It's an ominous framing, but it does highlight a sea change in the balance of power. Iran is teaching the US the lesson that we already should have learned from Ukraine. Kegbreath and Don Corruptione are busy pissing tax revenue down an obsolete hole, chasing big, flashy, ostentatious weapon systems. Ukraine and Iran are bleeding their opponents dry with small, cheap, quiet, widely distributed weapons. Europe is in the process of figuring this out. The Gulf States are as well. The Trump boys have figured out that they can snuggle up to the US military teat if they can speak just enough drone to kick start the new grift.
I don't think that the drone will replace the power of the nuke, but it will certainly add a new wrinkle in the calculus. Nukes are veto power, but drones give groups the ability to target international economies with small, but highly targeted strikes at economic pain points.
And this lesson has come at huge cost to fossil fuel infrastructure, with catastrophic effects on carbon emissions. That too will be part of the bill when it comes due.
I don't think this latest attempt will help anyone's polling numbers. We are dealing with a wholly dysfunctional media environment. The US public has been signaling its disapproval for a while now, and rather than responding to that input by moderating, the GOP leadership and their propaganda machine have been escalating. This has repeated now enough times that it's been normalized, and I don't believe the right has anything more they can get out of this pattern. The growing sense of unrest and urgency comes from the need to see this cycle broken, but I don't think the current GOP leadership could stay in power if it does break, so I expect this will continue at least until the midterms, after which who knows what happens.
That particular homophobic slur was widespread and not particularly attached to any one person, public figure or not. I remember (in the early 90's) a couple of gay classmates who were using it to express their personal loathing of each other.
Different times. Hard to imagine hearing it from any but the most aggressive and regressive right wing students today. And if they did use it, it wouldn't be in casual conversation.
My comment about Buttigieg was less about him as a potential candidate and more for him as an exemplar of how to talk about foreign policy with substance and effective critique without wandering into any rhetorical minefields. I think all the younger Dems should be looking to him and to AOC and studying their communication styles - Buttigieg for outward facing coms and AOC for keeping the center and the activist edges pushing towards a common goal of a more just and inclusive society. Anyone who could become accomplished at both of these would be a good face for the party.
I wouldn't want anyone to tangle people up in the difference between being anti-war and anti-militarist/adventurist. What I want is for the Dems to be clear that they think we should be spending less on big weapon platforms and an expansive footprint in the world and more on trying to take care of our domestic needs and keeping strong relations with our allies. That's not anti-war or weak (which do get treated as equivalent in many Americans' minds); that's strength in unity and sharing the burden of a strong peace.
The best part of a message like this is that it's already in line with the reality of our moment. Our allies are already preparing to take back some of their power because they no longer trust us. That's going to reduce our military footprint. And Ukraine should be proving to everyone that our military doctrines of the last quarter-century-plus are as useful as a cavalry charge and a massive cost sink.
Best to put a positive spin on that, and one that matches the public mood.
That Rhodes op ed about Graham Platner is a mixed bag for me of semi-cogent criticisms of US military power and the wishful, disconnected way in which most Americans envision this use of power, coupled with a list of policy and strategy recommendations that range from essential, concrete, and winnable (revoking the open-ended AUMF) to coalition rending (going after AIPAC). And packaging it all together like the piece does really gets in the way of progress because it starts fights and uncovers potential vulnerable places in the coalition before anyone has had a chance to accomplish the parts that will be broadly popular and productive. Rhodes leans towards the comprehensive when I think that being more narrowly focused on reducing the allure of militarism would shift the narrative in ways that could be built upon as more people start to buy into the idea of an America that is less hegemonic.
As for Platner himself, I like a lot of what he says and agree with a lot of what he says, but that's how I felt about Fetterman at the beginning as well, and I see in Platner a lot of the same potential for maverick disruption and martyr complex stubbornness. Yes, he's bringing in more people, and has a more dynamic message than does Mills, but part of that is just the generational difference. Mills is old and has been a Democrat forever, and her insistence that she knows how to win assumes that the old gameplan is still a winning one. Recent history argues otherwise. Mills being wrong and out of step doesn't make Platner or Rhodes correct, just more timely.
