It is all going to be as bad as it can be, with shocking stupidity, for at least two years. But I don't have to wallow in it.
Basically all I can do this time is deny him my tiny piece of the outraged attention cycle. Can't trigger the libs if the libs won't look.
Janelle Bouie had a good little thread https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3ld6qrtx5yc2g
1: I mean, I don't think that would make for a very lively front page, if I adopted that policy.
This is probably very worrying for people with jobs that depend upon a functioning FDA. And people who like breathing.
But is that a good form of lively? Are we really going to do this for four more years? It was already boring by year 3 last time. We know the cycle.
OP: Mention of shockingly stupid horrific thing.
Thread: 70 comments about how unbelievably stupid it is, more nuances on the horror by someone who knows that field and some macabre jokes.
But this time we can't fight it and protests do nothing. But we don't have to live deep in the horror and we don't have to give them the satisfaction of our outrage. That is about all we can control.
Well, there will also be McDonald's threads?
All of the bad shit will happen and it will be amazingly bad and stupid. There's no point in a ton of dread and energy on "will it happen? to what degree?". Yes. To a shocking degree.
Done. Think about something better in the small domain you control because that is all we can do. Certainly don't dwell in the shit.
I mean, I'm being shitty about this, because the intentions are different. The blog's function is to find stuff to talk about and "how godawful will it be" is a compelling conversation. But my intention is to live a good life and four years of "will it be godawful, maybe less godawful? no, really godawful after all and stupid to boot" is just not a good life.
I already did that and maybe it made a difference, but this time there's no difference to make, so all there is is my quality of life within what I can control.
I understand feeling exhausted, because I feel exhausted, but I don't buy the idea that there's no difference to make. And, weirdly for me, I think one of the importance differences there is to make is the making (or maintenance) of community, and this place is a community.
Is RFK Jr. really going to be confirmed? I ask not because he's a wacko, but because he's not a Republican.
Anyway, it's gonna suck so much, and I hope that communities that matter to me will help sustain me through the suckage. I'm not sure what else will, I guess.
I agree with 11, I don't want to see unfogged offer a constant gawking at the horror (LGM already exists), but if there was a conscious decision to minimize politics that would feel less rather than more comfortable of a community because it would feel more disconnected.
Seems to me that energy spent in accurate dread is not energy spent in building my private sphere, including community.
My "learn trombone instead of wallowing" program is proceeding! But my lips are still so crap that I can only play like 10 minutes a day, so it's only a tiny bit less wallowing so far. On the upside, I can play eight or so notes, all at a thunderous volume, and it is fun as heck. Not so much productive of beauty yet, I guess.
I'm at like 260 days for the Duolingo streak.
15: Not to be trite, but I think the hope is that, as Spider Robinson said, "Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased (and bad puns are appreciated)."
I think 4 years of meta-discussion about what to discuss is just what the doctor has ordered.
l like this plan!
I was already exasperated by the three-day outrage back at "raking the forests". Even then I wished we wouldn't do the whole commentary, including the valid essays by real experts about the obvious. There was an infinite supply of the stupidity and all of it required real work out of us and we donated the funny and outraged energy. It wasn't a good way to spend the last two years of Trump and isn't a good way to spend another four years.
I'm torn about this. I will say that having purposefully cut back on other sources of news, this is now the place where I'm most likely to hear about national politics. Not sure how I feel about that.
On this particular point I did hear about it already from RWM who still subscribes to some daily NYTimes newsletter.
The NYT headline is somewhat misleading. Aaron Siri filed a petition to revoke the approval of the polio vaccine in 2022. Now he's working with RFK JR in choosing candidates for positions in HHS. This is bad, but I think the headline makes it sound like RFK has just filed a petition to revoke the polio vaccine.
Actually, I wouldn't mind taking this in a different direction: who were Trump's worst cabinet picks in the first administration? Who was too incompetent to achieve much, who did the most damage, how many truly poisonous people went under the radar, etc.? I dug up some 2016/17 threads yesterday with the Chris Arnade post, and the deja vu was significant.
