I have no idea if this is of any interest to anyone, but it is a gift article from the Atlantic by James Parker called The Great Mystery of Drumming, about a book called Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers by John Lingan. I've heard of neither of these guys, but maybe some people here have.
I wasn’t even born in the 50s but I’m already nostalgic for the days when, rather than re-bombing drowning Venezuelan sailors to make sure none survive an airstrike in a war Congress has not authorised, American operatives in sharp suits and sunglasses instead tried to implement regime change subtly, discreetly and even tastefully, to a soundtrack of Paul Desmond cool jazz classics. It’s called democracy, daddio, you dig?
The historian Frances Stonor Saunders believes the CIA promoted the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in order to discredit Soviet realist art. Donald Trump, meanwhile, just gave some kind of made-up award to the band Kiss, who pretended to be magic animals from space in the 1970s.
A world in which America could imagine abstract art as a cultural propaganda tool is a far cry from one where the president releases an AI video of himself carpet bombing protesters with clods of human excrement, although the 60s Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who canned his faeces and sold them, might recognise Trump as a kindred creative spirit. On balance though, those postwar CIA guys were a better class of bastard.
Because on Monday, quietly and without much fanfare from the mainstream media, the world we grew up in changed for ever and our Euro-doom was decreed. Donald J Trump’s National Security Strategy statement explained, quite explicitly, that he will be actively aiding European far-right nationalist parties to win elections in order to “restore western identity”, end mass migration into Europe, and enforce a contemporary American idea of freedom of speech, which appears to mean the right to say anything irrespective of its accuracy. Don’t like these facts? The algorhythmically amplified far-right avatars of American social media have others. And if those don’t convince you, the president has a cartoon of himself bombing people with shit.
Conservative commentators like to imagine Donald J Trump as a largely unserious presence whose provocative statements are meant to bait the libtards rather than to represent a genuine direction of political travel. Keir Starmer in turn chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast with Magic King Charles of Ye Olde England, and some string.
Trump in turn has already agreed to use the United Kingdom as an enormous energy-sapping battery, housing all the servers needed to generate the algorithmically skewed content that will eventually destroy liberal European democracy. Result! Sir Keir did a great deal with Donald, who then sent him down to the DIY shop to buy some striped paint.
But since Monday’s White House National Security Strategy statement, Starmer’s going to have to up the standard full English at Windsor Castle to at least the level of the late lamented Little Chef Olympic if he wants to avoid the country falling fast into fascism. Baked bean ramekins all round! Just how good can those Windsor Castle sausages be? And will the Royal footmen even be able to find any sausages now Prince Andrew, currently Andrew, is rumoured to have been playing a game involving hiding them?
Keir Starmer chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast
As an alleged teenage fan of Hitler alleged to have told small black British children to go home to Africa, although all in a spirit of harmless banter if he even said it at all, Nigel Farage would benefit from Trump’s foreign intervention in our politics. But being a man of honour and principle he will of course reject America’s direct assistance as it would be hypocritical to do otherwise. Because back in 2016, when Barack Obama said Brexit would harm British trade with America, Farage said: “Vladimir Putin behaved in a more statesmanlike manner than President Obama did in this referendum campaign. Obama came to Britain, and I think behaved disgracefully, telling us we would be at the back of the queue. Vladimir Putin maintained his silence throughout the whole campaign.” Farage and Putin sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
We must assume that, unlike Farage’s colleague Nathan Gill, the Reform leader wasn’t being paid at that point to promote Putin, the world leader he most admires, who, although nominally silent himself during Farage’s referendum, certainly had a lot of online bots making a lot of pro-Brexit noise on Farage’s behalf.
Don’t look for much pushback against Trump’s plan for European regime change from America’s on-off enemy-ally Russia or the rightwing British media. Both Kremlin mouthpiece Dmitry Peskov and the Times columnist Melanie Phillips found some common ground to jointly endorse Trump’s plans, the former saying “The adjustments we’re seeing are largely consistent with our vision … we consider this a positive step”, and the latter commenting “Only Britain and Europe can save themselves. That’s what the Trump administration is saying.” Phillips appears to welcome the dismantling of our democracy as long as it returns us to “principles rooted in historic faith, traditions and institutions”, and the imposition of a puppet fascist government is a small price to pay to get Songs of Praise back on the BBC. And the Kremlin wants to make sure an Islamified UK doesn’t neglect all those beautiful old cathedrals so beloved of its architecturally infatuated international chemical weapons assassins, slaughtering civilians on our streets. Defence analysts discreetly admit we may already be at war with Russia, which is probing our communications cables, badgering European airports with drones and quietly flooding our social media with misinformation to make your Facebook-following uncle foam at the mouth and ruin your upcoming Christmas dinner by insisting Volodymyr Zelenskyy spends all the Ukraine aid money on yachts, cocaine and designer puffa jackets.
