Category: Miscellaneous

“I don’t need a ride, I need ammo.”

-Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy, February 2022

“I don’t need ammo, I need a ride.”

– Russian Armed Forces, September 2022

Welcome back my friends, to the war that never ends.
On November 11, which we celebrate as Veterans’ Day from the Armistice of World War I in the West (in Russia, they weren’t quite so lucky), Ukraine liberated the city of Kherson, capital of Kherson Oblast, the only major regional capital that Russia managed to capture in 2022. It was a surprise how suddenly it happened. Less than three days before, Russia controlled a large territory on the west bank of the Dnipro River which comes into the Black Sea near Kherson. On November 9, Ukraine retook the town of Snihurivka, which is about 59 kilometers drive from Kherson city. And now Ukraine’s military is in Kherson’s center.
It was not expected to be this easy. Given the Putin government’s general contempt for human rights, everyone in the West expected Russia’s telegraphed withdrawal from the area to be a giant trap, with garrisons hiding in the cities to snipe at Ukrainian troops, or worse, Russia blowing the dam on the east side of the river to flood the city and delta, causing thousands of casualties. That didn’t happen, or if there are any traps, no one has seen them yet. On YouTube, the channel Combat Veteran Reacts pointed out that Russia needed to secure bridges to get people across before blowing them up to stop the enemy. With temporary pontoon bridges, they’re usually only one vehicle wide, which means you might have a max of 50 troops in an APC cross the river at a time. That would of course assume that everyone was retreating in good order. “What appears maybe to have happened is that instead of a systematic careful withdrawal that Ukraine can exploit, the Russians just… heard a withdrawal order on the TV, literally picked up their rifles, got into any vehicle, and just drove to the river.” Which, as with their retreat from Kharkiv Oblast in September means leaving a lot of military equipment behind, only worse because the earlier campaign was over more open terrain.

Since then the war has become a bit more stagnant, but as the weather worsens, Russia has tried to press for what advantage it can, mainly by pushing for the east-central town of Bakhmut, which most Western military analysts think has little strategic value. By contrast, Ukraine took not only the Kherson area west of the Dnipro, they really changed the course of the war by taking back most of the Kharkiv oblast due northeast of their capital, Kyiv. That was some time after they had managed to defend the capital well enough to make Russia retreat from their offensive there. Overall, since Vladimir Putin started his war of choice in February 24, 2022, Ukraine has taken back roughly half of the territory that Russia managed to seize at the high mark of their invasion progress.

It is the most impressive military campaign in Europe since World War II. And one of the ironies is that while Putin has tried to combine the reactionary politics of the Orthodox Church with the statism and organized power of the Soviet Union, part of Ukraine’s success is that, intentionally or not, they are doing a better job with World War II Soviet military theory than the Russians.

The Soviet approach to land warfare was called deep operation, or deep battle doctrine, and it was so called because it dealt with not only tactics and strategy but also what the US military now calls the operational level of a military campaign, dealing with the totality of both tactical and strategic affairs. According to the Wikipedia article, “It was a tenet that emphasized destroying, suppressing or disorganizing enemy forces not only at the line of contact but also throughout the depth of the battlefield. …The goal of a deep operation was to inflict a decisive strategic defeat on the enemy’s logistical abilities and render the defence of their front more difficult, impossible, or indeed irrelevant. ” In military history, the theory was most associated with Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a marshal who got executed in Stalin’s purges, but after Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded Soviet Russia, Marshal Zhukov and other generals re-developed it and put it to use against the Axis. However the first theorist to name the theory was Vladimir Trianadfillov, a Soviet general who died in 1931.

Deep battle’s emphasis on mobile warfare and encirclement resembled the Germans’ contemporary ‘blitzkrieg’ tactics (which themselves borrowed from maverick generals in Britain and France) but according to its name, went deeper in intention and results. From the article:

“Blitzkrieg emphasized the importance of a single strike on a Schwerpunkt (focal point) as a means of rapidly defeating an enemy; deep battle emphasized the need for multiple breakthrough points and reserves to exploit the breach quickly. The difference in doctrine can be explained by the strategic circumstances for the Soviet Union and Germany at the time. Germany had a smaller population but a better-trained army, and the Soviet Union had a larger population but a less-trained army. As a result, Blitzkrieg emphasized narrow front attacks in which quality could be decisive, but deep battle emphasized wider front attacks in which quantity could be used effectively.

“In principle, the Red Army would seek to destroy the enemy’s operational reserves and its operational depth and occupy as much of his strategic depth as possible. Within the Soviet concept of deep operations was the principle of strangulation if the situation demanded it, instead of physically encircling the enemy and destroying him immediately. Triandafillov stated in 1929:

The outcome in modern war will be attained not through the physical destruction of the opponent but rather through a succession of developing manoeuvres that will aim at inducing him to see his ability to comply further with his operational goals. The effect of this mental state leads to operational shock or system paralysis, and ultimately to the disintegration of his operational system. The success of the operational manoeuvre is attained through all-arms combat (combined arms) at the tactical level, and by combining a frontal holding force with a mobile column to penetrate the opponent’s depth at the operational level. The element of depth is a dominant factor in the conduct of deep operations both in the offensive and defensive.”

This differed from blitzkrieg and “Clausewitzian” principles of destroying enemy units in the field, which was the main focus of Germany in the two World Wars. The article states that the major example of this approach was Operation Uranus, the Soviet encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad; once the Germans were committed in the city, the weaker military units guarding the flanks were routed and the Germans were cut off from any escape. At that point the Soviets simply waited for winter and lack of supply to defeat the Germans in the city. The Battle of Stalingrad ended up capturing 91,000 Axis soldiers.

The other term used for this military approach in World War II was maskirovka (masquerade), basically deceiving the Germans as to where the Soviet offensive was going to move so that the Axis would try to defend in a different area and then the Soviets would attack at a weak point. What Americans might call “hit ’em where they ain’t.” Not unlike what the Western Allies did in 1944 when they made all their maneuvering in Britain look like our invasion of Nazi Europe was going to start in Calais (a narrower point in the English Channel than Normandy and closer to both Paris and Germany) so that the Nazi garrisons were concentrated there instead of the real invasion points (in Normandy) so that Normandy was less defended and the Allies had more time and space to expand the beach heads.

Ukraine, with its relatively small army and pre-war lack of mobile forces, is not really able to perform Nazi or Soviet style encirclements of Russians on the battlefield. But they have still been operating as much on an operational as a tactical level, with the Kharkiv offensive in particular being not so much simply engaging the enemy directly as wearing down their front and support lines before attacking so that the offensive was on their terms. As with maskirovka, the principal element was feinting moves to make Russia believe that the main offensive was going toward Kherson city. US military support was critical in this regard, as HIMARS missile batteries were used to strike behind Russian lines up to 70 kilometers, hitting critical supply and ammunition depots. Another huge factor in Ukraine’s success with deception is its greater mastery of modern information war; one Ukrainian official said “They are blind, we see everything.” Ukrainian strikes behind the lines also included attacks on Russian radar systems and the use of anti-aircraft systems to counter Russian drones and air missions. By September 6, Ukrainian forces had amassed at a focal point in Balakliia, dazing Russian forces and causing a rapid retreat. By September 9, Ukraine had reached Kupiansk, a major rail and transportation hub, undermining Russia’s ability to resupply and redeploy in the sector and contributing to the armed forces’ decision to withdraw to the Oskil river. But in October Ukraine continued the offensive and managed to reach as far as Kreminna before Russia managed to regroup and push back. In the wake of all this Russia’s forces were further deteriorated by loss of equipment, partially because of Ukraine’s rapid advance but also because Russian attempts to blow bridges frequently occured before they could get tanks and heavy equipment across, and as Russian troops simply abandoned their defense posts.

