Fucking Hell: David Mamet Files The Most Pointless, Silly Amicus Brief In Texas Content Moderation Appeal

O My! That's strong language written by Techdirt's Mike Masnick earlier today:

"About the only positive thing you can say about famed play/movie writer David Mamet deciding to file an amicus brief in support of Texas in that state’s appeal of a district court correctly tossing the state’s social media content moderation bill as unconstitutional is… that it has fewer swear words than your typical Mamet production. As you’ll recall, Texas followed Florida down this dubious, censorial road, pretending that it can magically force private companies to perpetually host speech it disagrees with.

We expected some silly amicus briefs in support of Texas, and there have been a few (some of which we’ll cover elsewhere), but by far the most bizarre is David Mamet’s decision to, um, weigh in, I guess?

Mamet, if you don’t know, took a Trumpian turn, and like pretty much anyone supporting this law, seems to think that their support of one dude now, um, trumps any actual principles. Or rather, they demonstrate impressively demented levels of cognitive dissonance by twisting themselves into knots pretending that commandeering private property, compelling speech, and removing the 1st Amendment rights of association from private companies is somehow… all about freedom?

The filing starts out with Mamet’s statement of interest in which he — in a brief supporting the government compelling private parties to host speech — claims he’s really concerned about government interference in our freedoms.

Proposed amicus David Mamet aspires to enjoy freedom of speech without government-enabled censorship. Mr. Mamet worries about how Americans can navigate their world when firms that control information conduits, and are privileged and subsidized by the government, serve curated “information” to users and the public which no longer maps onto the world that Americans personally observe.

That’s silly enough, but the actual amicus brief, well, holy shit. It’s… um… a story?

It includes no citations. It makes no arguments. It’s just some sort of fictional story that feels like something a freshman in high school might write after getting high the first time and thinking they were profound. It starts out thusly:

The pilot wants to orient himself. He knows approximately where he is, for he knows the direction in which he’s been flying, the speed of the plane, and the time of flight. And he has a chart. Given a 100 mph airspeed, flying west for one hour, he should be at this point on the chart. He should, thus, see, to his right a camelbacked double hill, and, off to his left, a small lima bean shaped lake.

He now looks out, but he can’t find the objects the chart informed him he’d see. He concludes that he is lost.

How can he determine his location? He has a map, but he’s just misused it. How?

The Map is not the territory. The territory is the territory

It goes on like that. Mercifully, not for that long.

But I can assure you that this is likely to be the only amicus brief ever to include the line:

I report as an outdoorsman, that Panic is real. It is the loss of the mind and will to Pan, God of the Woods.

Anyway, after two pages of this silly drivel, he concludes:

A pilot in this situation might conclude he’d simply picked up the wrong map.

But what if the government and its privileged conduits prohibited him from choosing another?

copyright © 2022 by D. Mamet

Deep man. Pass the bong.

======================================================================

{.   } Skip to the end "...

As for the — and I hesitate to call it this, but whatever — “substance” of Mamet’s argument, even given the most forgiving read of it, Mamet seems to be claiming that the obviously unconstitutional restriction on private property rights and the 1st Amendment rights of social media companies should be allowed, because… otherwise the government “and its privileged conduits prohibited” you from choosing another platform.

Except, that’s not at all what any of this is about. First off, social media platforms are not the government’s privileged conduits under any conceivable definition. Second, at no point is anyone prohibited from choosing another platform. And these days there are so many platforms for Trumpists like Mamet to choose from.

As someone who has attended apparently a few too many of Mamet’s plays and movies, I’ll say that in his old age, he seems to have completely lost the plot."

More details from the source >>

Fucking Hell: David Mamet Files The Most Pointless, Silly Amicus Brief In Texas Content Moderation Appeal

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from the where-are-all-the-fucks dept

Mon, Mar 14th 2022 10:49am - Mike Masnick

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WAR IS HELL: Devastating Long-Lasting Consequences + A Less Politically-Stable Planet

Let's not lose a focus - America's offshore wars after World War II in Korea, Viet Nam, Central America, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and lo-fi Proxy Wars in Africa and The Pacific are getting us all deeper into Conflicts of Empire, where Russia and China are roaring back.

Beyond the humanitarian crisis of special military operations anywhere and everywhere at the same time all over the world, the conflict is spewing clouds of planet-warming gases.

Photograph: DANIEL LEAL

Ukrainian military vehicles move past Independence Square in central Kyiv on February 24, 2022.

 

Machines of War Take a Heavy Toll on Ukraine—and the Planet

The conflict is poised to exacerbate the climate crisis, as tanks, jets, and convoys burn fossil fuels and nearby nations boost their military spending. 

