Round The Decay Of That Colossal ONT, Boundless And Bare, The Lone And Level Sands Stretch Far Away

Evening Horde! It's that time of night when we kick back with a cold one and relax from another wonderful day in Biden's America. Better yet, have you ever considered olives?

Thursday Night Question

What to Leave Behind: Weird Wills of All Kinds

The article lists a bunch of weird provisions from wills, but I thought this would be an interesting discussion for the ONT. What is the weirdest thing you have ever come across in a will? Tell us in the comment section.

Is This Something?

How GOP Legislatures Can Copy Johnny Depp and Defang the Lying Press Tomorrow With One Simple Trick

I am not a lawyer, so I can't speak definitively to the merits of the proposal, but it seems like a hell of an idea to me. Basically, what the author is arguing for, is for Republican state legislatures to add falsely calling someone a racist or white supremacist to the list of things that constitute defamation per se.

“Defamation per se” denotes statements so inherently damaging that their false utterance is presumed to hurt the target, no matter what – even if he cannot prove economic harm. The damages are simply assumed automatically. When a libel or defamation case involves statements that are defamation per se, it is substantially easier to win a case. But just as importantly, by reducing the pleading hurdles at the outset of a case, defamation per se makes it much easier to hold a defendant’s feet to the fire in discovery — for example, by demanding all Slack or Journolist logs pertaining to the smear.

Traditionally, four types of false allegations have been considered severe enough that they constitute defamation per se:
Claiming a person was involved in criminal activity
Claiming that a person was unethical or incompetent in their professional conduct
Claiming a person has some kind of contagious or loathsome disease.
Claiming a woman is unchaste or has otherwise engaged in sexual misconduct

He goes on to argue that a false accusation of racism today is far more damaging than the traditional allegations above.

Imagine you’re the typical American mid-career professional, a doctor or lawyer or college professor—if you already are one, no need to imagine. What do you fear more? Being falsely accused of having monkeypox, or of being a “racist”? Would it be worse to appear on your local newspaper’s front page under a headline suggesting you embezzled money, or one suggesting you are a white nationalist? The answer, we suspect, is obvious.

…

Holy Land, a restaurant and hummus brand in the Minneapolis area, was destroyed after activists dug up tweets the owner’s daughter made as a teenager eight years previously. Despite the owner firing his own daughter, stores yanked Holy Land’s products from shelves, a landlord evicted it from one of its restaurants, and ultimately nearly 70 people lost their jobs.

So what do some of you lawyerly types think of the idea?

Fallout From The Sexual Revolution

I originally had three items under this section, but one of them was deleted by the author. First there's this:

The Culture of the Single Millennial

Environment matters. When the environment around you does not seem conducive to serious courtship and marriage, then there is a high probability you will not seek those things. On the other hand, if you see the majority around you acting more mature and marrying earlier, then you will seek potential life partners from the outset and look for a different set of qualities.
A lot of young men, being naturally competitive, may not necessarily envision a life of casual sex but become seduced into it after observing their peers engaging in the lifestyle. Young men enter a sort of arms race against one another. Many of them will think: “Why should I settle down early when the other guys are hooking up with so many girls now? Are they cooler or better than me? I have to prove that I can do it to!” This will lead him down the rabbit hole of “hook up culture” which could become addictive. It may take years to undo this lifestyle.
Young women compete with each other too. If they think showing off their bodies on social media or having sex with the more popular guys will raise their status or secure a higher status man, then many of them will act accordingly.
It is difficult to commit to a partner unless you sense loyalty from that person. An environment of partying and easy online dating does not exude loyalty, but rather, opportunism and fleeting pleasures. This makes everyone involved more paranoid and avoidant.

Then there is this tweet, and the discussion that follows.

The third was a long Twitter thread from a lady who recounted, quite frankly, some of the things she had done as a young adult, including having a threesome with the man whom she later married, and how they reverberated to this day and almost destroyed her married sex life and indeed her marriage itself. I don't know if it was “brave” to post what she posted, but she was very candid about things that she had done and how they effected her later in life, and how she and her husband were working on healing the wounds. The thread was up for several days, but when I went to link it for the ONT it had been deleted.

As someone from Gen X, I sometimes think that we hit the sweet spot of the sexual revolution. The hedonism of the 70s certainly bled over into our high school and college experiences, but traditional expectation of marriage and families also held sway, and most people my age moved pretty seamlessly from college to career and marriage. Now than I am older I can see the problems with it, but all in all, and generally speaking, I don't think the college party scene impacted our future lives too badly.

Nowadays, however, for millennials and zoomers, it didn't end with college. Hook up culture continues right through their 20s and into their 30s. By the time they start to think about the future, the men are jaded and the women are bitter. Not everyone, of course, but a good chunk of the population. It's a problem. I can't think of a stable society that wasn't centered around the family unit,and ours is becoming less and less so.

I Love The Smell Of Gasoline In The Morning. Smells Like...Freedom

I Rented an Electric Car for a Four-Day Road Trip. I Spent More Time Charging It Than I Did Sleeping.

The infrastructure to support electric cars isn't there yet. I have a buddy who drives a Tesla, and he travels all over without many problems, he says, but for non-Tesla vehicles it can be quite a chore, as the author relates in the article.

Keep Your Chin Up Bros, We're Winning

Sarah Hoyt, discussing the videos that came out of Davos. These Are Not Signs of Winning

But you have to remember nothing in this are the signs of a winning ideology, one that has any grip on hearts and minds. Yes, the communists always wanted to watch your every move and control everything you did and if possible thought. They even achieved some of it by being low-key and sneaky for a while, when the mass-communication technologies favored them anyway. But now? Now they are saying the quiet part out loud, and so desperate — as their ideology of top down and center out control proves absolutely bankrupt in every sense, including economic — that they have changed from “we must gull them with promises” to “We’ll just control everything and watch their every expression, and they can never escape, never!” This is always the final phase of crashing regimes, and it won’t go any better for them now.

DALL-E

There's a new AI to play with online called DALL-E. The name is an amalgam of the Pixar robot and Salvador Dali. Basically you put in a word or phrase and the AI creates a series of images based upon your input. Like this:

If you'd like to play with it yourself you can find it here, but be warned you'll get a server too busy result if a lot of people are using it at the time. Link any good results in the comments.

Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by dick taters:

posted by WeirdDave at 10:00 PM

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