Recent posts

#1

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by The Minsky Moment - Today at 04:14:14 PM

Leon is an old timer, a former Reagan hand in the Justice Department.

#2

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by Baron von Schtinkenbutt - Today at 04:04:36 PM

I love judicial snark.

#3

Off the Record / Re: Climate Change/Mass Extinc...

Last post by Baron von Schtinkenbutt - Today at 03:56:46 PM

Before the US Supreme Court changed the Chevron test, I would have said this decision would certainly have been quashed by the court.  But now I am not so sure. 

I don't understand.  My understanding of Chevron is that the decision, and resulting "Chevron deference", defended a similar action by the EPA against a challenge by an environmental group.  I would assume reversing that deference would make it easier to challenge this (though I think it won't matter either way with this court).

#4

Off the Record / Re: [Canada] Canadian Politics...

Last post by crazy canuck - Today at 03:48:24 PM

Somebody got video of the RCMP rushing to the school.  They got on scene in an impressive 2 minutes and saved a lot of lives.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUpO1YbESTT/?igsh=d2dncHk0MTBqOTh1

#5

Off the Record / Re: [Canada] Canadian Politics...

Last post by Valmy - Today at 03:40:39 PM

It's not clear.   

Edit: new info

Officers inside the school recovered a long gun and a modified handgun. Neither were registered to Van Rootselaar, whose firearms licence expired in 2024.

Just want to point out that the perp was using those weapons illegally. What I am not clear on is what the legal status of those particular firearms were.

[So, yes, I saw quite a while ago that the passing of my parents' generation would leave a gap to be filled and I have been trying to fill it. But I realise now that I entirely misunderstood the scale and nature of the hole there would be. I had thought it was primarily an organisational issue. That it was mainly about finding the time and my brother-in-law editing films of Mum and Dad's witness, so our children could use them in talks.In fact, the problem was far more profound. The problem was not really about how the story would be told, but how it would be received. To a rising generation, what happened to my parents had become distant history, like the Battle of Waterloo or the American Civil War. A subject to be read about in a textbook or revised for an exam.]

#6

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 03:40:03 PM

No, not quite. It's just that we have stopped being under the delusion that the Americans are a reliable ally and a reliable trading partner.

Also less likely to lecture you about antisemitism. 

I'd thought about posting this but hadn't because I couldn't really think of a thread about it - but I think this attitude is possibly dangerously blind to what's going on on the American right/internet with anti-semitism which matters because we live on America's internet. So there may need to be a bit of self-lecturing too. From the Times:

Daniel Finkelstein: How the world's antisemites turned on me
The Times columnist's mother survived Bergen-Belsen. When far-right activist Nick Fuentes began spreading antisemitic, pro-Hitler ideas, our writer challenged him. He wasn't ready for the onslaught that ensued


Daniel Finkelstein at the West London Synagogue, where his parents were married
TOM JACKSON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE
Tuesday February 10 2026, 5.00am, The Times

About a year before my mother died, she came to my sons' school to give a talk about her life. She was already pretty frail by then and needed me to take her there in a wheelchair. The pupils were totally gripped but her powers — that lovely open, captivating way she had of telling a story — were clearly on the wane. And as I listened, I realised I was seeing the last of all the many talks she had given.

I understood a little of what that might mean for me. I knew my duty. I would have to tell her story for her. And I set to work on a book about her experiences and those of my father.

Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad told of my mother's near-death and ultimate survival in Bergen-Belsen, of the death from starvation and disease of my grandmother, and of my family and their neighbours who died in the gas chambers. It followed my father and grandparents to a Siberian gulag and slave labour on a state collective farm. It followed Mum and Dad to the peace and stability of life round the corner from Brent Cross shopping centre.

And when it was published I ended up travelling round the country, doing some of the speeches Mum wasn't here to do.

So, yes, I saw quite a while ago that the passing of my parents' generation would leave a gap to be filled and I have been trying to fill it. But I realise now that I entirely misunderstood the scale and nature of the hole there would be. I had thought it was primarily an organisational issue. That it was mainly about finding the time and my brother-in-law editing films of Mum and Dad's witness, so our children could use them in talks.

In fact, the problem was far more profound. The problem was not really about how the story would be told, but how it would be received. To a rising generation, what happened to my parents had become distant history, like the Battle of Waterloo or the American Civil War. A subject to be read about in a textbook or revised for an exam.

The idea that it might have political significance had begun to seem an absurd notion, like using the Bayeux Tapestry as a warning to have a checkup with your optician.

