What’s interesting is these movies inspired no artistic imitators, no change in the movie industry in the vein of terminator, nor impacted the culture more broadly. Avatar came out at the beginning of a wave of environmentalism and is absent as a cultural touchstone for that entire movement.

It’s easy to forget because everything is crazy, but in the span of 5 years JD went from unelected to vice-president with basically no governing experience in between that might have put some breaks on this.

I love that we’re setting up for another decade of failed Navy procurement just after completely botching the last two. The US Navy will be useless come 2040 for peer conflict at this rate.

Looks like Moyn understands what his reputation will be for the remainder of his career; as an enabler of the worst parts of the modern right.

This is my modal assumption for all Trump policies; the administration wants the outcomes but reflects its principal in that it’s too dumb and lazy to put forth the effort to achieve them.

Jensen desperately hunting for power for his chips is going to lead to some wacky places.

The hyperscalers probably survive a bubble pop, they have huge businesses that backstop them with nothing to do with AI. It’s the model developers (ex. Google) and neoclouds that would be at serious risks.

Also known as the think tank report.

The UK seems uniquely fucked up as a nation. Even the US doesn't feel like it's coming apart to the extent the UK is.

It’s part of politics to cry foul at the other side doing politics, but why is everyone so goddamn whiny all the time! It’s a primary and there’s going to be oppo dumps, go do some politics instead of trying to work the refs!

A significant number of these functions should be replicated under Congress instead of in the executive branch. After this presidency there’s no way to trust it with this much authority again. Same for statistical agencies like BLS and the census.

When dems get back the presidency they should do something totally left field in response. Demolish the whole building and put in a skyscraper, just go wild.

People say it’s nuts to use AI to make important decisions but honestly letting a frontier model run DHS would be miles better than current management.

I still don’t know what the goal of blowing up Chinese-flagged shipping in particular is supposed to accomplish since it has no relationship to shipbuilding.

Decades of work wasted. I really do wonder how some of the older civil servants in natsec feel right now. At least I’m young enough to imagine getting to work on building something new one day.

I think this is a fair read of the narrative the WH is selling, but I have no idea if this is actually playing or being taken up by the political class or public at large. At the very least the media outlets I look at don’t seem to be boosting it.

I have been surprised by how disarrayed republicans have been in this shutdown, which I think has made it much easier for the Dems to hold firm.

I favor a bright line rule on this: troops can be deployed domestically if congress authorizes the deployment. No discretion, no grant of statutory authorities to the president. Congress decides when troops are necessary and for what purpose.

Too many big fantasy creatives don’t seem to know anything but hero’s journey, post-9/11 paranoia, and their fandom, so a lot of works adopt the narrative conventions of spec-ops without any further grounding.

“I can’t build high-end systems therefore you should buy my low-end system” is the end result of so much drone hype.

It’s crazy we’re rediscovering many of the concerns of the founders that haven’t felt relevant for at least 50 years.

Apparently, the new Federalist Society position is that judges don't have equitable powers?

Apparently political candidates still have such bad opsec that they're reposting Nazi porn on accounts with the same names as their public social media.

But I don’t want to get a heat pump, I want to write my special theory of how we should structure our relationship with Mother Nature!

I feel Klein really just cannot handle the Schmittian moment we've found ourselves in and is desperately trying to find a way out that doesn't involve fighting.

Does this effectively legalize pocket recissions?

Lmao what if he makes them take pt tests?

The repeating use of “we need a national debate” is fascinating for what it says about how politics, and politicians, now feel totally estranged from the media systems which are the lifeblood of democratic politics.

You should be betting on both.

Pedro Gonzalez’s tweets came across my feed and he seems totally changed? I remember him as one of the most aggressive claremonters but he seems much calmer. What happened there?

It's a real problem for Democrats that they're behind on immigration, foreign conflicts, the economy, and political extremism (!) as compared to Republicans. Some of this may be disaffected Dems voting "not sure," but it's still wild to see this.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say SCOTUS is preparing to repeal the entire 20th century in the coming term, from the Civil Rights Era to the New Deal, they’re going to annihilate it all.

Well I think the left-of-center critics do care about both but many of the right-if-center critics definitely seemed to be operating in bad faith and won’t criticize the Trump administration for fear of losing influence.

Imagine being the other guy lol.

This particular culture war has been waged in military circles for decades so it’s funny to see the lingo of the broader culture war deployed as part of it. The basics of it is that Army wants more CAS platforms and Air Force doesn’t.

I need a paper that explains to me exactly how American people believe the housing market works. A comprehensive survey that just reports what they think and why they believe it.

No clerks, require them to adjudicate all parking tickets in DC in live hearings, and move the court to Utqiagvik.

This should be the nail in the coffin for any sustained concept of strategic competition btw. There's no way to sustain a long-term competition with China with a GOP like this.

Great post to open the discussion of nuclear operations in a US-China war. As someone on the more hawkish side of this debate I think what’s missing is that if conventional deterrence weakens in the Straight, nuclear deterrence becomes more attractive to planners.

This should be read more as Stimson Center folks saying they don’t think war with China over Taiwan is worth it because the operations necessary for success are too escalatory to risk.

Hot take but there’s basically a shared set of social and structural problems across the anglosphere right now that each country is in, in its own specific ways, having difficulty grappling with.

I will never get mad at any of those big-think China books that have dragons on the cover again.

Laws made by Congress are in some sense democratic. If the Republican Party wished to democratically end Fed independence it's entirely possible for them to do so under current law. The imagine contrast between Fed independence and democratic management of money is false.

Industrial policy is for making things part 100.

I’ll wait to see, but I doubt the US paid nothing but rather put in a ton of CHIPS Act money.

Moyn, and many like him, conceive of a popular front primarily as an exercise where liberals submit to the left despite the former’s far greater size and power. In short, it’s a demand that liberals do entryism on behalf of leftists too dull to do it themselves.

Weigel often needles things near to my heart so it’s nice to see him go off on an object of mutual loathing.

I really wish it was this straightforward for the public but a lot of what they prioritize (mostly preventing “disorder”) arises from patrol instead of investigation.

I give this a relatively low chance of coming to much simply because this admin has mostly been unable to do anything particularly "big," but obviously it would be very bad if they did anything like what this implies.

Should this be taken as an example of Baulmol's Cost Disease, or just an unintended consequence of the massive economic overperformance of the US versus the rest of the Anglosphere?