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.
Welp. Greta got detained.
We ain’t talking about that no more, Greta. We’re talking about LA now.
You do realize that what is happening in LA is exactly the same sort of attempt to wash protest and control the narrative that Israel is engaging in right?
I’m mostly upset that the bunch of people having fun watching cars burn are flying Mexican flags instead of Palestinian ones.
I’m confused on what you think is happening in both of those.
I think the state is using excessive force to stop people
Protesting its policies.
Israel tweeted back:
And there’s a cute picture of Greta wearing a froggy hat getting a sandwich from one of the soldiers.
It’s really rich for Israel, with a selfie-loving military (to the point that, if we’re lucky enough to get war crime trials, a ton of selfies will be admitted into evidence), to make fun of them for using social media.
In other words, the entire situation ended in a very predictable manner.
Greta has been released and is flying home to Sweden.
You make leaving sound voluntary. She’s being deported.
I regret the implication. In her original post announcing that the authorities had detained her, she specifically said “If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces, or forces that support Israel.”
I meant it to be contrasted against the whole “kidnapped” thing.
Not against something like visiting Israel without proper documents.
If she’s the first one on an (evil carbon using) airplane then it’s because she’s not fighting her deportation in Israeli court.
The show is over. Leaving was part of the plan. “Voluntary” might be a good word.
This was about her getting in the news and not doing anything useful in Gaza.
If she’s being deported involuntarily, it’s not fair to mock her for using an airplane to do it.
That part wasn’t up to her.
RCP’s polling website.
Something to check all week, I’m sure.
Here’s how CNN is reporting polling.
At first, I thought that this was from April or something but then it talked, at the bottom, about the Thunder vs. Pacers game bringing the finals to a tie at this point. Apparently, the finals are 1-1 and there was a Thunder/Pacers game last night and…
So this is from today.
CBS offers a more nuanced view:
“https://www.cbsnews.com/news/deportation-immigration-opinion-poll/
“Views of the Trump administration’s deportation program headed into this weekend with positive net approval from Americans, including continued strong backing from the Republican base — but also heavily shaped by contrasting views about which people, and how many, are being targeted for deportation.
A slight majority feel the administration’s deportation efforts are prioritizing people they believe are dangerous criminals. Those who say this are very supportive of the program, and feel the program is making people in the U.S. safer.
But if people don’t think it is dangerous criminals who are the focus of the deportation effort, support drops dramatically.
The survey was completed just prior to Saturday’s protests and events in Los Angeles.
In terms of how many people the administration is trying to deport, more is not necessarily better in the public mind.
Views of the Trump administration’s deportation program headed into this weekend with positive net approval from Americans, including continued strong backing from the Republican base — but also heavily shaped by contrasting views about which people, and how many, are being targeted for deportation.
A slight majority feel the administration’s deportation efforts are prioritizing people they believe are dangerous criminals. Those who say this are very supportive of the program, and feel the program is making people in the U.S. safer.
But if people don’t think it is dangerous criminals who are the focus of the deportation effort, support drops dramatically.
The survey was completed just prior to Saturday’s protests and events in Los Angeles.
In terms of how many people the administration is trying to deport, more is not necessarily better in the public mind.”
Half of Americans say Trump is deporting more people than they thought he would during the 2024 campaign. And most in this group disapprove of the deportation program.
Some of this is tied to views on process: those people are also more apt than others to say potential deportees should get a hearing and due process.”
Sigh. I just suppose all the incentives are on people to pretend things are normal and not realize the danger because it might mean uncomfortable thoughts.”
So basically a good chunk of this country is completely cocooned in the right-wing media universe where all the people being deported are dangerous criminals and thugs.
So basically a good chunk of this country is completely cocooned in the right-wing media universe where all the people being deported are dangerous criminals and thugs.
This is why (dung) like the “Biden is Senile” story kinda matters, Saul.
If you wait until 2025 to tell the stories you covered up for temporary political advantage, you may be wondering why everybody is stampeding to the media universe that you recently decried as showing cheap fakes and propaganda making stuff up about the president’s mental state.
Oh, and the whole “I remember the last time we had news covering the mostly peaceful protests” thing ain’t helping either.
But we can check the numbers tomorrow.
And the day after.
Maybe the cars being set on fire will show the country just how much of a fascist Trump actually is.
There is some grade A Murc’s Law going on here.
No, Murc’s law is that Democrats are the only party with agency.
I am arguing that the Correct, Unbiased, and Objective News Media covered up Biden’s senility and the Right Wing Media Bubble slandered Biden by saying the stuff that Tapper said in Original Sin prematurely.
And a bunch of people, for whatever reason, hold that against the Correct, Unbiased, and Objective News Media.
Additionally, the stupid stuff the Correct, Unbiased, and Objective News Media said last time people were burning cars on camera.
It’s the Right Wing Media Bubble that is displaying agency by showing pictures of people burning cars and saying “THIS IS A RIOT!” and the Correct, Unbiased, and Objective News Media is saying “LA is a big city, this took place on three city blocks, it’s no big deal, most of LA was just going about its business like normal.”
In this case, *BOTH* media environments are displaying agency.
So you’ll have to find some other fallacy to accuse me of engaging in.
Both Sides Do It, maybe? Oooh! That Sartre quotation!
Wait, let me get this straight, there is a size requirement for something to be correctly called a riot? I would love to know how to calculate that.
Is it:
– Number of people engaging in riotous activity?
– %age of city having riotous activity?
Report state about 1000 in LA taking part in riotous activity. There was an estimated 2000 taking part in the January 6th riots. Is the size requirement somewhere between1000 and 2000?
Inquiring minds want to know.
The current narrative is that the mostly peaceful protests are sufficiently small to not require being covered by the news. Some people got rowdy! There was vandalism! This is what happens in a big city! Homicides are down!
Which would be all well and good if this didn’t feel like “okay, these are bad optics… we’ll pretend it’s not a big deal.”
Well, the mayor instituted a curfew last night.
And now we’re stuck wondering why there is a curfew in response to a handful of people people engaging in graffiti.
So, if you wanted a hard line, the difference between “a bunch of rowdy people” and “a riot” is whether the mayor imposes a curfew.
So, can we reclassify January 6th then? I think DC was ‘mostly peaceful’, the city just had one isolated incident in a very small fraction of the city. Not even all the 2000 were involved in the riot… excuse me rowdy activity.
This is already happening. All that needed to happen to keep January 6th as an evil Insurrection was to not have any mostly peaceful protests until 2029 or so.
Welp.
Here’s another takeaway that I got from reading the article itself:
Trump is at 45% approve/55% disapprove for overall job rating.
Trump’s deportation plans are polling at 54% approve/46% disapprove.
So even with this particular sample, Trump’s deportation is doing 9% better than Trump himself.
Quick! Burn more flags!
What power does the Democratic Party have over the protestors? Do you think they get instructions from DNC headquarters?
What power does the Democratic Party have over the protestors?
Somewhere between “diddly” and “squat”.
Do you think they get instructions from DNC headquarters?
Maybe they have similar donors but I don’t think that there’s any coordination between DNC HQ and the protestors at all.
“What power does the Democratic Party have over the protestors?”
It’s funny how you think this is a defense of either the Democratic Party and the protestors.
I mean, there’s not *ZERO* relationship but it’s mostly limited to stuff like this.
I see a handful of different responses to what’s happening in L.A. and in other cities, but the one from centrists and even some more progressive Dems that amount to, “We should only take actions that poll well” is baffling to me. If you think something is wrong, why should you wait until it polls well to fight against it?
I asked Todd Akin about this and he told me that he agrees with you. When you have a principled position, you *NEED* to fight for it with everything you have.
Even if you lose an election, it’s more important to fight for what’s right.
Now, I personally believe that heightening the contradictions is a good way to turn taking the principled side in an 80-20 issue and turning it into a 95-5 issue, but I’m much more into vulgar utilitarianism than most.
Let’s say that you didn’t want mass deportations, and you especially didn’t want the sorts of raids and deportations we’re seeing right now. You understood, of course, that a majority of the American population want to see mass deportations, and a majority may even like what they’re seeing right now. How would you go about fighting against what you see as genuinely evil? How would you go about convincing people that mass deportations are bad, and the sorts of raids and deportations we’re seeing now even more egregiously so?
Well, the first thing that I would do is search for something vaguely like common ground and appeal to the hell out of that.
Even something as simple and straightforward as “man, Biden really screwed up on the border and I don’t think that he should have let it be half as porous as it became and that was a major mistake” would tell the rubes that I wasn’t like the crazies.
From there, I’d explain that we should deport the violent criminals and the drug dealers and NOBODY IS ARGUING THAT WE SHOULDN’T but we shouldn’t be deporting little old ladies who make food.
I would motte and bailey the hell out of the argument.
I like to think that I’d also be better on issues of whether the riots are actually happening and whether they actually look bad, in an effort to communicate that I have eyes and a brain and the ability to remember the summer of 2020.
And then I would go back to motteing and baileying.
That’s what I would do.
I’m unsure of how you’re going to argue we shouldn’t deport people if you’re telling people you agree that they shouldn’t be here.
Because I know that if I argue that the bad ones should stay too, I will turn an 55-45 issue into an 80-20 issue if not a 90-10 issue.
To be quite honest, the undocumented little old ladies who make food are undocumented visitors that I very much like and the undocumented gang members who sell drugs are undocumented visitors that I very much don’t and I also see half a loaf as better than none and I am not upset with getting rid of the bad half of the loaf if the other option is “mass deportations of everybody”.
But I’m much more into vulgar utilitarianism than most.
So you’d say “Yeah, Biden let too many people in too easily, which let some criminals in, but the people who came in under Biden who are law abiding should be able to stay? Who wants to deport the little old ladies who make our food?”
Nose of the camel. I’d get people to agree that the nose of the camel is okay.
I would absolutely *NOT* argue that everybody gets to stay. That will immediately lead to whatabouts.
Start with the camel’s nose!
Chris, are you really arguing that The Law Must Apply Equally In Every Circumstance No Exceptions No Matter What You HAVE TO FOLLOW THE LAW And If You Don’t Like It Then You Need To Get Rid Of That Law
because that’s, um, a libertarian argument
I am not.
Guess I can’t figure what you mean by “I’m unsure of how you’re going to argue we shouldn’t deport people if you’re telling people you agree that they shouldn’t be here”, then.
If you’re saying, “There are a bunch of people shouldn’t be here, and it’s Biden fault” which is what Jay’s first statement implies, certainly to people who already believe that the people who came here illegally under Biden shouldn’t be here, it’s going to be difficult to go from there to, “But actually, they should be here.”
