It’s New Year’s Eve. Goddamn, this has been an awful year.
There is nothing magical about this date, it’s just another day in a long series of them, we’re just going to change the number of the year, but there are things I’ll be wishing to happen (while having low expectations that anything will happen.)
For 2026, I would like to see the rule of law creep back. I want white nationalism to be repudiated. I want vengeance: I want the fascists in government arrested and locked away.
Is that too much to ask?
If not, throw in the end of capitalism, the collapse of the AI bubble, and the death of Trump.
My hope for 2026 is that the Democratic party can come up with better messages and better ads for the upcoming midterms.
Those Republicans who are now distancing themselves from Trump, for their midterm elections? Remind the public how those same politicians were being ever loving toadies to Trump in 2025.
Remind the public about all the ways the Republican candidates promised things to be better in 2025, only to help make those same things worse instead.
Did they pose with Trump? Have those images share space with photos of Trump and Epstein, the two people who the candidate hasn’t ever spoken against, while “thank heavens for little girls” plays.
I’m just a Canadian nobody. If the professional messengers of the Democratic party can only come up with worse messaging, fire them and replace them with the people who can do that job.
Besides the death of Trump, I hope for everything in Government with his name on it gets demolished. His ballroom, his arch, all the fake gold he has adorned the White House in needs to be removed, and anything else he touched. The Kennedy Center should also be demolished, his has tarnished and corrupted it, demolish it and build a sparkling new one with the just JFK’s name. His name must be eliminated from the history of our government, just like he tries to eliminate history he doesn’t like.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I recall 2019 becoming 2020 and sending memes alluding to 20/20 vision to friends and acquaintances. How did 2020 work out for us? Seems something was in the air already.
One would think the bar really low with 2025. Could it go lower? Maybe send James Cameron down to the trench in a submersible to retrieve that bar?
Hopefully Desantis gets prosecuted. Maybe a blue tsunami in November leads Trump and lickspittle cronies to a similar fate.
At least the Kansas City Chiefs won’t be in the Super Bowl so the power couple will be out of the spotlight. F1 cars will be a little different and Sergio “Checo” Perez returns with a…checks notes…Cadillac.
Measles and other diseases will increase thanks to Robert Felching Kennedy and MAHA loons.
Hate to be a downer, but I expect 2026 to be more of the same as 2025 and perhaps worse. If Donny and the Repugs don’t get their way in the mid-terms then lord knows what they’ll do. Remember January 6, 2020? It could go way beyond that.
I heard an English historian say last night that the reason we celebrate January 1st as New Years is because sometime in the 150s BCE the Romans needed to name someone to deal with a situation in Hispania but they could only fill that position on New Years. At the time, Romans celebrated New Years on March 1st. Rather than change the law about when they could fill the position, they changed when New Years was celebrated to January 1st. I don’t now if that’s accurate but the woman is a professor at Oxford or Cambridge so she has some cred.
It’s been a bad year. The next one will probably be worse.
YES! REVENGE!
You don’t need to completely tear down buildings like the Kenedy Center. Far more fun would be to remove his name in the most public and embarrassing manner possible.
Aside: I’m waiting for the Trump Reagan National Airport. 8-)
“vengeance”
I don’t think you want vengeance, you simply want actual justice. We’ve just had so damn little of it for the past decade.
“There is nothing magical about this date”
but … about 2025:
(1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9) squared is 2025
1 cubed + 2 cubed + 3 cubed +… + 9 cubed is 2025.
@robro:
That story is in a serious “Time in Roman Religion” book: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hTDku_ZQ0JgC&pg=PA15
though it adds that “it seems likely that [January 1st] had long supplanted March 1 in marking the commencement of the Roman year (see Michels 1967 97-100).” So that’s arguing it was more changing the consular date (from March 15th, not March 1st) to the one that was already used by people for other purposes.
We, too, hope for a less destructive, less murderous new year. We hope you and your loved ones have a 2026 of health and safety.
