Iris Meredith

You kinda take the fact that states bomb each other sometimes as a given. Like, it's a very *bad* thing, but well... it happens, and pretending otherwise does nobody any good. But... when I talk about it, it sounds sociopathic.

Secondary conclusion: studying international relations quickly makes you sound like a complete psychopath to anyone who hasn't

Wait, are you actually Anglican? Not that it much matters, but if so you're a sister in faith and {insert weird parasocial shit here}

The most important form of privilege at this point is "not actively being shelled or bombed privilege"

So far as I'm concerned, you're Haitian. Do what's in your power to make life difficult for the fuckers, and I think you have every right to be proud of yourself.

Well, shit. What do we know? Limited strike, or all-out commitment?

So it seems, so it seems. One of these decades I will register that knowing things only leads to pain

I mean, unironically yes? I'll encourage whatever good they do, but yeah... they really should

Sometimes a few days is enough

Look, if Amodei is willing to put his hopes of whatever Anthropic aims for at risk over this, we have to respect it. We don't have to respect his goals or what Anthropic wants to achieve, but from his perspective, he's willing to risk almost everything to oppose fascism. That *means* something

155% tax on billionaires, 155mm for foreign tyrants, 15.5 mg of estrogen for trans women.

(With apologies to @abeardedpanda.bsky.social for the addition)

Oddly enough, what saved me through the last few years of being broke and unemployed wasn't AI maturity or whatever: it was being able to write well.

(Would still like a respectable job, but like, being able to stay afloat without one is useful, and AI can't help with that)

If Mamdani and Spanberger are anything to go by...

Is this the day of "people whom everyone thought were very leftist turn out to be surprisingly hawkish and pro-market (laudatory)" on this website?

Which, as I say, I don't think they've the skills or resources to actually do

Yes, well... I think that's one of those situations where all I can say is "Read Theory". And that's "Read Theory (Lenin)", even, not "Read Theory (Clausewitz)", which is my usual go-to

still alive to make the first complaint.

Quite. The economic planning one is odd: I don't know what the correct amount of central planning is, but I'm pretty sure it's more than what we're currently doing. As for the hawkishness, well... it's a lot easier to complain about being too hawkish than being too dovish, usually because you're

e) I'm Polish, and there are distant family in Ukraine, and I spend quite a bit of time in IR circles, so my opinions on defence policy and such can be a bit... well, you see the issue.

(I think Australia and New Zealand should maintain a joint carrier group, for example)

that leads to Lysenkoism and general unpleasantness.

d) Stalin is bad and we should try and avoid doing a Stalin.

demand for say, steel, concrete or flour, but I don't think we should nationalise the videogame or shoe industries because that ends badly.

c) I think that we need a consistent epistemology: we can't believe the scientific ulema on climate and vaccines but not on resource planning or pest control:

a) I'm still pretty preoccupied with individual morality: you don't get to say that you're a good person because you have the right political views if you *personally* behave like shit

b) I'm in favour of free markets for consumer goods: I think the state can probably do a good job of predicting

Those of you who know me personally will know that I am fairly hard left. I am too right-wing-coded to be entirely welcome in most leftist spaces.

I mean, to be fair, "Trump and Hegseth are mad about being told no" seems to have more than enough explanatory power.

From what I've seen, the mid-terms are almost certain to be a wipe-out. And beyond that, they just don't have enough goons.

I think the big question is "what proportion of the democrats that aren't fighting effectively get primaried?"

can demonstrate actual, material improvements in quality of life for people at home and abroad, I could see quite a lot of the left being willing to get behind that.

Counterintuitively, I think this might also draw in quite a bit of the progressive left who are mostly there because establishment liberal forces simply haven't been effective rather than thinking they were too conservative (full disclosure: this is roughly my position). If the militant liberal wing

Update: looks solid, and I think I like it. This should be standard for statistical research

Counterpoint: they seem to be *really* struggling with the "manufacture a pretext" part. Like, there's maybe a few dozen things that could have been made to stick, and they flubbed all of them.

Defence contractors aren't always evil though (or at least it'd be hypocritical for me to say that they're entirely evil when they're keeping Russia from fucking up Ukraine as badly as they could have and then rolling into Poland)