This seems like something the media should be covering, but they are too busy with other things, like, in the instance of the NY Times, they are asking eugenicists whether or not Mamndani passes(fails?) the one drop rule.
I’m sure we’re all super fucking excited about this:
The tattered bromance between Republican President Donald Trump and his main campaign financier Elon Musk took another fractious turn on Saturday when the space and automotive billionaire announced the formation of a new political party, saying Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill would bankrupt America.
A day after asking his followers on his X platform whether a new U.S. political party should be created, Musk declared in a post on Saturday that “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”“By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!” he wrote.
The announcement from Musk comes after Trump signed his self-styled “big, beautiful” tax-cut and spending bill into law on Friday, which Musk fiercely opposed.
Musk, who became the word’s richest man thanks to his Tesla car company and his SpaceX satellite firm, spent hundreds of millions on Trump’s re-election and led the Department of Government Efficiency from the start of the president’s second term aimed at slashing government spending.
The two have since fallen out spectacularly over disagreements about the bill.
Musk said previously that he would start a new political party and spend money to unseat lawmakers who supported the bill.
He could be in a tropical paradise right now surrounded by rescue animals and he’s not and that makes me hate him even more.
Really enjoying the Bridge and was excited to learn there is a second season. So that is what I am up to tonight. Nursing this chest cold/sinus thing and watching tv. Yay.
Baud
This is sure to help with Tesla sales in Europe.
Nukular Biskits
Good evenin’, y’all.
schrodingers_cat
Not a fan of either Mamdani and his tankie politics or the Garbage Times and their Republican party enabling ways.
Both his parents are of Indian origin so by no definition is Mamdani black
Tankies and MAGAs have a symbiotic relationship. Tankie DSA type politics helps Rs not the Democrats
They traffic in similar bigotries. On the right they hide their intentions using patriotism as a cover on the horseshoe left its economic justice.
Scout211
So that’s that. He didn’t know he was using an antisemitic slur, people! That word just means a “money lender at high rates.” That’s nothing like an antisemitic slur. //
My gawd.
MagdaInBlack
Oh yay! “POOF” just like that we have a new political party. Who knew it was so easy? I know I’m feeling better already. Thanks, Elno.
JFC.
WTFGhost
Open thread?
Hey, if your brain misfires, and you can’t think of the word “caricature,” do you realize how hard it can be to search for it?
“Funny pictures of people”
(no)
“Comic drawings of people”
(“STOCK STICK FIGURES!!!”)
“That famous line drawing of that famous director who did the radio… fuck me.” (Yes, I know, “orson welles,” *NOW*.)
“Drawing funny pictures of people”
I don’t have the foggiest what I finally typed in, and saw “caricature” and *BAM*, it was like getting your fingernail *right* over the itchy spot. Also a sound reminder of the need for humility, just because I’ve felt a bit more rational for entire half-hours here and there.
Elizabelle
@Scout211: He watches Cats. Not Shakespeare.
trollhattan
On Tuesday Stephen Miller will announce federal seizure of cattle railcars. No particular reason, they just found out our strategic reserve is low.
trollhattan
@schrodingers_cat: There was that time Idi Amin threw all the ethnic Indians out of Uganda and I expect he’s somehow connected to that diaspora.
As to why I need to GAF about who occupies the NY mayor’s chair, working on it.
Mathguy
Check out Department Q on Netflix. Excellent series (9 episodes).
Elizabelle
Honestly. I wonder if Trump can even name any of the cats from the musical.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Elizabelle: He sleeps through Cats.
Maybe he would stay focused through The Producers?
schrodingers_cat
@trollhattan: Yep Mira Nair made a movie about it. Mississippi Masala. That’s where she met Mamdani. The entire movie is about the tension between the Indian-Ugandans who were bought to Uganda by the British to work on the railways and other public work projects and the black Ugandans and later black people in the US.
Geminid
Setting aside the source’s background, and the NYT’s flexible rules on using hacked materials, the story about Mamdani’s college application was a big nothing-burger. If people want to sink Mamdani, they’re gonna have to come up with something much better than this.
NotMax
So when does Dolt 47 publicly torch his shiny red Tesla on the White House lawn?
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Elizabelle: Spot?
different-church-lady
Maybe Max Berger should have a chat with the “Genocide Joe” folks.
Elizabelle
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): Kitty!
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Elizabelle:You win.
JCJ
So I am at Summerfest in Milwaukee to see BabyMetal. The band before them is an excellent heavy metal band from Ukraine (Donetsk) named Jinjer. They are quite good.
