Aha, out of the gulag! It only took about 40 minutes for both to come out.
I know almost nobody who disagrees with me about Trump, so that (luckily) doesn't arise. The exception is someone fiercely clever who has been my close friend since we were 11, and she is a tribal Republican who actually voted for Trump 3 times. I don't talk to her about it, because a) I can't bear to hear what she might say, b) I love her, and also I am worried about her cognitive decline (starting long before Trump). Now let's see if it's the gulag again...
lj, two of my comments on wonkie's post (the second one sentence saying the first is awaiting moderation) have gone into moderation! I thought this is the kind of thing you should know about!
wonkie, this is a subject which I spend a lot of time thinking about. For me, it matters most with personal friends (because I don't really have a social media presence), and luckily most of mine are roughly on the same page as me, at least about purely political issues. One exception is the Israel/Gaza situation, where someone I have known since she was a child, and whose family was and is deeply entwined with mine, is still (or was still a month or so ago) reflexively defending Israel's actions in Gaza, although not in the West Bank. She was deeply upset by my attitude and my arguments, and although I kept (civilly) making them for a while (because she is a) bright, b) a liberal/lefty, and c) generally a really good person), I stopped because I do not want her to disappear from my life or that of my family. So we have a truce, and don't discuss it. The only other friends I know who were supporting Israel wholeheartedly when we last discussed it several months ago, are non-Jewish (unlike the other friend) and rather rightwing. It will be interesting next time we talk about it to see if their attitude has changed at all in the meanwhile. The only thing which gave them pause in our last discussion was my point that Israel's actions in Gaza have done more damage to Israel than anything I have ever seen in my lifetime.
But on the subject of what kind of effect this sort of extreme argument is having on the participants, I am really worried. I have seen more and more people (including people with whom I agree) becoming more extreme and unempathetic, insulting, even cruel, in their arguments, the longer these kind of things go on. It seems to me a sort of radicalisation: not entirely surprising I suppose in people who have been defined by others in hateful ways, threatened over long periods with e.g physical violence, rape, murder etc because of their opinions, or have seen people they respect so threatened. As well as certain public figures, I have seen this "radicalisation" happen even with a few people to whom I am very close. Personally, I spend a lot of time and effort trying to make sure this doesn't happen to me - I don't want my opinion to change for any reason other than exposure to new information, or other rational (as opposed to emotional) evolution. I hope I have been reasonably successful, but it is a worry.
And, of course, on a societal level, it is a disaster. We are rapidly becoming a world in which it is impossible to have rational discussions and disagreements on many important subjects. I feel very gloomy about it.
I generally do not engage in discussions about politics with Trump supporters. I'm fine with talking with them about pretty much anything else.
There are a couple of people - long time friends - that I have had short political conversations with. In those cases, I haven't really brought up facts etc. I just say "I have no use for Trump, he's an asshole and a crook." Or something to that effect. And the conversation moves on to other topics. They're not really that curious about, or interested in, why I think that, it just places me in one bucket or other in their mind and the topic is done.
Once in a while I'll engage with someone online, usually FB, but that also doesn't get to the point of something like conversation. It's more you stated your position, I've stated mine, and move on.
The thing is, I don't think that many Trump supporters are that invested in arguments from fact or reason. It seems more vibe-y. Trying to persuade someone away from that position is less like engaging in thoughtful discussion of ideas, and more like trying to tell someone they shouldn't support their favorite sports team.
People have to experience the real human cost of this stuff before they'll change their mind. Like, someone they care about getting grabbed by ICE, or getting kicked off of Medicaid. Even then, they may find it difficult to impossible to give up their "team" identity. They'll just blame fate, or the "deep state", or similar.
I really don't know what the way out of all of this is. To some degree, all of the toxic stuff that Trump et al traffic in is stuff that's been part of the American consciousness since day 1. And people love being told they are special, they are the best, anyone who doesn't see that is just picking on them.
