A few notes.

1. Last year I wrote an essay on the different structures of the Democratic Party and the GOP. With the Democrats, power flows from the bottom up; with the GOP, from the top down.

The one major exception to this pattern is... you guessed it, Elon Musk. You can find that essay here scholars-stage.org/patronage-vs-c…

Let’s take that question seriously. If you were to design the education of the future FSO, CIA officer, NSC staffer, etc from scratch, what would it look like? What experiences do they need to have? What competencies most critical to gain?

https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1929970877753393623

I am having fun imagining a college that sort of combines the Thucydides course from Naval War College with required language immersion housing /dining with forced summers in developing countries with practicums in nat/sec law

There should be more universities like St. John's. I do not mean their specific great books curriculum so much as their commitment to a completely distinct curriculum that bares no resemblance to the standard American university model. The program is taught in a unique way. There are no "professors." Instead, there are "tutors." And so on. St. John's does not give the students a lot of choice in what or how they study--everybody goes through the same program.

There are lessons for Taiwan here. Be like the Houthis.

https://twitter.com/lrozen/status/1922068124150464991

No, but the problem isn’t just American “commitment” to the campaign. You cannot read that NYT article and not have a half dozen operational lessons jump out at you, come on guys…

https://x.com/Mo_Porkburger/status/1922349272218882427

I tend to think of the current American liberal/left policy world as a triangle with three points:

1) The the centrist liberals, recently "abundance"

2) The socialisty far left, think Bernie Bros

3) The "woke" left or social justice warriors

Why this division is useful: There is a lot of talk about the left vs the libs recently, with each side blaming the other for their coalition's recent defeats.

But there is conceptual confusion here. The common understanding acknowledges group 1) and group 2) but not group 3). Or more accurately--

I have a theory for why this happened, and it goes something like this:

https://twitter.com/jaycaspiankang/status/1921221352964472920

Once upon a time there was a cohort of young politicos who wanted to do good in the world. By both disposition and ideology they were inclined to view political problems through the lens of incentive structures, statistics, and wonkish dives into regulation and law.

I recently finished this book. It describes the lifeways of the men and women who lived in Utah and Nevada between 13,000 years ago to about 1600 AD.

A few notes of interest. 1. The paleoindian pioneers who settled the North American continent were extraordinary people--a daring culture like the Polynesian wayfinders or the 19th century American pioneers, intent on driving forward into great unknowns.

1. This is insane

2. Adolescence was easily the best filmed piece of media I have consumed since Oppenheimer. The plotting, acting, and blocking were incredible.

https://twitter.com/addicted2newz/status/1910281285798396237

I am no film critic but I suspect doing entire episodes in one shot really forces everyone involved to perform at a higher level. I was really blown away.

lol. What was an incipient bipartisan pro-tariff, pro-industrial party movement is being turned into an full fledged bipartisan anti-tariff, anti-industrial policy movement. You had a democrat sponsored bill in congress legislating an across the board 10% tariff.

Halfway through Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN.

I think it is very good, but have difficulty articulating why. I disagree with its philosophy. (Or at least I think I do—I am only halfway through).

I think its depiction of the old west, manifest destiny, etc is somewhat dishonest.

What he says about video games are true for many things: social media, television, even, to an extent, sex and food.

In all cases you have things that provide a level of hedonic enjoyment that in moderation give more pizzazz to life but in larger amounts sap you of strength, skill, and meaning.

For my part I can say this: my personal accomplishment is almost always inversely correlated with the amount of time playing video games.

The exception are social video games like Super Smash Brothers which are physically played in the presence of other people. I do not play video games right now. The last time I did was during a depressing and stressful family crisis that somewhat shot my productivity in any case.

Does it seem like there are conflicting explanations for these tariffs?

What if I told you that there were multiple economic schools of thought in the Trump administration, all with different goals--including for tariffs?

Would you want to know more? See my latest report for @FPRI for my breakdown of the different tribes of Trump economic policy, and the competing priorities each endorses: fpri.org/article/2025/0…

I think “abundance” is something like the new right (or even the integralist policy platform), but for liberals: it appeals primarily to educated millennial urbanites—and in this case, educated millennial urbanites who do not own homes!

3 points:

https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1905745553977483479

1. It is always hard to build an electoral coalition around a set of policies where the gains are widely distributed, relatively modest, and cumulative over the long term while the costs are highly concentrated both in time and place.

