It’s going to be an awkward conversation but she is officially off the trivia team. If she thinks I’m switching trains to get to Capital Hill just to lose, she’s got another fact to learn.

It probably means the prime minister will be a more moderate figure from the left that can work with centrists. They’ll horsetrade with the centrists over cabinet positions and policy priorities. You could imagine a deal where Macronists get foreign affairs posts (like Minister for Armed Forces and Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs) and the left gets domestic ones (like Minister of Labor, Minister for Health, etc.)

In reality, that’s way simpler than it likely will be. Realistically, given France’s history, it probably means some gridlock and grandstanding. Every Prime Minister wants to be president next so there’s probably going to be some positioning for the next presidential election (in 2027) involved. Maybe they’ll get along for a year and then have new elections.

We don’t host the Olympics in an election year until 2028. We have plenty of time to prepare. Plus, fascists famously suck at using the Olympics for propaganda. Hitler’s 1936 Berlin games was supposed to be a showcase of German superiority and then Jesse Owens dominated the marquee event.

BONUS FUN FACT: Until the 1936 Olympics, somehow no one had realized that Haiti and Liechtenstein had the same flag. So, Liechtenstein added a crown to theirs and then made that their new national flag.

Well, it didn’t seem to work for the election.

In the U.S., “Neck” by Cameo has become a college marching band standard. I wonder if that will help. Not that it would come from U.S. college sports but maybe a song like “Sweet Caroline” or “Seven Nation Army” that’s played at professional sporting events in multiple countries.

I’ve been to Paris several times now and I found it way better after I did all the touristy stuff. Just walking around old neighborhoods and doing less iconic activities. I kind of had to run out of “must do” tourist checklist things before I really appreciated Paris.

It’s good for marketing, though. “Ah, our software is so powerful, it could destroy humanity! Please pass a bill saying so while we market friendly chatbots to the public while actually making money by selling our products to despots and warmongers that might actually end humanity.”

I’ve just been saying what the world most needs now is a bunch of fucking morons with lots of money. Things aren’t nearly ignorant enough.

Yep. The best part of the U.S. constitution is the amendments. We should probably all spend some time thinking about that. Is our constitution good? The edits and polite suggestions are. The main bits are outdated, though, and were written by eloquent people who had the same knowledge of 2024 as we have for the year 2350.

As a leftist in Louisiana, it’s sometimes important to remind people that there were more Trump voters in California than Texas.

Obligatory: when he was at Princeton, there was a tradition where during the first snowfall of the year, the sophomores would make a lap around their dorm naked. Somehow, Ted Cruz took a wrong turn and instead of waiting for him, everyone locked him out of the dorm.

The Roberts court is arguably the worst since The Taney court (before the Civil War). It’s Calvinball and whole textbooks probably have to be rewritten after this term. Several justices are openly corrupt. Half their decisions just cause chaos for lower courts because they’re too chickenshit to even be bad in a clear way and define a simple test. (What is an “official act”? Only the Supreme Court knows for sure but they’ve decided to let lower courts try to decide so they get a menu of options.)

Just open hostility to the rule of law. There’s been worse decisions but bribed judges deciding “gratuities” aren’t bribes is top 5 for most shameless.

Ok, fine. I’ll stop lighting Canada on fire. We all have to do our part.

Private Internet Access is a VPN service.

Hard disagree. Russia is worse at the moment but the West is perfectly fine with neocolonialism (using multinational corporations rather than annexations). And we spread destabilizing lies all the time. The most recent one exposed is the U.S. military’s “psychological operations team” (in Tampa, FL) spreading antivax lies about Chinese and Russian vaccines in the Philippines and Middle East.

We absolutely have large scale disinformation campaigns. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

The military’s “psychological operations team” is based in Tampa, FL and that’s all they do. And that’s just DoD. The CIA obviously does even more.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to an industrial coast but I assure you, they will do a lot to protect themselves while not doing anything positive for the residents of Louisiana. Oil executives and energy traders in Houston will reap the benefits while Louisiana gets a handful of mostly blue collar jobs in exchange for oil spills, cancer, destruction of wetlands, and climate refugees from rising sea levels.

In 2017, under Corbyn, Labour got over 40% of the vote compared to about 34% yesterday. Even in 2019 under Corybyn, Labour got like 32%. The narrative in Britain might be that Corbyn was too divisive and Starmer is a unifier but the real issue is that the right wing was split this time in ways it wasn’t under Boris Johnson.

I mean, say what you want about Corbyn — lord knows the garbage UK media will — but his Labour Party did very well once and about average the next time. The main issue is that using a “first past the post” system in a country with more than 2 parties is silly and undemocratic.

I agree with everything except that A.I. doesn’t make money and may never solve a problem important enough to justify the cost.

Lots of western companies are. Not everything is subject to sanctions — the U.S. government still buys uranium from Russia and there’s cooperation on space launches — but even the companies that tried to divest for moral reasons found it challenging, to say the least. The ones who tried often had their assets essentially stolen or sold for pennies on the dollar to a Putin loyalist oligarch.

I’m not sure what Apple is doing there besides having the App Store. They did stop all exports so any new Apple products there are smuggled and probably way more expensive. On balance, I think it’s better keeping the App Store and software updates available to Russians. Some dissidents and journalists use Apple products too and you don’t want their devices left insecure.