It's amazing that we live in a country with two shite parties, one reduced to a proto-fascist cult of personality that's currently being led from behind the scenes by the son of a South African emerald dealer, and the other a gerontocracy clinging to power so tightly, and at the expense of any other aim, that they ran a septuagenarian in serious cognitive decline for president, twice.
Related, from one of the organs of the liberal left:
In other democracies, the leaderships of parties that have endured humiliating defeats like the one Democrats saw in November—or even just regular defeats—resign. That kicks off a process by which members determine a new, ideally more successful direction, represented by different people. But the Democratic Party isn’t really a “party” of the sort that exists in other democracies, with memberships and official constituencies, like unions, who have some say over how it’s governed. Members mostly make decisions based on their own interests rather than to drive some shared, democratically decided agenda forward.
It's actually worse than that: Harris, the "young" candidate, would have been the second oldest Democrat, after Biden, to become president since Truman.
No, it's even worse than that! She would have been the third oldest Democratic Party president when she became president, behind Biden and Truman, since Buchanan!
How did the party of youth and energy end up so old that a president younger than only two Democratic presidents since before the Civil War was considered the young one?
I think amid the terminally online center-right's obsession with wokeness and the center-left's obsession with "misinformation," one of the Democratic Party's problems that has been underdiscussed is how much of a gerontocracy it is, and how much that hurts them in many ways, both with voters and with their own younger candidates.
I mean, Harris was considered a young candidate at 60. The three Democratic presidents prior to Biden were, I believe, 52, 46, and 47 when they were first elected, and while obviously the Republican candidate the last 3 times has been quite old, the GOP seems to be really trying to elevate its young politicians, whereas the older Dems will hold onto power at the expense of their younger colleagues until death or the voters pries it away from them.
A great example of how their oldness has left them out of touch was Pelosi, Schumer, et al. kneeling in Kente cloth stoles in 2020.
This is pretty funny. It was pretty much assumed AOC would win, and she went out of her way to show her subservience to the party, even telling leadership she'd stop supporting progressive primary challengers for incumbent Dems, but Pelosi swooped in at the end and undercut her.
As someone who thinks the left wastes way too much of its energy on electoral stuff, this series of events is definitely going in my rhetorical arsenal.
Thinking about Clay Travis, one of the best entries into this benighted discourse came from his friend Riley Gaines, the former mediocre college swimmer who gained fame through her mixing of politics and sports. who said on Twitter "No one was asking for Caitlin Clark to position herself as a right-wing hero. All she needed to do was remain neutral." Travis also weighed in on Clark's Time Magazine interview, of course, asking whether people would be less likely to watch her games now that she's used the phrase "white privilege."
What "remained neutral" here means, of course, is not say anything that would offend reactionaries, which is a pretty thin tightrope to walk these days.
Relatedly, I grew up in the South in the 80s and 90s, in a conservative small town, and not standing for the anthem was fairly common, especially among young people, and was generally unremarked upon. I don't think I stood for an anthem from like 1992 until the early Aughts, when 9/11, the "War on Terror" and the Iraq War made "patriots" fighty about such things. In fact, I distinctly remember going to a baseball game in "liberal" Austin, TX in spring 2002 with my (then 4-year old) son, not standing for the anthem, and getting some choice words from a bunch of students and a few people my grandparents' age.
I think there's a very real possibility that the worst medium/long-term effect of Trumpism will be a reduction in childhood vaccination rates large enough to threaten heard immunity for multiple diseases that for most of our lifetimes have been almost completely eradicated in the United States. A lot of people would then die or be permanently disabled.
I'm not sure anything he will be able to do about Big Pharma, Big Ag, or Big Food within the context of a Trump administration will outweigh that.
I don't know about you, but I don't have AI glasses that tell me a person's criminal history when I look at them.
What's more, I'm not to keen on the idea of random people choosing when to intervene, and when not to intervene, when a person is having a mental health crisis in public, or when several people are clearly afraid of someone how has not yet to the random people's knowledge harmed anyone.
