wj - I'd never call Newsom a progressive, but I agree that any reasonable CA pol would be read as a loony leftie by default because that's the trope everyone knows.
First and foremost, the Dems need someone who is young-ish, charismatic, and a good communicator, and then whoever that is needs to hammer on the idea that the middle class needs saving and expanding, and that tax cuts have not done the job for that. They need to run on restoring dignity and affordability to working people and reducing the influence of corporations and donors over elected officials - basically a pro-labor message without the high church union messaging.
wonkie - agree that policy messaging is a loser, but think that a good fight message needs some sort of big picture policy narrative that resonates and that gets to the core of the party's values. And they need to take aim at all of the tropes that have harmed us - trickle down, tax cut prosperity; tough on crime justice; making schools compete - and replace them with a focus on investing in the public good.
Not a complaint about you or your posting that, wonkie, but I hate polls like the one that Emerson College put together because I don't think that they have any actual relevance to a real election. It's more about how people label political positions in their heads, and it shows us nothing about what voters actually want or what they respond to.
Who is the person being polled thinking of when they think of "MAGA Republican," of "moderate Republican," of "moderate Democrat," of "progressive Democrat?" What are the tipping point issues that make them choose one over the other? What do they like or dislike about each of them? No idea. Instead, we are left to guess what each of those labels might mean to a group of a thousand strangers.
These surveys pretend to inform, but they don't do any real work to unpack the assumptions on which they work to find any real information that might make a difference. And politicians are paying people six figure salaries to make this sort of tea and read the leaves.
As an undergrad in Boulder, I used to make a trip to NCAR a handful of times a semester to collect signatures for grants for the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (I was a grant courier there for two year). They did a lot of grant work with NCAR, including a lot of grants I remember that were doing some of that important work on climate change that drew all that fire from He Who Slumbers' quid-pro-donors.
I know that the age difference between these musicians and Drum Corps International (22 max age) is vast, but the marching band show had me thinking about how much fun I used to have watching the DCI championships on PBS with my late brother back in the '80s, and set me to looking for a modern show that could give me a sense of the current state of DCI showmanship:
https://youtu.be/8EktPlyf7Ok?si=CEO9hjqJqB4bRi5d
Bluecoats: Downside Up 2016 performance.
Their 2014 show - Tilt - is also pretty amazing from a technical standpoint as they are performing the whole thing at an angle to the field markings, which seems like it would take a ton of practice to pull off consistently. I liked the music for the 2016 show a little better, though, so that's what you get.
I would not discount He Who Slumbers as the "author" of those based on the language and the weird syntax. There's often a disconnect between people's spoken and written vocabularies that happens because one is synchronous and extemporaneous and the other is asynchronous and somewhat iterative. The Ancient Orange One could very well type part of it, get suggestions from AI that get incorporated, and then riff on the AI suggestions in ways that undo part of the coherence forced upon the first draft by the suggestions. They all read like patchwriting to me. He could be pissed and ranting, set it aside for an AI check and a McNugget, seize hold of a suggestion and then try to kick that suggestion up with his own special spin on it.
What I see is not so different from any freshman first draft done too late at night in a fit of pique.
So put me down as a vote for "it's him - with slight input from an inanimate assistant."
As Gramsci wrote: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters." In an ordinary world the likes of Liz Truss would never rise to power, but in an age of monstrosity her her refusal to be deterred could just win her support amongst the political Kaiju fanciers. Scoff at your own peril.
Back in our tutorials, Truss demonstrated an unnerving ability to surprise. No other student matched her mischievous ability to read out essays on any number of the main events in British political history which always managed to say something new; not always accurate, but definitely new.
These essays were creative and self-consciously unconventional. As we argued over the hour, she almost never backed down, even when I did what all Oxford tutors try to do and present fact after fact to try to change her mind. It was frustrating at times, but as a young tutor, I really liked how she insisted her judgment mattered just as much as anyone else’s. Older tutors were probably more frustrated by how she was happy to deviate sharply from the textbooks.