Which only brings up the point that as cunning as Ukraine’s strategy has been up to this point, its success has at least as much to do with the deficiencies of the Russian side.

Putin launched his invasion in February apparently on the assumption that Ukraine’s field defenses were just going to break, he would be able to take Kyiv, and then whatever rump government managed to hold the west of Ukraine would eventually accede to whatever stooge he wanted to impose on them. He may have thought this because President Zelenskyy really wasn’t that popular at home before the war started, or because the West hadn’t done anything to help Ukraine after Russia’s previous violations of Ukrainian territory in 2014 and after. Indeed, part of Putin’s escalation to full-scale war was his diplomatic recognition of the pro-Russia Luhansk and Donetsk “republics” on Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, and the fact that Ukraine had been fighting those separatists on a low level for years despite lack of Western support should have told Putin that his “special military operation” wasn’t going to be just a three-hour tour.

A large part of this is the relative lack of presence of the Russian Air Force. Many of its Sukhoi models of close air support craft are outdated by 21^st Century standards. The Ukrainians’ use of anti-aircraft batteries, even before high-level NATO support, demonstrated greater efficiency for the value than Russian offensive air and contributed to making Russian pilots “risk averse.” Part of that is because Russian craft are more reliant on unguided weapons, meaning they have to get close to the target to fire. The overall problem is that Russia’s military does not train their pilots intensively, with their flying time roughly 100 hours per year, less than one-third that of their NATO counterparts. More skilled pilots would be better able to reach “dynamic” targets and still survive.

That hollowness and lack of support point to an even more fundamental problem with Russia’s military. In October, a lieutenant general reported that 1.5 sets of military uniforms had gone missing. Apparently this was 1.5 million sets of uniforms that were supposed to be on record and are now unaccounted for. These were supposed to include winter uniforms. And as the Starks would say, winter is coming. Such gear as they do have is not optimized for winter and is made out of synthetic materials to save costs. Corruption is endemic in the entire Russian government, leading to a military that is more designed for the elites to profit from graft than to perform its national defense or attack purposes. “Most companies responsible for providing food to the Russian military are connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin — the patron of PMC Wagner, the mercenary organization, and sponsor of the Internet Research Agency, which has been accused of meddling in the United States elections. ” The military’s performance in the Ukraine invasion was foreshadowed by the fact that just a few days after the first attacks, Russia, the greatest fuel exporter in Europe, had army vehicles stuck on the road for lack of gas. The country uses tanks dating back from the 1980s and earlier. And of course it has absolutely no regard for information security, which is why social media has so many examples of Russian soldiers calling home from war zones. So if everyone on YouTube knows where the Russians are and what they’re doing, certainly the Ukrainian Armed Forces do.

So you have a Russian invader force that is easily monitored by Ukraine, poorly equipped, poorly organized, with no one knowing what they’re doing, no chain of command who can tell grunts what the mission is and what to do if conditions change, no one cares about anything besides getting through the day or how much they can scam from the war zone, and no one really wants to be there besides Vladimir Putin. And every day their support network is being hammered by Ukraine so it would be that much harder to hold a position once Ukraine actually advances. And then one day, they advance.

The end result was the ultimate example of “quiet quitting.”

Putin says on one hand that Ukraine is essentially Russia and there is no such thing as Ukraine, but then he forgot why you don’t want to start a war with Russia. Even if YOU ARE Russia.

Moreover, like any good fascist, Putin seems to think that that which he wishes to be so therefore is so. He seems to think that because the “traditional Russia” exists in his mind, that his country still has the tools of traditional Russia, namely an inexhaustible manpower reserve. Like, the Germans could kill all the Russians they wanted and there would still be more. That’s not the case any more, and it hasn’t been the case for quite some time. According to Wikipedia: “From the 1990s to 2001, Russia’s death rate had exceeded its birth rate, which has been called a demographic crisis by analysts. Subsequently, the nation has an ageing population, with the median age of the country being 40.3 years. In 2009, Russia recorded annual population growth for the first time in fifteen years; and during the mid-2010s, Russia had seen increased population growth due to declining death rates, increased birth rates and increased immigration. However, since 2020, due to excess deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s population has undergone its largest peacetime decline in recorded history. In 2020, the total fertility rate across Russia was estimated to be 1.5 children born per woman, which is below the replacement rate of 2.1 and about equal to the European average.” Also, in 1941, the Russian fertility rate (number of children born to each woman) was 4.6. In 1945 it was 1.92. The previously higher fertility rates did not lead to an overall population increase because of Russia’s Civil War, the two world wars and “political killings”.
This is of course why Putin invaded Ukraine with a peacetime army not nearly the size needed to subdue the population and army of Ukraine, and the failure of that was not even so much because of not having 300,000 more men but because Russia didn’t have the supplies to cover the force it did have.

Which all adds up to the fact that Russia simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to run a military the size of the Soviet Union. Heck, the Soviet Union couldn’t afford a military the size of the Soviet Union’s, which was a large part of why the Cold War ended.

Less than two days after appearing at the battlefield in Bakhmut, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy made a surprise flight (most likely unannounced for security reasons) to Washington DC, appearing at a press conference with President Biden on December 21 to petition the US government for more military support. He then appeared to a joint session of Congress, much as Winston Churchill spoke to Congress just after Pearl Harbor, the difference being that Churchill probably had less fascist sympathizers on the Republican side of the aisle. But Zelenskyy said at one point that most Ukrainians would be celebrating Christmas this holiday by candlelight, not out of sentiment, but because of Russian attacks on their infrastructure. But he continued, “we will celebrate Christmas, and even if there is no electricity, the light of our faith in ourselves will not be put out.”

It gets to a point that applies to both Ukrainians and Russians this winter, which one of the MSNBC talking heads made when they found out about Zelenskyy’s visit Wednesday morning. Quoting Napoleon, he said: “In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.”

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

-Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men

Of course this is the week that we’re all supposed to give thanks for what good fortune we had this year and to specify what exactly we are thankful for. Off the top of my head, I can give thanks to at least two people this year.

The first, perhaps not surprisingly, is Donald Trump. The Republican Party has failed to gain more than ten seats in a Congressional midterm where a Democrat was president, and Trumpnik Republican candidates have largely failed to win key races for state government. This historic failure to perform is almost entirely because the Party felt the need to stay in Trump’s good graces and so agreed to nominate election-liar candidates like Adam Laxalt for US Senator in Nevada, Doug Mastriano as Governor in Pennsylvania, and pretty much every Republican in Arizona. All of whom lost.