Putting aside the question of whether Perry used excessive force; the precedent we're setting here is a disturbing one.
Nikki Giovanni's death and events in the news reminded me of this little gem, "Allowables":
I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn’t
And she scared me
And I smashed her
And the SNA and the Turkish army are advancing on Kobani, a name that anyone paying attention to this conflict in 2014/15 will remember well. The Kurds will of course not only put resources into keeping territory, but will try to pull political strings as well, which will put the fragility of the rebel (now ruling?) coalition to the test. The Kurds will also try to appeal to the West, with whom they've worked closely for decades, though the U.S. has shown a willingness to abandon the Kurds in favor of Turkey.
Looking at his social media, there's a lot of Haidt and Thiel and even some traditionalist architecture views (with complimentary links to Tucker Carlson). Seriously, just looking at his social media, his politics were probably not that far off from many here. I bet there's gonna be an interesting "What radicalized you?" story coming out of this.
Oh, I agree, and we don't have a great track record in supporting people who turn out to be good leaders. It's gonna be a mess, I think (see my extremely long paragraph below).
What and who Julani will be, should he take full control of Syria (and there are a lot of competing interests who might oppose that, including the people who helped him defeat Assad: the Turks, the Israelis, and us), there's no telling whether he'll be al Qaeda-lite (important to note that Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group he was part of, is pretty different from the bin Laden-led group), or the politician he's been over the last few years, purging the extremists from his own group with the purpose of building a larger coalition that extends beyond his base of Islamists. Will he be a friend to the people who helped him get to where he is (which, again, includes us), or will he turn his now well-organized, well-trained, and well-equipped military against the hands that fed him? His history of moving from group to group, alliance to alliance, makes it really difficult to tell.
I get celebrating the downfall of Assad, who was truly evil (the videos and photos from Sednaya are heartbreaking and infuriating), but judging by the social media discourse, I don't think people understand the potential far-reaching implications of this. Obviously this is a big defeat for Russia and Iran, neither of whom will likely take the reduction in regional influence lightly. While HTS' offensive was able to move so fast in large part because HTS had spent years developing relationships with the leaders of minority groups (Christians, Druze, Kurds, etc.), militarily, it is heavily reliant on groups with very different motivations: Islamist groups, Kurds, Turkish-backed militia, etc. Those Islamic groups will want to have a say in the shape the government takes, and its actions, while the Kurds and Turkish SNA are already fighting. And let's not forget who Julani is: part of the Iraqi resistance (so no friend of the U.S.), including as part of the Iraqi resistance group that became ISIS, and then Al Qaeda in Iraq, so he's no friend of the U.S., and he's buddies with some of the worst of the Islamist leaders in the region, but more importantly, he's willing to side with whomever he thinks best serves his needs at whatever time, which makes the power vacuum and competing interests within his own coalition all the more unpredictable. And then there's everyone else: Israel has already invaded, and is bombing in several parts of the country, including Damascus; Turkey not only has its own militia in Julani's coalition (who, as I've mentioned, are already skirmishing with the Kurds), but also has not been afraid to use its own military to suppress the Kurds in Syria; the U.S. not only has a military presence, but will almost certainly want to divvy out the oil fields to Western companies (as will other western states). So it's likely to become part of the broader Israeli war, the Turkish-Kurd conflict, and there will be American forces, with American business interests, on the ground in a country led by people who don't like the U.S. so much, and will definitely not want to give up those oil fields. It is already becoming a mess, and has the potential to become a mess with global consequences.
It happened to us when our daughter was born in '19. What's particularly infuriating is that we knew it could happen, took steps to prevent it, and on the day of the birth (which was scheduled!), the in-network anesthesiologist was out sick, so we got an out-of-network anesthesiologist, and a few extra grand in out-of-pocket costs, for the epidural.