Shalimar
I am disgustingly forced to agree with Steve Bannon: Fuck Elon Musk, he isn’t an American and shouldn’t use that name.
The Lodger
@Elizabelle: Macavity, Rumpleteazer and Ramaswamy?
Gloria DryGarden
Government sponsored kidnappings
prisons we send people to in other countries, and who benefits? Who is making money from this?
concentration camps. concentration camps. concentration camps.
your tax dollars at work.
basically, funding cut to anything humane, at a few dollars per person, to fund inhumane illegal abuse and violence, and to fund billionaires.
really, in a better budget, all we can afford is to deport the few immigrant criminals, and maybe, with luck, protect people from citizens who are the bulk of criminals in the USA. ( and then to be sure, reconstitute everything Doge slashed)
i don’t have time to split hairs about mamdani. I’d rather talk about food, and books and gardens, and how we can stop these fucking concentration camps.
ymmv
The Lodger
@NotMax: Teslas are self-torching. He won’t have to do a thing.
lowtechcyclist
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq):
Which one, the original with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, or the more recent version with Nathan Lane and Michael Broderick?
Dammit, I miss when Nazi jokes used to be funny because they were in the dustbin of history. Not only The Producers with all the “Springtime for Hitler” jokes, but also thinking of John Goodman’s line in Lebowski, “say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism…”
In short, fuck these fascists.
Jackie
Wasn’t it a few weeks (it feels like years) ago Muskrat proclaimed he was done with politics? He seems determined to destroy the country he adopted that made him a billionaire. Why?
MagdaInBlack
@Jackie: His brain is fried?
Musk breaks things because he can.
Jackie
@Elizabelle: Pussy
Elizabelle
@Jackie: LOL.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@lowtechcyclist: Either.
I was thinking of material he might understand.
Elizabelle
@The Lodger: Good for you. Personally, I could not think of a one. Macavity, for sure.
Geminid
@Gloria DryGarden: I think the drama over Mamdani’s candidacy is largely manufactured. At least, the Emerson poll relrased a few days before the June 24 primary showed Mamdani(D) at 35%, Sliwa(R), at 17%, Adams (I) at 15%, another independent at 6% with 28% Undecided.
This poll also substantially underrated Mamdani’s primary support, and my guess is his general election support was similarly underrated. So unless Mamdani blunders– and he seems too smart a politician for that– he ought to win handily.
Gloria DryGarden
Ever hear of AMOC? There’s also a SMOC, SOU5HERM MERIDIONAL OVERTURNING Current/ circuit.
apparently, it has reversed, and may be a big deal, and may greatly affect climate change. You know, floods, rain, fire drought, heatwaves, cold. Article found on the blue sky env sci feed.
seems a big thing to pay attention to.
WTFGhost
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): Or at least “The Aristocrats”
Gloria DryGarden
@Geminid: he seems a good guy, giving hope and breaking the mold,
no matter what others say about tankies. My iPad does not recognize that as a word.
I might like him.
I have still not looked up tankies .
A, considering the source. B. Wondering what’s for dinner. C. Wishing I could sleep when I try to get to bed earlier. D. Wondering what will help my life calamities, physical, spiritual, financial, social, material, and health wise. E . Desperate for a way to stop these concentration camps. What will it take? How does it get any better than this? F. A quivering mass of silent screaming distress over numerous things, as previously mentioned.
im just going to fill my tank with math problems, divide by zero, multiply by the square root of minus one- it’s a thing. Then I will eat cherries, and ground, and consult math friends about different sizes of infinity, and contemplate where is my place in Lanikea.
Jay
@schrodingers_cat:
But he’s African, born in Uganda. The Brit’s moved Indians all across the globe as indentured labour and as low level bureaucrats. Ghandi was a South African for a while.
In some countries, post independence, they stayed and were tolerated, in others, Guyana, they stayed and thrived, in Uganda they were driven out.
There are even white Africans.
Miss Bianca
@JCJ: that combo is coming to Denver. May have to go.
Jay
@Scout211:
he also uses “Globalist” a lot, Cosmopolitan much less so, because I think he thinks it’s more of a drink and less of an insult.
opiejeanne
@lowtechcyclist: Matthew Broderick.
kindness
Musk only wishes there were significant cuts to everything, except his contracts with the governement. He’s worried about the national debt, not the $3.8T in free money the government is shoving billionaires.
hotshoe
@Mathguy:
gripping show — but insane torture repeated over and over for nine episodes — this show should never be recommended without a massive TRIGGER WARNING.
I watched late into the night, and I enjoyed it, but I paid with emotional disturbance for weeks afterward.
And probably the worst scene of all was an almost-throwaway scene where the teen son is threatened.
