17 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread”

1. Schadenfreude Christmas! From TPM

   Read the whole thing "A Calamitous Day At The ‘Fair And Balanced’ Network"

   A Calamitous Day At The ‘Fair And Balanced’ Network

   I’m not sure longtime Fox News critics and observers could have imagined a day like Tuesday ever coming to pass. The cable news net’s lies, fabrications, bamboozlement, and misinformation all came home to roost in spectacular fashion.

   On a day that not so long ago would have seen Fox News preening over its top star’s bogus Monday night segment downplaying the Jan. 6 attack, Rupert Murdoch’s baby was instead lambasted by Republicans and law enforcement and humiliated by more revelations from the titanic defamation case pending against it.

   Tuesday marked a collision between the Dominion Voting Systems $1.2 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News over its Big Lie claims during the 2020 election and the network’s latest Big Lie: that Jan. 6 was a hoax, a peaceful saunter of the citizenry through the halls of the Capitol. One Big Lie begat another, both centered on the 2020 election and its aftermath. All in service of Donald Trump, its own ratings, and the warped worldview that sustains a propaganda network for more than quarter of a century.

   In the end though, what was most striking about yesterday was Fox News starting to eat its own. No one deserves it more than the personalities, hosts, and would-be journalists who populate the Fox News shows.

   Fox v. Fox!

   In a remarkable segment Tuesday night, Fox News host Bret Baier and congressional reporter Chad Pergram effectively counter-programmed Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 6 whitewash from the night before.

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   1. "In a remarkable segment Tuesday night, Fox News host Bret Baier and congressional reporter Chad Pergram effectively counter-programmed Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 6 whitewash from the night before."

      It's like watching Sybil.

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      1. Wonder if Bret Baier and Chad Pergram are openly contradicting Tucker Carlson now because they know he's most likely going to get the axe? Maybe – maybe not, but at least one of the fountains of propaganda there is going to be looking for a new job. As much as I hate Fox, I'd love to be a fly on the wall there right now.

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         1. Someone out there who would know better than most thinks FOX is being typically duplicitous (imagine that?) — they want to both have their Tucker, and eat him too.

            https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/fox-news-tucker-carlson-jan-6-dominion

            Gretchen Carlson on Twitter:

            “This is F’in bs — have your ‘straight’ news anchor call out total fabricated lies and an injustice to the American public by promoting lies via Tucker Carlson and pretend it’s not your network. WTF.”

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            1. Interesting. They were all so good at being on the same page. Not anymore.

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         2. It's a shame Succession is in its last season and production is finished.

            They could have had some great story lines if Logan Roy's news network was facing a Dominion-type lawsuit complete with depositions and a sacrificial talking head or two who facing the axe.  

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2. On our breathless but not-yet-so-brave new world:

   The False Promise of ChatGPT

   The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.

   For instance, a young child acquiring a language is developing — unconsciously, automatically and speedily from minuscule data — a grammar, a stupendously sophisticated system of logical principles and parameters. This grammar can be understood as an expression of the innate, genetically installed “operating system” that endows humans with the capacity to generate complex sentences and long trains of thought. When linguists seek to develop a theory for why a given language works as it does (“Why are these — but not those — sentences considered grammatical?”), they are building consciously and laboriously an explicit version of the grammar that the child builds instinctively and with minimal exposure to information. The child’s operating system is completely different from that of a machine learning program.

   Indeed, such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.
    

   https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html

    

    

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3. Colorado Newsline provides an interesting description of the entry of a 7th announced candidate for the Republican Party Chair.

   Kevin McCarney, former chair of the Republican Party of Mesa County, announced his candidacy for chair of the Colorado Republican Party.

   McCarney becomes the seventh candidate in the race, with the March 11 election just days away.

   “We are at a crossroads for Republicans in Colorado. We have a tremendous decision in front of us. Will we unify? Or will we continue to tear ourselves apart,” McCarney wrote in an email, obtained by Newsline, sent to other Colorado Republicans on Sunday evening. “We squandered thousands of votes just because we refuse to get along. I am not saying we need to all sing Kumbaya, but if we fail to even marginally come together, we will consign ourselves to (irrelevance).”

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   1. Well, at least he's pro-ballot harvesting. And according to an area blogger, he might have given us a little Freudian Slip showing he's into porn:

      In a video of a talk at Appleton Christian Church on September 16, 2021, Mesa County Republican Party Chair Kevin McCarney repeatedly calls Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold “Jenna Jameson,” the name of a famous adult film actress known as the “Queen of Porn.” 

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4. Kevin is just about as batshit crazy as the rest of them. His only redeeming feature is that he finally broke with Tina Peters. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make him sane.

    

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   1. Isn’t he concerned that some of the more dyslexic members of the state central committee may mistake his name for Kevin McCarthy and oppose him simply because Bimbobert and Gaetz opposed McCarthy?

      While the only person Tina Peters could be confused with is the stage name of a meth-driven drag queen.

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      1. I wondered about his name, too. Kind of a bad time for him to step up, maybe?

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5. Qbert is going to be a grandmother. The crazy one you hide in the attic.

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   1. Surely Boebert will make sure young papa Tyler marries his baby mama and works to support his child…Christian.family values, and all.

      Probably not.

      I love the way Bobo gushes about how rural areas have better family values because abortion rates are lower. It couldn't have anything to do with less access to reproductive health care, now could it?

      Anyway, she's lying, of course. Christian evangelical women get abortions at similar rates as nonbelievers.

       

       

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      1. Following in the fine footsteps of Bristol Palin and her baby daddy. 

         Any takers on whether Bimbobert becomes a great-grandmother by the time she is 50?

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         1.  Well, Great Granny Qbert is like 54 or so, so it's "Game On".

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      2. "Christian evangelical women get abortions at similar rates as nonbelievers."

         Or maybe more. I think of that episode of Orange Is the New Black where they explain how the Jesus-loving meth head played by Taryn Manning ended up in prison. She went to a clinic so often that they refused to assist her terminating her last pregnancy. So, she got her shot gun and shot the place up.

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