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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26922 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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This is somewhat tangential to the culture war, but WD-40 will soon be banned in Canada, despite what the headline of the linked article says.

At issue is a 2021 piece of legislation that comes into force on January 1, 2024. It limits the amount of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in many products, setting the limit for "multi-purpose lubricants that are not solid or semi-solid" to 25% (Listed in Schedule 1, Item 26(i)). Needless to say, this is much lower than the 65% VOC concentration listed on WD-40's MSDS pages (website link) for the classic product.

WD-40 Company responded to talk of the ban by evoking the spectre of Fake News, and didn't mention how they would comply with the regulations. I've sent them a message asking if the MSDS info will be valid into 2024 (because I don't trust journalists, particularly when they can't find the "VOC" entry in a table and don't understand that "low vapor pressure" means less volatile.), and I strongly suspect that it will be reformulated by replacing at least 40.1% of WD-40's composition with substantially different chemicals. EDIT: They've answered, and it will be reformulated.

This ties into the same issues as @some's top-level comment on food names: I don't think that breaded tofu is "Chicken" (or even "Chikn"), and I don't think that a >40% new lubricant is "WD-40".

See also: PYREX vs. pyrex

I don't think that a >40% new lubricant is "WD-40".

So is that the reason it's called that? I thought it was just some brand name and didn't know (or care) how it was derived. I think most people will feel the same way and if there is a new formulation, they'll continue to buy it.

Thanks for the link about PYREX and now I have learned about kitchen glassware. I checked, and my measuring jug is indeed PYREX not pyrex, so it'll be safe to use 😀 Interesting to learn about manufacturers cheaping out on ingredients once the brand name has been long established, but I suppose it's not surprising nowadays.

So is that the reason it's called that?

Nope. The WD stands for Water Displacement. When they developed it they tried out a bunch of different formulas, and they numbered each, eg WD-25, WD-37, etc. The 40th one turned out to be the best one, so they went with that.

It was developed for and initially used in the aerospace industry, so they just used the same generic "WD-40" name from their lab book instead of coming up with a catchy marketing name. It was only after employees kept nicking it to take home that they decided to sell it as a consumer product.

OP was just arguing that a large change in the composition of the product makes it substantially a different product, not that the WD-40 name was linked to a specific percentage of a specific component.

Thanks for the correction! Clearly I am woefully ignorant of the high-paced world of lubricants!

I was taking it by "I don't think that a >40% new lubricant is "WD-40" that it contained 40% of whatever the compounds are, but I should have paid more attention to the start where he says "the 65% VOC concentration listed on WD-40".

I dug into this a little more. You linked to the WD-40 Canada website, but when I get the SDS off the USA website, it looks like they already changed the American formulation to 24.1% VOC. The term they use is "50-state VOC compliant," (thanks California).

So yeah, they'll probably just start shipping to Canada the same product already in circulation in America. Presumably if there was a big difference in performance you would have heard about it by now.

California Air Resources Board strikes again.

Presumably if there was a big difference in performance you would have heard about it by now.

By my understanding, the volatility of its organic compounds is a core feature that distinguishes WD-40 from normal spray lubricants. It dissolves gunk, penetrates through cracks/threads, and spreads over surfaces because of the relatively small molecules (which are also volatile).

Also, where are you getting your news from, that you would expect to hear about things in a tiny niche like this??

WD-40 is not even a lubricant, and I wish people stopped calling it that, because some people will take it to mean that it can be used to lubricate moving parts, when in fact the opposite is true: what it will do is that it will strip any lubricant that might have lingers there, and then evaporate, leaving dry surfaces behind.

WD-40 is not even a lubricant, and I wish people stopped calling it that, because some people will take it to mean that it can be used to lubricate moving parts, when in fact the opposite is true

WD-40® Multi-Use Product Classic does claim that it "lubricates almost anything", so perhaps the WD-40 Company should be the first target of your ire.

what it will do is that it will strip any lubricant that might have lingers there, and then evaporate, leaving dry surfaces behind.

Now I'm curious. Did you reach that conclusion from personal experience? If so, in what country and year? I'm wondering if that claim applies to the 25% VOC formulation that's sold in the US right now, or only the (soon-to-be-discontinued) 65% VOC formulation.

Speaking of which, I need a new can of chain cleaner. The old one has a plastic cap that was on too tight and I was dumb enough to try to pry it off with a screwdriver. WD-40 should work just fine.

I saw a headline about it Friday or yesterday. Conservative news loves finding stories like this (popular product faces ban for regulatory reason).

Looking into it more, I believe this Youtube video broke the story last Wednesday.

Also: Google's date ranges lie, but DuckDuckGo's don't. Google gave multiple relevant-looking results when I searched for "WD-40 ban Canada" and restricted the date range to before Sept. 6. They either had the date listed incorrectly, or they had it listed correctly but decided that a page from "6 hours ago" deserved to be in a search that specifically excluded it.

Aww now I'm a little bummed I didn't get it straight from the source, it's been too long since I watched an AvE video.

Also, where are you getting your news from, that you would expect to hear about things in a tiny niche like this??

He still believes we live in a world where when something is an issue, people start talking about it, which kicks off some sort of a chain reaction, rather then getting throttled to hell.

This is antagonistic. You've had 6 previous warnings for bad behavior. And two of those were just last month for this exact kind of low effort antagonistic posting:

https://www.themotte.org/post/621/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/128997?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/640/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/132787?context=8#context

3-day ban.

Man, I'm starting to wish for an AI-powered "are you sure you want to post this" feature they have on twitter, because half the time there's no telling what will set you guys off.

I suggest WD-25

My marketing instinct suggests WD-41.

It's 1 more than before, so people will assume it is better, also the original WD-40 is because it was the 40th attempt to create something that displaces water (or so legend goes, I can't be arsed to go track down the veracity), but you can play on that.

AP News reports:

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence.

The firearms suspension, classified as an emergency public health order, applies to open and concealed carry in most public places, from city sidewalks to urban recreational parks. The restriction is tied to a threshold for violent crime rates currently only met by the metropolitan Albuquerque. Police and licensed security guards are exempt from the temporary ban.

Violators could face civil penalties and a fine of up to $5,000, gubernatorial spokeswoman Caroline Sweeney said.

The summary, if anything, understates the brazenness. There's a delightful video of the release press conference that starts out with Grisham highlighting the emergency order as a state-wide message to "start arresting people", and "just arrest everyone", and goes downhill from there to outright state intent to violate her oath of office! For an order she does not expect criminals to obey. The order declares the city off-limits for public carry, nearly exactly mirroring a specific hypothetical from Bruen.

I went to bed on this last night after trying to find a way to discuss it at a deeper level than 'boo, outgroup', and I'm still hard-pressed this morning. It's not like this is some unique and novel approach: I've written before on the prolonged efforts to provide massive resistance to Breun, or to otherwise violate the law, exploiting the nuances of standing and court timelines. Federal administrations have played footsie with overtly unconstitutional or illegal actions at length as delaying tactics over any coherent principle for matters as serious as the rental economy and as trivial as cancelling Easter. There were even a few efforts from the Red Tribe in early COVID days.

There's some tactical and logistic discussions that can be had, here. Most obvious, there's a ton of fun questions involved when the state can throw around multi-thousand dollar fines against people with no more warning or notice than a press conference late Friday night, should it ever come to that, though it's not clear that the specific stated punishment here matters. There's no evidence that the shooters in any recent murders motivating this order were carrying lawfully. There will almost certainly be open carry protests by mid-week, a completely foreseeable result that someone who actually worried about bunches of lawful gun carry causing violence would at least have planned around; the people going should plan around what happens if and when they're arrested and cited, but it's not clear that will actually happen.

The Bernalillo County police have already stated that they have not been charged with enforcing this: a sufficiently cynical reader should expect that the state police may not consistently 'enforce' the order either rather than tots-unrelatedly harassing the hell out of anyone who disobeys it.

Grisham signed a law abolished qualified immunity in some cases, but the precise text of that law and the New Mexico constitution make this unlikely to apply in the specific nexus of carry. The 11th Amendment makes federal 1983 lawsuits particularly complex, and unlikely to be renumerative or punishing.

They're also pretty boring. So I'm going to make a few predictions. Maybe I'll be wrong! Hopefully!

Grisham will not be impeached for a very simple reason. She will not be indicted, and I think it's more likely than not she never pays in her personal capacity. There will be no grand jury leaking embarrassing details, or FBI investigations doing the same, whether honestly or fraudulently established. New Mexico allows citizen grand juries, and it won’t matter Grisham will not be frog-marched before a tipped-off news media for a predawn raid, nor will we have arrest mugshots on national or local news. There won't be a long series of supposedly-unbiased news programs calling her a fascist, no baldly coordinated smear campaign to distract from someone else's failures, nor will some random employee become a minor celebrity by breaking the law to embarrass her and then claiming prosecution persecution. There will not be a New York Times article or The View segue fearful about how this undermines reasonable public health policy, nor will Lawrence Tribe be writing a characteristically incoherent argument about how this disqualifies her from any future elected office.

We will not have an injunction today, or a temporary restraining order the same day as a complaint was filed, to mirror the DeWine overreach linked above. The courts will not make a final determination before the order expires, even if the order extends beyond the thirty-day window. If the courts issue a TRO or preliminary injunction before the policy expires, people will still be harassed for carry, and no one will find themselves in jail for contempt of the court's order, even and especially if they Tried To Make A Message out of their disobedience. There will be a perfunctory mootness analysis when asking whether the state will do the same thing again, and in the unlikely even that threshold and standing can be achieved, the courts will instead notice that no colorable relief can be granted.

We will instead have taught a city's portion of gun owners that they can and should violate the supposed law, at length; that the government will quite cheerfully do the same and get away with it; and that the courts will shrug their shoulders and ponder what can you do thirty days later. And that is what happens if they are lucky.

Fucking hell. I can only hope you’re wrong.

On one hand, we are getting the enforcement split that should be expected for this issue. I do think that’s some evidence against the strong form of the deep state, where anyone who takes government dollars is on board with a particular brand of authoritarian neoliberalism.

On the other…I’m not seeing any evidence that the courts or pundits or general voting public are giving Grisham the thrashing she deserves. There’s some intraparty squabbling, but it’s laughable—directly proportional to their distance from the actual law. Talk is cheap, and tweets are cheaper. So your central thesis is holding up depressingly well.

To be fair, the New Mexico Attorney General says he will not defend the law in court, which is a bigger surprise to me. I don't think it'll turn tomorrow hearing into an effective ex parte one unless Grisham decides against sending anyone, but it's not something he had to do, either.

So this is going to get injuncted. Until the injunction happens, there will be some open carry protestors- either local yokels or three percenters- taking over some minor public place in Albuquerque. These people will get away with it, the New Mexico state government will see the NRA crowd take over the square in front of their capital building some time in the next year but otherwise come away unharmed, and the lesson everyone takes will be "violating firearms laws is OK".

... so, there's a funny thing that happened today:

Handguns, assault rifles and even a few muskets were fully on display on Sunday in Old Town Albuquerque by about 150 or so people defying the recent New Mexico public health order issued late Friday by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham banning the carrying of firearms in public spaces.

What wasn’t obvious, was an attempt at enforcement. Police were not present, save for an Albuquerque Police Department surveillance device parked at the corner of Old Town Plaza that is often there during weekend events. It’s unclear if any plain clothes officers were in attendance. No police in uniforms were seen throughout the event.

