Monday Night Raw is on Netflix tonight! If you tune into USA as usual, you’ll be watching London has Fallen, a fun and dumb little 2016 movie where Gerard Butler saves the G7.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Trump’s vote certification went through without a hitch, not even a symbolic protest like in 2016, 2004, or 2000.
Prepare your “straightforward from here” takes.Report
If Kamala had only had the courage… oh, never mind, we changed the 1887 ECA with the ECRA in 2022. Good for us anyway.Report
Jeffries gave a stirring speech in which he explained that Democrats were not election deniers.
Which, effectively, cuts the resistance off at the knees.
It’s going to be an interesting Semiquincentennial.Report
Trudeau to go. Official now.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-news-conference-1.7423680Report
Ooops, missed it on the main thread.Report
So it turns out all the protect the kids from being turned transgender was indeed a moral panic. Well done us:
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/06/nx-s1-5247724/transgender-teens-gender-affirming-care-hormones-jamaReport
From your own link, about 3% of youth self identify as trans. “Youth” implies 43 million people.
Thus the potential “size” of this issue is 1.3 million people.Report
1.3M is the total universe, not the universe actually receiving medical treatments under psychological supervision – which is much smaller. That aside, this is still a vanishingly small community in a country of 340,110,988, and their receiving standard of care (under the supervision of physicians and psychologists with parental permission) makes them no threat to anyone – as if helping people live as their authentic selves should be a threat to begin with.
All this boils down to the fact that those who waste political energy on “battling” transgender people this cycle did so from a morally corrupt and cynical position, a statement now backed up by empirical fact. Those “warriors” deserve derision and mockery for attempting to inflict pain and suffering on a tiny number of children – and public shame if they attempted to do while claiming to be Christian.Report
“derision and mockery for attempting to inflict pain and suffering on a tiny number of children”
Funny, I would use this myself against your opinion on this. My position saves children from the pain and suffering of sterilizing and/or militating themselves before being and adult. We don’t let children drink, smoke, own guns, or marry until then.
Also, a large number of children with gender dysphoria do not continue into adulthood.
One such study
https://www.transgendertrend.com/children-change-minds/
This is a no brainer to add to the list for me and let the children’s bodies and brains continue to grow naturally and see how they finish in adulthood.Report
did so from a morally corrupt and cynical position, a statement now backed up by empirical fact.
Female genital mutilation doesn’t affect many people in the US. Ergo opposition to it must be “morally corrupt and cynical”.
Adults making serious and permanent changes to the genitals of children seems like something that should get a lot of attention.Report
Moral panics never depended on facts and numbers.Report
Of course they don’t. But when the facts don’t align with the panic-ers narrative I will happily call them idiots in public because they richly deserve the derisive shame I intend to pile on them.Report
Would it be weird if I came back just to remind everyone that I predicted Harris getting 230 electoral votes on July 2? That’d be weird, right? (I’m always terrible at guessing election results. I need this victory lap.)Report
No weirder then anything else going on here today.Report
Yes, it’s impressive calling 230 for Harris. It’s the 308 you called for JEB! that we’re less impressed with.Report
I was close though. He got 324 votes in NH that one time.Report
Take that victory lap…Report
Well done.Report
Looks like we might not have super high tariffs after all: https://jabberwocking.com/trump-preparing-to-abandon-yet-another-promise/Report
Though it comes with plenty of quid pro quo corruptionReport
When all you have is performative politics, all you get is performance. One has to wonder what the true believers he intends to employ in his White House will do when his short attention span turns away from their cause.Report
Facebook has announced new policies regarding… well, I’ll let Zuck tell you.
The content moderation team is moving from California to Texas.Report
Tough to fact check politicians who feed you billion dollar contracts. Just ask Jeff Bezos.Report
Hey. Private companies can do whatever they want.
More seriously, I think that Zuck is *REALLY* ticked off about the laptop thing. He sees that as a betrayal of trust and is moving forward accordingly.
