Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

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

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Too little, too late, ftfnyt. fuck all the way off.

The lights are all blinking red.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

In after Baud. Damn.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

The National Guard is not Batman.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

I really should read my own blog.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: Whack *All* the Moles, Many Times!

Late Night Open Thread: Whack *All* the Moles, Many Times!

by | 85 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

I come from a culture that cherishes its grudges, so of course I like this framing:

COMPLAINT: trying to counter these guys is like playing whac-a-mole!
REALITY: Whac-a-mole is:
–fun for the folks holding the mallets
–rough going for the moles
–dumbass moles just keep on exposing themselves
–it's something a whole group can enjoy
–feels good inside to thwack an asshole

[image or embed]

— Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 6:10 PM

so much of media seems to think its primary job is to turn a spotlight on the hypocrisy of the audience's own pieties when its actual job is to hit a guy who made one million dollars turning puppies into mulch with a hammer five hundred times

— rev. howard arson (@theophite.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 2:12 AM

The voters asked for cheap eggs. Trump & Musk are the villains here

[image or embed]

— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 3:27 PM

Every time you run the blade across you cut the groove deeper

[image or embed]

— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 2:25 PM

With at least one target, it seems to be working…

im not mad, im laughing, actualy

[image or embed]

— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 12:19 PM

please dont put in the very platform that i own that i got mad.

— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 12:20 PM

Reader Interactions

85Comments

  1. 1.

    sab

    My family is very Irish diaspora. They came out right before the Famine, felt very lucky to have survived, and haven’t looked back since.

    But we are still epic at holding grudges.

  2. 2.

    Ten Bears

    My only regret is I am not on Shitter, have never been on Shitter hence cannot insult the inbred chimera on the very platform it owns. I’m OK with that, can live with that.

    Yes, it …

  3. 3.

    satby

    This must be the bat signal that got me out if bed at 3 am to read 😂

    Thanks, Anne Laurie, from a fellow grudge holder decendant.

  4. 4.

    sab

    @satby: My GGGreatgrandmother from Ireland had three sons. One married an Anglican (Episcopalian) with lots of Presbyterian ties. Another married a Jewish girl who became Episcopalian.  The third never married, and had a lifelong affair with a woman married to someone else.

    Irish Catholic mom disowned the two married sons (left each three dollars in dimes in her wiill: thirty pieces of silver like Judas) and loved her fornicating unmarried son  to the end.

    I don’t have a problem with the unmarried son and his mistress. I do have a problem with his hypocryticapal mom.

    Makes me think twice and three times when my Irish Catholic inlaws criticize anything we are up to.

  6. 6.

    moonbat

    Descendant of Scots here and also darn good at never forgiving and never forgetting. Frankly savoring the environment so rich in thin-skinned, fragile, and over-inflated male egos. I’ll be skewering for the rest of my life.

    As ever, so grateful for your posts, AL. I hope the pneumonia is clearing up quickly. We need you!

  9. 9.

    sab

    @SpaceUnit: Now that you asked, I have been thinking about it. So far no clue, other than the Irish thing. Which will always set me off.

    ETA Also too, anti-Trump who is stealing my country’s governance,which sets me off way more. That isn’t familial bigotry.That is heartfelt fear for country and patriotism.

  12. 12.

    sab

    @Matt McIrvin: I will never forgive Trump II voters, but I really don’t believe they wanted all of this.

    But they will believe the wrong/false lessons: Biden’s people let the Muskrats in, to damage stuff. ETA False stuff. Biden’s people were fired immediately to clear the way for Muskrats people to do this.

  13. 13.

    satby

    @sab: @SpaceUnit:  OMG you guys, it’s not about being Irish or grudges, other than it’s a humorous hook for the narrative about the long hard slog it is / will be to change the minds and penetrate the apathy of most of the normie population with better information. Read the quotes again, especially the Linkins and Chatham Harris one in answer to rev howard arson:

    Every time you run the blade across you cut the groove deeper

  15. 15.

    sab

    @satby: Point taken. (As I said, the Irish thing always sets me off. But it shouldn’t.

    ETA Also too, point taken without my excuses above.