There's a lot going on between the lines in this assessment.
I always think of noise rock, math rock, and post-rock when I think about influential Japanese musicians: MONO, Toe, Boris, Merzbow - all hugely influential far beyond Japan itself. (I'm tempted to throw Sigh into the mix as well, with their avant-garde black metal catching some of that noise and dada influence.)
It seems to me that Japanese rock splits itself into the groups that are coming at things from an Idol influenced direction - having a huge emphasis on visual presentation and fandom - and the more otaku side that is dedicated to exploration of some aspect of music with willful disregard for the Idol ethos.
I would say that I prefer the latter over the former, but I listen to a lot of BABYMETAL, so I am not immune to the charms of the idol aesthetic.
Interesting. I'm fairly familiar with how China does their music education because of the music writing class I've taught. There the emphasis is more on testing and certification than on ensemble playing. I'm sure that there must be a lot of young people who did the lessons and found something they loved, but most of the students who have written essays about their experience complain that it was too much about technical ability and challenge, and not nearly enough about play. They were pushed into it by their parents in order to have an objective certification of their diligence and discipline. Expression was secondary. Their stories are mostly about rediscovering music and learning to love it only after they had either refused any further lessons, or crashed and burned out of the competitive testing at a lower level of proficiency. They only learned to love playing after they came back to it with no outside pressure to excel.
Are there parallels in Japan, or is this one of those cultural differences over how each nation expresses their collectivity?
"We are pushing all of our chips in on artificial intelligence as a fighting force. The Department is tapping into America's commercial genius, and we're embedding generative AI into our daily battle rhythm." Secretary of War Pete Hegseth remarked, "AI tools present boundless opportunities to increase efficiency, and we are thrilled to witness AI's future positive impact across the War Department."
...
GenAI.mil is another building block in America's AI revolution. The War Department is unleashing a new era of operational dominance, where every warfighter wields frontier AI as a force multiplier. The release of GenAI.mil is an indispensable strategic imperative for our fighting force, further establishing the United States as the global leader in AI.
All things 2025 are 2005 again. This is Rumsfeld's Revolution in Military Affairs v2.0. Find "Networked" and replace with "AI." Find "Iraq," and replace with "Venezuela." They will bring the Shock And Awe again, and then falter on the lack of HUMINT and any plan for what comes after that might bring stability and hope to a population that no one in the administration gives a single damn about.
Complete Charlie Foxtrot in the making once again, but the techbros are ready at the trough.
I have dreams where I am lost in a conference hotel and wandering through all manner of industrial, dystopian tunnels trying to find my way back to the lobby. And like many of you, I still have student dreams (damn you, grad school trauma), or very similar retail work dreams, where I have failed to check a schedule and am trying hard not to fail or be fired for having ghosted something important.
Never any teaching anxiety dreams, though. I save all of my teaching anxiety for my waking hours. Thank the botanical gods for CBD.
LOL - yes and yes. Casper, Sheridan, Gillette, Weston, Lusk, Riverton, Chugwater, Rawlins, Lander, Rock Springs, Saratoga...
All the happening places.
So much wind. Especially fun when it's snowing, you are driving a full 14-passenger van, and you have been awake for 36 hours straight. The drifts blowing across the road start looking surreal.
I've written here before about the one day while working an inventory job across CO, NE, SD, WY, MT that I drove from Fort Morgan to Fort Collins and drove through sunny weather into fog, hail, sun, rain, fog, light snow, and sun again over about 35 miles of empty state highways.
Colorado: sunny weather punctuated by acts of god.
Pro Bono - There are people in the UK well to the left of me whom I respect. They ought to have a party to represent their views. But Your Party seems to me to represent almost no one apart from its activists.
I recognize this impulse from the perspective of someone who has been (somewhat reluctantly) involved in union leadership for a few years now. And I think, given what I have seen from the Project 2025 wing of my family, that it also holds true of the far/religious right.
