Friday
anti_dan
1mo ago
I will try but I have no idea how they work. We have had this happen one time before at our previous residence. The driver hung a bag over the fencing of the adjacent lot and took a picture then 3 minutes later I went to look for it and there was nothing. We never were told what happened in that case. I suspect unless I file my own police report (which I dont really have cause for because they fully refunded me) I would ever get any notice.
I know that on large purchases Amazon does file its own reports with local PD. But that is for over $1k at a single location, and then the PD will try to see if there is a camera and file charges. But for $50 of takeout we ordered because we both had really stressful Friday workdays? I doubt it.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
it's not at all mainstream opinion
Being very critical of Obama wasn't mainstream among Democrats, but obviously being critical of your own sitting President is generally unheard of these days. How many mainstream Republicans criticised GWB? Left and right factions of the Democrats criticised Obama to what I would consider a normal degree for a sitting President - there were Blue dogs who attacked him semi-regularly and some progressives who did the same.
That most obvious bellwether of mainstream liberal opinion, the New York Times wrote an endorsement for re-election in 2012 that was very enthusiastic, yes, but very conventional and offered such qualifications as
We have criticized individual policy choices that Mr. Obama has made over the last four years, and have been impatient with his unwillingness to throw himself into the political fight
Elsewhere, the NYT editorial board was sharply critical of Obama on all sorts of issues all the time. There are too many to list here but here are a few from various points in his Presidency:
Deepwater Horizon:
But a year and a half into this presidency, the contemplative nature that was so appealing in a candidate can seem indecisive in a president. His promise of bipartisanship seems naïve. His inclination to hold back, then ride to the rescue, has sometimes made problems worse.
It certainly should not have taken days for Mr. Obama to get publicly involved in the oil spill, or even longer for his administration to start putting the heat on BP for its inadequate response and failure to inform the public about the size of the spill. (Each day, it seems, brings new revelations about the scope of the disaster.) It took too long for Mr. Obama to say that the Coast Guard and not BP was in charge of operations in the gulf and it’s still not clear that is true.
He should not have hesitated to suspend the expanded oil drilling program and he should have moved a lot faster to begin political and criminal investigations of the spill. If BP was withholding information, failing to cooperate or not providing the ships needed to process the oil now flowing to the surface, he should have told the American people and the world
Libya:
Mr. Obama made the wrong choice, trying to evade his responsibility under the 1973 War Powers Act to seek Congressional authorization within 60 days of introducing armed forces into "hostilities" -- or terminate the operation. The White House claimed that the Pentagon's limited operations are not the sort of "hostilities" covered by the act. It is not credible.
NSA:
Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
2011 Budget:
What Mr. Obama’s budget is most definitely not is a blueprint for dealing with the real long-term problems that feed the budget deficit: rising health care costs, an aging population and a refusal by lawmakers to face the inescapable need to raise taxes at some point. Rather, it defers those critical issues
Privacy Bill:
The draft bill released by the White House on Friday only vaguely reflects those ideas and is riddled with loopholes. It seems tailored to benefit Internet firms like Google and Facebook and little-known data brokers like Acxiom that have amassed detailed profiles of individuals. For good reason, many privacy groups and some Democratic lawmakers have criticized the draft.
there are entire Reddit communities devoted to conspiracies about 2024, you know
I can't quite tell if you're joking. On the one hand, we have the sitting President of the United States alleging that millions of votes were cast fraudulently. On the other, we have "Reddit communities". I wonder, might there be a slight asymmetry between these two things?
Indeed, J6 was actually uniquely acceptable compared to other protests, given it actually directed itself against the ruling elites
This is such a strange rendering of the riot in abstract terms. Indeed it was directed against ruling elites, but unfortunately in this case those elites were democratically elected representatives of the people certifying a fair election, and the rioters were targeting them because the process had failed their cult leader. Good job for those J6ers that the same election riggers who had the power to magically turn the result against Trump didn't show up for 2024 (or 2016), I suppose. Perhaps they overslept.
On Friday a butcher exposed his wife to Sale in Smithfield Market, near the Ram Inn, with a halter about her neck, and one about her waist, which tied her to a railing, when a hog-driver was the happy purchaser, who gave the husband three guineas and a crown for his departed rib. Pity it is, there is no stop put to such depraved conduct in the lower order of people.
The Times (July 1797)
Huh. Never would have guessed that.
I was aware of the more common colonial practice of a man skipping town on his wife and her later getting a legal divorce due to abandonment.
You have described a reality dating show that I might be willing to watch.
Every single contestant has a glove or gauntlet they carry around to throw down a challenge. There should be a board that tracks challenges made, challenges rejected/accepted, and fights won or lost, but yeah, no other consequences than that.
For additional fun have one of the contestants secretly be a trained MMA fighter.
I'd imagine there'd be alliances formed early with the best fighter, but then later some betrayals as they try to get him removed. Maybe you have 4-5 guys each throwing down challenges to the same dude forcing him to decide if he wants to lose some face or actually fight each of them in a row. I'd bet that under almost ANY circumstances, sleeping 5 dudes in a row buys you immense status points.
(Most TV shows or sports could be improved by allowing contestants to fight it out)
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
Looking Forward (In Time) To The Democratic (Midterm) Civil War (And Likely Trump Law Enforcement Accelerant)
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How about that Democratic National Committee drama last week month, am I right?
This post started being sketched out last month, in expectation of a predictable event just last week. Then the last couple of weeks happened, and what could have been an interesting culture war episode got overshadowed by, well, war-war. Crazy times… but the premise is still relevant in the future, if not now. So, ahem.
Last week’s resolution to some ongoing party drama has implications for the next year or so of American politics. Implications include intended infighting, pessimistic predictions for Senate prospects, and a predictable next escalation enforcement of federal laws that will feed the partisan polemics of dictatorship and whatnot. This is because as the progressives and establishment Democrats begin to position against eachother while trying to use Trump as a foil for their internal party power struggle, the Trump Administration looks to be preparing enforcement action against the professional protest apparatus involved in recent not-entirely-peaceful riots in LA and elsewhere, which both will strike at parts of the Democratic power base but also provide leverage for the Democrat factions to try and use against eachother even as they loudly decry it.
This post is looking to organize thoughts and identify trends that can help predict / make sense of some of the upcoming predictable public drama that will shape American media coverage through 2026. When equally predictable media campaigns follow, you’ll (hopefully) be taken less by surprise, and have an ear open for what may not be said at the time.
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Part 1: The 2026 Democrat Senate Prospects
Not to put too fine a line on it, but in some respects the 2026 midterms are a lost cause for the Democrats, and some of the ongoing politic are going to be a reflection of that context.
Part of the background of today’s subject really begins five years ago, in the 2020 US election. The same election that brought Biden to the Presidency also got the Democratic Party 50 seats in the US Senate, giving them control of the Senate with the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote.
At the time, this was a great and glorious thing for the Biden Administration, as it was a key part of giving the Democrats the might trifecta, which is to say control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency. As narrow as the Senate margin was, it supported things like appointing judges, budgets via reconciliation, and so on. This was a highwater mark of Democrat institutional power, before last year’s 2024 brought in the current Republican trifecta.
Most people are familiar with this, and are also likely familiar with how the ruling party nearly always looses House of Representative seats in the midterms after an election. Presidential approval drops, the base gets complacent, the opposition gets hungrier / more motivated, all that jazz. The US House changes quickly, as every elected representative is up for re-election every two years.
What people may not realize is that only a third of the Senate is up for re-election every cycle, as the 6-year terms are staggered so that only one third are up for grabs at any given cycle. This means that far less of the currently Republican-dominated Senate is up for re-election. It also means that the seats that are, are the seats that were last voted in 2020.
It also means that senate maps can be deeply uncompetitive. Like how most Republican Senate seats this cycle are in solidly red states, so that there are about two competitive Republican seats, but four competitive Democratic seats.. While there are no guarantees in politics, it is not only plausible/likely for the Republicans to maintain control of the Senate this cycle, but to increase their margin of Senate control. After all, the last cycle these seats were up was 2020 pandemic election, and Biden’s results then were considered an especially good showing.
This is why US political watchers have been warning since the earliest parts of the Trump Administration- before any of the current drama- that the Democrats face a rough wall next year. While the House is often more competitive and up for being flipped, the Senate is much less malleable. And without control of both the House and the Senate, the ability of the opposition party to limit / oppose / impeach the President is relatively limited. (Or rather- they can impeach all they want, but lose in the Senate.)
The lack of formal ability is important. It would mean that even if the Democrats take the House, then they could impeach Trump however many times they want, but not remove him due to a lack of the Senate. It means the House could refuse to pass a funding bill, but they couldn’t use Control of Congress to dictate terms of short-term spending bills to prevent Trump’s options to further gut parts of the federal government during a shutdown. Having one chamber of Congress is better than none, but it makes those leaders relatively impotent.
This is relevant scene setting, because this is a clear and obvious wall that the Democratic Party is heading towards. If they fail, they can take solace in ‘just’ retaking the House, but the worse they do, the more bitter the recriminations. At the same time, while the senate map is daunting, there is also a clear way forward.