Matt Simon

Wired |

War is hell, and it’s extremely energy intensive. The fighter jets screaming above Ukraine and the tanks rolling across the country’s terra firma are burning through a torrent of fuel. There's also the personnel carriers, support trucks, generators humming on bases, and flaming infrastructure—all spewing clouds of carbon into the atmosphere.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an obvious humanitarian crisis, as its army ramps up the targeting of civilians. But a hidden crisis is unfolding too: The carbon emitted by war machines is helping warm the planet at a critical moment in human history, when every day not spent decarbonizing adds to the compounding misery of climate change. 

That 40-mile-long convoy of Russian vehicles outside Kyiv has been crawling along, burning through petrol. Military vehicles are feeding a steady stream of supplies into Ukraine—one of the biggest and fastest arms transfers in history. And if the countries of eastern Europe are now flying more patrols along their borders with help from the US, they’re burning through more fuel. “Jet fuels by far are the most dirty emissions,” says Durham University political scientist Oliver Belcher. “It is a more potent polluter just by virtue of the type of fuel that's used, but on top of that, the amount of fuel that burns is extraordinary.”

Yet it’s difficult to put a figure on exactly how much carbon has been emitted so far in this particular war. For one thing, many of the available statistics on military emissions come from studying the United States and the European Union, not Russia and Ukraine. For another, getting figures on an armed force’s fuel usage is the most straightforward way to estimate emissions, but it doesn’t paint a complete picture. (Militaries aren’t required by, say, the Paris Agreement, to report their emissions, so researchers have to pick through sparse data to make their estimates.)

But there are some ways to get a sense of the environmental damage. Last year the Conflict and Environment Observatory, commissioned by the Left Group in the European Parliament, took a swing at estimating the carbon footprint—or carbon bootprint, if you will—of the EU’s military sector. Critically, they also considered indirect emissions—for example, those created by the defense industry supply chains that support military operations. Producing missiles and ammunition takes energy, and then you’ve got to use more energy to ship the goods around.

There are inherent data gaps, but the observatory’s researchers reckoned that in 2019, military emissions in the EU were equal to those of 14 million cars. And that was before the continent faced its biggest land war since 1945. “It's quite a conservative estimate,” says Linsey Cottrell, environmental policy officer at the charity and coauthor of the report. “As military expenditure increases, so will the associated greenhouse gas emissions. . .

The US Air Force alone is responsible for more than half of those emissions, both because aircraft get terrible mileage and because emitting carbon at high altitude leads to warming up to four times as intense as emitting on the ground. 

Quantifying the emissions of war isn’t as easy as just tallying how much fuel a military burns when its vehicles are running normally. What happens when those vehicles are blown up matters too. After the conflict, researchers will have to do an inventory of how much carbon cooked off of, say, a destroyed tank’s burning fuel and ammunition. 

The wartime mass migration of people requires energy too. So far, some 2 million people have evacuated Ukraine by train and bus. “You've got all the extra humanitarian peacekeeping activities—you've got movements of refugees across the country,” says Cottrell.

Emissions are also coming from the built environment: from burning apartment blocks, from broken gas lines, from fuel and ammunition depots going up in smoke, from people switching to diesel generators when the power goes out. And when the war ends, construction crews will begin the cleanup with heavy machinery. Rebuilding will require cement and concrete, which are notoriously carbon-intensive to produce. 

Once a military escalation starts, it may be locked in for a long, long time. The prospect of an increasingly militarized Europe—even a future one not actively at war—is the prospect of a continent that will disgorge ever more greenhouse gasses to maintain those swelling forces. . .

European nations may also further bolster their forces, as defense spending among NATO members was already trending up before this war. “As states do that, that increases the pollution from militaries, and that will last, of course, well beyond the conflict,” she says.

If other countries follow Germany, which late last month boosted its military spending by $113 billion in response to the conflict, that’s all the more emissions associated with building and maintaining those forces. An air force that invests in, for example, a new jet will use it—and need to fuel it—for decades. “Once you build this infrastructure, you're buying into a duration of fuels being used for a period of time,” says Belcher. “We’re quite literally adding fuel to the fire over these many years.”

The war in Ukraine is also, potentially, a political distraction from the war on climate change. “This conflict is going to dominate the news agenda and the political agenda for months, if not longer,” says Eoghan Darbyshire, a researcher at the Conflict and Environment Observatory. “And this probably blocks lots of progress, which was agreed at the last COP [climate conference]. Governments are not paying attention to the climate, and all of a sudden are now more interested in energy security.” 

. . .More green energy could at least offset what could be a devastating, long-lasting consequence of this war: an even hotter, less politically stable planet."

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