For more than half a century, Syria has been ruled by the Assad family – thirty years by the elder Hafez, and nearly as long by his son Bashar – a brutally authoritarian reign that, following the Arab Spring in 2011, devolved into an even more brutal civil war that has claimed half a million lives. The deeply complicated conflict, a bloody multipolar struggle between the Russia-backed Assad regime, the US-backed opposition forces, Iran-backed Hezbollah, the Kurdish leftist enclave in Rojava (and its Turkish antagonists), various ISIS-aligned terror cells, and myriad competing tribes, warlords, and sub-groups, has been more or less static since a 2020 ceasefire. That is, until a surprise offensive late last month by the Islamist opposition group HTS triggered a pile-on from all sides that broke through Aleppo, Homs, and finally Damascus, swiftly collapsing the Ba’athist government in a matter of days and driving Assad out of power (and out of the country). The regime’s stunning fall is a massive blow to Russia, reshaping the balance of power and leaving an unprecedented power vacuum as a shattered nation looks to the future.

Donation resources: UNHCR - UNICEF - Syria Relief - Karam Foundation - International Rescue Committee - Islamic Relief Worldwide - Save the Children

HT: Metafilter

The word of the year: Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary says it’s “enshittification” (wasn’t that last year?) while Oxford says it’s “brain rot.”

I know it’s still 2024, but I’m absolutely sure the 2025 word will be kakistocracy.

Nicholas Bate –

Is often just perfect. The slow-cooked meal. The relaxed endless tumbling obliques conversation. The amble rather than a hike. The new book a few pages at a time. The slow r e a c h i n g stretches prior to just one or two yoga moves. The pen to paper for those better-late-than-never cards. The slowest of cuddles on the sofa. Coffee without rushed pressed buttons and a bean that needs TLC.

There’s a time for fast, responsive and agile.

There’s definitely a time for slow, slower, slowest.

Recently, I stumbled upon the best post-election post I’ve ever read. Here’s Sam Kriss saying, “I told you so.” The opening is good enough that I could just post that, but you should read the whole thing so I’m basically reposting the entire piece here.

There are two factions in American politics, and they’re not evenly matched. As everyone knows, one of them contains all the smart people, the academics, the professionals, the people who’ve read the studies, learned the science, educated themselves, who eat well and own nice things made of wood, the good little boys and girls who know what’s best for everyone. It’s not polite to say this about the other side, but everyone is secretly aware that they are—let’s be honest here—morons. Actual imbeciles, breathing through the spittle in their mouths. Glassy-eyed religious maniacs. Frothing adult virgins with their heads full of Y-DNA charts and built-up cum. Uncomfortably globular men who have unknowingly outsourced their entire sense of reality to Kenyan scammers generating engagement-bait with ChatGPT. If you talk to these people for even a few minutes, it becomes clear there’s something very seriously wrong with them. Instead of articulate speech, they produce a constant stream of meaningless drivel, mashed-up waste syllables, usually referring to some podcaster, political nobody, or minor advertising campaign that no one whose life is worth living has ever heard of. A good chunk of them have reverted to a magical, Stone Age account of the universe, in which everything that happens, including ordinary weather events, is part of a Plan set in motion by Them, to distract you. Distract you from what? It’s not clear, but the idiot’s eyes are constantly shifting around from object to object and screen to screen, darting with the terror of a primitive in a defensive crouch against a world he simply doesn’t have the faculties to understand. Because this faction is so stupid and offputting, its political party is deeply unpopular. In fact, it’s only won the popular vote in a Presidential election two times since 1988. The first time was in 2004, when the entire country was in the middle of a psychotic war fever, ravenous for blood, crazy in a way that’s difficult to imagine now. The Disney channel used to broadcast little idents of teen celebs, gushing about how much they loved the American flag. The other time they won was the other day. It wasn’t even close. Somehow, the imbeciles outsmarted the smartest people in the world. And I said this would happen. Not to gloat, but: I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.

One of my most foundational political beliefs is that while the winner in an election doesn’t usually deserve to win, the loser always deserves to lose. I can’t think of anyone who deserved to lose more than Kamala Harris.

