yakiimo

@yakiimo

I write about politics (left-liberal), philosophy (analytic), metal (heavy), and Japan (anime and idol groups).

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yakiimo@yakiimo· 23d

Evangelists aren't preaching on planes to win converts, they're doing it to gain clout on social media and cast themselves as outcasts persecuted by the modern world. If they really wanted to defy the sinful modern world, then they'd be defending immigrants from ICE

To small crowds on airplanes — and often to much larger audiences via social media — self-described evangelists are seizing the opportunity to share their faith with other passengers, whether fellow travelers asked for the word or not.
“They have no choice but to hear the truth,” said Whitney Lynn, an evangelist, producer and singer-songwriter from Orlando who said she preaches on most flights she takes, filming the proclamations for social media. “When I have a gift and I have a life raft, if you’re drowning, I want to give you that life raft so you can be saved.”
A video she posted earlier this month showed a postflight preaching session given as passengers waited to disembark in San Diego. Almost no one looked around as Lynn, 40, spoke for a little over a minute about the weather, Jesus, sin, hell, redemption and heaven. Beneath the clip, she wrote: “I just love a captive audience."

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jul 18

It's an interesting question whether Trump and his associates do crazy self-destructive things bc they don't care about long-term consequences even for themselves, or because they're just too stupid to understand the consequences. This supports the latter theory. www.politico.com/news/2026/07...

That set off a scramble inside the White House with senior officials, including chief of staff Susie Wiles, fearing that it could undermine the president’s broader point about election vulnerabilities and put intelligence analysts’ lives at risk, the two officials said.

They argued to Pulte that naming individuals involved in an alleged cover up of election fraud could lead to conspiracy theorists to take the law into their own hands.

Pulte, who flew to New York with Trump on Friday, did not respond to a request for comment but the two officials said he backed down.

“Pulte got really scared by the whole thing and pulled back,” said one of the two senior officials. “He got POTUS all spun up and then was incredibly scared when he realized people could die with his reckless behavior.”

Simultaneously, several Trump officials urged the president to remain restrained and on script, a notoriously difficult task for the president, whose aides often learn what the president is going to say as he says it.

“They explained the way to be taken seriously is not to be crazy,” the senior official told POLITICO.

The combination of a full-court press from some aides and Pulte’s retreat convinced the president to stay “on the rails” as the senior official put it.

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jul 5

Minor issue relative to the rest of it, but it really pisses me off when people use dumb puns like suffrage/suffering to make a point in politics. It's not like they're even etymologically related, lol. Also, that same pun was straight up used by opponents of women's suffrage.

Anti-suffrage cartoon: "My wife's joined the Suffrage Movement, (I've suffered ever since!)"

yakiimo@yakiimo· Mar 3

This woman's son died in Iraq, so the attack on Iran gives her "closure," because it makes her feel like his death had meaning. Years ago Chris Hedges wrote a book called War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. This story illustrates exactly what he was talking about. www.wtvr.com/news/local-n...

May said watching the strikes gave her a sense of comfort and closure, as she believes Iran helped extremist and insurgent groups fighting against the US-led coalition in the Iraq War.

"I'm not ashamed of it," May said. "We had to do what we had to do to protect the American people. And people like my son, and many others that passed in the beginning of the Iraqi war... It makes us parents, family members feel like they didn't die for nothing."

She said she has struggled for years with the fear that her son's death was in vain.

"I was really tired of thinking that maybe my son died for nothing, but with President Trump, I have full confidence in him," May said. "And to me, it's not a war — it's payback."

yakiimo@yakiimo· Mar 2

Boy this sure doesn't seem like a policy that could have entirely foreseeable side-effects causing it to cost more money than it saves

yakiimo@yakiimo· Mar 1

This is a video on the YouTube channel that Graham Platner says he is a "longtime fan" of. Until now I'd assigned roughly equal probabilities to the "just a dumb guy" theory and the "straight-up Nazi" theory, but this tips the balance substantially towards the latter. www.yahoo.com/news/article...

Video title: "Zoran Mamdani's campaign fooled everyone." Depicts Mamdani surrounded by men in Orthodox Jewish garb.

yakiimo@yakiimo· Mar 1

"There was little in Trump's record to suggest he would embrace a war of choice in the Middle East." Yeah, you know, except for the fact that his supposed isolationism was an obvious pretext for unrestrained patrimonial imperialism. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Later, he flew to Palm Beach for the weekend, where he mingled with supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort Friday evening, looking tired but otherwise in good sprits before exiting to his private quarters to record a speech he would give announcing the attack, according to one person who was there and interacted with him.