The question of how to find, read, analyze, and propagate news over the next 4ish years is a big one, and it's fairly critical because there are so many holes, but I haven't even finished my coffee yet and I'm too groggy to frame the questions well.
I'm not consuming Quisling Media directly, although I'll click on a link if someone suggests it. Following the ins and outs of the Transition is always a fool's errand, so I don't think ignoring these people is any loss.
I don't know whether RFK actually gets confirmed, but I would expect any rulemakings they try to do will run into heavy weather at the DC Circuit. Getting rid of Chevron will work against Trump's minions. The question is whether "we" can get there before MAGA can file a case in the NDTx.
I think Harmeet Dhillon at the Civil Rights Division will be pretty bad, or at least that's what I'm most worried about.
I am also quite worried about Harmeet Dhillon.
Orange post title, so people know which posts to avoid.
Still genuinely curious about answers to 24...
11: I feel pretty strongly that there is work to do, and it won't all be through party politics. I mean getting Democrats elected is the most importantly thing. But I had a conversation with my priest about the role of ten Church in resisting the administration. Grassroots protection of immigrants even if it's just a few people is not wasted.
24, 31: Trump's first-term appointments were so much more normal than his new ones that it's kind of hard to say which were the worst. I can't think of any particular harm caused by any of them that another Republican appointee wouldn't have also done, but maybe I'm forgetting something.
That's fair. I remember that Sessions seemed like a bad deal and that was borne out by events, but I'd have to look back at specifics and lists to give an informed account.
Apart from Dhillon, I think I'm still most concerned about Hegseth, in part because there's now a perverse effect where sexual assault allegations strengthen candidates (the Kavanaugh Effect, maybe?), and in part because doing even a small amount of gratuitous damage to the military seems bad. That's pretty amorphous and should be taken with a shapeless grain of salt.
Yeah, Sessions was bad, but in ways that most Republican AGs would be bad. Maybe somewhat more extreme? In general though I think these new appointments are likely to be much worse in various ways than any of the first-term ones. I agree that Hegseth is particularly concerning.
Barr ended up doing more damage than Sessions.
What did Sessions actually do? Like I remember being very worried about him at the time, but now I can't actually remember what he did.
He keeps on finding new Horsemen to nominate.
37: His tenure was fairly brief, but he gave a green light to the family separation policy. (I'm looking for the report that is the basis for this article. Incidentally, the current Inspector General has held the office since 2012.)
36 is right, though.
I think this is the report. Is this the sort of business-as-usual government activity that is going to look very different in Jan 2029? That's the Trumpist pledge, right?
three-day outrage back at "raking the forests"
I remember raking the forests and it was probably discussed here maybe in a thread, but I don't remember three days of it here and I don't see a reason to specially and preemptively exclude any current event from comments threads here. I can't speak for what it's like on blogs I don't read or social media where I have no account.
I reserve the right to complain about too much Trump reaction in the future, possibly by storming the capital and or data center where Unfogged is hosted.
I think you mean 'capitol'. Tedious bitchery is an old tradition here.
Don't tell me what I meant! What if I meant to be wrong? Did you think of that?
Can we storm capital in the capitalism sense?
The JCC put CNN back on the tv in the weight room, so I'm thinking of antisemitism.
I can't remember what raking the forests even means.
Speaking as the representative for the less sharp tools in the drawer.
It was a felony in Alabama until 1985.
46: he was blaming us Californians for our fires because in Europe they take their forests.
It was a couple years in and when I realized that I just didn't want to read the smart rebuttals anymore.
Sorry to be pissy about this. No, we shouldn't pre-emptively decide that we aren't talking about politics anymore. But I do that that we should do "OMG, it could be so bad! Will it be all the way bad? What are the associated bad secondary things?" because, yeah. That's all gonna happen.
