The whole appeal of Hunter Biden was that he was a harmless and somewhat sympathetic fuckup who was very unlikely to do any real damage to the world. But now he's just another ghoul trying to gain power. The odds of him drone-bombing a hospital have increased significantly and now exceed my threshold. No longer interested.

I'm feeling very vindicated in my original take, that he's completely amoral but non-ideological, and just extremely into doing hands-on violence. I think he just hit a certain age and realized he'd need to change careers to social murder instead.

Looking forward to the next scandal involving taking trophies from his victims, like Ben Roberts-Smith and that prosthetic leg.

Edit: ok, looks like the sourcing is bad on this one so I'll delay my gloating. But if he's been collecting ears like a Diablo player I'm gonna be completely obnoxious about it.

If they want to say popular things are Communist then I guess I can't stop them

There was a brief window where they did this, and they're still seething about it generations later. Just the idea of it is an affront to them.

I mean it sounds like ok science. "We maybe found a correlation but it's pretty weak so we can't be sure" is a valid result that can/should be published. It's not going to win any awards but it's something that other researchers might want to know. Might as well get it on the record just in case.

The problem is "science journalism" that likes to dig up mundane things like this and turn it into clickbait.

Yep.

Hopefully I'm wrong and the NYPD is defeated somehow and then this sparks off some new municipal pink tide. I'm nowhere near there & can't really do anything about it (other than write/post) so I guess I'll wait and see

"rapidly evolving" like in the chernobyl exclusion zone? Or does he mean the kind of "rapidly evolving" that happens when everything is fine and normal?

backroom negotiations that keep the NYPD off his back for the time being

Yeah that's the obvious read on this imo. I'm concerned that this will continue. Not that "immediately fight the NYPD head on" is a good plan either, but he should have seen this coming and had something better prepared.

My larger concern is that by winning office, he's now administering a hostile system, but without the social power to actually transform it. Despite some "sewer socialism" at the margins, the main function of local gov is policing and repression, that's why it always dominates the local budgets.

Withholding all judgment, whatever you think of him or his intentions or his larger plan, we now have a socialist who is (nominally) in charge of the very system of repression that's the biggest and most immediate threat to his constituents. That's the contradiction he put himself in.

An actual confrontation would require an unprecedented social mobilization (well beyond the scale of BLM) so I'm concerned he'll continue to take the realistic option of non-confrontation until his entire project withers.

Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast!

How does that compare with Iran?

They do care. LB wins. It's the birdest bird

I'll believe he's mad when he does something about it