Your Party, as a populist socialist movement, wants to be radically democratic and represent all its members, but there is tremendous asymmetry in how involved members in these types of movements are, and how involved they want to be, in the day to day. Consensus building is tedious, time consuming and exhausting. Only a small fraction of the membership in any of these groups has the time, interest, or characteristics to actually do this sort of work long term. What you end up with is a mixture of scrappy, fearless pragmatists, and people for whom the institution takes the place of a sort of political church in their lives. They love to hear the testimony of others and have people affirm their faith in the institution. In my union, I think of myself as part of the former group and find the latter to be utterly exhausting to deal with.
I suspect that what Pro Bono is seeing is a result of this sort of dynamic. The scrappy pragmatists mostly stay on the edges and pick their battles, fighting activist burnout the entire time as the High Church idealists sap momentum with committees and leadership retreats and another round of membership questionnaires because the last round didn't get the number of responses that would give them the confidence to move forward on any major issue. But since the majority of those involved at the leadership level are the ideological activists, they do all manage to unite around a few small ginger faction sorts of issues that they start to mistake for a consensus, so the leadership communications all come out sounding a bit too strident.
All of which makes the rank-and-file less likely to want to get involved because of the culture clash.
lj - I think that Kim Stanley Robinson had the Indian government doing the sulfur geoengineering (rather than a private entity) is because India started doing it after it was clear that the world had already overshot the climate boundaries. It was part of a hodgepodge approach to solutions that was necessitated by our collective inability to make collective change.
The reasons for private entities to do this are more complicated, and get at wj's thoughts about the profit motive. The tech startups that are working the geoengineering angle are doing so partly for public minded reasons, but that is also mixed with the conviction that whatever we do collectively must not interfere with the economy or their own business interests. They are trying to delay the moment of accountability in order to stretch the bubble for their own fortunes.
It's an informative comparison, and it highlights the difference in priorities between the global north and south.
Just chased one of the Newsweek links from the anti-weather militia article to see what MTG had to say about her anti-weather-tampering bill.
She is an idiot - I am not suggesting otherwise - but at the same time, I don't think that it's a bad idea to pass laws forbidding unauthorized geoengineering because we are already seeing startups that are attempting to kick start this sort of environmental hacking in the name of combatting climate change:
"Heritage American" is a bit like "Originalism" in that the term is infinitely Humpty-Dumpty-able. Once you establish that the Founding Fathers were Christian Nationalists (the subject of so many books and church basement visits by "noted Bible-believing historians") then the heritage in question becomes a spiritual heritage, and any American born Christian Nationalist regardless of ethnicity can be provisionally adopted into the family of Heritage Americans.
Of course that heritage is instantly revocable as well, even for actual Heritage Americans. I have ancestors on my father's side of the family going back at least to 1700, and possibly to Jamestown. I'm pretty sure that my status as a Heritage American was revoked the moment that it became clear to everyone that I was an exvangelical, a feminist, and in favor of LGBTQ+ rights. When my mother passed, the only people who spoke to my wife and I at her funeral were blood relatives or the two Taiwanese converts who were treated as adopted family. The pastor of the church was literally the only other member of my parents' church who spoke to us, and he only did so enough to try to suggest that I read CS Lewis (as if I hadn't already done that during my evangelical days).
Since we are on the subject of philosophy here, and the philosophical justifications for one's totalitarian tendencies, I ran across this piece at The Guardian, which highlights the cachet that Carl Schmitt has on the Christian Nationalist right:
Other Schmitt-positive applicants include a Heritage employee who has since landed in the administration. Max Matheu is now an attorney adviser at the State Department, according to his LinkedIn page.
[...]
In his Project 2025 application, in response to a question about which books have influenced him, Matheu nominated The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt, adding that “The friend/enemy distinction is the cardinal concept that undergirds all politics. The Left has been making the distinction since Gramsci and other cultural marxists captured the media and academic institutions to subvert Heritage Americans and the shared ideals this country once held."
