Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

The lights are all blinking red.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Celebrate the fucking wins.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

75% of people clapping liked the show!

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Consistently wrong since 2002

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

I really should read my own blog.

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

You are here: Home / John Cole Presents "Stories from the Road" / Thursday Night Open Thread

Thursday Night Open Thread

by | 197 Comments

This post is in: 

I’ve been in a touch of a mood the past few days, and this article goes a long way to explaining why:

Whether I am engaging with the news, or with Musk tweeting constantly like a man with no job or friends, or with Zuckerberg sending out weird videos and appearing on Rogan, I am in pain. Not just because I don’t like what they are doing but because they are so incredibly, painfully cringe.

I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.

I’ve always been someone who cannot tolerate embarrassment. I hate being embarrassed more than just about any other emotion and I’ve always skipped content based on cringe humour like Meet the Parents, Borat or Nathan for You. It makes my skin crawl and it makes the contents of my stomach try to crawl out of my mouth. But I cannot skip world events.

I just wish they would give us a fucking number. How much money do you need until you will fuck off and leave us alone. Go buy an island and do ketamine and disappear.

I’m just so fired of being fucked with by these guys. Meanwhile, this fucking jackass:

It’s clear that more time is needed to find an American buyer for TikTok.

We will continue working to keep TikTok alive, protect content creators’ livelihoods, protect against CCP surveillance, and protect national security.

I will work with the Trump Admin to find a solution.

— Chuck Schumer (@schumer.senate.gov) January 16, 2025 at 1:06 PM

Man, if only you had been in charge of the Senate and could have done something to stop it from being banned. Fucking dipshit.

Look, I am not here to debate the merits of the tiktok ban for national security reasons, and the reason I am not is because I have no information. The reason I have no information is because these motherfuckers decided not to tell us, just that it needed to be banned. So they rushed and banned it, and now, with Americans saying fuck you and leaving tiktok before the ban to flock two Red Note, an actual Chinese app:

As a TikTok ban looms, hundreds of thousands of Americans casting about for a new video-sharing app have migrated to Xiaohongshu, a social media platform that translates as “Little Red Book,” the American nickname for a classic compendium of quotations from Chairman Mao. It has all played out like a global practical joke on the American government: Threatened with exile from TikTok over concerns of Chinese interference, its users have simply scrolled to a different Chinese app, one whose name evokes the Chinese Communist Party.

If, in fact, tiktok is doing all sorts of illegal data collection, the thing that would have made sense to me is to state what they were doing that was so bad, and then ban those methods and apply them across the board to ALL apps. But they didn’t because what they wanted to do was to just rush it through, ban it, and give a boost to domestic apps, which have been every bit as abusive with your data as anything the Chinese want to do. How do I know that? Because actual functioning government bodies have proven it in Europe.

Has anyone at FB paid a price for the Cambridge Analytica stuff in 2016? The Russian disinfo campaigns. The Covid bullshit? The militia organizing. The targeting of lgbtq+ and POC? Fuck no. What about the crdit agencies and their weekly data leaks? And on and on and on.

So, yeah. You played yourself Schumer and the rest of you dipshits. When people ask “What can China do with my data that you fucking already haven’t let Zuckerberg and Musk and Google and the rest of these chucklefucks already do?” and you have no answer, it speaks volumes. And you deserve to be ignored. And this isn’t even getting into the crypto bullshit, the AI bullshit, and the NFT nonsense.

Fucking hell. Even fucking apple in their latest update turn on AI learning on every fucking app and gave no way to turn it off without individually going to every app on your phone. Fuck them all.

Like I said, I am in a mood.

Reader Interactions

197Comments

  1. 1.

    Jacqueline Squid Onassis

    The only tiny bit of a sign of a fragment of a silver lining is that most of these sociopathic billionaires are going to ruin their own finances if they get their way.

    I’ve been calling these folks losers for years because they clearly are.  I mean, I question every social interaction I have after it’s done and I have confidence that I’m not nearly the weird, creepy losers these guys all are.

  3. 3.

    wenchacha

    Along with all you have mentioned, I read the articles about Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro, and I have been coughing since before Christmas.

    January 20 is going to feel like January 6, 2021. Zombie hordes scale the Capitol, but this time they succeed.

  5. 5.

    AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team

    Same.

    I remember being happy earlier today, but not atm.

    Fk all these assholes. WTF.

  6. 6.

    Baud

    So they rushed and banned it,

    Did they rush? I remember it being discussed for quite a while before it passed.

  12. 12.

    tobie

    I haven’t followed the whole TikTok debate because I don’t have the bandwidth for it. It’s a social media app I will never use. But I did read that Mark Cuban wants to start a version of TikTok based on Bluesky’s AT protocol. We live an an era of super rich media owners. At least Cuban is on the side of Dems, as best I can tell.

  13. 13.

    Kayla Rudbek

    I was in an absolutely horrible mood earlier today. I was up at 0-dark-thirty to catch a plane out of DC, flight ran late so we were bumped off out connecting flight in Atlanta and there’s only one flight a day from Atlanta to the final destination.  So we would

  15. 15.

    TBone

    Try cleaning up after two vomiting males, one a cat.  And poop too.  Thank teh gawds for steam cleaner upholstery attachment & Oxi carpet shampoo hahahaha

  17. 17.

    hrprogressive

    They didn’t ban the methods because the methods benefit all their wealthy corprofascist American & Russian friends. They simply “banned the app owned by China” because it was quite literally a Red Herring.

    I don’t use TikTok, I find the mere concept to be quite literally the definition of “brainrot” that has come into our lexicon these days. But the idea of this type of government overreach is the type of thing that should have scared most freedom-loving Americans, except, it didn’t, because we’ve quite literally all been under the Panopticon for quite literally a generation at this point, thanks to all the Bush-II Era COINTELPRO and ATT and that orange door and/or whatever else they’ve been doing under FISA and so on and so forth, to say nothing of any other clandestine activities that happened before then.

    At this point, simply trying to be prepared for surviving the worst should it happen is about all I care about at this point.

  18. 18.

    Ohio Mom

    I can’t bear paying attention to the news anymore. Maybe I’ll adjust. If you notice my absence, don’t worry, I am binging on dumb YouTubes.

  19. 19.

    Scout211

    Same Cole, same.  Sigh.

     

    TikTok is spending $50,000 on an inauguration party honoring influencers who helped Donald Trump spread his campaign message, according to the party organizer — and it’s scheduled for Sunday, the deadline for the company to spin off from its China-based owner or be banned in the U.S.

    . . .

    In a sign of Trump’s close ties to the company, CEO Shou Zi Chew will be seated at the dais of Trump’s inauguration.

    This is my shocked face.

  20. 20.

    Old School

    @Baud:

    Did they rush? I remember it being discussed for quite a while before it passed.

    Republicans added it to a Ukraine/Israel funding bill.

    That’s how it passed.

  22. 22.

