I think it has stayed in place because of the US defense umbrella, but to suggestion that it was the Japanese put this forward because they felt safe in the embrace of the US is ahistorical.
I've read a few articles about Spanish being either overlooked or resistant to AI. Some of the arguments were Spanish had more dialectical variants, Spain had stronger data laws. The articles vary from lauding it to complaining that AI models are English-centric. The point of your roommate may also play into it, a fully duplex language has reduced information density, which means that it is more difficult to derive logical principals out of it that a language that requires alternating turns
Apologies for the side jaunt thru my own thoughts, but that word, 'necessarily' is the one that I'm chewing on a bit. I've restarted my martial arts, and the biggest problem I'm having is to reacquire the requisite 'softness' that I need. While I don't want to engage in Orientalism or start spouting Zen koans, I'd argue that softness and hardness have to be combined to create strength and there is a tendency in the West to assume that soft=weak. Even with something that would appear to be simply applying force, like weight lifting, flexibility (something I'm sorely lacking at the moment) and pacing are essential to producing the best result.
You can see that in the current administration, where the whole idea of soft power is considered an oxymoron, so much so that they have gone to eliminate any agency that might engage in it.
That elision is reveals a bit more about the Spanish politics involved.
La ciudadanía española siempre repudió la dictadura de Sadam Hussein en Irak, pero no por ello apoyó la guerra de Irak, porque era ilegal, porque era injusta y porque no supuso una resolución real a casi ninguno de los problemas que pretendió resolver.
Del mismo modo, nosotros repudiamos al régimen de Irán que reprime, que mata vilmente a sus ciudadanos, particularmente a las mujeres.
There is a little back story to the Iraq part, Spain was part of the coalition of the willing in 2003 and the PM, Aznar, a conservative and a staunch ally of Bush, but there were train bombings in Madrid that the ruling party first blamed on ETA, but was later revealed to be a home-grown Islamist cell, something that seemed to be suppressed by the government because they knew it would f-up support for the deployment. (that summary doesn't really do justice to all of the ins and outs)
Aznar was kicked out for Zapatero, the socialist candidate, who had campaigned against the deployment and withdrew Spanish troops when he got in office.
I might be misunderstanding, but I kind of feel that the strength and excellence of _all_ people should necessarily be grounded in their caring and empathy and the challenge is to extend that to men rather than giving women an 'out' for not exhibiting those traits.
While I understand that we have to think about neurodiversity and understand that people have different brain chemistries and such, I feel like I'm dealing with some people who put out a self diagnosis as an excuse for not being empathetic. I find this happening with a few Westerners that I interact with here in Japan, so I don't know if they are picking up signals here of a system that is being imperfectly adopted here, or if this represents something in the system.
I realize that this creates the classical double bind that women and minorities always have to deal with, but I don't think the solution is to have people in those categories behave without caring and empathy, but to make sure that caring and empathy be something that is more or less required of all people.
But journalists who have been covering the Trump administration were quick to point out that there is in fact evidence Trump knew about the ad campaign ahead of time.
[...]
During her tenure at DHS, the secretary earned the name “ICE Barbie” for her camera-ready costume changes, including cosplaying as an ICE agent, pilot, rescue boat captain, and firefighter.
She and Trump “had several meetings during the transition, talking about it,” she said of the ad campaign, according to The Atlantic.
She recalled the president telling her, “Those beautiful ads you did about South Dakota. They had Mount Rushmore. I want you to do those for the border.”
He also said, “I want you in the ads. And I want your face in the ads. I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border,” according to Noem, with the goal of telling the world that the U.S. had a new leader.
I imagine her trying to wrap her head around getting fired for something Trump explicitly told her to do and smile.
