"Standing at the Crossroads, Believe I'm Sinking Down"

• Missed Opening Day this year.  Oh well.  But at least they're breaking even.  So far...
• Via skippy:  Device weirdness.  (Ian Bogost, The Atlantic)

  Technology’s role has begun to shift, from serving human users to pushing them out of the way so that the technologized world can service its own ends. And so, with increasing frequency, technology will exist not to serve human goals, but to facilitate its own expansion.
  
  This might seem like a crazy thing to say. What other purpose do toilets serve than to speed away human waste? No matter its ostensible function, precarious technology separates human actors from the accomplishment of their actions. They acclimate people to the idea that devices are not really there for them, but as means to accomplish those devices own, secret goals.
  
  This truth has been obvious for some time. Facebook and Google, so the saying goes, make their users into their products—the real customer is the advertiser or data speculator preying on the information generated by the companies’ free services. But things are bound to get even weirder than that.

• What Bernie Sanders and others get "wrong" (Chauncey DeVega, Indomitable):

  Chasing the largely mythical “white working-class voters whose loyalties went from “Obama to Trump” will not win future elections. The white working-class voters they covet are solidly Republican.
  
  Alienating people of color and women by embracing Trump’s base of human deplorables will not strengthen the Democratic Party. It will only drive away those voters who are the Democratic Party’s most reliable supporters.
  
  Sanders has unintentionally exemplified the way that both white liberals and white conservatives are heavily influenced by the white racial frame. As such, both sides of the ideological divide are desperate to see the best in their fellow white Americans, despite the latter’s racist behavior.

• Echidne of the Snakes:  Patriarchy makes its move.

  Well, Bernie Sanders is still in politics. Donald Trump ran for president three times. Newt Gingrich is still mouthing on television. And so on. But there is something very different about presumed female ambition. As an aside, there is no evidence at all that Hillary Clinton would consider running again. She has simply given a few speeches, but that is too ghastly for words.

• Body Impolitic:  Police/Jail Violence

  This series [Undisclosed podcast], now five episodes in, is very painful to listen to. When I want to turn it off, I remind myself that Freddie Gray didn’t get to turn it off, and neither did his family, friends, and neighbors. Nor do they still. Besides, if you can hear anything through the pain, it is also fascinating.

• On the Republican dislike of poor people (The Hunting of the Snark):

  When you don't, all your complaints about the new system don't mean anything. You wanted the system broken. You demanded its failure. You fought tooth-and-nail to kill it. You don't get to just walk away from that and shrug your shoulders and go back to your well-paid career rat-fucking the poor. You are responsible for your actions.
  
  And make no mistake: [Megan] McArdle doesn't care about the people who need insurance. She doesn't want the Republicans' greed and incompetence to ruin Republican political success.
  
  [...]
  
  McArdle gives the reasons why she is against the Republicans' plans, which are mixed in with her usual lies and deceit about Obamacare and too tedious to discuss. Then she tells us that she simply can't understand why Republicans decided to pull down Obamacare without having a replacement.
  
  [...]
  
  She should have thought of that when she was predicting that Obamacare would destroy health care and must be stopped immediately. She watched Republicans do nothing viable to replace Obamacare with a functioning market yet for seven years yet she yelped constantly to kill it. Now she shakes her head and fumes that her political party will be hurt by their and her actions.
  
  [...]
  
  After eight (or more?) years of Republicans rat-fucking Obamacare, McArdle became convinced that it was damaged enough to die on its own and she is not best pleased that her ego or career might be dinged by a loss of Republican power. The sick, dead and suffering are beside the point.

• ETA: Lance Mannion: They want people to die.

  They want people to die. I’ve preached this sermon before, and I know I’m preaching to the choir. But it’s the unholy truth. They want people to die. That’s the explanation for this. The AHCA was---is still---wildly unpopular and one of the reasons is it would take away guaranteed coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. But that’s the part the Freedom Caucus wants to bring back. They want people with cancer to die of it. Poor people, first, but not just poor people. Anybody who isn’t rich enough to pay top dollar for tests, treatment, operations, and medicine. They---we---should all die if we aren’t smart enough, strong enough, virtuous enough to not ever get sick.
  
  Their religion requires human sacrifice. They pray by offering other people’s suffering to their wicked demon of a god. It’s how they feel virtuous. By being tough. Cruel. Impulses to kindness, charity, common decency are signs of weakness, failures to be tough enough to carry out God’s will.

• Yastreblyansky:

  You start the unmasking procedure not because of the identity of the person, which you don't know, but because of their behavior, which makes you want to know it. Flynn, Stone, Manafort, and Page were just Male X when whoever it was got interested in them, their identities hidden by the NSA rules; they were unmasked because somebody at some agency, NSC or elsewhere, needed to find out who it was that was doing the stuff they were doing.
  
  I should add that what the story as it's unfolding really shows, in addition to the willed psychopathic incoherence of rightwing storytelling, is further evidence that the techies of NSA who collect the material do indeed follow the rules of minimizing and masking the identities of US persons with excruciating rigor. Whatever bad eggs at FBI and CIA may end up doing with them.

• Colorblind Christians:

  It will be a bleak future for American democracy if the poles of political debate range from racist/incompetent populism to technocratic liberalism to leftism. There must be a place for thoughtful conservatism. Do you believe in the value of reasoned debate and the vigorous airing of dissenting opinions? Then support conservatives of integrity.

  Yes, I did observe the date.
• Still trying to destroy health care. (Zandar Versus The Stupid)  Keep up the vigilance!