#donald de line

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Boss politics antitrust

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy

Xi Jinping inaugurated his second term with an anti-corruption purge that ran from 2012-2015, resulting in a massive turnover in the power structures of Chinese society.

At the time, people inside and outside of China believed that Xi was using the crackdown to target his political enemies and consolidate power. Certainly, that was the effect of the purge, which paved the way for reforms to Chinese law that have effectively allowed Xi to hold office for life.

In 2018, Peter Lorentzen (USF Econ) and Xi Lu (NUS Policy) published a paper that used clever empirical methods to get to the bottom of this question:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181222163946/https://peterlorentzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Lorentzen-Lu-Crackdown-Nov-2018-Posted-Version.pdf

Working from the extensive data-files published during the corruption trials of the purged officials, Lorentzen and Xi Liu were able to estimate the likelihood that an official had really been corrupt. They concluded that overwhelmingly, the anti-corruption purges did target corrupt officials, some of them very highly placed.

But when they considered the social graph of those defenestrated officials, they found that they came from blocs that were rivals of Xi Jinping and his circle, while officials who were loyal to Xi Jinping's were spared, even when they were corrupt.

In other words, Xi Jinping's anticorruption efforts targeted genuinely corrupt officials – but only if they supported Xi's rivals. Xi's own cronies were exempted from this. Xi did use the anticorruption effort to consolidate power, but that doesn't mean he prosecuted the innocent – rather, he selectively prosecuted the guilty.

Donald Trump will be America's next president. He campaigned against "elites" and won the support of Americans who were rightly furious at being ripped off and abused by big business. The Biden administration had done much to tackle this corruption, starting with July 2020's 72-point executive order creating a "whole of government" approach to fighting corporate power:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Trump will have to decide what to do about these efforts. It's easy to say that Trump will just kill them all and let giant, predatory corporations rip, but I think that's wrong. After all, the Google antitrust case that the DoJ just won started under the last Trump administration. Trump also sued to block the absolutely terrible merger between Warner and AT&T.

I think it's safer to say that Trump will selectively target businesses for anticorruption enforcement – including antitrust – based on whether they oppose him or suck up to him. I think American business leaders know it, too, which is why every tech boss lined up to give Trump a public rim-job last week:

https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/i_wonder

Trump killed the AT&T-Time Warner merger to punish CNN. He went after Google to punish "woke" tech firms. That doesn't make AT&T, Time Warner or Google good. They're terrible monopolists and the US government should be making their lives miserable.

Trump will not need to falsify evidence against corporations that are disloyal to him. All of America's big businesses are cesspits of sleaze, fraud and predation. Every merger that is being teed up now for the coming four years is illegal under the antitrust laws that we stopped enforcing in the Reagan era and only dusted off again for four years under Biden. They're all guilty, which means that Trump will be able to bring a valid case against any of them.

This will create a trap for people who hate Trump but don't pay close attention to anticorruption cases. It's a trap that Trump sprung successfully in his first term, when he lashed out at the "intelligence community" – the brutal, corrupt, vicious, lawless American spy agencies that are the sworn enemies of working people and the the struggle for justice at home and abroad – and American liberals decided that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, and energetically sold one another Robert Mueller votive candles:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Over the next four years, Trump will use antitrust and other corruption-taming regulations to selective punish crooked companies. He won't target them because they're crooked: he'll target them because they aren't sufficiently loyal to him.

If you let your hatred of Trump blind you to the crookedness of these companies, you lose and Trump wins. The reason Trump will find it easy to punish these companies is that they are all guilty. If you let yourself forget that, if you treat your enemy's enemy as your friend, then Trump will point at his political rivals and call them apologists for corruption and sleaze – and he'll be right.

It is possible for Trump to fight corruption corruptly. That's exactly what he'll do. But just because Trump hates these companies, it doesn't follow that we should love them.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lisa Needham at Public Notice:

Reading the complaint in Donald Trump’s lawsuit against pollster Ann Selzer over her 2024 poll that found Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa, it’s hard not to give in to thoughts of how comically obscene it is. The suit stretches the interpretation of the relevant law — Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act — well past the breaking point. It leans heavily on “facts” that are nothing but Trump quoting Trump about being mad. It spends a good deal of time citing hard-right outlets like Breitbart as if they are neutral. It’s hard not to laugh at how absurd it is. But then you remember that ABC just gave Trump a total of $16 million rather than fight the paper-thin defamation lawsuit he brought against them. And that even after ABC knuckled under, Trump still has lawsuits against CBS, Simon & Schuster, and CNN. And then you also remember that Trump has stated he’s going to use all his might — and that of the government — to bury media he doesn’t like. All of this makes trying to rationally assess whether the lawsuit will succeed nearly impossible.

Trump can afford to go scorched earth whether his claims have any merit or not. He has bottomless wealth, particularly regarding legal fees, as he’s made his donors cover at least $100 million of them so far. He’s utterly unconcerned about whether something is true, and he seems to have a never-ending stream of lawyers willing to step up even though several have ended up facing sanctions, criminal charges, or both. Put simply, he has no incentive to back down, ever. All that being said, the lawsuit against Selzer is still straight-up trash, even if it’s trash that somehow manages to succeed because of the unique blend of horrible characteristics exclusive to Trump.

The nonsense is the point

Trump is alleging that Selzer, her Selzer & Company polling company, the Des Moines Register (the paper that published the poll), and the Register’s parent company — media behemoth Gannett — broke Iowa’s consumer fraud statute. To demonstrate this, Trump would have to prove actual fraud — as in that Selzer, the paper, and the publisher knew or should have known that the poll was fraudulent and that they intended people would rely on that fraud. But Trump doesn’t argue anything like that. What he does instead are include random quotes slamming Harris from places like Breitbart and a list of other times Selzer got poll predictions wrong.

[...]

Bullying the press into submission

So what happens now? Regrettably, the answer isn’t necessarily the same for all the defendants here. Gannett has already removed lawsuit from the Iowa state courts to the federal courts. There’s nothing particularly odd about that as such — cases can be shifted to federal court when the parties are in different jurisdictions and the damages claimed exceed $75,000. However, this also puts any loss Gannett would suffer in federal district court in Iowa as getting appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, where only one of the 11 current judges was nominated by a Democrat, and then on up to the exceedingly Trump-friendly US Supreme Court. To be fair, it isn’t clear that Iowa state courts would handle this case well either, and it may be that Gannett thinks that the federal courts, which deal with media lawsuits more often, are a better bet. But the one thing that is clear is that Gannett is also only looking out for Gannett. The notice of removal filed by the company is only on their behalf. The other defendants get dragged along, but Gannett is not, at least as of yet, providing a defense on behalf of Selzer, her company, or the Register. The party with the shallowest pockets and the least ability to withstand the juggernaut of endless Trump litigation is Selzer, which makes it hard for her to be the face of taking a hard line against Trump’s war on the media.

Donald Trump’s frivolous lawsuit against Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register is a gross attack on the freedom of the press.

[mitigatedchaos]

You Won't "Beat Trump at His Own Game"

Post for July 8, 2024 5,500 words, 25 mins

[ @morlock-holmes ]

Like, can you guys imagine Donald Trump ever admitting that he lost a debate? Let alone imagine his party *withdrawing him as nominee* because of it? And we're going to beat him at his own game by, uh, doing literally the exact opposite of his game?

[ mitigatedchaos ]

Your plan is to beat Trump by being better at being Trump than Trump is? Damn, son. You got a Texas oil baron lined up or something?

-★-

I watched the first hour of the debate. At one point the moderator asked Trump about abortion. As the Republican candidate, this is a tricky question for him, since evangelical voters would like abortion banned in most cases (and thus presumably every state). Trump then argued that he was leaving it up to the states, and the states would decide. He says that he agrees that the abortion pill should be legal, and agrees with the court ruling in favor of it, and that he supports the exceptions for rape, incest, and health of the mother. Further, he's against third trimester and 'post-birth abortion.'

While banning most first trimester abortion only has 38% support, banning most third trimester abortion has 80% supermajority support. The views of the median voter are in tension: they don't want to force women to have babies they don't want, but they also don't want to kill babies.

