Paul Waldman

He's coming for Michael Brown

"Even More Vulgar"; Elon Musk's Dystopian Nightmare What happens when the world's richest man is desperate for people to think he's funny and cool?

An insecure little boy who wants us all to think he’s funny and cool is taking AI to the worst possible place.

paulwaldman.substack.com/p/even-more-...

I really wish you hadn't told me this book exists

I wish I could have gotten the message across that there is an extremely important place called the Jerk Store, and though it may not be widely understood, their inventory of, if you will, a product that is sometimes referred to as "You," is, according to recent reports, running low

I really don’t think we can overstate the harm that the tech ethos of move fast and break things (followed by the unsaid “and then just move on”) has done beyond tech. Government, ngos, universities, public schools that have invited the folks who think like this in keep ending up gutted

To be honest, I'm a little worried about Babydog's long term prospects. That puppy is not living a healthy active lifestyle.

It was pretty clear Justice was going to beat Manchin easily. He was pretty popular as governor, and the state just gets more and more red.

Funny story, Jim Justice used to be a billionaire and the richest person in West Virginia, but apparently he's now in so much debt that his net worth is "less than zero" according to Forbes: www.forbes.com/sites/christ...

That definitely gives me one of those "Damn, I wish I had thought of that" moments

I'm sure you're right about friction - the rest of us complain about all the petty inconveniences of life, but once you take them all away, there's only so much left. Also, that friction is part of how we encounter other humans who aren't being paid to serve us and tell us how great we are.

And yes, I'm sure they all have 8 houses. But they invest all this time and money, then just a few years later they're like "This Statuario marble disgusts me. And we were crazy to think 14 bathrooms would be enough. We're selling the house."

Every real estate article in the WSJ is like "The Wilsons, owners of GloopCorp, paid $19 million for the house in 2022, then spent $4 million renovating it. They say it no longer fits their lifestyle, and they have listed it for $32 million."

Are these rich weirdos just moving every three years?

There are some insights you can only get from a guy who once worked on a winning campaign 33 years ago

On behalf of everyone at MSNOW, let me extend our thanks to your dad

Undoubtedly, Musk's "make people laugh at a party" is him taking a picture of someone he employs, having MechaHitler roast their appearance, and then delighting in the forced laughter of his other employees.

More and more politicos are realizing that 2026 is going to be an absolute catastrophe for Republicans, and that means opportunities for Democrats to win races they would have struggled to win in an ordinary year

Next phase: a wave of Republicans announcing they won't run for reelection

"This administration is protecting you from antisemitism. Now, give us a list of the names, phone numbers, and addresses of all your Jews."

Oh sure, that sounds fine, nothing worrisome going on here at all.

evergreen

Years ago I remember being shocked when Antonin Scalia threw a bullshit argument I knew for a fact he had to have gotten from a Rush Limbaugh rant into a written decision. Today federal judges are using their opinions for shitposting. Next we'll see a dissent that's just a string of groyper memes.

Heritage also understood that time-pressed reporters were already adopting the horrid he-said/she-said style that plagues journalism today. If we got wind that some world-class Brookings scholar was due to release a book on, say, national health insurance that made an original contribution to knowledge in the field, someone at Heritage would quickly draft a short paper rehashing the same old talking points attacking national health insurance that had been around forever and release it the same day as the Brookings study. More often than not, we would get a story in the Washington Post the next day saying little more than this: “Today the Brookings Institution published a book, 3 tears in the making, advocating national health insurance, and the Heritage Foundation released a report on the same subject saying it would bankrupt the nation and lead to a deterioration in health quality.” Reporters never distinguished between the quality of one study and the shallowness of the other; they both got conflated and prevented the other side from getting traction on an issue.[vi] This method still works today.

Revealing piece from Bruce Bartlett explaining how even back in the 1980s, the Heritage Foundation understood how to play the news media in ways other think tanks didn't:

brucebartlett.substack.com/p/my-days-at...

U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas, nooses as hate symbols The military service, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, has drafted a new policy that classifies such items “potentially divisive.”

So now swastikas are merely "potentially divisive" according to the Trump administration

www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Pundit Brain Continues to Afflict Nation People who know a lot and care a lot about politics want to believe that the average voter does too. But it isn't true.

Should Democrats move to the center to chase the median voter? It's the wrong question.

paulwaldman.substack.com/p/pundit-bra...

There’s an interesting parallel with the “mecha-Hitler” episode here: AI seems to have a lot of trouble with the sort of winking needle-threading “respectable” right wingers have spent decades mastering, although that’s breaking down of late as well.

Right? And subsequently we had half a century of apologetics (e.g The Rational Voter, all the work on heuristics) to explain why it's okay that they know very little and don't think ideologically. And yet so many supposedly shrewd and informed people are still convinced that they do!

Nvidia’s Strong Results Show AI Fears Are Premature The chip maker says demand looks strong through next year, while a selloff has made the $4.5 trillion company look cheap.

I'm no economist, but is Nvidia making huge profits really evidence that there isn't an AI bubble, when so much of the insane spending on AI goes right to Nvidia? It's like saying "How can there be a bubble when this tulip farmer is making so much money?"

www.wsj.com/finance/stoc...

Very important piece here - we really need to escape the pundit-brain thinking that imagines voters think about politics in the same ideological way people who think about politics all the time think about politics. Because they don't.

Obviously bad because the idea is to scare states away from creating any regulations to begin with, but at this point, who isn't going to call their bluff just to see what kind of dingbat bullshit DOJ tries to file

How could this thing that absolutely everyone knew would happen possibly have happened

Opinion | Trump has a way with Pennsylvania. This interview shows why. The president’s unpredictable approach can be an asset — and helped remake an American industry.

What the Washington Post opinion section has come to: A long piece by Salina Zito full of lines like "His curiosity has always been his most compelling strength," people telling her why they think Trump is so brilliant, and how he was nice to her grandkids.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

In 2016 when Bobby Knight endorsed Trump I wrote a piece about how every dirtbag, scumbag, and douchebag was behind him; attracting the world's worst human beings was a key part of his vibe. But like everything, in his second term it's gotten so much worse.