Tanista
16hr ago
Republicans have a Senate advantage. It's by no means clear that nuking the filibuster (especially in Trump's term) is a good idea in the long run.
Though I grant it'd allow Democrats to pull more shenanigans like the ACA subsidies and then dare Republicans to take away the gibs.
Tanista
17hr ago
It's one group that doesn't trust the BBC and another group that insists that, yes, the BBC has problems but it's also the bulwark against barbarism and the target of a nefarious right wing plot (sotto voce: maybe driven by American lackeys) to destroy it. A similar dynamic exists with the CBC: any talk of funding becomes a matter of the sort of paranoid patriotism that would otherwise be mocked from the other side.
So I think the situation is actually worse for the BBC than uncritical trust of half the electorate. They don't even have that.
Tanista
1d ago
Is that actually the explanation or is that (the oldest) fanon?
Obviously 007 is a codename but "James Bond" being a codename (is "Felix Leiter" also a codename? Do all Bonds and Leiters end up as friends?) doesn't seem to have ever been canon AFAIK. The Craig Bond films certainly reject it.
It just seems like canon just doesn't matter that much to Bond. New actors allow soft reboots and that's that. Getting tangled up in the history is how you get a mess like Spectre or the need to give a definitive ending in No Time to Die. I'm not sure that form of modernization is actually better. That's how you eventually end up with MCU kudzu-canon.
For having such a bulk of population, Africa has nearly literally zero cultural force.
Afrobeats did have a moment with artists like Burna Boy being successful and working with members of the diaspora in Britain. From South Africa Tyla is probably the most prominent artist that's making waves in the US?
Their momentum seems to be stymied in the US though which might explain why it doesn't feel like it has any impact. In both cases their promotional runs seem to have poisoned the well a bit either because they were perceived as lecturing American blacks or not responding correctly to awkward questions - the whole colored category in SA apparently sounds awkward to AA ears and Tyla really failed to give a soothing answer, or any answer at all. Now every time she comes up in the hip hop media so does this issue and they're not kind. Probably doesn't help build up a head of steam.
In her defense, it's kind of a no-win. The answer that I see is that "colored" is a different thing from black and saying that might be even worse than appearing uppity.
Tanista
1d ago
What end could James Bond expect?
(Pretty funny that the one time we have a consistent canon they just kill him off)
Tanista
3d ago
I think policies should also have a "needless stupidity" modifier.
Some things are bad implementations of policies that are at least somewhat necessary. Some things are just needlessly stupid and never needed to happen and that makes them more egregious because of what they imply about our systems.
Tanista
5d ago
As with eSports, female participation and competence in war will increase with the deployment of the tranissaries.
I don't see it as particularly more incoherent than when right-wingers, who are generally hardly known for wanting to improve the lot of imprisoned criminals, develop a strange and very isolated compassion towards women prisoners who are forced to share their prison tracts with men.
Maybe I'm so tough on crime I just don't want men escaping to a comparatively nicer female prison.
(I do truly think a significant amount of the backlash and the gulf in male-female trans support is legitimately just disgust that some men, specifically the sort of man other men know to distrust or contain, think they get to defect)
Tanista
7d ago
Not sure what you mean by “raises your standards,” maybe you can elaborate.
That the more homogeneous a society the more small differences stand out.
The other question is to what degree already being homogeneous raises your standards.
The common argument is that nativism is just a standard reflexive response that you have to power through and people react the same way to visible Muslims and visible Irishmen.
You have to wonder if what are now considered irrelevant differences mattered more because people were more similar. Which would mean that you can't really safely assume it'd apply to Pakistani Muslims.
(That said, America is doing much better than, for example, Britain here anyway because the filter for such groups that were barred from immigrating before is still relatively strong)
Tanista
10d ago
You can also bring in Star Trek influenced works.
Battlestar Galactica is a direct response to Voyager, 9/11 and the Iraq War (the New Caprica arc with an outright suicide bombing insurgency especially feels dated) and is progressive in a very particular way that is both familiar and distinct from how things were done post 2020.
Tanista
11d ago
Tanista
11d ago
Can't wait to have another "is Hillary Swank Zendaya hot?" discussion when Dune 3 drops!
Outside of that, it's rather obvious KJP is carrying water for Biden. But to what end? Is he not out of politics? The earnest defense of his honor, whilst admirable, is a political dead end. Suicide, even.
Biden is clearly relitigating his legacy. Which is why Hunter came out not too long ago or we get comments when Jake Tapper releases a book.
But it is interesting that the two people who seem most willing to public go down with the Biden ship are black women.
It makes some sense with KJP since she'll never get another major role in the party.
But Kamala seems to be making noises like she'll run for something again and she's still providing cover for his health issues. She was also a late addition that wasn't particularly loved in Bidenworld apparently so one wonders what she gains.
To steelman KJP: Running with Biden through the election and then benching him and getting Kamala in as VP was probably the best choice given they did not have a better candidate than Kamala. My guess is that the people behind the scenes got greedy, pushed Biden aside and went with Kamala to their detriment. To that extent, KJP defending the honor of Biden is just as much a political dead end as the interviewers defense of the current democrat establishment. Two political losers fighting over lost scraps.
This is not actually a defense of KJP and her ilk.
What most likely happened was that Kamala was already on the ticket and so could use the money raised. The other issue is that many of the other Democratic candidates that did seem viable saw the situation was a mess and knew they could run in four years (when Trump might have nuked his popularity again) with a full campaign. Once Biden spitefully endorsed Kamala it was especially not worth it.
