#world environment day 2020

[fandomtrumpshate]

Defeating Tr*mp and the Republican party: how you can help

So as you've probably heard, there is a presidential election coming up in the US this November. You may even be experiencing some concern about the outcome of that election -- given both the high stakes and the active efforts by Republicans to suppress the vote -- and wondering what more you can do to stave off the possibility of a literal fascist takeover of the United States.

The good news is: you're not helpless. There are wonderful organizations out there -- staffed by knowledgeable, talented people with their feet already on the ground -- and they could use your help.

Here are a few of them:

VoteBeat offers deeply-researched local reporting about elections, which is both valuable and rare in the current news environment. A spinoff of ChalkBeat, it was founded and is run by journalists from ProPublica.

Spread the Vote is an organization that works on the ground to help every eligible voter secure the documentation and the access they need to make their voices heard. In particular, StV runs a program called Vote by Mail in Jail to help ensure that incarcerated persons also have access to these rights.

VoteRiders, like StV, works to ensure that every American has the opportunity to vote. In particular, they provide financial and practical support to trans people so that they can get hold of the documentation they need and can vote safely and confidently.

FairVote advocates for ranked-choice voting, a system in wide use outside the US which far more effectively captures the will of the electorate. (we don't have an individual feature page for them, but FV was one of FTH's supported orgs in 2020.)

(This is just a short starter list of amazing organizations, pulled from FTH's supported orgs list in past years; there are plenty of others. Please feel free to add them in reblogs!)

Ways you can help

Donate to one (or more!) of these organizations. These are all fairly small operations, even if their goals and their impact is large; they could use the help!

Volunteer your time. Many of these organizations rely on volunteers to make their day-to-day operations work. Sometimes it's necessary to do this volunteering in person, but often there is a remote option for volunteering if that's what works for you.

Run a fanworks auction to raise money. FTH recently rolled out a full and detailed playbook, sharing all of our organizational materials and step-by-step guides for how to use them and adapt them to your needs. This is a great moment to put that to work! Whether you want to raise money for one of the organizations listed above, or for some other nonprofit, or even for a progressive local candidate that could use the support (FTH doesn't do individual candidates, but you shouldn't let that stop you!) you can make a real difference while also helping to put more fanworks into the world.

[reasonsforhope]

"For generations, the people of Erakor village in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu would pass their time swimming in the local lagoon. Ken Andrew, a local chief, remembers diving in its depths when he was a child, chasing the fish that spawned in its turquoise waters.

That was decades ago. Now 52, Andrew has noticed a more pernicious entity invading the lagoon: plastic.

“The plastic would form a small island inside the lagoon, it was so thick,” Andrew says. “We used fishing nets to pull some of the trash out, but we didn’t know how to get rid of it all. We couldn’t conquer it, there was just too much.”

While residents were struggling to empty Vanuatu’s waters of plastic, the country’s politicians were considering another solution. Could they stop the waste directly at the source?

Small island nations like Vanuatu face a series of unique challenges when it comes to plastic pollution. Many rely on imported goods to sustain their populations, and receive tonnes of plastic packaging every day as a result. Ocean currents pull plastic waste from around the world into Pacific waters, which eventually end up on the shores of its islands.

Few Pacific island governments have adequate recycling or waste management facilities on their narrow strips of land, so rubbish is often burned or left to wash up in rivers or lagoons like the one in Erakor. It is estimated that Pacific countries generate 1kg of waste per person a day, 40% higher than the global average.

In an attempt to drastically limit the amount of waste generated in Vanuatu, in 2018 the government became one of the first in the world to outlaw the sale and distribution of certain single-use plastics – including a world-first ban on plastic straws.

In the six years since, the results have been impressive. Thin, plastic shopping bags are hardly ever seen, with most shoppers carrying reusable bags at their local market or grocery store. At festivals and outdoor events, food is more often served wrapped in banana leaves instead of polystyrene takeaway boxes. Now-banned items used to make up 35% of Vanuatu’s waste, but now make up less than 2%.

Pictured: Pandanus leaves are now used instead of plastic bags at markets, but supply of the crop can be affected by storms and cyclones, vendors say.

The plastic islands that once choked Erakor lagoon are also shrinking.

“Since they started the ban, you can see the lagoon has become cleaner,” says Andrew.

It is a massive victory for a small island nation made up of just over 300,000 people across 83 islands...

In 2020, a second phase of the policy added seven more items to the list of forbidden plastics, which now covers cutlery, single-use plates and artificial flowers.

“It’s quite difficult to enforce because of the very low capacity of the department of environment,” Regenvanu says. “So we try to work with the municipal authorities and customs and other people as well.”

Compromises had to be made, though. Fishers are still allowed to use plastic to wrap and transport their produce. Plastic bottles are also permitted, even though they often litter coastlines and rivers.

Secondary industries have now developed to provide sustainable alternatives to the banned items. On the island of Pentecost, communities have started replacing plastic planter pots with biodegradable ones made from native pandanus leaves. Mama’s Laef, a social enterprise that began selling fabric sanitary napkins before the ban, has since expanded its range to reusable nappies and bags.

“We came up with these ideas to reduce the amount of plastic in Vanuatu,” says the owner Jack Kalsrap. “We’re a small island state, so we know that pollution can really overwhelm us more than in other, bigger countries.” ...

Willy Sylverio, a coordinator of the Erakor Bridge Youth Association, is trying to find ways to recycle the litter his team regularly dredges up from the lagoon.

“The majority of the plastic waste now comes from noodle packaging or rice packaging, or biscuit packets,” Sylverio says. He hopes the plastic ban will one day include all packaging that covers imported goods. “Banning all plastic is a great idea, because it blocks the main road through which our environment is polluted.”

The Vanuatu government plans to expand the plastic ban to include disposable nappies, and says it will also introduce a plastic bottle deposit scheme this year to help recycle the remaining plastic waste in the country."

-via The Guardian, June 20, 2024

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Stephen Robinson at Public Notice:

A near-majority of American voters willingly reelected Donald Trump. This harsh reality is a collective moral failure, but it’s also not a choice made in sound mind. Consider that voters believed Trump’s first presidency was a roaring success and Joe Biden’s only term a Carter-level catastrophe. It’s an upside-down Bizarro World view that ultimately played a key role in dooming Kamala Harris.

Trump’s 2024 platform was rooted in an obvious lie — that the nation under Biden’s leadership is a flaming dumpster fire and everyone was much better off when Trump was president. Democrats challenged this false reality with facts, but they ultimately lost the messaging war. Their best efforts were no match for the most powerful weapons in Trump’s propaganda arsenal — a timid press and a right-coded social social media environment. Greg Sargent reports in the New Republic that the Harris campaign’s own internal polling revealed an alarming trend: “Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency — even if they saw these things negatively — were his fault.” According to exit polls, Trump decisively won the questions “who do you trust more to handle the economy?” and “who do you trust most to handle a crisis?” Of course, in reality Trump utterly botched the 2020 pandemic response, which researchers concluded resulted in 40 percent more deaths than necessary. And yet swing voters are willing to risk it all again in hopes of cheaper eggs and cruelty against outgroups.

Disinformation on demand

Legacy media shoulders significant blame for their “sanewashing” of Trump’s incoherency and deteriorating mental state. Voters believed Trump could fix a steadily improving economy despite his promotion of inflationary tariffs. The media even presented Trump’s rants as cogent discussions of economic theory.

It’s worth noting, however, that an NBC poll from April revealed that voters who received news primarily from legacy media (newspapers, cable news, etc.) still overwhelmingly supported Biden. Trump owes his victory in great part to low-propensity voters of all races, including young men, and those voters don’t necessarily form their views based on mainstream media reporting. Rather, far too many are stuck in an online social media bubble where they are delivered a steady diet of rightwing propaganda. The median age of a Fox News viewer is 68, and liberals have joked about the network “brainwashing” their conservative parents. But rightwing social media content has effectively targeted and radicalized younger people, who — unlike the typical Hannity-obsessed grandpa — can vote for the next several decades. TikTok, which Trump joined in June, has 170 million users in the United States, and according a Pew Research survey, more than half of them said they regularly get their news from the platform. That’s up from just 22 percent in 2020. This is a serious concern because the far right uses TikTok to advance unfounded conspiracy theories and outright lies.

[...]

Lower income Americans, particularly young people, do spend more of their income on groceries, rent, and gas. That’s why Republicans were so laser focused on the price of eggs. Unfortunately, there’s a dearth of liberal content countering the negative vibes. Of course, explaining the post-pandemic economic recovery is complex and requires more than a punchy one-minute video can convey. Although people might idly scroll TikTok all day, consuming 60-second quick hit videos like potato chips, they will balk at reading an extensive, well-reported news article. That’s too filling a meal.