On January 14, 2026, it was reported that former United States senator Jon Tester had successfully convinced Bodnar to run as an independent candidate for Montana's Class 1 Senate seat, facing off against Republican incumbent Steve Daines in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.[14] The news broke after a text message, allegedly sent by Tester to a confidant, was leaked to the Missoulian in which Tester criticized the Democratic Party, calling it "a poison in his attempts to get re-elected". The sender of the text message, purported to be Tester, further argued that Bodnar would have a stronger chance at defeating Daines running as a political independent than Democratic state legislator Reilly Neill, who was the then-frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.[15]
Cillizza says a couple of times 'but this is Montana'. It's hard to figure out if he's pointing out that the state went to Trump the past three presidential cycles (56%, 57%, and 58%) or that he thinks that they are all inbred idiots (or maybe both), but Tester got 44,000 more votes that Harris did, so there was split voting, and Tester tagged Sheehy as 'Transfer Tim' (he moved in from Minnesota), though Sheehy still won. Unfortunately, the newcomers to the state voted Republican.
There is no Democrat running, but Seth Bodnar is running as an independent. Bodnar was president of the Uni of Montana, and is a veteran. Montana has a strong relationship with Kumamoto, so I should start talking him up over here.
I'd personally be happy if we had several independents pick up seats, I'd like to think that it might help.
Not a huge Chris Cillizza fan, (see https://pressthink.org/2012/08/everything-thats-wrong-with-political-journalism-in-one-washington-post-item/
and
https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/chris-cillizza/chris-cillizza-milquetoast-hack-and-enemy-of-truth )
but he gives this about the Montana race
https://youtu.be/vTBcfv55twQ?si=tjkYL94FzQevEzcz
A few more thoughts, with pro bono's link, it certainly pushes it over to sexism, had it only been the reposted message by Wang, I might have hesitated, but reading his wikipedia page, he seems like a real jerk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Lebrecht
(don't know why my wikipedia always has each reference on a different line)
Mentioned in the wikipedia page, but worth a read on its own is Hurwitz's piece about him.
https://www.classicstoday.com/journalist-norman-lebrecht-dead-at-61/
I think I have touched on that in the most recent post about Yuja Wang and if folks want to take the conversation there, please feel free to copy paste any comments from here that you want to use as a springboard.
And double checking on Gemini, while McCain referenced the Beach Boys, it was actually a parody song by Vince Vance & the Valiants, which was recorded during the Iranian Hostage Crisis.
Head of Anthropic Amodei left OpenAI specifically because he felt the commercialization was overriding the need for guardrails. So in that respect, he's being consistent. Anthropic also doesn't have any public contracts with the IDF, where all this stuff is getting real world tested, so Michael Cain's observation about retail vs. wholesale murder is probably true.
nous, I really appreciate your comment, it is always hard to talk about this stuff. This isn't to keep the conversation going and draw you out, but I would make an additional observation. You wrote: I’d posit that, yes, all of the men involved were feeling sexual desire, but that the attraction in that case was to be doing something secret about which the woman had no knowledge and over which the woman had no say. The men were demonstrating to each other their power and control over a woman who had been “shared” with them by the man to whom she belonged, and that sharing was a secret that was withheld from any of the women in their lives. That makes it a moment of homosocial bonding in which they violate a societal taboo, and there is a type of in-group status that comes with that sort of secret violation, as many fraternity brothers might whisper to each other when in private.
I'd also add that sexual desire is often less about the specific object and more about the internal meaning we project onto it. Your suggestion that the breaking of a societal taboo may be the focus seems likely, and because there is a shame factor involved with sex, it's easy to see how breaking those taboos can be become intertwined with sexual desire.
Just in case anyone forgot, Frum was the one who coined the phrase 'Axis of Evil', which started out as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and was expanded to include Cuba, Libya and Syria. Including Iraq cost the US $800 billion to $1.1 trillion, and while Frum isn't responsible for the full price tag, he doesn't seem to think the mistake should impinge on his bona fides.
"I was powerfully swayed by the fact that the proposed invasion of Iraq was supported by those who had been most right about the Cold War, and was most bitterly opposed by those who had been wrongest about the Cold War."
