The number of displaced persons in Lebanon is now over a million. 20% of the population, roughly, is unable to sleep their home tonight.

If we are entering an era of competition between empires in various states of dysfunction with no sole hegemon then India, China and to a lesser extent Brazil are as substantial concentrations of political economic power limiting the agency of states around them as the EU, US, Russia or Japan

I don't think a concept of a Global South or Global North really reflect any kind of coherent geopolitical order outside of a cultural sphere since the power position and strategic interests of states vary so wildly within both. Increasingly that model hampers understanding of geopolitical rivalry

i know some prominent people who think newsom has the juice and he just doesn't

Similar to being weirdly cagey about SB79 then signing it, he just kinda torched his reputation with pro housing groups while also not actually gaining any praise from nimbys

Yeah, there's two ways to do this. One of them is to be super incoherent. The other one is to be coherent, but have your unique ideas be orthogonal to the left right spectrum, like yang. But like this is just not workable

like trump gets away with this because he has no higher level worldview, its personalist grievences and base intuition all the way down. if you try to articulate a postion which people clearly understand to mean one thing and then you change that 3 days later, everyone will just hate you

yeah, i think he’s trying to a version of trumpism but that wont work if people perceive you as ideological first and then you switch your position.

the thing about newsom is that he chronically sells out low salience liberal causes to the chagrin of the base for almost no political benefit. starmerism, basically. a guy who would have no friends or allies left 15 minutes into his presidency.

It's so funny to be like Israel's an apartheid state and then 2 weeks later say you revere it. Like no man this doesn't cancel out to a position in the middle now both sides hate you

Can the American Single Market survive?

What people aren't ready to hear is Israel just isn't an especially unique country.

It is unique in the degree to which it had near infinite diplomatic cover in the 1990s through the mid-2010s due to a pretty anomalous period in US diplomacy where we suddenly started treating it as if it was a quasi-51st state, despite previously often being far more restrictive (e.g. Reagan).

It's a pretty bog standard post-1945 "Europe cannot be trusted to have multi-ethnic states so everybody gets their own place and we're going to do some cleansing and border shifting to make sure that happens" state. The challenge is that it also decided to be a post-Soviet 1991 state.

I'm not overly judgemental here bcs i think all societies do this, presence of ancient civilizations in your body politic can be strong cultural influences and you can morph them to serve whatever political vision you deserve Fascists and Jacobins loved Roman larp equally as much

Btw the Greek example is genuinely funny here. A society totally transformed by Rome, the Slavic migrations and Ottoman rule that pretends in its historiography that its an unbroken continuation from Pericles onwards

These fucking people manifestly do not care about their own well-being. Now I gotta care about them in addition to my community when they can't even stop kicking themselves in the nuts because it'll own some libs somewhere?

Because East Palestine voted 70+% for Trump, they want to murder my entire family, I don't know how else I'm supposed to react to that

rule in Hell vs. serve in Heaven, but you don’t get to rule Hell and you weren’t gonna have to do anything in Heaven, and yet…

They don't want things to be better; they want to be miserable, to wallow like pigs in the misery, and then make everyone else miserable too.

They thought the money was a Chinese plot!

Also, we elected a guy who cranked the money spigot for those same rural areas, and they wanted him dead, and turned off the money.

And like, we should still support rural hospitals, but when the cupboard is bare in 2029, guess who needs to be at the back of the fucking line.

1) People don't believe that Democrats will cut their taxes, so its utility as a campaign slogan is low.

This is absolutely the most persuasive defense of the stupid tax cut proposals I've seen. I think it fails for two reasons though.

The fact that Van Hollen's tax proposal just about pays for a generous CTC restoration, and Booker's pays for that, plus an expansion of Social Security, plus other stuff, argues I think for a more intelligent slopulism—you might call it fast-casual.

2) If we are going to play the "give money back to people" game, better to take it in taxes and then mail out checks than cut taxes, because a $1200 check is much more noticeable to people than $1200 returning to their paychecks over the course of a year.

It's why I often wonder whether the chaotic global disorder of the 17th century might be a more useful historical frame of comparison for our own era then the relatively ordered global system of the late 20th.

It causes a ton of blindspots both in who we refuse to learn from and who we mistakenly tend to look up to.

There's an innate tendency among educated upper middle+ class folks to *need* to believe that if you are competent you are moral and, vice versa, if you are immoral you cannot be competent, because our own modern value systems center morality on competence. But it just doesn't work that way.

So this is definitely a (general) subtweet, but Robert E. Lee discourse really reveals how tightly Bsky type people (and associated twitter communities) tend to correlate competence with morality and vice versa.

Sky UK's Washington correspondent Mark Stone being a real exception here among European tv news broadcasters right now in being willing to directly call out Trump's record of lies and incoherence in statements about US war strategy

Impact on Meloni's image as a winner + someone who has voters on her side = BIG. Opponents should try to cash in in the run up to the next general election. Will they get their act together?

Impact on chances that Meloni introduces another Constitutional change she cares about even more: direct election of PM? Also BIG. The signal is increasingly clear—persuading a large enough share of voters to amend the post-war, post-Fascist Constitution remains extremely difficult.

It appears that the electorate has rejected Meloni's Constitutional changes concerning the functioning of the Justice System. Impact on the stability of her govt = Zero. Her allies have nowhere to go (and they campaigned for YES vote, too) Impact on Italy's foreign and security policies = Zero.

I suspect that in a few months time a lot of people will come to regret embracing the Trump TACO meme if it turns out to be just another means to pump and dump wishful thinking

The TACO meme in effect assumes that some kind of market force will force Trump to do that reasonable and rational thing that a consensus view assumes he should be doing. It might just be reinforcing complacency about how far he might pursue dangerously irrational actions.

Rather than TACO, perhaps the best acronym for America in the age of MAGA is TOFU: Trump Often Fucks Up

I enjoy how I am now able to point at American politicians and go "that is a literal, unexaggerated Kremlin agent" like it's 2011 Ukraine or something.

It's really weird to watch a superpower also be a zone of competition for influence, and not in the historically usual "people send diplomats to the Tang Emperor to ask for boons in exchange for tribute" sense but in that outside powers can now just buy American politicians to keep as pets.

Videos of massive airport lines across the country are going viral after Republicans blocked 7 bills to fund the TSA.

american healthcare policy is a mess primarily because the GOP doesn't really have a plan outside of "what if we did Singapore but without forced savings" and Obamacare is essentially, "what if we created a MA style risk pool"

part of the problem is that the GOP basically doesn't want to touch employer-based healthcare despite the fact that getting everyone into a common pool and providing universal basic care is probably more affordable

Hard to do when your parameters are that there shoukd be no government involvement in healthcare, no limits on insurance profits, but everyone should always be covered for cheap, and have total freedom of choice.

this is the future the Lost Decades denied us

If America copied Japan’s healthcare system, dense building, and public transportation, I would be very, very happy.

every time i hear about the american healthcare system, man

yeah man he folded like three seconds after Ben Shapiro told him to stop calling ICE agents terrorists

There's a reason I don't think Shapiro is going anywhere nationally

Remember how Chris Christie, towards the end of his campaign, just made it his goal to talk as much shit about Trump as possible? Pritzker is gonna do that for, like, Seth Moulton and it’s gonna be amazing