However, we see that everyday the increasingly massive push by obscenely wealthy magat plutocrats make what you, and we, wish for less likely to happen. The sad part is that corporate democrats are aiding and abetting that Death Spiral.
In the 2026 off year elections, the GOP will learn, America is not ready to cripple ACA, Medicare, Medicaid, And Social Security. Big Pharma has just announced price rises for a large selections of drugs. People don’t want to make it harder to vote to get GOP politicians elected. Rusiia is not our friend. Good Americans will be sick and tired of the antics of ICE. 2026 will be a mandate election. And goodby to political Kirkism and project 2025.
A bit more for Ethicsgradients #9 observation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squared_triangular_number
Can someone with better online-search resources/know-how help me with a calendrical question?
My subjective impression is that this year there have been many more headlines with “2026” in them than “2025”. T/F?
There is nothing special about a number? Ask the ghost of Srinivasa Ramanujan. (If you know, you know).
Good news in time for the new year.
“GOP gets WIPED OUT in Shock Election Loss In IOWA!!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=t-LCX-LS7_4
.
A different bias:
“Trump Allies Deserting Him in Droves”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZZAJzR5ok_w
I just want this Blue Wave thing to happen, and hope it’s enhanced by smarter policies, rather than preemptive “compromise.”
I agree with PZ!
also, “revengeance” should be a word.
The prisons aren’t big enough to contain all the MAGAts that deserve a heapin’ helpin’ of JUSTICE.
So, my suggestion is to empty out Gitmo and turn it over to the MAGAts. They can use the torture facilities to root out traitors in their midst (there’s MANY, I’m sure).
Then, after a year of hijinks, whisper to Cuba “no ours any more. Have fun”.
More good news. PZ, pay attention!
“Researchers identify protein that mimics exercise to boost bone strength in aging adults”
.https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-protein-mimics-boost-bone-strength.html
I want the bogus Democrats in the party leadership to be primaried. Chuck Shumer et al. Otherwise it will be another Obama period, with no legal consequences for the weasels and the Republicans bouncing back as hopes for fundamental reforms are dashed.
Let’s just bring back the terror of Robespierre, that would be the spirit! /s
Hossenfelder:
Not the end of the AI bubble but maybe of quantum computers.
“Why Quantum Computers might never work”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=WeVGJr6h-CQ
The creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams has prostate cancer. I don’t want him to die but it would be nice if the scare triggers some introspection.
.
As for Rupert Murdoch, the individual who made a generation of US grandparents racists and paved the road for Dubya and Trump in USA and the Tory dregs in Britan…yeah, he can die. In fact, he is overdue in Tartaros.
Captain Kendrick @ 21
I like the ambience you bring to the thread!
Be careful what you wish for.
I for one would like to see the application of good laws and the disobedience of bad ones.
Well, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble burst in 2000, but dot.coms are ubiquitous now.
When the AI bubble bursts, expect the same.
The tech ain’t going nowhere.
—
billseymour @7, a degradation ceremony would be rather nice.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cashiering
John Morales @ 26
We need a Degradation song, preferally based on The Inquisition Song by Mel Brooks. With DJT & Stephen Mills et al chained up as in the film.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=NUMkcBctE7c
Trump can start 2026 with a bang with this one cool trick…
A cool trick…like tell him, if he stuffs a fork into an electric outlet, he will create a cool display of sparks from the metal.
Minnesota revisited.
Trump administration freezes childcare funding to Minnesota in wake of fraud scheme allegations
.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/31/trump-administration-minnesota-freeze-federal-funding-childcare
The head of the frsus scheme was a very White woman. In the scheme there were 80 of Somali descent… of a demographic of 80 000.
You know, if it takes a frequency of 1 in a thousand of a demographic to tag a whole state where they live, I suppose even an all-white America would be a shithole state. In fact, in 2026 you should name Minnesota the ‘No Swamp’ state while calling Florida ‘T Swamp One’.
