zn wrote:

Zooey wrote:

Who among us hasn’t had a few stents, ammirite? (Glad your well. This was a bit startling, as I’m sure it was for you.) Merry Christmas.

Well it helped that I live with an RN. We caught it very early. I had chest pains, and they weren’t awful, just concerning, and it came with shortness of breath. She took a look at me, stethoscope and all, and then called 911 without even asking or announcing it. Just boom, call, ambulence, with her saying “be sure and take your phone and charger to the hospital honey” before I had said a word (“hospital??”) The dead giveaway was when the EMS guys in the ambulence gave me nitro and the pain immediately went away. That could only mean one thing. Nitro opens up arteries, so that means the pain was from blockage. At the hospital they tested me, none of it too arduous or painful, then they scheduled me for surgery and put in a stent. The stay wasn’t too bad–I had a good book with me (“Station 11”). People say I hope you have a good recovery but honestly it’s not like that, there’s no recovery per se–you don’t want to run a marathon quite yet but day to day is just normal, it’s more like replacing a sparkplug than repairing a damaged engine. And here I babble on. Have you had a stent? Who else has had a stent? Merry Christmas.

I have never had a stint put in my chest. That’s totally an old person thing. I am still young and vibrant, and if I put in just a year or so of training, I’m confident that I could build up to running a mile in less than ten minutes. So I’m not participating yet in this Death’s Door stuff. And I know you aren’t either, but you just damn well stepped on the porch.

Just stop it with that shit. I don’t like it.

Well, merry christmas anyway. We’ll have some egg nog for you when you come home.

I’m sorry to hear that, zn.

Elon Musk Is Everything That’s Wrong With the Media

The great rolling fiasco that is Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter got boiled down into a tidy pop-culture parable this weekend. As Dave Chappelle, the comedy world’s most prominent foe of all things woke, called Musk up to the stage at Chase Center in San Francisco, the Twitter titan was treated to a prolonged, lusty chorus of boos from the crowd. Footage from the show only erratically remained on Musk’s vanity platform the next day, and Musk himself suggested that he’d inspired “90% cheers and 10% boos” onstage—a falsehood so flagrant that it got “Boo-urns,” a 27-year-old Simpsons joke, trending on the site. For good measure, Musk—who’d also recently tweeted that something known as the “woke mind virus” was seeking to exert total control over civilization in a struggle in which “nothing else matters”—suggested that he’d “offended SF’s unhinged leftists,” without accounting for just why this offense-taking demographic would turn out in full force for a Dave Chappelle show.

The episode drove home just how much Musk’s self-ballyhooed takeover of the microblogging outlet is a protracted study in flop-sweat failure. As formerly banned hate merchants of the right stream back onto the site, and advertisers abscond en masse, Musk is left flogging the same wearisome tropes of culture-war exclusion into a yawning void of audience indifference, now verging on all-out hostility. His latest obsession is relentlessly promoting the content-challenged “Twitter Files”—a trove of documents from the regime of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey now selectively released into the tender care of pet journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. What’s touted as a searing study in ideological censorship and “shadow banning” stands exposed instead as garden-variety content moderation, notable mostly for staidness and bureaucratic jargon. And, inconveniently, the actually existing record of message-boosting on the platform skews strongly and consistently rightward, as the corps of allegedly Maoist Comstocks and bluenoses directing things on Doresy’s watch readily conceded.

In short, Musk-era Twitter reprises longstanding maladies of the media industry in America—its chronic vulnerability to the vanity and whim of the right-wing ownership caste and its pronounced structural bias toward monopoly control. Prone to buckle under the keening choruses of aggrieved ideological messaging from the right, the media industry is acutely sensitive to the refrain that it represents a premier source and outlet of lefty agitprop. It’s a surreal discursive template that has guided media debate for nearly half a century, particularly jarring given that the true complexion of an ad-driven, cartelized culture combine is all but designed to lend undue weight to the economic and ideological agendas of the right. But Elon Musk is, in nearly every sense, its logical culmination.

