I'm backing away from the tech companies where I can without cutting myself off too much. I should try to find another email as I have only Google accounts.
I need to find some media worth subscribing to. I now have a regular donation to Wikipedia and a TPM subscription, but that's about it.
You want reporting specifically, as opposed to opinionage?
Yes. I do give to the Guardian. But I'm looking for an American one.
Half my friends are switching from Whatsapp to Signal, and half are staying put, so that's a real fucking pain in the ass.
Unfortunately I'm really devoted to IG and would be sad to give it up. Like I bookmark all sorts of cute funny things to share with the kids, and then when we're sitting around waiting for an appointment, we go through the Kids Folder and just have a blast.
Gabbard confirmed on party line vote. It's Susan Collins' world, we just live in it.
Wow. I really thought from back in December that she'd be the one that failed.
I do have a Signal account now. But I've never used it.
I think the Republicans are fully in the cult now.
I don't trust the CEOs of all the MSM not to be Republicans.
Not sure how bad it is going to get on the media front.
They are clearly pulling punches all over the place now, but still mostly within the "both sides" framework they have cemented over the past 30 years that privileges the lies of the Rs.
I suspect that T et al are actually somewhat comfortable (for now) with the "frenemy" stance of the "liberal" media to attack.
But there will be increasing threats against non-media interests of the owners.
Whatever happens, the NYT will be the paper of record of the Kleptocratic Autocracy, whatever that requires.
8: Yeah, things now are not m like then. You see 9and R senators see) how quickly a "serious" person like Marco Rubio goes all in and realize what's the point.
Are the Five eyes actually still sending us intelligence?
2: I got a Wired subscription. The talk radio at my local PBS/ NPR affiliate has been pretty brave, so I'm upping my contribution. The station WGBH, however, took down all references to DEI on their website which is concerning and changed it to Community or something.
I'd really like a TPM- lite subscription for $35 instead of $70. The Philadelphia paper seems to be pretty good. I am subscribed to the Boston Globe.
11: And what it measn to be a republican now is much more than it meant in say 1995.
I think US media might ot some degree be slightly constrained by what happens in other world media. Will there be viable competitors for the US market who are not full on Pravda?
7: Oops, McConnell voted against. What a world.
I would definitely like recommendations for nob-google web-based e-mail. I'd be willing to pay something but not a huge amount.
Honestly, I can't get away from Google or Microsoft because of workplace subscriptions, so while I could change my personal accounts, it feels like it would be kind of pointless.
16: I'm with Will Stancil on this:
it's dramatically appropriate that mcconnell is forced to live in a hell he himself created, but I wish I wasn't also forced to live in it
Patel seems like the only one that still might not actually be confirmed. Even that's questionable given everything else.
I don't know how they'd confirm Gabbard and not Patel. Unless it's because Patel lied to their faces much more recently?
I don't get it exactly, but maybe some personal grudge like with Gaetz. Grassley holding over the nomination seems like a sign of something but I'm not sure what.
Fuck it I'm breaking out the bourbon even though I have to go to work tomorrow
definitely like recommendations for nob-google web-based e-mail
I'm happy with Fastmail.
17: Protonmail. They have a free service but there's also a sale going on the plus-level tier right now. Easy to migrate and forward everything from gmail. Good VPN too.
Not sure what the Proton mail CEO thinks of Trump now, but (screenshot of tweet being referenced). I have seen people say that the product is still fine from a security perspective.
The problem is not gmail so much that I've got my entire life embedded in Google Drive. And various other google apps.
Maybe I should subscribe to a worthwhile Canadian newspaper?
My problem with abandoning gmail is that I have the addresses for my actual name. With no numbers.
28: Yeesh, gross. Hadn't seen that. I mainly like having E2EE. But I'm guessing for most people who don't have weirdly intense or niche email needs the diff between fastmail and protonmail is small.
29: I use the calendar. I have dome photos in google drive but mostly back up onto idrive. Wondering if Apple is any better for any of this stuff.
28: Speaking of companies you want to avoid because of the politics, are there Musk-controlled entities other than Tesla and Starlink we shoukd boycott?
30: For Canadian news to sponsor - Canadaland and Halifax Examiner are my choices. And I need to start reading The Tyee for the other coast. Some others listed at this question with comments:
https://ask.metafilter.com/384251/Help-me-know-whats-happening-in-the-frozen-northlands
Is something like the Toronto Star any good for international coverage? I want to replace the Washington Post and an willing to learn about Ontario if it gets me better coverage.
The Globe and Mail is the canonical one. Their Doug who's an international columnist and occasional Berlin resident is mostly astute. Plus he gave me a bluesky code back when those were necessary.
Only $11 for a week of home delivery.
Speaking of companies you want to avoid because of the politics, are there Musk-controlled entities other than Tesla and Starlink we shoukd boycott?
Don't forget Twitter, but also consider Visa for helping him build a payment system, through which I assume he's going to force everyone to have an account so they can accept their Social Security checks as $MUSKBUCKS.
Hark! Look to the brave, principled Democrats! They valiantly hold the line on preserving decorum in the face of
the immoderate bleating of their unreasonable constituents:
Fetterman seems to be a piece of shit whose main achievement is being marginally better than a fake doctor.
||
After practicing sorcery during his youth in order to avenge the hardships inflicted on his family by a cruel uncle, Mila began to regret the sufferings he caused through his success in the black arts.|>
So we're going to be issuing letters of marque now? This is going to get a lot of American tourists and expats in Mexico killed.
Madness
https://x.com/reptimburchett/status/1889719640923762971?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
where's Ralph Nader to say that the Corsair's were unsafe at any speed
Unsafe to you, losers!
The Corsair was based on the Crusader, which was very definitely unsafe at any speed:
1,261 Crusaders were built. By the time it was withdrawn from the fleet, 1,106 had been involved in mishaps.[25]
Though the article does note that if you accidentally took off with the wings still folded in half, it would fly more or less OK (this happened several times).
40: I was thinking about that. We mostly use Amex, but we also have Mastercards from Apple. We have an RBC Visa that Tim has that's tied to a Canadian bank account. For in- person shopping Costco only takes visa. We order bulk items and medications (antihistamines) online and use the Mastercard, but in-store you have to use Visa. I want to support Costco, because they've resisted challenges to DEI by right-wing activist shareholders.
What does 46 say? Can't read the link.
51: A loon congressman says he's going to propose a bill that will allow the president to issue letters of marque to private individuals to "seize persons or property of any cartel or linked organisation". He's probably lying to get attention.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/why-asteroid-collision-course-earth-111928076.html
Why an asteroid on a collision course with Earth is actually good for humanity
"Another thing to appreciate about the current risk from 2024 YR4 is that a 2.3% chance of an impact in 8 years is still lower probability than the odds of a similar sized undiscovered object hitting before that time."
||
Wouldn't it be great if some smart tech person developed a program that was basically one click that disabled all the AL shit the various platforms are pushing on us? Wouldn't the developer become a zillionaire?
|>
No, wait, I like the American League! I meant AI.
Acrobat has gotten to be such a shit about AI that I read pdfs in Edge sometimes.
Any tech kabillionaire who tried to protect us from enshittification would get Batman-levels of idolatry.
58: I was going to make some kind of joke about the Designated Hitter Rule, but then I had a vague memory of reading that the National League adopted it too. I checked and yes they did in 2022.
There's no doubt the US has fallen from grace.
57: YES
I would also like to be able to set my Epic record to block automatic notifications to bulk messages so that I Know when to log in. Even better, if I could have n automatic reply which said, "this message was rejected because it was sent to multiple addresses or was written using AI".
50. Don't rely on Amex if you visit Europe. Almost nobody takes it. OTOH Visa is ubiquitous. Apparently Amex takes too big a cut from the retailer. MC is everywhere too.
51: Here's the X-tweet from 46, BG:
Rep. Tim Burchett
@RepTimBurchett
I'll be introducing the "Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025" which would authorize
@realDonaldTrump to commission privately armed and equipped individuals or groups to seize persons and property of any cartel, cartel member, or cartel-linked organization.
11:54 AM · Feb 12, 2025
·
Discover is accepted in "99% of places", I can't help but know from watching sports on TV
At first everyone thought the Republicans wanted to bring us back to the '50s, but then we realized that the target date was actually in the Gilded Age.
And now, we're talking letters of marque and reprisal - that's really going back there.
Wikipedia is good on this. I have learned that
[S]ince the American Civil War, the United States as a matter of policy has consistently followed the terms of the 1856 Paris Declaration forbidding the practice.
I have to admit, this strikes me as the upside of casting aside international constraints. Pirates are fun! At least, more fun than Nazis.
Is there any remote chance that Hochul will remove Adams from office now that it has really blown up? (I'm guessing not.)
Has this lit a fire under the freaking Times at least? They buried a story on $80M being taken back from NYC coffers I noticed. Don't have the heart to look if they are giving this story its due.
46, 65: Submitting crazed bills that they know will die has been an R specialty since the days of Gingrich. But now that so many of crazed delusions have been made immanent within the Republican party who even knows what they might actually do.
NYT front page right now:
"Adams Case Provokes Justice Dept Upheaval"
"U.S. Attorney and Others Resign After Refusing to Drop Charges Against Mayor"
and
"An Ambitious Prosecutor Quits Rather Than Do Trump's Bidding"
So it's a big deal for some reason, maybe you'll find the corruption if you click through and read for a while. They do include the letter, which a different newspaper may have considered worth quoting in a big headline.
The DOJ are now effectively mob lawyers, and the work is underway to turn the FBI into made men. And so on.
stealing from someone on Bluesky, I was led to believe by REM that I would feel better about this.
CNN.com is currently featuring the very important revelation: "NASA astronauts weigh in on Trump's rhetoric"
Smaller text and to the right is: "Acting US attorney in New York and five others quit after being told to drop Eric Adams case"
Six people resigning rather than doing something corrupt is kind of a big fucking deal!
Scroll down a bit further, and you find:
"Drama over Adams case raises questions about Trump administration's 'weaponization' of justice"
and then
"Analysis: Americans voted for Trump. Did they vote for this?"
Can't wait to find out the law is nothing more than whatever people wearing MAGA hats in diners think it is.