And the moment we start sending Russia’s seized assets to Ukraine we can expect to see our entire online infrastructure shut down with the flick of an undersea switch, as British politicians’ eyes melt out of their faces while swathes of civilians evaporate behind them on the high street in invisible chemical warfare clouds, tapping at their suddenly unresponsive phones and asking an inert ChatGPT why their internal organs are wriggling about on the pavement. But the truth is we are now at war with Trump’s America as well, and the only reason we don’t recognise the situation for what it obviously is is because it seems so utterly inconceivable. And still Starmer prevaricates about re-entering the European customs union alongside Trump’s other intended European victim nations, because he worries it may jeopardise our American trade deal, a scarecrow walking into a furnace.
Open thread, so: I'm sick at heart about what seems to be happening with regard to Trump and Ukraine. None of it is even that unexpected, but I guess I was still hoping beyond hope that, to quote Grace Paley, there would be Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. I suppose it could still happen, but you'd be a fool to put any money at all on it.
I do realise that many or most of you have concerns that are a great deal closer to home, and with that in mind I am posting a gift link to a podcast and its transcript from the Atlantic, with David Frum interviewing Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center at NYU. The main part is about the threats to the coming elections (2026 and 2028), and what can be done to thwart them:
I used to get frantically worried in the dream but one night I thought, “Fuck it. This isn’t my fault. I’m not going to feel bad. I am going to get mad instead.” So now that dream has a different story arc.
This is great, as an add-on not as a replacement, which is what I assume was the intention? Does this now happen automatically, or does someone have to do things to it intermittently? If the former, win-win!
Kindness and human decency weigh a tremendous amount with me, and more and more as I get older. But in politicians, and especially those who aspire to lead the country, with all the enormous complications and problems that involves, I feel intelligence (or at least the lack of stupidity) are a necessity.
My serious (but not far) lefty mates think well of her. I don't know much about her, but her participation in this absolute clownshow so far makes me wonder about her judgement. However, I agree that lefties do deserve effective political representation, and if she turns out to be capable of it, good.
Corbyn's judgement, on the other hand, is and has always been execrable. And most serious lefties of my acquaintance say he is also not very bright.
Zack Polanski's past as a hypnotherapist, and his (disputed) claims that he could hypnotise women to have bigger breasts, are rather hard to forget when considering how serious he is capable of being.
That aside, however, our politics are in such a mess at the moment, and most of the alternatives so frightful, that a vote for the Greens could make sense under some circumstances.
lj: I think ObWi is infinitely preferable to LGM and BJ, so I definitely don't think there should be more threads, and I also agree that the non-US commenters add interest (but then, to quote Mandy Rice-Davies, I would, wouldn't I?). But I've always been far more interested in e.g. American politics etc than British, to the consternation of some of my friends, so the balance on ObWi seems excellent to me.
One trouble with too-frequent posts is that conversations in Comments sometimes fizzle out prematurely, as people move on to comment under the latest post.
This of Tony P's is something I've noticed as well, so I guess I prefer fewer threads. The great thing about our open or open-ish ones, IMO, is that people introduce new subjects during them, which may or may not get talked about, and then people can circle back to prior subjects as they get around to catching up, or have time to think about them. There's something about the less staccato rhythm of that which seems more relaxed to me, and more conducive to an atmosphere like friends hanging out together and talking about what interests them, and generally chewing the fat.
But the old ObWi was the site which formed my (first and only personal) experience of blogs, so I guess a lot of it is personal taste and familiarity.
More threads aren’t needed. What I mostly want is to be able to easily find if there are new comments, and read them.
This pretty much sums up my attitude. I think the number of threads we've been having can be a real distraction, and disrupts the easy flow of conversation we've tended to have in the past. Also, IMO, what's in most of them can just as (or more) usefully go in Open Threads. And although historically I may possibly have been the worst at thread discipline, it's become obvious that I am not alone.