Even without that physical presence, the governor’s office intends to act.

“The order is being enforced, and citations will be forthcoming from the State Police,” said Caroline Sweeny, a spokesperson for Lujan Grisham’s office. ”To ensure officer safety, we will not be providing additional details at this time.”

I don't expect this will stick -- if actually sent, and not sent pretextually, if anything this makes the standing argument easier -- but at this point I could see something stupid like arbitrarily pulling CHL permits without stating the cause.

Separately, there was a hearing scheduling on one court case for a temporary restraining order for early on 9/12; it has since been canceled. Presumably it or another companion will be rescheduled at some point.

I'm all for gun control, but this is just lawless. Trying to pretend that bullets are a disease is nonsense. Using that as a justification to unilaterally take away a constitutional right, without any sort of legislative fig leaf? It's absolute garbage.

If you don't like the second amendment, repeal it. If you can't repeal it, abide by it. It's that simple.

This will obviously get slapped down by the first court it encounters, but there really ought to be some sort of penalty for this kind of blatant abuse of power. I'm not sure what options are available other than impeachment, but if I were a republican office holder in NM I'd be exploring them.

I am genuinely glad to see you post this.

I'm not sure what options are available other than impeachment, but if I were a republican office holder in NM I'd be exploring them.

Unfortunately, most of them find the same problem. New Mexico's abuses of emergency health orders during COVID weren't as severe as California or Michigan, but they were still pretty severe, and legislative attempts to limit them stalled in committee on a party-line vote. The legislature does not even convene until January 16th (for 30 days on even-numbered years), so unless this order is extended for nearly four months it would take a special session to even start any legislative response, which can only be convened by a 2/3rd majority. And Grishman can veto or pocket veto legislation, which again requires a 2/3rds majority to pass.

The New Mexico GOP has claimed to pursue a federal lawsuit, though I'm skeptical that they'd have any better standing or argument than the individual cases. There's... not much hope of a state lawsuit going anywhere.

It's too bad NM doesn't seem to have criminal penalties for violation of oath like Georgia.

Also relevant to point out that CHL license holders are filtered for higher levels of law abidingness than the general population, and if the goal is to make gun owners trust gun control, it is almost exactly the wrong approach to make policy which primarily impacts them.

if the goal is to make gun owners trust gun control, it is almost exactly the wrong approach to make policy which primarily impacts them.

And this is obvious to anyone, including skilled politicians like the New Mexico governor. Therefore, that is not the goal.

If you don't like the second amendment, repeal it. If you can't repeal it, abide by it. It's that simple.

Thats outdated point of view, the constitution is something to be ignored, worked around or at best something to be read as we say in my country - the way the devil reads the bible. And also courts are allowed to write their own fan fiction on the original material.

To explain in game of throne terms - after the 60s we are living in the constitutional season 8. Probably split 2/1 about it written by democratic leaning SCOTUS.

Sometimes I dream about the Marshall of the Supreme Court going to the house of the NY governor and jailing them for contempt of court for passing the same bullshit gun restriction that has been slapped down a dozen times with minor alterations. Would certainly enact the spirit of the law if not it's letter. Then I remember that would only escalate the situation and probably trigger court packing.

But if officials are going to have such blatant disregard for the law of the land, maybe escalation is all that's left.

That's the beauty of it, with leftist control of the justice system, they can just do this in thirty day chunks and by the time any judge ever hears it, it will be "moot" because that particular policy ended and a new thirty day one just started.

There are of course exceptions to mootness for recurring policies.

I'm sure there's an emanation from someone's penumbra that creates an exception to anything that's unpopular in law schools.

There are of course exceptions to mootness for recurring policies.

Indeed, but entirely up to judicial discretion. Which means whether they are applied or not will be decided by other criteria.

Could this work by "all law-abiding citizens no longer carry, only the criminals, so now if someone is stopped and found to have a gun, the book gets thrown at them NO EXCUSES so for once we can keep Denzil The Drug Dealer in jail for longer than ten minutes"?

I don't see any serious approach where it could. There's already a lot of normally law-abiding citizens who are going to go far out of their way to break this particular order, and the order was issued with far too little notice for law-abiding normies to obey it if they wanted. And the punishments are trivial compared to traditional criminal law.

Perhaps more damning, I'm not sure why anyone would issue this order for that purpose, as opposed to simply directing her branch of the government to do it directly. There's some fun constitutional questions for whether drug users or sellers can possess firearms legally, but they're less constitutionally dubious than this. And the simple bit of "actually just go after drug dealers and violent criminals" is right there waiting for someone to pick it up.

There's a (very limited) steelman where this becomes a police tool, as a fig leaf for a broader stop-and-frisk; even if no one's ever prosecuted for breaking the order, it gives a lot of space for police to do random searches for weapons (and thus drugs and contraband and fleeing-from-police and not having a license for a gun and not having a gun that's not the one listed on your CHL and whatever). But even that doesn't really do a great job of actually focusing police power on violent criminals; it's one of the major flaws with actual stop-and-frisk. And it of course only augments the constitutional issues.

No, fails the disparate impact test.

No, no it can't.

Which means Denzel just hires local youths to be his security. Drug dealers have been splitting up roles for decades to make prosecution harder.

I will make a further prediction: At least one person will be arrested and charged with violating this order. Like the tiki torch marchers, they will not get their day in court; they may not be convicted of violating the order but they will be effectively coerced into pleading guilty to something and having their firearms and firearms rights taken for them.

I predict that this emergency order works as intended: if you look like an upstanding citizen you can CC and no one will care. If you look like a felon, this now gives the police a great pretext to stop you, leading to your likely arrest for other infractions.

That is, unless an unlikely bipartisan coalition tries to force the government hand: upstanding citizens that look like upstanding citizens and defiantly OC because constitution, and upstanding citizens that look like felons and want profiling to stop.

It's New Mexico. It's solid democrat but there's actual hardcore red tribers in much more significant numbers, and much more urban and periurban environments, than in say New York or California, and lots of libertarians running around. Open carry protestors will take over some minor local landmark(maybe a farmer's market or a park) and the cops(at least the locals) will let them. That's just going to happen.

Usually, at least at the prosecutor's level, if not the actual beat officers, this seems to work the opposite way. If you're an upstanding citizen CCing in full compliance with the actual published law, then you get the book thrown at you - full charges, highest bail they can get, max punishment, etc. If you're a career criminal on the way to commit another armed robbery or gang hit, then you get charges dropped lightened to where you can be released immediately.

This law doesn’t prohibit CC though.

Actually it does

become a minor celebrity by breaking the law to embarrass her and then claiming prosecution.

* persecution?

Technically both, since she claimed the persecution was in the form of prosecutions, but yeah, that's more correct. Thanks.

"Civil Rights" is a wholly-owned trademark of Blue Tribe, and as such nothing Blue Tribe does can be recognized by them as a civil rights violation. The right to keep and bear arms obviously is not a real civil right, and neither is the right to practice Christianity; such activities are simply too harmful to society, and of course things people want must be balanced against the interests of the public, as understood by Blue Tribe. They will never stop violating these rights, because they fundamentally do not and cannot recognize them as rights. If they have power, this is how they will use it.

[EDIT] ...And of course nothing in the above is exclusive to Blue Tribe. Rights are, in fact, a spook. The vast majority of people will never respect them as anything more than a means to an end, and ends differ between tribes. As our values continue to diverge, the "Civil Rights" framework becomes increasingly unworkable.

It's helpful to note the ways in which consensus is formed. You wrote this up yourself, pulling together a dozen or so articles to attempt to generate context. When it goes the other way, that job is done by a professional class who are paid to do it and outnumber you, roughly speaking, 9 to 1. That means they can generate at least nine times as much context as you do, and even if that "context" is absolute garbage, it's still inescapably dominant. Naively, people look at that information and drift naturally to the easy conclusion, that the truth generally lies with the majority. This naïve base impression persists even in relatively sophisticated environments like this one; we triangulate based on our data, so controlling the data means controlling us, even here. The only possible response as an individual is epistemic closure: to refuse to update based on discredited sources. Not doing this means allowing yourself to have your dataset irreparably corrupted. Doing this means foreclosing any ability to conduct constructive object-level dialog with the outgroup.

I think that the "civil rights" approach degenerated decades ago. When I was thinking about it, the right is now basically whatever value you want to push, it is an excerpt of your holy book you want to impose on other people. I had this discussion about the program of leftist party in my country and I was called a bigot for opposing some trans related points in the program. Of course, because these are rights and we do not discuss them, rights are outside of political purview, you see?. Of course we also have climate rights, we have right to free shelter and healthcare including proposals for right to oral care. In such a case you are basically supposed to live in blue tribe version of sharia law, the only thing that is to be part of the political process is meaningless issues - such as if tax should be X or X+1 percent. The rest is not subject of discussion, it is all spoils for winners of culture war. Everything is political indeed, and at the same time nothing is.

Similarly to OP, I realize that this post is quite antagonistic in a sense, but I do not see any other way. I consciously decided to vote on culture war issues exactly for OPs reasons. I think that voting based on policies is becoming stupid in this polarized society. Otherwise you will exactly end up in situation that OP describes, an anarchotyranny where one side views your values as illegitimate and that is capable and willing to do anything to suppress them. It is fundamental clash of aesthetics above substance. In my political discussions I have better results pointing out that incompatibility:

You think that I am transphobe for criticizing program of your favorite party? Look, I don't care. Your words ring hollow to me, I could not care less because I do not share your aesthetics. To me it is analogous as if you criticize me for being uncouth pigeater who sins against muslim aesthetics. It is a category error, I do not care about it whatsoever - in fact I laugh in your face while eating greasy pork fried in lard, downing it with huge gulps of forbidden strong beer. What are you going to do about it?

I really do not know how to get out of this pickle.

When the arbitrary and unconstitutional "public health orders" for things like mask mandates and business closures started coming down, many argued that it was a slippery slope towards the Government making up any orders they felt like any time they felt like it and successfully enforcing them. Well, here's us starting to slide down that slope. Make up any rule you want, call it a "public health order", and just maybe it will stand and actually be enforced.

I really hope this doesn't stand, because it will only accelerate us towards a regime of government executives actually ruling by decree without regard to the Constitution. And what'll happen if a Red team executive in a Red state copies the pattern, maybe doing something like closing down all gay bars and other meeting places as a "public health order" to stop Monkeypox or Aids or something.

When the arbitrary and unconstitutional "public health orders" for things like mask mandates and business closures started coming down, many argued that it was a slippery slope towards the Government making up any orders they felt like any time they felt like it and successfully enforcing them.

It wasn't a slippery slope. It already was the Government making up any orders they felt like at any time they felt like and successfully enforcing them. There's no need to make a slippery slope argument when you've already hit the jagged spikes at the bottom.

It makes me wonder what the governor’s motivations are. I don’t know anything about New Mexico politics (besides the fact the the state is inexplicably left wing). This seems like a totally bizarre thing to do in an off election year for a politician who can’t possibly aspire to an office outside of New Mexico. I wonder if she is trying to get ahead of a scandal or something.