Yes a bloody awful year personally and in general.
I wish PZ a better year. And myself.
After reading Mano Singham’s blog, I was reminded of the many members of Freethoughtblogs that have de facto quit, presumably after Trump-induced paralysis.
.
We (meaning you, because I am on the wrong bloody continent) need to recruit new voices in 2026, even if many potential bloggers are still in a state of shock.
What a way for a shitty year to end.
Disney cast member recovering after videos show runaway boulder at Indiana Jones show
Who could have predicted that a runaway giant boulder might be dangerous? Anyone who watched a certain movie…
birgerjohansson @32
Crip Dyke (Pervert Justice) isn’t active blogging on FTB. Maybe she is still in some comments. Her Substack isn’t active either, since late August I think. She’s quite active on Bluesky as I follow her. Bluesky is a popular site for many microbloggers and commenters. That seems a trend now. Discord is another. There’s a whole side thing going on there.
Not sure why various bloggers fall away. It’s probably difficult to come up with stuff to talk about while also dealing with personal stuff. Easier to hang out in the comments. I admittedly don’t follow FTB outside of Pharyngula.
PZ has made a call for new blogging blood once in a while.
Had to fix this biased headline.
Trump administration freezes childcare funding to Minnesota in wake of completely fabricated fraud scheme allegations by a magabro YouTuber named Nick Shirley. He made the fraud claims and then proceeded to film themselves trying to force their way into a daycare owned by a Somali immigrant.
He actually had at least four other masked guys with him including a cameraman, and unsurprisingly, the daycare refused to allow any of them inside. CBS has already debunked the allegations but reality doesn’t matter to the current administration.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2PRty40Cf8M
I don’t want Trump’s name erased from history. I want it attached to all of the legislation passed in the future to keep this sort of atrocity from happening again. Maybe the “Donald J. Trump Anti-Corruption Act” for starters.
John Fleisher, that’s one pole, and my preferred one; cf. “If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.” by Catherine Aird.
The other being damnatio memoriae, which has also been proposed.
(Forgetting the past is the wrong path, I reckon)
I hope you all have something planned for tonight.
Here on the west coast, we all have 5 1/2 hours to live.
Of course, there is a slight chance that Dr. Jane Orrick is completely delusional.
Trump says he is withdrawing National Guard troops from some US cities
Surely this will convince the Nobel committee he is worthy of a peace prize.
I would like to see vengeance not justice. There can be no justice until every measure of pain and blood and suffering inflicted by the monsters who run this society is retured in equal measure, and beyond for the benefit of posterity.
@ Pierce R. Butler :
Intresting question.
Google searchés AI overview said no – butt ehn that is an AI overview so, hmm..
FWIW, haven’t had that impression myself but then haven’t thought about that question much, indeed at all, either..
Duh.
Headlines mentioning “2026” appear more common than headlines mentioning “2025” because 2025 is the present year and 2026 is the immediate planning horizon.
(Well, ‘was’ where I live, right now it is 11:28 AM AEST)
^ but then.
Can’t help butt wonder what a vastly different and so much better year the world would’ve had if Kamala Harris was POTUS this year – and convicted felon and court proven rapist Trump was thus rotting in jail where he belongs instead of ruining / running the worlds most powerful nation in terms of military and political influence.
Of course that wondering goes for the rest of our lives now as well as just this new year (2026 here now) wityh everyone’s futures mad esomcuh worse buy those who refused to do the obviously most & only ethical thing by totally supporting and voting for Kamala Harris last, wait, year before last year.
@44 StevoR
And yet her campaign was a miserable and historic failure, by all measures. Perhaps the obviously ethical thing to do was to intervene earlier at the convention and choose a better candidate. Or intervene even earlier, and actually hold proper primaries to select a proper candidate approximately when you thought it would be smooth sailing for Genocide Joe. Anything but the clusterfuck the Democrats engineered, with its predictable outcome.
