I never thought I'd paste a link to a facebook post, but here it is. A friend of mine shared it. The original poster is someone (I'm guessing an actual human) going by Cory Nichols. I haven't a clue who that is.
https://www.facebook.com/share/1DC6bLNdGj/
The first 20% or so:
The misinformation surrounding Charlie Kirk is astounding - and I’m not talking about average people sounding off on social media - I’m talking about the BS being spread by major news outlets.
While Kirk’s shooter was obviously overly steeped in internet whackadoo memelord culture - the “normies” don’t have a clue about how internet culture works at all.
Charlie Kirk wasn’t someone who was looking for honest debate. He was a political operative spreading hate and divisiveness. When you show his fans his racist, sexist or bigoted rhetoric - they defend it by saying “That’s not (racist, sexist, bigoted) - it’s true.” And that was his goal.
The whole “Prove Me Wrong” setup that made Kirk famous wasn’t really about proving anyone wrong. It was about creating content. Kirk mastered a specific type of performance that looked like debate but functioned more like a carefully orchestrated show designed to make his opponents look foolish and his positions seem unassailable.
What the writer gets into later tracks with some of the things nous has said about what constitutes meaningful dialogue.
More simply than that murk, though, I'd expect that The Papaya of Hate would either pardon or under-bus-chuck whoever oversaw the whole thing, and then sleep secure in the cover that the USSC has given him over presidential immunity.
At some point, with any luck at all, an administration which actually believes in the law may try to arrest and try those responsible.
In my honest but non-lawyer opinion, not a chance. US Navy action in international waters: the legal questions that may reach civilian courts will be about authorization to use force; those under the UCMJ will be about rules of engagement. Obama and Biden weren't as bad as Bush and Trump, but all four stretched the hell out of Congress's AUMFs on terrorism including rules of engagement. To be blunt about it, from 2001 the US military has been in the assassination business. My prediction is the best we might expect is that suspected drug smugglers outside of US waters will be made non-targets going forward*.
Part of me says that this is an inevitable outgrowth of drone technology. The idea has been kicking around for many years. In Real Genius (1985) the purpose of the 5 MW one-shot laser is assassination from a bomber flying tens/hundreds of miles away. The main piece of military porn in Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon (2000) is smart bombs that can be dumped from high altitude, then autonomously identify targets and strike straight down, wiping out whole divisions' worth of armor while the top brass watch from the other side of the world via a drone called Marilyn Monroe.
* I have an occasional nightmare that my kids probably and my granddaughters certainly will live to see the day when the 20 km on the Mexican side of the border will be labeled a no-go zone. Spotter drones and artillery will enforce it against climate refugees. And yes, in the nightmare Tijuana and Juárez and all the smaller cities have been reduced to rubble.
I think the contributions of lawyers can be very helpful. I wonder whether, for example, pollo de muerte knows about our move? bj is a lawyer of course, and someone we have heard from over here, but I don't recall ever getting any criticism of the current regime from that quarter.
Funnily enough, I only posted that last Klein/Shapiro piece for the preamble about the reaction to Klein's last piece! I didn't even read the Shapiro stuff - I barely knew of his existence until he was interviewed by Andrew Neil, one of our best known rightwing journalists (and ex-editor of the Sunday Times), fearsome and respected enough that BoJo refused to be interviewed by him the last time he ran, and saw Shapiro (obviously completely unaware of who Neil was and his background) responding to his proper questioning by calling him a leftwinger! Andrew Neil merely chuckled and moved on. But it was such an astonishing exhibition of ignorance and arrogance (Shapiro hadn't even bothered to look up who was interviewing him), and such an example of the tendency of these people immediately and brainlessly to label anyone who disagrees with them "leftwing", that I lost any interest in ever hearing anything else from him again. However, I suppose this phenomenon is now so widespread in the US that journalists can't just decide to boycott any politician or commentator who displays it.
