when tiktok was ordered to divest a lot of people thought trump was not going to win, and it was in the same bill as the Ukraine Aid

The national security concerns predate the war and the renewed focus on Israeli conduct by multiple years! People are either amnesiacs or they've settled on something more convenient to believe.

I think this is a pretty fair take on the matter overall, but with TikTok they should have just committed If you're going to ban it, actually ban it, don't just try to make it some other congress' problem

Sure, Lina Khan got us right-to-repair and click-to-cancel and would've had more success if it wasn't for the utterly corrupt Northern District of Texas. But it pales in comparison to Congressional Dems letting media consolidation happen while they sat on their hands.

I think there was reasonable evidence based on public information that TT was juicing the algorithm based on CN government needs (eg., videos about Tiananmen Square getting much broader share on Instagram or YT Shorts than on TT) but as an intel tool that's a little iffy, yeah

Well yes, but that's an argument to ban all social media with an algorithm much more complex and opaque than bluesky's (very much including Tiktok). Which, honestly, fine by me.

This is a really naive view of cybersecurity that should give you pause as to how well you understand the domain you cover. Non-govt hardware is the majority of attack surface for spying attempts. Both for direct attacks and exfiltration of personal info for social engineering... All widely known.

Journalistic coverage is also not a credential in of itself. You can report on a topic for many years and not understand it. Especially in security topics.

You can even work in the field and simultaneously not understand anything outside of your specialty

Or in it.

the government had and still has an extreme credibility problem on this, because the natsec concerns more or less a) didn’t prevent legislators from being addicted to using it for their own benefit b) didn’t prevent the corrupt bargain that trump made to evade the law

i personally felt at the time that the natsec case was way overstated even though i had little sympathy for a company that — like all major chinese companies — was bound to obey the party and implement its will

But more to the point, I think that future Democratic administrations are going to need to be willing to aggressively crack down on bad internet actors like Elon Musk's perversion of Twitter, and the TikTok ban provides a useful blueprint.

I think there is a very real discussion to be had about the constitutionality of the TikTok ban, but ultimately, I agree with it. I think TikTok did pose a real national security problem and the Biden administration was correct to target it. CCP-dominated companies do not have 1st Amendment rights.

Somebody wake George Lucas up, we just got more footage for "Revenge of the Sith":

Earth. Air. Fire. Water. Only the Pope, master of all four elements ...

As in 1066 England will prevail against the Norwegians before tragically losing to the French a couple of weeks later.

It's kinda funny that the US and Norway's best players are both English

literally incapable of conceiving of global relationships (this is Meloni, an ideological ally he has managed to completely alienate in recent weeks) in any terms other than those of a rapist.

Few things make me as sad as knowing he’s unlikely to ever receive a fraction of the justice he deserves.

I don't know if he is the worst human being on Earth right now - a lot of competition there - but he is the most viscerally nauseating one.

After I wrote last week's column, I learnt that a neighbour with severe disabilities, an extremely tough & resourceful woman who lived to the full, died in the heatwave. Everyone here is devastated. I can scarcely express my anger towards a mindset that treats people like her as collateral damage. 🧵

It's a collective psychopathy, which treats disabled people, elderly people and people with long-term conditions as disposable. We see it in the Covid-19 pandemic. We see it in the heatwaves. Their deaths are inconvenient reminders that a favoured policy is disastrous. So they must be dismissed.

I think for fairness' sake the referee should ignore one red card offense by Belgium tomorrow. Give them a freebie.

What makes the imperialism of the 19th century distinctive is, frankly, how *inefficient* it was. There was brutal exploitation and extraction...which mostly went straight back into paying for the exploitative system in the first place. Industrialization and not colonialism made Europe rich.

Now, was there overlap? Certainly - things like the opium trade and the sale of goods to colonies are commonly cited, but the fact of the matter is that nations such as Germany managed to industrialize with minimal colonial holdings. Imperial Germany did not grow rich from Namibia's captive market.

This is a distorted element of Franklin saying something very racist about how if the Haudenosaunee could ally together then there was no reason white people couldn't also do it (and the Albany Convention then went on to fail showing that he was uh, wrong).

*But* in terms of the mechanisms of each? The Haudenosaunee required unanimity and consensus and relied equally on a matrilineal system to hold power. Literally none of that describes 18th Century Anglo culture. It'd be a lovely story if it were true but it isn't.

