…you know how it’s always easier to see a fault in others than it is in ourselves?

The initial results of the European Union’s parliamentary elections may point to a definitive arrival. Across the continent, and especially in some of its biggest countries, far-right parties produced strong or record results. Their gains aren’t a ticket to power — a coalition of European center-right parties remains the biggest group in the Parliament and can collaborate with the mainstream center left — but they highlight the deeper trend. The European Union, long hailed as a post-national bastion of liberal values, is not just hospitable to illiberal nationalism, but possibly a crucible for a new age of right-wing politics in the West.

The vote is grim reading for centrist stalwarts such as French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The latter’s Social Democrats were, according to exit polls, slated to finish a humbling third behind their main center-right rivals and the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. The former saw his party trounced by that of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, a chastening so dire that Macron dissolved the French National Assembly and scheduled snap parliamentary elections. Their predicaments echo across the Atlantic, with President Biden fighting a tough battle against a Trumpist movement that sees itself explicitly in alliance with the anti-immigrant, “anti-woke” parties of Europe’s far right.

…&…the fact that (so far at least) farage couldn’t get elected to britain’s actual government but appealed to enough of the sort of people who turned out to vote for the EU ones when he hadn’t leveraged the idea those voters might undermine the tory’s core supply in a “real” election into a means to coerce cameron into calling that fateful referendum…is broadly indicative of the attitudes towards protest votes & votes for the european parliament…doesn’t let me feel like there’s nothing to worry about…but…doesn’t necessarily mean that for the the first time the french version of that protest in the domestic context will lurch from letting the right get to the head-to-head run-off final round before breaking out the sane vote to picking the punishment option…so macron might be on to something trying to call that bluff

“Nearly a decade ago, the Brexit earthquake in the spring of 2016, in which voters in the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, was an early sign of a global trend toward conservative nationalism,” wrote Politico’s Nicholas Vinocur. “In retrospect, it seems clear this movement was part of what powered Donald Trump to a surprise upset over Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton in the U.S. presidential election of the same year.”

…that those were riding the same currents hardly seems to require hindsight…it was plenty obvious at the time, as I recall…but…whatever

The Parliament is not as powerful as other E.U. branches, though it helps set the bloc’s agenda. “It cannot directly initiate laws, but it can veto and shape them and is responsible for approving the E.U. budget, giving it some agenda-setting authority,” my colleagues explained. “Members of the Parliament played a key role in negotiating the E.U.’s landmark artificial intelligence regulations this past year. The Parliament also has the last word on the selection of the European Commission president — arguably the union’s most powerful job.”

…&…in terms of currents & undertows…could be a me thing that I get frustrated by the way we break out strands of the weave when the degree to which they’re interwoven seems like it might be important

Analysts see in Meloni’s rise a template for how the far right can come to power: In Italy, the center right was hollowed out and proved no barrier to a party that traces its origins directly to post-World War II neofascism. But they also see in her success an illustration of the limits of the far right’s capacity for collective mobilization: Meloni has kept a distance from (and is occasionally at odds with) supposed fellow travelers like Le Pen, who in turn has shunned hard-line counterparts in Germany’s AfD party.

Still, European politics appears to be going toward where these parties broadly align: on skepticism around the E.U.’s aggressive climate policies and, more potently, on migration. “The different far-right parties across Europe have a shared position on identity, immigration and Islam, and it’s also where they’re increasingly converging with the center right,” Hans Kundnani, a visiting fellow at New York University’s Remarque Institute, told me.

“The new power center will not so much be the far right,” observed Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde, but the far right of von der Leyen’s center-right bloc, which will seize on the pressures exerted by Meloni and others to “push its traditional coalition partners further to the right, particularly on issues such as the environment, gender and sexuality, and of course immigration.”