I didn't read your comment about bringing in Shapiro as being about the timing, but rather the positioning. I think both reflect Klein's commitment to staying together and keeping up appearances for the sake of the kids.
i have some minor WP coding experience: i've written a couple of plugins that i use on my own site, and i've tweaked the PHP for some theming things I couldn't get from plugins.
if there's anything specific you need, i could possibly help. or possibly not - WP is large and ever-changing.
At this point, the best hope for anyone with a small boat in the southern Caribbean is probably the short attention spans of the people in this administration. They'll likely move on to the next shiny thing soon. Especially since, after they first couple of outrageous instances, it will no longer be generating the media attention they crave.
At some point, with any luck at all, an administration which actually believes in the law may try to arrest and try those responsible. Not holding my breath, especially given the statute of limitations. But as I recall (IANAL either), there is no limitation on murder, so....
I accidentally skipped over a part to go to the dialogue where Klein notes that he had taped his coversation with Shapiro before Kirk's death, so it was wrong for me to link the two.
I mentioned that I hadn't seen the video associated (if there is one) to the first Klein piece, though looking at it, it is probably too short to record. I have seen the link for the YouTube video of the Shapiro conversation (It's here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAqG00FUOK8&t=1s ) but haven't seen it, so I appreciate GftNC for putting it up here.
Some thoughts about the two. Klein says in the second that Many appreciated the [previous] piece, particularly on the right. It saw their friend and ally more as he saw himself. There were many, closer to my own politics, who were infuriated by it.
It's amazing that he doesn't really analyze what his piece did, which was basically white/sanewashing Kirk, and take the divided response as supporting it. I'd also say that the fact that he brought Shapiro on is indicative that Klein doesn't want to take a side and thinks that bringing Shapiro will let him play the centrist. He seems to edge up to understanding when he says Much of what I would describe as Kirk’s worst moments were standard-fare MAGA Republicanism. And the leader of that movement is the president of the United States. He is now in the White House, having won about half the country’s votes in the last election. But then he ends the paragraph with We are going to have to live here with one another, believing what we believe, disagreeing in the ways we disagree.
I don't understand how, if one side doesn't want us to live here, doesn't want us to participate in society, doesn't want us to exist, we can actually do this.
That Shapiro conversation really captures the reasons why I think Klein is an unproductive voice. Shapiro claims over and over throughout the conversation that "the right" saw Obama in a particular way, and Klein spends all of his time trying to empathize with how they might have felt, rather than stating that Shapiro spent his entire career crafting the very narratives by which the right learned to see Obama in that way.
It's the asymmetry of empathy that is just allowed to sit there and not be spoken of that makes me dismiss Klein. Shapiro can just passive voice away his own role as an ideological insurrectionist and sower of division and Klein cedes that ground in order to imagine himself a good and sensitive listener and participant in dialogue.
Yes, a preview button would be great if not too troublesome to set up. Otherwise, it's taking me time to get used to the new layout, but no doubt it will get easier with more use.
I once declared on the old site that it was perfect IMO. Being fickle, I say this one is perfect too. Lacking Michael's god-like powers, I am not tempted to customize the presentation for myself, and anyway I like it as is. FWIW, my laptop browser is Firefox and my Android browser is Chrome. From the start, I set Chrome to show me the laptop version of the page, as I had done on the old site. Works for me.
A preview function would be nice, but I haven't seen its absence be a problem so far.
So, that's my 2 cents worth of opinion. My gratitude for setting up the new site and for creating the archive site is boundless.
The Academica theme is oriented a little more towards discussions. It's what I used when I was fooling around at the beginning of the month and trying to recreate the old layout. I prefer the new look overall. My main complaint (with my script disabled) is that there's way too much vertical white space.