This first began to dawn on me when I saw the re-emergence of stupid economic ideas that the Cold War had totally discredited. But I only grasped it properly when I had a tangle with a man called Nick Fuentes.

A couple of months ago, the egregious American talk-show host Tucker Carlson announced that his latest guest would be the 27-year-old leader of a right-wing online cult known as the Groypers. Nick Fuentes has built a large following through provocative monologues and exchanges with his followers. What he comes out with is pretty wild. Let's just say he doesn't like women or black people or gays.

Most of all, however, he doesn't like Jews. He really doesn't.

Hitler, on the other hand, he's pretty fond of. He has said he is on Team Hitler. That Hitler was "cool". And his idea is that America — and the idea of America First — has been subverted by Jews who put Israel first. Half the time when you listen to Fuentes you are depressed to learn how awful we Jews are; the rest of the time you find out that we are so brilliant that we run the world.

Anyway, Tucker Carlson decided that this was someone we needed to hear more from. So he invited him on for a gentle interview in which the main thrust was how a group of Jews had tried to "cancel" Fuentes. Throughout this Carlson gave his famous baffled look, unable to imagine what anyone could possibly have against his guest. The whole Team Hitler thing didn't come up. Carlson clearly ran out of space. Maybe the internet was full up. I suppose you can't cover everything.

This extraordinary encounter is unfortunately not an isolated occurrence. It's part of a trend. The idea that Jews are in control of America is spreading on the right, a counterpart to the left idea that world governments are under Zionist occupation. It has become an open part of political debate among American conservatives, alarmingly.

Apparently, we Jews are everywhere and in charge of everything. Fascinatingly, when the podcaster Joe Rogan was asked how many Jews there were in the world, he said that as there are 7 billion people in the world there are probably 1 billion Jews. There are in fact 8 billion people and fewer than 16 million Jews.

Or to put it another way, 99.98 per cent of the world's population is not Jewish. Every time I see a fellow Jew in a restaurant I tell them to eat more quickly; with so few of us, we can't waste time on eating when there is so much dominating required from each Jew.

The Carlson interview prompted Piers Morgan to challenge Fuentes to come on his show. His idea was to put to him all the points Carlson had failed to ask. And I offered to help. I provided a short video, which I filmed in my kitchen, briefly summarising my family story and suggesting to Fuentes that he should be on "Team Mum" rather than "Team Hitler".

I didn't expect, and neither did Morgan, that Fuentes would respond to this video by sending me an apology, agreeing to go on a course and donating to my synagogue. That wasn't the idea. It was more to expose the things that he and his followers have been talking about in a way that Carlson had deliberately failed to do.

Even before Fuentes appeared, and certainly after it, there were many people who thought it a mistake, or even outrageous, to give him any sort of platform. I think these people are making a reasonable point and I understand it, but I don't think they are right. They are failing to understand how the modern media works.

Even if it were desirable to deny Fuentes a platform, it isn't possible. He has his own platform and a vast number of young followers. Beyond these groupies is an even larger audience that is receptive to his America First message and the idea that the United States is being undermined by rich and powerful Jews. If we shut our eyes to this, it doesn't go away.

There is, of course, another argument: this is an American problem and not mine. I see this too, but again it fails to grasp reality. Social media means that political ideas that circulate in the United States circulate here too. Young people here — actually, not just young people — are passionately engaged with rows happening in the US. The death of George Floyd had a huge impact on British political life. And there were people marching around chanting, "Hands up, don't shoot!" at the British police, a slogan that originated in a police shooting in Missouri and ignores the fact that British officers are mostly unarmed.

So I thought it was important to take on Fuentes. And I appreciated that he wouldn't back down and that what resulted might be unpleasant. But still.

Fuentes is a clever man. He knows what moves an audience and he appreciated instantly the power of the story I was telling. He couldn't give me any quarter and he didn't. He repeated that he thought Hitler was cool. Then he mocked my accent (using Dick Van Dyke's Mary Poppins voice), said the British probably had a slang for Holocaust and, starting on the Morgan programme, began to mimic me saying, "Me mum died in the Holly."

In so far as he had an argument, it was that the Holocaust was completely irrelevant to him and his generation. There was nothing to be learnt from it. He wasn't going to be put off blaming the Jews for all societies' ills by the fact that at some point in history a similar argument had led Hitler to kill some British bloke's grandmother.