According to the Democratic Party, the election they just lost in a humiliating landslide was the most important election in anyone’s lifetime, a last-ditch effort to protect democracy itself from Trump’s incipient authoritarianism. Out of the entire population, they could only choose one person to be their champion, to go head-to-head against Donald Trump and stop his new fascist cacocracy from becoming reality. The lives and welfare of millions—billions!—depended on their making the right choice. And who did they pick? One of the least popular politicians in the country, the goofy cackling woman who says things like ‘It is time to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day,’ who seems mildly but permanently xanned, who moves through the world like a pat of half-melted butter. For the Democrats to lose one election to Donald Trump by nominating an obviously terrible candidate is an honest mistake. Two, and something’s up. The question isn’t why Harris lost to Trump—why was she ever in a position to lose to him in the first place?

Kamala Harris is not an untalented politician. In fact, she’s a very good one, but unfortunately that’s all she’s good at. Her parents do seem like genuinely interesting people. Donald Harris is a Jamaican development economist and one of only a handful of people to have received his country’s Order of Merit; the others include Bob Marley, Derek Walcott, and Fidel Castro. Shyamala Gopalan Harris was a Tam-Brahm from Madras who moved to America to research the genetics of breast cancer. Not exactly the kind of hardscrabble immigrant background that plays well in America, but it’s not boring either. The couple met through the Black Panthers. Cool! But maybe coming to America was a mistake, because in America everything is tinsel-thin, and in America even students of the historical dialectic can produce a daughter who goes around giving unrequited commencement speeches on what can be, unburdened by what has been. Kamala was not good at school, not particularly talented at university, and when she defaulted to law school she wasn’t particularly stellar there either. But at Howard she was pouting around with the girls at Alpha Kappa Alpha, which was apparently the swaggiest, brown-paper-baggiest sorority on campus, and at Hastings Law School she was the head of the Black Law Students Association. She was good at the game, making connections, leveraging them, getting ahead. After law school she spent a few years dating California political legend Willie Brown, and while it might not be fair to imagine that’s the only explanation for her political success, he can’t exactly have hurt. She got herself into enough of the right circles to jump from District Attorney to Attorney General to the Senate. Her world kept getting bigger; by 2003 she was calling Willie Brown ‘the albatross hanging around my neck.’ By all accounts, she’s a charismatic schmoozer, but deeply tyrannical to anyone unlucky enough to find themselves among her underlings. In 2020 she ran for President. She can’t have possibly thought she would win. It was Joe Biden’s year, the result was already written, and she was a two-year Senator with no actual achievements to her name. But it was a smart move: raise her profile, make her talents known, and after dropping out she could leverage her way into some kind of juicy post. Keep on climbing. She’s a very good politician.

The one thing missing from this story, though, is the electorate. Kamala Harris isn’t good with electorates. She’s a machine politician. She wants power, but not for any particular reason. It’s just that life is a game, and the point is to reach the highest level. Sidle your way into a series of darker and smokier rooms. When she ran for Attorney General in 2010 she secured endorsements from Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, but in the end she beat her Republican opponent by less than one percentage point—in California, which hasn’t elected a Republican AG in thirty years. When she dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary, it was still 2019. She was polling as close to 0% as makes no difference, and had not actually contested a single state. But why bother? For politicians like Harris, the electorate are just another annoying hurdle on the road to success. And she was right. History intervened. Nobody knew it at the time, but it turned out that the 2020 election was held in the fateful year of 2020, which meant that Biden was essentially obliged to pick a black woman as his running mate. (A lot of people seem to remember him explicitly promising to do so, which he didn’t; he promised to put a black woman—any black woman, apparently—on the Supreme Court. This sort of thing was normal at the time.) Of all the black women available, Harris was the obvious choice. She wouldn’t make trouble. She knew how to play the game. She was a well-functioning part of a well-functioning machine.