Now, of course Trump was already planning to announce his wonderful re-election campaign to be Vladimir Putin’s Viceroy for Russian North America, and he was hoping he would get a huge boost from supporting all these candidates who were supposed to sweep against an unpopular Democratic Party and Biden Administration. It turns out, there’s one thing more unpopular than the Biden Democratic Party, and that’s the Trump Republican Party. So that meant Liddle Donnie Clown Boy didn’t get the big push he was hoping for in his campaign announcement. Worse than that, the truly amazing performance of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and some other Republicans (like Georgia Governor Brian Kemp) who are just as authoritarian as Trump but not as erratic mean that for the first time since 2016, some Republicans are actually advocating for someone else to be President. Of course Trump has to run anyway, basically to stay out of prison, but it’s getting that much harder. In a further act of disloyalty, “his” Supreme Court ordered that he must hand over his tax returns to a House investigative committee. The fact that Democrats won’t have charge of the House after December doesn’t matter, because they can share those documents with Senate committees, and the Senate hasn’t changed over to the Republicans. Again, largely because of the Party going along with Trump’s incompetence.

None of all the establishment Republican huffing and puffing against Trump is going to make much difference, because the professionals haven’t been in charge for a while. I plan to write in much greater detail about this subject, but I am thankful for Donald Trump because he always wants to make everything about him, even when he isn’t on the ballot. And by forcing his party to go along with his Big Lie, he did indeed make the election all about him, because everyone knew that all of those Church of Trump candidates for Governor and Secretary of State were going to change the rules to protect their party, and Trump in particular, from competition in 2024. So he made this election matter about as much as 2024, and a whole bunch of people, probably including some conservatives, realized we had to put a stop to that campaign this year. And we did. And in the process we made it a little less likely that Trump’s scheme to grab power again will work.

Again, none of this is going to stop “the base” from goosestepping in line to elect Trump so that they’ll never have to vote again, but that’s the other reason to be thankful. If Trump’s lies and schemes forced the non-Republican part of the country to move actively against him – which required acting against his Party – he’s forcing Republican and conservative influencers to consider if their slavish loyalty was worth it in the long run. A party that literally is only a Party of Trump, that is only about catering to his whims and delusions, cannot survive. And yet it has taken over precisely because celebrity worship and irrationality are more prized in the public sphere than professionalism and intellect. To really address the broader problem we need to address a culture that would make somebody like Trump president, which is where I get to the other person I want to thank:

Elon Musk.

I have already gone over how much Musk is fucking over Twitter, but apparently he’s not done. In his continuing tilt to squeeze a profit out of a medium that has never been profitable, Musk decided to fire a whole bunch of technical employees only to ask them to come back because they were fired “by mistake” or because he needed them to handle software issues that he didn’t realize needed to be dealt with. It turns out two of these people never worked there in the first place and were just trolling the company. I had said that the Occam’s Razor explanation for Musk’s erratic behavior is that he made a deal without knowing what he was doing or how to run this particular company, and he is hardly disabusing me of that notion.

I now put Elon Musk on a list with Rudy Guiliani and Vladimir Putin – men whom I used to think were intelligent. It turns out they’re just latter-day cases of the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle, for those who didn’t grow up in the ’70s, states that “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” Consequently, “In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.” Like, maybe Vladimir Putin’s skill set at destroying opposition on a political level led him to believe he could invade the largest country in Europe other than Russia, with draftees and trainees and inadequate air support and logistics for the operation, and get the capital to fall in three days. Almost a year after the fact, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Of course Trump is an even bigger example of the Peter Principle, but the difference is that Musk used to be considered competent. As in, even the people who didn’t like his management of Tesla or Space X didn’t think he was running them into the ground. But now the Tesla stock he was using to back up his takeover has gone down $700 billion in value from a year ago.

I can’t remember where, but someone recently said that Musk’s Twitter purchase was like a gambling addict buying the race track. This is about what you would expect. But I am thankful because not only is Musk wrecking Twitter, he is wrecking its credibility as an information source in the event that someone else takes charge. Liberals have been complaining for some time that Twitter is a monopoly, as if it were the only company providing a posting medium and as if that were the same thing as a public information service. But Musk’s utter disregard for information security really is a problem for anybody who wants to post on Twitter, and illustrates the problem we face when such a large and influential company is suddenly taken over by a capricious nitwit. But the difference between the Twitter base and the Republican Party is that social media users really do have other options. The one currently getting a lot of the buzz is Mastodon. The difference between that service and Twitter is that Mastodon is open-source. A Reason Magazine article explains it this way: “Essentially, Mastodon is a federation of independent but interconnected servers. It’s common to see Mastodon users refer to it as the “fediverse.” For the most part, folks in one part of the Mastodon fediverse can see and interact with folks in all other parts of the Mastodon fediverse.” One poster said, “This really isn’t a place of influencers – at least in its current iteration. If you don’t want to reply to comments on your posts you probably shouldn’t post. This (is) engagement and community not hot takes and “influence” that can be monetarized by advertisers.”

Of course that last bit may illustrate why Twitter got as toxic as it did and why all the people complaining about it didn’t leave until it became more liability than it was worth.

As Adam Conover said recently regarding Musk in particular, “(Sam Bankman-Fried), Elon and (Mark Zuckerberg) haven’t been hurt by their apocalyptic failures, but their image has. Everyone from the media to the government can finally see the truth. And that’s a good thing, because if we remember that these guys are actually dumbasses, then we can beat them.”

Of course that’s the bright-side way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that these con men got as far as they did because the majority who gave them power are that much bigger dumbasses.

On Friday November 11, it was Veterans’ Day, when we honor our veterans, including those who died in service. And I checked my cellphone as I was getting out of bed, and found out that Kevin Conroy, the definitive Batman voice actor, had died. Not only that, Gallagher died.

Gallagher doesn’t die. I always thought that 50 years from now I would be dead and cremated and Gallagher would still be touring the clubs, his skeletal arms lifting the mallet to crush watermelons with maniacal focus, his remaining hairs wisping behind him like the angry ghosts of better comedians.

It’s like when I found out Lou Reed died. Once I was watching a concert video with him and somebody asked, “Who is that old guy? He looks like he’s dying, like he’s starving to death.” And I said, “No, he’s not dying, he’s just Lou Reed!” Lou Reed doesn’t die, he just gets homelier and homelier! And then he really died. Wow. Man, when Lou Reed died, it was a sad day for trans junkie hookers everywhere.

But at this morbid moment, I can at least take solace in an impending death that will actually do the world some good.

Twitter.

People have been bagging on Elon Musk for a while now, and his latest tilt towards the LOL Right has only confirmed why so many people hated him in the first place even as the rest of us admired his entrepreneurial moxie. But his latest and biggest mistake was sealing the deal to buy out Twitter even as he’d found out early on that it wasn’t profitable enough to be worth the investment. And so he is apparently deciding to make it an actual business. And in the process he is doing more to destroy the Twitter brand than he could if he were trying to liquidate Twitter on purpose, and I can’t prove that that isn’t what he’s really doing.

The first thing Musk did was to fire its previous executives including its general counsel, cause I guess Twitter had too much content supervision. Apparently, Elon’s takeover was so poorly done that the Twitter company got locked out of its own account for 12 days because login details had not been shared for the transition.

