SpankyMcFarland

When a relative unknown with no money thrashes a big beast like this it is well worth asking how it was done. Something dramatic happened here. Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein have quite a few thoughts on the matter: Hayes has just written a book on attention. He thinks the outcome is significant far beyond New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-chris-hayes.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Mamdani’s skill at making videos is hardly surprising given that his mother is a brilliant film-maker.

How much support the mullahs still have is completely open to debate but it’s probably significant among blue collar, traditional Iranians with limited education. I’d be surprised if it’s less than 20%. Maybe 30% are willing to actively and openly campaign against the regime. That leaves 50% who might like to see change but are more focused on getting by.

Who is denying that? I took examples where many people clearly didn’t love their leaders and still fought for their country, eg Iran itself in 1980 when the ‘Shah’s pilots’ helped halt Saddam’s invasion. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/iransource/how-the-iranian-air-force-turned-the-tide-of-the-iran-iraq-war-in-1980/ Or 1941 when the Soviet Army, still reeling from Stalin’s murderous purges, stopped the mighty Wehrmacht in front of Moscow. I’m sure many Vietnamese weren’t too keen on communism either but people will naturally unite to fight foreigners who attack their country whatever the state of internal politics. One of many mistakes America made in its constitutional order was to combine the roles of head of state with head of government. The executive du jour and the nation should always be clearly distinguished.

America after this Bill will resemble any Trump business, headed for negative territory on the financials. He sure loves debt.

Any tax on corporations can end up being paid by customers. Does that mean we should give up taxing corporations? We are a country with an economy, not an economy with a country.

What will we get for being right about this? Not much. You think I want the CCP to win? This is one of the central delusions of the fossil fuel crowd.

America under Trump seems to be offering a retrofuturist fossil fuel alternative to China’s renewable tsunami. It’s a form of denial as pathetic as it is worrying.

I know they lead the way in those technologies and I suspect you do too. Of course they still use a lot of coal because China is still a rapidly developing country with 1.4 billion people. You have to look at the direction they are taking to assess where they will soon be.

Trump’s own campaigns for the presidency criticized the forever wars in the Middle East that his country embroiled itself in which is why some of his supporters were disappointed by this new development.

We are getting a little off track here. Unfortunately, English speakers have generally received a lopsided education in Napoloeon through a British lens of yesteryear that equated him crudely with the likes of Hitler and ignored the way in which he transformed France, and European law. One example would be the emancipation of Jews in his empire and what happened to many of them after he fell from power, eg in the original ghetto of Venice. Needless to say, there were wars in Europe involving the great empires before and after Napoleon. That’s another day’s work. My initial point was that a young French corporal was given an opportunity to seize power in France because of a foreign invasion of the country. To reiterate: foreign ‘liberations’ rarely work because they are usually not aligned with the interests of the invaded nation.

He was defeated eventually because he became a despot himself and also because the emperors of Europe hated the dangerously meritocratic example he offered their oppressed subjects, especially their ethnic and religious minorities, thus conspiring against him for years with the British who didn’t care one whit about absolutism on the European mainland. The ideas of the French Revolution lived on. The point I’m making is we are all tribal creatures first. France was divided by the Revolution but rallied around the flag once foreigners invaded the country. The same thing happened in both Iran after Saddam’s invasion and the USSR during Barbarossa. Uncle Joe may have been a tyrant but he was their tyrant.

The US used to lead on renewables. Now China is pulling away. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/climate/china-clean-energy-power.html

DSTs are only going to become more common around the world. Governments have been remarkably patient about the shenanigans of American high-tech firms partly because of the benefits their products have brought but their patience has run out. Facebook, Google and the rest have wiped out the revenue from local tax-paying media companies, replacing them with complex arrangements that squirrelled money away in havens like Ireland, the Caymans and Luxembourg. Trump shouting at Canada isn’t going to stem the tide.

Generally speaking, a foreign bombing campaign rallies people around the flag and whatever regime is in charge, eg Britain, the Soviet Union, Vietnam. When foreign forces tried to end the French Revolution they made Napoleon a hero.

Yes, we’re negotiating with Trump and his team, not all of America. They described it as caving.