Yeah, I think you’re right: I’ve seen the argument (I read the ADL page), and I just don’t agree with it. In particular I didn’t like how we’re back to saying that he “paraded around on stage wearing an SS Nazi uniform.” It makes about as much sense as those people who attacked the actress who played Skyler from Breaking Bad (or more accurately if they attacked her when the entire thesis of Breaking Bad was how Skyler was a bad person and it’s a terrible thing to let yourself become like Skyler.) I mean, it may be that the ADL simply didn’t give enough time to the situation to really understand it and misunderstood the intent of that uniform in that particular show, because they do have genuine Nazis to deal with who show up in genuine Nazi garb.

I have Jewish ancestry myself, and I see the actions of the Israeli government pretty similar to how Roger Waters sees it. Being anti-Semitic and wanting a particular group of Jewish people to stop committing crimes are two very different things; if you define being anti-Israeli-apartheid as being racist, then I’m racist too. Furthermore a person who uses racism as a shield against someone who criticizes their actions for reasons that have nothing to do with race, I think hurts their ethnic grouping in the long run a lot more than they help it.

Do you have some kind of citation on him being racist?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=roger+waters+racist

So, I’m really not trying to be combative with you about this. I actually did exactly this already to find the Guardian link I sent. I’ve now read the second link, the CNN article, which says basically more of the same – that he’s potentially in trouble for playing that satirical character in “The Wall” because of Germany’s strict regulations against Nazi iconography. Also he doesn’t like Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Nothing about racism that seems at all convincing to me. There are some people who call him anti-Semitic because he disagrees with Israel’s government, but long story short those are two very different statements to me. You’re free to have a different opinion, but I read the two articles and I’m not convinced.

IDK man. It sounds to me like you’re falling back on “It’s all there, do your own research, it’s all there” and sort of talking down to me because of my viewpoint, but I feel like that’s not a fair thing to ask – if this stuff is easy to find, you’re welcome to find some and send it to me and I really will take a look. I’m genuinely open to someone showing me why I need to change my view if you’re into the idea of investing the time to do that, but I don’t feel like I should have to indefinitely search for new sources when I’ve already invested a certain amount of open-minded time into trying to research the question.

Like I say, I have actually read a few articles trying to look for the information. I see that there are certain people who think he’s a racist. I read their reasons and in my opinion they’re wrong. But you’re free to see it differently.

Cheers mate

You do know that’s the “bad guy” speaking at that point in The Wall, right? It’s pretty complex and this is only my take on it, but I interpret the whole album as basically a titanic struggle between authoritarianism and humanity in a bunch of different contexts and in that section the antagonist (authoritarianism) is the one speaking.

Do you have some kind of citation on him being racist? I read this just now but I’m not convinced. “The Wall” is among other things a pretty strong statement in opposition to fascism and the holocaust (which is not an especially bold stance to take), but it sounds like he’s also against Israel’s modern-day version of apartheid, which is a little more bold stance and one I definitely agree with. That doesn’t mean he’s anti-Semitic.

Why he likes Putin and Russia I have no idea. He had pretty complex feelings about WW2 because the Nazis were very clearly the “bad guys,” but also his dad got killed in the war when he was just a little kid, so he also just hates war in general. If I wanted to be charitable I could say he’s applying that logic to Ukraine (maybe there’s some kind of justice to this war, but also war is so horrible that we should just make peace with Putin and end it at whatever cost, even if Russia “wins,” so no one else has to lose their dad.) That’s not to say I justify his view – it’s just me trying to make some kind of sense of it.

Jann Wenner has ALWAYS been a gargantuan prick. This was pretty well known all along, but people kept it shushed up because from its inception through at least the early 90s, getting a nod from the Rolling Stone was a career maker (or breaker). Hell there’s even a cheesy old Dr. Hook song about it.

That’s sad to me. Oh well, these things happen. If people are finding it out and publicizing it and punishing him for it (now that he’s no longer in a position to damage their careers 😐), then better late than never, I guess.

Eric Clapton, Ted Nugent, and Roger Waters

Fuck me, what did Roger Waters do? I know he supports Russia in Ukraine for some godawful reason but I thought that was some recent early-onset dementia or something. I like Roger Waters, does he have some kind of awfulness I wasn’t aware of?

But that’s what I’m saying: Back in his day, it was all white men. He was a little outside the mold that he even would put a black person on the cover or work with women as human beings with abilities (Annie Leibovitz) instead of as machines for coffee/filing/sex. In his mind I think that’s still super progressive. But, all the people who really run shit are white men; it’s not at all weird that all the “masters” in his book are white men, any more than it’s weird that all his employees are humans. What sense would it make if they weren’t? That would be just putting someone who isn’t a master into the list for some weird other reason, not because they had important things to say.

I really have no idea about the guy, I’m just sort of guessing here. But it seems pretty plausible just based on that interview.

I think he genuinely just doesn’t see anything odd with any of his answers. Think about how different a world he comes from. I have a vaguely positive impression of Jann Wenner because of his association with the golden age Hunter-Thompson era of Rolling Stone and the genuinely good journalism that it still does today. But at the same time, the landscape of what’s permissible behavior from a big white guy in charge has changed so much that we can lose track of how much of an asshole it used to be okay to be.

