So it is obviously a good thing when Congress asserts its constitutional authority over war-making right?

Not necessarily.🧵 The truth is how separation of powers has worked in practice has chiefly followed the utilitarian benefit to the country. For example, it's strongly agreed now that the Federal Reserve should control monetary policy rather than Congress.

So lab leaks happen all the time right?

So, whether true or not, on its face this should be a plausible theory for the pandemic, right?

Well that’s actually a quite complicated question. 🧵 We’ve learned an incredible amount of information about the origins of pandemics due to research in the last few years that makes this very much an ever-updating subject.

If Biden had announced in 2022 that he was not running for President what would have happened?

This is extremely speculative and uncertain, but I hold the minority opinion that the balance of the evidence suggests Democrats would have probably done even worse. Let me explain.🧵 For starters, it was a good thing for Democrats that he dropped out in favor of Kamala Harris when he did, with polling suggesting Trump would have likely defeated Biden by a much wider margin, with severe consequences for down-ballot races.

I had always assumed that Lo in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the bandit-lover from Xinjiang, was supposed to be a Uyghur, but I now believe, that based on the historical context, he is supposed to be one of the last of the Dzungars.🧵 The only thing that is explicitly said about his ethnicity in the film is that he is not Han Chinese, which could be gathered from context clues anyways.

I would imagine the novels go into much more detail than this, but they have never been translated into English.

So do Trump's threats against Greenland undermine the political science consensus on the Democratic Peace Theory?

I don't think so, but let's explore this question.🧵 The Democratic Peace Theory posits that liberal democracies have an unusually low tendency to go to war with each other. Though this empirical observation seems to be very overwhelming, the supposed mechanisms to explain it are extremely vague and unconvincing.

I'm sorry: I have crunched some numbers and Kamala Harris was officially a weak candidate.

In this thread, I will aim to disentangle candidate strength from "national environment" (i.e. how well Democrats or Republicans are doing generally).🧵 Looking at House election results in 2024, Kamala Harris performed at about the 51.8 percentile among House Democrats in the two-party vote share, adjusted for incumbency, suggesting that she was essentially dead-even in candidate strength with Trump.

I used to think the Palestinian cause was completely inexplicable and idiosyncratic because, anathema to almost every other national liberation movement, they made absolutist demands instead of the normal pragmatism that comes with desperately fighting for an independent state.🧵 In this thread, I contrasted the uncompromising nature of the Palestinian cause with the Irish and Timorese liberation movements:

https://x.com/DerekPederson3/status/1764307199906480359

When a country withdraws from a disputed territory while other disputes remain unresolved it does not always fail and lead to war. Many times, it succeeds. So what happened in Gaza?🧵 Indonesia has been at peace with East Timor since its independence in 1999, in spite of continuing Indonesian rule over other Christian-majority territories including West Timor. Since the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Ireland has never tried to violently retake Northern Ireland.

I will argue in this thread that Palestinian radicalism stems in large part from the situation of the Palestinians.🧵 This is a painful argument for me to make right now. The overwhelming impulse of most people after such horrific violence as we just saw is to express unreserved solidarity with Israel.

Did the US support for the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s contribute to the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s? Let's evaluate this controversial claim.🧵 A common misconception is that the US backed the Taliban against the USSR. This is a conflation of the various Mujahideen warlords who fought against the USSR with the Taliban, which did not form until 1994.

Given that we appear to neither be pursuing a policy of returning to the Iran deal nor regime change in Tehran, it seems that we have more or less acquiesced to a nuclear-armed Iran in the near future. Let's see what that looks like.🧵 The optimistic (and I think likely) interpretation is that Iran is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons as a defensive hedge against a US-backed regime change. This is essentially the same strategy as North Korea.

My answers to these questions:

- None, the US clearly *could* abandon Taiwan, and may very well.
- Yes, because under the current US-led liberal order, they will eventually be deposed in a popular revolution, and Xi Jinping reversed any hope of the CCP willingly liberalizing.

https://twitter.com/rajan_menon_/status/1646499729100926976

- Economic growth could just as easily be a net-negative for the CCP. Development *increases* the probability of revolution in the long run; see North Korea's approach to the issue. They really only care about economic growth because it allows them to build up their military.

I have also considered this. Some thoughts:
- Yes, it is a possibility. We must take even unlikely security risks seriously.
- North Korea will only roll the dice on such a move if they think they can win the war, not just to do a favor for the CCP.

https://twitter.com/fedtanyl/status/1646299426967760896

- North Korea would be favored to lose such a war, so it seems unlikely that they would attempt such a risky endeavor. However, America may be too bogged down in Taiwan to quickly come to South Korea's aid, giving North Korea the best shot they could ever hope for.

The largest language groups tend to be associated with some ancient technological innovation that allowed for dramatic expansion:

Domestication of horses in the Eurasian steppe: Indo-European, Turkic, Mongolic

Advanced boat technology in Taiwan & Philippines: Austronesian Are there any other examples?

Recently, Sweden, Finland, and Norway have all adopted highly restrictive standards towards minors transitioning in response to rising concerns of a social contagion of transgender self-ID. In this thread, I will caution against these policies being widely adopted.🧵 Understanding the experience of gender dysphoria is more or less impossible for anyone who does not have it. The common explanation that "I feel as if I am a woman trapped in a man's body" obviously makes no sense, metaphorically or otherwise.