I won’t be able forget that for the rest of my life, no matter how much I wish I could.
hotshoe
@Mathguy:
Salty Sam
Link or citation? This would be a very big deal indeed.
Jay
@Salty Sam:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Ocean_overturning_circulation
Salty Sam
@Jay: Yeah, missed the edit window. There’s quite a bit out there about this. This is really really bad.
MagdaInBlack
@Salty Sam:
https://www.icm.csic.es/en/news/major-reversal-ocean-circulation-detected-southern-ocean-key-climate-implications
Old School
@JCJ:
Stay dry!
Timill
@Salty Sam: Try this for size
Bah: beaten by mere seconds…
MagdaInBlack
Oh boy. It’s leftover fireworks night in the Chicago NW suburbs……..
@JCJ: Many many (oh so very many) years ago I was at Milwaukee Summerfest watching Waylon and Willie and Jesse Colter and several others I’ve forgotten because there was beer involved =-)
(and possibly cannabis)
Gloria DryGarden
@Scout211: it has happened to me. That I didn’t know or understand that a phrase was pejorative, and hateful to a group of people.
Once I was told, and made aware, I could flag it, and not speak those sorts of words of phrases. Innocent naive unconsciousness can wake up.
Some said it made me a better person. But no. It made me aware of language usages and things in popular culture, common understandings, that I missed, because it wasn’t used as a bad word in my house, had never been flagged, and I hadn’t see. It. I didn’t know.
A librarian client used to say, about heinous things people did or said, they didn’t know.. It can be true.
And then, you know,
and so you don’t say it, you learn, like a language, what certain words mean. When you go to a new country, you learn all the bad words right away. But sometimes there are words you weren’t told..
I didn’t know this word trump used either. I don’t have tv, I haven’t seen all the movies, I don’t know all the tropes. But now I know.
does trump change once he “learns”? Does he care to remove all cruelty, separation, divisiveness and harmful dishonesties from his speech and intentions?
well then
@wtf ghost, you said an orange pterodactyl flew by,
and I want to know why you didn’t use your slingshot to take it down? Or why you didn’t surround it in math and divide it into zero, or even, better, multiply by zero? Where were you when we needed you? I’m circling it with my sharpie, pointing it your way. When you see it, don’t miss! we’ll pay you handsomely… more if you get more of his flock. Rooting for you, cheering for your success.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: Just leave it out on the lawn, it’ll torch itself, it is a Tesla.
Gin & Tonic
@Gloria DryGarden: ”Tankie” is a term used generally to describe hard-line supporters of the USSR (now russia.) It has its origin from those who supported the USSR’s armed suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
hotshoe
well it’s a good thing that no decent sincere person is trying to claim he’s “black”
The form which he checked had one single box for “Black or African American”. Absolutely true he is “African American” — born in Africa and moved by his folks to America when he was seven years old — of course that was the correct box to check, as best as anyone could tell at the time.
And as you know, he added “Ugandan” to the form, just to make the African identity as clear as possible.
No one could predict that, years later, douche-y racists would try to claim that Mamdani was somehow cheating with “Black” identification.
Now even the shitwad NYT admits they “could not find any speeches or interviews in which Mr. Mamdani referred to himself as Black.”
mrmoshpotato
@Shalimar: Well, fuck Bannon too. Who has a more disgusting, fascist face – Dump, Bannon, RFK Jr, or Melon Husk?
Jackie
@MagdaInBlack:
Two things: That had to be an awesome festival! That would be Waylon and Willie and The Boys ;-)
And…. was Willie supplying? ;-D
Scout211
Thank you for explaining that. I have been curious as to what that term meant. But in the end, it really didn’t matter to me because once I read a commenter using terms like that to describe a person or a group of people, I move on. I just don’t think it’s helpful and tends to be very divisive.
But that’s just me and my 40+ years in the mental health field. I just move on to the next comment.
Jackie
@Scout211:
You and me both.
Librettist
Is “The National Party” taken… or didn’t focus group well??
Gloria DryGarden
@hotshoe: oh, because Africa, don’tcha know, is not one country,
but 54 countries
each of which contain peoples of a few hundred tribes and often several hundred languages. The number of cultures and ancient wisdom path is huge. The land are could swallow most of the world’s largest countries, and a few contents, whole. I play guess the country, a lot, on worldle, and I still struggle to name some of the places in Africa, their capitols, main languages spoken, major exports.
specificity has value, and interest.
big stupid categories, kind of shuts a door, write those people off. Hmm.
Gloria DryGarden
@Gin & Tonic: you are kind. No idea how to apply this to a category of democrats. It doesn’t feel constructive to apply it, yet.
