In fairness, that’s basically everyone in political journalism right now.

I dare him to say this in Dealey Plaza, from the back of an open-top car.

You’re suggesting that this is a stunt by Talarico’s campaign or by Kimmel?

Kimmel. He’s a hack, so of course he stole Colbert’s bit.

You’d sooner believe that both Kimmel and Colbert’s shows would pull the same stunt to boost their YouTube channels

I think Kimmel’s boosting his own brand because he’s also on his way out.

From my outside perspective, this is what put Talarico into the national spotlight.

Sure. Nationally it was big for his brand. But all the local media was on this race months beforehand. Texas Tribune, Houston Chronicle, all the local stations. Ken Paxton running against John Cornyn showed an enormous fissure in the Texas Republican Party when it was already sporting wounds in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. Everyone who follows Texas politics was locked in on the Texas Senate race going back to 2025.

Also, plus, too, Abbott running for a third term as Governor was kinda assumed to be a shoe-in. And Texas is a big media market. So Senate is where the coverage naturally went.

I was previously unfamiliar with him, but had seen her fighting the good fight against GOP stupidity and ICE specifically.

I mean, Crockett was certainly good at getting in front of a camera. But she was heavily keyed in on African American civil rights and not terribly popular with Latinos. Without Talarico in the race, she could have probably clinched it. But he’s scratching all the itches that your classic Central Texas indie voter loves.

I think Talarico caught people off guard because he codes as a classic Conservative Republican in appearance and demeanor. But that’s just what Anne Richards / LBJ loving Texas Democrats all look like.

It won him that election.

Idk about that. Talarico had a stronger ground game and a prodigious fundraising haul. He won with a healthy 6-pt margin over Crockett.

Incidentally, CBS gave plenty of coverage and multiple interviews to Crockett during her primary run. And Crockett was even interviewed - multiple times, including on CBS - specifically over the Colbert show controversy. The idea that she just wasn’t getting enough press to win in Texas seems sparse.

I think the biggest baggage Crockett had to carry was Colin Alred’s. He flubbed it in 2022. So Texas voters decided to try and run another Beto-style West Texas cracker, instead of a second Dallas social media suburbanite.

Paradox of Tolerance. Fascists leverage an open society to build political support, then close off the society as soon as they’re in power.

It’s the same trick, executed out of the same playbook.

Go to the FCC, say “We’re going to do an interview with a popular candidate for Senate”, get a nastygram from some DOGE staffer back in response, then generate a bunch of attention-grabbing headlines with “The Man Won’t Let Us Interview America’s Coolest Senator on TV so Come See It On Our Website Instead”.

Ukraine is not really application of the flypaper theory since Russia took the initiative in invading Ukraine.

Ukraine has been a playground for espionage and special operations since before the collapse of the USSR. The invasion came in the wake of a decade of civil strife following the Maidan Revolution. And that was, itself, following a decade of Russia influence on then-President Viktor Yanukovych. A man who was installed to roll back the 1996 constitutional reforms, which were imposed as part of the western Shock Doctrine model for post-Soviet state integration. And you can trace it back from there.

History didn’t begin in 2022.

The West did not draw Russia to invade.

The EU states were hoping to employ a combination of economic carrots and sticks to align Ukraine with its allies in Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. The Russians - having had success in Crimea and Georgia with direct military intervention - decided to flip the chessboard and start throwing punches, after their friendly governments kept getting pushed out of power through West-friendly civil uprisings.

But the end-goal of EU interference in Ukraine was to advance the US-sponsored ring of anti-ballistic interceptor missiles inward towards Russia. And the presumption was that this would neuter Russian long-range artillery without provoking an all-out fight across the European member states. Ukraine (and Estonia and Latvia and Bulgaria) were always supposed to operate as a buffer zone to absorb any Russian ground attacks.

Ideally, it was never supposed to go this far. But to say Emmaneul Macron and Merkel / Sholtz / Merz want an air war west of Ukraine is absolute clown shoes.

Especially now that the Iranians have proved how porous and inefficient America’s anti-ballistic interceptor shield has become.

It is debatable whether the UK and France had the military capability to stop Hitler

You can debate absolutely anything, sure. But post-WW1 UK/France were squarely in a Trans-Atlantic economic depression in the 1930s. Even if you want to argue they could have mustered the physical capacity and projected it east of Germany, presumably by way of… where? Fascist Italy? there was zero domestic political interest in kicking off a second European land war.

What you’re totally forgetting is 1917 Russia, where the Tzarist government had collapsed on itself and imploded into a full communist government entirely on the back of Lenin’s anti-war movement and conscripted soldier’s revolt. Meanwhile, you had Spanish Republicans in a guerrilla war with Franco’s fascist officer corpse right next door in Spain happening at the same time as Hitler pushed on the open door of Czechoslovakia.