Rather than anti-war, I'd say that the Dems need to be anti-militarist, and anti-adventurist. I think Buttigieg would be the ideal sort of messenger for something like this.
It's too long to be a news article and it includes a wider array of arguments and perspectives than would normally be found in an op-ed. I'd call this a long form journalistic essay.
I'm optimistic that Magyar will be less of a Russian tool than Orban was. We'll know better once we see how they deal with the question of those Ukrainian funds, and also the question of EU membership.
CharlesWT - If it did, restrictions would also apply to labor unions and other organizations favorable to the left. You may consider that a worthwhile tradeoff.
Given how thinly spread the union funds are in a post-Janus environment, that would probably be a net positive. Most of us would rather use the money for legal support and organizing rather than as a counterweight to oligarch propaganda.
One more illustration of the tension between the groups. These private equity idiots are probably going to kill their business with this sort of bonehead move:
You can really see the tension between the groups (market-friendly liberals and market-suspicious progressives) by looking at what Newsom is trying to do with his brand and messaging. He's definitely governing as someone who is sensitive about and responsive to the concerns of the donor class, but he's trying to run a media game like a pointy-end progressive. That seems to play well on the national level, but I see a lot more suspicion at the state level.
The article's discussion of the ambivalence of the liberals and wj's comments about a lack of grassroots organizing both highlight the blindspot of the left-leaning media. The tension there is really between neoliberals and progressives, with the former's corporate donors really antipathetic towards the people that the progressives are drawing itwith their ground game. The donors don't want reform or restrictions.
You aren't getting to the heart of this field of research in an encyclopedia entry, or even in a day's worth of entries. There's a reason why most Ph.D. programs require surveys of literature and long exam lists before beginning thesis/dissertation work. And even then, there's going to be a lot of relevant work that is simply outside one's own expertise.
And communication is another field of expertise entirely for most disciplines. It's rare to find someone who is adept at both.
wj -I suppose this could just be a case of experts in a field consciously perverting the meaning of common terms in order to exclude those not participants in the field.
Most people would say that a field is a large, open piece of land. Are you trying to exclude me with this jargon of yours?
And my friend the mathematician would really like to have a word with you.
It's not uncommon for people who are not part of a particular discourse community to misinterpret messages between members within that community.
wj - here are two discussions of altruism from a biological perspective. The first is from Wikipedia (which seems preferable to me than trusting a LLM to get it right) and the second from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is preferable to either of the others, but harder going for a lay reader:
Both of these will at least review the most significant literature on the subjects and locate the disputes and discrepancies as a jumping off point for more serious reading.
But are we really talking about a "mechanism" in any meaningful way when we talk about gravity? Mechanism is such an interesting word - it's full of thingness and of a materialist paradigm. It implies a mover and a moved, when what we are actually observing is not a noun, "gravity," but a description of a relationship between two or more entities (or elements) that seems to repeat itself in a regular fashion - it's the nouning of a verb. And it is a very selective view of things that prioritizes those relationships in quite interesting ways - helped along by our linguistic habit of constructing things as subjects and objects and inferring things about them based on their status as one or the other. This gets even more fraught when we start to consider the role of pronouns and the difference it makes in our understanding of personhood when we shift between he/she/we/they on the one hand and it on the other.
I arrived at this, in typical me fashion, through a series of lateral jumps while surfing the Web and trying to dig in around the idea of physics and animism - focusing on entities (nouns) versus focusing on reciprocal relationships (verbs). Found a physicist discussing their linguistic notions thereof and citing Robin Wall Kimmerer - and probably getting problematically out of his own linguistic depth and mine in the process. But his discussion of what gets the status of an entity and what gets the status of an object - taken with lj's discussion of citizenship - got me thinking about JL Austin and performative utterances and illocutionary acts - not descriptive, or predictive as in the "laws of physics" but utterances that transmute social reality by moving a thing from one social status to another. It seems to me that the whole citizenship question is of this nature. It's attaching a speech act to a protocol in order to enact a social (and thus legal) change of status. It has material traces that can be verified (a record of citizenship) but that status only holds so long as the various parties involved agree to follow the protocol.