Biden stumbles in his delivery of his canned line in response, which appeared to be based on the idea that strict limits on abortion access would de facto nullify the exceptions.

Democrats have repeatedly lied about abortion. Republicans have repeatedly lied about abortion. The whole argument about 'after-birth' abortions appears to be based on political fencing with bills, which Democrats also do. (Something like the classic, "Oh, sure, it's illegal, but will you make it super double illegal? Oh, you won't? That means you support it, then.")

(I should note, at the time, I wrote, "I don't think Americans should trust a single word either of these guys is saying.")

But later, Biden trips over Roe v. Wade and the three trimesters to the point that it's unclear just what the hell he means.

The main CNN video doesn't support comments, but there's a clip that does. The top comment?

we're fucked as a nation

In my opinion, these comments overall agree with my post...

Man, both of these men are so old and tired, though Biden is the older and tireder of the two. ... This guy's like a cat with 6 months to live.

It isn't that Biden "lost" the debate, as in he morally failed to engage in enough preparation. The man is simply too old; no amount of preparation would have worked.

-★-

With the abortion argument, we get a good example of Trump's pattern of exaggeration: "Everybody wanted to get it back to the states. Every legal scholar, all over the world. The most respected."

There was a substantive debate about this, and in fact there were a number of legal scholars that believed that the issue was, on a legal basis, on shaky ground. This was a common argument over the past two decades. There was not a complete, unanimous consensus.

People talk about Trump lying a lot. For a lot of that, I think they have this sort of thing in mind, but I don't take it all that seriously. This is salesman lying. He is trying to sell you a Trump steak.

Each message has a [social] component and a [content] component. Trump is weighting the [content] component lower, making it less accurate, but the [social] component lacks tactical depth.

I think this gets into some sort of personality conflict.

All politicians lie. They put on a nice suit, tell you some flowery speech, and then go bomb some country in the middle east. Obama was a genius at public speaking, like Hollywood President tier, but the drone war continued.

So, to make up an example (that's less controversial), a regular politician will start talking about "the human dignity" of guys that break into cars, or something, and the initial language will be quite empathetic. But rather than going where this is supposed to go, and improving the quality and safety of the prisons, they'll get you to agree to this nice-sounding language as part of a multi-step maneuver, and then they won't fix the prisons, and they won't properly rehabilitate the guys that break into the cars, and they'll just... release them, to break into your car.

So if someone starts talking about "human dignity," I start looking for where they hid the knife. (I also consider their personal record; I'm willing to entertain that they're serious, but I have to see the evidence of pragmatism first.)

Trump comes in and he starts talking about how, "All the legal scholars agree with me, all over the world. The most prestigious." This translates to, "I'm popular. I make great decisions. Vote for me."

It's so crass that it has a tactical depth of like, one. It's not part of some long and complicated chain. There is no sophisticated ideological permission structure being setup. He's not trying to redefine the language. There is no second maneuver.

So to me, this feels safe.

I'm not expecting to be attacked from some high-level social plane or whatever, so I can relax. This man is a salesman. A lot of what he says is bullshit, but he just wants to sell me something.

I know it's bullshit. He knows it's bullshit. He knows I know it's bullshit. But this deception is so unsophisticated that it loops back around to being somewhat honest, or even friendly. (It's like if you had a mandatory prison gang fight, and technically, they have to "fight" you, but they're not really trying.) Obviously it results in a lower rate of information transmission, though. (What will he actually do? It can be hard to say.)

This is not the same as "lock her up," from Trump's 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. That was concerning, and in fact in the 2016 election I voted for Clinton. But then, he didn't follow through on that.

-★-

Thinking from the other direction, why would someone find the general, "we have the best cows," approach to be disconcerting rather than just annoying? (The Wall was kinda also like that. It's just a big, dumb object.)

Well, if you're used to everything having three layers of social misdirection in order to protect everyone's reputations and social position, and using this to demonstrate loyalty to others, maybe the crass rhetoric makes it sound like anything could be up for sale, with enough votes.

So you're supposed to say the stuff that your network socially agree sounds nice, and if you aren't saying the stuff, that might mean you're planning to coordinate to do something bad. (Why aren't you following the network? Do you think you're better than other people? Sounds like you might be planning to subordinate others.)

But the actual content of the messages doesn't get properly evaluated.

To quote some swing voters from the famous Reddit "sanewashing" post:

Only one participant here agrees we should "defund the police." One woman says "That is crazier than anything Trump has ever said." 50% of people here say they think Biden was privately sympathetic to the position. We are explaining the actual policies behind defund the police. One woman interrupts "that is not what defund the police means, I'm sorry. It means they want to defund the police." "I didn't like being lied to about this over and over again" says another woman. "Don't try and tell word don't mean what they say" she continues. Rest of group nodding heads.

During the early part of the 2014-2022 era, when we had the feminist push, there was a term called "mansplaining," intended to mean roughly "a men condescendingly explaining things to a woman."

In discussion with each other, men may try to assess who is the most knowledgeable or sharpest (in order to lead the discussion), so they may throw a piece of information out there like it's a tennis ball, and they expect you to hit it back. So a man might tell a woman about a book that she wrote, and then expect her to respond with some insight about the passage he was discussing.

From what I've seen, among men this is social statusy, but it's not like, hardcore. From some women, we got tweets along the lines of, "How dare he lecture me about my own book! Does he think he knows better than me about the book I wrote myself?!" It's basically mismatched systems of etiquette. (An autistic woman might have powered through and info dumped about the book to the man anyway until he got tired of the topic, and perceived no insult.)

This was a triple failure.

First, the men did not realize that the women (this kind of woman) have different discursive norms from men, and adapt in a way that makes them feel more comfortable in mixed spaces.

Second, the women did not realize that this was not a male plot to subordinate women. Feminists connected this etiquette mismatch to a larger ideological construct ("patriarchy"). Some of them are probably still angry to this day.

Third, the two groups largely did not reach a mutual understanding on this issue, except for a few honest people (and people less prone to viewing the opposite sex adversarially) in small spaces, coming into maturity.

Which is to say, in this clash of norms, the view based on multiple layers of social indirection as a form of politeness may be socially astute within its own culture, but may be socially maladapted outside of that culture.

Because these social norms are social, they are a product of a local social equilibrium rather than a more universalist analysis, which in practice makes them more particular. Compare economic or scientific ideas, which, while they exist in a social context, have a non-social framework for discovery and resolution.

I don't find it that difficult to understand the median voter wanting first trimester abortion to be legal and third trimester abortion to be illegal.

In the same way, to the median voter and not just conservatives, a slogan like "defund the police" means "defund the police." A lot of the more confrontational slogans produced by this process sound positively unhinged to outsiders - in a way that makes Donald Trump seem normal by comparison.

-★-

There are a good number of right-wing grifters who are out there regularly lying. I don't post much about them, because they just aren't that interesting. The field of politics is constantly shifting, anyway.

But I think it's worth considering how Democrats got into this situation.

To pick another Trump example, some readers may have seen this 2018 video of Trump telling Germany they're too dependent on imported Russian natural gas, and the German delegation smiling at him.

I vaguely recall that this was part of a Trump push to sell more liquefied natural gas from the US to the Europeans.

Of course, Russia did expand their war with Ukraine in 2022. At the time, Germany was importing 55% of their natural gas from Russia.

Brookings interviewed some economists about how the results went down. Russia cut down on gas supplies into Europe in 2021, reducing the amount of stored gas in Germany by the expansion of the war in early 2022. They raised and lowered the amount of gas coming in to Germany until the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline in mid 2022.

So it's likely that Putin's Russia were, in fact, trying to gain leverage over Germany. Estimates from industry CEOs predicted a major recession.

The economists predicted that the situation would be expensive, but manageable, and the damage to Germany's economy was less than expected. Why?

First, the demand for gas was not perfectly inelastic. The dire predictions were based on gas as a bottleneck causing a cascade of missing production inputs ("for want of a bolt, the bulldozer is lost; for want of a bulldozer, the factory is lost; for want of a factory..." one might say). It turned out that it was possible to substitute at multiple points in the production process, so more gas-intensive components could be imported if needed. (As the war was in Ukraine, Germany was not blockaded.)

