James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.
@Bobert: In retrospect, it seems so obvious that the Internet’s most important feature – sharing information without the old-school gatekeeping forces – would turn out badly.
There’s a reason journalism schools spent so much energy on sourcing stories from multiple angles, and editors worried about their reputations when publishing things that were speculation or hearsay.
I want to believe that humanity will come up with a mechanism to put those gatekeeping forces back in place, to assure that truth, and reason, and science prevail, but perhaps Pandora’s box is open now in the way that Trump opened it for violating the norms and traditions of the presidency.
Maybe the best we can hope for is that the bad guys don’t start out with the benefit of the doubt anymore — that society overall becomes more cynical and wise to the schemes.
The first Americans to earn the Distinguished Service Cross were not combat soldiers but two women serving as nurses with the British Army before the U.S. entered World War I.
On Aug. 17, 1917, Nurses Beatrice MacDonald and Helen McClelland of the Army Nurse Corps Reserve were assigned to a surgical team at the British Casualty Clearing Station Number 61 near Lillers, France.
During a German night air raid, MacDonald and McClelland continued caring for their patients despite bombs raining down all around them. When explosion wounded MacDonald, causing her to lose sight in one eye, McClelland treated her fellow nurse along with the other wounded service members.
Their actions under fire were the combat actions first deemed worthy of the Army’s then-new Distinguished Service Cross, which had been officially created by Congress on Jan. 2, 1917. The two were awarded the Cross on July 9, 1918.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states like Texas to ban nearly all abortions, the number of pregnancy terminations in the United States actually increased. This paradox, which pleases abortion advocates as much as it frustrates their conservative counterparts, hinges mostly on pills.
An average of 2,800 Texans receive abortion-inducing medications through the mail each month from states that still allow abortion, according to #WeCount, a tracking project from the Society of Family Planning.
…
In December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a first-of-its-kind civil lawsuit against a New York doctor for allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a Texas resident, setting up a conflict between Texas’ abortion ban and New York’s shield laws.
…
Nothing in New York’s shield law prevents a Texas court from hearing a case against a New York doctor
…
If Carpenter doesn’t show up to the hearing, Paxton’s office will likely ask the court for a default judgement. If that is granted, Paxton can ask a New York state court to enforce it, which is where the shield law may come into play.
But much of the shield law’s protections are about protecting doctors from criminal investigations and regulatory consequences, like losing their medical licenses. In a civil suit, like the one Paxton has filed, it’s much harder for one state to undermine another’s ruling, Berman said. The U.S. Constitution specifically requires that a civil judgement issued in one state, like Texas, is enforceable in all states, regardless of their other laws.
…
This clause applies most clearly to private lawsuits — if a court orders you to pay someone you’ve harmed to make them whole, that judgement is enforceable no matter where you live.
…
But when it’s a state, not an individual, bringing the lawsuit, the judgement may not be as easily enforced. There’s an exception for “penal judgements,” when one state is using a civil lawsuit to try to enforce their state laws.
“This is clearly not just one random person suing another random person,” Ziegler said. “New York’s best argument is that this is the state of Texas enforcing its abortion policy through a lawsuit, which is a penal judgement, and they wouldn’t have to deal with that.”
But this is a rarely litigated question the federal courts haven’t meaningfully waded into in decades. Complicating matters further is a provision in New York’s shield law that would allow Carpenter to sue Texas right back, opening the door to more questions about sovereign immunity and state-on-state litigation.
In retrospect, it seems so obvious that the Internet’s most important feature – sharing information without the old-school gatekeeping forces – would turn out badly.
Important point, but I think it can be divided into two different things. It’s true that in the early days of the internet some technologists believed that it eliminated the need for newspapers and journals as everyone could just “go right to the source”. Even forty years ago in my youth I though this was ridiculous and stemmed from the naive but still common belief that the internet/blockchain/distributed system has a magical ability that keeps bad information out. I mean look at scientific journals – what is the “source” given that for every one that is respected in the field, there are ten that will publish anything in return for a fee?
The second part is more of a question: given that only edited and curated sources are worth anything, how does one source rise above the others and gain a reputation for diligence and reliability?
@CSK: I’ve been convinced for a while that he’s misled by the Mercator projection into thinking Greenland is about the size of South America, when it’s really only a hair bigger than Mexico.
Also, he thinks it’s actually green.
Keep in mind that if you told Trump you were on a trip and saw sea lions, this is what he’d picture.
According to the press conference being held now, Trump will not rule out using military force to take Greenland and Panama. Also, he wants the Gulf of Mexico renamed the Gulf of America. He’s really lost his marbles.
@Not the IT Dept.: He apparently also said that all hell will break loose in Gaza if the hostages are not freed by his inauguration. I am going accept this as Trump asserting maximum threat from which he can negotiate backwards, but I think his constant resort to this ploy is going to quickly have a boy who cries wolf effect and wear out anything that can be viewed as effectiveness.
I keep an informal list of people who frequently post here who I find dishonest, tendentious, argumentative, clueless, racist, misogynistic or a combination of those. I feel that reading them or replies to them at best waste my time or, at worst, make me stupider, and so I skip over anything that has their name attached. I’m not preaching this for anyone else, it’s just one of the things I do that helps me keep the crazy out of my daily life. But yesterday I added someone to this list and the exchange that led to it conjured up a revelation: one of the reasons this list is beneficial to me in particular is that I find myself obsessing over whether someone is an old school troll (someone who will say anything just to get a reaction and doesn’t actually have any beliefs of their own) or legitimately interacts in this way.
Trolls have been around from the earliest days of Usenet. In the 80’s and 90’s there were groups I had to give up on for days at a time because some troll with two sock puppets would inject “The real problem is that you are a PC user and we all know they are brainwashed ninnies”, watch the corresponding shitstorm for a while and when it appeared to be dying down, put on the other sock puppet and make the equivalent comment guaranteed to rile up mac users. (None of these forums had anything to do with personal computers.) A somewhat more recent example is in the weightlifting 8 day week discussion. I actually went through every message in that original thread and there were so many old school trolls poking the bear with a stick that I suspect there were times when it was just them trolling each other.
If I had to guess, I would put my money on this latest guy being an old school troll. But given that I can’t stop myself from analyzing such messages for giveaways, I’m probably much better off just tossing commenters like them onto the list.
Well, Elon Musk turned Twitter-X into an open sewer, and that is exactly what Zuckerberg wants to do with Meta.
The election of Trump and Musk scared the crap out of the Tech oligarchs. Many of them have pledged at least $1M to the Trump January 20th Nuremburg Rally festivities. They cannot genuflect fast enough. They are very much afraid of Trump.
I do the same thing, though it is actually two lists, one those who are completely ignored and the other, I read the first line or two to see what the comment is about, because the second group does make contributions from time to time.
@Kylopod: Also, his cable TV watching may have him convinced that Greenland is a treasure chest of precious metals and minerals waiting to be exploited. There are at least two TV series on treasure hunting in Greenland: Frozen Gold (the Weather Channel) and Cold Gold (Discovery).
I find myself obsessing over whether someone is an old school troll (someone who will say anything just to get a reaction and doesn’t actually have any beliefs of their own) or legitimately interacts in this way.
I don’t think I’m telling you anything that you don’t already know, but the next 4 years are going to be very hard for you.
I’ve been noticing an increase in people online who not only operate from an entirely different set of truths, but whose relationship to the nature of truth itself is entirely different. Forget just not agreeing on basic facts, but not agreeing on what the definition of fact is.
@Not the IT Dept.: Perhaps the second most important thing* to know about Trump: He really is Putin’s bitch. A good percentage of his cockamamie foreign policy ideas are essentially Putin’s wet dreams.
*The most important thing is that he is a moron. You should take that one into account before anything else.
I will admit that I watched the video. He doesn’t actually lay out how Trump can get this done, just that Greenland should first declare independence and then petition for statehood.
I’m still not sure he isn’t joking. Like, I’m sure he’s not, but still I’m not sure.
@Gustopher: Alas, this is nothing new, and also not limited to trumpers. I have long noticed that when facts contradict something that people have become emotionally invested in, the facts are ignored.