Note here the use of the phrase "Heritage Americans" as a way of othering anyone that does not fit the alt-right mold. It's really interesting that Matheu is accusing "The Left" of being Schmittians. It's particularly ironic because Schmitt was using the friend/enemy distinction to argue why liberalism was doomed to fail because it insisted on universal rights and the humanity of all subjects in the realm of the political - pretty much the opposite of what they accuse "The Left" of doing. Not a surprise, really, when most of these Heritage hangers-on seem unable to hold onto the distinction between liberals and leftists, and treat them as interchangeable.
Since I have mentioned Schmitt so many times before, I should probably quote him here to show the central reason for his popularity in the Christian Nationalist right:
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy…the distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, an association or dissociation. It can exist theoretically and practically, without having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, aesthetic, economic, or other distinctions. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflict with him are possible. - The Concept of the Political I.2
So the Christian Nationalist project functions institutionally upon this one basic premise - that the only way to have a unified state is to refine it into a homogenous, elemental society that is not vulnerable to any sort of othering. Any attempt to try to base that essence in a universal humanity is, to their eyes, doomed to lose in the realm of politics.
This is what we are up against. Anyone not actively working for their Christian Nationalist agenda is not a Heritage American, and therefore can be excluded from political existence. Their attempts at gerrymandering are merely the least bloody and turbulent means to make their enemies cease to exist. Failing that, there are other means.
I'm not sure that Rubio (or his people) is the source of the leak. Given the leak of the second call between Ditriev and Ushakov, I wonder if this hasn't been leaked to Bloomberg from one or more of the European intelligence services. I'm sure that they would rather be dealing with Rubio than with Witkoff and Vance, and they have been a lot more public in their profile since The Ancient Orange One threatened to withhold US intelligence from other NATO members.
In terms of internal climate migration, I think it is important to realize that the US does not have one form of nationalism. My guess is that we have at least three competing forms of nationalism, and the White Christian Nationalist side of things is going to find itself on the move moreso than the others. For reference, we have the maps here at the Public Religion Research Institute: https://prri.org/research/support-for-christian-nationalism-in-all-50-states/
Note that support for Christian Nationalism is strongest in the Southeast, Northern Plains, and the Great Plains states that connect those regions.
Compare this with the map of climate winners and losers at Pro Publica: https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/
My guess is that we will see some migration along the diagonal between these areas as people leave the Southeast and look for something like the "American Redoubt" for their idea of a nationalist utopia, and we are going to start seeing some stark regional divides between WA/ID and MN/SD. Think Ruby Ridge. There's more of that on tap, but the right is now much more aligned with their fringe, so that's going to be more difficult to deal with.
It's one of the things that would make me think harder about settling in places like Spokane, Eugene, or Fargo. Those could become the epicenters for violence fueled by dueling nationalisms in the region.
That is one of the current double standards on the US right at the moment. Russian expansionism is less alarming to many because Russia is a white Christian nation, and the far right in America is smitten with the Orthodox church, its muscular Christianity and patriarchy, and its staunch opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.
China, in the eyes of the US right, are godless asian communists, and thus enemies of Western Civilization.
So the Department of Defense (which Pete Dawg wants to be called the Department of War because the packing penis wasn't fooling anyone) has now declared that they are investigating Sen. Mark Kelly because Kelly had the temerity to remind US military service people, past and present, that they have a duty to uphold the Constitution which supersedes their duty to follow any order that would violate the Constitution.
You, know, keeping that oath that they swore when they joined the service.
And on social media the Ancient Orange One is calling Kelly et al's statement a "clear act of sedition."
This from the same merry band of miscreants who commuted Stuart Rhodes' federal sentence for having committed Seditious Conspiracy during the January 6 insurrection - while leading a group that called themselves the Oath Keepers.
So Kelly is being investigated for warning service people that if they violate the law and the constitution, they will end up a convicted felon like Rhodes.
They are going to keep pushing until there is a confrontation. And then they will push some more.
Do not yield.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Wiles Interview”
wj - I'd never call Newsom a progressive, but I agree that any reasonable CA pol would be read as a loony leftie by default because that's the trope everyone knows.