Grok clearly doesn't search out all the sources
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2438589/
Research suggests that rates of sexual victimization in prison may be as high as 41% or as low as less than 1%.12 A recent meta-analysis estimates a conservative “average” prevalence estimate of prison sexual assault at 1.9%. While the estimated rate of victimization varies significantly across studies, the characteristics of the victims reported in these studies are more similar. First, rates of sexual coercion are higher than rates of sexual assault or rape, independent of gender. More specifically, unwanted and sexually suggestive touching of breasts, genitals, or buttocks is more typical inside prison than the act of rape itself. Second, in the vast majority of studies, male facilities have been found to have higher rates of sexual assault compared to female facilities. Yet the perpetrators of sexual assaults against female inmates, compared to male inmates, are less likely to involve staff. Third, younger inmates are at greater risk of sexual victimization, particularly if they are new arrivals to a facility and are serving their first convictions. This may explain in part why rates of sexual victimizations vary across facilities within the same prison system. Facilities with a younger population would be expected to have higher rates of victimization than those facilities with a more mature and acculturated prison population. Fourth, inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization has an interracial bias, with victims most likely being White and sexual aggressors most likely being Black. This interracial pattern of victimization has been attributed to revenge for historical oppression and the reversal of racial dominance inside prison.
I also looked at your Grok summary and your takeaway seems to be remarkably narrowly focussed. I'll leave it to others to point out how your takeaway points are misleading.
when wonkie posted, I was tempted to post, but I realized that what I was writing was just me happy to, as they say in the commons, 'attach myself to the statements'. I was born in 61, so the 70's and 80's were my cultural memories, so discussions, like the famous bear example, seem a bit overblown. I do think that there were mechanisms to protect women, but those mechanisms were also to keep women in line and there was an implicit bargain that if you don't rock the boat, you won't get thrown to the sharks. What underlies that is power relationships, and I think you can't erase those relationships or declare them out of existence, you can only be truthful about their existence and make sure that they aren't being exploited to do something they aren't supposed it.
As an example, in my FB feed, I've recently had a bunch of people talking about the French figure skater Suraly Bonaly, who was the first person to do a backflip in competition and she did it in 1998. The only problem was that it was an illegal move and she was penalized. However, in these Olympics, it was allowed in 2024 and included in the programs this time. So, just going by the fb posts, this was a female skater (who was also black) being mistreated while the two male skaters were allowed to do it.
None of these posts told the story of Bonaly doing the backflip in the warmups, inches from Midori Ito's head, in 1992, during her warmup just before the short program. This apparently got into Ito's head, because she subsequently missed her triple lutz in the short program and was only able to get the silver by making a comeback in the last program.
It seems indicative of something that it ended up with a black skater trying to throw an Asian skater off her game. In the Rodney King riots, it was Korean stores that took the brunt of protester's rage, and the whole 'Natural Conservative' push (Reagan said something like 'Latinos are Republicans, they just don't know it yet') tells me that the pressure is going to be exhibited more in the groups oppressed. Hurt people hurt people.
So I'd argue that the 'there are no women in the Epstein files' is reflection of a collection of power, not of some unavoidable darkness in the souls of all men. Next to the substack GftNC posts, I'd suggest reading Amelia Gentleman's Guardian piece Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club. Setting aside the irony of the writer's last name, she points out that Epstein's whole enterprise was on the backs of women who booked tickets, organized plans, etc etc. Wonkie's mention of Mad Men is interesting, because while the series revolves around the men being assholes, another important thread is how the women, in the background but vital to keep the machinery running, slowly begin to assert their own power.
While the apparent absence of asian and black victims in the case of Epstein can probably be traced to his own bent, which then gets passed thru his whole enterprise, I also wonder if the absence of asian or black men in the Epstein files might also suggest that minorities are more attuned to the transactional nature of ALL things, and therefore avoided being drawn into it.
In this regard, Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fcf87c
is an interesting read, pointing out how women were often relegated to support roles in these movements while simultaneously being demonized by the media.