They’re also breaking their relationship with Politifact. That’s another huge thing.Report
Oh, and Dana White is now on the board at Meta. (He’s the UFC guy.)Report
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-curious-case-of-lindy-li
The Bulwark looks at the curious case of Lindy Li, a woman who spent 2024 being a very big Democratic cheerleader in PA but turned to a proud Fox News apostate right after the election.Report
That transformation worked for Trump and Gabbard, so …Report
Meta’s retreat from fact checking (trying out Elon X) makes malicious rewriting of history even easier:
https://www.salon.com/2025/01/07/why-mike-johnsons-fake-jefferson-prayer-matters/Report
Oh, Amanda Marcotte! There’s a blast from the past!
Anyway, I would prefer a note at the bottom of a post praising Johnson’s statement saying “we have no documents where Jefferson said this” to censoring the post praising Johnson’s statement.
“You’re not allowed to praise what Johnson said since what Johnson said was factually inaccurate”.
Who the hell are you to make that call?Report
I would prefer Johnson being publicly shamed for lying. And those defending his right to lie being publicly mocked.Report
I support you in your efforts to shame Johnson.
I’m not defending Johnson’s right to lie. I’m defending your right to praise him for lying. On top of that, I’m denying someone else’s right to censor you for praising Johnson for lying.
Well, of course, maybe if it’s not a private company or something then they’d have the right to censor you for praising Johnson.
Private companies can do whatever they want.Report
I don’t praise liars.
And yes, private companies can do whatever they want.Report
Of course you don’t, Phil. Of course you don’t.
But I hope we hammered out some distinctions in this conversation anyway.Report
The GOP has learned things from Trump:
Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article298115113.html#storylink=cpyReport
So, for some reason, this is important. Yeesh.
https://www.mediaite.com/trump/just-in-trump-announces-plans-to-change-gulf-of-mexico-to-gulf-of-america/Report
Trump said it so it must be important. Just like taking back the Panama Canal or taking over Greenland.Report
You have to wonder why Mediaite went with “Gulf of America” rather than military threats to Gaza, Greenland, and Panama, and economic threats to Canada and Denmark.
I suppose someone has convinced Mr. Trump that he can achieve a Greater United States that includes all of North America above Mexico, much like Putin thinks he can achieve a Greater Russia.Report
We can call it “North America”.Report
If Trump’s going to go with “Gulf of America” he probably doesn’t mind dropping Mexico from its historical designation as part of North America.Report
Oh, I expect most of this to be a troll on his part. But this one seems more pointless than the others.Report
It kept him in the news cycle on a day when Jimmy Carter was moved from Georgia to DC to lie in state prior to his funeral. Your call on how closely those two things are correlated.Report
Important right at that second. I’d love to have that moron’s ear for 20 minutes. Whispering the right things in his ear could accomplish so much good.Report
Jay Varma has written an opinion piece for the Daily Beast: Why I Shouldn’t Have Been Shamed for My Pandemic Sex Parties
The main thing I was thinking while I read it was “why, oh why, did he not share this with the world *BEFORE* the election?”Report
What economic forces will Trump use to get Canada to bend the knee?Report
Threats of chili powder, cayenne pepper.Report
Oooh, there may be a wrinkle. Pierre Poilievre has tweeted “Canada will never be the 51st state. Period.”
Conspiracy theorists speculate that Trump was tossing the Conservative party of Canada a slow one right over the plate.Report
This is not a good issue for the CPC and making Canadian politics about it is the biggest risk Poilievre has of going from an easy win to real fight. Poilievre has been trying to stay as far away from it as he can afford to right now.Report
Tariffs in theory could utterly tank the Canadian economy fast, because North America is so networked together.
The upshot is that American takes all kind of damage that the voters weren’t going to expect in that scenario. Gasoline becomes crazy expensive in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest because it runs on Canadian imports, the traditional American automakers have production grind to a halt because the supply chain is integrated. Chaos is the word of the day.
Canada takes way more damage, but is also going to have vastly more political will to weather the crisis than Americans who had no idea why the prices went up but hate it.Report
Republican trolls sing “Imagine” at Jimmy Carter’s funeral service:
Report
I hate the song Imagine, loathe it entirely, however Garth and Trisha also did this at Rosalynn’s funeral and it was long planned by request from the Carter’s themselves that they do so. Their funeral, they can have it how they want itReport
Odd song for the born-again Carters to choose. The lyrics include “Imagine there’s no heaven,” then later “and no religion, too.” Didn’t they notice?Report
I’m sure that he was thinking about the Middle East.