In addition to Snarki's nitpickery, I would also love it if the actual pages of comments were longer, I think it's distracting to have to turn the page forward and back so much on occasion.
On Your Party, and lj's question, IMO the whole phenomenon demonstrates yet again the factionalism of the far/mid left, and its incredibly self-defeating tendency which seems to (in fact if not in theory) value purity and virtue as against electoral success and the ability to actually achieve anything. There's no question that there are "stubborn attitudes to anything on the left", although admittedly not in the same league as in the US, but the far/mid left makes it awfully easy for them. The Monty Python sketch has never been far from mind during these developments.
Michael, I did get the pillow, and I can see why it works perfectly for you and many others. And it sometimes works well for me, but not always. I can't really say why. I had to take a fair amount of the hulls out because it was too full and unwieldy to begin with, and since then I use it intermittently. In fact, I alternate between three pillows, changing when the pain starts coming back. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than it was.
On other matters, unfortunately I was too late for the Black Friday Apple TV deal, but I will be keeping my eye on it. I may cancel my Netflix sub after I finally get round to watching The Ballad of Wallis Island, since I normally watch nothing on there from one month to the next, and if I do I'll probably get Apple.
Ha - I've not seen any of the series, although I know everyone says they're great. I try to limit the platforms I subscribe to, and actually I watch very little TV compared to most people, but I imagine I'll weaken at some stage...
russell: Jackson Lamb is a great creation and character, and someone a joe would definitely want on their side. But the Rodmeister - what bliss he is in all his deluded glory. Have you read all of them, including the Slough House adjacent "The Secret Hours"?
I love the Slough house books - they're also hugely scornful about BoJo. But Roddy Ho is my fave.
Our House of Commons has always been more confrontational and rougher than eg the Senate. Badenoch has been doing so badly as leader of the opposition that speculation about her imminent loss of office has been endless. She must be ecstatic to see Starmer and Reeves recently facing the same sort of thing, and about having a hugely problematic budget and its rollout to get her teeth into. I agree it was unpleasant and mocking, but not altogether out of the norm.
But the important thing is that it's another example of Trump's eagerness or willingness to placate dictators, with (very little or) no regard for the possible victims of their territorial ambitions, no matter what assurances they have previously been given by the US, and with no regard to the global political consequences.
Further to our discussion upthread about what Trump's possible attitude towards China and Taiwan might be, this is from today's Times. It's paywalled, so this is only a snippet.
President Trump has urged the new Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, not to provoke China over the sensitive matter of Taiwan, according to reports.
The intervention will raise concerns in Japan that its ally and military protector is ready to compromise with its increasingly powerful neighbour and leave the country isolated and vulnerable to Chinese aggression.
US and Japanese officials said Trump’s request came in a telephone call on Monday, according to The Wall Street Journal and the newspaper Asahi. Significantly, it followed an hour-long conversation between Trump and President Xi, in which the two men discussed the implementation of a trade deal and the Chinese leader called for the US to recognise his insistent claim to sovereignty over Taiwan.
Thanks lj, now I see it I do vaguely remember it, probably from when Trump nominated him. What an unbelievably corrupt and unsavoury bunch they are, a perfect fit for any other authoritarian regime on the take.
On “Weekend music thread #08 How do you get to Carnagie Hall?”
I have no idea if this is of any interest to anyone, but it is a gift article from the Atlantic by James Parker called The Great Mystery of Drumming, about a book called Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers by John Lingan. I've heard of neither of these guys, but maybe some people here have.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/rock-music-history-drummers/684955/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCfu6mZ7op8KFvj2oLcbyLWg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
On “Open Thread”
Just trying again, in case I found out how to delete one link
Part 1
Stewart Lee: Remember when America used to destroy democracy in style? Those were the days
The CIA once promoted abstract expressionism as a tool of regime change. Now we have AI videos of Trump bombing people with faeces
Stewart Lee
Dec 12, 2025
I wasn’t even born in the 50s but I’m already nostalgic for the days when, rather than re-bombing drowning Venezuelan sailors to make sure none survive an airstrike in a war Congress has not authorised, American operatives in sharp suits and sunglasses instead tried to implement regime change subtly, discreetly and even tastefully, to a soundtrack of Paul Desmond cool jazz classics. It’s called democracy, daddio, you dig?