The reason Kamala Harris lost is the same as the reason she was the candidate to begin with: the Democratic Party is allergic to democracy. It’s the instrument of a particular form of class power; its role is basically disciplinary. When it comes to an actual crisis, all it knows how to do is coil in on itself, breathe in its own fumes, suck itself off until completion. The party knew that Joe Biden’s brains kept running out of his nose and into his morning coffee, but they kept pretending until it was far too late that he was running laps around the White House lawn and solving new problems in theoretical physics in his spare time. They really seemed to think that people wouldn’t notice what was right in front of them. Maybe they simply didn’t care. When people did notice, when Biden stretched his arm too wide at the first debate and all the stuffing came out, the party made sure his overthrow and replacement went as smoothly and as seamlessly as possible. No messy primaries, no ideological bickering, just a slick, stage-managed show. They’re very good at politics too.

Do you remember Brat Summer? I remember Brat Summer. It was genuinely amazing, one of the most bizarre mass psychological phenomena I’ve ever seen. Before a clock spring popped out of Joe Biden’s forehead on live TV, Kamala Harris was the least popular Vice President in recent US history. There were a lot of reasons for this, but I think the big ones are these. Firstly, she was already deeply unpopular—0% polls, remember—before she became VP. Secondly, she’d done absolutely nothing with the position except emit strange and incomprehensible bromides whenever she opened her mouth. But as soon as she became the candidate, despite nothing about her actually changing, her approval rating skyrocketed. It turns out that all you have to do is tell the Democratic base that they ought to like someone, and they’ll just start liking her. I think this is evidence of an extraordinary generosity of spirit. All of us, and me especially, could learn something from them. But it was incredible to watch. All these pols and pundits, who had been so stiff and serious in the gloom of the Biden era, suddenly breaking out in virulent lime green. Like a new tropical disease ripping through the establishment. Doughy old columnists transformed overnight into thirteen-year-old girls in shiny lipgloss. Ew. You’re, like, totally weird. Somehow this career politician, born when parts of Africa still belonged to the British Empire, turned overnight into some kind of snotty egirl. The New York Times printed the words ‘coconut-pilled,’ along with an op-ed about how she embodied the principle of ‘black joy.’ Sure, it was all vibes, but the vibes were good. In Gaza, they were lining up dozens of people in the courtyards of hospitals and crushing them to death with bulldozers, but that was all very far away. Wasn’t it fun, now that Old Man Biden was gone and you could play with your brand-new Kamala doll as much as you like? But for some unaccountable reason, among the general public, ‘Kamala: You Already Like Her!’ was not the brilliant pitch it seemed to be.

Hard to blame her, though; it’s not like she had many other choices. She became Vice President in a cultural atmosphere in which her historic status as a black woman was a potential vote-winner, in which you could bludgeon people into supporting you—or, at least, not opposing you—by suggesting that they’re bigots if they don’t play along. A lot can change in four years. Bigotry is actually kinda in right now. Another option would be to actually offer something to the voters. Some prospect that she could maybe make their lives better. That’s what Trump did: he offered an enemy to blame and the prospect of doing violence to them. Not a bad deal. Once I might have said that Harris would have won if she’d adopted all of my preferred policies. Socialise everything; denounce Khrushchevite revisionism. These days I’m not so sure that’d work, but it couldn’t have hurt for her to have adopted literally any policies whatsoever. Stupid thought. That sort of thing isn’t available to politicians like Kamala Harris. It’s not how the system works. The candidate doesn’t owe anything to the public, the public owes something to the candidate. You have to give them your love and respect and admiration and, crucially, your vote. Otherwise the monster wins.

Which is the line they reverted to, once Brat Summer faded into the dying time when the leaves all fall. Blackmail: democracy is on the ballot. Project 2025. The Republican plot to steal your pronouns. Fascism on the horizon. All of which might be real: Donald Trump exists within the purely instinctive life, a kind of wafting meditative state in which everything is possible. He can levitate a few inches off the ground; he is capable of extreme evil. Last time, he tried to overturn the result of a democratic election, which is extremely bad juju. But ‘democracy is on the ballot’ is an incredibly antidemocratic slogan. You have no choice other than to vote for us, it says. You don’t get a say in the matter. Whichever grasping freak we pick is your only option: now deal with it. It should not surprise you that a lot of people look at the offer you’re making, and decide to pass.

