This is a general problem in the US. People like to compare it to, say, Italy or Denmark. Denmark has the same population as Wisconsin. Italy is comparable to California. The United States' GDP is 50% larger than the entirety of the European Union's.

Particulars of Israel-Palestine aside, it's a bit surreal seeing a mayor get grilled on foreign policy while everyone shrugs when the actual president appears to be throwing darts at a map blindfolded to decide our next war. Sorry, Cameroon. Nothing personal.

And lest we forget, these policies rarely work to actually crush the flow of drugs. China executes drug dealers too (including those from the West!), yet by odd coincidence Chinese international crime syndicates still do a bustling drug trade globally.

I think the trend on OSINT Twitter was instructive; guys who had spent years watching the atrocities in Syria, then the war in Ukraine, turned that same eye to Gaza and were shocked by what the Most Moral Army was doing *on camera*

Most places that rely on tourism dollars despise tourists. You see it in Hawaii, Japan, Italy, and the Netherlands (especially Amsterdam) too. The entire industry is somewhat masochistic that way. Chalk it up to "dirty foreigners" plus legitimately badly-behaved tourists.

Ross Douthat has evidently discovered Japanese salaryman work-life balance, and seems to think it will somehow lead to a revival of American masculinity rather than crashing birthrates and a spike in the suicide rate.

Trying to imagine what would happen if the Times published a piece entitled "Did Italians ruin the workplace?" One assumes they'd get an anonymous phone call from the Gambino family telling them to knock it off.

Admittedly this does have a "Russia bypasses Poland and tries to annex Portugal instead" feel to it. The assumption is presumably that destabilizing Cuba straight-up will not work.

People may act like this is new but he's previously said he wanted the generals to behave like Hitler's. It's just generic love of autocracy, though if he didn't have the memory of a goldfish I'd be worried about him cozying up to the PRC in particular.

The US last achieved consistent 4% GDP growth in the 1980s. Not coincidentally, the 1980s was when the US transitioned towards becoming a service-based economy in the face of the Japan Shock. It's *possible* that full automation could get us there (China's testing this now). I doubt it.

The standard answer here is "build a uniparty state with an Iron Triangle between business, the bureaucracy, and politics and a fixed exchange rate of 360 yen to the dollar." This is not a replicable solution, however.

We really are just rerunning the entirety of 1930-2003 over the span of ten months. We've done "bombs can accomplish strategic objectives", "passing a big tariff will get us out of a bad labor market", "save Nigerian Christians", and "tennōheika banzai!" Next: democratizing dictatorships by force?

Everything old is new again. Good heavens.

A quick backgrounder on Nigeria for those who are just tuning in. 1. There's no Christian genocide, and certainly not on the part of the govt. 2. There has been a decade-long Islamist insurgency, mainly in the north but spreading in recent years, that has targeted many, including Christians. 1/x

3. For several years the US military provided the Nigerian military with training to fight the insurgency (once known as Boko Haram but now splintered into two groups). Not sure if it still is. 4. The Nigerian military is pretty bad at counterinsurgency, including violence targeting civilians. 2/x

In fairness, Israeli democracy is likely more secure than Pakistan's (which was from quite early on co-opted by the military). But otherwise I agree, it's a quite solid comparison and the two states were born within a year of each other.

This is where an originality with even a shred of integrity is going to struggle to articulate what ‘taxes’ and ‘revenue’ could possibly mean besides tariffs in an 18th c context

It is not 1895 anymore. In the "Scramble for Africa" era, the entire continent put together had approximately the same population as the United States. Nigeria had the same population as Spain. Now Nigeria on its own is 2/3 the size of the US and Africa as a whole is five times as populous.

This is just a common Hindutva talking point of tarring liberal/progressive Hindus of being Pakistani/Muslim sympathisers

This is true across Europe, the entire continent is much less diverse than Canada, the US, and their Latin American peers. 83% of the British population identifies as white, in the US it's around 57%.

The difference is that in Germany there was gradual improvement in said conditions over the course of 1933 and 1934, even if they stalled out after 1935. The Brüning deflation was truly apocalyptic. Whereas Trump is simply driving a healthy economy off a cliff.

North Vietnam was fundamentally based on the Soviet experiment, most of the other non-European Marxist or pseudo-Marxist governments (Mugabe's ZANU, Democratic Kampuchea) were based either on the PRC or Castro's Cuba.

This is nearly identical to the treatment received by Japanese cadets in the 1930s who murdered not one but two prime ministers, or Hitler following the Beer Hall Putsch. Endless public sympathy and declarations that harsh punishment would divide the country, in the hope that all this would go away.