    TBone

    Dated 2021 (includes a short history).

    wired.com/story/tiktok-data-privacy/

    TikTok knows the device you are using, your location, IP address, search history, the content of your messages, what you’re viewing and for how long. It also collects device identifiers to track your interactions with advertisers. TikTok “infers” factors such as your age range, gender and interests based on the information it has about you. In the US, TikTok can collect biometric information including face and voiceprints.

    TikTok has also faced criticism based on ByteDance’s Chinese origins. In 2020, TikTok was banned by the Indian government, while former US president Donald Trump also moved to outlaw the app – a decision later reversed by president Joe Biden. TikTok denies the Chinese government can access people’s data.

  23. 23.

    gene108

    @hrprogressive:

    But the idea of this type of government overreach is the type of thing that should have scared most freedom-loving Americans,

    I think the people that might’ve cared were tuned out spending all their time on TikTok.

  24. 24.

    Quinerly

    I have to drop this tidbit here. What a coincidence!

    Peter Wolf (of J Geils) fame came up in last night’s thread. I then mentioned how great his last 2-3 solo albums had been. (Seriously, check out Sleepless and Midnight Souvenirs) Plus, he has done 2 great NPR interviews in the last 15 years.

    Peter posted on his page today:

    “So sorry to hear of the passing of David Lynch. I remember him fondly when we roomed together as students at The Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. My condolences to his family.”

    Makes me love the ex Mr. Faye Dunaway even more.

    Several of the commenters mentioned Peter talked about rooming with Lynch in at least one of the NPR interviews (probably Terry Gross/Fresh Air).

    Have a great evening, Jackels.

  25. 25.

    Another Scott

    Hang in there JC.

    Meanwhile, … NPR.org:

    ICE estimates it would need $26.9 billion to enforce GOP deportation bill
    January 16, 20256:25 PM ET

    Ximena Bustillo

    [ image – Detainees do a virtual visit with their attorneys or asylum officers at the Port Isabel Detention Center hosted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Harlingen Enforcement and Removal Operations center on June 10, 2024 in Los Fresnos, Texas. ]

    The Homeland Security Department is warning lawmakers in Congress that a proposed immigration enforcement bill would cost $26.9 billion to implement in its first year and “would be impossible for [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to execute within existing resources.”

    The Senate is currently weighing amendments on the Laken Riley Act, which would direct federal immigration enforcement to detain and deport anyone in the U.S. without legal status if they have been charged, arrested or convicted of burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting.

    The bill passed the House last week with more Democratic support than the previous time the body voted on it. The bill has been broadly seen as a marker emphasizing Washington’s focus on immigration and border security as President-elect Donald Trump is about to be inaugurated.

    Some Senate Democrats are giving the measure a chance. This week, a bipartisan set of procedural votes opened up the measure to further debate and changes.

    But the agency in charge of carrying out the potential new law warns that it may physically not be able to.

    New estimates from an internal ICE document obtained and verified by NPR show that the agency would need 110,000 more detention beds and over 10,000 enforcement and removal operations personnel to increase apprehensions, detentions and removals. More than 7,000 additional attorneys and support personnel would also be needed to handle immigration proceedings, according to the estimates.

    […]

    Best wishes,
    Scott.

  27. 27.

    sab

    @Ohio Mom: Oh Gawd. My husband is watching tv shows (he says) that will make him as stupid as Trumpers.1950s sitcoms. I can’t stand going near the tv lately. Also  Three Stooges, Seinfeld, Friends, and Dragnet. Emergency. Adam 12.

  30. 30.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Kayla Rudbek: to continue the story, we were bumped from our connecting flight while we were in the air and in transit to Atlanta. Since the delay from leaving National Airport was Delta’s fault, they are paying for our hotel and meal vouchers (only one flight per day from Atlanta to our final destination).

    My regular clothes and most of my carefully selected craft project supplies are in the checked luggage which is still at the Atlanta airport.  I do have something to wear for the trip tomorrow and Mr. Rudbek has received the short lecture on tactics versus logistics (he will get the longer lecture in great detail, although I suppose that it was a rookie mistake on my part to not have a second project in the Handbag of Holding and to let him pack the checked bag in the car the night before. Next time I bring a toothbrush, small deodorant, and a second craft project in the Handbag of Holding).

    And I was also in a bad mood because I lost one earring at TSA at National (I wore the wrong ones to travel in, too flimsy with respect to coming out of my ears). So it took a good dinner and vegan flourless chocolate cake to get me into a better mood tonight.

    I do have one craft project in the Handbag of Holding and I should probably pace myself on it so that I have something left for the flight tomorrow. I should suggest that the Atlanta airport add a craft supply store (yarn and needlework, no paint or carving tools) in order to soothe angry customers. Reykjavik airport sells yarn and needles and the yarn at the duty-free store is the cheapest thing you can buy in Iceland..

  34. 34.

    sentient ai from the future

    For a while the maker community had a slogan, “if you can’t open it, you don’t own it” targeted at apple when they started just making everything encased in epoxy.

    AI is aggressively anti-this. Not only can’t you open it, noone else can either.

    So I dunno how anyone expect ts to ever do any troubleshooting, or extract problematic prompts from the models

  38. 38.

    jonas

    Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan — all obscenely rich sons of bitches. But at least they were goddamn men who knew how to order a steak and had a sense that they owed the country that made them so wealthy something useful in return and made enduring contributions to the commonwealth with their fortunes. What the fuck are Zuckerberg and Musk? Pair of weenie-ass, petulant dorks with history’s most punchable faces.

    We produce the most pathetic titans these days. It’s as if an ancient Greek warrior got frozen in time and upon awakening found that the badass statue of Zeus he was used to venerating had been replaced with a cheap effigy of Urkel. But who was stupid and cruel.

  39. 39.

    zhena gogolia

    Read Milan Kundera about kitsch (the old-fashioned word for cringe). It’s very compatible with fascism.

  41. 41.

    TBone

    @Ohio Mom: my hubby has taken to watching Michael Landon in all of his various forms for some reason: Bonanza, Little House, Highway to Hell…

  42. 42.

    jonas

    @TBone:  TikTok knows the device you are using, your location, IP address, search history, the content of your messages, what you’re viewing and for how long. It also collects device identifiers to track your interactions with advertisers.

    My assumption is that virtually every site or social media app you use does this. Is TikTok any different? Or is it merely the notion that the CCP *may*, theoretically, be able to access this stuff? Frankly I’m starting to get less concerned about what China may do with data like this and what clearly unhinged wannabe fascists in our own country like Zuckerberg and Musk and Thiel want to do with it.

  44. 44.

    Miss Bianca

    @jonas: Yep. Can’t believe how the modern breed of oligarchs are making guys like Carnegie, Rockefeller et al look like *good guys* by comparison.