It’s a good song to bring up in the middle of any Palestine/Israel debate.
“Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do.”Report
If we’re making genii like wishes then I want super powers.Report
Yes, it’s a peace anthem for a certain liberal of a certain age and social stripe; the surprising thing to me, at least, wasn’t that he was that sort of liberal, but that he was that sort of age and social stripe.
I’d have put him as more of a Woody Guthrie guy — but how would I know?Report
Controversial take: the Beatles suck and the only one of them that kind of has talent is Paul. Double controversial take: the proof of the previous controversial take is the huge piles of suck they all produced in their solo careers.Report
Remember when some sites used to scramble really offensive comments? I wonder if anyone at OT still has that comment scrambler.
And man, I hope Schilling doesn’t see this!Report
Come at me!Report
Awww, the poppy mop-top boys were ok.
[sorry, best I can do, Mike]Report
Heh normally I wouldn’t threadjack like this but I feel like this thread is sufficiently lacking in seriousness that it doesn’t matter.
Without getting into all the pomo racial baggage around the mainstreaming of rock and roll, the fine line in art between theft, influence, and imitation, etc., my more nuanced take is that they reaped early adopter and consolidation dividends and influence wildly beyond the quality of the contributions themselves. Which isn’t to totally deny any and all value in what they did. You can’t talk about the history of rock or modern music generally without them.
But it does boggle my mind that in the year of our Lord 2024 there are people who get excited when some lame cover band starts into one of their hits, or is moved to turn up a Beatles song while driving down the highway.Report
Did your mind boggle when in the year of our Lord 1966 your parents (or grandparents or whatever) were moved to turn up something by Frank Sinatra or Benny Goodman? What’s the generational flip of “Hey kids, get off my lawn!”Report
Are you kidding me? The flip is obviously ‘this sucks!’Report
I know a lot of young people don’t know the Beatles at all, and that doesn’t bother me; there’s a ton of good music out there, more ever year, and there’s only so much time in the day. And while the early Beatles might have been a mere pop music historical blip had they not moved on to doing something very different a couple years later, I’d agree with you, but what they did from Revolver on was genuinely interesting, musically and culturally, even if the careers of 3 of the 4 produced a bunch of slop after the band broke up (I think Harrison did some interesting post-Beatles stuff, especially early in his solo career, but not interesting enough for me to still listen to it in 2024). Sometimes the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts.Report
Ok, hear me out, what if we think of them as a feeder band for the Travelling Wilburys?Report
I admit to liking Jeff Lynne’s production of that new Beatles song.
He did good work with them.Report
I do believe in the existence of something called creative energy that sometimes requires the interactions of particular people, and that can come as easily as it can go.
Now, taste is taste, and beyond a certain point you can’t dispute it. Maybe my tune would change (no pun intended) if I gave some of their later catalog a revisit. I will say that by the time of Revolver you’re getting close to territory inhabited by those, that for me, are the real godfathers of the genre, but who are less universally celebrated, like Tony Iommi.Report
You might be the only person on earth to be a mainly Harrison fan. 😉Report
I like Paul too (I meant Paul as the 1 of 4), but yeah, I like George until he starts singing about money.Report
I always put George on a level with John in his solo career. They occasionally knocked out some bangers, but most of their production was filler. I never was able to make it through All Things Must Pass. It’s just a little too turgid for me.Report
Iconoclast!
It’s funny. You’d find common ground with my father who is an early boomer who despises the Beatles. Not for any actual musical critique beyond the British Invasion ended his active listening to pop music. He was/is a late 50s/early 60s Dion & the Belmonts doo-op kind of guy.Report
I remember watching a late night TV preacher, many, many years ago, when he said he was a huge fan of the Beatles stuff, but only their early work, not their later godless hippie music, and though this was before the era of the “hot take,” I still consider that to be the hottest Beatles take I’ve ever heard. I mean, if someone says they just don’t like them, I get it, à chacun son goût, but to just love the teeny bopper stuff? That’s going too far.Report
I actually sort of get that take tho. To my Gen X ears, the evolution from singer driven pop in 62/63 to 64-65 Brit pop is far more subtle than when things started to “get weird” with Revolver/St Pepper around 1966.