A small but non-partisan example: there is a developer trying to get approval to knock down the existing Harbor Place structures in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and replace them with a larger scale development. From the renderings shared with the public, they will sit on the same footprint (or perhaps encroach into the street side) but simply be much taller. Many in my neighborhood are dead set against it and organized and door-knocked against a ballot referendum. But when I asked three different people what they objected to, the number one thing was that it was a giveaway of public land to private developers. I pointed out that the existing Harbor Place structures (almost completely empty now) were privately owned, albeit in and out of bankruptcy over the past 10-15 years, and the new structures were built on the footprint of the old ones. In all three cases I could see them mentally glaze over and they did not respond to that in any way. I’m pretty sure it didn’t even register in their consciousness. These were not stupid people by any stretch, and were much more civically aware than most but they knew what they knew and weren’t going to let facts get in the way.
@Gustopher: Oh my god, Steve Forbes is still alive? The trust fund baby who has never accomplished anything on his own but, honest to god, ran for the Presidency twice pretty much solely on the platform that trust fund baby money was untouchable?
Well, I guess Trump DOES want to start a war. He suggested today he’d use military force to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal, and “economic force” to annex Canada.
1) Location — My hunch is that he wants as much of the northern hemisphere as possible.
2) REE — Greenland has huge deposits of rare earth elements that are important to manufacturing. My guess is someone made mention of that and he retained it.
3) Strategic importance — Greenland’s positioning will become ever more critical as sea ice declines. Again, he wouldn’t know this on his own, but someone in an intel briefing probably used some pictures that made sense.
He was president for four years, and that was the first time this came up. My money is on a briefing that happened at some point that managed to convey some information through that thick skull, and he’s been obsessing about it for years.
Genuinely sad at hearing this news. My father was into folk music singers and one of only 2 or 3 music concerts I have been too in my life was Peter, Paul, and Mary many, many years back when I was much younger. RIP
everything about this new Meta AI bot is so dystopian but for me the AI-generated images of nonexistent donated coats is up there
I’m really struggling to tell fact from fiction.
Pro-Fiction: Petri is a professional parodyist. An AI generating an inspiring message about organizing a clothing drive, complete with AI generated images of boxes of coats is just too insane. And, the AI account is a black woman, which is amazingly offensive in ways that I can’t pin down. All together, it reads like parody, coming from a parodyist.
Pro-Fact: I know this is happening. Himamaliv was just turned off, but was Meta’s AI generated account, and a —sigh— proud black woman and mother of two. When I do a google search of the text in the instagram screenshot, I can see results pointing to the Facebook and instagram accounts for himamaliv, with matching summary text, although clicking through gets nothing (search index will catch up, but hasn’t)
I give up. Fuck it, everything is true. Per DS9
Bashir: What I want to know is, out of all the stories you told me which ones were true and which ones weren’t?
Garak: My dear doctor…they’re all true.
Bashir: Even the lies?
Garak: Especially the lies.
@CSK: I still think it was likely a briefing. So, probably some mid-level CIA analyst tasked with turning the intel briefing into a cartoon/puppet show that would stick.
I do the same thing, though it is actually two lists, one those who are completely ignored and the other, I read the first line or two to see what the comment is about
I do this on virtually every comment longer than 2 sentences now. This is the Internet. The difference between a troll and fount of rationality and wisdom is the extent to which the reader is offended by/agrees with the opinion expressed.
I do this on virtually every comment longer than 2 sentences now.
So you roll your eyes and roll up your sleeves and get reading the world salad that escapes my goblin brain? I haven’t had a thought that could be exclaimed in less than 15 paragraphs in a while.
Thank you, I’m having a garbage day ([bonus thought redacted]) and I read that in Garak’s voice. Deeeelightful.
Shifting gears slightly, as part of our pending move to the UK and what is likely to be an extended period of either unem or semi-employment, I’ve decided that I’m going to use at least some of that time to read Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin.
I’ve been telling a lot of the Transes I know or interact with that guns won’t save us; it’s going to be art and memory. I figure those two are a good place for me to start.
As an added bonus, for some reason, my bigot mother in law gifted me an Apple gift card that I’d like to use to purchase those items. I think it’s fitting that someone so profoundly ignorant and intentionally incurious would give me the means to purchase some enlightenment. The questions I have for everyone are 1. is there a particular edition of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” available through Apple that I should get? I see an expanded edition is coming out in April, but I’m not sure if that one is better than any other, and 2. anyone have any suggestions on where to start with Baldwin?
@CSK: Another indicator of the double clicking really fast is getting the same post logged twice. My theory is that what happens depends on the time interval (in nanoseconds or smaller units, obvs). Shortest–2 posts, longest–already said this message.
(And yes, I do have these happen frequently to have invested this much curiosity in them. In a week’s posting, I’ll get one or another of the 3 effects about a dozen times.)
@Beth: I never skip your comments, at least so far. The variety of dissent you bring to the thread is one of the things that people praising “the variety of views here” are talking about whether they realize it or not.
@Beth: The rhetoric of fiction is easy for me to ignore, so I would lean toward Notes of a Native Son or The Fire Next Time. If you run well with fiction, there are many lists with different priorities on the innertubes to consult. May even be some queer-centric lists, but I dunno on that point.
Forget just not agreeing on basic facts, but not agreeing on what the definition of fact is.
WAPO had a story this morning on Zuckerberg dropping fact checks. I commented that Zuckerberg is accepting a post-modern world in which we all have our own truth. Just like Bezos is.
You might want to check out Autocracy Inc. by Anne Applebaum, published recently. It’s short, and gives an overall view on how modern autocrats work, and how they cooperate with each other. I found it both enlightening and depressing.
The really nutty thing is that Denmark could not transfer Greenland to the US even if it wanted to.
Greenland is an autonomous self-governing territory under the Danish Crown, but self-determining. It’s not even part of the EU (sort of; its complicated.)
If the US was serious about acquiring Greenland, it might try approaching the Greenlanders with a buy-out offer.
The reply be pretty certainly be something like“Nipangerit daqatulakan iteq.”
But such is the Art of the No-Deal.
“On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”
Relieved that my wife is not meek. Also doesn’t know where the kitchen is.
Do you figure the armed service chiefs will obey an order to attack Greenland and/or Denmark? I figure they’d go ahead with Panama, no matter how insane the notion is.
But, hell, even the Spanish American war required a perceived provocation by Spain, far stronger than “their fees are too high and there are imaginary Chinese troops and ships there”.
@MarkedMan: Regarding the opposition to the new plans for Harbor Place, I’d expect the door knockers’ discussions to hit on the plan for a new residential tower on a site that was previously publicly accessible retail and dining, if I remember it correctly. So maybe they had a principled position within themselves based on a set of facts, but failed at the rhetorical part. But I should make it clear that I not only have no dog in that fight, but I recognize mixed use that includes residential is a common and apparently successful concept for redevelopment of urban former commercial and industrial sites.
Do you figure the armed service chiefs will obey an order to attack Greenland and/or Denmark?
Don’t ask me.
Maybe he’ll replace the current Service Chiefs with the cast from Dr Strangelove.
It’s seldom a sound bet that a Scandinavian will knuckle-under readily, though.
Obvs the US would win, but it could be rather messy.
Perhaps more important: what happens if Trump goes totally nuts and tries to attack Mexico?
Or even Canada.
War with a bunch of surly Quebecois, thrawn Scots, descendants of the Metis, and Slavic settlers.
What could possibly go wrong?
(The Canadians were arguably THE most formidable fighting forces of WW1 and WW2 in Europe. They chewed up the SS Hitlerjugend and spat them out.)
@gVOR10: I would performatively drop Facebook if I had logged into it in the past few years.
Even my dinky instagram art account has mostly been ignored in favor of a dinky BlueSky art account, although that’s hard to tell since I’ve had a bit of a slump* anyway.
(BlueSky’s blocking tools are really kind of impressive. When you block someone, they just don’t exist, and their existing posts on your stuff are separated from your stuff. And there are people maintaining block lists of all the MAGA shitposters and hate mongers, and the porn bots.)
There’s much talk that Putin wouldn’t attack a Nato country. But this supposes the US would get involved, along with its nuclear arsenal. What happens if America attacks a NATO country?
During the cold war, Europeans asked whether America would trade New York for London, Paris, Amsterdam, etc. Would France trade Paris for Copenhagen? Would the UK?
If the felon attacked Mexico, we’d surrender in a matter of minutes, if that long. Mexico has nothing like the military power to tackle a modern army. Although Pancho Villa gave Pershing’s boys a real workout for a few weeks. these days it would be the cartels doing the guerrilla warfare*.
