Remember when Israel kept yanking the football away from the Biden administration every time that Biden announced new Gaza ceasefire talks? At this point, you’d have to be a fucking fool to believe a word that slithers out of Nettanyahu’s head. Israel is working damn hard on burning as much political capital as it possibly can as fast as it can. Of course, they’re not doing it to do something cool like fighting climate change or build a moon base, it’s simply to murder as many people as they can as fast as they can.

"They’ve been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

I honestly to goodness can’t think of the last time I heard Trump drop an F bomb. I think he’s actually rather cross with them

Remember when Trump said he was going to end this war even before taking office? Then proceeded to try and extort Ukraine, whined at Putin, and gave up when neither of those worked?

Yeah, I’m in California’s central valley, which is a lot like the Serengeti in that it’s a grassy desert-ish thing that’s seasonally wetted by snowpack melt. It’s actually pretty swampy in its natural state. Used to be that you couldn’t drive forty minutes here without your car being a hopeless mess, especially in the late winter/spring. Now, I almost never hit a bug at all. It’s been that way for years. I pointed it out to my nature-loving MAGA mom and it freaked her the fuck out.

Psst, the artist doesn’t get paid when AI companies use the IP for free to turn out slop

Well, let’s replace it with whatever they’re doing for the AI companies.

Not if we’re just giving it away to the richest people on earth to feed into a plagiarism generator, no. There’s either IP law for everyone, and EVERYONE gets DMCA, or there’s IP law for nobody. Nobody is above the law, including AI execs.

Nothing, but only if they’re quite serious about demolishing IP law. If we’re going to do this, let’s not half ass it for a couple of spoiled rich kids, let’s go all or nothing.

Bullshit, why give them special treatment? Just dumpster the whole copyright system.

I’m a parent. I’m not going to try and sell you on having a kid; don’t do it unless you know you want to. What I’m about to say isn’t trying to sell you on parenthood or making apologetics, but just sharing my own personal experience having thought of almost all the same things you’ve thought and then crossed the bridge anyway. I figure that parenting really isn’t about what you get out of it, and you do get stuff out of it- the love, the experience, the ups and downs, someone to depend on and who depends on you. In a lot of ways it’s a microcosm of the human social experience in that you much more personally experience the things that make up existing with others in a society. You don’t necessarily need kids the same way you don’t necessarily need a significant other or a circle of friends, it’s just that humans are, by our nature, social creatures, and we’re almost always better off with richer social connections in our life than not. Yeah, you definitely do lose stuff; take autonomy, it’s kind of similar to how you lose a certain degree of autonomy when you get into a serious long term relationship, only you really shouldn’t break up with your kids if they piss you off. If that tradeoff isn’t for you, that’s cool!

Everybody’s different, but my kids have motivated me to get involved in politics (beyond just voting) at the local level and try to start planting trees whose shade I may never get to enjoy. It made me think hard about the kind of world that we’re leaving to them, and about what responsibility I have as a parent to do what I can to make that world a better place. I don’t expect anything from them; if they move away to live their life, that’s fine, I trust them to use their best judgment and live their life how they see fit, and just knowing that they’re depending on us to do everything we can for them has really motivated me to think differently about things in ways that I believe are generally positive. In case you’re curious about it, you could always try hosting an exchange student. It’s about the lowest commitment way to be a parent to someone, especially since they’re typically older teenagers. If you hate their guts, you can always ask the host organization that they be placed elsewhere. I’ve hosted I think eight exchange kids, and in hindsight, I don’t regret a single instance, even for the kids we didn’t get along with and had to place elsewhere.

This might be a good time to pitch looking into joining or starting a local chapter of Strong Towns. They’re a local-first advocacy group rooted in the premise that our cities are broken because we’ve been building them badly for nearly 100 years now. Strong Towns aims to restore cities as places that are built first and foremost for people to live in. As I’ve gotten deeper into this, it’s really shocked me how much of the blame lies nearly exclusively with municipal policy and political inertia (politicians sticking with doing things the established bad way because that’s the established way and they’d rather have a bankrupt, unlivable city than risk changing what they know). The good news is that municipal policy is probably the easiest, most accessible level of policy to effect, and it has the most direct and immediate impact on your life and the lives of people around you. Affecting good urban policy to make our cities livable is what Strong Towns is all about.

