Ohio
bolido_sentimental
4d ago
I appreciate the detailed answer. I live in Ohio, where there haven't really been any since the time of Anthony Wayne. I have a sense that, as with things like the Celtic Revival, Chinoiserie, etc., there was a period in the 20th century where there was, for a time, a broader cultural interest in "Indian" things; but this has waned, and now they don't seem to have any particular presence in the wider cultural arena. I don't think I can name any living Native Americans. Perhaps the absolute number simply isn't high enough. So I just find myself curious about - what are their politics? What are their unique subcultural practices in 2025? How did the Internet change their lives? In America you see things like Chinese laundries, Hispanic roofing crews, Vietnamese nail salons; apart from casinos, do the Native Americans have some thing like that? Perhaps I'd just have to go and see.
But as you note, the experiences of Native Americans in Florida vs. Oklahoma vs. Alaska are so different that it may not even be worthwhile to think of them as a single bloc.
Oh, Epstein certainly used that connection to his advantage, but there's a difference between "guy has to hit on models who work for his business" (rather creepy and sleazy, low-class) and "guy who meets attractive young women at parties in the right social circles" (eligible bachelor).
The impression I'm getting - and admittedly this is all at second- and third-hand - was that Wexner was socially awkward/dominated by his mother enough that he couldn't manage this kind of thing (unlike Trump who had no problem hanging around the Miss World pageants or whatever). So having a fixer who can make sure photos of you with appropriate arm candy end up in the gossip columns and who manages your public profile, amongst other things, is very convenient and useful.
This profile from 1985 is fascinating; it's a guy who at age 48 still has Mommy very clearly holding on to the apron strings, he's a guy from Ohio who is now a big cheese in New York (and probably aware that he doesn't fit in with the circles he is now moving in - see that little line about "he doesn't pronounce 'La Grenouille' or even 'entrepreneur' right and it doesn't matter").
Wexner is what used to be known as a “confirmed bachelor”. He doesn’t feel alone. He doesn’t seem to want a child and, despite what he says about the perfect woman – Ali McGraw as she was in Love Story, someone who is “very, very pretty” and not aggressive – he seems to be waiting to achieve some mystical harmony and balance in himself first. “A lot of people think because I am not married I am asexual or homosexual, but I enjoy a relationship with a woman,” he says sometime later, hating to discuss this, known for keeping this part of his life very tucked away. Of course, like his social absence, this increases his mystery and allure. Only Alfred Taubman, among his friends, still constantly tells him to get married, but Wexner, whenever asked, says, “Me and the pope.”
So someone like Epstein, charming and comfortable with that kind of society, who could help Les manage his social life, or manage it for him? Worth his weight in gold. Even setting aside any gay attraction, the important thing is that Epstein too was Jewish (and his Jewish heritage seems to be very important to Wexner) so that automatically makes him someone Wexner feels he can trust, someone with the same cultural identity, someone who gets it. Let Jeff manage the money while Les moves on to things he finds more important (new business deals, art and philanthropy) and, so long as profits are being made, what's to question?
(The irony about the perfect woman being someone who is not aggressive is that he ended up married at age 56 to a lawyer. Maybe I'm stereotyping lawyers, but that seems like the aggressive type to me!)
gattsuru
7d ago
Dayton, Ohio 2019 spree shooter. Very heavily themed his online presence around Canti and Atomsk.
Given how poorly that Red Hood comic went, I'm not sure Felker-Martin's barely a tenth of a Tara Strong. Dowd is more persuasive, with the caveat that it falters if pulls a Toobin and is back in six months.
I guess this is where I should clear my throat and say "Political violence is bad and I condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk"?
I genuinely do appreciate that. I will note others: I've mentioned KelseyTUOC already, but there's been some number of decent prominent and not-so-prominent people who've spoken up, sometimes even in credible or costly ways. Even some pretty awful scumbags are at least trying to motion around it, if not very sincerely. Some of them are even sincere-seeming: I genuinely neither expected nor hoped a Young Turk to have tried, even if he's still pointing the wrong direction.
It's also a long way from persuasive enough. This is a moderator at NeoForge Discord. This is a moderator at the Hexcasting Discord (to her credit, the mod dev herself has been more responsible, albeit in a 'don't make people watch someone die' sense than a 'aggressive violence is bad even when it happens to people I don't like' one). This is imgur yesterday, this is the front page sorted by viral today. This was tumblr yesterday, hastag his name, sorted by top; this is tumblr with the same constraints today. I logged into Star Citizen last night to take my mind off things, and had literally could not get out of the in-game bed before I had chat cheering it on; this is from an FFXIV guild I dropped before the election, and a discord I'm gonna leave in a few months.
And it's not just the nameless and faceless grunts, or bluesky, or the people who skinsuited a project I once respected. This is Ken White, who to what minimal credit he deserves says that Violence Is Bad before going straight into 'you can't defame the dead' mode. This is Barry Deustch, B from Radicalizing the Romanceless. This is from the writer of NeoReaction: A Basilisk, and was well-respected in the tumblr ratsphere for almost a decade. There were 51 posts over 12 hours in the rpg.net thread (cw: big image), and while there's a couple that aren't dancing in blood, there's literally five times as many where people who I once took seriously now going full :
On the other hand, my immediate reaction is fuck them, they get NOTHING.
It's like the person upthread saying how we shouldn't have this thread at all - is this how we defend actual free speech and small-d democratic values? By running and hiding and staying quiet? Nah, screw that. Charlie Kirk was an awful person and I feel bad for the family he left behind, but I would feel bad for them beforehand, too, for having that kind of guy as a father and husband.
Now, anyone getting revenge porny or actually cheering on political assassinations isn't correct, either. Frankly, given how parts of his fanbase were turning on him from going from 'release the Epstein files" to "it's a Democrat hoax", I expect this to be part of the occasionally seen far-right "you aren't hating enough or the right people" circular firing squad, which unlike the leftist version tends to involve actual firearms.
I can keep doing this, if you'd like, but I don't think it's healthy for either of us.
I've gotten it from someone I let live in my home for six months while they were getting back on their feet. Didn't even go looking for them, I don't follow them on tumblr anymore, just bam, snuff video with a Dark Souls meme thrown into it, with a 'leopards eating faces' tag in case they needed to make it clearer what they were condoning. Do you want a list of exactly what thoughts, in what order, went through my mind? It's not just me; KendricTonn is another guy who fled to the heartland (poor bastard ended up in Ohio!) and he's getting it, too.
I considered looking up the social media of some of my past partners. Do you think it would help, or not? I'm pointedly not doing it, because that way lies even more psychosis than looking up your exes normally does.
As a prediction, which I will send you in plaintext in PM and post publicly here in a week, sha256: a009fcb948bd1a70a38d133d81f0cc96af6efa94904133184a5f40d0cb5d6004
Because ten years ago, it would have been useful to have a decent handful of examples of prominent speakers who would consistently speak in defense of "bad argument gets argument, not bullet". We have not been dumped ten years in the past. We have a decade of people Friedersdorfing these grand principles about how they'll defend people that they totally didn't defend in the past.