Nettoyeur
@Shalimar: I OTOH am rooting for injuries. Because I am a bad person.
Gloria DryGarden
@Geminid: I love your hopeful predictions about future elections.
thank you for your clarity about manufactured drama.
I might need to make a t-chart for which things are that.
Then in my free time, I can entertain manufactured dramas. After I attend to dinner and sleep, and the other things.. and after I watch Andor, again.
cain
I hope the ADL is proud of itself. Literally funding nazis. They apparently don’t give a damn about what’s going to happen with history repeating itself. I get it that their charter is Israel but goddam, why did Israel need to exist in the first place?
Gloria DryGarden
@Miss Bianca: it does sound interesting. Depends on price and venue…
cain
I look forward to the “America Party” vs “GOP”. This should put the media in quite the conundrum. They’ve always targeted democrats. But now we got a “business party” and a “fascist party”.
I look forward to thought pieces where writers declare that Dems need to join one of the parties and that there should always be two parties.
Martin
@Jay: Despite @schrodingers_cat‘s protestations regarding the bigotries of the left, she seems to believe it’s impossible for someone of Indian descent to identify as Ugandan, as if someone here of Indian descent could identify as American.
With regards to the NYT piece, in around 2009 or so when he went to college the US has adopted the current IPEDS racial classification which was to first check Hispanic or Latino or not Hispanic or Latino, and then American Indian or Alaska Native, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, White, and Race/Ethnicity Unknown. And that’s it. A lot of our students of Indian ancestry did not check the ‘Asian’ box. They checked White, or Race/Ethnicity Unknown. I will also note that a faculty colleague of mine, a very observant and white-as-me Israeli Jew would always check ‘Asian’ because he was born in Israel which is in Asia. Was he trying to get away with something or was it a poke in the eye of a stupid classification system? I worked with him on many projects and I can assure you it was the latter – he relished in throwing sabots into the machinery. I had a black colleague who was of black Jamaican ancestry who would throw a fit if you called her African American and absolutely would not have checked that box before they changed it to Black/African American because her ancestors were not part of the Africa to American slave trade. She was ‘Black’ and there was a difference. There was no ‘Indian Subcontinent’ category to check and a zillion other perfectly reasonable (relative to what was on the list) categories to select along. Note, ‘Hispanic’ refers specifically to the language commonly spoken, so it includes Spain and all of Spains colonies (ethnicity). No such distinction for other colonizing nations. So if you are from Spain you are likely White Hispanic. You still need to choose a race group – and latino wasn’t always an option for how the form was designed (picking non-hispanic latino would be a valid option – someone from, say, Suriname – South America but a Dutch rather than Spanish colony.) None of those options seem accurate for someone of Indian descent. He knows his race, so picking ‘Unknown’ is a lie. He may not identify as white so picking that is a lie. African American at least sorta reflected the passport he was carrying. Nobody is obligated to interpret the racial classification system in the manner you intend it, let alone respect it. I had to remind people of that all the time – especially when even the people who created the fucking system didn’t agree on their intentions.
At the time he applied to college he was not a US citizen (he became a citizen when he was 27), so on the common app you need to indicate your nationality – where you are a citizen of, and at the time he was a citizen of Uganda, so of course he checked that box – that was the passport he was carrying. That box has meaning – we can reject your application if you misrepresent where you are a citizen of. Anyone can check whatever fucking race box they want – it doesn’t really mean anything. This is true for the US Census as well, btw. Go nuts in 2030. Note too, even in race conscious admission which Columbia did have at the time, if you have checked a non-citizen box on the application you are race classified as either US Nonresident (temporary visa) or US Resident but not citizen (permanent resident, green card) – these override the race selector. Not sure what category he would have been at the time and it probably doesn’t matter. You do not count a black Ugandan student on a visa as a ‘black’ student because it fucks up the IPEDS reporting and the feds will jump on your ass. Foreign students do not count toward race conscious admissions anywhere I’ve ever heard of.
2liberal
Has Kent been posting lately? I’ve skimmed thru some threads lately but haven’t noticed his nym popping up.
hotshoe
@Martin: Thanks for the expanded information.
Another Scott
@Martin: I knew a white guy who taught at a HBCU and applied for a summer faculty research position open to professors at HBCUs. And was accepted.
He wasn’t trying to game the system. He answered the questions and followed the rules. And when he returned to the HBCU, they got the benefits of what he learned and his new connections developed during his work that summer. Etc.