…don’t get distracted…don’t get distracted…don’t…too late

…so…I do need to not let this get entirely out of hand the way it did at the weekend…but I might get as far as trying to argue that splitting asylum/migration out from, variously, economics (structural stuff involving everything from health & social care to pensions & taxes) to environmental shit to that constant background hum of “worked real good coming up on 2016″…let’s call it influence…doesn’t entirely do us favors…&…not even a little bit coincidentally…the way that if you flip the tapestry around so you can see all the dangling threads on the back of the thing…what ties the whole thing together is almost entirely the fossil-fuel/petrochemical fabric of how everything works…but…the struggle is real…

Reform UK has defended one of its candidates who said Britain should have “taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality”, saying the comments were “probably true”.

The row prompted the Conservatives to directly criticise Ian Gribbin, the party’s candidate in Bexhill and Battle, who was reported to have written on a website’s comment section: “Britain’s warped mindset values weird notions of international morality rather than looking after its own people.”

The BBC said Gribbin had written that Britain needed to “exorcise the cult of Churchill and recognise that in both policy and military strategy, he was abysmal”. He is also reported to have said that women were the “sponging gender” and should be “deprived of health care”.

Reform’s spokesperson told the BBC the views on Hitler’s offer were not endorsements but were “shared by the vast majority of the British establishment including the BBC of its day, and is probably true”.

He said they were written with “an eye to inconvenient perspectives and truths. That doesn’t make them endorsements, just arguing points in long-distance debates.”

The spokesperson also told the Jewish Chronicle the party would not sack the candidate and he had “done nothing wrong.”

…are you…FUCKING KIDDING ME?

…their candidate…for a seat called battle…which is an allusion to being pretty much where harold lost to william the fucking conqueror in fucking 1066…or what a lot of brits tend to think of as the last time someone succeeded in invading the joint…is on the record that we’d be better off if the allies lost WWII…by capitulating early & capitulating hard…& they’re comfortable telling the jewish fucking chronicle that saying that’s “probably true” is “nothing wrong”

…not sure I’d ever really been able to think of a way of pulling a “hold my beer” on the MAGA propensity for “we’re for all the shit the last couple or three generations of our forebears would have considered capitulation to the russians” in the make-them-spin-in-their-graves stakes…but…that might have cleared the bar?

The BBC later said Gribbin had apologised for the “old comments and withdraw them unreservedly and the upset that they have caused”.

He said his “mother was the daughter of Russian Jews fleeing persecution” and he had been “upset at the way these comments were taken out of context”.

…unreservedly withdrawing them *after* saying they were “nothing wrong” & “probably true”…sure…not far off rishi’s tactic with the made-up tax tarriff soundbite…but…holy flaming-dumpster-full-of-gas-tanks, batman

The Reform leader, Nigel Farage, distanced himself from the comments and said the snap election had meant the party’s vetting programme had run out of time. “They’ve got a bigger problem in the Green party,” he told a press conference on Monday.

“They’ve had to suspend 20 of their candidates for putting out pretty vile antisemitic tweets. Here’s something I think every party will suffer because it was a snap election. We’ve put in place a good vetting programme, but we’ve run out of time.”

The party chair, Richard Tice, added: “We’re really pleased with all candidates. When people do inappropriate things, say daft things, then of course we’ll look at it and investigate it and that’s what we do.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/10/reform-uk-defends-candidate-over-hitler-neutrality-comments

…&…before I get back to solid ground & acknowledge that “better KYC vetting would have let us get ahead of this but once we’d looked & investigated…that would be all we’d do…in that just like this time, we’d keep those candidates…that’s our whole deal”…real handy to be able to claim *the other guy* is more antisemitic that the brown shirts 4.0, though

…to break out the tinfoil for a moment

Green party losses in EU elections raise concerns over Green Deal [Guardian]

…being big on going green & being a frothing antisemite…those things aren’t what you might call a natural pairing…but…not least in the UK…making out that antisemitism is woven into the DNA of the tories’ opposition has been a thorn in labour’s side that looks a lot more like a knife the tories have repeatedly (& not without success) tried to stick them with…trying to paint the greens as being partway through a process of co-option by the same interests…in the broader contrast of trying to up the extremity of the leverage exerted to heave right…doesn’t seem like it takes a full six degrees of separation…even if you leave out the likes of aaron banks…but I’m flirting with disaster again & I haven’t made it to the part where I give up the link for the first thing I yanked a quote out of…so…excuse the crinkling noises while I turn my head back in that direction