  18. 18.

    satby

    So I guess the work of curating links to create a narrative thread is wasted. Far be it from me to speak for AL but what I got was:

    1. (Linkins) How frustrating the media/ people feel in trying to counter the crazy story lines, amplifying the Arson remark about reporting the similarities is worthwhile (pro-social activity);
    2. And, also the Harris skeet in answer to Sanchez reiterating who the real villains are vs. people who we’re (rightfully) angry with who voted (or didn’t vote at all) who brought us to this point. Because, even people who realized what the Project 2025 plan was didn’t anticipate the insanity of Musk and his rats doing what they’re doing now.

    That any help?

  19. 19.

    Geminid

    From Al Arabiya:

        The death toll from heavy winter storms in the central and eastern US has risen to at least 14, as floods, gale force winds snd bitterly cold temperatures sweep the region.

    I sure hope those poor Yankees will be ok! Oh that’s right, I’m a Yankee.

    Actually, it shouldn’t be too bad here in central Virginia. We’re supposed to get ~6″ of snow, lows in the teens. It’s alresdy rough north and west of us though. At least the sun is higher now and that will help melt the snow.

  20. 20.

    SpaceUnit

    How frustrating the media/ people feel in trying to counter the crazy story lines,

    You’re cute.

  21. 21.

    Gloria DryGarden

    Is this the thread where I post my cranky dark complaining poems, instead of the ones that are

    trying to balance -the dark with little spritzes of positive thought?

    I try to keep quiet about grudges, and suppress them, I try to not indulge them, and find something productive.
    at this point, I’d even be glad to have a house drop on my autocorrect, and watch it wither away like the wicked witch’s sister.
    You have no idea how many words it has substituted in for me tonight.

  23. 23.

    YY_Sima Qian

    The entire world has been heading toward a much more turbulent time, but now MAGA is rapidly accelerating the schedule, & its populist nativism is finding ready audience:

    Evan A. Feigenbaum
    @EvanFeigenbaum

    1: It takes a unique kind of nihilism to think that everything the U.S. has done internationally was a scam except to project military power. Keep our market open? Scam. Trade pacts? Scam. Write rules from which others benefit too? Scam. Foreign assistance? Scam. Alliances? Scam.
    2: There seems to be a lot of this going around. All these tools, from foreign assistance to alliances, had a deep well of bipartisan support for decades. They reflected a certain optimism not just about America’s role in the world but also about what America would gain not lose.
    3: Skepticism isn’t the same as nihilism. We can be skeptical and question how much we gain, where, and how from our foreign policy. Those are robust debates. But quite a few people in my timeline have crossed from skepticism to arguing that such tools have never had value.
    4: That’s a very different dynamic and since it has champions now among both elites and the American public broadly, it will play into discussions internationally about whether the US still believes in public goods. Those are NOT new discussions that others are having about us.
    5: I work mostly in and on Asia. In that region, some of these debates about the United States go back to the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 and some go back even farther. This isn’t just a “Trump” thing so this kind of nihilism about American power will play out in a context.
    6: There’s been attention to a speech this week by Singapore’s defense minister, who flatly called the U.S. predatory. His speech had more questions than answers but I think it should set off alarms if you care about, say, a robust future for the U.S. in the most dynamic region.
    7: Because it reinforced a point about regional order that this nihilism ignores. Postwar U.S. leadership in Asia turned on seeing a SELF-interest in providing security and economic public goods. But the U.S. is no longer interested in rule-making and views partners as proxies.
    8: That is not a signal of an optimistic worldview, in my view—one that sees self-interest in tools that made the U.S. not just a power but a leader. Americans are spending a lot of time debating these things with each other but it’s not like the world will just wait around.
    9: It feels a little like the interwar moment to me, when Americans debated not just whether to engage with the world—because we will—but how. But a lot of what I’m reading here, including about my own stuff, reflects a view that somehow the rest of the world won’t get a vote.