If the Democrats want to defeat Trump over all else, they need to (re)build the anti-Trump coalition. Use opposition and public discontent to Trump to turn out their base. If there isn’t enough organically, then manufacture and generate more, using all the levers of influence and political mobilization they can across the institutions they still control. To do as well as they can, they need to work together.
Insert laconic ‘If.’
Alternatively, a dismal year where Senate gains are unrealistic is the best election cycle for internecine conflict over the soul, leadership, and composition of the Democratic Party going into 2028.
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Part 2: DNC Drama
Insert the multi-month Democratic National Committee drama that resolved last Friday, when Washington State Democratic Party Chair Shasti Conrad won the election for the open vice chair position of the DNC. Shasti Conrad herself is irrelevant to this story, besides that she is an establishment democratic, and onboard with the DNC’s job of helping get Democrats elected across the country.
Why was there an open vice chair of the DNC? Because the Democratic establishment defenestrated the previously elected chair, David Hogg, over his still current intention to primary ‘asleep at the wheel’ sitting elected Democrats with younger (and more progressive) challengers.
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. No one literally threw David Hogg out a window. He “resigned” before he could be formally removed. And his removal technically wasn’t because he promised to use his DNC position to give $20 million USD to his personal super PAC ‘Leaders We Deserve,’ breaking DNC neutrality to primary his internal-party political opponents. Rather, a DNC subcommittee recommended a redo of the otherwise uncontested DNC election on grounds of procedural issues.
And by procedural issues, the standard media coverage is obviously referring to
In her complaint, shared with Semafor by a Democratic source, Free argued that she lost a “fatally flawed election that violated the DNC Charter and discriminated against three women of color candidates,” and asks for “two new vice chair elections.” In February, after several rounds of voting, the race came down to five candidates – Kenyatta, Hogg, Free, and two other women. Kenyatta and Hogg claimed the open spots.
“By aggregating votes across ballots and failing to distinguish between gender categories in a meaningful way, the DNC’s process violated its own Charter and Bylaws, undermining both fairness and gender diversity,” argued Free, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation.
If that parsed to what you think it parsed to- yes. David Hogg, a young white man whose ascent into progressive politics was based primarily on being a school shooting survivor](https://www.centredaily.com/news/local/education/penn-state/article286954330.html), got out-progressive stacked by a female minority over… a race and gender quota.
Ms. Free filed her objection at the end of February, well before Mr. Hogg was called a Jackass by notable / still influential Democratic strategist James Carville in late April](https://www.drewberquist.com/2025/05/james-carville-calls-out-jackass-david-hogg-directly-to-his-face-watch/). Clearly her action was unmotivated by any desire for personal advancement, and her complaint was not a convenient pretext for senior Democratic party officials like DNC Chair Ken Martin to remove a vocal progressive who sought to style himself as the next AOC.
If it were, though, then it seems the DNC establishment won an important victory. Given the first-past-the-post nature of (most) US elections, primarying your own party is a great way to expose almost-certain-win seats for a Republican upset if the primary dispute bleeds over to the general election. (American politicians are infamous for their magnanimous forgiveness in such things.) Additionally, even though Hogg ‘only’ wanted to primary dems in ‘safe’ seats, that in itself would have represented an attempt to make the permanent / core Democratic party more progressive, and leave the non-Progressives in the unstable / competitive seats. Over time, attrition would ensure that the powerful committees (which tend to go to those with seniority, i.e. safer seats over time) would go to progressives, while the non-progressive Democrats stood to be turned into the next round of Blue Dog Democrats- tolerated to a point, but sacrificed in the name of some policy priority popular with the core but unpalatable to the broader electorate in competitive areas.
Or perhaps the geriatric problem got worse. David Hogg was, after all, supposed to be part of the solution by getting the younger gen-Z into Democratic offices. His earlier PAC efforts of $8 million for young progressives was lauded at the time for getting candidates on the ballot and elected at lower levels in various red states, such as the youngest Texas-Senate senator. This was supposed to be all the more important after Trump made major gains amongst young voters in the 2024 election. David Hogg was (supposed) to be part of the solution for that, hence his relatively meteoric ascent. Even his message on primarying out the old, infirm, and insufficiently progressive resonated- something like 60% of the Democratic party want the leadership who just replaced Hogg to be replaced.
Or perhaps not. James Carville may be one of the louder cranks to publicly claim the Progressive wing is detrimental to the Democratic Party, but he is not the only one by any means. And while Carville has suggested that the party should have an amicable split over pronoun politics with progressives going off their own way, he’s also accused progressive wing leaders like AOC and Bernie Sanders of being more interested in running against Democrats than the Republicans. While Carville makes the motions of a good party man who would come behind the party regardless who wins, there is an awareness that not everyone is interested in the party winning as much as winning the party.
The point of this segment is not (just) to give some context to an American political drama you’d rarely hear about (and probably didn’t given the events of last week). The point is that an institutional power struggle is already underway between the progressive (and often younger) wing of the Democratic Party, and the (older) establishment.
David Hogg was just an iteration of more direct party-on-party fighting. He lost the institutional battle, and his supporters were not influential enough to protect him. At the same time, David Hogg would like you to know he’s not going anywhere. He still intends to primary, or at least threaten to primary, sitting Democrats. Since Trump bombed the Iranian nuclear program over the weekend, Hogg has argued any Democrat who supports Trump on the conflict should be primaried. Now that he is free of the expectation of DNC neutrality, he is free to pick fights with fellow, though rarely progressive, democrats.
For now, though, inter-Democratic competition for influence and future electoral prospects is taking a more amicable, or at least acceptable, turn of targets- who can turn out support for anti-Trump efforts.
Or, to put it another way- the acceptable form of inter-Democrat competition is, for the moment, orienting to who can oppose Trump the best.
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Part 3: Trump Protest Power
Not to blow anyone’s mind, but Trump is kind of unpopular with Democrats, and they’d really like their elites to fight back.
After a dispirited and divided start to the new administration, where Trump’s 100 Days agenda was dominated by DOGE tearing through the bureaucracy and Senate Minority Leader Schumer avoided a government shutdown to partisan discontent, despite his belief that doing so would have empowered Trump more, early Democratic party polling suggested a desire to on the base for more and more active resistance.
How to fight was up for debate, and rather than a comprehensive strategy something of a spaghetti strategy of ‘throw everything at the wall and see what works’ was pursued. Many of these have been covered in the Motte over the past weeks, from the record-breaking national injunctions, to the media campaigns over the ICE deportations trying to equivocate migrant deportations with citizen exile, to the efforts to stall DOGE and administrative personnel actions. The recent Ivy League struggles by the likes of Yale and Harvard against Trump are also emblematic, as (university) administration have risen and fallen depending on if they are seen as weak against Trump. That’s not to say all these actions have been successful- for every ‘Trump suffers major blow in effort to [X]’ there is often a partially or mostly reversed decision later- but it is popular, and clearly so.
In the last weeks, this has organized to the point where various Democratic media organs are explicitly re-raising the #Resistance moniker, trying to re-build the sort of mass-mobilization efforts that fortified democracy to save the 2020 election. This recently culminated with the mid-June No Kings protest, where various DNC-aligned organizations including MoveOn, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Federation of Teachers and the Communications Workers of America organized nation-wide protests. These protests were meant to eclipse the military parade in D.C. for the 250th anniversary of the US Army (or Trump’s birthday, if you prefer), and called to mind the various early anti-Trump protests of the first administration. These protests demonstrate organizational capacity, coordination efforts, influence with the sort of people to show up, and of course the supporting media coverage to get their message out.
There was just one slight problem for the stage-managed revival of the #Resistance- rioters waving the Mexican Flag over burning cars in Los Angeles, California, beat them to the punch.
While the actual photo was almost certainly one of those naturally occurring protest images, the California protests weren’t (quite). On 6 June, about a week and a half before the No Kings protests for the 14th, hundreds of protestors rallied in downtown Los Angeles to protest various ICE raids that had occurred across the city earlier that day. By the 7th, local riot police and teargas were being used On the 8th, Trump federalized California National Guard over California Governor Newsom’s objection to protect federal property and personnel.
This was an unusual, arguably provocative, decision. In US law, national guard operate under the state governor’s control and are not legally under Presidential or federal control unless done under certain legal authorities. Failure to do so is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a post-civil-war-reconstruction act making it a crime to use federal forces in law enforcement roles except where authorized by Congress. Trump invoking these authorities- which provide the Congressional authorization criteria- has been the subject of litigation by Governor Newsom, who opposed activation at the time, allegedly on grounds it would inflame the protests- which it arguably did.
Why did Trump do it, besides malicious disregard for the governor? Trump’s decision to do so anyways was likely influenced by the acting ICE director alleging that the LAPD took 2 hours to respond to requests for law enforcement assistance on 6 June despite multiple calls when ICE agents were swarmed by objectors during the 6 June enforcement raids that kickstarted the protests-turned-riots. The LA Police Chief has disputed this, claiming police responded in 38 minutes, citing traffic. (There is a joke to be made about LA traffic and how this is plausible.) The Police Chief also claimed they weren’t informed ahead of time, which is… also quite plausible.
