Monday, October 21, 2024

The MAGA and the Gender Gap Thread -- Mister Robinson's Neighborhood

[Written 9/29/24]



It is surprising, and then when you think about it unsurprising that, after all the major Republican scandals that have turned out to be 48-hour stories, it is the Mark Robinson one that had legs. The establishment media has tried to pretend that this is about the Nazi/slavery comments, but those still contested (okay, technically still contested) remarks on a chat site years ago are not all that worse than what the man has said on the record, and often on mic, as recently as a couple of years ago. Given the widely circulated videos of Robinson endorsing white supremacy and denying the Holocaust, if the Nude Africa comments had been unearthed from some obscure chat room in the 90s, they hardly would've caused a ripple.

This is about the porn.

This is about the luridness, the hypocrisy, the creepiness, and the "you knew it all along" quality of the story. Robinson was one of the most hateful "moralists" of MAGA whose anti-abortion stance seems to have been based entirely on slut shaming. Even a cursory Google search will turn up numerous on camera claims that we only have abortion because women can't keep their skirts down. (That same Google search will probably reveal that Robinson actually admitted in an ad to paying for his future wife's abortion back in 1989, another story that disappeared from view within a couple of days.) These comments attacking female (and, as far as I can tell, exclusively female) promiscuity alternated with Holocaust denial and endorsements of white supremacy.

Mark Robinson is just the kind of judgmental misogynist that women suspect of being a porn addict, and, in a move that would have been to on the nose for even the most hackneyed of streaming series but which is right on brand for 2024, it turned out he wasn't just a porn addict, he was pretty much the creepiest and most hypocritical version imaginable. Even in the highly expurgated CNN article (which was very much a PG-13 edit of an NC-17 movie) we learned that his interests included fantasizing about his experiences as a teenaged voyeur, constructing elaborate sexual fantasies about his sister-in-law, and most of all (queue up Robinson's anti-LGBTQ comments here) transsexual porn.

The other reason that the Robinson story continues to have legs is that he refuses to drop out of the election, which tells you a great deal about today's Republican Party. A Trump-endorsed, own-the-libs candidate, the very idea of dropping out of the race for the good of the party is alien to him. Dickishness is so fundamentally ingrained in this movement as to be possibly its defining trait. Sometimes it can be viewed as a show of dominance. More often, it is nothing more than an adolescent need for attention. It is followed not that far back by a refusal to conform to conventional standards, mores, even consensus views of reality. Staying in the race, even when told that winning is impossible and that by not dropping, you are threatening Republicans up and down the ticket, is entirely in character.

One of the points we've been making in dozens of posts for more than two years now is that Dobbs has pushed us into unexplored political territory. Over that time we've had any number of data journalists and news analysts assuring us that they have it all figured out, that they have factored in all the new developments, and that we should trust them. They haven't and we shouldn't. When it comes to the impact on presidential elections of Dobbs and of the radically changed landscape of reproductive rights, N = 0.

We can't quantify or calibrate. The best we can do is try to keep track of what's going on and make a few very cautious assumptions about direction and the range of magnitude. With all that in mind, the Republicans are doing an extraordinary variety of things seemingly designed to drive women away from the party. There is no statistical basis for predicting just how big of an effect this will have, but it is difficult to see it being positive for the GOP in November.



PS And in case you were wondering. No, he's not going down quietly.

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Friday, October 18, 2024

RFK jr. went from one end of the political spectrum to the other. That was a bit of a family tradition.

If you're interested enough in politics and history to read this post, you should definitely take a few minutes and check out this bit by Mort Sahl on the Hollywood Palace (sort of a poor man's Ed Sullivan Show, but not without its notable moments).

Listen for the Reagan reference at the beginning, "even the New York Times" around two and a half minutes, Mitt Romney's dad, and lots of other familiar names, but mainly pay attention to the way Vietnam had become the issue that defined left and right, especially when it came to Bobby Kennedy.





The story is complicated, particularly when you factor in Roy Cohn, Trump's mentor and RFK's bitter rival. I don't have any big point to make, just provide an ironic bit of context.


Larry Tye excerpted in the Boston Globe.

Senator McCarthy dated Kennedy sisters Patricia and Eunice in Washington when they visited Jack, and on Cape Cod, where Eunice thought it fun to push McCarthy out of her father’s boat until she learned he couldn’t swim. The Wisconsin senator played shortstop for the Barefoot Boys, the Kennedy family softball team (McCarthy was benched after making four errors). And he cracked a rib during one of the storied touch football games on the lawn in Hyannisport.

...

