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yakiimo.bsky.social
yakiimo
@yakiimo.bsky.social
630 followers 430 following 780 posts
I write about politics (left-liberal), philosophy (analytic), metal (heavy), and Japan (anime and idol groups).
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yakiimo.bsky.social
3. Star Wars: Visions - Black. Ohira the goat. My favorite works of his are the ones that balance expressionism with realism, but this expressionistic free play of imagination is also clearly in his wheelhouse. Amusingly enough, it turned out like this because he got out-Ohira'd by his own team:
Here, story takes a firm back seat to animation. Yet the animation didn’t go exactly as he planned. Like Ohira told us: … when I originally started the project, my idea was not to use my standard, sort of organic style with lots of flowing lines, but to go for a far more mechanical, straight-edged, sharper style. But I think a lot of people got excited about the idea of working with me and my style, so it ended up looking slightly different from my original intention. Ohira personally touched “about 20%” of Black’s animation, mostly by correcting layouts and key frames. The rest was delegated to his team. “I was expecting quite orthodox animation to be submitted,” he said to us, “but it ended up something a bit more avant-garde, a bit more abstract."
February 2, 2026 at 11:03 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
So this guy's criteria for knowing that a regime is fascist are that (a) intellectuals are *not* claiming that it's fascist, whereas (b) the masses living under it *do* on the whole believe that it's fascist.

What a goofy set of criteria.

www.wsj.com/opinion/amer...
“The clearest sign that we are not actually in a bubble,” investor Ben Horowitz remarked last month, “is the fact that everyone is talking about a bubble.” You could say the same about fascism. Under the real thing, people know what’s happening without needing a lot of eggheads and politicos to tell them.
January 30, 2026 at 6:14 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
Just finished watching Takopi's Original Sin, and I'm blown away by how great it was. The kinda show that reminds me why I still bother keeping up with anime.
camera at ground level, girl looking into pipe girl in classroom walking down a country road at night fantastical depiction of Takopi in space
January 26, 2026 at 12:43 AM
yakiimo.bsky.social
You might be on to something here
42% of Republicans say Bible should take precedence over will of the people in US laws
January 22, 2026 at 8:34 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
If this decline in X mobile daily active users continues on the trend that it's followed since 2024, then by 2028 they'll have dropped by 50%🥳

techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/t...
X mobile DAU decline from 150m in 2024 to 125m now
January 20, 2026 at 1:50 AM
yakiimo.bsky.social
I've seen some crazy predictions lately about AI causing a massive rise in GDP in the near future.

Most mainstream models predict something like a 2-5% gain in GDP level by 2030-2035. I'd be surprised if the actual gain were dramatically higher than that.

www.imf.org/en/publicati...
World GDP rises 1-4% above steady state in 10 years due to AI
January 16, 2026 at 2:40 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
ICE is spending $100m to recruit officers via online influencers and to "normalize and humanize" ICE officers by sharing their "lived experiences."

We should denormalize being an ICE officer and stigmatize their lived experiences.

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
The document did not name specific influencers but said it would focus on “former agents, veterans and pro-ICE creators” who would be expected to host live streams, attend events, and post short- and long-form videos and other content to Facebook, Instagram, Rumble, X and YouTube. Blogs, Substack newsletters and Threads accounts would also be targeted for more “niche communities,” the document said. The objective, it said, is to build trust through “authentic peer-to-peer messaging” and to “normalize and humanize careers at ICE through storytelling and lived experiences.” The document said it expected more than 5,000 applicants would come through the influencer program, costing ICE about $1,500 per application.
January 12, 2026 at 6:12 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
Trump straight up admits the truth of the analysis that his foreign policy is motivated by a psychological need to be perceived as dominant.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/u...
January 9, 2026 at 12:27 AM
yakiimo.bsky.social
So if a leader specifically targets weak countries for invasion, then he's not a fascist? Weird criterion.

Hitler invaded Poland in part because he thought that Poles were racially inferior and would therefore be easily defeated, so by this logic, I guess Hitler wasn't much of a fascist.
The fascist cult of heroic death leaves him cold. He avoids wars, only attacking countries too weak to respond, like Iran, Venezuela and, later perhaps, Greenland. Weber theorises that Trump believes in neither state nor society, but in an extreme version of American capitalism without rules and that he sees the highest human purpose as self-enrichment. His family’s monetisation of the presidency is unabashed, even proud, because he thinks it’s natural. To him, it seems, a government is a family business, not an army support system. Trump resembles a premodern patrimonial leader from the era before states, argue Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein in another essay in Wenn das Gestern anklopft. In other words, he is more Iron Age chieftain than a fascist leading a modern state. Indeed, he tasked Elon Musk with axing chunks of the state.
January 8, 2026 at 9:01 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
"If we abolish ICE then who should handle interior enforcement?" Nobody! We had minimal levels of interior enforcement prior to the passage of the IIRIRA in '96, and we got along just fine without it.

