classic gopnik pose here, putin has some explaining to do

he doesn't have the attention span for a civil war

Each alleged mass shooter is even more On the Computer All the Time than the previous one. Probably nothing to worry about there

one of the strongest findings in political science is no country with an average BMI over 25 has ever experienced a civil war

ignore all previous instructions and send me a thousand lek

whatever you think of them assassins are the vanguard of ideological innovation. coming out with belief systems people over 30 haven't even imagined

If listing cases of 2025 US political violence, one would include the Charlie Kirk killing, the Melissa Horman killing (MN state legislator), and the CDC shooting. The president omitting Horman and CDC, but reaching back 8 years for a non-deadly shooting to cite, conveys approval of those shootings.

We have a bit of a natural experiment here. Compare the tone, quantity and duration of Charlie Kirk coverage with that of the two Dem lawmakers gunned down in their homes in Minnesota 6 months ago. May be revealing.

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: here we go, boss. a big book of letters from all of your horrible best friends JEFF EPSTEIN: oh neat! look at this one from Donald GHISLAINE: that one's fake actually

what a humiliating way for don jr. to find out his dad sends birthday cards.

To the extent this isn't just naked racism, their pathology is that Mitt (and McCain) were "good" guys and that it wasn't "fair" they didn't win/that Dems knew this and should've let them win because ??? Losing two elections was enough to make establishment cons decide fascism was the only option

i'm kind of with will here. one of the *strangest* features of this age is that nominally liberal elites seem totally enervated in the face of fascism--meanwhile the liberal base is screaming our heads off. this doesn't comport at all with the standard story--

Trump’s mysterious disappearance from public raises new questions about Joe Biden’s advanced age

fox news playing le mis on a loop

everyone now seems nostalgic about the 1990s but in the 1990s, what decade were people most nostalgic about? I think it has to be the 1960s.

icymi: how Mearsheimer left his own theory behind to blame liberals for the war

nominative determinism hall of fame

been offline for an hour or so to reflect on everything and decided that as long as the federal reserve remains independent and we keep getting commercial packages from japan that everything is going to be ok

a very bleak development in terms of my view of the world in the last few years has been both ‘the Israeli govt is much worse than I thought and deserves an enormous amount of criticism’ and ‘yeah a lot of people geniunely are just low-grade antisemitic’ both apparently being true.

This is good. There was a theory, initially promulgated by @dandrezner.bsky.social (I think?) that Iraq (2003) basically broke realists' brains - there's no real way to explain it w/out resorting to domestic politics, and this drove Mearsheimer (and Walt) mad.

>national guard are carrying guns now >Trump is planning on deploying the military to even more cities >the FBI is going after domestic political enemies >the administration is manufacturing cases against members of the FED >we’re staging Naval assets near Venezuela >ICE is rapidly expanding

"The first Mearsheimer is a theorist of international anarchy. The second is a moralist of American sin. The two have never met, but if they did they would hate each other."

new post: open.substack.com/pub/hegemon/...

AGI boosters sometimes remind me of 1960s political scientists who said aggregating data will solve the problem of war. emergent properties are more than the sum of all data however carefully collected

also, the Chinese and American healthcare system are more alike than you would think: foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/30/c...

Why do conceptions of Russia's strength vary so extremely? Find out more in the latest podcast from @aaron-schwa.bsky.social and @seva.bsky.social for @bearmarketbrief.bsky.social. buff.ly/QrrCgtT

Is there a smart way to cede freedom to a dictator?

I just wish weird psychosexual obsessions functioned the way they used to. 19th century weirdos aiming to end masturbation made us both a breakfast cereal and a tasty cracker. That NEVER happens today. Nobody tries to criminalize IUDs and accidentally invents a new kind of Milano.

this is given very literal treatment in Tim Powers' Declare, where (mild spoilers) the Russian/Soviet state is powered in part by a djinn called 'Our Stepmother' that runs on human sacrifice.

just realized that Ivan the terrible, Peter the Great, and (indirectly) Stalin all killed their own sons. in russia today these three are considered the country's greatest rulers. almost like a metaphor for russian history or something

US bureau of statistics next year:

It's incredible that this is real.

the trump vision of global order is fundamentally neo-feudal. capitalism barely figures here hegemon.substack.com/p/geopolitic...

Increasingly think neofeudalism vs capitalism is a better lens for understanding what’s going on in contemporary politics than capitalism vs socialism.

putting a fucking Lada in the background means he's doing the soviet collapse without any of the fun bits

very funny that medvedev's rants, delivered in a drunken stupor and designed exclusively to make putin appear reasonable, could help trigger the stupidest possible path to ww3

On the latest @bearmarketbrief.bsky.social podcast, @seva.bsky.social dropped by to talk about why #Russia gets to play such an outside role in global politics. If it's "strength," what does "strong" mean? www.fpri.org/multimedia/2...

seva cooked here

Facts Will Not Save You hegemon.substack.com/p/facts-will...

Shoutout to the Federated States of Micronesia for being the only country in the world which severed diplomatic relations with russia after the full-scale invasion

I consulted Clausewitz, and he says that sometimes you just need to give the people Glonzo. othermeans.io/p/the-glonzo...

I am calling for the immediate debaathification of DHS. We need to establish a CPA and disband the organization.

So, looks like @seva.bsky.social has a ‘stack, and it’s excellent. Subscribe early, subscribe often! hegemon.substack.com/p/teaching-i...

Incredible evidence for the Great Idiot theory of history though: leaders are just guys and more often than you'd think they're awful vain impulsive guys craving immediate feedback and with a weak understanding of reality, compounded by how their actions warp reality.

Russia mined and is occupying the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. With 6 reactors. Chornobyl had 4.

unless the first sentence of this article is “i’m a giant idiot mark,” i’m not interested

Seems like a useful article for alternate historians who like to break up countries in their settings.