Now that I've caught up with 2025 anime, my year-end ranking: 1. Takopi's Original Sin. Already wrote about this one. Pretty much perfect in every respect. 2. The Summer Hikaru Died. Crazy good direction and sound design convey the heavy atmosphere of living in a small town where you don't belong.

Xi's call for the renminbi to become a reserve currency isn't recent. He made it in 2024, it's just being republished now in the CCP's journal. China's ability to internationalize the renminbi is limited by capital controls and lack of convertibility and market depth. www.scmp.com/economy/chin...

So this guy's criteria for knowing that a regime is fascist are that (a) intellectuals are *not* claiming that it's fascist, whereas (b) the masses living under it *do* on the whole believe that it's fascist. What a goofy set of criteria. www.wsj.com/opinion/amer...

Just finished watching Takopi's Original Sin, and I'm blown away by how great it was. The kinda show that reminds me why I still bother keeping up with anime.

Noteworthy that the immigration restrictionist project fails even on its own terms as a project aimed at preserving American culture, because ICE and MAGA more generally destroy everything good about American culture.

Hell yeah, the greatest anime year in review article is out. This thing is a crazy labor of love, and it's the only way that I (belatedly) keep up with anime anymore. Having read it, here's what I'm gonna watch from last year: City The Animation Takopi 100 Meters Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc Niccolo

The zero-sum nature of many real estate transactions encourages this kind of antisocial attitude: "in order for me to win/be right, everyone else must lose/be wrong." See also that other guy who came up in real estate and learned a zero-sum worldview from it.

My problem with messaging that reduces moral questions to questions of affordability is that it suggests that it might be acceptable to do heinous things if they *did* lower prices. That's precisely the Treatler logic that led swing voters to vote for Trump.

If guys like him were smart, then they'd like Mamdani more than the average socialist because he's a sewer socialist. But they're not, so instead they hate him even more than the average socialist because he's Muslim.

This is why you don't want high turnout. She's says she's not politically active, and she was clearly uniformed about Trump's immigration policy, but had bigoted beliefs. Since low-propensity voters have no policy knowledge, turning them out means inviting them to vote on base instinct.

Every day I wake up and check the Greenland news and prediction markets to see how worried about the End Times I need to be today. I can only imagine how much worse it is for Greenlanders and Europeans.

If this decline in X mobile daily active users continues on the trend that it's followed since 2024, then by 2028 they'll have dropped by 50%🥳 techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/t...

There's a moral void at the heart of US society and a lack of social consequences for abhorrent behavior. In a healthy society, all these people's careers would be over, and they and their supporters would be ostracized for life. www.miamiherald.com/entertainmen...

The thing about Hanania is that his whole "elite human capital" shtick is premised on the idea that he's not like the other rightists because he's too high IQ to be a Trump supporter. But at the end of the day, he voted for Trump just like all the rest of them. So what good did his IQ do anyone?

The whole argument for talking to Republicans on podcasts is that it enables you to reach median-voter types and expose them to Democratic arguments that they might not have heard before. Newsom is accomplishing the exact opposite here. www.mediaite.com/politics/gav...

I've seen some crazy predictions lately about AI causing a massive rise in GDP in the near future. Most mainstream models predict something like a 2-5% gain in GDP level by 2030-2035. I'd be surprised if the actual gain were dramatically higher than that. www.imf.org/en/publicati...

Brain-rot short-form video is naturally repellent to smart people, but we probably need some more smart people to take one for the team and get in the game so that we have a fighting chance of reaching median voter types.

Third Way calls Abolish ICE an "emotional" "impulse" (come on dude) and says we should drop it. I disagree: 1. Abolishing ICE is an intrinsically important policy goal and this may be the best window of opportunity that we'll ever have to make it happen. www.thirdway.org/memo/democra...

It's ironic that Trump wants to cap credit card rates, which would lead to a tightening in credit availability comparable to the effect of several Fed rate hikes... given that he's so desperate for the Fed to loosen monetary policy with rate cuts.

ICE is spending $100m to recruit officers via online influencers and to "normalize and humanize" ICE officers by sharing their "lived experiences." We should denormalize being an ICE officer and stigmatize their lived experiences. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

"I suggested Powell step down to protect the Fed's independence." Powell caving to Trump's threats and letting him get the easy-money policy that he's been pushing for would by definition end the Fed's independence. I mean come on, it's not like it would be a mystery why he'd resigned.

Trump straight up admits the truth of the analysis that his foreign policy is motivated by a psychological need to be perceived as dominant. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/u...

So if a leader specifically targets weak countries for invasion, then he's not a fascist? Weird criterion. Hitler invaded Poland in part because he thought that Poles were racially inferior and would therefore be easily defeated, so by this logic, I guess Hitler wasn't much of a fascist.

"If we abolish ICE then who should handle interior enforcement?" Nobody! We had minimal levels of interior enforcement prior to the passage of the IIRIRA in '96, and we got along just fine without it. cmsny.org/wp-content/u...

All the media figures like Rachael Bade who did the amoral "no matter what you think of it, you can't help but be impressed" thing in response to Maduro's abduction--not to mention politicians like Fetterman who outright celebrated it--are to blame for having raised the probability of Greenland

All else being equal, political polarization is genuinely bad, because it substantially lowers economic growth. But all else is not equal, because Republicans are fascists, and negative polarization against fascists is the bare minimum appropriate response. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In AD 64 the Roman emperor Nero ordered the construction of a vast palace complex, the Domus Aurea. It was finished just 4 years later and represented such an indulgence of luxury and hedonism that it embarrassed even the emperors. After Nero's death it was torn down. I think about that sometimes.