Charitably, people who don't care about guns or are anti-gun to start with sometimes might have seen a recent few high-profile incidents that Hit Close To Home and suddenly justified everything. This model's kinda the dark mirror to the "conservative is a liberal who's been mugged" deal: there's a lot of people who were once willing to live-and-let-live (or at least had better places to spend their political capital) who become true believers over some incident that made things too salient for them. The resulting policy proposals aren't always this hairbrained, but you're picking from a group that's by definition not considered the space at length in the past nor been heavily exposed to other people who have. Some people are people do really believe what they're doing.

But Grisham has been in this game for a while. The more cynical analysis is that she's term-limited (New Mexico governors can only serve two terms; her second ends in 2027) in a pretty Blue and increasingly blueing state (between Californian exodus, and the aftermath of the last decade worth of redistricting), and she's been working in (otherwise unemployable parts of) the .gov since 1992. There's three major career paths available where this sorta trial balloon is a major resume-burnisher even and maybe especially if it flops: either moving to federal politics, managing state-level politics, or going into the bureaucratic activism or non-technically-state-just-state-funded activist groups.

It's possible she's gunning for Lujan's seat -- he had a stroke last year, and while he's recovered might take it as a sign to retire -- or perhaps the VP slot for 2028. But more likely I'm thinking the last option. This is the sorta thing that absolutely blocks any chance of a cabinet-level position or other place requiring a senate confirmation, short of a wildly stacked Dem Senate, but it's an excellent advertisement for Acting whatevers or bigger names at think tanks or commentary positions, where this hugely visible commitment is useful to know who's likely to stay bought.

besides the fact the the state is inexplicably left wing

It got me to wondering, why is New Mexico more left wing than the surrounding states? I had two hypotheses: indigenous population and government employment.

Looking up indigenous population, New Mexico is third in the nation, at 10.86%. And looking up government employment, New Mexico is also third in the nation at 22.2%. The combination of the two seems initially compelling.

Looking at other states, however, seems to refute both hypotheses. In terms of both, Alaska trounces New Mexico, taking the top spot in both at 19.99% and 24.6% respectively despite being significantly less left-wing. I can buy that it's kinda sorta a special case. But at second place are Oklahoma at 13.2% and Wyoming at 24.1% respectively. (Oklahoma is 6th in government employees at 20.6% and Wyoming is 8th in indigenous population at 3.5%).

Curious if anyone has other explanations.

New Mexico/Colorado have always been kinda libertarian in a vaguely blue way(eg drugs and weird sex stuff and not too attached to guns). New Mexico is also super duper Hispanic.

Many of the government employees are military and fairly reddish, I don't think it's government employment.

All I know is back in the 2000s, people were complaining about all the Californians moving in. And the state moved from a Red, to a Purple, to a Blue state in the time following. I don't have any actual statistics on how many Californians moved to New Mexico, I just know that was a complaint people were making.

A lot of filming started to take place in New Mexico, the Albuquerque government began courting studios.

I mean instead of checking 1 by 1 you can plot and check for correlations

Harder to do on a phone, though, and I try not to open my computer on weekends. Maybe I'll do it at work on Monday.

I think that sounds very compelling, I would also add a little to the government employment aspect (especially with respect to large # of very well compensated scientists working at sandia and Los Alamos), is substantial, but who knows, the hard sciences are usually split more evenly.

Urban is a bit underspecified, but some statistics about the urban population:

Arizona 89.3%

Colorado 86.0%

Nevada 94.1%

New Mexico 74.5%

Texas 83.7%

Utah 89.8%

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/mapping-us-urbanization-by-state/

NM is more urbanized than AK, OK, and WY though.

Is this using a system like the census where they define urban as an arbitrary density cutoff that includes things like small farming towns that are ruby red? That kinda undermines everything people mean when they say urban.

I mean, it's kinda justifiable for the census. Their data presumably have some hand in planning things like plumbing infrastructure, but it's really not helpful for a thread on the culture war where urban tends to imply blue tribe.

At least for Texas the vast majority of the population lives in definitely urban environments in a few major metros(DFW and Houston combined have just over half the state's population, add in San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso there's a supermajority), so I think the data is directionally correct.

How many of those residents would self-identify as "suburban" instead of "urban"?

Because there's a pretty big difference between the political behavior of suburbanites and urbanites.

From what I remember, there was an article from a while back about the majority of Texas identified as suburban. Let me see if I can dig it up.

Edit: Found it. I was thinking of an old 538 article from 2015. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-american-cities/ it's ~8 years old at this point, so the percentages could have swung a couple points, but I think the general point still stands.

It's mostly wasteland, so very desolate and unproductive outside cities. So it's urban in that sense, but only a tiny sliver of the geography is actually urban.

It's mostly wasteland, so very desolate and unproductive outside cities.

Or in other words, the state is just Australia in microcosm; political implications and all.

Interesting, because Oz is perhaps surprisingly more woke and lefty despite the "pioneer spirit" which would lean very much the opposite. But, I suppose, now that the vast majority are softies in the cities, it makes sense.

Could be she’s angling for a possible Vice President nomination. Correct-thinking Latina governor in a border state? You may recall when Susana Martinez, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, was a serious VP contender for Mitt Romney, and she spoke at one of the RNC national conventions one year.

As far as the state being ‘left wing’, it really isn’t. Not in the Vermont/Bernie Sanders/Portlandia way. New Mexico has for some time been a majority-minority state. American Indians make up 11 percent of the state’s population, the third highest in the United States after Alaska and Oklahoma. The median household income in 2021 was on the level with Alabama, making it 45th out of 50 in the United States. To put it bluntly, the modal New Mexican citizen is a poor, lowly educated Hispano-Indian who correctly perceives the Democratic Party as the party of handouts. The state is about as far away from the Gray Tribe, Bay Area rationalists and the Sanders socialists as can be!

Long term I think this might be a blessing in disguise. There’s really a mask-off moment here where the government never even pretended to be making or enforcing a new law. They didn’t bother with even a decent pretext for doing this. The governor simply declared a health emergency out of not much (the murder rate isn’t as bad as most major cities) and decided that carrying is illegal.

This is a case that everyone concerned with civil liberties can and will point to probably for a long time as the point where the mask slipped and the public got to see the full on truth that the government doesn’t actually believe in rights or at least not your rights. I don’t believe in conspiracy, however the last several years seem to have been a whole series of red pills in the sense that I don’t think anyone paying attention can deny just how far from the Republic (as defined by the Constitution) we’ve actually gone.

Inside Disney and internal corporate boardroom drama. Iger appointed Chapek as his successor but ended up decided coming back. It touches on the fight with Desantis, the prior generation deciding not to retire, internal power struggles, managing a business where no one has the skillset for all of the businesses (creative, running parks, international, finance, sports, launching a streaming business). About a 15-20 min. Iger seems more interested in the Desantis fight than Chapek who just wanted to play nice.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/09/06/disney-succession-mess-iger-chapek.html

Disney's 2023 releases have been duds

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2023/08/04/the-four-flops-of-2023-that-cost-disney-1-billion/?sh=4e9e00b13bed

Losses on some, profits on others. I don't see how a $100 million loss on a movie can cause a decline of market value in the tens of billion. mediocre movies cannot explain why the stock has fallen so much. Disney has always produced a lot of mediocre but expensive movies throughout its recent history [1], yet the stock has done so well , until 2022. The value is in the IP and other services, not so much box office. A movie that loses money at box office will still generate $ decades down the line through IP.

[1] https://screenrant.com/disney-biggest-box-office-bombs-disasters/#a-wrinkle-in-time-2018

Disney's stock is losing value quickly because D+ isn't working and they have a big payment to buy out their Hulu partners rapidly approaching (and Hulu isn't doing hot either).

mediocre movies cannot explain why the stock has fallen so much.

To the extent this is correct, it is because you’re looking at the stock price through the wrong frame. The big rally into 2022 was due to Star Wars and Marvel climaxing at the same time in 2018-2019, followed by the pandemic fed-tech bubble. The 2019-2022 price level isn’t the baseline, it’s the outlier.

Disney has outperformed or tracked the S&P 500 as far back as it began trading. 2022-2023 is a huge outlier in terms of bad relative performance . from $200 to $80 in just a year vs spx almost having recovered its losses. i think you could be right that the stock may have simply gotten ahead of itself due to Star Wars and Marvel hype wearing off, combined with some costly unforced errors, changing sentiment, woke backlash, etc. .

As someone who was in the machine for a few years, you're correct in that the value is in the IP.

And they've trashed their IP.

The missing thing everyone tends to overlook is merchandising. Consumer Products was an extreme overperformer in Disney's catalog during the Marvel golden years and the first of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Add to the ocean of Frozen merchandise... Disney makes significant gains on both product and selling the license to produce product for their brands, backed by a minimum guarantee sales agreement. Their IP did so well that they basically bullied toy and product companies into accepting whatever terms they wanted in order for access to their properties.

This is why The Last Jedi was so significant for Disney. It was a movie where the demand for product basically imploded. Hasbro lost their ass on it, and due to the poor performance of that movie's products as well as the chaos of getting anything approved by Disney for that movie (and the increasingly short turnarounds for Marvel ones in time for movie releases), it basically heavily damaged Disney's relationship with a lot of the toy and product guys.

Bear in mind Consumer Products did so well that they merged it with Parks to try and hide the black hole of Parks spending, mostly driven by overspending on development of new attractions, construction and cost overruns in upkeep.

If your company's value is the value of your IP, the price going through the floor is indicative of how the company is doing at IP management. Faith in Disney's ability to effectively monetize the IPs they own is critically low.

That has been a problem with parks too. They build these (occasionally amazing) rides but they are so expensive, take so long to build, and actually don’t move many people.

Disney had an amazing ability to create truly interesting fun unique rides that moved a lot of people. Sure the ride was expensive but not that expensive.

Outside of some weird cases like airlines, the value of a stock is a function of expected future earnings. Shareholders may have been convinced in the past that there was potential in owning DIS. They are no longer so confident.

Disney may always have had duds, it's the cost of doing business in that industry. But I believe what the market has realized is that they have lost the ability to make the popular entertainment that makes the duds worth it. It's not a stroke of bad luck, it's skills shortage.

Marvel is winding down massively, Star Wars has been blown up for nothing, Pixar is way past it's prime, the parks aren't making much money and the political spats have tarnished the image of family friendliness that has always been a core part of Disney's strategy.

They bought so much they own all of classic pop culture and yet I'm left asking: who is going to care about Disney IP in ten years? Versus, say, Nintendo.

Wait, how do airline stocks work?

Long video

Airlines are banks. You read that right. Flying is both such a necessary service and so unprofitable that it slowly has become a subsidized activity of companies whose main business is actually controlling a currency in frequent flier miles which other, actual, banks will buy and integrate into the rest of the financial system.

Banks behave differently than other businesses because they're a peculiar kind of business that's allowed to print money and is so important to the economy there is an expectation that the State will bail them out of a crisis. And so it is with Airlines.

As Taleb point out in Black Swan such enterprises are in the business of hiding risk. The stock price then isn't properly understood as a bet on earnings (at least not for the most part), but as a bet on the solvency of the State and its willingness to enact a bailout in the next crisis. A bet on the solidity of the financial system and how much that particular part of it can act as a safe haven.

The key similarity is that neither industry has much in the way of moats. They tend to be too competitive as there is nothing to prevent new entrants from boosting supply.

When I think of a bank I think of a company that makes money either by lending money or by investing and providing other financial services.

And this is indeed what Airlines do. They sell credit services and benefits directly and administer their own mini-financial system as a main activity.