  46. 46.

    banditqueen

    The oligarchs are desperate to keep making money, for centuries if they can find the best drug combo. If they aren’t  wearing high school clothing and carrying around skate boards (‘hello, fellow billionaires’), they’re taking anabolic steroids, testosterone, or soaking in blood baths (so literal/so metaphorical), shooting up antibiotics, and getting ketamine high–the list is endless when your cash is endless. Think of all the girls they can marry, children they can test tube, planets they can destroy. They’re trapped in their own dusty, cobwebby brains and can’t see that all they do is anything at all to make a buck, from bending the knee to…him and then telling everyone else they should do the same. Vile people.

  47. 47.

    sentient ai from the future

    @jonas: the CCP, like russia and the DPRK, wold just exfiltrate the data fb etc al collect.

    Much easier, and it’s not like those shitbirds would say boo about it, they would go to the wall to deny a breach to the EU

  49. 49.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    @TBone:  Have you heard this one?  I came across it about a year ago and I am pretty obsessed with it.  I saw Beck in 1995 at U of R in Rochester and it was fucking awesome.  He was an amazing showman.  youtube.com/watch?v=pyCkhPTU13w

    I still have not watched any cable or network news since the Election.  What’s the fucking use?

    Edited due to wrong college.  And it was March of 97.

  51. 51.

    cmorenc

    @Jacqueline Squid Onassis: i

    True, the sociopathic billionaires may end up screwing up their own fortunes, but in doing so they will likely take down their own fortunes stock-market invested retirement accounts of millions of citizens, Trump voters and Harris voters alike.  Even if they are only indirectly invested via mutual funds or even eg whole life (the ultimate value of which is made up by insurance companies investing the premiums paid in.  If only these bastards weren’t coupled in with the health of the whole economy, even though none has but a modest individual share.

  52. 52.

    Sister Golden Bear

    I’m in a mood today as well. Two well-known, well-loved, performers in one of my communities died this week unexpectedly and far too young. I knew both of them. The second one died of suicide after years of mental health struggles, which were untreated because she was a literal starving artist and couldn’t afford to get care. Just devastating.

  55. 55.

    Starfish (she/her)

    @Baud: They wasted their time with this nonsense when they could have written us a national version of the CCPA so we could all ask these companies to delete us, AND they would have to do it.

  56. 56.

    Sister Golden Bear

    I posted about this downstairs, but since we’re on the subject of cringe techbros, this is a great essay about why they’re so cringe.

    tl;dr: at heart their really tech posers rather than nerds. They want nerd cool, but don’t actually want to put in the work to develop the expertise that actual nerds do.

    Dorks, like nerds, care a lot, but what they care about is how they’re perceived. Like nerds, dorks tend to be men who lack social skills. They have also experienced a lot of rejection. However, they lack the expertise of nerds because they were more focused not just on fitting in, but on dominating….

    What cannot be cool is sweaty desperation, and Musk walks around drenched in flop sweat 24/7. He visibly cares too much about how he is perceived while he cares so little about actually developing the expertise he wants you to see that even non experts can often see through him. Sure, he fools a lot of people, but like Trump, he’s not fooling the people he wants to fool. Musk brags a lot about what he could have done but didn’t do because it’s easier to say you could have done something than to do it. And people who did those things can tell that he doesn’t know anything about them. Nerds get PhDs. Dorks brag about getting accepted into a PhD program they never attended or about dropping out of a good college. Being accepted at all proves that they are worthy even though they never did the work.

  57. 57.

    noncarborundum

    I cringe when I see or hear “cringe” used as an adjective. Is there any hope for me?

  58. 58.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Sister Golden Bear: yes, a true nerd doesn’t care what other people think of them so long as they and everyone else in the room knows/acknowledges that they’re an expert in something, e.g. ancient weaving techniques, the Klingon language, medieval beer recipes, etc, and a true nerd is also very easy to get going on the topic(s) that they nerd out about, and will have Opinions that they go on for days about. And I’m an intellectual property attorney so I have spent most of my professional career dealing with nerds, and it could be argued that I am a nerd (my sibling would say that I am the undisputed Nerd Queen).

  61. 61.

    artem1s

    @jonas: you don’t know shit about JD Rockfeller. He was Scrooge x1M. It took the third generation failson, Nelson before the family started to recognize how impoverished the rest of the country was and start to throw a few pennies of their wealth to the poors. Up to that point, their ‘charitable’ giving was essentially land deals with various municipal, state and federal governments to avoid having to pay taxes.

    Here is what Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in his decision for Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States

    “All who recall the condition of the country in 1890 will remember that there was everywhere, among the people generally, a deep feeling of unrest. The nation had been rid of human slavery, fortunately, as all now feel,—but the conviction was universal that the country was in real danger from another kind of slavery sought to be fastened on the American people; namely, the slavery that would result from aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations controlling, for their own profit and advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country, including the production and sale of the necessaries of life”

    Rockefeller was just as horrible as Elmo or Fuckerberg. He just didn’t have the internet to trumpet it out to the whole world what an asshole robber baron he was.

  65. 65.

    KatKapCC

    @Kayla Rudbek: (Trying this again because now it won’t let me use any formatting in my other reply.)

    Many years ago, some friends and I were trying to differentiate between nerds, geeks, and dorks. YMMV as far as how it holds up but what we came up with was:

    • A nerd knows they’re uncool and doesn’t care
    • A geek knows they’re uncool and wishes they weren’t
    • A dork knows they’re uncool and makes it their key personality trait
  71. 71.

    KatKapCC

    @Sister Golden Bear: I’m so sorry to hear this. Losing someone is hard enough, but when you know it likely could have been prevented if we lived in a society that actually valued human life and well-being…

  72. 72.

    prostratedragon

    @Quinerly:

    Oh no. Just finished a Twin Peaks rewatch last week. Will start another on Feb. 23. We met and had an interesting chat years ago. Godspeed, sir.

  74. 74.

    Spanky

    I see JD Vance is on the back of my milk carton. Where the fuck is that guy? Still in Moscow getting final training and instruction?

  75. 75.

    Old School

    @Baud:

    But it was talked about for months

    If not years.  It seems to me the campaign to do so went on for a long time.

    It’s not clear to me if the Democrats had a stance on TikTok or they just didn’t see it as worth holding up funding.

  79. 79.

    Gretchen

    @noncarborundum: No worries. It’s nearly out of style. You can just wait for the next word meaning the same thing. I was trying to think of a timeless word for that – embarrassing? Icky? Creepy?

  82. 82.

    Gretchen

    @Sister Golden Bear: I’m sorry to hear that. It’s harder when it’s unexpected, harder when it’s someone too young, harder when it might have been preventable. I’m sorry you’re experiencing something with layers of hard.

  83. 83.

    sentient ai from the future

    @Sister Golden Bear: fucking elmo makes a big show of Iaian M Banks Culture names for spacecraft and shit, but has clearly never read the books because the Culture is a literal goddamn pansexual transgender luxury space communism.

    he’s also publicly mangled the princess bride quotes, which no self respecting nerd would ever allow themselves to do.