I don't think Trump et al have the resources or the wit to make the big agenda - Project 2025 and stuff like it - happen in full. There are too many different agendas going on with these guys, the country is just physically too large and various to lock down, and too many of the folks in the administration are just plain stupid.
But they're gonna break a lot of stuff before they are through, and I have no idea what things will look like when they're done.
So I've kind of arrived at the point of not trying to change anybody's mind about anything, I'm just waiting for this particular fever to run its course and hoping that something worthwhile is left when it's over.
Thank you for your thoughtful in depth response. I think my neighbor was really shocked by an attack on a Christian church--that definitely rattled her world view. I don't know if there's any change in her attitude toward Kirk because she has gone silent.
I have another rightwing friend that I met through the community of dog rescuers. Her instinct is to be a racist. She calls herself a conservative and is very responsive to Republican messages that trigger her tendency to "Other" everyone else. The one exception is that she dislikes intensely religious conservatives. She is a racist, not of the N-word type, but of the type that very readily believes any negative generality applied to all immigrants who aren't white.
The Republican party has built a community around "othering". My theory is that they are appealing to an instinctive behavior hardwired into humans from clear back in caveman days when "our" little band of cave people were in competition for territory and resources with "yours", a competition that could be put aside sometimes for interbreeding or cooperation on a hunt, but still an embedded sense that people like me are a group and people unlike me are inherently scary.
I've talked my dog rescue friend down from anti-immigrant hysteria several times but it takes very little for her to revert. She consumes Republican hate propaganda all the time.
I don't do an especially good job of handling these sorts of disputes, but it's not because of anything I have done. The people we engage with have been primed to see our rejections of their positions as a rejection of them, and our criticisms of their influencers as criticisms of them. These conversations are not meant to be exchanges, they are rituals, and when we are on the other side of them we are not people to be listened to and understood, we are opportunities for them to test their courage in service to their community. If we agree, then we can be welcomed into the community. If we disagree, then they have been courageous because they stood up for their community in the face of our scorn and hostility to them.
This is why appeals to reason fall flat. The MAGA movement is not a debate. It is a worldview. And worldviews do not yield to evidence; they yield to rupture.
If rupture is rare, then resilience must be cultivated. Not through fact-checking alone, but through narrative reformation—stories that offer coherence without conspiracy, dignity without domination, and agency without scapegoating.
We have glimpses of what this looks like. When labor movements organize around dignity on the job rather than resentment of the outsider, they create belonging through solidarity. When local communities reclaim public institutions—schools, libraries, clinics—they generate meaning that resists privatization and fear. These efforts are fragile, but they remind us that counter-narratives are possible when they are lived as well as told.
That means confronting the architecture of belief not with contempt, but with clarity. It means recognizing that for many, MAGA is not a political position—it’s a survival strategy. And if we want to dislodge it, we must offer something more resilient than resentment. We must offer belonging.
While I was looking for productive readings to help us find a way out of this I found a Carnegie Endowment policy guide for countering disinformation that I think offers some helpful findings about which sorts of interventions are most effective. I was especially pleased to find Table 1, the Overview of Case Studies because it identifies a few things that we can do which have been shown to be effective. Chief among those are supporting more local, grass-roots reporting, and educating people to give them better media literacy. The first of those points to what Greenberg was saying about offering other ways of belonging - getting outside of the big, national narratives and giving people information that they can connect with personally because they know the people who are providing the information. We have to re-localize our communities. Influencers provide the illusion of this connection through para-social relations. If we can do better with real connections, then we can reverse this.
Easier said than done. To quote one of the people interviewed in Sherry Turkles Life On Screen: "RL is not my best window."
The second - better media literacy - is basically what I teach at university, and yes, it is difficult. It takes time, and effort, and practice, and it doesn't really work unless the person doing it is willing to put their worldview and their identity in the balance as part of the effort. In my experience about one in five of my students are willing to risk this, and fewer than half of these actually carry through and start to actually break through the media narratives to find actual, actionable information that could make a difference.
