Obsidian Wings

Your Schadenfreude monitoring open thread

by liberal japonicus

As I mentioned, I'm having trouble determining the amount of Schadenfreude to take when things happen lately. This one is a conundrum

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/15/trump-epstein-files-maga

An open thread for all your Schadenfreude needs.

Like encountering stone age tribes in the Amazon

by liberal japonicus

I often see videos with titles like 'Why young people can't communicate', which I usually find to be someone from my generation making pronouncements about younger people and explaining why everything has gone to shit. I normally don't click on the titles but when this Ezra Klein interview titled How The Attention Economy is Devouring Gen Z, and I didn't have anything else to listen to on the treadmill, I went for it. And I have to say, this one seems different, not only from all of those clickbaity videos, but also from Klein's usual interviews.

All of the other Klein pieces I have seen have Klein talking to people who are, for lack of a better word, of his 'tribe'. They share a common set of referents, their communication flows back and forth, they discuss things and I follow like I'm listening to two people I know talk about our circle of friends. This interview, with Kyla Scanlon, about attention and Gen-Z is different. As a comparison, if you haven't listened to Klein, and you want to compare, first listen to this either these two Klein interviews of Chris Hayes, Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly. or Mamdani, Trump and the End of the Old Politics (as an aside, it is interesting that videos actually have different 'titles' on the screen, which are Inside Trump's Attentional Vortex and Attention beats Money)

If you've not listened to Klein, the format is Klein giving an earnest lead in with a voice that has gotten lower and added more vocal fry over the time I have listened to him, followed by him and his guest going back and forth. I feel like he's simultaneously channelling and extending the whole Walter Cronkite model, understanding that you can't have a newscaster who accepted to be completely transparent, but not going too far out on a limb to flood the zone with his own opinions. 

This interview seems completely different to me. This is not to say it is bad, but the way the two interact is unlike any of Klein's other interviews. I don't know if I can make a comparison but Klein's standard interview is like a tennis match at Wimbledon. Shots are hit, volleys are returned, the rhythm is totally understandable. For this one, it is as if they are playing a game that is similar to tennis, but the ball doesn't bounce, and it goes plop in the middle of the court. Yet somehow, the point is still going. 

Scanlon has a lot of interesting ideas and insights, and Klein has done his homework, and there are tons of things that are worth following up on, so I'm not knocking the utility of the interview, it was just that the pair's interactions were very different from what I was used to, which seemed to indicate something to me. 

Useful as a comparison is this Hasan Minhaj video interview where he is talking to General Stanley McChrystal. Minhaj could be described as Klein on crystal meth, the culture referents fly fast and thick, so him talking to McChrystal can be thought of as similar generational gap to Klein talking to Scanlon, but I know how both generations communicate.

Minhaj's format is obviously different (after McChrystal says he was unaware of prison conditions, it cuts Minhaj speaking to camera reviewing why that claim is misleading/false before cutting back to the interview) so the comparison is rough but there are two things that I draw attention to. At the opening of the video, the hook that is pulled out of the video to encourage people to keep watching is Minhaj introducing an Onion piece to McChrystal and if you watch to the end, at 35:55, there is a post interview chat, where McChrystal is talking to Minhaj and it starts off with McChrystal saying 'I know you aren't a young man, but you are younger...' and then gives a spiel about not being too 'binary' in thinking about the division between war and diplomacy. It would be after this spiel that someone in Minhaj's place might reply 'ok, boomer', but that sort of riposte is something that Minhaj reserves for people who are in on the joke. This is how I understand that people on opposite canyonsides communicate. Klein-Scanlon seems different.

At the end of every Klein interview, he asks the guest to recommend 3 books and Scanlon's three, well, I'll let you check them out, though I hope you won't skip to the end and then assume you know what the interview was about. You (and any discussion) wouldn't be well served by that. 

 

Plus ça change...

by liberal japonicus

This has been reported in several places.

In a new discovery about this mysterious yet often familiar species, researchers have found ancient evidence of a Neanderthal "fat factory" in what is now Germany.

Operational around 125,000 years ago, the factory would've been a place where Neanderthals broke and crushed the bones of large mammals to extract valuable bone marrow and grease, used as a valuable extra food source.

