HOLLUPAMINNIT

Where in 1940, kids graduating from high school were generally capable of reading and writing at least at a twelfth grade level.

22% of people graduated from high school in 1940. High School was a new idea in 1940 related to industrialization and the need for the American economy to pivot from agrarian to manufacturing. Meanwhile the illiteracy rate among minorities in 1940 was over ten percent so... that's gotten rather better? And while there have been some troubling trends related to COVID there's been a lot more right-wing hay made about it than anything else.

We destroyed the work ethic to the point that an entire generation is unwilling to get a job despite having spent decades going to school to train for those jobs.

That's because we stopped making it worthwhile. This isn't a "work ethic" problem this is a "rational actor" problem.

For that matter, Osama didn’t refuse to pay to keep up our infrastructure.

Not everyone refuses to pay for infrastructure.

We got problems, agreed. But howling at the moon about how everything has been bad forever doesn't point towards solutions.

It's interesting, isn't it? I mean obviously it sucks balls. Lives are being destroyed. Livelihoods are in the shitter. Global geopolitics is being rocked to its core and wealth is being destroyed at a rate not seen since 2008. But once you get over the "front seat at the apocalypse" nature of it all, it remains... interesting.

I think the Democrats had a duty to warn about all the heinous bullshit the Trump administration would try to pull. it didn't work? But "no, you don't understand, all this stuff is holy-shit bad" was an electoral strategy that should have worked. They could have taken the tack of "do you realize how incompetent they were last time" as well as "and all the clever people who signed on last time are farts in the wind" but not after getting caught pretending Biden was more competent than he was.

I also think the Democrats are leaning too heavily into Napoleon's maxim "Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake." But I can see the thinking - if "these guys would burn the Reichstag" doesn't work, and you have a good guess they will fucking suck at everything they do, standing back and letting the populism dissolve in the face of pure criminal incompetence is a strategy. It's certainly the lowest effort. I'm halfway convinced the Dems are hammering everyone's emails and phones so they can see just how small their base truly is; I know I'm in no mood to give them any money and i broached some "oh you're a REAL sucker" giving level last year. They're historically unpopular and that's saying something, considering the environment.

One of my favorite morning rituals is opening up Yahoo! Finance and comparing the articles written three hours before the market opens with the tickers after the market opens. They rarely align anymore. Futures kinda went "lol tariffs" and then retail went "oh noes tariffs" and every talking head and substack analyst shows their ass about the fact that all their models and prognostications date to a world that makes sense. Broadly? The markets have stopped taking Trump seriously.

And has been pointed out about that whole Signal shitshow, the only evidence that Trump had any involvement whatsoever was Stephen Miller going "daddy Trump told me" at which point it isn't even the populists in charge. '87-'88 were rough for Reagan, even after this:

Because Iran-Contra made it really clear that homeboy was not in charge. Bush won in '88 anyway? But a lot of that was Dukakis had the charisma of a wet paper towel and a lot of that was ample evidence that Bush was a competent bureaucrat (new taxes notwithstanding).

I think it ends in ignominy. I think it's gonna suck to get there but I think the fever dies back. I mean, the Trump administration hasn't even been able to do shit about egg prices, despite this:

What have they done recently for the people who voted for them? Because what minuscule fraction of the electorate gives a shit about stuff like this?

But UBL got what he wanted right? The goal was the decline of the American Empire, and he managed it?

The goal was a Sunni Islamist caliphate stretching from Libya to Turkey. UBL wanted the decadent influence of the west to decline to the point where the teachings of Hassan Al Banna and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab could establish a durable nation where the correct practice of Islam could flourish.

The lesson Islamists took from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is that plucky freedom fighters can vanquish immoral foreign empires if they believe it hard enough. UBL in particular saw the lack of appetite the Soviets had for a protracted war while also lacking the perspective to regard the role of greater geopolitics - he saw the helicopters go down and he saw the Stingers but didn't see the half billion dollar a year budget or Pentagon-level planning and logistical support. He saw the dispirited Soviet troops but he didn't see Chernobyl or the black marketization of Peristroika.