And as small as that success rate might be, its existence is the reason why the present administration is working so hard to turn America agains their educators. They know that everything they are doing right now is fraying the crap out of those worldviews they have so carefully built up over 40 years, and they cannot afford to allow any communities of resistance to give people a more attractive counter-narrative and sense of identity.
I remain a registered Democrat. However, here in Colorado we recently passed the point where more than half of all registered voters are registered as "unaffiliated". My first reaction when I read the story in the local paper was to wonder if people were hiding from the nastiness.
Here's a list of eight ways to do redirects with detailed instructions for DNS-level redirects at the end of the list. To my untrained eye, none of them looks very applicable to our circumstances.
I know it can be confusing, but in this case 'post' is main article/item and 'comment' is something that follows from it. There is NO problem with people writing a long comment with links, it's just very difficult to post an resourced article on breaking news and people shouldn't expect that. For example, trying to write a post about Charlie Kirk, you had a situation where mainstream outlets were posting mistaken information and it is difficult to impossible to link to social media information. I have really felt that lack when looking at the archive and seeing posts that carefully laid out a position that was referenced fully, allowing you to check and understand. So the posts here are probably going to be, at least from me, more conversation starters, especially for things that are in the news.
I’m thinking that posts can no longer be the sort of writing where a position can be set out and supported by links, especially if it is a topic in the news.
Does this only apply to frontpager posts, or to all our comments from the peanut gallery? I'm asking because I never understand what exactly is a "post".
lj, I have an NYT subscription (gave up WaPo because of Bezos's craven behaviour), and would be happy to post gift links. I am allowed 10 gift articles per month, and would probably only have to save say 4 for my own purposes, so doing one a week for ObWi shouldn't be a problem. Just let me know how to do it, and also what kind of thing you would like linked, and it shall be done. Also, I have an Atlantic sub, but can't remember what the gifting rules are (I rarely read it), so let me know if there's anyone from there you'd like on ObWi and I'll look into it.
Pressure was put on TSMC to hire US workers, even though there were very few US workers qualified to build and operate the plants. Government industrial policies often result in paying more for less.
TSMC also is doing a huge fab in Phoenix which is apparently having lots of problems. I'm really interested in that one because TSMC is also coming to the prefecture I'm living in. Here is a youtube video about the problems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD1jyk3LhA8
In late 2024, a $40 billion chip factory rises from Arizona's desert, aiming to recreate the magic of TSMC's worldleading Taiwan fabs. The stakes are high. This is where chips for iPhones and AI supercomputers will be born. Yet, early on, engineers faced a baffling dilemma. The facility had to import ultra pure sulfuric acid from 6,500 m away in Taiwan. American suppliers couldn't meet TSMC's standards, and local chemicals cost five times more. Even Intel, the veteran US chipmaker next door, jumped in to buy from these overseas shipments, a fact TSMC's CEO relayed with incredulity. How did you live before? It was very hard before, but now you are here, he recalls Intel saying.
The level of technology for the Hyundai plant wasn't at the level of a chip fab, but I imagine there were a ton of things that required oversight from headquarters. So I just have to laugh with the interviews of MAGAts who say 'just hire American, we have lots of people who could do that.'
Charles, a long term redirect isn't possible, once the servers shut down, it's gone. A short term might be possible, but I think the url is a typepad domain and I can't log in to the typepad interface, (and have no way to contact type pad) I can't imagine how I would do it.
Don't overlook the fact that Kirk supped deep from the financial side of the wingnut rage machine. He was very well connected with big time funding doners. The grift...it's always there. Othewise Kirk would just be another wingnut hater with an insignificant following....a more polished turd, if you will.
Meanwhile, since the UC itself is too busy running scared as the Yam of Grievance and his cabal seek to destroy higher education, looks like all of us involved in the actual educational mandate of the schools will have to fight this bullshit ourselves.