No matter the open internal borders of the Schengen Zone, the European Union is working hard to fortify its external barriers to asylum-seeking migrants. On the back of a year-long investigation with a consortium of media outlets, my colleagues recently detailed how the European Union and individual European governments are supporting and financing North African states that detain tens of thousands of migrants and abandon some of them in remote areas of the Saharan desert.

…or…you know…the balkans if your name is meloni…but…who’s counting, right?

“The E.U.’s refugee policy is a lot more Trumpian than people seem to realize,” Kundnani told me, adding that a more overtly right-wing European Union “won’t look that different from the current European Union.”

Kundnani, who is also the author of “Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project,” argued that the present moment exposes the “myth of cosmopolitanism” that has long surrounded discussions of the European Union and its idealistic liberal technocrats in Brussels. Some evangelists of the European project saw in its workings the first step toward a borderless world, but the political reality of the continent tells a rather different story.

“The E.U. is a political form of regionalism in the same way that the nation-state is a political form of nationalism,” Kundnani said. “When you say you’re European, you’re not saying I am a citizen of the world.”

The European Union, long hailed as a post-national bastion of liberal values, is not just hospitable to illiberal nationalism, but possibly a crucible for a new age of right-wing politics in the West.

…there’s…other ways to look at it…& some of those might come to some different conclusions…but…that’s how it goes with a thing that is lots of things at the same time…so the one wouldn’t necessarily invalidate the other…still…if those elections look pretty clear from a desk at the washington post…well…that cuts both ways, I guess

Friends of the United States in Europe seem far more aware of the stakes in our election than we Americans are. They understand the threat posed to long-standing alliances among democratic nations and to a political consensus that transcended ideological lines in resisting extremism and authoritarian impulses.

…but…even quicker than you can say “things look clear from a distance”…you take an arrow to the knee & wind up with a forced perspective with a distracting pain component that helps you not think of that shift as the thing to worry about

To say this, of course, risks being labeled partisan since President Biden is making the preservation of democracy a central issue in the 2024 election, as he underscored during his trip to Europe last week honoring the anniversary of D-Day. Meanwhile, Donald Trump regularly praises the effectiveness of repressive regimes from Russia, China, Hungary and even North Korea. Their leaders are “at the top of their game, whether you like it or not,” the former president said late last month.

But it should not be viewed as partisan to describe what is at issue in an election, and in my conversations with Europeans over the past few weeks, I was struck that so many — of various political inclinations — were acutely aware of how different the world would look and how much trouble democracy would face if Trump were victorious. Outside the ranks of supporters of far-right parties, there are few Trumpists in Europe.

…for all that the ones there are seem uncommonly likely to remember to vote for the EU parliament when a lot of the regular folks forget to

In one sense, this transatlantic disconnect is not shocking. In most democratic nations, voters typically cast ballots in response to workaday domestic concerns — prices, housing, employment, health care, crime and immigration. For a fair share of the U.S. electorate, “defending democracy” is a rather abstract issue.

If you live in Europe, on the other hand, American food prices or the future of Obamacare make little difference to your life, but how a U.S. election outcome might affect global alliances matters. So does whether American influence and power will be deployed against the threats posed by Russia’s aggression, in Ukraine and elsewhere.

There’s another reason for Europe’s relative sensitivity to the democracy question: Dictatorship is a relatively recent reality there in a way it has never been in the United States. Consider not only the experience of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s and early 1940s, but also the relatively recent transition to democracy in Spain and Portugal in the 1970s or in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of Soviet occupation.