Jerk That Can't Write A Comic Story Worth Shit isn't a costly signal. Matt Dowd might be, if it sticks. Actually blackballing people and organizations that promote or defend this sorta stuff is. Either people haven't brought serious and costly signals of enforcement against their own side, or people think these examples you're bringing forward are the serious and costly signals. If that's the central example from the aftermath, I'm going to point to Forge again, and Damore again, and Kashur again, and show exactly how much political debt their alliance is in.
They might not have done it, themselves! They might even, in their heart of hearts, have whispered words about how it tots would have been better if no one did these terrible things. It's genuinely terrible that people have to handle the weight of bad acts from people they might not even like, just because their political alliance. It's also a little late for them to complain.
I see a few common types of criticism of Charlie Kirk floating around in response to his death. These appear to be gotchas that people are using to justify his assassination, or that he had it coming. I don't think these gotchas are as valid as some people think they are. It's a mixture of his own quotes and things he has said previously.
- Kirk said "I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage" so no empathy for him.
- Kirk said "It's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights" so he deserves it.
- Charlie Kirk asked his listeners to bail out the person that attacked Paul Pelosi and celebrated it.
- The rest that I've seen so far are weaker arguments with less traction about Charlie Kirk saying something mean about people like George Floyd or great replacement theory etc. so I'm not gonna address those.
There are also some comparisons of Kirk's assassination to the assassination of two democrat Minnesota lawmakers, and how the right gave little care for the killing of the two democrat politicians. I go more into detail about why these are not comparable here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/364180?context=8#context
Here is the full context of the empathy quote:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-charlie-kirk-once-001900786.html
So the new communications strategy for Democrats, now that their polling advantage is collapsing in every single state… collapsing in Ohio. It's collapsing even in Arizona. It is now a race where Blake Masters is in striking distance. Kari Lake is doing very, very well. The new communications strategy is not to do what Bill Clinton used to do, where he would say, "I feel your pain." Instead, it is to say, "You're actually not in pain." So let's just, little, very short clip. Bill Clinton in the 1990s. It was all about empathy and sympathy. I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage. But, it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy, I prefer more than empathy. That's a separate topic for a different time.
He also had this to say about empathy
The same people who lecture you about 'empathy' have none for the soldiers discharged for the jab, the children mutilated by Big Medicine, or the lives devastated by fentanyl pouring over the border.
Spare me your fake outrage, your fake science, and your fake moral superiority.
So Kirk is criticizing the liberal use of empathy, and he directly states he prefers sympathy. Not a gotcha. Maybe one doesn't need to empathize with him, but at least show some sympathy since the stated reasoning is he said he doesn't like empathy, but he did not say the same about sympathy? Kirk's stance on the word empathy does not justify gleeful jubilation of his death.
Here is the full context of the second amendment quote:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-charlie-kirk-once-205500283.html
AUDIENCE QUESTION: How's it going, Charlie? I'm Austin. I just had a question related to Second Amendment rights. We saw the shooting that happened recently and a lot of people are upset. But, I'm seeing people argue for the other side that they want to take our Second Amendment rights away. How do we convince them that it's important to have the right to defend ourselves and all that good stuff?
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. So, I'm a big Second Amendment fan but I think most politicians are cowards when it comes to defending why we have a Second Amendment. This is why I would not be a good politician, or maybe I would, I don't know, because I actually speak my mind.
The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — "wow, that's radical, Charlie, I don't know about that" — well then, you have not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. Number two, you've not read any 20th-century history. You're just living in Narnia. By the way, if you're actually living in Narnia, you would be wiser than wherever you're living, because C.S. Lewis was really smart. So I don't know what alternative universe you're living in. You just don't want to face reality that governments tend to get tyrannical and that if people need an ability to protect themselves and their communities and their families.
Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price. 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.
You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am, I, I — I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.
So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do you stop school shootings? I don't know. How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games.. That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?
This is so clearly not a celebration of gun deaths from Charlie Kirk. It's part of a larger argument. He's not calling for or supporting the use of guns in senseless killings. I think this is a stronger "gotcha" and the irony is definitely there. I do think the argument that his stance of gun control directly contributed to an environment that made him being killed by guns more likely does have some element of truth to it. But Kirk's stance is not a gleeful condonation of deaths via guns. It's also a pretty standard pro 2nd amendment stance.
One could argue the rates of death to usage in auto accident deaths is much lower and the benefits much higher compared to the availability of guns in America. But then they would be making the same type of argument Kirk is making here. I don't think people would say someone that dies in an auto accident deserves it because they support driving cars. I do think at a certain point the statistics will shift my stance that the risk of guns outweigh the benfits procured by the second amendment. Most people using this quote are not even willing to have that conversation.
Also, we have to consider the usage of the tool. It would be extremely ironic if Kirk died via gunfire in the process of protecting god-given rights, as he claimed. We don't know the motive of the killer, but I highly doubt the intention was to protect any god-given rights. Going back to the car analogy, if someone were to argue we should allow unlimited speed on a highway but dies from drunk driving, there is some element of irony, but it's not as ironic as if that person were to die from driving high speeds on the highway. Neither did Kirk die from a random altercation on the street or a stray bullet, which I think would give more credence to the irony factor. Kirk was deliberately assassinated via gun for likely politically motivated reasons.
Here is the full context of the Paul Pelosi quote: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/charlie-kirk-bail-out-alleged-paul-pelosi-attacker-1234621493/
"Politico says, ‘top Republicans reject any link between GOP rhetoric and Paul Pelosi assault.’ Of course, you should reject any link!
Why is the Republican party — why is the conservative movement to blame for gay, schizophrenic, nudists that are hemp jewelry makers, breaking into somebody’s home or maybe not breaking into somebody’s home? Why are we to blame for that exactly?
And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions. I wonder what his bail is? They’re going after him with attempted murder, political assassination, all this sort of stuff.
I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful, it’s not right. But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day?
Not an exact comparison for a few reasons. Paul Pelosi is not dead. Furthermore, this statement is made in context of a world that many criminals from blue cities constantly get out on bail. See Karmelo Anthony or Decarlos Brown Jr. as recent high profile examples of criminals getting out on bail (In the case of Decarlos Brown, he is not out on bail for murder, but he was out on bail when he murdered the Ukrainian girl).
Kirk is not stating the attacker is a hero. He's saying we should bail him out to ask questions. He does come off a bit celebratory of the attack. But Paul Pelosi is not dead, and I'm fairly certain news was out by this point that he was recovering, which gives for more room to makes jokes about the other side than murder.
He also literally states that he thinks the attack was awful and it's not right.
The constant use of out of context quotes to push an agenda or to condone murder is frankly sickening and all so tiresome. Find me an example of Charlie Kirk being gleeful at the deaths of others, and I'll adjust my stances a bit. But so far, these are not it.
EDIT: Adding in this as one more example of a criticism I just saw from someone I consider a centrist.
- Kirk thinks 11 year old rape victims should be forced to deliver their babies if impregnated.
This is followed up by a statement that Kirk has "abhorent" politics, he was perpetuating bad ideas to a wide audience, and that we're better off without him. He did express symapthy for his wife and kids. My benefit of the doubt is that all but 2 of the people he is talking to had been making fun of Charlie and criticising him, so he subconsciously adopts a more critical stance.