Especially galling when so many of us have so few protections, employment or physical, in the first place. We are exposed while UCOP and the Regents dither and appease.
I'll admit, I'm a bit nervous going back to teaching in a couple weeks while the right is this riled up and screaming bloody murder against universities as if we had a god damned thing to do with the escalating political violence. Campuses are not safe. And now the Vice President of the United States is personally advocating for a doxxing campaign against us.
And my doctor wonders why my blood pressure has gone up since last exam.
Just looked again at the mass "notification" email - some of course are anonymous, and it may just be one email, but I wonder if Donald was notified? I know some of us are very much hoping he will eventually come back!
Indeed, I will be unsurprised if NO Korean companies are willing to consider new facilities in the US.
One big question is the massive integrated circuit fab Samsung is building in Texas. It's supposed to cost $17B to build fully, and some small parts are preparing to open soon. The motivation behind it is, of course, both Biden and Trump's insistence that Samsung and TSMC bring their bleeding-edge technology to the US. The fab complex is so large that some of Samsung's primary Korean suppliers have also started building large operations nearby.
I hope they scrap the plant. I wonder what the local people in the area think about this. It doesn't seem like there is any limit to how many convoluted thought pretzels Trump supporters can conjure up to rationalize their continued support, but maybe being screwed out of 8000 good paying jobs in a depressed area will mean something to them? How do the voters feel about the R pol responsible for this?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Guestpost from Wonkie”
Aha, out of the gulag! It only took about 40 minutes for both to come out.
I know almost nobody who disagrees with me about Trump, so that (luckily) doesn't arise. The exception is someone fiercely clever who has been my close friend since we were 11, and she is a tribal Republican who actually voted for Trump 3 times. I don't talk to her about it, because a) I can't bear to hear what she might say, b) I love her, and also I am worried about her cognitive decline (starting long before Trump). Now let's see if it's the gulag again...
On “Excelsior 2.0: more details about the site and requests”
lj, two of my comments on wonkie's post (the second one sentence saying the first is awaiting moderation) have gone into moderation! I thought this is the kind of thing you should know about!
On “Guestpost from Wonkie”
And again, for no reason I can make out, my comment is "awaiting moderation".
"
wonkie, this is a subject which I spend a lot of time thinking about. For me, it matters most with personal friends (because I don't really have a social media presence), and luckily most of mine are roughly on the same page as me, at least about purely political issues. One exception is the Israel/Gaza situation, where someone I have known since she was a child, and whose family was and is deeply entwined with mine, is still (or was still a month or so ago) reflexively defending Israel's actions in Gaza, although not in the West Bank. She was deeply upset by my attitude and my arguments, and although I kept (civilly) making them for a while (because she is a) bright, b) a liberal/lefty, and c) generally a really good person), I stopped because I do not want her to disappear from my life or that of my family. So we have a truce, and don't discuss it. The only other friends I know who were supporting Israel wholeheartedly when we last discussed it several months ago, are non-Jewish (unlike the other friend) and rather rightwing. It will be interesting next time we talk about it to see if their attitude has changed at all in the meanwhile. The only thing which gave them pause in our last discussion was my point that Israel's actions in Gaza have done more damage to Israel than anything I have ever seen in my lifetime.
But on the subject of what kind of effect this sort of extreme argument is having on the participants, I am really worried. I have seen more and more people (including people with whom I agree) becoming more extreme and unempathetic, insulting, even cruel, in their arguments, the longer these kind of things go on. It seems to me a sort of radicalisation: not entirely surprising I suppose in people who have been defined by others in hateful ways, threatened over long periods with e.g physical violence, rape, murder etc because of their opinions, or have seen people they respect so threatened. As well as certain public figures, I have seen this "radicalisation" happen even with a few people to whom I am very close. Personally, I spend a lot of time and effort trying to make sure this doesn't happen to me - I don't want my opinion to change for any reason other than exposure to new information, or other rational (as opposed to emotional) evolution. I hope I have been reasonably successful, but it is a worry.