Osama bin Laden took the milquetoast American responses to the Khobar Towers and USS Cole as a green light for a large scale domestic attack within US borders. it was the dumbest fucking move in terrorism since the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. It led to the perpetual occupation of Iraq, it led to twenty years of occupation in Afghanistan, it led to a changed dynamic with the Saudi royal family, it led to Houthi uprisings. It's fair to say that ISIS was UBL's goal but "NO NOT THAT WAY!!!!" in that ISIS was primarily decadent Europeans LARPing in the desert rather than enlightened Islamic scholars assembling an enlightened nation-state. ISIS also managed to rally the entire goddamn world against them by leaning on the piracy rather than the religious teachings. You wanna know what happened to ISIS between 2004 and 2011? It was UBL's missives-from-the-cave that kept 'em down. Everything UBL mumbled into a camcorder was anti-ISIS. Fast forward a few months past Abbotabad and we're breaking walls.

It's fair to say that the one single event that allowed the rise of MBS was the death of Osama bin Laden. Prior to UBL's death, American foreign policy required a nominally agnostic, nominally tame power structure within Saudi Arabia. After UBL's death American Foreign policy was able to adapt to a nominally fundamentalist, nominally disruptive power structure within Saudi Arabia. It was Osama bin Laden, after all, who objected to American bases in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War... and it was MBS who allowed direct El Al flights between Riyadh and Tel Aviv.

Osama bin Laden wanted the whole of South Asia to look like Talib Afghanistan. That's why al Qaeda capped Ahmad Shah Massoud two days before the twin towers. Fast forward twenty five years and the ruler of Saudi Arabia is WhatsApp buddies with Jared Kushner. Women can nominally drive. They're building ski resorts and billions have been spent importing European culture.

We all lost on September 11? But Osama bin Laden lost big. Things went exactly the opposite of how he thought they would. He was able staunch the bleeding while he was alive? But the minute he could no longer control the narrative, all hope of a Caliphate was fucking gone.

As far as "decline of the American Empire" I don't know if you've noticed but the only credible militaries in the world anymore are Ukraine and the Americans. Yeah Trump is a dumb fuck arranging Yemeni strikes over Signal but in Civ VI this is what you call "total cultural victory." That's an American jet, with an American soundtrack, aping an American cultural reference while saber-rattling against Americans. The co-opting is complete.

His persistence landed him an assistant manager role with another local five-and-dime chain, TG&Y, when McClellan’s shuttered its doors.

By the '60s there were over a hundred TG&Y's. By the '80s I was buying my school supplies and clothes there.

TG&Y wasn’t a perfect operation by any means, but it was something akin to Walmart – the sort of place where you could get just about anything you needed.

You might be An Old if the stores of your youth are explained in terms of Walmart

The operation expanded, leading Green to set up a small factory. There, he staffed “cerebral palsy patients” to chop, glue, and bag frames for $.10 per piece.

This was hardly novel. Crap manufacturing has been done by the disabled at ruinous rates the country over since the WPA.

Expanding the Hobby Lobby proved easy because Hobby Lobby was unlike anything anyone had ever seen.

What a bunch of abject bullshit. Hobby Lobby is TG&Y (or Woolworth's, or any other five and dime) without the guns, ammo and ready-to-wear clothing. Take a five and dime and get rid of everything that might come with a warranty? And you have a dollar store. Take a five and dime and get rid of everything that comes without a warranty? And you have a Target. In an era where clothing was largely American-made, lasted a while and was more economically repaired than replaced, a five and dime was a place with notions, dry goods and things kids wanted. Hobby Lobby is that without the dry goods.

The term “arts and crafts” conjures humble images of primary school children gluing together popsicle sticks, of grannies weaving needles through embroidery hoops.

The term "arts and crafts" now means "doing the shit your grandparents did for kicks rather than out of necessity."

While not quite a monopoly,

bitch please

And so, the Green Collection was born in 2009

Fuckin' no less than NPR called out the Greens for raiding the Museum of Baghdad in 2003. Of course Google sucks now, thanks AI, so all that data has been lost in time like tears in rain. There's ample evidence that the Greens washed their existing holdings through their foundation in 2009 but most of it was them selling to themselves.