Don't get me wrong, BCBS is still evil, and they weren't trying to lower costs for the good of their customers, because customers aren't going to see that reduction in cost: their copays and the amount going to their deductibles will almost certainly look exactly the same. But this is a fight between snakes, and we shouldn't side with either of them.
To be fair, doctors are a lot like cops, in that it's not the profession itself that's the problem, but the system within which it is embedded, which includes the process of entering the profession, and the way the professionals are compensated. Specifically the system that makes doctors extremely well-paid, but that requires them to go through a multi-year education and hazing process, and to go into massive debt for the privilege. That system attracts a certain kind of person, mostly extremely greedy and status-hungry people, with a few people who care so much about helping people that they're willing to go through all that thrown in.
They may where rainbow flag masks for surgery, but that's the industry equivalent of an In This House sign.
Man, I wish in 2008 (or in 2024, for that matter), we though there'd be any chance that Cheney would be tried for his crimes.
But yeah, liberals are shortsighted, on this and so many other things. Remember when a Democratic solution to gun violence floated by high-ranking Dems was to block gun sales to anyone on the No Fly list? Or their insistence on using the word "terrorism" increasingly broadly and loosely? And these are probably the exact same people who 20 years ago were so upset about the Patriot Act, the No Fly list, and the increasingly loose use of the word "terrorist" to refer to anyone we don't like.
On “From The Wall Street Journal: How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge”
It's amazing that we live in a country with two shite parties, one reduced to a proto-fascist cult of personality that's currently being led from behind the scenes by the son of a South African emerald dealer, and the other a gerontocracy clinging to power so tightly, and at the expense of any other aim, that they ran a septuagenarian in serious cognitive decline for president, twice.
"
If this is all true, it sounds like he never should have run in 2020, because he was likely already in pretty serious decline.
On “The PKK Puzzle”
The left is crushed to see President Barack Obama’s vision of an Iranian dominated Levant has failed spectacularly.
I only had to read as far as this howler to realize this was wasn't worth my time. Thanks for making it clear this was unserious near the top.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024”
Related, from one of the organs of the liberal left:
In other democracies, the leaderships of parties that have endured humiliating defeats like the one Democrats saw in November—or even just regular defeats—resign. That kicks off a process by which members determine a new, ideally more successful direction, represented by different people. But the Democratic Party isn’t really a “party” of the sort that exists in other democracies, with memberships and official constituencies, like unions, who have some say over how it’s governed. Members mostly make decisions based on their own interests rather than to drive some shared, democratically decided agenda forward.
"
It's actually worse than that: Harris, the "young" candidate, would have been the second oldest Democrat, after Biden, to become president since Truman.
No, it's even worse than that! She would have been the third oldest Democratic Party president when she became president, behind Biden and Truman, since Buchanan!
How did the party of youth and energy end up so old that a president younger than only two Democratic presidents since before the Civil War was considered the young one?
"
I think amid the terminally online center-right's obsession with wokeness and the center-left's obsession with "misinformation," one of the Democratic Party's problems that has been underdiscussed is how much of a gerontocracy it is, and how much that hurts them in many ways, both with voters and with their own younger candidates.
I mean, Harris was considered a young candidate at 60. The three Democratic presidents prior to Biden were, I believe, 52, 46, and 47 when they were first elected, and while obviously the Republican candidate the last 3 times has been quite old, the GOP seems to be really trying to elevate its young politicians, whereas the older Dems will hold onto power at the expense of their younger colleagues until death or the voters pries it away from them.
A great example of how their oldness has left them out of touch was Pelosi, Schumer, et al. kneeling in Kente cloth stoles in 2020.
"
Pettiness is definitely what it was.
"
At least by congressional staffers, if not by the congressfolk themselves.
"
This is pretty funny. It was pretty much assumed AOC would win, and she went out of her way to show her subservience to the party, even telling leadership she'd stop supporting progressive primary challengers for incumbent Dems, but Pelosi swooped in at the end and undercut her.
