#unit members: nominations

[companion-showdown]

Who is the best member of UNIT? Nomination Day

the rules are:

must be a member of UNIT, a precursor to UNIT, or a succesor of UNIT

must be emplyed by the relevant organisation (eg Sarah-Jane doesn't count just because she's around UNIT a lot). Some exceptions may be made if for example the relevant organisation doesn't emply anyone, but the character must be as close to an official member as its possible to be

No nominees that are spoilers for series 14, meaning their working for UNIT must be pre-The Giggle

Please bare in mind when you are nominating that I am hoping to keep the number of nominations under 64 to run this as a mini-tournament. This is not a hard rule so if nominations do exceed 64 its not a big deal, just something I'd like everyone to bare in mind

Nominees

at the moment these are just the ones who'll obviously be nominated, nobody has actually nominated them except, I guess, me

The Brigadier

The Doctor

Sergeant Benton

Mike Yates

Liz Shaw

Jo Grant

Harry Sullivan

Martha Jones

Kate Stewart

Petronella Osgood

Mel Bush

actual nominations

Erisa Magambo

Malcolm Taylor

Abby McPhail

Joel

Anthony Sinclair

Ron Winters

Tony Clare

Other Petronella Osgood, + the other other one to replace the other one (zygon/human)

Jane Fonda!Iris Wildthyme

Captain Scarlet (SPECTRUM)

Captain Black (SPECTRUM)

Kathleen (UNISYC)

Adrienne Kramer

Winifred Bambera

Shirley Anne Bingham

Tom Osgood

Muriel Frost

Hamlet Macbeth

Sam Bishop

Josh Carter

Jacqui McGee

Ross Brimmicombe-Wood

The Vlinx

Corporal Bell

Chris Cwej

Roz Forrester

June Turner

Inspector Drake

Inspector Thorn

CCPC

Emily Chaudry

Robert Dalton

Nominations will be open for at least 24 hours (until 29/05, 20:00 BST (GMT/UTC+1))

[zvaigzdelasas]

An Irish nationalist made history Saturday by becoming Northern Ireland’s first minister as the government returned to work after a two-year boycott by unionists.

Sinn Fein Vice President Michelle O’Neill was named first minister in the government that under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord shares power equally between Northern Ireland’s two main communities — British unionists who want to stay in the U.K., and Irish nationalists who seek to unite with Ireland.[...]

O’Neill, 47, who was born in the Republic of Ireland but raised in the north, comes from a family with links to the militant Irish Republican Army. Her father was imprisoned as an IRA member, an uncle raised money for the group and two of her cousins were shot — one fatally — by security forces.

O’Neill has been criticized for attending events commemorating the IRA and told an interviewer there was “no alternative” to the group’s armed campaign during the Troubles, a period of about 30 years of violent conflict over the future of Northern Ireland, which ended with the Good Friday accords.

3 Feb 24

[charlesoberonn]

Trump doesn't qualify to run for president in 2024 due to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

I think it'd be hilarious if he won the Republican nomination only to be disqualified from running and not appear on the ballot in any state.

[tempting-seduction]

Born on 31 December 1962, Jeffry Lane Flake is an American politician and diplomat who is the United States ambassador to Turkey. A member of the Republican Party, Flake served in the United States House of Representatives from 2001 to 2013 and in the United States Senate from 2013 to 2019, representing Arizona. He was nominated by Democratic president Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate for his ambassador post on October 26, 2021.

[matan4il]

One of the worst justifications for the Hamas massacre that I have seen is the idea that the Palestinians had been suffering for 75 years, and such a long period of suffering is what made them be so brutal towards the civilians in the Jewish state.

This ignores, of course, brutal massacres that happened way before decades had passed since Israel's Independence War (which the Arabs started and lost). One such massacre took place on March 17, 1954. Less than five years after the end of that war. The other day, we commemorated 70 years since it happened. In order to remember, one reporter interviewed a survivor.

The entire piece was too long for Tumblr even after I downgraded the vid quality, so I edited out parts that were less relevant to understanding the massacre, and the story of this one child survivor.

Translator's notes:

-> Chaim'keh is the affectionate diminutive for Chaim, Mira'leh is the same for Miri.

-> In another interview, Miri shared that the reason her dad was taking them to Eilat, was because he wanted them to move to Israel's most southern city, meaning he felt Chana and the kids should see it.

-> This is the Ma'ale Akrabim road, you can see how serpentine it is, and the bus was driving uphill, explaining why it had to slow down so much that it became a perfect target for the terrorists.

-> 'Confirmation of killing' is a military term, referring to any situation where after shots have been fired at someone, the shooter comes closer and shoots (or wounds) again, from a much smaller distance, to make sure the victim is indeed dead, and not just wounded.

-> Chaim was shot in the head point blank, but somehow he technically survived. However, he was left in a coma for the next 32 years, before passing away and becoming the final murdered victim of this massacre.

-> Excluding Chaim, but including Miri, 5 people survived the Ma'ale Akrabim massacre.

-> Ha'Shomer Ha'Tzair (Hebrew for: the young guardian) is the first Zionist youth movement, established in 1913. It's also a socialist one.

-> A chuppah is a canopy under which Jewish couples get married.

-> Sayeret Matkal is an elite Israeli unit, whose most well known operation is the 1976 IDF rescue of Israeli and Jewish hostages (all the non-Jewish hostages were released, other than the French air crew of the hijacked Air France airplane, because the Captain refused to leave the Israeli and Jewish hostages on their own. The kidnappers were 2 German terrorists and 2 Arab ones who were members of a Palestinian terrorist organization. The Israeli and Jewish hostages were held in an airport in Entebbe, capital of Uganda, that the terrorists believed the IDF couldn't reach, since the distance was greater than Israel's airplanes could fly to and back, and passed over enemy territory. Several movies have been made about the operation, including an Israeli one, which was nominated for an Oscar, for best foreign film, in 1977).

-> Z"l is the English transcription of the Hebrew abbreviation ז"ל, which stands for may his/her/their memory be a blessing.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[haunted-headset]

Do you know what annoys the shit out of me? The fact that Dream cannot handle somebody else getting attention.

Quackity's finally creating his own successful SMP & finally pursuing an idea he's had for a while? Dream just has to copy that & create the United SMP.

Wilbur gets to be in a band that's been nominated for an award & he's having the time of his life making music? Dream just has to make music too, even though we all know he never wanted to in the first place.

A couple of his friends are coming out as queer (this one was a while ago)? He just has to post on Twitter saying "Yeah some guys are hot ig" because he needs to put himself in a community we all know he isn't a part of.

It's strategic. He knows that he has a large fanbase, or used to have a large fanbase, that'll mindlessly support him no matter what. & he's so used to having everybody focus on him because he created the Dream SMP, & as soon as the former members of the Dream SMP are doing their own projects or pursuing their own goals or dreams, he just has to steal it from them because he's a narcissistic bitch who can't handle the spotlight being on somebody else for once.

Edit: Forgot to add, but have y'all ever seen the clips of Dream being absolutely fucking disgusting toward Tommy? There's some compilation out there (I forgot the title of the video) that shows how Dream was making sick comments toward Tommy. The majority of the comments were sexual & it's obvious that they made Tommy uncomfortable, & it even got to a point where Wilbur had to step in multiple times & either say "He's 16!" or "That's gross" or "Don't say that, Dream".

[contemplatingoutlander]

This is such an important article, the above link is a gift 🎁 link so that anyone can read the entire article, even if they don't subscribe to The New York Times. Here are some highlights:

Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning. The professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long article to be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review. [...] He summarized the article’s conclusion: “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.” [...] The provision in question is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War, it bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” [...] The article concluded that essentially all of that evidence pointed in the same direction: “toward a broad understanding of what constitutes insurrection and rebellion and a remarkably, almost extraordinarily, broad understanding of what types of conduct constitute engaging in, assisting, or giving aid or comfort to such movements.” It added, “The bottom line is that Donald Trump both ‘engaged in’ ‘insurrection or rebellion’ and gave ‘aid or comfort’ to others engaging in such conduct, within the original meaning of those terms as employed in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.” [...] The provision’s language is automatic, the article said, establishing a qualification for holding office no different in principle from the Constitution’s requirement that only people who are at least 35 years old are eligible to be president. “Section 3’s disqualification rule may and must be followed — applied, honored, obeyed, enforced, carried out — by anyone whose job it is to figure out whether someone is legally qualified to office,” the authors wrote. That includes election administrators, the article said. Professor Calabresi said those administrators must act. “Trump is ineligible to be on the ballot, and each of the 50 state secretaries of state has an obligation to print ballots without his name on them,” he said, adding that they may be sued for refusing to do so. [color/emphasis added]

Let's hope that election administrators across the US read this article and begin to set in motion the mechanism to prevent Donald Trump from appearing on ballots across the U.S., in case he does get the GOP nomination.