Source of that claim is around 18:20 in this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aL1k2I1HtXE&t=1066
By the way this is really fucking painful to transcript becuase Charlie and the other person speaking keep talking over each other so I will put this AI transcript for now and clean up later. Just watch the video at the timestamp i gave if you want the full context.
I how are you nice to see you um so I just have one question there's like in any case you don't think there's any case where abortion should be legal there's a very very rare couple cases Okay so you do think that a couple cases is legal if if if cesarian section is not going to save the mother's life and the mother's life is actually at risk which is debated amongst growing numbers of OBGYNs okay that is the only case where abortion should be should be allowed but people say it is a growing consensus in the pro-life world that abortion is never medically necessary okay so if you had a daughter and she was 10 and she got red and she was going to give birth and she no wait oh and she was going to give birth and she was going to live would you want her to go through that and carry her that's awfully graphic it's no but it's a real life scenario that happens to many the answer is yes the baby would be delivered oh okay great so I that's insane um but let me tell you why no hold on let me ask you a question there's two ultrasounds I have one is a baby conceived in one is a baby conceived by a loving couple which one is which which which person here was conceived by tell me which one was conceived by you don't know exactly cuz it's all human rights and it's all human matter but it's about your daughter who's pass to give birth to it and it's going to be tortured by that for the rest of her life that's going to take away every freedom she's ever going to have that's going to ruin her life she's going to grow up and she's going to be attached crime the the point is how you were conceived is irrelevant to what human rights you get when hold on one second if a person can see the walks down the side of the street it's not like they don't get First Amendment rights or second amendment rights the worst thing to do to that do the daughter is to then say hey we're going to go murder the being inside of you they would wouldn't even know like listen they they wouldn't know listen listen listen listen but wouldn't it wouldn't it be a better story to say something evil happened and we do something good in the face of evil instead of saying we're going to do evil and then murder the being because we're going to we're going to we're going to Pander to the evil no what makes what makes the West great is that we do good after evil not evil after evil it's not not about the being and the the cells it's not about no no no I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking thank you so it's not I'm not talking about that I'm talking about the person no I'm talking about the person who is dealing with the pregnancy I am not talking about the cells I don't I don't care listen the fetus the whatever I don't care about that right now until it is formed if there is if there is a 5-year-old child who is pregnant and the baby is 2 weeks can't get prant actually they have and they have given birth there is one recorded case of a 5-year-old gave birth is is that is that common yes not it's common for 5-year-old get sometimes and it's if they get pregnant I think they should be able to have medical access to something that could save not only just their life but like their livelihood how many how many I'm curious how many I hope your daughter lives a very happy life and gets away from you okay so that is really nasty and so her her belief system just so we're clear is that the time's up yeah no I got it it's fine I mean it's insanely nasty and we'll talk again
I expect a better take or example from someone with a centrist view. The reason that claim might come off as shocking is because the imagery of a raped 11 year old being forced to give birth is sickening. But if your stance is that is that the fetus are human beings with rights and that abortion is murder, it is not an absurd position to hold that aborting the child in an 11 year old is wrong even if the circumstances of that pregnancy is horrifying and evil. This is a logical conclusion from his openly stated beliefs about abortion. Also this is an absurdly rare scenario that the other person, Maren, brought up to justify abortions. It's not like Kirk randomly made that statement to be edgy, it's in response to a hypothetical scenario made by his opponent.
aiislove
10d ago
I have spent the past 5 months traveling between the US Midwest, California, Japan and Thailand. I believe the economies of the US and Japan (along with the bulk of the other “rich” countries) are very dysfunctional compared even to poor countries like Thailand.
I. Food and Services
Food in Thailand is extremely delicious, healthy, and very cheap. I am sure the average Thai person eats a healthier diet than the average Japanese. Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.) Thai foods feature a great variety of vegetables, fruits, meats and seafoods. Before I visited Thailand, I imagined that maybe they would be behind on trends or stuck in the past, since they are poor, but the opposite is true. You can find the trendiest foods in Bangkok- anything from the latest Korean baked craze, to Dubai chocolate bars and parfaits and ice cream cones, to Burmese tea leaf salad. They have it, and you can have it delivered within an hour for pennies.
Why is Thailand so trendy compared to Japan or the US? Basically, it is too expensive to take risks in rich countries. Thailand is a poor country but their economy feels incredibly healthy. Their money converts to pennies outside the country, but inside money trades hands so easily that anything feels possible. Food delivery and rideshares are so cheap because housing is so affordable that they can afford to live on such little money. Cab rides in rich countries are very expensive, because we have to pay for insurance, the pensions of drivers, and so on.
The quality of hotels has declined drastically in the US. I typically stay at mid-range hotels and rarely do I find that maid service is provided more often than once every three days. Hotels that charge $20 a night in Thailand provide maid service every single day. Why can’t Americans afford to pay someone to clean a room?
Airbnbs in Japan, fraught with regulation, are so bad. The apartments are old and cramped and dark and expensive. I am currently paying about $50 a night for an old build in a random part of a random city, and while the host is very kind, talkative, and helpful, it is also twice as expensive as the luxury airbnb I stayed at in Bangkok a month ago with a chic pool, gym, library, and dirt cheap food within walking distance. By the way, airbnbs and hotels in the midwest are incredibly expensive lately- why is it cheaper to stay in a room in a literal castle in Europe than a crappy hotel room that smells like weed in Ohio?
II. Airline Flight
I hate the cramped cheap seats on long flights. This time I flew from California to Japan and upgraded to a full-flat seat on Zipair, a low cost Japanese airline owned by JAL (Japan Airlines.) This 11 hour flight cost me $1515. I am not really going to complain, because it was great to have the extra room and I managed to sleep a bit. But the amenities on Zipair are shockingly meager. I asked for water early in the flight and she told me I had to order a bottle from the in flight service on my phone which they didn’t make available for another hour or so. There was no food provided, your only option was to order a few packaged snacks like Pringles from your phone.
A month later I flew Tokyo to Bangkok on Thai Airways. This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself. They provided multiple delicious meals and snacks throughout the flight. It felt significantly less cheap than the Zipair experience.
By the way, I am concerned that the cost of international airline flight is far too cheap. The first time I traveled internationally was when I was in middle school around 2001. I believe my round trip flight between the US and London was about $1200 at that time. The inflation calculator I just checked said that’s the equivalent of $2190 today. I just checked google flights and the same round trip costs only around $491 today. The incredibly cheap barrier to entry of international flights seems like an obvious problem leading to more illegal immigration and erosion of local culture than I’ve ever seen anyone point out before.
III. Conclusion
You may be thinking- ok, this guy is rich in Thailand and poor in the US, of course he is going to have a merrier view of the Thai economy. But when I look at charts like this I am in the 95th percentile of wealth for my age, in the US. I am frugal with my money, yes, but I would like to be able to afford a life on par with or better than that of my father at the same age, and I’m not sure I can.