The decision to launch the attack was in some ways foretold by the massive buildup of U.S. forces over the past two months. But there was little in Trump’s record to suggest that he would embrace a war of choice in the Middle East with the goal of regime change.

yakiimo@yakiimo· Feb 27

The songs are tiny flashes of brilliance. We're talking sub-grindcore song lengths here, but they manage to cram hooks and breakdowns and tempo changes in there and somehow make it all work. Cool zine interview from 2012: allsortazines.neocities.org

-Why do you play punk music instead of painting/horseback riding?
-I once went horseback riding and it was... I was falling off, and I thougth I was gonna die, and was very scared. And that's why I play punk music, cuz I'm scared. (laughs)

yakiimo@yakiimo· Feb 26

It's actually very telling that this AI guy regards education as not an intrinsic good, but rather a burden to be abolished. Makes you wonder what his ideal vision is for how we'll spend our time if AI abolishes all labor. Mindless slop scrolling? www.404media.co/whats-the-po...

There’s a new agentic AI called Einstein that will, according to its developers, live the life of a student for them. Einstein’s website claims that the AI will attend lectures for you, write your papers, and even log into EdTech platforms like Canvas to take tests and participate in discussions.

Educators told me that Einstein is just one of many AI tools that can do homework for students, but should be seen as a warning to schools that are increasingly seen by students as a place to gain a diploma and status as opposed to the value of education itself.

If an AI can go to school for you what’s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn’t one. “I think about horses,” he said. “They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I'd argue horses became a lot more free,” he said. “They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’"

yakiimo@yakiimo· Feb 25

True-crime YouTubers and podcasters were bad enough when they were just covering old cases. Now they're intervening in ongoing investigations, with predictable results. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/u...

Online Accusations in Guthrie Abduction Leave One Family ‘Scared Numb’

A fifth-grade teacher and his principal wife hid in their bedroom as dozens of people who believed he might be a kidnapper appeared on their suburban street.

yakiimo@yakiimo· Feb 24

Everything is an aspirational lifestyle brand these days, and the aspirational lifestyle that Trump sells is that of impunity. Seems to me that the counter-messaging should be that impunity for Trump = *less* freedom for you. www.liberalcurrents.com/what-trump-s...

It is by now a cliché to assert that Donald Trump is acting like a parody of a personalist dictator. But to get here, he had to sell Americans on a vision. Little about his politics offered a positive vision; instead, it was his very lifestyle that offered something worth aspiring to. Not a vision for society, but a vision for the individual: to say, do, and be whatever you want without consequence—not in spite of cruelty or selfishness, but because of those things.

What Trump unleashed was, yes, a tidal wave of prejudice that has assaulted and corroded our civil society. But the real earthquake behind that tsunami was the promise of emancipatory irresponsibility.

yakiimo@yakiimo· Feb 19

Great piece on how social media aesthetics is one of the most important factors driving the Trump administration's behavior. Government by content creators. The memeification of everything drives me crazy. We desperately need a return of earnestness. www.liberalcurrents.com/killing-for-...

Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America. His cabinet secretaries are the heads of some of the largest and most powerful bureaucracies on the planet. They cannot ever “do a little trolling.” This is real life. They (as well as many observers) may treat it like it’s a game but it is real. Their actions and their words have consequences.

The danger of allowing the mindset of “Everything is Content” to become normalized is that it contributes to the “unreality” of real life. If everything is content, then everything is a meme, and if everything is a meme then you don’t have to take anything seriously because it's all kayfabe and it goes away when you put the phone down.

yakiimo@yakiimo· Feb 18

Pretty decisive refutation of the idea that there's any kind of value in staying on X to oppose right-wing content. The algorithmic feed works as Musk intends, to radicalize users to the right. And this study was conducted in 2023. X is even more far-right now. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Using the algorithmic feed on X causes users to adopt more right-wing positions.

yakiimo@yakiimo· Feb 2

3. Star Wars: Visions - Black. Ohira the goat. My favorite works of his are the ones that balance expressionism with realism, but this expressionistic free play of imagination is also clearly in his wheelhouse. Amusingly enough, it turned out like this because he got out-Ohira'd by his own team:

Here, story takes a firm back seat to animation. Yet the animation didn’t go exactly as he planned. Like Ohira told us:

… when I originally started the project, my idea was not to use my standard, sort of organic style with lots of flowing lines, but to go for a far more mechanical, straight-edged, sharper style. But I think a lot of people got excited about the idea of working with me and my style, so it ended up looking slightly different from my original intention.