Second, gas was imported from other sources, including Norway... and liquefied natural gas from the US. (A second source claims that 5-6% of the gas is still coming from Russia.)

Third, the disruption was already on the horizon from 2021, so it was easier to coordinate actors.

So was Trump right? Was he wrong?

Germany was getting about 26% of its energy from natural gas in 2021. If 55% of that is from Russia, that makes for about 14% of Germany's energy supply, not including imported Russian oil. As of 2014, Russian troops were already occupying Crimea.

What I want to argue is that, less than right or wrong, "Getting ≥14% of your energy from a powerful geopolitical rival, particularly one currently engaged in a military occupation just two countries away, gives them potential leverage, and this makes it risky," is obvious.

Going, "Haha, look at this ignorant buffoon who thinks that Putin might exploit providing us with 1/8th of our energy for leverage," is just... It's cringe.

Germany had to reactivate their coal power plants to deal with the energy crisis, but they still had coal power plants to reactivate. The long-term storage problem for renewables hasn't been resolved yet. If they had an energy economy that was 60% natural gas, 40% renewables, and 0% nuclear, they'd be in an even worse spot.

(Lately it looks like people are making a stab at sucking CO2 out of the air and converting it to fuel. Will that be online as a replacement in 2030? That's harder to say. It would be fortunate, because combustible fuels don't have the same security concerns as fission power.)

-★-

Anyhow, that was all background.

How did Democrats get into this mess?

Well, obviously Democrats and left-leaning people in the media made a huge deal of Trump as the exception, Trump as the risk, Trump as would-be dictator, Trump as the erosion of norms, and so on. And of course, the Covid-19 pandemic landed on Trump's term and was very abnormal.

The point of running Joe Biden, from the perspective of the median voter, was a "return to normalcy." This is what voters were telling them by picking the pre-Trump Vice President from Obama's term.

After Trump got in and stopped caring about pursuing Hillary Clinton, I found it hard to buy the idea of Trump as an emergency.

Democrats always seemed to use "Trump is an emergency" as an excuse to behave in worse ways. For example, Democrats argued that protests against lockdowns of community centers like churches were too dangerous to be allowed due to the risk of spreading the virus, but then argued that nation-wide race riots needed to be allowed and that this was the position of 'science' as an institution.

Did the race riots accomplish anything of value? No. The opportunity for normal police reform was squandered on braindead slogans like "Defund the Police," which swing voters think are insane. There was a significant increase in homicide, and this is before accounting for significantly-improved trauma surgery since 1990. If LA is any indication, most of the victims of the increase in homicide were black and hispanic.

They complained constantly about Trump eroding institutional norms... and then eroded institutional norms. By 2022, trust in mass media among independents and Republicans collapsed to 27% and 14% respectively.

This is going to be a long-term problem; conspiracy theories are proliferating due to a lack of trust in sense-making institutions, and sense-making institutions have had their reputations shredded by wasteful partisan behavior that barely moved the needle electorally.

One way to assess how much someone values something is to ask what they're willing to give up to get it. Ask any Democrat on Twitter - what concessions are they willing to make to the rest of America to ensure Trump doesn't get back into office? The answer is none.

A "return to normalcy" would mean using the racial identitarians as expendable shock troops and then dropping them after the election, not getting shut down by the courts for doing "race conscious" policy.

The administration would quietly make changes to shore up the practical (not mere messaging) legitimacy of the institutions in order to cover for the spent legitimacy from the Trump era and run a boring administration focused on policies with supermajority support.

So now Democrats are the weird theater kids, and Trump is the normal guy. (And he's already been President, so publishing a magazine cover calling him Hitler just comes off as hysterics.)

-★-

Why did this happen?

First, as the guy that won the election, Joe Biden is the primary guy with the political capital to reshape the Democratic coalition's priorities. In 2020, Joe Biden had the same problem he has in 2024: he's too old.

There is no Democrat strategic command to impose discipline on the coalition members. There are lots of factions all fighting each other to pursue policy that's aligned with their own interests rather than the national interest, and it's resulting in what I call a coalitional interest deadlock. (For a relatively uncontroversial example, Left-NIMBYs and boneheaded environmentalists oppose housing construction, while pro-immigrationists bring in millions of people... who, when they get here, would need housing. One of these two factions needs to lose.)

Nasty identitarian rhetoric requires no immediate material concessions from these factions, nor does it require any discipline, so we get nasty identitarian rhetoric that does not benefit the country in any way, and is not connected to positive programs (that would require actual work and limiting claims to what's realistic, which defeats the point).

Some of you are probably familiar with the idea of a "leveraged buyout." This is when a private equity firm buys a company with debt, and then typically put it on the balance sheet of the company they just bought out. A firm with too much debt is said to be "overleveraged."

The second problem is that Democrats are epistemically overleveraged. They are making too many bets based on incomplete information, and a lot of the assumptions they're making in the process are not accurate.

Some tech-related online right-wingers believed that mass schooling was having almost no effect on learning or performance, and that it was almost entirely just selecting for conscientiousness and intelligence.

Learning losses from online schooling during the pandemic showed that mass schooling was having an effect - by removing it.

However, in researching the literature on education shortly before the pandemic, I found that getting educational results beyond what schools were achieving was very difficult, and that many educational interventions would fade out. Charter schools only produced modestly better results (for about the same price), in a way I couldn't differentiate from selection effects on parents. (I did find that online charters performed horribly. Well, I guess that's one finding verified by a larger-scale experiment.)

It isn't a matter of funding. Baltimore schools are highly funded and get terrible results.

We lack means to convert funding into results.

(Roland Fryer reportedly managed to beat the average for one class, but as a sign of things to come, he got politically sidelined in 2019. Naturally, he's an economist.)

Line voter Democrats are likely to claim that sub-par US school results are due to underfunding. The condition of scientific institutions is not as bad as right-wingers think it is; researchers know that just blindly slapping more funding on to education won't work. However, the guys in between, the 'officers' of the Democratic coalition, are quite happy to leave the line voters in the dark.

They're probably patting themselves on the back, thinking, "I should leave out the most damaging information in order to protect the weak and marginalized," and then not accounting for the possibility that everyone else in their information chain is doing the same thing.

Because of this, we don't get a more serious conversation that would establish a better method to convert funding into results. (This applies to other domains as well. Public transit in the US is ruinously expensive to construct, particularly in CA and NYC. A "car tax" without the ability to practically construct public transit is just a hateful punishment.)

When a Democrat is talking about "beating Trump at his own game," for example, by pretending that Biden did OK at the debate, this is generally of the form, "we should be more aggressive, deceptive, and selfish."

The Democrats are already too deceptive. It's inhibiting their ability to govern effectively. The Democrats are already too aggressive. A number of the online right being read by Chris Rufo and Elon Musk were once self-identified liberals [1] who were driven away and radicalized by the hostile messaging (which was not connected to practical benefits for society, so this isn't "mere selfishness"). Democrats are already selfish enough; forgiving student debt without fixing the system to reduce the origin of that debt polls 30-40 approve-disapprove.

And for the debate itself...

Bro why do we have 70+ year old[s] running for office? Shouldn't we have someone at least young and more modern? This is like watching a retirement home cafeteria fight 😭

Do you think telling someone like that, "Biden didn't lose the debate," sounds, you know, hinged? At the very least, it certainly doesn't inspire trust or confidence.

-★-

A little while ago, collapsedsquid posted:

Seeing a lot of the "This Trump thing is because everyone was so unfair to Romney in 2012 and he lost" out there again and this is fucking abuser logic man, "Why did you make me hit you? If you'd only put away the dishes like I'd asked then this wouldn't have had to happen" shut the fuck up man.

I had been writing a draft response to this.

Basically, seriousness is both a substantive position and a rhetorical stance. The Bush administration undermined the rhetorical stance on the Republican side due to the Iraq War, which was mismanaged, and in which no nuclear weapons were found. (Some old chemical weapons were found, but not an actual development program.)

Throwing the line "binders full of women" at Mitt Romney didn't help, of course, but it's more like that faction of the Republican party failed to regain its footing.

During the Bush administration, there were comparisons of George Bush to Hitler (it showed up on protest signs, for instance).