It seems like if Hochul can really remove Adams and she did it, that would make the story pretty hard to downplay but she's probably got consultants saying if she does that, she'll lose some slice of voters in some suburb of some city somewhere in the state who care more about the price of dog food.
CNN must read Unfogged because they've now reversed the placement of the astronaut story with the Adams/DOJ story and raised "weaponization" to the leading headline.
||
and the virtuous wife of a doctor is sentenced to just a week in the poisonous waters of purgatory in order to expiate her husband's crime of imprudently bleeding (in the medical sense) his patients.|>
67. If they wanted to bring back the 50s, they'd have to swap out Trump for Eisenhower. I'd take that.
I have a dumb fear. Has this administration somehow caused my spam filter to deteriorate? I'm literally seeing a lot more extremely-poorly done spam, with weird fonts and bold lettering that feel like ~2003, and a surprising amount of it invokes Elon in some money-making scheme. Based on the subject heading at least.
More in my yahoo account than in my gmail account.
It would seem more likely that that your addresses have been leaked via the incompetence of the Doge crew.
64: when I temped at a division of American Express in the 1990s, there were posters around the office exhorting employees to turn in retailers who claimed to take American Express but then discouraged customers from using their card when presented. I don't know if that's still a problem for them, but if you're relying on random employees to narc out your contractees, that would seem to suggest there is a flaw in your business model.
When I had a job with a company credit card, it was Amex - which is the only time I've ever actually encountered it. It was really noticeable how many places in Europe would only take Visa and Mastercard.
My suspicion is that Amex survives in business by having a crap product but being very good at persuading large organisations to make their employees use it, see also BAE Systems, Boeing, Microsoft etc.
American Express has a weirdly prominent place in Patricia Highsmith's European novels.
Travellers' cheques and freight forwarding was how they started out. The cards came along later.
81: The Supreme Court found that American Express's high transaction fees benefited consumers and therefore it was okay for the company to demand that retailers not discourage the card's use.
So merchants can't provide discounts to users of Visa and Mastercard because that's what's best for the customers.
Usually being defrauded by the other characters!
That reminds me. Last night a guy at the bar ran up a $43 tab, put down $45, and said "keep the change."
And if that guy just happened to get run over on his way home, well, Hick drivers are notoriously accident prone.
I always walk to the bar. But it was a very big week locally for overturned cars. Fortunately, I didn't have to go places by car.
Overturned cars because of weather or sportsball? Or something else?
My uninformed guess is that Trump being a piece of shit and getting away with it has encouraged young men in cars and trucks to try the same, but gravity doesn't play. My theory doesn't entirely work because the one nearest to me was a woman. But she really didn't overturn the car so much as drive the car into a retaining wall (after narrowly missing a bunch of school kids legally crossing the street).
But certainly not weather and no one here is overturning a car for an Eagle's win (though I think most people did want them to win).
But her car was a Jeep Wrangler, so at least that stereotype was supported.
My experience of Jeeps is definitely that they suck and one crashes them.
I'm having odd reactions to the steady torrent of bad news: I think I decided long ago that I wasn't going to be reactive, and so I've conditioned myself to be calm and stoic in the face of most of Trump's b.s. I think I'm now at the point where I'm clearly failing to resolve the cognitive dissonance effectively, but the will not to react is incredibly powerful. It would be nice if I could turn it to some better use.
We've had three Jeeps (none were Wranglers) and I've only totaled one.
I'm having odd reactions to the steady torrent of bad news
I'm really struggling with the urge to do more vs the urge to check out. Actually it's a triangular struggle between three things:
1. I should be doing more because what if all of our collective resistance is swelling to some imperceptible but important-in-hindsight tipping point?
2. I should not be doing more because I'm already harried and cranky about how much I've got going on (mostly kid-related but also local politics)
3. I should compartmentalize more because it's going to be a really fucking long four years either way, and I might as well not ruin my mental health along with it.
ALSO!! Here's a question:
Hawaii is really struggling to cope with wondering which adults in her life are Trump supporters. She's sussing out the teachers she likes, etc, and asking them point blank. She's never been a counterculture kid, so there's a real potential for people she admires - dance studio teachers, etc - to be Trump supporters.
The bleg is specifically about her OCD therapist. She's been amazing for the OCD. But what if she's Republican?
- Arguments against: therapists are pretty realistic about the problems of the world.
- Arguments that she might be: she lives in the next town over, which is a world of upscale Trump supporters. (Their county broke 70% for Trump.)
I'd say there's a 30% chance she voted for Trump, and it's unlikely she's full-throated MAGA. But usually the advice would be "discuss this with your therapist", and usually the therapist wouldn't answer. But she might indirectly answer in a way that tells us too much. I'm worried that if we get the wrong answer, we really can't see her anymore, and she's been extremely helpful.
Do I just advise Hawaii to keep it professional and not ask?
I am in a weird emotional place. Intellectually, I think this round of Trump is much more dangerous than the last one -- he's trying much more sincerely to disassemble our system of democratic government, flawed as it always was. I honestly believe that the risk that our government is unrecognizably changed in five years is meaningful.
But emotionally it's all kind of funny to me. Eight years ago I was upset and poised to resist (not that I did much of anything but show up at some demonstrations.) This time, I can't take it seriously. I know it's serious, but I'm not feeling it.
Lemons, lemonade. Train her to murder Republicans, leaving only meticulously cleaned crimescenes behind.
I'm similar to 99. Though the whole "end scientific research in America" thing is piercing that bubble a little. Presumably it doesn't go through because they suck at doing anything legal, and because big hospitals have real lobbyists, but it is a bit of staring at the void. Mostly staring at the void and chuckling because it's so ridiculous, but the void nonetheless.
With the new HHS, maybe it will become obvious which therapists are really into Trump because it looks like they're going to target mental health.
Hawaii's a teenager, isn't she? I think she's old enough to decide what rocks she needs to look under. Lay it out for her -- this is someone who's helping her a lot and would be hard to replace. There's a significant chance she's a Trump voter: what would Hawaii want to do if she is, stop seeing her or go on seeing her anyway? And based on that thought, does she want to know?
There's not a right answer, all you can do is lay out the pathways.
Yeah, that was basically the conversation we had. I know she's really consumed by this question, though.
Last spring, the theater director picked the play they'd do for theater competitions. He picked a play about refugees trying to cross into Texas and running into Border Patrol. Then Trump got elected. The play got cast maybe in December. Now a lot of the leads are terrified that their families are going to be deported.
The director is being very responsible around this - he's opened the conversation to whether or not they want to switch plays. He's pulling in counselors. They're doing a lot of processing, and for the time being, they're continuing with the play.
It's been super eye-opening for Hawaii though, and she's filled with rage that anyone could support Trump. She's down in the weeds the way you are when you first start to realize how shitty and ignorant people can be.
This is me just sharing. It doesn't really affect anything.
98: People voted for Trump for different reasons -- all based on misconceptions, in my opinion, but still different. This includes a lot of bright, competent people who are locally capable of empathy and insight. That said, I have no fucking advice. Maybe you can make an analogy with shitty people making powerful, lasting art? Sometimes (often? usually?) competence just isn't that broad-based.
I am a little cheered by all the noisy resignations from the Southern District NY US Attorney's office over DOJ's attempt to use the corruption charges against Adams to extort him into enforcing federal immigration policy. Don't know if it'll do any good, but they're saying the right things.
They're going to have to touch the stove
Funny how when you put a little incentive like "not getting disbarred" up there, suddenly Republican lawyers are willing to do the right thing.
I wonder how many other USians under 50 have never used a traveler's check? Even in 2002, when I was in Red China, it was already a simple matter to take yuan out of the ATM using my regular debit card.
107.4: I'd be happy to send her a copy of Living My Life if she hasn't already read it.
112: I remember going to England with two terms worth of expenses in traveler's checks in a belt under my trousers.
I bet if you never traveled abroad before 2000, you haven't used travelers checks.
My parents used to use them on domestic travel. Every few days, they would find a bank or something to cash them at.
Wow. How long did they keep that up?
My parents might have, I suppose. I wouldn't have paid any attention. But they certainly stopped by the 90s.
My parents certainly stopped that by the 90s. No local banks had ATMs until maybe 1984. Lots of places wouldn't take credit cards in the 80s, including most stores. You'd pay with a check at home, but out-of-state checks were sometimes hard to use.
My mom still holds up the grocery line to balance her checkbook after writing a check, rather than moving off to the side to record the details. It's a pet peeve of mine.
98/107. Would it be helpful to say that other people have lived in worse places, where interpersonally decent neighbors supported the awfulness? Not that helpful for dealing with social aspects of wilful ignorance and a preference for lies that are social reality now in the US socially, but the psychology of cognitive dissonance as a lifestyle is not new. Since the touchpoint is theater, has she ever read/seen Havel's plays? Audience and A Private View both deal with the psychology of much more severe alternate realities/cognitive dissonance.
It's better than holding up the line to explain why beans are woke to the cashier.
121 social social social I need an editor
I spent a semester in DC in the late 1990s and some students set up local bank accounts because their banks didn't make it easy to withdraw from out of state. I think I might have brought travelers' checks with me as a backup when traveling to Europe for the first time around that same time, but I don't think I ever used them.
111: I'm not inclined to be cynical when people do the right thing, especially when shitty people decide to step up. (I realize that this puts me at odds with the folks who would reject Liz Cheney's endorsement of Harris.) I imagine that a lot of these prosecutors were Federalist Society types, so coming down on the right side of the rule of law is a big step for them. And yeah, Giuliani and John Eastman and a few others got in trouble with bar associations but I think that's basically because they got in trouble with government prosecutors. I don't see the DOJ taking action here, and even the states are going to think twice.
On the other hand, do we think Sassoon et al are safe from Trump? I wouldn't be so sure.
My daughter got a sweet internship with a federal government agency that now may be withdrawn. But she voted for Jill Stein, so she deserves it.
(What must it be like to be a young American nowadays? I'm old enough that when I was a kid, adults were talking about how cynical kids were getting because Watergate had destroyed the idea of virtuous US leadership.)
I don't even get foreign cash before traveling before. I did last year at SFO, and then realized they had screwed me so bad with fees I said never again.
I used traveller's checks, and I even collected mail held for me at American Express offices. This was early 1990s.
I kinda don't think the first bit of 108 is a statement you want to make when a Germanist is around.
