Month: August 2021

by liberal japonicus Tossing out another quasi open thread. My FB has a number of Canuck friends getting their ballots in the mail. Here’s the WaPo article on it. Anyone want to talk about this? I do have a joke that I heard that seems apropos. One Mexican was speaking to a compatriot and said … Read more

by liberal japonicus I don’t know what everyone saw of the Olympics. Here in Japan, it was very much contested, seemed very Japanese, as if the country put on a show for the rest of the world, but no one came。 This is a wonderful article about Yu Miri and the Olympics by Miles Osgood. … Read more

by liberal japonicus Since I’ve been found out, I figure I should just fly my hammer and sickle flag. Debout, les damnés de la terre!! But naturally, the Japanese flavor of Marxism tastes a bit different…. https://palladiummag.com/2021/08/20/the-school-that-built-asia/ But during its lifetime, the Japanese colony was a highly unusual exercise in the history of imperialism. The … Read more

by liberal japonicus This op-ed from the South China Morning Post might give something to talk about. The piece is actually quite interesting, contrasting the glee expressed by various Chinese sources and the nervousness of a potential flash point with the Uighurs that could arise. A lot of Western media have accused the outlet of … Read more

by liberal japonicus As I mentioned earlier in a comment, I was going to go back to posting a Friday open thread. I’m not sure why I stopped, but maybe it was just was too mechanical to post ‘This is an open thread’ without doing anything else. It was obviously too easy for me to … Read more

by wj It feels like we are overdue for another Open Thread. So here are a couple of totally unrelated items to kick it off. First, it appears that a Texas school district may have found a possible way around idiot governors who want to ban mask mandates: dress codes!!! https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/08/18/texas-masks-paris-dresscode-abbott/ Authority over these seems … Read more

by liberal japonicus A flurry of new discoveries at Göbekli Tepe https://www.archaeology.org/issues/422-2105/features/9591-turkey-gobekli-tepe-hunter-gatherers https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210815-an-immense-mystery-older-than-stonehenge Amazing stuff

by liberal japonicus There are a ton of articles, so any list is going to suffer from selection bias. This 1-2 punch from LGM sums up my feelings Dan Nexon‘s take concludes with Events in Afghanistan do not necessarily provide retrospective justification for a continued presence there or buttress future arguments for U.S. intervention, military … Read more

by wj Here in California, we are having a recall election for our Governor. Why? After all, it’s not like the mess with Cuomo in New York. Well, today the official Voter Information Guide with Sample Ballot arrived in the mail. The official reason: Governor Newsom has implemented laws which are detrimental to the citizens … Read more

by liberal japonicus Lest it be felt that we are ganging up on one person, I post this for our favorite libertarian Jeffrey Clark, the highest-ranking DOJ official who tried to install Donald Trump as dictator, has been rewarded with a nice sinecure with a prominent libertarian litigation group The NCLA is not a fringe … Read more