Started/going, Sohrab Ahmari edition

He's got his $12bn in loot and John Roberts has already declared it unconstitutional for him to face any repercussions. Inmean why not?

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Basically, dollar diplomacy works great up until some third-rate power gets the bright idea to start putting tolls on your shipping for the privilege of sailing near their coastline and proves impervious to airstrike attempts to get rid of them. Which is why breaking freedom of navigation is silly.

We already know exactly what China will do when their favorite proxies start committing crimes against humanity, they've been doing it with North Korea for the past 75 years. They literally invaded Vietnam because it defeated the Khmer Rouge and overthrew Pol Pot.

The Glorious Post-Imperial Order

it is. software systems are in a state of perpetual failure the good ones acknowledge this and defend against it, at least until us-east-1 goes down

It's been wild watching fancy political soothsayers insist "The next war will be fought over water, not oil!" for the last 20 years because they thought it was obvious that renewable energy would become cheaper than fossil fuels. They really underestimated how stupid world leaders are.

As I understand it, software bugs did not occur prior to the advent of AI, so Mythos finding 27 year-old bugs in OpenBSD leads me to believe that there is another, malevolent, time traveling AI out there that has introduced these bugs. An Angra Mainyu to Mythos' Ahuru Mazda.

been said before but man it is crazy how bad slavery fucked this country up. nearly everything bad about Trump and MAGA is a direct lineal descendant of enslaver ideology and politics

Welcome back Napoleon during the 6th war of the coalition

Reminiscing about my time living in DC. If you've lived in DC or spent time there, especially in the Cap Hill area, let's look at some of the places you could be killed for being in range of the blast radius of a Mk 84 2000lb bomb dropped by the USAF or Israeli Air Force on a legitimate target

How certain are you that you don't live within a few houses of somebody like this? Whether you or I think he is a legitimate target doesn't matter - we treat the Iranian or Palestinian or Lebanese version of this guy like a legitimate target, even when he's at home with his wife and kids.

Realizing that some of my inexplicable sadness about the Artemis II stuff is that it feels like a trans-dimensional communication from an America that took a different path and chose joy instead of fear and hate.

random close-of-weekend thoughts

Incredible

what we need is more dogpiles from people who are right and fewer from people who are wrong

Kavanaugh twice says that he thinks their arguments about other countries adopting different rules is a good argument as a policy matter (ugh). Sauer falsely claims "almost every other country" doesn't have birthright citizenship, which is wildly wrong.

As I'll say till I'm blue in the face, if the next Dem President doesn't roll into office with a list of a couple dozen GOFOs whose resignations they are demanding at 1201 EST on 20 Jan 29, they might as well let pete stick around another 4 years

These people really are just filthy gutter racists aren’t they?

The reason why all these guys talk like they're cadre leaders reading charges to participants in the Kronstadt rebellion before executing them is because that was the last time the middle management of marxism leninism had power

To most of the existing political class of the US (on both sides of the aisle), the lack of youth engagement is a feature, not a bug

Therefore I'm looking for loose collections of old floppy disks to practice on. I'm especially interested in working with disks where the binder affixing the media to the donut is starting to fail. I'm in London; will pay shipping; can pick up disks around here as well. Reshares are appreciated!

lfg

Holy crap, did Bosnia knock Italy out of WC '26?

Neutrality, Authoritarianism, and Thoughts on the Cult of Both Sides talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/neutr...

“I’m always at your service”: leaked calls between war criminal Lavrov and his asset Hungary’s FM How I wish someone would leak calls between Russia and Trump officials.

Get someone who loves you as much as the New York Times loves Nazis

Four-byline alert: 🚨 “.. A broker for Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, attempted to make a big investment in major defence companies in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran, according to three people familiar with the matter.” www.ft.com/content/744e...

I feel like people are finally starting to internalize how important software is. that's my esoteric interpretation of the endless discourse about AI: public understanding catching up with a 20 year old reality. the butlerian jihad reaction makes even more sense this way

I want to ask how this is legal but *gestures to everything*

Our conception of masculinity is always contextual to the time, shaped by both historical and contemporary culture. Today's "uber-masculine" men are much more shouty with a deep voice and He-Man physique. IMO, a product of our digital age and gender anxieties.

An alternative to spending all one's time skeeting about how "The DNC won't give me a good candidate."

They think everyone else is a clout seeker as void of moral commitments as they are. Not that these moral commitments are always good, mind you. But they can’t even imagine their existence, for better or worse.

A final thought: the most important, efficacious, & sizeable faction on the left is plain old normie Dems, "wine moms," "resistance libs," whatever condescending term you prefer. They're the ones doing the actual work. But they are largely ignored by media, because they're organized & led by women.

To all the Dem factions, the actual right is mostly theoretical, alien, distant. In their daily lives they are surrounded by other people on the left & so intra-left disputes come to seem overwhelmingly important. They are more apt to *join* the right in critiquing their factional enemies.

what people sound like when they say i asked claude

human chauvinists unite

Won’t be long before the Iranians demand regime change before they agree to negotiate

the arguments that like, joe biden or barack obama’s times in office were “basically the same as fascism” is only a thing you can believe if you think “particularly inegalitarian liberal capitalism” is the worst it is possible for society to be, and that actual fascism cannot actually happen

The police are overfunded almost everywhere and some level of defunding would be sane fiscal management, not radical leftism

The charge that the NK coalition “doesn’t do anything except ask people to vote” is wrecker shit.

The NYT is very, very good at what it does.

Look, here’s the very obvious thing: RFK would have no fucking clue what an accurate map of the Middle East looks like or what the troop strength of every country on the map was. It’s like my dog saying my cat produced a perfect proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.

Evergreen.

This is truly inspiring. At the same time, god, so many Americans really do live in traffic hellscapes with no real third places.

if nothing else, there is something to be said for spending time outside in the sun with thousands of people who share your anger at the state of things

The difference between these two is racism