first habermas now norris. two masters of communicative action, gone

everyone I still know who's inside the country tells me russians are pretty depressed. bad news but historically speaking it's good for world literature

You won't a find better first draft of history on the three American Gulf Wars.

This is the only place where a woman walking up to you is absolutely 100% without a doubt a foreign agent

In 1991 the US had a reason to fight. In 2003 it manufactured one. In 2026 it didn’t even bother. Tracing the decay of the unipolar order via three Gulf conflicts. new post

Many people talking about how gasoline prices at the pump have already jumped. But what should really terrify Republicans is RBOB — the futures price on wholesale gasoline. This is up 75 cents a gallon since its low earlier this year.

LLM prose is everywhere now. How did it happen so quickly? A 25-year-old essay about Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy accidentally diagnosed the whole thing. new post

"LLMs have exposed a vast pre-existing cultural appetite for false profundity, and gave everyone a machine that can produce it on demand." Interesting take! It works with a lot of airport literature too, I guess.

reading "Bombing to Win" on the subway and shaking my head to show everyone I'm against bombing to win

LLM prose is everywhere now. How did it happen so quickly? I think at some point we have to stop blaming the technology. new post

New podcast with @seva.bsky.social out now: Putin is getting the multipolar world he always wanted. But now that he's got it, he'll hate it. Watch below: youtu.be/7xtB_MBG75w

been thinking about it and here’s where communism first went wrong: having the October Revolution in November

I have spent the past several months studying the cutting-edge research on modern democracies that have defeated authoritarian leaders. I've learned that the conventional wisdom on the topic is wrong — in ways that have clear implications for the US going forward THREAD www.vox.com/politics/479...

people born in america probably don’t realize how cool america used to be. how many random people around the world built their identity around US signifiers. the decline of American cultural hegemony is going to have long term consequences we're only beginning to see. new post

without looking it up, guess the author. It's a person you know. "History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior."

Talking to @seva.bsky.social for the podcast tomorrow. Dictators, Putin, the global order - that sort of thing. Anything you people would like me to ask?

The tragedy of John Fetterman is that he used to dress like a slob but have an encouraging spirt, making him an Oaf of Rugged Individuality, one of America’s great oaf groups. But now he dresses like a slob and whines all the time, making him an Oaf of Misery

dueling is a great mechanism of elite turnover and we should bring it back

The Supreme Court:

There's three votes for anything on the supreme court. If trump said "I'm the god-king of arrakis" he'd get three votes and a lengthy opinion about the long history and tradition of english common law with regards to the spice melange

the executive committee of the bourgeoisie comes to the rescue

A Boring Apocalypse, Russian Hybrid Wars, Jevon’s Paradox, and Sons. this week’s Office Hours

So Trump, and not the "anonymous staffer," actually did post the Obamas/apes video?

I never thought the multipolar world would eat MY face, sobs Russian president who voted for the Multipolar World Eating People’s Faces Party. new post

Be careful what you wish for, power & asymmetric interdependence edition 🇷🇺

“In an anarchic spheres-of-influence world, what does Russia have? A slowing economy, a military bleeding out in Ukraine, and a strategic partner in Beijing that increasingly treats it as a junior supplier of raw materials.”

Finland and Sweden - in NATO. Syria - gone. Armenia - gone. Venezuela - gone. Cuba - will be gone in a few weeks. Iran - will be gone in a few months. Russia - Ukraine will finish the job.

for years Putin has demanded a multipolar global order unconstrained by liberal rules. Is he ready to live in one? new post

there's a viral article to be written about the crisis of masculinity and the global rise of "strongmen" leaders

This elitist view that only rich/Ivy/private school kids should study/have access the liberal arts is so deeply ingrained in so many highly educated Democrats’ views (including tons who majored in the lib arts themselves) that they don’t even realize they hold it, let alone how ugly & elitist it is

"A modern-day concentration camp ... People have been killed by the staff here." Irish citizen Seamus Culleton has been in ICE detention since September, despite having a valid work permit and his own business in the US.

people born in america probably don’t realize how cool america used to be. the death of US soft power is going to have long term consequences we are only beginning to see

stalin could only dream of a purge like this

there's an unusual number of people on social media invested in pretending that epstein only worked for Israel and never for Russia. almost like there's some monetarily-rewarded motivated reasoning happening

Trump's constant degradation of female reporters is unsurprising but the press corps' collective decision to treat it as background noise is actually kind of sickening

Same reason educated left folks have tended to minimize or ignore or deny the scale & effectiveness of Russian state interference and disinfo campaigns in foreign countries —conspiratorial thinking is distasteful hangover of the cold war, mccarthyism etc that only vulgar simpletons engage in

that's the real weakness of eddington the movie: it thinks conspiracy theorists are something for stupid uneducated rubes while criticizing the liberal establishment *only* for being smug, self congratulatory, and dumb

I'm convinced one of the reasons epstein was able to coast for so long is that for many sensible people including and especially educated liberals, viewing the world through a conspiratorial lens was always seen as vaguely distasteful and rube-coded

Must read. Both RussiaGate and the Epstein Files involve "a sphere of elite impunity where American consultants, Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, European politicians, Israeli intelligence figures and British ex-spies all swim in the same waters." @seva.bsky.social 1/

everywhere I look I see hidden agendas, secret alliances, and shadowy figures. except for my mysterious benefactor, who is beyond reproach

US/the West emphatically won the Cold War and just as emphatically lost the peace

But a lot of people who have spent many years in other kinds of activism - activism that is generally far less effective than our networks have been - seem horrified that Minnesota moms and college students stumbled on a new model. They are rushing to assert themselves as the “true” organizers.

people who are just now realizing chomsky is bad

now I'm kind of curious about the disciplinary breakdown. econ and evo psych people well represented. any historians or humanities people?