State of the Discussion

I'm troubled by the purported peace proposal (I also note that since I started to write this, Trump is backing away from it). I want to see Ukraine free and prosperous and as intact as possible with a security guarantee (as the last one didn't work). This war is terrible and needs to end. And it needs to end in such a way as it doesn't happen again down the road as happened after Crimea. In a perfect world, Russia would be out of Ukraine. It's not a perfect world.

I can't tell whether or not Ukraine is on the brink. Certainly there is a conscription problem. If US support were to end, and the Europeans not step up, it would be a disaster. Even if the EU and UK did step up, it would be hard and embolden Putin and drag this debacle out even longer.

My take on Trump is to try to see the play and not focus on the particulars. One possibility: Trump is trying to get the Europeans to truly step up. Trump successfully got member nations to pay their fair share to NATO (well, collectively at least). The pause in US support brought Europe in even more. But despite the implementation by NATO of PURL (launched by Gen. Rutte and Trump) to fund the acquisition of ready to use weapons in US stockpiles for Ukraine, total military aid from Europe declined 43 percent in July and August of this year (humanitarian and financial support remained steady). I think that is the latest data. With the plan, the EU and the UK raced to take part in high-level talks and are voicing ever stronger support for Ukraine. I wonder if this really has nothing to do with appeasing Putin but lighting a fire under the Europeans (yet again)? It is their backyard, after all. And while they have stepped up, it doesn't make up for decades of underfunding the military and building a (mostly former) dependence on Russian gas. Europe isn't in a great position to take up the slack. And it should be.

Another reasonable take here: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-expert-conversation-separating-signal-from-noise-in-trumps-ukraine-peace-plan/

Hoping the Europeans really step in and Trump drops the hammer (e.g. Tomahawks). But I have my doubts on both.

With all this rage, we must also have a bold, simple policy plan — one that every American can understand. In the richest country in the history of our planet, we should not fear raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour, which had a 74 percent approval rating in 2023. We should not fear an America with free public college tuition, which 63 percent of U.S. adults favored in a 2021 poll. When 62 percent of Americans say their electricity or gas bills have increased in the past year and 80 percent feel powerless to control their utility costs, we should not fear the idea of expanding rural broadband as a public utility. Or when 70 percent of Americans say raising children is too expensive, we should not fear making universal child care a public good. And darn it, we should not fear that running on a platform of seismic economic scale will cost us a general election. We’ve already lost enough of them by being afraid to try. The era of half-baked political policy is over.

I'm well aware that not everyone here thinks kindly of James Carville, but I'm betting that nonetheless few will disagree with the extract above. Here's the whole thing:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/opinion/democrats-platform-economic-rage.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3k8.RLeA.wVApkzjlRXhM&smid=url-share

Hartmut, no worries, It's complicated by the fact that Karp is a non-native speaker of German, so it would be difficult to know what is from the translator and what is from Karp's German. In the New Statesman podcast, they say that Habermas turned down Karp's request to be the second reader on his dissertation because he didn't think that Karp's German was good enough, though softened that rejection by acknowledging that the ideas in the dissertation were probably difficult for native speakers of German to get across.

Here's another piece that I ran across on NPR:

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/23/nx-s1-5615410/ai-bubble-nvidia-openai-revenue-bust-data-centers

The parts of this article that really had me shaking my head at these hubristic tech muppets were the reports of how much they were spending to build tech centers and how gormless the private equity pinheads are being in their rush to invest money in them.

And then we have this:

The tech firm makes an investment in the data center, outside investors put up most of the cash, then the special purpose vehicle borrows money to buy the chips that are inside the data centers. The tech company gets the benefit of the increased computing capacity but it doesn't weigh down the company's balance sheet with debt.

The return of the "special purpose vehicle" for financing. So very bubble.

I'd say we are better off investing in tulip bulbs, but at the rate those data centers will swallow up water and warm the planet, you'd never get those tulips to grow, and the Netherlands will be entirely underwater - just like all those mortgages were the last time we let the promise of easy money gull us.

 “Maybe we are done putting down roots and will just keep moving.”

In reality, there have always been those who put down roots, and those who kept moving. As far as I can see, that is still true today.