WordPress provides an "Additional CSS" textbox in one of its configuration places that's a convenient way to override the theme's styling. Of course, using it requires that you have some understanding of the theme's use of CSS classes, ids, etc. Or you can define a plug-in that has just enough PHP to load a CSS file that overrides the style. I probably haven't said this here before since the old site was Typepad, but between the core/theme/plugin model, PHP, and CSS, WordPress has managed to recreate all of the development nightmares of late-90s Microsoft Windows.
OK made the font a little bigger. I totally agree with Michael, but the whole installation seems to have as its goal, keeping you as far away from the html as possible.
If anyone has an urge, here are some wordpress themes
https://wordpress.org/themes/
Everything seems more for an e-business website than for a group of people to communicate with each other. More's the pity.
I go running some 2 times a week and have been doing this for decades. No major problems so far, but I seem to be one of the younger ones here. What's really annoying is that additionally to my myopia, which I have had since childhood, I have developed far-sightedness as well in recent years. Also, I get the feeling that I'm slowing down when it comes to planning, multitasking and such things, feeling a bit overwhelmed at times of high stress, but generally I can handle it.
I won't be of any help here. I have a piece of JavaScript that runs on every page that I download. It forces my own choice of fonts, sizes, vertical spacing, and color adjustments on the text. I've already changed the small part that is specific to Obsidian Wings. Between a good adblocker and my script, my view of the Web is much more consistent and less garish than what non-fanatic people see. Y'all may decide that Papyrus is the official Font of Moderation, but I'll still see Noto Serif.
The JavaScript thing got started one day when I encountered too many pages that made you want to find the designer so you could ask, "Did you study ugly and unreadable in school, or are you just naturally gifted?"
I'm a believer in the original spirit of HTML -- the writer gets to specify structure, but presentation decisions belong to the reader. If it's important that the text be rendered in some obscure spidery gothic font, well, that's what PDF is for.
I was just thinking of the Constitution, I'm sure if Trump falls, there will be other things, sekaijin's list is good. Tariffs are probably difficult to tackle constitutionally, especially when one side has ignored the guardrails. Of course, after Smoot-Hawley, they gave control of the tariffs to the President, so it's not clear who could be trusted with it.
It might be instructive to consider what sort of laws were put in place after Nixon. I don't think there was any talk of amending the constitution, which might be a measure of how much more Trump has broken the system.
(I'm being incredibly optimistic that Trump will overreach and him and the people around him will be called into account, though that optimism calls to facts not in evidence...)
Wading in here. LJ's comment on amendments prompted me to weigh in on something that I've been thinking of for some time now. Here it is, as scattershot as it looks:
The first thing I've thought of is that the Emoluments Clause, as it has been, is now dead in the water. It will have to become at least law, and if possible, an amendment. I would even, in a Panglossian Best of All Worlds projection, tie it in to the proposals to ban stock trading by members of Congress and extend it down from the executive to the legislative - no running businesses or stock trading, or even sitting on boards of directors of any corporation, whether you're in the WH or the House or the Senate.
Some other things: Term limits for SCOTUS. Abolish, or at least, claw back, the War Powers Act. A cap on EOs - make the prez present their case to Congress for this, that, or the other.
There's a whole bunch of other things that could be enumerated, but these are what I can come up with.
From the Ministry of Truth link: "the Secretary of Labor will personally certify the initiation of investigations for the first time in the department’s history."
This could only seem like a good idea to someone who had never worked in an organization with more than a dozen people.
Governments, at least successful ones, all run bureaucracies. Big bureaucracies. Everybody loves to trash bureaucracy. But the reason that they are pervasive is that they are the best solution mankind has so far developed to manage large groups of people. And there are narrow limits on how much you can accomplish without involving large groups of people.