Crazy thing is that vatniks are motivated by revanchist nostalgia for the lost Russian and Soviet empires, whereas Trumpists inherited US preeminence on the world stage and actively chose to destroy it.

Populism is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Voters become bitter and cynical and stop believing that a better world is possible, so they vote for bitter, cynical leaders who actively make a better world less possible.

Besides being embarrassingly freshman thinking, this is also embarrassingly freshman writing. -Misquotation of Lincoln (should be "the last best hope *of* Earth"). -Shifting anaphoric reference from sentence to sentence: is the subject "we Americans" or "we at CBS"?

The way it works is that people adjust their level of intellectual rigor up or down in response to incentives. So even the relatively smart people who are still on there (talking in relative terms here) just turn off their brains, because brain-dead racism is what's rewarded.

Maaya Takeda (ex-GEM, greatest idol group of all time) is uploading new studio recordings for the first time in years, and they're astonishingly beautiful. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnBe...

My album of the year: Exordium Mors - Sworn to Heresy. New Zealand blackened thrash metal, intensely technical and in constant restless motion. Controlled chaos, full of so many awesome ideas that you can't possibly take it all in on a single listen. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S_t... #metalsky

New Appare music video is ridiculously fun. I love the use of explosions as transitions, the choreography at the end, and the whole idea of them getting into predicaments and causing disasters and just being like eh whatever don't worry about it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvjN...

Crazy good live performance of the Haikyu ending song Kessen Spirit on Sony's First Take YouTube channel earlier this month. youtu.be/Aq8bmrnbuII?...

The first critique that she makes is that Trump changed his tune on the Epstein files and called them a hoax. That's a genuine wedge issue that we can use to split the Republican base. It's one of Trump's least popular issues among Republicans. today.yougov.com/politics/art...

Amazing choice of photo for this attempt to portray Ms. Rachel as "controversial," lol. The "strongest" critique that anyone has of her is that she posted a video with photojournalist Motaz Azaiza-- nypost.com/2025/12/24/u...

Fed chair candidates from best to worst: Waller > Warsh > Hassett. Warsh was a crazy hawk who wanted to hike rates and end QE during the height of the global financial crisis, but he was also a Fed institutionalist who always voted with Bernanke for the sake of Fed credibility.

These ICE agents should not have been granted anonymity. Journalists are only supposed to grant anonymity for newsworthy information that can't be obtained otherwise. ICE agents' sob stories about being hated by the public aren't newsworthy, or exclusive. www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...

New article out! I reviewed the best albums of 2025. 2025 was a great year for metal, screamo, and J-pop, so if you have any interest at all in any of those genres, you won't want to miss this. demystifyanddisenchant.substack.com/p/the-best-a... #musicsky

Kafka is a kind of religious writer but also a political one by inference. The comedy of ‘Metamorphosis’ is that the metamorphosis is a Deleuzeian / quasi-christological ‘event’: the capital event of the universe for which Gregor alone has been chosen. But he can’t see this, so he tries to…

New article out! I wrote about physicalism, the theory that everything that exists is physical. Physicalism amounts to a rejection of dualism and all other theories that posit that mental or other fundamentally non-physical phenomena exist. demystifyanddisenchant.substack.com/p/physicalis...

New article out! Continental philosophy has come under attack recently, so I wrote a partial defense of it. I argue that before you can pass judgement on continental philosophy as such, demystifyanddisenchant.substack.com/p/continenta...

Alles Handeln, sei es im Krieg, sei es im Denken, ist falsch; und jeder Verzicht ist ebenso falsch. Wüßte ich doch, wie man weder handelt noch auf das Handeln verzichtet! Dies wäre die Traumkrone meines Ruhmes, das Schweigezepter meiner Größe. Fernando Pessoa: Buch der Unruhe

My favorite source that I read for my new essay on the political legacy of Romanticism was Lukacs' book The Destruction of Reason. A must read for anyone interested in the history of ideas. demystifyanddisenchant.substack.com/p/romanticis...

New article out! I wrote about the political effects of the early 19th-century philosophical and artistic movement known as Romanticism. I discuss analyses of Romanticism from Isaiah Berlin, Gyorgy Lukacs, Charles Taylor, and more. demystifyanddisenchant.substack.com/p/romanticis...

Race is not a biological reality, race is a construct. But neither are these colour-blind class-reductionist leftists (Adolph Reed, Walter Benn Michaels) entirely correct either. Race is a practice of power — it *does* something..

Schönes Beispiel für russische Propaganda. Der russische Kommersant berichtet heute über die neuesten Kernwaffentestpläne der USA. Dazu ein Bild , wo irgend etwas von Kernwaffen-Gegnern dran steht. Tatsächlich stammt das Bild von 2017 von einer Demo in Berlin. www.t-online.de/nachrichten/...

New article out! I wrote about the theory in philosophy of art known as formalism. Formalism is the view that what makes art valuable is purely a matter of formal properties internal to the work like line, color, and composition, demystifyanddisenchant.substack.com/p/moderate-f...

It’s impossible to politically sanitise horror. In its 18th century origins it was a reaction against enlightenment rationality, a space to explore the disturbing & uncanny. And yet, in a way that can open us to ‘radical alterity’: Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ is the romantic hero in an immoral society.