Your Once and Final Supreme Double Impeachee

[kladner]

Hmmm. Afghanistan and.....
Just the matter-of-fact reference to "heavy deployment" somewhere in the world is chilling. Gotta keep those arms purchases at a nice healthy level. Like the Cheeto in Chief said (more or less), What's the use of having (name your weapon) if you aren't going to use them?
Karma can be a harsh mistress, and the US account on the bad side must be overflowing.

[Dr Sardonicus]

My tracking of news stories relating to the ACLU's fight against Il Duce's jihad against illegal immigrants has turned up a story out of El Paso County, Colorado, hard on the heels of the story about the fire that spread out of Fort Carson.

It seems that, a few weeks ago, the ACLU had filed suit against the El Paso County Sheriff. He was holding defendants on requests from ICE, even though they had either tied to post bond or had resolved the cases that has led to their detention in the first place. The ACLU's suit claimed that this was a violation of Colorado law. By issuing an ORDER GRANTING PLAINTIFFS’ MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION, the judge ordered the affected detainees released, and also indicated the suit was likely to succeed on the merits.

The Sheriff's reaction may be summed up as, Justice has prevailed. Appeal immediately!

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by kladner

Hmmm. Afghanistan and.....
Just the matter-of-fact reference to "heavy deployment" somewhere in the world is chilling. Gotta keep those arms purchases at a nice healthy level. Like the Cheeto in Chief said (more or less), What's the use of having (name your weapon) if you aren't going to use them?

I recall warmongering WJC-era SoS Madeleine Albright as being the one who quoth "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" - is that the quote you have in mind or did Trump echo similar?

=====================

In other Trump news, I'm deriving wry amusement at the Cambridge Analytica hue and cry. More manufactured hysteria and selective-outrage theater from the Clintontite Dem establishment and their MSM bootlickers desperate to deflect from their own deep culpability in giving us the Trump presidency, by way of the fact that the nakedly elitist, brazenly corrupt warmonger, Big Money stooge and hubby's-coattails-riding political carpetbagger who emerged as the nominee from the party's rigged-six-ways-to-Sunday primary process was a horrible choice in an election year where large swaths of the electorate on both sides of the partisan divide, having seen the 8 years of the "hope and change" Obama presidency exposed as a Big Lie, were desperate for some kind of credibly populist message from a genuine establishment outsider.

Oh look! Our beloved "our users are the product" data-hoovering-and-selling social media are being used for - gasp! - data mining by non-altruistic interests - whodathunkit?

In "nothing new under the sun" news, here are some shockingly candid admissions by the director of data analytics for the Obama 2012 campaign, Carol Davidsen (bolds mine):

An example of how we used that data to append to our email lists. pic.twitter.com/VHhSukvXDY
...
Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.
...
They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.

Longtime Silicon Valley observer Robert X. Cringely weighs in: Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and our personal data | I, Cringely

There are hundreds — possibly thousands — of companies that rely on Facebook data accessed through an Application Programming Interface (API) called the Graph API. These data are poorly protected and even more poorly policed. So the first parts of this story to dispel are the ideas that the personality test data obtained by Cambridge Analytica were in any way unusual or that keeping those data after their sell-by date was, either. That doesn’t necessarily make the original researcher without blame, but the Cambridge folks could have very easily found the same data elsewhere or even generated it themselves. It’s not that hard to do. And Facebook doesn’t have a way to make you throw it away (or even know that you haven’t), either. Facebook never really tried to protect its data in any big way. They have a rate limiter to slow down the number of pulls through the API, but it is (maybe was depending on events of this week) all very lenient. The only trick is getting Facebook members to authorize you. Facebook’s safe harbor, you see, is the fact that you have authorized this specific release of personal data. Often, however, the Facebook member has no idea they have authorized anything.

On the GOP side of things, Steve Bannon, Koch[sucker] Inc and such have also been doing this sort of stuff for years. And if team Hill wasn't doing similar, what were all those multimillion-dollar consultants, media-strategists and data-analytics folks getting paid to do?

