Valueless analysis is obsessed with positioning and signaling the status/capability of the author. Examples include trying to highlight past predictions, jockying to be first to report/predict contingent turns within the conflict itself, and vapid regurgitation by algorithmitized audiences.
Valuable analysis is concerned with identifying and planning for political implications of violence. Examples include trying to identify and develop preferences on possible future conditions, and trying to identify what new political information the violence reveals about the states involved.
As we watch conflict unfold in the Middle East, let us take a moment to differentiate between valuable and valueless analysis. A short thread:
The most vulnerable to the corruption of Power are those most certain of what they would do with if it they had it.
The United States is preparing for war with Iran. What do we want out of war, and is war the best way to get it?
I explore this question in detail in my rapid-response piece on Substack:
open.substack.com/pub/alexdevi...
I had a great time discussing Iran, Islam, and the West on the Discourse Lab Podcast:
youtu.be/QSZ70mqZvxI?...
Because of the way populism acts, cordial disagreement can be pro-democracy work.
For the populist, the “Pure People” roughly all believe the same thing. Disagreement comes from the "Corrupt" Elite. If you can disagree without triggering enmity, you undermine authoritarianism.
As the international system degrades, we are left needing answers to the problems it tried to solve. Is mutually assured destruction still enough to protect us from nuclear war? Not Anymore, I argue:
open.substack.com/pub/alexdevi...
Coming next week on my substack!
open.substack.com/pub/alexdevi...
One of the ways in which power corrupts:
Using power to hurt people makes you afraid to lose power in case they decide to hurt you back. When you use law enforcement or the military to help you hurt people, they also will want to help you keep your power for the same reason.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk will be regarded as a watershed moment in American political history. How have we, the American People, responded? What have our responses taught us about our civic culture? I explore these questions in my latest substack article:
open.substack.com/pub/alexdevi...
Coming next week on my substack:
substack.com/@alexdevitry...
Why do experts keep saying that populism, a kind of movement that explicitly seeks to empower everyday people against corrupt elites, is bad for democracy? I explore this paradox in my latest piece:
open.substack.com/pub/alexdevi...
Coming next week on my substack:
substack.com/profile/4244...
This is how I found out he has passed. Wow.
Im gonna need to not be called out like this.
Students and teachers of political philosophy are invited to the online book launch of the edited volume 'Pluralizing Political Philosophy':
crookedtimber.org/2025/05/12/o...
The eruption of political violence always floods the internet with bullshit explanations for war. Adequate explanations for India-Pakistan will account for one or more of: Colonial history/partition, energy/climate disaster, realist logics amid global reorganization of power.
There IS a crisis of masculinity, that much is a real thing. It's just that the prescriptions offered by misogynistic sycophants are poison.
It's behind a paywall for me but if this is arguing that Peter Theil is living according to Tolkien's ethics then it's written by a fake fan.
Two woman walking and embracing each other in front of an ICE detention center. The woman on the left is wearing a black dress and heels. The woman on the right is smiling and wearing a white hijab, glasses, and a pink garment. Members of the press are in the background.
Two women standing, smiling, and embracing each other with grass, water, and the sky in the background. The woman on the left is wearing a white hijab, glasses, and a pink garment. The woman on the right is wearing a black dress.
Two woman stand next to each other and hold onto one another. The woman on the left is wearing a black dress. The woman on the right is smiling and wearing a white hijab, glasses, and a pink garment. In the background is the fence of an ICE detention center.
Today, our client Rümeysa Öztürk was released on bail from ICE detention in Louisiana, and she will return to New England to continue her studies.
📸 Giancarlo D’Agostaro
I just shared this with my university administrators.
Could not agree more! My book, Saving Apartheid: White Internationalism at the End of the Cold War, traces exactly this transatlantic connection between apartheid and the American right from 1980 to 1994. Out with Columbia University Press late 2025/early 2026!
it has taken me a minute to finish, but if you’re a 19th century american history/legal theory nerd you will love this book yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...
We are extremely pleased to announce the preliminary release of the combined pre-election and post-election dataset for the ANES 2024 Time Series Study!
The data and documentation can be downloaded from the ANES website at: electionstudies.org/data-center/...
Best,
The ANES Team
We read philosophers of the past because the past is still part of our world, not utterly absent. Though Aristotle never experienced capitalism, but he did experience community, suffering, and humanity. If we value people's experiences, it shouldn't matter that they're dead.
Debate-me-bro culture treats political engagement like it is a game of chess; deploying pre-memorized bytes of mini-rhetorics at one another as if they were moves in a chess game, each seeking to trap the other. This can never be the basis of a successful politic. #UFAmericatour
B...based Joe Rogan?
Basically, the tools we will need to make progress on the campus abduction cases will be unmade if we cannot produce a good outcome on the Garcia case. Getting Garcia home bolsters Constitutionalism, which we then use to free our students.
These are not politically or structurally equivalent cases. The SCOTUS order, admitted error, and structural stakes make the Garcia case strategically prerequisite to the Khalil, Suriname, and Ozturk cases.