Naturally / inevitably, however, the California protests became at least a short term win for Governor Newsom, whose post-protest Presidential prospects for 2026 seem stronger for having stood up to / opposed Trump. Resistance in this contexts has been more about verbal sparring and legal objections than something more concrete. Less assembling a platoon of people and buying the biggest fireworks possible to attack police, and more name calling, daring the administration to arrest him, and general ‘Trump is acting like a dictator’ themes. You know, the usual things political opponents in dictatorships do. At the same time, Newsom is playing the role of the moderate, and while it’s not like he can take full credit for the work of District Attorneys and such, California is publicizing charging some of the worst protestors in ways that weren’t really publicized during the Trump 1 era left-coded protests.
Except… Newsom isn’t the only winner here. Or necessarily the biggest Democratic power player. That may yet go to another, David Huerta.
If you don’t know who David Heurta is, you are not alone. He is not an elected politician, a party strategist, or elder statesman. He is a union leader. To quote his Biden-era White House bio when he was an honored guest-
David Huerta is President of the Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West (SEIU-USWW) whose members are service workers predominately from the commercial real estate industry. As a labor leader, David has worked to build an immigrant integration program that includes English classes for union members. Under his leadership, hundreds of SEIU-USWW members have become U.S. citizens. In addition, he has advocated for comprehensive immigration reform by empowering SEIU-USWW members to become their own advocates for change.
Or to put it another way- David Huerta is part of the labor union wing of the Democratic party, except his labor union is of the totally-not-illegal-immigrant sort of organized labor. And his role in the party is totally not as part of the labor union mobilization to party member pipeline that organized labor has served in the past.
Mr. Huerta was arrested Friday the 6th of June, which is to say when the protests started, for interfering with ICE operations. His protest seems to have been both non-violent and directly intended to obstruct ICE activities.
According to a Homeland Security Investigation officer's sworn affidavit, Huerta sat down in front of a vehicular gate to a staging ground for ICE operations that were ongoing nearby.
The complaint alleges he yelled to the protestors "stop the vehicles," and "it's a public sidewalk, they can't stop us."
The officer then says he asked Huerta to move from the gate so that cars could get in and out of the facility, and Huerta replied, "What are you going to do? You can't arrest all of us."
Mr. Huerta may well have been correct. Instead of everyone being arrested, Mr. Huerta was arrested. And within 12 hours hundreds of protestors were in downtown LA. Within 36 hours, hundreds grew to thousands and cars had been burned in the streets. Within 48 hours Trump sent in the national guard, clearly taking it seriously.
One on hand, this can be (as the sympathetic media seek to characterize it), a case of a peaceful labor leader being unjustly suppressed, leading to a cycle of provocation due to reckless escalation.
On another hand, this can also look like an excellent example of a union leader’s ability to organize and lead not only anti-Trump/anti-ICE disruption efforts, but force Trump to respond/take him seriously, even as Mr. Huerta’s organizational turnout capacity supported larger protests and greater effect. Sure, some of the protestors got out of hand, but there’s no evidence they were linked to Mr. Huerta… right?
To my knowledge, no. And that’s why I would suggest that Mr. Huerta, not Governor Newsome, may end up being the bigger winner from these protests. A $50,000 bail fee is one of those things that is not exactly going to cripple not only a labor union leader with friends in high places, but someone who has- probably- gotten far, far more popular with the would-be resistance. Willing to fight ICE, protest Trump, and a labor leader?
Mr. Huerta may not be challenging Governor Newsom for the governorship or Presidency any time ever, but Mr. Huerta probably has a good future ahead of himself in the Democratic party… if the glowing editorial linked in that first mention of him wasn’t clue enough that he’s already a significant local power player.
But remember- it’s not just Mr. Huerta.
Mr. Huerta’s glory comes, somewhat, at the expense of Governor Newsom. Media coverage, and public attention, is a 0-sum game. Some elements can reinforce each other, and in this case arguably did, but other elements work against each other.
After all, their glory/prestige/anti-Trump cred comes from the protests that came at the expense of the No King’s protests. Their exposure / attention grabbing was zero-sum between ‘polite, professional’ #Resistance, and a far more immediate, visceral ‘snap’ protests.
And the California protests- where both Huerta and Newsom had their political interest incentives be firmly in the ‘maximally oppose Trump’ side of things- have given Trump and the Republicans the sort of made-for-campaign-add images that only a Mexican flag over burned cars in American cities can.
And this doesn’t count the other people involved, initially or later, and who tried to get in on the action / influence. One man has been charged with trying buy the biggest fireworks he could to arm his ‘platoon’ and shoot at police in the later LA protests. When political fireworks- figurative or literal- are prestigious, bigger demonstrations of ability garner more prestige for more influence for bigger groups.
The LA Protests and the No Kings Protests weren’t formally or even directly at odds. But they were competing in various ways. For public attention, yes, but also for Democrat consideration. The #Resistance revival has, for the moment, failed to take off. Maybe it already would have, but the LA riots stole wind from the sail, to speak. And in turn, the LA riots- despite being vehemently anti-Trump and anti-ICE, two very popular things with the Democratic base- are likely to undercut the Democrat position going into the next election cycle. Now any future No Kings-style mass protests has to either take better care to distance from the more combative, or be tarred with the politically unpalatable for the non-democrats in the electorate.
Which lowers the value (and ability) of a combined effort… but does encourage partisans to do what they can for their own interest, regardless of how it affects the rest of the party. The nature of such publicity-driven contests creates natural incentives for speed (to pre-empt others), high-visibility (to dominate attention), and excess (the rawest form of proof-of-sincerity).
This creates something of a prisoners dilemma where everyone has an incentive to ‘defect’ first by going for their own public display, rather than coordinating. Even if the party, collectively, would perform better if everyone sang from the same sheet of music, any ambitious leader is incentivized to not be part of the choir.
The point here isn’t that these contemporary protests are adversaries. It is that these contemporary incentives are occurring at the same time as the inter-party conflict, where the David Hogg and progressives of the party want more combative responses at the expense of other party members. And if they can do so- and win party acclaim- by pushing protest actions as aggressively as possible against Trump, the acceptable target, rather than against other Democrats…
That’s a risky mix, even before you consider that another key actor has his own agency in this brewing inner-party struggle.
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Part 4: Trump Can Strike Back (Lawfully)
I’m torn between introducing this section as ‘Trump’s White House is more competent than you may want to believe’ and ‘it’s not legal just because it’s anti-Trump,’ and ‘don’t count on departed friends to protect you.’ All are applicable.
The first is a reminder / warning against those who want to dismiss the Trump administration’s ability for deliberate, even clever, action. Whatever your opinion on Trump himself, he is not an incompetent at everything he does. Nor, more importantly, are the people he’s brought into this administration. There are implications of some exceptionally competent people who understand how the government works at a mechanical level, as demonstrated from the takedown of USAID through dual-hatting, the ongoing efforts to move Executive branch agencies outside of the National Capital Region, and the budget/shutdown politics. I’ve even gone so far as to argue that various policy rollouts like DOGE have been done with the intent of shaping later / future policy efforts. The Project 2025 wishlist may not have been a formal Trump policy plan of everything he’d agreed to, but there are a lot of discrete, actionable items there that have been pursued as able by those willing to work with/for Trump.
The point here isn’t to praise, but to make a point about institutional competence. There are people in the administration who know what they are doing, know what they want, and know how to go about turning that desire into policy. And when they know to expect resistance, they loosely know who and what they need to act against- not least because various parts of the #Resistance wrote extensive tell-all articles last time to take credit for how they worked together to link elected politicians, media, labor organizers, and business interests worked together to manage anti-Trump protests.
When political opponents write a brag sheet of dubiously legal measures they took to defeat you, it doesn’t take the most capable political actor to plan to mitigate it on round two.
It’s not even something that necessarily only started this year. Reaching way back to 2017, you may (not) remember the Dakota Pipeline Protests, which were one of the anti-Trump-coded protests in the early first trump administration. In short, American tribal / environmentalist protests over a pipeline escalated after Trump voiced support, including occupations of work sites, blockades against ground routes to resupply them, and so on. It was framed as ‘Trump against native Americans and environmentalists,’ and the protestors received significant public media support at the time.
Well, after over half a decade in court, Greenpeace has been $660 million in damages for defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy and other acts. This may threaten to bankrupt the organization, though it will be years more before it works through the system. The crux of the verdict derives from the tens of thousands of dollars raised to train and send thousands of protestors, along with logistical support, with awareness and sanction at the highest levels of the organization.
Parallels to other mass protest organizers should hopefully be obvious.
This Time Would Be Different even if Trump were not Actually a Dictator this term, but because various factors that the Democratic party and partisans have taken for granted in the past two decades are changing. Various dynamics that let the election fortification of 2020 succeed were based variously on low awareness by the Trump administration of what was going on, having the right friends in the right places to make it work, and reluctance by the government(s) to go after coordinating elements.