Sometimes categories are helpful, but they rarely have sharp boundaries because people are complicated.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Martin
@cain: Musk is not a ‘business party’ guy in the sense that he’s a Neo-feudalist. So he’s not exactly a capitalist in the sense that we think of the term – he thinks corporations should be the state, and he as CEO should rule. My guess is that Musk will be unable to hide his real intentions there.
Gloria DryGarden
@Martin: going on a tangent to say when I took census in French wit recent immigrants from French speaking west Africa, I was insistent on finding out what languages they spoke. They tried to get away with French, their colonizer language. I would tell them in my broken French,
oops there’s the next door bottle rocket, dammnit, shit. Nit 25 fee5 from my window. Mm.
the system will benefit from hearing of languages beyond their long official list of languages. I’d have to write it in sometimes, because they were things I’d never heard of, that weren’t in the drop down menu.
More bottle rockets, and semi close other splosions. Jeepers, I’m like a cat with sudden loud noises. I’m going to need comfort food, m@caroni and not cheese. Cookies. The last cherries.
Scout211
@2liberal: I think i saw his nym in the Kamala thread downstairs.
Gloria DryGarden
@Another Scott: I agree, categories are sometimes helpful, and give a generalized understanding, help provide services and culturally relevant sensitivity.
just don’t like when a category or a label is used to shut a door..or to stop paying attention. You say it so beautifully .
I am all out of beautiful tonight.
2liberal
@Scout211:
@Scout211:
You are correct. thanks for the response.
Martin
@Another Scott: The categories are fine because the categories have no real consequence. There was some federal money if you are an HSI (Trump killed that) and HBCUs aren’t labeled as such because they have a lot of students that checked the ‘black’ box, but because of their status under Jim Crow. They were part of a second tier of the educational system and get some special dispensation as a result. Note, West Virginia State University is an HBCU with a black student population of less than 10%.
The issue isn’t the categories but the way that people like Schrodinger uses them in bad faith. There’s literally no box that Zohran could have checked that wouldn’t have allowed people to accuse him of trying to get away with something. If he’d checked White he’d be attacked, Asian he’d be attacked, and ‘Unknown’ he’d be attacked. Schrodinger isn’t attacking Zohran because he did something wrong, she’s attacking him because her views on socialist economics are identical to Donald Trump’s.
wombat probability cloud
Glad that you are tucking in and healing. I absolutely loved the Helin/Bodnia Bridge series. Need to find Mystery Road now.
JCJ
@Old School: the rain held off until the end! Got a little wet walking to the streetcar.
JCJ
@Miss Bianca: the band before Jinjer was Bloodywood. We missed them, but they came on for a song with BABYMETAL
Marc
@Martin: Thanks for that explanation, I long wondered how a lot of people dealt with the limited categories.
When I arrived at college in ’72, I triggered an interesting “decline to answer” problem. I actually started as a summer student taking CS courses, so I got to know the IT staff. One offered to find out which dorm room I’d have in the fall, which resulted in “oh shit, it says you’re white.” I was like, why does that matter? He says all of the black/non-white students live on one floor of the newest dorm, as a good percentage of the “other” students will object to having them as roommates.
I moved in, my roommate (rich kid chessplayer from NJ) met me and was cordial enough. A few days later I get a message to visit the Dean of students, who was accompanied by members of the Black Student Union, offering to let me move to the black floor. I said I’d ask my roommate if that’s what he wanted. He was actually hurt that I’d consider moving. We became good friends (particularly after I beat him the one and only time we played chess, I had no idea what I was doing and it confused him), but I did move to the the black floor (actually, the black, Jamaican, Zairean, Japanese-American, Filipino-German-American, and Iranian floor) the next year, much nicer rooms :)
Martin
@Gloria DryGarden: So, Ms Martin got cancer last year and is all better now, but we did the grand tour of all of the medical facilities in my area. I live in a city that is majority immigrant, mostly non-latino. Kaiser Permanente puts a sign at every reception desk listing the languages that can accommodate and it’s different for every office because there are different staff in every office. There’s always the big 10 or so – Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc. and then the fun part of the list shows up – Haitian Creole, Tamil, Yoruba and so on. Usually at least 20 more and usually at least one or two I’d never heard of before, despite doing international admissions. We’d be in some waiting room, and I’d wander off, find a new office and report back excitedly to the 3 languages they speak over there that I’d never seen on one of these lists before and the one I’d never heard of.