    While some among US FP elites have been thinking for over a decade about the “Thucydides Trap” dynamic of conflict between the incumbent (the US) & the rising (the PRC) powers, we are now more in the situation of the “Kindleberger Trap” dynamic of the incumbent power (& provider of global “public goods”, despite for selfish reasons) start to abdicate its position & the rising power (that might fill the vacuum) refuses to do so, which leads to increased anarchy:

    Kaiser Kuo
    @KaiserKuo

    1/ I’ve been thinking a lot about a conversation I had years ago with Joseph Nye—Joe Nye, Political Science Guy—about the “Kindleberger Trap.” We had been talking about Graham Alison’s “Thucidydes’s Trap” and he told me about this more pressing “trap.”
    2/ It’s come to mind a lot because of what Trump, and the US more generally, seems to be headed toward. This was explained really well in this highly recommended thread by @EvanFeigenbaum of the @CarnegieEndow
    3/ Here’s a link to the interview with Nye, from May 2017, in which he lays out what the Kindleberger Trap is. You’ll see the parallels — and the peril — right away.
    4/ For an even deeper dive into the idea, read this essay he wrote for Project Syndicate
    5/ The idea, for those who want the TL;DR, is that when you have an incumbent power that’s been providing the critical public goods in a system (in this case, globally)—a stable trading currency, security, standards, trade routes, air travel regs—and it suddenly can’t or won’t…
    6/ …and the rising power doesn’t step up and provide those public goods, then you’re in deep doo-doo. Charles Kindleberger, economic historian and architect of the Marshall Plan, thought that was the issue in the 1920s when the U.S. went isolationist and tariffed everyone.
    7/ I think Evan’s thread is spot-on. The US abdication of this threatens (in this case, unlike the UK, not due to national exhaustion or a major war, but because of straight-up nihilism) another vacuum. There’s one country that could step up, but many don’t like that idea.

    On the last point, the PRC will not be in so strong a position as the US immediately post-WW II, or during its unipolar moment post-Cold War 1.0, so as be able to write the “rules”, provide the “public goods”, & underwrite an “international order” (such as it is) as the US once did. While the CPC regime (& Chinese statecraft/worldview in general) absolutely abhors chaos & instability, & absolutely values order in the international system (which has been instrumental in the rise of the PRC), it so far has been unwilling to take on all the responsibilities associated w/ being the guarantor of the such order. It sees empire/hegemony maintenance as a burden that ultimately lead to the downfall of great powers.

    Of course, the Left Wing critique of figures such as Joseph Nye has always been that they are apologists for liberal hegemony, justifying US primacy under the guise of being the power “indispensable” to preservation of “rules based international order”, when in reality sustaining US primacy & its central dominant role in the world system served to preserve an unequal & unjust system that overwhelmingly favored the former colonial powers of the West at the expense of the ROW, & political economies that favored the capital owners over the working & middle classes in most places. The “Kinderberger Trap” idea is to support continued US primacy.

    Thus, the solution lies not in reasserting a global US primacy that is in the past, nor ushering in a global PRC primacy that the PRC is uninterested in & incapable of attaining, or global hegemony by another rising power. Multipolarity is the current condition of international system, that will not change for quite a long time. The question confronting the world (especially those parts w/o great power ambitions), & the populations in the polities that make up world, is whether we want to see an ethno-nationalist multipolarity of competing hegemonies (a la late 19th Century), or a corporatist multipolarity of large transnational corporations largely unencumbered by popular consent or national authorities (once popular in dystopian SciFi visions), or a liberatory multipolarity of a truly open & rules based international order, where even great powers are constrained (which was the original idea for the post-WW II order).

  24. 24.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Geminid: Meanwhile, it has been an unseasonably warm winter in most parts of China. But what’s “unseasonable” in the age of AGW?

  25. 25.

    TBone

    Mood is not good this morning

    m.youtube.com/watch?v=SuRCxakQt-c

    Coffee will not fix it.  Tea it is.

    I’m having an outrage attack and I haven’t even seen any news or anything else yet. GAH.

    Feeding tube blowout causing smelly goop to splatter everywhere.  And that’s not even why I have mood disorder already today.

    Today is a good day to go back to bed and pull the covers up over my head.  Stay put.

    Or get stinking drunk.

  26. 26.