As elements of this change, the system gears grind against rather than with each other. And in the sort of decentralized, every-Dem-is-pursuing-their-own-interest protest environment that the No Kings vs. Newsom vs. Huerte anti-Trump protests have been showing, there are probably going to be far more loose threads, and far more willingness to pursue them, going forward.
Take the Justice Department. A good deal of prosecution by any government is discretionary. You only have so many investigators, only so many prosecutors, and more potential crimes than you can handle. You prioritize what to pursue, and drop what you don’t want to. This is how something like 90% to 95% of the 2020 Floyd protest charges were dropped or never pursued in various jurisdictions.
But at the same time, non-prosecution is a choice, not a natural state of a just world. And it is a choice that can be made otherwise if someone wants to. Or if the people who wouldn’t want to depart and are replaced.
For example, the DOJ Civil Rights Division had a reputation for seeking certain types of civil rights cases, and not being as interested in others, such as university admissions discrimination. I say ‘had’ because something like 70% of the DOJ Civil Rights Division has departed since Trump took office. Whatever reputation / expectation you have of the Civil Rights Division, it’s probably not quite what the new DOJ CRD priorities are.
The “Civil Division Enforcement Priorities” memorandum identifies five priorities: (1) combatting discriminatory practices and policies, (2) ending antisemitism, (3) protecting women and children, (4) ending “sanctuary” jurisdictions, and (5) prioritizing denaturalization of naturalized U.S. citizens.
But this is the new institutional direction of the CRD. It still has the legal authorities Congress gave to the ‘old’ CRD. But as the saying goes, “people are policy,” and the people in the CRD have changed. Other people’s expectations just haven’t caught up to, say, the DOJ opening a civil rights case against any state or local officials involved sanctuary city politics that also just-so-happen to overlaps with, say, anti-federal riots.
I raised the fireworks platoon guy earlier, but that is far from the only case that can be pursued. About a week into the protests, a crowd broke into an ICE detention facility, overpowered national guard soldiers, and tried to release the detainees before about 100 law enforcement officers responded. That’s various charges on its own. The FBI is reportedly considering a criminal conspiracy line of effort for any groups involved in organizing the violent protests. The IRS is reportedly reviewing into non-profit and other organizational funding as part of the money flow investigation. Parallel to those parallels, House Republicans are investigating a US billionaire with possible ties to the protests, and the Chinese Communist Party… and Code Pink,an anti-war/social-justice organization.
And this doesn’t include other possible things that could be pursued. Doxing can be a crime… but what if its a municipal mayor who decides to dox ICE agents? When mostly peaceful protests are held outside of hotels suspected of hosting ICE agents, what if / when a not-entirely-peaceful protest occurs outside of a hotel that isn’t? When left-coded social media encourages eachother to follow and record ICE agents at work, what happens if someone ignores the ACLU’s carefully worded advice on dealing with law enforcement, particularly what the agents areallowed to do?
Would arrests and prosecutions be politically motivated? Sure, if you want. When any prosecution is discretionary, all high-profile investigations and prosecutions are arguably motivated. Similarly, a refusal to do so can also be motivated.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything that could be found. It won’t even require ‘three felonies a day’ over-criminalization of anything.
The point I am trying to make here is that there is a greater risk of legal risk to anti-Trump partisans this administration than in the last two, and this is matched by a greater interest in the Trump administration to do so.
This is going to challenge people’s expectations / understanding of what ‘should’ be tolerated / not challenged as illegal, but will be viewed as suspect now. I want to emphasize this even further, since this isn’t ‘merely’ corruption of justice, but an element of generational norms being overturned.
12 of the last 16 years have seen the American federal government under the control of the Democratic party. The Obama and Biden administrations would generally sympathize with, and not be interested in aggressively pursuing, Democrat-coded protestors. Four of the other last 16 years were the resistance phase, where significant parts of the government bureaucracy deliberately stonewalled Trump efforts- and in some cases, in active collusion with protest organizers. Four years before that, the last four years of the Bush administration, were also a period of large-scale and sustained political protest environments as part of the Democratic party apparatus, when the Bush Administration was sensitive to how it could respond due to falling political legitimacy and political norms of the era.
20+ years of established expectations on ‘what you can get away with at a protest’ is a generation. Younger partisans like David Hogg have spent their entire adult / politically-aware lives in that environment. It is a norm to them, the way things have ‘always’ been.
But such norms are not laws, particularly when the norms derive from the discretion of often sympathetic enforcers who are no longer in the position to make the call.
/
Part 5: When a Resistance Devours Itself
This is the final section, and an effort to bring the points above together into a hopefully coherent but non-obvious synthesis.
My forecast prediction is that over the next year, inter-Democrat competition is going to revolve around who can ‘stand up to’ / fight Trump by pressing the limit of the law, but attempts to toe the line are going to overstep changes in enforcement practices. This will fuel anti-Trump sentiment amongst Democrats and accusations of tyranny, but also influence the unfolding of the Democratic internal struggle not only going into 2026, but even into the 2028 election. This will be because the Trump administration will likely go after the ‘connective tissue’ of the Democratic protest-mobilization apparatus where it detects legal risk. This, in turn, can become a tool in the Democratic internal conflict that sub-factions can utilize against each other, because those same mobilization organizations are factional players in the Democratic internal conflict.
In part one, we made a case for why the Senate will be a rough bet for the Democrats at all. While coherent parties can spin a partial failure into a partial success, this will likely hinder the institutional ability of the Democrats to do major limits on the Republican party. This is liable to frustrate partisans, and lead to highly symbolic protests in the institutions, and other actions outside of institutions.
In part two, we raised the ongoing internal conflict within the Democratic party. Significant parts of the Progressive wing have and are making efforts to actively displace non-progressive rivals for control and even composition of the Democratic Party establishment. The non-progressive institutionalists won, but they are facing the challenge of the upcoming mid-terms, even as the progressives are trying to take the mantle of ‘actually fighting Trump.’ Democratic institutions are already being used against each other.
In part three, we raised how ‘actually fighting’ is something of a zero-sum game on the ability of leaders to mobilize protests and take the spotlight. Would-be leaders trying to organize great protests can be pre-empted and upstaged even accidentally by those doing their own thing with more modest means. When paired with the internal party struggle in part two, this creates incentives for would-be leaders of the party to push aggressive protests to the limits of the law.
In part four, we make the point is that the limit of the law is changing, and that this implication is not widely recognized. Between changes in institutional composition that have changed out more sympathetic actors who could have turned a blind eye, increased awareness of how the Democratic protest mobilization structure works, and the improved institutional understanding of the Trump administration on how to shape and act through the bureaucracy, the legal-enforcement environment has changed. When it is noticed, it will be probably be decried as tyranny, but there are non-tyrannical causes.
In part five, I want to make a point that these are not just individual facets that might each be an interesting observation of their own but part of a feedback loop. How the Trump Administration chooses to prosecute law-pressing protests is itself going to be a factor in the internal democratic power struggle in both future elections and the outcome of the Democratic power struggle.
The 2026 election argument is reasoning from (future) public polling. Will Trump and the Republicans be more or less popular if they crack down on lawbreakers involved in protests? If the public supports anti-ICE protestors over Trump, then the more anti-ICE protests, the better the midterm results. As a consequence, internal democratic party logic might be to maximize protests, even if it involves lawbreaking, for a net gain. Especially if/when anger at Trump administration arrest and prosecutions might turn out the base.
But this is an assumption, not a conclusion. While there are parts of the Trump migration policies that are unpopular, there are parts that remain popular. Moreover, prosecutions of protest elements can motivate the Trump base as well, and voter apathy/antipathy could deter Democrat support. It could well be a negative effect. We’ll see which proves right in the midterms.
What is arguably more important, however, is if the organizations that organize and execute start to being targeted, and what that might mean going into 2028.
Organizations that engage in mass protest politics, like Greenpeace, don’t only organize protests against Red Tribe-coded efforts. That money and manpower is put to use in other ways in other contexts. For Democratic party organizations, that includes things like voter mobilization, organizing fundraising, and coordinating communications. These take money and manpower, and when you lack the resources and the unified efforts, you end up like the Florida Democratic Party, which has practically collapsed in the third largest US state.
That is the larger 2028 election implication, if aggressive protest mobilizers in 2025-2026 lead to investigations/prosecutions in 2027-2028 due to the increased willingness to enforce against grey zone activities. The generational expectations of what could/would be prosecuted are shifted, so there’s the risk, and the consequence could be a partial paralysis of the Democratic Party mobilization/organization infrastructure in the next presidential election. Organizations frozen, donors uncertain/afraid to give to who, and so on.
This will obviously, understandably, and predictably alarm Democratic partisans. Condemnations will be demanded and almost certainly provided. However… it will also shape the inter-Democratic conflict as which organizations are affected/investigated first and most will matter.
After all, Democratic organizations don’t only try to help all Democrats get elected. Some, like Leaders We Deserve, would rather some Democrats lose so that a personal faction can get in place instead.