And, of course, on a societal level, it is a disaster. We are rapidly becoming a world in which it is impossible to have rational discussions and disagreements on many important subjects. I feel very gloomy about it.
"
I generally do not engage in discussions about politics with Trump supporters. I'm fine with talking with them about pretty much anything else.
There are a couple of people - long time friends - that I have had short political conversations with. In those cases, I haven't really brought up facts etc. I just say "I have no use for Trump, he's an asshole and a crook." Or something to that effect. And the conversation moves on to other topics. They're not really that curious about, or interested in, why I think that, it just places me in one bucket or other in their mind and the topic is done.
Once in a while I'll engage with someone online, usually FB, but that also doesn't get to the point of something like conversation. It's more you stated your position, I've stated mine, and move on.
The thing is, I don't think that many Trump supporters are that invested in arguments from fact or reason. It seems more vibe-y. Trying to persuade someone away from that position is less like engaging in thoughtful discussion of ideas, and more like trying to tell someone they shouldn't support their favorite sports team.
People have to experience the real human cost of this stuff before they'll change their mind. Like, someone they care about getting grabbed by ICE, or getting kicked off of Medicaid. Even then, they may find it difficult to impossible to give up their "team" identity. They'll just blame fate, or the "deep state", or similar.
I really don't know what the way out of all of this is. To some degree, all of the toxic stuff that Trump et al traffic in is stuff that's been part of the American consciousness since day 1. And people love being told they are special, they are the best, anyone who doesn't see that is just picking on them.
I don't think Trump et al have the resources or the wit to make the big agenda - Project 2025 and stuff like it - happen in full. There are too many different agendas going on with these guys, the country is just physically too large and various to lock down, and too many of the folks in the administration are just plain stupid.
But they're gonna break a lot of stuff before they are through, and I have no idea what things will look like when they're done.
So I've kind of arrived at the point of not trying to change anybody's mind about anything, I'm just waiting for this particular fever to run its course and hoping that something worthwhile is left when it's over.
"
Thank you for your thoughtful in depth response. I think my neighbor was really shocked by an attack on a Christian church--that definitely rattled her world view. I don't know if there's any change in her attitude toward Kirk because she has gone silent.
I have another rightwing friend that I met through the community of dog rescuers. Her instinct is to be a racist. She calls herself a conservative and is very responsive to Republican messages that trigger her tendency to "Other" everyone else. The one exception is that she dislikes intensely religious conservatives. She is a racist, not of the N-word type, but of the type that very readily believes any negative generality applied to all immigrants who aren't white.
The Republican party has built a community around "othering". My theory is that they are appealing to an instinctive behavior hardwired into humans from clear back in caveman days when "our" little band of cave people were in competition for territory and resources with "yours", a competition that could be put aside sometimes for interbreeding or cooperation on a hunt, but still an embedded sense that people like me are a group and people unlike me are inherently scary.
I've talked my dog rescue friend down from anti-immigrant hysteria several times but it takes very little for her to revert. She consumes Republican hate propaganda all the time.
"
I don't do an especially good job of handling these sorts of disputes, but it's not because of anything I have done. The people we engage with have been primed to see our rejections of their positions as a rejection of them, and our criticisms of their influencers as criticisms of them. These conversations are not meant to be exchanges, they are rituals, and when we are on the other side of them we are not people to be listened to and understood, we are opportunities for them to test their courage in service to their community. If we agree, then we can be welcomed into the community. If we disagree, then they have been courageous because they stood up for their community in the face of our scorn and hostility to them.
https://jamesbgreenberg.substack.com/p/beyond-facts-the-identity-politics
This is why appeals to reason fall flat. The MAGA movement is not a debate. It is a worldview. And worldviews do not yield to evidence; they yield to rupture.
If rupture is rare, then resilience must be cultivated. Not through fact-checking alone, but through narrative reformation—stories that offer coherence without conspiracy, dignity without domination, and agency without scapegoating.