But one of the things that distinguishes the 1950s-60s films from the 1980s-2010s version (exemplified IMHO by Pixar) is the moral urgency of the message.

https://twitter.com/Arbitrary_user/status/1895363688221286877

And perhaps that suggests a shift in the substance of the thing.

The 1950s narratives lionize man the THINKER. They express great faith in the potential of man as an abstract ideal; the focus is not “be yourself” but “learn to think. Take your stand.”

What do presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump have in common?

Each began their term in office -- and for Trump, both terms -- convinced that America needed some sort of reset with Russia, and if they played their cards right, they would get it.

https://twitter.com/Glenn_Diesen/status/1891183505729536479

So many folks talk about the power of nat/sec groupthink and DC 'NPC's who thoughtlessly shuffle down paths tread ten thousand times before, but nobody talks about Russia in this context.

If you want a measure by which to judge which tech right leaders are sincere and which are selfish—that is, in it to maximize their financial returns regardless of the cost to the rest of us—you only need to do one thing: read what they said when Silicon Valley bank went under. Some of these individuals tried to save their investments by attempting to cause a general banking panic—to ensure that the government would bail out the bank.

I have never looked at them the same again.

From my copybook.

1. Paradise Lost, Book IX, lines 120-130:

"By what I seek, but others to make such
As I, though thereby worse to me redound:
For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts." From my copybook.

Glenn Gray, The Warriors, pp. 216-217:

"They were not longing for the old days in sentimental nostalgia; they were confessing their disillusionment with a sterile present. Peace exposed a void in them that war’s excitement had enabled them to keep covered up.

No folks, here is what happening.

1. Donald Trump believes in the madman theory. Here he is last year explaining why the Chinese won't dare attack Taiwan under his watch: "Xi Jinping knows that I am F----g crazy." Exact quote he gave to the WSJ last summer. He believes, deeply, that is power on the international stage is directly related to how crazy the rest of the world thinks he is.

How do you convince people you are an unpredictable, erratic son-of-a-bitch? By doing crazy things.

Thesis: Southern gothic stopped making sense as a living genre sometime in the’90s.

Regional identity is too weak.

The isolated world of the southern county is isolated no longer. Also: the world where families feel connected to, much less cursed by, their connection to antebellum fortunes and hierarchies also past. Average Georgian can tell you nothing about her family in 1870—much less be haunted by their ghosts.

In November I traveled to India. Met with government officials. Traveled the high Himalayas. Listened to Bengalore coders speak.

Here I share what I learned. 🧵 I traveled to India as part of a delegation hosted by @rammadhav_ 's India Foundation (@indfoundation) and put together by @wrmead. The explicit intent of this trip to was to forge connections between the Indian and American right. As I put it in my essay:

This misunderstands Colby's logic, and perhaps misunderstands Xi Jinping as well.

@ElbridgeColby says TSMC should be destroyed if Taiwan falls not because he thinks TSMC is the reason Xi would authorize an invasion, but because he views Taiwan mostly through the US-China strategic balance, and believes that Chinese possession of pristine TSMC fabs would tip that balance away from the United States. Hitler didn't invade France BECAUSE he wanted the French fleet--but once the Germans were in, it was better to scuttle the fleet than to hand it over. That is the logic.

But there is a broader, important question here--do the fabs matter at all for Xi's invasion plan?

I would say "yes." They are a reason not to invade. Xi Jinping earnestly believes that China can only pull ahead of the United States by pioneering the next techno-scientific revolution. This is the plan for making China #1. (I have written at length about this before and will link to some of that in the next tweet).

At the present this requires Taiwanese fabs to stand in good working order. "The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" is not possible on the timelines Xi has articulated without either a functioning Taiwanese economy or the successful reproduction of Taiwanese technology in the mainland. This incentivizes Xi to wait. On the short term Xi faces a trade off between national reunion and national greatness. Xi does not need to be "Michael Moore's Dick Cheney" for the destruction of TSMC to give him pause.

Of course, it has always been a fantasy that full on war would not lead to the disruption of TSMC facilities or the death of TSMC employees, regardless of American policies. If Xi Jinping authorizes an invasion this will have already been baked into his calculations. Colby's comments are all about the American calculus, not Beijing's. The promised link: scholars-stage.org/saving-china-t…