Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

Milo representing himself reminds me of Keane vs Keane, as dramatized in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes.

Oh, goody, another nazi (Arpaio) running for Senate… on the repugnican’t ticket, of course

E.T.A., Yabbadabbadopolous as his own lawyer ensures that there won’t be any distracting “motions”, “testimony”, or any (real) “lawyers” to get in the way of his “LOOOOK AT MEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!” show

Kim Jong-Un is simply following in his grandfather’s footsteps. He is playing Trump — he knows he’s got a fish on the line and is making the most of it. He knows very well that if there is an actual war between North Korea and the US, nuclear or conventional, he’s dead and his country is destroyed. Part of his shtick is to do his best to convince the US that if he’s attacked, he WILL use his nukes.

It’s an old tactic to maintain power by scaring people about some foreign enemy, and Trump’s idiotic tweets are making it easy for Kim to pose as a hero standing up against the Big Bad Trump and the American Wolves. (Only he can fix it — does that sound familiar?) We don’t know how much real news about how life is so much easier in South Korea filters through to the average North Korean — the elites know, of course, but they want to hold on to their privileged position. I assume that South Koreans are officially presented as virtual slaves of the evil Americans. The same thing was done in the US in the 50s and 60s, to the point that many people were convinced that the Communists were about to arrive on US beaches with irresistible forces. That was one of the reasons for the stupid Vietnam War, where the US convinced itself that a poor peasant nation was an existential threat — with horrifying results. There are still a lot of older people who fear Communists, but Putin isn’t a Communist (officially, anyway), so it’s all good with Russia, amirite?

Kim’s nukes are meant to deter the US — he has learned the lesson of Sadaam and Gaddafi. Basically he has to play this game to keep a fundamentally rotten political/economic system from total collapse. He does a really good job of convincing the US that he will use nukes if he’s attacked, even if it does him no good. It’s basically Nixon’s madman theory. Trump is probably bluffing too, but he really is delusional and unstable, so he scares me a million times more than Kim does. The other thing that Kim gains from this game is that it shows Trump as willing to consider sacrificing South Korea to protect his ego, which gives Kim some leverage with South Korea — which has to question whether the US is a real ally, and therefore whether it should make more of an effort to mollify Kim.

Holy hell, is David even alive anymore?

slightly annoyed, the answer is the same as when you asked the same question six days ago.

Steve Bannon has left Breitbart. What does he do next, I wonder?

@Moggie My bad, mixing up the Kims.

And @Mish

But the thing is that he has complete control over N. Korean media, so he has the option to say one thing for internal consumption and something totally different for the rest of the world. To a certain extent, it’s logical. Wanting nukes is regrettably very logical. Threatening to use them keeps his enemies off balance, which is a reasonable calculation except for the “Holy F***, nuclear war!” part. I think he’s cultivated the wild and dangerous persona in order to dissuade hostile countries (most of them) from invading. No sensible US president would deliberately offend him. When the US president is as touchy and erratic and Kim pretends to be, the calculation changes. At least I rather hope so, because it would mean there’s at least one adult in the equation. Just not the one many people think.

Richard Spencer (the slightly less wimpish Nazi – the one who can take a punch) is suing University of Cincinnati for violating his free speech rights.
Apparently being asked to pay a charge for security is restriction of speech.

<3 David. You get better! Healing takes time and effort, and I'm very glad you're taking that seriously. I imagine your doctors have said "stay off the keyboard as much as you can!" or similar, and I'm very happy you're doing that whole-heartedly.

It takes *months* to reverse physiological problems, at a *minimum*. Take your time, you will improve!

Good to see you, David! And hoping you are as well as may be and getting better.

Here is Shaun’s first video on them (re Mad Max: Fury Road). He’s obsessed with them, by his own admission.

I’d also recommend BobVids’ “Everything Wrong With Everything Wrong With” series, which recently included an in-depth study of the history and practices of CinemaSins.

@David F.
Nice to hear from you! Take all the time you need in getting a grip on your health issue. We’ll talk among ourselves.

General

@Dormousing_it
Sorry about the delay. My nym should now link to my blog.

@Shadowplay
I’ve still got to do the work of peeling my individual experience from any generalized language about negative feeling and text.

Raw text is simultaneously amazing and infuriating. It’s amazing that we’ve made this thing to communicate with, but my upbringing and educational experience left me feeling a lot of negativity about language and non-group members. The first time I saw a chat room on a screen I felt negative about it. I’m still thinking about that one. I’m from a conservative, traditional American Pentacostal Air Force family. That’s left a whole bunch of things I need to be aware of and recontextualize that mostly just burn. Lot’s of negative but I still feel the positive and can remember it, it’s just hard given my last decade.

This slice of my TS/ADHD/OCD is so small and my feeling is raw and intense even when positive. At the moment I’m thinking about best ways to think about human development. How many definable developmental stages we might have (I’m leaving room for at least dozens between birth and puberty), how the timing can change between stages and between individuals as a function of natural diversity, how such timing can be influenced by ancestral experience (inherited developmental predispisitions, probably epigenetics related), culture (propagating it), just for the practice in figuring it out. I’m hypothesizing that I’ve turned my role-modeled culture’s fear of non-group members into something I attach to problem social behavior. It might also be involved in my general social anxiety.

Here’s an example: TS “turns on” (on average) at about 7 years old in terms of tics appearing. That’s right at the boundary between Piaget’s Pre-operational and Concrete Operational stages. So not only do I need a better feel for how my culture warped me, I need to figure out how I’m uniquely warped relative to things like that and how to be fair and useful about it more broadly. Extend back to conception and forward to extreme old age. I’m pissed off that we’re excessively pathologizing natural features of human nature instead of properly coming to terms with them, but it does get complicated when we can start breaking normal communication down into things we can technically label (the list of neurotic responses can be applied to arguments easily since they are general kinds of responses). My culture fucked me up and I can’t just blame that on my parents (blame’s not even appropriate in so much of it). But it still happened. I feel I may still need a sharper sense for how to look for places where I may still be part of the social problem, and frankly I am seeing two therapists one for me, and one for me and my spouse as a couple. My feelings need definition.