About jailbait in pop, you also have to take into account the whole structure of the industry, where bands do concerts and groupies flock backstage. My backstage adventures have been with classical music, a bit more sedate, but I remember that I had a 1st year student who was a huge fan of some relatively famous heavy metal band and she missed classes to attend multiple concerts on their Japan tour and she had been befriended by one of the guys in the band and was getting backstage. When she came back from the last concert, she had pictures of her, dressed like a demure Japanese uni student and the musician. Given that this was Japan, there were no drugs, but I didn't really ask what she actually did backstage, though she was clearly smitten. Multiply that by multiple groups and multiple concerts, mix in drugs, and it's probably a feature for a lot of groups.
Looking up those links revealed a few more and this one was particularly interesting
https://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2019/3/30/my-response-to-chomskys-extraordinary-accusations-by-chris-knight
The most interesting section to me is the discussion of Chomsky working at MITRE, and the funding was a machine translation system that would allow "the possibility of translation of Russian language materials, particularly in scientific fields, into English by machine."
which is incredibly ironic, given chomsky's opinion on the development of LLMs
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The penny drops”
The problem with that is that the constitution in general and Article 9 in particular were very much creations of MacArthur and GHQ.
https://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/ronten/02ronten.html
I think it has stayed in place because of the US defense umbrella, but to suggestion that it was the Japanese put this forward because they felt safe in the embrace of the US is ahistorical.
On “A little language practice”
I've read a few articles about Spanish being either overlooked or resistant to AI. Some of the arguments were Spanish had more dialectical variants, Spain had stronger data laws. The articles vary from lauding it to complaining that AI models are English-centric. The point of your roommate may also play into it, a fully duplex language has reduced information density, which means that it is more difficult to derive logical principals out of it that a language that requires alternating turns
cf: https://www.youtube.com/live/CyyL0yDhr7I?si=1RiobEdzk1GiuOHp&t=2083
"
I'm not sure what I would do with the translation, but I'd consider saying it as something like 'one simple phrase' or 'one short phrase'
Counting words reminds me of the West Wing debate between Jed Bartlett and Florida gov Ritchie
https://youtu.be/sS4UAZ5UfGY?si=-aIzURqqN19_mgbP
On “Yuja Wang, networking, transactionality and that guy”
Apologies for the side jaunt thru my own thoughts, but that word, 'necessarily' is the one that I'm chewing on a bit. I've restarted my martial arts, and the biggest problem I'm having is to reacquire the requisite 'softness' that I need. While I don't want to engage in Orientalism or start spouting Zen koans, I'd argue that softness and hardness have to be combined to create strength and there is a tendency in the West to assume that soft=weak. Even with something that would appear to be simply applying force, like weight lifting, flexibility (something I'm sorely lacking at the moment) and pacing are essential to producing the best result.
You can see that in the current administration, where the whole idea of soft power is considered an oxymoron, so much so that they have gone to eliminate any agency that might engage in it.
On “A little language practice”
That elision is reveals a bit more about the Spanish politics involved.
La ciudadanía española siempre repudió la dictadura de Sadam Hussein en Irak, pero no por ello apoyó la guerra de Irak, porque era ilegal, porque era injusta y porque no supuso una resolución real a casi ninguno de los problemas que pretendió resolver.
Del mismo modo, nosotros repudiamos al régimen de Irán que reprime, que mata vilmente a sus ciudadanos, particularmente a las mujeres.
There is a little back story to the Iraq part, Spain was part of the coalition of the willing in 2003 and the PM, Aznar, a conservative and a staunch ally of Bush, but there were train bombings in Madrid that the ruling party first blamed on ETA, but was later revealed to be a home-grown Islamist cell, something that seemed to be suppressed by the government because they knew it would f-up support for the deployment. (that summary doesn't really do justice to all of the ins and outs)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings
Aznar was kicked out for Zapatero, the socialist candidate, who had campaigned against the deployment and withdrew Spanish troops when he got in office.