But the biggest policy change Musk made was to the status of “the blue checkmark.” For most of Twitter’s history, having a blue checkmark next to your account name marked you as the verified user and protected against fakes. To get it, you had to fill out a form. Most public figures’ accounts, like the accounts of the President (and the individual who is or used to be the president) are verified this way. I did not know this until recently because I don’t give a rat’s tail about Twitter and until now it really didn’t matter. But now Musk, officially “Chief Twit”, decided his main goal with the site was to monetize a communications medium that he’d sunk $44 billion into. He told everybody that in order to keep their blue checkmarks, they’d have to pay him $20 per month. And a lot of those verified posters pointed out it was their traffic that built the site, with Stephen King saying “Fuck that, they should pay ME.” So Musk haggled himself down to $8. But then he said that with the monthly fee service, which he christened “Twitter Blue”, you got to use after-post edits and other features that previously weren’t in Twitter before. That’s good. Although most of these features are on Facebook for free. But the company seemed more concerned with monetizing something that had previously been free but optional than with screening out spam/bot accounts, which everyone agrees are a problem on Twitter and that Musk has promised to address as highest priority. Since anybody could “verify” they were who they said they were by paying for the privilege, you had a whole bunch of people doing Elon Musk clone accounts and saying goofy things to demean his image, which meant that Mr. Free Speech banned a whole bunch of people and specified that any such fake account that is not specifically labeled “PARODY” will also be banned. But that wasn’t it. You had another guy who has taken the handle of Jesus Christ (‘Carpenter. Healer. God’), and somebody who took a verified Nintendo account and used it to post an account picture of Super Mario giving the finger.

Of course, if I was running Nintendo and I were running their Twitter account, showing Mario giving the finger would be exactly what I’d do. But maybe that’s why I’m not running Nintendo.

If you believe in free speech, that means you protect the integrity of free speech. Even for corporations. We have a right to state our opinion and not have it mistaken for someone else’s, or have someone else claiming to be us and giving us issues. Like, with Eli Lilly having to explain that insulin ISN’T free now.

Somewhat predictably, Elon backed off the Twitter Blue spiel once it became clear how much legal liability it was creating.

Not to mention, Musk is so hopped up on cost controls that he is basically filling all the executive posts by himself while expecting his people to give up work-from-home arrangements and go without days off. Which is further evidence that he’s running things into the ground deliberately, but then he wouldn’t be making things so hard for himself in the short term. The Occam’s Razor explanation would be that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Somebody joked, “Hey Elon, you should buy Chik-fil-A and Hobby Lobby next.” The difference being that those businesses are actually making lots of money. Which among other things means that they wouldn’t have been vulnerable to a takeover because they don’t need a buyout.

As much as I hate to say, maybe liberals were right about libertarianism. Because a totally free, unregulated society still requires some level of implied rules that everyone voluntarily agrees to, and the reason we have all the damn rules we have is apparently because some people need to be told the obvious. Like “Don’t shit where you eat” and “Don’t be a racist moron.” The lesson with Twitter is that however much you believe in free speech and a marketplace of ideas, if your institution doesn’t adhere to a minimal set of principles and make them clear to everyone who wants to participate, then any jokester or opportunist can take over the medium and undermine it to the point that no one can trust it or take it seriously. Y’know, like what happened with the actual Libertarian Party.

Once again: Nothing is a priori. Nothing in this world sprang fully formed and equipped straight from the head of a god. People assume that Twitter is or should be some ideal public medium that fits their standard of what the ideal is, when Jack Dorsey and his people just built it as a small-scale, personal post platform, and because of that very informality, it took off. It was never really intended to become a profit instrument, much less the world’s “town square.” But that is what the community did with it.

And just as some in the community think of Twitter as an objective communications medium when it was never really intended to be such, Musk seems to think that because he paid many billions of dollars for Twitter that it ought to turn a profit. Again, Twitter only has value because of the people who are on it, and that value doesn’t necessarily translate directly into money. Remember what they say about social media: If you’re not paying for the product then you ARE the product. Someone on Pajiba pointed out, “If Twitter goes down, so does the easiest method Ukrainians have to inform the world of Russia’s war crimes, and an easy way for labor unions, dissidents, and other folks without much power to organize efforts. Twitter may have more problems than solutions, but it does have value. Or it did, before Musk’s ongoing crises gave him reason to smash it.”

A while ago, I concluded my opinion of Twitter with the following: “media critic Matt Zoller Seitz was quoted (from Twitter) saying “I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it now: if a superior alternative to Twitter appeared tomorrow, I’d be gone from here in a heartbeat.” My advice to Seitz would be to get together with like-minded people and come to a consensus about what “a superior alternative to Twitter” means, and then find people of means to finance it and experts to create it. My personal goal is to make enough money to where I can buy out Twitter with the specific purpose of destroying the website. Either that, or use the space for something more ennobling, like bumfights or fetish porn.”

Somebody still needs to figure out what a better alternative to Twitter would be and whether it would be more feasible as a profit site or a non-profit medium. As it is, I’m predicting Twitter bumfights and porn any week now.

The rather chaotic and somewhat anticlimactic resolution of Game of Thrones (the TV series) left a bad taste in a lot of fans’ mouths, but there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding House of the Dragon, a prequel based on George RR Martin’s background notes for the setting, set about 200 years before GoT and the fall of the royal House Baratheon, and based on the the previous ruling dynasty, the monochromatic and likely inbred House Targaryen.

The point of view character seems to be the teenaged Rhaenyra Targaryen (Milly Alcock), the tomboyish, quite possibly lesbian daughter of King Viserys (Paddy Considine) and his only child so far. Given how uncertain royal succession was prior to Viserys’ elevation, he is obsessed with having a son.

His cousin Rhaenys was actually the elder child but was passed over by the noble council for the throne for being female. This means that while Viserys (unlike most people in this universe) is not a raging asshole, he hasn’t really focused on his daughter. Rhaenyra’s best friend/chaste lover is Lady Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), daughter of the King’s Hand, who in this setting is somewhere between a Prime Minister and the Lord of the Privy Seal. She is much more conventional and ladylike than Rhaenyra, which is ironic because she looks a lot like Maisie Williams (Arya Stark). Viserys’ younger brother is the suggestively named Daemon, played by Matt Smith, most famous for Doctor Who and playing Prince Phillip in The Crown. At the start of things Daemon is the head of the royal guard and city law enforcement in the capital of King’s Landing. To Rhaenyra, Daemon is the cool uncle who uses his position and attitude to thumb his nose at all authority, including his brother. Rhaenyra would rather be an armed knight riding a dragon than be married and have to spend most of her life in childbed, especially since she can see how her mother has been debilitated by multiple unsuccessful pregnancies.

As Queen Aemma approaches her latest childbirth, the King announces a grand tournament to be held in honor of the event, and is able to announce on that day that she is going into labor. Daemon shows up on the jousting field and dominates the contests wearing a suit of sculpted black armor that makes Smith look that much more like Elric of Melnibone’ than he already did. Eventually he does get beaten in chivalrous combat against a young knight-errant. However other knights in the tourney treat each other brutally, and it seems to be a bad omen for the event. Even before that point, Viserys’ maesters take him away from his balcony and tell him that Queen Aemma has suffered a breech birth and cannot deliver her son. They ask permission to do a Caesarean section, which with their lack of medical knowledge will certainly kill her from blood loss. In an intense scene, Viserys tries to console Aemma as the maesters cut into her, but it’s still in vain: The child dies a day later.