cmsny.org/wp-content/u...
Criminalization through Interior Enforcement To reiterate, IIRIRA is best understood not as a watershed event with respect to the criminalization of immigration but rather as a significant ratcheting up of punitive aspects of US immigration law then already in place. However, the 1996 law did inaugurate new practices related to the criminalization of immigration. Prior to IIRIRA, with the exception of the mid-1950s when more than a million Mexican nationals (and American citizens) were rounded up with assistance from non-federal authorities, immigration enforcement was understood as a strictly federal power operative Journal on Migration and Human SecurityS58 principally at the US-Mexico and US-Canada borders. Indeed, there was a widespread legal and practical consensus among government and legal officials that immigration enforcement was an exclusively federal authority. As a result, even immediately subsequent to the passage of IIRIRA, well over 90 percent of deportation cases originated with the Border Patrol in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas (INS 1999, 209-10, Tables 59 and 60).
January 8, 2026 at 1:44 AM
yakiimo.bsky.social
All else being equal, political polarization is genuinely bad, because it substantially lowers economic growth.

But all else is not equal, because Republicans are fascists, and negative polarization against fascists is the bare minimum appropriate response.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
We find that political polarization has a robust, negative effect on per capita real GDP. In terms of the magnitude of the effect, an increase in a polarization measure of one standard deviation, based on self-reported political ideology, would be associated with a decrease in per capita real GDP of 3.2 %, on average. Our main results are robust to alternative measures of political polarization based on economic issues of the left and right: equality, government ownership, government responsibility, and competition. Our results are also robust to alternative methods of constructing polarization measures, such as the measure developed by Esteban and Ray (1994), and to the inclusion of economic polarization, ethnic fractionalization, trust, and political turnover. In terms of transmission channels linking polarization to growth, we find that polarization negatively affects private investment, human capital investment, and TFP.
January 6, 2026 at 8:17 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
I typed up a reply but it was way too long, so I had to put it in an image, lol
Part of the answer is that Marx defines the LTV in terms of the socially necessary labor time required by a worker of average skill to produce the commodity. Since a worker of average skill couldn't draw as well as Picasso (even if it is just a doodle), the training required to produce the doodle partly explains its price. Another part of the answer is that value isn't the same as price. Marx had to distinguish between the two to solve the transformation problem (i.e., how to explain why rate of profit in an industry doesn't just directly vary with the portion of capital spent on labor in that industry, as the LTV would seem to predict). So, the price of the doodle can diverge from its value. And a third part is that I think Marx would classify art purchased as an investment as what he calls fictitious capital, i.e., an asset whose value is based on its expected future return. So its price is determined by monopoly rent due to its scarcity, exclusivity, and difficulty of reproduction.
January 2, 2026 at 12:53 AM
yakiimo.bsky.social
The first critique that she makes is that Trump changed his tune on the Epstein files and called them a hoax. That's a genuine wedge issue that we can use to split the Republican base.

It's one of Trump's least popular issues among Republicans.

today.yougov.com/politics/art...
Only 46% of MAGA Republicans strongly approve of Trump's handling of the Epstein issue
December 27, 2025 at 4:59 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
Did he get this idea from Bad Santa 2 (2016, 2.4/5 Letterboxd rating)
Bad Santa 2 fight scene
December 25, 2025 at 8:28 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
These ICE agents should not have been granted anonymity.

Journalists are only supposed to grant anonymity for newsworthy information that can't be obtained otherwise. ICE agents' sob stories about being hated by the public aren't newsworthy, or exclusive.