And if, hypothetically, some process error or rules violation were to expose that faction to legal risk- where the big bad Trump administration might act and convenient clear the field…
Well, the surviving winners would certainly happily condemn the Trump administration for doing so. And get the perks with the party base for doing so. But it sure would be convenient, wouldn’t it?
This is the risk of the Democratic civil war quote-unquote “escalating” in the midst of the Trump administration’s willingness to crack down where it can. It’s not just that Democrats are fighting each other, or that Democrats fight Trump. It can be that Democrats use Trump to fight each other as a tool for their internal conflict.
If anyone has studied (or, worse, lived in/through) a country going through a civil war, especially one with a resistance with little formal power but motivated by performative acts of defiance, this should not be surprising. This has been a common / well recorded dynamic where rival insurgent groups are nominally on the same side, but competing with each other, and leverage the hated oppressor as a tool in their conflict.
Sometimes it’s as direct as an anonymous informant dropping a tip, so that a raid can go after a rival. Perhaps that old, establishment incumbent is in the way, but wouldn't be if evidence of patronage-network corruption were passed on to a hostile FBI. Or maybe that young, reckless progressive who didn't learn how to play the limits of the protests of the 70s makes a mistake that could leave them out and unprotected. Action, or inaction, could have similar effects when a hostile administration is looking for something to act on.
Does such feuding it hurt the combined potential of the resistance overall? Sure. Does it improve the hated authority’s position to have one less threat? Also sure. But does it position you better for influence / control of the local resistance networks, i.e. the democratic party?
This is why David Hogg was called a jackass for trying to primary fellow democrats as DNC chair. It was an explicit break from the premise of the DNC as a neutral leadership institution for democrats anywhere. The value of a reputation of neutrality is that people don’t expect neutral actors to be that sort of backstabber, and they don't make plans to backstab the neutral actors either. It reduces internal coalition tensions.
But in making that power play, and then the institutionalist purge of Hogg through totally-not-pretextual means, the Hogg struggle helped reframe the nature of the competition. It is not merely ‘how do the Democrats struggle against Trump?’ It is now, increasingly, ‘how do the Democrats use existing institutions in the struggle against each other?’
And since Trump is still a relevant actor, both as a foil and as an agent in his own right, the emerging Democratic infighting paradigm may well become ‘how do we use Trump in our struggle against each other?’
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Agreed. In an exchange of missiles and bombs, Iran would be losing decidedly, so it makes sense for them to not engage in it.
From my understanding, this ceasefire is mostly that both sides will cease lobbing missiles at each other for now, not anything about Iran stopping their nuclear program.
If either side feels they have anything to gain by breaking the ceasefire (e.g. Israel seeing another opportunity to delay the Iranian nuclear program by bombing them), then they will break it.
While it is a defeat for the Iranian regime, it is a defeat that they likely can survive -- they ideology is not based on how they are technologically superior to the West, after all. I imagine that support for their nuclear program has actually increased, because it seems like the only pathway to prevent the IDF from bombing Iranian generals whenever they feel like it.
Of course Trump announces the ceasefire like he had just negotiated the fucking Good Friday Agreement, when all he did was bomb Iran without getting into an indefinite missile war with them, which few if any people claimed was the main downside of bombing them.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
In doing so, their retaliation against Gaza will knowingly provoke a retaliation from Iranian-backed militias against Israel.
Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia, began attacking Israel on 10/8 though, before Israel did anything.
Nasrallah characterized it as follows:
“Some say I’m going to announce that we have entered the battle,” Nasrallah said Friday. “We already entered the battle on Oct. 8.” He argued that Hezbollah’s cross-border strikes have pulled away Israeli forces that would otherwise be focused on Hamas in Gaza.
AvocadoPanic
1mo ago
blessing that the Christians bestow on Israel (e.g. the Jewish diaspora) seems pretty limited
They're prayed for on Good Friday that they might repent their sins and find salvation through Jesus. What better blessing is there?
O merciful God, who hast made all men, and hatest nothing that thou hast made, nor wouldest the death of any sinner, but rather that he be converted and live; Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics, and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word; and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the true Israelites, and be made one fold under one shepherd, Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1mo ago
I've been there
Charge inaccurate hours to make sure you don't come off as inefficient or underutilised? Well the number is all fake anyway, so why track hours in the first place? Timekeeping ends up being a pointless part of the job, a metric that can be optimised for greatest manager and partner satisfaction, but provides zero actual value
Just do this. Just make your boss happy. The best part about timesheets being fake is you don't even need to worry about it. Every Friday just do a vibes based analysis of your work that week, ensuring that 1) you hit utilization and 2) you weight your hours towards the biggest files so no one gets mad about going over budget
So many things in large bureaucratic organizations are stupid wastes of time. So just play the game, fly under the radar, and the second you make senior or manager retire to industry.
Also warning, tax departments at large dinosaur(ish) corporations like telecoms are incredibly burnt. You won't have much to do and you'll be bored out of your mind. Great if you want kids though.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1mo ago
I’m trying to observe the 4 big ones. I don’t do every Wednesday and Friday fast, my parish isn’t very strict about it. I try to abstain from meat mostly but again it’s more the Spirit.
jake
1mo ago
The event mentioned here is the 20-month long Great March of Return.
"Protestors" accepts framing and implies them as the righteous party. Week after week these groups showed up to "demonstrate" and week after week people there got shot and killed. At a certain point it's no longer "protesting," if it ever was, it's about optics, and if it's about optics, well -- TPOASIWID and the purpose of the Friday "protests" was to produce dead Palestinians.
"Gunned down" evokes imagery of incidents of massed concentrated fire at civilians, and that isn't right either. Across those 20 months, Israeli soldiers, I think almost all snipers did fire on Palestinians, totaling 9,204 injured and 223 killed. 46 are listed as "children" but the citation is "minors under the age of 18."
The one claimed definite child was this:
An eight-month-old child, Leila al-Ghandour was widely reported, following an initial statement by the Gaza Health ministry, to have been a victim of tear-gas at the border. The following day, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that it was not certain of the cause of death and two weeks later struck her name off the official list of people killed during the protests. In a court case against a Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades militant, who had been captured on the border, the indictment stated that man in question was a relative of the deceased's parents, and had stated the latter had been paid by Yahya Sinwar, the head of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades in Gaza, about US$2,200 to report to the media that she had died of tear gas inhalation rather than from a pre-existing medical condition.
But even if this had been true, that a baby had died from tear gas inhalation, it wouldn't have been the IDF's fault someone brought a baby.
You will also find this recurrent. Any Palestinian aged 17 years, 364 days or younger is counted as a child. Children can use guns and toss Molotovs. 16-year-olds are not children and if one throws a Molotov at a soldier, whatever they get is what they deserve.
According to the Commission’s data analysis, the Israeli Security Forces injured 6,106 Palestinians with live ammunition at the protest sites during this period.
6,106 opportunities for video, or above, 9,204 total. Where the fuck is it? The absence is deafening. I am told to accept that thousands were unjustly shot and there isn't one single video? Not one single person over 20 months of "protest" thought "I should record this." Why would I accept this? I bet there is video, only it captures what I describe. A Palestinian tossing a Molotov or trying to breach the fence and getting their leg shot off or hit in the gut or groin or chest on a pass-through tumble from a kneecap.
As for that kneecapping, here's an interestingly candid article from Haaretz:
Eden says he broke the “knee record” in the demonstration that took place on the day the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem was inaugurated, on May 14, 2018. He did it jointly: Snipers usually work in pairs – together with a locator, who is also a sniper by training, and whose task is to give his partner precise data (distance from the target, wind direction, etc.).
Eden: “On that day, our pair had the largest number of hits, 42 in all. My locator wasn’t supposed to shoot, but I gave him a break, because we were getting close to the end of our stint, and he didn’t have knees. In the end you want to leave with the feeling that you did something, that you weren’t a sniper during exercises only. So, after I had a few hits, I suggested to him that we switch. He got around 28 knees there, I’d say.”
The sniper shot 42 people in one day, his partner 28. They're boasting or all but about shooting 70 people. I looked for video of this and found one: https://x.com/vic2pal/status/981095851010469888
Gunshot, he instantly falls, couple frames of the wound but it's not graphic. I think you'd have to know it's a gunshot wound to even make sense of it. (And of course you can't actually tell what's going on around him.)
This team in one day produced themselves 70 opportunities for video. Again, boasting or all but, "Yeah sometimes we hit people behind our targets. Bummer." Where's the video? We do know this happened, since both sides say it did. 70 opportunities from one team in one day for video of a bad shot.
Nothing.
From 2015, if something has supposedly happened more than 10,000 times and there isn't video of it, the simplest and only rational explanation is that it didn't happen. The excessively compassionate, I understand how their brains turn off, they just aren't the sort of people who can think past suffering, and that's often good. The inadequately cynical, who talk about how "you think you hate journalists enough but you don't," how much lefties lie, how the crusades were justified and Islam is shit and how much Muslims rape and marry their own cousins, how much human rights organizations are just masks for USAID State Department globohomo/lefty sinecures/looting public coffers, and how the UN is one giant fraud at best or Bilderberg NWO fronting at worst, to have their brains turn off on all of those things they loudly hate because of the word "Jew" is just fucking funny.