The historian Frances Stonor Saunders believes the CIA promoted the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in order to discredit Soviet realist art. Donald Trump, meanwhile, just gave some kind of made-up award to the band Kiss, who pretended to be magic animals from space in the 1970s.
A world in which America could imagine abstract art as a cultural propaganda tool is a far cry from one where the president releases an AI video of himself carpet bombing protesters with clods of human excrement, although the 60s Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who canned his faeces and sold them, might recognise Trump as a kindred creative spirit. On balance though, those postwar CIA guys were a better class of bastard.
Because on Monday, quietly and without much fanfare from the mainstream media, the world we grew up in changed for ever and our Euro-doom was decreed. Donald J Trump’s National Security Strategy statement explained, quite explicitly, that he will be actively aiding European far-right nationalist parties to win elections in order to “restore western identity”, end mass migration into Europe, and enforce a contemporary American idea of freedom of speech, which appears to mean the right to say anything irrespective of its accuracy. Don’t like these facts? The algorhythmically amplified far-right avatars of American social media have others. And if those don’t convince you, the president has a cartoon of himself bombing people with shit.
Conservative commentators like to imagine Donald J Trump as a largely unserious presence whose provocative statements are meant to bait the libtards rather than to represent a genuine direction of political travel. Keir Starmer in turn chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast with Magic King Charles of Ye Olde England, and some string.
Trump in turn has already agreed to use the United Kingdom as an enormous energy-sapping battery, housing all the servers needed to generate the algorithmically skewed content that will eventually destroy liberal European democracy. Result! Sir Keir did a great deal with Donald, who then sent him down to the DIY shop to buy some striped paint.
But since Monday’s White House National Security Strategy statement, Starmer’s going to have to up the standard full English at Windsor Castle to at least the level of the late lamented Little Chef Olympic if he wants to avoid the country falling fast into fascism. Baked bean ramekins all round! Just how good can those Windsor Castle sausages be? And will the Royal footmen even be able to find any sausages now Prince Andrew, currently Andrew, is rumoured to have been playing a game involving hiding them?
"
Part 1 obviously had more links than I realised, so is still "waiting for approval".
"
Part 2
Keir Starmer chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast
As an alleged teenage fan of Hitler alleged to have told small black British children to go home to Africa, although all in a spirit of harmless banter if he even said it at all, Nigel Farage would benefit from Trump’s foreign intervention in our politics. But being a man of honour and principle he will of course reject America’s direct assistance as it would be hypocritical to do otherwise. Because back in 2016, when Barack Obama said Brexit would harm British trade with America, Farage said: “Vladimir Putin behaved in a more statesmanlike manner than President Obama did in this referendum campaign. Obama came to Britain, and I think behaved disgracefully, telling us we would be at the back of the queue. Vladimir Putin maintained his silence throughout the whole campaign.” Farage and Putin sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
We must assume that, unlike Farage’s colleague Nathan Gill, the Reform leader wasn’t being paid at that point to promote Putin, the world leader he most admires, who, although nominally silent himself during Farage’s referendum, certainly had a lot of online bots making a lot of pro-Brexit noise on Farage’s behalf.
Don’t look for much pushback against Trump’s plan for European regime change from America’s on-off enemy-ally Russia or the rightwing British media. Both Kremlin mouthpiece Dmitry Peskov and the Times columnist Melanie Phillips found some common ground to jointly endorse Trump’s plans, the former saying “The adjustments we’re seeing are largely consistent with our vision … we consider this a positive step”, and the latter commenting “Only Britain and Europe can save themselves. That’s what the Trump administration is saying.”
Phillips appears to welcome the dismantling of our democracy as long as it returns us to “principles rooted in historic faith, traditions and institutions”, and the imposition of a puppet fascist government is a small price to pay to get Songs of Praise back on the BBC. And the Kremlin wants to make sure an Islamified UK doesn’t neglect all those beautiful old cathedrals so beloved of its architecturally infatuated international chemical weapons assassins, slaughtering civilians on our streets.