Clarity Fix : … with everyone’s futures made so much worse by those Americans who refused to do the obviously most & only ethical thing by totally supporting, uniting behind, working for and voting for Kamala Harris during the last Presidnetial election.
@ John Fleisher : “I don’t want Trump’s name erased from history.”
Agreed – too many people forgetting too much history has got us Trump now – despite many of us trying to warn and inform others. Depressing really.
OTOH, how Trump is remembered needs to be clear and that needs to be with extreme repugnance, loathing and as an evil man whose example must be avoided in future and with measures taken to prevent any Trump’s emerging in future.
Will that be the case?
I sure hope it is and yet doubt it will be at least entirely so.
Victors do tend to (re)write history to suit them and powerful, painful truths have been hidden through much of history in so many cases and ways and aspects.
StevoR: “Can’t help butt wonder what a vastly different and so much better year the world would’ve had if Kamala Harris was POTUS this year
beholder:
<snicker>
So, to a speculative counterfactual claim which is about hypothetical governance outcomes, the beholder performs a category switch, ignoring any relevance, and talks about pre-election electoral performance.
I am amused.
Genocide beholder.
Yes, but that was before global communications were a thing.
These days, what happens is disseminated globally.
Traces remain in the Web.
Tiananmen Square, for example: even with global dissemination, a state can still suppress and overwrite the event inside its own borders.
(we’re building a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn )
John Morales @ # 42: Headlines mentioning “2026” appear more common than headlines mentioning “2025” because 2025 is the present year and 2026 is the immediate planning horizon.</>
Fair ’nuff.
Next question: in USAstan, how does the ratio of this year/next year headlines vary in election and non-election years?
Apologies for ending the year with a closetag fail!
@ ^ Pierce R. Butler : No worries and good riddance to a bad year that could have been so very different if we lived in another timeline where the evil and literal fascism wasn’t triumphing..
At least the Adelaide Strikers won their New Years Eve BBL T20 cricket game at the Adelaide oval last night at last! (Iwas there and one good way to see the year off..)
10, 9, 8,7, 6, 5, 4,3, 2, 1 ..
Auld Lang Syne (massed bagpipes and drums) live @ Switzerland
HAPPY NEW YEAR!! To (almost) everyone commenting here (trolls excepted) and, of course, to PZ too!
From South Oz where it is already 3.30 pm New Years Day here..
Cheers to Bulgaria: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crlere3x28lo
↓
Bulgaria – the poorest country in the European Union – has become the 21st member of the eurozone – leapfrogging more obvious and prosperous candidates like Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
For mostly urban, young and entrepreneurial Bulgarians, it’s an optimistic and potentially lucrative leap – the final move in a game which has brought Bulgaria into the European mainstream – from Nato and EU membership, to joining the Schengen zone, and now the euro.
For the older, rural, more conservative parts of the population, the replacement of the Bulgarian lev by the euro provokes fear and resentment.
The lev – meaning lion – has been the Bulgarian currency since 1881, but it has been pegged to other European currencies since 1997 – first the Deutschmark, then the euro.
Opinion polls put Bulgaria’s 6.5 million population more or less equally divided on the new currency, and political turmoil is not making the transition easy.
beholder@45,
Why not actually answer the point made by StevoR@44? Do you consider that if Harris had won the presidential election, it is likely the overall state of the world would on balance be:
1) Better than it is now.
2) Worse than it is now.
3) Neither better nor worse than it is now?
You can justify your answer any way you like.
And just to take up your point @45, yes, both the Harris campaign, and what led up to it, were a clusterfuck.
1) Biden should have announced, at latest mid-2019, that he was not going to run again. He, his wife, and his other close advisors bear much of the responsibility for the world’s current state on that count among others.
2) Having left his withdrawal until his abysmal and highly revealing debate performance forced his hand, it’s doubtful whether there was any realistic alternative to Harris: no time for primaries, no agreement on a potential alternative, and a divided convention would have been disastrous.