————
I have to add a caveat. Whenever I am in Thailand I can never quite shake the feeling I’m about to get sick or get in some terrible accident. I don’t feel unsafe: people are very kind, and it’s not the same kind of fear that I feel in, say, the ghettoes of the US, which are truly scary. But buildings in Thailand don’t seem up to code, food safety is sometimes lacking (at least enough to fuel a constant anxiety in me) and my experience with the health care system (after passing out in a northern Thai hospital a few years ago) makes me know I must acknowledge the downsides to the “healthy economy” I admire in Thailand and be somewhat grateful for the safety standards and tradeoffs we make in rich countries. But I can only imagine that as the rest of the world catches up, the decline of the post WWII rich economies will continue to progress.
Doubletree3
23d ago
but can anyone name a single time Democrats opted for grace and forgiveness, for not "punching back twice as hard", for not "sending one of theirs to the morgue"?
This is quite easy. Unfortunately from the rest of your post I suspect you have quite a different standard of evidence than the plain meaning of your words as written. But here goes anyway. If your standard is, "John McCain telling his supporters to be less racist", then here is a symmetric example:
Former Vice President Joe Biden spoke out against the suppression of speakers and defended free speech during an event Tuesday with Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R.).
Speaking to an audience at his alma mater, the University of Delaware, Biden said shouting down speakers is "simply wrong." Biden noted that when he was going through college, free speech was also at the forefront but it was those on the left who were "shouted down when they spoke."
"Liberals have very short memories," Biden said. "I mean that sincerely."
Biden placed blame on those who have engaged in "violence" by stopping speakers from speaking.
https://freebeacon.com/issues/joe-biden-on-free-speech-liberals-have-very-short-memories/
hydroacetylene
28d ago
Redistricting fight
It's been in the news that Trump is pushing for mid-decade redistricting. Yesterday, the Texas house approved a new map(https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/20/texas-house-vote-congressional-map-redistricting-democrats-trump/) which nets the GOP five seats- while not a done deal de jure, in Texas politics when something the republican party wants passes the house, it's as good as done. Texas has only in-person filibustering(that is, a filibuster in the Senate needs to talk the entire time), so democrats can't delay the map for weeks in the upper chamber.
Separately, Gavin Newsom is pushing for redistricting California to gain more seats for democrats(https://apnews.com/article/california-texas-redistricting-congressional-map-4c22e21d5d4022d33a257045693b6fd4). One problem: California law doesn't allow the legislature to unilaterally do this. They need voter approval to override their independent redistricting commission. As gerrymandering tends to be unpopular with actual voters, their odds are a lot worse than Texas'. Other solidly blue states like Colorado have the same issue that they can't actually gerrymander on short notice due to their 'independent' redistricting commissions.
Trump is going beyond Texas as he tries to ensure Republicans maintain their House majority. He’s pushed Republican leaders in states such as Indiana and Missouri to pursue redistricting. Ohio Republicans were already revising their map before Texas moved. Democrats, meanwhile, are mulling reopening Maryland’s and New York’s maps.
The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against. Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions and it's pretty clear that democrats will lose in an all-out war of redistricting.
magicalkittycat
29d ago
Conservatives lost on every one of those three though, which shows they did not have any power.
They didn't actually, in fact part of the private school voucher initiative is to get kids into funded religious schools, schools that use programs like A.C.E, like my Southern Baptist friend had when she was growing up.
I live in a red rural area, I can assure you many of them don't see the fight as lost yet.
And environmental science? Odd then that the leader of the country doesn't believe in climate change and has targeted lots of funding cuts to climate science, including the termination of satellite data and missions regarding carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
If they lost, someone forgot to tell the president of the United States that.
DenpaEnthusiast
1mo ago
If you put the sentence "Ohio law states that you may not loiter less than three get away from a pubic building." into Google docs, it will correct "get" to "feet", and "pubic" to "public". This has been the case for around 15 years.
anti_dan
1mo ago
It is certainly true in almost all major blue states. It is also true in many purple states like Ohio, PA, Virginia, and more. Your admission that people can't take their gun into the post office anywhere is also telling. What that means is you can't GO to the post office if you have a gun on you while you are walking around, or if you are in your car, you need a safe in which to store your gun lest it get stolen when you go into the post office. Even many red states have municipalities that ban firearm possession on public transit, meaning many people are effectively disarmed during work hours.
DLs, OTOH are basically universal and trivially easy to obtain. No one actually fails the driving test anymore, I doubt they ever did. And you get multiple screw ups before privileges are revoked. Indeed they can be re-obtained even after DUIs. OTOH, 1 fuck up with a gun typically means permanent deprivation of your gun rights, subject to rapidly ratcheting prison sentences.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1mo ago
The principle of free speech is not infinite, you can’t talk about weapons on an airplane or in an airport, you can’t urge the commission of crimes, you can’t, rather famously, yell fire in a crowded theater (unless of course there actually is a fire), and you can’t lie about a product you are selling. Why? Other very important public goods: public safety, prevention of fraud, etc. need to be protected and cannot be if free speech is absolute.
Certainly you can talk about weapons on an airplane or in an airport. And that rather infamous "fire in a crowded theatre" case -- it actually concerned people distributing pamphlets protesting the draft as a violation of the 13th Amendment -- is not good law and has not been for a long time. The current law is Brandenburg v. Ohio, the famous "imminent lawless action" test.
This misuse of the "fire in a crowded theatre" incidentally demonstrates the disingenuous of those who use it to justify restrictions. Because on the close order of zero people have gone from "My new proposed restriction is OK because fire in a crowded to a theater" to "Never mind" when it is pointed out that Schenck v. U.S. has not been good law for over 50 years.
hydroacetylene
1mo ago
Right, the odd Florida man type story involving an illegal doesn't raise any suspicions, but it also isn't the occasional Florida man type in these stories- it's usually portrayed as some sort of trend. Believable third world behavior is often worth complaining about to people who aren't used to it(FWIW I 100% believe Haitian refugees were poaching ducks in a public park in Ohio, being extremely bad drivers, etc- because that's believable third world behavior).
it_is_so_weird_to_be
2mo ago
In my western state, there are NGOs specifically targeting african "refugees", shipping them in, and putting them in city subsidized housing. There are tons of africans that run around my neighborhood, more every year. The women walk to the grocery store in 100+ degree weather in their full traditional garb, walking back with the grocery bags balanced on their heads.
If it were limited to hispanics I'd be marginally fine with it. I am quite fond of latin culture, language, food, etc. They mostly assimilate, are catholic, and care about the same things I do. But it's fucking bizarre when my neighbors walk their dogs and the african muslims run to the other side of the street to avoid the unclean canines. Or how their corner of the neighborhood is consistently littered with trash and old furniture in the streets. Our community does a neighborhood cleanup and we just go straight to the african housing. Meanwhile the men sit on their porches watching us whiteys pick up their filth, probably confused at why we would care about things like clean streets.
Then you hear of the haitians descending upon small communities in ohio or minnesota being full of somalians. This is coming to the US and rapidly. The hordes want to live among the whites because the whites create pleasant communities. Five years ago, there were nearly none of these people around here. Now there are tons, and the neighborhoods are deteriorating before my eyes.
