Philo 🔜 Folsom Europe 2025

waitress last night kept repeatedly telling us this menu item was an aphrodisiac until i finally lost it and said "alright boys time to get real horny at dinner"

The weather in Berlin is honestly one of the weirdest summers I have ever seen. Just making it up as it goes along. Throwing elements in anyhow. Sunshine, lightning, random downpours.

I'd need to re-read it and am headed back to work soon, but I don't think they did, just straight reporting the poll results on a bunch of defense-related questions. E.g. a large majority is in favor of the defense spending increases.

The majority of complaints about porn fall into one of two buckets:

1) complaints stemming from the fact that a significant amount porn, like most media, is created by and for a white cisheteropatriarchy and reflects back those biases just like nonsexual media

2) frustration that porn isn’t sex ed

Understandable. The conscription question was separate, the 59% (rounded up by the telegraph) was specifically for if you would take up arms so to speak and fight to defend Germany. (There was also e.g. a separate question for if you'd be willing to help civil defense in such an eventuality).

Real material politics (who a person follows on social media) is too often neglected, imo.

Mehr Geld für die Verteidigung – nur kämpfen wollen die Deutschen eher nicht Die meisten Bürgerinnen und Bürger glauben, dass die Kriegsgefahr wächst. Sie glauben auch, dass die Militärausgaben steigen sollten und die Wehrpflicht zur Not wieder eingesetzt werden muss. Aber die...

Often I would agree but in this case they are just reporting the results of an RND poll (they did round up, the actual number is 59%)

www.rnd.de/politik/umfr...

Europe's humiliation is a comms strategy – and that's the problem - Euractiv Ostentatious humiliation may bring Europe some breathing space in the short term. But that will be worthles unless we effectively and jointly reduce dependency on the US.

Fits well with this piece I've written today for @euractiv.com arguing that much of the humiliation in trade and defence is communication strategy from European leaders letting Trump have his wins, but at cost to public perception:

I kicked off the @eurcorrespond.bsky.social defence desk today with an article taking stock of where Europe stands 6 months after JD Vance came to Munich and declared culture war on Europe.

The placating strategy to deal with Trump obfuscates that in fact, Europe has moved a lot.

Drei mit einem Streich: Gegen unerreichbar hohe Hürden bei der Einbürgerung, gegen die Ausgrenzung von Menschen mit Behinderungen und Menschen ohne Chance auf ein eigenes Einkommen.

Wir müssen gegen den Trend arbeiten, sonst drehen wir ihn nie.

In general, so much of Europe still must learn from our Eastern and Northern friends. They know how to take the Russian threat - one of an aggressive autocracy on one's doorstep - seriously.

Still, I would not be surprised if the numbers for Italy are even worse. And 40% of Germans can still produce a sizable force, especially as part of a multinational effort.

This news surprises 0% of Germans.

I will fucking help defend Germany for them, christ.

I'm queer, I'm not gonna roll over and accept Russian rule that easily. And I have (German) family and friends here.

My Season core Test What's Your Season Core?

Here is the test btw:

poomang.com/en/t/mycore_...

Bottom middle and bottom right aren't accurate but the rest is plausible

Love me some dumb US news in the morning

...sips coffee

I'm delighted to see this article out in @govandopp.bsky.social! Jonas Wenker and I show that losing an election has a far stronger negative effect on populist voters than on non-populist ones. For populists, losing signals that the system is broken. 1/5 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

That's possible, I'm not trying to interpret the meme so much as use it as a jumping off point for understanding the pejorative use of "liberal"

Links ein Bild der GFF-Juristin Soraia Da Costa Batista, rechts ein Zitat von Soraia: „Der deutsche Pass ist keine Bonusprämie für erwirtschaftetes Einkommen. Behörden dürfen alten Menschen mit Behinderung nicht den Weg zur demokratischen Teilhabe versperren, nur weil sie finanzielle Unterstützung bekommen.“

🪪 Zu arm für den 🇩🇪 Pass? Wer alle Voraussetzungen für die #Einbürgerung erfüllt, hat trotzdem keinen Anspruch auf #Staatsangehörigkeit, wenn er*sie finanzielle Unterstützung erhält. Das schließt viele ältere Menschen & Menschen mit Behinderung aus. Wir klagen gegen die diskriminierende Regelung!

Antivirus vendors fail to spot persistent, nasty, stealthy Linux backdoor 'Plague' malware has been around for months without tripping alarms Researchers at German infosec services company Nextron Threat have spotted malware that creates a highly-persistent Linux backdoor and say antivirus engines do not flag the code as malicious.…

Antivirus vendors fail to spot persistent, nasty, stealthy Linux backdoor

Add to that the long shadow of tankie-ism and various 20th century intra-left beefs that have been quite historically important to put it mildly, and this rhetoric persists, however unhelpful I think it is.

While in principle the two are only sometimes related and indirectly so, and are indeed often at odds, and the extensional overlap between the two is also highly variable, the extensional overlap between the two is just large enough to maintain the plausibility of the rhetorical abuse.

I think the basic problem is that "liberal" can mean

1) an adherent of the tradition in political theory which includes people like Benjamin Constant, J.S. Mill, Olympe de Gouges, John Rawls, numerous social democrats, etc.

2) a positional term like, though not synonymous with "centrist"

I was going to go back to bed but felt compelled to respond to elaborate on this meme (cursed sentence).

Okay attempting to go back to bed.

...if, like some of the people I knew, you were say a 20 year old freshly cracked egg who was not out to anyone irl and it felt like the only other LGBT people you knew would bully, blacklist, and secondary-boycott you for not using the au courant terminology from Tumblr that was 5 months old.

I was never that worried about it affecting me directly since I did have accepting meatspace friends, but I could see this 98.75% orthodoxy dynamic absolutely *shredding* circles I'd known and cared about for years. It was sad and frustrating, and I could only imagine how scary...

This was precisely the source of my uneasiness with some of the excesses of woke circa ~2013-15. I hung out (and still do) in a lot of exactly these sorts of online LGBT friend groups, and for a lot of people in them they had no meat space social life in which they were out.