According to a University of Oregon study, 40 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans surveyed said they’d become more conservative from their TikTok usage. Half of the Democrats surveyed said they’d grown more liberal, but a lot of far-left content on TikTok is downright alienating and can sound like MAGA’s idea of a strawman leftist. For instance, one user boasted that she “didn’t care” if liberal economic and social policies “hurt the economy,” thus conceding that those policies are in fact harmful to economic progress. TikTok’s artificial “vibecession” dominated the discourse, while abortion-related content was actively suppressed even while pregnant women were bleeding out in parking lots. Users of the platform resorted to disguising the word “abortion” as “aborshun” or “ab0rti0n” in order to reach an audience. TikTok has a longstanding policy against promoting abortion services, which it classifies as “unsuitable businesses, products or services.” However, TikTok, YouTube, and Meta have allowed users to spread and monetize anti-abortion misinformation. Studies have shown an interesting gender gap in where young people receive their news on social media: For most women, it’s TikTok, while most men learn about the world from YouTube, X, and Reddit, all of which have become havens of crude masculinity.

On YouTube, 56 percent of users are between the ages of 18 and 44. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit that researches extremism, conducted a four-part research project this year that determined YouTube’s algorithm consistently steers users to rightwing and Christian content. The algorithm does this even with seemingly apolitical search terms, like “male lifestyle guru,” which YouTube reflexively associates with conservative ideology. Rightwing news content was also more frequently recommended, including anti-vaxxer videos. As far back as 2019, both YouTube and Facebook’s autofill search boxes would return content that promoted anti-vaccine misinformation.

[...]

Why rightwing content has the edge

When Kamala Harris appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast, host Alexandra Cooper told her listeners, “I do not usually discuss politics or have politicians on the show because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place that everyone feels comfortable tuning in.” Left-leaning podcasters/social media content creators often avoid politics for fear of turning off their right-leaning fans. Joe Rogan and Dave Portnoy at Barstool Sports don’t bother with such apologies when they have rightwing guests because it doesn’t compromise their brand. They are rightwing cultural influencers. Liberal podcaster Hasan Piker recently commented on the impact rightwing influencers have on young men of all races.

“There is a massive amount of rightwing radicalization that has been occurring, especially in younger male spaces. Everything is completely dominated by rightwing politics,” he said. “If you’re a dude under the age of 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever, whether it’s playing video games, whether it’s working out, whether it’s listening to a history podcast or whatever, every single facet of that is completely dominated by center right to [the] Trumpian right. Everything they see is rightwing sentiment.”

Rogan and Portnoy might not present as overtly political as Walsh and Shapiro, but their edgy, hyper masculine personas are pure MAGA. Even billionaire CEO Elon Musk likes to present himself as a “disrupter,” an agent of change who boldly confronts the status quo. Anyone who’s seen the more popular indie films of the 1970s would realize how compelling this narrative is to young men. The subtle way that Rogan and Portnoy infuse politics into their personas presents a contrast with left-leaning social media content. The liberal TikToker or YouTuber who releases videos about home makeovers might endorse Democratic politicians during election season while wearing their “just voted” sticker, but rightwing influencers prime their audience on a daily basis. Young men marinate in a stew of rightwing sentiment and end up resenting the libs.

Stephen Robinson wrote in Public Notice a very valid case that a right-coded media environment gave Donald Trump the decisive boost to get elected, such as praising the disastrous Trump reign as a “success.”

Social media algorithms heavily favored right-coded and pro-Trump content, despite the never-ending whining about “censorship” from conservatives.

[charkepin]

VIDEO GAME: YAKUZA 0

Charles Gabrielle L. Pineda BSIT - 1A

OVERVIEW

Ref: PressStartOnce - Yakuza 0 Title Screen (PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One)

Well to explain this game in easier terms… it is very random and very funny. This game is actually a prequel to the original game Yakuza, or mostly known as "Yakuza Kiwami" because it got remastered. Yakuza 0 is an action-adventure game set in an open world environment and played from a third-person perspective. The game takes place from December 1988 to January 1989, in Kamurochō and Sotenbori, fictionalized recreations of Tokyo's Kabukichō and Osaka's Dōtonbori areas respectively. The game received a lot of praise for it's engaging story, character development, and a rich blend of serious and humorous vibes. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza_0

THE PROTAGONISTS

Everyone knows that a story will never be interesting without interesting main characters... At least that's what they say, right? Well, that's what you get in this game. Your first protagonist: Kazuma Kiryu, a junior Tojo Clan yakuza in Kamurochō who is forced out of the clan due to a murder accusation(This particular arc is very long to explain). While the other protagonist: Goro Majima, a disgraced former Tojo Clan yakuza who works as a cabaret manager in Sotenbori to earn his way back into the clan. Both these men are excellent in humorous scenes in the game. A lot of their movements are very similar from each other. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza_0

 Kamurochō

This is Kamurochō, a fictional district of Tokyo from Sega's Yakuza media franchise. It is modelled after Kabukichō, Tokyo's renowned red-light district and entertainment precinct situated in Shinjuku ward. This location is still used to this day. Last seen in Yakuza: Like a Dragon released in 2020, that it has been updating since time passes by. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamuroch%C5%8D

"KIRYU"SION

https://www.reddit.com/r/yakuzagames/comments/ooxf2c/i_cant_stop_fucking_laughing_at_this_picture/

Well overall, this game is a lot of fun like a LOT of fun. If you're into games that balances seriousness and humor. I had no idea about this game before because I wasn't really into japanese games that much. When I first entered the atmosphere of this game, it blew me away. It was like I was missing out a lot. This game really serves the best quality story wise, gameplay wise, and comedy wise. I can confidently say that this game is really a masterpiece.

[linkyu]

tell me about your defense contract pleage

Oh boy!

To be fair, it's nothing grandiose, like, it wasn't about "a new missile blueprint" or whatever, but, just thinking about what it could have become? yeesh.

So, let's go.

For context, this is taking place in the early 2010s, where I was working as a dev and manager for a company that mostly did space stuff, but they had some defence and security contracts too.

One day we got a new contract though, which was... a weird one. It was state-auctioned, meaning that this was basically a homeland contract, but the main sponsor was Philip Morris. Yeah. The American cigarette company.

Why? Because the contract was essentially a crackdown on "illegal cigarette sales", but it was sold as a more general "war on drugs" contract.

For those unaware (because chances are, like me, you are a non-smoker), cigarette contraband is very much a thing. At the time, ~15% of cigarettes were sold illegally here (read: they were smuggled in and sold on the street).

And Phillip Morris wanted to stop that. After all, they're only a small company worth uhhh... oh JFC. Just a paltry 150 billion dollars. They need those extra dollars, you understand?

Anyway. So they sponsored a contract to the state, promising that "the technology used for this can be used to stop drug deals too". Also that "the state would benefit from the cigarettes part as well because smaller black market means more official sales means a higher tax revenue" (that has actually been proven true during the 2020 quarantine).

Anyway, here was the plan:

Phase 1 was to train a neural network and plug it in directly to the city's video-surveillance system, in order to detect illegal transactions as soon as they occur. Big brother who?

Phase 2 was to then track the people involved in said transaction throughout the city, based on their appearance and gait. You ever seen the Plainsight sheep counting video? Imagine something like this but with people. That data would then be relayed to police officers in the area.

So yeah, an automated CCTV-based tracking system. Because that's not setting a scary precedent.

So what do you do when you're in that position? Let me tell you. If you're thrust unknowingly, or against your will, into a project like this,

Note. The following is not a legal advice. In fact it's not even good advice. Do not attempt any of this unless you know you can't get caught, or that even if you are caught, the consequences are acceptable. Above all else, always have a backup plan if and when it backfires. Also don't do anything that can get you sued. Be reasonable.

Let me introduce you to the world of Corporate Sabotage! It's a funny form of striking, very effective in office environments.

Here's what I did:

First of all was the training data. We had extensive footage, but it needed to be marked manually for the training. Basically, just cropping the clips around the "transaction" and drawing some boxes on top of the "criminals". I was in charge of several batches of those. It helped that I was fast at it since I had video editing experience already. Well, let's just say that a good deal of those markings were... not very accurate.

Also, did you know that some video encodings are very slow to process by OpenCV, to the point of sometimes crashing? I'm sure the software is better at it nowadays though. So I did that to another portion of the data.