If people want polio and measles so bad, I'm ready to let them have it. I can't make my own kid wear his coat when I know it is cold out and I can't fix a nation hellbent on self-destruction. But I don't have to dwell on it.
Measles hurts the immunocompromised too. Also, most kids get vaccines through the VFC program. If RFK fucks with that, the6 will be hurt through n fault of their own.
The Atlantic has an article titled "Trump is about to betray his rural supporters." So maybe going to be a farmer isn't a good fallback for me.
I'm not going to read the article, of course.
Weirdly, I'm broadly in agreement with Megan. The Kremlinology is a total waste of time. There is no plan, there is no game, there is no why; it's all jesters at a mad king's court. Whatever happens happens.
On which: Mattis very likely prevented Trump form starting a war with North Korea in 2017. Maybe Waltz can do that this time round (and there will be a this time, DPRK always provokes new administrations). Waltz looks dangerously competent if he has machtergreifung in mind.*
Rubio at State will be one to watch. IDK much about him, so you'll have to fill me in. Actually having LatAm** policies would be a novel change, with Rubio I'm guessing for the worse. There's a really noxious stew slopping over AFAICT almost the whole continent: coelacanth anti-communism, coelacanth leftism, spreading drug wars, migration crises.
*And maybe trying to sell out Ukraine; anti-DEI will be bad for Dod because you are disastrously short of personnel, but I don't see it being catastrophic. He's strongly anti-PRC which is of course what I care about most.
**Though Rubio presumably won't have any real influence on the Mexico file, by far the most important.
56.2 Mattis and Tillerson also prevented the UAE and KSA from invading Qatar during the the early days of the blockade
I approve of the adjectivization of "coelacanth". But I can't pronounce it.
54 Yeah, I'm not going to be all that sorry when Montanans in Ag realize that it was Jon Tester raining money on them, not some kind of natural process, and that they replaced him with someone not interested or capable of doing the same.
In addition to federal money, Montana Ag lives on international trade. Nothing about the incoming admin could disrupt that, right?
Trump will find a way to surrender to the PRC. Hilary Clinton thought the danger was he could be baited by a tweet, but the reality is that he'll disarm based on vague love letters.
56: I will be very surprised if Trump doesn't try to sell out Ukraine. Like, the only thing his people cared about getting into the 2016 Republican platform was a ban on lethal aid for Ukraine. It's one of the few things he's consistently been personally interested in. (AIMHMHB, I think that Russian intelligence pwns him and has for many years.)
The rest of foreign policy is a Project for a Post-American Century.
Hilary Clinton thought the danger was he could be baited by a tweet, but the reality is that he'll disarm based on vague love letters.
¿Por qué no los dos?
Sessions recused on the Russia investigation -- Trump is not going to make the mistake of appointing someone who would do that again.
60 I think he may well be able to preclude Starlink from assisting the Ukrainian military by executive order. Musk will play along. Whether this is game set match for Ukraine I leave to you smarter people.
I have no idea what will happen in Ukraine. I've been assuming that Americans are, as Americans are wont to do, overestimating the effect of our contribution to Ukraine's defense. But I'm also not competent to analyze the military situation.
65 Fair. I think of our role as providing certain nails, the want of which would have serious consequences. What happens if US defense vendors are precluded from providing software updates, spare parts, and ordinary maintenance on advanced weapons that have been delivered in the last 2 years?
I think Starlink probably is a big deal, though.
63: Well, I have no idea whether it's a pee tape per se. But given (1) the temptations that Russian intelligence routinely puts in the way of people doing business there, even people doing much less business than Trump was trying to do, and (2) everything publicly known about Trump's character, it's a super easy sum to do.
It's not easy to wrap your head around the idea that the head of state and government is compromised by, and extremely likely an asset of, an antagonist state's intelligence service. But believing that he is not requires a person to believe that out of all the times Trump was offered sex and money -- to say nothing of the times he decided to just try to grab either -- the one time he said no was to the Russians.