[mitigatedchaos]

The Floating Causation of Vulgar Anti-Racism

Post for August 12, 2024 ~7,400 words, 36 minutes

-★-

The late 20th century and the early 21st century were an excellent time for 'catch-up' development in under-developed countries. For example, the GDP per capita of the People's Republic of China rose from $312 in 1980, to $12,720 in 2022, more than a 40x increase. This is despite the People's Republic being nominally communist, 92% Han Chinese, and one of the largest potential geopolitical rivals to the United States. This is not a one-off – exports from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to the United States rose from $50 million in 1994 to $114 billion in 2023.

While the ideologically liberal government of the United States did invade Iraq and Afghanistan, and placed strict limits on Iran, in practical terms, the United States was willing to direct hundreds of billions of dollars of demand, for everything from disposable gloves to rice cookers, to countries that were neither majority white nor, officially, capitalist, which allowed these countries to build up their industrial base.

Inside the United States, as of the early 2020s, Americans of Indian descent, Americans of Asian descent, and a number of other non-white groups are outperforming the median household income of white Americans. It's not uncommon to see an Indian-American as the CEO of a major US corporation, such as Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Google's Sundar Pichai, or IBM's Arvind Krishna. And while Americans of Nigerian descent aren't earning quite as much money as Sundar Pichai, they are doing better than the U.S. national average. [1]

The American economy is willing to award non-white Americans and non-white immigrants with average pay higher than that the average pay for white Americans, and American society is willing to award members of these same groups with highly prestigious positions – Google is one of the most famous American companies, and to be its CEO is highly prestigious indeed.

Why is it that vulgar anti-racists aren't content to leave well enough alone on negative racial messaging, and take advantage of this opportunity to focus on personal development, ingroup development, and national development? Why is it that they have a strange totalitarian bent, such as Ibram Kendi proposing to give veto power over all government policy to a body of unappointed race experts, which would de facto end democracy?

Last month, @max1461 wrote a post, attempting to find a balanced compromise between the social justice movement and its critics in the discourses on racism over the past 10 years. Perhaps this was intended to close the books and allow the participants to move to a saner footing going forward. Subsequently, Max flagged the post as unrebloggable in order to prevent it from being beat up like a piñata. Near the end of the initial chain, Max wrote:

I can’t stress enough that, for all the excesses of DEI seminars and modern anti-racist academia and whatnot, for however unhelpful or even regressive these things may often be, what they exist in response to is fundamentally a horror of an entirely different and incomparable scale; something unspeakably evil and destructive. And, after 200 years of such an evil world order, which only really began to melt in 1945, I think it would be incredibly naive to believe that all the wounds are now healed.

It would seem that for the most part, the wounds that Japan suffered from America in World War II have already healed. The country already went through reindustrialization, followed by a boom period (which startled Westerners), and then a subsequent crash and the 'lost decade' of the 1990s. The Japanese have a favorable view of the United States, as perhaps they should – Japan has prospered in the Post-WW2 international order, in which they can simply purchase whatever materials they need on global markets with no need to invade or occupy anyone.

Yet for others, the past lingers on.

Ibram Kendi is one of the most famous contemporary self-identified anti-racists, a New York Times bestselling author (his most famous book was titled "How to Be an Anti-Racist") who was not only platformed by major corporations such as Microsoft (in 2020, an advertisement on the login screen of Windows 10 computers linked to a search for "anti-racism books," with his at the top), but even received funding for his own anti-racism center (now under attack for its ineffectiveness).

At one time, Ibram Kendi thought that white people were aliens. A roommate talked him out of it, asking how it was that white people could have children with everyone else if that were the case. To his credit, Kendi did change his mind.

...but how could anyone have come up with Kendi's conclusion in the first place?

In school in the United States, children are taught that the Spanish conquered the Aztecs. It is true that Spanish military forces brought about the downfall of the Aztec Empire, but often people forget the details of what they learned in school, and often what they learn in school is itself a simplified story, designed to be told to children. Encyclopedia Britannica's summary of the Battle of Tenochtitlan largely agrees with the gist of Wikipedia's more detailed article on the Fall of Tenochtitlan, which is littered with instances of "[citation needed]."

Wikipedia, however, provides more numbers. In particular, Wikipedia's version provides one of the Internet's favorite parts of wiki battle articles, a listing of the balance of opposed forces (with citations):

There is a racist narrative of the conquest of the Americas in which the brave Spanish explorers overcame the savage, human-sacrificing hordes of the Aztecs. There is an inverted, anti-racist narrative of the conquest of the Americas in which the powerful, cruel Spanish showed up to oppress the weak, innocent Aztecs.

And then there is a third narrative - a narrative that politics happened. A number of tributary states had grievances with the Aztecs, and the small number of Spanish probably didn't seem like enough to conquer the whole territory from the perspective of the tributaries, but did seem powerful enough to rally around to fight the Aztecs and win.

Nobody comes out looking good in this third narrative. The Spanish brought about a brutal war with tens of thousands of casualties, and devastating disease followed their arrival. The Aztecs and tributaries combined failed to overcome a foreign invasion due to (relative to the foreigners being from another continent) local infighting. The Aztecs were awful enough that a number of tributaries sided with an army of foreigners against them.

Now, suppose that we delete the 200,000 native allies from the balance of forces above, but still record a victory for the Spanish. The effect of the native allies remains, but the cause of that effect disappears. This creates an effect without a cause – unattributed causation, which is disconnected from what came before, or what we might call, "floating causation."

Some might call overcoming a force of 80,000 with only 1,000 or so men a miracle. For those not so inclined, the 'floating' causation gets attributed to the Spanish soldiers – their equipment, their valor, their tactics, and their discipline. Each of a thousand Spanish infantrymen is now somehow worth 200 native warriors.

In this cartoon version of history, the Spanish are an unstoppable psychic warrior race. Their steadfast will in the face of danger and their unit cohesion are quite nearly inhuman, and their technological advantage is overwhelming. The natives have not merely made a political miscalculation similar to others of the pre-modern era, such as the decisions of states facing Genghis Khan, but are buffoons to the slaughter, incapable of putting up any real defense.

In this cartoon, the Spanish can go anywhere. They can do anything. And because of this, they are the only people with agency in the whole world.

They sound... like aliens.

Trying to rebalance this cartoon only leads to greater absurdities, such as the idea that only Europeans ever meaningfully engaged in conquest (contradicted by Genghis Khan), or that industrial technology and its resulting pollution are "European" in nature (China has been quite aggressive about industrializing), or that only "European" countries waged modern and industrialized wars of conquest (the Empire of Japan used guns, bombs, and tanks as part of its project to create the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere).

All three of the above counter-examples are from Asia, which is usually conspicuously absent from self-identified anti-racist thinking, but none of them are obscure.

-★-

It is my belief that floating causation is a source of distortions across the ideological spectrum.

Ideology is not independent from human beings. Manifestos, one might say, do not print themselves. From the other direction, it is not a piece of paper which murders somebody – it is a human being who pulls the trigger.

There is ideology, which is a system of related rules and beliefs, and there are adherents who adopt ideology, spread beliefs, and put ideological rules into practice.

An ideology can contain taboos which prohibit noticing or explaining the true cause of some outcome, separating the cause from its effect. Practitioners can then attribute that effect to a preferred ideological construct instead, making it seem much more powerful, and often dangerous, than it really is.

The Elephants

Imagine (as this example is entirely made-up) that there is some village in which elephants are considered sacred, but the elephants in the area have a habit of trampling crops in the night. To avoid loss of face, the damage to crops is attributed to "bandits" by an initial group of elders. The young children who do not know better are then taught this explanation. Later, after the death of the elders, the initial truth is lost. Anyone claiming to have seen elephants trampling the fields is denounced as choosing the vile bandits over the virtuous elephants. An outsider who did not realize what was happening might be quite impressed to hear that a bandit in the region ruined a dozen fields in a single night, and assume that the bandit has tremendous physical stamina.

But floating causation is not necessarily the result of an ideological taboo. Someone may be ignorant about the cause of an effect, unable to understand the process by which an effect came about, have powerful emotions about the topic which they are unwilling to confront or may not even be aware of, or may simply have poor judgment. An adherent may be drawn to an ideology for these reasons.