     

    i also would be remiss if i didnt note, in this discussion that has included Saved By The Bell references, that Dustin Diamond, “Screech”, stabbed a guy, did a bid in jail for it, and died pretty young.

  85. 85.

    MobiusKlein

    I might be a geek, dork, and nerd.   Depends on who you ask.

    Saying “I went to college with the guy who wrote Bash” probably qualifies me on all counts

  88. 88.

    oldster

    A little sliver of good news —

    Skum’s latest rocket done blowed up. Again. He’s now 0 for 7 on this model.

  89. 89.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Kayla Rudbek:

    he will get the longer lecture in great detail

    That’s a great plan. Men really appreciate long, detailed lectures about things they did wrong.

  90. 90.

    Spanky

    Also too, the Monday forecast continues to be refined:

    Accumulating snow could fall Sunday before brutal cold on Inauguration Day

    … After the storm passes, temperatures are poised to drop to their lowest since at least Christmas Eve 2022. And if there’s accumulating snow Sunday, the cold will be even more intense.
    The worst of the cold is expected between Inauguration Day and Wednesday. The temperature during Monday’s presidential swearing-in ceremony may only be in the low 20s, with wind chills near 10. And if there’s considerable fresh snow cover, temperatures will probably be closer to 20 with wind chills in the single digits. These are even lower temperatures than during Barack Obama’s bitter-cold inauguration in 2009.

  92. 92.

    Baud

    @Spanky:

    These are even lower temperatures than during Barack Obama’s bitter-cold inauguration in 2009.

     

    The crowd size kept folks warm.

  94. 94.

    CaseyL

    @Sister Golden Bear: My god, that’s awful.  I am so sorry.

    I hate hearing anyone say the US, or society, or any collective noun, “values human life.”  It is abundantly clear that we do not, and amounts to an insult to one’s intelligence when someone makes that claim.

  95. 95.

    TBone

    @Gin & Tonic: but but but that’s also my specialty and hubby lurves me for it (first time I have evah typed loves that way, it skeeves me).  I don’t know why he stays here some days…oh, right – I’ma great cook!

  97. 97.

    noncarborundum

    @TBone: I actually know enough Latin to know that the phrase is nonsense. I had a go once at an actual translation, and came up with “Noli nothos sinere te terere”, which has absolutely no pizzazz whatever, so noncarborundum it is

  101. 101.

    Jackie

    @Baud:

    These are even lower temperatures than during Barack Obama’s bitter-cold inauguration in 2009.

     

    The crowd size kept folks warm.

    I sincerely hope the FFOTUS reads this blog!

  104. 104.

    noncarborundum

    @TBone: I went to a school that first offered modern foreign languages in ninth grade, but started Latin in eighth grade.  I was eager to learn a foreign language, so I elected Latin as soon as I could (I then started French the next year, and let me tell you, knowing even first-year Latin was helpful in picking up French grammar).  I did 5 full years of Latin in jr. and sr. high, to the point that I can almost read Latin poetry if I have a great deal of time to devote to it, and access to a good distionary.

  108. 108.

    dnfree

    @wenchacha: Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro, seconded.  I just took their books off my shelves.  We know a used book store that supports a domestic violence agency, and that’s where those books are going, just because I just can’t bring myself to throw out books.

  109. 109.

    Soprano2

    Come sit beside me. I had to call the lab where hubby’s blood work is done to find out why they didn’t do the tests for his doctor’s visit today when they drew his blood a week ago Wednesday. Evidently if two docs have ordered tests they do the oldest orders unless you tell them specifically to do all of them. At least I didn’t yell at them for 1 1/2 hours like I did with AT&T. I’m supposed to have our phone turned back on tomorrow.

  110. 110.

    Gretchen

    I foolishly read that NYT article about the 12 men who voted for Trump that Betty Cracker said she wanted to wrap them up in a Cybertruck and throw them in a volcano, if I recall correctly. If anything, that was an understatement. And of course they don’t allow comments. The gist of it is that Trump is a « man’s man », who says what he thinks around a coffee table. He wouldn’t deign to talk to you idiots, and since when does a « man’s man » wear a girdle, heels, makeup, and an elaborate, Liberace-style bleached and swirled hair-do? What are they seeing that I’m not seeing?

  112. 112.

    TONYG

    @Gretchen: Their definition of a “man’s man” is “a man who will keep women and non-white people in their place”.  It’s that simple.

  114. 114.

    Quinerly

    @prostratedragon:

    Read on Wiki that his divorce settlement agreement from his last wife hasn’t been completely finalized. Final decree had not been issued at the time of his death. She filed in 2023.

    He started smoking at age 8. Stopped when diagnosed with emphysema in 2022. Has been on supplemental oxygen for a few years. Just before he died he was evacuated to his daughter’s because of the wildfires. He died at his daughter’s.

    His Wiki page has a lot of updates.

  115. 115.

    Timill

    @Gretchen:

    since when does a « man’s man » wear a girdle, heels, makeup, and an elaborate, Liberace-style bleached and swirled hair-do?

    Since Prinny? Beau Brummell would give him the cut direct…

  116. 116.

    WTFGhost

    @jonas: I always thought the way to fix TikTok was to fix privacy.  If it’s so dangerous for furriners to have all that data, it’s too dangerous for anyone to have it. What, you think China won’t get it, eventually, if they’re willing to pay enough for it?

  119. 119.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Sister Golden Bear: Angela Collier recently posted a long video about how so many of these guys specifically brag about how they could have studied physics or wanted to study physics, because physics is apparently the most geniusy of sciences. They throw around Richard Feynman’s name a lot, go on about quantum whatever.

    Collier, who is a physicist, asked, look, you’re a billionaire, you can do what you want, why don’t you just study physics? But they don’t, they just want the genius cachet.

    youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA

  120. 120.

    catclub

    @sab: What of this do the US apps not also collect?

     

    The point is that the Chinese owned one might give the data – for instance locations of US special forces – to the chinese government.

    If the app (or its owner) could only give it to the US government, then the US government would not have banned it.

  121. 121.

    Jackie

    @oldster:

    Skum’s latest rocket done blowed up. Again. He’s now 0 for 7 on this model.

     

    “It blew up,” biologist Daniel Schneider wrote on Bluesky. “Elon Musk. It. Blew. Up. Starship exploded.” He later shared a photo circulating social media of a colorful array of fireballs falling from the sky and added: “Who knew that when Space X Starship explodes it looks like an LGBQT pride flag.”

  124. 124.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @CaseyL:

    I hate hearing anyone say the US, or society, or any collective noun, “values human life.”  It is abundantly clear that we do not, and amounts to an insult to one’s intelligence when someone makes that claim.

    Yeah, the worst part was watching her slowly get ground down by one damn thing after another. I’m devastated, but not surprised, it was like one of those nightmares where you can see the accident coming but are powerless to stop it.

  125. 125.

    Citizen Dave

    Comparing the rich techboys’ cringe with Meet the Parents, Borat,  and Nathan for You is very strange to me.  All of these things are very different from the other three things.