In practice, the Bush administration were libcons. Looking at Afghanistan, a mountainous, dry, landlocked country that has a GDP per capita of around $500, they were neither 'anti-racist' enough to decide not to invade and respect the local rule of the Taliban (and their local cultural traditions), nor conventionally racist (or culturalist) enough to conclude that national development would be a tremendous challenge requiring a radical reorganization of Afghan society.

Utilitarianism is generally about maximizing "utility," or subjective positive experience, and assumes that this can be summed across individuals. For example, there is a utilitarian thought experiment in which a surgeon has one healthy patient and five sick patients. If he kills the healthy patient, then he can harvest the man's organs in order to save the five sick patients. (Yes, like in Rimworld.)

There are many problems with a naive utilitarian approach.

However, if we rotate the concept of utilitarianism, we get the idea of moral prices, and morality as something that can be traded off against other factors of production, such as land, labor, energy, capital, and so on. Morality is not like these other resources; immorality can incentivize more immorality. However, this provides us with a potential frame with which to view a more violent and exploitative past.

One way to view the situation is that a radical reorganization of Afghanistan would be morally intensive, not just financially draining.

For example, Afghanistan has a high rate of cousin marriage, which is not common in developed countries. Overriding that would mean prioritizing foreign marriage norms as superior, taking on epistemic debt as the relationship between marriage norms and democracy or economy is more correlative than rock-solid causative, and to the degree that Afghan people resist this change, enforcing it at gunpoint.

While Democratic voters of the era would joke about Republican-voting "rednecks" being cousin-married, the appetite for such a program likely did not exist.

Another way to view the situation is that, from the outside, the Bush administration believed that democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation, were simply what happens in the absence of dictatorship. This view legitimized American power and influence as simply the natural order asserting itself, and argued that asserting American influence was morally cheap.

If democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation are non-trivially the product of particular cultural norms and values, then American interventionism is much more morally expensive.

In either case, Trump represents a "correction" in reaction to the failed project of the Bush administration: conflict and oppression are still undesirable; bombs are morally expensive; borders are cheap.

-★-

As we know, the United States lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban. A joke emerged at the time:

"Now the Taliban have to govern Afghanistan."

Discussion in right-wing circles claims that the Taliban won by doing a better job of maintaining basic property rights and resolving disputes than the US-aligned forces did, despite being in a state of war with the US:

The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.

There were, reportedly, complaints from members of the Taliban after their victory, but it would seem that the Taliban were already governing Afghanistan.

Richard Hanania may be a troll, but he went through some Afghan War documents posted by the Washington Post, and I don't think he's making it up. It would seem that while the Taliban were governing Afghanistan, the US forces, well, weren't:

Six months after he was appointed, Bush didn't know who his top general in Afghanistan was, and didn't care. General McNeill had no guidance about what he should be doing in the country.

He has a whole long thread of this sort of thing. It reminds me of reading through the Wikipedia page on the Vietnam War many years after high school history, which made it sound like the US was quite adept with high-technology weapons, but failed to properly identify and manage the political source for the conflict.

Let's return to the student loan debt forgiveness issue.

A typical firm only has a profit margin of about 7-10%. A firm can keep going as long as it's breaking even, so even a low profit margin can still pay wages. However, if a firm is losing money, it will have to sell off assets or lay off employees, reducing its production capacity.

There is investment, in which we spend current production in order to increase or maintain future production, such as by building a factory. If we make a good investment, we'll get the production value back later. There is insurance, which involves moving risk around. For example, you are unlikely to be in a car accident most of the time, but if you have car insurance and you do get in an accident, the insurance company will pay for repair or replacement of your car. [2] This may make you more likely to buy a car in the first place, or more likely to structure your life around the assumption that you will have a car.

Governments can (in theory) spend a great deal on investment or insurance, but they can only spend a more limited amount on consumption spending.

For a college degree that pays for itself, government can loan money at a low interest rate, and the value will be paid back by the person who took the loan later.

For a college degree that doesn't pay for itself, someone has to supply the production that builds the buildings on the campus, fixes the water pipes, reloads the toilet paper in the bathrooms, and so on, and if that's not "the person taking the degree, but in the future," then it has to be someone else.

Someone like collapsedsquid might have the view, "I want the state to subsidize college education. Why should I pre-compromise and reduce my negotiating position?"

To expand on this, "Guarding the state treasury is the work of the right and of capital (business); why should I do their work for them?"

From this perspective, the role of the Democratic presidential candidate is to be the leader of America's left-leaning coalition, the blue team.

But the median voter or swing voter does not necessarily have this perspective. The median or swing voter is choosing between two candidates to lead the American enterprise.

The actual job is President of the United States.

If you win the War in Afghanistan, you have to govern Afghanistan. If you win the US presidential election, you have to govern the United States of America.

That's the prize. If you don't like it, don't run for office.

-★-

Nonetheless, this causes a tension. In order to become President as a Democrat, you first have to win the Democratic primary, which makes you effectively the leader of the Democratic party.

How do you deal with this?

That's "simple": split the issues.

A political coalition has a lot of people and those people have diverse interests. Representing them all at once is too difficult. Talking about them all at once is too difficult. Generalization of coalitional interests into a smaller, more manageable set of principles yields ideology.

Take the issues, and order them by how important they are to the functioning of the country, and how important they are for mainstream voters.

For the issues most important to mainstream voters, aim for a very broad coalition using very general principles. Pass legislation that has supermajority support in the polls, and be loud about it so that voters know what you've done for them lately.

For more niche issues that mainstream voters care less about, aim for a narrower coalition with narrower principles, to reward your base.

The second is the reward for the first. The median voter should be able to trust you on the things that he cares about, and where he doesn't trust you, it's on things he doesn't care about.

Core issues for the functioning of the country will seep into more generic voter dissatisfaction with things like inflation, so it's better to keep on top of those. Whether to be loud about it depends on whether the individual policy that's actually needed has good optics or not.

-★-

If you want to "beat Trump at his own game," you don't do so by talking about how America has the best steaks.

You identify his most important issues, and then you work out how to best steal them from him.

-

[1] "They were elves, once." Extradeadjcb is probably the most prominent example, but it comes up for a number of them. I've written about this before, but ethnic conflict theory by one player creates an equilibrium more favorable to ethnic conflict theory by other players. Lefty Twitter users asked Razib Khan why he attended Extradeadjcb's natalism conference; he replied by asking where the left-wing natalism conference was. That's probably still 20 years out.

[2] It's more complicated than this.

[okaystoptellingmetomakeanaccount]

OKAY I FINALLY MANAGED TO FINISH IT (so sorry i might have taken “no need to rush it” a little too far). The quality is terrible (scans, font, translation, all of it, even the image quality because my phone doesnt like big files with clear pictures or something) but it is just about readable. I could have learnt how to use Gimp properly to do it on my laptop and get better results during this time but… there is no but, i could and should have just done that.

I actually think this one is quite funny. At least in the Dutch translation. There Donald uses a really dry and informal lexicon, which I’ve tried to emulate but I’m not that great at English. Oh well, hope anyone who read it still was able to enjoy, regardless of my mistakes!

If someone scanlates https://inducks.org/story.php?c=B+860087

Then in return i promise i will scanlate. Uh. https://inducks.org/story.php?c=H+2021-425 or something.

A 7 pager for a 7 pager. I just need to read magica bigenerates ok

[many-sparrows]

I love you social justice oriented Christians. I love you Gary (my pastor) who presided over gay weddings before they were legally binding and before the church had come to a decision on it. I love you Conrad (old pastor I work with) for getting arrested for protesting the Iraq war and performing a lesbian wedding the minute it became legal for a couple who'd been together for decades. I love you Dr Donald Hertz for your sermons on Acts 20:27 and your life spent living out that verse and for causing trouble when you were still a student assigned to a segregated church in Birmingham and for spontaneously joining a grape boycott picket line outside of a Safeway in Berkeley because that verse says we cannot shrink away from our duty to each other. I love you Martin Luther's common chest. I love you Charles de Foucauld. I love you Oscar Romero. I love you Dorothy Day. I love you for giving me a legacy to carry on.