Hispanic is such an odd inclusion in the list because it’s not racial/genetic – it’s purely colonial, and yet there’s no equivalent for other colonial subgroups – India and Australia as English colonies, or the Dutch or French ones, etc. The classification makes no objective sense at all. It’s purely a product of a lot of disparate fucked up eugenic biases all mashed together and as such it wasn’t so much a thing to try and be accurate about but a game to manipulate because the rules made no sense. That’s why my Israeli colleague would list Asian – because none of it made any fucking sense – not really. And he did that for decades with no repercussions, and I’d do the statistical report for the feds on our faculty racial makeup and laugh every time I added one into the ‘Asian’ column.
In the listing of US hispanic serving institutions, there is one that is 100% hispanic – University of Puerto Rico. They are US citizens so they stay inside the race selectors and they basically all speak Spanish.
I was part of a big exercise to sort out the gender/married selectors at a time when same sex marriage was legal and a fair bit of the LGBTQ alphabet was being accommodated. What kind of information does ‘nonbinary married to nonbinary’ convey to you? Nothing. Our recommendation was to stop asking the question because it only had discriminatory purpose. Once upon a time it was probably helpful to be able to label your Christmas card to ‘Mr. and Mrs. John Smith’ (back when wives were properly the property of their husbands) but what fucking purpose does it serve now?
We thought it would become dicey for housing to put roommates together, but it’s not really. You sort the easy categories and have discussions with the 21 remaining students that don’t slot in neatly, and they work it out, and doing it as a personal interaction is service the other students don’t get.
Martin
@Marc: Yeah, and you’ve hit on why universities are considered ‘liberal indoctrinating’ because you don’t segregate students any more. Don’t like having a black roommate? Tough shit – we’re going to work it out. And if someone does need to move, it sure as shit isn’t going to be the black student, you’re gonna let mom and dad know you’re kicked out of the dorms. Maybe that still happens in Alabama but by and large in the rest of the country, you have a problem with your black/gay/Chinese national roommate on account of them being black/gay/Chinese – too fucking bad. You’re going to learn a lot more about your fellow humans in your freshman year in the dorms than in all of the humanities classes you take in your 4 years. And that is the goddamn point of residential universities. The faculty aren’t going to tell you to tolerate gay people, but your HA will lay out the consequences if you don’t – you will be socially ostracized if you insist on being an asshole.
Martin
@JCJ: Babymetal is my ‘getting tired while driving, need to stay alert’ band.
Marc
@Martin: Sadly, a it was a bit more complicated than that. The college was trying to do right by us, given that there was only enough dorm space for freshmen and sophomores to be guaranteed housing. Most of the white male students lived of campus in frat houses, frat houses that took approximately 5 minutes to make it clear that we were not invited to their parties. Even trying to rent off campus was almost impossible for anyone not white (this was central Mass., not Mississippi). So, they offered us priority housing all four years, on the same floor so we could form study groups (which were otherwise frat based). They did the same thing for the then 20 women students in the adjacent dorm. After I left, the college replaced a couple of frats with ones that had more open membership, and started cooperative housing for anyone, of any race and/or gender, who didn’t want frat life.
cain
@Martin:
As long as they split the vote I don’t care. Trump is going to go after this new party and so will the GOP. This will create all kinds of interesting dynamics with the media
cain
@2liberal: I saw him on a thread some days back.
bjacques
Dead thread, but if Musk is stuck for a name for his party, the Social Nationalist Party has a nice ring to it.
rikyrah
@MagdaInBlack: Too phucking lazy to put in the actual WORK for a new party
Baud
Shalimar
@Nettoyeur: Oh, I am a bad person too. Just because Bannon is right about Musk does not decrease my hope that he drowns in his own vomit.
Geminid
@Martin: S. Cat’s views on socialist economics are not “identical to Donald Trump’s.” She might dislike the DSA, but that does not justify this smear.
Geminid
@rikyrah: Yeah, Musk is lazy. I don’t think he has the work ethic and focus to make a new political party work.
Baud
Via reddit, a little pick me up.
Baud
@Geminid: All he has to do is blame Democrats for everything. That’s how the Republican and the Democratic Parties work.
sab
Re turning off your notification alerts.
I turned mine off because Amber Alerts for cities in my state 4 hours away. I am old. I rarely drive beyond my grocery. They wake me up at 2, 3 5 am for no purpose. So I turned mine off.
Texas cop complaint has a lot to answer for, but they never will.
They really need to divide alerts between various recipients. Weather I always need. Amber not so much. Frightened cops hardly ever (they have their own communications.)
Baud
@sab:
You can’t select which ones to keep on and which to turn off?
sab
@Baud: Luddite here but trying to be serious. I don’t thinks so. I would love to have only weather alerts
ETA In my system it is alerts on or off. No choice on which alerts.