There were also those who, from necessity, picked up and moved, sometimes a very long way, before stopping and putting down new roots. (I am put in mind of a story I read long ago about a guy who moved from Europe, but having arrived in New York City, never went west of Ocean Parkway.)

I suppose you could make a case that, at least in the US since the middle of the last century, it became more common for entire families to pull up stakes and relocate multiple times. They put down roots serially though; they weren't really moving constantly.

The one thing I think has changed is that those who just keep moving are now able to form lasting connections online. Before, they were largely isolated. Being able to make lasting connections allows them to form communities. Just communities not based on geography. That makes them more visible.

I suppose

GftNC, thanks!

I was struck by the close of that article, which was:

“Maybe the future is just participation, not belonging,” she mused. “Maybe we are done putting down roots and will just keep moving.”

A bunch of clowns indeed - the implosion of the GoP is quite funny to watch (or should we actually be worried ...?) in the way the downfall of the GDR was quite funny to watch (but the there was the, still ongoing, decades-long hangover...) :

Some Republicans are now finding themselves in the extraordinary position of clarifying what long seemed obvious: Nazis are evil.

“It’s something that we all should know, but the fact of the matter is, it had to be said,” said Representative David Kustoff of Tennessee, explaining why he felt the need to denounce Nazis and antisemitism at a recent gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
He was joined there by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who declared, “I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party.”
And even Laura Loomer, the far-right activist, who is Jewish, has argued on social media that “the GOP has a Nazi problem.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/us/politics/republicans-antisemitism-carlson-fuentes-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3U8.2zff.86d5NwQCde2M&smid=url-share

(gift link; not sure it's ethical to contribute to Bret Stephens' salary, but hey ho)

I hope the Wall Street Journal editorial is right about American voters, but I fear it is not. Surely if American voters hated dishonour as much as all that, there would not be a second Trump presidency

It all depends on what American voters perceive as dishonor. Perhaps surprisingly, they seem more likely to take that view of foreign policy screwups than they do of dishonorable behavior on the domestic (or personal!) front.

As a Wall Street Journal editorial on Friday put it: “Mr. Trump may figure he can finally wash his hands of Ukraine if Europe and Ukraine reject his offer. He’s clearly sick of dealing with the war. But appeasing Mr. Putin would haunt the rest of his presidency. If Mr. Trump thinks American voters hate war, wait until he learns how much they hate dishonor. … A bad deal in Ukraine would broadcast to U.S. enemies that they can seize what they want with force or nuclear blackmail or by pressing on until America loses interest.”

Well, I hope the Wall Street Journal editorial is right about American voters, but I fear it is not. Surely if American voters hated dishonour as much as all that, there would not be a second Trump presidency. The piece from which I have taken that is in today's NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/22/opinion/ukraine-russia-negotiations-trump-deal.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3E8.xN85.ecN93aJ-jZL7&smid=url-share

However, I do have some (tiny amount of) hope that if this kind of criticism is very widespread, along with all the signalling from Europe, Trump might (once again!) back slightly off from this kind of approach. I guess this is what's behind today's statement that this was not his final offer. But to follow that by saying if Zelensky refuses to accept the terms, “then he can continue to fight his little heart out.” makes me feel sick. The Chamberlain comparison makes sense; appeasing Putin has been Trump's consistent approach as POTUS in both his terms.

For wjca, since it's an openish thread...

Status report on dewarping documents from photographs. I've finally settled on a camera (iPhone 17) and set up lighting, so I'm starting to take pictures seriously. Current state of the art for my dewarping software shown in these images. First one is a 24MP "original" taken with the iPhone. Second one is the dewarped output for it. I've settled on the .avif format as the best combination of quality, compression, and availability.

https://mcain6925.com/ordinary/demo1.avif

https://mcain6925.com/ordinary/demo2.avif

German neonazis use stickers "American Indians did not control immigration. Now they live on reservations."
And that was years before they Syrian civil war or Putin's "special military operation" in Ukraine. Then it was mainly against Turks (These days even neonazis buy at the Turkish greengrocer. Probably the same 'problem' that Himmler noted that every German had 'one decent Jew' he did not want to get persecuted).
Berlin in the 18th century was close to immigrant majority (French Huguenots) and that was essential to the economy (Brandenburg was the 2nd most devastated region of the 30 Years War after Bohemia).
I have strong suspicions that I have Huguenots in the family tree myself.Did not help with learning French though :-( .