To make sense of the Musk moment, says Siva Vaidyanathan, professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, “you have to go to the fact that for the past decade his run has been so lucky that he’s convinced himself he can do no wrong. No amount of evidence is going to shift that position. He’s too calcified…. The dude has baked his brain. He seems incapable of subtle or complex thought, so what he’s seeing is a total projection. On a whim he signed a piece of paper agreeing to buy this company for $44 billion. So once he gets into the office, he sees just how bad this company is, and he sees there’s no way out of it. He looked at the books and thought, ‘I might as well try everything, and have fun while I’m at it.’ Well, fun to a guy like Elon is cruelty and chaos.”

That’s the problem of entrusting a premier medium of public discourse to the whim of an obscenely wealthy mogul who’s just bored and gullible enough to acquire it in the hopes of making it over in his own image. “The whole Internet economy is controlled by five or six companies,” says Robert McChesney, emeritus communications professor at the University of Illinois and author of Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. “They can just print money and they can buy up everything else. Twitter isn’t Facebook, Google, or Microsoft, but it’s in that class of virtual monopolies. It’s a communications medium in a more exact way than newspapers are. It’s much more like the post office or a telephone company.”

That means, among other things, that extreme ideological directives of the type Musk has now routinely embedded in Twitter’s business model can’t be simply shrugged off as one more regrettable operating cost for a laissez-faire regime in the marketplace of ideas, McChesney argues. “Twitter is different—it’s what you might call a selective mass medium. Here the claim that an owner has the right to intervene in its operations, it would be like you’re discussing a country with one newspaper. We’ve seen countries like that, and it’s safe to say that’s not what you want in a democracy. For telecommunications devices, as with a post office, there’s no justification for an intervention for the owner’s agenda. It’s bad enough that they’re pushing an economic agenda down your throat, but to have an ideological one on top of that, which is what Elon Musk has already done, it compromises everything.”

For his part, Vaidyanathan says he’s “not convinced that Twitter is a quasi-monopoly platform. It is one of a handful of online platforms that molds opinion, but that opinion tends to be concentrated in the elites. It’s not as important or popular as Reddit, and it’s less than a tenth of the size of Facebook. Even TikTok is a much more influential platform for molding opinion, if not elite opinion.”

If that’s the case, Twitter could break down in more conventional market terms, the way that right-leaning social media sites such as Gab, Parler, and Truth Social are each on the verge of doing. That’s another curious factor in the extreme ideological pivot Musk is engineering for the site—Twitter is lunging into an end of the social media spectrum now rife with platform failures. In Vaidyanathan’s judgment, this is another reflection of Musk’s overall market-empowered nihilism—something that allowed Musk properties like Tesla and SpaceX to flourish as outlets with government contracting, and the Musk-owned Boring Company to attract enthusiastic public sector partners to a business model that’s little more than a glorified scam.

This economic profile also fuels the air of mounting desperation as Musk loads one right-wing meme after another onto the site. “I don’t know if he’s a true believer in, say, QAnon,” Vaidyanathan says, referencing the far-right pedophilia-obsessed conspiracy theory that Musk recently weaponized against former Twitter executive Yoel Roth. “But in a sense that’s immaterial. The fact is that he’s using QAnon to generate endorphins in the absence of money. There’s no way for Twitter to ever make money. From the moment he announced his intentions for Twitter, it was going from a slow downslope to a crash. He probably figures Twitter has a few more months left, so why not just do crazy stuff to see what works.”

In the toxic, cartelized economy of digital communications, a flamed-out and smoldering Twitter is likely a better outcome than a successful monopolized one. “If we’re going to solve this problem,” McChesney says, “it’s not going to be by finding a nicer billionaire to buy it.” It also means we’ll have to do a lot more than just boo this one offstage.