Transportation is not just a secondary activity, it's actually a loss leader. They consistentlyt lose money on operating plane trips to the tune of a few cents per seat and the disclosures we got during covid's loan season show the loyalty programs are worth more than the total market capitalization of the airlines which implies the transportation sides of the business have negative value.

For example if a bank offers a free toaster to anyone who opens a savings account that doesn't make KitchenAid a bank.

But what if KitchenAid started selling free toaster vouchers to banks for more than their market price? What if financial instruments started getting valued in those vouchers? What if there was an exchange rate for different voucher types? What if this was the main way they make any money?

The real magic here is in the fact they sell miles from their loyalty programs to other companies (like AA to Hertz) so they get the incentive benefits. These are sold at a markup, and the customer pays back the balance by flying. Given these miles are printed from nothing, they look very much like loans. Actually it's not quite from nothing, it's from the future expectation of the ability to fly, which is not really that different from the future expectation to redeem your money from a fractional reserve bank.

This makes the airline a sort of central bank of their own service backed currency that can, and does, adjust the value by controlling the supply and redeem rate. And importantly, this currency isn't taxed so it's possible to create weird tax free financial instruments using these, in a way that's really not dissimilar to how cryptocurrencies work today.

The real magic here is in the fact they sell miles from their loyalty programs to other companies (like AA to Hertz) so they get the incentive benefits. These are sold at a markup

I think that's a smart evolution of the business, although I wouldn't say there's any particular magic in this step either. This still falls under the universal logic of IOU issuance: anyone can issue their own IOUs (printed from nothing) and decide both what it takes to get one and what the redemption value will be.

I guess what moves it to feel more 'bank-like' is that the airlines take tracking accounts in their database very seriously, compared to less serious bearer punch-cards for free Subway sandwiches or whatever. And flights are more universally desirable, compared to more subjective businesses. Maybe I will use Hertz instead of Avis if it's giving me $X towards my next flight on my usual airline, but for some reason if they were partnered with Mcdonalds reward points, it would take a lot more than $X to move the needle.

They bought so much they own all of classic pop culture and yet I'm left asking: who is going to care about Disney IP in ten years? Versus, say, Nintendo.

Basically this.

They burned a bunch of bridges and are now acting surprised at the lack of foot traffic, much like Anheuser Busch, one gets the impression that they didn't understand who their core market were.

I think it's a little different than AB. AB knew their market but they wanted a different one because their current market didn't comport with their political goals, and besides they didn't expect it to be around much longer with the fulfillment of those political goals. Disney thought they owned their market and it didn't matter what they put out, their market would accept it.

Can you really blame them? The Starwars/Marvel "consooom" crowd were pretty hardcore in their merch consoooming ways. I honestly didn't expect them to have a spine either, certainly didn't expect them to have enough spine to reject the new Trilogy and its merch.

There's an idea for a "so blackpilled you come out through the other side as whitepilled" effort post that's been bouncng around my head for a while, where these would be used as prominent supporting examples.

Lead by their theory of Cultural Hegemony progressives moved to capture the commanding heights of our culture, only to discover that power doesn't literally let you bend the world to your will. Provisional title: "Congratulations, you've won the crown! Now you have to wear it..."

Dramatization

I'd genuinely like to read that.

"Not understanding core market" is a long way from "small pr stunt goes wrong". I don't think management could have imagined it would have such a long and lasting impact as what it has become. In the past, a bad PR stunt would probably be forgotten as the news cycle changes and the old product line is discontinued (the Dylan Mulvaney cans were a one-off thing, not a product line), but social media keeps it alive in perpetuity. In 1996, McDonald's Arch Deluxe burger is a notable example of a major brand misreading a market, but it did not have a lasting impact like this has. Congrats, i guess, to Kid Rock for having more of an impact on a stock price than famous billionaire short sellers like Bill Ackman, Jim Chanos, Michael Burry etc. He should get a job at a hedge fund.

I don’t think it’s quite the same as the Arch Deluxe. There’s no real insult with the arch deluxe, it was a sandwich, and it didn’t taste good, but it didn’t cross any major lines. It didn’t offend your values, it didn’t call into question your masculinity, it didn’t celebrate things you hate. It was just a bad sandwich.

The Budlight thing was basically tying the brand to something that the main audience of Bud Light was opposed to — which is woke in general and gay/trans in particular. There’s also the issue of the perception that Bud Light is now not a man’s drink. I think especially in bars this was part of the deal. No man wanted to be seen drinking the tranny beer, and likely that will continue for quite some time.

"Not understanding core market" is a long way from "small pr stunt goes wrong".

Hard disagree. This isn't hyberole or an uncharitable strawman, Heinerscheid straight up said that "we don't want bud light to be the beer of frat-boys and rednecks anymore", and she succeeded.

In short @ArjinFerman is more intelligent than you.

In short @ArjinFerman is more intelligent than you.

how is that even relevant. yet again HlynkaCG is able to break rules with impunity here and get endless warnings

In short @ArjinFerman is more intelligent than you.

Okay, really, what was the point of this comment?

The rest of your post was fine. "The other person is right and you're wrong." You can say that.

But you have a pattern, which you've been repeating for a long time now, of adding gratuitous little elbow shots that add absolutely nothing except antagonism. You're clearly doing it on purpose, and I don't exactly understand why. It does not fit at all with all your Grizzled Old NCO schtick in which you act like you're just trying to keep out the riff-raff (despite this no longer being your job) and point out the truths that us jannies won't acknowledge. No, this is purely you being a dick to people you don't like. Sometimes it feels like you're testing us, sometimes it just looks like you can't control yourself. Maybe it's a disgust reflex. Whatever. But you need to stop.

You still get more leeway than most people here because you have such a long history as a positive contributor, including AAQCs which you continue to generate. A lot of people who really hate you have been angry about this for a long time and keep demanding we ban you. I don't know when or if you will force us to do that, but giving people who have earned more community "credit" a longer leash is intentional and has always been our policy. That said, you have not earned infinite goodwill and do-overs, and if you keep testing us, eventually we'll have to say good-bye.

In light of multiple previous infractions of a very similar nature, I'm giving you a one-week ban this time.

Do you think they wanted their whole entire core market to stop drinking their beers?

Do you think they wanted their whole entire core market to stop drinking their beers?

If one takes Alissa Heinerscheid's statements at face value, yes that is exactly what the management of InBev wanted.

If you actually believe that then I don't know what to tell you

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It wasn't "a small PR stunt going wrong" it was "deliberately insulting the core demographic buying your product".

In 1996, McDonald's Arch Deluxe burger is a notable example of a major brand misreading a market, but it did not have a lasting impact like this has

Because they were bad products, not attacks on their core market.

yeah with the benefit of hindsight we can say it was an attack on a core market

Disagree - almost anyone with vague ideas about american culture would have been able to tell that it is a bad idea. Only single white college educated woman deep in the blue bubble that has drank the DEI cool aid wouldn't have known. Guess what type they had recently promoted as vice marketing director.

If you were in the marketing department at AB and someone said “hey, why not send a one-time promotional can to this influencer that she’ll only market to her (highly woke) progressive following and that our core audience will never even hear about?” what would you say to convince them of how badly things would go?

It’s not really predictable, tons of red-tribe-friendly corporations have done much more woke things than what AB did and still retain that entire audience. Red tribers still subscribe to Netflix, still watch Disney movies, beloved right-adjacent brands like Chick-fil-A went full DEI and other than some Twitter users nobody cared, the core oo-rah red tribe demographic sports league, the NFL, went full woke, even NASCAR went woke. None of them saw a major backlash that convinced them to backtrack (yes, there was Kaepernick, but the NFL is still ultra-woke).

Predicting that a promotional can of Bud Lite would set this off wasn’t obvious.

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I guess. but companies are always do weight/wacky promotions to generate 'buzz'. Think of Burger King's various weird promotions . The assumption is, a misfire will be forgotten and society will move on. But not this time. If I were a hedge fund manger, and then Kid Rock video just came out and I had to make a call if society would move on or it would have a lasting impact, I would be in the former camp. yeah I was wrong.

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You don't need the benefit of hindsight, the recording of the marketing exec will do just fine.

That's too much “Great Man of History” analysis. I think Disney was boned no matter what.

  • Huge amounts of Disney’s revenue came from linear commercial TV, which is dying, and big tentpole franchises like Marvel, which—no matter how brilliant of a creative team you hire—are going to get tired at some point.
  • They get plenty of cruise line and theme park revenue, but if you jack up the prices and/or degrade the service quality too much with nickel-and-diming with Fast Passes, demand shrinks.
  • It's incredibly hard to change the institutional culture of a company that is that big and that old.

I doubt the DeSantis thing or the board room drama doesn't really mean a damn thing, versus the economic and cultural flow that's adjusting to a giant surplus of entertainment that's available everywhere all the time whenever you want it. Post-scarcity entertainment killed the music industry long ago, and now it's time that everything else gets shanked too.

That article seems to be trying to retrospectively put the blame for Disney's current woes on Chapek. Well, Iger is back so tough luck, he gets to carry the can (the same way the president in office, whoever he may be, gets the blame for the economy going wrong/the credit for the economy going right even if that is down to what his predecessor did).

And it doesn't seem like Iger was that hands-off even during his 'retirement', so the current slump in the stock prices (and unhappy shareholders) is on his plate and he has to deal with it. Whatever the truth is, part of the problem seems to be a struggle with Kathleen Kennedy over Star Wars and how that entire franchise is flailing around. Parks are losing money due to lack of visitors, for whatever reason (probably because when money is tight, expensive holidays to theme parks that will cost $$$$ is something that gets cut out of family budgets). Movies are tanking, and I'd say part of that is simply down to audience fatigue - they just milked the MCU cow until it dried up. Same with streaming, which is another household expense that is likely to be cut in budget pinches. And they shot themselves in the foot pulling ESPN from the cable network who are putting the blame squarely on Disney for wanting too high a price. As several Youtube channels have pointed out, over the holiday weekend a lot of people sat down to watch the game or the tennis on their cable subscription, couldn't get it, and when they rang up to complain, were told Disney wanted to charge too much.

CNBC is owned, ultimately, by Comcast which has a two-thirds stake in Hulu with Disney holding the remaining third. They agreed that Disney would buy all the stakes in Hulu, so right now there's a lot of horse trading going on about getting Disney to pay what Comcast evaluates their stake is worth. I imagine this news story is part of all that - sure, Disney may be in trouble right now but that's not Iger's fault, so could you please not tank the stock price so we can get our money out of them before they go belly-up?

I don't think Disney is going to go belly-up, but I think there's going to be a lot of retrenchment before the books get balanced, and a lot of shows and movies given the green light or in consideration may be pulled.

I also think getting into the fight with DeSantis was just plain stupid; all the crowing online over how Disney was so big and so rich with such great lawyers that they'd force DeathSantis to crumble, because they were fighting on the right side of history for LGBTQ+ rights, was nonsense. Disney is in financial stormy waters right now, and posting photos online of guys in drag selling princess dresses to little girls is going to help convince a lot of people "Maybe we'll go to Universal Studios and Mario Land instead".

Post-scarcity entertainment killed the music industry long ago

Record labels have 10x’d their valuations from the nadir over a decade ago thanks to Spotify, and Taylor Swift’s next tour will gross $3.5bn in North America alone. The music industry is probably more profitable than ever, but the money shifted in part to touring and live stuff.