I’d start off by just saying, “The vast majority of people who come here come to work and to make a better life for their families and themselves, and to contribute to our society much as you and I do. Sure, people who commit serious crimes need to be punished, but the vast majority are law-abiding people like you and me.” If someone points out that they’re not law-abiding, because they came here against the law, I’d point out that there is no clear legal path for them to come here, and if there were, I’m sure they’d want to partake of that, so we should build one, and let the people already here, as well as those who’d like to come, use it.
“If someone points out that they’re not law-abiding, because they came here against the law, I’d point out that there is no clear legal path for them to come here, and if there were, I’m sure they’d want to partake of that, so we should build one, and let the people already here, as well as those who’d like to come, use it.”
hey remember that thing where people keep getting in screaming fits about how Jaybird won’t give an example of what he’s talking about?
this is what he’s talking about.
because he’s saying “a popular position might be that we should confine our immigration enforcement to people who are actual violent criminals” and you’re angrily declaring that the only acceptable solutions to you are “change the law” and “continue exactly as we’re doing now”.
To be clear, I’m not arguing my position. I’m trying to edit Jaybird’s argument in a way that doesn’t give away the game at the start.
My own position is that I would like to convince people that immigrants, legal or illegal, are not their enemies, and that in fact the people who’ve spent years trying to convince them immigrants are their enemies, are in fact their enemies. I’d argue that people come here for the same reason they always have, and bring their cultures as they always have, but just as they always have, those cultures get blended into the increasingly large and diverse “American culture.”
Americans have had periodic freakouts about immigrants that have resulted in some of the blackest periods in our history, from the Chinese exclusion act to (mostly) Italian immigrants for political dissent, from anti-semitism and anti-Catholic prejudice in the Johnson-Reed Act to family separations in the last Trump administration. If we’re not careful, this period right now will be looked upon by future Americans as a period of xenophobia and racism leading to the scapegoating of immigrants for societal ills that have little or nothing to do with them.
Our immigration policy should be simple and straightforward: if you want to come here, you should be able to come here. If you can work, you should be able to do so at a living wage. If you want to become a citizen, you should be able to do so. While fear of criminal immigrants is vastly overblown, fueled by dishonest politicians and sensationalist media, one of the primary reasons that there are, e.g., Central American gangs here, is the same reason that there is violence around the drug trade: prohibition sends immigration underground, which makes it rife for criminal exploitation and violence.
My problem with that is that, if you fail, we establish that Trumpism is the moderate position.
And I’m not sure that you’ll succeed.
Pretty sure you won’t, tbh.
I realize my position is extreme. I’m kind of used to that in political discourse. I don’t think there’s any way to make Trump’s position look moderate, though. The range of options between mine and his are myriad, some of them truly moderate.
I agree with all of that except the “living wage” part. My teenage children with joke jobs didn’t need “living wages” but benefited from having jobs.
Even something as simple and straightforward as “man, Biden really screwed up on the border and I don’t think that he should have let it be half as porous as it became and that was a major mistake” would tell the rubes that I wasn’t like the crazies.
Ah yes, accepting the lie that is Republican framing is a good way to indicate you aren’t ‘the crazies’.
You want to know what Dems should actually be saying?
“Trump and ICE are arresting everyone who vaguely looks Hispanic, including both actual citizens and people inside of courthouses who are attempting to lawfully comply with the legal system by becoming citizens. They are detaining people we have _issued visas to_, where we invited them to visit our country, for no justifable reason. They are making wild allegations, backed up by no evidence and without presenting them to anyone, and using that to ship people overseas to be tortured in foreign prisons. This is completely unaccceptable. We already had a system that used the _courts_ to determine if someone was an immigrants here without permission and if they were criminals, and Trump refuses to use them.”
There’s the ‘message’. Democrats are too stupid and focus-tested to actually start saying it, but I can promise it would play pretty well if they’d start.
They also should start challenging the idea that there is some massive amount of foreign gangs operating in the US, because there aren’t. But that is a level of misinformation that will take years to undo.
“no, no no no no NO, it has to be perfect! It has to be perfect or I won’t have it!“
If only you were around Germany in the 30s, you could have let the socialists and the communists know what they were doing wrong. Kept the whole thing from happening. I mean, what were those idiot commies, socialists and Jews thinking.
“Ukraine will be ours!”
Democrats are currently in an obvious internal battle about how to respond to Trump. I think Josh Marshall is largely correct that it is not a centerist/moderate vs. progressive battle but a complacency/wait until the midterms vs. 5-alarm five/things are going down right now battle.
Obviously, there are a lot of elected politicians who find themselves bewildered by current circumstances. Warren is sticking in her comfort zone of tax grabs for billionaires. I don’t think she is complacent. I think she is just stunned about what is going on and she has the joy of being technically correct.
I think others are aware about what is going on but don’t want to be known as the person who let Trump call for the use of the Insurrection Act.
Others like Slotkin, Souzzi, MPG would rather do anything than discuss Trump sending Troop to L.A. to restore “order” or what not or the sheer span of the current authorization.
AOC, Sanders, Walz, Pritzker, Schiff, Salwell, Connor Lamb are ideologically diverse but aware of the five-alarm fire.
There are Democrats who want to fight Trump and focus on what is actually happenign but I wouldn’t describe their level of alarm as five alarm fire. They seem to be walking a tight rope between focusing on Trump’s tyranny and not sounding too out there or calling for obvious bold and illegal actions.
It’s called learning lessons from 2020. I think it’s far from clear that Trump is on the wrong side of this politically. We all know that the protestor don’t believe anyone should ever be deported for any reason. Opinion isn’t going to turn on ICE dressed up as storm troopers when the substance boils down to enforcing decades or older immigration laws.
The real pivot needs to be figuring out what to do now that the illegal immigration bluff has been called. Encounters at the border plummeted. Interior enforcement is ugly but possible. Time to accept the L and figure out something else.
The protests in Los Angeles were from rounding up guys at a Los Angeles Home Depot waiting around for day labor jobs. Whether day labor jobs are a good thing or not is one thing but these guys are not the dangerous criminals that Trump voters allegedly thought he was going to arrest and deport. There are not that many dangerous criminals out there for him to arrest and deport. Or arresting and deporting them is hard (and dangerous! They have guns) so Trump and Co want easy targets.
So they are deporting hard-working moms who overstayed tourist visas in the 1990s and may or may have not had a sham green card marriage. They are deporting people who were here on humanitarian parole because they were fleeing war-torn areas like Ukraine, South Sudan, Haiti, oppressive political regimes in Central America (including Cuba! Hi Rubio!!!)
There is a backlog of millions of millions of immigration cases. The way you resolve this backlog is either through mass amnesty or mass cruelty/authoritarianism.
I know which one I would pick.
I would have preferred a settlement on the subject years ago but the people spoke. I get that there’s a lot of special pleading and unfortunate cases but it is what it is. And if it makes people think twice about entering illegally/on dubious grounds or overstaying visas then maybe after the GOP is trounced in the mid terms, or, failing that, in 2028 something more constructive will be possible on the policy front.
Yeah the Dems specifically and liberals in general have treated the immigration question as a second order policy concern. If nothing else this Trumpian era should finally have convinced them that something has to be significantly changed next time they’re in a position to do so. Especially now that the GOP has demonstrated they have no interest in doing so themselves and would rather the status quos just continue to fester to their electoral benefit.
Team Blue doesn’t agree with itself on what should be done. Within living memory Blue was the party against immigration.
Yes, they don’t agree which was why, in the past, it was easier to just ignore the matter or try and seek a grand bargain with the right- immigration restrictions for amnesty for Dreamers for example. No need for an intraparty brawl in that scenario. I’m relatively confident they now know that the immigration question has to be addressed even if they have to just do it themselves now. What they do is still open for debate but I don’t think the Dems have any notion that it can just be ignored or back burnered anymore.
I seriously doubt Blue is able to do anything. All options have a majority opposed to whatever.
There is a very strong minority against any potential solution, and there is no majority for anything.
Blue got elected by promising to not do whatever we might think of as a solution.
Heh, I think you’re likely wrong. Blue definitely could muster a majority if they had the trifecta to, for instance, adequately staff and fund judges for rapid resolution of the asylum backlog. It’s a classic Dem solution- more money and staff to throw at the issue. The far left/open borders crowd would kvetch but would struggle to articulate their true objections in a way that’d move anyone beyond their fringers. Likewise, if Blue was feeling very spicey on the subject, they could go quite hard on e-verify and hammering employers of undocumented immigrants with genuine penalties. That, again, plays to their innate inclinations and, again, is hard for the open borders fringe to articulate objection to.
And, frankly, if the Dems did those two things alone the vast majority of the current immigration imbroglio would be defanged. The Dems would then, probably, need to stand up a serious guest worker policy or else tackle a major labor shortage concern for ag and construction but that’d be a second order effect.
Let’s not forget that “the people” is Donald Trump who got the 2024 immigration bill scotched by his toadies in Congress.
I hear you. I still primarily blame GOP cynicism for rejecting and refusing to entertain any deal that’s ever been on the table on this subject. This is the kind of thing that establishment type Democrats would be dying to reach some sort of bipartisan compromise on.
I just also don’t think we can ostrich about where the voting population is. My sense is that they are skeptical towards illegal immigration and that while pushing the limits or being downright abusive aren’t popular in themselves it isn’t going to cause some re-evaluation where suddenly people totally change how they look at the subject more generally.
Trump is slightly popular on his immigration policies but not overwhelmingly popular, 54% approval to 46% disapproval. That being said Trump isn’t merely enforcing immigration policies. His administration is actively breaking immigration law in order to get maximum deportations in ways that previous administrations woud not. Even if immigration policy is broken, that doesn’t justify a harsh authoritarian mass deportation policy and allowing Trump to be authoritarian in this area will make it easier for him to subvert democracy and civil liberties in other areas.
CNN had another polling segment this morning where Harry Enten explained:
Yes, I realize that immigrants are not uniform pro-immigrant themselves. Far from it.
“Heh, I think you’re likely wrong. Blue definitely could muster a majority if they had the trifecta to, for instance, adequately staff and fund judges for rapid resolution of the asylum backlog. ”
There are millions of cases in the backlog. It will take lots of funding to sort this out and is it more important than healthcare and housing?
Funding Courts is an incredibly important but tricky political thing. If you look at civil cases in state trial courts (your PI cases, breach of contract cases, every day litigation, nothing special), there is a huge backlog. Alameda County is now setting civil trials out in 2027.
The voters have repeatedly said “yes” this is more important than tinkering with healthcare again. Housing, of course, is a state level issue- the Feds ability to do much about it is restricted to second order effects like trade policy.