    Rusty

    Ok, the press is a group of lazy hacks that would rather attack and insult their own readers rather than point out what those in power are actually doing.  Writing about that is hard and doesn’t get you invited to parties with the cool rich kids.  But hopefully they report at least some of it.  Americans are a dense lot that require being repeatedly smacked over the head with the truth in order to learn anything about what Republicans are actually doing.  When eventually (hopefully?) a few voters wander over to our side of the political spectrum to where we can win an occasional election, we need to make nice to them even when we would prefer dope slap them into next week.  That’s my take on the post (which I enjoyed).  Just my opinion, like bellybuttons, everyone has one.

  29. 29.

    satby

    @Baud: [primal scream] thinking of joining Omnes

    @SpaceUnit: says the unit that read approx 12 paragraphs and proclaimed they didn’t understand the point. And yes, I’m fucking adorable.

  32. 32.

    Nukular Biskits

    Mornin’, y’all.

    I’ve reached the point in my life where I welcome the support of any Trump voter who regrets their decision.  I still have the need to ask them “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU THINK HE WAS GOING TO TO?!?!?!?!?”, but in such a way as to acknowledge that, yes, they made a mistake, Trump fucked them and I empathize and appreciate their epiphany.

    For those people who still are guzzling the KoolAid and refuse to acknowledge Trump and his merry band of liars and thieves are shitting on the Constitution?  Fuck ’em. They can burn in hell for all I care.

  33. 33.

    Geminid

    @Geminid: I happen to get some US news on the various Middle East news sites I follow. I found Al Arabiya’s story on the severe weather event while following up on this story they posted yesterday:

    Egypt sends massive aid convoy to Gaza Strip

    A massive humanitarian aid convoy consisting of 457 trucks loaded with 7200 tons of food, housing and medical supplies leaves Egypt’s new administrative capital for Gaza Strip.

    The convoy included heavy construction eqipment and temporary housing units. I was like, Whoa! Trump and Netanyahu are talking about taking people out of Gaza, not bringing housing in. Is Egypt trying force the issue? Will there be a showdown at the Rafah Crossing?

    Evidently not. Israeli reporter Roi Kais posted this for Kan News:

         Egypt reports that the efforts by Cairo and Doha [Qatar] to bring heavy equipment into the Gazs Strip have been successful.

    On which Israeli commentator Iris Boker commented:

       The puppies bark but the caravan moves on.

    Later I saw pictures of the US military attache to Egypt at Rafah Crossing. He and various Egyptian officials and army officers looked pretty relaxed, even cheerful.

  37. 37.

    Nukular Biskits

    Today’s plan:

    • Go to work (ugh).
    • Take yard waste to compost pile at dump.
    • Get a muchly-needed haircut.
    • Visit the local office of at least one of my congress-critters, time-permitting.

    Will provide details on that last item on Bluesky.

  42. 42.

    Geminid

    @Geminid: The sarcastic Iris Boker has a very low opinion of her nation’s government. Ms. Boker is not the only one, according to this poll shared by journalist Gil Feldman:

        Public trust in institutions, from February survey by Reichman University compared to previous survey:

    IDF  62% (-3)

    Supreme Court  43% (-1)

    President of the State  41%

    State Attorney’s Office  30% (+2)

    Police  24% (-1)

    Government  18% (-3)

    Another reminder that the people with the lowest trust are trying to crush trust in other institutions because they themselves are unable to improve.

  43. 43.

    TBone

    Household chaos now vanquished except for hubby’s back being “out.”

    Yesterday was his VERY FIRST protest attendance.  He got to raise his hand when organizer asked who there was still a virgin, and the virgins were serenaded with much applause.  He was so cute driving merrily on the way home, and thanked me.

    That mood has since vanished for both of us but it was nice while it lasted.  Great memories are made of this stuff.

    Next time, he wants me to make him a sign.

    Chaos might be vanquished but the cleanup after these last three months is gonna be an epic chore.  I will have to hire help.  Many routine cleaning jobs have had to fall by the wayside and I am OCD about my home cleanliness.

  45. 45.

    Suzanne

    @Nukular Biskits:

    I still have the need to ask them “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU THINK HE WAS GOING TO TO?!?!?!?!?”, but in such a way as to acknowledge that, yes, they made a mistake, Trump fucked them and I empathize and appreciate their epiphany.

