You know that the US was essentially autarchic for decades? Any continental sized power with a half decent population can come close. China is NOT special. They're just the current industrial hegemon, because the US decided to financialize and send China their industry.

I’m reviewing applications for a job I’m leading hiring on. I wonder if any of these people realize that when they feed the same prompt as 170 other people into chatGPT that it gives them all the same answers. I have read the exact same sentence about power mapping in 100+ applications.

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

When socialists, Marxists and commies say this we get called “crazy commies”, “the radical left”, “Putin puppets”, and/or smeared as “trying to get Trump elected.” lol.

Reminder that Francesca Albanese is not being targeted for a sentence twisted and lifted out of context in a speech. She is being targeted for daring to name the names of giant companies complicit in the crime of genocide. They would rather destroy international law than be accountable to it.

Liberals don’t support cruel immigration policies, they just support leaders who enact cruel immigration policies. You can criticize putting kids in cages but these liberals don’t want to see people criticize Obama for putting kids in cages. They want to keep their image of charming, classy Obama.

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it. I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.” 1/

The short story of the 21st century in the United States is that out of malice or cowardice or some combination of both, every presidency contributed to building and expanding a federal secret police of goons and thugs, despite clear warning and obvious abuses, until we got to this point.

Tonight's beautiful murder of thousands of crows. ❤️

And that's if you don't think the numbers are cooked, which there is every reason to believe they are.

America's starving Cuba, because hey, they got away with Venezuela, so why not, if you're a psychopath? The world or China or the EU could so something, but won't. What could they do and why should they? t.co/R4Ge1vpJY7

One of the things that seems to make me different from most other people is that I can empathize with almost anyhone -- feel what they feel, think what think. Strangely (or not) this doesn't always make me sympathetic to them, it just means I understand.

Everything you let your rulers do to someone else tells them what they can do to you.

The most important thing to understand about elites is that when they commit genocide, torture, rape and impoverish other people they're telling you what they'd do to YOU if they thought they could get away with it.

This guy is supposed to be some sort of genius? fortune.com/2026/02/04/p...

I have decided that the Spenser novels, for me, end with Ace Atkins last book. The new author doesn't have the voice and is making choices I don't think Parker would agree with (letting Spenser and Hawk get old, which Parker clearly decided not to do.)

A conspiracy is just a small group of people deciding to do something without letting everyone else know. Most of government and business is run that way and pretending conspiracies don't exist is the intellectual equivalent of self-lobotomizing.

I'm convinced one of the reasons epstein was able to coast for so long is that for many sensible people including and especially educated liberals, viewing the world through a conspiratorial lens was always seen as vaguely distasteful and rube-coded

Solid piece for understanding the age of neoliberalism.

The world isn't run by satantic pedophiles. Just the West and some of its dependents. China executes pedophiles and China is the world's most important nation.

Chinese and American elites both got what they wanted. The Chinese got the tech lead and the industrial base, American elites got an oligarchy and destroyed their working class. www.ianwelsh.net/american-and...

All bodycams are going to do is facilitate a surge in prosecutions for “assaulting agents” and improve data collection about protesters so good work everyone who pushed for that big reform.

People say that Newsom can’t win if everyone doesn’t support him. They are informed that everyone does not, in fact, support him. Logically, those people should then drop their support for Newsom because he can’t win. And yet, they then try to double down on him. Totally illogical.

/6 Someone left a comment with a link to a piece by Matt Taibbi and Michael Tracy explaining that actually this wasn’t pedophilia. So, you know, thanks, Al Gore.

/4 alas, this piece has caused Cathy Young to give up on me. Notably it took her only this one piece to realize I am terrible, whereas previously it took a number of years to realize Milo Yiannopoulos wasn’t actually a free speech hero. This is personal growth, Cathy, and I congratulate it.

/7 Update: some of Scott Alexander’s readers have discovered this post. They have used It as a springboard to discuss how, in fact, Jonathan Swift sucks, as does “A Modest Proposal,” because they immediately realized it is satirical, and it goes on too long for someone as smart as they are.

