Trump is demonstrating that even in the attention economy, the laws of inflation still apply. We're at the point where we're better off ignoring what the US president says than to take him seriously.

The long 17th century finally comes to a close.

Really bad framing in the headline here. MLP inherited a party from her father. She did skillfully "normalize" that party by eschewing his explicit racism and antisemiticism and abandoning its least popular policy (leaving the EU). But she's a nepo baby, not a survivor.

Thinking a lot about this one these days.

Had to contain myself to keep from losing it in the Co-op when I glanced at the Telegraph's front-page and saw that Farage's only opponent in the Clacton-on-Sea by-election will be Count Binface, who is running as "the unity candidate." For this alone I love this country.

So Marine Le Pen will run for president even if she is under house arrest and must wear an ankle bracelet for the next year. Which means that if she wins the 2nd round on May 2, she'll be under house arrest for the first two months of her presidency. Quite something for a law-and-order candidate.

Meet the main character of the nightmare I will surely have tonight.

In general you turn on every match hoping to see something like Argentina-Egypt, and very rarely you get what you came for. This World Cup has had a handful of them already. Just told the 8-y.o. that his first World Cup is setting the bar really high.

"Intractable civil wars and the lack of attention paid to them are not in themselves anything new. But the range and scale of today’s 'invisible conflicts' points to three broader and interconnected dynamics that have reshaped international security in recent years." Gift link.

I have mad respect for people who own their mistakes.

Anti-intellectualism is a bipartisan project and in both cases it’s basically market protectionism for one’s artisanal shoddy, boring ideas that cannot find an audience.

Think they buried the lede here: "'Studies of museum visitation have shown that labels should be presented no higher than an eighth-grade reading level and that most visitors will read no more than a brief label,' she said."

Wow, Marine Le Pen's verdict leaves her eligible to run, but wearing an ankle bracelet and under house arrest, which she said she would refuse to do. Pretty impressive needle-threading there by the court, as it forces her to die on her own hill, and incentivizes Bardella to mount a palace coup.

Another expression of how colonialism's racist legacies are a past that's not even past.

VAR is my passion.

Is it too much to ask for historians to agree on one thing about the emergence of capitalism, the state and modernity? Just one single thing?

I think it's good to be the party for men who aren't okay with rape.

He is indeed one of the greatest, even if we don’t like him.

Regardless of his last match or even past few runs for Portugal, CR7 is among the greatest handful of people to ever play the game of football, and suggesting otherwise just seems strange to me.

Wrote about Ankara, and how Rutte's obsequious linkage of increased defense spending to Trump could amplify public opposition to the diversion of funds from social benefits to weapons. We hear a lot about Europe being caught btw Trump and Putin. But there's a third factor at play, too. Gift link.

is there anything more beautiful than the meeting of two people who deserve each other

I'd pay to watch a live feed tracking Meloni and Trump at the NATO summit. I suspect she is going to put the side into side-eye this week.

More than any other global event, the World Cup channels postcolonial legacies and the entangled nature of global modernities, from the countries competing and the commentary about specific teams and matchups, to the makeup of individual squads. I find it poignant, enraging and hopeful all at once.

FIFA needs to send a message by sanctioning Galarza, Caceres and Uruguay's federation, and relieving the field and VAR refs from all further duties. France showed restraint, but between potential injuries and red cards for justifiable retaliation, that 2nd half could have been tournament-altering.

The definitive summation of Trump II.

The ITV announcer calling him Eustaprio for the entire 90 minutes was priceless.

Two businessmen meet. One says, I've got a truckload of vodka. The other says, I'll give you 300 dollars for it. They shake on the deal. Then they part ways — the first to try and find a truckload of vodka, the second to try and find $300. This is a joke about AI.

Iconic image of the Trump era, akin to the photos of integrating Little Rock HS. American hero.

Arriving in Washington DC on July 4th and immediately seeing a bunch of Nazis marching with confederate flags feels like something you’d see in the pre credits scene of a an episode of Sliders/Star Trek, so the writers can quickly establish something has gone terribly awry on this timeline.

The Council on Foreign Relations has a tracker for Trump's use of taxpayer money to purchase federal government ownership stakes in private companies - something Republicans also told us was "communism". www.cfr.org/articles/was...

It's that time of year again!

Trump take means of production.

Since Trump is going all in on the anti-communist messaging, it might be a good time to point out that his admin has either taken, tried to take or expressed interest in taking stakes in a range of private companies (in addition to all the other ways it is the most anti-free market admin in memory).

In fairness, so did Marx.

Whether we conceive America as a city on a hill or a more perfect union, to be an American is to commit to our aspirational struggle.

Behind every book is a circle of family and friends who never want to hear another word about its topic.

The struggle to define what America and being American mean started with the Declaration of Independence and has been ongoing ever since, because America’s promise can never be fully accomplished, but only less imperfectly honored.

"their good temper and openhandedness – the terrible significance of their elections – the President's taking off his hat to them not they to him – these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it." Happy Fourth!

Hats off to Ed for arranging this - no quicker way to get public support for his campaign to be Chancellor than this kind of intervention www.thetimes.com/article/cc02...

The BBC has a live feed for the Taylor Swift wedding on its site, and I count that as payback for all the royal wedding hysteria that got imported Stateside over the years.

Thought of this, for no real reason.

The fun part of reading through the rough draft for the first time is running across the bits you forgot you'd written, like describing the U.K. during the section on Brexit as "a small island appendage of Europe."

My contrarian take: this is not an own goal for Fox because conservatives do not want equality for all; they want to defend or reimpose what they believe are natural hierarchies. Many progressives simply cannot wrap their heads around this.

So Isabella Weber was right, and all the serious economists who lost their minds over her were wrong? Got it.

Wars always come home.

Worth watching

"The Supreme Court decision, and the executive order it overturned, hinged on the constitutional amendment’s wording... But more importantly, the case represented a battle over American identity itself—what it means to be, and how someone can become, American." Gift link.

Gramsci still notching wins.

I can handle the current events play-by-play.

The closing graf distills the essence of the Western civilizational backlash Trump II expresses: modernity as a uniquely Euro-American production beyond the capabilities of black and brown peoples, with a primal fear of the judgment they might deliver on the crimes committed in Western civ's name.