First and foremost, the Dems need someone who is young-ish, charismatic, and a good communicator, and then whoever that is needs to hammer on the idea that the middle class needs saving and expanding, and that tax cuts have not done the job for that. They need to run on restoring dignity and affordability to working people and reducing the influence of corporations and donors over elected officials - basically a pro-labor message without the high church union messaging.
wonkie - agree that policy messaging is a loser, but think that a good fight message needs some sort of big picture policy narrative that resonates and that gets to the core of the party's values. And they need to take aim at all of the tropes that have harmed us - trickle down, tax cut prosperity; tough on crime justice; making schools compete - and replace them with a focus on investing in the public good.
"
Not a complaint about you or your posting that, wonkie, but I hate polls like the one that Emerson College put together because I don't think that they have any actual relevance to a real election. It's more about how people label political positions in their heads, and it shows us nothing about what voters actually want or what they respond to.
Who is the person being polled thinking of when they think of "MAGA Republican," of "moderate Republican," of "moderate Democrat," of "progressive Democrat?" What are the tipping point issues that make them choose one over the other? What do they like or dislike about each of them? No idea. Instead, we are left to guess what each of those labels might mean to a group of a thousand strangers.
These surveys pretend to inform, but they don't do any real work to unpack the assumptions on which they work to find any real information that might make a difference. And politicians are paying people six figure salaries to make this sort of tea and read the leaves.
On “Author, author?”
As an undergrad in Boulder, I used to make a trip to NCAR a handful of times a semester to collect signatures for grants for the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (I was a grant courier there for two year). They did a lot of grant work with NCAR, including a lot of grants I remember that were doing some of that important work on climate change that drew all that fire from He Who Slumbers' quid-pro-donors.
To quote Droopy Dog, "This makes me mad."
On “Weekend music thread #08 How do you get to Carnagie Hall?”
I know that the age difference between these musicians and Drum Corps International (22 max age) is vast, but the marching band show had me thinking about how much fun I used to have watching the DCI championships on PBS with my late brother back in the '80s, and set me to looking for a modern show that could give me a sense of the current state of DCI showmanship:
https://youtu.be/8EktPlyf7Ok?si=CEO9hjqJqB4bRi5d
Bluecoats: Downside Up 2016 performance.
Their 2014 show - Tilt - is also pretty amazing from a technical standpoint as they are performing the whole thing at an angle to the field markings, which seems like it would take a ton of practice to pull off consistently. I liked the music for the 2016 show a little better, though, so that's what you get.
On “Author, author?”
CharlesWT - there's AI content, and there's AI generated autofill suggestions. He would not use the forer out of pride, but the latter is a fair game.
"
I would not discount He Who Slumbers as the "author" of those based on the language and the weird syntax. There's often a disconnect between people's spoken and written vocabularies that happens because one is synchronous and extemporaneous and the other is asynchronous and somewhat iterative. The Ancient Orange One could very well type part of it, get suggestions from AI that get incorporated, and then riff on the AI suggestions in ways that undo part of the coherence forced upon the first draft by the suggestions. They all read like patchwriting to me. He could be pissed and ranting, set it aside for an AI check and a McNugget, seize hold of a suggestion and then try to kick that suggestion up with his own special spin on it.
What I see is not so different from any freshman first draft done too late at night in a fit of pique.
So put me down as a vote for "it's him - with slight input from an inanimate assistant."
On ““We’re now poorer than Mississippi. It’s like Huckleberry Finn without the steamboats.””
Yes, positive- ish, but in a very backhanded way.
As Gramsci wrote: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters." In an ordinary world the likes of Liz Truss would never rise to power, but in an age of monstrosity her her refusal to be deterred could just win her support amongst the political Kaiju fanciers. Scoff at your own peril.
...or something like that.
"
Here's a bit of what Stears wrote in The Times:
There's a lot going on between the lines in this assessment.