We have glimpses of what this looks like. When labor movements organize around dignity on the job rather than resentment of the outsider, they create belonging through solidarity. When local communities reclaim public institutions—schools, libraries, clinics—they generate meaning that resists privatization and fear. These efforts are fragile, but they remind us that counter-narratives are possible when they are lived as well as told.
That means confronting the architecture of belief not with contempt, but with clarity. It means recognizing that for many, MAGA is not a political position—it’s a survival strategy. And if we want to dislodge it, we must offer something more resilient than resentment. We must offer belonging.
While I was looking for productive readings to help us find a way out of this I found a Carnegie Endowment policy guide for countering disinformation that I think offers some helpful findings about which sorts of interventions are most effective. I was especially pleased to find Table 1, the Overview of Case Studies because it identifies a few things that we can do which have been shown to be effective. Chief among those are supporting more local, grass-roots reporting, and educating people to give them better media literacy. The first of those points to what Greenberg was saying about offering other ways of belonging - getting outside of the big, national narratives and giving people information that they can connect with personally because they know the people who are providing the information. We have to re-localize our communities. Influencers provide the illusion of this connection through para-social relations. If we can do better with real connections, then we can reverse this.
Easier said than done. To quote one of the people interviewed in Sherry Turkles Life On Screen: "RL is not my best window."
The second - better media literacy - is basically what I teach at university, and yes, it is difficult. It takes time, and effort, and practice, and it doesn't really work unless the person doing it is willing to put their worldview and their identity in the balance as part of the effort. In my experience about one in five of my students are willing to risk this, and fewer than half of these actually carry through and start to actually break through the media narratives to find actual, actionable information that could make a difference.
And as small as that success rate might be, its existence is the reason why the present administration is working so hard to turn America agains their educators. They know that everything they are doing right now is fraying the crap out of those worldviews they have so carefully built up over 40 years, and they cannot afford to allow any communities of resistance to give people a more attractive counter-narrative and sense of identity.
"
I remain a registered Democrat. However, here in Colorado we recently passed the point where more than half of all registered voters are registered as "unaffiliated". My first reaction when I read the story in the local paper was to wonder if people were hiding from the nastiness.
On “Kuzushi and Charlie Kirk”
Read page 8 for a load of self-incrimination.
Read the Charges Against Tyler Robinson
On “Excelsior!”
Here's a list of eight ways to do redirects with detailed instructions for DNS-level redirects at the end of the list. To my untrained eye, none of them looks very applicable to our circumstances.
URL Redirection Methods and Techniques
On “Excelsior 2.0: more details about the site and requests”
GftNC, I'll email you with some details.
I know it can be confusing, but in this case 'post' is main article/item and 'comment' is something that follows from it. There is NO problem with people writing a long comment with links, it's just very difficult to post an resourced article on breaking news and people shouldn't expect that. For example, trying to write a post about Charlie Kirk, you had a situation where mainstream outlets were posting mistaken information and it is difficult to impossible to link to social media information. I have really felt that lack when looking at the archive and seeing posts that carefully laid out a position that was referenced fully, allowing you to check and understand. So the posts here are probably going to be, at least from me, more conversation starters, especially for things that are in the news.
"
I’m thinking that posts can no longer be the sort of writing where a position can be set out and supported by links, especially if it is a topic in the news.
Does this only apply to frontpager posts, or to all our comments from the peanut gallery? I'm asking because I never understand what exactly is a "post".
"
lj, I have an NYT subscription (gave up WaPo because of Bezos's craven behaviour), and would be happy to post gift links. I am allowed 10 gift articles per month, and would probably only have to save say 4 for my own purposes, so doing one a week for ObWi shouldn't be a problem. Just let me know how to do it, and also what kind of thing you would like linked, and it shall be done. Also, I have an Atlantic sub, but can't remember what the gifting rules are (I rarely read it), so let me know if there's anyone from there you'd like on ObWi and I'll look into it.
