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yakiimo.bsky.social
politics, philosophy, Japan, metal liberal
498 posts 611 followers 460 following
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Second best album of 2025 so far: Fumes - Skeletal Wings Threshold. Mexican black metal, out in February. The closest reference point is probably the combination of aggression and melody of Swedish black metal bands like Watain. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rxgq...

submitted 20 hours ago • 1 comment

Great observations from Ganz today on the foundations of Trump's economic worldview. Fits in with his previous theory of Trump's appeal consisting in the personalist warmth of "gangster Gemeinschaft." www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-juggler

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

The median US worker will earn about $1.7 million over the course of their life. In the month and a half since Trump took office, his actions undermining the foundations of US primacy and prosperity have probably reduced those expected lifetime earnings by at least 5%,

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

If you believe that empathy has been weaponized against you, such that in order to avoid being manipulated you have to completely reject empathy whenever it conflicts with your goals, you are by your own admission a psychopath. www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/p...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

The weird thing about guys like Rubio selling out their principles in exchange for power is that the power they're purchasing is extremely fragile.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

What is this guy talking about? The campaign promises that Trump made with regard to the military were to use it to carry out mass deportations and purges of "the enemy within," to fire "woke" generals, to restore Confederate base names,

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

A month ago I tried to explain to my friends abroad what a dire situation the US was in, and understandably they didn't really get it and kind of looked at me like I was crazy.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

The problem with this proposal to listen to workers who say that trade is bad and tariffs are good is that those positions are in fact bad for everyone, including workers. If you deliver bad results then people will be angry, even if they said that they wanted it. newrepublic.com/article/1920...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

The funny thing about the crypto stuff is that I believe, based on analogy to its 2013 and 2017 cycles, that the top is probably already in or will be in within the next month or so. Would be truly poetic justice if Trump got all his supporters in at the top.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

According to Musk's definition, the Nazis didn't become Nazis until 1939, and everything they did before then was fine. www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-te...

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

One reason why the idea of cutting a deal with Russia makes no sense is that US companies don't even want to go back there in the first place. time.com/7261449/puti...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

One of the greatest anime openings of all time: Heavenly Delusion. Directed by Weilin Zhang with animation by Shingo Yamashita, the webgen pioneer whose influence pervades the OP. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuAc...

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

I'm not giving you the finger, I'm just giving you a straight-fingered gesture. www.jpost.com/american-pol...

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

Someone said that the decline of the US and the international order was inevitable, and Trump is just a symptom. Couldn't disagree more strongly. What Trump's doing precisely refutes that kind of structural determinism.

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Vought and Musk have sometimes been portrayed as representing different or even competing factions within the Trump administration--Project 2025 vs. DOGE--but this reporting makes it clear that they're one and the same.

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

If you want to tune out politics and focus on other things, I actually think that's fine--*provided* that you don't then go on to vote. Declining to stay informed and then voting just amounts to wielding power while refusing responsibility. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

This pro-"DOGE dividend" poll is by a conservative polling firm, and the question is framed so as to elicit support. That said, it's no surprise that voters say they want free money, especially when invited to believe that it would come without consequences. jlpartners.com/doge-poll

submitted 9 days ago • 2 comments

If Bezos actually wanted to promote markets and liberty, instead of undermining the independence of the Post, he could just cancel some of the grants that he himself has made to organizations that are opposed to those things, such as anti-permitting reform groups like the NRDC and UCS.

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

Turns out that unleashing an army of commissars to terrorize the federal workforce actually makes things less efficient, not more. NBC estimates that dealing with Musk's e-mail cost tens of millions of dollars in person-hours. www.nbcnews.com/politics/dog...

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

It's funny that Corey Robin is talking about Trump's unbridled presidential power, since he's always refused to call Trump a fascist, based on the claim that he's too weak and constrained by Congress to be a fascist. jacobin.com/2025/02/marx...

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

Some of the reasons why Trump's attempt to peel Russia away from China won't work, from a conversation with Hal Brands: www.wsj.com/podcasts/opi...

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

So the position of the Trump administration is that we need to conquer Greenland and destroy NATO in order to control the Arctic, but also that we need to expel the Five Eyes member that already gives us the best access to the Arctic.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

I assumed that the reason why Musk chose young people for DOGE is because he wanted people who felt invincible enough to take the legal risks involved, but the theory that he chose them to humiliate civil servants is also very plausible.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

That unclassified e-mail that identified CIA officers may have burned not only the individual officers, but also past occupants of their roles, everyone who worked with them in their host nations, and the entire position itself going forward. www.cnn.com/2025/02/24/p...

submitted 12 days ago • 5 comments