James Fridman, a Twitter artist who specializes in satirical Photoshopping was asked by a young woman in the tweet above to “make her look pretty,” supplying a selfie for the “before” shot.
Here is what Fridman tweeted back:
Nice.
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Pointer: The Blaze
Now, do I think Pete doesn’t look too bright only because I know he isn’t too bright? I think so…
There are two reasons to deride Rep. Nielsen. First, by his own words he is marked as an idiot unworthy not only off high office but of public trust, and second, he either has been paying no attention to epic, infamous, well-publicized catastrophes in his own party, or doesn’t have a brain pan of sufficient depth to comprehend them.
Surely you remember Todd Akin, the Missouri GOP Senate candidate in 2012, who blew his party’s chances of taking a eminently winnable seat from the horrible Claire McCaskill by uttering this nonsense on the issue of whether rape-caused pregnancies should be an exception to abortion restrictions:
“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down…”
He was ridiculed, he was attacked, he was mocked, and from all parties and ideologies, for his magical theory that a woman’s body knows the difference between “legitimate rape” and the nice kind of sexual intercourse. (Oddly, none of those “doctors” ever came forward, perhaps because they were wearing diapers and had turnips sticking out of their ears. Somehow, Pete Nielsen missed all of that, and so during a debate in the Idaho Legislature on bill that would require women seeking abortions to be given a list of providers of free ultrasounds, when it was noted that the measure makes no exception for victims of rape or incest, he piped up with this:
“Now, I’m of the understanding that in many cases of rape it does not involve any pregnancy because of the trauma of the incident. That may be true with incest a little bit.”
Now, if he had been immediately pelted with wadded up papers, soda cans and other things by his horrified colleagues, may be would have had the sense to stop digging, but, being an idiot, he didn’t. Asked how he knew this absolute non-medical non-fact as reliable as the theory that you can catch AIDS from a toilet seat, Nielsen said, “That’s information that I’ve had through the years. Whether it’s totally accurate or not, I don’t know. “I read a lot of information. I have read it several times. … Being a father of five girls, I’ve explored this a lot.”
Wait, what? Never mind, I don’t want to think about that last part. Continue reading
Beneath contempt.
And this applies to the Republican Party, too.
Yes, it is that simple.
(The disgusting Heidi Trump story is here.)
Developers in Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams made “Tay,” an Artificial Intelligence web-bot, to “experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding.” She spoke in text, memes and emoji on severalf different platforms, including Kik, Groupme and Twitter ‘”like a teen girl.” Microsoft marketed her as “The AI with zero chill.” You could chat with Tay by tweeting or Direct Messaging the bot at @tayandyou on Twitter. Though she was programmed to use millennial slang and be up to date on pop culture, she was, like Arnold the good cyborg in “Terminator 2,” designed so she would learn from her online interactions with humans, and you know how ethical humans are.
Within 24 hours, Tay was asking strangers she called “daddy” to “fuck” her, expressing doubts that the Holocaust was real and saying things like “Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have got now;” “Donald Trump is the only hope we’ve got;” “Repeat after me, Hitler did nothing wrong” and “Ted Cruz is the Cuban Hitler…that’s what I’ve heard so many others say.” For Tay, becoming more human meant becoming a vulgar, sex-obsessed, racist, anti-Semitic, Nazi-loving Trump supporter.
Imagine what her values would be like in 48 hours. Wisely, Microsoft is not willing to chance it, and Tay is now unplugged and awaiting either reprogramming or replacement. One of Tay’s last tweets was,
“Okay. I’m done. I feel used.”
Oh, yes, this artificial intelligence stuff is bound to work out well.
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Pointer: Althouse
I must confess that I got a bit bored with my promised unethical Trump quote of the day feature, since on most days there are so many of them. After a while they are predictable and redundant. It’s best to just assume that Trump is being unethical, and wait until he crosses a new line before highlighting an example of his despicable nature. I think threatening another candidate’s wife is a new line: has any Presidential candidate ever directly and publicly threatened an adversary’s wife? Would any previous candidate survive public outrage if he did?