Drunk and depressed, Prince Daemon attends a brothel orgy (because this is a George RR Martin setting on HBO) and is heard toasting “the Heir for a Day.” The Hand hears of this and tells the King. Rightfully pissed, Viserys sentences his brother to leave King’s Landing and to exile himself to his fief in the Vale. Daemon’s reckless behavior also cements Viserys’ decision to make his only child, Rhaenyra, the official heir, even if she is a girl. And so in the final scene of Episode 1, while Baratheon, Stark and the other senior nobles give their vows of fealty to King Viserys and Princess Rhaenyra, Daemon is shown taking his mistress to the pens where they take his favorite dragon and fly out of Kings’ Landing.

This sets the stage for tragedy, since Viserys, with no son or wife, is effectively already doomed as a monarch, and Rhaenyra will have to confront someone she had seen as a role model.

The series reintroduces audience to all the old elements of GoT, including the medieval violence and medieval misogyny, but Game of Thrones showed the final breakdown of an already dysfunctional society, whereas House of the Dragon seems to be more the beginning of the end- a relatively stable kingdom before House Targaryen decided, “Hey, our bloodline is the leetest of the leet, so let’s make a family tree that doesn’t fork.” It is also produced by GoT showrunner Miguel Sapochnik with no input from the team Benoit and Weiss, who took the original Martin concept to TV and made it huge but didn’t stick the landing after having to come up with their own material in the wake of Martin’s writer’s block. The show certainly has potential, especially with Matt Smith playing a sort of Luciferian character, a prince who isn’t necessarily a bad guy but seems destined to become one.

House of the Dragon has certainly resurrected interest in a property that many fans had soured on, with HBO announcing just days after the pilot episode that they’ve already ordered Season 2. And that’s got to be good news to the new corporate structure, Warner Brothers Discovery, which has taken numerous self-inflicted wounds for the sake of bean-counting. Or as HBO’s John Oliver put it, “HBO Max: It’s not TV. It’s a series of tax write-offs to appease Wall Street .”

The nice thing about being a genocidal dictator is that you can put economic pressure on other countries to accede to your destruction of an innocent country without thinking they can do the same to you, because, as a dictator, you don’t succumb to economic pressure because you don’t have to care about public opinion. In February of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine hoping to seize the entire country too quickly for the West to react, and sadly, that just didn’t work out. While Russia had engaged in aggression and small grabs against its neighbors (including Ukraine) over Putin’s time in power, the scale of this attack was such that not only world governments but international business felt compelled to react. In particular, the McDonald’s restaurant company, which had made a symbolic inroad to Russian culture by opening a store in Moscow during the Soviet era, made a prominent announcement that it was pulling out of Russia, along with a host of other businesses. And as of 2022, they had 850 restaurants in the Russian Federation.

In the wake of the pullout, the McDonald’s properties were sold to a firm owned by Russian businessman Alexandr Govor. As of June 12, the new chain is called Вкусно – и точка, in Latin letters, Vkusno I Tochka. A phrase which translates literally as “Tasty, Period.” Most Western journalists have rendered it as “Tasty and That’s It.” In British English the concept might come across as “Delicious, Full Stop.” There have been some Russian commenters saying that the phrase sounds just as stupid in the original Russian as it does in English.

I am not sure what the issue is with calling a fast-food joint “Tasty. Period.” I mean, see how it would work with other fast-food chains. Like: “Wendy’s. Hot & Juicy. Period.” Or: “KFC. Finger Lickin’ Good. Period.”

OK, I think I’m beginning to see the problem here.

The company says that Vkusno i Tochka sold a record 120,000 burgers on its opening day at the Moscow location alone. Which is quite possible given the buzz regarding the changeover. It is less clear how business has been since. Credible sales reports have been hard to come by.

Assuming that Russian salaried employees usually have the same pay days and that people on welfare/social assistance would be getting their payments at the same time, as in most American states, this would indicate that the chain’s best revenue flow usually occurs over the same three days a month.

Unfortunately, the cost involved in refitting the stores, not to mention the general downturn in the Russian economy after the current Tsar started a war of choice, means that the profit picture in the long term is not very good, and for the foreseeable future, Vkusno i Tochka will likely stay in the red.

One of the issues is that the owners took over an American operation, and Americans are famous for our marketing. With McDonald’s, the current ad phrase is “I’m Lovin’ It.” Obviously they can’t use that, but you need something catchy to attract customers. There have been a few suggestions:

“Vkusno i Tochka. That’s Not Ketchup, It’s Borscht.”

“Vkusno i Tockha. I’m Tolerating It.”

“Vkusno i Tochka. Okay, That’s Not Borscht.”

But the other issue is with the property itself. Just as they can’t use McDonald’s branding, there are certain key elements that Vkusno i Tochka can’t use, like the “Big Mac” or a sandwich resembling such. McDonald’s uses Coca-Cola soft drinks, and the company can’t use those, cause Coca-Cola pulled out of Russia, too.

According to Business Insider, Vkusno i Tochka does have some menu items that seem more interesting than the real McDonald’s, like potato wedges, wraps with pork cutlet, fried shrimp, and chicken wings. There’s also a breakfast item described as “rolls with cottage cheese”, otherwise known as a blintz. And the prices are slightly cheaper.

So,Vkusno i Tochka is imitation McDonald’s. And since McDonald’s is imitation food, there doesn’t seem to be much of a problem so far.

However, one thing that even critics will credit the McDonald’s company for is consistency. It may not be gourmet cuisine, but the whole premise of McDonald’s is that it’s a food assembly line – you go to one restaurant, and then go to another McDonald’s across town, and you can expect exactly the same quality of food. Even non-American franchises, while they have local variants, are supposed to make their products on the same standard of quality. This does not seem to be the case with the Russia spinoff. Various reports spread pictures of mold on the burger buns after less than a month of operations, which leads to the question of how the quality declined so much when the company still had some stocks of McDonald’s supply. Another Business Insider article reports that one franchise of Vkusno i Tochka is now forbidding customers from using or charging cell phones on site, allegedly out of concern for their privacy but really to prevent getting evidence of food spoilage. Which has been pretty consistent with the Russian approach to bad news at least since February.

An article in an international site says that the company’s long-term issues reflect a “Russian disease.” “If everything described is true, and not the intrigues of competitors or exaggerated hype, then I must admit that we are seeing a common disease in Russian business,’ Grigoriev believes. ‘Immediately after opening, the institution shows brilliance and beauty, and then begins to slide, the administration cannot maintain the required level. The prospects in this case are quite dismal.

“…“McDonald’s exists in Africa and India, in any culture with any people it will work like a Swiss watch. The brand simply comes to the country, builds a mechanism, and after some time begins to turn on its own, everywhere at the same high level. Unfortunately, everything is different with us,” Grigoriev said. Based on previous observations, the expert said that Russian companies frequently cut corners to save money, which results in lower quality, which results in less business, in a downward spiral. In this particular case, the problem isn’t just the Russian “disease” but the fact that the Western divestment has meant that a lot of the suppliers the former McDonald’s used to rely on are no longer available, not just Coca-Cola but European potato suppliers, for instance. Which means that from month to month the stream of some items may be irregular, spotty, or missing altogether.