BTW, if the felon had like a few working neurons, he’d meddle in support of Greenland’s independence, and that way he might get like 90% of whatever the hell he wants without making a fool of himself.
I mean, the Canadians already kicked our asses once and burned the White House to boot. I think it’s a given that the U.S. will be at war with Mexico by the end of next year. No one will call it a war, but it’ll be a war. The racism is a given. I also don’t think people appreciate enough the fact that Trump is apparently a teetotaler and has surrounded himself with religious zealots.
I wonder what will happen when Americans find the price of their drugs has skyrocketed.
But definitely don’t refer to anyone as “cis”. On a more serious note, I guess I’m going to be looking for the exits on Instagram sooner rather than later. I’ve done a very good job of curating things so that I’m sold things I actually want to buy and I see things that don’t inherently and automatically piss me off. I’m already starting to see an uptick in misogynistic content in in what I’m getting. If I start getting tons of Nazi, misogyny and transphobia, I’m gone. I might even drop messages to the nice people that sell me things that I’m gone because of the Nazis.
My partner and I were darkly laughing that we hope that the Bluesky people come up with an Insta clone. We’d probably jump ship immediately if that came out.
@Gustopher:
a) Never try to analyze someone else’s marriage. It’s a mug’s game, as Chandler might have written.
b) Especially 45 year marriages.
c) Katherine would happily confirm that she makes coffee. Full stop.
d) And she’s the one who reminded me of the quote.
e) Finally, you want to bear in mind that I do self-satirize.
@Kathy:
There are some questions best left un-answered.
Or better yet, never asked.
Though the odd thing about some some MAGA (and Russians, for that matter) is that at they assume European right-nationalists are automatically going to love Trump like they do, because he “pwns the libs”.
And miss the fact that nationalists tend to be nationalist, and the European right have always been somewhat ambivalent, if not outright hostile, to the US. (Also, Russia)
As for Mexico, the state might fold.
(Or it might not: history offers multiple instances when confident expectations go horribly pear-shaped)
But personally, I’d hate to be a US general in charge of an occupation force in Mexico.
Nope.
Latrine duty in Alaska, if you please.
I suspect Trump is too shallow to recognize that Pax Americana largely worked because it was soft. “We will defend you, so you don’t have to build and maintain a big army!” is quite attractive and does not generate a lot of enemies, but America the drunken Jolly Green Giant recklessly throwing it’s weight around will.
@CSK: So we’ve made absolutely no social/cultural progress since Veblen referred to wives and children as “chattel property of the household” in Theory of the Leisure Class? Good to know…
Yes and @Gustopher: has a point about how straight men talk about their wives as if they are an imposition at best or the absolute dumbest life-ruiners at worse. It’s so prevalent, stupid, and frequently unfunny that it’s difficult to sus out who’s being silly/kidding and a who’s a misogynist. I stopped making jokes like that a couple years into my now 15 year marriage.
With so many men I really wonder if they like their wives. Not you, but many many men, including the husbands of friends.
One thing to remember about Mexico with the felon once again in power, is that the country is now led by a woman.
As to nationalists, no one who’s not under occupation by a hostile power ever welcomes foreign troops. WWII was the exception because the nazis were even worse than the war propaganda said they were. Even Soviet troops were welcomed, though they wore it out in a hurry.
So, people in a liberal democracy with an effective welfare state even the right wing parties want to preserve, are not going to be happy to see American troops lording it over Greenland, much less Denmark or Canada.
i once had a colleague who ranted on about how he couldn’t meet the right women. Finally, more to shut him up than anything else, I said I’d go out with him. He stared at me for a moment and then said, quite seriously, “Oh, Susan, I’d never date anyone as intelligent as I am.”
Incidentally, Greenlanders are almost universally armed (with rifles) and trained in their use.
As tends to be the case when you have polar bears and surly walruses (walri?) as neighbours.
And a very large proportion of the population are experienced Arctic hunters.
@Beth:
I don’t believe in collective guilt. A great many men hate women. Too many hate their wives. But they’re not me, I’m not them, and I’m not going to carry their guilt. It is presumptuous to comment on another person’s marriage, or another person’s children. We are a million miles beyond division of housework issues, in fact, we never did have issues with that. We were busy.
What are you talking about “collective guilt”. What nonsense. Gus made an anodyne observation that the joke you made is similar to the absurdly common genre of straight male humor based around hating your wife (all women really) and that seemed out of character based on what you have previously written. That’s not an observation of your marriage or a comment on it and even if it was a comment it was based on what you have shared.
Calm down.
And yes you are not all men, but you swim in the culture. It shapes you. You are not sui generis. Existing in some sort of permanent imperviousness. I know how men are taught to be cause I had that same garbage shoved at me. I just didn’t understand any of it. I was a terrible man. I have a lot clearer understanding of what you guys are put through. But that doesn’t change anything. I wish I could download my experience into you so you could see just how cool you are and, simultaneously, a giant jackass.
you swim in the culture. It shapes you. You are not sui generis. Existing in some sort of permanent imperviousness. I know how men are taught to be cause I had that same garbage shoved at me.
I’m sorry, what? Swimming in the culture am I? And from that you conclude what, exactly? What happened to judging people as individuals and not as a representative of their race or religion or gender?
I don’t know what you were taught, and I’m sorry if it messed you up, but yes, I am sui generis. I am my own creation, my own character. There is nothing in my head that I have not long-since pulled out and examined.
Presuppositionlessness and decathexis. First, do all you can to ruthlessly erase assumption and prejudice. Does this belief make sense, does that assumption hold up? If not, delete it and re-write the code. You conditionally keep what makes sense, and de-cathect from any element you can’t justify. Try it. It’s exhausting but in the end it’s liberating.
You could start with the assumption that because you have defined a set (all men) and drawn conclusions about that set (as you clearly have), that your questionable conclusions about a set you’ve defined a priori are not in any way predictive of the actions or behavior of any individual. The failure to understand this is the basis of all bigotry.
Tech issues or not, let’s try to get a ball rolling. Mistermix at Balloon Juice has a post up linking to the election analysis of Michael Podhorzer, political strategist for the AFL-CIO. He pinpoints low D turnout as the problem, saying Trump’s support hasn’t increased. He sees that largely as blue state urbans who feel protected from Trump not being motivated.
I would add:
– the electorate are a box of rocks. Especially the marginal voters.
– Governing is about policy, elections are about entertainment. We highly motivated Ds were entertained by Harris’ sudden blossoming, but I don’t think marginal voters were.
– Harris as veep, like most veeps, was not quite as out of sight as JD Vance. Then she had three months to excite the nation. In competition with a man who has higher name recognition than God. That would have taken extraordinary charisma, which Harris does not have. Marginal voters were saying they didn’t know what she stood for.
Podhorzer concludes,
[…] When Flatland analysts argue that America “moved right,” the prescription tends to be that Democrats should also move right, or at least play nice with Trump to avoid alienating the Americans who supposedly granted him a decisive mandate. The same prescription will be dispensed to civil society and the media.
But that diagnosis completely misses the life-threatening illness America is really struggling with: a billionaire-captured system that doesn’t work for most people, and justifiable disaffection and anger at this system. Americans are fed up, and people are perpetually in the mood to throw the bums out, whoever the bums in charge are. But with only two parties to realistically choose from – plus a democratically illegitimate Electoral College that makes most Americans’ presidential votes all but irrelevant – all of these “change elections” add up to little more than a seesaw that most Americans don’t want to ride in the first place.
And so, nearly 250 years after putting forth the then-revolutionary aspiration for governments “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” we deploy election procedures that can claim no more legitimacy than the seething resignation of the governed.
React. Thanks to tech failure, we have a chance to push past a hundred comments like we did years ago on guns.
@Michael Grouping people and stereotyping the people within those groups is in our nature. Certain countries, cultures and religions have decided that is a bad thing (others, not so much), but it remains a work in progress. For most people it seems to mean simply shifting the groups that it is acceptable to stereotype.
n Texas, undocumented people have built apartment complexes and skyscrapers that changed skylines. They have picked fruits and vegetable in fields, cooked in restaurant kitchens, cleaned hospitals and started small businesses. They have become stitched into communities from El Paso to Beaumont.
Now some of their employers worry that many of them could get deported when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House.
A number of Texas business leaders interviewed by the Tribune describe a sort of wait-and-see apprehension about Trump’s pledged mass deportations. The impact any deportations could have on Texas’ economy will largely depend on the specifics of what Trump does, business leaders say. But those specifics are not yet clear.
