Monday’s Forum
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29 responses to “Monday’s Forum”
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The “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax is not a hoax at all. It is what we suspected all along.
Today’s Letters From an American
Tonight Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.
The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.
A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.
After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.
I am disgusted. And frustrated. While my Senator Cruz rails on about Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed as if they have anything to do with Texas.
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The remarkable thing is that the people in both the MAGA-verse and Moscow think these fantasies of “spheres of influence” are remotely realisable.
In Asia, for instance, neither India nor Japan nor Indonesia nor Vietnam are inclined to accept Chinese domination.
And the concept of a Russia that will be accepted as hegemon over a Europe that is far richer, more populous, technically adept and, yes, basically militarily stronger, is absurd.
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In Asia, for instance, neither India nor Japan nor Indonesia nor Vietnam are inclined to accept Chinese domination.
Doubleplusgood. They can act as the disputed territories for the endless wars Eurasia, Eastasia, and Dumbfuckistan will fight for ever.
And the concept of a Russia that will be accepted as hegemon over a Europe that is far richer, more populous, technically adept and, yes, basically militarily stronger, is absurd.
That’s no skin of El Taco’s ginormous orange ass.
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It means, though, that a Putinist Russia, unable either to achieve dominion over Europe or tolerate being one among equals, is likely to become mini-me to Xi by default.
Russia as peer of China and the US is pre-1990 fantasy.As for the US, China, and Asia, the choice remains: outside a “rules based” imperfectly cooperative and competitive order, there can either be contests for allegiances, or there can be, more or less, agreed spheres.
In neither case, despite the imaginings of some “IR scholars” are the middling states likely to accept the disposal of their fortunes even by the US or China, and certainly not by Russia.
The entire history of Europe can be read, if you choose, as a whole sequence of rather bloody-minded “lesser” states determinedly jamming spokes in the wheels of the “greater”.
Even at terrible cost to themselves.
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Here is Tom Nichols on the same:
America Is Now an Ally of Russia. Donald Trump has abandoned the Western order.
In the past week, the president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.
Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history. To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.
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I continue to think, as Nichols seems inclined to at one point, that Trump’s view of politics is largely based on a mix of “mob wannabe” from his early days in New York and an international version of that based on some 1980’s paleocon tropes.
In this worldview, allies inclined to lawfulness are just “little people” who must bow to the “bosses”, and need a good punching if they dare to be defiant.
While the “council of bosses” divide up the spoils in “deals” to avoid inter-mob fighting.Trump seems entirely unable to realise that others in his fantasised “council of bosses” are not working on the same basis at all. And regard his blundering incompetence with barely concealed contempt.
Xi and Putin may respect the power of the US; the competence of Donald Trump, not so much.Trump’s worldview also overlooks the reality that assumed subordinates he thinks must submit and obey are in reality sovereign states, which even separately are considerable, and as allies of each other, rather formidable.
Much more so than, for example, Putin and Russia.That they may be less inclined to performative displays of swaggering brutality does not alter the basic calculus of relative power.
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Trump has decided that, just over two weeks from election day, his focus is going to be…
Right.
DOJ lawyers are in court right now, and one of them apparently instructed junior attorneys not to answer the Judge. Which seems like questionable direction.
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I spend a lot of time thinking about how social media has made lives worse.
However, this brouhaha over the young man (“Tommy”) who got up at a town hall and asked Abdul El-Sayed to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood made me realize how, back in the day (aka, Ancient Times, like the mid-90s) when I was working in politics, if something like this had happened it would have been days if not a week (or more) before someone uncovered the fact that this guy used to work for Sen. Hawley and was clearly a partisan plant. Now, it took around 24 hours.
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Unquestionably the Internet has given people access to resources that would have been much harder to come by in previous generations. It’s just that this ability has been more than counterbalanced by the Internet’s capacity for the spread of misinformation. We have better tools for combating misinformation than was the case in the pre-Internet days, but these tools are useless the more people retreat into their ideological bubbles, believing what they want to believe, and discounting information that conflicts with their worldview.
Notice that I used the term “Internet” and not social media. The observation I just made is not remotely new and in fact predates the rise of the term “social media” around the mid- to late- 2000s. But I think it helps place into perspective how the freakout over the impact of new technology is so often overblown–always glass half-empty, always ignoring how it’s not much different than what we had before.
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I asked Gemini about stainless steel cookware, and it showed me ads for cookware sets on eBay, Amazon, and other online stores. Then it answered.
Maybe they were links and not adds, but Gemini is a Google product. On Google search, links and ads are sometimes not easy to tell apart.
In any case, I wondered bout the stickiness of various foods on stainless steel. I wasn’t searching for pieces to purchase.
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The ad-ification of Google is becoming increasingly annoying.
Though sometimes if you actually are looking for purchaseables, useful.
It would probably work better for users if they made the general query and “shopping” results more distinct.
But obvs less lucrative for Google.Also, the “AI results first” default can also be a p.i.t.a.