Months later, it was Bobby’s turn to get a boost from McCarthy, who had been reelected and elevated to chair the powerful Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. One of the first calls McCarthy took, when searching for a chief counsel, was from the other Joe. This time the senior Kennedy was plugging Bobby, whom he’d once described as the runt of his litter of nine — the lamest athlete, most tongue-tied, and least likely to matter. He now understood that Bobby was the most like him of his children, in everything from his capacity to hate as well as love, to his hard-as-nails single-mindedness (in Joe’s case it was to make money so his kids wouldn’t have to, while Bobby’s three totems were, in descending order, the Kennedy family, God, and the Democratic Party).

During his undergraduate years at Harvard in the late 1940s, Bobby had shown where he stood on McCarthy’s soon-to-be holy war against Communism when he defended the senator in impassioned debates with friends. In a law school paper, he argued that President Franklin Roosevelt had sold out US interests in his agreement with the Soviets on the configuration of postwar Europe. His first job after law school in 1951 was investigating Bolsheviks at the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department. And as manager for his brother Jack’s Senate campaign, he attacked Senator Lodge for being soft on Communism.

Now, as McCarthy weighed his options for chief counsel, Bobby said he was almost as alarmed as the senator about the “serious internal security threat to the United States,” adding that “Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it.” The lawmaker and the newly-minted lawyer both had the whatever-it-takes instincts of alley fighters, which Bobby believed they’d need in a Cold War where the enemy fought dirty. “Joe’s methods may be a little rough,” Bobby once told a pair of journalists, “but, after all, his goal is to expose Communists in government, and that’s a worthy goal. So why are you reporters so critical of his methods?”

There was one last reason why a job with McCarthy was so appealing to Bobby Kennedy. Bobby knew his father admired McCarthy, and he saw the senator as a reflection of much that he loved in his dad. Working for a tough-minded jingoist like McCarthy also was Bobby’s way of trying to erase the public’s lingering memory of Joe Kennedy as a Nazi apologist and, as many British still saw FDR’s early-war ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, a coward. What Bobby failed to see was that his father — an isolationist who believed that Communists, like fascists, could be accommodated until their regimes collapsed from within — was far less of a cold warrior than McCarthy was. Less even than Bobby himself was on the way to becoming.

...

Both Bobby and Jack understood McCarthy’s magnetism as well as the menace that turned his name into an “ism” personifying character assassination and fear-mongering. How they responded to that spoke volumes about the brothers’ own differences in temperament and outlook. The silky-smooth and highbrow Jack wanted little to do with McCarthy; the more gut-trusting, free-spirited Bobby embraced the Wisconsinite as a friend. The public may have thought McCarthy a “monster,” but he actually “was just plain fun,” Bobby’s widow, Ethel, told me. “He didn’t rant and roar, he was a normal guy.”

...

Bobby was quicker to grasp the immorality but was more loyal than his big brother, and even his father. While he’d worked for McCarthy for just seven-and-a-half months, Bobby stayed his friend till the end, making his last visit to the senator just before McCarthy died. His job with Joe launched Bobby’s career, injecting into his life passion and direction glaringly absent before then. His relationship with the Wisconsin senator became, too, a paradox he couldn’t escape, serving for some as a testament to his fidelity and patriotism, and for others as a measure of his youthful misdirection.

Senator McCarthy died at the age of 48 in 1957, liquor having eaten away at his liver. Jack stayed away from the funeral and urged his brother to do the same, but Bobby insisted on being there. At the church in Appleton, Wisconsin, however, he sat in the choir loft where nobody would see him; at the graveside, he stood apart from other Washington officials. And when the service was done, he begged journalists not to mention his being there for fear of embarrassing himself and his brother, the man who would become president of the United States in just three years.



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Thursday, October 17, 2024

Does a mechanical Turk bartender count?

Tesla finally had its robotaxi debut, the new product launch that was supposed to save the company. 

It did not go well. 



 (On a related note, Dark City was better than the Matrix, but we'll get beck to that.)


 Jonathan M. Gitlin writing for Ars Technica [emphasis added, but the caption was his.]:

Over time, Musk claimed the operating costs of his Cybercab would be 20 cents per mile, "and yes you'll be able to buy one," he told the crowd to excited shrieks. "We expect the cost to be below $30,000," Musk said, before expounding on a business model where instead of the company owning and operating these allegedly revenue-generating assets itself, they are instead owned by private individuals who each give Tesla its regular cut. This week another four top executives left the company in advance of last night's event, including "the global vehicle automation and safety policy lead."

...

Musk claims that Tesla "expects to start" fully unsupervised FSD next year on public roads in California and Texas. A recent analysis by an independent testing firm found the current build requires human intervention about once every 13 miles, often on roads it has used before.

 ...