Baud
@sab:
I have a choice on Samsung. I can turn off Amber alerts but leave other alerts on.
sab
@Baud: I may need to change providers. I have been thinking about that for several years.
Geminid
@Baud: I’ve thought that too, that Musk will drift over to undermining the Democratic Party. It’s easier, and there are Democratic-adjacent groups that will take his money.
Baud
@Geminid:
Lot of words to say Ro Khanna.
Princess
@Martin: My understanding is also that affirmative action programs were only for citizens. A university got no “credit” from admitting students from Africa; only American students of under represented races. Though maybe green card holders were included too? Not sure of that.
Geminid
@Baud: Well, there’s always Ro Khanna. He’s got one foot in the tech-bro camp already.
I was thinking more of the “Abundance” crowd. Ed. They seem to have ambitions regarding the Democratic Party.
Baud
@Geminid:
I said that half in jest.
I think it was Ro who was a “Dems should work with Musk” advocate after Musk left DOGE.
ETA:
We’re up for grabs.
Glory b
The university application section was “race,” not country of origin.
“Black/African American” is a designation VERY commonly, pretty exclusively applied to black people or mixed race people who have black heritage.
Mamdani is ASIAN. If he wanted to, he could have explained that he was Asian by race but a citizen of Uganda.
I don’t know the timing of it but there’s a video clip of a (kind of silly to me) on the street interview between Mamdani and a black woman (wearing a bikini in the streets of NYC, but I guess that might not be a big thing there). She asks him about his background, he says he’s proud of being from Uganda. She asks him if he considers himself African American.
He says no, that would be MISLEADING.
Honestly, there’s a history now of people of other races believing that being black gives us an advantage. Recall the story of actress Mindy Kaling’s brother cutting off all of his hair and applying to several universities as a black student.
This feels like progressives falling all over themselves to explain to black people WHY it was totally okay that Fetterman pulled that shotgun on a black jogger.
Geminid
@Baud: Next year’s Democratic House primaries will be interesting in that respect. That will be an opportunity for various groups to build clout, and they will try to make the most of it.
The open seats will be hotly contested. Between retirements and House members running for higher office, there ought to be 25 to 30 open seats next year.
Liminal Owl
@Martin: Thank you. That was helpful and interesting.
I had one friend in college whose father—very white, parent born in Spain—always checked Hispanic, and he _was_ trying to take unfair advantage. Surname was Irish ir Scottish, so I don’t know how well it worked.
Baud
@Glory b:
Maybe Trump will put an end to that now that being white is the clear advantage.
sab
In my county we just had a father and a five year old drown doing stupid rafting on a raging river.
Five year old’s body found. Dad’s not.
We have a friend our age ( sort of old) whose father pulled a drowning scam. He allegedly died by drowning. Wife collected Social Security for years as widow. Raised the kids.
Then years later turned out the not deceased bastard had moved into the next county, remarried and named the next crew with the same names as the last litter.
Social Security made fisrt wife repay all her survivors benefits.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Injuries that I’d have rooted for, if I’d known about that situation in the first place. 😁
Baud
O. Felix Culpa
@Martin:
@Geminid:
What Geminid said. Martin’s characterization of sc is untrue and out of line.
TONYG
@cain: Yes. As stupid as these two guys (Trump and Musk) are, in a logical world Elon forming the “America Party” should be a good development. A second racist-fascist party should siphon votes from the first one — especially if Donald Trump actually obeys constitutional term limits in 2028. (Or maybe they’ll just cancel all elections anyway.)
Baud
@TONYG:
Who knows? Maybe some current Dems will jump ship and join Musk’s party too. I don’t really know which group of Republicans is looking to jump ship.
TONYG
@Liminal Owl: That is such a stupid goddamn thing for the fucking New York Times to pay attention to. My sons are ethnically half Italian and half Japanese. One daughter-in-law is a mix of Dutch and Indonesian. The other is half Brazilian and half African-American. Goddamn eugenics bullshit from the Times.
Liminal Owl
@TONYG: Absolutely.
I just saw this on bsky (prankster36, whom I have now followed); C&P because I figure this is the right audience:
Trying to Destroy the Ring just Hardens the Dark Lord’s Resolve. Editorial by the Mouth of Sauron
O. Felix Culpa
That’s a good one! Thanks.
To Liminal Owl at #115.
Geminid
@Liminal Owl: I saw another funny one. Someone asked, “For those who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, what skill did you develop that you no longer use?”
Someone replied:
Liminal Owl
@Geminid: Anyone know where to find telephone cords nowadays?