But if you’re ever in Russia, you may want to see what the fuss is about. Especially if you’re an American, because the government may not let you leave. So if you’re in Pushkin Square, or the guards at your cell will let you order out, remember the name:
Vkusno i Tochka.

It’s Tasty.

Period.

Space – the final frontier.

Because apparently we keep coming back to it.

These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

Its premature mission – to journey to strange new worlds

To seek out new actors with new forehead makeup

To boldly go where we’ve already gone before.

Well, an Internet friend of mine pointed out that YouTube was given the rights to show the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, so I didn’t have to pay for Paramount Plus to watch it. And from what I’ve seen, it lives up to the hype.

It starts with Captain Christopher Pike still trying to process the mental fallout from Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, which has put a touch of grey into Anson Mount’s All-American Hero persona. When Admiral Robert April shows up at Pike’s ranch and orders him to get back on the Enterprise to rescue his Number One (Rebecca Romijn) from a first contact mission gone awry, Pike is reluctant to go. He’s going through what might be described as pre-traumatic stress syndrome, in which he keeps reliving the vision of the future where he sees his own death, “or as good as.” Spock (Ethan Peck), the only other crewman he can discuss those events with, quickly deduces what’s going on. Spock and a new crewman (Christina Chong) give Pike new and unique perspectives on living with the knowledge of death, and he reaches a kind of Zen approach to accepting his fate.

The problem that I (and a bunch of other people) had with Discovery (aka, DISCO, STD) is that it wanted to be all “progressive” and different even as it insisted on being set in the Star Trek history before Kirk. The much-maligned Enterprise series at least tried to appear as though it were part of the setting’s pre-Original Series past, but Discovery never bothered, creating all kinds of setting anachronisms that could only be resolved by chucking the entire cast and ship into the next millennium.

Strange New Worlds really isn’t that much like the Original Series. Unlike the James Cawley and Vic Mignogna fan projects, they don’t try to make the sets look just like the ’60s Enterprise, and the established characters don’t look or act like the original actors, even to the extent that the JJ Abrams cast did. But I think they’re getting the right tone. The cast has the kind of camaraderie and heroism that I remember from the original show, including Cadet Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) who looks nothing like Nichelle Nichols but is immensely charming, especially in the pilot episode’s last scene.

But even if this cishet, conventional Star Trek goes in the opposite direction of Discovery, it confirms that old-school Trek was always more liberal and less conservative than some people want to believe. Because in the pilot episode, Strange New Worlds went there. When Pike rescues his Away Team they tell him that the natives of the planet in question reverse-engineered antimatter tech when their astronomers observed the Discovery’s warp jump into the future. And rather than use it to develop space travel, they’re using it to make strategic weapons. So Pike just says “screw General Order One” and appears at the peace talks between the squabbling factions. And he shows them footage from Earth’s history immediately after the 20^th Century, including real footage of people marching on Washington with signs like “AUDIT THE VOTE.” The writers have retconned Trek’s Eugenics Wars to be just one stage of a larger conflict that included a second American Civil War and culminated in a nuclear exchange that led to the extinction of hundreds of animal and plant species and 30 percent of the human population. And Pike tells the diplomats that that’s where they’re headed.

I mean it seems like crazy science fiction, but when the main sponsor of fascism around the world just started a genocidal war, and threatens to launch nukes if the international community doesn’t let him win, cause apparently he’s deathly ill and doesn’t have anything to lose, and meanwhile his main protege in the United States makes his master look like Bertrand Russell, and he’s STILL got at least even odds of getting re-elected president, well, who knows what could happen?

With Strange New Worlds, what we’ve got so far is good enough that I want to see where it goes next. I’m still not sure I want to pay for another streaming service when I can’t make the time to watch what I have. If you have Amazon Prime, you can watch the show but you still have to get an add-on subscription to Paramount. However they do have a 7-day free trial offer. After a few weeks I may check that out to see some more episodes. I may also binge Discovery Season 4 and Star Trek: Picard Season 2, if only to see if they’re AS bad as everyone says they are.

Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

This is the means of subordinating “might” to “right.” This is the American concept of “a government of laws and not of men.”

…We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

-Ayn Rand, The Nature of Government

Well, in actual news this week, somebody decided to leak Samuel Alito’s draft opinion on Thomas E. Dobbs et al v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which political observers predicted was going to be the case where the conservative majority finally got rid of the Roe v. Wade right to abortion one way or another. The text indicates that this is not merely a technical restriction of abortion rights but an active assertion that no such rights exist.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Alito passes over certain legal justifications for an abortion right, such as the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Which among other things would flip the argument: Not, why is there a right to abortion but why is there a state interest in preserving a pregnancy prior to fetal viability? But he says that the Ninth Amendment was not the basis of pro-choice arguments and points to the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause regarding its Section 1. He then asserts that such pro-choice rulings did not establish that a right to abortion was confirmed by the Fourteenth, even as he goes over how it applies in other cases.

Alito points out that while there had been no asserted right to abortion in national law prior to Roe, 30 states still prohibited abortion at all stages. As though the Roe case were not about addressing that fact, going on from Section V, and whether such laws should be valid or whether the Court should assert a different standard. In Section B of his opinion, Alito pronounces “Until the latter part of the 20^th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion.” As if emotional emphasis were necessary, he follows by saying, “Zero. None.” Apparently the fact that a right did not exist prior to being asserted by the government, as if that were not the reason cases are taken to court, means that such a right cannot exist. After all prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, what support was there in American law for the belief that a Negro had more than three-fifths the value of a human being?

The gist, highlighted in the Politico article, is on page 4: “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely – the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Truly, the implications of such a ruling are staggering and encompassing. So encompassing, in fact, that I am not sure the author himself is aware of them.

Here are several other words that are mentioned nowhere in the main Constitution or the Bill of Rights: Homosexual. Heterosexual. Machine gun. Semi-automatic. Internet.

By Alito’s Solomonic approach to “strict constructionism”, some liberal justice could at some point assert that the Constitution does not protect a citizen’s right to semi-automatic weaponry or certain types of ammunition, because the Constitution doesn’t specifically protect them, and smirkingly cite Alito’s opinion in their reasoning, just as Alito smirkingly refers to Ginsburg and Blackmun in his reasoning.

Basically, the premise of this decision only works if the Right assumes that the Left won’t end up commandeering the legal system in the blatant and partisan manner that they have. Which is a laugh given that most of the reason for “conservative” bad-faith arguments against the Left is the manic fear that liberals will take over government and do to conservatives what they’ve been doing to the rest of the country all along.

It should be telling that conservatives’ main reaction was neither opposition nor support of the decision so much as shock and indignance that the decision was leaked and “decorum” was violated. After all, that’s more important than human rights. You would think that if abortion is so terrible and the need to protect life is so sacrosanct that they would be rushing to release the news as soon as they could, or perhaps they did and suddenly found out that other people didn’t like it.

It’s almost as if Republicans think that the purpose of government is to act explicitly against the will of the public.