3) Harris, after a reasonable start, sabotaged her own campaign by failing to distance herself from th hugely unpopular Biden, specifically by saying she couldn’t think of anything she would have done differently. She did not need to specify anything, just say something like: “I’m a different person from the president, and we are going to be in a different time after the election.”
@astringer :
Thanks – after I posted it, I wondered about other numbers, and then realised it was true for “the first n positive integers for any n”. And then I proved it to myself by mathematical induction – haven’t done that in years!
robro@4: “I don’t now if that’s accurate but the woman is a professor at Oxford or Cambridge so she has some cred.”
I’d guess that’s Mary Beard, (former?) Professor of Classics at Cambridge.
richardh, the claim is false, or at least not attested.
It is not true that the Second Celtiberian War triggered that change.
I checked, no record of Mary Beard claiming that.
[there is a grain of truth,: “Expecting a long war in Hispania, the Senate decided in 153 BC for the first time that the election of the magistrates would take place on 1 January, instead of 15 March.” from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Celtiberian_War#Victories_of_the_Celtiberian_coalition ]
HNY everyone! I watched Kpop Demon Hunters last night and cried, so that’s where it’s at. Just went to the petrol station to buy beer, normal service resumed.
A broader persepctive of time year putting the new year and indeed old years and all our lifetiems and beyond into persepctive 12 minutes long – by Algol on youtube. .
A broader persepctive of time year putting the new year and indeed old years and all our lifetiems and beyond into persepctive 12 minutes long – by Algol on youtube. .
ethicsgradient #9
This would’ve been more interesting last January.
StevoR @ 62
For posterity, leave a very strongly magnetic slab buried under the regolith in Tycho Crater on the moon.
MAMDANI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hillary, [damn I am, madman I] !
Man amid
Maid man
! I missed those.
But yay!
He is now a made man. :)
Crossposted with the infinite thread
The president delivers a … not very heartwarming…New Year’s Eve message.
.https://youtube.com/live/DTjbw12xFXY
OK. He is losing the remaining inhibitions and revealing what is really going on in his mind.
I am no MD but people tell me this is consistent with some neural condition like frontal lobe dementia.
I guess we will have president Vance in a year or two.
What I am hoping to see in 2026 is more USians actively involved in some form of resistance. Protecting their immigrant neighbors, supporting transgender folks, especially youth, supporting unions and strikers, boycotting billionaires, participating in workplace walkouts. Also participating in more traditional democratic activities such as calling elected representatives and filling their voicemail boxes.
“Throw in the end of capitalism”. A long list of countries have switched to capitalism in your lifetime. Perhaps you have never heard of China, Vietnam, and Russia.
@ ^ anat : Yes please and here’s hoping!
Whether the USoA’s Democracy is still salvagebale under Shadow POTUS Miller and his demented puppet Trump and will be allowed to operate as such anymore is a whole other question, sadly.
@ 45 Contemptible drive-by bad faith Trumpy troll beholder :
False – indeed, almost certainly a deliberate lie.
Kamala Harris was robbed by voter suppression, possibly also Musk manipulation and still officially won 48.3 % of the vote vs Trump’s 49.8 % and 226 seats compared to Trumps 312. (86 seats dif.)
Former President Joseph Biden defeated Trump by 51.3% to 46.8 % and 306 seats to 232 (74 seats dif.)
Hillary Clinton won 227 seats and 48.2% vs Trump’s popular vote loss of 46.1% yet EC 304 seats. (77 seats difference and how utterly fucked up is that!)
Obama beat Rmoney by 51.1% to 47.2% & 332 vs 206 seats. (126 seat dif.)
Bill Clinton beat Dole 49.2% to 40.7%, 379 vs 159 (220 seat dif.)
Reagun beat Mondale 58.8 %(!) to 40.6 % & 525 to 13 seats. (512 seat difference.)
Stats from Wikipedia.
That’s just in recent history and proves that – even if you believe the official results & discount the role of voter suppression – Kamala was NOT “..a historic failure by any measure.”