That actually has similarities to Disney. Disney owns the parks, which are the entertainment equivalent of a Taylor Swift tour (expensive and an experience participants save for and look forward to), and which are fantastically profitable.

The problem was (as others have said) that Iger spent tens of billions on TV and movie content at the exact time that was becoming less profitable and the ESPN cash cow was drying up.

How do record labels make money when every song I can think of is available from youtube for free? I don't understand why Spotify has revenue. Just download songs and put them on your phone? How hard is that?

I pay for spotify and when I find tracks I like I buy the flacs from the artists. I'm mostly paying Spotify for convenience (playing music I don't listen to for other people/events) and for access to the algorithm, which has found a lot of incredibly nice artists that fit my incredibly niche tastes.

Nearly all of those songs are on YouTube channels that send their ad revenue to the record companies.

Just download songs and put them on your phone? How hard is that?

I used to do this, and then I got a trial Spotify subscription and never went back - what they really sell is convenience. The value to me of my time and attention is greater than their fee.

Isn’t YouTube lower quality? Also for $10 a month the library that follows you everywhere, can be streamed or downloaded anywhere and has pretty much every song in the standard version directly available is pretty convenient.

Maybe so, especially if it's one of those youtube videos that was uploaded 13 years ago by the Peruvian fans of a Finnish band with some random anime stitched onto it... but that's part of the charm IMO! https://youtube.com/watch?v=_HAuXWVLyW4

  1. for many people "download songs and put them on your phone" is a hard challenge to overcome.

  2. many people prefer to listed to some prepared playlist rather than hand-curate and build music library

  3. for many people Spotify is cheap enough to round it to "free" - or at least considered cheaper than investing time into (1) and (2)

"when every song I can think of is available from youtube for free" - well, not every (the same goes for Spotify)

(Spotify is doomed to have no real profits, but that is a separate problem)

Shockingly most people browse without an adblocker. They couldn't figure out how to download a video if you put a gun to their head. Spotify, sells convenience and a clean conscience that you're not stealing from your favorite artist.

Convenience is an interesting factor here. People my (our?) generation had a vague sense of anxiety, that our kids are going to run circles around us with regards to technology the same way we did around our parents, only for it to turn out that growing up with "streamlined" software made them effectively technologically illiterate.

The parks are an important way to generate revenue, but they only work if new generations get the same buzz from high giving Mickey or walking through Radiator Springs. There are far less expensive alternatives and far better thrill rides at other parks.

I think Disney was boned no matter what.

I think Iger knew this and resigned at a strategically optimal time to avoid it being on his record. Most of Disney's problems start with decisions made in Iger's tenure. Lots of people dont understand how amazing,yet bonkers, the ESPN/Disney cable model was (still is). They made most of their money from non-customers. ESPN was $10-15 a month in carriage fees, and was included in most standard packages (Disney would through its weight around to ensure it was, and made it so cable companies that didn't play ball got squished). Now, ESPN is a hugely popular channel, for cable, but even so, most cable subscribers dont watch ESPN, or if they do, only do for a few games a year. Those people were paying $12/month to ESPN for years! They tried to double down on that by buying RSNs, which they thought they could do the same with, but Comcast, et al, had caught on and didn't let Disney force them to include $10 a month channels like NESN and YES be bought by every subscriber in Boston/NY respectively. And thus that move blew up in their face (while Rupert Murdoch laughed while swimming in his money pit).

Going to Disney world is still a very different experience compared to pretty much any entertainment platform.

They are better positioned compared to most entertainment platforms.

Which would be fine if that were all they did, but they have an entire media empire to feed. The theme parks make money, but not enough to subsidize the rest of the business.

Not only that, but the theme parks are tied to IP. And they’re screwing up the IPs appeal to the kinds of people who would choose Disney themed vacations. Soccer moms are the ones who want to take the kids to Disney or book a Disney cruise. But, this is no longer a guaranteed family friendly brand. They might not let their kids watch Disney, they’d be turned off by gay days at the park (which are pretty well known), and are not family friendly especially if you’re from a conservative part of the country or are religious,

  1. They should spin out sports. Not a core business.

  2. They should be content creators; not distributors. Hulu was a mistake. Disney+ was a big mistake.

  3. Focus on what makes you different. For them, it is classic IP entangled with some of the most unique family fun vacation spots. Focus on that (distributing the IP in movies and toys; use that IP to get people to vastly overpriced theme parks).

Disney+ was a big mistake.

Disney had to make an app. The nightmare scenario was Netflix eating the world, and using their audience control as leverage to take all the profits on any given production after it left theaters. Every studio needed an app as a backup play, so they all made them.

The big mistake was the streaming wars. For a decade, every media exec lost their minds and decided the only way to win was to bury their enemies in piles of content. But, as it turns out, there's just not that many competent people in Hollywood. No amount of money will call forth a writer into existence. If in a given year there's 10 good movies and 10 mediocre ones, then an executive mandate to produce 100 movies will... produce 10 good movies and 90 mediocre ones. Disney+ was full to the top with shitty exclusives and interminable Marvel miniseries that went nowhere and meant nothing.

That's fine, they said. We'll just keep going. Eventually our enemies will run out of money and give up. The stock market will always give us infinite amounts of money and interest rates will always be zero. (The Uber/Lyft playbook, or the explosion in scooter rental apps)

But what if the winner of the streaming wars is... nobody? Disney and Netflix are in trouble. Paramount physically cannot stop making Star Trek junk. Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video are side plays run by notoriously ruthless CEOs who will cut anchor the minute they stop being profitable. The studios have picked a moronic fight with both the unions and started a strike that has dragged on for more than a hundred days. What if they all go bankrupt, and Hollywood has to reboot from nothing?

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is actually pretty good. Picard Season 3 wasn’t awful.

I do wonder if Disney would’ve been better off doing Disney+ and just opening up the vault. They already had a lot of great content. They didn’t need to produce new content.

It has been their corest business aside from maybe parks since ESPN/ABC was acquired. Cable and broadcast is still the company's largest operating profit segment, today. It's financing their streaming losses.

They need to replace that profit as it declines or shrink dramatically. It also boosts returns on their content development, and provides a ton of marketing for their parks and resorts.

One can still make money on content by licensing it to streamers.

Spending $64 billion to buy a whole lot of additional linear commercial TV in 2019 can be attributed pretty directly to Iger.

Interesting article, but I'm surprised they didn't mention the large payment Disney is contractually obligated to make for Hulu. Even at the floor valuation $9 billion is a mountain of cash for a company saddled with an enormous debt load from the Fox acquisition and whose net cash flow hasn't been great over the last 7 quarters and has had all the cash they've generated going into debt repayments.

Iger did the disastrous Fox deal.

trying to diagnose Disney's fall from grace is beyond my paygrade. goes to show why index funds and diversification is so beneficial . true, Disney took on a lot of debt, but so did tesla and look how well tesla did in 2020-2021

Taking on debt per se isn’t bad. Question is whether taking on debt for NPV positive or negative assets.

Not to defend Chapek, but seems to me most of Disney’s problems were Iger problems.

  1. Iger did the disastrous Fox deal.

  2. Iger pushed into the disastrous streaming business.

  3. Iger forced a fight with DeSantis over culture war issues that have soiled the Disney brand.

I don’t know why an activist investors hasn’t put two and two together that Iger is the one who needs the boot.

Is there evidence that Disney suffered O($10B) from the DeSantis fight? I don't think it's really penetrated among the biggest Disney consumers (children and women obsessed with princess fantasies). Even the fact that it's in a rut putting out boring, derivative content is probably a bigger factor.

children and women obsessed with princess fantasies

If that's the core market, or an important part, then the decisions they've made recently have not helped. Look at the controversy over the recent Snow White live-action remake, which hasn't even been released yet. The leads giving interviews about scrapping the love story, dumping the prince, and the struggle between Snow White and the Evil Queen being over who is the "fairest" (read: most just) ruler is going to fundamentally change the story beyond just updating it for 2023. They're also getting rid of the Seven Dwarfs and bringing in seven 'magical creatures' instead, a move that has been roundly mocked due to the set photos that got released. Disney at first denied these were real, but were eventually forced to admit that yes, they were real, they just weren't official.

Revamp the princesses too much, and you lose the audience.

The rut is related to woke programming. Without DeSantis the programming still would’ve been woke and bad, but it fit the narrative that DeSantis helped create.

Disney was family; not necessarily women and kids obsessed with princesses (though of course they offered that). They need to try to rebuild that family brand.

I’m not sure how easy it is to rebuild a family reputation. It’s a matter of the broken trust. Disney is not longer the “it’s okay to let my kids see this movie or TV show without worrying about it” company. And without that level of trust, that parents can really be sure that content they’re putting out won’t be full of woke propaganda, sexual content, rude and obnoxious behavior, parents are not going to feel safe letting their kids watch Disney. Basically, especially as it concerns kids, watching the content is the same as trusting an adult with those values around your kid. Everyone knows that kids pick that stuff up.

The only reason that it’s a slow loss is that most of the rest of Hollywood TV and movies are equally bad in content. Even though I’m not Christian, about the only content I’d feel safe plopping a 5 year old in front of made after the 1969s is evangelical stuff. At least that way I can know that they won’t be subjected to propaganda, sexual content, or rude and obnoxious behavior in their TV and movie choices.

This leaves the question of how Christian entertainment goes mainstream for kids stuff. It’s kids stuff, it doesn’t have to be good, and lots of people are trying to pick the twenty dollar bill up off the sidewalk.

I think it would be much better if it didn’t feel like it has to preach at you or overtly quote the Bible. The biggest problem they have, for me is that they come off preaching at the audience all the time. You can show faith by actions and make good moral characters and show them doing good moral things without having to tell the audience. The best examples I can give off the top of my head are 7th Heaven and Little House on the Prarrie. In both, it was pretty obvious that the families were Christians, but the producers and writers didn’t feel the need to have everything boil down to “the message” and related Bible citations.

VeggieTales seems to have been the one that cracked the conundrum, but nobody managed to replicate it since.

but nobody managed to replicate it since

The recipe is one part captive audience (this was always 'Churches looking for Sunday school material' or other Christian parents looking for something that was, well, Christian), one part strangely competent 3D animation team (cartoons don't need to be complex re: industry dominated by low-cost CalArts style for the last 10 years, they just need to not look outright bad- simple objects that bend, thus "veggies", were arguably the ideal way to do this in the late '90s), one part sane storyboarders who can keep the message in their pants for more than 5 minutes, and one part parents that won't get a bug up their ass about it being a chocolate bunny instead of a golden idol even though the message works better (especially with that age group) if you use the former.

It is my opinion that you need all 4 of those things to make that kind of media work, and to a point it's why that group persisted. The other medias of this type were just... boring, like so fucking boring- they might have meant well but you can only do so much with kid's choir, puppet shows, and a host that's totally not going to be dealing with rape allegations in 20 years.

Agreed. But that’s why you need a public reputation. Sure LGBT aligned NGOs will bellyache but they aren’t really Disney’s core audience.

Chapek was right to want to stay out of politics and it seems like the biggest problem was his board support was a lesbian.

The Fox price seems like the worst decision, by a significant gap. I suspect Nelson Peltz is biding his time to do just that. Better to strike when the executives and board are weaker, when the target is this big.

Think peltz is on deaths door last I heard.

This sounds interesting, could you explain more? I'm very unaware.