[kladner]

I recall warmongering WJC-era SoS Madeleine Albright as being the one who quoth "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" - is that the quote you have in mind or did Trump echo similar?

At the point when Trump started receiving Nation Security advice, it got around that he was asking, to the effect of, "Why can't we use nukes, since we got them?"
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/03/trum...h-reports.html

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

At the point when Trump started receiving Nation Security advice, it got around that he was asking, to the effect of, "Why can't we use nukes, since we got them?"
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/03/trum...h-reports.html

I like that "receiving." Because if there's one thing that's well known about Il Duce, it's that he doesn't listen to or heed advice -- be it from national security advisors, legal counsel, economists, anybody.

Another thing that he's demonstrated, time and again, is that if he gets blowback about anything he says -- like, say, wanting a tenfold increase in our nuclear arsenal --- he simply denies he ever said it. This is an example of what is called "gaslighting."

[kladner]

I don't think I ever heard the term "gaslighting." I assume there is some kind of metaphor involved, although "gas" alone is suggestive.

[wombatman]

Originally Posted by kladner

I don't think I ever heard the term "gaslighting." I assume there is some kind of metaphor involved, although "gas" alone is suggestive.

Gaslighting is a common technique used by emotionally and psychologically abusive people that is essentially designed to make you think you're the one who is being crazy/unreasonable.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/b...ns-gaslighting

Some good examples in the above link.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

I don't think I ever heard the term "gaslighting." I assume there is some kind of metaphor involved, although "gas" alone is suggestive.

The link provided by wombatman (I have inserted an IMDB link in the quote) mentions the movie whose name is the origin of the term:

For example, in the movie Gaslight (1944), a man manipulates his wife to the point where she thinks she is losing her mind.

It's a classic. I recommend watching it. The IMDB summary has the following:

Named for this film, gaslighting is actually a recognized form of antisocial behavior. It involves an exploitative person manipulating people who suspect him or her, into questioning their own perceptions so that they distrust their own suspicions of the manipulator.

The term gaslighting is, of course, mentioned (though without explaining its origin) in the link Coping with narcissistic personality disorder in the White House which I provided in a post last August here.

[kladner]

Thanks for the link, Wombatman. Some good tips.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

The link provided by wombatman (I have inserted an IMDB link in the quote) mentions the movie whose name is the origin of the term:

Careful - the 1944 version of Gaslight is a big-money Hollywood remake of the 1940 British original. Both are fine films, but there is some interesting history about the 1944 remake, as detailed in Wikipedia (bolds mine):

Encouraged by the success of the play and film, MGM bought the remake rights, but with a clause insisting that all existing prints of Dickinson's version be destroyed,[3] even to the point of trying to destroy the negative, so that it would not compete with their more highly publicised 1944 remake starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotten.[4][5] "Fortunately they failed, and now the British film has been restored by the BFI and issued in the UK on Blu-ray in a pristine print."[6]

That kind of attempted obliteration of an artistic work for money-grubbing's sake is just evil.

I recently watched a used DVD of the 1940 version (I scored a used DVD for just $2 + $3.99 shipping from an Amazon reseller - currently looks like ~$9 total is cheapest there). I figure if MGM tried so hard to eradicate - literally! - the original when it came out with its 1944 remake-starring-bigger-named-actors, the original must be worth watching. Wonderful performances from the 2 leads, the great Austrian actor Anton Walbrook is thrillingly creepy as the controlling, evil-scheming husband, and Diana Wynyard is equally brilliant in portraying the victim of said psychological machinations.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Careful - the 1944 version of Gaslight is a big-money Hollywood remake of the 1940 British original. Both are fine films, but there is some interesting history about the 1944 remake, as detailed in Wikipedia (bolds mine):

That kind of attempted obliteration of an artistic work for money-grubbing's sake is just evil.
[snip]

Thanks for this -- never knew about it. That is evil. Worthy of the Gaslighter-in-Chief himself.

Jeez -- a five-year non-compete clause would have served the financial agenda just as well.

Glad the original survived. I'll have to track down a copy...