It's 100% a statement I am making as a quasi-Germanist (PhD included a lot of German literature). I'm not excusing fucking anything. Bright, competent, locally empathetic and insightful people who vote based on misconceptions do incredibly evil things (and yet they're still human; there's no moment of damnation that we can discern). I didn't vote for Trump, but I have to hold out the possibility that I myself am such a person despite all my Germanistik and noble impulses. I'm also spiraling pretty badly right now on a personal level, apparently.
As it happens, my German department advisor co-taught a class with Peter Thiel and I'm almost certain he voted for Trump, at least in 2024. I wonder if he regrets it yet, and I have to wonder what particular ironies he sees or doesn't see, but I will be done giving that fucker any thought when I hit the period key. (Nosflow knows what I'm talking about here, I think.)
So DOGE just published NOFORN NRO budgets on their website.
The fox is in the henhouse.
I have to admit I'm surprised by the pro-cancer policies.
One quasi- to another then, the people who joined the Party late, or for business reasons, or because they thought they could change it, or from social pressure, they were all of them -- however bright or locally competent -- still Nazis.
Enough crankiness, though; is there any way this imaginary friend can contribute to unspiraling?
The only German I know well at all is a radiologist.
He looks a little bit like a younger, very fit Werner Klemperer.
Jesus fuck
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-doge-posts-classified-data_n_67ae646de4b0513a8d767112
We have the American Express, because we get cash back. It's like 6% on groceries up to 6k, then 3% and. 3% on gas, 1% on everything else. We used to have the Costco Amex, but they parted ways. Amex also lets you use Venmo (send and split) without giving Venmo your bank info.
112: I am still under 50. When I went to France for summers on school trips/ family home stays, they did not expect 8th graders to have debit cards, so we were told to get travelers checks. We were also supposed to send letters to our parents, and to make airmail affordable there were special, extra light envelope and letter in one with postage.
64: We have the Apple Mastercard because it's a handy way to buy phones and computers. And Costco online takes it. I figure that I can use Mastercard in Europe and don't need to use Visa. Is that not so? I think they now give small businesses a better deal than they used to. Square trade is the most famous, but there are others.
136: People keep pointing to Federal laws he's violating, but I'd like to know about state laws so that we can prosecute him.
I'm morbidly fascinated to see what the new Kennedy Center does. The New Criterion crowd has debased themselves so far for Trump, I'm no longer sure they'd push a European High Culture ca. 1950 program. I don't know who else in the Trump right even cares for that sort of culture. Maybe it will just be screenings of the Melania doc, adaptations of the Turner Diaries, and Elon Musk talking over AI-generated garbage.
139: wait, what? I used to read ten New Criterion when I would take breaks from studying in the library. I was young and stupid. It looks like it's declined in quality, but also I was young and stupid when I read it regularly.
133: I mean, I get that usually when people say "don't lose sight of other people's humanity" they mean "temper your negative views with [excuse-making]," but that's not exactly where I'm coming from here. I feel more like I underestimated the enemy for a long time. Masha Gessen has been on this "people who do bad things for good reasons" theme in the Times, but I think I've shared those links already.
That said, I'm at a bit of a disadvantage because -- to a large degree by chance -- I've lived in a liberal bubble for the vast majority of my life, and I just haven't evolved the defenses against right-wing America that most of you possess. I went from being dismissive, to mildly curious, to dismissive again, to more fearful and vigilant, and right now I feel like the bubble is simply gone and won't ever come back. I can see exactly how human these people are now -- they look and sound just like me -- and they're my enemies. The cartoon version of this confrontation with evil that so many people think they "know" growing up is not the real thing. The schematic versions of political struggle that I diligently typed out or took to the streets for years were also shadows of the real thing. What's happening now is the real thing.
Even when Putin came to power in Russia in 1999, 2000, first he was prime minister, then he was president. And then when he was finally inaugurated as president it felt pretty fast. He immediately unleashed an attack on the media and on businesses, trying to get the oligarchs to line up.
I felt like I was living on a chessboard and somebody was picking off pieces and I couldn't predict which piece was going to get picked off next. It felt like I would turn around to say something to somebody, and they'd say: Oh, but I support him now. Or: Oh, but we can't run that article because of all the good reasons.
But in this country, it's faster. And it's worse. We saw the big money line up and genuflect before the inauguration.
Defenses against right wing America? I have hardly met them and have a very difficult time believing they're real, which is part of what makes me so inimitably ineffective. I had that job at the weird little law firm twenty years ago now with a bunch of rightwing partners, but they were still very New Yorky.
But other people probably have defenses. Or at least familiarity.
Yeah, it's one thing to know from history that people had others sent to the gulag to get their apartment, or their furniture, or to settle some other score. It's another to say, Hey look, let's not get anywhere close to that kind of public life and government because Americans are not a different species and some of them will denounce others and get them deported or sent to Guantanamo or whatever franchise it develops in order to make some minor gain or settle some petty grievance. It's yet another to see counties offering up their land to build Guantanamo franchises. I'm not close enough to have any idea of who's tipping off ICE, but that some of them are normal-seeming is a bet you can take to the bank.
[blush] you GUYS, I do have familiarity avoiding political talk with people around me unless I know for sure they're not lunatics!
Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Hey, this is a safe space for passing harsh judgments. 147 to what exactly?
139: I'm looking for a place I can bet on Ted Nugent to be one of the next Kennedy Center honorees.
Jonathan Swift says "We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love each other."
JD Vance replies, "That's right! We have precisely the right amount of religion!"
I confess to many flaws in my dictionary, there being no definitions therein for heebie, nor jeebie, nor teacher, nor professor, nor yet mathematician.
143/144: Yeah, I was thinking of my interlocutor Doug, apo, Cala, heebie, Barry, Upetgi, and a bunch of others who have right-wing neighbors or associates. I just don't (apart from my extreme outlier academic adviser in the humanities, I suppose). I guess my maternal grandparents were fairly right-wing in the pre-9/11 era, but that was easy to chalk up to senility and Catholicism. They got a lot of alarming junk mail. There was one pitch I remember vividly, by a guy who was frothing about the Radical Homosexuals coming to take over America: he couldn't afford an office, he'd gotten kicked out of his house, he was living in a utility sink or something and your donations were more needed than ever so he could keep up his desperate fight with the gays. I was a young adult, not a kid, but I'd never seen anything like that before (i.e. a completely unappetizing, deranged scam) and it blew my mind.
98: My wife faced this with her current therapist and her previous nurse practitioner during Trump 1.0. The practitioner was pretty enthusiastic after the election, and she put of going to appointments as a result. (The practitioner did retire after about 6 months, or she'd probably have finally switched to a new doctor.)
For her therapist, it's more inference rather than enthusiasm -- neither of them bring up politics much; when they do, it's often in the context of my wife discussing how she really shouldn't read the news so much, then passing along recent outrages. Fortunately the therapist's response is usually surprise - she seems very uninterested in policy and politics, and doesn't seem to know how government machinery really works. For my wife, that's fine - it's a red county and we interact with plenty of people from all walks and political persuasions - but it's probably helpful that they've invested a few years at this point.
...so he could keep up his desperate fight with the gays
Maybe he's winning? I heard that the Village People have gone straight.
154: Only the cop; all the rest have been replaced at some point.
They resigned rather than go straight.
I heard that the Village People have gone straight.
Straight and abusive. The Full Trump.
But wearing a leather vest over bare skin is now saved.
My shrink is Jewish and studied European history as an undergraduate. He's pretty strongly anti- Trump.
At work after the election, they suggested people go to EAP, presumably to learn coping skills. I certainly never got any hint of the idea that Trump's election wasn't a really terrible thing. What I find really bizarre is that in 2016 everyone at work was very anti-Trump, and they talked a lot about protecting immigrants. There are a couple of doctors I've talked to who sympathized when I said I was upset, but the non-clinical folks are pretending like everything is normal, and it's so weird. Nobody talked about po,it is AT ALL. I mean there are coworkers I knew from before I switched to corporate who I called on their cell phones who I know hate Trump, but the ones I've met since 2024 never talk about it.* The Latina practice manger Ik ow commented to me about how silent the hospital had been. I think they thought that if they kept their heads down they could keep their funding.
I texted my Brazilian-born coworker last weekend when all this shit about Musk came out. (Luckily he got his citizenship in 2023.). I asked him if this is what it was like being in Brazil under Bolsonaro. His response: "it is worse."
he couldn't afford an office, he'd gotten kicked out of his house, he was living in a utility sink or something
Why do all these homosexuals keep stealing my caulk?
144: most of the time it's what would have been a good faith disagreement except that the media ecosystem is shot so they think that DOGE is cutting waste, and that Utah joining the lawsuit to get rid of the 504 won't mean their disabled kid can't go to school, because the actual Project 2025 is bonkers but sounds like it's in the neighborhood of something sensible.
The bill that's destroying the university is a great example: woohoo, cut waste! Wait, they mean this class?!? But it's a good class and I like it!
145: Somehow this comment gives me pause. It is making me rethink my interactions with others that could inform authorities of my strong political leanings. The idea still seems remote but has now moved within the realm of possibility. I still remember when Trump season 1 sent the federal goons to Portland, and things are moving much faster this time.
How does Portland feel these days? Same chill as everywhere?
So DOGE just published NOFORN NRO budgets on their website.
Doug (?) wondered what it might take to get the American Operation Valkyrie moving. I think things like this are a strong candidate.
I was taken aback by a paragraph in the New Yorker article about U.S. military recruiting difficulties:
China's military is far larger than America's, with more than two million members. And, as the U.S. hollowed out its industrial capacity, China expanded; its steel industry is the largest in the world. In war games simulating a conflict between the two nations, the United States usually loses. According to the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, an American research firm, the Air Force would run out of advanced long-range munitions in less than two weeks.
Those who know anything about militaries: how true is this? Is "usually loses" a common understanding at this point? (Presumably "loss" could mean a lot of different things depending what sort of conflict they're simulating.)
167: True. (With your parenthetical caveat correctly held in mind.)
165: I don't know how Portland is doing. I haven't been getting out much, but it does seem weirdly quiet given all that is going on.
The last comment was me. I do know several people with disabilities and/or very limited income that are really terrified of what lies ahead.