And, agreed, the backlog is big but dealing with it has a variety of options if there was money and will. And no constituency in the Dem caucus would be eager to stand up and say “no, it’s better to leave the backlog as is” even if they (the open borders left) would prefer that it be left that way.
The most practical, humane, and logical way to deal with it is a mass amnesty.
If only Kamala Harris had run on that! She could have lost New Jersey, Maine, and Rhode Island!
You left out politically suicidal.
Advocating for open borders would be politically suicidal.
But I am not sure mass amnesty will always be a politically suicidal argument. It happened before and can happen again.
I don’t know what you’re quoting but it seems to me that that’s as much of a formula to cut corners as it is to say that it’s impossible to do.
I personally agree with you, even if I am overall more hawkish on illegal immigration. However I don’t think the voting public is likely to see it that way, if the enduring image 1.5 or 3.5 years from now is torched cars and Mexican flags. Doubtlessly there are many outrages to come between then and now some of which may be worth emphasizing. What I don’t think we should do is get really caught up in championing the procedural rights of illegal immigrants. Just because Americans don’t like to see families broken up or otherwise law abiding foreign nationals that have been here a long time summarily deported doesn’t mean it is solid ground to fight on. We’ve lost there before and shouldn’t gamble on it again.
I realize that the procedural rights of various out groups tends not to be politically popular but it is extremely important. Civil liberties and procedural rights are important even if most people bristle under the full implications of them or at least aren’t thrilled about groups they don’t like that much having the same rights they do.
Pushing for civil liberties and procedural rights needs to not, absolutely not, look like isolated demands for rigor.
If people don’t feel like they have security, they might ask “what about *MY* rights?”
If that question gets asked, you’re going to find that there’s a hell of a lot of people who don’t have a hell of a lot of sympathy.
Noah Millman has a decent article on the Dems being stuck in a Catch-22… I think there’s something to that at a ‘this very moment’ sort of way. But the way out of the Catch-22 means staking a future path that incurs the penalty you have to eat to get out of the Catch-22.
I don’t think it’s hard to figure out what that means… with the caveat that it can’t mean a Regan type path. Not this time around.
https://open.substack.com/pub/gideons/p/the-street-fight-trump-wants?
Eigen said something similar:
CA govt buckles and crushes riots: W
That’s the path out… the frog that has to be eaten… if it sets the Dems on a new path, it becomes a W in the long term.
There was a twitter account called “LA Scanner” that was doing his part to post doxing information about the various ICE raids going around in LA. The hotels the agents were staying at, the streets they were on, the businesses they were likely driving to.
Well, as it happens, there was a single person associated with this account and it got doxed and the guy behind it was a twenty-something kid still living at home with his parents and, wouldn’t you know it, some people started calling his house and calling his parents and someone even showed up at his house and started banging on the door.
The kid posted what seems to be a sincere apology, turned himself in to local law enforcement, said he would stop, asked people to stop calling his house and bugging his parents, and then he deleted his account.
You don’t want to normalize vigilantism.
You really, really, really, really, really don’t.
Reporting the location of law enforcement, and what business law enforcement are going to next, is not even _vaguely_ doxxing.
Doxxing is a real thing that that does not mean ‘reporting on the functioning of the government’.
Well, the kid apologized and then deleted his account anyway.
Probably because he was getting doxxed himself.
Anti-Semitic vandalism in the heavily Orthodox Jewish Five Towns. An overly minor event in the grand scheme of what is going on but just a reminder why most Jews don’t buy it when the protestors say they are merely “anti-Zionist.”
https://5townscentral.com/2025/06/09/coordinated-antisemitic-attacks-rock-5-towns-community-urged-to-stay-vigilant/
Administration is sending 500 marines to Los Angeles to impose it’s iron fisted rule:
https://www.kcra.com/article/marines-mobilized-la-protests/65014363
Have we crossed the line yet?
Yes. Though 500 Marines in Los Angeles is not really enough to cover the area and from what I’ve heard things are omnishambles with logistics for the troops in LA currently,
We crossed it awhile ago.
Bill Kristol wrote yesterday that the memo Trump sent to the three Cabinet-level officials doesn’t mention LA or California, the numbers are in “at least” form, with no time limit on the authorization or lengths of deployment. I went and took a look and my opinion agrees with Kristol’s: it’s an open-ended authorization from the Commander-in-Chief to deploy US troops domestically for whatever the Secretary of Defense deems is necessary.
If I were in Congress or the Supreme Court, I might want to be somewhere outside of DC when the 6,000 troops are getting organized.
Fun from Trump’s parade, Army scrubs videos of tanks with Hang Faucci and Hang Bill Gates: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/09/army-parade-tank-hang-fauci-bill-gates-graffiti/84112187007/
Sly Stone has passed away. He was 82.
He had a lot of great songs and his live performances seemed to be even better than the stuff captured in the studio. Dance to the Music was a particularly fun one.
Ave atque vale.
Border Czar Tom Homan decides to go Fidel Castro and puts on military style uniform.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-is-tom-homan-going-full-fidel
American wine exports are collapsing:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Screenshot-2025-06-09-at-4.06.06%E2%80%AFPM.png
… to Canada.
This is pretty interesting in a Canadian backlash kinda way; it appears to be an actual political reaction to tariffs rather than an economic reaction to tariffs. It’s chunky to the overall export market approx 15%)… but it’s a uniquely Canadian event.
Wine consumption trends have been alarming producers and distributors for the past few years (unrelated to tariffs or even inflation)… the biz has been reducing production and fears ‘generational trends’ away from wine.
Unfortunately, rather than seeing prices come down, we’re seeing ‘bulk’ vineyards being torn up production reduced, and premium wines becoming the focus with prices holding steady.
Ugh. This will result in more box wine and more $50 bottles but we’ll see the $8-12 market bottom out.
It’s still early, but I suspect the middle-tier $12-18 (dude, under $10 is 2000s) will decline in quality, not in price. The premium tier will increase prices and shift some of the best mid-tier lots into new Sub-Premium second labels or sub-regions. But yes, $50 might turn into $45 and $65 bottles.
It’s a little bit like how Restaurants abandoned the middle so that the middle is a central-kitchen reheat slop-house (chile’s, tgif, appleby’s, etc) or a high-end dining experience. With a sub-set of places that used to charge $9 plates trying to survive on $20 plates constantly getting squeezed by the $15 plates of the franchises. +/- $$ for regional and post inflation vagaries.
First, my M.J. Vallejo disappeared, then my Black Opal became a bottlecap wine… and now this.
Two buck Chuck was, I think, $4.99 last time I saw it?
Just means you have to seek out the varietals/regions no-one is drinking… they are looking for markets because, well, no-one has heard of them. But that can often mean slogging through a lot of very mediocre wine; which, truth be told, is mostly just the story of drinking wine.
I’m not a picky man. I just want a burst of dark fruit and an aftertaste of dark spice. I don’t need it to be paired with a four-star meal, it’s fine to make it go well with pizza.
This is what happens when you embrace the Instagram folks.
Iron Triangle: you can have a Burst of Dark Fruit, Secondary finish of Dark Spice, or Good Price Point.
Pick two.
Mostly kidding. Try a Minervois from southern France. Nobody drinks it here and can find decent value.
Canada’s our largest trading partner and a 69% collapse to China is far from chump change either. My husband is still waiting and hoping that this’ll precipitate a collapse in bourbon prices domestically.
He isn’t going to get Pappy Van Winkle at 120 a bottle
I read that to him and he laughed and said “if only” but it still means nothing to me.
It is a perfectly cromulent bourbon that should cost about 120 a bottle but costs thousands of dollars a bottle because of the irrationality of crowds.
Ahhhh thanks.
But it is kinda chump change. US wine sales are $80B/yr … $300m drop in exports is a thing, but not a very big thing… and not a guaranteed thing as this reflects MAR and APR only. China exports dropped $2M… French imports went up $1.5M. Beware the battle of percentages.
As I say, it’s interesting because it doesn’t really reflect a tariff market drop (10% price hike isn’t *that* sensitive to cause this) but reflects what seems to be a pretty solidly enforced decision by the LCBO.
But yes, we can all hope for Bourbon prices to return to reasonableness… Go Canada!
Yup, definitely a decision by the various commissions but my, unscientific, read is that the populace is not at all clamoring for those American brands back on the shelves- quite the opposite actually.
I certainly hope the Bourbon prices drop if only so the hubby’s future excursion the Bardstown (I can only put him off on going for so long) doesn’t carry such an insane price tag.
Last time this happened there were human interest stories about distillers having to downsize operations because of retaliatory tariffs from Europe. Could well get more expensive.
I envy your husband though if he goes out to KY on a regular basis. I’ve wanted to do the trail for years and never gotten around to it. My favorite bourbon is Four Roses which I believe is 40 minutes away from Bardstown. To the extent he is open to totally unsolicited recommendations from people on the internet I have also heard positive things about their tasting set up.
I shall pass the recommendation on! I, myself, have little use for spirits and little enjoyment. Bourbon just tastes like smoky burning to me. But the hubby went to Bardstown once in the past, it’s not a terrible drive from MN, and went to all the places around there. I don’t recall him mentioning Four Roses though.
The amusing part will be if this spawns another Chicken Tax and we end up with some long-reaching preference creation in American consumer products that has absolutely nothing to do with the commodity in question.
Like if Americans stop wearing denim and become permanently devoted to, like, gabardine, and in 2094 everyone’s all “hey how come there’s no jeans anymore” and the answer is “because in 2025 the Canadians put a tariff on American wine”.
In today’s Jews are a prop, the federal government sues a Palestinian owned cafe in Oakland for discrimination against Jews. I can believe that these incidents happened and that the current administration is pursuing this in bad faith:
https://sfstandard.com/2025/06/09/jerusalem-coffee-house-oakland-department-of-justice-lawsuit/
Trump’s post LA polling is no bueno:
https://bsky.app/profile/simonwdc.bsky.social/post/3lraxoanxw22q
45%-49% (-4) – June 2
45%-55% (-10) – June 6
40%-53% (-13) – June 10
RCP has the latest polls.
Today’s are:
Morning Consult, Rasmussen Reports, and Economist/YouGov.
Morning Consult’s poll is on Trump’s approval and it has him at 47/51.
The previous Morning Consult poll was June 2nd and it had Trump at 46/51.
Rasmussen Reports’ poll is on Trump’s approval and it has him at 51/48.
The previous Rasmussen poll was June 6th and it had him at 50/49.
Economist/YouGov’s poll is on two things: Approval and Right Direction/Wrong Track.
Approval is 45/53.
Right Track is 38/54.
Previous poll had approval at 46/51 and Right Track at 42/51.
Trump underperforms in polls. As a general rule of thumb we should add +5% to his ratings.
