REDISTRICT EVERYTHING

ESCALATE TO DE-ESCALATE

GERRYMANDER EVERY SINGLE STATE IMMEDIATELY

CREATE A DELICATE BALANCE OF TERROR NOW

RESTORE DETTERENCE

The implicit media consensus is that urban voters should not be able to overrule rural voters, but that rural voters should be able to overrule urban voters, an assumption so axiomatic and unquestionable that nobody even understands they're making it.

I don't disagree that there were numerous other extremely foolish choices (virgin lands, the lack of safeguards that led to giant industrial accidents like Chernobyl, and the desertification of the Aral Sea all come to mind), yeah.

GREEK CAPTAIN OF A PANAMANIAN-FLAGGED MALAYSIAN OIL TANKER EN ROUTE TO AUSTRALIA WITH IRAQI CRUDE: "So is the Strait open or not?"

IRGC COMMANDER, REFRESHING TRUTH SOCIAL: "Look here man, I know just as much as you do, ok?"

"Freedom in Afghanistan
Say goodbye Taliban
Free elections in Iraq
Saddam Hussein locked up
Libya turns over nukes
Lebanese want freedom too
Syria is forced to leave
Don't you know what all this means?"

"Modern" warfare in cinema basically froze at WW2-era technology. Even Top Gun (from 1986) has dogfights with machine guns because they knew that portraying actual jet fighter combat ("fire a missile with a range in the tens of kilometers and watch their plane blow up on radar") is boring.

Or its duration (7 Years' War, 30 Years' War, etc). There are all sorts of ways to do it, and there are plenty more in languages that aren't English.

Trump Is Said to Be in Talks to Send Afghans Who Aided U.S. Forces to Congo

This is monstrous. Just profoundly shameful behavior by our government.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/w...

Acknowledging the stark, ugly truth that the Republicans basically had no good reason to do what they have done for the last 11 years and have lapsed into vast collective psychosis over totally immaterial and utterly depraved delusions is terrifying, and as such most commentators simply do not do it

We are talking about an organization whose leader routinely calls for the deaths of his political opponents, it needs to be locked out of government for the next few generations by every dirty trick in the book.

The modern Republican Party is engaged in an active project of authoritarian lawbreaking and civilizational suicide, and until it learns to behave like a political party and not a cult of mindless violence it really has no business in power.

There is no set naming convention for wars, the Persian Wars were named after the attacker, the Great Northern War over where it was fought.

Or put another way: is it imperialist to call it "the Ukraine War"? No, it is not. That's where most of the war's destruction is happening.

The Cold War was mostly won because the Soviet Union committed economic suicide in the late 1980s. And *that* was due to the US's track record of economic growth and prosperity that Gorbachev tried and failed to emulate plus cratering oil prices.

In other words, GE and Exxon won the Cold War.

Also I rather suspect the academic achievement gap - boys now trail girls substantially in the aggregate - has a lot to do with these sorts of attitudes pushing male teachers out of primary school education.

It is bad and false to tell boys and men that they aren't and cannot be nurturers.

Honestly it's more likely to replace those than eldercare.

Which is why it's so notable that the tech CEOs are floating the concept at all!

Hanania is of course a race science advocate for pedophilia, but let's be honest here 95% of Hollywood films involve a meet cute between two extremely attractive heterosexual twentysomethings.

The roster runs the gamut from *Sinners* to *Anora* to *Dune*.

You could put pistols on the NFA and stop an enormous amount of gun violence in the US but it would do little to stop the highly publicized spree shootings so people would think it's worthless

In case anyone's interested in the historical track record of these "meat wave" attacks, I have a recent paper on that topic (with Yuri Zhukov)

Spoiler alert: forcing your soldiers to fight isn't a war-winning move

It would be nice if, at a moment when academia is under brutal assault from outside forces that are opposed to the very core of its mission, academics weren't so obsessed with self-flagellation.

Iran surely understands, because it’s obvious to everyone on earth, that Trump is desperate to chicken out, and will basically give them anything short of his firstborn child* to save himself from the disaster he created

*nah jk he’d definitely give him that too

This is genuinely one of the foundational copes of the modern conservative movement, a stabbed-in-the-back narrative about why the US lost Vietnam

This seems to have been a core religious policy in the Kushan Empire, which featured Greek coinage depicting Egyptian deities under Hindu names, with the Kushan Emperor himself taking titles ranging from "Son of Heaven" to "defender of the Buddhas" to "Caesar."

But it's difficult to be for sure.

Amusingly, one amusing side effect of female nurses being imported to New Guinea in bulk to treat malarial infections was that they were extremely good at getting starry-eyed GIs to actually take their atebrin. Or at least, better at it than their actual commanding officers were.

Yes, influenza actually killed more Americans in 1918 than the German Army did, leaving the US with the dubious legacy of being the only major combatant in WW1 to suffer more casualties from disease than from combat.

In the New Guinea campaign (which is all but forgotten today in favor of Guadalcanal but dwarfed it by an order of magnitude) entire units were completely wiped out by malaria. Half of all Japanese soldiers sent there were killed by malaria alone.

Your obligatory reminder that in the Pacific Theater of WW2 there were more American *and* more Japanese casualties from malaria than from each other's guns and bombs.

Reports from Army commanders on the ground were often little more than rants about the men not taking their antimalarial drugs.

Oh I quite agree!

My point above is *not* that AI is going to throw half the US into unemployment. It's that tech CEOs are actually considering what they will do if it *does*, and their response is to be concerned about the consequences rather than celebrating them.

This was not true before.

"Caesar was a conservative" is an extremely bizarre perspective that has virtually no support in classical history. He was a populist murdered by wealthy conservatives who were nonetheless also pro-Republic.

Perils of trying to map modern politics to history.

Timothy Snyder and Tooze are alike in that they both wrote very good books about central and Eastern Europe surrounding WWII and have basically good politics today but have become cranks around the edges due to an obsession with abandoning the US in very particular ways

xAI likewise has access to Musk's entire business empire to cannibalize. It can spin this out for a long time.

Do I expect OpenAI to survive the next 5 years? Probably not, no. But I also don't expect most of the Chinese automakers to survive, and that doesn't mean Chinese EVs are roadkill.