Unfortunately the training model itself was handled by a different company, so I couldn't do more about this.

Or could I?

I was the main person communicating with them, after all.

Enter: Miscommunication Master

In short (because this is already way too long), I became the most rigid person in the project. Like insisting on sharing the training data only on our own secure shared drive, which they didn't have access to yet. Or tracking down every single bug in the program and making weekly reports on those, which bogged down progress. Or asking for things to be done but without pointing at anyone in particular, so that no one actually did the thing. You know, classic manager incompetence. Except I couldn't be faulted, because after all, I was just "really serious about the security aspect of this project. And you don't want the state to learn that we've mishandled the data security of the project, do you, Jeff?"

A thousand little jabs like this, to slow down and delay the project.

At the end of it, after a full year on this project, we had.... a neural network full of false positives and a semi-working visualizer.

They said the project needed to be wrapped up in the next three months.

I said "damn, good luck with that! By the way my contract is up next month and I'm not renewing."

Last I heard, that city still doesn't have anything installed on their CCTV.

tl;dr: I used corporate sabotage to prevent automated surveillance to be implemented in a city--

hey hold on

wait

what

HEY ACTUALLY I DID SOME EXTRA RESEARCH TO SEE IF PHILLIP MORRIS TRIED THIS SHIT WITH ANOTHER COMPANY SINCE THEN AND WHAT THE FUCK

HUH??????

well what the fuck was all that even about then if they already own most of the black market???

[andivmg]

Hello o/

I’ve been offline since I’m in school and I have a job but because there are so many new people here I just wanted to hit a quick introduction for those who don’t really know me too well and to also say thank you all so so so much for all your support the past couple of days. I have read so many lovely messages from you guys and it truly means the world to me to feel seen, heard, understood and supported.

So I want to start off by saying hi! My name is Andrea, but online I go by Andi. I used to be a content creator on tiktok and twitch from 2020-2022. At the end of 2022 I decided to remove myself from the content scene for personal reasons. And now I’m pursuing a career in esthetics, which is something I am extremely passionate about!

I originally created this blog as a sort of safe space for myself outside of twitter and now I just kind of use it to post life updates and stuff. But, I still want this to be a safe space for me to just kind of yap about my life into the void sometimes. I wanna make it very clear that I am not interested in creating content or promoting anything so if you’re here for someone to stan, I am sorry to disappoint. Sometimes I disappear for weeks at a time and sometimes I’m super active. Most of the time people come here looking for advice, which is really nice, because I love helping other people navigate through their experiences and emotions. But, I don’t have the strength it takes to be a therapist or psychologist so I just post here!

I will note that my boyfriend, Danny, is a youtuber. He is incredibly talented and I am so so so proud of him! Because I want to support him in his career, I will appear in his videos occasionally. But, again, that is his career and his thing, not mine. I want to give him a quick shoutout for being my rock throughout the last few weeks. It has been incredibly tough to navigate and he has handled the situation and me with such grace, patience, and respect. So yeah I love my bf and I wanted an excuse to gush about him for a sec while clarifying that just because I am in his content, doesn’t mean I want to create content myself.

I also really don’t want my experiences and my relationship to that community to define who I am now. Again, I have almost entirely removed myself from that space. And I am very happy I did. I think the environment as a whole was not conducive to the happiness and mental stability of most creators. I truly, genuinely hope that everyone gets the help they need to lead genuine, productive, and fulfilling lives. I have said before that I am in a much better and happier place now. I’ve been in therapy for a little over two years, and I’m very proud of myself for how far I’ve come in my healing process in this time. I also am incredibly lucky to be surrounded by amazing people who love and care about me. In the future I’ll probably talk about my mental health more openly, but I don’t feel that now is that time.

To anyone who needs to hear it: It gets better, I promise. Shit happens, and even when it feels like you have nothing ahead of you, the universe proves you wrong.

Thank you for reading.

Much Love, Andi

[zerbu]

Project Squealer BIG REVEAL

Calling all mystery buffs, adventure seekers, and gumshoe wannabes!

I am developing MY OWN INDIE GAME under the working title PROJECT SQUEALER! In this action-packed adventure RPG game, a disease called Laughter Pox has plagued the town, and it's up to three kid detectives to investigate!

These days, I'm mostly known for making mods for The Sims 4, but I've been interested in game development as far back as 2009. In fact, I originally bought The Sims 3 for PC back in 2012 as a tool to plan out characters and worlds, before becoming hooked on the gameplay. For a long time, The Sims was my main creative outlet, but I was still coming up with game ideas in the background.

Skip ahead to mid 2016: while playing with my Go to School mod, I needed to create some child characters to fill the school with. I created two rival teams of kid detectives, and came up backstories and mysteries for them to solve. I ended up liking these characters far more than any other characters I had created. They felt like my creative masterpiece, begging for something bigger than just creations made in a character creator.

That's when "Project Squealer" started brewing in my brain. This indie RPG wasn't just some vague idea; I was developing full-blown stories, environments, and gameplay planned for my kid detectives. I also had the perfect art style in my head. Emphasis on in my head.

Turns out, bringing my dream art style to life was way harder than I thought. So hard, in fact, that I spent the next few years learning how to create art. It took until 2020 to finally have character and environment art that could (almost) pass for pro-level game stuff. Not only that, the project was undergoing what indie devs refer to as scope creep. I kept adding more and more ideas to the design doc, making the game more complex and pushing the release date even further into the future. In 2018, I even decided to move from 2D to 3D, and switched engines from MonoGame to Unity (and later to Unreal Engine 5 in 2023).

Now, it's 2024, and I'm finally, finally ready to announce what I've been working on for the past 6 years!

Project Squealer is the working title for my own indie game about a team of three kid detectives: Orlo (middle), Von (left) and Zoros (right). Together, they go on adventures and solve mysteries… or at least they would, if they weren't constantly having their business stolen by a rival detective team.

In this action-packed adventure game, a mysterious disease known as Laughter Pox has plagued the town, causing people to laugh hysterically. Where is it coming from? How can it be cured? It's up to our detectives to find out! If they can convince others to trust them with such an important mission, that is!

Project Squealer uses a hybrid of 2D and 3D graphics to create a 2D cartoon look with full 3D movement. Characters and some organic objects are 2D sprites that move with the camera. Most environments, objects and buildings are 3D, but have texture-based outlines to give it a 2D look.

The game features a variety of different quests, characters, abilities, enemies, locations, weapons and items. In addition to the main storyline, you can help out NPCs by performing "errands" for them, which will unlock cool rewards and even side missions.

Unlike many RPG games, Project Squealer won't include a character level system, because I want the player to be able to progress using their own skill, not by grinding levels. One of the game's main design philosophies is that there are few, if any, permanent upgrades. Weapons will eventually break, status effects that make your stronger will eventually expire, etc.

Project Squealer is still in relatively early development. I plan to post more information, screenshots, and eventually even videos, as it gets closer to release. Follow my Twitter for quicker updates: https://twitter.com/ZerbuTabek

Your support and feedback is welcome, and will help improve the game!

[formlines]

Reflection

Qwalsius/Shaun Peterson

from the website: As the saying goes, hindsight is 2020. Of course this references vision, but as much as I shy from these nuanced phrases, it’s inevitable. Not unlike the other phrase, “I wish I knew then what I know now”. Just before the pandemic I was setting on making–and still am–the work of my dreams. I always wanted to see the art tradition of the land I was born and have deep roots in recognized in a higher profile. Like roots, it takes time for a message to break through and connect. All that said, there were foundations that helped me get there, which are many.

In process of carving I have always been aware that the cedar I carve was alive, and from this place, and therefore sacred. It can be daunting to think about what you are shaping into something and be lead into paralysis by analysis. Which lead to my naming of this print as such. I felt it wasn’t easy to name something with complex reflection, which it is ultimately named. It is something that isn’t talked about often, but it’s not always clear what I am making as I am making it, or why it comes to be a driving factor for me to make it.

As a Native artist, I’m often asked about casinos and stereotypes of my culture. We are unfortunately not well represented or visible. To some, we are like unicorns in the wild, which is something I have finally made peace with over the years. In the end, we are human beings like anyone else, but with a unique history in the land of the free and home of the brave.

During the time of ‘lock down’ in the early pandemic, I was nervous like anyone else, but somewhat reluctant about how I could express it. I had worked on designs that could be looked at as a card deck, and from there this image shaped itself. Examining what our ancestors would think about how we live today, caught in a game of monetary values as a gauge of worth. Yet, all the while thinking of underlying values of the environment that shaped our culture.