The owner of a Rio Grande Valley agriculture import-export business who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of legal repercussions said four of his seven employees are undocumented. A majority of similar businesses would take a hit should the government deport undocumented people en masse, the business owner estimated.
Without undocumented workers, he said, “We wouldn’t survive and we’ll have to close.”
@gVOR10: Split the difference. Yes, “D” turnout is probably the biggest issue in election losses (overall, not just 2024), but, sadly, yes, Trump support increased. Reduction in the number of total votes cast doesn’t cover the spread for the raw vote totals. Also, third-party turnout seems way lower than average. Less than 1%, IIRC.
[Random Geeky Subject Alert] Apple seems to be in the process of updating their AirTag product, but it looks like they are still going to miss out on a potentially huge market, and I assume that is a deliberate choice: asset tracking. This is the locating of an asset (instrument, rolling cabinet, tool set, etc). Throughout my career I’ve designed instruments or devices and for more than 30 years of that I have had customer after customer in industry after industry ask for asset tracking. Heck, I would love to have a cheap, reliable asset tracking system myself. State of the art today is to either use GPS and a cellular connection, which really only works for assets in the open (cars, trucks, construction equipment and tools), or to have a dedicated infrastructure of antennas, hotspots, and smart tags, which costs a fortune to set up and is limited to what you’ve elected to cover. The AirTag and the devices that precided it (anyone remember the Tile?) doesn’t eliminate the need for those antennas and hotspots but instead piggy backs onto the mobile phone infrastructure. Every Apple phone (and every Android phone with the right app) is constantly looking for these AirTags and if it finds one, it reports the location to a server. Lose something in the forest and you’ve got a problem, but lose something where there are people walking by with phones and you’ve got it located.
When the Tile, and then the AirTag came out, I thought it was a natural to expand this into asset tracking. However, people use such devices for nefarious purposes, in particular stalking, and Apple got a heap of hate over it. They’ve since made some changes that makes it harder to use for stalking – for example, over the holidays I was traveling with a family member and part way into it I got an alert that an AirTag not registered to me appeared to be traveling with me. This type of alert makes it harder for a stalker to drop a tag into a purse or attach it to a car. The problem for asset tracking is that all of the things you would do to make it useful for such a purpose would make it a lot easier to use it for bad purposes.
@MarkedMan:
Yes, it is in our nature, but so are lots of natural things I don’t approve of and try not to do myself. Identifying oneself as a member of a group seems to me to be a loss of autonomy, a reduction in my personal freedom. The advantages of membership may be apparent to most people, but they are not advantages to me as they demand a sacrifice of time to the group. Conformity is a requirement for membership in a group, and freedom requires autonomy. I am clearly a fairly extreme outlier and I’m not trying to recruit anyone, as always, I don’t want to be in a civilization built around people like me. Somebody’s gotta be normal or I can’t be abnormal.
@Neil Hudelson:
I love Chandler. His voice is unique and memorable. As a writer I’m jealous. I probably have a ‘voice’ but it’s nothing like as compelling and seductive as his. Everyone always quotes the opening graf of The Big Sleep, so you’ll have read it before, but look at what he does:
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
One paragraph and he’s established character and milieu while announcing a voice unlike anything that came before. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. So much character building with so few words. Can’t plot for shit, but damn, the boy could write some prose.
Yes, it is in our nature, but so are lots of natural things I don’t approve of and try not to do myself.
If we define civilization is the attempt to rise above our animal instincts, then the road to civilization is a long, uphill one, and slippery at that. But the city on that hill is worth striving for.
There is no Wed Open Thread, so I will put this here. I still consider myself an Angeleno (folks from Los Angeles still use that term, right?), having not left home until I was about 28 years old, and I just want to say that Los Angeles, and the San Fernando Valley (where I grew up) are having a rough week and should be kept in your thoughts and prayers.
My mom is not directly impacted, but she lives near the San Fernando Mission, which is not crazy far from the Sylmar fire that broke out, and my sister lives near the Sepulveda Basin, where it seems a fire that broke out there has not flared up beyond 75 acres (still, a 75 acre fire is unusual right in the heart of the valley), thank goodness that fire did not turn into a major firestorm, it is rough for folks in Southern CA.
My Mom’s health is rickety, so I am thankful she has a great air conditioning set up including really good air filters, as the air quality must be beyond nasty in parts of Los Angeles.
I was just watching live youtubes from the news stations and even President Biden was getting briefed on the weather/fire event.
@gVOR10: I continue to believe a latent, unrecognized sexism is relevant in examining Harris’s loss. Yes, even among Democrats.
When no woman has held the position before, people can’t “see” a woman doing the job.
I’ve long said that the only way this country will get a woman as president–at least in the near future–is through the position of VP. (With clarity of hindsight, Biden stepping down after the midterms would have been the solution.)
An article in my local paper (The Baltimore Banner) about the neighborhood three blocks adjacent to mine highlights the over-simplification of those who cry “Government Red Tape!” as the cause of all ills. A local Pizza Shop was literally about to go out of business when he was visited by some famous influencer. Influencer posts, and the place fills up and he stays open a little longer. Paper runs an article on him and he says the thing that is really keeping him from being a success is that he can’t get a liquor license, which is all the fault of the politicians. Politicians just want to screw the little guy, according to him. But the reality is complicated. The neighborhood he has in has been upset about the number of bars in the area for decades. In fact, my wife and I refer to the section he is right in the middle of as “Frat Boy Row”, in honor of the young suburbanites who come in, get shit-faced, and stumble around until the wee hours. So years ago they local people pressured the politicians to pass an ordinance stating that no new liquor licenses will be issued, they can only be transferred from another location within the neighborhood. I’m sure the local business people were against it at the time and lobbied against it, but the local residents prevailed and got what they wanted.
The downside is what is happening to this little pizza place – the liquor licenses become very valuable and keep going up in price, which means only bigger places can afford them. So while we don’t get any more bars, we get bigger ones. But this is not the fault of the politicians – it’s what the residents wanted.
In this specific case, I’ve been to this place a couple of times, and they make great thin crust pizza. But the owner strikes me as disorganized and messy (although not dirty). The first time I was there we ate in, but found random boxes of fixtures on empty tables, and clutter everywhere. This was months and months after he had opened. The only other time we went it was for takeout, so I didn’t go into the back to see if it had improved. Bottom line, someone that runs a messy restaurant is unlikely to stay in business regardless of his licensing status.
I’m sure the local business people were against it at the time and lobbied against it
First, we made it to 100 comments.
Second, other business places may have lobbied against restricting liquor licenses, but I’d bet the existing license holders lobbied way heavier for restricting additional licenses. Usually the local pastors and bar owners make common cause against additional licenses. .
When no woman has held the position before, people can’t “see” a woman doing the job.
I heard someone say something like this for the June elections here in Mexico. You know, “I just can’t see a woman leading a country.” As both major presidential candidates (those with a chance of winning) were women.
I think I said something like “Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Queen Elizabeth I, etc.”
@gVOR10: Just speculating, but that might not have been the case here. When we lived in B’more (in a different area) 30 years ago, Fed Hill was hopping but it seemed more locals. To become a suburbanite destination you need a lot of variety. If you’re going to get a group of twenty something’s to all agree on an area there has to be multiple something’s for everyone. I think it was the big places that caused it to become a destination area, and I imagine it was the larger business owners that wanted that to happen. You could certainly be right about the small places though. We are reaching a breaking point, with non food and alcohol places fleeing the area (who wants to walk down a street with art galleries and shoe stores and gift shops and family restaurants in a place where wild partying is going on?), and vape shops and cheap food shops taking their place.
Meta to eliminate fact checkers, “ fact checkers were too biased”
What could go wrong?
BTW,, Who hired these fact checkers in the first place?
@Bobert: In retrospect, it seems so obvious that the Internet’s most important feature – sharing information without the old-school gatekeeping forces – would turn out badly.
There’s a reason journalism schools spent so much energy on sourcing stories from multiple angles, and editors worried about their reputations when publishing things that were speculation or hearsay.
I want to believe that humanity will come up with a mechanism to put those gatekeeping forces back in place, to assure that truth, and reason, and science prevail, but perhaps Pandora’s box is open now in the way that Trump opened it for violating the norms and traditions of the presidency.