On “Weekend music thread #08 How do you get to Carnagie Hall?”
I always think of noise rock, math rock, and post-rock when I think about influential Japanese musicians: MONO, Toe, Boris, Merzbow - all hugely influential far beyond Japan itself. (I'm tempted to throw Sigh into the mix as well, with their avant-garde black metal catching some of that noise and dada influence.)
It seems to me that Japanese rock splits itself into the groups that are coming at things from an Idol influenced direction - having a huge emphasis on visual presentation and fandom - and the more otaku side that is dedicated to exploration of some aspect of music with willful disregard for the Idol ethos.
I would say that I prefer the latter over the former, but I listen to a lot of BABYMETAL, so I am not immune to the charms of the idol aesthetic.
"
cleek - that one is fun. For Japanese post-rock I think the grandmasters are probably MONO.
https://youtu.be/hlh6-M04pt0?si=IcY6ROkql4hsqP7P
"
Interesting. I'm fairly familiar with how China does their music education because of the music writing class I've taught. There the emphasis is more on testing and certification than on ensemble playing. I'm sure that there must be a lot of young people who did the lessons and found something they loved, but most of the students who have written essays about their experience complain that it was too much about technical ability and challenge, and not nearly enough about play. They were pushed into it by their parents in order to have an objective certification of their diligence and discipline. Expression was secondary. Their stories are mostly about rediscovering music and learning to love it only after they had either refused any further lessons, or crashed and burned out of the competitive testing at a lower level of proficiency. They only learned to love playing after they came back to it with no outside pressure to excel.
Are there parallels in Japan, or is this one of those cultural differences over how each nation expresses their collectivity?
On “Cory Doctorow and enshittification”
Here's a big one.
https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4354916/the-war-department-unleashes-ai-on-new-genaimil-platform/
...
All things 2025 are 2005 again. This is Rumsfeld's Revolution in Military Affairs v2.0. Find "Networked" and replace with "AI." Find "Iraq," and replace with "Venezuela." They will bring the Shock And Awe again, and then falter on the lack of HUMINT and any plan for what comes after that might bring stability and hope to a population that no one in the administration gives a single damn about.
Complete Charlie Foxtrot in the making once again, but the techbros are ready at the trough.
On “How are you sleeping?”
I have dreams where I am lost in a conference hotel and wandering through all manner of industrial, dystopian tunnels trying to find my way back to the lobby. And like many of you, I still have student dreams (damn you, grad school trauma), or very similar retail work dreams, where I have failed to check a schedule and am trying hard not to fail or be fired for having ghosted something important.
Never any teaching anxiety dreams, though. I save all of my teaching anxiety for my waking hours. Thank the botanical gods for CBD.
On “Open Thread”
Did you go through Casper? Was the wind blowing?
LOL - yes and yes. Casper, Sheridan, Gillette, Weston, Lusk, Riverton, Chugwater, Rawlins, Lander, Rock Springs, Saratoga...
All the happening places.
So much wind. Especially fun when it's snowing, you are driving a full 14-passenger van, and you have been awake for 36 hours straight. The drifts blowing across the road start looking surreal.
I don't miss it.
"
I've written here before about the one day while working an inventory job across CO, NE, SD, WY, MT that I drove from Fort Morgan to Fort Collins and drove through sunny weather into fog, hail, sun, rain, fog, light snow, and sun again over about 35 miles of empty state highways.
Colorado: sunny weather punctuated by acts of god.
On “It’s Your Party, you can cry if…”
Pro Bono - There are people in the UK well to the left of me whom I respect. They ought to have a party to represent their views. But Your Party seems to me to represent almost no one apart from its activists.
I recognize this impulse from the perspective of someone who has been (somewhat reluctantly) involved in union leadership for a few years now. And I think, given what I have seen from the Project 2025 wing of my family, that it also holds true of the far/religious right.
