In which the pond yet again seeks distractions and finds a little relief with a traditional Groaning ...

 

The pond's search for alternatives continues, with one correspondent kindly suggesting a Doctorow read, Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox, Not what the machine does, but who it does it to.

Inter alia, the enshittification man managed to drag Marge into it ...

...The job of a science fiction writer is only incidentally to describe what a technology does — at its best, science fiction interrogates who the technology does it to and who the technology does it for.
This is a political act of resistance. Margaret Thatcher’s motto, after all, was “There is no alternative,” by which she meant, “Stop trying to think of alternatives.” The bully’s trick is to present your defeat as a fait accompli: “Resistance is futile.”
Tech bosses practice a form of vulgar Thatcherism all the time: Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think there’s no way to talk with your friends without letting him listen in; Sundar Pichai wants you to think there’s no way to search the web without being spied on; Tim Cook wants you to think there’s no way to have a safe and reliable computing experience without giving him a veto over which software you install; Satya Nadella wants you to think there’s no way for you to edit a Word file without letting your boss compare your keystrokes-per-minute to your co-workers:
And AI bosses want you to think that the only way to use these tools is to displace and immiserate labor, because that’s the promise they raise investment capital on ...

In a similar spirit, the pond notes that Parker Molloy some interesting observations in the wake of the Reiner murders, The Rules of Grief, The post-Kirk purge was never about decency. Trump's response to Rob Reiner's murder proves it.

It's too long to quote in detail, but the nub of it came towards the end ...

...What this was always about

The post-Kirk purge was never about mourning. It wasn’t about opposing political violence or maintaining civil discourse or respecting the dead. It was about power. It was about demonstrating that there would be consequences for insufficient loyalty, for failing to perform the correct emotions at the correct time about the correct people.

A kindergarten teacher quoting Kirk’s own words about gun violence? Fired. A climate scientist sharing a post that explicitly said “No one should be gunned down”? Fired. A late-night host criticizing the MAGA movement’s response to the killing? Suspended by government pressure.

The president of the United States mocking a murder victim hours after his body was found, blaming him for his own death because he criticized Trump? That’s just Trump being Trump.

Reuters called their investigation “The Charlie Kirk purge” and described it as mapping “the pro-Trump machinery of retaliation now reshaping American political life.” Some academics they interviewed compared it to the Red Scare, when the test wasn’t whether you’d actually done anything wrong but whether you’d demonstrated adequate loyalty.

Even Ted Cruz — Ted Cruz! — acknowledged on his podcast that letting government decide “what speech we like and what we don’t” sets a dangerous precedent. Silencing voices like Jimmy Kimmel’s might feel good, he said, but “when it’s used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”

Here’s the thing, though: it won’t be used to silence conservatives. That’s the point. The rules don’t apply evenly. They never did.

The actual rules

Let me spell them out, since they’re now pretty clear:

If a prominent conservative is killed, you must mourn publicly and appropriately. Quoting their own words is not allowed. Pointing out the consequences of their rhetoric is not allowed. Criticizing how their allies respond is not allowed. Failing to show sufficient grief is grounds for termination, investigation, deportation, or FCC action against your employer.

If a prominent liberal is killed, the president can mock them, blame them for their own death, and make it about himself. No one will be fired for celebrating. No one will be investigated. No one will lose their visa.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

The mourning requirements were never about principle. They were a loyalty test dressed up in the language of civility. And now Trump has made that impossible to deny.

That's worth bearing in mind ... as we reach Thursday, and the reptile barrage goes on and is beginning to sound relentlessly political, with hate monger petulant Peta leading the way...

Golding sprang to mind, as he often does...

Wilcox also had a thought ...

As before, the pond looked around for alternatives, a respite from the relentless barrage and wall-to-wall never ending coverage ..

Like the grandiose make-over being proposed by King Donald, along the way to doing a Caesarean, or perhaps a Napoleonic, arch ...

Secret Plans for Monster Trump White House Ballroom Revealed

WINGING IT!

The plans were outlined in court documents as part of a lawsuit against the controversial ballroom. (*archive link)

No need for text. Just the image will do, as the elephantine building not only dwarfs the original structure but the Treasury building shown on the far right for comparison...