"Before 2027" should see the Cybercab, which Musk claims will be built in "very high volume." Tesla-watchers will no doubt remember similar claims about the Model X, Model 3, Model Y, and most recently the Cybertruck, all of which faced lengthy delays as the car maker struggled to build them at scale. Later, Musk treated the audience to a video of an articulated robotic arm with a vacuum cleaner attachment cleaning the two-seat interior of the Cybercab. Whether this will be sold as an aftermarket accessory to Cybercab owners, or if they're supposed to clean out their robotaxis by hand between trips, remains unclear at this time.

...

"Reading Wall Street analyst reactions to the 'We, Robot' event, the consensus that the event was 'underwhelming' says more about their expectations than the event itself," said Ed Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors. "You can tell it's unsettling for them watching the fantasy float free of even appearing plausible or real. The fantasy of self-driving Teslas has worked for almost a decade because it felt real, but now just feels like a fantasy. Real things do not happen on movie studio lots. This was a theme park, not an informational event about an emerging technology," Niedermeyer told Ars.

Those who have paid attention to the details—the years of production hell that accompanied each of Tesla's five models, the repeated claims for a "coast to coast" Autopilot drive that haven't materialized in eight years, the regular federal safety investigations and resulting recalls for both Autopilot and FSD (which still can't drive itself in a one-way tunnel), and so on, there is nothing to suggest this latest chapter—couched cleverly under a "forward-looking statement" disclaimer—will be any different from the ones we've already read.

The Verge is also skeptical.

As good as the Ars Technica write-up was, it left out my favorite detail. Fortunately, we still have Jalopnik.

 

We predicted that this would either be a non-demonstration or a fake, possibly involving a mechanical Turk. My question is: does the bartender count?

Monday, April 8, 2024

If I had a slightly cynical attitude toward Elon Musk, I might be a bit suspicious of a couple of things here

 First of all, there's the timing of this.


 

The surprise Robo Taxi announcement certainly came at a fortuitous moment for Musk. Before the news broke, Tesla was having a really bad, awful, totally nogood year ...

 

 

 

... followed by a really bad, awful, totally nogood day thanks to the release of a Reuters story about the company ever so quietly canceling its plans for a low-cost EV. This was on top of tons of bad news about the companies inventory and other problems, not to mention the cybertruck managing to edge out the Ford Edsel as the ultimate cautionary tale of why not to overhype a new automobile. 

 At 4:49 in the afternoon, less than an hour after the stock dropped another 3.63%...

 

 And one minute later...


 


Longtime readers will be familiar with Musk's history of announcing incredible breakthroughs, often just as one of his companies is about to go over a cliff.

From May 25, 2022

About seven or eight years ago, Musk's promises started becoming unmoored not just from what his engineers were working on, but from what was even possible. As best I can tell, this started with the hyperloop.

[And before the rumbling starts again, though you have heard about hundreds of millions of dollars going into hyperloop companies, absolutely none of that money is going into Elon Musk s air cushion idea. Every proposal and protype you've seen has been for maglev. Companies like Virgin scrapped his concept but kept the name.]*

Part of the reason for these increasingly delusional boasts may just have been Musk getting high on his own supply.** Take someone with messianic tendencies, give them a full-bore cult of personality, and have even the most respectable journalists refer to him as a real life Tony Stark. You know it's going to go to a guy's head.

But these fantastic claims also served his financial interest. The huge run up in the stock of Tesla came after the narrative had shifted to over-the-top fantasy.

Maintaining his current fortune requires Musk to keep these fantasies vivid in the minds of fans and investors. People have to believe that the Tesla model after next will be a flying exoskeleton that can blow shit up.

To be blunt, the industry is nowhere near the level of self-driving functionality and Tesla in nowhere near being the leader in this field. Assuming we do not witness the company leapfrog the competition and unveil a major breakthrough in level 4 autonomy, what are we likely to see on August 8th?

1. Nothing. Elon Musk will announce that the big reveal has been pushed back to make the product even more spectacular.

2. An Optimus Style non demonstration where Elon will haul out a barely functional prototype years behind the competition in terms of sophistication and will spend the rest of the time talking about how incredible the next iteration will eventually be.

3. Low level fake. A painstakingly choreographed drive-through of carefully mapped course with selective editing to cover the remaining glitches. (see Optimus.)

4. High level fake. Everything in the low level fake plus a Mechanical Turk actually at the controls. Check out the right side of this video which was released to great fanfare.


Musk later added a note that the robot was not actually operating autonomously but of course, he wasn't trying to mislead anyone. 

* In the two years since this post, those hundreds of millions have been long been burned through with the biggest and best financed Hyperloop One/Virgin Hyperloop finally shuttering its airlock last year. 

** And we now know getting high on a lot of other things as well.

 

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