I just returned from a pro trans/immigration rally that had pretty good turnout for a snowy afternoon in our small city. Lots of the youth showed up, which is great because usually protest events around here skew pretty gray.
I talked to one kid who's trying to get a punk scene established in town. Godspeed, kid.
167: no, it's meaningless without context. US invasion and occupation of China? US always loses. Chinese invasion of California? China always loses. Big surprise.
And in simulations of the most likely context, a conflict over Hawaii, it is false that the US always loses.
And the idea that steel output equals warmaking capacity is like something out of the Edwardian age. What next, coal reserves? To fuel our ironclads?
Is a conflict over Hawaii really the most likely scenario for a US-China war? Not, say, a conflict over Taiwan?
Ah, okay. That makes way more sense.
That's what I kept saying.
I ill try to dig out the recent report on why every analyst and simulation got the invasion of Ukraine totally wrong, but tldr, they did, by badly overestimating Russia. It's a good cautionary tale about conflict predictions. The most important things are not always the most measurable. We can count tanks and VLS cells. We can't count expertise, patriotism and motivation.
Also also, the New Yorker lazily asserts that the US has hollowed out its industrial capacity. False. It's doubled since 1983. Manufacturing employment has fallen, but that's not the same thing.
171: There was an impromptu anti Tesla protest in Boston. I should have gone. This is a really stupid question. I went to one of the early March for Women's Lives marches in DC under Bush, and I don't remember bringing a sign. Or maybe it was really organized and they gave us stuff or we wore T-shirts.
If I join a group of people in Boston to protest Tesla, what am I supposed to bring? Remember that getting there requires taking a commuter rail train and then getting on either a light-rail or a bus.
If I join a group of people in Boston to protest Tesla, what am I supposed to bring?
Mask, spray paint, keys.
American watchmaking died in the 50s, so I believe we've lost our industrial capacity.
America has great small scale manufacturers of ultralight hiking equipment.
If I join a group of people in Boston to protest Tesla, what am I supposed to bring?
A lot of times the organizer will have extra signs to share. Or you could be the cool one and bring a pack of paperboard and a couple of sharpies.
The really cool people bring donuts and hot chocolate, but that's hard to manage on a bus.
Also also, the New Yorker lazily asserts that the US has hollowed out its industrial capacity
Okay, let's zoom out. Media criticism is fun, but talking about the woeful state of the U.S. military is more fun.
And in simulations of the most likely context, a conflict over [Taiwan], it is false that the US always loses.
Great. How often does the U.S. lose? Let's maybe take it from there, with your data?
Why do they tell protesters to leave their phones at home? So that you won't be tracked? Or some other reason?
Probably because of the Pokemon Go playing.
I mean, it is Boston, so the Tesla dealership is probably across from a Dunkin Donuts anyway.
Why do they tell protesters to leave their phones at home? So that you won't be tracked? Or some other reason?
Yeah, cell phones are basically spies. They can reveal your location, they can be used to figure out who you are with, photos taken with them can be incriminating, your Twitter app could be secretly collecting audio, etc.
190: I was thinking about getting a Faraday bag. And turning it off while out. I need to call someone to get picked up at the commuter rail stop.
189: I think there's a Starbucks coffee and Blu Bottle in that area.
So Trump tweets "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law." And then Musk quote tweets it with 14 American flags.
181: My neighbor has one. It's company car, but he did have the option of a Volvo EV and went with the Tesla, so to some extent he chose it. His dog is our dog's best friend, so I would not want to him or his wife.
After the last few days I think a US-China conflict has become much less likely because the US would just surrender.
We'd be in the middle of a three front war with Canada and Mexico too
102:
The number 14 and the US Flag has some symbolism that I am not really pinning down by search. Is it the hallmark of a coming Civil War? I think that is based on a non-slave state only flag from before the Civil war. But these choads usually go for the Confederate symbolism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words
It's been a white nationalist/neo-Nazi dog whistle for so long it's practically a klaxon by now
Ah, it goes back to the 14 words; I thought there was pome sperate flag-related thing.
Apparently the whole "150-year olds are grifting off social security" is rooted in a COBOL thing, where dates are on some 150 year cycle and if there's a 0, it's interpreted as 1875. What a lark, hope no one dies.
COBOL was a tool of Reconstruction.
It was designed closer to the end of the 19th century than to today.
Abraham Lincoln: COBOL Programmer
That's probably a pretty good example of how if you hook up an LLM to translate your COBOL into Python, even if the code looks right it could very easily not have the same behavior, due to differences in the underlying implementation of the system
There is no way BigBalls knows about the 1875 thing.
194 is also a concern of mine. Really, I just have a large number of concerns since I had to throw out my "no, because that's fucking insane" triage process.
If China decides that it does actually want to attack and try to conquer Taiwan, this is their window of opportunity.
Don't mention it here. They can read this.
Only if you're on your phone, though, and it's not in a Faraday bag (which is a thing?).
I'm not sure how a Faraday bag is better than just turning your phone off. Quicker access, I guess?
I couldn't find a Faraday Bag. My wife has a Louis Vitton bag I can borrow, but I can only borrow it because it is fake.
I was posting something at the other place about how hard it is to log on and see all these good people losing their jobs (I have a lot of friends, colleagues and former students in the National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and NSF, and people are sharing their devestation) so that some petty billionaires can feel powerful. It makes me angry at everyone who voted for Trump. I was going to add a parenthetical to my post: most people connected to me would already know what Musk is doing has nothing to do with saving money. And then I was going to tack on "well, it's to save money in the same way that Hetty Green refusing her son medical care, which led to amputation of his leg, was to save money," which I thought was a spot on analogy (whoops!), and being a good boy I went to Wikipedia just to check that what I learned about Hetty Green (world's greatest miser) from the Guinness Book of World Records as a teen was still true and, finally getting to my point...her Wikipedia account has been totally whitewashed. There are all these citations to Fortune magazine and papers from the Mises institute and the wikipedia article now is basically "'Witch of Wall Street?!' Oh, heavens no, she was known admiringly as the 'Queen of Wall Street.'" All the facts are the same - she wore only one simple black dress, would only pay to have the dirty parts washed to save soap, her son had his leg amputated, all so she could die with 17 billion (in today's dollars) but everything is glossed as "she's really great, isn't she? She was a victim of the media!" It looks like an organized campaign by the pro-misers committee. Which is as 2025 as you can get.
It makes me angry at everyone who voted for Trump.
So angry.
Al Sharpton is really thin, but in a way that looks frail.
Al Sharpton's body looks too small for his head now, like dashboard bobblehead.
Have one family member who works for the Feds. Job so far is intact (other than return to office, and the Fork in the Road offer which engendered all the emotions from rage to incandescent rage and disgust*). They are in a somewhat backwater agency so they have not come under direct scrutiny. Their relatively small office is currently scrambling to prepare for the return to office stuff as the office never had the whole compliment and many workers were hired under the premise of remote work. They are doing so without being able to spend a dime on desks, chairs, what have you. And in the end there will probably be cutbacks; in fact I think their probationary's got the axe late Friday. They are pretty sure most of IT was probationary, so they are curious to see who shows up tomorrow.
*The sloppiness, lack of clarity and disrespect in every communication was really something.
214: Have unsuccessfully tried to temper my rage at his voters, but done with that shit now. Fucking adults every single one. I probably have some sympathy for the few in very underserved communities who had access only yo bs, but everyone else's mix of ignorance, stupidity, greed and nastiness puts them beyond the pale.*
*All* the elites in the country are now busy steeling themselves for the inevitable. Judicial system and some states will be the biggest holdouts, but we shall see.
Going to first protest tomorrow.
*I realize I certainly have all of those to some measure, but having enough to get you to vote a demented criminal into the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth is something else again. Unhelpful.
No idea if protests help or hurt; comms with electeds have been unsatisfying so far; but that's just my own selfish framework (but I am trying to pay some attention to self-care as some unhealthy manifestations of stress have occurred*)
*As I write as if I were describing the side effects of drugs.
We and neighbors are headed to the protest at the state capitol at noon tomorrow. I don't know what it can accomplish other than show at least some people are paying attention and don't like what they see.
Also notes on senator townhall meetings in last comments http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2025_02_09.html#018841
Fucking adults every single one.
Yes, this exactly. I also have zero sympathy for "but that's the only news they hear." Sure, but that too is a choice. Basic media literacy isn't hard and it has never been easier to access multiple sources. When I run that excuse through Google Translate, it comes back "but they are unserious and adamant about remaining ignorant."
My in-laws have a neighboring couple where one of them is a federal worker working remotely and the other has a local job in Pennsylvania. They had Trump signs up during the election. Oops.
207 has the PLA demonstrated combined arms capabilities across service branches at the level that would be required for an invasion of Taiwan and have they been conducting exercises at that level? No on all counts at least according to the latest I've seen though I could be wrong. I believe they have been working on it at the brigade level at least and they're certainly aware that they need such capability in addition to the amphibious landing craft they've recently been building. I would think Taiwan has a few years breathing room in which to get their shit together though 2028 may be a nail biter.
--
How is Starmer's proposal to deploy British forces in Ukraine in the event of a peace deal going over?
222: Om nom nom nomnomnom
Kofman https://x.com/kofmanmichael/status/1891416706427322549?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
When I run that excuse through Google Translate, it comes back "but they are unserious and adamant about remaining ignorant."
I want Apostropher's version of Google Translate. Mine must not have updated to snark4o.
223: Exercises yes, absolutely.
Exercises equivalent to operations needed for a blockade they do every few weeks.
Demonstrated capabilities of course are another story.
Blockade sure but not the kind that would be required for an invasion
223: also bear in mind that in 1990 Iraq had demonstrated to its own satisfaction both in exercises and in actual combat that it had the capabilities required to defeat, or at least inflict unacceptable casualties on, the US - and that a lot of US observers agreed with them.
How is Starmer's proposal to deploy British forces in Ukraine in the event of a peace deal going over?
I mean, I like it. And support for Ukraine is still very popular in Britain so I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to put across to the country at large.
The army would love it, I would think. Back to the good old days but just a bit further east (I guess it'll be the British Army of the Don this time rather than BAOR?) Clear mission, proper allies at our side, local population at our back, defending something worthwhile rather than pissing around for two decades trying to make friends with the Pathan equivalent of Jeffrey Epstein and getting your feet blown off.