Your Party, as a populist socialist movement, wants to be radically democratic and represent all its members, but there is tremendous asymmetry in how involved members in these types of movements are, and how involved they want to be, in the day to day. Consensus building is tedious, time consuming and exhausting. Only a small fraction of the membership in any of these groups has the time, interest, or characteristics to actually do this sort of work long term. What you end up with is a mixture of scrappy, fearless pragmatists, and people for whom the institution takes the place of a sort of political church in their lives. They love to hear the testimony of others and have people affirm their faith in the institution. In my union, I think of myself as part of the former group and find the latter to be utterly exhausting to deal with.
I suspect that what Pro Bono is seeing is a result of this sort of dynamic. The scrappy pragmatists mostly stay on the edges and pick their battles, fighting activist burnout the entire time as the High Church idealists sap momentum with committees and leadership retreats and another round of membership questionnaires because the last round didn't get the number of responses that would give them the confidence to move forward on any major issue. But since the majority of those involved at the leadership level are the ideological activists, they do all manage to unite around a few small ginger faction sorts of issues that they start to mistake for a consensus, so the leadership communications all come out sounding a bit too strident.
All of which makes the rank-and-file less likely to want to get involved because of the culture clash.
Solidarity is hard.
On “The surprising philosophy behind Palantir”
lj - I think that Kim Stanley Robinson had the Indian government doing the sulfur geoengineering (rather than a private entity) is because India started doing it after it was clear that the world had already overshot the climate boundaries. It was part of a hodgepodge approach to solutions that was necessitated by our collective inability to make collective change.
The reasons for private entities to do this are more complicated, and get at wj's thoughts about the profit motive. The tech startups that are working the geoengineering angle are doing so partly for public minded reasons, but that is also mixed with the conviction that whatever we do collectively must not interfere with the economy or their own business interests. They are trying to delay the moment of accountability in order to stretch the bubble for their own fortunes.
It's an informative comparison, and it highlights the difference in priorities between the global north and south.
"
Just chased one of the Newsweek links from the anti-weather militia article to see what MTG had to say about her anti-weather-tampering bill.
She is an idiot - I am not suggesting otherwise - but at the same time, I don't think that it's a bad idea to pass laws forbidding unauthorized geoengineering because we are already seeing startups that are attempting to kick start this sort of environmental hacking in the name of combatting climate change:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/24/1066041/a-startup-says-its-begun-releasing-particles-into-the-atmosphere-in-an-effort-to-tweak-the-climate/
MTG is not the only idiot around, and in this case I'll support one idiot in order to stop other idiots.
"
"Heritage American" is a bit like "Originalism" in that the term is infinitely Humpty-Dumpty-able. Once you establish that the Founding Fathers were Christian Nationalists (the subject of so many books and church basement visits by "noted Bible-believing historians") then the heritage in question becomes a spiritual heritage, and any American born Christian Nationalist regardless of ethnicity can be provisionally adopted into the family of Heritage Americans.
Of course that heritage is instantly revocable as well, even for actual Heritage Americans. I have ancestors on my father's side of the family going back at least to 1700, and possibly to Jamestown. I'm pretty sure that my status as a Heritage American was revoked the moment that it became clear to everyone that I was an exvangelical, a feminist, and in favor of LGBTQ+ rights. When my mother passed, the only people who spoke to my wife and I at her funeral were blood relatives or the two Taiwanese converts who were treated as adopted family. The pastor of the church was literally the only other member of my parents' church who spoke to us, and he only did so enough to try to suggest that I read CS Lewis (as if I hadn't already done that during my evangelical days).
"
Since we are on the subject of philosophy here, and the philosophical justifications for one's totalitarian tendencies, I ran across this piece at The Guardian, which highlights the cachet that Carl Schmitt has on the Christian Nationalist right:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/28/project-2025-heritage-foundation-hack
Note here the use of the phrase "Heritage Americans" as a way of othering anyone that does not fit the alt-right mold. It's really interesting that Matheu is accusing "The Left" of being Schmittians. It's particularly ironic because Schmitt was using the friend/enemy distinction to argue why liberalism was doomed to fail because it insisted on universal rights and the humanity of all subjects in the realm of the political - pretty much the opposite of what they accuse "The Left" of doing. Not a surprise, really, when most of these Heritage hangers-on seem unable to hold onto the distinction between liberals and leftists, and treat them as interchangeable.