The thing is, the market value of kompromat on Trump has been in the toilet for years. You have to wonder how the hypothetical Russians would be dealing with that novel situation, even if they have something particularly good. They're still basically in the same fractured media universe as the rest of us. Where's the leverage? (Sincere question.)
I think Trump just genuinely is infatuated with Putin. There may be kompromat, but I agree that there's no angle to use it because Trump is only id. You can't get Trump to ever be anything but id. Trump keeps on pre-empting the need for kompromat because his id sincerely loves Putin.
Lots of men are in love with the big, firm daddy from Russia.
68: Couldn't say, exactly. But look at his first-term behavior with Putin. It is so, so far from the norm of presidents meeting Russian leaders (only translator present, no notes, etc.) and so different from Trump's meetings with other heads of governments, that to me it adds up to pwnage. Then there were the things like trying to set up a channel for communicating with the Kremlin that was outside of government channels, plus Flynn, plus what sounded like an offer to lift the sanctions that had already been leveled before 2016. He hasn't been a weathervane, he's wanted to submit to Russia since early in his first campaign.
Was Trump in hock to Russian mafia people in New York? How long have they had their hooks in him? What did he tell them during his term in office?
Maybe this stuff coming out wouldn't affect the devoted R voters, but there's probably something deeply humiliating, which a narcissist like Trump just can't face up to having revealed.
Putin is of course keeping the kompromat that is being held by others from being released.
It's the money. Laundering Russian money has been Trump's main business since the mid-90s, with a brief interlude as a reality TV star.
https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/trump-and-russia-a-timeline/
With him, all roads lead to Putin.
Best rumor I've seen is that the Russians honeypotted Trump with a visibly underaged girl who was the spitting image of Ivanka
Lots of men are in love with the big, firm daddy from Russia.
There is a song for them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takogo,_kak_Putin!
It's not gross at the same level, but I knew some folks at an organization that would occasionally host a retired former world leader. Somehow, they'd found an employee working for the organization who was the spitting image of the world leader's late wife, but at 30 not 70. So they'd concoct excuses to have this employee be present for events, whether or not in the same country -- or continent -- as her duty station. For completely unrelated reasons, one of the people in the organization played around enough with other parts of the budget, and a comprehensive audit was triggered. The auditors were having real trouble figuring out why this minor employee from a branch office kept getting detailed to various places to do minor tasks that the local people could easily have done. No one had told the employee what was going on -- she was just getting assignments to go to X place and help out at an event. She wasn't fucking him or anything, just being in his entourage., and he apparently liked talking to her.
I don't think anyone ever admitted it. It's obviously too embarrassing to everyone.
Naked apes, all the way to the core.
78 A man who (like Yeltsin) met his historical moment quite well, and then later had a very minor moment with the quite appropriate "por que no te callas?" And, again like Yeltsin, will be remembered better in posterity if everything else is forgotten.
Following up on the other day's thread, the AI Snake Oil bloggers search for political deepfakes and find...not many?
[Is there a good reason why I get the forbidden page if I try to post from my phone?]
Rubio at State will be one to watch. IDK much about him, so you'll have to fill me in.
He's pretty much a nonentity, so presumably he'll do whatever Trump wants on the few issues Trump cares about and whatever his most influential subordinates want on everything else.
What'll be more interesting to watch is whoever replaces him in the Senate.
I'm in the running.
I honestly keep forgetting that Rubio exists. His namesake fast casual restaurant went out of business.
Huh, the restaurant is still around. I thought bankruptcy + closures wiped them out but that wasn't all the locations.
I don't see Rubio as anywhere nearly as dedicated as Trump to killing NATO and the surrender of Kyiv.