Continuing with our example, a fresh-off-the-boat colonial administrator arriving at the village might be unaware that elephants exist, or trample crops, and conclude that there were ongoing feuds driven by animosity among the villagers, with bandits as the cover-story. Alternatively, the new colonial administrator might love the elephants and hate the villagers, and be unwilling to consider the possibility that the elephants are trampling the crops, including cooking up rather elaborate rationalizations.

Ideology

Issues with not understanding a process are more likely to come up with things like economics – occasionally a worker will post a video to social media complaining that he is not paid the full value of the items he sells or creates, ignoring all the money that went into the construction of the facility, the work from other workers putting together the input materials, and so on.

Liberals in the late 00s and early 2010s had an interest in memetics, which concerns the replication and spread of ideas. (This field is where the term "Internet meme" comes from.) Then, as now, they had a tendency to treat people as too similar to each other, and some of them leaned towards the idea that any person could hold any ideology. Ideologies do (in my judgment) influence behavior – there are far fewer monarchists around these days, and far fewer monarchs with real power, for example – but how a set of beliefs is expressed depend on the emotions, motives, and temperament of the person who holds those beliefs.

So do people choose ideologies, or do ideologies choose people?

One way to view this matter is as a cycle. Someone's social environment is partly a matter of choice, and partly a matter of circumstance. The ideologies that show up in someone's environment are generally going to be ones that spread (as ideologies that don't attract new adherents will die out), but which ideology someone actually chooses and how they practice it will be influenced by what type of person they are.

Another way to view this matter is that emotions, motives, temperament, and beliefs are all things that make certain actions or thoughts either easier (and cheaper) or more difficult (and more expensive). A drug addict who believes in hard work and free market capitalism, but finds himself stealing to feed his habit, may find that the influence of his beliefs is not enough to overcome his addiction. (He is likely to feel miserable.) However, when a religious person is choosing what time of day, or day of the week, to worship, the explicit belief of their religion is likely to have a great deal of influence.

Yet another way to view this matter is to treat things like social relations, ideology, and temperament as interacting layers, and then propose that politics spans multiple layers.

Human Talent

I don't believe that all human beings are equally talented, and I don't believe that they all have identical temperaments. Therefore, one of my beliefs is what might be called the "human capital theory of movements." Ideologies consist of networks of related beliefs which can be used to interpret the world, to guide behavior, or to create arguments. But ideologies do not create beliefs or arguments themselves. Humans do.

When a movement has a lot of talented, virtuous people working for it, these people can create new arguments in order to win debates, and change parts of the ideology, the network of beliefs, to adapt the network to changes in conditions. Without talented people, the ideology of a movement will drift farther from environmental conditions, causing its responses to become more misaligned with conditions on the ground.

Talented people are also needed for the implementation of an ideology. An ideological book is just an inert text. No matter how complex it may be, it is fundamentally limited in its complexity. Applying that text in the environment, bridging the gap between what the text says and what that means in the reality of a specific situation, requires both intelligence and good judgment. Not every person is equally talented, and not every person is equally informed. If someone more talented and with better judgment is around, they can read the situation and come up with some simpler rules or orders for others to follow.

The less talented the adherents of a movement are, the lower the ability of the movement to adapt to conditions over both the short-term and the long-term.

A shift in the distribution of talent can precede other forms of political change. Ideologues may smile as the most disagreeable members are driven out of their movement, but at the same time, the lack of criticism will reduce the movement's ability to respond to change.

There are trade-offs. The use of floating causation may make an ideology less aligned with reality, but it may also be useful for the movement to stoke the emotions of their followers in order to drive action. (This emotional motivation bit is why every election in the United States is "the most important in your lifetime.")

-★-

Beliefs are not intelligence. Nonetheless, a person with a belief may act as though they are smarter (or even wiser) than they actually are. This is just the nature of knowledge (as cached intelligence, wisdom, and observation).

I developed the talent theory in the prior section by observing opposition to racism in the United States prior to 2014. In the United States between 2000 and 2014, there was substantial support for individualist "colorblindness," while at the same time, there was immense social pressure against overt white racial organizing.

Racial organizing takes time and effort. Because white Americans were not subject to racial discrimination, they could simply go out into the market and earn what their work was worth. For talented white Americans, the gains from white racial organizing would be marginal, so the penalties could easily overcome those gains. The less talented would have the most to gain due to the ability to reduce the amount of economic competition they would be up against, but they were also less able to organize. [2]

There was somewhere famous for white racial organizing in the US during this era: prisons.

Racial prison gangs have been particularly noted in the California prison system. Prison gangs offer inmates a credible threat of retaliation if the inmate is harmed, so every inmate has an incentive to join one, and the bigger the gang the better that threat of retaliation is, so every gang has an incentive to recruit. If you're a gang member and a new guy comes in and starts causing trouble, and you don't want to escalate (and thus risk extra charges for your guys or reduced privileges), what are you to do? You would prefer to negotiate with someone that has leverage on him. Race is very visible, even if inmates move around between prisons, so if all inmates get sorted into gangs by race, then someone is responsible for this guy, and by talking to the right people, you can make sure he knows it. (If the troublemaker still doesn't respond, and his own gang cut him loose, then you can punish him without fear of retaliation from other inmates.)

Different incentives produce different results.

Four Options

Glenn Loury is a black man, and an economist at Brown University. He views himself as an American and therefore an inheritor of human rights philosophy of the American founders and their English forebears. He has his own show on YouTube in which he regularly discusses matters with John McWhorter, another black man, who is a linguistics professor at Columbia University. (John strikes me as more liberal, and I heard that he was frightened of Donald Trump, a sentiment shared by many white American culturally liberal Democrats.) Both of these men are quite smart, and if you watch the show, you'll see them easily consider arguments from various perspectives and toss hypotheticals back and forth.

Neither of these men are vulgar anti-racists.

Roland Fryer is a black man, and is an economist at Harvard (although he was suspended for 2 years) who I have discussed previously. He thinks like an economist, and has conducted studies such as paying children to read books. In previous appearances, it seemed that he believes that education gaps can be closed through extremely rigorous selection of teachers and other methods.

Mr. Fryer does not appear to be a vulgar anti-racist.

These men are all relatively prominent voices. If you go looking for the sort of content they produce, they aren't that hard to find. And they're all smart. They might have disagreements with each other and with some of my readers, but smart people can disagree.

However, during the 2014-2022 era, when it was decided to push a black academic to prominence, political forces settled on Ibram Kendi instead. There must have been dozens of other candidates.

When I think about why that happened, I suspect that the answer is that while the first three men care about the interests of black Americans, all three of them are willing to say, "No." Although I doubt they would phrase it in exactly these terms, I suspect that all three understand human rights as rooted in high-order consequences, limits on information, and human bias.

If you proposed to John McWhorter that we should give veto power to a committee of unelected race experts, he would immediately recognize the problem with just that.

Why Vulgar Anti-Racism?

With all of that said, I believe we can think about vulgar anti-racism by means of comparison.

a. Economics

Loury and Fryer are both economists. They know about gains from trade, prices as a distributed form of economic planning, property rights as enabling investment, specialization of labor, economies of scale, and dozens of other things. They understand where wealth comes from.

The typical vulgar anti-racist that you will encounter on an Internet discussion board has little knowledge of economics, and tends to think of total production as fixed. From their perspective, if someone has more resources than another person, it has nothing to do with production, and is purely the result of hoarding.

The typical vulgar anti-racist also doesn't think in terms of entropy, the tendency of things to break down over time. They tend not to discount temporally-distant advantages. (If a well was built 400 years ago, they treat that advantage as retained today.) They tend to think of capital as fixed and not as something that is constantly being rebuilt and adjusted. They don't understand that the ability to create new capital is generally more important than the initial capital in the long-run.

Thinking about production is probably why we see Fryer focused on educational gains. His theory is likely that if the children have a good base of education, they'll be able to produce more, avoid losses, overcome entropy, and net accumulate wealth. If they don't have a good base of education, then they'll be less productive, and entropy will eat a higher percentage of their earnings, leading to reduced wealth.

If someone doesn't know economics, then the wealth of developed countries is "unexplained," and so are the motives of many people within developed countries.

b. History

I don't know about Fryer specifically, but Loury and McWhorter seem to have a good grasp of history.

A solid understanding of history leads to seeing actions as emerging from their historical contexts. This places a limit on the range of expected behavior.

For example, for most of history up until about the 1900s, the child mortality rate was about 50%. That example is relevant for feminism, as under such brutal conditions, we would expect any society that didn't push for women to have at least 4 children to die out. Gender-based oppression didn't occur for no reason, or because of pure male greed, but was influenced by material circumstances.

If we run this understanding backwards, it follows that 1700s or earlier gender norms would be unlikely to return without 1700s or earlier child mortality rates.