[sprites4ever]

DE-BULLSHITIFYING THE RECENT DEVELOPMENTS OF THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR, AS OF THE 12TH OF DECEMBER 2024

Since both russian media (for the sake of propaganda) and Western media (for the sake of clicks) misrepresent and misreport many news items regarding this conflict, I feel the need to clarify the big headlines, as per my own research.

AS RUSSIA HAS CROSSED THIS SO-CALLED 'RED LINE' ON THE FIRST DAY OF THEIR INVASION, Joe Biden has finally given Ukraine permission to use Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) supplied by the US, to strike russian troops and military instalations on internationally recognized russian territory. ATACMS have a range lf 300 kilometers and can only be fired at russian border regions from Ukraine. The United Kingdom and France have quickly followed suit, permitting Ukraine to do the same with the Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles supplied by them. This move has angered russians who have been firing missiles, including hypersonic, aerobalistic, ones with far greater range than ATACMS and nuclear-capable ones, at Ukraine themselves since day one. In an escalation disguised as a mirror response to strikes on military instalations, as is a typical russian tactic, russia has fired a new type of hypersonic missile with the prototype name 'ORESHNIK' (russian: 'Hazel') at a civilian industrial facility in Dnipro, Ukraine, calling it a 'message to the West', regarding russia's 'red lines'. The American Right, including President-elect Donald Trump, has, due to their support of russia, latched onto the renewed public attention due to this russian escalation, abusing fears of World War Three for their own purposes, by echoing russian narratives, painting Biden and the Democrats as warmongers in the war russia started, is escalating and which they could end any day. Donald Trump has now for the first time commented Joe Biden's ATACMS decision himself in an interview with Time Magazine, instead of letting his cronies like his son Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson etc. do the talking. He, of course, criticized the decision as senseless and an escalation. Unconfirmed rumors had previously claimed that, before Joe Biden made the decision to permit Ukraine to strike russia with ATACMS, Trump had discussed the matter in a meeting with him and had given his approval. My personal speculative opinion, given his now-published comments, is that Trump approved of the idea, just so he could call Biden a warmonger for it later. The Pentagon recently stated that russia had signaled its intention to launch another ORESHNIK missile, following Ukraine's continued ATACMS strikes at russian military instalations.

DE JURE PRESIDENT AND DE FACTO DICTATOR OF NATO AND EU NATION HUNGARY, Viktor Orban, has continued his undermining of the Western alliances with more pro-russian political maneuvering. He has announced that he had proposed a Christmas ceasefire and massive prisoner swap to russia and Ukraine, then claimed that Ukraine had rejected the proposal. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed that russia was interested in the proposal and reiterated the same russian lie that they were never opposed to peace talks. Factually, russia has sabotaged or rejected all diplomatic attempts at ending the war to conditions which would be acceptable for both Ukraine and russia, made by Ukraine, NATO nations, EU nations and even BRICS nations, since day zero. The Ukrainian government claimed that Orban had never made such a proposal to Ukraine. My personal opinion, given Orban's track record of lying, is that the Ukrainian government's claim is 100% truthful.

UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT ZELENSKYY HAS, in a disappointing, russia-style maneuver, massively understated Ukrainian battlefield losses, claiming that around 43.000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the war. Most reliable Western estimates of Ukrainian casualties by mid-2024 averaged around at least 70.000.

ZELENSKYY HAS ALSO, in various statements, hinted at the possibility of ceding annexed territory to russia, in order to bring about a ceasefire, a possibility which he had previously ruled out. Ahead of a NATO meeting, Zelenskyy had proposed that NATO should invite only the Ukrainian-controlled parts of Ukraine into the alliance, in order to make it possible for Ukraine to join immediately, as NATO cannot accept new members which are at war. Since this was not done, Zelenskyy later also proposed that instead of an immediate NATO invitation, a ceasefire could also be guaranteed by stationing NATO peacekeeeping forces, after a ceasefire would be reached, a proposal which is currently being intensively discussed by the leaders of Germany, Poland, France and the United Kingdom. My opinion is that Zelenskyy is panicking due to Donald Trump, who is a russian agent and who spreads Putin's narratives verbatim, having been re-elected President of the United States. Because of Trump's threats to withdraw all support for Ukraine and perhaps even NATO, Zelenskyy is now trying to get a ceasefire in place as quickly as possible, instead of recapturing Ukrainian territories which were annexed by russia, in order to prevent a total russian destruction of Ukraine without American support. This is also why he's been insistent on joining NATO or getting NATO peacekeeping forces immediately, to guarantee that russia would honor any ceasefire.

WORKERS OF THE UNITED NATIONS' INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY (IAEA), who were allowed by russian occupiers to establish a presence at the occupied Ukrainian Zaphorizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the partially occupied Enerhodar region, for the purpose of maintaining the safety of the power plant, reported one of their vehicles having been struck by a drone on a road close to the power plant. My personal opinion is that, since the IAEA vehicles were travelling together with Ukrainian vehicles, this was definetly another russian false-flag operation, like russia's many other false-flag operations surrounding the power plant, in order to create fear of a nuclear catastrophe. If it wasn't clear yet, russia are global terrorists.

UNLIKE WHAT HEADLINES OF SOME WESTERN NEWS OUTLETS MIGHT INSINUATE, the russian Foreign Ministry's statement, warning russians of travelling to Western countries, has nothing to do with the Pentagon's statement that russia might launch another ORESHNIK missile. The full statement given by russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova is actually a tirade which projects any and all russian guilt of arbitrary enforcement of law, onto the United States, Canada and most EU nations, as is typical for russian propaganda.

[mrs-stans]

Sebastian Stan’s Crash Course in Becoming Trump

After a long tour of duty in the Marvel universe, the Romanian-born actor is conquering the festival circuit, with starring roles in “The Apprentice” and “A Different Man.”

Illustration by João Fazenda

By Alex Barasch

The actor Sebastian Stan glanced approvingly at the neon signage and old-school menus at the Pearl Diner, in the financial district, the other day. He’s lived in and near New York since he was twelve—around the time Donald Trump swapped his first wife, Ivana, for Marla Maples—and has watched the city evolve. “It’s funny. It’s changed, but it’s also the same buildings,” he said. “And then you’re, like, ‘The buildings are there, but you are not the same.’ ”

Stan took off a white ball cap and ordered coffee with cream; he was jet-lagged, fresh from the Deauville American Film Festival, where he’d received the Hollywood Rising-Star Award. “Rising” is a stretch for the forty-two-year-old, who’s appeared in a dozen Marvel projects, but Stan has lately reached a different echelon. In May, he went to Cannes for “The Apprentice,” in which he plays seventies-era Trump. In Berlin, he’d won the Silver Bear, an award whose previous recipients include Denzel Washington and Paul Newman. “Everyone was, like, ‘Oh, the Silver Bear!’ ” Stan said. “Then you go back and you’re, like, ‘Do we know what the Silver Bear is in America?’ ”

The prize was for his role in “A Different Man,” Aaron Schimberg’s surreal black comedy, which nods to “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Stan stars as a man whose lifelong disfigurement is miraculously reversed; the shoot included a grisly three-and-a-half-hour session spent peeling off chunks of his face.

“The Apprentice” demanded a transformation of a different sort. At the diner, Stan pulled out his phone and swiped through an album labelled “DT physicality”—a hundred and thirty videos of Trump, which capture his tiniest gestures and his over-all mien. Marinating in Trump content was, Stan said cheerfully, “a psychotic experience.” He watched the clips so many times that when the director, Ali Abbasi, asked him to improvise in a scene about marketing Trump Tower, he could rattle off the stats: sixty-eight stories of marble in a peachy hue chosen by Ivana, because, as the real Trump put it in a promo, “people feel they look better in the pink.” (It turned out that he’d also memorized Trump’s lie: the tower is actually fifty-eight floors.)

Growing up in Communist Romania, Stan had just an hour of TV news each night; New Year’s Eve was an event because it meant twelve hours of programming. His instinct for mimicry—he had a habit of imitating family members and neighbors—was the earliest tell that he might be an actor. After he and his mother fled to Vienna, in 1989, Stan got his first credit, in a Michael Haneke film—an experience that nearly put him off show business. “I stood in line with, like, a thousand kids, for I don’t know how many hours—which I hated,” he said. “If I could fucking meet Haneke now, it would be amazing!”