What Western Europeans and American Atlanticists feared more than anything was domestic communist uprising. If anything, Hitler moving east and squashing Soviet parties between Germany and Russia was seen as favorable to western interests.

I miss the old Internet, where people would just post pictures of cut down cameras in their neighborhood, rather than this twee “haha, they’ve all got winning lottery tickets, hehe, I hope someone else does this for me”

You mistakenly thought I said use Ukraine as a fly paper. In response I said Europe would prefer that it be the fly paper.

I didn’t think you said that. I think Ukraine is the obvious fly paper in the analogy. Europe very clearly is not, nor does anyone outside of the continent wish that on themselves.

The UK and France thought that letting Hitler have the Sudetenland would appease him

That’s historical revisionism.

They had no capacity to keep Germans out of Europe. This wasn’t a choice they were making, it was an excuse for their impotency.

If both those premises hold

You’re just doing Pascal’s Wager For Computers.

Problem is the official definition of unemployment disregards the many who drop off the unemployment-insurance rolls, never qualified for unemployment-insurance to begin with so were never counted and those who are long-term unemployed

Because they’re not part of the labor force for reasons independent of a given economic cycle. If I’m on Long Term Disability because of some chronic medical issue, the number of job postings, the current interest rates, and prevailing wage rates won’t incentivize me to look for a job. If I’m retired, there’s not a lot you can do to the labor market to entice me back out of it. If I’m going to college for a professional degree, you’re not going to lure me back into a dead-end service sector job with a marginal change in job availability. If there’s a glut of construction jobs, that won’t impact my search for a nursing position or an IT gig.

Stats are great but go out and do some qualitative data gathering by talking to people.

Sure. But the conclusions you’ll reach are that people are sticky for reasons that have nothing to do with regional economic policy. Looking at U3 gives us a picture of prevailing trends among active job-seekers. Dragging in a bunch of people who aren’t looking for jobs doesn’t give us a clear picture of changes in job availability among people looking for work. You’re just muddying the waters to make the unemployment figure look scarier than it is.

What I said was that Europe would prefer that Russia attack it rather than Ukraine.

That’s an insane thing to say, both on it’s face and based on the last four years of Europeans very strategically avoiding direct confrontation with Russia.

Then the combined forces of Europe would be able to defeat Russia.

Napoleon on line 1. Hitler on line 2. They are both eager to discuss what you have in mind.

The UK and France gave Hitler the Sudetenland

It wasn’t theirs to give. The Sudetenland is in Czechoslovakia, a country that didn’t even exist until 1918. It was full of Austro-Hungarians who were some of the first foreigners to explicitly align with Nazi Germany.

The UK and France weren’t in a position to stop him, any more than they were in a position to stop the proto-fascist war hero Gabriele Annunzio and a rogue force of Italian mutineers from seizing the Adriatic port city of Fiume in 1919.

Might as well claim Obama gave Putin Crimea. Or that Bush gave him South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The Donbus had similar problems. It was populated by a large number of Russian nationals who were getting propaganda pumped into their brains from across the border. That was kicking off domestic insurgency, which Ukrainian nationalists were eager to squash.

Europeans had neither skin in the game nor influence in the region. All they were willing to do is send mercenaries and cheap military equipment over the border. And we know how that worked out.

Nobody wanted an all out war with Russia.

U6 is around 8%. Pretty bad.

Historically below average.

Things are much worse than the “official” stats are saying.

Then put some real analysis on the table and stop making scary fingers behind every stat you dredge up.

I’m tired of reading the “everyone’s lying to you and things are worse than you realize” line when I’m fucking alive in the world and can see for myself, at a personal level.

I don’t bother reading statistics if I’m just going to add a vibes-based modifier to scare myself.

I’ve seen people arguing that the BLS wasn’t a reliable source since 2008.

But I don’t know how you get “I’m confident we have a 25% unemployment rate” from “I don’t trust the numbers”.

Idk how you determine unemployment if you plan to dismiss the organization that calculates unemployment.

Modern journalism is just sixty part-time reporters standing around a photocopier.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu used the flypaper theory in that the French attempted to draw the Viet Minh into attacking Dien Bien Phu where the French thought they could destroy them.

But they failed. And their defeat was so horrifying for the French public that the government lost its civilian support and was forced to withdraw from Indochina as a result.

If Ukraine is Europe’s Dien Bien Phu, that doesn’t look good for the Europeans.

War between Europe and Russia would be destructive but Europe has to decide a solution to Russia’s hybrid war against it.

I have no idea how Russia and the rest of Europe can reconcile after the last decade of relational decay. But I have to assume there’s some path back to peace that doesn’t run through a Ukraine-style missile exchange that stretches all the way to the Atlantic. There’s no world in which Moscow trading ballistics with Berlin, Paris, and London ends better for humanity than one without it.

Getting into Berghain with a doctor’s note.