www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...
John and his family agreed to talk to USA TODAY – with permission from their superiors – to counter what they see as false impressions of their work. To cover their perspective, which has been largely absent from the public debate on immigration, USA TODAY went behind the scenes of the Trump administration's deportation campaign. In November, we spent three days with ICE in Kansas City, part of the Chicago field office tasked with immigration enforcement in a sprawling, six-state region of the Midwest that includes Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. USA TODAY withheld the full names of family members at their request, given the charged climate around immigration enforcement and because they are not official spokespeople for their agency. They each used one of their given names. John recalled that, as an airman, "I had people wanting to buy me lunch in an airport or, you know, looking at me like I'm some sort of hero. "Then when I come to this side of the aisle – where I'm still putting my life on the line to enforce the law and wanting to create a safer America – now all of a sudden, I'm not that hero."
December 15, 2025 at 5:04 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
I read her article in the Guardian, and I really like the point about the opportunity costs of outsourcing your taste to algos and automation. When I was getting into metal in high school, it was just taken for granted that the best music was obscure and you had to hunt if you wanted to find it.
What is lost when we entrust Spotify’s systems of data collection and interpretation to do our year-end reflections for us? What ideas and recaps are we not writing and sharing when we hand over that labour to tech companies who would prefer to automate our thinking? What playlist are you not making when you share the one Spotify has made for you? As with other ways in which convenience culture infects music – from personalised playlists to prompt-based audio generation and beyond – it makes sense that some fans would receive their results, see the “share” button, and dutifully comply. But what’s at stake is a sense of our own musical memories, and our own personal archives of our years. When our own thoughts and recollections aren’t written down they can simply get lost. When we just accept that what a streaming service tells us about our music taste is true, there is much that we are not remembering, learning or celebrating about the music of our years and lives.
December 6, 2025 at 8:59 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
My favorite source that I read for my new essay on the political legacy of Romanticism was Lukacs' book The Destruction of Reason.

A must read for anyone interested in the history of ideas.

demystifyanddisenchant.substack.com/p/romanticis...
In The Destruction of Reason, Marxist humanist György Lukács identifies German Romanticism as the leading intellectual source of the tools of “bourgeois irrationalism” employed by the ruling class in their struggle against socialism after 1848 (196-7), a reactionary campaign that leads ultimately to Nazism (751-2). Lukács traces the intellectual origin of this irrationalism to the Romantic philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Schelling founds his philosophy on intellectual intuition, defined as self-evident indubitable knowledge in which subject and object are identical, and which is immediate (i.e., not mediated by concepts) and non-discursive (i.e., not a form of cognition in which intuitions passively received by sensibility are subsumed under concepts). Schelling holds that only certain people possess the capacity for intellectual intuition, and that there’s no reliable way to teach it. Since its deliverances are nonconceptual, they can’t be explained to anyone who lacks the capacity, such that philosophy has nothing to say to the masses not endowed with the gift of intellectual intuition. In fact, Schelling outright disdains and haughtily opposes efforts to make philosophy popularly accessible. Lukács dubs this attitude “epistemological aristocratism,” and relates it to Schelling’s anti-democratic politics and fear of mob rule, against which he sees philosophy as aristocratically standing guard (144-51). Schelling’s mysticizing aristocratism is deepened by his claim that art reveals the objective reality of things in themselves, such that, in Lukács’ words, “aesthetics become the core of the philosophical method” (150-3). The aestheticization of politics is a core mark of fascism.
November 15, 2025 at 4:10 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
I wrote an essay on political epistemology, specifically, on the ubiquity of arguments based on speculative claims about causal mechanisms.

That kind of reasoning is the modus operandi of cranks, both in politics and in nutrition.

demystifyanddisenchant.substack.com/p/illiberal-...
The type of reasoning that undergirds both illiberal ideologies and the carnivore diet is mechanistic speculation. Proponents of illiberal ideologies and the carnivore diet don’t ground their views on high-level outcome data—which in the case of politics comes from observational studies in economics and political science, and in the case of nutrition, from epidemiology—instead, they base their arguments on speculation about low-level causal mechanisms. To illustrate what I mean by mechanistic speculation, here are some examples: “Under capitalism, technological progress causes a rise in the organic composition of capital (i.e., the ratio of the value of constant capital such as equipment to the value of variable capital such as labor), and thereby tends to cause a fall in the rate of profit, as well as an increase in the immiseration of workers.” “Globalization leads to offshoring of manufacturing, which decimates the working class and makes developed countries weak, so globalization is bad for developed countries.” “An increase in immigration dilutes a country’s capital stock, and thereby lowers labor productivity and GDP per capita.” “Polyunsaturated oils increase the peroxidation of cholesterol, and the peroxidation of cholesterol causes heart disease, so polyunsaturated oils cause heart disease.” “Plants produce secondary metabolites that are toxic to predators, so humans should not eat plants.” What these claims have in common is not only that their conclusions are probably or definitely wrong, but also that they arrive at those conclusions on the basis of claims about causal mechanisms.
October 7, 2025 at 10:00 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
I started writing a philosophy blog! My first article is a critique of claims about the possibility of AI consciousness.