Harvesting cedar bark from the trees to provide shelter and clothing is, or at least was, commonplace at a time. Bark pounded into soft fiber, roots woven into hats, capes lined with eagle down as means to literally remind us our connection to the land and its values. It was a different time and a different world in many ways. However, in time of isolation–which I have to do as part of my nature of occupation painting or carving–I recalled a powerful memory of a woman and man wearing cedar clothing, not entirely, but a hat, a backpack and eagle feathers crossing the street in downtown Seattle. It made me light up to know that they were not putting on a show or flaunting culture in opposition, but moving about as we all do in our daily lives.

Something about that memory made me put a pen in my hand and start drawing something from what was not comfortable, necessarily, but felt right to me. In this time of reflection I was thinking about the mask of this day we wear for function and not for show. Then, equally, how we put on a mask to show how happy we are when we aren’t, and how it took a pandemic for some to come to grips with this. I would be lying if I said this wasn’t something I wrestle with, but I’m no shaman, I’m no leader, I’m a product of my environment. I’m fortunate to have roots that kept me grounded here and I see the power of reflection in so many ways. Like anyone else, looking into my phone doesn’t tell me who I am or where I came from. No more than a screen does, or looking in the mirror.

I also wanted to depict somehow a modern reflection of a story of a man who sought fire for power so much that he had become it. Without humility, we give up more than we know. For some it is time, for some it is value, but there is resolution where lightning touches the water.

[thehopefuljournalist]

Am I a little bit late for some of you? I might be. But anyways. Here's what went right around the world this past week :)

Youth climate activists won a huge climate lawsuit

Sixteens youths (aged five to 22) from Montana, US, have emerged victorious after suing state officials for violating their right to a clean environment.

In their lawsuit, they argued that Montana's fossil fuel policies contributed to climate change, which harms their physical and mental health. Montana is a major coal producer, with large oil and gas reserves. The state has rebuffed these claims, saying that their emissions were insignificant on a global scale.

Judge Kathy Seely, in a 103-page ruling, set a legal precedent for young people’s rights to a safe climate by finding in their favour. “Every additional tonne of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions exacerbates plaintiffs’ injuries and risks locking in irreversible climate injuries".

This win marks the very first time a US court has ruled against a government for a violation of constitutional rights based on climate change. It will now be up to Montana lawmakers to bring state policies in line.

“As fires rage in the west, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today’s ruling in Montana is a gamechanger that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos.” - Julia Olson, executive director of nonprofit law firm, Our Children’s Trust, which represented the youths in this case.

Number of Mexicans living in poverty fell by millions

Thanks to a new minimum wage boost and increases to pensions, the number of Mexicans living in poverty fell by 8.9 million between 2020-2022, according to new data published by the country’s social development agency, Coneval.

Coneval’s statistics suggest that the number of people living in extreme poverty also fell – from 10.8 million in 2020 to 9.1 million last year – although that figure is still up from a pre-Covid 8.7 million recorded in 2018.

There is still a long way to go, and some critics do claim that during the current president, López Obrador's presidency has been characterized by austerity.

An organised crime group trafficking endangered species has been jailed

The Wildlife Justice Commission (WJC), a small European wildlife charity, is apparently busting kingpins behind as much as half of the world's illegal trade in pangolin scales. The traffickers began six-year jail sentences a few weeks ago.

The wildlife charity went undercover to expose three Vietnamese and one Guinean national, members of an organised crime group trafficking body parts of endangered species including rhinos. 

They were arrested in May 2022, following a four-year investigation by the WJC, and were accused of trafficking 7.1 tonnes of pangolin scales, as well as 850kg of ivory. Last month they pleaded guilty to smuggling and were jailed for six years.

All eight species of pangolin are listed as threatened animals, four critically endangered - they are protected by international law.

“There has not been a reported seizure of pangolin scales in Asia originating from Africa in more than 550 days,” said Steve Carmody, WJC’s director of programmes. “There is no clearer example of the importance of disrupting organised crime networks.”

AI gave conservationists a breakthrough

The use of AI-controlled microphones and cameras seems set to revolutionise

biodiversity monitoring in the UK following groundbreaking work by researchers at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). They used the tech to record and analyse 3,000 hours of wildlife audio captured by monitors located near London railway lines.

The computers detected dozens of bird species, foxes, deer, bats and hedgehogs, and mapped their locations.

It’s hoped the innovation will help improve conservation and habitat management on Network Rail land.

This year is best ever for UK renewable energy installations

This years looks to be the best year so far for UK renewable energy installations, with record numbers of households fitting solar panels and heat pumps.

2023 marks the first time solar panel installations have topped an average of 20,000 a month, as homeowners look to harvest energy from the sun amid rising utility bills. 

Read the full story here.

The UK’s Tree of the Year shortlist was revealed

The Woodland Trust has announced the shortlist for its annual celebration of some of the UK’s most treasured ancient trees, and for 2023 the spotlight is on the urban landscape.

“Ancient trees in towns and cities are vital for the health of nature, people and planet,” said the charity’s lead campaigner Naomi Tilley. “They give thousands of urban wildlife species essential life support, boost the UK’s biodiversity and bring countless health and wellbeing benefits to communities.”

Article published August 17, 2023

Thank you so much for reading! Let me know what interested you, and if there's any specific topic you'd like me to dig into, my DM's are always open :)

Much love!

[centrally-unplanned]

In my previous post around "ignoring election victories as events-in-themselves" we were memeing about it being a subtweet of Richard Hanania, but as I mentioned at the end it really isn't. And for a bonus reason, he doesn't make that mistake! He has a very explicit theory about "why Trump winning itself won't change the party":

This is an argument, fair enough! But I think it is a pretty bad one. The intellectual journey for this is, imo, the way that Trump beat all of his challengers in the post-2024 environment. People seemed to copy his playbook, he had halfheartedly launched a failed coup, and yet none of it was enough to beat him. It made a lot of people think, "oh, this guy is magic. No one can replace Trump"

The key weakness of this reason is that, yeah, no one can replace Trump - because Trump still exists? He was president. And he is still running for office! That is, in fact, quite normal for how loyal followers work. For them nothing has changed, why would they change? Trump's coalition is definitely not as bright as Obama's coalition so he gets a more extreme version of it, but Obama is still getting glowing reviews and polls well almost a decade out from his presidency era from typical voters. People are naturally sticky this way, it is how we work.

There certainly is more to it - Trump's 2020 lie definitely gave him a sort of narrative throughput to justify extended support for example - but you really don't need more, because this factor goes away when Trump dies. Which he will, pretty soon. And meanwhile what Trump's core wants is probably not going to go away (particularly because it is pretty incoherent). The idea that they will simply be incapable of elevating someone else to the same position is extreme Great Man Theory Brain.

A lot of this buys into this notion of 4D Chess Mastermind Trump but for political charisma, but that is silly. He is a perfectly talented politician in some respects, a charismatic guy, don't get me wrong. But he isn't like a savant; he constantly does weird, alienating shit, and is much worse this campaign as his age is showing. There just isn't any big mystery to why he succeeded (beyond the inherent mysteries of all causation): he was famous and also very committed to being a big liar who gunned for the obvious Republican weaknesses. He was happy telling a motivated base he truly understood their nativist impulses, while promising mainstream Republicans normality and his commitment to things like abortion. Shockingly few Republicans were actually willing to just Come Out And Say It like he did - like really, you can find barely anyone in 2016 who does it.

And meanwhile, Trump is not a popular politician! He isn't at 50/50 because he ran a good campaign, he ran an awful campaign. He is just up against an incredibly unpopular incumbent in a world where incumbents in every country are losing every election. Nikki Haley would have easily done better. A big part of Trump's hand-picked down-ballot candidates doing badly is that he just chose fucking awful ones because he is a dumbass. They weren't awful because they were radicals; they were bad politicians, with ludicrous weaknesses and poor skillsets. What "magic" is there to capture here? The next leading Republican politician will likely do much better than him, unburdened by all his terrible baggage and off-putting behavior.

A next leader who will be leading a party that has now been shaped and molded into one far more comfortable with authoritarianism as a solution to policy gridlock. Maybe they won't value that! Fair, I think that is possible, and even likely. Most people are just generally decent people, and voters generally find this brand off-putting. But saying that it can't happen is complete folly. And we have a laundry list of leading Republicans who have openly embraced election denial to juice those odds, and voters who love to punish incumbents for this-or-that problem of the day.

IMO this is cope, building up Trump to be something far more special than he is. Voters just like authoritarian policies sometimes, and courting that isn't magic. It alas be that way.