Since I have mentioned Schmitt so many times before, I should probably quote him here to show the central reason for his popularity in the Christian Nationalist right:
So the Christian Nationalist project functions institutionally upon this one basic premise - that the only way to have a unified state is to refine it into a homogenous, elemental society that is not vulnerable to any sort of othering. Any attempt to try to base that essence in a universal humanity is, to their eyes, doomed to lose in the realm of politics.
This is what we are up against. Anyone not actively working for their Christian Nationalist agenda is not a Heritage American, and therefore can be excluded from political existence. Their attempts at gerrymandering are merely the least bloody and turbulent means to make their enemies cease to exist. Failing that, there are other means.
On “An openish thread featuring the comedy stylings of Steve Witkoff”
I'm not sure that Rubio (or his people) is the source of the leak. Given the leak of the second call between Ditriev and Ushakov, I wonder if this hasn't been leaked to Bloomberg from one or more of the European intelligence services. I'm sure that they would rather be dealing with Rubio than with Witkoff and Vance, and they have been a lot more public in their profile since The Ancient Orange One threatened to withhold US intelligence from other NATO members.
I'd trust the Euro's competence over Rubio's.
On “Shabana burns the cakes”
In terms of internal climate migration, I think it is important to realize that the US does not have one form of nationalism. My guess is that we have at least three competing forms of nationalism, and the White Christian Nationalist side of things is going to find itself on the move moreso than the others. For reference, we have the maps here at the Public Religion Research Institute: https://prri.org/research/support-for-christian-nationalism-in-all-50-states/
Note that support for Christian Nationalism is strongest in the Southeast, Northern Plains, and the Great Plains states that connect those regions.
Compare this with the map of climate winners and losers at Pro Publica: https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/
My guess is that we will see some migration along the diagonal between these areas as people leave the Southeast and look for something like the "American Redoubt" for their idea of a nationalist utopia, and we are going to start seeing some stark regional divides between WA/ID and MN/SD. Think Ruby Ridge. There's more of that on tap, but the right is now much more aligned with their fringe, so that's going to be more difficult to deal with.
It's one of the things that would make me think harder about settling in places like Spokane, Eugene, or Fargo. Those could become the epicenters for violence fueled by dueling nationalisms in the region.
On “An openish thread featuring the comedy stylings of Steve Witkoff”
That is one of the current double standards on the US right at the moment. Russian expansionism is less alarming to many because Russia is a white Christian nation, and the far right in America is smitten with the Orthodox church, its muscular Christianity and patriarchy, and its staunch opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.
China, in the eyes of the US right, are godless asian communists, and thus enemies of Western Civilization.
"
You seem to think that Trump wouldn’t just walk away from his debts, in spite of all past evidence.
Those other debts weren't being enforced by the Russian Mafia.
"
So the Department of Defense (which Pete Dawg wants to be called the Department of War because the packing penis wasn't fooling anyone) has now declared that they are investigating Sen. Mark Kelly because Kelly had the temerity to remind US military service people, past and present, that they have a duty to uphold the Constitution which supersedes their duty to follow any order that would violate the Constitution.
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/24/nx-s1-5619314/pentagon-mark-kelly-trump-hegseth-military
You, know, keeping that oath that they swore when they joined the service.
And on social media the Ancient Orange One is calling Kelly et al's statement a "clear act of sedition."
This from the same merry band of miscreants who commuted Stuart Rhodes' federal sentence for having committed Seditious Conspiracy during the January 6 insurrection - while leading a group that called themselves the Oath Keepers.
So Kelly is being investigated for warning service people that if they violate the law and the constitution, they will end up a convicted felon like Rhodes.
They are going to keep pushing until there is a confrontation. And then they will push some more.
Do not yield.
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