Tree
2mo ago
No, I want you to be psyched! Life is the ultimate experience, anything can happen! One day you could find yourself in South Africa or Lebanon, without leaving Ohio! Everyone's in trouble. The only question is: are you on top of that trouble or not ?
But in all seriousness, some people literally act like we’ll all be dead in 10 years because of AGI, climate (in Germany they often call them the ‘last generation’ protests ffs), elite mismanagement & evil and what have you. They just throw down their arms: "oh, we’re finished, it's over". The prospect of a civil war, properly considered, should cheer them up. It's not over till the fat lady sings.
Epstein's Unanswered Questions
In a recent speech at the Turning Point USA conference, Tucker Carlson criticized the administration's recent closing of the book on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Carlson alleged that there was 'no answer' to his central question, namely how a "high school math teacher at Dalton" became a "billionaire" who owned the largest private residence in Manhattan "by providing accounting advice". Apparently, this is a question for which no answer has ever been provided. According to him, the truth is that Israel provided Epstein with his money.
In this comment, I will suggest
(1) By far the most plausible explanation for the source of Epstein's wealth
(2) Implausibilities in the Mossad agent theory
How Did Jeffrey Epstein Get Rich?
Jeffrey Epstein was born in the early 1950s to a working class family in Coney Island. He was an extremely smart student with a talent for maths and physics, and graduated high school two years early.
"He was just an average boy, very smart in math, slightly overweight, freckles, always smiling"
He pursued a major in math at Cooper Union and then at NYU (for just under three years), which he dropped out from, then took a job as a math teacher at Dalton aged 21. Dalton, which as I noted recently is the most progressive of Manhattan's old prep schools, was undergoing a time of transition. It had become co-ed a decade earlier, and - in the long aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 1960s - liberalized in other ways too. Unlike the city's public schools, subject to the strict demands of NY's extraordinarily powerful teachers' union, private schools can hire who they want.
In the 1970s, with the city in slow-motion financial crisis, tuition at elite private schools was also much lower than today, in inflation-adjusted terms about a quarter of the price. As youth became prioritized above all else and the peak of the baby boom in education led to increased demand for teachers (the boom itself had peaked in the late 1950s, meaning the mid-70s were peak demand for high schools) hiring a 21 year old NYU math dropout as a math and physics teacher was less unusual than it might seem to us. At Dalton, Epstein quickly made an impression and a name for himself as an intelligent, charming and handsome man.
Epstein was at Dalton for around two years. At parent-teacher conferences, a parent who knew Ace Greenberg of Bear Stearns (whose own children also studied at the school, but weren't taught by Epstein) was repeatedly impressed by him, thinking he was a smart and capable young man. When Epstein was fired by the school as enrollment numbers dropped, the city-wide spillover from the financial crisis continued to dent confidence in NYC and drive the UES wealthy out to the suburbs, he begged that parent for an introduction.
“This parent was so wowed by the conversation he told my father, ‘You’ve got to hire this guy,’ ” recalled Lynne Koeppel, daughter of the late Alan “Ace” Greenberg...Greenberg, son of an Oklahoma City women’s clothing store owner, rose from Bear Stearns clerk to CEO and had an affinity for employees he called “PSDs” — poor, smart and desperate to be rich.
As Bloomberg found, Greenberg offered Epstein a job - not as a trader, as has repeatedly been falsely alleged - but as a trading floor assistant, essentially a clerk to a trader. This was a clerical job that required no particular education, certainly not a degree (which wasn't necessary even for traders until the mid-1990s).
Epstein arrived on Wall Street in 1976 at an auspicious time, even though the decade was poor for equities. Options on securities had existed for centuries, but had always suffered from a fundamental problem with liquidity because they were largely specific bets made between individual buyers and sellers, with no standardized pricing, each arrangement a custom contract, traded over the counter if at all, with price discovery difficult. From 1973, the CBOE allowed the easy trading of options as a hedging tool which, coupled with the slow emergence of computerized valuation and ledger tools, allowed investment banks and brokerages to offer a much larger and ever more complex array of tools to their corporate clients. This tied into growing financialization that made intermediaries like Bear more important than ever after the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the oil crisis and growing globalization of American firms who wanted to hedge huge swings in fuel prices, FX rates and so on.
Epstein made partner at Bear in four years. This was not unheard of at the time for an exceptionally talented young man. Even today, while progression is much slower in most of finance, it can still be that fast in booming sub-fields for very smart people. I know of someone at a leading quant firm who made partner at 28, in his first job, after four years, in the early 2020s. In 1981, Epstein was asked to leave Bear for a violation of securities law, possibly for failing to register products with the CFTC. Avoiding an expensive revenge-driven regulatory case would have been the firm's overriding interest, meaning that even for Epstein's brief partnership and overall tenure he would likely have received a decent payout.
In the early 1980s, Epstein floundered as an 'independent' financial consultant. A huge amount of drivel has been written about his activity between 1981 and 1986/1987. He used his looks to embark on brief relationships with a couple of heiresses he ripped off, most notably Ana Obregon. Her father had been caught up in the collapse of a short-lived firm playing games in the reverse repo business; Epstein merely facilitated her family's addition to an already-extant lawsuit with Chase, who were caught up in the affair, and who eventually repaid most of those involved. Epstein took a modest cut for pretty much no work. At around this time, Epstein socialized with some moderately influential people in New York. This was hardly surprising; he had met many advising corporate executives at Bear Stearns. They were also usually new money or outsiders to NYC; not UES generational New Yorkers.
Epstein told some of these people that he was a secret agent for the CIA, and perhaps Mossad. He told others he was deeply involved with Adnan Khashoggi, the world's richest man at that time, who had made his fortune taking a cut of arms deals between the UK, US and Saudi Arabia. Epstein had a fake gimmick Austrian passport, likely of a low quality and kind you could order in gray-area magazines at that time, and carried around a fake handgun sometimes, to impress party guests. He claimed he was an arms dealer, and lated claimed he was involved in facilitating Iran-Contra. There is no evidence of any of these claims, which are regularly repeated by the credulous. Khashoggi was famous at the time and Epstein was a compulsive liar; Khashoggi was one of the most photographed men in the world, his parties and debauchery attracted the world's press, he loved the media and was happy to appear on TV shows about the rich and famous. Epstein does not appear to have been part of his circle, just a liar who pretended he knew him.
My guess is that the occasional cut of a deal with the poorly informed, his payout from Bear and his winnings from Obregon tided Epstein over through to the mid 1980s. According to Vanity Fair, he lived in a small one-bedroom apartment; other sources suggest that he had no office at this time other than a temporary space he occasionally rented. Not exactly the lifestyle of an ultra-rich international arms dealer man of mystery.
The true source of Epstein's fortune dates to 1986, and his meeting with Les Wexner. Wexner had taken over his parents' clothing store in Ohio and built it into a chain of discount stores, which he then leveraged to buy and found a number of other store chains, including Victoria's Secret and Bath and Body Works. Wexner didn't need to move to New York (he could easily have run the conglomerate from Columbus, as he now does), but he chose to, and chose to buy a series of ever more extravagant homes in Manhattan as his fortune grew. In 1986, Wexner was an almost-50-year-old billionaire who had never been associated with any woman, was unmarried, and was widely considered a 'confirmed bachelor'. He was on magazine covers as 'the bachelor billionaire', with all the implicit subtext. There was rumor in both Columbus and Manhattan.