Perhaps the Greens, in their inexperience, did not understand the magnitude of their actions. Perhaps the Greens just didn’t care.

Perhaps the author should go to the library. Fuckin' libs have been losing their minds over Hobby Lobby since Randi Rhodes was on the air.

There was a hell of a Frontline backintheday that they've never released for streaming, maybe because it essentially concluded that gender politics in general were essentially how repressed people expressed their self-control. They listed a bunch of studies in which those found guilty of hate crimes against homosexuals tended to score higher on clinical evaluations of homosexuality than violent criminals in general, and ploughed through interview after interview about how the perpetrators committed their violence because their gender identity was threatened by witnessing homosexuals enjoying their homosexuality. A number of them were big fans of gay porn... but they weren't gay because they were in prison for beating gay men to death so how on earth could they be homosexual?

It would not surprise me at all if a study were to find that all this LGBTQ backlash was a bunch of closeted, repressed conservatives who need external reinforcement to keep from enjoying themselves. Because a whole bunch of people started to have fun for the first time in a long time? And we can't have THAT

And I think it would be less of a problem if we weren't so busy being siloed with our clones by social media. If the only people you ever interact with are the 3Pers who are also secretly watching futanari you're never going to have a reason to re-evaluate your shit. But then, would there be safe spaces where people could explore gender without judgment and reprisal? I dunno.

Back in the '00s, in the midst of the Defense of Marriage Act, the line not even the Democrats would cross was "civil unions." The reasonable thing would be to ban legal recognition of religious marriage at all and just create a civil construct that serves the same legal purpose. That was howling-at-the-moon territory. So while I'm a fan of the idea? And have been for 20 years? It ain't gonna happen in the US at least.

I have seen exactly zero evidence to back this up but I'll hypothesize it anyway - in addition to greater cultural acceptance for transgender youth, it would not surprise me to learn that an increase in dissatisfaction with gender roles and gender identity was playing a part in the increase in gender dysphoria. It's an incredible challenge to jump out of society's expectations and take on an entirely new identity. Maybe people just feel freer to do it now than they did 30 years ago? But also maybe people feel more impetus to do it because we're getting stuck.

I think everyone should give up on marriage. It's a silly tradition with legal implications that can range from extremely helpful to financially catastrophic.

It's also a deeply-ingrained legal construct that serves a number of vital purposes within most societies worldwide. At a base level it's a civil contract allowing for partnership benefits and legal shelter for raising children, AKA 'future taxpayers', that has no easy replacement. You can think "everyone should" but nobody will. The discussion here is not "marriage is dumb" the discussion here is "partnership is faltering."

I don't really know what being "grown up" as a man means today or in the past, but a lot of the men I know have never done it. I know guys in their mid 30s who don't think twice about skipping showers for a week, who get in brawls with the homeless after leaving the bar, who are visited by the police a few times a year for getting wasted and causing a domestic disturbance while living in their mother's home, who think cooking on things that aren't a barbecue "is gay".

Right but that's no different than it's ever been. I grew up with "real men don't eat quiche" and ten years before that we had "The Lumberjack Song." That's not about partnership, that's about gender identity. This is about partnership:

This is about partnership:

This is about partnership:

Let's look at that, though -

with a degree - there's been less and less of that lately. For whatever reason (and I've seen "autonomy" suggested a lot, as a consequence of rising tuition) the male fraction at colleges has dropped an easy ten percent. If you are male and have no degree, there are a lot of "laborer" positions open to you. If you are female and have no degree, the gender-normative world says you need to get married. Sure, there's retail etc but there's retail etc. for men. There's more incentive for women to at least invest in enough debt to get a leg up.

or a good job - if you grabbed the bottom rung out of high school your opportunities for career advancement are slim. The job you got five years ago is the job you have now and likely the job you'll have five years from now. If you got a degree in dental hygiene you're in the same spot but you're also making $80k a year - a friend's daughter scored a slot in a dental hygienist program with an 80 percent rejection rate, zero men in the program.

