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James Palmer Profile picture
James Palmer
@BeijingPalmer
Deputy editor @ForeignPolicy. Wrote Bloody White Baron, The Death of Mao, and upcoming Heaven's Empires. Married to @larsonchristina. DC, ex-Beijing. He/him.
4 subscribers
Aug 30 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
The primary problem with the RINGS OF POWER is that it's bad - badly written, badly cast, badly staged. But the secondary problem is that the creators have no understanding of what Tolkien was trying to do, and nothing to say themselves. If they had something to say, some vision, their failure to understand Tolkien would be much less of a problem. Michael Moorcock couldn't understand Tolkien, and he wrote Elric and other books partially in response to his failure to understand it.
Aug 10 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
yeah those losers, preserving the linguistic heritage of their ancestors for thousands of years in exile, clearly a sign of a fake identity I've seen a lot more deranged anti-Hebrew stuff this time round and I think part of it is that the framing of the conflict as about who is 'indigenous' has become much stronger. Which is a shame because it's not a very fruitful or useful concept and it's dangerous territory.
Aug 5 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
listen I say this only reluctantly but Donald Trump would have been a great drag queen. loves glitz and glamor? attracted to an image of exaggerated femininity without actually being interested in women? catty little minx who adores showbiz?
May 26 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
having read every letters page in the first three hundred issues or so of Dragon magazine, the D&D house organ, it's interesting to see what problems dominated bad play back in the 1980s and 1990s compared to today one common back-in-the-day problem is the PC who has found a rules loophole that allows them to dominate the game. several months of letters, for instance, are dedicated to a player who has crafted an armor in Star Wars that makes them virtually invulnerable
Apr 17 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"A while ago, David and Julia's marriage had gotten stale. Then David found himself attracted to a new sales associate. But, he says, this wasn't be a problem. He just wouldn't tell Julia.

David practices unethical non-monogamy. It's a new idea - but in some ways an old one." "Of course I listened to a lot of podcasts and read the books before I started," David says. "Philip Roth, John Updike - the classics of the field. But I think the most important part is communication, specifically, making sure Julia and the women I'm sleeping with don't.'
Apr 2 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
the vast majority of Japanese are not war crimes denialists but boy the minority who are really go all the way. I think people sometimes get a misleading impression of the state of Japanese discourse on the war as a *whole* because of the sheer wackadoodle nature of a fairly small group of denialists. there's whole bookcases on war crimes in stores!
Jan 29 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
guys, I am not an economist, I was just bitten by a radioactive mid-tier Chinese official in Gansu and gained a strange 'cadre sense,' but apparently can casually outperform 'the most experienced fund managers' on this issue Image here is my prediction from december 2022. Image
Dec 20, 2023 • 33 tweets • 5 min read
@lastpositivist Ok, this is about to be possibly way too much information. At some point next year when the next edition comes out I hope to actually write some of this as a long essay somewhere. @lastpositivist Over the course of 5th edition D&D, the makeup of the average D&D group substantially changed - as I've heard it put sometimes, "from autists to theatre kids." Thanks to the popularity of streaming, the game's base hugely expanded - and toward *narrative* rather than rules
Dec 19, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
my extremely compromise view on this is that the *potential* for Trumpism was clearly there in U.S. society but the *inevitability* of it wasn't, and the potential did not have much to do with anybody's actual suffering and a lot to do with media dynamics but also Magdi's post reminds me that I've been to bits of rural Maryland and PA that remind me of being in Siberia in the 2000s.
Sep 19, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
embarrassingly gullible/complicit on their part to a *striking* degree. you have to be a very particular type of fool to be like 'the xinjiang academy of social sciences invited us on this totally legitimate and un-stage-managed trip' at this point.
May 15, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
it's worrying how much old people are getting shut out of access to services and entertainment by the digitalization of everything, especially by the growing demand for specific apps a friend mentioned that you literally can't buy tickets at the gate for the Oregon Zoo anymore, for instance, you have to do it online. accessing help services even more so. I would like to see some of this potentially taken up as access issues under ADA, to be honest.
May 11, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
my guess on why the MFA used this uh, questionable, language is that it's that they didn't want to say 'white race,' 'yellow race' etc which is the usual Chinese language and somebody thought this was an appropriate equivalent because they're increasingly incompetent but ... I would not be at all surprised if some of the materials the military-academics who came up with these conspiracy theories in the 2000s were using were straightforwardly anti-Semitic.
May 10, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I mean I would value sentiments like this more if it they stemmed from any examination of *Beijing's* actions, which more than anything else is what's going to doom us to that Cold War. Because they want it, regardless of whether the US does, and it only takes one side. to convince the CCP leadership that it did not need to fight that Cold War, for instance, you would have to take actions such as extraditing Chinese dissidents from the United States upon Beijing's request.
May 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
america 2023: POLYTHOUGHT is ILLEGAL. the MONOTHOUGHT COMMISSARS patrol the streets to enforce RIGHTTHINK. only one man is BRAVE enough to stand against the TROLL ARMY thank you chatgpt Image
May 9, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
the process for a lot of this stuff is that some 25-year-olds at a consulting firm make up a number, then media cites that number, then other consulting firms cite that number to make up other numbers. learning how to dig down into 'where did this figure come from' is one of the great skills of research, because surprisingly often the answer involves wild guesswork or extrapolation that through a process of replication turns into 'fact'
May 8, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
went to look up George Chakiris (Bernando in the original West Side Story)'s wiki page, figured the date on his photo must be a mistake, looked up other pictures of him in his *80s* and some kind of deal with the devil must be involved. he is 83 in this picture. Image
May 6, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
'manic pixie dream girl but gradually the guy realizes that this inspirational life-changing girlfriend is actually a Nazi' would be a hilarious movie 'she's so QUIRKY and MUSICAL and FULL OF LIFE'

May 6, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
One of the interesting things about the Star Wars sequels is how they seem to have generated very little creativity in others. The prequels were bad but the penumbra of stuff around them was great. Haven’t seen anything like that with the last 3. Contrast with Rogue One which has been a tremendous source
May 5, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Andrew Sullivan's main contribution to the world of 'serious' journalism was promoting Charles Murray's racist shit and calling opponents of the Iraq war traitors before he had a road to Damascus moment. American magazine journalism of the 1990s does not deserve any kind of kudos in retrospect
May 3, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
man this whole thing is so low-effort, here is the twitter bio for the organization

"To maintain the public relations with the society, which will influence the crowds in the long term." you have to think of Chinese stuff like this as being as much about extracting money/jobs from the PRC for the participants as it is actually achieving any goal overseas.
May 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
it's pretty remarkable that a former president of the united states and likely Republican candidate in 2024 has multiple well-attested sexual assault claims against him and the media largely treats it as a page 6 story. 'donald trump, who has been accused by multiple women of rape' is something that could, you know, be prominent in every story.