[world-of-wales]

Happy International Women’s Day! Celebrating the impact of amazing women today, and every day. Here are just a few of the brilliant women we’ve been inspired by over the past 12 months. #IWD2024

After her daughter Brodie's death by suicide in 2020, Emma Webb launched a suicide prevention campaign. Brodie was a talented equestrian, which is what inspired @thewebstermwebb’s challenge pulling a life-size resin horse 160 miles from Chepstow to London.

Sarah Goldson has directed the @Wimbledon Ball Boy and Girl training since the 2012 Championships. The training helps develop life skills among young people, with 280 BBGs selected from local schools.

Vaitea Cowan is a co-founder of @Enapter, a company aiming to account for 10% of the world's green hydrogen by 2050. Enapter won the Fix Our Climate category at the 2021 Earthshot Prize and continues to thrive.

Bianca Sakol is the founder and CEO of @Sebbys_Corner, a shop-style baby bank which believes no child should go without the basic essentials they need to thrive. They provide a warm, welcoming environment and gives families choice and dignity to choose the items they need.

Mother and daughter, Jennifer and Emilia Clarke, were awarded MBEs for their brain injury charity work. They are co-founders of @SameYouOrg, a charity which develops better mental health recovery treatment for survivors and raises awareness around rehabilitation.

Dr. Gubby Ayida has been the CEO of @EvelinaLondon since May 2023 and oversaw its opening of the new Children’s Day Surgery Unit last year.

Wendy Simm was born and raised in Moss Side, Manchester and founded ‘Keeping It Real 24/7.’ The food bank focuses on delivering culturally important foods to those in need, such as yams and sweet potatoes, which generally are not provided by other food banks.

Captain Preet Chandi is a British Army Captain who holds three world records for polar trekking, most recently in December 2023 for becoming the world's fastest woman to complete a solo South Pole ski expedition.

Barbara Smith is a psychotherapist who has served over 16 years with @BritishRedCross, offering psychosocial support in disaster and war zones, aiding those in trauma.

Sarina Weigman began her role as England Women’s Head Coach in September 2021, leading The @Lionesses to Euro 2022 victory. She was presented with an Honorary CBE in June last year.

Renee Salt is a Holocaust survivor who was born in Zdunska Wola, Poland in 1929. She survived both Auschwitz and Belsen, but her family did not. Renee has spoken to thousands of young people as part of @HolocaustUK's programmes.

Professor Uzo Iwobi founded @rcccymru to boost art, heritage, and culture for minority groups in Wales. She empowers African Caribbean elders through learning initiatives and mentors young people to fulfil their aspirations.

In 2024, @hmsoardacious will be represented by Team Valkyrie, the first all-serving women's military team to row across the Atlantic. The @toughestrow challenge raises money for military charities and organisations that support veterans and their families.

- The Prince and Princess of Wales

[louisupdates]

VIDEO

The former One Direction will perform in Chile on May 24 at the Bicentenario Stadium in La Florida with his "Faith in the Future" tour. We talked exclusively with the British star who went from being a teenage pop idol to a professional soccer player, and finally to consolidating his own more mature and rocking sound. This is the successful present of the artist who loves to sing as much as he loves to play ball.

Dove Couple

Monday, April 8, 202408:10 am

[Translated from Spanish]

In 2022, Louis Tomlinson stepped on Chile for the first time alone to present his debut album "Walls". A bet that exceeded any expectation, because the madness was such that the British, that the former One Direction filled the Movistar Arena three times.

But that was not all, his fans had prepared a surprise for him that, as he confessed to La Cuarta, gave him "goosebumps." During the chorus of the song "Kill my mind", the young women organized themselves to coordinate the lights of their cell phones, creating a kind of mesmerizing wave, leaving the singer and his team speechless, so much so that the moment was recorded in his documentary "All of Those Voices". Moreover, the photo of one of those concerts was nothing more and nothing less than the poster.

But the music that makes him vibrate so much was not always his first choice in life. In 2013, just when the One Direction world tour that brought them to Chile was announced with two concerts at the National Stadium, Louis signed a contract with the League TwoDoncaster Rovers team, and only in 2017, two years after the group took an indefinite break, he was able to debut as a substitute in a match witnessed by more than five thousand fans.

“It's really an honor to be in the club where I spent most of my childhood," he wrote at the time on his Twitter account. However, the boy's dream stagnated when in 2020 and in the middle of the pandemic, he decided to launch himself as a soloist. All of his former bandmates had done it; it was his time.

Thus Louis - whom we recognize with nostalgia, familiarity, and a psychological interest - became one of the most important artists of his generation, adding milestones such as a billion streams on Spotify, numerous awards and being in the Guinness World Records book for breaking the record for the most watched live broadcast concert of a male soloist.

"I FEEL VERY GRATEFUL TO HAVE THAT LOVE HERE"

On the day of the interview with the newspaper, we arrived at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel where the interpreter stayed two days after a successful presentation at Tecate Pa'l Norte 2024 in Mexico, and a promotional step through Brazil. Despite the fatigue, he maintained a good attitude with the press, but mainly with his crowded fans outside the venue, who shouted his name from time to time.

Being in front of a pop idol who has spent half of his life on tour, in conferences and with a handful of iconic songs that marked more than a generation, is truly intimidating, but Louis makes anyone lower their guard because he welcomes you as if he were your friend. Wearing a pair of relaxed jeans, black t-shirt and sneakers in tune, he smiles and greets us in a friendly manner. Although he is surrounded by people who make up his team— overwhelming— but this is his natural environment; and thus begins a dialogue with La Cuarta about his two passions.

Q: Louis, you return to Chile in May after filling three arenas on your last visit, something historic! What will it be like to return with that powerful precedent?

Louis: I feel like my Spanish is coming back! I almost knew what you were asking (laughs). I'm very excited, I feel very lucky to be able to perform in an enclosure of that size in my... well, technically on my second solo tour. I feel very grateful to have that love and passion here. I'm mainly very excited about these shows.

Q: In several of your "Faith In the Future" songs, you talk about nostalgia, changes and the passage of time. Are they topics that you think about frequently or only arise when composing?

Louis: Yes, I would say that I am a little bit of a deep thinker. I think it helps me as a songwriter, but I also think that nostalgia is a great thing to write about. It’s a great topic to feel as a listener and also to write as a songwriter. And I'm also interested in psychology, so anything that makes the brain feel in a certain way, I think it's interesting.

Q: What would the 32-year-old Louis with a successful second album under his arm and a new tour say to the teenager who applied to The X Factor in 2010?

Louis: I would insist that he should do it. I think there is definitely an element, in every young person in that situation, there is something very terrifying that makes you want to start. But I would also tell you, what I have learned the most, to trust your instinct, trust that feeling and be brave to make decisions, the right decisions for yourself.

Q: Among those decisions is to be the last 1D member to make your solo career, and today we are here with "Faith In The Future" that sounds 100% yours. Looking back, how do you see the path has unwinded?

Louis: I feel very comfortable. The mentality I have now feels very different from the one I had when I started this trip as a soloist. I feel very blessed to be able to continue making music. But it's also a very nice feeling and it's something very new for me to feel so comfortable on stage and so comfortable when I'm making the music I want to make. In general, yes, I am very happy.

WHEN CHILE DRISTLED HIS SKIN

Q: Louis, I imagine there must be some time in your career when you said, wow, I did it!

Louis: You know, I used to resist that idea, ‘cuz for whatever reason, I don't know, I never wanted to give myself that, I suppose… my brain. But I have, I have started trying to have those moments more for myself. It often happens on the live show. It can be something that fans did together, like some kind of fan project. But also, even when I played the festival just now, in Mexico, that was one of those moments. I was kind of nervous going out there, and the audience was so vast, but people seemed to be having a good time. So yeah, it was great.

Q: Now that you mentioned the fan project, when you came to Chile, your followers prepared one for the song "Kill My Mind" that was beautiful. How did you experience it from the stage?

Louis: I had no idea that was going to happen! I know that fans often do their own little fan projects, in a way of doing something fun for me and something unique at every individual show, but I didn't know what to expect. And to be honest, that— literally gave me goosebumps, it was such an incredible spectacle. And, again, like always at these shows, and especially in Latin America, you’ve not got like ten people giving it a go, everyone in the room is participating! It’s a very euphoric thing for me to see from the stage.

Q: Changing the subject, football is one of your passions, what place does it occupy in your life today?