Nelson Peltz is a fairly famous activist investor. The article mentions him, and he bought about a billion dollars of the stock last year, and currently owns about 6.4 million shares both amounts are less than 1% of the company. However it is enough to show a credible interest and to threaten proxy fights which he did earlier this year.

He definitely wanted a board seat and with the stock down as much as it is, he's in a better position for a proxy fight next year should be wish to try again. He was open about thinking Iger was not doing well with Disney.

Streaming and that as a platform turned out to be a tough business. WBD who I think has some awesome content trades at 50 billion in debt plus 30 billion in equity value which is really cheap compared to the valuations Netflix has achieved in the past.

You're forgetting the most important aspect for an entertainment company. Disney under Iger produced good content. Disney under Chapek didn't.

Except Iger was responsible for some horrible content like Star Wars, which he rushed into production - which caused a cascade of production issues and failures. Which then basically killed the movie side

I’m kinda wondering why Disney didn’t look at the cash cow they acquired and turn the actually good parts of the EU(which are after all known quantities) into GoT like series- HBO’s success was about the same time. It seems like an obstinate refusal to do the boring, safe thing made Disney blow what should have been a sure bet.

Not 100% sure on this specific case, but my understanding is that the usual reason for shenanigans like this is that the new owner would have to pay more (and/or do more-complicated negotiations) in order to get the rights to use the EU material, whereas "the EU is decanonised" costs nothing (except screaming fanboys, which execs are known for underestimating to some degree).

I think it's a combination of arrogance and general "Prequels PTSD"'.

The arrogance is not just in Iger rushing it to have it out in his time. It's also in the fact that the people on the A-side - the movies - just didn't give a shit about any of this. Joss Whedon admitted as much about the original MCU shows like Agents of Shield. They're lower budget fanfiction that just interfere with their canon (which is the real canon) and may confuse fans but they have to pretend to indulge because some nerds buy the tie-ins. In that way, they treat it much like Lucas did. They just didn't care. Especially since there's just so much you can point to to shit on the EU.

The second thing is that basically everyone old enough to work on these films either hates the Prequels or remembers the absolute, wall-to-wall hate the Prequels got. Simon Pegg is a friend of Abrams and look how he talks about them in an otherwise diplomatic industry.

But people disagree on what exactly was bad about the Prequels. As someone who grew up with them I hated the dialogue and characterization. I was not only fine with but loved the Republic era - plenty of us found some quality in the games, books or The Clone Wars show even if we agreed with the criticisms of the mainline films.

The message Disney apparently took was that they were bad in their essence: people didn't just hate the prequels cause of bad execution, they hated the idea. What everyone wanted more OT-like stuff, fewer Jedi, less of a Republic, more Empire v. Rebels, less shiny CGI Coruscant so give them a ton of that, at least at the start. Well, that led to the derivative mess we got and the insistence on movies like Rogue One and Solo which all stayed in the very safe "post-Revenge of the Sith, pre-A New Hope" space.

Which would have perhaps been survivable (The Force Awakens made too much money) but the rush meant no ability to plan for a coherent trilogy and each movie not only pissed off fans of anything original, it even pissed off fans of the previous movie.

The prequels were bloated movies with a decent concept and terrible execution. A strong editor and better action would’ve led to a great set of movies.

The sequels lacked even the decent concept.

A better editor would have helped, yes, but IMO the critical flaw in the Prequels was that George Lucas originally intended for the Big Bad Guy to be Darth Jar Jar Binks. The theory is that he chickened out when he saw the overwhelmingly bad fan reaction to the character in The Phantom Menace. But ironically the only thing that would have redeemed the character and the whole trilogy is if this bumbling idiot was just a Kaiser Soze-esque mask for Palpatine's master. Cowardly scrapping that left Episode II without a memorable villain.

For those who haven't seen it already: https://old.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/3qvj6w/theory_jar_jar_binks_was_a_trained_force_user/

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The stupid part is that for all intents and purposes, the EU draft for star wars sequels in the Zahn trilogy is very much "more of the OT" (not least because that's how Lucas told Zahn to write it). Unlike the chaos they got with total improvisation, the structure would have guaranteed some story coherence. And when I reread the books recently I was struck at how naturally they flow with the OT and how well they maintain the characterization. Luke doesn't feel like a completely different person, which is apparently not something to be taken for granted.

And as much as you can tax the EU of being bad or at least not good enough to fit on the silver screen (a debatable proposition given what we got instead), the Zahn trilogy is pretty universally beloved. I haven't met a prequel hater that doesn't at least recognize Thrawn as a memorable character. And I've actually met many who prefer the more mystic, weird and scruffy continuity of the Zahn sequels to the cleaner, sanitized and mighty setting the prequels had to depict.

They could even have had their cake and eaten it too, by just cribbing the narrative structure and characters and done a free adaptation of the EU, which is what they ended up having to do as a crutch anyways. TLJ being a midwit version of Kotor 2 and ROS being bargain bin Dark Empire.

The stupid part is that for all intents and purposes, the EU draft for star wars sequels in the Zahn trilogy is very much "more of the OT"

It's different in many ways. "More OT"' in the case of the Sequel Trilogy is literally "no, everything we can possibly roll back to then we will", in some sort of childlike desire to relive things exactly as they were, regardless of how it distorts the story. Republic? Gone despite what it does to the heroes' sacrifices. Han's character development? Gone. Leia's Jedi nature? Meh. The Jedi..come on.

This is silly because people want growth, but if it was rational I wouldn't call it PTSD.

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Kotor was such an amazing game. I for one would love to see a Revan series.

Early Iger or late? Disney don't have much good content since the great wokisation began in the mid 2010-s

It is clear from the article that Iger is very much a social creature. So when the environment went woke so did Iger.

Is that really true? Sure the stuff Disney has put out is garbage. But it’s because of the people Iger put in charge.

Also Disney is unique. They make a lot from parks. Chapek didn’t do a great job there though.

Time for some links about breaking and not so breaking culture war news.

1/Effective altruism

It is happening, Sam Bankman-Fried finally arrived in prison.

Here is exclusive dead bird thread about his first days in the big house.

2/Catholic church

The Pope gets more based and redpilled every day. On his latest visit in Mongolia, he celebrates achievements of Mongol Empire and praises unifying legacy of Genghis Khan.

No response so far, even after 800 years no one dares to disrespect memory of the greatest conqueror ever.

In contrast, when the Pope recently praised Russian tsars Peter and Catherine and called Russians do not forget their heritage, the feedback was massive.

Many people vigorously protested and pointed that Russian tsars were never friends of Catholic faith, and Ukraine put the Pope on official list of enemies.

Backlash was so big that Pope was cancelled and forced to apologize for his "faulty comments".

3/ Alt-right movement

New wild white warriors just appeared, one Christopher Pohlhaus with his Blood Tribe and became front page news overnight.

No surprise, their fashion sense is superb, their salutes are brisk, their flags are well ironed and their tattoos of Nazi and Satanic symbols are just perfect. Everone loves Nazis who look properly Nazi, and these guys cannot get any Nazier.

Why nobody heard about these people before?

Why they walk away scot free, no matter how many crimes they do?

Where they get money for their stunts?

Do not ask, just watch the show, be very, very afraid and support whatever measures are necessary to combat the Nazi menace.

4/Ayys

UFO enthusiasts can celebrate, long awaited secret document is now there in the wild, available for download.

It is really big thing if you are part of UFO community.

This book was written about 1960 by Albert Vernon Bowen, copywriter, journalist and children book author.

The manuscript was mysteriously seized by USAF, kept classified for 39 years, and then, it was even more mysteriously declassified and sent unsolicited by mail to UFO researcher Timothy Cooper.

It was the original manusript, but with notes added by unknown hand with ballpoint pen.

Timothy Cooper gave the book to another UFO researcher Robert Wood who published it - without the ballpoint notes. Since then, Woods kept the manuscript for himself and never allowed anyone to see it.

No surprise that all these sheeningans agitated UFO community and the book achieved near mythical status.

Now, it is finally out there. Was it worth the hype?

Let us see what is Bowen's argument for alien origin of flying saucers.

Such reasoning might lead to the asking of another question: Are Major Keyhoe, Ray Palmer, Kenneth Arnold, George Adamski, Harold T. Wilkinson, Donald E. Menzel, Frank Scully — and all other writers on the subject of saucers — counter espionage agents for the U.S. Government? Are all of them, by official directive, muddying-up the greatest cover- up job of modern times?

Such a question is equally absurd in the light of the record, in the light of the fact that saucers — or of things with the same attributes of saucers have been sighted for centuries, if not for millennia.

Furthermore, it is equally inconceivable, in trying to explore the possibility of hoax, that FATE Magazine, LIFE Magazine and TRUE Magazine, with their circulations and their reputations at stake, would deliberately involve themselves in a hoax. It is inconceivable that the Readers Digest, with its millions in circulation, would reprint the LIFE article claiming that saucers are extraterrestrial, or publish J.R. Aswell's article on saucer sightings for 150 years, if its editors thought saucers were a _ hoax. It is equally inconceivable that LOOK Magazine, with its millions in circulation, would first cling to the side of scientific explanation, then follow-up with an article on the seriousness of the Air Force's search, and later on, in October 1953, publish excerpts from Major Keyhoe's book, Flying Saucers From Outer Space, even though the editors said they did not commit themselves one way or the other. It is inconceivable that LIFE would publish an article Flying Saucers Bounces Off Design Board, a completely factual report on Canada's flying saucer and how it could work, and then follow, in its November 1, 1954 issue, with an equally factual report on what various Frenchmen claimed they had seen in the way of “little men” climbing out of flying saucers in the fall of 1954. It is inconceivable that The New York World Telegram & Sun should claim, early in 1955, that the U.S. Air Force knows what flying saucers are — if WT&S had any belief that they could be a hoax.

It is likewise equally inconceivable that men of the stature of Professor Herman Oberth, international rocket authority, Air Chief Marshall Lord Dowding, Commander in Chief of the British Air Force, Dr. Maurice A. Biot, leading American aerodynamicist, Dr. Walther Riedel, once chief designer and research director of the German rocket station on Peenemunde, and now doing work for the U.S., should have expressed the belief that saucers are real — and extraterrestrial — unless they had real reason for doing so.

Yes, it is rather underwhelming - but illustrating how people in the 1950's really felt, how trust in government, media and authorities in general was real thing, even among self professed skeptics.

This ship really sailed, there is no coming back.

Re: 3, the ADL and other advocacy groups have a vested interest in showing you the most irrelevant but vivid cases of extremism. They do this because it helps their ethnocultural block. It brings in wealthy donors who fund the ideological version of the Western Wall, it creates an image in the mind of the public of perpetual Jewish victimization, and it attempts to unify Jews together (stories of Jewish persecution are, like, half of the Torah; this is a deeply Jewish religious practice).