Likewise, some basic historical knowledge would reveal that wars of conquest have happened pretty much everywhere, so it's quite unlikely that Europeans are uniquely conquerors. You end up having to declare everything from feuding Chinese kingdoms, to the Māori, to chimpanzees, be "European" in order to fit the model.

The typical vulgar anti-racist's position is, implicitly, "Everyone lived together in peace and harmony, until one day, for no reason at all, the Europeans became possessed by the spirit of greed, and attacked."

If someone somehow doesn't know that war existed outside of Europe prior to 1492, then the wars of colonialism are "unexplained," and so are the motives of the people who fought them.

When vulgar anti-racists do research history, they generally focus on collecting racial grievances in order to build up a case that the group they favor are poor, oppressed, not responsible for anything bad their group has ever done, and are owed indefinite benefits for incalculable harms. They don't proceed from the idea of, "How does this work?" They don't, say, look at the tremendous economic success of South Korea, and ask, "Based on how South Korea obtained their wealth, how can our group achieve such riches?" (They don't even look at South Korea's birthrate and ask how they can avoid such a fate!)

Even before World War 2, Japan did look afar to ask how they could become rich. That kind of mentality is part of how they were able to become a developed country (who could threaten other people with tanks) in the first place.

Looking to Asia is useful for people making comparisons to figure out how things work, but is not useful for collecting racial grievances in order to build up racial claims to make demands. That's why vulgar anti-racists often don't know basic facts about Asian history, like that state testing to determine government positions was practiced in ancient China. [3]

c. Racial Attachment

Even during the individualist colorblindness of 2000-2014, there were still white Americans with some talent engaged in racial organizing. In general, these were people to whom race was very important, and thus who were out-of-step with the mainstream of white America.

It's my opinion that there is a natural range of tribalism among human beings. Sometimes, the rival tribe on the other side of the mountain just want to trade. Other times, they really are out to kill you. The trait doesn't disappear, because wars still happen, and even if they didn't happen, someone could just reinvent war and start it all back up again.

In my view, this tribalism trait isn't attached to race specifically. It can attach to religion. It can attach to sex. Some of the rhetoric from radical feminists sounds the same as rhetoric from hardcore ethnic nationalists – or at least it would, if we treated men as an ethnicity. In our modern environment in which race is highly legible due to intercontinental travel, for a lot of people, it gets attached to race.

Rather than assigning people a single number on a scale from "moral" to "immoral," it's probably better to think of people as having virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses.

Some level of racial attachment itself is not inherently evil. Based on his research topics, for example, Roland Fryer seems interested in bringing about the success of people with a similar background to himself. His virtue (his interest in truth) and his strength (his intelligence) convert that attachment into something that's beneficial to society.

High levels of racial attachment fly much closer to the wire. A highly racially attached individual might do good work in other domains, but there's a risk that they'll end up routing too much of their sense of self-worth through their race, and become obsessed with guarding their race's self-perceived reputation. For such a person, any information deemed unflattering to the group may be interpreted as an attack on himself (or herself).

The Mayo Clinic (a network of hospitals in the United States) describes narcissism as:

Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. They need and seek too much attention and want people to admire them. People with this disorder may lack the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others. But behind this mask of extreme confidence, they are not sure of their self-worth and are easily upset by the slightest criticism.

A number of users on Twitter (now known as X.com) began using the term "ethnic narcissism" to describe this sort of disordered thinking when done on behalf of a racial or ethnic group rather than oneself specifically.

2019 and 2020 were banner years for platforming this sort of behavior, with the nation's leading newspaper arguing, in its own words, that we should make the suffering of a particular racial group the core narrative of American history, that everyone should define their identities around:

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

Obsession with self-perceived ethnic reputation is part of what leads to the "rebalancing the cartoon" behavior I discussed earlier:

Trying to rebalance this cartoon only leads to greater absurdities, such as the idea that only Europeans ever meaningfully engaged in conquest (contradicted by Genghis Khan), or that industrial technology and its resulting pollution are "European" in nature (China has been quite aggressive about industrializing), or that only "European" countries waged modern and industrialized wars of conquest (the Empire of Japan used guns, bombs, and tanks as part of its project to create the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere).

How does someone end up so ignorant that they don't know that Genghis Khan existed? By being the kind of person that doesn't want to know that Genghis Khan existed. They don't look it up. If you tell them, they either forget or they take a conflict theorist approach and think that it's some sort of trick.

Unfortunately, while a fairly accurate description of the behavior at issue, the term "ethnic narcissism" can also be used as an attack by ethnic narcissists themselves, as well as people engaged in ethnic conflict. This makes it of limited utility in practice.

The Mysterious Anglo

Option #1: In general, the right wing would consider the vulgar anti-racists to be liars working to selfishly advance their own personal interests and those of their preferred groups. Left-wingers would tend to take a negative view of this, as they believe that right-wingers are unjustly dismissive in order to 'protect the unearned and unquestioned advantages of the privileged.'

In this version, vulgar anti-racists won't drop the issue and hit the GDP gym because they're bullies who think the particular groups they dislike are easy targets. The appropriate response is to become a harder target by systematically defunding any institution that supports them, putting them on the same footing as conventional racial supremacists in the US.

I tend to agree that many of the vulgar anti-racists are just being selfish. There is a question of just how consciously aware of it they are, however.

Option #2: A left-wing view would be that the vulgar anti-racists are "good people, just a bit misguided." Right-wingers tend to take a negative view of this, because if a right-winger published a book titled "Black Fragility" that was as circular in its reasoning as the "White Fragility" of Robin DiAngelo appeared to be, he would be hounded as a racist.

In this version, vulgar anti-racists just need patient guidance to put their empathy back on the right track.

I tend to believe that a good chunk of the vulgar anti-racists are just low-tier progressives who get their opinions socially. If the social consensus changes among progressives, they'll forget ever fretting about "microaggressions." Arguing with them individually mostly won't work, though, because it doesn't override their social consensus, and it won't make them think harder about the issues.

Many left-wingers would disagree with me on this assessment.

Option #3: A more centrist view would be that vulgar anti-racists are a mix of people with excessively high racial attachment, enthusiastic people who are underinformed, and people who serve their niche of the information and political economy, and that this isn't that different from the lower quality wings of other left and right political movements (look how bad "degrowth" is, for example), except that race feels much more core to people's identities (it's certainly not easy to change one's race), so it evokes more powerful emotions. A centrist would likely say that there are more academically and philosophically serious opponents of racism out there, but because the things they say are more serious, they're less controversial, so they get less coverage. ("You wouldn't expect a textbook in the Sunday paper.")

A person with this perspective would say that the appropriate course of action is mostly just to wait for it to blow over.

I would disagree. If vulgar anti-racism is taught in schools for a generation, it would create an expectation that racial blame is the default course of action. This would create a situation which is much more favorable for racial conflict, so it should be shut down now to prevent that from happening.

However, I feel that this does not adequately explain the totalitarian bent. What about other values society might have? What about trade-offs? [4] I would like to throw a fourth possibility into the ring.

Option #4: Life inside the vulgar anti-racist worldview is anxiety-inducing and subtly terrifying.

I don't fully endorse this view, because I think that vulgar anti-racism is a coalition of multiple groups (see the previous three options).

However, while I learned from school that racism and ethnic conflict are extremely dangerous in general (e.g. they can boil over and result in mass murder), the susceptibility of vulgar anti-racists to, "It's impossible to be racist to white people," which is very obviously racist, strongly implies that what they learned was, "Jews good; Germans bad" – basically just a list of which groups are acceptable, and which groups aren't. [5]

I reverse-engineered a sophisticated moral worldview, and when I was young, I assumed that everyone else had done so, too. And for a little while, society approximated that view closely enough for that misconception to kind-of work.

I think that a significant number of people in the vulgar anti-racist coalition don't understand white people.

In terms of anxiety, a number of them seem to think that Europeans and their descendants think about race as much as the vulgar anti-racists do – that they are silently passing judgment, or saying nasty things when others are not listening.

I've been around middle-class and above white Americans my entire life. I've seen some kids make stupid racist jokes, and I can imagine bullying targeting race if it looks like an axis of vulnerability, but in general, among themselves, they don't talk about race much at all.

A skeptic reading this may say that that's just anecdotal. However, according to surveys, "white conservatives" have about the same "racial/ethnic" "ingroup favorability" as either "hispanic moderates" or "asians." "White liberals" were the only group on the chart to have a "pro-outgroup bias."