Maybe the best we can hope for is that the bad guys don’t start out with the benefit of the doubt anymore — that society overall becomes more cynical and wise to the schemes.
I don’t think Le Pen’s departure from this world constitutes a balance aspect of Ma’at.
A little military history. The Distinguished Service Cross is officially authorized by Congress as the nation’s second highest award for valor.
The first Americans to earn the Distinguished Service Cross were two Army nurses
Prediction: this will be going to the Supreme Court.
With lawsuits and legislation, Texas Republicans take aim at abortion pills
…
…
…
…
…
Why is Trump so hot to take over Greenland?
This is weird. I just got a notice from OTB saying “you are posting comments too quickly.”
@Tony W:
Important point, but I think it can be divided into two different things. It’s true that in the early days of the internet some technologists believed that it eliminated the need for newspapers and journals as everyone could just “go right to the source”. Even forty years ago in my youth I though this was ridiculous and stemmed from the naive but still common belief that the internet/blockchain/distributed system has a magical ability that keeps bad information out. I mean look at scientific journals – what is the “source” given that for every one that is respected in the field, there are ten that will publish anything in return for a fee?
The second part is more of a question: given that only edited and curated sources are worth anything, how does one source rise above the others and gain a reputation for diligence and reliability?
@CSK: I get that message a lot. I think it comes from my tremor triggering the “post comment” button twice in succession.
@just nutha:
Interesting. If I accidentally hit post twice, I usually get “It seems you already posted that comment.”
@CSK: I’ve been convinced for a while that he’s misled by the Mercator projection into thinking Greenland is about the size of South America, when it’s really only a hair bigger than Mexico.
Also, he thinks it’s actually green.
Keep in mind that if you told Trump you were on a trip and saw sea lions, this is what he’d picture.
@Kylopod:
My thought exactly. And it’s 80% ice. The habitable area of Greenland is about the size of California. But a California minus everything.
According to the press conference being held now, Trump will not rule out using military force to take Greenland and Panama. Also, he wants the Gulf of Mexico renamed the Gulf of America. He’s really lost his marbles.
@Not the IT Dept.:
https://tenor.com/bdI5P.gif
@Kylopod:
What makes him think Denmark will just hand it over to him? Does he plan to start a war?
@Not the IT Dept.: He apparently also said that all hell will break loose in Gaza if the hostages are not freed by his inauguration. I am going accept this as Trump asserting maximum threat from which he can negotiate backwards, but I think his constant resort to this ploy is going to quickly have a boy who cries wolf effect and wear out anything that can be viewed as effectiveness.
I keep an informal list of people who frequently post here who I find dishonest, tendentious, argumentative, clueless, racist, misogynistic or a combination of those. I feel that reading them or replies to them at best waste my time or, at worst, make me stupider, and so I skip over anything that has their name attached. I’m not preaching this for anyone else, it’s just one of the things I do that helps me keep the crazy out of my daily life. But yesterday I added someone to this list and the exchange that led to it conjured up a revelation: one of the reasons this list is beneficial to me in particular is that I find myself obsessing over whether someone is an old school troll (someone who will say anything just to get a reaction and doesn’t actually have any beliefs of their own) or legitimately interacts in this way.
Trolls have been around from the earliest days of Usenet. In the 80’s and 90’s there were groups I had to give up on for days at a time because some troll with two sock puppets would inject “The real problem is that you are a PC user and we all know they are brainwashed ninnies”, watch the corresponding shitstorm for a while and when it appeared to be dying down, put on the other sock puppet and make the equivalent comment guaranteed to rile up mac users. (None of these forums had anything to do with personal computers.) A somewhat more recent example is in the weightlifting 8 day week discussion. I actually went through every message in that original thread and there were so many old school trolls poking the bear with a stick that I suspect there were times when it was just them trolling each other.
If I had to guess, I would put my money on this latest guy being an old school troll. But given that I can’t stop myself from analyzing such messages for giveaways, I’m probably much better off just tossing commenters like them onto the list.
Well, Elon Musk turned Twitter-X into an open sewer, and that is exactly what Zuckerberg wants to do with Meta.
The election of Trump and Musk scared the crap out of the Tech oligarchs. Many of them have pledged at least $1M to the Trump January 20th Nuremburg Rally festivities. They cannot genuflect fast enough. They are very much afraid of Trump.
@CSK:
Bored and in mental decline.
@CSK:
He sees himself as the consumate real estate expert
I think he’s barking, and hoping that Denmark will finally take him seriously and negotiate a sale to America.
@al Ameda: Imagine being a whole billionaire and still being so weak and corny as to be scared of Donald Trump.
Very odd.
@MarkedMan:
I do the same thing, though it is actually two lists, one those who are completely ignored and the other, I read the first line or two to see what the comment is about, because the second group does make contributions from time to time.
@Kylopod: Also, his cable TV watching may have him convinced that Greenland is a treasure chest of precious metals and minerals waiting to be exploited. There are at least two TV series on treasure hunting in Greenland: Frozen Gold (the Weather Channel) and Cold Gold (Discovery).
@CSK:
You have to think somewhere deep in the Pentagon there is a plan for war with Denmark.
In Tom Clancy’s novel Debt of Honor, Jack Ryan and Admiral Robby Jackson had the following exchange-
RJ- I wonder how the office is doing.
JR- Probably conjuring up a plan for the invasion of Bangladesh.
RJ- That was last week.
Greenland + American “ownership” = increased shipping lanes for Russia.
I’ve seen this mentioned a few times and it makes as much sense as anything. Could also be why he wants to take over Canada too.
@CSK:
Because it is one of the few safe areas of the earth after a zombie apocalypse?
Oops, that’s part of a story in my next book* to hit the bookstores.
*- Story #2 in a short story collection. Time travel, LGBTQ, zombies, patient zero. Not really too original a work except for my twist ending.
Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul and Mary has passed away. He was 86. I love some of PPM’s songs. RIP.
@MarkedMan:
I don’t think I’m telling you anything that you don’t already know, but the next 4 years are going to be very hard for you.
I’ve been noticing an increase in people online who not only operate from an entirely different set of truths, but whose relationship to the nature of truth itself is entirely different. Forget just not agreeing on basic facts, but not agreeing on what the definition of fact is.
@Not the IT Dept.: Perhaps the second most important thing* to know about Trump: He really is Putin’s bitch. A good percentage of his cockamamie foreign policy ideas are essentially Putin’s wet dreams.
*The most important thing is that he is a moron. You should take that one into account before anything else.
@Not the IT Dept.: I wasn’t sure if you were joking. A brief google said that you weren’t. Also this:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/01/07/the-way-for-president-trump-to-get-greenland/
I will admit that I watched the video. He doesn’t actually lay out how Trump can get this done, just that Greenland should first declare independence and then petition for statehood.
I’m still not sure he isn’t joking. Like, I’m sure he’s not, but still I’m not sure.
@Bill Jempty: Alas, I have had the pleasure of meeting and having a couple of serious conversations with him.
@Gustopher: Alas, this is nothing new, and also not limited to trumpers. I have long noticed that when facts contradict something that people have become emotionally invested in, the facts are ignored.
A small but non-partisan example: there is a developer trying to get approval to knock down the existing Harbor Place structures in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and replace them with a larger scale development. From the renderings shared with the public, they will sit on the same footprint (or perhaps encroach into the street side) but simply be much taller. Many in my neighborhood are dead set against it and organized and door-knocked against a ballot referendum. But when I asked three different people what they objected to, the number one thing was that it was a giveaway of public land to private developers. I pointed out that the existing Harbor Place structures (almost completely empty now) were privately owned, albeit in and out of bankruptcy over the past 10-15 years, and the new structures were built on the footprint of the old ones. In all three cases I could see them mentally glaze over and they did not respond to that in any way. I’m pretty sure it didn’t even register in their consciousness. These were not stupid people by any stretch, and were much more civically aware than most but they knew what they knew and weren’t going to let facts get in the way.
@Gustopher: Oh my god, Steve Forbes is still alive? The trust fund baby who has never accomplished anything on his own but, honest to god, ran for the Presidency twice pretty much solely on the platform that trust fund baby money was untouchable?
Well, I guess Trump DOES want to start a war. He suggested today he’d use military force to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal, and “economic force” to annex Canada.
@CSK:
A few things leap to mind:
1) Location — My hunch is that he wants as much of the northern hemisphere as possible.
2) REE — Greenland has huge deposits of rare earth elements that are important to manufacturing. My guess is someone made mention of that and he retained it.
