La nenita me dijo que quiere acostarse con él. Me enfadé, le dije que I needed a break and dejé de responder por un rato. Luego volví y descubrí que me había bloqueado y había borrado todos sus mensajes de ese día.

Andaba bien deprimido y hasta me costó seguir la trama de “Blade Runner” –casi no quería irme pero fue la última oportunidad de verla en Dolby Cinema. Voy a visitarle –la he extrañado tanto, tanto.

Ayer me sentía muy solo y entré el chat para distraerme un poco mientras trabajaba. No podía trabajar mucho… y terminé charlando toda la tarde con otra little (tuve que esforzarme para no decirle “nenita” varias veces) de Chihuahua. Ups.

Google in particular has come close to realizing our nightmare scenario from 1998, a vertically integrated Internet controlled by a single monopoly player. Google runs its own physical network, builds phone handsets, develops a laptop and phone operating system, makes the world’s most widely-used browser, runs a private DNS system, PKI certificate authority, has photographed nearly all the public spaces in the world, and stores much of the world’s email.

But because it is run by more sympathetic founders than Bill Gates, because it builds better software than early Microsoft did, and because it built up a lot of social capital during its early “don't be evil” period, we’ve given it a pass.

—Maciej Cegłowski, “Notes from an Emergency”

Ironic disclaimer: Blogger and YouTube are owned by Google, and they now have records of you reading this entry and seeing the embedded video above.

An excellent piece on digital rights, dissemination and attribution in the 21st century.

Yet another therria dream… I’d really thought I was done with those. Fell asleep thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and she popped up (not, like, as a bit character). Oh, and I guess I was thinking about her yesterday, too. How good the lovemaking was.

Shit, even as a Pearl Jam fan, this is dangerously accurate

[I]n stepped good old Eddie Vedder [in the early ’90s] with his puppy dog eyes and progressive stance on abortion, and taught a nation of hairy jockish apes how to project a modest amount of guitar-based masculinity while also faking enough idiotic brooding sensitivity to convince young women… [A]ll of a sudden there was a new way to act if the average American John Q. Nobody wanted any chance of copulating with a female. Grunge was off and running. It was a pretty sucky time.

I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart.

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is a-okay. In 1972, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton e-mails story was nonsense.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs.

The Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the Sandinista government where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,” while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

President Donald Trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term. The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivanka’s arm during his infrequent public appearances.

Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for reelection. His has been a popular presidency: Big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits have worked their familiar expansive magic. Wages have grown strongly in the Trump years, especially for men without a college degree, even if rising inflation is beginning to bite into the gains. The president’s supporters credit his restrictive immigration policies and his TrumpWorks infrastructure program.

The president’s critics, meanwhile, have found little hearing for their protests and complaints. A Senate investigation of Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential campaign sputtered into inconclusive partisan wrangling. Concerns about Trump’s purported conflicts of interest excited debate in Washington but never drew much attention from the wider American public.

Allegations of fraud and self-dealing in the TrumpWorks program, and elsewhere, have likewise been shrugged off. The president regularly tweets out news of factory openings and big hiring announcements: “I’m bringing back your jobs,” he has said over and over. Voters seem to have believed him—and are grateful.

Most Americans intuit that their president and his relatives have become vastly wealthier over the past four years. But rumors of graft are easy to dismiss. Because Trump has never released his tax returns, no one really knows.

Anyway, doesn’t everybody do it? On the eve of the 2018 congressional elections, WikiLeaks released years of investment statements by prominent congressional Democrats indicating that they had long earned above-market returns. As the air filled with allegations of insider trading and crony capitalism, the public subsided into weary cynicism. The Republicans held both houses of Congress that November, and Trump loyalists shouldered aside the pre-Trump leadership.

The media have grown noticeably more friendly to Trump as well. The proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner was delayed for more than a year, during which Time Warner’s CNN unit worked ever harder to meet Trump’s definition of fairness. Under the agreement that settled the Department of Justice’s antitrust complaint against Amazon, the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has divested himself of The Washington Post. The paper’s new owner—an investor group based in Slovakia—has closed the printed edition and refocused the paper on municipal politics and lifestyle coverage.

Meanwhile, social media circulate ever-wilder rumors. Some people believe them; others don’t. It’s hard work to ascertain what is true.

Nobody’s repealed the First Amendment, of course, and Americans remain as free to speak their minds as ever. Trump-critical media do continue to find elite audiences. Their investigations still win Pulitzer Prizes; their reporters accept invitations to anxious conferences about corruption, digital-journalism standards, the end of NATO, and the rise of populist authoritarianism. Yet somehow all of this earnest effort feels less and less relevant to American politics.

—How to Build an Autocracy

A convenient liberal interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr. Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis. This is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns. It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run — which means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps. The surprisingly high percentage of the Latino vote that went to Mr. Trump should remind us that the longer ethnic groups are here in this country, the more politically diverse they become.

Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html