Europeans seem to grasp the threat to U.S. democracy better than we do [WaPo]

…so…sometimes…distance comes with a bit of a value-add in perspective terms…but…other sorts of distance…flip that feature to a bug, you might say

During the pandemic, he was a moderator for a Discord community, at first mainly sorting out technical problems and weeding out trolls. But one night, an adolescent boy called him over voice chat, and started sharing how lonely and depressed he was. He spoke with the boy for an hour, trying to talk him down and give him hope. That call led to more like it. Over time, he developed a reputation as an unofficial therapist on the server. By the time he left Discord a year or so later, he’d had about 200 calls with different people, both men and women, who spoke of contemplating suicide.

But it was the boys who seemed the most desperately lonely and isolated. On the site, he said, he found “a lot more unhealthy men than unhealthy women.” He added: “With men, there is a huge thing about mental health and shame because you’re not supposed to be weak. You’re not supposed to be broken.” A male mental-health crisis was flying under the radar.

I have spent the last few years talking to boys as research for my new book, as well as raising my own three sons, and I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness. This is a new problem bumping up against an old one. All the old deficiencies and blind spots of male socialization are still in circulation — the same mass failure to teach boys relational skills and emotional intelligence, the same rigid masculinity norms and social prohibitions that push them away from intimacy and emotionality. But in screen-addicted, culture war-torn America, we have also added new ones.

…so much for not getting distracted

For many progressives, weary from a pileup of male misconduct, the refusal to engage with men’s feelings has now become almost a point of principle. For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or someone more marginalized. The two are not morally equivalent, but to boys, the impact can often feel similar. In many cases, the same people who are urging boys and men to become more emotionally expressive are also taking a moral stand against hearing how they actually feel. For many boys, it can seem as though their emotions get dismissed by both sides. This political isolation has combined with existing masculine norms to push a worrying number of boys into a kind of resentful, semi-politicized reclusion.

The statistics are starting to feel like their own cliché. Over a quarter of men under 30 say they have no close friends. Teenage boys now spend two hours less a week socializing than girls and they also spend about seven hours more per week than their female peers on screens.

[…] One teenager described his social circle, a group of boys who had been best friends since kindergarten, as a “very unsupportive support system.” Another revealed that he could recall only one emotionally open conversation with a male friend in his life, and that even his twin brother had not seen him cry in years. But they felt unable to articulate this pain or seek help, because of a fear that, because they were boys, no one would listen.

…well…some people are quick to pretend they’re listening…before supplying their brand of kool aid to slake what they say is the root of the audience’s thirst…always been a good way to get the youth to join your gang…from ill manors to the neverland ranch with a reach-around for your andrew tate types

Spend any time in the manosphere, and it’s easy to start to hate men and boys. The extreme misogyny, the gleeful hate speech, the violent threats and thrum of menace make it hard to summon much sympathy for male concerns, and easy to forget the ways that patriarchy harms them, too.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that in the grip of the culture wars, caring about boys has become subtly coded as a right-wing cause, a dog whistle for a kind of bad-faith politicking. Men have had way more than their fair share of our concern already, the reasoning goes, and now it’s time for them to pipe down. But for boys, privilege and harm intertwine in complex ways — male socialization is a strangely destructive blend of indulgence and neglect. Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except the thing that’s most worth having: human connection.

Silencing or demonizing boys in the name of progressive ideals is only reinforcing this problem, pushing them further into isolation and defensiveness. The prescription for creating a generation of healthier, more socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own homes — to approach boys generously rather than punitively. We need to acknowledge boys’ feelings, to talk with our sons in the same way we do our daughters, to hear them and empathize rather than dismiss or minimize, and engage with them as fully emotional beings.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/opinion/boys-parenting-loneliness.html

…needless to say…not all father figures were created equal

We believe the lessons of our fathers’ life and work — and, most important, the ways in which they bridged the divides between their communities — offer us a path toward navigating our own divisive era.

…&…one of the kids saying that is…a daughter not a son…but either way

When Abernathy and Dresner met in August 1962, it was through the bars of a segregated jail in Albany, Ga. During their years together in the movement, our dads became soul mates.