The part of all this that really sent a chill up my spine, though, was going to Wikipedia to refresh my understanding of JL Austin, and seeing that one of the citations there under performative acts was this conversation between Enoch Powell and Jonathan Miller on the Dick Cavett show, with Miller bringing up performative acts in conjunction with Powell's "Rivers of Blood" immigration speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEPtyb9OHP8
Fuck me if we aren't right back there again in both the US and the UK. Aside from the fashion and the unapologetically highbrow diction, the entire conversation feels contemporary and relevant.
I guess Atwood isn't personally bothered by the fact that Anthropic fed Claude most of her major works without seeking any permission or paying her anything. Wonder if she's signed up as part of the class for the class action suit?
Either way, Claude's charms seem rather thin to me. It always sounds like a student who hasn't bothered to do the readings trying to bullshit their way through a discussion.
Funny (not funny), when Mr. 33% Approval Rating refers to NATO as a "paper tiger," it reminds me most of this:
"After leaving Afghanistan, the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle, thinking that the Americans were like the Russians," bin Laden said. "The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat. And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda ... about being the world leader and the leader of the New World Order, and after a few blows they forgot about this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat."
I asked bin Laden why he would kill American soldiers whose work was to restore order and allow for the distribution of food.
"Why should we believe that was the true reason America was there?" he replied. "Everywhere else they went where Muslims lived, all they did was kill children and occupy Muslim land." (1998 interview with John Miller)
America under King TACO is more like OBL's assesment of America than it has ever been. King TACO is the purest expression of that kernel of truth.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Just call me Laocoön”
It's an ominous framing, but it does highlight a sea change in the balance of power. Iran is teaching the US the lesson that we already should have learned from Ukraine. Kegbreath and Don Corruptione are busy pissing tax revenue down an obsolete hole, chasing big, flashy, ostentatious weapon systems. Ukraine and Iran are bleeding their opponents dry with small, cheap, quiet, widely distributed weapons. Europe is in the process of figuring this out. The Gulf States are as well. The Trump boys have figured out that they can snuggle up to the US military teat if they can speak just enough drone to kick start the new grift.
I don't think that the drone will replace the power of the nuke, but it will certainly add a new wrinkle in the calculus. Nukes are veto power, but drones give groups the ability to target international economies with small, but highly targeted strikes at economic pain points.
And this lesson has come at huge cost to fossil fuel infrastructure, with catastrophic effects on carbon emissions. That too will be part of the bill when it comes due.
We are entering into interesting times.
On “Clusterfucks r us”
I don't think this latest attempt will help anyone's polling numbers. We are dealing with a wholly dysfunctional media environment. The US public has been signaling its disapproval for a while now, and rather than responding to that input by moderating, the GOP leadership and their propaganda machine have been escalating. This has repeated now enough times that it's been normalized, and I don't believe the right has anything more they can get out of this pattern. The growing sense of unrest and urgency comes from the need to see this cycle broken, but I don't think the current GOP leadership could stay in power if it does break, so I expect this will continue at least until the midterms, after which who knows what happens.
On “Your choice: an open thread”
That particular homophobic slur was widespread and not particularly attached to any one person, public figure or not. I remember (in the early 90's) a couple of gay classmates who were using it to express their personal loathing of each other.
Different times. Hard to imagine hearing it from any but the most aggressive and regressive right wing students today. And if they did use it, it wouldn't be in casual conversation.
"
My comment about Buttigieg was less about him as a potential candidate and more for him as an exemplar of how to talk about foreign policy with substance and effective critique without wandering into any rhetorical minefields. I think all the younger Dems should be looking to him and to AOC and studying their communication styles - Buttigieg for outward facing coms and AOC for keeping the center and the activist edges pushing towards a common goal of a more just and inclusive society. Anyone who could become accomplished at both of these would be a good face for the party.
"
I wouldn't want anyone to tangle people up in the difference between being anti-war and anti-militarist/adventurist. What I want is for the Dems to be clear that they think we should be spending less on big weapon platforms and an expansive footprint in the world and more on trying to take care of our domestic needs and keeping strong relations with our allies. That's not anti-war or weak (which do get treated as equivalent in many Americans' minds); that's strength in unity and sharing the burden of a strong peace.
