Claude Levi-Strauss lived long enough to finish watching the Sopranos.

👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇

Literally unconstitutional; Congress has the power of the purse under Article I. Trump is trying to create a personalist regime where every dollar of federal spending is allocated at his whim.

My reaction to reading papers outside my own area. Three categories:

1. Brilliant
2. Obvious
3. Impenetrable

Zohran’s citibike numbers make me feel like we need to start demanding bike share stats from our politicians in the same way we demand tax returns

Please scream this from the mountains. Do we really want them to be as efficient as the Nazis before responding?

Honestly I find the idea of going to the Gulf states on holiday so instinctively repulsive that I forget how many people do. There are so much nicer and cheaper and less morally appalling places in the world!

Expert in a Dying Field The Breaking of the Bipartisan Military Consensus

Good @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social article:

othermeans.io/p/expert-in-...

This would single-handedly transform the lives of everyone I know in such profound ways it is difficult to fully articulate, but it would also let us actually make more and different and crazy things

Maybe things will get that bad. We should all fervently hope not. It is a disaster to be avoided, not something to eagerly rush into. Playing out everything short of that first is not weakness. It is both a moral obligation and a strategic necessity.

There are other examples but the Revolution is the most relevant for us, and that took years of escalation, of attempting peaceful politics, of protests and petitions, and of organizing for the eventuality. It's not some flip a switch and then ok, fight's on. That is how you get crushed, not win.

There is an escalation ladder here and he understands how that is the absolute last step, one you don't touch until all else has failed and you've done a lot of laying the groundwork. Things are bad, heading that way, it's deadly serious. But we're not there yet and he is right to not say it now.

We're only 80 years from Keynes' death so very feasibly the grandchildren referenced in that title are...us

(chanting) ECONOMIC POSSIBILITIES FOR OUR GRANDCHILDREN

Post from Threads user rodneyowl: "Ireland has declared the Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent. This will be officially announced in tomorrow’s budget. Details to follow. Congratulations to all who fought for it and the present and future artists of all sorts in Ireland. That includes me 👌We’re just comin to the end of a 3 year pilot scheme. It’s been a roaring success. For every €1 paid out to the 2000 participants, the government got €1.46 back. Can’t argue with that. Other countries are already taking note."

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy:
www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

The geopolitics of international development (after foreign aid) You can't have nice things without strategic independence and policy autonomy

what am I, supposed to remember the link every time? substack.com/@kenopalo/p-...

Several surprises here, mostly pleasant:

1) Relatively concise for Opalo!

2) Tooze and Gabor are very serious intellectuals compared to what I'm used to seeing in Foreign Policy!

3) Opalo usually doesn't mind naming names but I'm not sure who he's talking about here

An interesting range of interpretations here but what jumps out at me most is that sharp economic downturns seem to be associated, with some lag, with the far-right cannibalizing the center-right and thereby threatening democratic systems.

Some implications, perhaps, for democratic system design.

In our - very limited - historical experience of democracy,

(i) states rot from the centre-right
(ii) and it's contagious (via geography/powerful exemplar states)

Also Landmark Tacitus WHEN

My high school for some reason had us memorize Herodotus: The Histories, Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War, Tacitus: The Annals, without keeping copies of any of these books around or explaining what made them good. You can imagine my surprise reading Tacitus 18 months ago!

"The more I think about history, ancient or modern, the more ironical all human affairs seem."

Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome

“I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal … and that’s ok. Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”

I kind of can’t believe this Bari Weiss quote is even real, and yet www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/b...

This is not a person who believes in democracy, the American Constitution or government…

The GOP has been trying to replace Obamacare for 15 years. It still does not have a plan. We are supposed to take their claim to be a party interested in legitimate governance seriously.

There was a great anecdote going around substack from a theorist who wrote a paper about how MacIntyre and Foucault both went from Marxism to a "politics of small communities". MacIntyre read it for him and said it was a very interesting novel, he'd like to meet the MacIntyre character someday

fundamentally the only postliberal thinker who still holds up well is Alastair MacIntyre, primarily because he indicts the systems of racism among others at odds with his postliberalism (CLR James references in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity are not a mistake.)

Back when lawfare first caught on in 2017 I remember a ben wittes interview where he says essential this, like "our marketing is that we deal with hard questions in national security. I would love to get back to that. "Ban muslims?" is just a stupid question"

The stakes are vast, obviously. But it’s as intellectually stimulating as arguing with a small child over whether her imaginary friend is real.

A naked descent into authoritarianism is weirdly boring because what’s being debated is fundamentally uninteresting. Is the antifa legion burning down Portlan real or not? Well, let’s have someone look out the window over there. No? Okay. Facts are settled. It either matters or it doesn’t.