Van Jefferson has caught 3 TDs this season. All three are from different QBs. It’s also the only TD each QB has thrown for the Rams this season.

So all 3 of those QBs are better than Matthew Stafford.

I had this game circled before the season started.

I guess the NFL did, too.

“After everything Stafford has gone through and the fact that the Rams aren’t good, the rumor is both he and McVay are going to retire at the end of this year.”

Lost me at “the Rams aren’t good.”

I respect the brutally effective cynicism. If instead of promising to buck party leadership and never back down, she’d run on supporting Pelosi and voting party line, I can’t imagine she’d have won. The left lane was open and she took it. Now our services are no longer required. https://t.co/gpoCbmMPRT

— mousdrvr (@mousdrvr) December 10, 2022

zn wrote:

Thursday reminded me a bit of “Ferragamo to Waddy.” Not really the same conditions and circumstances, but winning in the last minutes when it looked bleak and then pulling it out of a hat.

I think that’s a good “victory pulled out of a hat” comparison. Games that seemed lost, but where the Rams made big plays at the crucial moment.

The difference, though, is that going into the game against the Cowboys, if you were asked if the Rams could beat the Cowboys on a big play late in the game, you would say, “Yeah, that could happen.”

If you had offered me Baker Mayfield with his 17 QBR, who was with the team 2 days, a chance to win the game from the Rams’ own 2-yard line with less than 2 minutes to play, and no TOs, and a mangled WR and OL corps, I would have bet my house against it.

There is just no effing way the Rams win that game. No chance whatsoever.

This game will live with me the rest of my life. It will come up on this board 20 years from now, and everybody will instantly recall some very specific things about this game.

(And another thing about that game, though, a thing a lot of people WILL forget… Mayfield doesn’t even get that opportunity if the Rams don’t get a 3-and-out, including a stop on 3rd and 1).

Of all the chatter I’ve encountered so far, I think I agree with Colin Cowherd’s assessment the most.

That was perhaps the most stunning thing I’ve seen in 55 years of following the Rams. I didn’t think Baker could even play with less than two days to prepare, let alone play nearly the entire game. He showed his arm on the first play. The man has physical gifts, that’s for sure. 98 yards with less than 2 minutes, and no timeouts, and he barely knows anybody’s name he’s giving the ball to. I just can’t believe it. If it was a movie, I would certainly observe that this ending is why I hate sports movies. They have preposterous “come-from-behind” storylines in the games.

Anyway, Baker is going to be the focus of attention in the final 4 games. I’m still skeptical of his character (based on innuendo I’ve been exposed to in the media), but he can throw the football, that much I know.

In spite of some of the worst officiating I’ve seen, the Rams ended up benefitting from a couple of calls on that final drive. Even with the penalties the Raiders gifted them, the Rams still made those plays. Skowronek’s catch was superb, and the dime to Jefferson was a spectacle. The Raiders contributed to this loss (which is devastating to them, I am happy to observe). They tried to walk through this game. Carr barely cracked 100 yards passing, and they didn’t play Prevent defense on the final drive, and it cost them the game.

The silver lining of this devastating season is that a lot of guys are getting live experience, and the team (as Hram observed) is still playing with heart. There is depth going into next year.

And maybe an heir apparent at QB?

wv wrote:

We will rally around Baker Mayfield, and play disastrous football.

Did you watch the video joemad posted?

I was surprised by Bayless’ strong support of Mayfield.

Why on earth would they play Mayfield tonight unless Perkins gets injured? That would be absurd. And insulting to Perkins. And for what? He’s had no reps.

zn wrote:

Sorry!

My objection was to the idea of starting Mayfield as a means of evaluating and developing the WRs in the last 5 games.

I don’t mind bringing him in to play scout QB, and see if he has learned anything about leading a locker room. He’s low cost, low risk, and potentially high upside.

I just don’t see him starting for the Rams this year. I see this more as early OTAs.