To put it bluntly, if the Secretary of Labor really is personally certifying the starting of every investigation then either 1) he doesn't have time left to do his actual job, or 2) there are only going to be a handful of (no doubt extravagantly publicized) investigations. Or, considering this administration, probably both.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Precursors”
I never thought I'd paste a link to a facebook post, but here it is. A friend of mine shared it. The original poster is someone (I'm guessing an actual human) going by Cory Nichols. I haven't a clue who that is.
https://www.facebook.com/share/1DC6bLNdGj/
The first 20% or so:
What the writer gets into later tracks with some of the things nous has said about what constitutes meaningful dialogue.
On “Don’t know much about [ObWi] history…”
same katherine
On “IANAL, but…”
More simply than that murk, though, I'd expect that The Papaya of Hate would either pardon or under-bus-chuck whoever oversaw the whole thing, and then sleep secure in the cover that the USSC has given him over presidential immunity.
"
At some point, with any luck at all, an administration which actually believes in the law may try to arrest and try those responsible.
In my honest but non-lawyer opinion, not a chance. US Navy action in international waters: the legal questions that may reach civilian courts will be about authorization to use force; those under the UCMJ will be about rules of engagement. Obama and Biden weren't as bad as Bush and Trump, but all four stretched the hell out of Congress's AUMFs on terrorism including rules of engagement. To be blunt about it, from 2001 the US military has been in the assassination business. My prediction is the best we might expect is that suspected drug smugglers outside of US waters will be made non-targets going forward*.
Part of me says that this is an inevitable outgrowth of drone technology. The idea has been kicking around for many years. In Real Genius (1985) the purpose of the 5 MW one-shot laser is assassination from a bomber flying tens/hundreds of miles away. The main piece of military porn in Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon (2000) is smart bombs that can be dumped from high altitude, then autonomously identify targets and strike straight down, wiping out whole divisions' worth of armor while the top brass watch from the other side of the world via a drone called Marilyn Monroe.
* I have an occasional nightmare that my kids probably and my granddaughters certainly will live to see the day when the 20 km on the Mexican side of the border will be labeled a no-go zone. Spotter drones and artillery will enforce it against climate refugees. And yes, in the nightmare Tijuana and Juárez and all the smaller cities have been reduced to rubble.
"
I think the contributions of lawyers can be very helpful. I wonder whether, for example, pollo de muerte knows about our move? bj is a lawyer of course, and someone we have heard from over here, but I don't recall ever getting any criticism of the current regime from that quarter.
On “Precursors”
Funnily enough, I only posted that last Klein/Shapiro piece for the preamble about the reaction to Klein's last piece! I didn't even read the Shapiro stuff - I barely knew of his existence until he was interviewed by Andrew Neil, one of our best known rightwing journalists (and ex-editor of the Sunday Times), fearsome and respected enough that BoJo refused to be interviewed by him the last time he ran, and saw Shapiro (obviously completely unaware of who Neil was and his background) responding to his proper questioning by calling him a leftwinger! Andrew Neil merely chuckled and moved on. But it was such an astonishing exhibition of ignorance and arrogance (Shapiro hadn't even bothered to look up who was interviewing him), and such an example of the tendency of these people immediately and brainlessly to label anyone who disagrees with them "leftwing", that I lost any interest in ever hearing anything else from him again. However, I suppose this phenomenon is now so widespread in the US that journalists can't just decide to boycott any politician or commentator who displays it.
"
I didn't read your comment about bringing in Shapiro as being about the timing, but rather the positioning. I think both reflect Klein's commitment to staying together and keeping up appearances for the sake of the kids.
On “Time for a makeover: a webpage design thread”
i have some minor WP coding experience: i've written a couple of plugins that i use on my own site, and i've tweaked the PHP for some theming things I couldn't get from plugins.
if there's anything specific you need, i could possibly help. or possibly not - WP is large and ever-changing.
On “IANAL, but…”
At this point, the best hope for anyone with a small boat in the southern Caribbean is probably the short attention spans of the people in this administration. They'll likely move on to the next shiny thing soon. Especially since, after they first couple of outrageous instances, it will no longer be generating the media attention they crave.