Some commentators thought this leak was some “last-ditch effort by the Left to stir up yet another culture war in the hopes it can save them from utter obliteration in November.” (In which case, Mission Accomplished.) Some thought this was more a conservative attempt to shore up a wobbly conservative justice who might possibly back off of Alito’s opinion. I don’t think so. You already have Justice Thomas who if anything is more reactionary than Alito, and then you have the three Justices that Viceroy Trump appointed, implicitly and explicitly to take out Roe v. Wade. They would not have a draft listed as a Court opinion if there was not a solid majority behind it. It’s been pointed out that after Chief Justice Roberts, Clarence Thomas actually has seniority among the conservative justices and therefore he would have had first right to pen the decision. The fact that Alito took it up meant that an internal deliberation was already made. And the fact that his language directs to strike down Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (when the Dobbs v. Jackson case in question does not specifically require it) seems to indicate that Alito doesn’t particularly care what anyone thinks of the opinion or has any fear of defections. As he says, “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work.” I’m sure King George III would agree.

Perhaps the leak was some clerk or Court insider who might actually be pro-life in broad terms and against widespread legal abortion but who is also conservative in the practical sense and realizes that pushing the issue too hard in one direction will lead to a radical backlash and a liberal effort to undermine the entire conservative project in the same way that the radical Right sought to undermine the previous legal tradition immediately after Roe v. Wade. And given the changing demographics of this country it is hard to say that such an effort would not succeed.

And then ask yourself who such an insider might be.

Perhaps this was said moderate conservative’s attempt to say: Are you SURE you want to do that?

Are you SURE you want to do that?

Samuel… Samuel… Are YOU SURE you want to do that?

I am not a huge fan of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, because it leads to taking absurd hypotheticals to impractical levels, but if one is determined to assert an absurd hypothetical, it is still a good rule for determining the consequences of treating your desire as a universal law. At one point Alito said “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision.” This is of course an attempt to pretend to objectivity and to wash one’s hands of consequences for a decision that are likely if not inevitable. One could argue, as many scholars over the years have, that Roe v. Wade was ambiguous in its reasoning and difficult to defend. One could argue, as Rehnquist did in his dissent with the original decision, and as Alito does now, that federally the decision ought to be state by state. And federally, it should be the Congress’ power to determine the protections of the federal government, rather than having the Supreme Court making the decision for them and “legislating from the bench”, as conservatives put it in 1973.

There are of course reasons why that did not happen and why Roe lasted as long as it did. The Politico article quotes: “In the main opinion in the 1992 Casey decision, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and Davis Souter warned that the court would pay a “terrible price” for overruling Roe, despite criticism of the decision from some in the public and the legal community.

“While it has engendered disapproval, it has not been unworkable,” the three justices wrote then. “An entire generation has come of age free to assume Roe‘s concept of liberty in defining the capacity of women to act in society, and to make reproductive decisions; no erosion of principle going to liberty or personal autonomy has left Roe‘s central holding a doctrinal remnant.”

Whatever philosophical matters concern the status of unborn life, when the state gets involved in the matter the practical result is to assert that the rights of a woman to her own body are trumped (so to speak) by the existence of a pregnancy.

(Alito, incidentally, had previously said that the government’s pandemic policy led to “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” While he was busy citing all the cases in which abortion was not guaranteed and a state’s right to prohibit abortion was a precedent, he could have looked up all the restrictions on individual liberty that government imposed over the Spanish Flu.)

On Facebook, writer Thomas Clay posted: “All women in the United States are now second class citizens who do not get to enjoy the bodily autonomy we grant a corpse because we still respect the right of a corpse to keep its organs.” You basically have a situation akin to the build up to the Civil War in which some states were “slave” and some were free, but the divider in this case is genitalia and childbearing age rather than racial origin. Although some would argue it’s not much of a difference. While in the abstract it might be better to leave the matter to the states, “conservatives” like Alito and Thomas elide the point that their decisions do not have an impact only in the abstract. It is a good question whether the state of Missisippi would have proffered its case, or whether Alito would have written this opinion, if a majority of state governments were pro-choice or if there was a US Congress motivated to federalize the provisions of Roe.

And one of the reasons that old-time general conservatives, like O’Connor and Kennedy and to some extent Roberts, were loath to mess with precedent even when it goes against moral conservatism is to preserve what one might call the mystique of their institution. Jack Shafer: “The court has long feared that if the nation knew how its decisions come together — if its members dared to wear human faces, if it appeared as anything but a sacred tribunal — its decisions would carry less weight. It’s that easy to lose the mystique built up for centuries. The POLITICO piece reveals a court-decision-in-process as a purely political document that aligns five conservatives against the court’s liberals and, presumably, the chief justice. That accurate portrayal might take decades for the court’s myth-makers to erase.”

We take the Court as Supreme not just because there needs to be a final authority but because that authority is supposed to be outside politics and a balance on the legislature and executive. The decisions of the Court are assumed to have an almost supernatural authority, as if they were written by God on stone with fire. And instead the bias displayed here reveals that any given Court decision has no real need for precedent or constitutional grounding, all you need is a grudge and four other justices to go along with you. And now that Democrats know this, they’re going to do everything they can to just shove through their agenda and shift the balance again, decorum and precedent be damned. And they need a bigger majority in Congress to pull that off. And since Republicans know that, they’re going to do everything they can to make sure they never lose elections anywhere they can help it.

Fortunately for them they have the courts on their side.

To cement that, Republicans would need to build up even bigger judicial majorities in the states during this year’s election to change the election laws for the next national election. And at that point Trump and McConnell’s court majority will be able to do for the 2024 Republican nominee what they did not do for Trump in 2020, perhaps because at the time they thought they wouldn’t be able to force the issue. But apparently now they think they can.

There’s only one thing that could stop that.

The next two elections are Americans’ last chance to determine their own future.

ACT LIKE IT.

Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.

But nobody can handle that other trip – the possibility than any freak with $1.98 can walk over into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The big super-important story in the news last week was that Elon Musk, after over a week of playing games with the board at Twitter, finally decided to buy the social media outlet outright. And if I seem blase’ about how important this actually is, well, yeah. I seem to notice that the people who are most upset (or elated) about how important this change actually is are the same people who are most invested in spending time on that indulgence.

Of course a lot of the implicit and explicit fear (and elation) is the idea that once Elon Musk comes in to restore “free speech” to a site that actually started taking its own user rules and policies seriously after January 6, he’s going to let Donald Trump, the once and future Viceroy of Russian North America, back on. But in reaction to the news, the Sovereign of Subnormal told everybody that he wouldn’t go back on Twitter even then, cause he’s got this brand new site called… Truf Censhal. Yeah, that’s it.

My take, which I have gone over at least once, is that Twitter’s format is deliberately intended to blast unconsidered opinions and emotional hot takes, that this is the very nature of the format which Musk’s liberal critics are patronizing and posting on and using as a professional community, and if they have a problem with that potential, then they have a problem with the site itself, because that “abuse” of the medium is the very nature of the medium. People like Donald Trump were the ones using the Twitter format in the manner that it best works. And if liberals have a problem with someone buying out the site so that it can be used in such a way, their problem is with the site itself, and if you want a private actor to buy it out, or want the government to regulate it, you might as well have a private actor or the government shut it down altogether, because that is the only way to solve the problem.