My sister’s worked in a male-dominated industry for basically her whole life, and now that I’m thinking about it the stories she tells have gradually been transitioning from stuff that’s genuinely horrifying to now being simply upsetting and wrong. I think people who lived during that era are just starting to sound like everyone’s segregation-era grandparents did back in the 90s. I mean, for a lot of his adult life, women basically did live under a segregation system. In one way it’s a good sign for how much progress has been made. Not to excuse him for being an asshole - I’m just saying that it kind of makes sense that the system didn’t filter him out back then, in the way that it would today if he didn’t learn to keep quiet about what he thought about these things.

HOLY CRAP you’re not kidding (vaguely NSFW)

The Q: "There are seven subjects in the new book; seven white guys. In the introduction, you acknowledge that performers of color and women performers are just not in your zeitgeist. Which to my mind is not plausible for Jann Wenner. Janis Joplin,

Janis Joplin was literally the exact counterexample that first jumped into my mind when I read the headline.

Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Wonder, the list keeps going … What do you think is the deeper explanation for why you interviewed the subjects you interviewed and not other subjects?

Wenner’s answer is telling. He says, “When I was referring to the zeitgeist, I was referring to Black performers, not to the female performers, OK? Just to get that accurate.”

Oh wow. Did he get screwed through no fault of his own? That’s a very straight answer, and I’m not at all a fan of this new thing where you can get your career fucked if you say “black” in any sentence and don’t immediately follow it with “empowerment” or “voices.”

The selection was not a deliberate selection. It was kind of intuitive over the years; it just fell together that way. The people had to meet a couple criteria, but it was just kind of my personal interest and love of them."

Yeah, that seems 100% reasonable to me.

“Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.”

…

Jann you fucked yourself.

I take it all back. You’re a creep for thinking this and a moron for saying it out loud to a reporter.

The reporter pushes back, incredulously asking if he really doesn’t think Joni Mitchell was articulate enough to talk music on an intellectual level.

Wenner responded, "It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest.

STOP IT, STOP IT, THERE ARE PEOPLE THAT CARE ABOUT YOU, YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS

Don’t sell yourself short, queen. I think you nailed your values spot on.

Yeah but all of that is a lot less wild than actual aliens. If Jenna Ellis or Hugo Chavez was involved in some way, then I’d say the headline was getting closer to a justified exaggeration, but this is just con men.

After the last 7 years, I saw “wild” in the headline and was expecting something spicy. No such luck.

TL;DR they’re fake

“We recognize there are sediments in the well water, which can at times affect clarity with a reddish-brown tint,” said DOC Spokesman Andy Skoogman in a release, who added the testing will include water from cell faucets. “It’s important to point out that although the water may be unclear, it has not been deemed unsafe through the routine third party water testing.”

Has it been deemed safe? Or is the system “¯_(ツ)_/¯ IDK drink it good luck”?

(I mean, I already know the answer. The article talks about testing in general terms without really making it clear whether the water quality in the cells has been tested, when, or what the results were… which, to not answer the question is answering the question.)

Usually that means “unread” (which Lemmy will sometimes assign for a while to things which you have actually read.)

I know this is not gonna be some revelation, but: I have literally never encountered someone who makes their whole identity about being an Alpha for the sake of getting women, being superior to other men, etc, who doesn’t have some deep insecurity at the heart of it (and not very well hidden).

Mostly the dudes who are what Andrew Tate wants to be have interests like fishing or carpentry or business or some particular sports team. They don’t spend all their time in the “war room” scheming with other dudes how they can work together to trick women into having sex with them.

Remember: “If you come at the king, you best not miss” cuts both ways. There’s a pretty good chance that some Trumpy Republican is planning to let all these guys out of prison as the vanguard of the new order in 2024, or in 2028.

I’m glad they’re going to prison. But also, please vote.

4. McDonalds and Taylor are fighting tooth and nail to prevent people from circumventing their weird agreement and maintaining their machines successfully, in a Kafkaesque indictment of the whole concept that competition in a free market will lead to a sensible world

This dude on Youtube did an in-depth examination of the weird corporate reasons why the ice cream machines can’t be maintained properly. Sorry for the Youtube link, but I honestly couldn’t find a text story that went into the same type of analysis about it.

Edit: Timestamped the link to skip some folderol at the beginning

1. We all know why they put “AI-driven” in the headline… I mean, it worked on me; I clicked on it.
2. That doesn’t mean they’ll be “autonomous” in the sense that people think of when they see the headline and click on it.
3. Having a human in the loop does make a difference. Snowden talked about watching on his desktop people getting killed by drone strikes in real time, as part of his motivating factor for why he turned against the NSA and its mission. The Nazis had a lot of “morale problems” with Nazi soldiers who were assigned to holocaust-adjacent operations and had to find other solutions. Etc. Every human you take out of the equation is one less person who can rotate home and tell people, “Yo what they’re telling us to do is really fucked up, let me tell you…”
4. I see the air force’s point. I honestly don’t blame them for feeling that there’s no future in an air warfare system that has to have a squishy slow-thinking meatbag in the middle of it putting limits on its performance. This kind of thing was already part of the plan for the US’s next generation fighter (with the pilot as the “commander” of a little network of drones) and has been for a while.
5. If you haven’t seen Slaughterbots it’s well worth a watch.

Covid, strep throat, the flu, and other illnesses, i.e. covid covid covid and covid, but a lot of our parents have a very particular way of approaching what they’re willing to accept about why their child is sick.