Jeff Maurer on the LA situation: I Hate That When Some Dickhead Sets a Car on Fire, We Have to Talk About It For a Week
Dammit I can never get the hyperlink right on my phone: https://open.substack.com/pub/imightbewrong/p/i-hate-that-when-some-dickhead-sets?r=2jsh9&utm_medium=ios
Good news, I guess. We now can talk about the body that has been found.
The cause of death has not been released.
Perhaps it was Covid-19.
I like to read Jeff as the Dave Barry of 2020 lefty political discourse:
“…this riot gave Trump the excuse he needed to dial his authority up from “Andrew Jackson” to “Mid-’80s Bobby Knight”
Peter Coyote (yes the actor) has some rules for Protests:
“Number 1 let women organize the event. They’re more collaborative. They’re more inclusive, and they don’t generally bring the undertones of violence men do. 2 appoint monitors, give them yellow vests and whistles. At the first sign of violence, they blow the whistles and the real protesters sit down. Let the police take out their aggression on the anarchists and the provocateurs trying to discredit the movement. Number 3 dress like you’re going to church. It’s hard to be painted as a hoodlum when you’re dressed in clean presentable clothes. They don’t have to be fancy they just signal the respect for the occasion that you want to transmit to the audience. Number 4, make your protest silent. Demonstrate your discipline to the American people. Let signs do the talking. Number 5 go home at night. In the dark, you can’t tell the cops from the killers. Come back at Dawn fresh and rested.”
I agree with 1, 2, and 5. 3 and 4 seem like impossibilities. It is not 1962 anymore and we don’t just go about in our Shabos best all the time. Number 4 seems too influenced by Coyote being a zen buddhist.
If we could get the undocumented visitors to be more feminist, follow coordinated direction from leaders, dress well, stop talking loudly, and go home at night, WE WOULDN’T BE IN THIS MESS IN THE FIRST PLACE SAUL.
I think the big thing he left off is that the protestors should collaborate closely with the LAPD. This isn’t 2020 and the cops in LA have weighed in against Trump so the protestors could, in theory, have a very significant and welcome police presence that could tamp down on troublemakers while not inquiring about immigration status at all.
There is very little good faith in the police right now. A lot of blue-city police have been working with ICE and going against the will of the people they are supposed to protect and serve in various sanctuary cities. Minneapolis had an issue with this last week.
The police have lots of fences to mend and the burden is on them to mend them
Oh, don’t I know it (I live in Minneapolis)!
Doesn’t change my point- the protestors absolutely should still collaborate with (or use) the LAPD- not for the LAPD’s benefit but for the protestors benefit.
What did Minnesota do?
Minneapolis has an ordinance, adopted in 2003,[160] that directs local law enforcement officers “not to ‘take any law enforcement action’ for the sole purpose of finding undocumented immigrants, or ask an individual about his or her immigration status.”[161] The Minneapolis ordinance does not bar cooperation with federal authorities: “The city works cooperatively with the Homeland Security, as it does with all state and federal agencies, but the city does not operate its programs for the purpose of enforcing federal immigration laws. The Homeland Security has the legal authority to enforce immigration laws in the United States, in Minnesota and in the city.”[160]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city#Minnesota
They apparently learned their lesson: https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minneapolis-police-department-federal-immigration-enforcement-memo/
Based on the anti-ICE protests, point 1 should have been agreed upon before the protests started. It’s way late for that now. Many of the anti-ICE protestors are the types that like to see themselves as revolutionaries and they think they see themselves in a battle against an American you know who. They aren’t going to be able to resist the temptations.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/06/the-free-speech-administration
Trump warns that anyone that protests his Stalinesque military parade will be met by heavy force.
Also he thinks his parade is on Sunday.
The Free Speech and Senility Free admin
The Wall Street Journal has the scope on the White House marching orders that led to the Los Angeles protests:
https://archive.is/tWRtP
I’m reading in amazement here as people misunderstand what is happened. That they think this is ‘protests’. This is not protests, this is not a riot, this is an insurrection, an attempt to stop the government from doing what the government is trying to do. (Because the government are fascist sociopaths.)
“Hey, look at those Germans protesting the Na.zis trying to drag Anne Frank out of the basement…but why are they being _violent_? Surely non-violence would play better on TV. Why don’t they stand around showing solidarity as people are hauled off?”
Did none of you watch Wicked? I’m fully expecting people to suggest changing their name to show support next as your law-abiding neighbors (Some only 95% law-abiding, but others fully law-abiding) are hauled off and possibly shipped to torture prisons, but at minimum having their lives destroyed.
You can protest if you want. Feel free. In fact, do that. There’s a big one this weekend.
But what is happening is LA is not that. It is people attempting to throw themselves on the machinery of fascism to keep it from harming people. It cannot, by definition, be peaceful, it cannot operate with the laws. It is trying to damage the system, to at minimum waste resources, even if it cannot break the system.
And, yes, it is going to result in Trump escalating. So? The current situation was already unacceptable to the people it was affected by.
You know why they’re not calling it that, right?
Like, if you told journalists to start calling it that, you’d understand why they’d, at a minimum, assume you were being a right-wing jokester, right?
You know why they’re not calling it that, right?
Because they’re fools that think appeasing Trump will cause him to stop short of going full fascist.
And by ‘stop short’ they mean ‘only unimportant people will get hurt’.
They’re always been fools, constantly baffled as Trump goes further and further, sure he’s done _now_ and now that’s all, surely that’s the end of it.
It will not be the end of it. This is going on all the way. The sooner people internalize that, the better. Trump _will_ invoke the insurrection act. He _will_ attempt to occupy and/or arrest state governments. He _will_ attempt to use the military to suppress dissent. When that fails, he will start using brownshirts…I suspect he’s going to have ICE start deputizing civilians.
The question is does he do it _now_ or three months from now.
I said four months ago that we were getting fascism. We currently have troops being sent to quell protests and military parades and people being send to gulags with no due process and MAYBE PEOPLE SHOULD ACTUALLY START BELIEVING PEOPLE POINTING OUT WHERE THIS IS GOING.
I, for one, am very very tired of everyone pretending this ends in some way other than it must.
I, for one, am very very tired of everyone pretending this ends in some way other than it must.
Divorce or war?
Oh, I have no idea how the rest of the government will ultimately respond, much less what the ultimate outcome will be. The rest of the government, so far, has been incredibly bad at responding.
And huge chunk of that is how the media responds, and, frankly, the media is owned by a bunch of people who don’t have a lot of problems with fascism.
I cannot tell you what anyone else is going to do.
All I know is where _Trump_ is going. It is incredibly clear when this ends up if Trump is not stopped. I just do not know if he will be or not.
Team Red will lose the election next cycle, and Team Trump will age out of the Presidency.
We are literally less than five months into this thing and he already has troops on the streets with illegal orders to detain people.
If you think he’s going to allow the midterms to happen without interference, you are delusional.
And considering the lags the courts have in dealing with anything, they should be perfectly willing to stop any interference he’s doing during the November 2026 elections in mid-March 2027.
And before you start acting like I’m paranoid, ask yourself if, five months ago, you thought there would be Marines in the streets less than a 1/10th of the way through his term. And maybe understand that people need to start UPDATING THEIR PRIORS.
(Some of us actually read the books that Republican in the first administration cowardly released after he was out of office, and always knew what an out-of-control psychopath with no understanding of constitutional order and the rule of law he was, hemmed in only by his normie-Republican advisors, which he has the opposite of this time. So predicted this pretty accurately.)
The number of people involved in these protests is an accounting accounting error. There were maybe 20 protestors at the the Concord Immigration Court today. Calling this an insurrection is leftist wish-casting. These protests are probably not going to cause a great shift in popular opinion to the left and I am sympathetic to the protestors including even some of the vandalism that they are doing. It may end up growing to something more or it may not but calling this an insurrection is basically to inline with how Trump wants this to be because it will allow them to do violence.
The Greta Thunberg saga comes to it’s end. She and her fellow protestors attempt to breach the blockage of Gaza by magic, get intercepted by Israel, utterly refuse to engage with 10/7 in any way, get put on an El Al flight to France, and then go home.
I would of had them meet with survivors of 10/7 rather than ask them to watch the video footage of what Hamas did but they would have refused this to. I’m utterly convinced that every Pro-Palestinian Westerner lives in a fantasy world that has no bearing to the actual chronology of what really happened in the entirety of the I/P conflict. They basically decided that the only just solution is “No Israel/No Jews” or at least a Palestinian state created without having to negotiate with Israel so that the war against Israel can continue forever or that the Palestinians and other Muslims do not need to confront themselves over the vast amounts of genocidal Jew-haters among themselves.
The actual area of the Los Angeles protests is…about six blocks in downtown.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Screenshot-2025-06-10-at-7.00.48%E2%80%AFPM.png
I’m reminded of when we were told that all of Portland was being destroyed, in 2020, while Portlanders (including OT’s own Burt Likko) were just going about their business as usual.
Hey I’m open for that kind of clarification. What I’d throw out there though is that if this really is a highly localized, small scale situation that precludes it from also being first shots fired in the Resistance to Trump’s imitation of everyone’s favorite Austrian, rejection by the public of heavy handed interior enforcement of immigration laws, etc. There’s either something to see here or there isn’t.
These things are always highly localized*, in large part because they’re aimed at specific institutions, housed in particular places, and because the number of people participating will be relatively small, from the tens to the low thousands, with rare instances in the low 10s of thousands. There have been, in and around Los Angeles, much smaller demonstrations (like, fewer than 20 people) at hotels where ICE and other federal agents are being housed, but those are not much different from what you’d see outside of any Planned Parenthood on any given sunny day.
Given that such institutions are almost always located in the same parts of town, you can pretty easily predict where any demonstrations will be. Here in Austin, for example, they will be either at the Capitol building, at one of the other government (city, state, or federal) buildings, or on/around I35 downtown, which basically gives you about an 10 block north-south, from City Hall on Cesar Chavez/1st to the Capitol on 11th, and 9 block east-west range from Lavaca to 35 (the protests will never cover this full range, it’s just that they’re likely to be located somewhere in this area).
The only exceptions I can think of have been large scale riots like we saw after the Rodney King verdict, and I can’t think of a single instance of anything even remotely close to being that large scale since the 90s.
*In the U.S.
I get it, I used to work on Capitol Hill (not in any remotely interesting capacity, think barely above manual labor kind of stuff). Once the weather was nice there was something going on every week but almost never something worth talking about.
Two nights ago, Austin had police shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at protestors. Today, I am within a couple hundred yards of the Capitol and it’s very quiet outside. Such is the American will to protest.
Schoedinger’s Insurrection.
It’s a handful of people in a small area, why do you care?