The best part of a message like this is that it's already in line with the reality of our moment. Our allies are already preparing to take back some of their power because they no longer trust us. That's going to reduce our military footprint. And Ukraine should be proving to everyone that our military doctrines of the last quarter-century-plus are as useful as a cavalry charge and a massive cost sink.
Best to put a positive spin on that, and one that matches the public mood.
"
That Rhodes op ed about Graham Platner is a mixed bag for me of semi-cogent criticisms of US military power and the wishful, disconnected way in which most Americans envision this use of power, coupled with a list of policy and strategy recommendations that range from essential, concrete, and winnable (revoking the open-ended AUMF) to coalition rending (going after AIPAC). And packaging it all together like the piece does really gets in the way of progress because it starts fights and uncovers potential vulnerable places in the coalition before anyone has had a chance to accomplish the parts that will be broadly popular and productive. Rhodes leans towards the comprehensive when I think that being more narrowly focused on reducing the allure of militarism would shift the narrative in ways that could be built upon as more people start to buy into the idea of an America that is less hegemonic.
As for Platner himself, I like a lot of what he says and agree with a lot of what he says, but that's how I felt about Fetterman at the beginning as well, and I see in Platner a lot of the same potential for maverick disruption and martyr complex stubbornness. Yes, he's bringing in more people, and has a more dynamic message than does Mills, but part of that is just the generational difference. Mills is old and has been a Democrat forever, and her insistence that she knows how to win assumes that the old gameplan is still a winning one. Recent history argues otherwise. Mills being wrong and out of step doesn't make Platner or Rhodes correct, just more timely.
Rather than anti-war, I'd say that the Dems need to be anti-militarist, and anti-adventurist. I think Buttigieg would be the ideal sort of messenger for something like this.
On “If nothing, it will boost tourism”
[RowanAtkinson]...Myprick...has anyone seen Myprick...?[/RowanAtkinson]
On “Imagining a mad king”
It's too long to be a news article and it includes a wider array of arguments and perspectives than would normally be found in an op-ed. I'd call this a long form journalistic essay.
On “Your choice: an open thread”
nooneithinkisinmytree - Maybe headed for Russia
Well, I'm sure there is a window of opportunity there.
Look for him soon on the pavement below it.
On “Maybe time for an Open Thread”
This is what you get when your government is made up entirely of influencers.
War is the perpetuation of viewer clicks by other means.
On “What exactly did William Wallace say?”
I'm optimistic that Magyar will be less of a Russian tool than Orban was. We'll know better once we see how they deal with the question of those Ukrainian funds, and also the question of EU membership.
Here's hoping.
On “Maybe time for an Open Thread”
CharlesWT - Grok seems less concerned about copyright infringements than other AIs.
Since every last one of these LLMs is built upon stolen IP we can as well say that Grok's designers are just more brazen about it than the rest.
"
CharlesWT - If it did, restrictions would also apply to labor unions and other organizations favorable to the left. You may consider that a worthwhile tradeoff.
Given how thinly spread the union funds are in a post-Janus environment, that would probably be a net positive. Most of us would rather use the money for legal support and organizing rather than as a counterweight to oligarch propaganda.
"
One more illustration of the tension between the groups. These private equity idiots are probably going to kill their business with this sort of bonehead move:
https://sf.gazetteer.co/philz-ceo-orders-removal-of-flags-from-stores-including-pride-flags-to-create-an-inclusive-experience
"
You can really see the tension between the groups (market-friendly liberals and market-suspicious progressives) by looking at what Newsom is trying to do with his brand and messaging. He's definitely governing as someone who is sensitive about and responsive to the concerns of the donor class, but he's trying to run a media game like a pointy-end progressive. That seems to play well on the national level, but I see a lot more suspicion at the state level.
"
The article's discussion of the ambivalence of the liberals and wj's comments about a lack of grassroots organizing both highlight the blindspot of the left-leaning media. The tension there is really between neoliberals and progressives, with the former's corporate donors really antipathetic towards the people that the progressives are drawing itwith their ground game. The donors don't want reform or restrictions.
"
Clear. Precise. Simple. Brief.