"There could be many explanations"

My best guess at this point is that he just likes Putin, in a kind of fanboi crush way.

Putin is doing it the way Trump wishes he could do it.

What a fucking bunch of clowns.

Definitely true of Witkoff, and many other Trump appointees. But I am amazed by the number of people I have encountered over the last few months who said variations of "but Trump will eventially get/is getting impatient with Putin, so it looks like things are going to change". To me it has looked absolutely clear from the beginning that Trump's intention is essentially to give Putin whatever he wants, that he will throw Ukraine to the wolves, and that any little zigzags have been purely performative. There could be many explanations: that he is bought and paid for, that Putin has kompromat on him, that he hates Zelensky ever since the perfect phone call, or that he is at heart a weak and pathetic man who kowtows to those he sees as ruthless, strong and powerful. It could be a combination of any of these. But as for the bunch of clowns, dumb or not, if they know they are giving Trump what he really wants, it may not be their competence that is the problem.

I fault Obama for not acting on Crimea in 2014. But the behaviour of the Trump administration over Ukraine is a stain on America which, to paraphrase Trump, is probably the greatest ever seen.

London’s foreign-born population is 41%.

And the percentage of foreign born residents in New York City over the years would be what?

If you're going to cherry pick numbers, gotta expect folks here will notice.

CharlesWT - The UK’s foreign-born population was 4.2% in 1951, 8.3% in 2001, and 16% in 2021.

I'm not taking issue with you here, CharlesWT, but I am going to note, for the sake of information literacy, that the Wiki entry you cite has some problems with the data that bear scrutiny.

The 1951 and 2001 data come from one data source and the 2021 data from another. The first set counts "foreign born" population, and the last one counts "migrants." Those two things are defined in the sources that are being cited, but a closer look at those shows that "foreign born" and "migrant" are not at all the same things, and the way that the Wiki article is written, they never foreground any difference.

If you chase the source for the earlier dates, you will find that, for example, in 1971 about a third of the "foreign born" population came from families where one or both parents were born in the UK.

That would mean that for the purposes of the data from 1971, Boris Johnson would count as "foreign born," but had he been born in 2017, he would not have counted for the table because he would not be considered a "migrant," since his parents were only abroad in the US temporarily while his father was attending university there.

I suspect that there are a lot of incongruities and methodological problems in that article, but I don't expect that the average reader - even one with an undergraduate degree - would have the habits of mind to check for, or reflect on, the impacts of such problems on the conclusions being drawn from them.

This is why teaching information literacy is so challenging, and why people get impatient with academics. To paraphrase The Who, the simple things we see are all complicated, and most of us just want to get our washing done.

Substitute your lies for fact
I can see right through your plastic mac
I look all white, but my dad was black
My fine looking suit is really made out of sack

I’ll bet that in the last 1000 years England has seen more immigration than in the previous 500,000,000 years.

Britain was almost entirely depopulated by the end of the last glacial maxima 22,000 years ago. All of Scotland and Ireland were under the ice. Southern England was inhospitable tundra. At least on a percentage basis, the immigration after the ice started to retreat was probably larger than the last 1,000 years.

There was a ten-year period during the Blair government England had more immigration than during the previous thousand years.

Keep those context free facts coming Charles! There were probably as many, if not more who came from 1950-60. However, at that time, they were called citizens of the Empire, not immigrants.

It is *SO* obnoxious seeing obviously AI-produced images, and having the obsessive need to count fingers just to suppress the "My name is Inigo Montoya" reflex.

But check the soil first. I would not eat anything grown in our little backyard garden* - at least not without changing the top 1 m of earth first. Everytime anything is done on this building, the materials are stored there and I take it as a given that some nasty stuff seeped into the soil on more than one occasion in the last half century we have lived there.

*the rental flats on the raised ground floor have one (with stairs from the balcony leading down to it).