On “Yuja Wang, networking, transactionality and that guy”
I might be misunderstanding, but I kind of feel that the strength and excellence of _all_ people should necessarily be grounded in their caring and empathy and the challenge is to extend that to men rather than giving women an 'out' for not exhibiting those traits.
While I understand that we have to think about neurodiversity and understand that people have different brain chemistries and such, I feel like I'm dealing with some people who put out a self diagnosis as an excuse for not being empathetic. I find this happening with a few Westerners that I interact with here in Japan, so I don't know if they are picking up signals here of a system that is being imperfectly adopted here, or if this represents something in the system.
I realize that this creates the classical double bind that women and minorities always have to deal with, but I don't think the solution is to have people in those categories behave without caring and empathy, but to make sure that caring and empathy be something that is more or less required of all people.
On “The Last Noem Standing”
More schaden on my freude
https://www.thedailybeast.com/evidence-mounts-that-donald-trump-double-crossed-ice-barbie-kristi-noem/#user-comments
But journalists who have been covering the Trump administration were quick to point out that there is in fact evidence Trump knew about the ad campaign ahead of time.
[...]
During her tenure at DHS, the secretary earned the name “ICE Barbie” for her camera-ready costume changes, including cosplaying as an ICE agent, pilot, rescue boat captain, and firefighter.
She and Trump “had several meetings during the transition, talking about it,” she said of the ad campaign, according to The Atlantic.
She recalled the president telling her, “Those beautiful ads you did about South Dakota. They had Mount Rushmore. I want you to do those for the border.”
He also said, “I want you in the ads. And I want your face in the ads. I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border,” according to Noem, with the goal of telling the world that the U.S. had a new leader.
I imagine her trying to wrap her head around getting fired for something Trump explicitly told her to do and smile.
On “The ides of Texas”
And I think this is the Sheehy incident
https://youtube.com/shorts/1Rj9mXzscnU?si=Cz6Ht29ITxdR8Crt
"
More details from Bodnar's wikipedia page
On January 14, 2026, it was reported that former United States senator Jon Tester had successfully convinced Bodnar to run as an independent candidate for Montana's Class 1 Senate seat, facing off against Republican incumbent Steve Daines in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.[14] The news broke after a text message, allegedly sent by Tester to a confidant, was leaked to the Missoulian in which Tester criticized the Democratic Party, calling it "a poison in his attempts to get re-elected". The sender of the text message, purported to be Tester, further argued that Bodnar would have a stronger chance at defeating Daines running as a political independent than Democratic state legislator Reilly Neill, who was the then-frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.[15]
"
Cillizza says a couple of times 'but this is Montana'. It's hard to figure out if he's pointing out that the state went to Trump the past three presidential cycles (56%, 57%, and 58%) or that he thinks that they are all inbred idiots (or maybe both), but Tester got 44,000 more votes that Harris did, so there was split voting, and Tester tagged Sheehy as 'Transfer Tim' (he moved in from Minnesota), though Sheehy still won. Unfortunately, the newcomers to the state voted Republican.
There is no Democrat running, but Seth Bodnar is running as an independent. Bodnar was president of the Uni of Montana, and is a veteran. Montana has a strong relationship with Kumamoto, so I should start talking him up over here.
I'd personally be happy if we had several independents pick up seats, I'd like to think that it might help.
"
Not a huge Chris Cillizza fan, (see https://pressthink.org/2012/08/everything-thats-wrong-with-political-journalism-in-one-washington-post-item/
and
https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/chris-cillizza/chris-cillizza-milquetoast-hack-and-enemy-of-truth )
but he gives this about the Montana race
https://youtu.be/vTBcfv55twQ?si=tjkYL94FzQevEzcz
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
We've got some Texans here, so opening another post to talk about it.
On “Yuja Wang, networking, transactionality and that guy”
A few more thoughts, with pro bono's link, it certainly pushes it over to sexism, had it only been the reposted message by Wang, I might have hesitated, but reading his wikipedia page, he seems like a real jerk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Lebrecht
(don't know why my wikipedia always has each reference on a different line)
Mentioned in the wikipedia page, but worth a read on its own is Hurwitz's piece about him.
https://www.classicstoday.com/journalist-norman-lebrecht-dead-at-61/
Ouch!