It’s an uprising representative of America that is standing up to America’s Hitler!
It’s one. It’s the other. It’s both! It’s neither.
What gives the temporary advantage needed in this moment?
I don’t think it has to be one or the other. It’s going to be highly localized in each city, because they’re targeting specific institutions, but it could be large on a national level, if it’s happening with thousands of people in dozens of cities.
That said, I haven’t seen anything that suggests to me this is as large, in terms of the number of participants, as 2020, much less 2002/2003 or even 1998. It’s just starting, though, so we’ll see where it goes.
I went to marches in 2002/2003 that had more than 10,000 people here in a city that, at the time, probably had <600k. There were other cities where the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands. They were still pretty localized, though.
so you’re saying that these protests’ appeal is selective?
The protests are not the insurrection. Words have actual meaning:
Insurrections are organized, or at least people-working-together-at-the time, (As opposed to random criminals) who are systematically trying to interfere with the operation of the government, including law enforcement…and I guess I should add that the operation of the government that they are interfering with _isn’t against themselves_. (A standoff isn’t an insurrection.)
The acts of insurrections we saw including ringing a Home Depot to stop ICE form easily arresting people, and at the textile factory, chasing ICE out of the community by throwing rocks at them. And dropping rocks on police cars could hypothetically be an insurrection if that was some sort of organized attempt to stop the LAPD from functioning, but I sort of doubt it.
Everything else since then has just been protests that started in sympathy with the acts of insurrection.
Oh, and some Waymos were lit on fire, but I’m pretty certain that’s legal in LA:
https://www.foxla.com/news/waymo-vandalized-street-takeover-beverly-center
Oh, of course. Of course.
“our protest is tiny and small and only involves a few people, you shouldn’t take it so seriously, we actually don’t have a lot of the community behind us, our message isn’t very inspiring or widely-accepted, this can be safely ignored and most of the citizens around us are doing exactly that”
…interesting strategy, let’s see how it plays out for you.
JK Rowling’s works are slowly but surely being uncancelled…
In response to Stephen Miller calling California a sanctuary state, Governor Newsom’s Official Twitter Press Account called Stephen Miller “Voldemort”.
¡Los Republicanos se Abalanzan!
Trump announces that FEMA will be wound down after this year’s Hurricane season and that all disaster relief going foward will come from his office
Over/under on the number of “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job?” moments we’ll get in the next 3 1/2 years?
I joke, but as someone who’s in a place seeing more and more extreme weather, and that was just missed by a bad hurricane (after landfall, but it knocked power out and did a ton of damage well inland) last year, I’m anxious. We gotta get out of this place.
Well you live in a red state so you will get Trump’s largese more likely than us heathens in California during wild fire season.
I’m less worried about where he throws the money than his ability to implement. Granted, Brownie was running FEMA, but it’s a great illustration of how poorly disaster response can be implemented by thoroughly incompetent people.
But yeah, with climate change ravaging y’all from every which way, y’all are well and truly fished with him in charge of relief.
Use the high speed rail money to help approve more than 7 construction permits.
Brian Wilson has passed. Currently listening to Pet Sounds, and wishing Smile had seen the light of day.
What might have been!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbswOqC4cVU
I saw Brian Wilson and Al Jardin do a double bill with the Zombies at the Fox in Oakland in 2018 or 2019. The audience was half old people and half music-nerd hipsters. Wilson was in bad shape even then.
Yeah, I probably would have passed on that. He was in rough shape in one form or another since the late ’60s. America’s Syd Barrett.
Yeah, I’m writing a post about him.
Welp. David Hogg is no longer a vice chair.
This is alternately a “why do you care? it’s a position where you can’t name a *SINGLE* other person who held it!” issue and a “this issue is representative of the Democratic party as a whole” issue, depending on whether the time on the second hand is odd or even.
Gay Mizrahi Jew cafe owner in SF finds his cafe vandalized by Pro-Palestinian protestors after in SF after joining an anti-ICE protest. This is not the first time this happened to him. This is why Jews don’t believe people when they say they are merely anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic because many of them can’t seem to help themselves in doing random vandalism and violence against Jews.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/mannys-cafe-ice-protests-20370306.php
How much of a percentage of San Francisco was this vandalism?
I mean, surely there are thousands of cafes in SF that didn’t get vandalized.
And he’s got insurance so why is he upset?
And small-business owners are all proto-fascists anyway.
The hard left of San Francisco have been waging their own war against Manny’s since before it opened. This was from a 2019 call for a boycott:
“Boycott Manny’s and its ‘woke-washing’ of the Mission,” blared an email sent Dec. 5 to media outlets by “The Lucy Parsons Project,” a self-described “radical black queer direct action group fighting anti-blackness in the Bay Area.”
“Manny’s as a gentrifying wine-bar, cafe and fake ‘social justice’ space in the Mission District, will only accelerate the raising of rents and the displacement of Black, Latinx, disabled and trans/queer people in the Mission,” the letter continued. “Additionally, the proprietor of Manny’s, Emmanuel Yekutiel, has unequivocally espoused racist, Zionist, pro-Israel ideals that we will not tolerate or accept in our community. … We will not tolerate gentrifiers and Zionists attempts at invading and destroying our community through ‘woke-washing’!!”
https://missionlocal.org/2019/01/how-many-hoops-must-manny-yekutiel-jump-through-before-hes-deemed-worthy-to-do-business-in-the-mission/
Did they accelerate the raising of rents and the displacement of Black, Latinx, disabled and trans/queer people in the Mission?
I mean, was their criticism accurate? If it wasn’t then we can completely and totally dismiss them.
Jewish businesses in the Five Towns area of Long Island were firebomed and vandalized in the name of Palestine. Merely anti-Zionist my rear end.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/409755
You will not be surprised that the guy who wrote Rich Men North of Richmond has a song about his divorce and it is just as bitter and sexist as you would expect: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Screenshot-2025-06-11-at-7.35.50%E2%80%AFPM.png
Drag Queens steal Trump’s thunder at the Kennedy Center. Good for them.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7bZcfJimSqk
Ah, good. The upcoming protests aren’t just about immigration anymore.
“From Mexico to Gaza, globalize the intifada!”
Everybody on LGM considers this person to be a boneheaded idiot that isn’t helping but keeping these types out of protests is hard work.
Ah, the essays, you know the ones, have started to show up:
In Defense of Destroying Property
The Symbolic Power of Burning Waymo Robotaxis
The first one you linked is from 2020 (even without looking at a date, the words “widespread” and “Confederate monuments” probably would have given it away). That one was widely remarked upon on the right at the time, I recall.
The second one isn’t really a defense of the burning of Waymos, but an attempt at an explanation, and a use of the events as a launching point for criticism of the AI revolution. And frankly, the burning of Waymos does suggest that people may be getting angry at this level of automation, so I’m not sure why someone shouldn’t write about that, even if it turns out to be an isolated incident and maybe the people who torched them just did it for kicks and giggles and had no real political or political economic motivation.
Oh, you’re absolutely right about that first one. I was led astray by the fact that they retweeted it yesterday. I regret the error but not as much as if they hadn’t retweeted it freakin’ yesterday.
As for the Waymos, the cowardly owners moved all of the Waymos out of LA.
Wow. If the burnings really were a protest of Waymo, then they were incredibly successful.
It’s a pity that the protest against self-driving taxis putting taxi drivers out of work was overshadowed by the guy who spray-painted “(heck with) ICE” on one of the Waymos before setting it on fire.
Completely undermines the real message trying to be sent.
Who needs just one message? People’ve got lots of opinions, and some people have spray paint too.
Technically, destroying the Waymo might be a message *SUPPORTING* Donald Trump.
We just don’t know!
Holy cow, some actual good news. The Supreme Court ruled that a lawsuit against the FBI in response to a wrong-house raid can go forward. UNANIMOUSLY.
Harvey Weinstein convicted on one count, acquitted on another. A mistrial declared on the third count:
https://mail.aol.com/d/list/referrer=newMail&folders=1&accountIds=1&listFilter=NEWMAIL/messages/AD-eaqVMf4IXaEr0MAmFgBTibUk
If you don’t have an AOL login, you can’t read that one. Here’s one from Variety: Harvey Weinstein Judge Declares Mistrial on Rape Charge.
It seems to be a nutso story involving jurors threatening each other.
The takeaway is that the one count seems to be bad enough by itself:
Even if “25 years” doesn’t mean 25 years, half that is still quite a bit for a 73-year-old man.
Chris Rufo (yes, that Chris Rufo) has announced that a whistleblower has announced a discrimination lawsuit against Lockheed Martin (yes, that Lockheed Martin).
City Journal has the whole story.
What’s interesting is that it reached the point where HR was putting this stuff in writing.
I wonder if he’s ever uncovered a case of a black guy getting shafted.
I’m pretty sure that he didn’t uncover this instance either. He’s just reporting that it happened.
It’s the house rag of the Manhattan Institute, with which he is connected.
So it’s probably just as likely to be a real story as the other stuff he announces from time to time.
I had to stop reading when I got to “masculine industries,” in the first sentence. I’m sure this is a real story.
I will try to remember to post updates as I come across them until we’re both confident that it did or did not happen.
This isn’t evidence of anything but Lockheed has released a Statement on Past Compensation Practices.
Let’s watch ICE goons manhandle and remove a US Senator from a Press Conference
What is this referring to?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-alex-padilla-forcibly-removed-dhs-sec-kristi-noems-press-conferenc-rcna212688
Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., was forcibly removed from a news conference in Los Angeles on Thursday and detained after trying to question Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
“I am Sen. Alex Padilla. I have questions for the secretary,” Padilla said to Noem, which prompted several men to physically push him out of the news conference.
Padilla’s office shared a video of the incident with NBC News. The video shows Padilla being taken into a hallway outside and pushed face forward onto the ground as officers with FBI-identifying vests told the senator to put his hands behind his back. The officers then handcuffed him.
Yeah, *this* is pretty fucked.
The Marines in LA have low morale and don’t want to be there: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/12/los-angeles-national-guard-troops-marines-morale
Noem sounds like Trump plans to impose Iron Prefects on Los Angeles and the Rest of California:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Screenshot-2025-06-12-at-12.33.16%E2%80%AFPM.png
Mike Johnson runs interference for Trump and says that Padilla, by being a Senator and asking a question, deserves censure. The Republicans are playing for keeps and dictatorship.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c1858036060df8a821cbaf580bd862b41a28e66f8e3bb891b8cf94a0849d4198.png
He should look to his own House if he wants to find people deserving of censure, of which there are several. I’m sure the Senate will politely ignore him, if not on principle then out of a sense of its own prerogatives.
Can we stop pretending Israel is anything but a dangerous, nuclear pariah state now that it’s using military strikes to undermine US diplomacy?
