Trump has handily diverted the conversation from President Elon to whatever he’s going to invade today, which I guess includes Panama (to get back the canal), Greenland and Canada.  He’s also threatening to name Mexican Cartels as terrorist organizations so he’ll have an excuse to attack them across the border.

Here’s Claudia Sheinbaum’s response:

“We will collaborate with and coordinate with the United States,” Sheinbaum said in response, “but we will never subordinate ourselves.”

Here she is yesterday on the topic of the Panama Canal:

“The Panama Canal belongs to the Panamanians,” said Sheinbaum.[…]

Sheinbaum said Mexico would never accept foreign interference and was confident that an agreement on migration, trade and tariffs would be reached.

Here’s Denmark’s response:

The Danish government has announced a huge boost in defence spending for Greenland, hours after US President-elect Donald Trump repeated his desire to purchase the Arctic territory.

Danish Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said the package was a “double digit billion amount” in krone, or at least $1.5bn (£1.2bn).

He described the timing of the announcement as an “irony of fate”. […]

The whole Trump 2 presidency is a god damned “irony of fate” — that guy got it right.

So, that’s how you do it, Mexico and Denmark.   As blood lusty as some Republicans are, Trump is too afraid of bad news to deploy the military to do shit.  Adam Kinzinger has Trump’s number on that topic when he skeeted this:

The fact that Kinzinger calls him a “sissy” puts it in the Republican frame of military action being the hallmark of manly men, which is stupid — just goes to show that D’s agree with him on basically one thing.  Still, he’s right that any threats by Trump that could only be accomplished by military force are absolutely meaningless.

Media outlets like CNN are so hollowed out and click-thirsty that they’ll excitedly report on Trump’s ramblings, despite knowing that he barks all day but he doesn’t bite.  But the rest of us know that Trump won’t do shit unless President Elon tells him to, and even then he still won’t if military action is involved.

Invade All the Things – So Exciting!Post + Comments (129)

I think WG and the group have put together a good list of media sources in the post below.

One note on the Guardian:  I link to it a lot because it doesn’t have a paywall.  When they sent me notices that my credit card had expired, I assumed I could just “quiet quit”, but they re-billed me the other day even though my card was supposedly expired.  I’m disputing that with customer support.  So I will be in the market for another news source without a paywall that I can use for “basic news”.  Perhaps the AP?  If anyone has suggestions, I’m open to hear them.  I use Yahoo News a fair amount because they’ll re-print stories that are otherwise paywalled.  I don’t want to use the archive links people use to get around paywalls.  If a media outlet has a paywall, well, they’re telling me that I need to like their stuff enough to subscribe.  If I don’t, I don’t want to go around it.  (This is a matter of taste or preference, I realize.)

I read through a few comments and saw at least one comment about Pakman saying that he was too sensationalistic.  Well, I’d say that about pretty much any YouTube creator (including Meidas Touch, fwiw).  The algorithms on that platform rewards sensational thumbnails.  (I don’t have big opinions on Pakman — I’ve seen some of his stuff and it strikes me as OK.  YouTube videos are not my preferred way to consume political news.  Again, a matter of taste, not a hill to die on.)

In general, every social media platform has a special exploitable weakness driven by the algorithms.  For YouTube, it’s sensational thumbnails.  For Instagram, it’s too goddam many ads and too many “influencers” who are hawking shit.  I use Instagram almost exclusively to follow people who travel and camp.  Almost every one of the creators I follow has commercial deals with some outdoor product company or other.  Plus the ads are endless.  It’s funny that Threads (which uses similar algorithms and ad placements) collapsed once BlueSky got up a good head of steam — the user experience was just so shitty that people couldn’t tolerate it.

This is not to say that YouTube doesn’t have an ad/influencer problem — it certainly does.  It’s just that the Instagram folks I follow don’t seem to get traction from sensational posts, unlike YouTube.  TikTok’s special problem is just the firehose of the god damned algorithm jamming content in your face without any apparent rhyme or reason.

(Note that I have a YouTube Premium Family subscription, which I still think is a good deal at $23/month for 5 family members, since it includes ad-free YouTube as well as YouTube music, which is basically Spotify without Joe Rogan and other exclusive podcasters.  So I don’t see the ads that others do on that platform.)

That all said, if we’re to have liberal / Democratic / Progressive creators on those platforms who gain traction, we’re going to have to cut them slack on the techniques they use to game the algorithms.  I mean, I still use Instagram, and I get some good content from it, despite all the shit it tries to throw at me.  I watch a lot of YouTube in the outdoor/camping and aviation space, and I find it useful.  And I try to navigate TikTok, with less success.  What’s clear to me is that these platforms require a massive investment in time and effort to become a heavily-followed creator.  We need those.  I respect the effort, and if I’m not in love with the result, I at least try to view it in the context of the labor involved.

A Couple of Notes on MediaPost + Comments (43)

Here’s the list I compiled from input in yesterday’s post.

Goodbye NYT & WP, Hello… ?

I think I included everything except suggestions related to mainstream media.  I removed The Guardian because I hate the idea of promoting an anti-trans news source on our list of alternate media sources.  If you anyone wants to argue either of those choices, I’m listening.

