“It’s The Great Stupid, Charlie Brown!”
1. I saw that meme on Facebook today. Is that the kind of misinformation social media platforms are supposed to censor, or is there value in learning that one’s Facebook friend is a moron?
2. On today’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade broadcast on NBC, three separate hosts mispronounced “Rockettes.” One called them the “Rockets,” another said “Rockeets,” and a third said “ROCK-ettes, with the accent on the first syllable. The Radio City Music Hall iconic kick-line dancers have been part of the parade for decades, and NBC has had broadcast rights for the event all year. Yet their “journalists” couldn’t bother to check to see what the perennial act is called? (Or learn to read?)
3. This week, New York State Senator Liz Krueger proposed that New York secede from the U.S. and become a province of Canada. Because Trump, of course.
4. This is the current query on “The Ethicist” column today: “My Trump-supporter friends understand that he’s a liar and adulterer but adamantly defend him with reasoning like ‘Everyone lies — have you not lied before?’ or ‘My dad’s an extremely trustworthy guy even though he cheated on my mom a couple of times — so what?’ I understand they are rationalizing to feel good about their candidate, but is it ethical to be hypocritical?” This question is so stupid in so many ways that I didn’t even bother to read Prof. Appiah’s answer. I think it was only chosen for the column as a vehicle for cheap Trump bashing.
5. Finally, here is MSNBC’s Designated Racist (though not the only one) Joy Reid’s closing rant last night on Thanksgiving Eve about conservatives who don’t think Trump-Deranged family members should ban them from the annual feast:
“So apparently the people who voted for the ‘I will protect women whether they like it or not’, ‘childless women should have no rights’, ‘Puerto Rico is a trash island’ and ‘Haitians will eat your pets’ gang are the real victims. Despite their guy winning the election. In fact, they are now the modern day equivalent of Rosa Parks, we’re told by a white comedian [Bill Maher], civil rights heroes, the lot of them. And the rest of us, among the 73 million Americans who voted not to have fascism, autocracy, mass deportation, internment camps and economy crushing tariffs are the bad guys, the segregationists of our time. Hold on, let me check my notes: I don’t want to have turkey dinner with the people screaming ‘Your body, my choice.’ Okay, so there is this strong dual energy among MAGA people and their apologists, and it actually fits quite neatly with the history of America. It’s equal parts bully energy, where they want to relentlessly troll liberals and lash out at minorities, and victim energy, where those same liberals are supposed to take the trolling quietly and also pity the trolls. It’s the eternal victimhood of the conservatives. We need to constantly coddle, study and understand them.You right-wingers shouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of your votes? ‘You don’t want to be around me because I voted for fascism. No fair. I am coughing on you with COVID, but you want me to wear a mask for your safety? No fair. My body, my choice.’ Well here’s an alternative thought: make your own dinner, MAGA. Make your own sandwiches, wipe your own tears, troll amongst yourselves with Elon and leave us alone. You worship Trump instead of Jesus. This time you didn’t even have to storm the Capitol, smash the windows or try to kill police officers or issue death threats to poll workers. See? You did it just by voting this time. Congrats, you got your way. And he even got away with breaking the law. Yay! But if you expect the 73 million who voted for the prosecutor, not the felon, and particularly the 92 percent of black women who voted for Kamala to give you a cookie for your vote, a trophy hug, the high fives, you might be asking too much. If we want to eat with you, we will. But if we just want some peace over the holidays and we don’t want to put up with your trolling while we eat our tofurkey. Get over it. Stop acting like we owe you. And for God’s sake, stop whining. It’s embarrassing. Our Thanksgiving, our choice.”
Ethics Alarms 
A career broadcaster on the notes that should be in front of every on-air person on mic for the parade coverage. Setting aside whether someone who takes part in U.S. culture should know the name of that iconic 99-year-old dance troupe (I looked it up), the production assistants should have provided prepared note cards (in 2024 maybe digital pages on the tablets they’re working from) with phonetic pronunciations* of the names of every participant in the parade. In this case it would read “rok-ETTS”. If it wasn’t in the talent’s notes, not only did they mess up, but the ‘backstage’ people did as well.
*The broadcast industry’s standard reference for this is a regularly updated guidebook first published in the 1930s by the radio network that devised the pronunciation symbology for their announcers. It’s now an e-book and website but I still have a hard copy, from my radio days, of the NBC Guide to Pronunciation.
Thanks for the inside dope on this Gregg. It seemed wholly unprofessional.
Stupid memes like this cause arguments, which drive traffic. Whatever drives traffic is A-Ok with Facebook. It’s hardly moderated at all, the report system is a joke, it’s infested with AI junk content and AI bots, which they do nothing about. Anything for Zuck’s bottom line.
There is some kind* of moderation on Facebook. Smith & Wesson’s page was suspended yesterday because “some of your activity looks like it doesn’t follow our rules”. FB was removing S&W posts for being about weapons.