When the family moved again, to America, he experienced pop-culture shock. He binged every movie he’d missed—from “Back to the Future” to “Ace Ventura”—in a pal’s basement. Another friend roped him into the school play. “My high school was really, really small, so I didn’t have a lot of competition,” Stan said. “They were, like, ‘Please be in the play!’ ” Soon he was playing Cyrano himself.

After stints on Broadway, and on “Gossip Girl,” Stan was scooped up by Marvel. “I’ve been lucky to play a character for fifteen years,” he said. The blockbuster paychecks freed him up to explore edgier material. “I, Tonya,” in which he played the ice-skater Tonya Harding’s dirtbag husband, was a turning point. “It allowed me to see that a good director will bring out more in you than you can,” Stan said. It was also his first time portraying a real person—a feat that he repeated in “Pam & Tommy,” as the Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, and now in “The Apprentice.”

“It’s like learning a piece of music,” Stan said, of nailing an impression. “You’ve got to start out slow—it requires practice. Suddenly, you’re getting it more. You’re still making mistakes—but you’re playing the music. You’re playing the music every day until you can do it in your sleep. That’s when the fun starts.” He sliced the air for emphasis, then caught himself and grinned. “And sometimes it’s months later at a diner, and you’re, like, ‘Why am I doing that with my hands?’ ”

[singeratlarge]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Adam22, Felice Allesandri, Clem Burke, Dale Carnegie, Billy Connolly, Denise Crosby, Candy Darling, Howard Duff, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Colin Hanks, the great American composer Scott Joplin, producer-songwriter Terry Lewis, Stanley Livingston, Lee Michaels, Charles Theodore Pachebel, Elvis Ramone, Dave Sinclair (Caravan, Hatfield & the North), Baruch Spinoza, Staind, Chad Taylor (Live), keyboardist Richard Tee, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Robin Williamson (Incredible String Band), Teddy Wilson, Jim Yester (The Association), and Pete Best, the original drummer for The Beatles. That’s him on the Decca audition tapes and other early recordings. Deep Beatlemaniacs know that, in 1962, Best was replaced by Ringo Starr, which led to the classic line-up of the Fab Four. That episode is shrouded in urban legend, including rumors that Best was sacked because he was a bigger “chick magnet” than Paul McCartney. The true reason was more prosaic—Ringo had more experienced chops. It was an emotionally-wrenching career move for both Best and the other Beatles as they’d grown up together in Liverpool.

Best retired from drumming in the late 60s and became a civil servant. Then the 1995 Beatles ANTHOLOGY restored him to the public eye. At the behest of family, fans, and friends, Best formed a band and hit the road. In 2005 I was playing keyboards for The Davy Jones Band at a music festival in Newport, Rhode Island, and The Pete Best Band opened with a raw, rowdy rave up show, replicating the Beatles Cavern Club rock’n’roll set from the early 60s. It was a blast to watch! I lost my photo of Pete and I at the catering tent, but in this video I’m watching sidestage w/family members. HB Pete and God bless your rock’n’roll heart!

#beatles #petebest #drums #drummer #britishinvasion #davyjones #monkees #anthology #ringostarr #paulmccartney #cavernclub #liverpool #rhodeisland #newport #musicfestival #keyboards #johnnyjblair

[mariacallous]

Former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has expressed doubts about U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's ability to deliver a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in a pessimistic interview with Politico published on Nov. 27.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is in no mood to strike a deal.

“Putin still believes he can snuff out Ukrainian statehood and crush Ukraine as an independent democracy, and he thinks he’s one step away from exposing the West as weak,” he said.

“Ukraine is a personal obsession for Putin, but crushing Ukraine is also a means to accomplish his grand goal — to show to the world how the West is incapable of defending itself or what it stands for.”

An agreement that would include concessions from Ukraine, including territorial ones, would not work, because Putin is not interested in diplomacy and “is just trying to exhaust the West, believing that he can get everything he wants.”

Kuleba also stressed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would not sign any agreement that included the transfer of occupied Crimea, the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, and other territories to Russia.

“The Russians keep the Donbas, they keep Crimea, no NATO membership. Can Zelenskyy sign? He cannot because of the Constitution. And because it will be the end of Zelenskyy politically.”

He warned that if Trump stops the supply of weapons and ammunition to Ukraine, the front line in Donbas could collapse, placing Ukraine in great danger.

“The Russians will be at the gates of Dnipro, Poltava and Zaporizhzhya, That will be the most dangerous moment for Ukraine in this war,” Kuleba said, questioning whether Europe would be able to compensate for the loss or reduction of US support.

“The big unknown is how the European Union is going to behave. Europeans will have two choices. They can either pursue a wait-and-see strategy or follow Trump’s lead, or they accept the fact that they have to bear greater share of responsibility.”

This follows an analysis of statements by Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergei Naryshkin on Nov. 26 that suggest the Kremlin aims to seize more territories in Ukraine and is unwilling to engage in genuine negotiations with Kyiv.

[oilith]

I got reminded of this book!

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, with the b- and c parts! It's in finnish of course, but still managed to keep all jokes! I used to be obsessed with Donald Duck and Ducktales, especially Scrooge lol (i also may or may not have had a crush on Goldie and Magica). I love this book, since it has all the stories, including the bonus ones in one piece. My favorites out of all of them are The King of Klondike, The Prisoner of White Agony Creek, and A Letter from Home. A Letter from Home is especially one of my long time favorites.

I really like Don Rosa as an artist and a writer! His art is always very detailed, and honestly kinda funny. A lot of my early line work was actually very inspired by him! Also all his stories featuring Magica De Spell are hilarious, especially the one where she's messing with gravity.

Some of my favorite panels:

An honorary mention goes to A Little Something Special, which isn't in this book, but i just love it SO MUCH lmao

Scrooge is such an idiot hELP-

[rose-tea-and-strawberries]

Hey, I sent in this ask and Tumblr ate it, so here it is:

You know how Yuu getting turned into a child because of a potion accident or a spell mishap is a pretty popular trend in twst headcanons and imagines. I'm thinking about the same scenario with Yuu while she's on her shift in the club. It either happened because of one of Von Drake's inventions accidentally zapping Yuu or someone was messing with Fairy Godmother's wand again.

I mean the chaos and panic that would ensue in the club when Yuu gets hit by a spell gone wrong, and she straight up disintegrates except for her clothes. Everyone's like "OH NO, WE KILLED OUR KID!" And Donald's reaction is like this. But then the clothes start shuffling, and they all find a cute baby Yuu.

If you thought they clubgoers were bad before when it came to competing for the custody over Yuu, it's worse now. Hell, even Mickey is twitching to grab his sorcerer hat and keyblade. Any disney character who's a parent are fighting over on who gets to hold Yuu next. Pepa Madrigal is summoning a biblical storm outside because Triton was taking too long holding Yuu, and it's supposed to be her turn. The parent characters all miss holding a baby.

"Your five minutes are up! Let me hold her!"

The couples are all high on baby fever when they get to hold Yuu. I can see Ariel really missing when Melody was a baby and turning to Eric to say that they should have another kid.

The villains to Yuu: Come to the dark side we have cookies.

I can see just cuddling with the Winnie-the-Pooh characters since they're technically anthropomorphic stuffed animals and soft enough to sleep on.

Even characters who I don't see as parent types take to Yuu so well. Gaston finally gets a turn, and he gets quiet. For the next five minutes, his hubris goes away, and he's so gentle with Yuu. Belle and Adam are in awe because that's what got him to shut up? I mean they get it. Yuu is adorable but still.

Lol. I think went too far with this ask.

"Oh no, we killed our kid!" *Side eyes the villains* it's not like any of you have ever attempted child murder before

That Donald link is everything and it is now canon that that is exactly his reaction when Yuu, his nephews and Max are in danger (I've never watched Ducktales so I don't know if there are any other kids Donald hangs out with)

I absolutely love de-aging fics. It's been one of my favourite tropes in practically every fandom I've been in. I actually did have this one story line I was brainstorming in my head during this very long car ride where some magic caused Yuu, Ace, Deuce, Leona, Azul and Epel to de-age to around 6-7-8 and the NRC students had to deal with that (it kind of played along the lines how the day before the magic accident Yuu said that if she met the NRC gang when she was younger, her younger self definitely would've wanted to be friends with them - there was even this scene where smol Yuu 'meets' baby octopus Azul and he gets all teary-eyed that this pretty 'stranger' thinks that he's nice - and there was another one with little Yuu and cub Leona where they take a nap together) but I digress.