Looks like it was a full decapitation strike. They got everybody.
Yup. And look, I’m not exactly confident that the yokels running the country right now even know what a nuclear weapon is, much less how one is built, but peace with Iran is way better than the alternative, and it seems like those yokels were serious about working towards a level guarantee of peace with Iran. I suspect this open declaration of war makes such discussions pretty much impossible for the near and likely medium term.
Given Iran’s response, I’m pretty sure that discussions have been mooted.
If Iran wants peace, then they have to stop funding terror groups and training them to kill civilians. If they’re not willing to do that because Israel is Jewish and they think Jews shouldn’t be allowed to exist then that says more about them than about Israel.
These various terror groups also cause other problems with other countries.
There is this weird two step with the Iranian clerical regime in Western discourse where on domestic issues they are theocratic dictators imposing a harsh Islamic regime on an unwilling populace but when it comes to foreign affairs they are responsible and serious people that only want security for Iran and don’t engage in military adventurism, despite this being a blatant lie.
Part of this might be to make negotiating with them more palpable. It might also be because their main opponent in the Muslim world is the equally odious Saudi regime, who don’t have any democratic features in their government, and reflexive anti-Americanism/anti-Israeli beliefs in certain quarters.
The Iranian Clerical Regime is also fine with Jews as long as we are second class dhimmis who know our place under the glorious empire of Islam. As an equal group that they must treat with respect, not so much.
Does the fact that we funded terror groups in Syria mean we don’t want peace? Iran funds proxy militaries and militias, just like we do, and just like Israel does (and Russia, and Turkey, and pretty much everyone in the region or with interests in the region).
Pointing to Russia and/or Syria as examples of what should happen does not strengthen your argument.
And what are those “interests” that Iran is projecting when it trains it’s terror groups to attack civilians?
I’m pointing to what we’ve done, and what pretty much everyone does. Iran is in a regional power struggle with the Saudis and Israel, and the allies of those countries (which includes the U.S., Russia, and other regional states), and like each of those other countries, Iran funds and supplies proxies to help them in that power struggle. Three of those countries, the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia, have gone so far as to bomb and/or invade other countries in the region in service of their aims, in this century. Just in the last year, Israel has had troops in Syria and Lebanon (as well as the occupied territories), and has bombed Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. The U.S. has bombed Yemen this year, and Syria with the last couple of years. The Saudis waged a brutal war against the Houthis that led to mass starvation, using American-supplied planes. All three of those countries have funded terrorist groups in Syria (and elsewhere). The Americans used a large-scale bombing campaign to support groups either involved in or associated with terrorism in Turkey.
Putting aside the politicization of the word terrorism (if it’s my enemies doing it, it’s terrorism; if it’s my friends doing it, it’s insurgency or whatever) inherent in any discussion of terrorism in American (to the point that I wish we’d just get rid of the word, using Iran’s funding of friendly groups throughout the region as a means to undermine Iran’s moral standing, sovereignty, or its regimes legitimacy is sort of like shooting a pellet gun straight at a wall, because that thing’s gonna bounce right back and hit us in the eye.
The real question is who among us hasn’t funded a little jihad, when the moment felt right?
You are equating groups whose mission is to end the anarchy in Syria (and/or remove one of the more heinous dictatorships) with groups whose mission is genocide.
If we’re talking about ethics, then we lose a lot by obscuring those differences. So no, this is not “everyone does it”.
And by “genocide” I mean “the real deal”, not a war where the birth rate is higher than the kill rate.
Man, I don’t know what to tell you if you believe that the mission of the former Al Qaeda in groups (and affiliated groups) was to “end the anarchy in Syria. These sorts of conversations can only take place with at least a minimum amount of common ground, and that statement suggests such doesn’t exist.
And there’s currently only one state in the Middle East committing genocide, and it ain’t Iran or any of their proxies.
In fact, there is no one committing genocide in the Middle East at the moment. The most recent attempt at genocide was ended by the IDF, though not soon enough.
the mission of the former Al Qaeda in groups (and affiliated groups) was to “end the anarchy in Syria.
How did you get to Al Qaeda? When were we funding them? And I mean “us” as in “the USA”. I’m not going to defend Saudi Arabia much less Russia.
And you just handwaved the entire “trained to attack civilians” part which is one of the key differences. We are not training anyone, anywhere to slaughter civilian populations.
there’s currently only one state in the Middle East committing genocide
Can you make that case without changing the definition of “genocide” and/or air-brushing Hamas out of the picture?
We funded, and supported militarily (including with troops on the ground and planes in the sky), the groups that took over Syria from the Assad regime. Those groups are a coalition of “secular” rebels and Islamists, mostly groups formerly within or affiliated with Al Qaeda, including the person currently leading Syria. We, the U.S., not the Saudis.
It’s very weird to have this conversation with someone who clearly knows nothing about the conflict in Syria but who makes so many statements about it full of confidence.
As I have said before, I won’t address genocide denial. I consider it too disgusting to address.
We funded, and supported militarily (including with troops on the ground and planes in the sky), the groups that took over Syria from the Assad regime.
The primary group that took over was HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), lead by Abu Mohammad al-Julani. Far as I can tell we’ve never supported him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay%27at_Tahrir_al-Sham#Foreign_support
Our side lost and is now an opposition group. We supported the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). We have backed a few others over the years but dropped them in favor of the Kurdish-led SDF. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_intervention_in_the_Syrian_civil_war
Mostly our objective was to oppose ISIL.
In any case I’ve put forth links which describe why I believe what I do. I think it’s your turn.
I won’t address…
Pity. I learn more from people who disagree with me.
We have been trying to make deals with the Iranians for decades. Those efforts have consistently failed leading us to where we are. That’s on top of the various terror groups that Iran has created and so on.
Pretending that the Iranians are reasonable and we’re inches away from a deal to resolve these sorts of issues ignores the reality.
The Israelis don’t want to see Iran surround them with multiple terror groups again.
That’s a reasonable goal and the sort of thing a normal country would be able to do without the world blinking. Subtract Israel being Jewish and Iran looks like the bad actor here.
Iran is currently enriching uranium to 60% purity, close to weapons-grade, and has been accelerating its nuclear advancements by installing more advanced centrifuges. Analysts warn that these activities far exceed any plausible civilian purpose.[10] A day before the attack, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found Iran non-compliant with its nuclear obligations for the first time in 20 years.[11] Iran responded by launching a new enrichment site and installing advanced centrifuges.[12]
Sounds like Iran was finally going for a bomb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2025_Israeli_strikes_in_Iran
I’m no apologist for the Iranian government but their behavior is rational. Having a nuclear weapon is the only deterrent they have against invasion, which has happened to two of their immediate neighbors and is the subject if constant sabre rattling. Its the same reason the Israelis have nuclear weapons.
Anyway while I’m not sure pariah state is the right way to describe it I think Chris has a pretty good point about what exactly it is we get in exchange from Israel for our largesse. Not that it hasn’t been an open question for decades. At least the Europeans have the decency to come die with us once in a while as part of the alliance.
The whole episode is an embarrassment for America and a sign of our own waning influence in the world. The history in this era is going to be that the US has been asleep at the wheel on the world stage since the day Obama left office.
their behavior is rational.
If we subtract their Jew hatred, their desire to convert the world to their religion, their creation and funding of terror groups with the expectation that no one will have a problem or blame them, and so on.
Sure, if we subtract all that then we’d be able to make a deal, but they have a many decade history of ignoring the deals they’ve made so maybe not.
Their stated policy goal is to kill every Jew in Israel so Israel should be concerned over their getting the nukes they’d need to do that. In theory MAD (mutual assured destruction) would prevent them from using nukes themselves or giving Hamas nukes… however 10-7 showcased that the religious fanatics who think God will help them can misjudge how the Jews will respond when facing extermination.
All you are doing is proving my point that this kind of stuff goes both ways. No one has to support the particulars or anything about any government to see that.
But look if the end result is a radioactive crater where Tehran and Tel Aviv used to be then maybe America would end up better off by virtue of having less to worry about. Like Forrest Gump said, one less thing.
Peace between Iran and Israel is impossible so long as the current Islamic “republic” is in power. The ayatollahs don’t wish to annihilate Israel because it has done this or that, but because a Jewish state is theologically impermissible. Iran has been at war with Israel for about 50 years, conducted via its local proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel’s attack on Iran is not aggression, it’s returning fire. Israel chose now to attack Iran now rather than sooner because this is a time when an attack is most likely to succeed — Iran’s proxies are weak, its defenses are weak, and its economy is in shambles. It’s cheap and easy for Americans to condemn Israel’s attack from our position of comfort and safety.
As much as I hate to put it this way, as an American, I don’t see what any of that has to do with us.
Other than supplying the bombs and planes used, absolutely nothing.
Yes, that is a policy choice, among many, that has long been very hard to understand.
Stability is good for everybody.
Instability in the right places is *REALLY* good for commerce.
The Obama administration reached a nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with Iran in 2015. Remember? What happened? Oh.
The deal where we pretend that Iran isn’t funding terrorism and trying to destabilize most of it’s neighbors and doesn’t have a multi-decade history of making these sorts of deals and then ignoring them?
So we give them billions of dollars and they pretend they’re not working on a bomb by only researching the “civilian” parts of it?
The JCPOA also didn’t balance the federal deficit nor did it do my laundry. It, of course, was never meant to do those things nor was it marketed as doing those things. It also was never meant nor marketed to be a guarantee that Iran would not sponsor terrorism or get up to other malicious activity in its neighborhood, nor did any other nuclear arms control agreement in history. It did, however, provide concrete and verifiable safeguards that would prevent Iran from sprinting to a nuclear bomb and which worked perfectly well up until Trump unilaterally abrogated it and now, eight years later, I think we can say with absolute confidence that Trump was horribly wrong to do so.
The purpose of the plan was to stop Iran from being able to sprint to the bomb for 10 years. I.e. for 10 years Iran would be 3 months away from getting a bomb.
At the end of those 10 years, the breakout time would gradually decrease. By the 15th year they could be a few weeks away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Action#Breakout
The dispute resolution was if we thought they were breaking the agreement we’d be allowed to re-impose sanctions after two months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Action#Dispute_resolution
eight years later, I think we can say with absolute confidence that Trump was horribly wrong
Only if we think that an Iran with a lot more money and a much better economy would be more willing to be pushed around by Israel. OR that Iran would have somehow become a normal country in these 8 years. The underlying theory of the treaty seems to have been that just 10 or so years would make them a lot more normal.
Their current drive for the bomb is because their various terror groups have failed and they need some other way to destroy Israel.