If we interpret these ingroup favorability measures as racism (which is a stretch, because a favorability measure is not itself a discriminatory policy), then white conservatives have a "normal" (as in typical of most groups) amount of racism. White liberals (probably in the sense that the label "liberal" is used for the entire left in the US) are the only ones who loop around into what might be called "anti-racism." (Razib Khan has his doubts about the stability of this arrangement of anti-racism as opposed to non-racism.)

A vulgar anti-racist doesn't know this, and doesn't want to know this.

Now, for the "subtly terrifying" part. If someone accepts, for instance, that the British were sincere in sending warships to intercept slave traders, then there are all sorts of explanations that they can come up with for that behavior, such as it being a natural result of industrialization, or maybe a result of rising literacy, or motivated by Christianity in combination with previous political developments in England, and so on.

From Wikipedia, here's a map of the British Empire, a map of the Spanish Empire, and a map of the Portuguese Empire. While from the perspective of Europeans at the time, the European states were in competition with each other, if taken together as a group, they were closer to achieving true world conquest than anyone else in history. (Sure, the Mongol Empire was huge, but they didn't make it over to the Americas.)

If someone believes that the Europeans turned off the slave trade for some sincere or enduring reason, then the 1700s are unlikely to come back. If someone believes that the Europeans turned off the 1700s for no reason, or for a secret reason, then one day, they could just... turn the 1700s back on.

And maybe that thought isn't entirely conscious. Maybe it just sits quietly, at the back of the mind.

And they get stuck, much like people who are still focused on "overpopulation" as birthrates plummet in industrialized countries throughout the world.

-★-

Whether they consciously intend to or not, vulgar anti-racists leverage social taboos to make it difficult to argue for one group's innocence without making another, generally more vulnerable, group, look worse. People don't want to be mean and say mean things about a vulnerable group. Vulgar anti-racists exploit this. (This kind of behavior is immoral, but I'm not sure how much vulgar anti-racists consciously understand that.)

Online Tactics

I've developed tactics to argue with them in online space, but I haven't tried them out in in-person institutional spaces where they have institutional influence (power).

In general, you cannot argue with vulgar anti-racists grievance-for-grievance. Building up an ammunition depot of racial or ethnic grievances on behalf of "overperforming" groups won't work – vulgar anti-racists will dismiss you as irrationally motivated by racial hatred and dismiss your entire collection, and normal people will also think it's weird (even though they still don't think many racial or ethnic minorities collecting grievances is weird). [6]

A better approach is to pick one or two grievances to shut down the idea that the group you're defending are "invulnerable." Morally, you shouldn't have to point to, say, children or minors being mass victimized, because it should be obvious that people of any race can be victimized. But that's just the world we live in.

Collect examples of institutional policy, such as by governments, corporations, or universities, that is racially discriminatory against the group you're defending, in order to show that the intent of vulgar anti-racists is racial discrimination. Use center-left, mainstream sources to prevent dismissals. The goal is not to show major harms; most Democrats who are not social justice critical will initially attempt to deny that racial discrimination is a goal of vulgar anti-racism.

(If necessary, it can be emphasized that not wanting to be racially discriminated against is a normal thing to want.)

Vulgar anti-racists will try to shut you down by reciting their list of grievances. Memorizing racial grievances is something that they are strong at. Redirect the conversation to where they are weak: demand that they show whatever policy it is that they want will actually improve things and permanently close racial outcome gaps.

If you find someone who has memorized a list of successful academic or nutrition interventions, you've likely found a philosophical liberal. In my experience, almost no vulgar anti-racist has any even modestly-successful intervention memorized. If they propose an intervention, demand evidence that it will work.

It's possible that they could propose something scientific, but science is undergoing a replication crisis, and 'race scholars' have come under fire for scientific misconduct. If a vulgar anti-racist does come up with something, the next step is to get a binding commitment to close the racial claims against their target group.

If their political leaders will not agree, in writing, with binding mechanisms (and punishments with teeth if they don't follow through), to close out the racial claims against their target groups, conditional on some social intervention going into effect, then they don't believe that the intervention will work.

A working intervention is win-win. Outcomes improve, and the odds of conflict (over this particular issue) decrease.

IRL Tactics

X user CantonaCorona must live somewhere very different from me, because I never hear vulgar anti-racism from people in real life. His advice?

100%. I can’t even tell you the number of times I’ve been in a friendly/polite mutual friend gathering, and someone who knows 10% of the room will add “gawd, white people, gross” etc.

The issue is they are also the person lacking social skills to see the room gets uncomfortable

In 2023ish I started responding by asking them very honest seeming questions and leading them into saying really crazy stuff.

Takes a lot of finesse to not sound like a schizo, but if you can pretend to be genuinely curious it works wonders and someone else will call them out

It does, indeed, take a lot of finesse, even online. Because vulgar anti-racists are exploiting taboos, they have a huge terrain advantage in most encounters due to normal people not wanting to touch reputationally-damaging information. Successfully navigating the situation without sounding "schizo," and without sounding cruel, is difficult.

The advantage of the tactics discussed above are that you don't have to attack the reputation of the vulnerable group that vulgar anti-racists are using to justify their own bad behavior. It isn't surprising that, like a successful hostage rescue, it requires being more careful than the hostage-takers.

"Corrective" racial discrimination that does not permanently close racial outcome gaps is not actually a correction, it's just extra harm for no reason, and the motives of people who support it are suspect.

Demobilization

While the online tactics I've discussed above are reasonably effective for an online debate or argument format (and vulgar anti-racists are increasingly retreating to protected contexts where they don't have to engage in open debate), the long-term goal needs to be demobilization. Ethnic conflict interferes with stability and good government.

There are some supporters that don't recognize the logical errors in their positioning, but they can sense, "Wait, this guy isn't like the others," and flee rather than risk being split off from the social approval of their group.

I propose the fear theory for the potential to develop new angles. If the real motivation is fear, then addressing most of the intermediate arguments won't work, as the intermediate arguments are just products of the fear.

Reportedly, black musician Daryl Davis demobilized many Klansmen just by befriending them. [7] I suspect that most vulgar anti-racists already know a number of white people personally, so that tactic probably won't work here.

I have not conducted field experiments (either online or offline) on using the fear theory during encounters, so I can't provide solid information on its tactical use, yet.

-★★★-

[1] Stylistically, I have chosen to capitalize nationality while not capitalizing racial groups. On a quick reading, the tables provided by Wikipedia don't appear to disaggregate between first-generation immigrants, who have foreign nationality of origin and American citizenship, and second-generation immigrants who only have American nationality. All three CEOs listed were born in India.

[2] The ability to buy off competing talent is one of the reasons for the endurance of capitalism. Capitalist systems tend to be extremely productive. They can offer wages from increased productivity that are higher than the wages that other systems offer from rents.

[3] This is one of the reasons I got into writing about politics. It became common to find people whose professed opinions implied they'd never even heard of Genghis Khan, and at that point, I figured the bar was set pretty low.

[4] Positions on migration appear related, but I'll touch on that in another essay.

[5] One reason it wasn't obvious that people were just making an acceptable targets list at the time was that quite a few people from all over the world have a tendency to get wacky about Jewish people specifically, so putting antisemitism off-limits looked like it was backed by more sophisticated reasoning than it actually was. Obviously, people shouldn't hate Jewish people. The problem with the acceptable targets list approach is that it's fragile – since the list is based on social approval rather than deeper philosophical principles, it can end up being "readjusted" later.

[6] I also suspect that continuing to constantly expose yourself to the worst behavior of other groups may be corrosive. Watching a video where a man is shot on some other street, in some other city, may give you a jolt of adrenaline while you sit helplessly in your chair. Reading about atrocities may make you feel helpless and doomed.

[7] This behavior is morally praiseworthy, not morally obligatory.

[rjzimmerman]

Opinion |Joe Biden: My plan to reform the Supreme Court and ensure no president is above the law. (Washington Post)

This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one.

But the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on July 1 to grant presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office means there are virtually no limits on what a president can do. The only limits will be those that are self-imposed by the person occupying the Oval Office.

If a future president incites a violent mob to storm the Capitol and stop the peaceful transfer of power — like we saw on Jan. 6, 2021 — there may be no legal consequences.

And that’s only the beginning.

On top of dangerous and extreme decisions that overturn settled legal precedents — including Roe v. Wade — the court is mired in a crisis of ethics. Scandals involving several justices have caused the public to question the court’s fairness and independence, which are essential to faithfully carrying out its mission of equal justice under the law. For example, undisclosed gifts to justices from individuals with interests in cases before the court, as well as conflicts of interest connected with Jan. 6 insurrectionists, raise legitimate questions about the court’s impartiality.