So I'm not going to go for baby since there's not much a baby can do so I'm going to say she's reverted back to a 5/6 year old.

Lilo, Alice and Wendy insist that she spends most of her time with them. They see Yuu as a big sister and now that she's younger, they are much more protective of her. Christopher Robin is included in that group not because he's part of the Yuu Protection Squad but because he's close friends with Alice and Wendy so he's dragged along for the ride. Lilo doesn't want Yuu to hang around with the villains or the NRC boys - she's made badness charts of both Yuu and the villains to show her friend how dangerous they are. Lilo and Yuu definitely get Horace to play Elvis songs because Elvis is amazing.

It doesn't matter how old Yuu is, if she sees our favourite tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff she is hugging that silly old bear for as long as she can (lucky, lucky her). The tv show called 'My Friends Tigger and Pooh' and one special episode of 'Doc McStuffins' show that the Hundred Acre Woods gang love hanging around children even if they aren't Christopher Robin - let's just hope, Tigger doesn't get too boisterous with his bouncing. Speaking of which, Roo is very happy to have another kid to hang out with (he excitedly asks his mother if they can bring Lumpy with them the next day) and Kanga finds herself doting on Yuu even more with the other animal mothers (etc: Perdita, Mrs Jumbo, Bambi's mother, Duchess etc)

Since Simba (canonically in the first movie) and Ariel (in the non-canon sequel) are the only prince and princess to have children, I think that they would argue that they are the best suited to looking after Yuu - only for Baloo to pipe in that he and Bagheera have plenty of experience in caring for mancubs (the fact that Mowgli was raised by wolves who are still very much alive seems to be completely forgotten by the bear)

Tiana has to literally restrain Naveen and Charlotte from either kidnapping Yuu on the spot to go gallivanting to every toy and dress shop they know or just going to said shops anyway and buying everything they see.

Aladdin and Robin Hood are really good with kids in their movie (and Aladdin's TV series) so they would be having a blast regaling Yuu with tales of their adventures.

Wait, wait Jack Skellington and Sally canonically have kids in the epilogue of their movie so they would have some experience to boast about (in the movie's soudtrack with Sir Patrick Stewart at least)

Unfortunately, none of the heroes trust the villains to go within five feet of child!Yuu for completely logical and justifiable reasons so Yuu the villainous sidekicks usually end up sneaking around nearby

(At some point, Yuu ends up giving Ed the hyena a hug, headpats and a forehead kiss and he never lets anyone forget that)

All the Disney parents are living their best life with Yuu around. I think King Stefan and Queen Leah are especially happy because they never got to see their daughter, Aurora, at that age and they kind of feel like they get a chance at seeing what could have been.

Someone should also probably keep an eye on Fauna incase she pulls a Lilia and straight up kidnaps Yuu

[jadelotusflower]

2024 Roundup - books read

Fiction

Stone Blind: Medusa's Story - Natalie Haynes

Atonement - Ian McKeown (re-read)

A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries - Heather Fawcett

Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands - Heather Fawcett

Coraline - Neil Gaiman

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum (re-read)

The Marvelous Land of Oz - L. Frank Baum

Ozma of Oz - L. Frank Baum

Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum

The Road to Oz - L. Frank Baum

The Emerald City of Oz - L. Frank Baum

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West - Gregory Maguire (re-read)

Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

Orlando: A biography- Virginia Woolf

Sappo: Poems & Fragments - Sappo (translated by Josephine Balmer)

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne (translated by Henry Frith)

The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne (translated by Jordan Stump)

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude)

Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus - Mary Shelley (re-read)

The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Emmuska Orczy (re-read)

Sir Percy Leads the Band - Baroness Emmuska Orczy

The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Emmuska Orczy

The Elusive Pimpernel - Baroness Emmuska Orczy (re-read)

A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah J Mass

Best Fairy Tales - Hans Christian Andersen (translated by Jean Hersholt)

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (re-read)

Non-Fiction

A year in the life of Ancient Egypt and the real lives of the people who lived there - Donald P Ryan

Persians: The Age of the Great Kings - Lloyd LLewellyn-Jones

American Prometheus: The Tragedy and Triumph of J Robert Oppenheimer- Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin

Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth - Natalie Haynes

The Splendid and the Vile: Churchill, Family, and Defiance during the bombing of London - Erik Larson

The History of the World: From the Dawn of Humanity to the Modern Age - Frank Welsh

Pagan Britain - Ronald Hutton

Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens - David Mitchell

Burn it Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood - Maureen Ryan

Montaigne: A Very Short Introduction - William H Hamlin

Essays: A Selection - Michel de Montaigne (translated and edited by M.A. Screech)

Hey Honey, I’m Homo: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture - Matt Baume

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent - Judi Dench (with Brendan O’Hea)

What I Ate in One Year (and related thoughts) - Stanley Tucci

What I liked

I enjoyed most of what I read this year, including revisiting some older books with new eyes, finally getting around to some classics from my TBR list (with a few detours), and general mix of history and biography/memoir.

My favourite book of the year, and now up there with my favourite books of all time, is Piranesi, something that has been on the list a while and yet something I have successfully avoided spoilers for. I went in completely blind and so glad I did because the way this story washed over me is one of those very rare things and I loved loved loved reading this book.

I also really enjoyed A Gentleman in Moscow (the tv adaptation was sadly a bit of a disappointment). There’s a fine line between whimsical and twee and while that line likely differs for everyone, for me it successfully kept just on the side of whimsy - or maybe I just love a literary reference and this was full of them. It also inspired me to check out the works of Montaigne which I found interesting in context.

On the non-fiction front, American Prometheus is a good companion to the Oppenheimer film, and Burn it Down was an excellent but rage-inducing peak behind the Hollywood curtain, but The Man Who Pays the Rent was my other favourite read this year. Rather than ghostwritten, this takes the format of question and answer between Judi Dench and actor/director Brendan O’Hea, each chapter focussing on a different Shakespeare play and the characters Dench performed. It’s a beautiful insight into the acting process, theatre history, and Shakespeare’s female characters. Dench is so compelling and charming and the format allows her voice to leap off the page (more memoirs should take this approach tbh). I love Shakespeare but hardly consider myself an expert, so her perspective on the works and the characters was insightful - one of those books you look forward to returning to at the end of the day.

What I didn’t

When I tell people I’m writing a fantasy novel they often ask if I’ve read A Court of Thorns and Roses and I’m kind of sick of seeming uninformed about this faeriecore juggernaut, so finally gave it a go. It’s…not for me, really, despite it being generally keyed into my interests. I just found it…kind of boring? Feyre is dumb as rocks difficult to care about, and Tamlin, despite the cute nod with the name, is stock beast archetype with no other discernible personality.

Most of the book was an absolute slog until it finally got semi-interesting 3/4 in, but we’re stuck in Feyre’s pov and therefore unable to explore anything approaching compelling or nuanced. I’ve been told it actually gets good in the second book (and have been spoiled about the whole Rhysand thing), but I’m not really inspired to give it any more effort.

I also had mixed feelings about Emily Wilde - while of better quality than ACOTAR and I really loved the worldbuilding and some of the fae characters (Poe my beloved!) the central romance fell completely flat for me (maybe I’m just immune to the charms of faerie lords?) and I find the narrative is limited by the epistolary style. However I enjoy the fae plotline enough that I will likely get around to the third book at some stage.