"
Interesting pro bono. It looks like it was before the email tantrum and none of the pages I saw mentioned it. Makes it look even more egregious.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
I think I have touched on that in the most recent post about Yuja Wang and if folks want to take the conversation there, please feel free to copy paste any comments from here that you want to use as a springboard.
On “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran”
And double checking on Gemini, while McCain referenced the Beach Boys, it was actually a parody song by Vince Vance & the Valiants, which was recorded during the Iranian Hostage Crisis.
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
Head of Anthropic Amodei left OpenAI specifically because he felt the commercialization was overriding the need for guardrails. So in that respect, he's being consistent. Anthropic also doesn't have any public contracts with the IDF, where all this stuff is getting real world tested, so Michael Cain's observation about retail vs. wholesale murder is probably true.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
Putting this up, in hope that Grok might watch it and pass it on to Charles.
https://youtu.be/nWu44AqF0iI?si=le7FLj87qVUlVihK
"
From Charles' Grok summary about prisons
Disciplinary outcomes differ sharply. Women receive misconduct tickets at higher rates—often 39–155% more—for “defiance” categories (disrespect, disobedience, hygiene, tone).
If they just wouldn't act like boys, they wouldn't get punished!
"
nous, I really appreciate your comment, it is always hard to talk about this stuff. This isn't to keep the conversation going and draw you out, but I would make an additional observation. You wrote:
I’d posit that, yes, all of the men involved were feeling sexual desire, but that the attraction in that case was to be doing something secret about which the woman had no knowledge and over which the woman had no say. The men were demonstrating to each other their power and control over a woman who had been “shared” with them by the man to whom she belonged, and that sharing was a secret that was withheld from any of the women in their lives.
That makes it a moment of homosocial bonding in which they violate a societal taboo, and there is a type of in-group status that comes with that sort of secret violation, as many fraternity brothers might whisper to each other when in private.
I'd also add that sexual desire is often less about the specific object and more about the internal meaning we project onto it. Your suggestion that the breaking of a societal taboo may be the focus seems likely, and because there is a shame factor involved with sex, it's easy to see how breaking those taboos can be become intertwined with sexual desire.
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
Just in case anyone forgot, Frum was the one who coined the phrase 'Axis of Evil', which started out as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and was expanded to include Cuba, Libya and Syria. Including Iraq cost the US $800 billion to $1.1 trillion, and while Frum isn't responsible for the full price tag, he doesn't seem to think the mistake should impinge on his bona fides.
"I was powerfully swayed by the fact that the proposed invasion of Iraq was supported by those who had been most right about the Cold War, and was most bitterly opposed by those who had been wrongest about the Cold War."
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
Grok clearly doesn't search out all the sources
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2438589/
Research suggests that rates of sexual victimization in prison may be as high as 41% or as low as less than 1%.12 A recent meta-analysis estimates a conservative “average” prevalence estimate of prison sexual assault at 1.9%. While the estimated rate of victimization varies significantly across studies, the characteristics of the victims reported in these studies are more similar. First, rates of sexual coercion are higher than rates of sexual assault or rape, independent of gender. More specifically, unwanted and sexually suggestive touching of breasts, genitals, or buttocks is more typical inside prison than the act of rape itself. Second, in the vast majority of studies, male facilities have been found to have higher rates of sexual assault compared to female facilities. Yet the perpetrators of sexual assaults against female inmates, compared to male inmates, are less likely to involve staff. Third, younger inmates are at greater risk of sexual victimization, particularly if they are new arrivals to a facility and are serving their first convictions. This may explain in part why rates of sexual victimizations vary across facilities within the same prison system. Facilities with a younger population would be expected to have higher rates of victimization than those facilities with a more mature and acculturated prison population. Fourth, inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization has an interracial bias, with victims most likely being White and sexual aggressors most likely being Black. This interracial pattern of victimization has been attributed to revenge for historical oppression and the reversal of racial dominance inside prison.