I served as a U.S. senator for 36 years, including as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. I have overseen more Supreme Court nominations as senator, vice president and president than anyone living today. I have great respect for our institutions and the separation of powers.

What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.

That’s why — in the face of increasing threats to America’s democratic institutions — I am calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy.

First, I am calling for a constitutional amendment called the No One Is Above the Law Amendment. It would make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office. I share our Founders’ belief that the president’s power is limited, not absolute. We are a nation of laws — not of kings or dictators.

Second, we have had term limits for presidents for nearly 75 years. We should have the same for Supreme Court justices. The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court. Term limits would help ensure that the court’s membership changes with some regularity. That would make timing for court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary. It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come. I support a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court.

Third, I’m calling for a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court. This is common sense. The court’s current voluntary ethics code is weak and self-enforced. Justices should be required to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest. Every other federal judge is bound by an enforceable code of conduct, and there is no reason for the Supreme Court to be exempt.

All three of these reforms are supported by a majority of Americans— as well as conservative and liberal constitutional scholars. And I want to thank the bipartisan Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States for its insightful analysis, which informed some of these proposals.

We can and must prevent the abuse of presidential power. We can and must restore the public’s faith in the Supreme Court. We can and must strengthen the guardrails of democracy.

In America, no one is above the law. In America, the people rule.

[nctxlight]

˖ ࣪ . 🌱 ࿐ ♡ ˚ .  NCT XLIGHT, pronounced as NCT BLACKLIGHT, is a seven-member fictional unit of NCT. They debuted on March 23rd, 2018 under SM ENTERTAINMENT as the fourth and only female sub-unit of the unlimited member concept group NCT. Multiple members debuted within separate units under NCT before making their debut in XLIGHT during the group's NCT 2018 EMPATHY era. 

The individual members of the group faced heavy amounts of backlash when they made their original debuts in NCT, but when the first all female unit was announced in 2018, both fans and the general public were excited for the debut. Due to XLIGHT debuting during NCT 2018, they didn't see too much success with their debut song 'P!NK' despite the song being well enjoyed by the public. The girls began to gain notable traction when they had their first comeback in 2018 and became considered a monster rookie group after being nominated for multiple Rookie of the Year awards.

In the early months of 2019, SM confirmed that XLIGHT's lineup will be expanding with new members throughout the years. Since the group's debut in 2018, they have gained only three members and there are no foreseeable plans to add any more members.

Over the years, XLIGHT has been known to have their own distinct music style that sits somewhere between the style of 127 and Dream. They have been praised for having such diverse concepts each comeback but still managing to keep their unique but recognizable sound. XLIGHT is considered the most popular NCT unit in the eyes of the general public but according to the fans, the girls are the third most popular unit.

˖ ࣪ ˚ . GROUP NAME ⇁ NCT XLIGHT

˖ ࣪ ˚ . MEMBER NICKNAME ⇁ The Neos

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FANDOM NAME ⇁ NCTzens / Lightzens

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FANDOM COLORS ⇁ #bbf604 #df0095

˖ ࣪ ˚ . COMPANY ⇁ SM Entertainment 

˖ ࣪ ˚ . DEBUT DATE ⇁ March 23rd, 2018

˖ ࣪ ˚ . DEBUT SONG ⇁ P!NK

˖ ࣪ ˚ . GREETING ⇁ "To the world, this is NCT! Hello, we are NCT XLIGHT!"

˖ ࣪ . 🌱 ࿐ ♡ ˚ . MEET THE NEOS!

˖ ࣪ . 🍒 ࿐ ♡ ˚ .  HEO DURI professionally known as DEDE was born in 1996 in Daegu, South Korea. She is the oldest of the group and was placed into the lineup in late 2019 after previously debuting in 127 with Regular. She made her debut in U during NCT 2020 with the release of from home. DEDE was introduced as a SM Rookie on July 17th, 2014 alongside Haechan. She was given the title of Mom of NCT by both the girls and boys due to her very motherly personality and for being the oldest female member.

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FULL NAME ⇁ Heo Duri

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHDAY ⇁ May 17th, 1996

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHPLACE ⇁ Daegu, South Korea

˖ ࣪ ˚ . POSITION ⇁ Main Vocalist, Lead Dancer, Visual

˖ ࣪ ˚ . UNITS⇁ XLIGHT, 127, U

˖ ࣪ ˚ . HEIGHT ⇁ 163cm

˖ ࣪ ˚ . ETHNICITY ⇁ Korean

˖ ࣪ ˚ . NATIONALITY ⇁ Korean

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FACECLAIM ⇁ Im Nayeon

˖ ࣪ . 🦋 ࿐ ♡ ˚ .  YOSHIDA HANABI professionally known as NABI was born in 1997 in Yokohama, Japan. She is an original member of XLIGHT but didn't make her debut in NCT until the NCT 2018 Empathy era, when she debuted in U with boss. NABI was introduced as a SM Rookie on July 9th, 2015 alongside Koeun, Hina, and Herin. She was the 2nd Japanese member to debut and is highly popular over in Japan.

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FULL NAME ⇁ Yoshida Hanabi

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHDAY ⇁ April 5th, 1997

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHPLACE ⇁ Yokohama, Japan

˖ ࣪ ˚ . POSITION ⇁ Main Dancer, Lead Vocalist

˖ ࣪ ˚ . UNITS⇁ XLIGHT, U

˖ ࣪ ˚ . HEIGHT ⇁ 166cm

˖ ࣪ ˚ . ETHNICITY ⇁ Japanese

˖ ࣪ ˚ . NATIONALITY ⇁ Japanese

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FACECLAIM ⇁ Hirai Momo

˖ ࣪ . 🌤️ ࿐ ♡ ˚ .  BYUN NOEUL professionally known as NOEUL was born in 1998 in Incheon, South Korea. She was the first female member to debut in NCT, turning the group into a coed group with her debut in U with the release of without u. She then made her debut in 127 with firetruck, and then became an original member of XLIGHT. NOEUL was introduced as a SM Rookie on December 9th, 2013 alongside Irene, Jaehyun, and Lami. She was given the position of leader due to her training the longest and being the group's founding member.

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FULL NAME ⇁ Byun Noeul

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHDAY ⇁ December 31st, 1998

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHPLACE ⇁ Incheon, South Korea

˖ ࣪ ˚ . POSITION ⇁ Leader, Main Vocalist, Lead Dancer

˖ ࣪ ˚ . UNITS⇁ XLIGHT, 127, U

˖ ࣪ ˚ . HEIGHT ⇁ 165cm

˖ ࣪ ˚ . ETHNICITY ⇁ Korean

˖ ࣪ ˚ . NATIONALITY ⇁ Korean

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FACECLAIM ⇁ Hwang Eunbi

˖ ࣪ . 🐼 ࿐ ♡ ˚ .  AHN ISEUL professionally known as ISEUL was born in 1999 in Seoul, South Korea. She is the first added member to the lineup and made her debut in the unit in early 2019 after previously debuting in U with Yestoday. ISEUL was introduced as a SM Rookie on December 23rd, 2013 alongside Johnny, Ten, and Yuta. She also debuted as a member of project girl group Girls on Top. ISEUL is one of the group's main producers and has credits to her name for other major groups as well.

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FULL NAME ⇁ Ahn Iseul

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHDAY ⇁ September 4th, 1999

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHPLACE ⇁ Seoul, South Korea

˖ ࣪ ˚ . POSITION ⇁ Main Rapper, Lead Dancer, Vocalist

˖ ࣪ ˚ . UNITS⇁ XLIGHT, U

˖ ࣪ ˚ . HEIGHT ⇁ 162cm

˖ ࣪ ˚ . ETHNICITY ⇁ Korean

˖ ࣪ ˚ . NATIONALITY ⇁ Korean

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FACECLAIM ⇁ Lee Saerom 

˖ ࣪ . 🐺 ࿐ ♡ ˚ .  JUNG YOUNGHA professionally known as LIBBY was born in 2000 in Daegu, South Korea. She is an original member of XLIGHT and was the second female member ever announced. She made her debut in Dream and NCT with the release of chewing gum, then 127 with limitless and finally in U with make a wish. LIBBY was introduced as a SM Rookie on December 3rd, 2013 alongside Seulgi, Jeno, and Taeyong. She was given the nickname of Miss Neo due to her being considered the most neo female member in the group.

