Nick

Basically the US catapulted its way into a position of global dominance by essentially inventing the mass-scale industrial economy and the modern permanent meritocratic civil service and is dismantling both of those things because of a series of cults which have grabbed control of our institutions

I know this is in fundamental opposition to his business model, self-image, and Silicon Valley tech cult he’s built for himself, but has anyone actually sat Palmer Luckey down and explained how industrial economies work and how those industrial processes have impacted war both historically and today

(And also you ignore that the drone war only really ramped up in late 2023, and that the initial Ukrainian victories were won with very conventional ATGMs and maneuver)

I think the “Ukraine creatively used drones to beat Russia, ergo Taiwan should buy drones” premise is really smart so long as you pretend the war ended in Spring 2023.

How has no one made Sibelius’s violin concerto into a ballet yet it’s begging for it

Fuck it, planning a vacation to Taiwan I can’t afford because if I’m forced to live when it seems like civilization is going into remission I might as well see what I can of it

I think the gnawing sense in my gut that there will never be justice for the countless dead Musk has caused by killing USAID has grown to eclipse any hope I can feel for the future

Me myself I feel not so good

To reference a post someone else made — Kamala seems to genuinely understand that the Republicans just perpetuated the American Wannsee and wants no part of it to stain her soul any more than it already has

Anyway time to drink like 5 Negronis and listen to Chet Baker

Also maybe this has something to do with boiling this all down to sex to begin with but what do I know

Yeah if you’re upset about not being able to find love and socially expressing heartbreak is forbidden you’re going to turn to forms of emotional expression that aren’t socially punished

Maybe this is me riding my hobby horse but maybe the whole “men are falling to the edgelord virulent misogynists” has something to do with the fact that in popular American culture, being sad is basically portrayed as a virus that needs eradicating and being angry is a virtue

Mamdani dressing basically solely in J. Press, a brand associated with waspy stuffiness, is both a genius political move and one that totally makes sense for the son of a professor. Anyway, J. Press should pay him for the free advertising

The Boy Genius Who Killed 14 Million Poor People What is the moral weight of responsibility for the men who carried out DOGE’s work?

What is the moral weight of responsibility for the men who carried out DOGE’s work?

The latest Triad from @jvl.bsky.social only @thebulwark.com:
www.thebulwark.com/p/the-boy-ge...

I think being compared to Kennan is both one of the better compliments I’ve ever received and also possibly not a very good sign for my future career

How the hell is someone who works in national security more concerned about labor rights than the guys who claim that exploiting Ubereats drivers is integral to their ability to live in the modern world

We are discussing two extremely different modes of production with extremely different implications for how labor grants value and how labor is rewarded by a society. Flattening them by saying “oh people in the past could go to Ye Olde Costco and get a chicken” is not helpful for anyone

While it is true that some premodern agricultural societies relied heavily on communal methods of cooking and eating, this is not a historically analogous process to modern delivery — which is a postindustrial VC-backed capitalist process designed to alienate and impoverish food service workers

And, frankly, we have established a system of massive climate-destroying factory farms in order to keep our taste for meat sated. I’d bet money that the agricultural yields of a preindustrial society (two agricultural revolutions back!) could never support a level of meat consumption similar to ours

Again, yes many European societies had communal ovens. That does not mean buying bread from one of these bakeries was a historically analogous process to picking up an industrially produced loaf from a supermarket.

Again, “premodern societies had some differentiation of labor in some cases to allow some parts of some societies to make laborious foods such as whole grain porridges” is not the same thing as “…and this was a historical analogue to app delivery”

The defunding of USAID was the American Wannsee, the moment the ruling party’s psychosis and disregard for human life led them to choose to kill millions of innocents for its own sake. There is no normal politics possible after that, and no one has understood that yet (not even me, at a gut level).

“Pre-seasoned meat” has to mean, like, salt pork or smoked ham hocks, right?

“Complex things (veggies)” is going to live in my head rent-free forever. What do you mean you think eating vegetables is complicated? Are you aware of the concept of a salad?

There is a world of difference between “ovens for baking bread were generally communal since they took up a massive amount of space” and “people used to get rotisserie chickens before the Industrial Revolution”

Do you think people in renaissance Italy ate meat every night? Do you think premoderns had the infrastructure to have meat every day?

We are sleepwalking into a catastrophe thinking that Iraq and Afghanistan were full-scale wars, and we can get away from the next actual war similarly unscathed

This is, incidentally, why the Russian casualty counts in Ukraine do not fucking make a single dent in Russian public approval. The Wehrmacht was able to take 300,000 casualties in 14 days. They kept fighting for another year. We are deeply unprepared for what a full scale war looks like

I adore the stranglehold Papers Please has on NatSec professionals of a certain age — tiny indie game radicalized an entire generation of a certain type of Goon against restrictive border controls