And if the wire is tripped, what then? Do the UK and France take the place of the US nuclear umbrella? (And if not, how soon are we likely to see an independent Central European deterrent?)
Does Ukraine just resign itself to losing Donetsk and Luhansk? I don't really see Russia withdrawing from Mariupol and the rest of the Black Sea coast. They'll want to restock Sevastopol and Crimea, too.
I think the two provinces will be the Alsace-Lorraine of the 21st century. Any break now is more likely to be a Feuerpause, a pause in firing, than a Waffenruhe, stilling the weapons.
A blockade is still a war, Barry.
2nd 231 last.
I don't see Russia withdrawing from anything. I see them demanding total capitulation and Ukraine telling them to get fucked. Then Europe will have to find its honor. Or rather, they will after they've spent the Russian $300bn in Belgium.
Polish and/or Finnish nukes in 5 years.
229.1 good point. The CCP has yet to demonstrate to itself that it has those capabilities, and until they do Taiwan is safe from outright invasion. As you point out they may well fail as Iraq did but that would still be a disaster for all concerned.
99: it is actually true that you experienced round 1 and you can meet this one from the point of view of someone who's had the experience. More generally, if you believe in the stuff about OODA loops and Dead Cat Strategy and flooding the zone and all that, it's actually incumbent on you to choose what you ignore and what you respond to, because otherwise you're acquiescing in the strategy. If you insist on reacting to every post he throws out, this means giving up the initiative, being permanently behind in terms of time, and generally having your behaviour controlled by your enemy.
There's a really interesting point in this book about what a huge break point it is in terms of behavioural complexity when a creature develops the ability to stop responding to a stimulus, even if it's just by freezing and then responding to the next one.
232.1 yes, but I'm speaking specifically to an outright invasion. Of course a blockade could lead into, if not that, an all out war between China and the US.
"What do people think about this" is a different question from "do you think this is likely to happen", though.
Even if the US betrays them, I can't see Ukrainians being OK with recognising the Donbas as part of Russia. The US might manage to shoehorn through a ceasefire on current lines but that won't be a lasting peace. Putin would see it as a victory because he would have more land than he started with and that is the only thing apart from his personal welfare that he cares about - though he will also push, successfully, for the US to lift sanctions, because he wants to rearm so he can have another go at Ukraine, or Georgia, or somewhere else.
235.1: Yes, and that's a mistake. The PRC is not obliged to choose the most difficult and dangerous strategy.
227: I don't think they do. They certainly sail around the general Taiwan area but it's worth remembering that the typical media graphic for this shows dotted lines that would be hundreds of miles long and tens of miles deep on the ground as if they were solid physical barriers. The perimeter of the ROC EEZ is about two thousand miles long; the sea is big. If you really mean it you would want to actually stop ships for visit and search; shooting randomly at them with long-range rockets won't cut it (see: the Red Sea, now) and will mean taking lots of risks on who you hit. Obviously that means getting close to them and also keeping at sea all the time to maintain the coverage, which is not a trivial issue in itself.
Well at least we can all agree that the US has a well-equipped, capable, and competently led navy to deal with such contingencies.
238: And I think you're wrong. At present they have multiple warships* circumnavigating the island nearly all the time. They ratcheted up to that tempo steadily over IIRC about 5 years, while at the same time also ratcheting their incursions against Japan and the Philippines, at greater distances.
And the EEZ is a less relevant line than the contiguous waters (up to which they are beginning to sail).** Nor is it actually necessary to board or search; ** war premiums will do most of the work for you, see Ukraine.
*Including equivalently capable CCG vessels.
**Unless there's some provision in in law; in which case I am happy to be enlightened, but if you think the law means anything I refer you to the Philippines.
The perimeter of the ROC EEZ is about two thousand miles long; the sea is big
The entrances to the Taiwan Strait are, however, much shorter. The northern entrance is about 120nm if you stretch it to include Keelung and the southern one about 200nm. And that's a lot closer to China, of course, so you've got land-based air and missile cover. Blockading that only really blockades the west coast of the island, of course, but that would blockade:
Kaohsiung, Taiwan's largest port (154 megatonnes of cargo per year and 9m shipping container TEU/year)
Keelung, the second largest (63Mt and 1.3mTEU)
Taipei itself (19Mt and 1.9mTEU)
Taichung (53Mt and 1.3mTEU)
What you'd be left with is Hualien, which is a small port on the east coast that specialises in gravel and AFAICT has no container handling at all. Taiwan, remember, is high on the right (big unfriendly mountains) and low on the left (big flat wet plains), so the left is where people live and make stuff, so that's where the ports are. There are very few roads across the centre of the island (because big unfriendly mountains), and the only rail link runs around the coast (because big unfriendly mountains).
Also, the geography of Taiwan means a blockade can be effective without much persistent presence east of Taiwan. All major ports* are on the west coast, and all the east coast ports* are on the wrong side of the central mountains.
*Save Keelung. Which *might* be enough for the ROC, but only with a lot of help from at least Japan.
Which meaningless line is pretty irrelevant, but the geography isn't. It is a lot of space to cover, and the horizon from a ship is small.
war premiums will do most of the work for you
The Germans thought this would happen in both world wars but missed the possibility that the government might just backstop the risk with its big printing press.
The entrances to the Taiwan Strait are, however, much shorter.
Good point. I am just trying to push back on the tendency to draw very thick lines on very small scale maps.
120nm
Took me longer than it should have to come up with nautical miles after ruling out nanometers.
The PLAN will blockade Taiwan using two of its newly developed military streptococci.
Further to 231 and so, the Economist's Shashank Joshi notes that one Russian demand is "no foreign troops in Ukraine". So a peace deal including a large NATO-nation presence in Ukraine would mean Russia giving up one of its main demands.
Trump would just love a sham peace deal as an excuse to lift sanctions. Maybe that's what he's going after.
I'm sure it is, but it won't even count as a sham peace deal unless both sides are prepared to at least pretend to sign up to it, and while Russia will of course take any peace deal as a way to buy time to rearm and go back to war, Ukraine won't.
I don't think both sides will need to pretend to sign it for Trump to roll back sanctions. All he needs to say is that he and Putin made a perfect deal and that he is ending sanctions as a way to push Ukraine into accepting peace.
He's certainly negotiating without including Ukraine now.
250: but in that case Ukraine keeps blowing up Russian refineries.
And of course Trump doesn't have unilateral control of all the sanctions on Russia!
FT reporting today: "European officials believe that Trump is likely to agree to withdraw US troops from the Baltics and perhaps further west". (In context, from the rest of the former Warsaw Pact).
I think that definitely means Poland gets the bomb. Poland got into NATO, if you remember, by saying to NATO "we cannot risk another Russian occupation. We will ensure this does not happen in one of two ways. Either we will become members of NATO or we will build and deploy nuclear weapons. Your choice."
I think the U.S. just fired the people who make or maintain nuclear weapons. Probably a good time for Poland to have a look at LinkedIn.
I wonder if Britain and France should just go liberate Crimea. Its been done before.
Strategically, isn't the semiconductor industry a deterrent to invading Taiwan? Maybe they wait until the US has more domestic production, assuming the CHIPS Act remains a thing.
The latest plane crash was in Canada, though the flight started in the U.S.
In a very Canadian touch, nobody died.
254: Finland has one of the world's most efficient nuclear industries. Sweden recently decided to resume mining its uranium. Poland's economy has at least doubled since the turn of the century; they can afford to bankroll some 1940s technology. Ukraine has a good claim to return to its status as a nuclear power. I think a Central European deterrent is a thing that will be happening soon, though whether and when it is announced is another matter.
This gives new currency to "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out"
But sure, tell me again how Zionists *aren't* genocidal racists.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/17/miami-shooting-israeli-men
I saw that. It probably says as much about Florida as Israel, but it doesn't say good things about either.
I honestly don't think we should welcome comments like 261.
Prediction: US corruption charges against Adani go away soon.
264 is a substantive response to 263. If you read the linked article, 261 is not advocating "kill them all, let God sort 'em out," but noting that that's how the murderer in the linked article seems to be thinking.
I'm pretty good about reading articles like that.
I think maybe the point is that no one here ever really wants to have a conversation about Israel with Natilo, but we all agree to pretend that someone might and leave the door open.
Acting Social Security Administrator just quit over giving Musk's DOGE access.
I don't want to have a conversation about Israel with hardly anyone. But I do like stories about stupid people shooting stupid people where no one dies.
||
"The grass had grown so long because our cattle were stolen during the raids. The wildfire is suspected to have been caused by rat hunters. These young boys are ignorant about the environment. But currently, we are sensitising the community on how to avoid these kinds of disasters."|>
271: Yeah, my capacity to have conversations about Israel is basically limited to "oh, man, it's all so terrible." Anyone who wants more detail than that, I'm mostly out.
I thought I was the only one who couldn't tell an Israeli from a Palestinian without some kind of contextual clue.
274: Me too, for quite some time.
I wonder if Britain and France should just go liberate Crimea. Its been done before.
None of this would have happened if we hadn't fumbled the ball badly in 1870. We should have sent the Fleet if necessary to preserve the provisions of the Treaty of Paris.
Once again, we see that all the sorrows and misfortunes of our modern world come back to the catastrophic failure of Canrobert to hold the left flank at Gravelotte.
LB, if you're still here, what do you think about whether Hochul should turf out Adams?
Unrelatedly, 272 is another of those paragraphs whose elements in no way enable you to predict what the next element will be.
280: Yeah, I think she should. There's a process, it's right in the City Charter, and if this doesn't justify it, what does?
Thanks! Kinda what I figured, too, but good to hear from someone who's local and reasonably well informed.
Also, I guess this is as good a place as any to state my expectation that Trump is going to give Putin everything he wants, and maybe more. Lift sanctions, recognize the conquest of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, end military assistance to Ukraine, end intelligence assistance, unfreeze Russian assets, push for immediate elections in Ukraine, the whole kit and kaboodle.
Further to 229, YouGov poll of Britons out today shows:
(Favourable opinion/unfavourable opinion/don't know)
Putin: 4/89/6
Trump: 22/73/6 (that 22 is a quarter of Conservatives and two thirds of Reform voters)
Zelensky: 64/16/20 (biggest support in Lib Dems and Labour but net positive in all parties)
There is no group in which Trump is actually less popular than Putin, but it's close among Labour and Lib Dem voters.