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Wife and I (and daughter) just got back from early voting. I was wrong about how many voting elements there were. I thought there was 107. Actually, there were 113 voting elements. Supposedly the largest in the nation. Being anal retentive and obsessive, I had my ballot all filled out and just punched in my choices on the touchscreen. Pretty sure most just punched in the top ten most important ones (Gov, Lt Gov, Senator, Representatives, etc.) and left the rest blank. Except for the $1.3B school bond issue at the back of the ballot. That always excites people.
The line was long and out the doors. There were about 75 voting machines. Couldn’t really tell from looking at folks what were their voting orientation. Except for the guy in front of us who had the Charlie Kirk T-shirt. The voting center was in the affluent NW corner of Harris County. Lots of old folks and lots of old folks needing physical assistance.
Later on tonight, the Elections Dept will release the statistics on numbers of voters.
I’m just glad I’m done. I did my duty.
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It has to be said, from a UK pov, that’s just nuts.
In both general elections and locals (which are usually separate dates, and always separate ballots) we usually just get between three to half a dozen candidates.
And no local referendums at all.
Confronted with such, I’d be inclined to write in “Go do your damn jobs, and stop bothering me!”The US does seem inclined to default to over-egging the pudding.
Congratulations to you for wading through it.
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I think this is why I have a hard time finishing a story.
Over my last tranche of vacation I began a novel. I’ve been adding to it on weekends. Then last Friday I was thinking about a story I finished in 2025, and wondered. “was the world building really necessary?”
The thought kept gnawing at me. Over the weekend I re-read it, and then thought some more about it. And then decided I could reduce it from aprox.15,000 words to under 6,000 by eliminating most of the world building and changing a couple of developments. And now I want to do that next weekend…
I’m allotting that one weekend and nothing more. If I get it done, swell. If not, that’s it and I resume work on the novel.
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I vaguely recall reading something by a rather famous Brit SF author decades back.
Stross? Baxter? Reynolds? Banks? Damned if can recall who right now.
But what they said was roughly: “Build your world, in as much detail as you see fit, and set the story in it. But show, don’t tell, about the world, as it emerges. Avoid info-dumps on the reader unless they somehow fit naturally into the narrative.”-
I’m afflicted with “Show! DON’T tell!” trauma. Part of the problem lay in showing a lot of the world build that was irrelevant to the plot.
It’s a parallel universe story. So I did a lot of showing how the civilian scientists get along with the military ship’s crew. The purpose being when the protagonist finds herself in another universe, the reader can tell, or infer, this is the case because the relationship is different.
That’s one part. The other was a long scene where the protagonist justifies and defends her choice of landing spot. That one will hurt to cut out, as I built a logical case for why oxygen levels on the planet are too high judging by the extent of the areas covered by water and vegetation, and where the additional oxygen might be coming from.
Of course, all that gets dropped later…
What I concluded is that a short story doesn’t need, and really can’t have, as much world building details as a longer work. but you have to have interesting events, rather than two scientists pushing a ground penetrating radar unit while they chat about navy protocols, or later how relaxed everyone is at lunch in the field.
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Meanwhile, Trump
On France:“I told Emmanuel [Macron], you should close up your borders … I’ve known him for probably eight or nine years. I told him as soon as I met him, I said, ‘you’re making a big mistake’. We closed our borders. He didn’t.”
“The whole world was coming in, and as you know, Paris is going to be a Muslim city very soon, and that wasn’t the deal…. We closed our borders. (Macron) didn’t.”This speaks to a general MAGA belief that Europe has “open borders”, which it does not.
I continue to suspect a lot of the US right in general, and Trump in particular, are too bloody stupid to distinguish between “free movement of workers” and “open borders” within the EU and externally.
They are not remotely the same thing.
See also:House Speaker Mike Johnson posted: “France is descending into chaos because they wanted OPEN BORDERS — just like the socialist Democrats in America.
Trump on the Russian war on Ukraine:
“Frankly, Zelenskyy is not helping matters much. I think he doesn’t want to stop it, but I want to see people not die.”
“If he would have listened to me, he would have made a much better deal a long time ago, and he’d have a million people living from his side …”
“I think it’s time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine ”
Just surrender, dammit, and give Trump his Nobel!
How can that little guy refuse to accept that Trump is the dealmaker, and deserves his cut?Trump continues to be a quite amazingly disgusting mixture of stupidity and narcissism.
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I had a notion a long time ago of a series of 10-15,000 novellas all dealing with one exploration ship. It died when I couldn’t come up with more than three ideas that would make decent stories. This story I’m rewriting would fit right in with some major changes in the characters.
I might revisit the series idea later.
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I’ve sometimes vaguely attempted to write fiction in a “realistic” future on the basis of no ftl, limited AI, partial uploading, using “sub-light relativistic” ships in some sort of “spatial bubble” to dodge the relativistic particle impact problem, limited quantum communication channels, some means of “suspension” and extended lifespan, possibly in “mega ships”
Minimal aliens, and those entirely non-humanoid.
The non-humanoids being human produced.
Gave up.I can build the world, but simply can’t write a good story, lol.
Just as I can understand music, but can’t convincingly compose it.-
Writing fiction is really easy for me. Which people hate to hear me say. Have an idea, start typing. And I always knew I could do it. But being practical and a bit lazy I settled for serviceable prose and cool concepts. I never wanted to be an official writer, I just want to make shit up and get paid.
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