January 29, 2025

January 28, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Tuesday’s groovy.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BRENDAN O’NEILL: Holocaust Envy.

One of the most striking things in the aftermath of 7 October was the silence of the fascism-spotters. You know these people. They’re the centrists and liberals who see fascism everywhere. Who think everything is ‘like the 1930s’. The vote for Brexit, Donald Trump, the rise of populist parties in Europe – all of it reminds them of the Nazi years. And yet when the Islamofascists of Hamas stormed the Jewish State and butchered a thousand Jews, suddenly they went quiet. No more Nazi talk. No more trembling warnings of a return to ‘the dark days of the 1930s’. No more handwringing over ‘new Hitlers’. It seems that to a certain kind of liberal, everything is fascism except fascism.

These are the people who lapped up Guardian articles with headlines like ‘The reich stuff’, exploring the supposed ‘comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler’. They’re the people who will have nodded in vigorous agreement when a spokesperson for Joe Biden slammed Trump for parroting ‘the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler’. They’re the folk who no doubt permitted themselves a chuckle when it was revealed that Biden staffers refer to Trump as ‘Hitler pig’ behind closed doors. They’re the self-styled ‘vigilant’ members of respectable society who will have cheered when Biden described Trumpism as a ‘semi-fascism’ that threatens the ‘soul’ of the free world.

They’re the pro-EU middle classes who fretted over the vote for Brexit, viewing it as a ‘return to the 1930s’. They’re the broadsheet readers who will have murmured in agreement with headlines saying there are ‘terrifying parallels between Brexit and the appeasement of Hitler’. They’re the royalty-sceptics who will have found themselves in agreement with princes for once when Charles, then Prince of Wales, said populism has ‘deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s’. They’re the weekend marchers who will have attended anti-Trump demos at which people waved placards showing Trump with a Hitler tache, and anti-Brexit protests at which speakers issued dire warnings about our descent into Hitlerite mania.

There was a time when you couldn’t open a newspaper or peruse social media without seeing some pained liberal hold forth on how populism will drag us back to the death camps. Fascism panic was the fashion of the day. And then it stopped. In the wake of the 7 October pogrom – the worst act of slaughter against the Jews since that period of the mid-20th century these people love talking about – their fascism chatter evaporated. In fact, they started warning people not to use Nazi analogies. Not to compare 7 October to the 1930s. Not to engage in the very fascism fretting that had been the bread and butter of their own political commentary for years.

Just two weeks after the pogrom, the Guardian published a piece denouncing Israel for ‘weaponising the Holocaust’ in its response to Hamas’s assault. It is an outrage, it argued, that Israeli leaders are likening Hamas to fascist Germany and thus portraying Israel as ‘powerless Jews in a struggle against Nazis’. This is the same Guardian that had been namedropping the Holocaust for years. Which ran pieces asking ‘Are we living through another 1930s?’ after the vote for Brexit. Which published columns saying that, thanks to Trump, ‘the world could be heading back to the 1930s’. Yet when Israelis suggested that the slaughter of a thousand Jews by fascistic men with knives, guns and rocket launchers was somewhat reminiscent of the 1930s, the Guardian essentially tut-tutted.

Related: Watch: You Are NOT Going to Believe Who ITV Sidelined on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Except that by now, you likely know what’s coming:

Europe will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Will 2025 Be A Year Of Marvel Flops? New video by the Critical Drinker:

Well, Captain America: Brave New World’s fate may have just been sealed:

UPDATE: Disney’s New Captain America Just Decided to Set His Box Office Prospects on Fire.

MORE: Somebody just got a stern talking to from management:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

JIM GERAGHTY: America’s Artificial Intelligence ‘Sputnik Moment?’

I find myself wondering about some of the boasts behind DeepSeek’s announcement.

  • How certain are we that it really only cost $5.6 million to develop? Who’s in a position to verify that number? How do we know this really only took two months to get “trained”?
  • In a world where nefarious actors can smuggle whole tankers full of oil in defiance of trade sanctions, it’s not that hard to smuggle small flat computer equipment. How do we know that DeepSeek is running on a bunch of lower-rated Nvidia H-800 chips and not some of these advanced H-100s?
  • How certain are we that DeepSeek didn’t get some help from the Chinese government along the way? As with most Chinese companies, where does the company stop and the regime start?

Now, I don’t know about you, but when something allegedly amazing comes along for free from a mysterious Chinese company, the last thing I would want to do is download it onto my phone. Alas, not everyone else sees it that way; this week, DeepSeek is the most downloaded phone application on the Apple app store.

And oh, by the way, if you thought TikTok was a security risk on your phone, DeepSeek “collects your IP [address], keystroke patterns, device information and stores it in China, where all that data is vulnerable to arbitrary requisition from the Chinese government.”

Many of our fellow citizens have learned nothing from the experiences of recent years.

As Steve noted yesterday: Commies Gonna Commie.

 

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEVELOPING: Air Force pilot safe after F-35 jet suffers ‘significant damage’ in accident at Alaska base.

Nahh — that’ll buff right out:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

CRAZY AND UNORTHODOX:

Posted at 6:16 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BOOM:

Civilian control of the military isn’t just written into the Constitution, it’s paramount for a civil society — and Milley undercut nearly 250 years of it.

Related:

Posted at 6:07 pm by Stephen Green

FAIL, BRITANNIA: Navy bosses rename HMS Agincourt to avoid annoying the French.

The government has been accused of “craven political correctness” after it approved a Royal Navy request to change the name of HMS Agincourt to avoid offending the French.

In 2018 the Astute-class submarine became the fleet’s sixth vessel to be named after the 1415 English victory over the French in the Battle of Agincourt as part of the Hundred Years’ War.

The decision has also prompted anger from former Tory defence secretaries, who called the decision “sacrilege”.

n a social post late on Sunday evening, the Royal Navy announced the ship would be renamed HMS Achilles, subject to approval by the King. It added the decision had been made “in light of the 80th anniversaries this year of VE and VJ Day”, when many French and British troops fought alongside each other.

Spoiler: You can’t avoid annoying the French, particularly if you’re British. We make things work, anyway.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

NEW JERSEY DRONES MYSTERY: White House Reveals What Was Going On. “After research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons. . . . Many of these drones were also hobbyists, recreational and private individuals that enjoy flying drones. In time, it got worse due to curiosity. This was not the enemy.”

Posted at 3:48 pm by Glenn Reynolds