Talk about balance and a sense of proportions ...

There were other distractions, such as another cracking Crace ... A black swan event: Keir actually cracked a good joke at PMQs, MPs from most corners of Commons laughed at the festive gag – but stony-faced Farage failed to see the funny side.

Desperate times in the UK ...

...Let’s hear it for the joke, then. It came near the start during Starmer’s opening monologue. Having addressed the serious stuff of antisemitism, Keir wished everyone a happy Christmas in his last Commons appearance of the year. And in the spirit of goodwill to all men – and all women – he had this advice to Reform: “If mysterious men appear from the east bearing gifts, this time report it to the police.”

Weirdly, the only person who didn’t seem to find this funny was Nigel Farage. Perhaps he still can’t quite see what the problem is with taking bribes from the Russians – believes that Nathan Gill has been hard done by. Instead, Nige looked stony-faced as he sat in his new, favourite place in the Commons. 

That's what passes for a good joke and makes Nige glum?

And then there was the matter of King Donald suing the Beeb for squillions, reviewed by Jane Martinson in the Graudian, Trump’s $10bn attack on the BBC doesn’t have to make sense. In his absurd world, he has already won, The legal action has made news and it will do damage. A potential disaster for the corporation and the UK, but a good day’s work for this president

The headline said it all, and the pond might then have moved on to The Atlantic ... and signs of hope for the truth teller, Trump Still Needs Susie Wiles (*archive link)

Or the pond could have stepped outside the whole mess in The New Yorker, in Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing? (*archive link)

The pond's cognition immediately began to dissonant, which perhaps is a good thing.

But in the end the pond's remit is to cover the reptiles and the lizard Oz editorialist offered one path forward, a way of including the lizard Oz in the day's mix...

Dry as dust, as desiccated as coconut, and returning to the reptiles' insatiable desire for cuts and mutilations, worthy of a self-harming punk or Goth, or perhaps the ketamine-addicted Uncle Leon in his prime DOGE days.

From day one, Wiles had to grapple with another power center: Elon Musk.

“He is a complete solo actor,” said Wiles of Trump’s billionaire pal who led the scorched-earth blitz known as the Department of Government Efficiency. Wiles described Musk as something akin to a jacked-up Nosferatu. “The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” she told me. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”

Musk triggered the first true crisis of the Trump presidency and an early test for Wiles. Trump’s chief was shocked when the SpaceX founder eviscerated USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. “I was initially aghast,” Wiles told me. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”

In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had decreed that lifesaving programs should be spared. Instead, they were shuttered. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” said Wiles. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”

Wiles knew that fixing this was on her. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” she told me. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”

Wiles says she called Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalls telling him. At first, Wiles didn’t grasp the effect that slashing USAID programs would have on humanitarian aid. “I didn’t know a lot about the extent of their grant making.” But with immunizations halted in Africa, lives would be lost. Soon she was getting frantic calls from relief agency heads and former government officials with a dire message: Thousands of lives were in the balance.

Wiles continued: “So Marco is on his way to Panama. We call him and say, ‘You’re Senate-confirmed. You’re going to have to be the custodian, essentially, of [USAID].’ ‘Okay,’ he says.” But Musk forged ahead—all throttle, no brake. “Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles said. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china. But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”

The shuttering of USAID crippled the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The antiretroviral program, launched with $15 billion by George W. Bush in 2003, was credited with preventing millions of deaths. It depended on USAID grants. In an interview with The Financial Times, Bill Gates remarked: “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.” (Vanity Fair).

The lizard Oz editor  howling for the evisceration of the budget isn't a pretty one - some might find it deeply boring - but it was a small chink in the wall to wall reptile coverage of the barking mad fundamentalist Islamic killing fields...

And it reminded the pond that Dame Groan had been out and about yesterday performing exactly the same feat.

It was only a three minute read, but it was a chance to step away from mass murder ...

The pond decided on the Burroughs' cut and paste approach, because Dame Groan offered a number of graphs, as if seeking a spot in an ABC finance report ...and these graphs were best appreciated in situ ...

Did the pond mention desiccated coconut?