We saw this play out very clearly during the “day of hate” earlier this year, and both SS and myself wrote about that comprehensively. They found an absolute no one with something like ten telegram followers who planned to hand out flyers, and the whole behemoth of Jewish advocacy turned that into a “day of hate” quasi-religious spectacle, replete with police presence at every synagogue, statements by governors and congress, news reports and bipartisan condemnation. It turns out that the funder behind this push was a Jewish billionaire who has involvement with ultra-orthodox yeshivas and who lobbies for security enhancement bills that give synagogues free money yearly. But the ultimate absurdity of the day of hate is that a Jewish man in Florida read about the fiction of “the day of hate” from one of his advocacy group feeds and proceeded to find a gentile toddler and throw him against a wall while complaining about antisemitism. That’s right: while the Jewish advocacy engine complained about antisemitism, a Jewish extremist literally threw a toddler against a wall in response, and this got almost zero non-local attention. [Sources]

This is all very boring to post about which is why I don’t anymore, but this is the reason you will always hear about “literally who?” antisemites — it’s extremely beneficial for Jewish advocacy groups to bring this to your attention, groups which employ tens of thousands of people to specifically enhance Jewish Life in America, without any scruples about giving Americans anxiety attacks or leading to stochastic terrorism or just generally promoting fake news.

“I am adjacent to the corners of the dissident right from which stuff like this would come. I’m friends with many, many people, who live in that world and know it like the back of their hands. Somehow, nobody has ever heard of these groups that end up in national media. They have no history, they somehow organized themselves to the point of having uniforms and flags without ever leaving a trail on the internet, and weren’t known even by hardcore alt right autists until the day they make their national media debut.”

That’s because these guys aren’t Twitter dissident right, they’re much lower brow working class types, some veterans, some ex-cons, some both, they’re in the suburbs and exurbs in the south and Midwest, well away from urbanite dissident righters retweeting 34-tweet threads about celtic admixture, pictures of Leopoldville in the fifties and graphs about immigration demographics. These guys are on stornfront and lower brow sites, they have tattoos, they’re more interested in fishin and huntin than in Crusader Kings 5 or whatever.

And these are what, likely, the numerical bulk of real life ‘extreme rightist’ antisemitic types are like in the US, most of whom do not listen to Nick Fuentes and who have not read A Culture of Critique.

I haven't looked into this specific case, but I'm pretty sure these guys are twitter/discord dissident right, and claims to the contrary just stem from ... in part the far-right being quite large, somewhat fragmented due to all the censorship, but mostly just a lack of care for accuracy and attention to detail among those spreading the claims that allows the diffuse far-right social networks to amplify convenient-seeming information.

Even so, it’s highly unlikely that they could organize to such a level without anyone knowing they exist. That part is extremely weird, there are known groups. There are KKK groups, Neo-Nazis, National Socialists, Aryan Nations, etc. those groups aren’t ever seen to be protesting. It’s always a brand new group, always men of military age with high levels of fitness, fresh uniforms and flags, always with masks. Once or twice, sure, that could happen. But the two things together — a completely new set of groups and no one from the old guard showing up or knowing about these guys, and these new groups in an age of obesity all being physically fit? It’s not impossibe but it’s so highly improbable that these groups are organic.

Wouldn’t part of that learning be skepticism of new groups and memberships especially ones that require online purchases (and thus credit card information like their name and home address)? Then there’s the travel to appear sudden in Florida.

As far as skepticism goes, if you begin by denouncing all groups as compromised, it's impossible to do anything regardless of context.

The same is true if all groups actually are compromised.

That's just what a Fed would say. Encourage action, and then bring down the hammer for acting.

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It’s not all groups though. It’s extremely new compared to other groups out there, which, again, to anyone in a dissident movement would be a big red flag, especially when they’re selling the required uniform online. the OPSEC of simply showing up with such a group is pretty bad, as there’s no information about the leadership until after 1/6 when the government was basically put on notice that groups of dissident right people exist.

Normal prominent relatively milquetoast people like Jared Taylor can't even travel to Europe. Euros like Martin Sellner, who afaik has never even been convicted of anything, and who had the Austrian government pay his court costs after a lunatic jewish state prosecutor charged him with running a criminal organisation can't travel to either UK or US.

You want us to believe it's perfectly normal someone like that cretin Skullface who's as trashy and poor white with multiple criminal convictions as can be can just waltz over to Ukraine without any problems, and that he's lying when he's saying US government helped him go there?

It's assets all the way down.

You want us to believe it's perfectly normal someone like that cretin Skullface who's as trashy and poor white with multiple criminal convictions as can be can just waltz over to Ukraine without any problems, and that he's lying when he's saying US government helped him go there?

99.9% of dissident rightists can travel freely, a few very high profile figures known to prosecutors like Sellner, Taylor, Spencer had visa restrictions imposed upon them in large part because they publicly announced they were travelling to attend rallies, conferences or other political gatherings (which obviously served as motivation for prosecutors or interior department staff to deny those travel requests). Why would there be travel restrictions on random white trash with nazi tattoos?

And this also betrays a misunderstanding of how this travel happens. The US doesn't impose exit restrictions except de-facto via the No-Fly Scheme, which very few dissident rightists have ever been put on (Fuentes was never on the official scheme, his restriction (now rescinded) was a corporate ban). What happened was that various Western European countries like the UK, Germany, Austria imposed visa restrictions on high-profile dissident right activists. Eastern European countries tend not to do this in part because they're largely under conservative governments, so the 'route' to Ukraine from the US (which typically involves flying to Poland or Hungary) is unaffected. Even in the event of a Schengen-wide ban (uncommon in these cases), flying from the US to Romania (outside the Schengen zone) and then travelling into Ukraine is feasible.

Yeah. I believe Fuentes' presence on a corporate list was due to bad behavior on a flight, it looks like over wearing a mask.

Fuentes is vastly more notorious and has a higher media profile than Taylor.

Given his behavior around january 6th- when he said things far more damning than Trump, it's almost certain the claims that feds have him by the short hairs are true.

known to prosecutors like Sellner, Taylor

Taylor was never prosecuted for anything, as far as I know.

I didn’t mean to say they were prosecuted, just that they’re regularly mentioned on lists of far right intellectuals and activists, and so prosecutors will be aware of them.

The "Blood Tribe" comes off to me as some O9A type thing, which would basically make then "pagan aristocrat" Satan worshippers essentially doing a Nazi larp for their own cultic purposes, if I've understood correctly.

What’s O9A?

Order of 9 Angles, a truly weird and disturbing nihilistic occultist group.

You’re right, they are capital W weird batshit crazy, but where did we get the vibe that they worship satan as opposed to being run of the mill gangbanging Nazis?

And they keep showing being all wHyWoNtYouTaKeUsSeRiOuSlY? ducking cartoon characters..

I can't speak for Stefferi's characterization of them but I understand them to be more LaVeyan Satanist than theistic Satanist. They're anti-Judeo-Christian in their outlook.

I meant the protestors, not order of nine angles. Where’d we get the vibe that the protestors are some kind of self-consciously anti Christian cult as opposed to being run of the mill gangbanging Nazis that got too into their larp.

Ah, I misunderstood. You'll have to ask Steff about that one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Nine_Angles

In all likelihood, it'd also make them FBI provocateurs.

Maybe, maybe not, but my point was that there is also a non-FBI-provocateur explanation which would go to explain why their optics are so offputting, why the whole thing comes off as a LARP and why they're not familiar to others in the US extreme right scene.

That’s because these guys aren’t Twitter dissident right, they’re much lower brow working class types, some veterans, some ex-cons, some both

This doesn’t line up with my personal experiences with the types you’re talking about: the kinds of low brow toughs you’re talking about are far too disengaged from politics and history to even really understand what it means to have an ideology, let alone one imported from a regime that hasn’t even existed for 70 years.

Not to say these types can’t be every bit as provocative and antagonistic as actual Nazis. But it would almost always take the form of low level reactive aggression; think randomly attacking a brown guy “cuz we don’t like dem coloreds round here” rather than an ideology an actual fascist transported from 1930s Europe would recognize.

Oh I think most modern day “neo nazis” are an aesthetic LARP rather than an engagement with actual fascist ideology, these guys obviously haven’t read Schmitt and don’t have views on the state and economics beyond that they want the Jews out of them.

My point is more that a lot of these people are real, they’re not wholesale fabricated by the FBI and even if they’re heavily monitored and infiltrated sometimes (the same is, of course, true of the ‘intellectual’ DR) there are probably as many of these lowbrow ‘neonazis’ as there are comparatively highbrow Kevin MacDonald enjoyers etc.

I'd strongly suspect there is a prison pipeline that feeds "Aryan Nation" type ideology, and these types do buy into it.

I mean you’re portraying these people as typical working class red tribers that hunt and fish, but realistically most IRL white supremacists got into it by making meth or going to prison, which is quite a few rings below.

True, that’s the upper tier of these guys. That said, most actual activists of this kind are believers in a way the average prison white gang member isn’t.

The true believer threshold is true as far as it goes, but IME the underclass are antisemites to begin with and racism isn’t a big stretch past their preexisting attitudes.

A lot of the underclass are antisemites by the ADL’s definition because they use phrases like “he jewed me” to mean ripped off, but they’re not necessarily such by the definition of a hardcore antisemite.

3/ Alt-right movement

Why nobody heard about these people before?

Because it's convenient? There are two groups, the Goyim Defense League and the Blood Tribe.

The Goyim Defense League has made national news before, most prominently for hanging the "Kanye Was Right About The Jews" banner over an LA Overpass last year.

Polhaus, leader of the Blood Tribe has been an activist for years under various different group names, including the "Hammer" brand since at least early 2021 when his telegram channel had ~6k members. where he apparently also sold white nationalist branded merch.

Why they walk away scot free, no matter how many crimes they do?

They don't. Kent Ryan McLellan who claims he went and fought in Ukraine at the behest of the CIA has been arrested and jailed several times according to FL court records.

Where they get money for their stunts?

Judging from the court documents, selling meth.

You realize that 2021 is just two years, right? Even if what you say is true, that makes Polhaus an extremely new activist leader able to create a new organization in a year or less and able to gain enough followers with enough fervor to get a rally planned and get people to risk showing up (which would seem a problem for any highly despised ideology being subject to honeypots aimed at disrupting their activities and thus trust would be a huge problem). Yet he can win ove4 the skeptics well enough to get people to join publicly and buy merch online. Which gives names and addresses

This protest had 15 people between two aligned groups. I'm not convinced you need to be a master statesmen to gather these kinds of numbers.

I did another brief search and found Polhaus fundraising as of 2020.. I'm sure he has been around for awhile.

I like this post. Would be down for more! Even though we typically disagree about object level things hah.

Ukraine put the Pope on official list of enemies.

Worth noting that this didn't happen. It's not an official list of Ukrainian enemies (the Pope isn't even in that list, but that's details)

Wait, so what is it? Because that sounded hilarious. A book of grudges.

It is a website, that "publishes a running list, and sometimes personal information, of people who are considered by authors of the website to be enemies of Ukraine" but without any official backing.

In post Soviet parts of the internet it's treated more like a meme, and sometimes site owners seemingly lean into unseriousness as well, but that some gullible American conservative picked it up and started wringing hands about "Ukrainian kill list" fails to surprise me

List is used in court, by police officers, and by death squads. Fair to call it a kill list if international journalists who were put on it get killed.

That the authors of the list don't do the killings themselves but merely help in coordinating them is just a convenient cop-out.

1/Effective altruism

It is happening, Sam Bankman-Fried finally arrived in prison.

Here is exclusive dead bird thread about his first days in the big house.

back to jail, and bad accommodations. yeah, so much for all his donations and connections helping him, as some predicted. But still too soon to know for sure and it's still possible he may get a light sentence.

Can we get a Netflix series or something about this?

Like Orange is the New Black, but with nerdier cringe comedy.

That would be fantastic. I'm picturing SBF trying to buy designer stimulants from the neo nazi gang that sells meth.