that is capable of empathizing with others - if you look online for dating advice you're going to find Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate, all of whom will tell you that if you man up and start treating women like shit they'll fall at your feet. You can be empathetic but to profess empathy requires a counter-cultural belief that women are humans.

and not totally strange - If you're twenty two right now you (A) graduated during COVID (B) playing first-person shooters with 99% dudes (C) and watching pornography that heavily favors the humiliation and degradation of women (D) having experienced nowhere NEAR a reasonable amount of unmediated, spontaneous interaction with the opposite sex.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen? I'm saying that over the past fifteen-twenty years the lake is bigger, the lily pads are fewer between and there's less time spent learning how to jump. And the statistics are now bearing out what was predicted ten years ago. Now here's the problem:

the soldiers never left and they're not getting laid.

The thing is? Mother Earth News is half hippies, half preppers. There's a big contingent that gives no fux about the oil industry. They like that Henry Ford distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

What I think is important to note here is that it's the cults of personality, not the underlying belief system. And the one thing you can say about the past few months is that both Trump and Vance have been demonstrating their incompetence to the people who were only conditionally in the cult in the first place.

I would say "tesla contrarian" has been a lonely place for a long time.

THANKS OBAMA

They introduce the text by asking the reader to imagine the year 2050—the same year Schwartzman envisioned for solar communism—replete with desalinated ocean water flowing from the taps, skyscraper farms growing our food indoors, and “star pills” manufactured in space. Clean air and super-fast planes. Lest we confuse this scenario with science fiction, Klein and Thompson remind us what it was like to live in New York City between 1875 and 1905, when the streets filled with novelty: “automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines, people riding bicycles in rubber-soled shoes—all recent innovations.” The world has changed very fast before. Why not now?

Hey I read that book. Bastani is never going to be confused with Ezra Klein, but at least he acknowledges that major public works projects do not happen from private investment.

Once these clogs are cleared, there’s no reason to believe we won’t supply ourselves with the high-pressure spray of ever-improving goods and services that is the American birthright. If there appears to be a problem regarding scarce resources or conflicting values, we should just innovate our way out. Lab-grown meat means we get to have our animals and eat them too. This isn’t the focused solar-communist prediction about the increasing efficiency of photovoltaic modules, it’s an all-purpose ideological faith in novelty.

Bastani's work, on the other hand, argues that innovation is the cause, not the effect - he points out that the advent of cheap solar power and cell phones has done more for African independence than anything else because for a thousand bucks you can turn a hut in the Congo into a no-grid modern bastion and that price is only coming down. Both Bastani and Hinkel point out that it isn't the abundance, it's the choke points and Klein wants rich people to control them.

Klein and Thompson are skilled presenters, and Abundance is hardly the worst thing for sale at the airport.

ice burn

If anyone can persuade America’s selfish liberal homeowners to stop thinking of every new housing development within their real estate market as a personal attack, it might be these two.

And nobody talks about this enough:

“Wealth - any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.” - H. L. Mencken

Society is striation and striation is driven by resources. If you would like to increase striation, increase resources. If you would like to decrease striation, decrease resources - you can do this by ensuring everyone is poor, or you can do this by ensuring that excess wealth is distributed into the common good via taxes, much like they were during the era of American prosperity. The basic problem is that we all keep up with the Joneses, I don't care where your civilization is, and if the Joneses are taxed so poorly that they can start rival space launch companies nobody is going to sit around thinking "well, my commute is shit and there's nowhere to park in my neighborhood but at least all these young immigrant families from Honduras have a roof over their heads." Bastani misses it, Klein misses it. Hinkel doesn't; his whole point is that global trade is a mechanism by which rich nations make poor nations poorer. McKibben gets it; his whole point is that the more we focus on keeping things local and within our own communities the less the global competition matters.

The state’s voters approved startup funding for the train plan in the fall of 2008. It should have been a gimme; but almost twenty years later, we’re still flying between LA and San Francisco, at an absurd cost to the climate.