3) Strategic importance — Greenland’s positioning will become ever more critical as sea ice declines. Again, he wouldn’t know this on his own, but someone in an intel briefing probably used some pictures that made sense.
He was president for four years, and that was the first time this came up. My money is on a briefing that happened at some point that managed to convey some information through that thick skull, and he’s been obsessing about it for years.
@Bill Jempty:
Genuinely sad at hearing this news. My father was into folk music singers and one of only 2 or 3 music concerts I have been too in my life was Peter, Paul, and Mary many, many years back when I was much younger. RIP
https://bsky.app/profile/petridishes.bsky.social/post/3letqq4yzq22a
I’m really struggling to tell fact from fiction.
Pro-Fiction: Petri is a professional parodyist. An AI generating an inspiring message about organizing a clothing drive, complete with AI generated images of boxes of coats is just too insane. And, the AI account is a black woman, which is amazingly offensive in ways that I can’t pin down. All together, it reads like parody, coming from a parodyist.
Pro-Fact: I know this is happening. Himamaliv was just turned off, but was Meta’s AI generated account, and a —sigh— proud black woman and mother of two. When I do a google search of the text in the instagram screenshot, I can see results pointing to the Facebook and instagram accounts for himamaliv, with matching summary text, although clicking through gets nothing (search index will catch up, but hasn’t)
I give up. Fuck it, everything is true. Per DS9
@Jen:
Agreed. Trump would never know about strategic importance on his own.
I wonder who mentioned this to him.
@Jen:
Agreed. Trump would never know about strategic importance on his own.
I wonder who mentioned this to him.
@CSK: I still think it was likely a briefing. So, probably some mid-level CIA analyst tasked with turning the intel briefing into a cartoon/puppet show that would stick.
@CSK: I get that one, too. Maybe the AI alternates the messages for some reason.
I do this on virtually every comment longer than 2 sentences now. This is the Internet. The difference between a troll and fount of rationality and wisdom is the extent to which the reader is offended by/agrees with the opinion expressed.
@just nutha:
So you roll your eyes and roll up your sleeves and get reading the world salad that escapes my goblin brain? I haven’t had a thought that could be exclaimed in less than 15 paragraphs in a while.
@Gustopher:
Thank you, I’m having a garbage day ([bonus thought redacted]) and I read that in Garak’s voice. Deeeelightful.
Shifting gears slightly, as part of our pending move to the UK and what is likely to be an extended period of either unem or semi-employment, I’ve decided that I’m going to use at least some of that time to read Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin.
I’ve been telling a lot of the Transes I know or interact with that guns won’t save us; it’s going to be art and memory. I figure those two are a good place for me to start.
As an added bonus, for some reason, my bigot mother in law gifted me an Apple gift card that I’d like to use to purchase those items. I think it’s fitting that someone so profoundly ignorant and intentionally incurious would give me the means to purchase some enlightenment. The questions I have for everyone are 1. is there a particular edition of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” available through Apple that I should get? I see an expanded edition is coming out in April, but I’m not sure if that one is better than any other, and 2. anyone have any suggestions on where to start with Baldwin?
@CSK: Another indicator of the double clicking really fast is getting the same post logged twice. My theory is that what happens depends on the time interval (in nanoseconds or smaller units, obvs). Shortest–2 posts, longest–already said this message.
(And yes, I do have these happen frequently to have invested this much curiosity in them. In a week’s posting, I’ll get one or another of the 3 effects about a dozen times.)
@Beth: I never skip your comments, at least so far. The variety of dissent you bring to the thread is one of the things that people praising “the variety of views here” are talking about whether they realize it or not.
@Not the IT Dept.: “According to the press conference being held now, Trump will not rule out using military force to take Greenland and Panama.”
Apparently he’s forgotten that he campaigned as the peace candidate.
@Michael Reynolds:
Ah, but Trump and the GOPs are fixing that. Another hundred years of warming and it might be good cropland.
@Beth: The rhetoric of fiction is easy for me to ignore, so I would lean toward Notes of a Native Son or The Fire Next Time. If you run well with fiction, there are many lists with different priorities on the innertubes to consult. May even be some queer-centric lists, but I dunno on that point.
@Gustopher: ” Greenland should first declare independence and then petition for statehood.”
I wouldn’t mind seeing two senators from Greenland seated.
@gVOR10: Could end up being important as the only place where you can grow things that aren’t mangos, papayas, and bananas.
@Gustopher:
WAPO had a story this morning on Zuckerberg dropping fact checks. I commented that Zuckerberg is accepting a post-modern world in which we all have our own truth. Just like Bezos is.
@Beth:
You might want to check out Autocracy Inc. by Anne Applebaum, published recently. It’s short, and gives an overall view on how modern autocrats work, and how they cooperate with each other. I found it both enlightening and depressing.
The really nutty thing is that Denmark could not transfer Greenland to the US even if it wanted to.
Greenland is an autonomous self-governing territory under the Danish Crown, but self-determining. It’s not even part of the EU (sort of; its complicated.)
If the US was serious about acquiring Greenland, it might try approaching the Greenlanders with a buy-out offer.
The reply be pretty certainly be something like“Nipangerit daqatulakan iteq.”
But such is the Art of the No-Deal.
We are getting SoCals Santa Ana winds in Vegas.
Relieved that my wife is not meek. Also doesn’t know where the kitchen is.
@JohnSF:
Do you figure the armed service chiefs will obey an order to attack Greenland and/or Denmark? I figure they’d go ahead with Panama, no matter how insane the notion is.
But, hell, even the Spanish American war required a perceived provocation by Spain, far stronger than “their fees are too high and there are imaginary Chinese troops and ships there”.
It’s now permissible to refer to women as “household objects” on Facebook.
@CSK: Because he thinks that would make him appear to be strong, and he believes being viewed as ruthless and strong is key to his popularity.
@MarkedMan: Regarding the opposition to the new plans for Harbor Place, I’d expect the door knockers’ discussions to hit on the plan for a new residential tower on a site that was previously publicly accessible retail and dining, if I remember it correctly. So maybe they had a principled position within themselves based on a set of facts, but failed at the rhetorical part. But I should make it clear that I not only have no dog in that fight, but I recognize mixed use that includes residential is a common and apparently successful concept for redevelopment of urban former commercial and industrial sites.
@Kathy:
Don’t ask me.
Maybe he’ll replace the current Service Chiefs with the cast from Dr Strangelove.
It’s seldom a sound bet that a Scandinavian will knuckle-under readily, though.
Obvs the US would win, but it could be rather messy.
Perhaps more important: what happens if Trump goes totally nuts and tries to attack Mexico?
Or even Canada.
War with a bunch of surly Quebecois, thrawn Scots, descendants of the Metis, and Slavic settlers.
What could possibly go wrong?
(The Canadians were arguably THE most formidable fighting forces of WW1 and WW2 in Europe. They chewed up the SS Hitlerjugend and spat them out.)
@Michael Reynolds:
One of my favorite James Bond lines. From License to Kill-
“I’ll do anything for a woman with a knife.”
@gVOR10: I would performatively drop Facebook if I had logged into it in the past few years.
Even my dinky instagram art account has mostly been ignored in favor of a dinky BlueSky art account, although that’s hard to tell since I’ve had a bit of a slump* anyway.
(BlueSky’s blocking tools are really kind of impressive. When you block someone, they just don’t exist, and their existing posts on your stuff are separated from your stuff. And there are people maintaining block lists of all the MAGA shitposters and hate mongers, and the porn bots.)
——
*: my shrink calls it “depression”
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m 100% positive that last sentence was not meant badly*, but it reminds me that half of my brothers’ humor is based on just hating their wives.
I would have rather not been reminded. Maybe it’s time to cut them off again.
Also, are straight people ok?
*: You generally praise your wife, so… I’ll give you a pass for whatever that’s worth (it is worth nothing)
@CSK:
That would make men couch sleepers.
@JohnSF:
Kind of asking everyone hanging on the thread.
There’s much talk that Putin wouldn’t attack a Nato country. But this supposes the US would get involved, along with its nuclear arsenal. What happens if America attacks a NATO country?
During the cold war, Europeans asked whether America would trade New York for London, Paris, Amsterdam, etc. Would France trade Paris for Copenhagen? Would the UK?