But, not an argument, and I'm not saying you're either of these. I'm only saying you should consider if you reached your position from pure reason as applied to evidence, or if you reached it because you read words that aligned with how you already saw things. That you felt convinced by those words when really you were flattered, and you think I might also be convinced. Words won't convince me, I am adequately cynical, I know both sides are nothing but liars, and that's why I want video.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1mo ago
My next digital fast is starting tomorrow. I'm actually looking forward to it. Maybe I'll even digitally fast every Wednesday and Friday, like a good Christian.
Speaking of fasts, I have a question to the various American Orthodox here: do you observe every single one?
MollieTheMare
1mo ago
You can tell a lot about someone from assessing their choice of car. Even if you think your car says nothing about you, it does.
I'd be interested in a car horoscopes reading on the what do you drive thread. I'm a Pleiades. Not a lesbian or an old person, believe it or not.
There's a lot less 'adult' games out there than you might expect, even for a pretty shallow level of curation and taste.
F95 doesn't have literally every porn game (or even every recent porn game; Fek's Spellbound (cw:m/m) has a surprisingly interesting central mechanic and afaict no f95 thread), and its filtering tools aren't the best, but the widest tag search gives a little over 2k items for 'cheating'. I don't have a good grasp on netorare/netorase/netosi, but the whole category of cheating is probably not really what erwgv3g34's after, and a lot of games will get marked for a kink for having one or two scenes even mentioning it rather than any real serious focus. I'd be surprised if there's more than a couple hundred, and as much as the ones erwgv links are Bog Standard In Progress VNs, even moderately good writing or design would probably put them at the top 10% of the pack.
There's a lot of furry games (F95 gives about 1200), and we tend to be pretty omnivorous when it comes to material. But a lot of those are either tech demos, like most VR games or very-early-prototypes, or games with maybe a couple story paths or a handful of animations, like VNs or platformers. There are some games that are complex enough to be worth visiting a few different times, most of which I've either bought or donated for. But if you wanted a list (and, uh, were pretty open-minded), I'd still probably given dozens, not hundreds. Even of the one-shots, a pretty sizable portion are not great, even by the standards of LLMs or AIgen. You can run out pretty quick without being some supergooner.
That's most severe for adult media and for kink, because there's a lot of kinks that range from personal nonstarters even in tiny doses (eg, I personally don't like hyper period, no offense to those that do) to possibly illegal in many countries (ignoring the obvious examples, people have gotten pretty seriously legal concerns over producing a cartoony CBT game). Many of the better games for my interests are text-only, because the nature of what they are means producing more than a handful of paperdoll-style images is agonizing work even with a lot of artists willing to work for near-peanuts!
But it's not like it's specific to porn games.
A year or so ago Rayon brought a big conversation about Palworld. And it's never been that clear how much (if at all) AI was used in producing the game. But it's a genre with a mere handful of serious competitors, and even the most 'successful' ones are often much worse. Over a year later, Nintendo has brought a pretty deadly legal threat against Palworld; they don't have a game that can actually compete with Palworld's not-exactly-great implementation yet. Maybe Legends ZA will break the pattern in October, but the last Legends game was pretty much just a joke. ARK I remains notoriously unplayable for the vast majority of people, it has a 'remaster' that manages to be buggier, and ARK II is in ETA:soon mode and has been for three years now. Kenshi or Grounded, if you have a wide enough definition? There's a couple attempts in Roblox for dragon manager games, I guess? But that's an insult to gatcha.
Base-building survival game with critters seems like it'd be inundated with clones; it's not exactly the goats-on-fire of SFW gaming genres. And that's not really happened. AIgen isn't there, yet. Maybe those limitations are why nobody's been able to step into the space, and maybe it'll never get there. Or maybe AIgen will act as an attacter for the sorta people who make very shallow games. (after all, most AIgen on f95 is glorified VN)
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
You know, I was saving this for Friday Fun but it almost fits better here...
If you came of age and discovered internet porn in the early 00's, ideepthroat dot com was legendary. It was this couple, one part a bottle blonde woman with a handsome face and giant fake tits, and the other a dopey sounding guy packing some above average heat. The hook was that this lady had no gag reflex what so ever, and he could literally fuck her face without her gagging or crying or anything. To this day, if blowjobs are your thing, best in class.
Eventually the site shut down, but the clips lived on. They were early 00's quality, but if Citizen Kane can be a masterpiece despite the technology of the time, so are those blowjobs. I heard rumors from time to time, she became a realtor after she quit cam girling. Or that her and her husband had kids and hung it up. Or that they split. No clue if any of it was true.
Well, a couple years ago she decided to return on pornhub. It's gross. Really gross. She's in her late 40's or early 50's now? The giant rock hard fake tits are pretty much the only part not succumbing to the ravages of time. She was shoving comically oversized dildos up her prolapsed asshole. I used to think there was nothing sadder than a washed up rock star who's arthritic spasms on stage make you wish they'd joined the 27 club. But it turns out an old camgirl, first of her breed, trying to recapture some of that young and sexy magic is even sadder. Makes me wonder if in another 20 years or 40 years we'll see these old camgirls auctioning off the chance to be their partner in a snuff film, to die as they lived.
I've mostly been focused on image generators. Between improvements to LoRA development processes along with Wan's image-to-video and first-frame-last-frame-to-video, there's been some pretty massive advances in the last six months or so. It's still hard to get consistency in animation, along with long generation times the reasons why why all those animation shots floating around tend to just be a couple seconds long, but that we're at the point where 'make this arbitrary subject into a turntable motion effect' is getting complaints about background consistency is not what I imagined just a couple years ago. They don't always work, but we're not talking 'success' in the sense 'that it can do it at all' anymore.
I keep hoping that this'll end up being a useful tool for artists -- someone with a real eye for the medium and a good sketching hand should be able to use this to crank out in days what would otherwise take weeks or even months of dedicated work, in the same way that two years ago plain StableDiffusion could save artists a ton of time with crosshatching or rosettes or shading -- but there's not enough people really messing in the field to say for sure. Even for those few working in this there's not a lot publicly visible with how many conventional galleries ban the stuff, and a lot who might be some of the most adept at it already have workflows that fill in many of these gaps for comic- or even animation-level work.
AI voicework has a lot of potential. I've toyed with it a little, though getting decent emotion through is still a bit beyond me. The workflows are still a little too finicky to use real-time, but eventually getting an Emet Selch together would be fun for the memes.
I've been trying to get a full workflow for image-to-3d-print and image-to-CNC together. 2D works are easy, if not especially entertaining, but it should be well within the existing tech to do a lot of creative stuff, here. Almost have Meshroom to a point where it'll work, but not there yet.
Haven't been able to get any of the offline ones to write reasonable fiction, and I don't particularly trust the online ones for anything more complicated. For conventional fiction, it takes a frustrating amount of prompting to get a work that's surprising enough to be interesting without swerving into M. Night Shamalayan territory; trying to get exofiction or a counterfactual story or anything complex with viewpoint tends to go batshit (and for smut, the line between interesting and disgusting is very thin and hard-to-encode just for my own use). But I haven't messed with it too much.
yofuckreddit
1mo ago
A world without color under the rainbow
Well, it’s pride month (Grammarly suggests capitalizing Pride here...)! Again. I rolled out of bed last week to a saccharine salvo of big brand bullshit. That, and smug condescension from the women I know on Instagram “wishing homophobes an uncomfortable month”.
When the gay marriage movement really kicked up steam in the early 00’s, I was always a bit perturbed by the use of a rainbow. I’ve always been a fetishist for color - my first attempts at building user interfaces somehow became unusable clown vomit because of it - and so a single group monopolizing literally every hue of light at the same time seemed like a bit much. But I was a good lefty-libertarian and didn’t complain.
I tried to drag this board into a conversation about cars. I won’t make that mistake again, but a point of discussion centered around all of them being way less colorful than they used to be.. If you take a look at a graph you can see that things really started getting “Super Fucking Lame” right about 2007. Don’t worry, the problem’s gotten worse: 78% of all cars sold today are a neutral color.
It wasn’t just vehicles, though. At almost the exact same time, Millennials began making everything grey..
Meanwhile, woke discourse has been (was?) on a tear in mainstream media institutions:
A clear trend of increasing prevalence of prejudice related terms is apparent with words such as racist or sexist increasing in usage between 2010 and 2019 by 638% and 403% in The New York Times or 514% and 141% respectively in The Washington Post.
If you ask a politically correct LLM about why everything is lame, it will suggest that we’re this way because of “economic uncertainty” or social media. Others will say something vague like resale value.
If I know anything about anything, it’s that correlation is causation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a wave of rainbows and the unrelenting drumbeat of intersectionality has, in many ways, relied on the dilution of color everywhere else. How else can you shove it in the world’s face? A coffee shop already full of colorful whimsy would be burying v99.0 of the LGBTQIA+ flag. It’s only through the clash of it with the drab whites and browns of an espresso machine that a message can be sent. At least the latest revision inoculates itself against good taste pretty well. The clashing racial bars and two spirit circle make it hideous on its own.