Almost instantly I was flooded — on social media, on my email — with taunting messages. There were thousands of them. It went on for weeks. And I am still getting them.

Your dad is a lampshade and your mum is a bar of soap (or a pair of shoes) was a pretty common one. I was sent pictures with my parents' faces superimposed on light fittings. Someone made a song called Me Mum Died in the Holly. Someone else turned that into a video with an AI-generated Hitler doing the singing. An account was set up on X called @ilovegaschambers that collected together the more creative insults. I became a meme.

The posts slavishly followed Fuentes. In American movies that feature a bully in the high-school canteen, there are usually two moronic sidekicks standing just behind him and repeating his "jokes". This was a similar phenomenon, just with a cast of thousands.

People also used Grok, Elon Musk's AI tool, to ask how I could have been born in 1962 if I said that my mother had died in Belsen. I had of course said nothing of the sort. It was kind of interesting, as well as alarming, to watch a conspiracy theory at its birth.

It has slowed down now, but it hasn't stopped. It's a rare day without several encounters with this sort of stuff. Only yesterday I had someone with multiple phone numbers sending me text messages about how I was a dirty Jew who should expect imminent arrest in the Epstein scandal.

And I was right that political arguments that begin in the US come here pretty quickly. I started to notice that some of the "Holly" memes were from accounts in the UK. But soon a more intellectual version began to appear. Hitler was absent, there was no mention of soap, but there was the suggestion that I should be deported.

The thrust of these messages, hundreds this time rather than thousands, is that it is deeply hypocritical of me to believe that there should be a country for Jews (Israel) but not for English people.

I tried rational argument. I pointed out that I did want a country for English people, that we had one and I live in it. I also said that Israel wasn't exclusively for Jews and that it wouldn't need to exist in the first place if there weren't so many people interested in deporting me. But in the end I found these exchanges as unavailing as it would be to argue with someone who called the Holocaust "the Holly".

What would my parents have thought of all this? They would definitely have agreed it was right to confront it. That's what my grandfather had done in Germany in the Twenties and Thirties, after all. They would have been realistic. Because Jews are a small minority in almost every country in which they settle, this kind of antisemitism has lasted for hundreds of years and always been dangerous.

They would also definitely have found it upsetting. Anyone would. Particularly the fact that it comes from young people in the United States, because the young and Americans were people they believed in.

But one of the most important things about both of them is that they had a sense of proportion. They were never complacent. Yet they weren't going to live their lives as victims, despite what had happened to them. They wouldn't want me too either. And I won't.

In the history of civilisation, I don't think there's been a better time to be alive or a better place to live than now and here. I think that's an objectively defensible statement. But it's also how I feel.

My parents didn't just survive. They lived. And I am doing that too.

He has been sharing some of the memes. The one I saw was truly repulsive (the bar of soap one). It has now been removed which I suppose is good and indicates that even Twitter has some line you can't cross - but in a way I'm not sure as I actually think it was worth seeing having just read that article. I'm sure if you search online you can see it.

#7

Off the Record / Re: The Off Topic Topic

Last post by Valmy - Today at 03:38:16 PM

I did learn that King Charles III is also officially the Lord of Mann which is a badass title.

He's reigning Mann? Hallelujah!

OK, that made me laugh.

Beeb!!!

I have missed you pal 

#8

Off the Record / Re: Climate Change/Mass Extinc...

Last post by The Brain - Today at 03:36:47 PM

Weird to have scientific findings as political decisions.

#9

Off the Record / Re: Climate Change/Mass Extinc...

Last post by crazy canuck - Today at 03:36:29 PM

Before the US Supreme Court changed the Chevron test, I would have said this decision would certainly have been quashed by the court.  But now I am not so sure. 

#10

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by The Minsky Moment - Today at 03:34:48 PM

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.288365/gov.uscourts.dcd.288365.37.0_2.pdf

United States Senator Mark Kelly, a retired naval officer, has been censured by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for voicing certain opinions on military actions and policy. In addition, he has been subjected to proceedings to possibly reduce his retirement rank and pay and threatened with criminal prosecution if he continues to speak out on these issues. Secretary Hegseth relies on the well-established doctrine that military servicemembers enjoy less vigorous First Amendment protections given the fundamental obligation for obedience and discipline in the armed forces. Unfortunately for Secretary Hegseth, no court has ever extended those principles to retired servicemembers, much less a retired servicemember serving in Congress and exercising oversight responsibility over the military. This Court will not be the first to do so! 

Keep whacking those moles.