  132. 132.

    randy khan

    All you actually need to know about the Chinese government and TikTok is that the government, not TikTok, issued a statement dismissing a proposed solution involving a sale.  The government would rather let TikTok die than give it up.

    But also there are some interesting studies comparing TikTok to other social media platforms and finding that it suppresses content the Chinese government doesn’t like and elevates content the government does like.  If that’s happening, it’s not hard to imagine the government’s also getting access to user data.

  133. 133.

    TBone

    @noncarborundum: waaay cool!  What a great school!  I love language and am a tiny bit jealous.  We were only given a choice of French, German, or Spanish.  I chose German at my parents’ urging.

  134. 134.

    Harry

    TikTok data collection is certainly not any worse than what Meta/Facebook/Instagram and Xitter do. X is definitely a greater national security risk because of its large quantity of porn. It would be easy to blackmail someone if you know their porn habits.

  138. 138.

    Sherparick

    @TBone: Also, why should the Chinese Govt. need Tik-Tok to gather data on Americans since they have backed into OPM, SSA, & pretty much all 3 credit reporting agencies.

  141. 141.

    cain

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    I’ve really started to hate this country for how badly we treat our vulnerable.

    I’m paying more in taxes, but the service is the same. We should be doing universal healthcare.

  142. 142.

    rikyrah

    The final days of TikTok have been hilarious.

    The way that people are just being completely unserious, while making the point of why the ban is BULLSHYT…

    Some of the best videos.

     

    I wrote about it earlier today.

    All a scam and a fraud.

    The anger of the people is that they believe the House and Senate pissed all over them, and are trying to gaslight them into believing that it’s water.

    They know the ban was brought under completely false pretense.

  145. 145.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @randy khan: The study you are probably referring to failed to consider the very different demographics (& therefore their interests) on TikTok versus Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Furthermore, the study accumulated data on posts critical of the CPC regime going back to the early ’10s, for most of that time TikTok was not yet a significant presence on the international social media landscape.

    Members of Congress were on the record stating that the sudden impetus for rushing forward w/ the divestment or ban legislation was that TikTok was the only social media platform where the pro-Palestinian voices were dominant, & that is just not acceptable to most of the political establishment in the US, & could only have bee the result of a CPC regime influence operation.

    If TikTok is really the dire threat to US natsec, Schumer would not be saying what he is saying. Instead, he would be raking Trump over the coals for the obviously corrupt motives behind the latter’s attempt to circumvent the legislation & keep TikTok alive in the US market.

    BTW, the Biden Administration has also planned to carve out exceptions for so that the State Department can conduct “public diplomatic outreach” on TikTok even after it is banned in the US:

    Biden Administration Quietly Carves TikTok Ban Loophole for Itself, Leaked Document Shows
    TikTok ban for thee but not for me
    KEN KLIPPENSTEIN
    JAN 15, 2025

    & this is just the overt efforts.

    Then again, this kind of hypocrisy is par for the course for governments. Plenty of PRC government organs are on Twitter & YouTube to get their messages out to international audiences, even though these platforms are banned in the PRC (or more precisely, the PRC created conditions where international platforms do not find it financially worthwhile to operate in the country).

  146. 146.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @rikyrah: It is telling that so many Americans are willing to sample a completely unknown (to them) platform catered to & populated by an overwhelming foreign community that speak a foreign language, that had (& still has) limited functions in English (no native translation capability, yet), not to mention one that has to operate under the full restrictions of a hard authoritarian regime, just to avoid Meta products & raise the middle finger to the DC politicians (of both parties).

    The alienation & illegitimacy of the status quo, of the current institutions & elites, in the eyes of many younger plebs of all backgrounds, is something the political & economic elites in the US (including many elected Dems) have not yet come to terms w/. Are these people harming their self-interest by not voting or voting for 3rd party? Absolutely. But berating & belittling them achieve nothing.

  147. 147.

    No One of Consequence

    @NotMax: and there went 50 or so well-spent minutes. Thanks for linking that, you’re right, forgot about this one. Thanks man,
    -NOoC

  148. 148.

    ArchTeryx

    @Sister Golden Bear: I’m so sorry to hear you had to go through that – and so did they. It’s part of why I created the community I have… to support folks that suffer from mental disabilities so they are never alone. It’s not a panacea and not a substitute for actual therapy and psychiatric help, but it is far better than nothing, and we try and help folks find resources they need.

    We protect one another. It’s the best we can do in these terrible times. *HUG

  149. 149.

    YY_Sima Qian

    As for what is currently happening on RedNote, David Fishman has a good summary:

    David Fishman
    @pretentiouswhat·12h

    Glenn makes some solid comments here about the wave of non-Chinese RedNote/Xiaohongshu users. I esp. agree on the part at the end, about paying attention to who’s trying to gatekeep this, and thinking why they want to do that. Besides that, I had some other thoughts…

    …One thing that has really struck me while observing this unfold over the last few days, and spending an embarassing amount of time surfing RedNote/ Xiaohongshu,is the sheer variety of people checking out XHS right now. They represent much more diversity than I have in my personal or professional circles, which means I’m learning how other people encounter and engage with China, in a totally fresh way for me…

    Like basically all the people I know professionally are in the Sinosphere already, or in the energy sector. If I go back to college friends, it may be people outside my professional space, but they’re college educated white collar professionals with similar backgrounds…

    But right now on XHS there’s American construction workers and single moms and grandmas and people who deliver mail, black, white, queer, bi, everything. All of them engaging with citizens of China in a way I wouldn’t even think to, asking questions that would never occur to me.

    So I think that’s cool – that a huge group of Americans (and other countries, but mostly Americans) that wouldn’t normally have any reason to be “in the Sinosphere” are so enthusiastically taking advantage of the opportunity to engage with China in this way. Very heartening.

    And as Chinese social media platforms go, XHS is the softest possible landing they could get. The Chinese userbase on there skews young, urban, educated, liberal, and female (obviously not all, just on average). They aren’t necessarily getting the most diverse or representative sample of China, but they’re encountering one that is very likely to receive them warmly, greet them in English, want to engage, answer their questions, ask lots of questions of their own, and hope they’ll stick around. That’s a great scenario.

    Although it probably IS the most likely outcome, it would be a real bummer if China ends up pushing for XHS to be split into Chinese and international verions (like Douyin and Tiktok). Of course English content moderation (censorship) will be a huge resource-intensive task, and I could see that being the motivation to split the app. Before that happens, I hope the relevant bureaucrats get a good briefing on the quality of cultural and social exchanges happening on there right now, and what a boon it is for China. They didn’t really do anything to “earn” an influx of 1M open-minded Americans to suddenly flock to their friendliest, most receptive social media platform, asking Chinese people to educate them on “what things have we misunderstood about China?” This is a gift horse. The unforced error of the USG’s handling of TikTok made this happen. The worst thing they could do in response is commit their own unforced error…and shut it down.