That year, Epstein met an insurance executive named Robert Meister on a flight from New York to Palm Beach. The insurance executive was taken in by Epstein's charm and bluster (no doubt full of stories about Khashoggi, international deals, arms, scandal) and invited him to an event also attended by Wexner after Epstein repeatedly showed up to his racquetball games and begged to meet Wexner. Epstein charmed Wexner, and within a year they were 'business partners', with Epstein increasingly directing Wexner's investments. It is impossible to do more than speculate here, but Wexner's business partner's thoughts, followed by some other anecdotes from the Vanity Fair piece:
Robert Morosky, who had been the vice chairman of The Limited [Wexner's holding company], was surprised Mr. Wexner took to Mr. Epstein so readily. “Everyone was mystified as to what his appeal was,” Mr. Morosky said.
Jeffrey said, ‘See all this stuff? I don’t need any of it. I could live in a tent. But Les gave this to me for a dollar. Les would do anything for me.’ ”
“Les would defer to him in any meeting…. Les would put his hand on Epstein’s shoulder.”
Wexner's own friends, according to several sources, believed that Wexner and Epstein were in a romantic relationship, and referred to him as "the boyfriend". Epstein denied he and Wexner had a sexual relationship in a filmed deposition.
Wexner and Epstein soon became virtually inseparable. They were an odd pair. Wexner was in his late 40s, with a round face and big ears. Epstein was in his early 30s and dashing—from the right angle he looked like Richard Gere. Wexner’s public image continued to grow after hiring Epstein. A 1989 Boston Globe profile that detailed Wexner’s rise reported that his September 1 diary entry that year read: “I finally like myself". Wexner’s physical appearance changed. A former Victoria’s Secret executive recalled Wexner dyed his hair. He hired a live-in personal trainer and adopted a new wardrobe. “Les would wear the tightest jeans you saw. I don’t know how he didn’t cut off blood supply to his private parts,” the former executive said.
In the early 1990s, well into his fifties, and at the urging of his elderly mother (who abused him in company meetings and was his unspoken co-CEO) Wexner married a London-based corporate lawyer in her early 30s. Epstein wrote the prenuptial agreement. The couple moved back to Ohio and had four children. Wexner stayed close with Epstein, and gave him control over his finances and investments. Even very rich people regularly make terrible financial decisions, especially when love is involved. Anyone who has been in the presence of that rare, 99.9th percentile charisma knows that very few people are immune to it, no matter their usual sobriety.
Merritt recalled once asking Wexner why Epstein was so well compensated. “Les just said, ‘Because I got more money than I can ever spend,’ ” said Merritt. “Les gave him free rein over his checkbook.” In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported Epstein earned $200 million from Wexner. Merritt puts the number at $400 million.
The bond between an older and younger man, protege and elder, can be particularly strong in cases. Unlike some thieves, Epstein didn't even take all the money, because as will become clear, he didn't need to.
Behind the BS, Wexner was Epstein's only ever client. Which brings us, at long last, to the money. Epstein 'stole' $46m from Wexner according to Wexner, and made at least tens of millions more in asset management fees in which he was paid (as is common practice) a percentage of the money he made his client. Wexner’s business was already turning over $3bn a year by the early 80s, with exceptionally high margins for the already lucrative clothing retail business. Of course, Epstein didn't invest the money himself. Instead, he just handed it (as was made clear in the recent Jes Staley case) to JP Morgan and a handful of other banks and firms, who did the work for him. Fortunately for him, Epstein was again lucky. The bull market of the age mean that even an index fund for the S&P 500 would have returned almost 500%, meaning that Epstein's loot, plus his share of Wexner's own gains, could easily have amounted to over a billion dollars by the early 2000s in a 2-and-20 arrangement, without Epstein doing anything more than acting as a middleman between private wealth teams at a few big Wall Street banks and his dear friend Les.
Was Jeffrey Epstein an Agent for Israeli Intelligence?
It is important to be clear about the specific nature of this allegation. By the late 1990s, many of the social connections Epstein had fantasized and lied about the in the 1980s were real. He really did know Bill and Hillary Clinton, Oprah, and various other important and famous people. He was not the most well-connected man in the country, and there were social scenes in which he was less widely known, but the combination of his relationship with Maxwell, who had been raised into the British elite and had connections he didn't, in addition to Wexner's money, had been good for him. Now well-connected in Washington and internationally, in part because Wexner had introduced Epstein to his social club of Zionist activist billionaires (the Lauder family etc) who Epstein had tried and failed to pitch his 'financial advisory' services to, Epstein made friends with Ehud Barak, the Labor Prime Minister of Israel. Barak's influence in the Israeli state was already declining; he would be the final left-wing Israeli leader.
It is to me entirely plausible that Epstein trafficked gossip to Mossad, and likely also American intelligence agencies. It is possible, although unlikely, he was paid for it, and I suspect anyone who did pay would have found out, as so many of Epstein's associates did over the course of his life, that he was full of shit, but it may have happened. This is different, however, from the Israeli state being the source of his wealth and power. I will summarise some reasons here:
-
The substantial majority of those alleged to have been victims of Epstein's supposed blackmail scheme were Zionist Jews. Consider this logically. You do not need to blackmail rich Jewish-American billionaires to support Israel. They will do it for free. The idea of Israeli intelligence spending a huge percentage of their budget on destroying the goodwill of their number one supporters who already spend billions lobbying for Israel is absurd. Step One: Gather prominent people who already support Israel, often fervently. Step Two: Film them having sex with underage prostitutes. Step Three: Tell them to keep supporting Israel Or Else... Anyone who approves that operation likes burning money.
-
Even the gentiles allegedly involved in the scheme had no natural hostility toward Israel. Most were old-school WASPs uninvested in either the socialist or Islamic angles of Palestinian liberation. Almost no Muslims were involved. If you were Mossad and wanted to blackmail people ambivalent or hostile toward Israel into supporting it, you'd target rich Chinese, Indians, gentile Russians, and above all rich Sunni Muslims, particularly in the Gulf. You would not target Alan Dershowitz. The blackmail argument betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic purpose of blackmail. It also betrays an understanding of diaspora Jewish politics and Mossad's influence over it. Most critically, those rich Americans who were more skeptical of Israel do not appear to have associated much with Epstein (likely because that isn't really their crowd). Epstein bragged about working for intelligence agencies; that is the one thing you don't want your agent of blackmail to be doing.
-
Epstein had no ingrained loyalty to Israel beyond that he was ethnically Jewish (like 7 million other Americans), and so there is no good reason for Mossad to trust him with one of the most expensive intelligence operations in history. There were and are plenty of charismatic Israeli-American businessmen, who have served in the army and who in some cases have connections to intelligence, that Mossad could would have prioritized for an overseas influence operation. Many were - unlike Epstein - actually successful on Wall Street or in other industries. A random conman and compulsive liar who had been fired from every real job he ever had isn't a good target for this kind of operation. It is telling that while "Mossad wanted to blackmail Americans into doing Israel's bidding" sounds like a clever plan, nobody can even present a compelling case for why Jeffrey Epstein's inviting of various influential pre-existing zionists into his social circle would actually serve the goals of that plan. Was there some great mass of principled Anti-Israel (largely Jewish, presumably) Americans just waiting to go full BDS if Mossad didn't have the sex tapes? A poor argument at best.