71: honestly, it will be interesting to me to see if anything changes this time around. His first-term behavior drove no end of speculation about how and why he was beholden to Russia, and it ended with him losing a re-election bid and getting hit with a bunch of fairly serious lawsuits. The fact that he has now survived all of that (including a felony conviction) and been reelected with a popular majority... I guess I wonder if his behavior will be the same, if he feels like his interests are pretty much still aligned with Russia's, or if he's willing to take more risks. It seems like he basically sees Putin as a mixture of Fox News and family-- part of the soothing and familiar mirror-frame for his self-regard-- and he's been willing to go with the flow. But I think at this point Russia wants more from him than vice versa. The even more interesting speculation is how much additional leverage they got on him during his first term.
How much will he be driving the boat this time? He was an absolute shambles in the election, way off his game from 2016, and only managed to gut it through on a cocktail of pure evil and the overwhelming fecklessness of American institutions. But we all watched the guy spend thirty minutes rocking out to YMCA and other classic hits of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.... is he really up to governing?
Conservative have whined for years about how conservatives get appointed to the Supreme Court and then they end up ditching their convictions because they crave approval from the New York Times. This has always seemed like transparent bullshit to me. Instead, what happens is that they find that the self-centered bullshit that is American conservatism doesn't really work in our system. I think there's a level at which the needs of the institution strongly mitigate the needs of the ideology.
Maybe that's finally breaking down now that conservatism has given up completely on the idea of being intellectually coherent, and is reduced to being just about power.
Anyway, I think Rubio may end up more susceptible than most of the Trump nominees to walking past the portraits of past secretaries -- Jefferson, Madison, Seward, Acheson, Dulles, Kissinger, Baker, Powell, Rice -- and feel like he's become a historical figure in a way that being a senator just isn't. A world historical figure. This is what happened to Sessions, who knew that Ashcroft had sat up in a hospital bed to defy GWB. Court jesters around a mad king, yes, but they take the hat off when they get home, and they look in the mirror. Most of them see non-entities who owe everything to Trump, or billionaire hobbyists, looking back. Rubio, who actually thought himself qualified to be president, isn't going to be one of those.
He's the one who's not like the others, so much so that it's a wonder Trump picked him.
Trump did say he wants to end DST so maybe he's not all bad?
Maybe he'll just stare at the Kissinger portrait and forget the others.
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Can someone please explain this to me like I'm in kindergarten?
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/14/abc-george-stephanopoulos-trump-15-million
Trump is a public figure. How was he planning to prove that he suffered economic harm?
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But we all watched the guy
I'm wondering how little pay I'd be willing to accept for watching Trump dance for half an hour straight. The marginal dignity tax is just so high. Could I go as low as four figures?
94: You aren't supposed to explain bribery to kindergartners.
Everyone tries to bribe them, but usually people leave the ethics aside.
"We can't just torment a little kid by seeing how long they can resist eating a marshmallow if we promise them a bigger reward."
"What if we tormented a bunch of kids and wrote up the results?"
At least with Rubio you can be fairly certain he'll get confirmed. I refuse to speculate about most of the cabinet picks when even the inauguration itself is still over a month away.
Rubio rhymes with polio. Maybe the Trump administration will destroy America in a way that lends itself to verse.
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City council run-off election was today. The candidate I endorsed won by 14 votes. I am 100% preening right now!
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Maybe the Trump administration will destroy America in a way that lends itself to verse.
HHS portfolio: polio embroglio.
It tightened to 12 votes! It already said 100% of precincts reporting, but they must have located some absentee ballots or something. Anyway, with 830 total votes, I don't think there's going to be so many more late votes that it sways it, but I suppose it's possible.
Did Trump really shit himself in France? Now that ABC has kissed the ring and paid the protection money, I don't see how I could accept a negative report from the media. So, to be on the safe side, I'm need to assume Trump shit himself in France.
Let's operate under the assumption that he leaves a snail trail wherever he goes.
Ooh, that's even closer than our city council candidate won by in the last election (679 to 640).
110: it's the era of conspicuous corruption. All interesting.