I got put in FB jail for a couple of days during the first year of COVID. I posted a meme of Jeffrey Dahmer with the caption, “No one is going to tell me how many people I can have for Thanksgiving dinner.” I wouldn’t have been as mad if I thought I was being dinged for making light of cannibalism, but I’m pretty sure it was for posting something that sounded like it was defying the government.
You are right about the report system being a joke. I reported an account that was making scam posts where the account holder says a relative has a house that they need to rent. They offer it way below market. The goal is to scam people out of deposits. The photos were all copied from Zillow. FB said they didn’t see a problem with it. between posts like this and FB Marketplace, that platform is the scammiest.
*The worst kind.
Where in hell did you get that Joy Reid quote in a format that pissed me off trying to read because I had to go aaaaaaalllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the way to the end of the line?!
Never saw that happen before—appropriately, that was another stupid WordPress trick: on my draft, it looked like a normal pasted quote. I apologize, and thanks for the head’s up. Fixed!
3) Damn, I hope not, I’ll have to move because I’m not a citizen of Canada. Will there be a Nyexit vote? What will happen to Kathy Hochul? This is because of Trumps stance on illegal immigration. I guess NY doesn’t have to follow Federal Law.
Shoot, that’s going to mess up Niagara Falls also. There won’t be a US side and a Canadian side it will all be in Canada.
Will they rename the George Washington Bridge?
How will they handle all the gun owners in NY?
There are, of course, endless questions but we all know NY will never secede from the US. It’s just grandstanding.
Let ’em go. And take Massachusetts and Vermont with them. They can all pay Canadian taxes, eh? The finance bros and the stock exchanges will all move to Florida. We’ll get rid of Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders and Alvin Bragg. The Canucks can figure out what to do about public housing in New York City. And all the pro players will have to be paid in Canadian dollars and pay Canadian income tax. Oh, wait, the Jets and the Giants and the Patriots will have to play in the CFL! Er, sorey fellahs, eh?
And AOC will be in the Canadian Parliament! Yay! As will Chuck Schumer and Dan Goldman Brilliant!
If Mass went to Canada, I’m recommending MAID to every TDS sufferer I can find. And at least the Patriots can get back to winning once the competition gets easier.
That jug doesn’t have $36,500 worth of pennies (3,650,000). 3.65 million pennies (post 1982) would weigh in at slightly over 10 tons. Before 1982 they were 95% copper and 3.11g. So, if they were all 1982 and earlier that would come to just over 12.5 tons. 73,000 penny rolls would probably cost you a bit also.
#1-Start my pay @1¢ per day, and double it EACH DAY for a month, and I’ll make do…
PWS
After reading and hearing what comes out of her mouth over the years, from my vantage point here in southern Wisconsin, it appears to me that Joy Reid is a genuine imbecile, a racist – yes a racist, a psychological snowflake, and very likely an Orwellian styled totalitarian; I honestly can see no other root causes for the CRAP that comes out of her mouth. There are lots of signature significant things that have shown us over the years that MSNBC is a pure progressive (aka totalitarian) propaganda outlet and giving Joy Reid a regular platform to inflict her idiocy upon the world is certainly one of them.
I don’t understand how did media outlets like MSNBC become this way. Are these places completely full of ignorant emotional troglodytes with thousands of participation trophies displayed in their psychological trophy cases?
1: This is what you get when being bad at math is considered virtuous in the popular culture. I’m reminded of the bit a few years back when people–including the press–were saying to the effect that Bloomberg could give everyone in NY one million dollars for what we was spending on his presidential primary campaign when in reality it more like a penny.
2: Also, has no one involved ever in their lives encountered the linguistic / cultural device of appending “-ettes” to a word to denote a group of women* who are somehow associated with the root word???
3: Put me down as another one in favor of NY becoming a Province. (Says Humble Talent: “Fuggetabouttit!”) I also look forward to the effort that will come 100 or so years later when we go around erasing all traces of the existence of the State of New York from the culture and taking down any statue anywhere of anyone from New York. Gosh, in the history books they’ll even tell of how Donald Trump ran UNOPPOSED in 2016!
4: Oh so now after all those years of supporting Bill Clinton and “Character Doesn’t Matter” and “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” . . . NOW the Democrats are all about character and insisting that all that inflation in a non-issue. What goes up, must come down. Spinning wheel, got to go ’round.
5: Yeah, Joy, because it’s the Conservatives who are the ones disrupting dinners and shutting out family members over politics. The Left has never ever done anything of the sort. Tell me another one! Project much?!?
I have a friend (well…friend’s son, but anyway…) whose girlfriend is livid that he voted for Trump and telling him that he needs to repent or she can’t be with him. The whole rest of the family is telling him, “Cut her loose, Son. You can do better….”
–Dwayne
* Whatever a “woman”, as they say, is….