{"id":55813,"date":"2024-12-23T06:01:35","date_gmt":"2024-12-23T14:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=55813"},"modified":"2024-12-22T16:13:56","modified_gmt":"2024-12-23T00:13:56","slug":"open-thread-december-23-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2024\/12\/23\/open-thread-december-23-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread December 23 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, Trinette came by and took out my trash and recycling (for once I had more trash than recycling), changed a light bulb, brought me a Christmas card, and then we chatted. It&#8217;s always so good to visit with her.<\/p>\n<p>Rebecca Schoenkopf, the original (and current owner and publisher of) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wonkette.com\/p\/idea-what-if-we-didnt-purity-test\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Wonkette<\/a>, is pissed. And I believe rightly so. Elon Musk claims to support free speech &#8211; and means &#8220;as long as you agree with him.&#8221; Substack actually practices free speech &#8211; by not censoring or in any observable way even suggesting they might have an opinion on subject matter produced by a Substacker otherwise eligible, and now this. Rebecca puts it better than I would (and not only because the knows more in the subject from the inside &#8211; she&#8217;s also a better writer.) It would not surprise me if Substack were very soon to become the main source for people to get their &#8211; without their needing to distinguish fact from fiction &#8211; because anyone can pick and choose to whom they will subscribe &#8211; and there&#8217;s very full range. And it&#8217;s free. Sure, you can gat a paid subscription and get some extras &#8211; but you don&#8217;t have to. I have six free subscriptions, not counting the subscriptions to Wonkette, Talking Points Memo, and others who post as groups rather than as individuals), and it doesn&#8217;t cost me a dime. Read or skim Rebecca&#8217;s rant and see what you think.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/wolvesandsheep.substack.com\/p\/lets-do-this-democratic-victory-in\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Wolves and Sheep<\/a> is a Substack which I don&#8217;t subscribe to, but Chris Bowers, who is connected with it, has started sending me newsletters of his own, and one of them included this, and I found it worth sharing. It really would be terrible if Democrats, buth elected and unelected, started acting like Republicans. I question whether life would even be worth living were that to happen. That said, that doesn&#8217;t mean we can&#8217;t take some tips.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2N8cb5Oq_d8?si=9idOov_mhZdhaofz\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/K8z3uj-9Xkk?si=5Hal25abX2yqvEYu\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-55790\" src=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Xmas-polio.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"750\" height=\"508\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Xmas-polio.jpeg 750w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Xmas-polio-300x203.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Xmas-polio-150x102.jpeg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, Trinette came by and took out my trash and recycling (for once I had more trash than recycling), changed a light bulb, brought me a Christmas card, and then we chatted. It&#8217;s always so good to visit with her. Rebecca Schoenkopf, the original (and current owner and publisher of) Wonkette, is pissed. And I <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2024\/12\/23\/open-thread-december-23-2024\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":53906,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[4355,5375,6116,4531,4831,3811],"class_list":["post-55813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-animals","tag-cabinet","tag-democratic-pushback","tag-dogs","tag-free-speech","tag-personal","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}