Louis: I would say that definitely, before I was in the band, nothing came close in my life, football was my IT. Now music is. I absolutely love football, but for me nothing comes close to music. Obviously it's my job, that's important, but as a fan, I'm talking more like a fan, I probably don't watch enough football these days, I'm usually busy, but I catch up with the "highlights" (the most important moments of the game). It's still a big part of my life, especially when they play in England. I'm excited for the next European Championship. We're going to win it!

Q: Of course! [England] is the parents of football. Finally, what makes you happiest today?

Louis: The family, definitely, the family and friends. And specifically in my work world. It's live concerts. That gives me amazing feelings.

[dailytomlinson]

Louis Tomlinson, two passions and one direction: “I absolutely love football, but for me nothing comes close to music”

The former One Direction will perform in Chile on May 24 at the Bicentenario Stadium in La Florida with his “Faith in the Future” tour. We spoke exclusively with the British star who went from being a teenage pop idol to a professional footballer, and finally to consolidating his own more mature and rock sound. This is the successful present of the artist who loves to sing as much as he loves

In 2022, Louis Tomlinson set foot in Chile for the first time alone to present his debut album “Walls” . A bet that exceeded any expectations, since the madness was such that the British, that the former One Direction filled the Movistar Arena three times

But that was not all, his fans had prepared a surprise for him that, as he confessed to La Cuarta , gave him “goosebumps . ” During the chorus of the song “Kill my mind” , the young women organized themselves to coordinately move the lights of their cell phones, creating a kind of hypnotizing wave, leaving the singer and his team speechless, so much so that the moment was recorded in their documentary “ “All of Those Voices . ” Furthermore, the photo of one of those concerts was nothing more and nothing less than the poster.

But the music that makes him vibrate so much was not always his first choice in life. In 2013, just when One Direction's world tour was announced, which brought them to Chile with two concerts at the National Stadium , Louis signed a contract with the League Two team Doncaster Rovers , and only in 2017, two years after the group took an indefinite break, he was able to debut as a substitute in a match witnessed by more than five thousand fans.

INTERVIEW UNDER CUT:

“It is truly an honor to be at the club where I spent most of my childhood,” he wrote on his Twitter account at the time. However, the kid's dream was stagnant when in 2020 and in the middle of the pandemic, he decided to go solo, all of his former bandmates had done it, it was his time.

Thus, Louis - who recognized us as being nostalgic, familiar and interested in psychology - became one of the most important artists of his generation, adding milestones such as one billion streams on Spotify , numerous awards and being in the Guinness World book. Records for breaking the record for the most-watched livestreamed concert by a male soloist.

“I FEEL VERY GRATEFUL TO HAVE THAT LOVE HERE”

On the day of the interview with the pop newspaper , we arrived at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel where the performer spent two days after a successful presentation at Tecate Pa'l Norte 2024 in Mexico, and a promotional tour of Brazil. Despite his fatigue, he maintained a good attitude with the press, but mainly with his fans gathered outside the venue, who shouted his name from time to time.

Being in front of a pop idol who has spent half his life on tour, in conferences and with a handful of iconic songs that marked more than one generation, is truly intimidating, but Louis makes anyone lower their guard because he welcomes you. as if he were your friend. Wearing a pair of relaxed jeans, a black t-shirt and matching sneakers, he smiles and greets friendly, he is surrounded by people who make up his team, overwhelming, but it is his natural environment; and thus begins a dialogue with La Cuarta about his two passions.

Louis, you return to Chile in May after filling three arenas on your last visit, something historic! What will it be like to return with such a powerful precedent?

I feel like my Spanish is coming back! I almost knew what you were asking (laughs). I'm very excited, I feel very lucky to be able to perform in a venue that size on my... well, technically my second solo tour. I feel very grateful to have that love and passion here. Mainly I feel very excited for these shows.

- In several of your songs on “Faith in the future”, you talk about nostalgia, changes and the passage of time. Are these themes that you think about frequently or do they only arise when composing?

Yes, I would say I'm a bit of a deep thinker, I think it helps me as a songwriter, but I also think nostalgia is a great thing to write about, it's a great thing to feel about as a listener and also to write about as a songwriter. And I'm also interested in psychology, so anything that makes the brain feel a certain way, I think is interesting.

- What would the 32-year-old Louis, with a second successful album under his arm and a new tour, say to the teenager who applied for The X Factor in 2010?

I would insist that he should do it. I think there's definitely an element, in every young person in that situation, there's something very scary that makes you want to go. But I would also tell him, what I have learned the most, to trust his instincts, trust that feeling and be brave to make decisions, the right decisions for yourself.

- Among those decisions is being the last member of 1D to go solo, and today we are here with “Faith in the future” which has a sound that is 100% yours. Looking back, how do you see the path you have traveled?

I feel very comfortable. The mindset I have now feels very different than when I started this journey as a solo artist. I feel very blessed to be able to continue making music. But it's also a very nice feeling and it's something very new for me to feel so comfortable on stage and so comfortable when I'm making the music I want to make. Overall, yes, I am very happy.

-Louis, I imagine there must have been a moment in your career when you said, wow, I did it!

You know, I used to resist that idea, because for some reason, I don't know, I never wanted to give myself that. But I've had it, I've started trying to have those moments for myself. It often happens during concerts, it can be something that fans did together, like entertaining fan projects. But also, even when I played the festival now in Mexico, that was one of those moments. I was a little nervous going out and the crowd was so big, people looked like they were having a good time. So yeah, it was amazing.

- Now that you mentioned the fan project, when you came to Chile your followers prepared one for the song “Kill my mind” that was beautiful, how did you experience it from the stage?

I had no idea what was going to happen! I know that fans often do fan projects, in a way to do something entertaining for me and something unique in each show, but I didn't know what to expect. And to be honest, I remember getting goosebumps, it was an incredible show. And, again, always in these concerts, and especially in Latin America, there are not ten people, everyone in the venue is participating! It's a very euphoric thing to see from the stage for me.

- Changing the subject, football is one of your passions, what place does it occupy in your life today?

I would say that definitely, before I was in the band, nothing came close in my life, football was everything to me, now music is. I absolutely love football, but for me nothing comes close to music. Obviously it's my job, that's important, but as a fan, I'm speaking more like a fan, I probably don't watch enough football these days, I'm usually busy, but I catch up on the highlights. ). It's still a big part of my life, especially when England plays. I'm excited for the upcoming Euro Cup, we're going to win it!

- Of course! You are the fathers of football. Finally, what makes you most happy today?

Family, definitely, family and friends. And specifically in my work world, it's live concerts, that gives me amazing feelings.

Louis Tomlinson will perform at the Estadio Bicentenario La Florida on May 24. General ticket sales are available through Ticketmaster.cl

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dan Pfeiffer at Message Box News:

In close races, nothing is more important than closing strong. And with four days to go, Donald Trump is most definitely not closing strong. Just look at the last week of his campaign:

On Sunday, Trump held a disastrous rally in Madison Square Garden filled with racist, misogynistic regret including the Puerto Rico joke heard around the world;

On Tuesday, Trump talked about the major role that anti-vaccine crank Robert F Kennedy Jr. would play in setting health care policy in a Trump Administration;

On Wednesday, Trump brought up both his history of sexual assault and his role overturning Roe v Wade when he said would protect women “whether they like or not;”

On Thursday, Trump sued 60 Minutes for $10 billion for a laughable series of reasons; and

Also on Thursday, Trump suggested that Liz Cheney should be shot for not supporting him.

I am writing this midday Friday, so it’s likely Trump will find another way to self-immolate politically between now and when you read this post. Trump’s surrogates like Speaker Mike Johnson, Elon Musk, and Trump Transition Chair Howard Lutnick make matters worse at every turn. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, has been closing very strongly. I have seen polling on her ellipse speech in front of 75,000 people, and she knocked it out of the park. Over the last week, her campaign played offensively, dictating the terms of the political conversation. Trump is reacting to her and is clearly off his game.

Why Closing Well Matters

While most voters made up their mind months if not years ago, there is a slice of voters who don’t decide until the final week. The news environment in the final week is very influential with these voters. They have either been going back and forth for months or, more likely, are just tuning into politics in the final days before the election. This is particularly true because our media ecosystem makes it challenging for all but the biggest junkies to follow political news. Campaigns track what voters are hearing about the candidates. In focus groups, the first question asked of respondents is often how much they have heard about a candidate and whether what they heard made them feel better or worse about that candidate. The poll often includes an open-ended question asking voters to volunteer what they have heard. Those responses are then put into a word cloud to see what’s breaking through. Here’s an example from a recent Navigator Research poll about Project 2025.

Want more proof that Kamala Harris (D) has the edge as we get closer to the finish line?