But the fact that I don’t loathe Musk doesn’t mean that I’m a huge fan either. I liked the one take I saw recently where somebody called him “Tony Stark without the redemption arc.” One of the other whines about this whole deal is that (supposedly) Musk had pledged to the World Food Programme that he would pledge almost $6 billion dollars to end world hunger if they presented a plan to do it, and he didn’t follow through. I don’t think this is so much because he cares less about world hunger than about letting Trump and Nazis back on Twitter, it’s just that he seems to have the priorities of a fruit fly. At least to judge from his last few tweets where he said he would next buy out McDonald’s to fix the shake machines, buy out Doritos to make sure the chip bags are actually full, and buy out Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in the cola, all three of which are goals I would support more than buying out Twitter.

And yet while liberals were panicking about the unaccountable decisions of a super-billionaire and “conservatives” assume that said unaccountable rich person is defending free speech, there’s another big story which shows how quickly the script changes when you switch the sides.

Over the last few months, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron “Mini-Trump” DeSantis has been trying to one up his former mentor in his appeals to the MAGA cult in what might be a serious effort to get the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. It’s doubtful Trump will just roll over and let him take it, after all, he needs the potential of being president again to stay out of jail. But it’s not like DeSantis can sit around and wait for Trump to die, either. My guess is Trump will die of natural causes in three years then spend the rest of the century as a lich while he’s in litigation with God.

For instance, DeSantis’ administration decided to ban a set of math textbooks that supposedly included questionable ideas. Not that they gave any details. Apparently Arabic numerals are part of a Muslim conspiracy against Christianity.

But the most controversial and consequential act of mini-MAGA was where DeSantis signed what liberals call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prevents public schools from holding discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity, stating that lessons “may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards”. This law also allows parents to sue school districts on those grounds. If you’re wondering how the Right is defending free speech here, well so am I.

The Disney corporation, which just happens to own a massive chunk of real estate in Florida, had at first tried to remain out of the debate, but the leadership ended up siding with “progressives” due to massive public pressure. Well, of course the modern Republican Party is focused on making sure that government is never subject to public pressure again, so DeSantis decided to declare war on Disney. On April 19, DeSantis extended what was already a special session so that Republican legislators could sponsor a bill removing the Reedy Creek Improvement District which the state had outright given the Disney company in 1967 to build Walt Disney World, so as to take away its special privileges and tax status. On April 22, DeSantis signed the bill into law, and admitted that this would cause Disney to pay more taxes as a result.

Let us stand back and commemorate the moment in which a Republican politician actually said that raising taxes on a corporation was a GOOD thing. Y’know, as if this were a principle that “conservatives” would actually hold to even if it inconvenienced their patrons, as opposed to a needledick bugfucker move to punish any deviation from right-wing political correctness.

But as it turns out, the special district arrangement meant that Disney was paying all the infrastructure costs for Reedy Creek and removing their authority would mean that the state or the county take over those costs. Now you know why they agreed to that deal in the first place. Which probably doesn’t concern DeSantis because in his epic quest to impregnate a molecule, the neighboring counties are Democrat-majority. However, “The resort complex’s governing board says that when Florida created the Reedy Creek Improvement District decades ago, the state pledged to protect the district’s debt holders — and not to alter its status unless all debts are paid off.”

In another post, I’d also said that it would not be a good thing if Elon Musk could just buy the 1-15 roadway and start charging tolls for himself, “But on the other hand, if he did that, there might actually be road maintenance.” Well, as it turns out, something like that was already happening in Florida.

Both libertarians and liberals think (in theory, anyway) that we shouldn’t be giving businesses too many breaks, and on that level it seems like a good idea to take away a corporation’s legal authority over a territory. If liberals and libertarians agree on anything, it is that government has a monopoly on force. That is the defining feature of government. It cannot have final authority otherwise. In a way the idea of whether one man should have all that power over Twitter is the same issue as one company having so much control of a public infrastructure.

Do we seriously want the Disney corporation to have more power in Florida than the Florida state government? In a way, the question is moot: the controversy arose because, in fact, Disney DOES have more power in the special district than the state of Florida, and the state of Florida finally decided to object.
Nobody in the state even questioned whether it was a good idea for Disney to be in charge of the Reedy District, because (in contradiction to normal cheapass corporate policy) they actually spend money to get the best work, because they know that the work reflects on them. The only reason anything changed is because the state government decided to punish what counts as heresy this week. And that ought to be a lesson to any liberal who is hoping the Federal government will look at Twitter and save them from capitalism and freedom of choice.

Why, it’s almost as if all the people wailing about “the rule of law” just meant it as “the way we’re accustomed to doing things”. And almost as if liberals mean “free speech” in exactly the way conservatives do: It only means the stuff they like.

It all comes down to the fact that libertarianism is limited and yet everything still comes back to libertarianism. Libertarianism is the only political philosophy which does not hold that government exists a priori – because existentially, nothing else does. As I say: A collective without its individual components is an empty set. A government cannot exist without individuals. Individuals CAN exist without a government. Yes, they would exist on the level of cavemen and wolves, but they would exist. The Constitution was not handed down by Jesus or Moses (no matter what some professional Christians think), it was a product of its time, and while it’s still superior to a lot of the alternatives presented, we are seeing that it has problems because not every decision the Founders made could be perfect, and every decision has consequences. This means, among other things, that government doesn’t HAVE to do everything we can imagine, and a lot of the duties we ask of it were only applied recently because we only recently thought they were government’s purview. It doesn’t have to grant a huge corporation its own real estate to privately manage, nor does it have to take that territory back. Nor does it have to regulate a “free speech” site that has been unregulated by government precisely because we had not had a precedent in social media to do so.

People keep calling Twitter the modern equivalent of a “town square.” Would you be allowed to go to the town square in your community and scream the things in person that people do every day on Twitter? Christ, this is a site that is too rude and profane for ME. Such restrictions that it has on free speech were put in place mainly by user demand. Half of the reason Viceroy Trump was cut off from twitting is that the Twitter staff might have revolted if he wasn’t. It remains to be seen how well the staff will put up with Musk. And then there’s the point that the site never has been profitable, which is why Musk had to put up so much of his own stock to finance the deal. Given that the site is both too big to buy and not turning a profit, certain bankers surmised that when Twitter resisted Musk’s initial offers to enter into partnership, they put out feelers to every other potential buyer and got turned down because it wasn’t worth the deal. Which might be why that Tesla stock took a double-digit plunge in the week after the sale announcement.

As a financial investment, Twitter isn’t worth it. It doesn’t charge for subscriptions. Its advertiser base might not cover expenses. It only matters because of its base of users. Fact is, the social media mavens and other liberals who made Twitter what it is made it huge, and became dependent on it in the process, because they wanted the same freedom that Trumpniks did: The freedom to spout catty, mean-girl opinions to other people without getting punched out like they would for mouthing off to the same people face to face.

Look, as galaxy-shattering catastrophes go, Elon Musk buying out Twitter is less of a problem than Republicans buying out state government, because liberals can give up on Twitter, even if apparently they don’t want to. They can’t give up on government, even if apparently they have.