    Fishman is a long time resident of Hong Kong & then Shanghai, & a great resource to follow for analyses on the energy sector in the PRC (including coal & green energy), as well as his brilliant travelogues through the well off the beaten paths parts (even for the vast majority of Chinese) of the country & insightful conversations w/ average Chinese people (far outside of the tiny slice of liberal/libertarian leaning urban elites that form the social circles of most foreign journalists & academics).

  153. 153.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    I’m sorry. I hadn’t read your post before now. I’m very sorry for your loss. Losing a friend is hard in a different way to losing older parents.

    The lack of proper mental health support isn’t confined to the US. It’s a fucking shambles here, and if we win in March, there are plenty of us who are going to ensure that the ALP lifts is game in this area.

    Once again, my condolences.

  154. 154.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @sab:

    @Aussie Sheila:

    You are both too kind.

    Like Fishman, in the last few days I have been spending an embarrassing amount of time on RedNote. The generally & genuinely sweet & wholesome interactions between Chinese & Americans (& other people from around the world) have often brought tears to my eyes. I am seeing videos of Chinese artisan who make the most elaborate Han/Tang Dynasty era hanfu (traditional dress) next to videos of American artisan making equally elaborate dresses from Louis XIV‘s court, grizzled Chinese artist playing erhu in a Suzhou courtyard next to an American band playing country music in a Nebraska cornfield next to Irish dancers tap dancing in a glen, firefighters from Chongqing & California & New South Wales bonding over their experiences, Chinese LGBT folks inviting American/Europeans ones to visit Chengdu & Chongqing (respectively the gay & lesbian capitals of the PRC), people around the world exchanging photos/videos of the scenery & foods of their countries/cultures, & people around the world admiring all of the above.

    Theoretically, all of this was possible on YouTube & Instagram, but the recommendation algorithms were only interested in reinforcing epistemic bubbles, & the vast majority of Chinese have not been motivated to obtain VPNs to go over the Great China Firewall & reach the international web.

    The RedNote algorithm was not better. Before, I had only used it occasionally for recipes, product reviews, & travel recommendations. There was a lot of suspect accounts promoting suspect products, lots of clickbait content, the usual consumerist drivel. It almost seems like RedNote changed their algorithm overnight, in response to the sudden influx of “TikTok refugees”, & started promoting content that celebrated Chinese culture, traditions, scenery, art & modern lifestyle, a boon to independent Chinese artists, artisans & content creators who had struggled to expand their audiences beyond niche communities w/in the PRC. Many Chinese users have commented sarcastically that “it feels like the holidays are here & there are guests from afar, so ‘mommy’ (as in RedNote) is finally taking out the good stuff she never let us eat before”.

    The years since 2018 or so have been rough on those of us trying to straddle & bridge the cross-Pacific divide, w/ the heightening geopolitical competition, the escalating trade/tech. wars, the beating of war drums, the pandemic cutting off people-to-people exchange, the worsening political dysfunction & rising xenophobia/nativism in the US, the hardening authoritarianism in the PRC, the increasing dire consequences of AGW, causing anxiety & dread in the background. The last few days on RedNote have been a breath of fresh air. Another common comment from Chinese users, for the fans of the Three Body Problem out there:”Don’t press the button Ye Wenjie! This world is salvageable, yet!”

    I don’t know how long the kumbaya will endure, whether USG or the CPC regime will move 1st to shut it off, whether Chinese or American users will be the 1st to blow it up, I am suspending my instinctual cynicism & rationalism to enjoy the moment for as long as it lasts.

  155. 155.

    Aussie Sheila

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    Well done. I avoid such sites and apps like the plague. I’m under no illusions about how all of them, without exception, hoover up personal data. It will be interesting to see whether the use of the app does anything to forestall the idiocy of another US led jihad, this time against the PRC.

    In this place in the warm up to another federal  election the trump lite idiot leading the LNP seems more invested in chasing after the anti Palestinian vote than the anti PRC vote. Probably because the business community and a number of key electorates aren’t quite so keen to follow in that latter folly. The former folly has little purchase here either, if truth be told.

    Christ almighty, the stupidity of democratic politics everywhere is a sight to behold. It’s simply beyond thunderdome.

    Who needs the PRC when western elite politics are so adamantly  determined to tip the cart over?

  156. 156.

    Ruckus

    @Jacqueline Squid Onassis:

    Very likely they will.

    BUT.

    They are going to do a lot of damage getting there and likely not only to themselves. They spend their money on things they think will make them more money – because of course money is the sole thing that is important in the entire universe. Or at least their entire universes. It seems like being a billionaire might just be enough for most people but no it seems they need the entire world revolving around the concept that they are rich, at least in the monetary concept. Ok sure, they seem to think the stick up their butt is the axis the world revolves around. It must be, they bought it and stuck it up there.

  157. 157.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Aussie Sheila:

    Oh and meeting with family and friends over Xmas was illuminating. If US political elites think middle class Australians will support a new ‘cold war’ with China, they are sadly mistaken. Nothing could be further from the truth.
    Middle class Australia is firmly of the view that the US is jealous of China’s success, and is firmly of the view that we won’t be dragged into a needless war with the PRC.

  159. 159.

    Aussie Sheila

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    Hard disagree.

    Humans build both and are responsible for both. That’s where good smart politics counts.

    People make history, under circumstances good and bad. That is the problem, because they don’t always understand the history they are reacting to, and the powerful always are ready to tell people stories.

  160. 160.

    sab

    @catclub:Seriously?

    Special forces are supposed to be highly trained adult professionals. If being on international social media is dangerous for them, perhaps they should stay off it, rather than shutting the whole thing down for everyone else.

    I know any number of adult professionals in various fields who self-govern their own conduct. It is sometimes just part of the job description.

  161. 161.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @YY_Sima Qian: I love this view of westerners and Chinese people having a warm cultural exchange on RedNote/ XHS. This is delicious. I love people asking, “what have we misunderstood about china?”

    thank you!

  162. 162.

    Aussie Sheila

    @sab:

    Exactly. If you can’t govern yourself to stay off dubious sites, you aren’t fit to be in any position of responsibility.
    JFC. I’m by no means a tech nerd, but I know better than to go to places where I know my personal info will be hoovered up. And that includes clicking on bullshit questionnaires and surveys.

    Christ some people are stupid.

  163. 163.

    sab

    @sab: I apologize to catclub for the four hour lapse between their comment and mine, making it unlikely they will be able to respond.

  164. 164.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Aussie Sheila: I don’t think we disagree that much, actually.

    It’s more sustainable when people who build and maintain whichever socio-political construct are alert to their own fallacies & the limitations of their constructs (& thus the eternal need to evolve w/ the times). However, there is a universal tendency to become triumphalist & complacent, & need to be smacked by reality again every few generations to relearn past lessons.

    Not to speak of the oppressed who are yet to escape from getting smacked by reality.