You might also look at the Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability. They’re another local-first group that focuses on all forms of justice for lower-income communities.

That’s not unique to Russia. Birth rates in developed nations have been plummeting across the board. The only reason the US was escaping it and hanging out around replacement was because of immigration, and, well, I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with the news lately, but it seems like that’s going to change.

There’s lots of reasons driving demographic collapse, but I don’t think war is one of them. South Korea is usually heralded as the shining example of demographic collapse because their birth rate is the worst by far, and it generally seems to be the case that as economies becomes more “advanced”, women have less time and supports to focus on motherhood, and so just choose not to have kids. I put advanced in scare quotes because it seems to me that a truly advanced economy wouldn’t footgun itself with rapid demographic collapse. Not to say that the trend shouldn’t be towards a smaller population that will tax the Earth’s resources less, but the way to get there safely for civilization isn’t by falling off a cliff.

I voted for Harris and I blame the democrats. They knew the stakes, they know the populist moment we’re in, and they decided that their best strategy was to take all the excitement and buzz of the new Kamala candidacy and say “we’re not going to really change anything; if things suck for you, no they don’t, actually, you’re just stupid lol; anyway, look, here’s Katy Perry and Barack Obama lecturing down to a bunch of black men.” The DNC twisted Kamala’s arm to make sure she didn’t insult Biden by saying she’d do anything different, because protecting the feefees of long standing and well regarded party members is more important than winning or getting shot done. The DNC decided to stack Kamala’s campaign with the same staff that lost the HRC campaign. Nobody made them decide that celebrity guest appearances were more important than proposing actually good changes to get out the vote, but here we are.

Israel was still negotiating with Hamas for a ceasefire and release of hostages. A ceasefire deal was even reached.

As I recall, Israel almost always said they would go to these, and then didn’t, without even telling the Biden administration they were going to miss it. They’d just dead ass no show and leave the Biden team twisting in the wind. Then team Biden would say “well, okay, I guess we have no choice but to give them more bombs.”

Israel reduced but still allowed some foreign aid.

My dude, the way I remember it, we had to build a float dock because Israel wouldn’t allow any aid to come in by ground, and for the little bit they did, they murdered the people who tried to get it. Then, the float dock broke up, and we all just kind of shrugged.

Ehh. Is there a meaningful difference between “we’ll help you do genocide and pretend to feel bad about it” and “we’ll help you do genocide and build a casino on top of the bodies”? One feels worse, for sure, but the functional distinction is marginal.

This is genocide. What’s more is that even if Israel annexes all of Gaza and the West Bank, people are kidding themselves if they think they’re going to stop there.

Let’s be real, the Biden administration didn’t achieve one single thing to slow things down. While they wagged a finger with one hand, they handed over billions of dollars of bombs with the other. They arranged peace talks that Israel super super promised they’d finally show up to this time and then didn’t for the seventh consecutive time in a row, and the Biden administration went “okay” and handed them more bombs. Maybe Trump is objectively worse, but it’s hard to imagine that a Harris presidency would be meaningfully better in this particular regard based on the actions, not the words, of the Biden administration.

Edit: to be clear, I voted for Harris, because I still wanted to reduce harm, but I really was expecting the older, more powerful, more pro-genocide voices in the party to be steering the wheel here, not Harris.

Not that they’ve got a real patriotic bone in their body, it’s all fast nationalism, but Ivan and his son, Ivan is one of the greatest paintings of all time.

Always has been.

Germany: well, okay, listen, it’s not working out for America, and it didn’t work out for us that one time, but they promised it’ll be different for us. What’s a few civil liberties and social safety nets if it means we get to extract slave labor from immigrants put immigrants in prison for life for the crime of existing?