To me there's a weird resonance between the NBA scandal and Trump's run at an American dictatorship: they are both downstream of a severe moral rot, where suddenly honesty doesn't matter, no one has courage, and nothing anyone does is wrong.

I think the specific reason why the AI bubble will burst soon is because all of the money is going into construction of data centers, but that aspect of AI--the quality of the AIs--is already in diminishing returns.

The actual money is now in deploying, scaling, and productizing the technology..

Vance might have just ended his political career with that quote about this Iran war not being something that's going to be a long term thing

Every terrible long slog of a war happened because the side that started it thought it was going to be over quickly

It is worth noting that the Trumpist movement--and the Trump administration itself--are so intellectually weak and anti-American that the entire edifice would crumble in a sustained cross examination from an earnest tenth grade speech and debate kid.

Non-citizens should enjoy full protection under the First Amendment; but setting that aside, in the present case, Trump is completely lawless since the statute under which he is deporting students (like Rumysa Ozturk) requires the US to be at war, and it is not.

A flagrant abuse of power.

There are two main arguments for why non-citizens should be afforded full protection under the First Amendment. First, the underlying model for why free speech is beneficial to society is the so-called "marketplace of ideas" metaphor envisioned by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which makes the

Very generally, here's why I think we should have optimism: motivating affect of reactionaries is FEAR. This is useful for organizing themselves and asserting hierarchic control, but it attracts mediocre cowards. And it's not very sustainable in the long term. People don't want to be scared forever.

Something I haven't heard Democrats say at all: what they are going to do, exactly, to curb Presidential power if and when they get majorities in the House and Senate. At the very least they should rescind the President's power to levy tariffs, suspending the Senate filibuster if need be