At some point, with any luck at all, an administration which actually believes in the law may try to arrest and try those responsible. Not holding my breath, especially given the statute of limitations. But as I recall (IANAL either), there is no limitation on murder, so....
On “Precursors”
I accidentally skipped over a part to go to the dialogue where Klein notes that he had taped his coversation with Shapiro before Kirk's death, so it was wrong for me to link the two.
"
I mentioned that I hadn't seen the video associated (if there is one) to the first Klein piece, though looking at it, it is probably too short to record. I have seen the link for the YouTube video of the Shapiro conversation (It's here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAqG00FUOK8&t=1s ) but haven't seen it, so I appreciate GftNC for putting it up here.
Some thoughts about the two. Klein says in the second that
Many appreciated the [previous] piece, particularly on the right. It saw their friend and ally more as he saw himself. There were many, closer to my own politics, who were infuriated by it.
It's amazing that he doesn't really analyze what his piece did, which was basically white/sanewashing Kirk, and take the divided response as supporting it. I'd also say that the fact that he brought Shapiro on is indicative that Klein doesn't want to take a side and thinks that bringing Shapiro will let him play the centrist. He seems to edge up to understanding when he says Much of what I would describe as Kirk’s worst moments were standard-fare MAGA Republicanism. And the leader of that movement is the president of the United States. He is now in the White House, having won about half the country’s votes in the last election. But then he ends the paragraph with We are going to have to live here with one another, believing what we believe, disagreeing in the ways we disagree.
I don't understand how, if one side doesn't want us to live here, doesn't want us to participate in society, doesn't want us to exist, we can actually do this.
"
That Shapiro conversation really captures the reasons why I think Klein is an unproductive voice. Shapiro claims over and over throughout the conversation that "the right" saw Obama in a particular way, and Klein spends all of his time trying to empathize with how they might have felt, rather than stating that Shapiro spent his entire career crafting the very narratives by which the right learned to see Obama in that way.
It's the asymmetry of empathy that is just allowed to sit there and not be spoken of that makes me dismiss Klein. Shapiro can just passive voice away his own role as an ideological insurrectionist and sower of division and Klein cedes that ground in order to imagine himself a good and sensitive listener and participant in dialogue.
"
And since Ezra Klein talks today about the reaction to that piece, here is his latest on that:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ben-shapiro.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nk8.DjGX.vndkpD-Jytfn&smid=url-share
On “Time for a makeover: a webpage design thread”
Yes, a preview button would be great if not too troublesome to set up. Otherwise, it's taking me time to get used to the new layout, but no doubt it will get easier with more use.
"
I once declared on the old site that it was perfect IMO. Being fickle, I say this one is perfect too. Lacking Michael's god-like powers, I am not tempted to customize the presentation for myself, and anyway I like it as is. FWIW, my laptop browser is Firefox and my Android browser is Chrome. From the start, I set Chrome to show me the laptop version of the page, as I had done on the old site. Works for me.
A preview function would be nice, but I haven't seen its absence be a problem so far.
So, that's my 2 cents worth of opinion. My gratitude for setting up the new site and for creating the archive site is boundless.
--TP
"
The Academica theme is oriented a little more towards discussions. It's what I used when I was fooling around at the beginning of the month and trying to recreate the old layout. I prefer the new look overall. My main complaint (with my script disabled) is that there's way too much vertical white space.
WordPress provides an "Additional CSS" textbox in one of its configuration places that's a convenient way to override the theme's styling. Of course, using it requires that you have some understanding of the theme's use of CSS classes, ids, etc. Or you can define a plug-in that has just enough PHP to load a CSS file that overrides the style. I probably haven't said this here before since the old site was Typepad, but between the core/theme/plugin model, PHP, and CSS, WordPress has managed to recreate all of the development nightmares of late-90s Microsoft Windows.
"
Thank you. I would love to tinker with WP but have very little spare time at the moment, sorry.
