{"id":57472,"date":"2025-08-27T06:00:03","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T13:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=57472"},"modified":"2025-08-26T19:44:37","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T02:44:37","slug":"open-thread-august-27-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/08\/27\/open-thread-august-27-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread August 27 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pogo.org\/investigations\/gold-rush-top-trump-officials-silicon-valley-ties\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">POGO<\/a> released information on a new investigation showing that officials of the current regime are aligned with (and profiting financially from their alignment with) the tech bro manosphere &#8211; surprising, I suppose, absolutely no one. If anyone is surprised, it&#8217;s probably because when they think of tech, they think STEM, which does require intelligence &#8211; but forget they there are different kinds of intelligence (or different ways of perceiving the universe other then through intelligence &#8211; the jury is still out on which is more accurate), and it is clearly possible to be highly competent, even expert, in a limited specialty while not understanding the first thing about the real world.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/robertreich.substack.com\/p\/life-in-the-shadow-of-the-american\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Robert Reich<\/a> quotes in full an essay from the Daily Yonder regarding how real people are coping with the regime and the uncertainty.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>This letter from <a href=\"https:\/\/heathercoxrichardson.substack.com\/p\/august-23-2025\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Heather Cox Richardson<\/a> is a few days old (sorry) and I doubt if any on our readers needs it to know how we got here. But as a blow-by-blow account, I&#8217;ve not seen a better one. Should you ever need to explain this, you&#8217;ll be better prepare with this in your intellectual armory.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9VBEnHwP2rY?si=hUjcSp1TcfUIpRLQ\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/oOoPVqJJMjw?si=_co-3qeZzxVpSd72\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-57475\" src=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/safer.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"882\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/safer.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/safer-300x221.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/safer-1024x753.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/safer-150x110.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/safer-768x564.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, POGO released information on a new investigation showing that officials of the current regime are aligned with (and profiting financially from their alignment with) the tech bro manosphere &#8211; surprising, I suppose, absolutely no one. If anyone is surprised, it&#8217;s probably because when they think of tech, they think STEM, which does require intelligence <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/08\/27\/open-thread-august-27-2025\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":57127,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[4355,5577,5425,6632,6635,6459,5175,5346,6634,6633],"class_list":["post-57472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-animals","tag-equines","tag-gop-corruption","tag-how-we-got-here","tag-manosphere","tag-militarization","tag-polling","tag-stem","tag-tech-bros","tag-where-we-are","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57472\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}