Klein is being disingenuous if he actually pretends that California high speed rail was ever anything other than a long shot. It was always a "if we build it they will hand over their property rights" project in one of the most corrupt states in the nation. You know what Klein doesn't believe in? Corruption.

Clearly, something is sabotaging society’s rational development. We should have those trains, and some big solar-powered apartment buildings near the stations.

Whatever could that something be

For example: capital is reluctant to enter industries that are easy to enter, for fear competition will drive out the profit.

Uhhhmmmm capital is reluctant to enter industries it won't make money from. This is why there's no malaria vaccine. Until the Gates foundation stepped in because there were no capitalist or communist economies big enough to fund the development of a malaria vaccine.

The abundant solution to a lack of housing is to make it easier for developers to build for increased density: the more units that come onto the market, the less landlords will be able to charge.

The abundant solution to a lack of housing is to stop treating housing like a profit center and start treating housing like a human right. Let's take the "deregulate it" argument and apply it to medicine. How we all feelin' now?

Permitting single-stair apartment buildings, ending single-family zoning, and eliminating parking requirements are all strong housing reform ideas, but no one seriously believes such an updated regulatory program will yield abundant housing for America’s poor

fucking YIMBY dipshits

The only way to guarantee real housing abundance is deep and concerted public support, by adding the necessary state capacity to build and maintain a home for everyone who needs one. Something analogous goes for health care and food—not to mention clean air and water, parks, schools, transportation, news reporting, universities, scientific research, museums, and worthwhile artistic production in general.

Bastani would like a word

The authors acknowledge, but decline to unravel, the ways that private demand for profit itself is a fetter on production, leading to a confused moment in the conclusion where they cite Karl Marx in their argument for unleashing the capitalist forces of production from government standards.

Yeah sounds about right

But why can’t decent liberals like Klein and Thompson bring themselves to interrogate America’s trillion-dollar defense budget?

Why doesn't anyone read Wallerstein

Would you rather have abundance or scarcity? Easy: more is better than less.

This is such a stupid way to look at it. Most people would rather have abundance in comparison to the relative scarcity of those around them. Given a choice between living in a trailer in Alabama in 2025 or being Henry VIII, most people would choose the Tudor even though that dude never got to see a single episode of Bake-off, taste a twinkie or be a Walmart shopper.

Ultimately, the Abundance authors ask too little of themselves and their readers. In adapting their short-form work, Klein and Thompson haven’t challenged themselves to go deeper or contend with their strongest critics.

bad ideas writ large are still bad, film at 11

Imagine the Middle East at peace, with popular governments devoted to using their national fossil fuel reserves to transition their societies to solar utopia, rather than on American-made weapons or weapons to shoot back at American-made weapons.

Haha the Middle East was under relative peace while completely under the thumb of the Ottoman Empire. People like to pretend it's always about oil without noticing that Israel doesn't sport a whole lotta wells.

Let us instead embrace the Schwartzmans’ solar utopian credo:

Yup, let's just wish things were different and then complain when they're not.

It's the green space literally next to the ferry, you gotta work hard not to get a ferry in the shot LOL

Show it

I took this the other day to show my niece what the rule of thirds is. I'm pleased with it.

surprise landscaping

So the guy who i lean into when talking casting called me up because he saw me driving around. Decided to come by and check out the house - he hadn't seen it in like four months. He brought a buddy who he's mentoring and we get to talking because this guy is a contractor. I showed him the indoor barbecue which is falling over and he offered to get rid of it. I asked for a bid, he gave me one, and lo and behold the next day I was losing four cubic yards of bricks.

Dude is a Tasmanian devil. He saw me clearing some of my blackberries and said "the guy who's hauling stuff to the dump is also a landscaper, he'll be here tomorrow would you like to talk to him" and I said "sure!" But what he said to the landscaper was "clear the blackberries."

So I get there and things are well underway. They ask me how much of what they saw was mine and when I said "all of it" they sorta took a pause. I said "yeah i mean let's get around the front and then let's take a breath" which was good because within about five hours my guy from the City showed up.

"Here unofficially," he said. "We know you're trying to do the right thing here and can be trusted."