The ADL under Greenblatt quite simply does not view neo-Nazis as a threat to Israel. Therefore, neo-Nazism is not a priority. The fate of non-Israeli Jews (the bulk of whom live in the US) does not enter the equation at all. It is absurd.

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel do not want Trump's tariffs or RFK Jr's conspiracy theories. They want a Nazi version of Park Chung Hee.

I think this is basically it. People wanted to be able to skip mandatory diversity training at work and to call Lucy in Finance a smoke show without getting reprimanded. What they got instead is graphic videos of Juan from Accounting getting beaten up by armed men while his kids look on in horror.

Today is like one of those sports podcasts where everyone overreacts to the first 2 games of the season.

The back half of the 21st century really is going to be all about the Indian Ocean. Egypt, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the DRC, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia are all there or in close proximity and are projected to be the most populous nations on Earth:

Incredibly bizarre that the Western right barely seems to notice or care about the fact that the world's second most populous continent is becoming a nightmare.

Iran's role in the emerging anti-democratic axis is quite similar to Italy's role in the old 1940s Axis. It's the weakest of the three major powers (Russia, Iran, China) and it's operating in a very peripheral theater, but it's still dangerous.

I can only imagine trying to explain why this headline would be insulting to 1980s conservative helicopter parents who hope their daughters never discover boys.

WW1 production was colossal. The French entered the war with approximately 1.4 million 155 mm shells, or slightly more than the entire combined production for the US and Europe in 2024.

I do not know how you win elections consistently with this electorate besides depressing turnout among low trust dipshits

If Democratic Party leadership actually does back down on the shutdown they are utter fools. The Republicans are not going to negotiate at all and bluntly the only good option they have is to make it as politically destructive to the GOP as possible to reopen the government.

there are basically not enough republican voters to create enough safe seats to withstand the kind of wave that, for example, turned virginia into a democratic supermajority state for the first time in the modern era of its politics

So I feel like the obvious GOP strategic choice now is, "outrage wave is real, so find a way to fold on the shutdown and give back those ACA subsidies to blunt the wave." And what they'll actually do is send ICE to invade NYC and N.Va, which will backfire spectacularly.

This is nowhere near the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. The Democrats have to win the midterms. Then the presidency. Then survive whatever horrors are unleashed on 1/6/2029. And then they have to get 1960s LDP margins for the next decade

There's literally audio out there of Biden getting a condolence phone call from President Richard Nixon on the death of his first wife.

I do think this will snap the Democratic Party out of its malaise, and (hopefully) remind them that they actually have constituents and a job. Of course, this being the Democratic Party, it may also make them dangerously overconfident and blow the midterms.

Worth noting that in 2017 a Democrat won Alabama. Three years later, Biden barely defeated Trump with a combined 80,000 votes in a few key swing states. Nothing tonight comes close to Doug Jones' performance then. I say this not to be depressing but to remind everyone that 2028 is 3 years out.

This is hardly surprising, given this is the most off-year of off-year elections and 2024 was pretty awful for the Democratic Party. Of course, the midterms will also be an off-year, and the Republican house majority is very small. On the other hand, the Republicans will enjoy a gerrymandering edge

Cheney is much too far in the past to be labelled an American Hindenburg (nor do I think the fragile newborn Weimar democracy is the best analogy for the path American politics have taken). More time has passed between the time Cheney left office and today than the Weimar Republic existed as a state

The only real upside here is that much like with Iran back in June, the effort seems unlikely to involve ground troops. In which case we're back to "airpower alone will not cause regime change".

the one good thing in that saga is that Brunner spent his last decade or so in absolute squalid misery under house arrest in a Damascus basement

This War on Terror death study is awful, attributing violent and nonviolent deaths in 7 countries to the US. Afghanistan and Iraq, already stretching. Pakistan, Somalia? The US caused every death from disease? You don't need to juke the stats to criticize Dick Cheney. The real evidence is enough.

Recall that the RSF actually comes out of the pro-Bashir militia groups that committed genocide in Darfur. Hemedti was one of the junior leaders there and was almost certainly involved in the mass killings.

I think moderation is often useful (see: Trump lying about being the "Father of IVF"). The thing is, it only worked because people covered Trump as "the Father of IVF". If you can construct a propaganda apparatus such that your moderation gets through, then it is valuable. Otherwise it's irrelevant

Same thing for much of Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Azerbaijan and Iran are also below the United States. Thailand has a fertility rate lower than Japan's. Even Vietnam is below replacement. People think of these places as home to a lot of young people, but they just aren't.

it *annoys* me when left-aligned folks act like 9/11 was imaginary and 3000 people weren't actually murdered, in the US, for going about their ordinary days, by religious zealots but Bush and Cheney did ultimately create that situation by building a web of lies around that actual atrocity