I bet they'll hook a brother up.

The Bolsheviks were heavily infiltrated by the Okhrana. To the degree that they had at least one, and perhaps several, high level meetings where nearly every person present was on the Tsar's payroll. (The degree of financial support I don't know.) Not only that but they Okhrana's strategy was to crush other more moderate groups, hoping the Bolshevik's radicalism would turn off 'normie' support. Needless to say, that strategy backfired.

“Generally”?

That sounds like you need a second point to make a line. I think it’s the plot of a Metal Gear game, though, so that might count.

I doubt anyone is really that much cowed by the legacy of Genghis Khan, more like he's too irrelevant to cancel the Pope over, unlike Russia.

He's also a PoC, so his patriarchal and genocidal tendencies can be overlooked and his non-discrimination of foreigners and infildels can be celebrated.

Backlash was so big that Pope was cancelled and forced to apologize for his "faulty comments".

'Pope Francis acknowledged on Monday that his recent comments on Russia, seen by Ukraine as praise for imperialism, were badly phrased and said his intention was to remind young Russians of a great cultural heritage and not a political one.[...]

"Maybe it wasn't the best way of putting it, but in speaking of the great Russia, I was thinking not so much geographically but culturally," Francis said, mentioning Russian literary icon Fyodor Dostoevsky, one of his favorite authors.'

It'd have been a great act of trolling on his part had the mentioned Solzhenitsyn instead, although I doubt Dostoevsky believed in the legitimacy of Ukrainian nationhood either. Either way, I doubt the Pope's qualified remarks will make a shred of difference in the eyes of the Atlanticists who voiced their outrage. After all, I doubt there's an interpretation of Russian cultural heritage being great anywhere in the world that includes the existence of an ethnic nationalist Ukrainian polity that is a satellite state of NATO.

It’s worth noting that the pope’s poor relationship with eastern catholic groups(none of whom like Russia very much) is a factor; these groups have rights within the Catholic Church and do not like the current pope to begin with.

Here is exclusive dead bird thread about his first days in the big house.

  • When Sam arrived at MDC his bunkmate wouldn't let him into the cell because he thought he was a "Chomo" or C*d Mester. They tried to move him to multiple cells but he was having disputes with his bunkmates. They finally moved him to the 4th floor with the Asians. He is hooked up with a gang from Downtown Manhattan. They are either protecting or extorting him, there is a thin line in prison. He has been sitting on the floor with newspapers, likely doing Sudokus.

...

  • Being Jewish might be a problem for Sam because of the high amounts of anti-semitism in Prison, especially if he lands in a Penitentiary after trial. When Prison riots happen the prisons split into White, Brown, and Black. Sam needs to decide which group to align himself with. Martin suggests that Sam may unironically have luck converting to Islam for protection.

I feel like I've seen a bunch of variations on these kinds of stories on TV and from actual ex-cons (it's a mini-industry on Youtube) and I still find it hard to believe these sorts of dynamics are just taken for granted. It almost feels like ludicrous cliches repeated until they're just assumed to be true...

And the idea that SBF willingly fucked himself into one of these places...Can Michael Lewis just release the book? Because I need to know how his mind ticks.

I'm not sure I believe everything Martin Shkreli and his alleged insider source say about what's going on. Shkreli is a liar and fraudster and making something off the back of SBF by posing as "yeah I'm this tough ex-con, I know how it works" on X isn't convincing me.

It's indisputable that Bankman-Fried is an idiot, though; he breached his bail conditions about "shut the hell up and stop going online" so often that it's not surprising the judge was pissed-off enough to send him to the slammer.

.Can Michael Lewis just release the book? Because I need to know how his mind ticks

hasn't considerable ink been spilled on this matter? he's a basically a high IQ sociopath and some narcissism too, similar to many white collar criminals and cult leaders. he had the boy genius thing going on, but same sort of thing.

I don't know if he's a sociopath; I think he's that particular kind of smart idiot who was very mathy and his indulgent parents and all around him told him he was a genius and he believed it. Given that his parents are both law profs, how the hell he ended up in jail can't be explained by anything other than that they indulged and enabled him to try and get around the restrictions on the phone and online time, etc.

Except then that having the freakin' NYT publish a story you gave them, involving private documents of a third party, is not keeping your head down and at least pretending to be compliant. Actions have consequences, and this is them.

I don’t know about sociopath. I feel like behaviors become beliefs. He may have crossed a few smaller lines and gotten away with it. Then bigger lines. Then all of a sudden he’s running a full fledged Ponzi scheme and has lost any about to see where the line of societal rules exists. Alcoholics don’t drink a bottle of vodka a night on their first sip.

Not to kick EA movement when it's down because hoo boy did SBF give them a black eye, but it's that general attitude: "we are so so Smart and we are working hard to make things go better with our Smart and we have all these lovely theories that the normies, bless their little Not Smart hearts, could never understand" at work, combined with "everyone I know has been on legal speed since they were in primary school, plus we are So Smart we call our drug taking 'nootropics' and 'hacking our brains to be more efficient'" and thus you end up with the guy taking so many pills he rattles when he walks and he's so wired to the moon he can't sleep above four hours a night, as per coffee_enjoyer below.

That gushing, fawning interview/article about how he was going to be the saviour of the world via crypto and EA probably didn't help, when you've got people propping up your view of yourself with "Sam, some say you are the most wonderful person in the history of humanity ever. I'm not one of them. I think you are merely superhuman and the greatest living genius right now".

how the hell he ended up in jail can't be explained by anything other than that they indulged

He was abusing dopaminergic drugs typically prescribed to Parkinson’s patients and went years with only four hours of sleep per night. I wouldn’t be surprised if we learn that he was abusing a lot of nootropics in addition to selegiline

I wouldn’t be surprised if we learn that he was abusing a lot of nootropics

Now I'm imagining a next-generation HHS targeted-ad campaign, "Modafinil destroys."

You think I'm joking. I'm not.

SBF is probably going to be classified into a low security prison, so he will not have to deal with any of the gang bullshit and instead the overcrowding.

Jail, and federal jail particularly, tends to mix security classifications together prior to trial as a matter of course so it tends to be generally worse than what most people experience.

depends how long he gets. he may get medium prison if he gets a life sentence, similar to Madoff

The biggest story of the week within the Dissident Right is the war between Elon Musk and the ADL. Quick rundown:

I'm skeptical there would be any sort of lawsuit, but that discovery would be very interesting to see the way ADL communicates with advertisers. But this week has been stacking wins for the Dissident Right, it's basically more engagement in the public sphere than the Alt-Right ever had.

How close do you think Keith is to making a big difference in Ireland? That seems to be his driving motivation.

I don't think he's anywhere close to achieving that. Irish politics is very local, and the closest thing to successful radical right politics in recent times was done by concerned neighbours using WhatsApp to organise anti asylum seeker protests. These people are nobodies politically or on Twitter, but they actually managed to cause trouble for the Irish government.

I asked a friend involved in the National Party what he thought of Keith Woods and he said "he's doing great work but he's only popular in the general Anglosphere, not so much in Ireland".

If he influences Ireland with his current strategy it will be downstream of whatever success he achieves in America.

I don't think it's possible to make a real difference on the blood-and-soil nationalist spectrum anymore, the world has moved beyond that. I think the only solution is to think at a global pan-European scale, although it's understandable why an Irish nationalist would find it difficult to embrace that. It's contrary to the nationalist struggle they identify with. It's my main disagreement with Keith, and that ideological difference ultimately led to his falling out with Richard Spencer.

It's telling that Keith's influence is mostly related to American politics, although he did make some waves recently regarding the Irish hate speech bill.

The blood-and-soil nationalist type versus the Spencerian globalist type is going to be one of the biggest rifts on the DR. Keith is on the former, I fall more on the latter.

At this stage, I'm so confused I can't tell if you mean this guy or this guy (because supposedly the dissident right is trying to make inroads over here).

If the latter - honestly, is this the best the Dissident Right can do? This pale, weedy specimen? Keith Wood Ex-Rugby Player is a better sample of what you'd want appearance-wise in 'guy who is fighting for the soul of the nation as a White Anglo-Protestant traditionalist'.

I think Woods (the rightist) is Republic of Irish, at least he often posts about Republic of Ireland issues.

Dissident Right influencer Keith Woods

Okay, I got a Youtube channel and he's Irish by his accent, and if he's thirty I'm the revenant of Margaret Thatcher.

What the hell is some kid doing with this tripe? Twenty or thirty years ago, he'd have been 'up the Rah' about Irish nationalism. Ireland has certainly become a lot more multi-cultural today, to the extent that I saw as many as four different African people around my local town the other day (don't laugh, we were pretty much 100% white Irish up till a few years ago) but for fuck's sake, we don't need to import UK/USA white supremacist stupidity.

When you import ethnic groups you also import conflict between those groups.

we don't need to import UK/USA white supremacist stupidity.

Well you imported BLM stupidity, so turnabout is fair play.

That's what I hate: the idiot Dublin 4 type wokies playing at being relevant (when it's Sinn Féin who have the appeal to the working class) for 'the poor and minorities' when their natural audience is the middle-class liberals, importing lock stock and barrel the BLM nonsense (including getting African immigrants spouting the same crap about 'the Feds' and racism) and then the English white supremacists trying to barge in on the other side and scoop up people.

I'd boot the entire lot of them off to Inishvickillaun to fight it out, and let the rest of us get on with life.

including getting African immigrants spouting the same crap about 'the Feds' and racism

I don't think 'the Feds' is the fault of Irish wokies. It's because every Nigerian in Ireland has a cousin in London and so Drill/Grime music slang spills over.

The former Canadian ambassador to Israel came on to chastise people who accused her of dual loyalty during her tenure and demands for anyone who believes that to speak up.

Technically speaking, I'm sure she's right. It seems very obvious that her loyalty is not dual indeed.

I’m impressed with the restraint. I would have expected the campaign to degenerate into literal happy-merchant posting by now. Elon might actually win here.

I think you meant to post this as a top-level, not a reply.

I'm not looking for a perma-ban for "single issue posting".

And you’re doing this by…joining other threads to talk about the ADL?

The OP hewed pretty close to bare links, so I can’t really blame you for taking your own spin.

Yes? Adding it as a comment to more of a roundup thread is less risky than a top-level thread, I received a 7-day ban for my last one.

The OP hewed pretty close to bare links, so I can’t really blame you for taking your own spin.

The thread is "Time for some links about breaking and not so breaking culture war news" and my reply is contributing to that.

Yes? Adding it as a comment to more of a roundup thread is less risky than a top-level thread, I received a 7-day ban for my last one.

No, it's not. Do you think you're invisible if you don't post a top-level thread?

I'm not going to ban you for this comment, but it's borderline and adds to our stack of evidence that all you ever post about is Jews, and that even when you pretend you're posting about something else, it will always turn out to be about Jews, and when you respond to someone else in another thread, you will make it about Jews. So yes, if you continue to do this, you will eat another ban.

  • -13

If there's relevant CW topics like the Indian Reservation excavations, or this controversy between Musk and the ADL, I'm going to post about it, sorry. If you're going to perma-ban me, then whatever.

We're not asking you to not post about it. We're asking you to also post about other stuff.

More comments

Hey I’ll post it and they can whack-a-mole my alts.

Sorry, I wasn’t being sarcastic. I really do think it fits in for that reason.


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