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.

Shouldn't Johnny Depp be a scream king rather than a scream queen?

It's like an Ancien Regime court where sleeping at the King's bed or being his Gentleman of the Stool was considered a great honor.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/us/politics/elon-musk-trump-mar-a-lago.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lk4.K2NQ.G87Hl_tiPBAe&smid=url-share

I suppose the big difference between the Zionists and the Anti-Zionists is that the Anti-Zionists believed that despite everything that happened between 1881 and 1948, the Diaspora System worked and didn't need to be disturbed while the Zionists argue that the period between 1881 and 1948 showed that the Diaspora System did not work and Jews needed to take steps to save themselves and a place and country of their own to pursue their culture.

By the Diaspora System, I mean how Jews lived between the Destruction of the Second Temple and the creation of Israel. We would be scattered into communities of different sizes and allowed to organize ourselves however the ruling powers determined. Some Jewish communities will be very acculturated and integrated into the majority society like they United States and others would live with degrees of alienation and neglect and just kind of be there like pieces of furniture if the majority deemed that correct. Some communities would be free of state persecution and others would be heavily persecuted. Nothing that happened between the start of Zionism and the creation of Israel meant that the Diaspora system didn't work including the Holocaust. That was just a super persecution but not unusual and if most of the survivors found themselves stuck under hostile Communist regimes and the Mizrahi Jews got the boot, so what? There were thriving Jewish communities elsewhere.

The Zionist argument is that the period between 1881 to 1948 definitely shows that the Diaspora System did not work and Jews needed to take steps to save ourselves.

I don't consider myself white but don't get into long arguments about it.

I prefer the term acculturated rather than assimilated but the more I compare my childhood to the childhood of other people who grew up in the 1980s, even among the same upper middle class lines, the more different it appears. Like DARE was not apart of my elementary school education but it seemed very common in basically every other public school elementary school during the 1980s. It was near totally absent from my school. Also my town had very strong music and theater program, complete with my high school putting on opera yes an opera every year since the 1970s, and more freedom for teacher in social studies and literature to assign things that would be hard banned in other schools.

I don't know how much of this weirdness comes from class or how much because of Jewish attitudes towards both culture and education plus the general liberalism of American Jews. We probably had the closet to a European style sex education that you can get in the United States.

Your last paragraph is probably spot and explains why the DEI paradigm tends to be African-Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and even Muslim Americans as the latest victims of American imperialism as seen by the Left.

I think it is a load of crock but a lot of it is a way to assert power.

Vox put this as no white supremacist thinks that Jews are white but a lot of non-whites think Jews as white. At least in the United States, Jews always came off as closer to white than non-whites to many African-Americans even during the pre-WWII era.

Some random thoughts about the DEI movement/Intersectionalists and it's tense relationship with Jews and Asian-Americans that I am putting here because of some sub-threads. I'm wondering if some of the tense relationship comes from while Jews and Asian-Americans are definitely a numerical minority in the United States, and Jews everywhere but Israel, we do not come across as a minority in what I guess could be called a behavior or cultural sense. In his book, "Jews Don't Count, David Baddiel argues that a lot of the rejection of Jews in the DEI movement comes from the fact that Jews aren't seen as suffering from material deprivation. He thinks this is a wrong reason to reject Jews as a minority/oppressed people but it is the reason why they are doing it.

I'm wondering if this also extends to the cultural realm. I've mentioned this incident before but a few weeks ago there was a group of six to seven African-American teens on the BART ride home that were making annoyance of themselves by sharing a blunt between them and behaving in a rowdy manner. Everybody was annoyed but, thanks to obviously cultural stereotypes, they seemed authentic and that this is who they really are. If you replace this group of teens with Asian-Americans or Jewish teens in your mind, the immediate reaction mentally besides annoyance would be "who are you fooling?" and that the teens would come across as tools to everybody. Even White Christian teens from relatively privileged backgrounds would come across as more authentic than Asians or Jews doing this.

I am just incredibly angry at the people you call identitarians. With the White Right or the Muslims, there anti-Semitism is at least to be expected. It doesn't seem as much as a rejection because Jews by nature can't be part of either the White Right Club or the Muslim Club.

With the identarians, it seems like an extraordinary betrayal. Jews were some of the most passionate advocates of pluralism and multiculturalism and this is a club that we can be part of. And what do we get? We get the current champions of multiculturalism treating Jews as a white people with pretensions at best. We are supposed to love them but they get to hate us in return.

