Bully backed down after running into resistance, indicating they hoped their target would weakly fold in the face of bluster and don’t have a back up plan?
Huh. That keeps happening. Maybe a lesson there.
View quoted note →The reason Ross Douthat keeps sounding incoherent is he finds the fascists appealing because he thinks people like himself are victims entitled to drastic measures to dominate others, except for professional—and likely psychological—reasons won’t admit it, except sometimes to envy Orban’s Hungary.
Why can’t businesses fire employees for being an asshole to customers? Not being an asshole to customers is a core part of the job.
The cancel culture debates helped me realize the actual argument against it is “I don’t think shouting those things at those customers constitutes being an asshole.”
It’s great Kilmar Abrego Garcia is free, after so much US govt effort to violate his rights.
And it’s good the regime has bogged down, tying up some of its limited resources in this failing effort.
And good few listened to the “popularists” who said don’t talk about Abrego, immigration, or rights.
So the president was like “hey Indiana, help me cheat in the next election,” and Indiana was all “no thanks,” but then the president went “you better disenfranchise a bunch of your citizens or I’ll illegally withhold money to hurt you,” and the Indiana Senate went “in that case, an even bigger no.”
I thought the new US national security strategy was a white nationalist document opposing Europe and the Western democratic alliance, but the NYT challenged my assumptions, explaining that the NSS is a white nationalist document opposing Europe and the Western democratic alliance and that’s good.
Dear the media,
When the US president claims he brokered a peace deal in a place with active combat—eg Rwanda and Congo—the story is (1) fighting rages on, and (2) US president lies.
The story is not “president touts historic peace deal.” A peace deal involves peace.
Sincerely,
Factual reality
Stuff with the US and Venezuela is bad and likely to get worse, but this seized tanker is reportedly owned by a Russian oligarch, and was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2022 due to suspected involvement in illegal oil smuggling with Iran. Plus breaking maritime law re: flags.
Not piracy. Not war.
No one can control a movement built on lies and conspiracy theories, at least not for long. The leaders might be cynical liars willing to say anything for power, and therefore readily stop pushing a given piece of nonsense when it’s no longer useful, a bunch of their marks actually believe it.
And the information security risks of hooking up DoD to Google's Gemini or any other LLM raises serious information security risks.
How confident are you that it keeps DoD info siloed off and secure? Or that no adversary can gain access?
Especially with these war-plans-on-Signal types in charge.