Donald Trump (R) has made gaffe after gaffe in recent weeks, and late-deciders are going towards Harris instead of him, unlike the last two elections.

[chaithetics]

american anon. i am not white but i am usually white passing in most contexts. my most important question is about the direction of democracy there. (also i heard a lot of conservative Americans moved to NZ because they made up some fetishized version of it in their head and imagined it as a white haven or something; is that true?) but also yeah would be interested to hear about the current government's social policies.

Yes! That is true, a lot of Americans think this is some white utopia! And I've even seen some who moved here on tik tok say that racism doesn't exist here because you can actually see Māori when you go outside 🙃

We're in a cost of living crisis, unemployment is up, job ads are down, there are cuts in every industry, massive ones in education and the public sector, it's so crowded people with postgraduate degrees are struggling to get basic office jobs and even retail jobs, not even specialist roles to their degrees. House and renting market is insane. You would need a guaranteed job and supported financial system to financially do it here. It's not an environment you could come to right now and 'wing it'.

We have the highest incarceration rate of indigenous women in the world (yep! We're even beating the US there!), Māori are overrepresented in the justice system as prisoners, victims, and offenders. Māori have poorer health and education outcomes. Overpolicing exists and I even have stories of uncles and cousins who have experienced police violence in 'the modern era' like millenial family members.

Over four years (2020-2024) we had over 14,000 hate crimes reported to police. Between 2022-2024 more than a third of reported hate crimes targeted people of Asian descent. Between 2022-2023, Muslims reported 205 hate crimes, that's just over one every two days and Muslims don't even make up 1.5% of our population! Pasifika communities experience racism, our incoming Deputy Prime Minister, David Seymour made a joke on live radio about how he'd like to blow up the Ministry for Pacific Peoples (which IS a government agency and he was an MP then too) last year BEFORE the election and there were no repercussions. The current government has no interest in racism except enabling it, they've demolished a group that were investigating hate crimes and white supremacy, the Māori Health Authority which was established to promote better health outcomes for Māori, want freedom of speech laws to pass and make Universities have to agree to uphold freedom of speech policies to receive funding. They're changing the tertiary and primary education landscape with no thought for learners or educators. They're destroying the tertiary education sector and creating so many job losses that'll also have intergenerational losses for the students who won't get qualifications and training, especially in the trades sector. What they're planning to do, over 90% of our polytechs won't survive.

Gender affirming healthcare is extremely inaccessible here, some schools still don't allow students to use the bathroom or wear the uniform that matches their identity. NZ First want to make it illegal for trans women to use women facilities and for sports to be based on biological sex assigned at birth rather than gender identity and are disguising their transphobia as 'concern for women's safety and wellbeing' when every single man in their party voted against abortion law reform to decriminalise it a couple of years ago.

We're moving more to privatisation of prisons, more prisons being built, youth boot camps being set up for young people, especially Māori. One of the parties in government, NZ First, is very much interested in trying to make prison slave labour part of their punishment and accountability.

Education and healthcare is fucked with cuts and legislation. So many teachers and healthcare workers have moved to Australia. They've done cuts to make it harder for people to use childcare services, families are struggling whether they work or not. They're trying to force people to not work from home.

Our PM has said he won't touch the abortion legislation but he has said in the past that abortion is "tantamount to murder". Our incoming Deputy PM is the reason why it's legal for people to harass people at abortion and gynecological healthcare providers, because it's freedom of speech.

There are so many bills going through to kill the environment and just make money. It's damaging for the environment and Māori as the land is part of us and we are her privileged caretakers. There's too many bills there to name. There are some conflicts of interest that are getting involved with this.

Our cabinet is stupid, those ministers are only doing work that is a waste of time and money. It's people establishing unnecessary projects to waste taxpayers money and boost their ego and dissolving other ones for the same reason.

This country is a racist place. These are just vague brief points and I honestly just don't have the brain to type up more. It's four am, I want to not be stressed and sleep. I hope you're having a nice morning. And I do not want to hear something like "oh it's so much better than america though!/shut up and be grateful!" because it is a DISGUSTING time to be Māori here, we are being told that we do not matter and are second-grade citizens in our own country.

[mitigatedchaos]

I've been mentally categorizing you as a pretty clean example of the 'new right'; editorializing with 'extreme' feels like it's giving more heat than light but w/e. It's very clear in the associative sense (you hang out with people on the right), in the stylistic sense (your writing is easy to match with the Moldbug, Land, ZHPL cluster), and in the operational sense (you critique the left primarily and the right only parenthetically).

And like, at the end of the day, your overriding issue of concern is to codify racial differences as beyond the scope of policy intervention. Whatever else you want it to be, that project is and always has been a keystone of the right's ideological basis and coalition-building.

When I was a child, in the year 2000, the Human Genome Project took 13 years and cost $2.7 billion just to sequence the human genome. Now that costs less than $1,000. Genetic engineering was science fiction.

In 2017, the FDA approved the first commercial gene therapy, Kymriah. It costs $475,000. If monogenic gene therapy costs $500,000 in 2020 and declines in cost by half every 5 years, then by 2035 it costs $62,500, and by 2050 it will cost around $7,800.

I recently posted a criticism of Hitler, and I'll bring up part of it because it's relevant here - Hitler apparently thought the world was going to be consumed by Malthusian total war, and that the only thing to do was to win. However, in many developed countries the fertility rate has been below replacement since around 1973, or for about fifty years as of 2024.

World War 2 started in 1939. Hitler killed millions of people. 1973 was a mere 34 years away.

The BAPism cluster is implicitly based on the biocapital meltdown theory. Its logical conclusion would be a return to pre-industrial mortality rates. In terms of actual science, at least one researcher said that it's a mystery how mutational load hasn't killed us 10 times over already - that amount of uncertainty is not a sound foundation for radical policy.

The Social Justice cluster are based on a theory of social causes, but their social approach doesn't work and the social interventions we do have are relatively weak and tend to fade out. Despite this, they want a system of formal racial benefits and penalties throughout all of society, and prefer to use one particular race as their moral dumping ground for all problems. They're the kind of people that would sabotage hiring for air traffic controllers.

Neither philosophy is based on a realistic assessment of the situation. Both are based on despair over genetic fatalism.

I'll go over 4 possible future cases, the relationship between the Rationalists and what you call the "New Right," and some of what I think will happen to the coalitions in 10-20 years.. (Total post is ~2,600 words.)

And like, at the end of the day, your overriding issue of concern is to codify racial differences as beyond the scope of policy intervention. Whatever else you want it to be, that project is and always has been a keystone of the right's ideological basis and coalition-building.

We already paid the staggering oppression setup costs for the 2008 world system. It's a sunk cost. Now is not a good time to engage in a radical political program involving much higher oppression, suffering, or material costs on the basis of very limited evidence.

Let's talk about the possibilities. When it comes to the things people complain about, there are basically three possibilities: { mostly_genetic, partly_genetic, barely_genetic } As for the genetics industry, we can treat it as having two possibilities: { improvement, stasis }

Genes and the environment are not actually independent. I work based on a theory of compounding capability. Someone with a higher ability can take better advantage of positive events ("positive shocks," such as a scholarship or inheritance), and has more options to mitigate the downsides of negative events ("negative shocks," such as a fire or illness).

Someone's genes influence the environment which they create around themselves, and the environment influences just what they can accomplish with those genes.

So we can actually collapse the first set of possibilities into just two: { partly_genetic, barely_genetic }. We can basically break the situation down into four cases.

(barely_genetic, stasis): It turns out that the genetics industry is a one-trick pony and can only cure a few terrible genetic diseases, and for no cheaper than $500,000 a pop. However, this is a different situation than the one we're in now. Currently, we have about 50 years of social interventions with relatively little to show for it. If in 2050, the genetics industry can only influence (and predict) some very narrow/minor stuff, then we'll have 30 years of mucking about with genetics with relatively little to show for it. At that time, it would be more reasonable to consider radical politics. (Though actually effective radical policy might look quite different from what contemporary progressives would imagine.)

(partly_genetic, stasis): In this scenario, it turns out that the genetics industry is not that bad at predicting things using genetics, but actually influencing them proves much more difficult for some reason. This seems like a rather unlikely combination, but was one of the sources of fear of genetics in the 90s and '00s - genetics could only show you someone's doom, and thus couldn't save anyone, only be used as a rationalization to leave some people to suffer and die.