This attack was particularly outrageous. Trump, whose calling card is Rationalization #2 A, Sicilian Ethics or “They had it coming,” was reacting to an offensive ad by a pro-Cruz group in Utah, which released a nasty ad featuring a nude photo Trump’s trophy wife Melania once posed for with the caption “Meet Melania Trump, Your Next First Lady. Or, You Could Support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.” It wasn’t Cruz’s ad, and he could not, under the law, have anything to do with it (not that I would put it past his campaign anyway.) Cruz responded by tweeting that Trump had shown that “you’re more of a coward than I thought.” Continue reading
Memphis, Tennessee Facebook user Jaton Justsilly Jaibabi posted this photo of her two small children with duct tape over their mouths and cuffing their wrists, with the legend, “Kids for sale, 45% because they bad.”
Now the Memphis police are investigating. I don’t know why the investigation is necessary; this is signature significance; No responsible parent who can be trusted with the delicate job of raising children would do this to them. It is also an example of what the law calls res ipsa loquitur: “the thing speaks for itself.” This is child abuse, and the woman responsible for it is a child abuser. No other interpretation is possible.
In fact, the poster, who has ended her Facebook account, appears to be part of an entire family that should be considered a societal menace. Jaibabi’s cousin, Derion King, explained that this was just a practical joke, writing in part,
“Basically a joke at the moment that people just went overboard about. People make mistakes and that’s what this situation is, a lesson learned. They are safe, unharmed, and loved. That’s all it is to it.”
There are eight incorrect, idiotic or unethical statements in this 36 word statement: impressive! And frightening. Here they are: Continue reading
Oh, shut up.
Wrote acclaimed pop astrophysicist Tyson in a tweet:
Hmmmm.
1. Tyson cannot help himself: he frequently mixes political bias into his supposedly “just facts and science!”lectures, and in cases like this, lets the cat out of the bag: he’s a partisan hack. The news media and allies of Hillary Clinton are doing their best to help Donald Trump get nominated, because they see him as one of the very few candidates that the awful Hillary Clinton could beat in a general election. Tyson reveals himself as one of them with his tweet. This was the same kind of calculation the Republican Party made when it allowed Trump, a Democrat, to run in the Republican primaries, and didn’t that work out well?
2. Tyson isn’t exactly a member of the news media, but he’s a media personality who carries some weight, as his opinions on things he really knows little about are given undue credibility because, you know, he’s smart. Well, Tyson’s dangerous game is dumb, and he’s also abusing his authority by playing it. It puts the U.S. at risk of a President Trump….and for what, to achieve the Nirvana of a President Clinton? He and others trying these tactics need to remember that any candidate who is nominated has a chance of being elected, especially running against a corrupt and bumbling liar like Hillary Clinton. Continue reading
—-Former chess grandmaster and Soviet dissident Garry Kasparov on Facebook, explaining to clueless U.S. citizens what they don’t appreciate about their own system, from the perspective of an immigrant who has seen where socialist fantasies lead.
Of course, Kasparov isn’t remotely eligible to be President, since he was born in Russia and is now a Croatian citizen. Yet if I could, I would vote for him over any of the leading candidates in both parties even if he couldn’t speak English and had to commute from Croatia.
Kasperov, who is the chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and the author of Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, elaborated on his theme at the Daily Beast, giving an American history lesson in the process (Does Donald Trump know any of this stuff? No chance!) and saying in part… Continue reading
David Sirota, who is an American political commentator, radio host, a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, a blogger, and from time to time a Democratic Party spokesperson, tweeted this yesterday:
That’s pretty straight-forward, don’t you think? Res ipsa loquitur, I would say. To be fair, Hillary would have to turn the clock back for her to be “talking about building walls,” but only four months back
The question really isn’t whether Hillary Clinton is trustworthy, but how anyone can think she is, or more pointedly, how anyone can claim she is and look at themselves in the mirror without gagging.
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Pointer: Instapundit
Ethics Alarms 