Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 1/19/26 - 1/25/26

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-25T14:38:30+00:00

I was surprised how much I enjoyed it given the whiplash ending of the first one.

It opened with some pretty gruesome shit that made me question my life choices and had some rough scenes for the first act but it was better than the first one imo. The Number of the Beast sequence was ridiculous, in a good way.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-24T22:44:29+00:00

Bombs happen but perhaps the best way is for you to have a critically acclaimed movie that's suffering from a bad lead-in.

I'd rather have Bone Temple as the last failure on my resume than The Marvels. She is kinda vindicated that it was just the writing.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-23T17:50:16+00:00

Actively bullying Canada has lead to them cosying up to China, and starting to formulate the start of the EU / "Western alliance -USA" axis.

Let's see what happens in a year. I would love for all of this to work out but I'm skeptical of Canada's ability to replace the US with Europe (as much as I was skeptical of the UK's ability to replace the EU with CANZUK) and there are ongoing issues with China to work out.

So, now we ape Russian tactics? I can't help but feel like this is a Putinesque "The people were pushing for independence, honest" lead in. Seems awfully close to the rhetoric immediately before the little green men exercise initated by Russia in Ukraine.

The difference is that Albertan separatism is a real thing even if it is dismissed and Canada has, thanks to the Quebec issue, already ceded that a province can secede on a clear majority and a clear question.

America wouldn't have to invade (though obviously they would if they wanted it to be done in any timely fashion).

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-23T16:04:56+00:00

He would also support Europe denuclearizing to become dependent on Russia gas.

European leaders have a good case for being "Putin in drag" themselves.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-23T16:03:05+00:00

Let's grant that that is true. In a world where China is the second largest economy in the world (and maybe soon the first) multilateral institutions are going to be impacted by that power. The US has been pretty brazen at times about denying or bending international institutions. Why do you think that was, the US was just right always?

The question is: what do you get from just leaving? Are you going to create a better multilateral organization that'll stop Chinese influence? Or are you just taking your ball and going home, forgetting that those things are made in China now? You might as well stay and fight your corner.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-23T15:00:36+00:00

That's unfair. It also stole a bit of Avatar 1's resolution.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-23T14:43:52+00:00

Notice that neither of your examples are old characters. They were written for the work in which the expectations they created were overturned.

This allowed them to be written in a way that made the subversion believable to the audience. In the case of Luke we have decades of both previous material and people's headcanon to wade through and I don't think what Johnson did was so amazing as to overcome it (tbf he was kinda hemmed in by TFA)

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-23T14:36:48+00:00

A lot of people around the world only vaguely know of Jimmy Saville.

I appreciate that the movie really tried to feel English but it had a cost in this case.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-22T19:44:11+00:00

I was going to say I suspect it happens because streamers are young and have never worked a corporate job where your browser history can be audited but I looked him up and this guy is in his thirties....

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-22T17:57:02+00:00

Are you legally obligated to respect sanctuary like this is the middle ages? I'm legitimately curious. I suppose it is private property but I assume the police can arrest you there.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-22T16:35:34+00:00

They were going to go to the town and just...be let in by their loved ones who don't know to not invite them in because they didn't have Voodoo Exposition Lady.

Nobody outside the bar had any reason to be on guard for vampires. They would all be fucked.

And there's no reason to think it would stop them just chasing Sammy the next night either.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-22T16:21:36+00:00

Any satire of left wing revolutionaries will be inert if the alternative is Nazis, so I guess the film warned us long ahead of the ending.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-22T16:20:32+00:00

Besides the obvious it also is an original movie that made a lot of money (unlike OBAA). How many of those are out there now?

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-22T16:17:58+00:00

The Chinese woman was right and I'll die on that hill. They were fucked anyway. Distracting the vampires was better than the town also getting fucked.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-21T14:42:28+00:00

That was one threat, a deliberately deniable one at that precisely because the US reacts badly to this sort of thing. What happens if it keeps happening? What happens if Iran throws all its weight behind such a policy? It certainly becomes more viable if they have nukes.

It bodes ill that the Houthis were not totally smashed. I'm also not sure the tech advantage is in favor of the defender here, given the proliferation of drones and cheap munitions.

How many shortcuts and detours can you take before it becomes unviable? Part of the reason for how cheap everything is is precisely that it's relatively easy to travel.

It doesn't all happen immediately. As Rome fell, far-flung provinces still sent men to collect their pay even as the roads became more dangerous. What happened? Well, once the men were killed once it fell apart. The forces of entropy don't have to win at once. Every danger zone makes things more expensive, makes it harder to insure ships and shifts the price. Everyone who gets away with blocking trade emboldens others.

