Can we all agree that ‘functional training’ is a euphemism for still being able to tie your own shoelaces as you slide into 50? God, this is depressing
I’m really not very functional, apparently. Ugh
Seriously, I hate all this cross-fit stuff. It’s depressing. It really makes you feel washed out. I’d rather run
Here we go again. Wow. All these mobility exercises are actually pretty tough. All this ham and spinal twisting makes you feel like a grandmother who can’t get out of a recliner. Very humbling
Seriously, I miss the 80s, when everyone sat around the gym in knee-high Dad tubesocks pretending to bench. That was way easier.
Wait, this gets worse? What the hell are ‘commando planks’? Planks are bad enough. Good grief.
on-the-make schtick would bowl Kim over or wow him into concessions. Instead, Kim played T for credibility-enhancing photo-ops & to foment US-S Korean tensions over how to deal with/ NK.
3. There’s absolutely nothing to suggest T’s approach to NK would be different a second
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time around. There will be no policy development process to work-up alternative offers to NK, no deliberation of what US/SK concessions we might tolerate in exchange for some NK WMD limits, no effort to build consensus w/ Congress, the SKs, or Japanese. Any second T engagement
Good thread, nicely illustrating how de-linked the GOP evangelical base is from the rest of America.
They wanna go after abortion, IVF, birth control, gay marriage, and the rest. GOP leaders know this is electoral suicide, but they don’t know how to get around it. If Biden is
smart, he’ll make personal family & sexual freedom the center of his campaign.
Evangelicals may overwhelm the GOP internally, but the rest of the country thinks they’re weird & creepy
This is the result of social isolation: churches which provide a whole separated lifestyle,
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a TV ‘news’ network which only tells you what you want to hear, home-schooling, a sealed media ecosystem of faith-based movies and influencers telling you that social change is the apocalypse.
Catholics once had parallel institutions like this, especially the schools. But we
This thread makes a point political science emphasizes a lot - and which I tell my students constantly:
Competent democratic government is actually really boring. A lot of it is unappealing trade-offs, wonks diving deep into detail the public won’t track, maintenance instead
of flashy new initiatives politicians can put their name on, compromise between parties which leaves no one happy, incremental, unexciting improvements only visible over the medium-term, and so on.
This is not entertaining or engaging, & doesn’t make for exciting journalism.
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But it is how you mostly want democracies governed. This is why you don’t elect showboats like Trump or Jesse Ventura, and you do elect competent administrators like George W. Bush or Biden.
Sometimes I think Fukuyama is right: wealthy democracies get so bored that they
Yes, NK's rhetoric seems more belligerent lately. Yes, this Kim seems to enjoy making scary threats more than his father did. Yes, the US is distracted by Ukraine & Gaza. But
NK constantly talks like this. I made this point back in 2013👇when Kim told foreigners to leave SK bc war was imminent (jerk). Perhaps Kim means it this time. That is possible,of course. But it's impossible to reliably infer that f/ NK rhetoric anymore
National elites say outlandish stuff all the time. Look at Putin. Threats are a cheap signal. What matters instead are costly signals, which in the NK case would mean something like a seventh nuclear test, a missile test flight over SK, or border skirmishes.
Latent capacity is not capability. Khrushchev said we will bury you, and Mao thought he could fight a nuclear war bc of China’s huge population.This is not how conflict works
Sacks says stuff like this all the time. I’ve no idea why he’s taken seriously as a geopolitical thinker