But that's not the reason it's not a defense of KJP. Another factor was people like Jean Pierre who deliberately tried to poison the well on any sort of contested primary by making it about the denial of a black woman her legitimate role. That was another reason candidates couldn't jump on.
If that had happened, KJP would be complaining again as a black, queer woman.
Try to get their American cousins to not launch a 20 year long pogrom against the demographics that most strongly supported Israel
Why would we assume that Ezra Klein class of Jews give a fuck what the mostly right wing current rulers of Israel do?
Especially without some inciting event.
If right wing white Gentiles can't prevent their own progressive brothers from championing that alleged ethnic cleansing why should we assume that progressive Jews could be talked down?
But, if I would raise a criticism myself, maybe Netanyahu's treatment of Obama and his lining up behind his American opponents, was slightly unwise.
We can argue that most of the outcome is baked in because of immigration but the absolute last thing you want as a foreign nation is to be seen as an ally to one side of America's culture war. It's a demented game with no clear rules but always two sides and it's insane to play it for real stakes.
Taking the invite from Republicans and rejecting any attempt by Obama to slow down on settlements didn't play well on the left, especially since Netanyahu seems to have the hardiness of a cockroach.
This naturally involved becoming harsher towards Ukraine. It didn't work, because Putin was intransigent and possibly took this (as many of Trump's opponents seem to have) as Trump being a pushover.
A risk raised by his domestic opponents when he suggested his solutions.
It even seemed to have worked in Gaza, where the ceasefire came right after the Trump administration got publicly pissy at Israel over attacking in Qatar.
Well Israel, the stronger party here, is closer to Ukraine than to Russia so it isn't really the exact same problem (putting aside whether Trump's vocal support emboldened Israel into that blunder or if the later apology was all theater)
Tanista
14d ago
It's obviously a problem because his theory of the case is that he can solve disputes with Xi and Putin by doing this...to US allies.
When Trump wanted to renegotiate NAFTA and slap his name on it, that happened. The idea that Canada's response is to just never do anything when it comes to US demands doesn't stand up to scrutiny. USMCA also has a mandated renegotiation period coming up so all parties agreed in principle that negotiations are part of the deal, Trump decided to jump the gun and impose tariffs outside of regular order (which is why he had to claim an emergency).
The idea that Canada is the party that "dug their heels in" and threw insults is...Like, I'm legitimately wracking my brain here because it's just so far from my experience of what happened. Trump started the conflict, Trump insisted on the idea of annexing a neighbor in a trade dispute, Trump then said a few times that there was nothing to be done to remove tariffs and Canada should just accept being annexed.
It of course does not help that both sides were let's say ideologically opposed to certain extent
It would be vibes-based idiocy to base trade policy on that in the first place
But this isn't even really consistently true. Starmer is probably worse than Trudeau on all of the major woke indices and he somehow gets along with Trump.
But in the end it is all besides the point.
If it is besides the point why bring it up? Why lump it in with legitimate strategic concerns like NS2? Why not just say from the start that the US is just thrashing about for advantage any way it can?
This is another hallmark of this sort of vibes-based, personality-driven "policy": frog-boiling and essentially apathy once it's done (for reasons no one could have predicted beforehand or hell, even articulate consistently today).
It's not a debate that Canada is weaker than the US (in fact, that's my argument against the idea that some meaningful defiance was going on), or that it has behaved in an indolent fashion that makes its dependency worse.
Tanista
14d ago
there seems to be a pattern where Trump deploys tough negotiation tactics most successfully where the goal is to get people to flatter him personally, not to advance US national interests.
And that those tactics aren't actually workable in the most intractable cases and thus only really fall hard on US allies.
In the past countries like Germany or Canada took USA for granted and even outright mocked Trump when he gave his speech as in this example.
The same Canada that got into a diplomatic mess with China because the US wanted to cause an issue Huawei? The lumping is doing a lot of work here.
This seems like a microcosm of a lot of Trumpian foreign policy: it's all a blend of vibes. What all of these groups have in common is uppity vibes, not actions.
Trudeau comes across as an Obama-wannabe -> this naturally means he comes across as the sort of person who would look down on Trump -> when Trump does something totally arbitrary against Canada it's then read through the lens of legitimate vengeance for ?? because the class of people who look like Trudeau/Obama include people who have ignored US strategic interests at some point or been mean to Trump.
Ultimately it just seems like the general grievances of red tribe have just metastasized to the international realm (because Americans are somewhat insulated from global affairs and so can turn foreign policy into a narcissistic affair).
It’s just DeCarlos Brown muttering to himself that the tiny white woman called him a nigger. It isn’t anything unexpected: he was already angry, as many loners are, and was desperately hoping to hurt someone. When he didn’t receive a justification, he manufactured one so he could stab someone anyway.
Tanista
14d ago
And Trump well within his right to say fuck you and stop negotiating with a party that finances attacks on him.
The President isn't supposed to arbitrarily tariff countries actually. If that were the case, Trump needn't have ever provided the fentanyl pretext for tariffing Canada.
We're supposed to pretend that such moves done in the past by Republicans weren't seen as massively norm breaking and a violation of normal politics?
It is literally called "the nuclear option".
Hell, Democrats cried bloody murder (and still bring it up with no small amount of bitterness*) about simply not holding a vote for Garland.
* Understandably. I'd be mad too if I allowed myself to be so outplayed.
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