And if your suggestion isn’t on there, it’s likely because I missed it, so please call it to my attention.

I’m not sure about all the local news.  Thoughts?

Also, please let me know if you think I have something listed under the wrong category.

Also, also, for BlueSky I think we should limit it to the best NEWS sources there, and not include interesting people, who can be found with the various lists on BlueSky.  I have no idea what news people are on BlueSky, so we could really use your help on that.

Also, also, too, I should say that I’m not worrying about order in a particular group until the list is mostly complete.

What’s Missing and What Shouldn’t Be There?Post + Comments (178)

After reading what Rebecca wrote on 12/19, I’m totally with her on this one.
Let’s not make perfect the enemy of the good.

Rebecca:

You guys, this is so infuriating and I am SO MAD.

You are reading this on Substack right now. Substack is run by some mostly nice libertarianish dudes who have bad taste in a lot of writers. They succor the anti-trans opinionists. They have (and monetize!) Actual Nazis. They just made Bari Weiss a shiny new deluxe website. (They also built Wonkette’s for us last year, for free.) Bari Weiss’s website was always on Substack, but they built her a newer and shinier one (with advances in their tech that they’ll soon start to push out to everyone), and that’s causing a new round of “cancel your subscriptions to sites using Substack so your money doesn’t go to support Substack, which is bad.” Right now, in the Year of Our Trump December 2024, and a week before Christmas, people are convincing other people to stop supporting independent liberal media if it uses a bad tech stack.

I don’t mean bad like it spies on you. I don’t mean bad like it sells your info or shows you ads. It doesn’t do any of those things. It’s actually super fucking ethical, for a tech-stack, if I am even using the term tech stack correctly! I mean bad like it makes money off bad people as well as good people.

Ten percent of this subscription goes to overhead costs that profit people who use it to support bad things. Ninety percent of this subscription goes to me paying my writers and feeding my babies and husband and old mom and animals and GAH I AM SO FUCKING MAD.

The people pounding this campaign think it’s very easy to leave Substack, and so if somebody doesn’t, you can help them understand the gravity of the situation by punishing them for someone else’s actions, a thing I believe we decided is also bad.

At the risk of SO BORING YOU, not everybody on Substack is a newsletter with a year’s worth of posts and a subscriber list, which would be easy to move to the elusive perfectly pure and moral capitalist tech company that definitely exists.

Some people on Substack (ME! I AM TALKING ABOUT ME!) are literally 20-(almost 21!)-year-old websites with millions of posts, hundreds of authors, and it isn’t in fact as easy as “just call Ghost which by the way also has fascists.”

You are being encouraged to encourage me, a literal mom and pop website, to be the first person in history to figure out how to ethically consume under capitalism, and if I can’t, you should “vote with your feet.” Boots! Get walking!

Last time we moved platforms (before Substack), it cost me $40,000 to have our new website built. If I had a spare $40,000 lying around, I would hire half a new writer! (We just finally hired Marcie full-time this month! But there’s another spiffy lady I’ve got my eye on, and I’m hoping to be Mr. Big Spender again soon!) Substack built our website for free in about six months. Again, before that and after the previous forty-thousand-dollar adventure, we hired developers who took a year and still didn’t have a website for us but at least with that one we got our money back.

It’s not just fucking “easy.”

Literally right now, people are encouraging other people to stop supporting left/liberal independent media — NOW! when the regular media is FUCKING BROKEN and we need every left of center voice we can fucking get — because it exists in a society in which bad people with shitty opinions also exist.

And today I’ve got dozens — dozens! — of people cancelling their Wonkette subscriptions so they won’t have to get dirty giving 10 percent of their monthly subscription money of $8 or $10 (or more!) to the bad tech bros who take that 10 percent to host us, keep the site up and secure from hackers and attacks, genially and patiently answer your support questions when you can’t log in, and share our content to new readers — some of whom might before have had shitty opinions about trans people and other living things, and might even begin to rethink them!

Might as well cancel Wonkette because we pay taxes to the US government which also does war and live in American which just elected Donald Trump to put all the liberal media in jail. Oh wait, THAT’S ME TOO. Well fuck!

I am so fucking angry right now I almost can’t breathe. What stupid purity-politics shooting ourselves in the face BULLSHIT.

Wonkette is hosted on Substack. We’re not leaving anytime soon, but more importantly I’m not even conflicted about it. If you want to cancel, you don’t owe us anything, and you are certainly allowed. I won’t even write you a nastygram like I did to people this morning after I got their (well, his; the other people were collateral damage and I already apologized) hectoring and condescending messages about how they just can’t support us but they’ll be happy to when I just do this very simple thing that they know FUCK ALL ABOUT FUCK.

Anyhoo! I think that’s out of my system.

LOL I feel better now, for real, love you, we’ll all be fine, sorry again to the people I yelled at this morning, bye.

Link

Like I said, I’m totally with her on this.  Where do you stand after reading this?

I’m With Wonkette On This – Her Post about SubstackPost + Comments (119)