    See, I dealt with some of that the first time. I have no energy for it this time. I don’t especially like that I’ve become a FAFO person, but neither am I going to get too down on myself about it.

  46. 46.

    TBone

    Noah woke me at 4 with gentle paws on my face while sitting on my chest actually smiling and purring.  Even that didn’t improve mood.

    Foul weather.

  51. 51.

    TBone

    @NotMax: I can always count on you for an attitude adjustment when I most need one, thank you!

    I thought that was James Earl Jones at first look hahahaha!

  52. 52.

    Geminid

    @Baud: There’s no telling. I saw one Israeli journalist say a critical budget vote next month could bring the government down.

    There is a new scandal though, called “Qatar Gate.” Three men are being investigated for serving in the Prime Minister’s office while on the Qatari payroll, and passing classified information to Qatar. This apparently was done with Netanyahu’s knowledge and could uncover more of the PM’s symbiotic relationship with Qatar and Hamas that blew up in his face October 7, 2023.

    This being a national security matter, Shin Bet chief Ronan Bar is in charge of the investigation. The Prime Minister wants to fire Bar, but Bar might arrest Netanyahu first.

  58. 58.

    Baud

    @Geminid:

    blew up in his face October 7, 2023.

     

    Unfortunately, I fear right wingers see it as a boon rather than a failure. Republicans benefited from 9/11 too.

    Despite the polling, I think right wing voters in Israel will find it hard to quit right wing parties. We’ll see.

  60. 60.

    TBone

    Temp right now with wind chill is zero.  The winds haven’t ceased for two straight days.  Yesterday a gust blew so hard against my sign that it cracked the makeshift handle on my protest sign, despite my using a 2 foot metal edged ruler to reinforce said handle.  I didn’t reinforce hard enough at the fulcrum.

  66. 66.

    Mousebumples

    Good morning! Reminder for Wisconsin voters – vote in the primary for State Superintendent (and maybe some local races) today. I supported Jill Underly, the incumbent.

    My take on the 2 challengers? One is ‘independent” but supported by Moms For Liberty or whatever that MAGA group is. The other seems like a nice guy, but he was more complainy vs action oriented when I heard him speak. Plus, I want a woman who knows what she’s doing in charge of schools.

    Big quarterly work meeting today. Hoping to do some postcards tonight as I watch returns come in…

  71. 71.

    Geminid

    @Baud: Right wing Israeli voters will likely not quit right wing parties, especially the two Ultra-Orthodox parties which have their own particular outlook and agendas, and whose voters do what the rabbis tell them.

    They all seem ready to quit Netanyahu though. And whoever forms the government will almost certainly exclude Belezal Smothrich’s and Itamar Ben Gvir’s extreme right parties.

    Right now polls show the most likely outcome of new elections would be Naftali Bennett heading up a govrnment. Bennet was PM of the government before this one. That was an 8-party coaltion with a one vote majority. It was engineered by Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid and only lasted 18 months. People here hardly noticed it because very little blew up under its tenure.

    Bennet stepped away from politics when that government fell. This will be to Bennett’s advantage. He can form a new party that no one hates yet. But the electorate probably won’t change much.

    Israel’s had five elections since 2019 with very little shift between them. It’s like they reshuffle the deck, deal the cards and everyone ends with almost the same hand as before. The big difference for the next government will the changes in Israel’s external circumstances. Those are very different now than in 2019.

  74. 74.

    Geminid

    @YY_Sima Qian: I have no way of knowing that, but there is new polling showing a greater willingness to accept a Palestinian state. That’s among Israel’s 77% Jewish poppulation. The 20% of Israeli citizens who are Arab have always backed the idea. We’ll see if this trend holds up.

    The Gaza ceasefire agreement is designed to move Israel and the Palestinians towards the formation of a Palestinian state. So if you are interested in this question it would be worthwhile keeping tabs on the Phase Two negotiations.

  75. 75.

    stinger

    @Nukular Biskits:
    @Baud:
     Yes. It’s a lot easier to get someone to change the way they vote than it is to get them to kneel before you proclaiming “I was wrong and you were right” and change the way they vote.
    Attempts to make them debase themselves will backfire. They’ll only dig in deeper.