As someone who thinks the left wastes way too much of its energy on electoral stuff, this series of events is definitely going in my rhetorical arsenal.
On “From Semafor: Kamala Harris’ digital chief on Democrats ‘losing hold of culture’”
She wasn't talking about on the court.
"
Thinking about Clay Travis, one of the best entries into this benighted discourse came from his friend Riley Gaines, the former mediocre college swimmer who gained fame through her mixing of politics and sports. who said on Twitter "No one was asking for Caitlin Clark to position herself as a right-wing hero. All she needed to do was remain neutral." Travis also weighed in on Clark's Time Magazine interview, of course, asking whether people would be less likely to watch her games now that she's used the phrase "white privilege."
What "remained neutral" here means, of course, is not say anything that would offend reactionaries, which is a pretty thin tightrope to walk these days.
"
That's great.
Relatedly, I grew up in the South in the 80s and 90s, in a conservative small town, and not standing for the anthem was fairly common, especially among young people, and was generally unremarked upon. I don't think I stood for an anthem from like 1992 until the early Aughts, when 9/11, the "War on Terror" and the Iraq War made "patriots" fighty about such things. In fact, I distinctly remember going to a baseball game in "liberal" Austin, TX in spring 2002 with my (then 4-year old) son, not standing for the anthem, and getting some choice words from a bunch of students and a few people my grandparents' age.
On “Thursday Throughput: RFK Jr Edition”
I think there's a very real possibility that the worst medium/long-term effect of Trumpism will be a reduction in childhood vaccination rates large enough to threaten heard immunity for multiple diseases that for most of our lifetimes have been almost completely eradicated in the United States. A lot of people would then die or be permanently disabled.
I'm not sure anything he will be able to do about Big Pharma, Big Ag, or Big Food within the context of a Trump administration will outweigh that.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/9/2024”
I don't know about you, but I don't have AI glasses that tell me a person's criminal history when I look at them.
What's more, I'm not to keen on the idea of random people choosing when to intervene, and when not to intervene, when a person is having a mental health crisis in public, or when several people are clearly afraid of someone how has not yet to the random people's knowledge harmed anyone.
Putting aside the question of whether Perry used excessive force; the precedent we're setting here is a disturbing one.
"
Nikki Giovanni's death and events in the news reminded me of this little gem, "Allowables":
I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn’t
And she scared me
And I smashed her
I don’t think
I’m allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened
On “Bashar al-Assad Flees To Moscow, Ending 50 Years of Syrian Dictatorship”
And the SNA and the Turkish army are advancing on Kobani, a name that anyone paying attention to this conflict in 2014/15 will remember well. The Kurds will of course not only put resources into keeping territory, but will try to pull political strings as well, which will put the fragility of the rebel (now ruling?) coalition to the test. The Kurds will also try to appeal to the West, with whom they've worked closely for decades, though the U.S. has shown a willingness to abandon the Kurds in favor of Turkey.
On “From the New York Post: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot outside Hilton hotel in Midtown in targeted attack: cops”
Maybe a Galleani or Sacco and Vanzetti fan?
Looking at his social media, there's a lot of Haidt and Thiel and even some traditionalist architecture views (with complimentary links to Tucker Carlson). Seriously, just looking at his social media, his politics were probably not that far off from many here. I bet there's gonna be an interesting "What radicalized you?" story coming out of this.
On “Bashar al-Assad Flees To Moscow, Ending 50 Years of Syrian Dictatorship”
Oh, I agree, and we don't have a great track record in supporting people who turn out to be good leaders. It's gonna be a mess, I think (see my extremely long paragraph below).
"
What and who Julani will be, should he take full control of Syria (and there are a lot of competing interests who might oppose that, including the people who helped him defeat Assad: the Turks, the Israelis, and us), there's no telling whether he'll be al Qaeda-lite (important to note that Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group he was part of, is pretty different from the bin Laden-led group), or the politician he's been over the last few years, purging the extremists from his own group with the purpose of building a larger coalition that extends beyond his base of Islamists. Will he be a friend to the people who helped him get to where he is (which, again, includes us), or will he turn his now well-organized, well-trained, and well-equipped military against the hands that fed him? His history of moving from group to group, alliance to alliance, makes it really difficult to tell.