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FULL NAME ⇁ Jung Youngha

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHDAY ⇁ August 17th, 2000

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHPLACE ⇁ Daegu, South Korea

˖ ࣪ ˚ . POSITION ⇁ Main Rapper, Main Dancer, Vocalist, Center

˖ ࣪ ˚ . UNITS⇁ XLIGHT, Dream, 127, U

˖ ࣪ ˚ . HEIGHT ⇁ 169cm

˖ ࣪ ˚ . ETHNICITY ⇁ Korean

˖ ࣪ ˚ . NATIONALITY ⇁ Korean-American

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FACECLAIM ⇁ Hwang Yeji

˖ ࣪ . 🌸 ࿐ ♡ ˚ .  ZHOU MEILI professionally known as LILI was born in 2001 in Beijing, China. She was the last member to join the group and was placed into the lineup in 2021 after previously debuting in WayV with Regular. She made her debut in U during NCT 2020 with the release of 90s love. LILI was introduced as a SM Rookie on July 17th, 2018 alongside Xiaojun, Hendery, and Yangyang. She is well known as China's Flower due to her ethereal visuals and sweet personality.

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FULL NAME ⇁ Zhou Meili

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHDAY ⇁ June 30th, 2001

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHPLACE ⇁ Beijing, China

˖ ࣪ ˚ . POSITION ⇁ Lead Dancer, Vocalist, Visual

˖ ࣪ ˚ . UNITS⇁ XLIGHT, WayV, U

˖ ࣪ ˚ . HEIGHT ⇁ 170cm

˖ ࣪ ˚ . ETHNICITY ⇁ Chinese

˖ ࣪ ˚ . NATIONALITY ⇁ Chinese

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FACECLAIM ⇁ Shen Xiaoting

˖ ࣪ . 🐣 ࿐ ♡ ˚ .  MCKENZIE LEE professionally known as ZIE was born in 2003 in Canberra, Australia. She is an original member of XLIGHT and was the third female member ever announced. She made her debut in Dream and NCT with the release of chewing gum, then later in U with 90s love. ZIE was introduced as a SM Rookie on December 16th, 2013 alongside Mark, Hansol, and Jisung. She also debuted as a member of project girl group Girls on Top. ZIE was given the nickname of Giant Baby due to being the tallest female member but the youngest overall member.

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FULL NAME ⇁ McKenzie Minjung Lee

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHDAY ⇁ May 5th, 2003

˖ ࣪ ˚ . BIRTHPLACE ⇁ Canberra, Australia

˖ ࣪ ˚ . POSITION ⇁ Lead Rapper, Lead Dancer, Vocalist, Visual, Maknae

˖ ࣪ ˚ . UNITS⇁ XLIGHT, Dream, U

˖ ࣪ ˚ . HEIGHT ⇁ 178cm

˖ ࣪ ˚ . ETHNICITY ⇁ Korean

˖ ࣪ ˚ . NATIONALITY ⇁ Australian

˖ ࣪ ˚ . FACECLAIM ⇁ Lee Chaeyoung

layout insp. by myah! ( @venusvity​ )

[companion-showdown]

can both osgoods be in the tournament or does that not make sense since we never actually knew which one was which?

uhmm, I think it works, they are different people, both separately employed by unit (or at least I would hope thet're both getting a salary

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Joan E Greve at The Guardian:

Just one month after making the historic choice to withdraw from the presidential race, Joe Biden took the stage at the Democratic national convention on Monday to deliver a reflective and optimistic address, urging the nation to elect Kamala Harris to protect American democracy. Looking back on his one and only presidential term, Biden reminded Americans that he took office just two weeks after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, when the country was still in the early grips of the coronavirus pandemic. “Yet, I believe then and I believe now, that progress was and is possible. Justice is achievable, and our best days are not behind us. They’re before us,” Biden said. “With a grateful heart, I stand before you now on this August night to report that democracy has prevailed. Democracy has delivered, and now democracy must be preserved.”

Only a few weeks ago, Biden was expected to be on the convention stage this week to accept his party’s nomination for the second time. Instead, the speech came a month after Biden shocked the nation with his decision to not seek re-election. After weeks of mounting doubts about his ability to effectively campaign following a devastating debate performance, Biden announced that he would step aside. He immediately endorsed Harris.

[...]

On Monday, Biden described selecting Harris as his vice-president as “the best decision I made my whole career”, and he drew a sharp contrast between her and Donald Trump. Mocking Trump over his recent conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden said: “Violent crime has dropped to the lowest level of more than 50 years, and crime will keep coming down when we put a prosecutor in the Oval Office instead of a convicted felon.”

Biden landed other punches against Trump as well, attacking the Republican nominee for describing America as a “failing nation”. “When he talks about America being a failing nation, he says, we’re losing. He’s the loser. He’s dead wrong,” Biden said to loud cheers. Even as he promoted Harris’ candidacy, Biden took a victory lap of sorts to celebrate his own legislative achievements over his four years in office. He reminded viewers of the major bills he signed, including the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act. “We’ve had one of the most extraordinary four years of progress ever, period,” Biden said. “Just think about it. Covid no longer controls our lives. We’ve gone from economic crisis to the strongest economy in the entire world.”

Still, Biden made a point to credit Harris with helping to deliver change. When discussing his administration’s efforts to lower prescription drug prices, Biden said, “Guess who cast the tie-breaking vote? Vice-president, soon-to-be-president, Kamala Harris.” And when audience members repeatedly broke out in chants of “Thank you, Joe,” the president responded, “Thank you, Kamala!”

The speech was not without its moments of conflict. One group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators displayed a banner reading, “Stop arming Israel!” Other convention attendees attempted to rip the banner away from them, and the lights were then dimmed over that section in the United Center. There appeared to be isolated shouts attacking Biden over his response to the war in Gaza, but those protesters were drowned out by the president’s supporters chanting, “We love Joe!” However, the president did not shy away from discussing the war in Gaza. Nodding to the pro-ceasefire protests unfolding in Chicago this week, Biden said: “A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.” Of the recent ceasefire negotiations, Biden said, “We’re working around the clock, my secretary of state, [to] prevent a wider war, reunite hostages with their families and surge humanitarian, health and food assistance into Gaza now to end the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally, deliver a ceasefire and end this war.”

On the DNC stage Monday night, President Joe Biden (D) gave a barnburner of a speech that detailed his achievements over his Presidency and his pre-Presidency tenure while passing the torch onto a new generation with VP Kamala Harris leading the Democratic ticket.

[godisarepublican]

A lot of pundits are naming Michelle Obama as Joe Biden's likely replacement...

This is very bad news for America. She's not a politician, she has zero political skills and she translates directly to more unelected shadow government.

No, it's not "Just like Hillary."

Hillary was an actual member of Bill's administration, though congress forbid her from drawing a salary. She was also elected to the U.S. Senate and served as Secretary of State before running for office. Michelle Obama was never more than First Lady.

If they tap Michelle Obama for President it's NOT because she has any useful skills or talents, it's because she has a high favorability rating. And that's all they care about, this unelected shadow government. They want an empty suit or, as in this case, an empty designer gown with a higher price tag than some cars. And THAT is her vulnerability!

Obama's family was largely off-limits during his administration. The media wasn't allowed to report on his wife's mishaps. So her favorability ranking isn't about her, it's about control of the pictures and the narrative. Though her election would be accompanied by a MASSIVE propaganda blitz, they failed to conceal Biden's feebleness and Michelle Obama's problems would likewise seep though.

SHE'S ANGRY, MEAN AND HAS A VICIOUS TEMPER!

When she was in Princeton -- PRINCETON! -- she wrote a paper about how repressed she was. Princeton. She was an underprivileged Ivy Leaguer.

Back in 2008 she said that the FIRST TIME she was proud of her country was when her husband was given the nomination. The first time. Ever. This Ivy Leaguer, this person living in a million dollar house back when a million dollar home was impressive: She had NEVER been proud of her country. Not ever. Not until her husband received the nomination for President.

EVEN THE UNITED STATES SENATE WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH FOR HER!

She got "Protested" once, that we were allowed to know about. A lesbian spoke out at a talk Michelle Obama was giving. With no "Grace under pressure" the First Lady stormed off the podium and barked into the protestor's face and basically told her that if she (the protestor) didn't stop then she was leaving. Yeah, that's going to fly at a world summit...

Do you trust the media?

I don't.

The whole thing was caught on video, including Michelle Obama's meltdown. And it's gone. So do you trust media "Reports" on an event when they're doing their best to hide the video & audio from you? If you do trust them, just Google it. There's plenty on the meltdown. Though I can pretty much guarantee that it waters it down some...

The point is, Michelle Obama is not a happy go lucky person. She has a carefully crafted media image and it is nothing approaching reality. And it is extremely easy to shatter her facade.