Jail was not new to either man, and between them, they would be arrested dozens more times. Both received multiple death threats. Abernathy’s home and church were bombed. Dresner found a bullet hole in the rear window of his car in the driveway of his home.

Despite the pain of all they went through, our fathers fervently believed that it is always the right time to engage in dialogue in the pursuit of understanding and peace.

Our fathers saw much in common. King, Abernathy and their fellow Black activists found inspiration in the Exodus story. King once told Dresner how much he admired Jews for celebrating the narrative of their slave ancestors in Egypt. The rabbi reminded him that Jews were slaves less than 20 years prior in the concentration and death camps of Europe. Most of Dresner’s father’s family was killed in the Holocaust, and he and many Jewish activists saw the world’s silence in the face of the Holocaust as a cautionary tale. They refused to remain silent in the subjugation of their African American brothers and sisters.
[…]
Our fathers taught us by example how to make meaningful change through meaningful dialogue, especially with those who disagree with us. We want people to understand that Jews, no matter where they live in the world, are not responsible for the violence in Israel and the atrocities being perpetrated on the people of Gaza by the current Israeli government. We want people to understand that when people are Muslim, it does not mean they support Hamas or that they hate Jews and Christians. We want to teach all of this and more, if people are willing to stop shouting long enough to listen. We promise to listen, too.

The work of Abernathy and Dresner was rooted in love — for each other, for humanity, for justice, for freedom, for equality, for America and for our world. They wanted the country we love to live up to the principles on which it was founded and which are enshrined in its founding documents. We want the same for America, for Israel and for Palestinians. Like many of the protesters across this country, we too want an end to the war in Israel and Gaza. We, too, want a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state. Getting there from here may feel insurmountable, but however we do it, as our dads taught us, it must be through nonviolent action, not violence and violent rhetoric.

Such ideas may feel impossible, but then, who could have imagined that Black and white people would be sitting side by side in buses and in restaurants before our fathers helped make it happen?

Our Fathers Marched With King. Here’s What They Would Say to Activists Today. [NYT]

…never mind the impossible…we live in a world where the party that held the reins as tax rates in britain rose to the highest they’ve been since the economy was on a war footing…can still run on “we’ll cut taxes, they’ll have their hand in your pocket”…the realm of the possible is…a broad tent?

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) lowered rates for individuals of nearly all income levels, though it cut taxes most for the highest earners, and slashed the maximum corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. The individual portions of that law expire in 2025, but Republicans who wrote the law made the business tax cuts permanent.

Now GOP lawmakers and some of Trump’s economic advisers are considering more corporate tax breaks — which could expand the national debt by roughly $1 trillion over the next decade, according to researchers at Stanford University and MIT — arguing that they would improve the U.S.’s global competitiveness.

Trump, who was convicted May 30 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records before the 2016 election, has told potential donors recently that they’ll get a better tax bill with him in charge; without his help, he says, they could face “the biggest tax increase in history.”

“The corporate tax rate has a much bigger impact on individuals than it does on businesses,” Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), who is in line to chair the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee if Republicans win control of the upper chamber, told The Washington Post. “Let me put it this way: Corporate taxes are paid by workers, by retirees and by consumers, so it has a huge impact on everybody in the United States.”
[…]
“Our tax system right now has many, many flaws, and one of them is that we don’t raise enough money from corporations,” a senior administration official told The Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

Biden and other global leaders have marched toward a unified corporate minimum tax rate of 15 percent to prevent businesses from shopping around the world for tax havens. A lower corporate rate, as some Republicans seek, would unwind that arrangement.
[…]
“The same corporations that have been price-gouging the American consumer at the grocery store, at the gas pump and everywhere else are now spending their money loading up these Republican political action committees with the plan that the Republicans will deliver even more tax cuts. It’s obscene,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told The Post.