Trump will be bad. He probably won’t be as bad as his enemies keep screeching, but he’ll be bad. This is your fault. Once, when the kings of Israel sinned, God sent terrible empires to sack the holy city of Jerusalem, carry away its temple goods, massacre its people, and sell the survivors into slavery. Things have changed, but not that much. Now, he sends the king of the morons. You have sinned, and Trump is your punishment: whatever happens next, you will deserve it. You did not learn! The last eight years have taught you absolutely nothing: we’ve gone nowhere, we’re trapped in the same stupid loop, and now I’m writing essentially the same post all over again. You should have listened to the voice of the prophet, wailing in the wilderness, in the deserts and the unclean places, gibbering with the fury of the Lord. But you didn’t, and there’s not much left to say. Just that I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.

In the latest article by Katie Woo regarding MLB winter meetings and the St. Louis Cardinals, the president of baseball operations, John Mozeliak, said this:

We have every intention of fielding a good baseball team. It’s going to have a different profile, but we still have a lot of belief that some of our younger players will take that next step forward. We’re excited about what we have. Now, it is Dec. 5, and things can happen and things can change. But we’re still going into (next season) with optimism that it’ll be a fun baseball team to watch.

This is unintentionally one of the funniest, tone-deaf things I’ve ever read. It begs the question, “Does Mo really think Cardinals fans are stupid?”

Look, I get it. He has to say something to try and get people to come to the games. I mean, they aren’t going to come to the games, especially when they are double digits out of first place in the friggin' National League Central. It won’t be a fun baseball team to watch. It just won’t be.

Maybe I’ll eat those words and this collection of youngsters Major League the hell out of the season. I doubt it.

Here’s a playlist of the 100 most streamed songs on Spotify.

The current top pick is The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” followed by Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” and Lewis Capaldi’s “Someone You Love.” I could not pick out Lewis Capaldi in a lineup.

There isn’t a rock song until “Bohemian Rhapsody” at 38.

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Laura Theisen –

I thought everyone knew The Popcorn Trick. But it has recently come to my attention that some people were unaware of The Popcorn Trick. Thus, I will explain The Popcorn Trick.

1. Acquire popcorn at a movie theater.
2. Acquire a straw.
3. Stick the straw in the popcorn.
4. Go to the self-serve butter machine
5. Position the popcorn so the butter from the machine enters the straw.
6. Keep that popcorn butter button pressed for as long as you want. Move the straw up and down a little if you feel like it.
7. Enjoy a bag of popcorn that will not be dry. The pieces at the bottom of the bag will be buttery as hell.

Of course, The Popcorn Trick only works at theaters with self-serve butter machines, which favors multiplexes more than indie joints.

.@Ken_Rosenthal weighs in on the rumored Golden Bat rule:

"My instinct is - it's not baseball" pic.twitter.com/ATKvMgcejN

— Foul Territory (@FoulTerritoryTV) December 3, 2024

Ken Rosenthal is absolutely correct. It is not baseball. In fact, this idea pisses me off more than the stupid ghost runner at second shit.

When does Rob Manfred, who apparently dislikes baseball, find new employment?

So good. Way better than the original. I’d love to hear a wholly reimagined Crazy Nights album done in this style.

Here’s another version with a piano and more of the original guitars. He’s really talented.

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Will Leitch, writing at his Medium page, has a few thoughts on AI, algorithms, and making decisions.

The ability to organize your own thoughts — either through writing them down, or just simple, straightforward cognitive processing — is fundamental to being a person. It is what makes us who we are. The notion that someone would want to outsource this to a robot — or, worse, to allow a corporation to define it for them so that corporation may more efficiently sell you shit — deprives us of the very point of being a human being in the first place. It’s not about being a good writer, or even a good person. It’s about having your thoughts and beliefs and emotions be your own. It’s about having control of your own life.

That, to me, is what I find most confusing as I get older, my sitting-at-the-breakfast-table-and-grousing-”the whole world’s going straight to hell” moment:

https://youtu.be/6Ncnpe6p93E

It’s not that people are making choices that are different than the ones I would make, or that people are somehow worse than they were before, or even that we’re staring at our phones too much in the first place. I use many of these services myself, after all. It’s that it has become commonplace, even almost trendy, to opt out of decision making entirely. We let Spotify tell us what music we like. We let Amazon tell us what we want to buy. We let ChatGPT tell us how to express ourselves, or even how to construct thoughts in the first place. We let YouTube, Netflix and TikTok algorithms tell us what we want to watch. We let our cars drive us around. We all have infinite options, the opportunity to make the world whatever we want it be, to discover who we are and what we might have to offer this life and the people in it, and it is becoming increasingly clear that we are collectively deciding to beg out of it entirely. We had the opportunity to use technology and connectivity as a way to elevate ourselves, to evolve into something bigger, to discover our best selves. We have instead ceded everything. We have become a Trad Wife to technology.

