Cry, cry loud and hard.

DEI and related stuff puts liberal and center-left politicians between a rock and a hard place because they need one of two things to happen and neither of them is going to happen. They need the activists who love the DEI stuff to tone it down because they are pissing people off at best and providing a lot of nut picking ammo to the Right. The activists either think that they are doing important work or that being ridiculous is part of the point and they wont' quit. Alternatively, we need the people who are pissed off at various DEI stuff to develop thicker skin but politicians telling Latinos and Latinas not to get annoyed at activists using the term Latinx when most Latinos and Latinas despise the term isn't going to work.

1. Ending Birthright citizenship by EO isn't unconstitutional if five out of four Supreme Court Justices say it is fine by sophistry.

2. It means that asylum seekers can't enter the United States through the Mexican-US border along with other people even if they have visas and such.

3. I'm very meh on DEI but the right is not going after it in good faith but as a bogeyman. Getting rid of remote work is a way to exert dominance and insure compliance.

4, 5, and 6 agreee.

7. Trump needs his freikorps.

Woke is mainly ivory tower discussions that moved into online spaces with a slightly bigger number of speakers. The big problem with a lot of it is that it comes across as really doctrinaire to normies. I don't think it turns people away from liberalism or leftism but it definitely can turn them off from politics. Take for example discussions about what books should be read in school. Real world people will speak about including non-white or LGBT authors. Online left edgelord people speak about cancelling white male authors with glee. Totally different ways of approaching the same topic.

Meanwhile, American Jews stayed loyal to the Democratic Party despite the antics of the Pro-Hamas people. There are only 250,000 Palestinian-Americans according to Wikipedia. This is really Muslim-Americans who are having their faces being eaten. Many of them were also going back to the Republicans before 10/7 because of the social liberalism of the Democratic Party. It is just considered very impolite to point this out and we have to pretend it is all about Israel and Palestine.

Can somebody please explain to me how so many people on the Western further left can take clear statements like "we want "Arab Muslim Palestine" and scramble it around to "we want multicultural secular Palestine" in their headspace? Every Muslim majority country on this planet puts Islam front and center in their national identity complete with blasphemy and apostasy laws and an official international oreganization of Muslim majority countries but Diaspora Jews are supposed ot just ignore all of this and pretend that they are a bunch of secular multicultural liberals despite it all and betray over half the world's Jews while two billion Muslims get their Grand Muslim Union?

Trump has done a pardon of all 1,600 people convicted for participation in January 6 on live TV. This is going to end bad. All constraints have been removed from Trump and he is going full on the further right extremism.

Trump comes out swinging against birthright citizenship. This is going to cause a lot of chaos because there are plenty of people born to undocumented immigrants who latter get status in the United States.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/01/20/trump-immigration-executive-orders/

Israel released 90 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 3 hostages. Bloody bastards Hamas.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/2025-01-19/live-updates-838156

I saw Nosferatu today. It was fine. A good workmanlike movie. It wasn't especially scary and you really need to go into it completely lacking prior knowledge of both the previous two Nosferatu movies or Dracula to be surprised about plot developments. The main advantage was that it took away the parts of the original Nosferatu that would come across as unbelievable or incredibly dumb for a 21st century audience, it's hard to give an example without a spoiler, and made them more in line with how people more familiar with the horror genre should play out.

Josh Marshall is getting Iraq II vibes about the Greenland Discourse:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/greenland-discourse-is-starting-to-have-that-pre-iraq-war-vibe

Too many people are sticking to NIMBYism.

My opinion on immigration is that relatively free and open immigration happens at times of elite consensus that relatively free and open immigration is a good thing. When you have at least one group of elites that believe that this is not a good thing or believes they can benefit from xenophobic feeling than you aren't going to have free and open immigration.

There needs to be a way to convince people to be more pro-immigrant. I think that globally, the developed world is turning against immigration. I don't like it but it is where popular sentiment lies. At the same time going "racist, racist, racist" at people skeptical of immigration has not exactly worked as a strategy.

There are editorials claiming that Donald is a Dove even though he is announcing is plans to take back the Panama Canal, redo the War of 1812, and add Greenland while he is at it.

I just remembered, Dr. Marya's actually accusation was that "Zionist" doctors are the cause of global health inequality. There is so much obvious anti-Semitism in this statement, and anybody with half a brain cell should be able to figure out that by Zionist she means Jews, and is basically doing a blood libel. She and her defenders utterly refuse to get it and raise their fists in blood thirsty defiance when you point out to them.

This is acutally from September 2024 but Dr. Rupa Marya, infamous off the wall chart linking inflammation to colonials and saying that "Zionist" doctors, was put on leave by USCF Medical School for accusing an Israeli student in her class of "genocide" on social media.

https://www.kqed.org/news/12006193/ucsf-campus-faces-uproar-after-doctor-allegedly-targets-israeli-student-on-social-media

Dr. Marya is naturally very self-righteous about this and not understanding that she committed deadly anti-Semitism but she and her like would be screaming bloody murder at the top of their lungs for racism against any other group they care about. These people are so disgustingly self-righteous and stupid that no matter how many times Jews or anybody carefully explain what they are doing is wrong and racist, they just don't get it.

I'm inclined to agree but the argument against us is that the reason the world is in such a mess is because people to strive for perfection enough but get distracted by pain relievers.

I think a lot of the health advice is saying do 10 in hopes of getting most people to do a 5 to 7. There are also lots of people with a firm belief in human perfectibility. Living the most healthy life is possible and they can't comprehend why every human doesn't want to do this.

Moral panics never depended on facts and numbers.

Part of the problem is that Trump is technically a first time defender and this is a crime people usually don't go to jail over. Another issue is that it will take nerves of steel and balls of titanium to sentence Trump to anything under current conditions.

A Tesla Cybertruck lit on fire outside a Trump hotel. I am not making this up.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tesla-cybertruck-appears-burst-flames-trump-hotel-las-vegas-rcna185932

Regarding the above thread on cities and development, Noah Smith of Noahopinion has a subscriber post on public order and good cities:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/good-cities-cant-exist-without-public

Here is a fascinating little story that deals with the globalization of anime meeting Western/American concepts about race and representation plus the Internet providing a lot of dirt on people in fascinating ways.

https://www.saturday-am.com/blog/dandadan-controvery/

Dandadan is one of the big hit animes of 2024 that is being simultaneously released in Japanese, English, Spanish, and other languages at the same time because of streaming allowing this. It is basically a teen romantic comedy/horror/science fiction/action series mash up. It's great fun. Sometime in December 2024, a fan put a fan art of the two main characters as Black up on X.*

What made this explode into a giant fight was that the English voice actor of the main African-American and put up the fan art briefly on his X profile. Then other fans began accusing him of Blackwashing and also found some inopportune quotes of Mr. Beckles stating that animated characters should be voiced by members of that group. The Japanese fans of the show apparently protested this loudly enough that Mr. Beckles deleted his social media account.

*For the record, I read the main male character as a Nice Jewish Boy in my headspace because of his hair style and mannerism.

Yes. No. Maybe So.