These people have committed crimes and need punishment. They may not be as powerful as the Right portrays them but they have access to many elite corridors.*

*Although on the other blog one person argued that maybe corporations embraced DEI so hard because they knew it might drive enough people to the Right.

To be fair, many countries in the Middle East do seem to be getting used to the idea of Israel. There are some that are not though.

I mean if they want a one state solution than they should ideally have the courage to say it rather than go about it in a backdoor manner that fools nobody. Saying that there needs to be an ethnic Palestinian Arab state in the WB/Gaza but Israel can't be a Jewish state seems more than a tad hypocritical.

Ideally there should be a way for Israel to leave the West Bank that doesn't feel like a win for the Palestinians. They aren't going to negotiate a treaty because they can never give up the desire to flood Israel demographically and leaving mainly but chomping off a bit of territory will be seen as not a real withdrawal by the diplomatic community.

I also expect that the dead enders, which will be most of them, can continue to press on the right to flood Israel or focus on the illegal settlements of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Be'er Sheva and tens or hundreds of millions would join that fray. Even if they got everything they are supposed to and demand more, nobody will ever tell the Palestinians to stop and that they are being ridiculous.

Really? Only Jews/Israel have agency? The Palestinians are just perfect innocent victims incapable of any bad act? Palestinian terrorist attacks and suicide bombings didn't sour Israelis towards peace? They should have just grinned and bared it and gave everything the Palestinians allegedly wanted on a silver platter in exchange for nothing?

I am sure that high school media people consumed are heavily influencing these conversations at least indirectly. Sort of like how Singles and other such media gave me some very misleading ideas about what my twenties would be like. My actual twenties involved way more studying and work than escapades with friends and paramours.

I don't know if this is relevant but my brother is married to a woman from Singapore and hangs out with people who went to high school in East Asian countries when we did. He finds their high school tales to be impossibly sweet. Like when Americans talk about telling their parents that they were going to study with their girlfriend or friends in the library, you always expect the tale to go on to some minor naughtiness or wasting time at the mall instead. From people who spent their teen years in East Asia, the story line doesn't continue. They actually did go to the library and study.

Part of the problem is that American education so decentralized that we have schools that range from the very best to some of the worst. When I was a kid, I'd thought that many of the things I've seen on sitcoms like the football coach teaching social studies were jokes because if my high school did that the school administrators would be looking down the barrel of a shotgun held by irate parents and being asked to name names. Turns out there are places in the United States, and these aren't poor places, where this does happen. It's why the S.A.T. is not an American abitur, there would be states where everybody fails.

Americans also have weird cultural beliefs around certain subjects like math and regard them as talents rather than learned skills. From what I can gather in Asian countries, any reasonably studious student is seen as capable as learning calculus if taught by a reasonably competent teacher. Even in my high school, regarded as being in the top twenty public high schools since it started, the administrators assumed that many students would just be average at math at best even though everybody would basically go on to college.

Then you have the fact that American teaching is a lot more prone to culture war issues than teaching in less politically divided countries. You usually see this on the liberal-left side with teachers fired up with social justice beliefs but it exists on the right side in many parts of the country as well.

So basically, America has some issues.

Responding to succinct points with long verbiage is not impressive looking.

I don't think this group is as fringe as you make it out to be. There seem to be a lot of them persistent in driving their message and not letting up. They need to be made to stop.

The Pro-Palestinian movement keeps running into anti-Semitism and the Holocaust without a particular solution. Saying that they believe that "colonial-settlerism is so bad that they believe it would be a more just world if more Jews died in the Holocaust and the Mizrahi Jews got the boot to the West in the name of anti-colonialism sounds bad, so they just pretend that Zionism isn't addressing a particular problem that Jews had and that the non-Zionist solutions lost because they failed big time,.

Ideally, I think they basically think that Jews take up too much room and make too much noise for our population size. They would prefer us to be more like the Zoroastrians and keep to ourselves in small isolated communities. Sort of like living museum pieces where the reaction is "oh, those people are still around" rather than people being able to rattle off large numbers of famous Jews without effort.

At least on the Right, there is still plenty of old school white lecturing of black people even if it can be more muted. The H1-B program is a form of indentured servitude but at the same time I do think the point about American STEM skills and education being lacking are correct. Americans tend to think of math as a talent rather than a learned skill even in very good schools it is just accepted that many kids are going to be bad at math and leave it at that. Few kids seem to want to go into computer programming but become the CEOs and management.

Here is a picture of Raquel Welch as Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island to start your weekend:

https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3d20b1c855ef491d1125295b9745401346f02a1019510b29e71a09c3b881fef8.png