If the felon attacked Mexico, we’d surrender in a matter of minutes, if that long. Mexico has nothing like the military power to tackle a modern army. Although Pancho Villa gave Pershing’s boys a real workout for a few weeks. these days it would be the cartels doing the guerrilla warfare*.
BTW, if the felon had like a few working neurons, he’d meddle in support of Greenland’s independence, and that way he might get like 90% of whatever the hell he wants without making a fool of himself.
*Pleonasm alert.
@JohnSF:
@Kathy:
I mean, the Canadians already kicked our asses once and burned the White House to boot. I think it’s a given that the U.S. will be at war with Mexico by the end of next year. No one will call it a war, but it’ll be a war. The racism is a given. I also don’t think people appreciate enough the fact that Trump is apparently a teetotaler and has surrounded himself with religious zealots.
I wonder what will happen when Americans find the price of their drugs has skyrocketed.
@Kathy:
Thanks I’ll add that to the list.
@CSK:
But definitely don’t refer to anyone as “cis”. On a more serious note, I guess I’m going to be looking for the exits on Instagram sooner rather than later. I’ve done a very good job of curating things so that I’m sold things I actually want to buy and I see things that don’t inherently and automatically piss me off. I’m already starting to see an uptick in misogynistic content in in what I’m getting. If I start getting tons of Nazi, misogyny and transphobia, I’m gone. I might even drop messages to the nice people that sell me things that I’m gone because of the Nazis.
My partner and I were darkly laughing that we hope that the Bluesky people come up with an Insta clone. We’d probably jump ship immediately if that came out.
@Gustopher:
Your art rules. It makes me happy when I see it pop up.
@Gustopher:
a) Never try to analyze someone else’s marriage. It’s a mug’s game, as Chandler might have written.
b) Especially 45 year marriages.
c) Katherine would happily confirm that she makes coffee. Full stop.
d) And she’s the one who reminded me of the quote.
e) Finally, you want to bear in mind that I do self-satirize.
@Kathy:
There are some questions best left un-answered.
Or better yet, never asked.
Though the odd thing about some some MAGA (and Russians, for that matter) is that at they assume European right-nationalists are automatically going to love Trump like they do, because he “pwns the libs”.
And miss the fact that nationalists tend to be nationalist, and the European right have always been somewhat ambivalent, if not outright hostile, to the US. (Also, Russia)
As for Mexico, the state might fold.
(Or it might not: history offers multiple instances when confident expectations go horribly pear-shaped)
But personally, I’d hate to be a US general in charge of an occupation force in Mexico.
Nope.
Latrine duty in Alaska, if you please.
I suspect Trump is too shallow to recognize that Pax Americana largely worked because it was soft. “We will defend you, so you don’t have to build and maintain a big army!” is quite attractive and does not generate a lot of enemies, but America the drunken Jolly Green Giant recklessly throwing it’s weight around will.
@CSK: So we’ve made absolutely no social/cultural progress since Veblen referred to wives and children as “chattel property of the household” in Theory of the Leisure Class? Good to know…
…I guess.
@dazedandconfused:
He may not be incorrect on that point.
@JohnSF: “Obvs the US would win, but it could be rather messy.”
If the US invades Denmark, then under the NATO article five would we be required to fight against ourselves?
@Michael Reynolds:
Yes and @Gustopher: has a point about how straight men talk about their wives as if they are an imposition at best or the absolute dumbest life-ruiners at worse. It’s so prevalent, stupid, and frequently unfunny that it’s difficult to sus out who’s being silly/kidding and a who’s a misogynist. I stopped making jokes like that a couple years into my now 15 year marriage.
With so many men I really wonder if they like their wives. Not you, but many many men, including the husbands of friends.
@Beth:
@JohnSF:
One thing to remember about Mexico with the felon once again in power, is that the country is now led by a woman.
As to nationalists, no one who’s not under occupation by a hostile power ever welcomes foreign troops. WWII was the exception because the nazis were even worse than the war propaganda said they were. Even Soviet troops were welcomed, though they wore it out in a hurry.
So, people in a liberal democracy with an effective welfare state even the right wing parties want to preserve, are not going to be happy to see American troops lording it over Greenland, much less Denmark or Canada.
@Beth:
i once had a colleague who ranted on about how he couldn’t meet the right women. Finally, more to shut him up than anything else, I said I’d go out with him. He stared at me for a moment and then said, quite seriously, “Oh, Susan, I’d never date anyone as intelligent as I am.”
Incidentally, Greenlanders are almost universally armed (with rifles) and trained in their use.
As tends to be the case when you have polar bears and surly walruses (walri?) as neighbours.
And a very large proportion of the population are experienced Arctic hunters.
Waiting in line in front of the Capital to pay our respects to a decent president
@Beth:
I don’t believe in collective guilt. A great many men hate women. Too many hate their wives. But they’re not me, I’m not them, and I’m not going to carry their guilt. It is presumptuous to comment on another person’s marriage, or another person’s children. We are a million miles beyond division of housework issues, in fact, we never did have issues with that. We were busy.
Trying out something new:
One fine day, the felon summons Neil deGrasse Tyson to the oval office.
“Bill,” the felon says, “I need you to answer a very important question.”
“It’s ‘Neil,’ sir.”
“Sure, Bill. I know a lot about astronomy, more than the astronomers. You know that.”
“Well..”
“Yes, yes. But there’s one thing I just can’t comprehend. Its about the stars.”
“No problem, Mr. Felon. Just ask me what you want to know. Is it perhaps about the fusion at their core, or their life cycle?”
“You think that would keep me up at night, Bill?Fusion? I know more about fission than the fissioners!”
“Your question, sir?”
“Ah yes. I ask the best questions, alotofpoeplesaythat. Fusion! What were you thinking? I know all about fission! I know more about fission–”
“Yes, sir. You’ve said that before.”
“Never mind! It’s the names! Tell me, how do you find out what a star calls itself?”
What are you talking about “collective guilt”. What nonsense. Gus made an anodyne observation that the joke you made is similar to the absurdly common genre of straight male humor based around hating your wife (all women really) and that seemed out of character based on what you have previously written. That’s not an observation of your marriage or a comment on it and even if it was a comment it was based on what you have shared.
Calm down.
And yes you are not all men, but you swim in the culture. It shapes you. You are not sui generis. Existing in some sort of permanent imperviousness. I know how men are taught to be cause I had that same garbage shoved at me. I just didn’t understand any of it. I was a terrible man. I have a lot clearer understanding of what you guys are put through. But that doesn’t change anything. I wish I could download my experience into you so you could see just how cool you are and, simultaneously, a giant jackass.
Some backend issues are stopping me publishing Wednesday’s open forum post.
@James Joyner:
And yet no one’s continuing the chat here. Go figure.
I’ve been too busy to think of something clever to say about the Time Variance Authority messing with OTB for obscure and possibly nefarious reasons…
According to Politico writer Alex Isenstadt, Trump had to be talked out of choosing Maria Bartiromo as his V.P.
She’s good on t.v., you know.
@Beth:
I’m sorry, what? Swimming in the culture am I? And from that you conclude what, exactly? What happened to judging people as individuals and not as a representative of their race or religion or gender?
I don’t know what you were taught, and I’m sorry if it messed you up, but yes, I am sui generis. I am my own creation, my own character. There is nothing in my head that I have not long-since pulled out and examined.
Presuppositionlessness and decathexis. First, do all you can to ruthlessly erase assumption and prejudice. Does this belief make sense, does that assumption hold up? If not, delete it and re-write the code. You conditionally keep what makes sense, and de-cathect from any element you can’t justify. Try it. It’s exhausting but in the end it’s liberating.
You could start with the assumption that because you have defined a set (all men) and drawn conclusions about that set (as you clearly have), that your questionable conclusions about a set you’ve defined a priori are not in any way predictive of the actions or behavior of any individual. The failure to understand this is the basis of all bigotry.
James and Steven are having technical difficulties and can’t post today’s forum. They have a help desk ticket logged.
@Kingdaddy:
Well, we’re a very adaptable group. We’ll just pretend yesterday’s forum is today’s.
Tech issues or not, let’s try to get a ball rolling. Mistermix at Balloon Juice has a post up linking to the election analysis of Michael Podhorzer, political strategist for the AFL-CIO. He pinpoints low D turnout as the problem, saying Trump’s support hasn’t increased. He sees that largely as blue state urbans who feel protected from Trump not being motivated.
I would add:
– the electorate are a box of rocks. Especially the marginal voters.