According to scientists, this is the earliest evidence yet for this type of sophisticated, large-scale bone processing, including both bone marrow and grease: the first confirmation Neanderthals were also doing this some 100,000 years before our species made it to Europe.

"This was intensive, organised, and strategic," says archaeologist Lutz Kindler from the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Center in Germany.

"Neanderthals were clearly managing resources with precision – planning hunts, transporting carcasses, and rendering fat in a task-specific area. They understood both the nutritional value of fat and how to access it efficiently – most likely involving caching carcass parts at places in the landscape for later transport to and use at the grease rendering site."

This had me think of the myth about how Prometheus tricked Zeus into accepting bones and gristle, covered with a layer of fat to make them appear more appealing instead of the edible parts of the offering, which were covered with the stomach and guts. Tossing that on the fire gave the gods food in the form of smoke going up to Olympus. In Aristophanes' play The Birds, in building Cloud-cuckoo land, the birds cut off that smoke to Olympus, forcing the gods to agree to a peace treaty. So I'm wondering if this fat factory connects in some way to Hesiod's explanation of the Prometheus at the Feast of Mekone.

When the gods and men met at Mekone to decide how sacrifices should be distributed, Prometheus sought to trick Zeus. Slaughtering an ox, he took the valuable fat and meat, and covered it with the ox's stomach. Prometheus then took the bones and hid them with a thin glistening layer of fat. Prometheus asked Zeus' opinion on which offering pile he found more desirable, hoping to trick the god into selecting the less desirable portion.

Just as a side note, looking up The Birds in Wikipedia has this

The play begins with two middle-aged men stumbling across a hillside wilderness, guided by a pet crow and a pet jackdaw. One of them advises the audience that they are fed up with life in Athens, where people do nothing all day but argue over laws,

A thread for all things under the sun.

An open thread on July 4th

by liberal japonicus

The comments on the previous post are closed (because we are obviously a Communist collective that can't tolerate a diversity of opinion) so here is an open thread. Have at it.

An announcement

by liberal japonicus

Re: BigBadBird

McK had been banned basically for being deeply rude, has apparently tried coming back under a different handle, so this new version is likewise banned. 






There is some other evidence, but given his last comment, it seems pretty clear that BigBadBird is a sockpuppet. さよなら。

From the Chinatalk substack

by liberal japonicus

I like this substack newsletter, ChinaTalk by Jordan Schneider and I thought this piece was quite fascinating.There are a lot of competing points and it would be impossible to summarize them, but the introduction gives an idea

I recently hosted a 2-session reading club for Abundance, bringing together paid subscribers of my Chinese-language podcast CyberPink and those of our sibling podcast American Roulette. Ours was conducted entirely in Mandarin Chinese, which meant that the participants, by default, were like me: born and raised in China, educated in the West, and now navigating the cultural and ideological fault lines between the two. Among the attendees were academics, lawyers, consultants, AI investors in Silicon Valley, and engineers in big tech.

When you discuss American politics in a group like this, perspectives shift constantly. As we dissected Abundance, we toggled between the imagined readers in Brooklyn, the Bay Area, and D.C., and a more distant, more foreign vantage point — one grounded in the trajectories of China itself. In short, we examine the U.S. as foreigners, as immigrants, as Chinese.

Somewhere along the way, our Signal group of book club organizers — my podcast co-hosts and friends — jokingly named the group *Ezra Thought Study Group* (Ezra思想学习小组), a parody of Maoist-era “Marxism Study Group” or more recent “Xi Jinping Thought Study Group.” It was tongue-in-cheek, of course, but it also captured something real: we all sensed that this book was both a techno-optimistic manifesto from central-left, and a piece of strong political persuasion to the reconfiguring Democratic Party.

In this article, I’ve selected fragments from the 100-page (!) transcript of two book clubs, each lasting 1.5 hours — but not the ones you’ve probably heard before. I’ve deliberately cut the standard U.S.-centric book analysis and policy talks; this article is some curated moments that I believe offer some fresh takes. Consider this: Reading Abundance from China.

Very interesting stuff.