I don’t know how to fix this, and, more to the point, I’m not sure people even want to. Life is hard, you know? It’s exhausting to be alive. It’s easier, even comforting, sometimes, to let someone else take the wheel. But, at the (very real) risk of sounding hectoring or helplessly lame, we only get to do this once, people. This is the sole life you get to live. Maybe we should try to actually live it? Because one thing is clear: These tech companies, their algorithms, their ravenous need to shove us away from a life that belongs to us … they’re driving us into a ditch.

Laura Olin –

You don’t actually have to stay on Twitter.

Even at the height of its influence, it was strategically only useful for a couple real reasons: because reporters were obsessed with it, and because it played some role in creating culture. The first is increasingly less true, and the second is largely less true.

Is Twitter a good persuasion tool? No. The people you need to reach for that reason probably never used it in the first place.

Is Twitter a good amplification or framing tool? No. Musk’s algorithm elevates views he likes and demotes those he doesn’t.

Is Twitter a place for creating culture? No, unless you’re a Nazi.

Is Twitter a good organizing tool? No. It’s filled with bots, not secure, it demotes links, and few people you’d organize with still use it.

Is Twitter simply any fun to be on? No, especially if you’re not a white man and regularly get rape and death threats.

A key fact: Not many people used Twitter in the first place. What mattered was WHO used it. The people who mattered are now largely gone or drowned out by the tidal wave of shit.

Overall: There are many better tools to persuade people with, organize with, frame arguments with, and have fun with.

Twitter’s gone, and now that Trump won again with Musk’s help, it’s gone forever. Let it go.

No one outside the Beltway or Elon Musk's Right-Wing Dutch Oven™ cares about Biden's pardon. Why would they? For almost a decade, conservatives have shrugged at every one of Trump's scandals, convictions, and fuck-ups. Nothing matters!

— John DeVore (@JohnDeVore) December 2, 2024

52 things I learned in 2024 by Tom Whitwell. A few that stuck out to me:

Ozempic is a modified, synthetic version of a protein discovered in the venomous saliva of the Gila monster, a large, sluggish lizard native to the United States. [Scott Alexander]

And before buying a web domain name, you should definitely check if it is haunted or cursed. [Bryan Braun]

Photographs of sporting events in the 1960–70s have a blue haze in the background that’s absent in modern photos. It’s because everyone was smoking in the arena. [Allen Murabayashi]

In the 2020s, over 16% of movies have colons in the title (Like Spider-Man: Homecoming), up almost 300% since the 1990s. [Daniel Parris]

Every director should have the "Spike Lee joint" thing

• A Danny Boyle gem
• A Christopher Nolan unit
• An M Night Shyamalan disappointment
  — Mat™️ (@futurekid.bsky.social) December 2, 2024 at 7:08 AM

Patrick Rhone –

You do the work because the work is worth doing. There may be many reasons why doing the work to get something or somewhere you want wont get you the results you were hoping for. But, this is not a reason for not doing the work. The work is worth doing because it makes you smarter. The work is worth doing because it gives you experience. The work is worth doing so that not doing the work is not a reason you fall short of the goal.

There will be insurmountable challenges to meeting many of your goals in life. Try anyway. Try because the challenge is worth meeting. Try because it may make the next opportunity surmountable. Try because it will make you better and smarter and stronger. You may fall short for many reasons, don’t let the work be one of them.

The work is how you grow and that makes the work worth doing every time.

Sigh.

Purdue fired head coach Ryan Walters on Sunday afternoon.

I have no ill will toward Coach Walters. He left Illinois, the program that helped make him a head coaching prospect, on terrible terms, and I doubt he’ll be a head coach at the D1 level ever again.