The pond knew what this groaning meant, being exactly the same as what all groaning by Dame Groan meant. 

We'll all be rooned by Xmas, or at least before the year is out.

And so to a final flurry of groaning gloom, though the pond suggests that being caught in the gun sights of a crazed sniper blazing away on a beach could be considered a lot worse ...

For a closer,  the pond searched far and wide for news of the war on Xmas.

But apart from Faux Noise mounting a war on Xmas - just buy a fake tree and join with Frank in singing about plastic people - it was decidedly slim pickings.

One scribbler even proposed that it had gone MIA ...Remember the ‘War on Christmas’? I Kinda Miss It. Make America argue about coffee cups again.

... I miss that absurd little era — not because it was harmless (it wasn’t), but because it was, in hindsight, the training-wheels version of what was coming.

Fox News would dedicate entire programming blocks to a random elementary school renaming its Christmas pageant a “Holiday Celebration,” treating it like an ISIS recruitment tape with craft-store budgets. They weren’t attacking policy; they were soft-launching a worldview. A prototype for “bathroom safety” panics and anti-DEI crusades and whatever fresh authoritarian nonsense they’re road-testing this week.

And yet, compared to now, it feels almost cozy — a simpler time when the panic du jour was a Starbucks cup that didn’t feature enough Christian symbolism. When the scariest chyron you’d see was something like: “WAR ON CHRISTMAS INTENSIFIES; NORTH STAR REPLACED WITH ENERGY-EFFICIENT LED.”

Back then, the culture-war machine at least had the courtesy to be stupid on a small scale. You could roll your eyes at the guy in Walmart shouting about how the cashier’s “Enjoy your holiday” was proof America was circling the drain, and then go about your day.

Now? We’re drowning in apocalyptic headlines. Abortion illegal in basically half the country. Diversity programs dismantled. Trans people targeted by bathroom bills designed to unleash vigilantes. Fox pundits bend over backwards to avoid criticising white nationalists. Oh and we’re on the verge of another elective war. It makes the old holiday hysteria look like a Hallmark movie compared to the political Mad Max franchise we’re currently living in.

Today, when someone says “Merry Christmas,” I feel a pang of nostalgia so strong it might qualify as a medical episode. I picture a Fox anchor getting red-faced over a “Season’s Greetings” sign — and for a fleeting second, I long for that version of America, where the outrage was fake but the stakes felt survivable.

What I wouldn’t give for Tucker Carlson to come out of retirement and yell at me about a snowflake pattern on a coffee cup instead of whatever democracy-eroding nightmare he’s promoting with Nick Fuentes this week. Let’s go back to arguing about whether Santa should be allowed to say “ho ho ho” without a parental advisory warning. 

Let’s return to a flavor of stupid that doesn’t overtly threaten the structural integrity of the nation.

Ah, Nick, the incel neo-Nazi with a love for Stalin and Hitler, and rising up the ranks of the GOP. Impotence incarnate:

In his recent interview with Piers Morgan, white nationalist Nick Fuentes, with his declarations of racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism, came across as the voice of a civilisation in decay. The cynical, mondain European Morgan, on the other hand, sounded like the rejuvenating advocate of a better future. Along with the Trump administration’s remarkable hostility to liberal Western democracies, that is a curious reversal. The New World and the Old World have finally changed places.

Think of Henry James’ American visitor to Europe, Daisy Miller, seduced by Giovanelli, an Italian gigolo, and symbolically killed by the moral rot of the older civilisation, dying of malaria in the Colosseum. Or Isabel Archer, another young American woman, in James’ Portrait of a Lady, this time in London, betrayed and debased by American expatriates soaked in corrupt European mores. In the interview, Fuentes seemed Giovanelli himself, seeming to seduce young American males with his desiccated assaults on history, reason and decency. Morgan found himself in the position of what might have been Daisy Miller’s American dad, glowering in derisive disbelief.

That's one weird way to look at it, Piers suddenly looking good up against mad Nick and cut snake Tucker, but in the end they're all a bunch of loons jabbering away at each other.

How the pond yearns to return to those simpler times, where Happy Holydays could start a riot.

The pond suspects that those days have gone forever, and that we're going to be a lot longer at sea ....