"Also I asked you what I could do and you gave me verbal permission to clear out all the weeds so long as I didn't use heavy equipment," I reminded him. He nodded and held up his hands in a placating gesture.

"All that is true," he said. "So I'm here in an unofficial capacity, as a friend, to let you know that the office has gotten six calls about this and we're curious what your mitigation plan is."

"Uhm... huckleberries, twinberries and sword ferns?" I said. Once they started clearing things out I went back and looked at the lists the county conservation district had given me just weeks before, because I invited them out to tell me what to do with my ravine.

"What's your immediate mitigation plan," they said.

"...what should it be," I asked.

"How about three inches of straw," they said.

"On it!" I said.

So what started as "Sure, I'll talk to you about removing the blackberries" became four days of work and $1800 in native plantings. I had to have a Come To Jesus with Mr. Tasmanian Devil in which i said that five thousand dollars worth of landscaping wasn't on my agenda for that week and he needed to slow his fucking roll. And that I was damn lucky that I had already talked to the city and the county and already had a relationship and plans in hand or I'd be looking at an easy ten thousand dollars in fines.

"No one could have predicted that - " he started and I said

"No, dude, I've done landscaping on this house before and they're super anal. I don't have rocks on that hill because it requires city council approval and a yearly insurance agreement on file. they made me measure the ground height under my photinias before they'd give me permission to cut them even though they're diseased and dying. I COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS. ME. Because I know what's up and you don't."

So that cooled his jets a little? he's still like a ferret on crack. Trying to keep him occupied with shit that needs to happen now rather than shit that will need to happen at some point as permits and the like fall into place.

But the best part is they were wrapping up when my dragging-ass-since-september landscape planner and architect showed up. "Yeah, it's just natives but also I didn't have to stand in my yard so you could charge me $150 to explain a drawing." They don't know they're super-fired yet but they probably suspect it, and that was liberating.

I am coming to the realization that I was an apex fucking predator of an architectural consultant. In 2003 I was on five of the AIA Top Ten nationwide. Was I an architect? I was not. But I'm sure as shit not one of these fuckin Houzz dilettantes. I fuckin' had to draw my patio. In SolidWorks. INDIVIDUAL BRICKS. Before my architect came back with "oh you want this detail, here you go" and she's the best-of-breed. FOURTH fucking architect I've hired.

I got a pond now tho

Will be a bit to catch up, ‘cos only reading non-fiction at any given time is a bore. Shout-out to Scott Lynch for getting me through the Gilded Age reading so far.

Post some shit dawg because I made the mistake of grinding through the Fleet of Worlds books which required me to acknowledge that there are actually like four books set on Ringworld and while I knew the second one was bad I am absolutely gobsmacked by how horrible the third and fourth one are.

The fights in court as Zeldin’s EPA tries to wrangle back already-dispensed funds under the allegations of criminal wrongdoing on the side of the last administration (lol?) is one hell of a way to try and stop further progress by a government back initiative like CHIPS.

The thing that strikes me about every move by the Trump administration so far is they're amateurish. They presume that if they kick the table the leg will fall. There's no greater strategy than "through executive privilege we will dismantle the government for we have Supremes supporting the Unitary Executive Theory." They make a lot of headlines and they're ruining a lot of shit... but they're ruining the shit people like. A whole goddamn country gets to learn what USAID does besides providing the CIA cover. Discover that their tax dollars really do empty the outhouse at Funacres National Park. Find out how much worse Social Security workers are when there are fewer of them. It's an impressively self-determined punitive civics lesson.

Everyone my algos are tuned to are trying to read the tea leaves on what percentage make-up of 1890s, 1930s or 1960s our future holds, but it all looks like these labor-first policies will be on hold until who knows when (read: if a rebuke gains any traction… as tired as that sounds).

sigh

Look.

It annoys me to do this. This book pisses me off the same way my vulnerability to homeopathic remedies does. it is without rigor. Among its examples it literally goes 'oops our model misses the Civil War.' But there are aspects of sociology to it that I haven't seen anywhere else. And if nothing else, it'll show you where Steve Bannon and the rest of the accelerationists are coming from.