Republicans love adding seats to state Supreme Courts! They've done it three times in recent years. This latest court-packing plan will shift Utah's high court far to the right and possibly flip rulings on abortion and gerrymandering. Democrats should take note that Rs have deemed this acceptable!

Kudos to Mayor Mamdani. This is what economic justice looks like. And it's a reminder of how we can fight corporate greed at the state and local level. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/01/mamdani-ice-delivery-workers-settlement-backpay-uber-gig-workers-million/

From FB regarding Pizza Luce in Minnesota. I like it when I can do something to help people displaced by ICE and then after I do that thing I get to eat a pizza.

Which does make one wonder about Peter Thiel. Though I'm sure he didn't rape underage girls.

I remember a college professor of mine going on a rant about how the world was owned and ruined by “five old white men on yachts” And I remember thinking, well, it’s probably more that people don’t examine their own actions, it’s not like a couple of people control the world But you know what

so all we agree he didn’t kill himself right

👀 Looks like the husband of the woman ICE abducted called his lawyer, lawyer called the cops, then the police chief went and got her & took her home Article says it may be the first time local Minnesota PD "intervened in a federal law enforcement action" since Trump started terrorizing the state

The elite are pedophiles by design. It's like how some gangs make would be members kill someone. If you want to be a member of the US or Israel (and probably UK) elite, they need to know they can trust you and that means they need blackmail on you.

Well, all these Epstein revelations mean it's time for a new military attack on someone, probably Iran.

I am grateful for little about my childhood, but I am very grateful I grew up before smart phones and helicopter parenting. I grew up free range. I did what I wanted when I wanted when not in school. Almost no kids get that in the West any more.

I will once again note that American decline is unstoppable. It is now impossible to turn this ship around. Cannot be done, as a practical matter. (It's possible in theory, but not in practice.) Empires, however, die ugly and do a lot of damage on their way down.

Legal fees for Maine families: many big orgs can’t cover these, but the Maine Solidarity Fund does, and was established by a coalition of some of the best local non-profits. www.mainesolidarity.org

Graham Linehan proves the point that trans liberationists have been saying from the start: If you'll permit dehumanising and stripping the rights of trans people, you will dehumanise and strip the rights of anyone on a long enough timeline.

im sorry but we just spent the last decade being told the biggest issues were pronouns in emails and a trans kid playing jv lacrosse if you said these things and got paid for it then you need to go away. literally if “woke mind virus” is something youve ever said unironically you need to go away

And the country is grieving the man whose last words were “Are you okay?”. CBS isn’t just “out of touch” - they are state controlled media.

And current discussion on the laundry subreddit www.reddit.com/r/laundry/s/...

stuff like this, etc

It is important to know that despite its prominence TikTok loses billions of dollars and tweaking algorithms lays havoc to your ad sales. Oracle is gonna destroy this thing and it’s going to combine with the data center debt and consume it whole www.theinformation.com/articles/tik...

Look, Canada can survive Trump's 100% tariffs better than the US. The % numbers do not tell the story. We sell you things you can't easily replace. Gasoline prices will soar, potash comes from us or no one, farmers will be destroyed.

I need someone to explain to me like I’m two why, if an ICE agent fires a tear gas canister into a person’s face, it’s a non-lethal object and no crime was committed, but if a protester picks up that same canister and throws in behind the ICE agents, it’s assault with a deadly weapon.

I knew it was going to be this bad. And it will get worse. But even I never expected "Look for the helpers" to become the motto of ICE/CBP execution squads.

From what I’ve read, CBP agents have actually been some of the most cruel and violent of the whole terror campaign so far, the ones most likely to escalate and brutalize people. Not that ICE isn’t also horrible, and people move back and forth between them as below, but yeah Abolish DHS

In the middle of the murder and terror happening in Minneapolis, some activists are finding themselves doxxed. If you’re new to the movement and you don’t know what this means, or you’ve been doxxed and you don’t know what to do, read on.