Because I'm behind the times, I just got around to seeing "Hamilton" now that it has been live-streamed, and I have a few thoughts. Part of the reason I didn't see it or listen to it before is that it is done in a rap/hip-hop style. I'm a highbrow classical music snob, so this is generally like fingernails on a chalk-board to me. And for the first few minutes, I was kind of gritting my teeth.

Time for some game theory....

Well, kind of sort of. Here's how I'm looking at the 2020 primaries and general election. There are four realistic possibilities. Let me rank them from worst outcome to best. 1/ Worst outcome: Dems nominate the moderate candidate, Biden, who loses to Trump in the general. This is the worst because it emboldens Trump and the nationalist wing of the right, while also emboldening the radical left, who get to say "we told you so." Worst of both worlds.

Hoo boy.

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1182341784187351041

This is a good reminder of why the betrayal of the Kurds is going to be so important. It's not a story that goes away in a few weeks. It will have ongoing repercussions. 1/

This is how I find out that Neil DeGrasse Tyson actually said something sensible for once.

https://twitter.com/_Rewhan/status/1158094753654702080

Here it is:

https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1158074774297468928

So I traced this Sohrab Ahmari thing back to its root, which is a little manifesto published in First Things a few months ago. 1/

firstthings.com/web-exclusives… None of this is really about David French. It's an attempt to launch a civil war within the right, with the goal of purging advocates of economic liberty. 2/

OK, I just can't handle this. Our challenges are "the greatest in living memory"? Get over yourselves, kiddos.

You want a list of way worse challenges within living memory? Because that's what you're going to get....

https://twitter.com/BetoORourke/status/1106155281845760000

OK, so in living memory, there was a massive war involving all of Europe and dragging in America. The war brought on an influenza epidemic that killed 50-100 million--out of a much smaller global population.

@RadioFreeTom @EsotericCD OK, so I see you two arguing about this the other day, and I have a different take that I think may get more to the heart of the issue. I think people like VDH signed on to Trumpism in part for real ideological reasons. 1/ @RadioFreeTom @EsotericCD VDH has been going on about immigration forever. (Mostly because he feels his own neighborhood in rural CA has gone to the dogs, so he extrapolates improperly from his own circumstances.) He likes Trump because of the Wall. Fine. 2/

So this helped me crystallizes a lot of what I've been thinking about lately: was social media a mistake?

"The Censorship of Conservatives on the Internet Is Approaching Critical Levels of Bad" redstate.com/brandon_morse/… I loved the Internet era before social media, before Facebook and Twitter swallowed up everything. Remember blogs? Blogs were great.

1. So Twitter has decided to go ahead and give everyone 280 characters for each tweet instead of the old limitation of 140 characters. 2. To be clear, nobody was asking for this, and it doesn't make the medium better. It makes it noticeably worse.

A persistent bias in looking at history is that from our perspective here in the future, we know how the story ends. 1/ So it's tempting to look at past conflicts (e.g., the Civil War) with equanimity, as the price to be paid for achieving a good result. 2/