Defence analysts discreetly admit we may already be at war with Russia, which is probing our communications cables, badgering European airports with drones and quietly flooding our social media with misinformation to make your Facebook-following uncle foam at the mouth and ruin your upcoming Christmas dinner by insisting Volodymyr Zelenskyy spends all the Ukraine aid money on yachts, cocaine and designer puffa jackets.
And the moment we start sending Russia’s seized assets to Ukraine we can expect to see our entire online infrastructure shut down with the flick of an undersea switch, as British politicians’ eyes melt out of their faces while swathes of civilians evaporate behind them on the high street in invisible chemical warfare clouds, tapping at their suddenly unresponsive phones and asking an inert ChatGPT why their internal organs are wriggling about on the pavement.
But the truth is we are now at war with Trump’s America as well, and the only reason we don’t recognise the situation for what it obviously is is because it seems so utterly inconceivable. And still Starmer prevaricates about re-entering the European customs union alongside Trump’s other intended European victim nations, because he worries it may jeopardise our American trade deal, a scarecrow walking into a furnace.
"
Open thread, so: I'm sick at heart about what seems to be happening with regard to Trump and Ukraine. None of it is even that unexpected, but I guess I was still hoping beyond hope that, to quote Grace Paley, there would be Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. I suppose it could still happen, but you'd be a fool to put any money at all on it.
I do realise that many or most of you have concerns that are a great deal closer to home, and with that in mind I am posting a gift link to a podcast and its transcript from the Atlantic, with David Frum interviewing Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center at NYU. The main part is about the threats to the coming elections (2026 and 2028), and what can be done to thwart them:
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2025/12/david-frum-show-michael-waldman-2026-elections/685219/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCUa60y1nrf54jxaP3FioTT8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
On “It’s Your Party, you can cry if…”
What Pro Bono said, on every count.
On “How are you sleeping?”
I used to get frantically worried in the dream but one night I thought, “Fuck it. This isn’t my fault. I’m not going to feel bad. I am going to get mad instead.”
So now that dream has a different story arc.
I'm delighted by this!
On “Site Experiment”
This is great, as an add-on not as a replacement, which is what I assume was the intention? Does this now happen automatically, or does someone have to do things to it intermittently? If the former, win-win!
On “It’s Your Party, you can cry if…”
Kindness and human decency weigh a tremendous amount with me, and more and more as I get older. But in politicians, and especially those who aspire to lead the country, with all the enormous complications and problems that involves, I feel intelligence (or at least the lack of stupidity) are a necessity.
"
She could do a lot of good in the future.
My serious (but not far) lefty mates think well of her. I don't know much about her, but her participation in this absolute clownshow so far makes me wonder about her judgement. However, I agree that lefties do deserve effective political representation, and if she turns out to be capable of it, good.
Corbyn's judgement, on the other hand, is and has always been execrable. And most serious lefties of my acquaintance say he is also not very bright.
Zack Polanski's past as a hypnotherapist, and his (disputed) claims that he could hypnotise women to have bigger breasts, are rather hard to forget when considering how serious he is capable of being.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/zack-polanski-deputy-green-party-hypnotherapy-womens-breasts-5HjcmXc_2/
That aside, however, our politics are in such a mess at the moment, and most of the alternatives so frightful, that a vote for the Greens could make sense under some circumstances.
On “Open Thread”
lj: I think ObWi is infinitely preferable to LGM and BJ, so I definitely don't think there should be more threads, and I also agree that the non-US commenters add interest (but then, to quote Mandy Rice-Davies, I would, wouldn't I?). But I've always been far more interested in e.g. American politics etc than British, to the consternation of some of my friends, so the balance on ObWi seems excellent to me.
One trouble with too-frequent posts is that conversations in Comments sometimes fizzle out prematurely, as people move on to comment under the latest post.
This of Tony P's is something I've noticed as well, so I guess I prefer fewer threads. The great thing about our open or open-ish ones, IMO, is that people introduce new subjects during them, which may or may not get talked about, and then people can circle back to prior subjects as they get around to catching up, or have time to think about them. There's something about the less staccato rhythm of that which seems more relaxed to me, and more conducive to an atmosphere like friends hanging out together and talking about what interests them, and generally chewing the fat.
But the old ObWi was the site which formed my (first and only personal) experience of blogs, so I guess a lot of it is personal taste and familiarity.
"
More threads aren’t needed.
What I mostly want is to be able to easily find if there are new comments, and read them.