The death of peak woke is… probably overestimated. But even my blackpill soul feels some sort of vibe shift. Dare I hope for color to make a comeback?
gakles
1mo ago
This is half culture war half Friday fun but I'm a bit more than halfway through reading The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Politics aside, it is a very well written political science book. If you wanted to, you could turn the book into a chart, with every thesis supported by claims which are in turn supported by (cited) evidence. This gives the book a sort of structure of hard logic, which I think is a consequence of Mearsheimer and Walt trying to avoid the charge of antisemitism (which the ADL and others have nonetheless leveled at them). The authors are very analytical and never take sides in any of the conflicts mentioned, the entire situation is presented from afar: "There is a network of individuals working to influence the US government to act in certain ways that they believe will benefit the state of Israel" (Part 2, which I haven't read yet, seems to be "why the polices the network advocates for may not serve the best interests of the US or Israel"). This book was published in 2007 so it's not a wholly contemporary analysis of the situation, but it provides a good recent history and background. Apparently the book sparked a good deal of scholarly debate, and I plan on reading some of the back-and-forth articles once I finish it. I think the book creates a strong argument that at least in in 2007 there was a network of individuals and organizations seeking to benefit Israel by influencing American opinion, discourse, and government policy. (Mods feel free to take this down if it's too spicy)
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2mo ago
So this week I started my 20kg kettlebell pentathlon effort. The 6:00 Work/5:00 Rest rhythm seems like a natural fit with BJJ, and I need to get myself back into lifting, I've been farting around since December. So far my physique results have been great, but I'm worried that as I get better at, or at least more used to, grappling the fitness benefit is going to fall off.
I started by doing a pure half, 3:00/2:00, on Saturday morning to start the month. I hit the reps easy, doing 60/30/60/54/60 on reps, hitting big single sets, but I screwed up the timing a little bit: I skipped some of the rest periods on early sets because I got bored, then ran out of time on snatch because I was trying to pack the car quick in the two minute rest. d'oh.
Tuesday I tried again, this time adding reps without adding time, to increase density, so 3:00/2:00 but 80/40/80/70/80. It went ok, but not great. I was able to hit the reps on the first four exercises without too much trouble, though I had to hustle to hit them within the three minutes working time. The added density definitely pressed me. But when I got to the snatch, I was able to finish it, but felt something out of place in my left lat. Not that bad, but enough that I took a dnf on the push press set. Technically still a higher point total than the first go. Can't get hurt over nothing.
It feels better today, so between tomorrow and Friday I'll give it another go.
BJJ wise, a funny thing happened. New guy joined, middle aged white dude, ponytail, used to do Aikido. We get to the open mat at the end of the class, he's kind of hovering around the edge, nervous to join. I want to be friendly, ask him to roll. I figure I'll let him work a bit, flow, use moves I don't typically hit, be gentle, don't push too hard, try to help him learn positioning. Anyway I let him start on top, hit a sweep, get to mount...and then this fucker tries to wristlock me from bottom mount. He's grabbing my fingers and trying to bend them. He couldn't actually sink it, because he had zero leverage, but it was annoying and if we had lost balance could have lead to injury. Which, I should have handled calmly, but in the moment my reaction was "Ok, man bun, you're tapping." And we worked our way through a bunch of submissions for him to learn.
Then the kid who was there for a weekend before he joins his Ranger unit bounced me off the walls a bit. C'est la vie.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
2mo ago
Tier 3 livin - mrvanillasky's guide to tier 3 India
Note - I am posting this on the friday thread since its not about my life but a vague travelogue from a first person POV
Indian cities are classfied into different tiers, tier 1 being cities like New Delhi or Mumbai where you find most amenities, white collar employment, occasional 6s in nightlcubs that I would never visit since I hate sausagefests and SEA and its travellers ruined dating in India for me permnently. These places are dirty but you have some really nice parts
Tier 2 cities are like the one where I live, Jaipur, though its low tier 1, high tier 2, whatever. Worse than the large towns but less populated, less polluted and has less distractions. You see a breakdown in more things, fewer good roads, smaller buildings, worse people in general but still livable
Tier 3 are semi urban dwellings that exist to justify hate pieces like the anti India AI movie made by another pajeet. My ma is visitng her family here on the border of Uttar Pradesh in tier 3 Madhya Pradhes and its not a good place to be in. Hygeine is just worse, open drainage is the norm, you see waste on the roads (some say SF checks this box). The people are just not smart, period. Houses are poorly made since the contractor cons people into not listening to an architect.
Everything is dirt fucking cheap. My monthly allowance of 100 dollars, 50 of which are for math academy would allow me to visit the most expensive restaurant here and feel like a king. Last night we had to drive 20 kilometers to get to a restaurant on the highway where the bill was half of what a terrible restuarant would cost in Jaipur, the kind I would not visit at gunpoint. I think we paid less than 10 dollars for 5 peoples worth of food. There are no thriving industries, no white collar jobs.
People are extremely dishonest, narrow minded and bitter. Nothing ever gets done, if it gets done, its after a lot of bickering and in the end no one enjoys it. I cherish my family back home in Jaipur, the sort of dysnfunction you see here is astounding. Scarcity permeates everything. There are no "bars" or "cafes" or large shopping malls. Everyones a phone addict since there is nothing to do. The wilderness is a little too wild, as owning guns is illegal and hunting is also illegal, the masses have no outlets for fun at all. My time has not been the best because when I leave my familys house, I see the reality of the subcontinet.
Many online will tell you that what I listed is specific to one region or one people, that is wrong, most of the subcontinent has simialr issues if you ignore the north east. The real silver lining that I really liked is that it offer peace because there is so little to do. The spiritual path recmmends you tone down stimulation, that works here better than in a large city. Had I been living in Manhattan, my rate of progress which has slowed down in the last month or two would have been zero since there is so much to do. I can frontload my days work to the beginning and spend the remainder with my family, watching TV, playing some badmiton with a rotating crew of random friendly kids who kick my ass.
I will travel to the literal village where my aunt is the current mayor equivalent and post an update from there. She has a PhD in philosphy from a pretty decent uni here.
The other big silver lining is the walkability, the city has a small radius, less than 5kms, you can walk to a line of stores in 30 seconds and get things, something not possible in larger cities due to the bad traffic. People are also less busy. My mothers brothers all live here and nearby, two in the same house and the third who lives seperately in the same city meets us daily many times since the drive to his place is less than 10 minutes. I enjoy the simplicity whilst my heroes journey arc incomplete. More than just all this, these visit help me appreciate what I have and if you are a westerner, it would do so a lot more.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2mo ago
Being anti-CCP, I'm concerned about stuff like this
I don't see much of concern there.
"For too long, Harvard has let the Chinese Communist Party exploit it," a White House official told Reuters on Friday, adding the school had "turned a blind eye to vigilante CCP-directed harassment on-campus."
Very likely the victims of the alleged harassment are Chinese citizens. I'm sure they'll be safer from the CCP if deported back to China.
Former Harvard Professor Charles Lieber was scrutinized by a Trump program started in 2018 called the China Initiative, which was focused on fighting Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft and investigated researchers and universities over whether they disclosed financial ties to Beijing.
He was convicted in 2021 of lying about his ties to China in connection with federally funded research. In April, he became a full-time professor, at a Chinese university.
Process crimes.
U.S. lawmakers from both parties have expressed worries about the efforts by Beijing-linked student associations to monitor political activities. In April 2024, a Harvard student activist was physically ejected from an event by a Chinese exchange student - not faculty or security staff - for interrupting a speech by China's Ambassador Xie Feng.
Oh noes, "student activists" can't shout down speakers they don't like.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Even this assumes a certain amount of stupidity or desperation among all of the women involved. If you want to keep up the pretense of dating someone, you have to at least make an attempt at seeing them a minimum of once a week, and unless you're in a committed relationship, you have to actually date them; that means that inviting them over to your house so they can hang out while you do whatever it is that you normally do on a Tuesday night doesn't count. Simultaneously stringing along 4–6 women thus means committing the bulk of your free time to dating, which seems horrible and expensive. It also means that there's some additional deception being pulled here—in addition to having to pretend you aren't dating four other women, you have to pretend that you have an active social life that keeps you from seeing them. So now if you do decide that one of these girls is the one, she's quickly going to find out that no, you don't ride bikes on Wednesday nights or go to the book club Thursday nights or bowl in a league on Friday nights or have dinner with your family on Sunday nights and even if she doesn't suspect that you were lying because there were other women, the image of yourself that you sold her on will be revealed as a sham, and you're likely to end up with zero women in the end.
128k words on my NaNoWriMo project. I'm only two half-chapters (~3.5k-4.5k words total) away from a complete first draft. All going smoothly I'll be finished by Friday morning, a full seven months (!) after I started the first draft. If I do manage to accomplish that goal in time, I won't mention my progress in these threads for six weeks, at which point I'll start working on the second draft.