See also and contrast with :
https://www.history.com/articles/landslide-presidential-elections
Nor was Kamala Harris a bad candidate given how very close she got especially after Biden’s polling position that she was left with and the very little time she had to campaign in. For her to get as close as she did – and perhaps actually win as might have been the reality without Musk and certainly was the reality without voter suppression proves she was an excellent choice and did exceptionally well.
Give us a laugh Trump enabling troll and tell us who your choice for better candidate would’ve been and why you think so exactly?
Which Democratic candidate would YOU have picked and supported and voted for, over de facto Trump as you in reality did, “beholder?”
Any bets folks that the Trump Enabling Dishonest Troll (TEDT) will actually answer this question for a very rare change? I’m predicting not. So they could prove me wrong and actually give a direct honest answer but see previous sentence.
Also, of course, we are talking here specifically about the election after the parties candidates were picked and not before. When the candidates – the two and only two actual real choices for POTUS – were either Trump or Kamala. A question the TEDT never answers and no doubt will run away from again – which out of those two actual choices was the better choice?
Of course if our TEDT were serious about left wing politics, they’d have joined the Democratic party and helped choose for themself who the candidate was and helped them win in other ways rather than spewing almost certainly deliberate lies against the relatively more left wing party and its candidates and leaders on blogs like this.
Fixed it For You. Fact.
Also note the tired old lie wrongly blaming Biden for what Netanyahu chose to do despite Biden opposing Netanyahu and calling for Netanyahu to NOT do what Netanyahu did (e.g. in Rafah) is, again, a tired old utterly self-destructive lie.
Oh and no one – with notably the possible exceptions of Trump and Musk – thought the election would be “smooth sailing” so yet another outright deliberate lie from the TEDT here.
As Luke Skywalker says Amazing every word of what you just said was wrong! The Democratic party (note accurate spelling and full name rather than the tellingly Repug shortening of it.) did NOT engineer the election.
It wasn’t a “clusterfuck” and many predictions based on reliable factors e.g. Allan Lichtman’s here (1 hr 10 mins long) predicted Kamala would win.
Indeed, the failure of Lichtman’s otherwise 100% accurate prediction is another possible indicator that the last election result was actually incorrect and manipulated rather than being a true result of the will of the American People.
Eromon Msicsaf@71 is obviously a returning troll previously posting as “nomorefascism”.
Indeed.
Troll speaks in what I believe is called the teleological fallacy in history: The false notion that historical events happened exactly as intended by the people involved.
SteveO @ 73:
I want to offer a perspective caution regarding the 2024 elections (and 2022, and 2020, and going into the future, too):
There was no “best choice” on offer. There was only a “lesser evil” on offer; and people (individually and collectively) don’t do very well choosing the lesser evil — perhaps, in part, because choosing the lesser evil is still choosing evil.†
Biden (and Trump) were/are too old for elective office. If you’re eligible for ordinary Social Security, your name doesn’t belong on the ballot; there’s substantial neurological research showing accelerating deterioration in both crisis/immediate decisionmaking and assimilation of data from unfamiliar contexts after 55-60 years old.
Harris voluntarily ran for two archly-partisan offices that were not suitable for election in the first place (city/county attorney and state attorney general)— they were for professionals requiring professional judgment over any partisan consideration. (The electorate at large that made these elected offices in the first place shares some blame here.) She wasn’t nearly long enough removed from those circumstances (needed at least a decade’s separation) to have reset her perspectives and habitual reactions.
The real blame belongs to the Party Elders who are not subject to any scrutiny or restraint. They — with their arch focus on their concepts of “electibility”… and “controllability — gave us the evil ballot.
† I’m a Warrior who couldn’t/hasn’t come in from the Cold [War]. The choice between “corrupt, horrible bigots” and “increased risk of nuclear armageddon” in the day job was ever-present and extremely fatiguing. And sometimes it wasn’t all that clear which was which, either — or if there was a discernable difference.