LB, anything to this post I saw on Bluesky?
Everyone demanding NOW NOW NOW: if Hochul takes action to remove Adams before March 26, NYC gets a snap special election that Andrew "sexual harasser and COVID murderer" Cuomo will win instead of a primary and a general election. This is, actually, a bad fucking outcome.
286:
This seems (to my ignorant eye) relevant background: https://reinventalbany.org/2025/01/fact-sheet-infographic-on-mayoral-succession-and-potential-special-election/
"If New York City's mayor resigns or is removed before March 26, 2025, the public advocate becomes mayor until a new mayor is elected in a special election held within about 80 days. That special election uses ranked choice voting, and any American citizen and New York City resident who submits at least 3,750 qualified petition signatures to the New York City Board of Elections is eligible to run.
If the mayor leaves office on or after March 26, 2025, the public advocate becomes mayor until a new mayor is voted on at the November 4, 2025 election, after also having run in the primary election [ie the scheduled Democratic party primary in late June- ajay]."
My query would be that the Bluesky post (what does one call that? A bloot? A bleat?) you're quoting tacitly assumes that Cuomo would not also win the primary in June - in which case you're going to end up with Cuomo either way so why not bin Adams now?
The polls put Cuomo well in the lead https://emersoncollegepolling.com/new-york-city-mayoral-poll-cuomo-leads-primary-adams-faces-low-support-amid-high-unfavorability/
I don't know. Cuomo being in the lead is mostly name recognition -- I am hoping that "not Cuomo" beats Cuomo but doesn't show up because it's not an individual yet. With ranked choice voting, though, I think not Cuomo can win.
Really don't know how timing cuts, so I'm going with immediate removal as the right thing.
Bluesky posts are, god help me, skeets.
288 agreed. Adams needs to go immediately, we can deal with Cuomo later
288: "I am hoping that "not Cuomo" beats Cuomo but doesn't show up because it's not an individual yet. With ranked choice voting, though, I think not Cuomo can win."
But either way Cuomo will have to win a ranked-choice election to become mayor. Either he stands in a special election at some point this spring, which is ranked-choice, or he stands in the Democratic primary in June, which is also ranked-choice.
Bluesky posts are, god help me, skeets.
MEDIOCRE.
Judge Ho will hold a hearing tomorrow so we'll see if he agrees to let DOJ drop the case
288, 290, 291:
And it is not clearly said, but it looks as if a winner in an all hands primary is only there until the end of the term. The regular election cycle would still take place.
The following clause exists for the post march 25th scenario but not the before:
Because 2025 is the last year of the four-year term, the winning candidate would not need to run in another election; they instead would be taking office a little early before the next full term begins.
So, if I read that correctly up until 3/25 you are filling the remainder of the existing term.
Good point. So the options are:
a) bin Adams now, special election in May, ex hypothesi Cuomo probably wins, D primary in June, whoever wins that probably becomes mayor in November. Less Adams, six months of Cuomo plus more if he wins in June and November.
b) bin Adams in late March, D primary in June, whoever wins that probably becomes mayor in November. More Adams, less Cuomo.
And, I suppose, under a) you only get three months or so of the Public Advocate, while under b) you get him for more like seven months. I don't know if he or she is a Good Thing compared to either Adams or Cuomo?
Bluesky posts are, god help me, skeets.
I like to mentally pronounce it like Russki.
OT: I think it would be good to remind people not to spread the rumor that Musk is impotent due to a botched penis implant. Even though there is second-hand and circumstantial evidence to make this rumor seem plausible, spreading it would be wrong. Among the things to be avoided are openly wondering how you can get sperm for IVF from a broken penis and if the implant was for medical or cosmetic reasons.
299: It never happened. Don't put in the paper that it happened.
Maybe if you have billions, they can take the sperm right from your balls?
Or find a tennis pro that looks like you, but younger and fit.
if the implant was for medical or cosmetic reasons
Early NeuraLink failure. It was supposed to be prehensile.
So Jo/e R/og/an and Ro/gan O'Ha/ndley are pushing the line that we need to liberate Canada. This is so insane. How long before we see it on the NYT oped pages?
What the hell happened to men as a concept, I don't understand when they stopped being regular people. Present company excluded.
War is a force that gives us meaning, or so I've heard some say
306: Heebie knows when *we* stopped being regular people.
(but seriously, I too am baffled)
I'm back to my theory that either Trump or Musk is the antichrist.
296: The Public Advocate is Jumaane Williams and he is comparatively definitely a Good Thing. Absolutely, his issue positions are basically what I'd want, but I do t have a super strong sense one way or the other of his competence. Head and shoulders above Adams or Cuomo, though, definitely.
Didn't someone recently write a "serious" op-ed about how annexing Canada would bring in more Democratic voters? But only two more Senators, I guess.
311: Peter Baker said some dumb shit about that just yesterday.
305: How long before we see it on the NYT oped pages?
Yesterday Peter Baker had a what-if analysis of Canada coming in what it would do to partisan blakance.
Oops. Two senators if it was one state.
No way would Texas allow a state 15 times larger than it.
I would be delighted to just call Canada part of Texas, but I think states have to be contiguous. Would the Atlantic Ocean count as a connector, like Michigan and the UP?
What the hell happened to Texans as a concept? I don't understand when they stopped being regular people. Present company excluded.
Lake Michigan isn't salty. Or it would have to be a different state. Hawaii is actually 137 states, but the Supreme Court fucked them over.
316: I don't think Florida's worked.
states have to be contiguous
Sounds like grounds for taking British Columbia right now.
54° 40´ or fight!
OK, so the Joe Ro/gan quote that freaked me out was over a month old. So that's on me for not checking why the screenshot on Bluesky didn't show a time stamp. I mean it's still not great that he said it but it doesn't constitute a ramping up of the rhetoric.
Well, actually, Maine was a part of Massachusetts for decades, with New Hampshire in between. There is no rule on contiguity.
UK research but I wonder if it would be replicated in the US?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/19/leftwing-activists-less-likely-work-political-rivals-other-uk-groups-study
327: I think the hypothetical 8 to 10% is a smaller group in the US. Maybe 3%? I dunno. "Leftism" of that sort isn't rewarded by the US political system.
But also, this survey appears to be low-quality science reported by a lazy journalist. I suspect the sponsor of the poll -- an organization called "More in Common" -- has an agenda. For instance, there's a pretty clear thumb on the scale when you identify Brexit as a centrist issue in 2025 and compare the extreme right to the extreme left:
While 72% of progressive activists view leave voters negatively, the same is true of 24% of "backbone conservatives" - the furthest right of the seven tribes - towards remain voters.
This has a Jonathan Haidt feel to it. Brexit has become increasingly disreputable among all voters, so it's pretty inevitable that "remain" has a better reputation on the right than "leave" does on the left.
I think the run-up to the Iraq War was incredibly damaging for the relationship between the left and the center-left in the US, and Obama's style of handling the financial crisis didn't help. In both of those contexts, it was legitimate for the left to feel as if it had been thrown under the bus despite having been straightforwardly correct (less straightforwardly for the financial crisis than for Iraq, but still), and there's a lot of hostility as a result. And I say this as someone who doesn't qualify as a member of the left, although I have sympathies in that direction.
Unfortunately, I think the hostility has become really unproductive, and it's not really justified by current actions from the center-left anymore.
328: a fair point about the possible agenda, but is it necessarily correct to conflate a poor opinion of Brexit with a poor opinion of Brexit voters (a group which makes up about half the population)?
Also, the swing against Brexit has not been nearly as wide as you imply. The 2016 vote was 48-52 in favour of leaving. 55% of people now think that leaving was a bad idea - up from 47% of people in January 2020. These are not colossal shifts, and a lot or maybe all of the shift can probably be explained by 2016 Leave voters being older on average, and therefore a lot of them now being dead, rather than any of them actually having changed their minds.
I'm guessing their views of Brexit voters are pretty mild compared to my views of Trump voters.
is it necessarily correct to conflate a poor opinion of Brexit with a poor opinion of Brexit voters
That's not the issue that I'm raising here, nor am I addressing the reasons that opinion has shifted. It's the magnitude of the current result -- 30% pro-Brexit vs. 55% agianst -- that is relevant. If you take an issue where the public at large favors the leftist position, then everybody skews more against the rightwing position than rightwingers do, so it's not surprise that leftwingers do, too.
But the More In Common poll is not asking people in different groups "what is your opinion of Brexit?" It is asking them "what is your opinion of Brexit voters?" I need to be sure that you're understanding the distinction here, because sentences like this
"If you take an issue where the public at large favors the leftist position, then everybody skews more against the rightwing position than rightwingers do, so it's not surprise that leftwingers do, too"
make it look like you don't.
I entirely agree that if most people support a broadly leftwing policy X, you'd expect to see the leftiest people being very pro-X, and the rightiest people being only mildly anti-X. But this is a survey of how people feel about other people, and whether they'd be willing to work with them on matters where they agree. Like, would you, a liberal sort of person who voted Remain, be willing to campaign alongside Joan Smith, who you happen to know voted Leave, to get more funding for the kindergarten that both your children attend?
Forty six per cent of Progressive Activists say they would never be willing to campaign alongside someone who voted Conservative, 27 per cent say they would never be willing to campaign alongside someone who supports Israel's right to exist, 56 per cent say they would never campaign with someone who believes that transgender people should not be allowed to change their legal sex, and 66 per cent would never campaign with someone who voted for Reform UK
Basically, it's pointing to a problem of purity-testing rather than coalition-building.
Purity testing or making a reasonable assessment of the other person's capability and trustworthiness?
Anyway, I detest the language used in this kind of stuff. You can call it a Purity Test, but avoiding people who have made it clear that they don't like me and don't value my opinion is just common sense. If I'm going to deal with unpleasant people who want to yell at me, that's fine at my full consulting rate. But I'm not going to do it for free.
"Virtue Signaling" also pisses me off. Like I'm supposed to use the occasional racial slur to make the racists feel better.
"Campaign alongside" strikes me as a very strange question to measure, but maybe that's just reflecting some basic differences between American and British elections?