By now, some of you have probably realized what the joke behind the #librx posts is. Just because we're in such an incredibly inconvenient scenario doesn't mean we need to let BAP deploy bodybuilder death squads that hunt fat people for sport. Both the bloodgild (vampire prison), and admitting college students based on their test scores per calorie, are fairly ridiculous policies. But if we take reactionary assumptions about underlying conditions, that doesn't necessarily mean we can't create more soft-touch policies than reactionaries would prefer.

(barely_genetic, improvement): This is not far from the scenario envisioned by sterile, party-line New York Times Futurism. In this scenario, the genetics industry enables us to cure a variety of health problems, but shows little ability to influence the things that people complain about.

From a policy development perspective, this puts us in an improved position compared to where we are right now. A powerful ability to manipulate genetics makes it much easier to determine what is not genetic, and thus makes it easier to narrow our search for successful social policy.

(partly_genetic, improvement): This is a new era. Three things.

1 - If genes are significant driver of performance, then the ability to alter genes allows us to use money to buy increased performance. This means that resource transfers are single-round and possibly even a net economic investment, and not just a moral or political benefit we're buying with our economic surplus.

Right now our means to convert money into performance are limited.

2 - Due to compounding capabilities, if genes drive performance, and we can alter genes, then this frees up potential for success with social policy. Suppose someone is a drug addict who has a genetic propensity for drug addiction. (This is a made-up example.) If the biological risk of drug addiction is changed (and this is a big if), then the ability of a rehab program to not only get this guy off of drugs, but keep him off of drugs, is improved.

3 - One of the primary arguments for cruel right-wing policy is conservation of scarce genetic capital. This does not completely eliminate such arguments, because it's necessary to retain a corps of personnel to maintain the necessary biomedical equipment, and to maintain a society that can continue to field this industry. However, such arguments are dramatically reduced in scope, and shifted towards things like reproductive alignment, prevention of excessive reliance on capital-intensive systems of reproduction, and other future bioconservatism.

This scenario is likely to introduce all sorts of new problems, including a new ideological mania where people insist that society has to be perfect, so natural reproduction must be outlawed and some genes must be made illegal. (Maintaining human freedom in this new high-energy, high-capital equilibrium will require new ideological development.)

It's very clear in the associative sense (you hang out with people on the right), in the stylistic sense (your writing is easy to match with the Moldbug, Land, ZHPL cluster), and in the operational sense (you critique the left primarily and the right only parenthetically).

The position of Scott Alexander circa 2013-2014 was that the current rate of gene burn does not constitute an emergency as technology is likely to change the game within 100 years, and that biological causes (in general) are not frightening because they seem likely to be easier to deal with than social causes. In 2017, he argued that people shouldn't worry too much about their personal aptitude test scores.

Mitigatedchaos is to the right of the median capital-R Rationalist - most of them are committed to the Democratic Party, and quite a few here wouldn't agree with my opinions on polyamory or borders. Mitigatedchaos has an overall more conservative portfolio than the typical 2014 rationalist on a number of metrics, including on bioconservatism ("reproductive alignment" being one example).

(A 2014 Rationalist, of course, would find describing beliefs as a "portfolio" (along with other investment terms) to be quite intuitive.)

Nonetheless, stalling for time until the genetics industry comes online is one of the positions that is mainstream within the rationalists.

What do Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land, and Zero HP Lovecraft all have in common? Imagination.

Take technology. Change it. Does that change other aspects of society?

If you are Ted Chiang of the New York Times, this is inconceivable to you. The Democratic Party has a position and a coalition right now, therefore the Democratic Party will have that same position and coalition forever. The work of futurism is merely to tell readers of the New York Times that they will believe the same things in 2050 that they believe right now.

What do Robin Hanson, Scott Alexander, Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land, and Zero HP Lovecraft all have in common?

They have a tendency to view the world in terms of dynamic systems (rather than static ones) and evolutionary dynamics. This is the kind of person who can think of an organization becoming misaligned, or organizational linkage limits, or limitations resulting from information processing and transmission. Or think of "coordination problems" as their own thing. You know, like in Meditations on Moloch.

With a few exceptions, the left coalition haven't done much interesting ideological work since the second term of the Obama Administration. It's largely conflict theorist stuff for winning interpersonal and institutional conflicts, shutting down criticism, and gaining power. No more "creating a free society through digital media piracy;" now it's all guns and bombs and knives and everything has to be tied in to the central narrative conflict about identity.

It's difficult to learn about a system when it's all functioning smoothly. It's when a system breaks that you start really learning about the internals. Compared to 2008, in some sense the left coalition's ideology-forming system is "broken," or more compressed into a particular, narrow range.

As a political theorist, I've learned a lot.

I learn from Social Justice by watching the conflict and then synthesizing theory about it. Watching events like, "It's inequitable and therefore racist to teach algebra to 8th graders," tells us a lot about political maneuvering, coalitions, and ideology, but the actual idea itself is just flat bad. It's observational, like a zoologist studying animal behavior in the wild.

This is different from how I relate to the Rationalists or what you call the "New Right." Both Scott and I understood the theory of racism as self-perpetuating, as every sufficiently smart liberal would have back in 2008. There, the relationship is more horizontal.

There's a crossover or flow of ideas or concepts between the Rationalists/Post-Rationalists and the "New Right" because they're the two major groups on the public Internet studying or inventing theory in a way that's of much interest, currently. (The exceptions mostly aren't far from the neighborhood, here. The actual community of people having these ideological or philosophical discussions is smaller than we would have naively expected back in 2008.)

In 2017, Scott published a review of Seeing Like A State, which focused on the concept of legibility (which I sometimes speak of in terms of "dimensionality;" this is an immensely powerful concept that has guided some of my thinking on the nature of capital). This is of interest if you're a "New Right" person or a smart liberal.

For the right-wingers, it's interesting because it sets limits on the appropriate scope and nature of state power.

For the smart liberals, it's interesting because it's part of the set of much more advanced arguments for liberalism based on the limits to obtaining and processing information, and the limits of what can be known, similar to the economic calculation problem.

But if you're Social Justice, then you want to flatten everyone into a limited number of legible categories, so that you can discriminate against them to "correct" "for past injustices."

To take it back out to the conflict analysis level again, Social Justice's actions aren't that interesting at the object level. However, criticisms about "what isn't captured in the metrics" would have been a more advanced critique back in like, 2010. From the conflict analysis perspective, this suggests that the body of ideology is changing in its interpretation as it moves into the hands of different people, which suggests different motivations and different levels of capability.

That is interesting. "How many bits of complexity can our ideology support, and how does it handle under compression?" is an interesting question both for right-wingers and smart liberals.

and in the operational sense (you critique the left primarily and the right only parenthetically).

Republicans can't even manage to produce enough professional-class personnel to staff the government without having to rely on like 30% Democrats (there's a chart somewhere about this).

A lot of assertions that the right wing have power are based on observing things that aren't necessarily caused by the right wing and concluding that the right wing intended for these things to happen, and therefore caused them, and therefore have an immense amount of power.

There is basically no risk of BAPism coming into actual power over the next 20 years.

Social Justice and the broader left coalition choking the genetics industry to death before it can come online, though? That's just assuming that they apply the same playbook to it that they apply to every other industry. (Imagine if they fucked it up as bad as housing is fucked in California.)

If smarter liberals within the coalition were going to stop them, then why haven't they stopped them already?

Between the right-wingers and the left-wingers, the right-wing ideas are generally more immoral or crueler but more functional, while the left-wing ideas are more moral on the surface but are anti-functional.

Think of reduced environmental restrictions vs "degrowth."

We've had social conservatism before, and liberalized out of it. Given that [the left have more power] × [their ideas are more destructive], yes, I primarily criticize the left and criticize the right less often and less severely at this time. I could make a pretty sophisticated argument against a number of right-wing ideas, but that's not really of benefit right now.

In the medium term, it makes sense to align with the right-wingers for the next 10-20 years, as growth in the genetics industry is fueled by the immense demand for near-miraculous cures.

After that medium term, it's much less clear what happens. At some point between 2030 and 2045, different questions within the field of genetics are going to undergo partisan polarization, and it's likely that the makeup of the two coalitions (as well as their ideology) will change.

As we saw from the coronavirus, partisan polarization is unpredictable and varies based on the initial state of the system and the order in which an idea is passing through a coalition. Observing it in action is quite the argument against maintaining a high partisan alignment.

Anyhow, I think you can call mitigatedchaos "right-wing," but I put way too much effort into hedging everything to call it "extreme right." It's about as far to the right as a lot of people are willing to read, as if it were a cottage right next to the jurisdictional border, with a big sign next to it marking out the border line, reading "Right-Wing Beyond This Point."