This pretty much sums up my attitude. I think the number of threads we've been having can be a real distraction, and disrupts the easy flow of conversation we've tended to have in the past. Also, IMO, what's in most of them can just as (or more) usefully go in Open Threads. And although historically I may possibly have been the worst at thread discipline, it's become obvious that I am not alone.
In addition to Snarki's nitpickery, I would also love it if the actual pages of comments were longer, I think it's distracting to have to turn the page forward and back so much on occasion.
Anyone else's MMV on all of this, of course.
On “It’s Your Party, you can cry if…”
On Your Party, and lj's question, IMO the whole phenomenon demonstrates yet again the factionalism of the far/mid left, and its incredibly self-defeating tendency which seems to (in fact if not in theory) value purity and virtue as against electoral success and the ability to actually achieve anything. There's no question that there are "stubborn attitudes to anything on the left", although admittedly not in the same league as in the US, but the far/mid left makes it awfully easy for them. The Monty Python sketch has never been far from mind during these developments.
On “Open Thread”
lj, is it your belief that ObWi would be better if there were many more threads, like LGM or BJ?
"
A proper Open Thread! Oh frabjous day!
Michael, I did get the pillow, and I can see why it works perfectly for you and many others. And it sometimes works well for me, but not always. I can't really say why. I had to take a fair amount of the hulls out because it was too full and unwieldy to begin with, and since then I use it intermittently. In fact, I alternate between three pillows, changing when the pain starts coming back. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than it was.
On other matters, unfortunately I was too late for the Black Friday Apple TV deal, but I will be keeping my eye on it. I may cancel my Netflix sub after I finally get round to watching The Ballad of Wallis Island, since I normally watch nothing on there from one month to the next, and if I do I'll probably get Apple.
On “Am I missing something?”
Thanks lj, will check that out today!
"
Ha - I've not seen any of the series, although I know everyone says they're great. I try to limit the platforms I subscribe to, and actually I watch very little TV compared to most people, but I imagine I'll weaken at some stage...
"
russell: Jackson Lamb is a great creation and character, and someone a joe would definitely want on their side. But the Rodmeister - what bliss he is in all his deluded glory. Have you read all of them, including the Slough House adjacent "The Secret Hours"?
"
lj: yes, I loved that!
On “An openish thread featuring the comedy stylings of Steve Witkoff”
RIP Tom Stoppard. And, relevant to current US politics and democracy worldwide:
“It’s not the voting that’s democracy,” a character says in “Rock ’n’ Roll.” “It’s the counting.”
On “Am I missing something?”
I love the Slough house books - they're also hugely scornful about BoJo. But Roddy Ho is my fave.
Our House of Commons has always been more confrontational and rougher than eg the Senate. Badenoch has been doing so badly as leader of the opposition that speculation about her imminent loss of office has been endless. She must be ecstatic to see Starmer and Reeves recently facing the same sort of thing, and about having a hugely problematic budget and its rollout to get her teeth into. I agree it was unpleasant and mocking, but not altogether out of the norm.
On “An openish thread featuring the comedy stylings of Steve Witkoff”
But the important thing is that it's another example of Trump's eagerness or willingness to placate dictators, with (very little or) no regard for the possible victims of their territorial ambitions, no matter what assurances they have previously been given by the US, and with no regard to the global political consequences.
"
Further to our discussion upthread about what Trump's possible attitude towards China and Taiwan might be, this is from today's Times. It's paywalled, so this is only a snippet.
President Trump has urged the new Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, not to provoke China over the sensitive matter of Taiwan, according to reports.
The intervention will raise concerns in Japan that its ally and military protector is ready to compromise with its increasingly powerful neighbour and leave the country isolated and vulnerable to Chinese aggression.
US and Japanese officials said Trump’s request came in a telephone call on Monday, according to The Wall Street Journal and the newspaper Asahi. Significantly, it followed an hour-long conversation between Trump and President Xi, in which the two men discussed the implementation of a trade deal and the Chinese leader called for the US to recognise his insistent claim to sovereignty over Taiwan.
"
Thanks lj, now I see it I do vaguely remember it, probably from when Trump nominated him. What an unbelievably corrupt and unsavoury bunch they are, a perfect fit for any other authoritarian regime on the take.
"
That's very interesting, wj. I did not know that, and I wish the media had covered it more. Where did you see it?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.