That is to say, my honest reaction if polled on that question would be "What... what does that even mean?'
If this subhed is accurate, hard to take the study authors seriously:
Exclusive: Lack of understanding by 'progressive activists' of other voting blocs has led to rise of far right, authors argue
A survey of current attitudes explains the past few decades of political history? Who put this '8-10% of the population, whom they classify under the heading "progressive activists"' in charge?
The polls I'm getting lately are inane. Someone wants to challenge the current mayor in the primary and I cannot make myself give a shit and resent whichever one is polling me for trying to waste my time.
333: You are correct that I assume that a low opinion of a political position correlates in some fashion with a low opinion of the people who hold that position. Had More in Common been interested in actual Purity Testing, it would have sought an issue with equal salience to those on the left and right. (I mean, I don't know how you'd find such an issue, but they deliberately selected an issue with a 30-55 public opinion split and then suggested that each extreme side was equidistant from the center. Was that an accident? If so, it was a pretty goddam dumb one.)
And then there's the question of factuality, which (in Haidt-like fashion) is finessed in the study. For instance the study concludes: "Progressive Activists are the most likely to think the Brexit vote was caused by the media misleading people." Are the progressive activists correct? The study tells us that they are not -- without providing evidence for that view. On the matter of Brexit:
... the groups with which Progressive Activists disagree are not necessarily informed by misinformation or prejudice. It is important to understand properly why people with opposing views hold the beliefs that they do and to try to empathise with their starting points.
But let's leave aside the factual issue and move on to the misrepresentation of the Progressive Activist view.The answer by the Progressive Activists is entirely consistent with the study-approved view that the pro-Brexit folks "are not necessarily informed by misinformation or prejudice." Here is the statement that the most extreme Progressive Activists assented to: "The Brexit vote a primarily the result of media manipulation and misinformation." The word "primarily" in that sentence does the exact same work as "not necessarily" in the study's critique of their view. It is entirely consistent to believe that your opponents are "primarily" motivated in a certain way and "not necessarily" motivated that way.
It's just bullshit piled on top of bullshit. Pure Haidt. It reeks of Moral Foundations Theory.
Trump's latest rant does not bode well for Ukraine at all
I mean, the one constant for Trump for decades is that he's pro-Russia, so the Ukraine stuff is literally the least surprising thing so far (and there's been many surprising things so far!).
True but he at least looked like he was trying to be reasonable before, for Trump that is.
Not on Russia he didn't. He's always been a complete fucker for Putin.
There were news stories that made him sound sane for a bit.
Right, newspapers are always trying to make him seem sane, but there's never been any indication in the last 20+ years that he's anything other than completely owned by Putin, since the Russian mob bailed him out.
Does anyone feel that Trump 2.0 is a bit like COVID. I don't mean just like the early phase of COVID where nobody knew what was going on. Rather, just like "Before COVID" is a reference, there will be "Before Trump" and "After Trump"?
Even if we manage to push back against the authoritarianism, things in the US will be permanently different. Never mind our role in the world or the blow to US science. We just can't go back to the government the way it was. I have no idea what the future will look like, but it will be different from what we saw from 1974-2016.
In history, they'll talk about the "short American century" from 1945 or 1949 to some date between 2016 and 2025.
They are going to pin the ending on the US withdrawl from Afghanistan, and blame Biden for it.
Obviously the turning point was Benghazi.
Benghazi ain't going away!!
Did they ever figure out why Hillary did it?
Okay yeah: this took a second, but the name rang a bell, and More in Common was indeed founded in the aftermath of Jo Cox's murder in the UK and takes its name from a speech she gave. Its international profile has grown quite a bit since then, and the board seems more right-leaning than not.
354: To what in particular? Also, did you guys see the tweet of Donald Trump declaring himself to be king?
Or vice versa , I've had to break into my Ramadan bourbon
I don't think that's the spirit of the holiday.
But I only drink it after sunset
The divine right of driving into lower Manhattan cannot be abridged.
What's really criminal is the CNN story I read about congesting pricing extensively quoted the real world guy for paragraphs before saying, at the end, that all evidence so far points to congestion pricing as a success.
360: I treasure the description I was given of Bosniaks being moderate Muslims. "That means they don't drink slivovitz. During Ramadan. Until after sunset."
How plausible do people think https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1892218975905308736 is?
My guess is that in the long run, bringing independent agencies more closely under presidential control is going to make policy outcomes more left-wing.
I'm trying to avoid both ygles and Twitter, thank you.
In the long run we're all dead.
ygles isn't much older than me though.
It's so weird that we still have lurkers. But even setting that aside, I wonder why Yglesias' thoughts (or anyone's thoughts) are heading in that direction right now. It's baffling to me.
Google tells me Yggles was born in 1981.
Keynes can just wait for him to die, but I can't.
368: he's a contrarian, through and through.
HITLER PAVED THE WAY FOR COMMUNISM IN EASTERN EUROPE
Meanwhile, I'm listening to a "telephone" town hall with my House Representative. It's literally a phone conference call and feels wonderfully retro.
That was not particularly enlightening given how too online I've been. But pretty clear about the threat Trump poses to democracy. Not at all a "let's talk about egg prices and the kitchen table" event.
Apparently Murkowski pushed back hard on Trump at her town hall today.
"Campaign alongside" strikes me as a very strange question to measure, but maybe that's just reflecting some basic differences between American and British elections?
It is talking about campaigning for things in a non-election context. This is a survey of how people feel about other people, and whether they'd be willing to work with them on matters where they agree. Like, would you, a liberal sort of person who voted Remain, be willing to campaign alongside Joan Smith, who you happen to know voted Leave, to get more funding for the kindergarten that both your children attend?
campaigning for things in a non-election context
Hmm. I think the only non-electoral context I ever hear "campaign" used here is either for team sports or the military.
Ah, OK. I thought it was clear from context - sorry. So what do you call it when you and other people are doing some sort of political activity in order to achieve something that isn't an election result? Like "keep our local school open"? Or does that just not happen?
I guess I'm not clear on what "campaign" means concretely in that context where standing next to somebody would be a consideration. Like holding a rally or a protest? Or am I being too literal? (NB: it's 6am here and I haven't had coffee yet, so may be even more dense than normal)
Seriously though, it's fine if a dominant sort of joke is "pretend to be very slow and ignorant so the unknowing foreigner has to spend hours explaining things in increasingly ridiculous amounts of detail" - god knows my own country has no standing to criticise anyone else for making jokes at foreigners' expense! - but you need to remember that you can't say both "but I don't understand. Tell me again how debit cards work" and "OMG this guy is patronising me by explaining something simple that OBVIOUSLY I understand".
382: "advocate for" Would be used instead of campaign as a verb. I do think people use "campaign" as a noun. For example, people talk about a "fundraising campaign."
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Have any of you any experience of the converted-gas-tank apartments in Vienna?
|>
I lived in one during the academic year 2001-2002. Does that help?
Honest, I'm not having fun at your expense. I'm trying to figure out what the concrete example of "campaigning alongside" would be in an American context. Attending a rally? Sure. Co-signing a statement? Probably. Speaking from the stage together? Maybe not.
355: it's definitely true that it has to be understood in the context of Labour Party faction fighting, but if you're going to say that being founded because Jo Cox was murdered by a neo-nazi is "right-leaning" I beg of you, please, take a break from getting involved in our beefs, it's not doing you any good.
391: What I'm getting at is: they sound like a great idea, and look great in photos, but architectural ideas that look great in concept frequently suck in practice.
391: cool but flawed. Each of the four gasometers was converted by a different architect with different aims; A, the one nearest to the metro, got Jean Nouvel and has three floors of mall and then privately owned flats, B (mine) was Coop Himmelblau (Wolf Prix & Helmut Swizincsky) and has one floor of mall, a concert hall in the basement, and a mixture of student halls and trade union housing. I forget who did C and D but they had more mall, more rentals, and IIRC either C or D's basement is full of city archives. Then there's a pretty banal multiplex cinema/restaurant/mall across the street.
Nouvel went for being sympathetic, although really only the brick external structure and the wrought iron fancy work on the top is original, but Prix and Co whacked an enormous spaceship thing made of stainless steel and glass up against the side of ours and created a couple of big industrial-look hallways at various levels (one was the street entrance, which nobody used because everything useful was out of the side door into the mall, the other made for a couple of really neat hall parties). The flats themselves are wrapped around the corridors so you either walk up or down a half-level staircase to get in; this means the bigger ones have facings on both the outside and the inside of the gasometer and Prix and Co could fit one-and-a-half floors of space into each corridor level. Clever!
The interiors were all either blonde veneer or steel, an odd combination of 90s and 80s aesthetics in the 00s.
It was so new when I lived there that there were still tradesmen constantly turning up to drill into the walls fixing snags. The whole thing was pretty great but the main problem was that it was literally in a mall; kind of soulless, permanently populated by randomly selected strangers, and surrounded on three sides by industrial zones, the rest of the gas works that's still doing gas stuff, and a power station. The location is deep in the super-proley 11th Bezirk but there was absolutely no connection between it and the neighbourhood. Also the mix of shops in the mall was kind of mall-y, so if you wanted jewellery or sneakers you were fine but you had to search for anything useful. There was a Spar for things like coffee but it had so little fresh stuff I had to make special trips to buy salad (to be fair a sausage wouldn't survive long in the neighbourhood anyway).
You can walk to the bottom end of the Prater quite quickly although you wouldn't guess that. Transport is good (it's Vienna, it's good everywhere) as U-bahn 3 is on site and a hatful of bus routes. My running route around the area took in apparently-but-not-quite abandoned rail sidings and the stables for one of the city centre fiaker operators; you could hear them clop-clopping back from town of an evening from my window. It was wired for FTTH then so I presume the bandwidth is great now.
394: Outbreak of campaigning? Should be mostly over by Sunday.
397: Unhealthy beefs.
396: Thanks Alex! Fascinating. If I understand you correctly, the big apartments would have one level extending under/over the corridor?
"Trade union housing"?