On “We are all Usain Bolt now”
No particular answers, just wanted to grumble.
On “Time for a makeover: a webpage design thread”
OK made the font a little bigger. I totally agree with Michael, but the whole installation seems to have as its goal, keeping you as far away from the html as possible.
If anyone has an urge, here are some wordpress themes
https://wordpress.org/themes/
Everything seems more for an e-business website than for a group of people to communicate with each other. More's the pity.
"
The font size is a bit too small for me. Otherwise all good.
On “We are all Usain Bolt now”
I go running some 2 times a week and have been doing this for decades. No major problems so far, but I seem to be one of the younger ones here. What's really annoying is that additionally to my myopia, which I have had since childhood, I have developed far-sightedness as well in recent years. Also, I get the feeling that I'm slowing down when it comes to planning, multitasking and such things, feeling a bit overwhelmed at times of high stress, but generally I can handle it.
On “Time for a makeover: a webpage design thread”
I won't be of any help here. I have a piece of JavaScript that runs on every page that I download. It forces my own choice of fonts, sizes, vertical spacing, and color adjustments on the text. I've already changed the small part that is specific to Obsidian Wings. Between a good adblocker and my script, my view of the Web is much more consistent and less garish than what non-fanatic people see. Y'all may decide that Papyrus is the official Font of Moderation, but I'll still see Noto Serif.
The JavaScript thing got started one day when I encountered too many pages that made you want to find the designer so you could ask, "Did you study ugly and unreadable in school, or are you just naturally gifted?"
I'm a believer in the original spirit of HTML -- the writer gets to specify structure, but presentation decisions belong to the reader. If it's important that the text be rendered in some obscure spidery gothic font, well, that's what PDF is for.
On “An experimental first post”
I was just thinking of the Constitution, I'm sure if Trump falls, there will be other things, sekaijin's list is good. Tariffs are probably difficult to tackle constitutionally, especially when one side has ignored the guardrails. Of course, after Smoot-Hawley, they gave control of the tariffs to the President, so it's not clear who could be trusted with it.
It might be instructive to consider what sort of laws were put in place after Nixon. I don't think there was any talk of amending the constitution, which might be a measure of how much more Trump has broken the system.
(I'm being incredibly optimistic that Trump will overreach and him and the people around him will be called into account, though that optimism calls to facts not in evidence...)
"
Wading in here. LJ's comment on amendments prompted me to weigh in on something that I've been thinking of for some time now. Here it is, as scattershot as it looks:
The first thing I've thought of is that the Emoluments Clause, as it has been, is now dead in the water. It will have to become at least law, and if possible, an amendment. I would even, in a Panglossian Best of All Worlds projection, tie it in to the proposals to ban stock trading by members of Congress and extend it down from the executive to the legislative - no running businesses or stock trading, or even sitting on boards of directors of any corporation, whether you're in the WH or the House or the Senate.
Some other things: Term limits for SCOTUS. Abolish, or at least, claw back, the War Powers Act. A cap on EOs - make the prez present their case to Congress for this, that, or the other.
There's a whole bunch of other things that could be enumerated, but these are what I can come up with.
On “To H-1B or not to H-1B (or leopards eating multiple faces)”
From the Ministry of Truth link: "the Secretary of Labor will personally certify the initiation of investigations for the first time in the department’s history."
This could only seem like a good idea to someone who had never worked in an organization with more than a dozen people.
Governments, at least successful ones, all run bureaucracies. Big bureaucracies. Everybody loves to trash bureaucracy. But the reason that they are pervasive is that they are the best solution mankind has so far developed to manage large groups of people. And there are narrow limits on how much you can accomplish without involving large groups of people.
To put it bluntly, if the Secretary of Labor really is personally certifying the starting of every investigation then either 1) he doesn't have time left to do his actual job, or 2) there are only going to be a handful of (no doubt extravagantly publicized) investigations. Or, considering this administration, probably both.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.