  165. 165.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Gloria DryGarden: Chinese people are learning about their (overly rosy or overly dark) misconceptions of the US & other countries, too.

    It’s healthy that people learn that other people are normal people w/ normal people problems/urges/pleasures, that other countries are normal countries w/ normal country problems.

    OK, maybe the US & the PRC are “normal” great powers w/ “normal” great power pathologies.

  166. 166.

    Aussie Sheila

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    Agree, except it’s often easier for people to agree with the powerful than to exercise their own common sense and often, their own material interests. The mark of a truly self governing people is the degree to which they feel comfortable deviating from the views and opinions of the socially and economically powerful!

    I’m very glad people are ‘meeting ‘ on the Red site. I’m happy they are exchanging views and ideas. But I’m under no illusions about either the US or the PRC regime. I detest both, truth be told.

    Note I said ‘regime’, not the people . Both peoples are sisters and brothers. But their regimes have this in common.
    They either prevail, or no one will.

  167. 167.

    sab

    @Aussie Sheila: Lots of ordinary people have interests contrary to what the prevailing government groupthink thinks.

    My sister will probably be furious for me dragging her in. She loves Chinese culture. She has followed it for almost sixty years, probably since before Nixon went to China. My dad too. Also his first cousin, who collected Chinese art. She has taught Chinese Art History at a state university for her whole career. Her Chinese immigrant husband has done the same at another state’s state university.

    Meanwhile, we in the US have had many hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrate here. Some stayed. Others went back. Most keep a foot in both cultures.

    As Biden ramps up his China issues (and PRC on its side does the same) I worry a lot about these many people with ties to both cultures. Do we really need another cold war breaking families apart

    ETA And of course going forward Trump has no policies other than what’s in it monetarily for Trumps.

  168. 168.

    Aussie Sheila

    @sab:

    Indeed. My grandfather was a WW1 veteran and came from a very ‘King and Country’ family. He had nothing but admiration for Chinese civilisation, and was acutely aware of the role imperialism played in its history. He wasn’t alone.

    If any US government thinks that Australian electorates as a whole fear and detest China, they are very much mistaken. After all, our future Prime Minister Gough Whitlam visited the PRC before Nixon.

    Australians don’t fear China. But they now fear the US.

  170. 170.

    YY_Sima Qian

    I saw it mentioned earlier on Twitter but had doubted the credibility, but WTF is this?

    Joe Biden will not enforce TikTok ban – leaving decision to Donald Trump
    The outgoing president will reportedly leave a decision over the future of TikTok in the US to president-elect Donald Trump, who will take over from Joe Biden in the Oval Office following his inauguration on Monday.
    Friday 17 January 2025 03:58, UK

    The effort to divest or ban TikTok was overwhelmingly bipartisan, & now the effort to “save” TikTok is also bipartisan.

    Is TikTok a natsec threat or not? Are Dems for rule of law or not? If it is indeed a natsec threat, why not enforce the current law, when the law is expected to be upheld unanimously by the SCOTUS (the slippery slope precedent such a decision would set for the 1st Amendments is another topic), instead of leaving it to the transparently incompetent & corrupt incoming Trump Administration?! If the purported threat is so unserious that a Dem administration can choose not to enforce the law & instead pass it off to an incoming bunch of malevolent & corrupt incompetents, then perhaps the Dems should not have participated in & legitimized the “Red Scare”/”Yellow Peril” farce/charade in the name of “national security” to start w/.

    The belated attempt by the DC politicians to “save” TikTok will only serve to alienate the disaffected TikTok user demographics even more, by proving their deep-seated cynicism right.

    Also, there are a lot of technical implementations to actually implement a ban, such as telling Apple & Google to remove TikTok from the App stores, & ending Oracle‘s business of storing the data of US TikTok users. Has any of the preparatory work been done, or did DC just expect ByteDance & the PRC government to fold?

  171. 171.

    Aussie Sheila

    @sab:

    I’m glad he did. Unfortunately the ‘popular’ Australian view re the US wasn’t reciprocated. Some of it was ridiculous. But some of it related to the fact that it was well known, including in my family, that the US took no Japanese prisoners in the war in the pacific.

    No one hated the Japanese more than my family whose male members fought them in New Guinea and Borneo. But to shoot pow’s was and is regarded, as beneath contempt. That is what began a deep seated scepticism among otherwise patriotic Australians towards US claims to ‘exceptional democratic values’.
    That scepticism has only increased over the decades.

    Australian fealty to the US is a mile wide and an inch deep.
    The US would be wise not to test it with a jihad against China.

    They will be in for a big surprise.

  172. 172.

    sab

    As Americans, we tend to lump “Communists” together. I think that is wrong.

    China has a four thousand year history of mostly competent government.

    Russia has a two thousand year history of mostly dreadful government. Even their few improvements (horse post system so the government could communicate across the country) was established by the Mongols.

    The US government sliding into a Cold War with China, when there is a comptetent government to talk to, just appalls me.

  173. 173.

    Aussie Sheila

    @sab:

    Well US jihads against foreigners is a good way of keeping an otherwise fissiparous polity together.

    Only this time it isn’t going to work abroad.

  174. 174.

    sab

    @Aussie Sheila: MacArthur was a war criminal. My father in law thought that, and he hated the Japanese ( part of troop training.)

    My own father liked the Japanese because his family had had prewar business contacts.

  175. 175.

    Aussie Sheila

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    Who knows? Who expects any rational real world based policy from US electeds? I don’t . They are without exception as to Party, as a whole, the most underprepared and under educated bunch of yahoos as any bunch of electeds outside actual dictatorships.

    The US is very badly served by both Parties re their elected pollies as a whole.

  176. 176.

    Aussie Sheila

    @sab:

    Well I think most Generals from that time were War criminals, not just MacArthur. But he wasn’t popular here I can tell you.

    As to the Japanese. My family didn’t buy a Japanese product until 2005. That’s how much they hated them. A lot of that was Japanese treatment of Australian PoWs and others of course. They were regarded by my family as savages, in a way they never regarded the Chinese.

  177. 177.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @sab: Well, there have been plenty of atrocious, malevolent & incompetent regimes in Chinese history, otherwise there would not have been so many revolts, civil wars & foreign invasions, all w/ massive bloodletting. & the Sino-Centric order that prevailed over E. Asia for millennia was never the benevolent construct that is in the minds of most Chinese elite & population.

    The crux of the matter is that the PRC poses a challenge to US primacy that Russia can no longer mount. As the majority of the US FP “Blob” (whatever their partisan sympathies) are motivated by preserving US primacy (which in reality has already been lost because the ROW has grown so much since the end of WW II & end of the Cold War 1.0), escalating geopolitical rivalry is not surprising.