Republicans pitch tax cuts for corporations, the wealthy in 2025 [WaPo]

…so…pick your context

The problem is that so much about this new era is unclear. Is the growing estrangement between the west and China being driven by America or by China itself? With so many of Europe’s leading companies deeply embedded in the Chinese market, is Europe in danger of falling hostage to Beijing’s will? How should the US counter China’s magnetism to many countries in the global south?
[…]
“The internment camps in Xinjiang, the betrayal of Hong Kong, hostage diplomacy, intense focus on national security issues, truculent secrecy around Covid-19, and, most of all, economic weakness have shown the world that China’s apparent desire to integrate into the global system of governance was temporary, provisional and opportunistic,” writes Stevenson-Yang in her highly perceptive and readable account.

Another double dose of realism runs through Germany and China by Andreas Fulda, an academic at Nottingham University. Step by step Fulda amasses a welter of evidence to expose an alarming predicament undermining Europe’s largest economy: that decades of outsourcing manufacturing to China and energy needs to Russia have made Berlin increasingly beholden to authoritarian states.
[…]
Fulda provides several case studies over more than 200 densely argued pages. But one of his main points is that Germany — both politically and commercially — has allowed itself to be manipulated by Beijing over many years. This “strategic blindness” can only be remedied by a more robust approach to countering Chinese pressure.

So far, however, there is little sign that a stronger tone is likely. In June 2023, the Scholz administration agreed to China’s demand that journalists should not be allowed to ask Li Qiang, the visiting Chinese premier, questions at a press conference in Berlin. Fulda quotes a German journalist as saying at the time “clear Chinese blackmail: either like this or there will be no press conference”.

But, in truth, it is hard to be robust when your adversary holds your fate — or at least part of it — in its hands. Oriana Skylar Mastro explores this in Upstart. Such interdependency is one unique characteristic of cold war 2.0.

“Never before have a rising power and the established hegemon been so economically intertwined,” writes Mastro, a China expert at Stanford University. “China holds at least $860bn in US public debt, representing 12 per cent of the foreign owned debt. Trade volume between the US and China measured just about $690bn in 2022 . . .The United States also remains the largest destination for outbound Chinese investment in 2022.”

The US has never faced a comparable competitor. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s GDP was about half that of the US but China’s in 2021 had already reached 76 per cent of US levels. This is one reason why China’s magnetism, especially in parts of the world where the US is less strong, is gaining traction internationally.

Mastro’s thought-provoking book, which explores policy options from a US perspective, shows how China has successfully exploited gaps in the US-led global order.

Whether it be enlisting developing countries to vote for Chinese candidates to head international organisations or forging free trade agreements with many countries of the “global south”, Beijing has been adept at capitalising on America’s blind spots. It has also built up its economic, military and strategic strength.

“Thirty years ago, the idea that China could challenge the United States economically, globally and militarily was unfathomable,” Mastro writes. But by 2021, at a meeting between President Joe Biden’s new team of officials and Chinese counterparts in Alaska, it was clear that the tables were turning.

Yang Jiechi, then China’s top diplomat, pushed back against a series of US accusations and snapped: “The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.”

It is true that these three books all represent western commentaries on China. They devote little space to exploring Chinese perspectives on the convulsive impact that the world’s emerging superpower is having on the west. This is yet another characteristic of the new cold war. As Beijing withdraws the welcome it once extended to foreigners and imposes strict censorship on its own thinkers, the narrative that surrounds its rise is increasingly written by outsiders. This only further eviscerates trust and nurtures the suspicions that propel a polarising world.

Beijing’s new world order [FT]

…so…anyway…lotta parallels going around…which…isn’t how perspective is supposed to work…but…eh…maybe the universe is a donut…or maybe that’s why we talk about “getting around to the point”…not that anyone seems likely to level that last bit in my direction

The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution on charges of retaining classified documents agreed on Monday to expunge from the indictment a paragraph about an episode where the former president waved around a classified document at his Bedminster club in New Jersey.

The US district judge Aileen Cannon ruled she would strike the paragraph because Trump was not charged with a crime for the conduct it described and would be unfairly prejudicial if a jury later saw it at trial.