For my father (who graduated HS the spring the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan), songs like Help and I Wanna Hold Your Hand were a bridge too far. This is well before a sitar made its way onto a Beatle record!
What’s sort of ironic is that early invasion Brit Rock was closer to mid-50s RnR than where U.S. music was in the early 60s. It’s a demarcation but also a quasi-return to making a racket with those instruments.Report
Someone has to throw a grenade around here once in awhile!
My dad is a middle boomer which would have made him a little young for the early days of the Beatles but plenty old enough to (I assume) have heard a lot of them in their last few years as an act. I’ve never gotten the sense he has any nostalgia about them so there was none passed on. He’s a huge Ramones fan though.Report
My father is an older Boomer (’49). When his mother died, we found his old mop top wig in the attic, from when he was in a Beatles cover band in 1963-64. So it goes without saying that I grew up with the Beatles playing a lot.Report
Probably, like most people, “his music” was being made between the ages of 16-22. If your pop graduated high school around 75, the Beatles were irrelevant. Something his friends older sister might still be into, but definitely not cool.Report
The Beatles were definitely greater than the sum of their parts.
I’ve learned to be forgiving of obviously very wrong opinions about music in my old age, so you’re off the hook in my book.Report
I appreciate it!Report
Just trying to bring a little light to the world.Report
I also hate this song, mostly because it’s just a bad song (as are almost all of his post-Beatles songs), but that liberals love it so much has always felt like evidence for my theory of American liberalism: liberals love a radical in the distant past and a utopia in the distant future, but prefer the status quo with maybe some minor tinkering here and there, nothing structural mind you, no boat rocking, in the present.Report
You’re reading too deeply into it. Everyone knows Lennon was under a deadline and threw it together after being on the Dick Cavett show with some simple redneck back from a trip to China.Report
Dang, the Left ™ is mean.Report
Jimmy Carter had more than one contradiction to his character, as do most of usReport
He was probably thinking “you know what’d be funny? If I could make Dubya and Obama and Clinton and Trump all listen to ‘imagine’.”Report
Obama cracked the joke at McCain’s funeral that John has purposefully requested W and Obama to do eulogizes “What better way to get a last laugh than to make George (Bush) and I say nice things about him to a national audience”Report
Is it possible that once, just once, you could let something be? I mean seriously – What was the point of calling this out and calling them Republican trolls? Or lambasting the song? What good does any of that do? What the iterated game you think this illustrates?
Or did you just decide between your All bran and your coffee to majorly troll today?Report
Seriously, he’s treating his funeral with far less reverence than I am.Report
I’m reasonably sure that the late President has no reaction at all to what went on at his funeral. He might have expressed some preferences before his death, but that’s a different matter.Report
Like I said.Report
There is a hilarious (IMO) fake letter in an old “National Lampoon” from Yoko Ono:
“‘Imagine no possessions’ Oh, that would be horrible.”Report
Sorry, another cute bit just occurred to me. Many years ago I was gifted with a gorgeous garden stone that read: “Imagine.” I write stories and such, so I didn’t even think of the Lennon song until later. So, as fate would have it, a 60s garage band star, Sky Saxon, was staying at our house and we were standing near the garden, him smoking a lavender cigarette. He noticed the pretty stone and said, a bit unfocused, “Is that where you buried your cat?” I don’t know, I just thought it was hilarious.Report
“Imogine? That’s a lovely name.”Report
The Pizzagate gunman and Karma:
https://www.aol.com/gunman-pizzagate-hoax-fatally-shot-232144205.htmlReport
I’m sure this went down exactly the way the cops said, as all police shootings do.Report
Once they get back to the station to compare notes, that is.Report
This is acutally from September 2024 but Dr. Rupa Marya, infamous off the wall chart linking inflammation to colonials and saying that “Zionist” doctors, was put on leave by USCF Medical School for accusing an Israeli student in her class of “genocide” on social media.