"
I get celebrating the downfall of Assad, who was truly evil (the videos and photos from Sednaya are heartbreaking and infuriating), but judging by the social media discourse, I don't think people understand the potential far-reaching implications of this. Obviously this is a big defeat for Russia and Iran, neither of whom will likely take the reduction in regional influence lightly. While HTS' offensive was able to move so fast in large part because HTS had spent years developing relationships with the leaders of minority groups (Christians, Druze, Kurds, etc.), militarily, it is heavily reliant on groups with very different motivations: Islamist groups, Kurds, Turkish-backed militia, etc. Those Islamic groups will want to have a say in the shape the government takes, and its actions, while the Kurds and Turkish SNA are already fighting. And let's not forget who Julani is: part of the Iraqi resistance (so no friend of the U.S.), including as part of the Iraqi resistance group that became ISIS, and then Al Qaeda in Iraq, so he's no friend of the U.S., and he's buddies with some of the worst of the Islamist leaders in the region, but more importantly, he's willing to side with whomever he thinks best serves his needs at whatever time, which makes the power vacuum and competing interests within his own coalition all the more unpredictable. And then there's everyone else: Israel has already invaded, and is bombing in several parts of the country, including Damascus; Turkey not only has its own militia in Julani's coalition (who, as I've mentioned, are already skirmishing with the Kurds), but also has not been afraid to use its own military to suppress the Kurds in Syria; the U.S. not only has a military presence, but will almost certainly want to divvy out the oil fields to Western companies (as will other western states). So it's likely to become part of the broader Israeli war, the Turkish-Kurd conflict, and there will be American forces, with American business interests, on the ground in a country led by people who don't like the U.S. so much, and will definitely not want to give up those oil fields. It is already becoming a mess, and has the potential to become a mess with global consequences.
On “From the New York Post: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot outside Hilton hotel in Midtown in targeted attack: cops”
It happened to us when our daughter was born in '19. What's particularly infuriating is that we knew it could happen, took steps to prevent it, and on the day of the birth (which was scheduled!), the in-network anesthesiologist was out sick, so we got an out-of-network anesthesiologist, and a few extra grand in out-of-pocket costs, for the epidural.
"
Don't get me wrong, BCBS is still evil, and they weren't trying to lower costs for the good of their customers, because customers aren't going to see that reduction in cost: their copays and the amount going to their deductibles will almost certainly look exactly the same. But this is a fight between snakes, and we shouldn't side with either of them.
"
To be fair, doctors are a lot like cops, in that it's not the profession itself that's the problem, but the system within which it is embedded, which includes the process of entering the profession, and the way the professionals are compensated. Specifically the system that makes doctors extremely well-paid, but that requires them to go through a multi-year education and hazing process, and to go into massive debt for the privilege. That system attracts a certain kind of person, mostly extremely greedy and status-hungry people, with a few people who care so much about helping people that they're willing to go through all that thrown in.
They may where rainbow flag masks for surgery, but that's the industry equivalent of an In This House sign.
On “Joe Biden Pardons Local Man”
Man, I wish in 2008 (or in 2024, for that matter), we though there'd be any chance that Cheney would be tried for his crimes.
But yeah, liberals are shortsighted, on this and so many other things. Remember when a Democratic solution to gun violence floated by high-ranking Dems was to block gun sales to anyone on the No Fly list? Or their insistence on using the word "terrorism" increasingly broadly and loosely? And these are probably the exact same people who 20 years ago were so upset about the Patriot Act, the No Fly list, and the increasingly loose use of the word "terrorist" to refer to anyone we don't like.
"
This wouldn't set a bad precedent at all.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.