I'm fascinated on why Japanese parents have a higher freak out threshold compared to parents in basically every other developed democracy, including ones from the same Confucian world view, on the amount of sex and violence they can deal with in kid's entertainment compared to everybody else.

So apparently in his letter from an ICE jail, Mr. Khalil states that Biden and Trump were equally bad on Palestine. He might not be a terrorist but dear Lord is this representative of the stupidity in the pro-Palestinian movement. They have been following the same strategy since my grandparents were kids during the mandate period. Like literally massive uprising or spectacular terrorism violence and when that doesn't work, stubbornly insist on their full demands being met despite not winning any battles. Then insist that anybody who doesn't agree with them fully or insists on working from the basic reality that Israel exists, is not going to stop existing, and showed repeated determination to fight for it's existence, plus that 45% of all Jews live there, are just as bad as the worst of their enemies. It's the do the same thing and hope for a different result again and again.

I mean obviously the fan service is problematic for their world view but I think the violence is even more problematic from a Western liberal-left world view. Japanese parents don't seem to mind their kids watching the good guys use a large amount of violence against bad guys as much as American and European parents do. They would have issues with boy heroes dishing out as much violence as anime boy heroes do.

Polling indicates that rank and file Democratic Party voters want the Democratic Party to fight against Trump but also move to the center on many policy issues like police reform and housing construction:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/dems-need-to-moderate-and-fight

I am not sure that Disney is all in on girls kicking physical ass. The, for lack of a better term, In This House version of the Disney princess is still far from an anime heroine who can and will kick ass. There does seem to be a sort of an inmates running the asylum thing going on where some very ideological sincere people working for Disney decided that this would be a great propaganda and teaching opportunity and that it was possibly also bad for little girls to watch stuff with romance.

An English language version of the controversies surrounding Netanyahu:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-22/six-controversies-plaguing-israel-benjamin-netanyahu/105080272

This just shows the utter stupidity of the Pro-Palestinian movement in the West. Netanyahu is not popular in Israel. By making the entire protest movement about "Anti-Zionism" and anti-colonialism, they made it impossible for Anti-Netanyahu Israelis and anti-Netanyahu Diaspora Jews to team up with them.

Disney used to be able to slip in light liberalism into their movies with out being blunt about it.

It seems like a movie steeped in the ethos of college educated bougie liberals but with the subtlety of the hammer.

There are a lot of practical problems for deputizing the bailiffs that need to be worked out.

Fairy tales and other stories are continually updated to meet modern social conditions but there is an art to doing this. Adding a Moorish/Arab character in Robin Hood stories so that non-white can see the Robin Hood stories as something they aren't excluded from is doing this correctly. Adding a lot of girl-boss to a fairy tale is not. You want to add something rather than divide, multiply, and subtract from it.

Federal courts can actually deputize people. So theoretically, the court bailiffs can be used to carry out court orders.

We are so fished:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/musk-pentagon-briefing-china-war-plan.html

I might have over stated but I don't think that Israel can diplomatically get away with that level of violence without becoming North Korea diplomatically.

I am on the record for not trusting Palestinian leadership as negotiators either. They either see any such negotiations as temporary ceasefires or are too afraid of starting a Palestinian civil war, imagine like the civil war in Ireland between those that accepted the Irish Free State proposal and those that did not, either. The Palestinians and their allies are going to have to come to some painful conclusions as well like Israel exists and it is going to continue to exist, no right of return, etc. So far, a lot of Pro-Palestinian protestors seem to want to spray paint "F-word Israel" and go on and on about Anti-Zionism or Settler-Colonialism than make sensible alliances with anti-Netanyahu Jews inside and outside Israel because they are petulant children.

Wanting Hamas not to exist is like the people who think that Israel can be made not to exist, bloody stupid. For the foreseeable future, the Muslim world is going to be filled with a lot of groups that really shouldn't exist but they do. These groups will exist until Islam confronts itself and this might make the European Wars of Religion look like pikers. I don't think that better policy from the West can get read of the attraction of groups like Hamas but I don't think the West can bomb them out of existence either. Muslims themselves must decide to confront groups like Hamas or Boko Haram.

Trump's AG seems to be in bloody defiance of a court order:

https://www.rawstory.com/pam-bondi-perkins-coie/

The actual policies have not changed though.

I agree with the business stuff but not necessarily the pro-life stuff. The social reactionaries are definitely getting more bold with different policy preferences they have like anti-DEI, transphobia, etc.

Also the Democratic Party has done this as well. The police reform faction is definitely not in control anymore. Law and order Democrats trounced them easily and the national party is going along. So at least the police reform/defund the police faction has been told that they are losers.

Just because the global right only agrees on no "Open Borders" doesn't mean that they aren't communicating or cooperating with each other. I'd also argue that there is plenty of stuff that they agree on besides even if it doesn't rhyme completely.

I'd start the early modern period at sometime in the early to mid-17th century and end it around the American/French Revolutions.

Netanyahu apparently decided to launch a surprise attack on Gaza for no good reason with Trump's backing. We are in a world ruled by mad men.

The basic problem is that the global right is cooperating internationally in ways that that global left is not. This is both at the formal state level with Vladimir Putin being very close to people like Trump, Netanyahu, Modi, and others and at the informal level. The various rightist online communities talk and help each other. The global liberal and left side of politics is filled with people that make each other retch and aren't talking or cooperating on a formal or informal level.

At the other blog we had long talks about the past few days on what the actual data shows from Harris' loss and what it means for the Democratic Party. There was naturally a lot of heat rather than light but contemporary liberalism and leftism might be an electoral loser. People seem to like center left policies but not the aesthetics of liberalism or center leftism. It's too feminine, bougie, namby pamby, etc. We might be looking at a Poland like situation where the best counter to the Far Right is a sane Center Right party.

I think most historians disagree with the idea of the dark ages and even the dark ages were seen as a thing, they were assumed to have ended around 1000 rather than the 14th century. The period between the 11th and the mid-14th century were seen as a Medieval boom time with lots of innovation.

White supremacists are going to white supremacists.

The propaganda tools that the 21st century authoritarians have are a lot greater than that of the 20th century regimes. Goebbels would have loved social media and YouTube. Just an easy way to lead people down the rabbit hole.