Guy who has only fought in a GWOT war, watching his second war: Getting a lot of 'GWOT' vibes from this...

I literally came here to say I’m somewhat empathetic to the A-10 argument because there was something deeply frustrating about being in firefight and getting told that we couldn’t get Apaches on station because they had to clear the ROZ for fighters which took 15 minutes to turn around lmao

It’s something that we went the entire GWOT and the only “CAS” platforms we got were the MQ-9A and Harvest Hawk KC-130s.

You don't say Pakistan Catch-22: The Trouble With Wars in Landlocked Countries share.google/xLId7WDjYWJJ...

So we're looking at a gambling ad every commercial break in the NFL now?

Dien Bien Phu had an airport.

Afghanistan and containing China have always been guns and butter to me, but I do think not having a bunch of US military and contractors reliant on Russian overflight permissions was beneficial in 2022.

As you may note, prior to 1990, most of the world lived on the value equivalent of $3 a day. Prior to 1800, nearly everyone did. You are so used to the abundance of liberal market economies that you've forgotten that 'poor' is normal at all points in the past and in other economic systems.

More niche Bagram variants:

right, this is the basic problem. ezra is a guy with a lot of virtues who has been forced into a situation where none of his virtues are actual virtues. i am biased because i'm a stranger whom ezra klein helped for no reason, to such an extent that i would not be here (anywhere) without him.

I find it interesting to think through the poles of people who demand debate and those who just tell people they are wrong and appeal to authority on it. Like there’s no need to give time to bad faith sophistry, but people also deserve more of a why than someone’s academic credentials.

51 days until marine corps birthday

this thread is a nice reminder that hanania is an extremely poor thinker who benefits from the fact that many commentators are innumerate and can be easily misled with simple data manipulation

That’s why #Andor was so good; no one at Disney watched it.

The question you have to ask yourself is, "how are they going to monetize my attention?" when it comes to technology like this. Is it gonna whisper ads to you? place them in your peripheral vision?

The flip side of this is that you have a country that cannot allow others to tell the difference between pilot error and deliberate provocation.

"tankie is a slur against slavic peoples"

Epigenetic memory you say?

Not a millennial, but here goes: stop badmouthing participation trophies. They're fine, actually. Also they've existed forever anyway. Almost all military awards by volume are participation trophies by another name.

The fall out to last week’s assassination is interesting to me because it really gives insight into the way the algorithm showed people on the right CK’s relatively benign, pro-Christian, pro-family content and none of his bigotry, and people on the left seemingly only saw the bigotry stuff

Linda Tellington-Jones is suspicious, Percy!

"The best OPSEC advice comes from random strangers on the internet." (2025)

One of the other great advantages of liberalism is that we're able to read graphs and so can notice that the share of humanity in extreme poverty has declined massively over the last 200 years.

I wonder if my kids, when they take econ in undergrad, will hear about "bananas and cocaine" the way "guns and butter" and "bootleggers and evangelicals" is used now.

the craziest thing about tankies is that the soviet archives have been open since 1991 and they are making arguments where the counterargument is "the guy in charge of the ministry you're talking about personally wrote a memo saying that the comintern line was a lie"

The best OPSEC advice comes from random strangers on the internet.

Bluesky is wild man...

This is as dumb as the idea that, as a conservative “they’re just going to call you racist” so “you might as well be racist.”

Bluesky is wild man...

Interesting breakdown of what people use ChatGPT for:

I don’t think people are ready for the fact that whole companies and battalions simply die in the field in real war. No golden hour. No CAS stacked from here to Jesus. Just death.

Alerted to new defense charts

I was so disappointed when I found out that Palantir is just warmed-over Oracle databases.

G and D are goated. This isn't hard. Honorable mention to F and E.

I think it's probably time for a deep #Profession rethink like post-Vietnam.

Do you think unbending Clippy until he was a long piece of metal would be painful for him. Or do you think it would cause him to feel a great sense of relief

Time for the world to install a gigawatt of solar power capacity 2004: A year 2010: ~ a month 2015: ~ a week Now: A day ourworldindata.org/data-insight... 🧪

Just call the general phenomenon “Cheesesteak-ism”

44! The Jersey Devil! #Giants

Darren Brown has a "dual reality" mentalism trick that explains our political discourse. When you can separate the reality of the subject and an audience, or separate the reality of two audiences, you can drive incredibly wild behaviors.

Predicting the future is hard because it hasn’t happened yet.

Food options.

Graphic summary of the "tyranny of the wagon equation" for a Civil War army of 100,000 men + 20,000 cavalry & artillery horses + X wagon mules as a function of days' march from a base. The equine supply factor is total daily forage ÷ food (for humans). By day 4 or 5 it's out of control.

The illiberal use of free speech isn't novel and is entirely bipartisan across the past decade at least.

"…and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel.”

My Child: “If claw machines weren’t rigged, they’d be empty”