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https://www.voanews.com/a/un-report-china-expands-forced-labor-in-xinjiang-tibet/7974064.html
Released Monday, the ILO report details how Chinese authorities have intensified efforts to investigate and monitor poverty levels, setting higher targets for cross-provincial labor transfers while pressuring ethnic smallholder farmers to cede their land to large state-led cooperatives.|>
398: the GPA, Private Salaried Employees' Union, was my landlord and in fact the main landlord in B. The ministry of education or possibly the university (I forget) had come in on the deal and paid some of the costs in exchange for the right to assign some of the flats to students. The federal state of Vorarlberg also had a piece on the same basis, I am not sure whether that was about students or random Vorarlbergers in the big city; there was a clique of Vorarlberg students but I have no idea if they were on the same basis as me or something else. But the rest of the residents were, I presume, GPA members.
On the architecture point, yes; in mine, for example, the kitchen was above the corridor, up a short flight of stairs that made a couple of turns, and the whole apartment was on that level, with iirc 2 bedrooms that faced on to the inside of the gasometer, the bathroom*, and another 2 bedrooms that faced onto the outside. Mine reached all the way to the outside but there was a space between the brickwork and the inside structure; the other one was slightly staggered so it faced onto this space. It was a pity that the kitchen/dining space was windowless when the bedroom doors were shut.
(I think there was a second bathroom on the inner side of the flat but I don't remember ever using it)
Also here with genuinely not getting the nuance of "campaign alongside" someone I disagree with.
Like, for the "raise money for a local kindergarten" thing, if I say I wouldn't "campaign alongside" a rightwinger, does that mean that I wouldn't advocate or work to raise money for the kindergarten, or does it mean only that I wouldn't participate in their specific fundraising and advocacy activities? Because the first seems like a problem: you should keep working for good policy outcomes even if bad people agree with you on that one specific issue. But the second seems perfectly rational: I am not going to staff a table at the Skokie Neo-Nazi Party bake sale even if all the proceeds from that bake sale were guaranteed going to the local kindergarten.
The poll language may be perfectly clear to the people who responded to it, but it genuinely isn't to me.
So Austrian unions routinely own housing? (Or property generally?) As (subsidized?) housing for members, or investment for pension/hardship funds?
Right, even at this point in the discussion it's a vague enough term for me that it covers a range of activities that wouldn't all have the same answer.
Or is it just being used to mean "work with"?
Plus, a gasometer is clearly much bigger than what I was thinking of.
Or, Europeans are really tiny because of their puny socialist diets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Gasometers
364: Echoing 368 and 372, and adding that one of the underappreciated aspects of the enshittification of everything is that it's conceivable that Yglesias has a point here, but in our Twitterfied world, he sees no need to even hint at an explanation. (My view: It doesn't really make much difference either way. Independent agencies really aren't that independent as a practical matter.)
I have a gas meter on the front of my house, behind the trash hole.
402: It's a nonprofit housing co-op established by the union in 1953 in order to house (or in the context, rehouse) its members. There are a lot of these - over 20 per cent of the population lives in a building either owned or managed by a co-op. This particular one is one of the biggest/the biggest and also takes on projects for other agencies e.g. managing all the city of Vienna's urban renewal projects in the western suburbs.
I am not sure whether you need to be a union member now although you do need to be a EEA national or have been accepted as a refugee. Obviously I wasn't as a student. The form to put your name on the list is here and does ask if you're a GPA member, a union member, or no kind of member: https://www.wbv-gpa.at/service/vormerkbogen/?wpf83_50=Gasometer+B+von+Coop+Himmelb%28l%29au
393: This might be the first example of reactionary centrism in the UK, but it's a pretty common thing in the US. But that really addresses a secondary question.
The primary question is: Is this survey bullshit? Once you understand that it is, then you can move on to the question of, "What vierwpoint does this bullshit serve?"
An American can only be amused at the idea that invoking a fascist murder to name your organization puts you anyplace on an ideological spectrum. In the US, Martin Luther King might be invoked nowadays most often to support causes that he would obviously oppose.
How did you determine that they made up their results, by the way?
Here is the summary of the study.
And here is the actual pdf of the study:
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/media/refmpx3b/progressive-activists-more-in-common-2025.pdf
Research in this vein is in pdf form that isn't easily searchable. Makes it time-consuming to work with.
It seems fine in Firefox using Ctrl+F, but it also seems that you're an idiot?
(The answer to the question upthread about campaigning is that the report was commissioned for NGOs to understand their avocado-guzzling millenials better....sigh....and of course campaigning is a lot of what NGOs spend their time doing. Well, apart from scheming to get their hands on legacies and stabbing each other in the back.)
Actually I'm sorry about that, that didn't need to be so salty.
413: Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but the link I provided to the pdf doesn't seem to work at all for me in a browser (on my computer, it wants to be Adobe), and I'm probably mentally impaired in some fashion, but I absolutely cannot search the pdf in Firefox.
Anyway, the summary has the relevant link to the study under the button that says "Read the full report." I truly do wish I could search it, because it's possible that some of the stupid things in the summary are better justified in the report, but I'm not curious enough to really read the full report. (And the author has done other poorly designed research in similar pdfs that I am also unable to search and therefore have a hard time picking out the really dumb parts for quoting and linking.)
Not sure if 411 is directed at me, but I have not contended that the results are made up. My most detailed critique so far is in 341.
I am agnostic on the actual thesis. The sort of leftist intolerance asserted by the study is a thing, and (I guessed in 328) might be a bigger thing in the UK. The problem is, the study itself is bullshit. It's perfectly possible to use bad evidence on the way to a correct result. But bad evidence is, by definition, useless as evidence.
if you're going to say that being founded because Jo Cox was murdered by a neo-nazi is "right-leaning"
Sincere question: did anyone else here think that I was making this claim?
I said "the board seems more right-leaning than not." Having taken a second look at the profiles of the board of governance, there is one U.S.-based member who stands out as being (historically) right-of-center but the rest of them do seem more center/liberal. I apologize for the incorrect generalization.
I think this mild response will likely get ignored. I am really angry, though.
Like "keep our local school open"?
Around here, people on the right have been engaged in a very focused campaign to defund and shut down public schools, and replace them with vouchers for private and religious schools. So, no, I can't imagine working with them to keep our local school open. They are the ones we would be working against.
NOT IGNORING YOUR MILD RESPONSE
416: I think we ought to be careful commenting on matters that are intensely personal to other people. In the US, I find the nutty left vexing, but can console myself that they are mostly ineffectual by design. Me, I get triggered by poorly designed research, and have to expend effort to not get pissed off when people try to defend it. But I try to remember (as my daughter likes to tell me) that's a me thing.
Alex and ajay, I'm guessing, might have a more personal relationship with this kind of leftist crap and aren't well-disposed toward critiques like mine. So, for instance, 411 strikes me as being so far off base that I can't find anything in the thread that it might be referring to, either by me or anyone else. And yeah, 393 seems tendentious and unhelpful.
But I do think ajay's link in 327 is really interesting, both as crappy research and crappy journalism, and I enjoy having the opportunity to talk about it.
Thanks for 419, whoever you are. Might be time for me to take a break though. Random contempt from a total stranger shouldn't bother me this much.
368: I'm not a frequent lurker but I've been checking in on places I used to read when I followed politics. I'm seeing a lot of what the kids call cope. Yglesias saying what's happening now will move things leftward, Krugman saying the administration is imploding, Drezner saying what's happening is killing the administration's popularity.
I don't understand Yglesias's position at all. Krugman seems unaware of how similar moves at Twitter played in the court of public opinion. Firing the wrong people then begging them to come back a day later did not make Musk's fans realize that Musk is making mistakes. Drezner looks wrong on the facts. I looked at approval ratings, Trump's is noisily jumping around. The most you can say is that it might have declined a little bit but it could be noise. Vance's approval numbers are up. 2026 generic ballot approval might be down a little but it could be noise.
Who do I read if I want a realistic assessment of things?
We're fucked. Make yourself at home.
Josh Marshall has been good.
Second on Josh Marshall. TPM is the only news/politics site that I pay money for, and it's worth it.
The last few noms have not even fazed me. Patel is a world historical evil, lying fuckhead, but even a more "sane" one like Rubio would be all in anyway. And Collins "no" was only that because it was not needed (unsure on Murkowski). Just like McConnel's on Gabbard and RFK Jr. We are the enemy. I hope and pray no one is sharing intelligence with us. DOJ is a bunch of mob lawyers. FBI will be mob enforcers. Whether Hegseth can move the military completely in that direction is a question. It will be process over time; they will certainly try. I expect he (or more likely someone else) will succeed in the end.
Giddyup.
To me 364 is classic Yggles clever boyism. "Well look here! This action of the autocracy might actually be good!"
Reminds me of when during Trump 1, the admin apposed some merger involving (AT&T? CNN? someone like that) for politics/grifty reason and Y was all in how that was a such *good* thing* as the merge was bad. Kind of like of they make one train run on time once we should be thankful.
*please don't wish me into the cornfield.
427: And apparently Musk has been hinting that companies that do not advertise on X might not be treated favorably for merger approval.
Is there any reporting on effective internal resistance? I mostly see stories about people resigning or being fired. There were a few stories about people who resisted and weren't fired, like the guy who accidentally became Acting Director of the FBI. He's an FBI agent's FBI agent, a door kicker who became head of the HRT. There was a story that said he pushed back "so forcefully that some FBI officials feared he would be dismissed".
What happened to that guy? There are a few stories like that and I haven't seen a follow up to any of them.
427: AT&T-Time Warner (with Time Warner being the owner of CNN). Trump publicly said he wanted to stop the merger due to CNN's alleged mistreatment of him; the DOJ staff recommended against a lawsuit; Trump put his lackey in charge; DOJ sued; DOJ lost.
I didn't read Yglesias on this, but the judge didn't think much of the government's case.
(Fucking Adobe hijacked my browser and wouldn't let me search pdfs. I have disconnected it, and can now search the judge's opinion.
Adobe went all in on fucked up AI.
Right, yes. It would let me apply artificial intelligence to a pdf, but not, you know, actual intelligence.
I've been using Foxit, which still has some annoying AI stuff but not nearly as much as Adobe.
It's really hard for me to read hiking trail maps during meetings now.
Around here, people on the right have been engaged in a very focused campaign to defund and shut down public schools, and replace them with vouchers for private and religious schools. So, no, I can't imagine working with them to keep our local school open.
How would you feel if you hadn't eaten breakfast this morning?