Pick two.
You aren't getting to the heart of this field of research in an encyclopedia entry, or even in a day's worth of entries. There's a reason why most Ph.D. programs require surveys of literature and long exam lists before beginning thesis/dissertation work. And even then, there's going to be a lot of relevant work that is simply outside one's own expertise.
And communication is another field of expertise entirely for most disciplines. It's rare to find someone who is adept at both.
"
wj - I suppose this could just be a case of experts in a field consciously perverting the meaning of common terms in order to exclude those not participants in the field.
Most people would say that a field is a large, open piece of land. Are you trying to exclude me with this jargon of yours?
And my friend the mathematician would really like to have a word with you.
It's not uncommon for people who are not part of a particular discourse community to misinterpret messages between members within that community.
"
wj - here are two discussions of altruism from a biological perspective. The first is from Wikipedia (which seems preferable to me than trusting a LLM to get it right) and the second from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is preferable to either of the others, but harder going for a lay reader:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_(biology)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/
Both of these will at least review the most significant literature on the subjects and locate the disputes and discrepancies as a jumping off point for more serious reading.
"
Sorry you are having yet another heavy day, Michael.
On “Materialism, rights and Japan”
Well, considering who has shaped Grok's output...
It does pair well with the whole "white genocide" incident that Grok went through in 2025.
"
But are we really talking about a "mechanism" in any meaningful way when we talk about gravity? Mechanism is such an interesting word - it's full of thingness and of a materialist paradigm. It implies a mover and a moved, when what we are actually observing is not a noun, "gravity," but a description of a relationship between two or more entities (or elements) that seems to repeat itself in a regular fashion - it's the nouning of a verb. And it is a very selective view of things that prioritizes those relationships in quite interesting ways - helped along by our linguistic habit of constructing things as subjects and objects and inferring things about them based on their status as one or the other. This gets even more fraught when we start to consider the role of pronouns and the difference it makes in our understanding of personhood when we shift between he/she/we/they on the one hand and it on the other.
I arrived at this, in typical me fashion, through a series of lateral jumps while surfing the Web and trying to dig in around the idea of physics and animism - focusing on entities (nouns) versus focusing on reciprocal relationships (verbs). Found a physicist discussing their linguistic notions thereof and citing Robin Wall Kimmerer - and probably getting problematically out of his own linguistic depth and mine in the process. But his discussion of what gets the status of an entity and what gets the status of an object - taken with lj's discussion of citizenship - got me thinking about JL Austin and performative utterances and illocutionary acts - not descriptive, or predictive as in the "laws of physics" but utterances that transmute social reality by moving a thing from one social status to another. It seems to me that the whole citizenship question is of this nature. It's attaching a speech act to a protocol in order to enact a social (and thus legal) change of status. It has material traces that can be verified (a record of citizenship) but that status only holds so long as the various parties involved agree to follow the protocol.
The part of all this that really sent a chill up my spine, though, was going to Wikipedia to refresh my understanding of JL Austin, and seeing that one of the citations there under performative acts was this conversation between Enoch Powell and Jonathan Miller on the Dick Cavett show, with Miller bringing up performative acts in conjunction with Powell's "Rivers of Blood" immigration speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEPtyb9OHP8
Fuck me if we aren't right back there again in both the US and the UK. Aside from the fashion and the unapologetically highbrow diction, the entire conversation feels contemporary and relevant.
Damn their eyes, these nationalist bigots.
On “Maybe time for an Open Thread”
I guess Atwood isn't personally bothered by the fact that Anthropic fed Claude most of her major works without seeking any permission or paying her anything. Wonder if she's signed up as part of the class for the class action suit?
Either way, Claude's charms seem rather thin to me. It always sounds like a student who hasn't bothered to do the readings trying to bullshit their way through a discussion.
No thanks.
"
Article is here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/world/europe/trump-nato-iran.html
Note at the bottom does list the headline above for the print version.
"
Funny (not funny), when Mr. 33% Approval Rating refers to NATO as a "paper tiger," it reminds me most of this:
America under King TACO is more like OBL's assesment of America than it has ever been. King TACO is the purest expression of that kernel of truth.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.