Edit: first draft in the can, 134k words. Not looking at it for six weeks.
I wrote on this about a year ago here, but I was replying to a Friday comment on Sunday and it found few eyes.
I'm reposting it because short of cataclysmic war or calamity, what I describe is exactly what will happen.
What's wrong here is the particular equivocation of politics and war. Politics is not equal with war, politics are meant to avert war, but they are equal in that both are about the transferral of power. If we were to assign a sex polarity to the practices, politics would indeed be the feminine method to the masculine method of war.
Beyond that, I can tell you where this divide ends. We'll pass the core of this turmoil, enough to stabilize us as we move into the approach for the singularity.
Around 2030 we'll see the first examples of convincing human simulacra. These will be proofs of the concept but they won't be largely available until later in the decade. Boston Dynamics maintaining their exact rate of advancement will have robots with convincingly human articulation by the mid-30s, especially with AI improving at helping research.
In the 2040s, simulacra will be able to replace a great deal of labor and production of simulacra will become the national industry of whatever country that perfects them. My bias is Japan: they're most poised with the combination of established acumen, workforce and key socioeconomic factors, namely their inverted population pyramid. Low TFR will be neatly solved by simulacra taking over labor. As so-ordered a nation and people as the Japanese, they will implement the necessary policies to begin the country's move toward quasi-post-scarcity. Those few other similarly ordered nations will likewise swiftly adopt simulacra, and as tens of millions are produced by the year, and only increasing, simulacra will quickly become a reasonable household expenditure. I expect by the end of the '40s they will be ubiquitous in every country where they are legal.
For the price of a mid-range car, households will be able to purchase a lifetime of service from a chef-maid-assistant. So average households will acquire simulacra, further increasing demand, and lonely men will also buy them for all obvious reasons. That motivation for purchase will not end with lonely men. "She's a 10 (she's a hotter-version-of-pick-your-hottest-celebrity), but she's a robot" won't last. One of your friends will get one, and you'll interact with it, and even if you're obstinate about "it," eventually it will be her to your mind, because she talks, she laughs, she appears to think, she in all ways seems the part. You'll only know because you know, that won't be enough. It won't matter how they aren't "real" because they will be real enough. All but indistinguishable for the existential question of soul in the machine, and it won't be long before you're not so sure about that, either.
At ubiquity they will end dating. The bottom third of men who can afford them for a start, to half, to I'd expect a Pareto 80%. The man is accustomed to not having children, it's our evolutionary history, it may bother them, it won't stop them. What women say won't matter, a guy might want what only they can offer, but not at the cost, especially not if they've never had that success, and that already increasing population will represent an even greater percentage of the next generation. To put in such effort to settle for someone less attractive, less responsive, more burdensome, more risky, to settle for something human when he can have something machine-perfect. Work, go home, play games until she has dinner ready, watch a movie, fuck, maybe play more games, go to bed. His friends can and will talk shit, his base urges are satisfied, he won't care enough about what they say. His true needs will go unsatisfied and it will be a lifestyle harmful to his soul, but it will be so much easier.
Some women will have them, not many. I'd rather not invoke inceldom, I find the specific slant to their ideas irrelevant here, but it's true men pursue while women are pursued and that imbalance defines dating. The asymmetric effort of dating as a man versus dating as a woman, again the man pursues, he works, he pays; the woman is pursued, she is worked for, she is cared for. The simulacra will thus be unnatural as a thing women acquire as a relational prosthesis; why would she pay for what, for good reason, she gets free? The simulacra will have no being (or so we'll reassure ourselves), can father no children, can offer no increase, can offer no status. Women will have them as the chef-maid-assistant models, maybe even more sometimes, but they won't replace, not in the way they will replace relationships for men.
Harems will re-emerge, they will be the only option for most women, so they will be easier. Between simulacra and harems, female sociopolitical power will collapse. They will lose too much leverage with too many low-status men, while high-status men will each become a little king with his court of concubines who will certainly have no power.
The 2050s will see human gestation in synthetic environments, so clinic-based artificial wombs. Here I don't think that it will take that long for the breakthroughs in tech, instead it will be the economics and social impacts of simulacra that will give incentive to developing the tech. Again I expect Japan to widely adopt, as their already low TFR falls off a cliff from their herbivore men taking to simulacra. They will have a reduced need for a new generation from so much of their labor being automated but I expect there still to be decades between the ubiquity of simulacra and those simulacra reaching the capacity to automate >90% of all labor. This will also be the first sight of the real benefit to the age of simulacra, the offer of stability in overseeing the drastic reduction in human population.
Starting in the 50s or 60s we'll see government regulation on reproduction. It won't be severe because it won't need to be, so anyone who really wants a big family will be able to have one with minimal structural hindrance. It will be simple incentive-based, I've referred to the policy as the "Half-Right to Reproduction." Systemically its purpose will be to halve the population with each generation, it'll work faster than that. Every person will be bestowed with one half-right they can exercise at age of majority. Would-be parents can combine to a whole-right and exchange it for their child's addition to the government dole, UBI, which will also exist. As AI and simulacra come from almost all labor, the newly jobless will need placation else promiseless young men become bored and at-risk for chaos. AI-managed industry, so all goods, pharmaceuticals, medical care, farming, and also advances in 3D printing, will see the cost of goods plummet while their quality peaks. It will become progressively harder for the government to not adopt major socialist practices as capitalism finally begins to "win" in competing itself out of existence. The population can't keep growing in such a system, at least not until we have FTL and a thousand shipyards in Sol. Assuming FTL is possible, which I don't, but I sure hope it is.
Simulacra will play a critical part in stability in keeping men satisfied. Advancements in entertainment, so another 20-30 years of development in video games, the arrival of UBI and the removal of needing to work to live. The population will need to be distracted until most can die childless but "happy enough." Half-rights help this goal, because people can sell their half-rights or buy other's half-rights, all at government exchanges. The exchanges will always buy half-rights, subject to reversible sterilization. A guy will go to a clinic next door to the exchange, maybe incorporated into the exchange, get whatever implant that stops sperm from working, get the cash to order a simulacra, sail into the sunset. Easy.
I don't expect western nations to swiftly automate labor like Japan. We'll need to acclimatize to the idea, begin the inculcation of no-work-to-live in successive generations so that when they're older, or their kids are older, they'll be prepared for not having jobs. With that and the shrinking population, by the turn of the century Western nations will be ready for post-scarcity life. New generations will still be needed in the interim, artificial gestation is pivotal here for the other paradigmatic social change.
As relationships and childbirth are "solved," as countries most adopting simulacra and bespoke children grown in vats enjoy golden ages while their men break productivity records, why would a country not produce as many sons as possible and as few daughters as necessary? There will be outgroups, so the Amish and the like, potentially a new movement of tech-circa-1999, but they will be small, none meaningful political factions, or where meaningful, supportive of the new power structure. I'd also expect a "reserve" population for practical concerns of catastrophe and ovum stocks, but most women will belong to the elite population. This above all is why we will see minimal and then no opposition to sharp sex-demo disparity with the great decline in the population of the human female: with so few, being a naturally born woman will be a position of immense status, inherently aristocratic. They will necessarily be the best of the best. Those chosen, those expressly wanted few. A new nobility, and it will indeed be so easy.
Women will "benefit" first, eventually men will, as again the purpose will be to shrink the entire population. So each generation will more-than-halve itself until the population is at an "acceptable" – at least stable – level. The sex distribution will once again be at parity, and those naturally born biological males will also be inherently aristocratic, as all civilized humans belong to the new nobility.
And all of this will just work. What I describe will happen because it isn't fighting back, it isn't trying to undo anything, it doesn't require conquest over more than a century of culture, it doesn't require recovery from war or calamity. It will work according to slopes and entropy, it will work in congruence with human nature. It will be the easiest path through, so it will just work.
If it's physically possible we'll break the tyranny of the rocket equation and achieve FTL travel. We'll begin spacefaring regardless and when, in however long, man reaches frontier planets to settle and dominate, they'll return to lifestyles us today find familiar. Those humans will begin the real work, of understanding and healing the light scarring on our gestalt soul from the depravity of human civilization, culminating in what was necessary to pass through the 20th and 21st century – with what was necessary to pass the Great Filter.
It didn't have to be this way, now it has to be this way. Or else we're all fucking dead.
Well, this has happened to us once before, so using these two (which are similar) incidents, I don't think these food delivery people are just stealing all the food. From what I can tell, in both instances it was the last delivery of the day and they just had reached a breaking point where they wanted food. There was food. And this seemed like a way to get free food at that time. Both times it has happened to me were around 9:00 PM which is about the end of these apps delivery windows. Both times were also on Fridays.
So these people are generally okay employees most of the week (I suspect). And what they do is if at the end of their shift they think they can get away with something, they try it. And they do get away with it mostly because despite the prevalence of ring cameras, most people are too lazy to follow up and the companies can't really fire them for stealing 1/50 orders a week because the pool of replacement labor is even worse. She will probably eventually be fired if this is a pattern. But she will just move to a different delivery app at that point.
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