats. Almost all of the signatories to the Southern Manifesto remained Democrats until they left Congress. Some, like Russell Long and John Stennis served as Democrats into the 1980s. When Haley Barbour ran against Stennis in 1982, he lost by a nearly 2:1 margin. George Wallace was elected Governor of Alabama as a Democrat in 1982.
Richard Nixon walloped George McGovern in the South, but this was hardly exclusively about race -- McGovern was to the left of you average Southern voters on just about every issue imaginable. Four years later, Jimmy Carter was still able to carry every Southern state except for Virginia in 1976. As late as 1988, the South was still considered something of a swing region (the reason that Lloyd Bentsen was included on the ticket). Bill Clinton carried four Southern states in 1992, and came within five points of carrying four others. Republicans didn't make real progress in the Congressional delegations until the 1990s; even then the transformation continued into the 2000s.
In the statehouses, the transformation was likewise slow. Table I shows the percentages of Republicans in the state legislatures from 1962 through 2002. Some states' Republican parties grew significantly in the 1960s, but for the most part, big gains for the Republicans don't come until the 1980s and 1990s:
Regardless, it is indisputable that it was his generation, and not Thurmond's, that finally changed the political complexion of the South. Did race still have something to do with it? Almost certainly. But you also can't ignore that the South was by that point aligned with the national Republican Party on a wide expanse of issues relating to taxes, anti-communism, school prayer, abortion, the counterculture, Vietnam . . . the list goes on. Chalking everything up to the Civil Rights Act is overly simplistic, to the point of being incorrect.
So, yes, there is definitely something to this story, the Southern Strategy clearly had some effect, even if it seems like it was mostly alienating black voters. But this story Democrats tell themselves that "And then one day, for no reason, all the good people and all the bad people switched teams" is mostly copium and deflection from their party's history, which by their normal standards ought to utterly damn them.
It is just as obvious that, starting in the 40s and accelerating after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, conservatives began migrating to the Republican Party.
That is not obvious when you look at the actual voting patterns. Quickly sanity check by looking at the presidential election outcomes, and see how much support you find for this version of events. 20 of the 22 southern Senate seats that voted for the CRA stayed Democrat for the next 20 years. They didn't start flipping Red until Reagan appealed to them as evangelicals. And even then, Clinton carried the south in 1992. A lot of those old racists stayed Democrat voters until they died, or at least well into retirement age, because unions, or FDR won the war.
There was a story from the 2008 campaign, about a canvasser for Obama in rural Pennsylvania who knocked on a door in a rural home. An elderly woman answers. The canvasser asks who they're voting for. The woman calls out, "Honey, who are we voting for?", and the presumed husband is heard to holler back "The n*gger!" And the woman smiled sweetly at the canvasser and reiterated, "We're voting for the n*gger." This story was told in a tone of awe at the Nyarlotep-tier charisma of Barack Obama, that he could inspire even these racist, sexist old assholes to vote for Hope and Change. But I think it's pretty likely that they had just been voting for whoever was a [D] since double-ya double-ya two, and if a yellow dog, why not a black guy?
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1yr ago
Agreed. I've claimed some ability at this, but it's based on more than a picture. It's more cues about neuroticism, self-confidence, demeanor.
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1yr ago
Can you name a straight government employee that was even asked about something like this?
Are you implying Sam was just blindsided about it, apropos of nothing, in a totally unrelated interview, and that their history of activism on the topic does not justify doing so?
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1yr ago
The guy on the left is actually a conservative activist, and the guy on the right is John Fetterman, newly elected Democrat Senator for Pennsylvania. Fetterman leaned heavily into the assumption that he was a conservative during the campaign.
I think this is just a new halfway measure that didn't have a specific term. Would anyone be unhappy with calling this as "partial shadowban" or something like that?
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