He made a whole goddamn movie about it in 2010:

Meh. The Nazis are a funhouse mirror through which every strident wannabe thought leader glances to confirm his historical accuracy. Very, very few actually bother to put the Nazis in the context of their time or their political history. WWI was launched in racism on a racist continent. The Zionists were looking for a homeland to avoid extermination since the Dreyfus Affair; the Balfour Declaration predates the Beer Hall Putsch by six years. From a humanitarian and totalitarian standpoint, the NSDAP and DNVP were equally nasty business; Russia went Communist because the Germans paid for Lenin to set up shop there to keep him out of Germany and even then, your political choices were basically "hard right fascists" "hard right fascists" "flailing centrists" "hard left communists" and "hard left communists." Throw that into an environment where the way out of reparations was ruinous inflation and you're gonna have a bad time. Worthy of note - "let's exterminate the jews" was a German secret hidden from the Germans much as "let's exterminate the Jews" was a Soviet secret hidden from the Soviets (and a non-secret before that).

If it makes you feel better, Snyder's book is considered a landmark read too and even he can't avoid ski-jumping to "well since the Nazis exist, obviously they will exist in America." He also leans hard into the culpability of Poland in the extermination of Jews to avoid being exterminated themselves and skips right the fuck over The Western Betrayal. I haven't read Adam Tooze's book and I won't, but I've read maybe a dozen books on the economics of WWII? And none of them hypothesize that "The idea that Nazi Germany was an unstoppable juggernaut, backed by an efficient, highly industrialized economy" was central. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM puts forth the idea that WWII was a make-or-break ploy by Germany and Japan to renegotiate the punitive economic treaties under which they operated, which is why battles were launched in violation of the standards of war, which were carried out with utter disregard to treaties and practices, which is why both countries were required unconditional surrender.

Unfortunately, we required a narrative of "nope only the Nazis were bad, and they were very bad, and otherwise Germany is great, yep, we should totally extend them the Marshall plan, now that Hitler's gone it's all sunshine and rainbows" without any deeper analysis of how WWII happened. And damn near every book written since 1960 accepts the "nope only the Nazis were bad" argument with varying degrees of "well ackshully Stalin was bad/kinda bad/very bad" depending on the era in which it was written. You wanna know why the only quote anyone uses of Arendt is that "banality of evil" quip that she regretted putting on Eichmann in Jerusalem for the rest of her life? Because the corpus of her work was that antisemitism was largely the work of the CheKa, NKVD and KGB that was then deployed by opportunists clear to Henry Ford. Can't simultaneously blame someone for the Holocaust while also using grain shipments to control their foreign policy!

That is definitely his basic point. He does not, however, support it with any aplomb. It's also - to be frank - a fucking dumb point to make considering 90% of the Harris Campaign's messaging was about Project 2025. The Democrats, in speaking to their base, were hair-on-fire serious about Trump's impact on the "American and global order."

Democrats built their platform on "Trump will destroy the country." Republicans built their platform on "Democrats will pay for sex change operations for prisoners." In general, voters made their choice based on "inflation pisses me off." "Inflation pisses me off" is pretty much the go-to "throw the bums out" trigger point and Adam Tooze pretending that a West Wing reunion at the White House is a sign that Democrats aren't listening to voters just illustrates what a dipshit Adam Tooze is.

Oddly enough, so have I! "Stonemasons as a class should be shot into the sun" "whoever designed this needs to be shot into the sun" etc

It's been a week

There was a time when Democrats could argue that Gavin Newsom and James Carville weren't grandstanding hypocritical blowhards whose only interest was self-aggrandizement but there was never a time they could argue it with any credibility. Those two have been a pox on the party since before the West Wing started airing.

I've been dealing with a lot of labels lately. It made me try to turn Bandcamp on in my car. I didn't have Bandcamp logged in. And then I did. And then I poked around through old shit given me by labels and this frickin' song has been on repeat for five days.

I also got notified about this comp and I put an hour together that's totally bomb but then it was pointed out to me (gently) that DMCA means I only get to air four songs from any comp so this fucker got banished to Mixcloud.