On “Excelsior!”
Thanks, lj.
On “Hyudai, meet ICE”
Pressure was put on TSMC to hire US workers, even though there were very few US workers qualified to build and operate the plants. Government industrial policies often result in paying more for less.
"
TSMC also is doing a huge fab in Phoenix which is apparently having lots of problems. I'm really interested in that one because TSMC is also coming to the prefecture I'm living in. Here is a youtube video about the problems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD1jyk3LhA8
In late 2024, a $40 billion chip factory rises from Arizona's desert, aiming to recreate the magic of TSMC's worldleading Taiwan fabs. The stakes are high. This is where chips for iPhones and AI supercomputers will be born. Yet, early on, engineers faced a baffling dilemma. The facility had to import ultra pure sulfuric acid from 6,500 m away in Taiwan. American suppliers couldn't meet TSMC's standards, and local chemicals cost five times more. Even Intel, the veteran US chipmaker next door, jumped in to buy from these overseas shipments, a fact TSMC's CEO relayed with incredulity. How did you live before? It was very hard before, but now you are here, he recalls Intel saying.
The level of technology for the Hyundai plant wasn't at the level of a chip fab, but I imagine there were a ton of things that required oversight from headquarters. So I just have to laugh with the interviews of MAGAts who say 'just hire American, we have lots of people who could do that.'
On “Excelsior!”
GftNC, yes he was.
Charles, a long term redirect isn't possible, once the servers shut down, it's gone. A short term might be possible, but I think the url is a typepad domain and I can't log in to the typepad interface, (and have no way to contact type pad) I can't imagine how I would do it.
On “Kuzushi and Charlie Kirk”
Don't overlook the fact that Kirk supped deep from the financial side of the wingnut rage machine. He was very well connected with big time funding doners. The grift...it's always there. Othewise Kirk would just be another wingnut hater with an insignificant following....a more polished turd, if you will.
"
Meanwhile, since the UC itself is too busy running scared as the Yam of Grievance and his cabal seek to destroy higher education, looks like all of us involved in the actual educational mandate of the schools will have to fight this bullshit ourselves.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-09-16/university-of-california-faculty-sue-trump-over-ucla-fine-research-cuts
Especially galling when so many of us have so few protections, employment or physical, in the first place. We are exposed while UCOP and the Regents dither and appease.
I'll admit, I'm a bit nervous going back to teaching in a couple weeks while the right is this riled up and screaming bloody murder against universities as if we had a god damned thing to do with the escalating political violence. Campuses are not safe. And now the Vice President of the United States is personally advocating for a doxxing campaign against us.
And my doctor wonders why my blood pressure has gone up since last exam.
Look.
The fuck.
Around.
On “Excelsior!”
Can the old URL be redirected?
"
Just looked again at the mass "notification" email - some of course are anonymous, and it may just be one email, but I wonder if Donald was notified? I know some of us are very much hoping he will eventually come back!
"
Thanks for the email, lj, and for all who made the transition and archiving possible! Nice to see everyone.
On “Hyudai, meet ICE”
I wonder what the local people in the area think about this.
"It's Joe Biden's fault!"
"
Indeed, I will be unsurprised if NO Korean companies are willing to consider new facilities in the US.
One big question is the massive integrated circuit fab Samsung is building in Texas. It's supposed to cost $17B to build fully, and some small parts are preparing to open soon. The motivation behind it is, of course, both Biden and Trump's insistence that Samsung and TSMC bring their bleeding-edge technology to the US. The fab complex is so large that some of Samsung's primary Korean suppliers have also started building large operations nearby.
"
I hope they scrap the plant. I wonder what the local people in the area think about this. It doesn't seem like there is any limit to how many convoluted thought pretzels Trump supporters can conjure up to rationalize their continued support, but maybe being screwed out of 8000 good paying jobs in a depressed area will mean something to them? How do the voters feel about the R pol responsible for this?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.