  79. 79.

    Stevarino

    It is incredible how the richest person in the world (supposedly) can be such a weird loser dweeb.

  80. 80.

    Shalimar

    @SpaceUnit: The point is interesting stories Anne Laurie has found for us to talk about so we don’t have to go dredging through the muck on our own.  Does there have to be a theme to every post?  It was the middle of the night and this is a lot more interesting than doing nothing.

  81. 81.

    Geminid

    @Geminid: I said the Israeli electorate won’t shift much if there is a new election, but I’ll add a potential exception which is the Arab vote. The two Arab parties have only 10 MKs between them, out of a 120 member Knesset; but Arabs constitute almost 20% of the population. Some Arabs, especially the Druze, vote for other parties but Israeli Arabs have a lower participation rate overall. If the Arab parties could motivate their community, they would win more MKs than the two Ultra-Orthodox parties. They won 18 MKs between them on the votes of only 13% of the electorate.

    That rate has declined in recent years; ten years ago the Arab parties had (I think) 15 MKs. Some Israeli Arabs refuse on principle to vote, but there also is a lot of cynicism and apathy in the community. This war and the years that preceded it could shake that apathy. Greater Arab participation would change the electorate significantly.

    The Arab Ra’am Party was part of the last government. They won 5 MKs in the November, 2022 election. That was an increase over the 4 they had, so their popularity increased. The United Arab Emirates recently hosted Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas for a well-publicized visit. The UAE has the best relations with Israel of all the Arab countries, so this could help Ra’am in the next election and might even help it enter the next government.

    Under Israeli law, that election won’t necessarily happen until late next year, but if and when this government collapses there will be an election ten weeks (I think) afterwards.

  82. 82.

    MrPug

    I, for one, wish the spoiled man child would take “his platform” and sulk off to home already.  Or, hey, I hear Mars is great this time of year.

  83. 83.

    Geminid

    @Geminid: Mansour Abbas’s visit to the UAE was interesting because the head of the UAE is hostile to Islamist political movements like the Muslim brotherhood, and Ra’am is an Islamist party. But evidently “MBZ”, as the Emerati leader is called, considers Ra’am the right kind of Islamist party.

    On the other hand, MBZ considers Hamas to be a very wrong type of Islamist party that needs to be neutralized in order to make the region a stable one.

  85. 85.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Kristine: I would argue that we are both in the middle of the “Thucydides Trap” as far as Sino-US relations is concerned (i.e. “Great Power Competition” verging on Cold War 2.0, and we have rapidly entered the “Kindleberger Trap” as far as international system is concerned. The world is just working through the 7 stages of grief to come to terms w/ it.

    We are largely at the Acceptance & Processing stages for the “Thucydides Trap”, but the “hope” (such as it is in terms of avoiding WW III) forward is MAGA ushering in the ethno-nationalist multipolarity, leavened by corporatist multipolarity. Countries & individuals are still variously working through the Shock, Anger (we saw both at the MSC), Denial (we see this from committed Atlanticists in Europe) & Bargaining (such as Macron telling the Trump Administration that it should concentrate its tariff fire on the PRC) stages. Some have already moved to Depression. The world already went through this during the Trump 45 term, but most only made it to Depression before Biden’s election brought hope of a return to normal. The Russian re-invasion of Ukraine & the PRC’s alignment (albeit not w/o limits) w/ Russia reinvigorated the Western  alliances & made a degree of Western alignment on PRC policy possible.

    Of course, that probably was not going to last forever, giving the increasingly competitive industrial policies across the Atlantic, rising economic nationalism everywhere, the steady erosion of international trade regimes, & the clear differences in threat perceptions between the US & Europe vis-a-vis the PRC. MAGA has now accelerated that re-estrangement process to light speed, & I think it will just take a major crisis during which the US declines to be meaningfully involved, & the PRC & the EU unwilling/unable to fill the vacuum, for all of the world to accept & process that we are now indeed in the “Kindleberger Trap”. (Kind of like the Suez Crisis made the end of British hegemony crystal clear, on the US & the USSR had already taken over as the world hegemony by then.) In that sense, it could be slow & then all at once, or rather, fast & then all at once.

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