    This not at all unique to the US as a great power, but par for the course in human history, hence the concept of a “Thucydides Trap“. The tragedy is that Chinese hegemony is not the only alternative to US hegemony. Indeed Chinese primacy (to the degree of the US’ unipolar moment post-Cold War 1.0) is impossible to realize even in the Asia Pacific, let alone the world, because the ROW is too powerful and has too much agency to be dominated by any one power, & the PRC’s neighbors are naturally inclined to hedge & balance against any potential PRC hegemony.

    What almost none of them will sign up for is attempting to contain the PRC’s rise, a containment strategy that will jeopardize their own economic prosperity & developmental objectives, & one that they understand is doomed to fail.

  178. 178.

    sab

    YY-Sima Qian: Thanks or putting a brake on my spat with Aussie Sheila the other night. I mostly like her input, and I was certainly over the line that night.

  179. 179.

    Aussie Sheila

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    Exactly and to the point.
    The US and more particularly the US electorate needs to understand before it’s too late. No one shares the US belief that only the US can be a dominant power in the Indo Pacific.

    It doesn’t mean everybody loves the PRC.

    It means no one loves the US more than their peace and safety.

  180. 180.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @sab: Don’t mention it. We all have those days where we just want to pick fights & lash out, whatever the cause.

  181. 181.

    sab

    @Aussie Sheila: And I agree we cannot be trusted to protect anyone’s peace and safety (we are a very unreliable ally) but our own, and I have doubts about whether we are even good at that.

  182. 182.

    Aussie Sheila

    @sab:

    Well protecting your own peace and safety depends on your own electeds and your electorate. But I can safely tell you this.
    If US liberals insist on blaming their own people for less than optimal election outcomes, then you will never obtain peace and security at home let alone abroad. US liberals need to look to themselves and their preferred political Party and improve both.

  185. 185.

    Matt McIrvin

    @YY_Sima Qian: I’ve mostly heard about this at one remove, through American Marxists crowing on other platforms about how the negation of American propaganda about the PRC will be the downfall of capitalism.

    And then my daughter, who has been watching all this intently, says, look, this is just people, it’s like the Chinese version of something between Pinterest and Instagram. (And rattles off some other Chinese social networks that she’s wondering why people aren’t flocking to instead.)

    I kind of think the crowing Marxists have odd ideas about China themselves but they’re different from American elite ideas about China (or perhaps the same, just in romantic inverse).

  187. 187.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kayla Rudbek: Yup, it’s this kind of fantasy cosplay. They could totally do all the homework in Jackson if they really wanted to!

    (apparently the 100th anniversary of his birth is coming up, someone posted a picture of the spine on Mastodon and there were people expressing PTSD)

  188. 188.

    TBone

    I’m thinking about making a Villain of the Week comment although I don’t know if I could follow through weekly.  The Inky brings up Jeff Yass today (registered Libertarian and wealthiest asshole in Pennsylvania) because of his Tik Tok connection.  So I read his Wiki section on Political Activities (again) and that inspired a naming of names – the Villain of the Week.  I’d concentrate mostly on the dragons that prefer to hide in their caves, lying on their hoards of gold and gems. If Wiki knows this much, I’m imagining what he does that we don’t know about. Starter:

    en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Yass

  189. 189.

    TBone

    @Sherparick: how should I know?  I don’t even use social media, I simply posted an article from 2021 because people were saying the Tik Tok SNAFU has been rushed through without information when the information has been available for years.

  190. 190.

    Dave

    For me one of the clearest but also most consistent grievances I have with the current moment is that it has made me appreciate Dick Cheney. He may be an evil twat waffle sewn together from Bond villain discards but at least he isn’t embarrassing.

  193. 193.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Dave: Angela Collier is one of the underrated stars of science YouTube; sometimes she does videos where she just works through a calculation of something, a bit of a niche interest. But her videos on sexism and harassment in physics are heartbreaking.

  194. 194.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Matt McIrvin: Yeah, well American Marxists (& Marxists generally) are a truly marginal breed struggling for any relevance at all, so not surprised that they are trying to latch on developments both world historical (such as the reemergence of China as a world power) & mundane (such as the current global kumbaya on RedNote) to assert their relevance.

    It is not surprising people disaffected from the status quo in their own countries would romanticize “greener pastures” abroad to serve as foils. I have seen disillusioned Chinese liberals/libertarians/conservatives do so w/ the West (& the US in particular) for decades, & now we are seeing disillusioned American Gen Zers do the same w/ aspects of the PRC they encounter.

    It is also true that Western governments & MSM often choose to focus on certain aspects of the PRC to the near total exclusion of others (& even then some of the claims are outright false), so that tend to leave a highly distorted impression among your average Westerner that only pays half attention (if any at all) to headlines w/ “China” in it. For example, there is no such thing as a dystopian “Social Credit System” in the PRC governing individuals. Even though the CPC regime does run one of the most pervasive, intrusive & sophisticated system of surveillance & censorship in the world that has plenty of dystopian aspects, it is still quite a ways from the sci-fi fantasy of Western imaginations & fears. Another example, the Belt & Road program is not “debt trap diplomacy”, even though the motivation is indeed selfish, the narrative promoted by the PRC government self-serving, & there have been plenty of goods, bads & uglies in its execution. Still another example, there is no physical genocide of Uyghurs & Tibetans, even though Uyghurs (especially) & Tibetans do suffer from persistent oppression & select members of these communities (activists, non-conforming intellectuals, separatists & religious fundamentalists, or people merely suspected of these tendencies) are specific targeted for persecution. Whether that amounts to cultural genocide is debatable, since there is no commonly accepted legal definition, but cultural repression is indisputable.

    There are a lot of high quality research in the West touching on all of these topics, but policymakers & politicians across the West persist w/ their preferred inflated narratives, instead of keeping to ones that are closer to reality but still plenty damning of the CPC regime, I can only conclude for reasons of domestic political (moral posturing) & geopolitical (Great Power Competition) expediency.

    Therefore, Westerners w/ vague but negative impressions of China are indeed shocked when they find that the slices of China they encounter themselves are nothing like those impressions. (Again, the Chinese user on RedNote are real & genuine, but still only representing a segment of the overall population.) Sinologists have warned for years that Western governments risk undermining their own credibility when they promote a relentlessly negative image of the PRC to their publics, despite the latter’s immense size, diversity & complexity. When your average Westerner is finally able encounter the complex & nuanced China that exists in real life, some/many are liable to overshoot & overlook the equally real bad & ugly aspects of China.

  197. 197.

    gluon1

    @artem1s: Thank you for saying this. We have somewhat obscured visions of Rockefeller and Carnegie because the things that remain, for most of us, are their palaces and Rockefeller Center and the libraries. We don’t see the farmers who starved to death because Rockefeller made it too expensive for them to ship their grain to market or the other families who starved because daddy dies in one of Carnegie’s forges. And I say We intentionally as I am subject to this failing, too, and needed the reminder.

    I did recall that Rockefeller was a puritanical dweeb and JP Morgan spent lots of money and time trying to prevent pictures that showed his disfigured nose, so the self-centered and self-conscious titan is not a new phenomenon.

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