-
Much of the argument for Epstein's supposed connections to Israel involves either Ehud Barak (whose influence in the country was again on the decline, who was PM for a very brief period, and who was 'collected' by Epstein as just another famous political or media figure to show off at events like the Clintons, Prince Andrew etc) or an alleged connection to Robert Maxwell. There is no evidence that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell beyond hearsay by anonymous callers into a popular Epstein grifter podcast that they 'supposedly' met in London in the late 1980s. Again, no photographs exist, no record of them being at the same social event or party exists (interesting given that there are tens of thousands of pictures of Epstein at big social events over the last thirty years; he didn't shy away from a camera, and neither did Maxwell). Maxwell was considered a hero by Israeli intelligence because he facilitated weapon and plane part shipments, illicitly, from the Soviet Union, France and elsewhere in the early years of Israel's existence. He was badly connected in America, such that his takeover of the New York Post was a desperate attempt to try to lobby for a bailout for his failing media empire, which collapsed upon his death.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
a private school teacher who seduced his students and blackmailing their dads by threatening to reveal their daughter was no longer a virgin
The only way that works is "your 14 or 15 year old daughter is no longer a virgin" and then the parents get him for having sex with minors. Besides, I thought he got his real start in the whole "getting accepted as part of the social circle of extremely wealthy people, not just the hired staff managing their money" by being a very good friend of a rich gay guy? (Not stated outright that he's gay but he didn't get married until he was in his mid-fifties and handing over everything to a young man seems a little too trusting for a guy who made his money, not inherited it:
The only publicly known billionaire client of Epstein was Leslie Wexner, chairman and CEO of L Brands (formerly The Limited, Inc.) and Victoria's Secret. In 1986, Epstein met Wexner through their mutual acquaintances, insurance executive Robert Meister and his wife, in Palm Beach. A year later, Epstein became Wexner's financial adviser and served as his right-hand man. Within the year, Epstein had sorted out Wexner's entangled finances. In July 1991, Wexner granted Epstein full power of attorney over his affairs. The power of attorney allowed Epstein to hire people, sign checks, buy and sell properties, borrow money, and do anything else of a legally binding nature on Wexner's behalf. Epstein managed Wexner's wealth and various projects such as the building of his yacht, the Limitless.
By 1995, Epstein was a director of the Wexner Foundation and Wexner Heritage Foundation. He was also the president of Wexner's Property, which developed part of the town of New Albany outside Columbus, Ohio, where Wexner lived. Epstein made millions in fees by managing Wexner's financial affairs. Although never employed by L Brands, he frequently corresponded with the company executives. Epstein often attended Victoria's Secret fashion shows, and hosted the models at his New York City home, as well as helping aspiring models get work with the company.
Epstein was a creep, no doubt about it, but he was probably more of a "guy in the same social circles who throws lavish parties where pretty young women are very attentive to important men" than "yeah he'll fill your order for three fifteen year old blondes".
jake
2mo ago
and I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in
By the way, and I should have said this back at Christmas, but alas. I'd say the probability of your assessment of Ramaswamy falsely professing belief is very high now. I won't go all the way, not because I mind admitting being wrong, you can treat this as my admission of being on the wrong side of assessing him, but because it's not my place to say on this whether someone believes what they say. "He's given adequate reason to doubt him," yes. I do think one of my arguments holds up, that a more competent actor would have found a way to say it without lying, because he dropped a few poorly chosen words on an issue and got himself banished to Ohio.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I think Hood is underrated, but only to the extent that he was merely a bad general and not in contention for the worst the Confederacy had to offer. What frustrates me with a lot of Civil War discourse, especially online, is the same thing I mentioned earlier about judging actions with knowledge of the outcome in place. Yes, Hood's actions look bad when we know they were unsuccessful. The problem is that, at the time, it wasn't obvious that these actions were worse than any of the realistic alternatives.
To put the whole issue into proper context: In the spring and summer of 1864, the overall Confederate strategy was hold off the Union until the November elections, in the hope that war weariness would usher in a new administration with a mandate to make some kind of deal. To this end, it wasn't critical that they score any major victories, but it was critical that they prevent the Union from getting any of their own. Ever since losing Chattanooga the Joe Johnston playbook had been to stake out a defensive position, only to abandon it after getting outflanked. He'd given Davis repeated assurances that he'd hold behind this river or whatever, then not like his position and retreat. After several weeks of this Sherman is on the outskirts of Atlanta, a city the Confederacy can't afford to lose, and Johnston is talking about giving it up.
At this point Davis, who didn't like Johnston to begin with, is getting fed up and is probably getting deja vu about the Peninsula campaign, where Johnston did the same thing around Richmond, which probably would have fallen if Lee hadn't taken over and changed strategy. So Johnston gets cashiered in favor of Hood, who has a reputation for fighting and will at least make an attempt at fending off Sherman and saving Atlanta. Hood, true to his word, launched a series of ill-fated assaults against Sherman that do nothing to stave off the inevitable and only serve to inflict casualties he can't afford to lose. Buffs like to argue that Johnston would have at least kept his army intact, but an intact army is useless if it isn't going to defend anything, let alone something as critical as Atlanta. There was pressure from the president, the state legislatures, and the public to do something, and Hood at least did something. I'm not going to comment on whether what he did was ideal because I'm not an expert on battlefield tactics, but the buffs who criticize Hood aren't criticizing his execution.
So now, to get closer to answering your question, we get to the fall, after Atlanta is in Union hands and Sherman is aiming to push to Savannah. Hood didn't attempt to stop him because he knew that the endeavor was pointless. He could have slowed the march but not stopped it; he would have fallen farther and farther back, desertions and casualties increasing with every passing mile, and there would have been nothing left of his army by the time Sherman got to the ocean. Furthermore, there would have been no reason for Thomas to keep his troops in Tennessee. He could have either invaded Alabama unopposed, or joined up with Sherman to give him 120,000 men to Hood's 40,000. So Hood made the decision to move toward the Alabama line, cutting off Sherman's communications. This would purportedly compel Sherman to leave Atlanta and divide his army, sending one wing to protect the threat to Tennessee and the other to hunt down Hood, who would get the opportunity to fight the remaining forces in Georgia on the ground of his choosing.
Sherman did indeed give chase, and Hood found the area he wanted to give battle, but Sherman showed up with his entire army, which was more than Hood could handle. At this point, Hood was stuck; if he took up a position, Sherman could do the same, and hold him there while Thomas came down from Nashville to hold him while he turned toward Savannah. Or he could hold him while he sent Thomas into Alabama, before turning toward the sea and forcing Hood to give chase, which wouldn't do anything but waste Hood's time. So instead he decided to give up Georgia and head north to Kentucky, hoping he'd have better luck where he wasn't at such a numerical disadvantage. If nothing else, it would keep the Union out of Alabama.