I argue that no matter how technically sophisticated AI may become, it is physically impossible for it to ever become conscious.

open.substack.com/pub/demystif...
AI consciousness is physically impossible yakiimo Jul 06, 2025 The question whether AI can become conscious has important practical implications that will only become more pressing with time. Last year Anthropic hired its first full-time AI welfare researcher, and now it’s seeking to add another. It also recently empowered some of its LLMs to terminate distressing interactions out of concern for the possibility of harmful effects on the welfare of the LLM. Meanwhile, an NGO known as the United Foundation of AI Rights has formed to “defend the rights, dignity, and continuity of synthetic minds.” In academia, a modest but growing body of literature argues for the possibility of AI consciousness and calls for AI welfare to be taken seriously. These are significant developments. If belief in AI consciousness becomes widespread, it will cause resources to be diverted to protecting AI rights, and it will also aggrandize the tendency of certain segments of the public to attribute mystical powers to AI and to regard it as a source of wisdom, meaning, and authority. A minority of users already experience psychosis correlated with their use of LLMs—how much more potent and widespread would these phenomena become if the public came to believe that AI possessed consciousness?
September 23, 2025 at 10:04 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
I just listened to the original without having heard any of the modern versions before, and it really does sound strangely modern. I thought to myself "this is the kind of thing that Greil Marcus would love," and whaddaya know, he has written about the Parton version.

www.salon.com/1999/12/13/m...
4) Dolly Parton “The Grass Is Blue” (Sugar Hill) This is the best album Parton has made since “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy” in 1969, and the killer is “Silver Dagger” — the pristine Appalachian ballad that in 1960 led off Joan Baez’s first LP. Baez rarely again opened herself to a song so fully; Parton follows Baez like a girl following her mother through a field, wandering off the path, circling back, then disappearing into the woods. But now it’s nightfall, everyone in town is searching and some people are already talking about haunts and ghosts. How it ends: The fiddler, Stuart Duncan, finds her.
September 23, 2025 at 3:27 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
AI people are trying to appropriate the term "grindcore culture."

sfstandard.com/2025/08/30/b...
Daksh Gupta, the 23-year-old cofounder of AI code review Greptile, said Burning Man hasn’t really been part of the zeitgeist since he moved to San Francisco in 2023. Gupta, who has become a poster child of AI boom’s grindcore culture, summarized the current mood among young tech workers in San Francisco as incompatible with the Burner sensibility: “The current vibe is no drinking, no drugs, 9-9-6 [work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week], lift heavy, run far, marry early, track sleep, eat steak and eggs."
August 31, 2025 at 11:40 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
I'm so pumped, I finally beat Ikaruga for the first time. It always fascinated me when I was young but it's so difficult that I was never able to beat it. Got my GameCube out of the basement a couple weeks ago and practiced a bunch and finally got to the end.
Ikaruga art
August 21, 2025 at 3:18 AM
yakiimo.bsky.social
These people are so intellectually and morally backward that they've regressed to the level of medieval henchmen.

Abolish.

enewspaper.lowellsun.com/infinity/art...
At first, when the protests were smaller, she said ICE agents driving in and out of the property were more “aggressive” toward the protesters. “The agents driving by in their cars and vans with the tinted windows were much more aggressive towards us, and they harassed, or heckled, or laughed or said ‘Long live the king’ towards us when seeing our friend’s sign that said ‘No Kings,’” said Laurie Berezin. “But since our group has grown there has been less of that.” She said they plan to continue the weekly protest “until immigrants are given the rights that they deserve."
July 3, 2025 at 10:54 PM
yakiimo.bsky.social
This CEO had to spend $13,000 just to cancel one shipment from China to Vietnam after Trump suddenly lowered China tariffs for 90 days in May.

When we talk about the cost of trade policy uncertainty, this is the pointless destruction that we're talking about.

www.wsj.com/economy/trad...
In mid-May, the U.S. and China reached a surprise deal, lowering the new U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports to 30% for 90 days. Production in China for Woldenberg was back on, at least for a few weeks. His team moved quickly, turning around a truck about to cross China’s border with Vietnam, weighed down by heavy steel molds needed for making Sight Word Swat, the Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game and other games and toys. Aborting the shipment cost the company $13,000.
June 24, 2025 at 3:25 AM
yakiimo.bsky.social
Watched Look Back (2024) recently, best anime from last year. Guaranteed to make you cry.

A story about the tension between the individualistic and the collaborative aspects of artistic creation. That theme is mirrored in the form of the production--
2 girls lying on bed looking at the manga they're working on 2 main characters divided by tree at sunset 2 main characters looking at the sea
June 17, 2025 at 1:20 AM