“There was no “best choice” on offer. There was only a “lesser evil” on offer”
False dichotomy.
I mean, I get your intended meaning:
‘There were no good choices; the decision was between degrees of bad.’
Still, one can be ‘best’ in terms of expectations of outcome.
(Gotta love disputing a laywer-type)
@ 78:
There is no “best” possible when choosing between/among evils, precisely because “expectations of outcome” are inherently implausible. It’s not a false dichotomy — it’s a boundary/undefined-function problem (such as tan(π/2) in radians).
@79, it’s not an absolute, but a relative claim.
When every option is bad, the best outcome is the least harmful.
That’s what ‘Still, one can be…’ refers to.
What you claim is that one should not prefer the least worst available as the best possible outcome.
After all, each is bad, right?
Seems to me you come from a place where voting is not compulsory.
“There was no “best choice” on offer. There was only a “lesser evil” on offer”, I wrote.
Meaning: out of the available alternatives, the least worst is perforce the best.
—
Your mathy analogy is misapplied and wrong.
“(such as tan(π/2) in radians)” is not a lack of choices from a bounded set.
Specifically, tan(π/2) isn’t “a boundary/undefined-function problem”; it’s a function with an asymptote at that point.
—
“There is no “best” possible when choosing between/among evils, precisely because “expectations of outcome” are inherently implausible.”
Let me be crude: Given a chunk of shit, shit‑flavoured pasta, and a shit‑smeared loaf of bread, is there no best choice? ;)
@77. Jaws : Do you really think Kamala Harris -the actual option Americans had was literally evil?
I don’t agree.
She wasn’t a unicorn, a perfect candidate with ultra-progressive views. Sure.
But evil? Really?
Trump OTOH, I think it is a fair asessment to state that Trump is actually truly evil. Likewise and even more so Shadow POTUS Stephen Miller.
So was it really a choice of one evil versus another evil or rather one centrist but relatively progressive and relatively left wing rational politician vs an outright evil fascist?
I think clearly it was the latter.
SteveO, I have a decades-long aversion to electing those ethically unqualified for the office (especially in the sense of professional ethics, much more so than any values judgment). It’s perhaps a different flavor of evil than comparisons of the evil of policy preferences, and that’s my point: Determining which evil is less is uncertain, because one ends up with infinitely reflexive alternations between “hindsight bias” and “predictability.”
Then, too, the time I lived in California overlapped with Harris’s term as an elected attorney general, so I got to see some of the the-public-won’t-notice-this-because-it’s-not-the-public’s-purview side issues. Part of this was/is a consequence of the American legal profession’s disdain for learning anything from anyone except lawyers — in particular, things like “leadership skills and philosophies” (the structure of the profession directly discourages even acknowledgement). I got to watch some of those consequences.
That evil flowing from these problems doesn’t result in supervillainesque cackling and stroking of cats (not even the Evil Cat) merely makes it harder to recognize, to evaluate, to choose.
@ ^ Jaws : So you really think Kamala is “evil” then?
A “different flavour of evil” (what extra super-mild evil flavour?) and “ethically unqualified for the office” eh? Wow. Because?
I really don’t see her as remotely that. In fact I see her as good. Certainly relatively good but also generally good as a person.
I really do not understand why you think she is that bad. I know she’s not uber-progressive despite the reichwing claims to the contrary and their depictions of her but, again, evil? Seriously?
What do you think is the very worst thing she has done and how many such really bad things has she done?
Then compare with Trump..
The old saying about mountains vs molehills comes to mind for me.
StevoR, Jaws is being a bit more abstract.
You’re treating “evil” only as a moral‑character descriptor, Jaws accepts that is not applicable in Kamala’s case, but still applies it as a structural or professional‑ethical category. Like, their approach to the job.
Functional definition.
Obviously, Jaws is being neither consequentialist nor deontic given that “expectations of outcome are inherently implausible” is a professed belief.