– Governing is about policy, elections are about entertainment. We highly motivated Ds were entertained by Harris’ sudden blossoming, but I don’t think marginal voters were.
– Harris as veep, like most veeps, was not quite as out of sight as JD Vance. Then she had three months to excite the nation. In competition with a man who has higher name recognition than God. That would have taken extraordinary charisma, which Harris does not have. Marginal voters were saying they didn’t know what she stood for.
Podhorzer concludes,
React. Thanks to tech failure, we have a chance to push past a hundred comments like we did years ago on guns.
@Michael Grouping people and stereotyping the people within those groups is in our nature. Certain countries, cultures and religions have decided that is a bad thing (others, not so much), but it remains a work in progress. For most people it seems to mean simply shifting the groups that it is acceptable to stereotype.
@Michael Reynolds:
Just finished a novel last night and was looking for a good palette cleanser.
Chandler it is, good suggestion.
As predicted.
Some Texas business leaders are apprehensive about Trump’s pledged deportations
@gVOR10: Split the difference. Yes, “D” turnout is probably the biggest issue in election losses (overall, not just 2024), but, sadly, yes, Trump support increased. Reduction in the number of total votes cast doesn’t cover the spread for the raw vote totals. Also, third-party turnout seems way lower than average. Less than 1%, IIRC.
[Random Geeky Subject Alert] Apple seems to be in the process of updating their AirTag product, but it looks like they are still going to miss out on a potentially huge market, and I assume that is a deliberate choice: asset tracking. This is the locating of an asset (instrument, rolling cabinet, tool set, etc). Throughout my career I’ve designed instruments or devices and for more than 30 years of that I have had customer after customer in industry after industry ask for asset tracking. Heck, I would love to have a cheap, reliable asset tracking system myself. State of the art today is to either use GPS and a cellular connection, which really only works for assets in the open (cars, trucks, construction equipment and tools), or to have a dedicated infrastructure of antennas, hotspots, and smart tags, which costs a fortune to set up and is limited to what you’ve elected to cover. The AirTag and the devices that precided it (anyone remember the Tile?) doesn’t eliminate the need for those antennas and hotspots but instead piggy backs onto the mobile phone infrastructure. Every Apple phone (and every Android phone with the right app) is constantly looking for these AirTags and if it finds one, it reports the location to a server. Lose something in the forest and you’ve got a problem, but lose something where there are people walking by with phones and you’ve got it located.
When the Tile, and then the AirTag came out, I thought it was a natural to expand this into asset tracking. However, people use such devices for nefarious purposes, in particular stalking, and Apple got a heap of hate over it. They’ve since made some changes that makes it harder to use for stalking – for example, over the holidays I was traveling with a family member and part way into it I got an alert that an AirTag not registered to me appeared to be traveling with me. This type of alert makes it harder for a stalker to drop a tag into a purse or attach it to a car. The problem for asset tracking is that all of the things you would do to make it useful for such a purpose would make it a lot easier to use it for bad purposes.
@MarkedMan:
Yes, it is in our nature, but so are lots of natural things I don’t approve of and try not to do myself. Identifying oneself as a member of a group seems to me to be a loss of autonomy, a reduction in my personal freedom. The advantages of membership may be apparent to most people, but they are not advantages to me as they demand a sacrifice of time to the group. Conformity is a requirement for membership in a group, and freedom requires autonomy. I am clearly a fairly extreme outlier and I’m not trying to recruit anyone, as always, I don’t want to be in a civilization built around people like me. Somebody’s gotta be normal or I can’t be abnormal.
@Neil Hudelson:
I love Chandler. His voice is unique and memorable. As a writer I’m jealous. I probably have a ‘voice’ but it’s nothing like as compelling and seductive as his. Everyone always quotes the opening graf of The Big Sleep, so you’ll have read it before, but look at what he does:
One paragraph and he’s established character and milieu while announcing a voice unlike anything that came before. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. So much character building with so few words. Can’t plot for shit, but damn, the boy could write some prose.
@Michael Reynolds:
If we define civilization is the attempt to rise above our animal instincts, then the road to civilization is a long, uphill one, and slippery at that. But the city on that hill is worth striving for.
There is no Wed Open Thread, so I will put this here. I still consider myself an Angeleno (folks from Los Angeles still use that term, right?), having not left home until I was about 28 years old, and I just want to say that Los Angeles, and the San Fernando Valley (where I grew up) are having a rough week and should be kept in your thoughts and prayers.
My mom is not directly impacted, but she lives near the San Fernando Mission, which is not crazy far from the Sylmar fire that broke out, and my sister lives near the Sepulveda Basin, where it seems a fire that broke out there has not flared up beyond 75 acres (still, a 75 acre fire is unusual right in the heart of the valley), thank goodness that fire did not turn into a major firestorm, it is rough for folks in Southern CA.
My Mom’s health is rickety, so I am thankful she has a great air conditioning set up including really good air filters, as the air quality must be beyond nasty in parts of Los Angeles.
I was just watching live youtubes from the news stations and even President Biden was getting briefed on the weather/fire event.
@inhumans99: Best wishes to her and to everyone in the affected areas.
@gVOR10: I continue to believe a latent, unrecognized sexism is relevant in examining Harris’s loss. Yes, even among Democrats.
When no woman has held the position before, people can’t “see” a woman doing the job.
I’ve long said that the only way this country will get a woman as president–at least in the near future–is through the position of VP. (With clarity of hindsight, Biden stepping down after the midterms would have been the solution.)
An article in my local paper (The Baltimore Banner) about the neighborhood three blocks adjacent to mine highlights the over-simplification of those who cry “Government Red Tape!” as the cause of all ills. A local Pizza Shop was literally about to go out of business when he was visited by some famous influencer. Influencer posts, and the place fills up and he stays open a little longer. Paper runs an article on him and he says the thing that is really keeping him from being a success is that he can’t get a liquor license, which is all the fault of the politicians. Politicians just want to screw the little guy, according to him. But the reality is complicated. The neighborhood he has in has been upset about the number of bars in the area for decades. In fact, my wife and I refer to the section he is right in the middle of as “Frat Boy Row”, in honor of the young suburbanites who come in, get shit-faced, and stumble around until the wee hours. So years ago they local people pressured the politicians to pass an ordinance stating that no new liquor licenses will be issued, they can only be transferred from another location within the neighborhood. I’m sure the local business people were against it at the time and lobbied against it, but the local residents prevailed and got what they wanted.
The downside is what is happening to this little pizza place – the liquor licenses become very valuable and keep going up in price, which means only bigger places can afford them. So while we don’t get any more bars, we get bigger ones. But this is not the fault of the politicians – it’s what the residents wanted.
In this specific case, I’ve been to this place a couple of times, and they make great thin crust pizza. But the owner strikes me as disorganized and messy (although not dirty). The first time I was there we ate in, but found random boxes of fixtures on empty tables, and clutter everywhere. This was months and months after he had opened. The only other time we went it was for takeout, so I didn’t go into the back to see if it had improved. Bottom line, someone that runs a messy restaurant is unlikely to stay in business regardless of his licensing status.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…
@inhumans99:
My very best to your mother and sister.
My cousin and her husband have had to evacuate twice so far over the past day.
@MarkedMan:
First, we made it to 100 comments.
Second, other business places may have lobbied against restricting liquor licenses, but I’d bet the existing license holders lobbied way heavier for restricting additional licenses. Usually the local pastors and bar owners make common cause against additional licenses. .
@Jen:
I heard someone say something like this for the June elections here in Mexico. You know, “I just can’t see a woman leading a country.” As both major presidential candidates (those with a chance of winning) were women.
I think I said something like “Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Queen Elizabeth I, etc.”
He just shrugged.
At least he didn’t say “What about Liz Truss?”
@gVOR10: Just speculating, but that might not have been the case here. When we lived in B’more (in a different area) 30 years ago, Fed Hill was hopping but it seemed more locals. To become a suburbanite destination you need a lot of variety. If you’re going to get a group of twenty something’s to all agree on an area there has to be multiple something’s for everyone. I think it was the big places that caused it to become a destination area, and I imagine it was the larger business owners that wanted that to happen. You could certainly be right about the small places though. We are reaching a breaking point, with non food and alcohol places fleeing the area (who wants to walk down a street with art galleries and shoe stores and gift shops and family restaurants in a place where wild partying is going on?), and vape shops and cheap food shops taking their place.