Tab Shaker Central

That's not what "goated with the sauce" means, Graeme.

April 13th, 2023

I thought we had already seen some bad takes on historical mass murder memorabilia and Supreme Court Justice collector Harlan Crow’s Hitler-curious tendencies, but yesterday Badlantic’s Graeme “Wet Charles” Wood pulled up in a coal-rolling monster truck of a Take and blasted out a hot cloud of choking new discourse about it:

I am reminded of the old joke about the man at the bar who complains about his reputation, “I build 1,000 bridges, but do they call me ‘McGregor the Bridge Builder’? No! But I screw one goat …” (You can watch Paul McCartney tell the joke.) Somewhere in the Crow library, there’s a signed Mein Kampf. And for some people, collecting a little Hitler memorabilia is like a one-night stand in a Scottish glen. It forever marks you as disreputable, suspicious, and—if you also fund conservative think tanks and befriend Charles Murray—a crypto-Nazi.

Whoms’t among us hasn’t heard that joke and sympathized with the goat fucker? You know, a “one-night stand in a Scottish glen?” A normal expression everyone always says? I suppose you think that just because someone collects Nazi stuff and funds Nazi organizations and befriends a famous eugenicist, that makes them… well, perhaps you have a point there. Wood continues:

What is it about Nazism that makes these people lose all reason and sense of proportion? I guess it’s the industrial slaughter of Jews, Gypsies, people with disabilities, and homosexuals, and the nearly successful attempt to conquer the planet. So I can see why someone might freak out over Hitler memorabilia.

Yikes. The real lesson here is that Graeme’s editor genuinely hates him, to allow these two paragraphs to run as written. If you need a palate cleanser after that, and you do, Jamelle Bouie speculated that Crow gets a “libidinal thrill out of owning representations of dictators, out of owning Nazi stuff,” (which is obviously correct and explains the rest of his collection too—the other dictators, the giant bust of Churchill, etc.) and pointed out that the defenses of Crow reveal a lot of the financial and media infrastructure of the conservative movement.

Meanwhile: After letting the original story breathe a bit, Propublica is back with more Clarence Thomas corruption: “Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal.” I wonder how many of these they have queued up? I bet Clarence Thomas also wonders.

Today in Good Threads:

Tweet from @kane: “infrastructure that looks like sci fi. 1/ liquid natural gas tanker” with an image of hard-hatted workers walking through a sci-fi-ish gridded empty space which is presumably the hold of an LNG tanker. Click through for a bunch more.

United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers…

In a video seen by The Post, the man who the member said is OG stands at a shooting range, wearing safety glasses and ear coverings and holding a large rifle. He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target.

The Discord was called “Thug Shaker Central,” which is a reference to this meme. What a charming group of lads. If a teenage racial meme fancier is giving interviews to the national press about you, your cloak of anonymity has just about frayed away to nothing, and sure enough this morning Aric Toler and a soccer team’s worth of other reporters at the New York Times had allegedly dug up the alleged leaker’s alleged identity: 21 year old Jack Teixeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. As I write this, Teixeira is being arrested in historic North Dighton, MA, gateway to Whitefolk and Mansocket. It’s gonna be interesting watching the development of “what if Edward Snowden was actually super horny for the American military industrial complex?”

Tweet by Bijan Stephen: “business……website’s” [image reads: “Business……Website’s”]

In The Ringer Nate Rogers sat down with Paul “@dril” Dochney over diner water to discuss the celebrity shitposter’s past and future. It’s surprisingly boring! Old and busted: BeReal. The new hotness: Chess. Also via Casey Lewis: “Are Frank Ocean and BMW teasing a ‘Nostalgia, Ultra’ re-release?” What was I just saying about that album. Mission Local’s Joe Eskenazi reports that SFPD has “made an arrest in the April 4 killing of tech executive Bob Lee… The alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew.” So hold off on the public hangings for a minute, I guess? Matt Taibbi heads to Truth Social; clown makeup tutorial intensifies.

Today-I in AI: “TurboPilot is a self-hosted copilot clone which uses the library behind llama.cpp to run the 6 Billion Parameter Salesforce Codegen model in 4GiB of RAM…” (i.e. AI code autocomplete running on your own laptop). While Elon Musk was signing a letter begging for a six month pause in AI development, he was also buying “roughly 10,000 graphics processing units” and hiring engineers for an AI project at Twitter, reports Insider’s Kali Hays. Mack DeGeurin: study finds “Training ChatGPT Required Enough Water to Fill a Nuclear Reactor's Cooling Tower.” And Max Tani tweeted that “Insider EIC [Nich Carlson] says the publication will begin experimenting with how to use AI for reporting and editing.” To be fair, Nich Carlson trying to use AI can’t possibly be worse than Nich Carlson trying to use his own brain.

Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance in “The Shining” looks at a piece of typewrite paper. Then we see the typing on it: “right about now, the funk soul brother, check it out now, the funk soul brother, right about now, the funk soul brother, check it out now, the funk soul brother…”

[NP:] You have to figure out, “Should we allow overt racism on Substack Notes?” You have to figure that out.

[CB:] No, I’m not going to engage in speculation or specific “would you allow this or that” content.

You know this is a very bad response to this question, right? You’re aware that you’ve blundered into this. You should just say no. And I’m wondering what’s keeping you from just saying no.

I have a blanket [policy that] I don’t think it’s useful to get into “would you allow this or that thing on Substack.”

If I read you your own terms of service, will you agree that this prohibition is in that terms of service?

I don’t think that’s a useful exercise.

😬 Good luck on your new public-facing social network, Substack!

Today’s Song: Shelly Fairchild & Shamir, “Fist City”

Gentleman’s Friday at last. If you’d like to get whatever kind of newsletter I cobble together from the Halls of Medicine tomorrow, please subscribe, and you will also gain access to the Tabs Discord, which always has the tabs first and best and where we never rarely endanger national security. Thx SotD Intern Sam Gavin. Catch me on Substack Notes, the best place to find “lots of things that we disagree with, that we strongly disagree with.”

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