I also looked at your Grok summary and your takeaway seems to be remarkably narrowly focussed. I'll leave it to others to point out how your takeaway points are misleading.
"
when wonkie posted, I was tempted to post, but I realized that what I was writing was just me happy to, as they say in the commons, 'attach myself to the statements'. I was born in 61, so the 70's and 80's were my cultural memories, so discussions, like the famous bear example, seem a bit overblown. I do think that there were mechanisms to protect women, but those mechanisms were also to keep women in line and there was an implicit bargain that if you don't rock the boat, you won't get thrown to the sharks. What underlies that is power relationships, and I think you can't erase those relationships or declare them out of existence, you can only be truthful about their existence and make sure that they aren't being exploited to do something they aren't supposed it.
As an example, in my FB feed, I've recently had a bunch of people talking about the French figure skater Suraly Bonaly, who was the first person to do a backflip in competition and she did it in 1998. The only problem was that it was an illegal move and she was penalized. However, in these Olympics, it was allowed in 2024 and included in the programs this time. So, just going by the fb posts, this was a female skater (who was also black) being mistreated while the two male skaters were allowed to do it.
None of these posts told the story of Bonaly doing the backflip in the warmups, inches from Midori Ito's head, in 1992, during her warmup just before the short program. This apparently got into Ito's head, because she subsequently missed her triple lutz in the short program and was only able to get the silver by making a comeback in the last program.
It seems indicative of something that it ended up with a black skater trying to throw an Asian skater off her game. In the Rodney King riots, it was Korean stores that took the brunt of protester's rage, and the whole 'Natural Conservative' push (Reagan said something like 'Latinos are Republicans, they just don't know it yet') tells me that the pressure is going to be exhibited more in the groups oppressed. Hurt people hurt people.
So I'd argue that the 'there are no women in the Epstein files' is reflection of a collection of power, not of some unavoidable darkness in the souls of all men. Next to the substack GftNC posts, I'd suggest reading Amelia Gentleman's Guardian piece Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club. Setting aside the irony of the writer's last name, she points out that Epstein's whole enterprise was on the backs of women who booked tickets, organized plans, etc etc. Wonkie's mention of Mad Men is interesting, because while the series revolves around the men being assholes, another important thread is how the women, in the background but vital to keep the machinery running, slowly begin to assert their own power.
While the apparent absence of asian and black victims in the case of Epstein can probably be traced to his own bent, which then gets passed thru his whole enterprise, I also wonder if the absence of asian or black men in the Epstein files might also suggest that minorities are more attuned to the transactional nature of ALL things, and therefore avoided being drawn into it.
"
In this regard,
Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fcf87c
is an interesting read, pointing out how women were often relegated to support roles in these movements while simultaneously being demonized by the media.
About jailbait in pop, you also have to take into account the whole structure of the industry, where bands do concerts and groupies flock backstage. My backstage adventures have been with classical music, a bit more sedate, but I remember that I had a 1st year student who was a huge fan of some relatively famous heavy metal band and she missed classes to attend multiple concerts on their Japan tour and she had been befriended by one of the guys in the band and was getting backstage. When she came back from the last concert, she had pictures of her, dressed like a demure Japanese uni student and the musician. Given that this was Japan, there were no drugs, but I didn't really ask what she actually did backstage, though she was clearly smitten. Multiply that by multiple groups and multiple concerts, mix in drugs, and it's probably a feature for a lot of groups.
"
Looking up those links revealed a few more and this one was particularly interesting
https://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2019/3/30/my-response-to-chomskys-extraordinary-accusations-by-chris-knight
The most interesting section to me is the discussion of Chomsky working at MITRE, and the funding was a machine translation system that would allow "the possibility of translation of Russian language materials, particularly in scientific fields, into English by machine."
which is incredibly ironic, given chomsky's opinion on the development of LLMs
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