Cannon’s ruling is notable because it could indicate how she will rule on future motions by Trump to suppress evidence as he attempts to limit the scope of the evidence prosecutors can introduce against him – and thereby dramatically undercut the case.
[…]
Cannon ruled that the passage should be expunged relying in part on a federal rule that says evidence of “other crimes” cannot be used against a defendant to suggest bad character, without addressing the second part of that rule that allows it in the case that it shows proof of motive.

The prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, had argued that they included the passage precisely because it was allowed under the second part of the rule but Cannon took issue with the fact that Trump had not been charged for the conduct it described.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/10/trump-classified-document-trial-indictment-expunge

…&…conduct unbecoming is…in contention

Is the risk of nuclear escalation rising between Russia and the west? [Guardian]

…hmm

Trump refuses to shift on climate despite supporters needing aid at rallies in extreme US heat [Guardian]

…uh huh

Wildfire smoke prematurely killed over 50,000 Californians in a decade – study [Guardian]

…uh huh

Far-right fossil fuel company allies pressure US supreme court to shield firms in unprecedented campaign [Guardian]

…sure

Trump’s Bizarre Moments With Dr. Phil and Hannity Should Alarm Us All [New Republic]

…there have been…signs & portents?

Marjorie Taylor Greene compares Trump to Jesus at Las Vegas rally [Guardian]

Justice Alito Caught on Tape Discussing How Battle for America ‘Can’t Be Compromised’ [Rolling Stone]

…some augury, even

Three letters have demanded outsized attention from companies, consumers, and investors in recent years — E, S and G. The uptick in funds with increased scrutiny over portfolio companies’ environmental, social and governance credentials has been a cause for celebration to some, and an object of derision to others — particularly Republican lawmakers in the US. News last week that patchy outflows from ESG funds have become a firm trend, with $40bn leaving so far this year, similarly divided political opinion. 

Most hyped market trends — be it hot Japanese stocks in the 1980s, the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, or, perhaps soon, the surge in AI stocks — eventually reach a point where the fundamentals can no longer justify high valuations. That leads either to a gradual readjustment or, in serious cases, the calamitous bursting of a bubble. The same can be said of trends in asset management. When investment vehicles perform below the market, hype alone cannot sustain investor interest.

ESG outflows are in part due to performance. Many ESG funds underperformed in 2022 and 2023. Despite fund managers’ attempts to engineer clever solutions, many could not outrun a surge in oil prices prompted by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Yet, the lustre of ESG has largely been dimmed by politicisation, especially of its own contradictions. Defence company stocks were initially left out of most funds, but support for Ukraine and a broad rally around the flag led to their inclusion by some fund managers — a shift that opened ESG to sneers from the right and criticism from the left. Persistent jibes from Republican policymakers have pushed many US companies to change their language around ESG and net zero commitments, engaging in “green hushing”.

Part of the issue here is that ESG is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of buzzwords. The grouping tells us less about the impact of a fund or a company and more about society’s muddled sense of beneficence. Environmental, social and governance standards are often vague, allowing fund managers to “greenwash” their records to lure investors. In truth, the make-up of many funds has largely mimicked typical indices, but with the exclusion of oil.

To the dismay of its critics, however, the first sustained outflows do not mark the death of ESG as a concept, though it may mark its decline as a marketing tool. Investors are still interested in sustainability, especially in Europe and the UK, where the market has been insulated from the worst of the US culture wars. More effective regulation has reduced greenwashing, and fund managers are becoming better at creating funds with fewer inconsistencies. And an outflow of $40bn is relatively small compared with the approximate $7tn of ESG assets under management.

The unsustainable hype around ESG [FT]

[…should probably take my laptop spontaneously rebooting as the hour chimed as some sort of sign…so…let’s say I’m nearly done & hope it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy?]