The Haudenosaunee had higher standards that in the end broke apart under the weight of European and US power as an outside context problem. Thresholds were lower, and US separation of powers (on paper) has no Haudenosaunee equivalent.

We do the Chieftains' Council and the Long Peace no credit by claiming it's somehow the inspiration for the system collapsing in record time right now. They did hard work and their system has held up much more successfully to greater stresses.

Limited influence, I think. We certainly didn't let women vote originally, like they did. We certainly didn't empower women to remove chiefs. And to say the Haudenosaunee had a central government is kind of a stretch.

"In October 1794, the Friend...accompanied him to talks with the Haudenosaunee aimed at producing the Treaty of Canandaigua... the Friend gave a speech to the US gov't officials and Haudenosaunee chiefs about "the Importance of Peace & Love", which was liked by the Haudenosaunee."

Shout out to the Public Universal Friend, the non-binary Quaker activist who preached radical feminism, abolitionism, and solidarity with Indigenous peoples during the late 1700s and early 1800s.

The Haudenosaunee had a single assembly ala the Kuriltai and other such analogues all over the world, one that required absolute unanimity, and where matrilineal societies meant women had a role they never played in the USA. How did this lead to three branches of government and checks and balances?

What specifically did they pick? In the compare-contrast of how the Council of Elders works versus the three branches of the US government, where specifically is the Haudenosaunee influence culturally or organizationally? Surely naming the specifics would be easy, right?

Until they actually interacted with him and found out he was a titanic arsehole

No it's not, I'm an early modern specialist and his parts on the early modern are terrible. Meanwhile harari has made good contributions to early modern military history

Years ago Graeber responded snippily to a short blog post on my obscure personal site that critiqued one of the dumber arguments he used in Debt. He really impressed me with how thin-skinned and defensive he was. Kind of like an unpleasant modern Kibo, biting back at every mention of his name.

I tweeted that a few minutes before noon and by the time I was back from lunch Wengrow was tweeting individual replies to my mentions assuring everyone that I was wrongly and mischievously characterizing the panels. Kind of a wild response to the mildest critique from an early-career adjunct.

I suppose I have a matching Wengrow story - after tDoE came out, it had a couple of panels at SCS/AIA on it, where Wengrow was the discussant. I attended some and noting each paper was a 'compliment-sandwich' (interesting! also wrong! also important!) tweeted that 'tDoE was having a rough ride.'

And as for often as I get asked about _Debt: The First 5000 Years_, I too should have a blog post... which is just a link to @delong.social's tale of discovering that Graeber a)often got his facts just plain wrong; and b)was a defensive bully when alerted to same delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/...

For as often as I get asked "What do you think of Graber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything" I need to just have a blog post titled, "What I think of The Dawn of Everything" which is just a link to @walterscheidel.bsky.social's devastating review (here: escholarship.org/uc/item/9jj9...).

Laptops! In Garages! I couldn't take anything he wrote seriously after that as far as facts. And thebaffler.com/salvos/of-fl... was just... a terrible argument. There's no technological progress because anything that is technological progress Doesn't Count, Because Reasons. So gave up in general.

2021 was my year of Graeber. I read Debt, Bullshit Jobs, and The Dawn of Everything. Throughout I was struck by how strong the weak forms of his arguments were, and by how weak were the strong forms. He was an incisive critic and talented polemicist but a sloppy scholar and a poor theorist.

From any one or two of these factions of populists it could get brushed off, from all at once it’s a recipe for immense insecurity despite the fact that the populists are in fact all fucking wrong

It’s also of note that the reason this neurosis is so strong is because it’s pan-ideological Leftists like Bernie Sanders and David Graeber, centrists like Matthew Yglesias and Jared Golden, rightists like…well, the entire Republican Party, all of them are neck-deep in this psychotic Gender anxiety

The only useful function of this euphemistic category is that I finally have what feels like an adequate term for Art Laffer.

except the author is reflecting on an incident where Graeber blew up in a deranged way at some measured criticism of *Debt*, and saying very magnanimously that it was still a valuable dialogue

i mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but you could apply basically the same description to Goebbels. he was writing speculative nonfiction (what a euphemism for lies.) about the jews (and germany etc), but that was valuable to expand the space of social/political possibilities for hitler.

Speculative Nonfiction actually feels like a good term for something like Red Plenty. This however, is closer to "fan theories" on a LOST message board.