On the point of mixed feelings, it’s interesting how much I enjoy Natalie Haynes’ non-fiction work on Greek myth while finding that her fiction completely misses the mark. Essentially a collection of essays, Divine Might is engaging and thought-provoking on the various depictions of Greek goddesses and their place within the mythos both then and now. On the other side of the coin, Stone Blind is ostensibly Medusa’s story, but mostly told through other perspectives and (much like with her previous effort A Thousand Ships) Haynes is preoccupied with recreating the whole of the myth which ultimately subsumes women, and therefore fails in its premise to showcase the female perspective. It’s just so odd that she can’t bring any of her insights from her compelling analysis to an actual narrative.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQ Nation:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has adopted former President Donald Trump’s platform for the Republican Party. The new platform removes the party’s opposition to same-sex marriage — though conservatives have signaled that they’d like to overturn it — and also "softens" conservative opposition to abortion and in vitro fertilization (IVF), two issues that Republicans worry could hurt them in the November election. The platform’s anti-transgender goals, numbered 16 and 17 among its 20 goals, are stated thus: “Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,” and “Keep men out of women’s sports.” Chapter 9, Section 5 of the platform promises to “end Left-wing gender insanity,” stating, “We will keep men out of women’s sports, ban Taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, and stop Taxpayer-funded Schools from promoting gender transition, reverse Biden’s radical rewrite of Title IX Education Regulations, and restore protections for women and girls.”

[...] The platform also echoes the Republican opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in schools by promising to “expose politicized education models.” The platform also promises to “restore Parental Rights in Education”, a dog whistle for opposition to anti-racist and LGBTQ+-inclusive education. Anti-LGBTQ+ groups like Moms for Liberty and Leave Our Kids Alone have functioned under the banner of “parents’ rights.”

“We trust Parents’ Knowledge and Skills, Not CRT [critical race theory] and Gender Indoctrination,” the platform states. “Republicans will ensure children are taught fundamentals like Reading, History, Science, and Math, not Leftwing propaganda. We will defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children using Federal Taxpayer Dollars.” As for higher education, the platform promises to “fire Radical Left accreditors … restore Due Process protections, and pursue Civil Rights cases against Schools that discriminate.” The line about accreditors may refer to the College Board, an organization that gives high school students a chance to pre-earn college credits through Advanced Placement (AP) tests. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) publicly criticized the board last year and tried to get it to drop AP test questions on racial justice movements and queer theory — he failed. The platform repeatedly mentions that Leftists should be removed from government. It also promises, “Republicans will use existing Federal Law to keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America. Those who join our Country must love our Country. We will use extreme vetting to ensure that jihadists and jihadist sympathizers are not admitted.”

The GOP’s proposed platform contains several anti-trans items, such as keeping trans women out of women’s sports, de facto support for bans on gender-affirming care, support for forced outing policies under the guise of “parental rights”, and pushes the lie that trans people are a “danger” to women and girls.

[queersatanic]

is that post about you wanting to discriminate against immigrants a meme? or????

It sounds like you're referring to this post, which you're right, is pretty jarring without the context of the bitter but serious joke being made there.

In the wake of the psychic trauma of the 2016 election and Hillary Clinton's electoral loss to Donald Trump, a librarian named Kristin Garvey came up with the following sign:

In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter. Women’s rights are human rights. No human is illegal. Science is real. Love is love. Kindness is everything.

Basically saying, "Unlike those people who supported and support Trump, we are reasonable people who have basic human decency and right opinions," and presumably these people vote for the most progressive Democrat they can in every election.

But pretty quickly the sign was mocked and satirized by others, especially on the political Right. On the Left, though, this was often done by noticing how such people tended to also be wealthy white liberals who would suddenly grow very reactionary when an issue moved away from platitudes to something material like greater housing density near them, sending their own children to public schools, or non-carceral government responses to immigrants or visibly homeless people. Even the opening phrase "in this house" tells you that you're talking about a certain kind of person with a certain kind of wealth because to be able to plant a yard sign you both need a yard and have the authority to put something on it, which renters rarely have.

So let's go back to @papasmoke's post, riffing on that:

In this house we believe in Housing de-regulation A strong border wall Discriminatory immigration policies Infinite funding for the police Rhodesia 2's right to rape, murder, and conquer A maximally lethal military Loving who you love ❤️

This is a reference to the current state of the Democratic Party under presidential nominee Kamala Harris, and specifically her speech at the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 22, 2024 (the day before papasmoke's post was made).

Now, we may be differing with @/papasmoke here in that "housing de-regulation" in the sense of ending shit like single-family zoning probably is actually a good thing. But the point we'd agree on is that Democrats aren't talking about using the federal government to step up dense, public housing projects like they did in the mid-20th century. It's just, "We're going to solve the problem!" as an applause line.

On the border, Harris is criticizing Trump for not being as strong on "border security" as she will be.

On police, since 2020, the Biden regime, and surely Harris as well, will continue to push for more federal resources for cops around the country. The spigot will be turned on for the publicly-funded thugs doing the attacks on unhoused people but not so much for the unhoused people.

In regards to "Rhodesia 2", of course we have Harris saying this about Israel:

And let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself — (applause) — and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7 — (applause) — including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.

Not only is there continued material support to proceed continuously bombing Gaza for what will soon be a year, there is not even the rhetorical condemnation of Israel raping, murdering, and starving two million people, all in the name of greater living space and manifest destiny of a brutal apartheid state.

For the USA's own military, Harris says:

As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. 

However, Harris does say that at stake is "the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride," which is one of the main clubs Democrats use to tell queer people in particular that if you aren't OK supporting genocide, cops, and imperialism, then you are not a serious or practical person and you deserve whatever the next Trump regime does to you.

All of this was wildly popular to that room full of people, who also chanted "U-S-A" in response to people trying to just get a Palestinian speaker on stage to have their suffering recognized.

There's an old joke about how if you ask a socialist to describe their problems with capitalism, the socialist tells you a long list of problems with capitalism. But if you ask a capitalist the problems with socialism, they just describe the status quo under capitalism.

U.S. politics is like that with progressive voters in particular. If you were to accurately describe the Biden regime's current immigration/border policy or the enabling of Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing to a liberal in 2017-2020, they would tell you, "That's why the next election is so important to get a Democrat in office."

Then when you look at what Democrats do while in office, yeah, you can argue that it could be worse. But it could be a hell of a lot better, too, and the fundamental problem is there are tens of millions of liberals and partisan Democrats who only seem capable of imagining and working toward a better world when the opposing party is in power. Meanwhile these same people call life under their own rule the best of all possible worlds and see anyone conceiving and working toward something better than that to be actively sabotaging them.

So, that's a much longer explanation than you presumably were asking for, but that's what that post is criticizing specifically and why it's in that format, and it's also why people left of Ronald Reagan are so antagonistic toward partisan Democrats and their political class when we recognize that, yes, Donald Trump and the GOP are horrible and want horrible things for everyone they can put under their power.

[ultraviolet-divergence]

The lawsuit filed on Monday in Polk County District Court asks for unspecified damages under the state's Consumer Fraud Act. It seeks "accountability for brazen election interference committed by" the newspaper and pollster J. Ann Selzer over the poll published Nov. 2

Apparently if your data doesn’t meet the party line, you'll be sued.

[chicinsilk]

US Vogue October 1989

Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel Haute Couture Fall/Winter 1989-90 Collection. Cordula Reyer wears a black wool jacket over a houndstooth wool tweed skirt, which projects a long, slim line. Generous shoulders and sleeves, well-fitted and well-cut torso. The multiple buttons and pockets are Chanel signatures of the season. Gandini wool jacket. Chanel jewelry: Another classic Chanel Teint Pur Oil-Free makeup in ivory. Sunglasses, Ray-Ban Dekko by Bausch & Lomb. Fashion editor: Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, Hair, Donald, makeup Stéphane Marais. Karl Lagerfeld pour Chanel Collection Haute Couture Automne/Hiver 1989-90.

Cordula Reyer porte une veste en laine noire sur une jupe Pied-de-poule en tweed de laine, qui projette une ligne longue et fine. Épaules et manches généreuses, torse bien ajusté et bien coupée. Les multiples boutons et poches sont les signatures Chanel de la saison. Veste en laine Gandini. Bijoux Chanel : Un autre classique du maquillage Teint Pur Oil-Free de Chanel en ivoire. Lunettes de soleil, Ray-Ban Dekko by Bausch & Lomb. Rédactrice mode : Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, Coiffure, Donald, maquillage Stéphane Marais.

Photo Peter Lindbergh vogue archive