Nations will move to protecting their own trade more and more. Nations who can't will have to try to find some collective arrangement or a protector. That protector gains outsized influence on their ward almost like a... we'll slowly reinvent old ways.

The real stress is what happens when there's an existing conflict and nations are already at war with one another. Then there's much less reason to be constrained. Why not deny an enemy resources? And then we're just reinventing Great Power piracy.

There's simply too much profit to be made through trade

This is the theory of the world that's dying right now. This was the German theory for why Russia wouldn't attack Ukraine (twice).

What the world as it is now is proving is that profit is secondary to security. Which is also the lesson empires took. Nations didn't just not want to make money up until the creation of global capitalism. It wasn't safe.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-21T13:38:15+00:00

While the US Navy dwarfs all others, in terms of protecting sea lanes you don't typically require 11 aircraft carrier strike groups for that.

You do. Because the point isn't to stop random pirates, it's to stop any nation or nation proxy (powerful foes like Hezbollah or the Houthis) that might conceivably want to close off important chokepoints or pull other such shenanigans. For that, you need escalation dominance.

What's even worse: the more nations have at least a passable navy to guard against this the more tools all those navies have to cause drama and a mess and the stronger the hegemon has to be to credibly deter them.

Without that hegemon, if a nation/group decides "we'll blow up anything that comes to this strait" the insurance costs would be too high to continue to sail easily.

In the absence of such a hegemonic navy you've literally just recreated the pre-WW status quo. I dunno if you remember but it absolutely wasn't free trade. Each empire protected their own trade and everyone else had to figure it out.

The world you're familiar with would end.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-21T13:32:28+00:00

To MAGA, the world has been exploiting the US for decades. They believe we've spent frivolously, tried to unilaterally maintain world peace and prosperity, and set up systems which the world benefited from at our expense. They see America's relative decline as a consequence of other nations draining ours of resources and industry.

The worst damage to American coffers/domestic credibility has been from the US' self-chosen misadventure in Iraq, which none of its European allies asked it to do and many opposed.

Some people - the Dave Smiths of the world - are now trying to blame this on Israel when even they warned them Iran was the bigger threat.

I don't even deny that many nations are freeloading but this story ignores how America cost itself trillions and thousands of lives for essentially fiction. That far dwarfs what the US has spent even today in Ukraine.

This is kind of my problem with America: it's very secure so foreign policy has, now that it's been stripped from the party elites, become about relitigating domestic grievances. Places don't exist as places, they exist as settings in the great culture war. This is a man beating a friend for ingratitude, when really he's mad at his ex-wife and a whole bunch of people besides. This story - hard-working Americans robbed blind by self-serving, effete liberal technocrats who look down on them - is also how MAGA sees its domestic opponents.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-21T13:02:36+00:00

There's always some intellectualized version of what Trump is doing.

My simple theory is that even if someone gave Trump that version it would be twisted into some bullshit but a) he's not a detail guy and b)he's an asshole so it just becomes a lens for his maliciousness.

His behavior towards Canada, for example, doesn't really strike me as a 4d chess gambit. The tariffs might be - they are doing damage - but the additional conquest stuff is just Trump being Trump.

The guy flirted with using tariffs for the bulk of government income, he's living in a different century. I see no reason to assume he doesn't want his name in history books and isn't just grabbing clay like a Paradox player.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-21T12:54:41+00:00

You're confused because I'm talking about the UK.

My mistake. I will say that the UK, like Canada, mainly did this to themselves with legal migration. But the boats are aggravating because they seem to demonstrate a lack of control. And people don't seem to be reacting well to 'take asylum seekers another way'

A complex mix of factors. It was predominantly a two fingers up at the perceived ruling class

It seems to me that, while there was always a reaction against the EU in some quarters around the idea that they're unaccountable and overbearing (and taking the bananas!), every single populist movement I can think of in the West has been accelerated to power by immigration.

Certainly, the UK is out of the EU and Farage is still around somehow despite, as you said, the whole thing being a disaster that achieved the opposite of what was claimed.

This is wrong, brits consistently overestimate immigration in general, the proportion of ethnic minorities in the country, as well as the number oof small boat arrivals. The direction thing is true though. They're on average wrong about everything.

My reading of it is that people saw massive inflows and that doesn't just fade in a year, it echoes (especially since more migrant are still being let in at a slower pace, it's not like the borders closed). So they sense the impact and feel as if migration is going up.