It's worth also noting that the Confederate army was having serious problems with desertion at this point, largely driven by the hopelessness of the situation. The buffs who talk about how Johnston would have at least preserved his army don't realize that no one wants to spend weeks putting his ass on the line in rear guard actions defending land you intend on giving up in a few hours without any immediate prospects for taking the initiative. On the other hand, if you go to Tennessee where you can win a few battles and keep the Yanks out of Alabama, there's much less temptation to desert. If nothing else, it might force Sherman to pursue and backtrack out of Georgia.
For Hood's part, he was wildly overambitious, thinking he could march straight into Kentucky, replenish his army with locals, and force Sherman to abandon Georgia to keep him from crossing the Ohio or, alternatively, that he could march from there into Virginia and hit Grant in the rear, crushing his army. Fantastical, yes, but at this point in the war, the only way to keep morale up and preserve any chance of winning is to go for a knockout blow. Even defeating Schoefield would have been enough to effect a short-term reorganization of Union priorities. Again, we can argue about whether poor tactical decisions led to Hood's downfall and the destruction of The Army of Tennessee, but criticism of Hood isn't that he blundered away good opportunities; to the contrary, if anything good is said about him it's that he was a competent corps commander under Lee but was too aggressive to command an army. His actions were all failures, but it's not like there were a ton of obvious alternatives.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
Never Meet Your Heroes, Even Posthumously
When I was a kid, I discovered Harlan Ellison on Sci-Fi Buzz during his Harlan Ellison's Watching segments. They were my favorite segments, and I was crushed when an episode didn't have one. I would have been about 10 years old at this time. Luckily enough, they are all still available on Harlan's youtube. This one in particular I remember, being a comic card collector in middle school, along with most of the boys in my boy scout troop.
For me at that age, there was a lot to look up to in Harlan. He was witty, funny, charismatic, and never gave up on his childhood passions. More over he seems important and respected, his awards always preceding his name. I thought he was simply the best as a young nerdling. But I never read his stories. I can't even remember wanting to. Maybe I wasn't there yet, in terms of reading level. I honestly have no memory of what I was reading at that age. I do recall that by the time I was a freshman in highschool, I had read ample Ray Bradbury collections, and had been dabbling in Iain M Banks. For whatever reason I never circled back to Harlan until much later, picking up a ebook copy of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and being blown away by every story in it, especially Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.
Over the last month, I've been working through The Essential Ellison: A 35 Year Retrospective. It's completely changed my view of the man, and not for the better. The tome really lays bare how autobiographical much of Ellison's short stories are. The barely disguised self loathing, the tireless hatred he feels for all of humanity, but seemingly goys above all others, and the immaturity disguised as worldliness. Qualities I admired as a child watching him on Sci-Fi Buzz I'm profoundly glad I did not grow up to emulate as an adult.
The facts are Harlan's father died when he was very young, he was constantly in and out of trouble, he ran away from home, he worked a smattering of tough sounding blue collar jobs, he spent 2 years in the army, he was expelled from college, he was married 5 times, divorced 4, and he had no children.
Through his fiction, you further learn that he was, imagines, or romanticizes, being the only jewish boy in a small Ohio town relentless victimized by it's shitty irredeemable goy population. He loathes goys, and it rears it's head in story after story after story. He hates their dumb kids, their dumb churches, their dumb music, their dumb bowling leagues, you name it, he hates it. And he hates that they're all bigger and stronger than him at 5'3". Does he really feel this way, deep down? Who's to say. But after 1000 pages, probably 500 of which riffed on that theme, I'm left with the impression some part of him must. Often cloaked in humor, or the virtue of the civil rights movement of his day. But in his fiction, he seems less interested in the humanity of Southern Blacks, and more interested in the inhumanity of the goy.
He returns to his childhood repeatedly in his fiction, and how much better things were then, when radio plays lit his imagination on fire and his father was still alive. This is a strain of stunted growth I too suffer from, as my grumpy rants about video games will attest. I find ample share of compatriots in this regard. But something about Harlan's inability to take on the masculine burden of supporting and raising a stable family casts a darker tint to his nostalgia.
Harlan Ellison's entire public persona was a fraud. Or at least, in many of his writings, his fear that he was a fraud came through. Stories about a 4 times divorced celebrity manufacturing a shameful charismatic and funny public persona to hide how much he hated everyone. Stories about a shameless womanizer who has worked all sorts of rough and tumble blue collar jobs... but only for a few weeks so he could say he did. In reality he (I mean his character of course) has soft hands only barely acquainted with manual labor. Which reminds you Harlan the author never draws on all the odd jobs he claims to have had in his fiction, beyond name dropping them. Lastly, multiple stories where a four times divorced main character convinces his first wife to get an abortion she doesn't want, resulting in her emotional destruction which he treats as a personal offense to himself.
Are all these details that sound curiously autobiographical true? Or angles Harlan plays up for want of something to do when seated at his typewriter? At this point, with enough dots connected, I suspect the worst.
After making it through The Essential Ellison, I'm hurt. Hurt that someone I looked up to so much as a kid was in reality a hateful, developmentally stunted man. And I mean emotionally, not physically, though I suppose there was that too. A man who for 35 years picked his wounds in public, on the page. He kept them fresh, knowing it's what put food on the table. I feel sorry for him, but I also sincerely wish I hadn't known all that. Ah well.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3mo ago
We still do have a First Amendment, it still applies to public officials, and Brandenburg v. Ohio is still the controlling precedent. Unless Newsom says more or less "Come on out right now and wreck the place", he's reasonably safe from prosecution. And he's not dumb enough to step over the line. (Trump might be dumb enough to try to prosecute anyway, but probably not)
doglatine
3mo ago
A key factor is how productivity improvements are handled by legacy companies vs new entrants. The digital revolution probably didn’t change much for Ohio Widgets PLC, with its large unionised workforce and complex compliance requirements. For Shenzhen Widgets LLC, on the other hand, digitisation is essential for its ability to take customised CNC machined orders from anywhere in the world, translate them into Mandarin, and have them shipped anywhere in the world in 5 days.
anon_
3mo ago
Have you looked at the projected electoral college map after the 2030 census?
Now look at 538 and try to figure out what path a D has to win here? Florida has been well lost (RDS doesn't get enough credit IMO) as has Ohio. So even if the D candidate wins the "blue wall" state and Nevada they still lose!
Of course, a lot can happen in 5 years. GA or NC might start to be in play, but even still, the Dems have to ring up a perfect set of victories with no margin for error. And their bench is not exactly exciting either: Newsom, AOC, Pete. Gretch is a good choice, which is why they probably won't chose her.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
Makes perfect sense to me, AI is a national-level issue. Really it's global, a server farm in Ohio can take jobs off Uzbeks and Bolivians, not to mention Floridians. Makes sense to regulate nationally.
Plus, would you really want California regulating a critical sector of the economy?
No, as long as Brandenburg v. Ohio holds (and SCOTUS has shown little interest in changing it) mere "incitement" isn't enough. You need "directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action" AND "likely to incite or produce such action."
More options
Context Copy link