RevRick
@Salty Sam: @Jay: @MagdaInBlack: @Timill:
In simple physics terms, climate is an engine and, like all engines, is powered by heat. In most motor vehicles, that involves the heat from the rapid (explosive) combustion of gasoline or diesel.
As the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius conclusively showed back in 1896, carbon dioxide, one of the byproducts of burning fossil fuels, acts like the glass in a greenhouse, capturing the heat of infrared radiation in the atmosphere. Since the Industrial Revolution we have been pouring billions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it still lingers. There’s now well over twice the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as before the Industrial Revolution. This has, of course, heated the atmosphere. But most of that heat has been transferred to the oceans. And now that excess heat is disrupting the ocean circulation which transfers heat from the tropics to the polar regions.
This ominous development is a huge flashing red signal that the natural systems which maintain a fairly stable climate are in danger of collapse.
Meanwhile, we have a stupid President, with lots of equally stupid GOP Representatives and Senators, insisting that climate change is a hoax. They have gutted the efforts to address climate change in the IRA legislation. I shudder for our children and grandchildren who will have to live with the consequences.
Geminid
@RevRick: Your comment reminded me of an E&E News article I read about a week ago:
The reporter notes that exhaust from diesel engines is particularly dangerous to health. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) estimated that diesel exhaust accounts for 70% of the state’s airborn cancer risk, and it’s a leading cause of asthma.
The article has a section about the effects of the pollution on the the people of Wilmington, who live next to the port. It was local Congresswoma Nanette Barrigan who intruduced legislation in 2021 that became the template for clean-ports funding in the IRA passed in August of 2022.
A fun fact: the Port of Los Angeles led the way in ending emmissions from ships docked at the port. Container ships used to idle their engines as they were loaded or unloaded in order to generate their large electrical repuirements, but now they plug in an electrical cable “the size of a dinner plate” and shut down the engines. In 2004, the Port of LA became the first port to implement this “cold ironing” practice, and it has since become the global standard.
A not so fun fact: China put 82,277 heavy electric trucks on its roads last year, compared to 1,476 for the U.S.
TONYG
@Geminid: That’s right. Two of the famous scenes from Casino and Goodfellas show Joe Pesci beating up a guy with a landline phone and Robert Di Niro destroy a telephone booth. Things aren’t what they used to be.
BellyCat
@Jay: This is VERY bad news for climate fucktinating.
schrodingers_cat
@Glory b: They will smear anyone who dares question them. See Martin’s comment about me at #75. This is not the first time I have had personal attacks directed at me on this blog by self identified white progressives.
schrodingers_cat
@Martin:@gloryb has more details about the application form issue.
Your attack on me is dishonest, personal and nasty. My economics is in line with Biden’s. Who brought back Keynesian economics after decades of austerity politics.
Find one comment made by me where I am in agreement with tax cuts for the wealthy and cutting government services as a policy prescription
schrodingers_cat
@O. Felix Culpa: @Geminid: Thanks for setting the record straight.
I don’t trust the DSA because while their stated goals are lofty their actions enable the Republicans and undermine the Democratic party.
Hillary would be finishing her second term now if Bernie Sanders had conceded when he had no path to the nomination. Instead he chose to undermine her and here we are.
UncleEbeneezer
When a questionnaire asks if you are “Black/African” we all know damn well what they are asking. Any White dude who was born in Africa tried to answer “Yes” would get rightfully roasted for it because that shit ain’t slick or cute and it’s actively trying to mess up the whole point of why that bubble for that category is on their in the first place. College age kids do stupid stuff. It’s not something that I’m gonna lose much sleep over but Mamdani absolutely deserves criticism for it and the only reason people are circling around to protect him is because he’s your new, Progressive savior. It’s ironic though that this post highlights a Bsky post about antisemitic slurs but doesn’t mention the fact that Mamdani gets a lot of support from FreePalestine activists/orgs who routinely use antisemitic slurs like “Zio”, call Jews “White”, invoke antisemitic conspiracy theories (about AIPAC, $, Jewish voters etc.) and use eliminationist phrases like “Globalize the Intifada.”
Sure we can all agree “Shylock” is a disgusting term of Jew-hatred that we should all rightfully condemn. But when Progressives are doing the same thing (or defending it) but doing so in Anti-Zionist language adopted from Soviet propaganda now it’s all fine and dandy. I swear that our side only sees antisemitism if it comes from the GOP. When it comes from people on our side (MP3 sound of crickets…)
Another Scott
@schrodingers_cat: Not defending Martin or his comments, but…
Does he identify as “white”? My (potentially faulty) recollection is no.
FWIW.
Hang in there.
Best wishes,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@Another Scott: Should I have said self identified progressives who also happen to be white?