The root problem to all this is they have 15k priests in charge of a country and they want to convert the world or something.
The fact that Iran has a bunch of priests in charge of the place is not something that’s been in our grasp to change for generations and it’s not like Saudi Arabia isn’t half run by similarly deranged clerics- just of a different sect (say 9/11?). The core point was that the JCPOA would have kept Iran well away from the bomb and would have kept us all closely appraised about exactly what Iran was up to vis a vis the bomb. Instead unilaterally withdrawing from the JCPOA discredited the US and left Iran free to get up to whatever they wished without inspections or monitoring. I recall Trump asserted that his sanctions would force Iran to make a better deal. So much for that eh?
I agree Iran probably has been headed after the bomb because they’re feeling threatened after so many of their other instruments got smashed up. My heart doesn’t exactly bleed for them. But then again it’s also not ambiguous that Netanyahu is lunging for war to try, desperately, to stay in political power- the same stunt he’s been pulling ever since his pet terrorists, Hamas, bit him on the posterior on Oct. 7th.
The Saudi ruling elite strikes me more like a high grade and classy Mexican cartel. They maintain an air of piety but they aren’t going to allow clerics to spoil their good time. The Iranian clerical regime seems to be more genuine killjoys and at least appear more austere in their public personas.
For what it’s worth my partner is Iranian, a Zoroastrian, and while not exactly enthusiastic about Israel’s attacks is somewhat supportive of them because she wants the clerical regime gone. Lots of Iranians want the clerical regime gone but believe it will take an outside force to weaken them significantly for internal removal.
I have no doubt. I also think that we’re several generations removed from embarking on any such adventures for just about any reason. Memories of Iraq are very fresh. I suspect we still haven’t plumbed the true depths of how far out of favor neocon thought is both among the masses and the elite.
Just riffing off you here but big picture it’s kind of crazy how far we’ve come, to the point there’s a part of me that worries we’ve gone too far in the other direction.
To me the big neocon lesson was that it was hubris and self evidently flawed ideology to think we were going to go into Muslim dictatorships and failed states, overthrow the governments, install a Westminster style parliament, and boom magically turn them into Germany or Japan. We should never have done those things and intelligent people took a lot of slings and arrows for saying so at the time.
Now however we seem to have devolved to a point where there is no appreciation for the role a strong America plays on the world stage, the value of both hard and soft forms of power, alliances, etc. I have no interest in the rehabilitation of the neocon worldview, and definitely not in their various obsessions with Israel and the Middle East but much as every moment is not Munich 1938 neither is every moment 2002-2003. There’s a similar intellectual laziness that’s taken hold where we constantly act like it is, I fear to our detriment.
I suppose it’s possible but I dare say there’re a lot of people who got absolutely torched by Iraq, including the population of the US who had a vast amount of blood and treasure as well as the historic post cold war window literally squandered over this kind of thinking. Bitterness over that isn’t going to dissipate anytime soon. Besides, if anything , Ukraine would be the foreign policy subject morally demanding a more activist American hand not Iran.
Oh I agree 100%, and Ukraine was actually what I was thinking of when I wrote the comment. But I also think of it in terms of China, the uninterrogated cynicism about the world order, and Western values generally, and sort of this larger premise that because Iraq was such an absolute epochal catastrophe that we can afford to retreat into total nihilism about everything.
But also no, we should 100% not get into a war with Iran or stupidly play into Israel’s pathological desire to spark conflicts into which we will inevitably be drawn.
We aren’t doing this, Israel is at the moment. I am rather pissed at the big exception to the rule against theocracy that Islam gets in many quarters. There are people who complain a lot about Israel as a Jewish state, Hinduvata nationalism in India, and even the treatment of Muslims in Buddhist Thailand if they are particularly knowledgeable but are strangely tolerant of the popularity of theocratic politics in Muslim majority areas. This might be out of a “nothing can be done about it” or they might have strange romantic attraction to it for exotic reasons but Islam is given a massive exception to the requirements of liberalism that other religions are not.
Islam is given a massive exception to the requirements of liberalism that other religions are not.
You probably don’t remember this but there was a “Draw Mohammed” thing a few years back.
I do remember that.
Remember the dynamic that existed between the “you should be able to make fun of Islam” people and the people who argued that doing such was “Islamophobic”?
Like, was there a Red Tribe side of this argument that was opposed to a Blue Tribe side of it?
If you remember there being sides, which side was the Blue Tribe on?
And if you remember that the Blue Tribe was pretty solidly on the “Don’t Make Fun Of Islam” side (with, sure, some exceptions), do you see a line between that and where we are today?
That dynamic has died down considerable since the first decade of the 21st century.
The Charlie Hebdo shooting was 10 years ago. 2015.
Remember the dynamic that existed between the “you should be able to make fun of Islam” people and the people who argued that doing such was “Islamophobic”?
Hey, look, it’s another glimpse into Jaybird remembering really odd versions of events.
Let me ask a question: What US politician, less than a week after 9/11, visited Muslim leaders and said ‘Islam brings hope and comfort to millions of people in my country’?
George W. Bush, a member of Team Red.
And what ‘team’, as you insist on calling people, drew a cartoon with Muhammad, and it was not aired?
Why, if I remember the Teams correctly, that would be…Team Gray, right? That’s South Park, right, they’re Team Gray?
with, sure, some exceptions
Hey, do you mean Bill Maher? Because I’m pretty sure he’s Team Gray also.
I specifically mentioned Charlie Hebdo but… would you like to read the threads we had here? Maybe you could see some of the interesting dynamics and interplay we had.
Hey, remember the discussions we had after Benghazi about whether people should be able to make movies about Mohammed and put them up on Youtube?
’cause I can find you those threads too.
911 was an ISISL thing.
ISISL is to Islam what the KKK are to Christianity.
It is a good idea to try to get Muslims to reform their own religion and kick out the bad players.
There are people who complain a lot about Israel as a Jewish state, Hinduvata nationalism in India, and even the treatment of Muslims in Buddhist Thailand if they are particularly knowledgeable but are strangely tolerant of the popularity of theocratic politics in Muslim majority areas.
I’m starting to suspect this is Spiders Jorge’s situation and you just know the one guy who constantly complains about all other theocracies but never Muslim ones.
This might be out of a “nothing can be done about it”
There’s plenty that could be done about some of it, because there _are_ Muslim theocracies that are our allies, or at least not enemies, and we could put pressure on them!
Like Saudi Arabia, for example! But you’re up there dismissing doing anything about Saudi Arabia, because it’s apparently fine for them to oppress their citizens as along as they don’t actually believe.
What? Why does that mean we shouldn’t put pressure on them? Tell them to knock it off? Or, hell, privately talk to the leadership and see if we could get them to slowly back off.
I mean, we’re not going to do that, the right wing loves Saudi Arabia, and theocracies (they even loves ‘wrong’ theocracies, which says interesting things about what theocracies are for when you think about it. Hint: Control, not religion.) but we could. If people would try talking about them instead of Iran, a country that (quite rightly) hates everything to do with us and is our regional enemy, and is hardly going to ever listen to us.
But let’s sit here and complain about Iran, I’m sure that’s going to accomplish something besides helping create a justification to start a war with them. Which, if you think about it, might be _another_ reason why people on the left don’t complain about certain specific Muslim theocracies, because the right traditionally is perfectly willing to invent reasons to start wars with them.
You just think that Jews should be happy to be good little dhimmis under Islam.
There are some issues where we really should insist on consistency. There are 57 self proclaimed Muslim states in the world complete with various degrees of laws against apostasy, blasphemy, and other aspects of Islam being made front and center and forced down people’s throat. If there can be a Muslim world than there can definitely be one Jewish State.
I do not see why Jews should want to be part of a state that calls itself Muslims and puts their nature above our nature. They have no right to lord it over us even though there are two billion of them and only 16 million of us. If Muslims don’t want Jews to have a country of our own where the culture is our culture and the history taught in schools is our history than they should dismantle their Muslim states and their Muslim world.
But what will happen instead is the usually hypocrisy and anti-Semitism. Pan-Islamic feeling will be treated as revolutionary, wonderful, and natural while Pan-Jewish feeling will be called racist insularity and dual loyalty. Jews will be expected to send their children to public schools that are de facto Muslim schools and everything will revolve around Islamic identity over our identity. The activist-chattering classes will look at the modesty clothing of Orthodox Jews and call it patriarchal but the hijabed head will fill them with masturbatory delight. Rabbis will be expected to respect Islam and tell Jews to respect Islam while the Imams will tell Muslims that Jews practice a corrupt and degenerate monotheism but they are so good because they tolerate this.
But you’re up there dismissing doing anything about Saudi Arabia, because it’s apparently fine for them to oppress their citizens
I suspect no one here is “fine with them oppressing their citizens”.
However our resources are limited so we’re not going to invade them to overturn their government. Nor are we going to let the Khashoggi family dictate US policy.
Big picture the Saudis going slow in reforming their culture (women’s rights and their treatment of dissidents) is a problem but Iran’s love of terrorism and nukes are on a different level.
and we could put pressure on them!
We do. That they haven’t changed into a Western Democracy showcases that our power is limited and they’re not the priority that others are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_assassination_of_Jamal_Khashoggi#Sanctions_on_Saudi_individuals
Iran probably has been headed after the bomb because they’re feeling threatened after so many of their other instruments got smashed up
I object to the word “threatened”. They have also lost a nuclear neighbor (the USA pulled out of Afghanistan) , Pakistan is less threatening nowdays, and Russia is both busy and weaker. If their defenses were the only issue then they’d be much better off.
They’ve lost a lot of their power to do bad things to their neighbors. That’s an offensive change, not a defensive.
it’s not like Saudi Arabia isn’t half run by similarly deranged clerics
The clerics in SA aren’t the gov. They’re a strong wing of society. In Iran they actually are the gov, and that difference is going to affect thinking.
withdrawing from the JCPOA… left Iran free to get up to whatever they wished without inspections or monitoring
The remaining monitoring has told us that they’re headed for a bomb right now. Exactly like we would have learned if we were in the JCPOA.
Iran doesn’t consider itself bound by treaties. That’s why we’re in this condition, it already has signed various treaties to get nuclear technology. Being a good country in good relations isn’t a priority but it’s various foreign terror groups are.
They aren’t going to be appeased and “niced” into giving up their nuclear desires and they never were.
You can object to their feeling as much as you want- it’s still how they obviously feel; not that I hold any particular sympathy for them. Still, objectively the Iranians lost a lot of their alternative escalation methods when Syria overthrew Assad and Israel decapitated Hezbollah so if the Mullahs are clearly seeking an alternative deterrent method.
Your handwaving and inveigling about Iran doesn’t change the basic facts, though.