…anyway…don’t sweat it if you don’t know the reference

…but…let’s just say it helps to pick your heroes wisely

Shrink the Economy, Save the World? [NYT]

…not to mention your cheerleaders

The 19th-Century Club You’ve Never Heard of That Changed the World

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/opinion/civil-war-wide-awakes-free-speech.html

…&…beware the mythology

At first I was confused about who the Unabomber actually was. Was he an environmental avenger striking back at timber companies, or a madman blowing up computer rental stores? People seemed to think he was smart. He’d gone to Harvard. I knew what that was. Then I saw his shack. Why would a smart person live that way? And why here?

The sudden media attention hinted at the answers. I heard the words “cabin,” “remote” and “wilderness” repeated on the evening news with an increasingly romantic luster. I began to see how people on the coasts viewed my home state: as a wilderness of possibility. A refuge for ruffians, seekers, dropouts, dreamers and the occasional psychopath. Someplace you could go if things didn’t work out. T-shirts and coffee mugs bearing the slogan “The Last Best Place to Hide” popped up in local souvenir stores.

My life in Montana wasn’t romantic. It was distinctly suburban. I lived two blocks from the local high school. We shopped at Kmart, rented movies at Blockbuster and ate at a pan-Asian fast food place called the Mustard Seed. I listened to Nirvana and wore clothing emblazoned with Michael Jordan. I had never been hunting, and had fished exactly once. Newspaper headlines first alerted me that I lived on the frontier. I wondered what this meant.

Thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau made the idea of the wilderness aspirational, as a place to purify one’s spirit and find one’s true self. Our heroes and outlaws have often played out their destinies there, from Lewis and Clark to Billy the Kid to Kerouac and Cassady. But the West is a place like any other place. We just use it as a mirror for the dark, untamed aspects of our national character.

Mr. Kaczynski’s story followed this blueprint. He left behind a successful career in academia to test himself in nature. Once there, he became an avatar for a much older myth — of the monster lurking in the woods, terrorizing a complacent society. His postal delivery bombs were a warped modern twist.
[…]
Mr. Kaczynski’s capture was my first encounter with the poison pit at the center of the American dream. I suddenly felt like a stranger in the only place I’d ever really known.
[…]
So it was with Mr. Kaczynski. Homeless and lashing out, confused, pedantic, reactionary, he pretended to have new ideas to mask his old ambitions, cherry-picking from French philosophers, Luddites and environmentalists. But the truth is, he was just trying to justify what he and so many other boys here want — to get away from their parents, transcend their peers and remake society in their own image.
[…]
The media got him wrong. In seeking to romanticize Mr. Kaczynski, reporters gave him Thoreau-like qualities — framing him as a philosopher who found purpose in the woods, dark as it was. But his only innovation was a new, cowardly kind of violence. Mr. Kaczynski never really saw Montana, the wilderness or the West itself, as it truly was. For him, its main attribute was its lack of people. He was a twisted embodiment of the dream of the frontier that was poisoned from its inception.

Strangely, Mr. Kaczynski’s mythology seems only to have grown since his death. Young people still spread messages from his manifesto across social media, creating their own story of “Uncle Ted” as a fiery anti-technology prophet. We must hate ourselves, I thought, reading their posts, for the way we seek heroes from the worst among us.

We are all fed myths about our homes, whether it’s Montana as the last best place to hide or New York City as the cultural capital of the world. But these are just stories, often relying on outliers like Mr. Kaczynski. Our hometowns are far more complex than these mythologies, but seeing them as they really are — and loving them in all their tragic beauty — leads us away from destruction and isolation, to community and stewardship, a form of deeper purpose.

…how does the song go?

Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin’ like a breeze

…ok…different state…but all country roads lead to…not rome…but…when in?

Each day I wake up and try to see Montana for what it is. Golden grass on the dry hills, a big sky that generally runs from gray to darker gray, clear-cuts and abandoned mines and meth-ridden towns and glittering stands of wilderness so stunning they bring me to tears. It’s complicated and beautiful and older than I can possibly imagine. One day, in the marrow of my bones, I hope to know it only as home.

The Unabomber, Me and the Poisoned Myth of the American West [NYT]

…them good ol’ boys…never meanin’ no harm?