- With an example of a Florida Attorney General suing Target for selling products the MAGA folks find objectionable; what happened to free enterprise? Let the market figure it out!
- Our Orwellian fascist government wants to eliminate past social media posts about diversity;
- While RFK Jr downplays the current measles outbreaks and cancels FDA plans for flu shots;
- Despite conservative claims, the US government has, in fact, being doing audits of itself, but Trump just fired those “inspector generals”;
- How Europe is appalled that Trump has become Putin’s poodle;
- And on a more enlightening note, another piece about “the dress” ten years on; it’s all about the lighting, or the lighting people expect from their daily experience.
Some of these things I just can’t figure out. I guess it’s because I still think conservatives act according to some underlying principles — like free enterprise, perhaps? — rather than behaving like tribal bigots, or authoritarian dictators.
AlterNet, Alex Henderson, 26 Feb 2025: ‘Buffoonery’: Far-right Florida AG suing Target over LGBTQ Pride merchandise (From Miami New Times)
There’s some background about Republican AGs attacking Target in 2023.
Now, in 2025, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is attacking Target’s Pride Collection in a new lawsuit.
The lawsuit, according to Miami New Times reporter Alex DeLuca, accuses Target of “defrauding investors” with the merchandise and accuses the company of “not properly disclosing to investors the risk” of “offensive” products.
Why is the government monitoring what a private business is putting up for sale to its customers? Is anything illegal going on here? Is Target violating any safety or environmental standards? No, apparently, just the delicate sensibilities of Republican politicians, who on behalf of their voters apparently, are doing everything they can to make things they don’t like simply go away: gays, news about climate change, advisories of vaccines, acknowledgement of the existence of anyone who is not white and Christian. This is a pervading theme of the past several weeks.
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Once again, we’re in Orwellian, fascist territory here.
Associated Press, 26 Feb 2025: Pentagon orders new purge of social media sites to dump diversity, inclusion mentions by March 5 (via)
On Wednesday, the department’s top public affairs official signed and sent out a new memo requiring all the military services to spend countless hours poring over years of website postings, photos, news articles and videos to remove any mentions that “promote diversity, equity and inclusion.”
If they can’t do that by March 5, they have been ordered to “temporarily remove from public display” all content published during the Biden administration’s four years in office, according to a copy of the memo obtained by The Associated Press.
They want to disappear the past, as well as all those people they don’t like.
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And, even as measles outbreaks are occurring in several states, and at least one (unvaccinated) child has died, RFK Jr. is downplaying the issue…
NY Times, 26 Feb 2025: F.D.A. Cancels Meeting of Vaccine Experts Scheduled to Advise on Flu Shots, subtitled “The cancellation plays into fears among scientists who worry that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will use his position as health secretary to sow doubts about vaccines.”
And:
MSNBC, MaddowBlog, Steve Benen, 27 Feb 2025: RFK Jr.’s rough start as HHS secretary gets even worse amid Texas measles outbreak, subtitled “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a fair amount to say about the measles outbreak in Texas. Much of what he said, however, was demonstrably untrue.”
Demonstrably untrue. He’s lying, or deluded.
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Presumably this is the kind of news conservatives hear.
PolitiFact, 26 Feb 2025: No US government audits for the last 100 years? Here’s why ‘Shark Tank’ star Kevin O’Leary is wrong
If Your Time is short
- For decades, inspectors general have audited the federal government looking for waste, fraud and abuse.
- The Government Accountability Office has been doing it for more than a century.
- These auditors’ findings are public and accessible online.
(And, Trump just fired a bunch of inspectors general. Are people paying attention??)
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Despite Trump’s delusion that everyone loves him…
Washington Post, opinion by Lee Hockstader, 27 Feb 2025: Europe, appalled, watches as Trump becomes Putin’s poodle, subtitled “Macron and other European leaders scramble as Trump sells out Ukraine.”
Beginning with that meeting between Macron and Trump, in which Macron corrected Trump to his face.
The language gap has never been wider between Europe and the United States. Europeans, reeling as Trump rips up an 80-year-old alliance like a used spa day pass, are clutching at bedrock values: democracy, fairness, territorial integrity and the right of states to freely choose their alliances.
Trump regards all that as a sucker’s game.
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Can we end for today with something more… enlightening?
Slate, Pascal Wallisch, 26 Feb 2025: It’s Been 10 Years Since “The Dress”, subtitled “The viral image holds a lesson in why people disagree — and how we can learn to better understand each other.”
A cellphone picture of a wedding guest’s dress, uploaded to the internet, sharply divided people into those who saw it as white and gold and those who saw it in black and blue — even if they were viewing it together, on the very same computer or phone screen.
This is primary evidence that human senses are not reliable; in this case conclusions about the color of the dress depend on the lighting, or more specifically, about the kind of lighting one expects, given daily experience of being mostly inside, with artificial lighting, or of being outside, with natural lighting.
The Today Show did a segment about this a week ago without really identifying this core issue.
But Slate does:
A decade after the dress, we’ve learned a lot about how people could see a simple image so differently from one another. The dress is of particular interest to me as a researcher who studies differences in perception and cognition between individuals. While the colors of a piece of clothing might be a trivial thing to disagree about, we can all learn a thing or two from the dress about how to navigate high-stakes disagreements.
Why did people disagree about the dress? It’s all in the lighting. Given the exposure of the image, it’s unclear to the viewer whether the photo was taken indoors (under artificial light) or outdoors (under natural light). The bright background could be interpreted either as a light source, or as glare (without you even realizing that your brain is making this calculation). A light object reflects most of the light falling on it, while a dark object absorbs most of the light falling on it.
And it goes on. The core issue here is that people should not make categorical conclusions about the world based on their personal sensory experience.
The piece here goes on with much more on this theme.