https://www.kqed.org/news/12006193/ucsf-campus-faces-uproar-after-doctor-allegedly-targets-israeli-student-on-social-media
Dr. Marya is naturally very self-righteous about this and not understanding that she committed deadly anti-Semitism but she and her like would be screaming bloody murder at the top of their lungs for racism against any other group they care about. These people are so disgustingly self-righteous and stupid that no matter how many times Jews or anybody carefully explain what they are doing is wrong and racist, they just don’t get it.Report
Marya has been blatantly antisemetic on Twitter since the start of the genocide (possibly earlier, but I don’t think I’d ever heard of her before 10/7), and I’m glad she’s facing the consequences for it.Report
I just remembered, Dr. Marya’s actually accusation was that “Zionist” doctors are the cause of global health inequality. There is so much obvious anti-Semitism in this statement, and anybody with half a brain cell should be able to figure out that by Zionist she means Jews, and is basically doing a blood libel. She and her defenders utterly refuse to get it and raise their fists in blood thirsty defiance when you point out to them.Report
Deadly?Report
You haven’t seen the pictures from Gaza and Lebanon?Report
While I certainly have, I’m not tying the awful things that happened in Gaza and Lebanon to Doc Marya’s criticisms.
I’ll need help doing that.Report
Lee never said deadly for whom.
(Damn, I thought it was a pretty good one liner.)Report
Touché.Report
Welp, at least this is not as bad as Harris’ “I’m a Man” add (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLzYPbtklGs). But that is a low bar to step over.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/montage-senate-democrats-pledging-oppose-trumps-bad-policies-mocked-cringeReport
Video Game Afficionados. Geoff Keighley is reporting that:
What does that read like to you? Here’s what it reads like to me: “AUGH WE’RE GOING BANKRUPT AUGH”
So let’s look at Ubisoft going back to… oh… 2023? Assassin’s Creed Mirage. It got scores in the mid-70s which, to be honest, is quite solid. “If you like Assassin’s Creed, you’ll like Mirage!” The game sold fairly well.
That’s our chalk line.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora came out and flopped. The movie made a bajillion bucks. Nobody remembered it enough to buy the game.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown came out. (Hey, I should look into that… I like the Prince of Persia games) and it sold a million copies which Ubisoft said was below the target. (Scores put it in the mid-to-high 80s. Yeah, I should definitely check that out.)
Skull and Bones came out next. This was supposed to be the culmination of everything that was awesome about Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. Remember the sailing fights and the awesome things with the cannons and ramming and grapeshot and all that stuff? Well, this was going to be the game that focused on that instead of just having it as flavor. And then they changed it to add multiplayer. And then they changed dev tech. And then they changed it again. And then they delayed it. And then they changed it again.
Anyway, it came out and it was undercooked and it cost more than half a billion to make and it got scores in the high fifties and low sixties. Clank.
Okay. So the next big thing. Star Wars Outlaws. This is going to be the tentpole, right? It’s Star Wars! It’s Outlaws! You’re a Han Solo kinda gal between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and you’ve got one big score to make and everybody loves Star Wars and we’re finally playing as something other than a dude who can use the Force!
And it got scores in the mid-70s and sold fewer units than Mirage did back in 2023.
Well, the next one is going to be Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
This game has already had a bunch of controversy about it for a bunch of reasons but the game has been delayed, delayed again, and now it is scheduled to come out on the 30th Anniversary of the Tokyo Subway attacks.
All that to say: whether Ubisoft goes under probably depends on Shadows doing very well.
And it doesn’t look like Shadows is going to do very well.Report
Samuel Moyn beclowns himself while deluding himself that Trump actually has a conherent worldview and understands what multipolar means: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-01-08/trump-foreign-policy-world-order
Plus he seems to think the guy saber-rattling about using force to get Greendland, the Panama Canal, and Canada will not engage the U.S. in foreign affairs as muchReport
Bad news: The California wildfires could be leaving deeper inequality in their wake.Report