Ohira personally touched “about 20%” of Black’s animation, mostly by correcting layouts and key frames. The rest was delegated to his team. “I was expecting quite orthodox animation to be submitted,” he said to us, “but it ended up something a bit more avant-garde, a bit more abstract."

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jan 30

So this guy's criteria for knowing that a regime is fascist are that (a) intellectuals are *not* claiming that it's fascist, whereas (b) the masses living under it *do* on the whole believe that it's fascist. What a goofy set of criteria. www.wsj.com/opinion/amer...

“The clearest sign that we are not actually in a bubble,” investor Ben Horowitz remarked last month, “is the fact that everyone is talking about a bubble.” You could say the same about fascism. Under the real thing, people know what’s happening without needing a lot of eggheads and politicos to tell them.

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jan 26

Just finished watching Takopi's Original Sin, and I'm blown away by how great it was. The kinda show that reminds me why I still bother keeping up with anime.

camera at ground level, girl looking into pipe

fantastical depiction of Takopi in space

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jan 22

You might be on to something here

42% of Republicans say Bible should take precedence over will of the people in US laws

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jan 20

If this decline in X mobile daily active users continues on the trend that it's followed since 2024, then by 2028 they'll have dropped by 50%🥳 techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/t...

X mobile DAU decline from 150m in 2024 to 125m now

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jan 16

I've seen some crazy predictions lately about AI causing a massive rise in GDP in the near future. Most mainstream models predict something like a 2-5% gain in GDP level by 2030-2035. I'd be surprised if the actual gain were dramatically higher than that. www.imf.org/en/publicati...

World GDP rises 1-4% above steady state in 10 years due to AI

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jan 12

ICE is spending $100m to recruit officers via online influencers and to "normalize and humanize" ICE officers by sharing their "lived experiences." We should denormalize being an ICE officer and stigmatize their lived experiences. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jan 9

Trump straight up admits the truth of the analysis that his foreign policy is motivated by a psychological need to be perceived as dominant. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/u...

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jan 8

So if a leader specifically targets weak countries for invasion, then he's not a fascist? Weird criterion. Hitler invaded Poland in part because he thought that Poles were racially inferior and would therefore be easily defeated, so by this logic, I guess Hitler wasn't much of a fascist.

The fascist cult of heroic death leaves him cold. He avoids wars, only attacking countries too weak to respond, like Iran, Venezuela and, later perhaps, Greenland.

Weber theorises that Trump believes in neither state nor society, but in an extreme version of American capitalism without rules and that he sees the highest human purpose as self-enrichment. His family’s monetisation of the presidency is unabashed, even proud, because he thinks it’s natural. To him, it seems, a government is a family business, not an army support system.

Trump resembles a premodern patrimonial leader from the era before states, argue Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein in another essay in Wenn das Gestern anklopft. In other words, he is more Iron Age chieftain than a fascist leading a modern state. Indeed, he tasked Elon Musk with axing chunks of the state.

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jan 8

"If we abolish ICE then who should handle interior enforcement?" Nobody! We had minimal levels of interior enforcement prior to the passage of the IIRIRA in '96, and we got along just fine without it. cmsny.org/wp-content/u...

Criminalization through Interior Enforcement
To reiterate, IIRIRA is best understood not as a watershed event with respect to the
criminalization of immigration but rather as a significant ratcheting up of punitive aspects
of US immigration law then already in place. However, the 1996 law did inaugurate new
practices related to the criminalization of immigration.
Prior to IIRIRA, with the exception of the mid-1950s when more than a million Mexican
nationals (and American citizens) were rounded up with assistance from non-federal
authorities, immigration enforcement was understood as a strictly federal power operative
Journal on Migration and Human SecurityS58
principally at the US-Mexico and US-Canada borders. Indeed, there was a widespread
legal and practical consensus among government and legal officials that immigration
enforcement was an exclusively federal authority. As a result, even immediately subsequent
to the passage of IIRIRA, well over 90 percent of deportation cases originated with the
Border Patrol in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas (INS 1999, 209-10, Tables
59 and 60).