-The JCPOA held Iran to very limited fissile material stockpiles and facilities with detailed monitoring to adhere compliance.
-Despite desperate Israeli and neocon searching absolutely no evidence was ever found that Iran was successfully evading or operating in non-compliance with those restrictions.
-Trumps unilateral abrogation of those terms removed those restrictions and failed to produce the outcomes Trump claimed abrogation would produce: a new better deal or regime change in Iran.
That the JCPOA wouldn’t prevent other Iranian malfeasance, nor turn Iran into a benign actor, nor erase Iran’s history of bad behavior is entirely irrelevant to those points.
no evidence was ever found that Iran was successfully evading or operating in non-compliance with those restrictions.
The problem is with what’s legal, not what’s illegal. At the end of the “restrictions” Iran would be 3 weeks away from getting a bomb.
the Mullahs are clearly seeking an alternative deterrent method.
“Deterrent” means they want a defense. That’s like saying Russia wants a deterrent against Ukraine.
Iran is the aggressor here. At best they want a nuke so the next time they kill lots of Jews in their efforts to destroy Israel they don’t suffer anything as a side effect.
That’s “at best”. At worst they want a nuke to destroy Israel directly, maybe by giving it to one of their proxies. If they’re expecting God to protect them then “they wouldn’t dare” isn’t a thing.
They have also lost a nuclear neighbor (the USA pulled out of Afghanistan) ,
To clarify: While Afghanistan may _technically_ border Iran, Afghanistan is an incredibly useless country, militarily, in literally every direction. You can invade no one from it. (I dunno, maybe you could invade Turkministan?)
Iran is at the uninhabitable desert side of Afghanistan (as opposed to the impassable mountain side, which is the other end), so attacking Iran from Afghanistan requires driving a hundred miles over completely open desert over the three possible roads that go into Iran. If you take the farthest north of the three roads and don’t do it in the summer, it isn’t _impossibly_ hot, but that just means you have literally one long, straight, 100 mile road to drive down that they can strafe the entire column of tanks. This is a dumb invasion when you can, instead, land on their shore.
Granted, you did say ‘nuclear’, but Iran always has the US as a nuclear neighbor, it’s called ‘The Arabian Sea’ and ‘Oh, wait, we have ICBMs that we can launch from subs’
Iran always has the US as a nuclear neighbor
But they don’t always have a US invasion force next door. As you pointed out, their actual borders are actually pretty good.
If they weren’t so determined to launch war crimes against most of the region, then their defensive situation would be great and improving.
And the reason they want to launch all these war crimes is religion. They want other countries in the region to be ruled by their flavor of Islam.
This is the old “I want to have an Empire so you need to let me control your country” story again.
I have no idea why you think those things about Iran, but that is not even vaguely correct. Nothing they do is motivated by religion.
Iran is doing the sort of proxy war nonsense that _all_ regional and larger powers do, mostly to destabilize and reduce _our_ influence in the region.
The US does exactly the same thing.
Okay, if you’re going to the protests this weekend and you can’t find a Mexican flag and you can’t find an Iranian flag, just use an Italian flag. It will get the point across.
Or an Irish flag, tell people it used to be a Mexican flag but you’ve had it in the USA for so long it got a bit more white…
I had been idly wondering if tomorrow’s scheduled MPPs would mostly about Immigration or if they’d finally bleed over fully into the Omnicause but, now, I’ll be surprised if there isn’t something close to parity.
Politico has a fairly awful article: “Democrats reclaim the American flag”
The main response that I’ve seen from Democrats is some variant of “WE NEVER LOST IT!” but that’s not the reason to click on the awful, awful article. The reason to click on it is the correction:
This lovely poster (sarcasm) appeared on the DHS website:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/eb10103b61a739f0c5d2cb63f8420f80d1704348e20f32b93fe614008f97cd86.png
Please show up at tomorrow’s ICE/Israel protests! Show your support for Immigrants/Palestine!
Like I said earlier, on the much more left leaning LGM everybody thought that the people doing this were idiots and hurting the anti-ICE protests. This includes people who really don’t like Israel that much. Also, if your political coalition doesn’t include people who make you reek than your political coalition is too small. I don’t like the people in keffiyehs ranting about globalizing the Intifada either but that doesn’t mean I’m going to support domestic dictatorship because of that.
Two days ago, I thought that it was laughable that they were trying to turn the anti-ICE MPPs into Globalizing the Intifada.
What with last night’s Mostly Peaceful Air Strikes, it only makes sense to take the signs you made anyway to the local gathering of passionate people. You mostly peacefully protest with the protestors you have, not the ones you want.
OMG, I should not have taken a drink when I read “Mostly Peaceful Air Strikes”. I mean the violence was done in such a small %age of Iran, the vast majority of Israelites were peaceful, and the rest of Iran was very peaceful, so was there really air strikes?
I think that is sarcasm, but I will defer to Jaybird.
If you are saying something that is not true, is obviously not true, and saying it mockingly mocking how not true it is, you may be in sarcasm territory.
If you are saying something that is true but is exceptionally impolitic and phrasing it in such a way that people will be outraged not at what you said but at the way you said it, then you may be in sardonic territory.
” I should not have taken a drink when I read “Mostly Peaceful Air Strikes”.”
You mean the Kinetic Military Activity?
People on the much further left LGM thought that the people trying to hijack the anti-ICE protests with a Pro-Palestine message were not helping but are basically impossible to control. Just because they make me retch politically doesn’t mean I’m going to support domestic dictatorship. All political coalitions contain groups and people you can’t stand. If they don’t, they are too small.
Re Iran; I’m of the opinion that the Iranian Clerical Regime wanted nuclear weapons but that Netanyahu’s method of dealing with them is the wrong way to do so.
One does have to wonder why a regime that can kill people with pagers would choose cruise missiles this time.
I assume the Iranians paid attention, and their pager supply chain is a whole lot more secure :^) Well, and you can only stuff so much explosive in a pager, and taking out a warehouse full of uranium-enrichment centrifuges requires more. I admit to some curiosity about the conflicting reports over time that (a) Iran had hardened their nuke program infrastructure and (b) cruise missiles did significant damage.
From what I understand, the Iranians don’t use pagers anymore for some reason.
Because going after a terrorist network that needs to get their supplies from shady sources is different than having to go after an actual military and government even if that military or government isn’t the best. Iran doens’t have to get government cellphones from shady Taiwanese sources like Hezbollah does.
CNN’s Dana Bash reports:
A pet peeve of mine: That’s not sarcastically. That’s sardonically.
ICE, raiding pre-schools to arrest those dangerous child care workers now: https://www.instagram.com/p/DK2vsWMzGXJ/
Tel Aviv is burning thanks to Bibi’s desire to stay out of jail for corruption. When you had a powerful person that was inconvenient but didn’t want to go to prison for their crimes, it used to be the custom to negotiate with them in order to make them less of a problem. This is how Idi Amin or August Pinochet or Pol Pot were dealt with. This isn’t really possible these days and more people are calling for powerful politicians to be kept in account. There are moral reasons for this but at the same time the powerful people are going to use every tool they have to avoid prison and they have a lot of tools. The negotiation might be a more practical way to deal with these types.
Tel Aviv is burning thanks to Bibi’s desire to stay out of jail for corruption.
This is like saying Gaza is burning because of Bibi. Any Israeli politician would go to war over 10-7. These other wars came down to Iran doubling down and/or not being happy that it’s proxies were taking a beating.
Well, that and Israel taking these terror groups a lot more seriously. Israel’s public is a lot less tolerant of terror groups taking pot shots and arming up on their border.
Iran has repeatedly shown that it and it’s proxies are a lot weaker than expected. It’s been badly humiliated in all these wars that it’s started. Iran has been openly claiming it will find a different way to destroy Israel. Iran sprinting to a nuke was reported by it’s monitoring body and is a result of Israel dismantling these various terror groups.
What do you suggest a non-Bibi politician should have done?
Sign ideas for today’s No Kings rallies:
“Legalize Pot Federally”
“End Daylight Saving Time”
Two Democratic state law makers and their spouses assassinated in their homes in Minnesota:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/6/14/2327949/-Two-Democratic-Lawmakers-and-Their-Spouses-Shot-in-Their-Homes-Last-Night-in-the-Twin-Cities
Vigilantism is going to end up going to very, very bad places.
They have a suspect. Governor Walz is saying that the shootings were “politically motivated”.
Apparently, the suspect is Vance Luther Boelter.
Wait, why are we still talking about this? What about January 6th?
Boelter has repeatedly been appointed by Democratic Governors to political jobs.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/who-is-vance-boelter-man-linked-to-minnesota-lawmakers-john-hoffman-and-melissa-hortmans-shootings-101749920197838.html
Okay, if it was Vance (I’m just going to call him “Vance” from now on in the hopes that people assume I’m talking about the VP), then Vance is also the CEO of a private security company that drives Ford Explorer Utility Vehicles that have been doctored with roof lights and whatnot and the employees have security kinda uniforms. He’s also a political appointee of both Governor Walz and back in 2016 under then-governor Dayton.
The private security stuff could be part of the equipment that was used in the whole “impersonating a cop” thing.
Of course, the State Patrol has announced that “No Kings” fliers were found in his vehicle.
The way to bet is this is either mental illness or, since he’s a political actor, personal.
He was also apparently CEO of the “Red Lion Group” based in Congo.
Looks like the funding dried up a few months ago and he started posting to LinkedIn asking for VP positions and whatnot.
Could be “unemployed guy goes nuts after losing job” like in Falling Down.
The No Kings protests seem to have been carried out with a lot of message discipline and few people imposing their hobbyhorses on the protests. Meanwhile, somebody thought that Fortunate Son was a good thing to play at Trump’s military parade.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vqtakzi5bityrtbjj4cfan4l/post/3lrm4ekho5k2b?ref_src=embed&ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%252F2025%252F06%252Ftriumph-of-the-will-directed-by-homer-simpson
Seems to have turned out very well so that’s a bright spot.
I’m assuming that Trump anticipated Bastille Day, with many tanks, mobile missiles, and lots of different regimental special dress uniforms. He was probably quite disappointed. With any luck, he’ll fire Hegseth on Monday.
Less France, more North Korea
IIRC, Trump has seen the Bastille Day parade, and his infatuation with a US version began soon after that.
I wonder if this was malicious compliance from the brass
If Trump even suspects that, he’ll fire the lot of them.
I think it’s just that people remember the opening bars of the song playing during the helicopter-ride bit in “Forrest Gump”, and they think “wow that was a cool bit”, so now they just associate the song with Cool Army Action Stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo20QAOBgLU
Yeah, it’s the Vietnam Theme Song, in the same way that Born in the USA was the Reagan Theme Song.