Protest her. Heckle her. Grill her with tough questions. In other words, subject her to the same things that real candidates must face. They can't keep her on Happy Pills all the time, her true personality is going to make it though. And when it does, even if they're twice as successful at killing the media, some of it is going to leak though.

A Michelle Obama candidacy can not survive scrutiny.

[vera-keller]

easy company registration cards part 1

part 2

included in this compilation under the cut are the registration cards of 15 easy company veterans featured in band of brothers (2001). all are taken from publicly available draft records held in online databases and collected by me, and contain details like the registrant's serial number, physical attributes, date and place of birth, phone number, residential and mailing addresses, place of employment and nominated next of kin, as well as their handwriting sample and signature. like or reblog if you use or save.

a note about draft registration

during the second world war, the united states selective service system conducted a total of six draft registrations, the records of which are held collectively in two groupings at the national personnel records centre in st. louis, missouri. members of easy company were drafted in all but one of these registrations from october 1940 through to december 1942. the six registrations are as follows:

16 october 1940: males aged 21 to 35 "within the continental united states". winters, nixon, welsh, toye, perconte and liebgott were among those registered on this date.

1 july 1941: males "who had reached 21 since the first registration". lipton and speirs were registered on this date.

16 february 1942: between the ages of 20 and 45 "who had not previously registered". roe, bull, malarkey and luz, among others, were registered on this date.

27 april 1942: between the ages of 46 to 65 "not eligible for military service". no known easy company members were registered on this date.

30 june 1942: between the ages of 18 to 20. talbert, webster, grant, guarnere, babe, shifty, skip and christenson, among others, were registered on this date.

10-31 december 1942: "those who reached the age of 18 after 12 november 1942". penkala, who turned 18 in august 1942 three months before the cutoff, was nonetheless among those registered in this period.

if you have a family member or ancestor who served in a branch of the us armed forces during either the first or second world war, chances are that you can find their registration card on databases like ancestry.com and familysearch.org.

richard "dick" winters

lewis nixon

carwood lipton

ronald speirs

harry welsh

charles "chuck" grant

note: a few online sources incorrectly state that grant was born on 14 july 1915. his registration card gives his real date of birth as 1 march 1922, making him about 7 years younger than people generally think he is. supposedly this misconception comes from confusing grant with another veteran drafted between 1940-42, charles m. grant, who was born on 14 july.

william "bill" guarnere

joseph "joe" toye

george luz

eugene roe

donald malarkey

denver "bull" randleman

frank perconte

joseph "joe" liebgott

[enriquemzn262]

Next week in Venezuela presidential elections will be held, in which the future of the country is at stake, as the current socialist asshole that has completely ruined the country, Nicolas Maduro, has for once a united opposition party going against him, lead by a woman named Maria Corina Machado, herself a former member of the National Assembly, until she was illegally removed from her position, and former presidential candidate, until she was also illegally removed from that, forcing her to nominate her deputy, Edmundo Gonzalez, as the main opposition candidate.

Currently the Venezuelan regime claims the elections will be fair, yet they have engaged in a massive intimidation campaign against supporters of Corina, closing roads for her caravans, many times actually destroying them all together, while fining and even closing down businesses like restaurants and hotels that gave their services to her and her supporters.

But so far those campaigns don’t seem to be working, and instead have galvanized support for her even more, all the while Maduro and his cronies have to literally force state employees to attend his rallies or be fired, and even with that public support has been at best pathetic.

I guess we will see if this will or won’t be a repeat of the fraudulent 2018 elections, in which now disgraced opposition candidate, Juan Guadió, “lost” the election, triggering a worse emigration crisis that continues to this day, with some 5 million Venezuelans already leaving the country as of 2024.

[racefortheironthrone]

Warhammer Gaslamp: Introduction

The year is 2725 IC...some two hundred years since the Age of Crisis. The time of Karl Franz I, the "Fourth Deliverer of the Empire," has long past, as has the age of knights and dragons – throughout the Old World, magic itself is a dying art.

The Empire of Man is stronger than ever before, but it is an Empire that runs on coal and iron, held together with roads of steel track, and powered by boiling, thumping hearts that pump steam and gas through the veins of the mightiest industrial power in the world. The forests remain, but they have dwindled in size, cut down to feed the endless hunger of the great metropolises, the mighty smokestacks of Nuln, Talabheim, New Averheim, and greatest of all, the bright gaslights of mighty Altdorf ("The Big Turnip"), and a hundred smaller cities that light the night skies.

The Neüscience of the Imperial Technomancers has increased national prosperity a hundredfold, improved the health and well-being of the common citizens, and helped the Imperial Army, Navy, and Airkorps put the endless hordes of Khaos on the backfoot for generations. In spite of (or because of?) this, Imperial society has become increasingly divided between the elite who profit from the new economy of high finance and heavy industry, and those millions of unskilled and semi-skilled laborers whose endless toil keeps them only ever one step ahead of the breadline and the bailiff. Meanwhile, the mounting toll of industrial pollution, epidemic disease, industrial accidents, and Neüscientific “experiments” running amok raises new questions about the high cost of success.

Politics has become ever more fractious. The Imperial Parliament is divided between the House of the People, where the Farmer-Artisan Party (representing a coalition of the Craft Guilds and their fellow urban workers, and a significant minority of rural laborers and small farmers) holds the plurality, and the House of the Nobles, where the Liberal-Conservative Party (representing both the traditional landed aristocracy and the new monied elite) holds power, and the two clash fiercely over labor rights, taxation, industrial regulation, and social welfare. Holding the uneasy balance of power is Emperor Karl-Franz XIV, his "Iron" Chancellor Ludwig von Ostermark, and their smaller Patriotic Party (largely supported by veterans and members of the civil service), who try to maintain Imperial unity and industrial production in the face of the "Threat from the Black North."

In the streets and on the shop-floors, the captains of industry known as the Great Monopolhauses (allied and often intermarried with the nobility) deploy their legions of spies and private soldiers against the rising strength of the Laborer’s Guild, who are mobilizing in the factories by the hundreds of thousands, and the industrial spies and gunthugs are kept in check only by the still-potent might of the Craft Guilds who fear and resent their industrial upstart rivals but trust the bosses even less.

The religion that once united an Empire today divides it, as Orthodox Volkmarites and Radical Hussites split over matters of class and faith. Although the two factions are still nominally part of the same Sigmarite religion, and the Church of Sigmar is held together by the firm hand of the Emperor, the two factions compete fiercely over theology and dogma, and positions within the Church unto the Grand Theogonacy itself. To the north, the philosophy professor-turned-street preacher Nietzsche von Zarathustein has single-handedly revived the fortunes of the Cult of Ulric with his fiery doctrine of Neo-Ulricism and his best-seller Man unt Wulf-Man. From the great industrial heartland of the south, the radical scholar Mark Karhl preaches the overthrow of the status quo as an inherently exploitative regime, and his pamphlet The Scarlet Platform and his massive three-volume treatise on political economy, Der Gelden (which almost no one has completed), inspire many young radical students and workers to join the revolutionary Scarlet Party and the ranks of the Laborer’s Guild. Are rumors of his secret allegiance to a Tzeenchite secret society true, or mere bourgeois propaganda?

Exacerbating these divisions is the constant threat from Khaos. Up in the "Black North" and their allied territories on the great steppes on the other side of the pole, the forces of evil pervert the laws of science to their mad push for world domination. Khornate breeder-lords select from an unceasing flow of gladiators to produce the perfect warriors; Nurglite bio-priests carefully engineer the next insidious plague to slip past the Imperial Plasmic Survey; Slaaneshi sin-merchants mobilize a world-wide network of Cathayan black tar and warpdust powder (bartered from the Skaven) to corrupt the Empire from within; and Tzeenchite techno-mancers design ever more fiendish mutated F.R.E.A.K.S and the twisted Biomechs.

Inside the Empire, things are scarcely better. Even with the darkness of the forests pushed back to the periphery and the Greenskin hordes banished to the far side of the World's Edge Mountains, the threat of Were-beastmanism and other, more insidious, forces winds its way into every neighborhood in the Empire despite the best efforts of the Imperial Plasmic Survey and the Schwarzmänner. Mutants who cannot conceal their true nature – known as the "Untervolk" - have decamped into the subway tunnels and sewers that form the Undercities of the Empire, waging an unceasing war for survival against “norms” and “ratfolk” alike. From the back alleyways and the salons of the nobility alike, the endless secret societies of Khaos vie to do their masters' bidding, undermining the Empire from within in preparation for the coming war.

It is a time that desperately needs heroes, men and women willing to brave the darkness on the mean streets and the shell-torn battlefields of the Old World alike. Mystery and intrigue, adventure and mad science await!