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jan 6

All else being equal, political polarization is genuinely bad, because it substantially lowers economic growth. But all else is not equal, because Republicans are fascists, and negative polarization against fascists is the bare minimum appropriate response. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

$We find that political polarization has a robust, negative effect on per capita real GDP. In terms of the magnitude of the effect, an increase in a polarization measure of one standard deviation, based on self-reported political ideology, would be associated with a decrease in per capita real GDP of 3.2 %, on average. Our main results are robust to alternative measures of political polarization based on economic issues of the left and right: equality, government ownership, government responsibility, and competition. Our results are also robust to alternative methods of constructing polarization measures, such as the measure developed by Esteban and Ray (1994), and to the inclusion of economic polarization, ethnic fractionalization, trust, and political turnover. In terms of transmission channels linking polarization to growth, we find that polarization negatively affects private investment, human capital investment, and TFP.$

yakiimo@yakiimo· Jan 2

I typed up a reply but it was way too long, so I had to put it in an image, lol

Part of the answer is that Marx defines the LTV in terms of the socially necessary labor time required by a worker of average skill to produce the commodity. Since a worker of average skill couldn't draw as well as Picasso (even if it is just a doodle), the training required to produce the doodle partly explains its price.

Another part of the answer is that value isn't the same as price. Marx had to distinguish between the two to solve the transformation problem (i.e., how to explain why rate of profit in an industry doesn't just directly vary with the portion of capital spent on labor in that industry, as the LTV would seem to predict). So, the price of the doodle can diverge from its value.

And a third part is that I think Marx would classify art purchased as an investment as what he calls fictitious capital, i.e., an asset whose value is based on its expected future return. So its price is determined by monopoly rent due to its scarcity, exclusivity, and difficulty of reproduction.

yakiimo@yakiimo· Dec 27

The first critique that she makes is that Trump changed his tune on the Epstein files and called them a hoax. That's a genuine wedge issue that we can use to split the Republican base. It's one of Trump's least popular issues among Republicans. today.yougov.com/politics/art...

Only 46% of MAGA Republicans strongly approve of Trump's handling of the Epstein issue

yakiimo@yakiimo· Dec 25

Did he get this idea from Bad Santa 2 (2016, 2.4/5 Letterboxd rating)

yakiimo@yakiimo· Dec 15

These ICE agents should not have been granted anonymity. Journalists are only supposed to grant anonymity for newsworthy information that can't be obtained otherwise. ICE agents' sob stories about being hated by the public aren't newsworthy, or exclusive. www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...

John and his family agreed to talk to USA TODAY – with permission from their superiors – to counter what they see as false impressions of their work.

To cover their perspective, which has been largely absent from the public debate on immigration, USA TODAY went behind the scenes of the Trump administration's deportation campaign. In November, we spent three days with ICE in Kansas City, part of the Chicago field office tasked with immigration enforcement in a sprawling, six-state region of the Midwest that includes Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.

USA TODAY withheld the full names of family members at their request, given the charged climate around immigration enforcement and because they are not official spokespeople for their agency. They each used one of their given names.

John recalled that, as an airman, "I had people wanting to buy me lunch in an airport or, you know, looking at me like I'm some sort of hero.

"Then when I come to this side of the aisle – where I'm still putting my life on the line to enforce the law and wanting to create a safer America – now all of a sudden, I'm not that hero."

yakiimo@yakiimo· Dec 6

I read her article in the Guardian, and I really like the point about the opportunity costs of outsourcing your taste to algos and automation. When I was getting into metal in high school, it was just taken for granted that the best music was obscure and you had to hunt if you wanted to find it.

What is lost when we entrust Spotify’s systems of data collection and interpretation to do our year-end reflections for us? What ideas and recaps are we not writing and sharing when we hand over that labour to tech companies who would prefer to automate our thinking? What playlist are you not making when you share the one Spotify has made for you?

As with other ways in which convenience culture infects music – from personalised playlists to prompt-based audio generation and beyond – it makes sense that some fans would receive their results, see the “share” button, and dutifully comply. But what’s at stake is a sense of our own musical memories, and our own personal archives of our years. When our own thoughts and recollections aren’t written down they can simply get lost. When we just accept that what a streaming service tells us about our music taste is true, there is much that we are not remembering, learning or celebrating about the music of our years and lives.

yakiimo@yakiimo· Nov 15

My favorite source that I read for my new essay on the political legacy of Romanticism was Lukacs' book The Destruction of Reason. A must read for anyone interested in the history of ideas. demystifyanddisenchant.substack.com/p/romanticis...