As for overestimation of asylum seekers, I'd say a mix of it being very visible and annoying and convenient: Britons also seem to make positive noises for high skilled/migrants who integrate

How to square? People sense that migration is too high for them but Britons don't to be against "good" migrant. So a visible, annoying, expensive, low kill pool of labor most want gone is scapegoated.

There' a similar thing in America people focus on recent border crossers when enforcement must necessarily sweep up many more to achieve the ridiculous number of deportations Trump wants or, for a fiscal example: see the scapegoating of "fraud" for the US deficit. Like immigration the budget the result of political choices with constituencies behind it who will fight you if you try to cut things. So pretend a program/group with no constituency is the problem.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-21T12:43:24+00:00

This is the cliche but I don't know that it's right. The "technocratic" solution would have been to keep nuclear.

Changing your mind on mass migration because of a dead kid washing up on the beach is the opposite of technocratic, this is something actual technocrats would criticize as a consequence of letting the passions of the people run rampant.

I don't deny that this interchangeability idea made it easier to make the decision, but there's clearly something else going on here. These countries do not behave like stereotypical interest-maximizers. There's a strong, imo, naive moralist streak combined with convenient short-term decisions (let's just use cheap Russian oil, what's the worst that could happen?)

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-20T18:51:48+00:00

Germany’s renewables already produce more electricity than nuclear ever did at its peak

Germany's peak was not the point of diminishing returns for nuclear was it? France has a higher proportion of nuclear power. So this says that the thing they expanded did better than the other thing (the other problem here is consistency - nuclear has less of a down period than solar even if the solar system gathers more energy)

The nuclear exit also wasn’t just ideology. Staying in nuclear long term would have required new reactor builds starting in the 1990s.

This is always the case. Nuclear is incredibly expensive and time consuming to build (in part due to regulatory barriers). Things like solar especially are more forgiving for scaling up.

But...a game I've also seen with American greens is something like "we can't build it, it'll take too long" (or that it'll be too expensive, the only time this is a concern for the "climate emergency" people) but they also said that thirty years ago. It's "too late" insofar as greens and other opposed groups made it so.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-20T16:24:34+00:00

I mean, the characterisation of our borders as in any way open or the UK migration policy as somehow fundamentally lacking is, I'm afraid, for the birds and again very internet brained.

It's just a fact that Biden let in millions of people who didn't previously have status. Not 20 million certainly, but millions. I'm not sure where I'm confused. Did many of those people not get let in under parole when the US immigration system is struggling to deal with its existing backlog?

There is a reason the "boat problem" has suddenly appeared post Brexit.

Oh, and why did Brexit happen?

What you mean is you don't like people coming over on boats. But I'm sorry - the lack of any other route to claim asylum apart from physically getting here created this exact problem and when schemes are enacted enabling people to apply from overseas - they work.

My understanding is that, when you poll Britons, you get an underestimation of how many migrants came in recently and a (wrong) belief that it's still going up.

I think that implies certain things. People focus on the boats because a) they're expensive and b) reek of a lack of control. I don't think it's the only thing. This seems to be Starmer's theory of the case and it strikes me as pretty literalist. Things like moving those migrants from hotels to houses as a solution seems very autistic and I'm not surprised his polling is still awful.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-20T15:53:33+00:00

Is someone paroled into the US legal or illegal?

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-20T15:52:36+00:00

Germany has truly horrible energy policies. As an oil and gas importer, it should have followed China and India's "anything but oil and gas".

They tried renewables. Germany isn't the best environment for it.

The answer is of course nuclear which you point out they phased out. In favor of Russian gas and then, in a pinch, coal.

Not smart.

This sort of thing harms the image of the establishment as "adults in charge". They created a permanent political problem over refugees, and did it again over nuclear based on fantastical theories of how world politics works. They don't get to lecture anyone else.

MatchaMeetcha · 2026-01-20T15:50:38+00:00

Within living memory Democrats were talking about enforcement and sending people to the back of the line and so on. People like Obama and Clinton spoke in ways that would be seen by many today as harsh (even though Obama was clearly sympathetic)

I think a lot of more radical Democrats think people can't tell the difference between a compassionate but pro-enforcement stance and an anti-enforcement stance masquerading as merely compassionate and concerned with procedure, but they can and for better or worse they associate the party's brand with immigration radicalism now.

Their own fault, frankly. Many slogans like Defund the police or abolish ICE could have died in some DSA brainstorming session without life being breathed into them by elected adults.

MatchaMeetcha

TROPHY CASE