if you define victory in terms of destruction of the other side, then war becomes a positive sum game, both sides simultaneously can be victors!
sometimes when you rip off the bandaid you just bleed out.
suffering is bad and should be prevented.
there's a thing the humans get caught up in where it becomes less important whether a thing is true or false than who the saying of the thing would be associated with.
escalation dominance is just another word for nothing left to lose.
“Literally, White treated corporations like children whose brains were too underdeveloped to truly hold them responsible for their actions.” @ddayen https://prospect.org/2026/02/17/epstein-files-email-kathy-ruemmler-elizabeth-warren-class-war/
failures of the neocons discredited idealism, but the current crew is managing to render publics cynical about cynicism itself. maybe there’s something hopeful in that.
having one of those days when my will is rather flagging in an optimism of the will kind of way.
“Power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, cruelty is not the same as strength, and a politics built on such ideas promises ruin, delusion about the limits of our power and a betrayal of the promise of our founding.” #PhilKlay https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/opinion/trump-iran-war-memes.html
it’s hard to wake up to all this.
political representation is supposed to be representation like a lawyer, not representation like a representative sample. we keep getting this wrong.
one way to understand all this is the world’s largest petrostate kneecapping its lowest cost competitors, potentially for years, all in the name of protecting the security of their region.
Maybe we will look back on this as the period of time that clarified for all of us that fossil fuels are truly over and post-WWII universalist liberalism is absolutely worth preserving because the alternative, the alternative is… this.
huh. i missed the big anniversary like a couple of weeks ago, but https://interfluidity.com is twenty years old this month. i'm on a bit of a hiatus as my life is overwhelmed by other things, but i'm still blogging after all these years. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/archive.html
sometimes nostalgia is so painful i think it will burn a hole right through me.
"There is no channel to change, and you can’t rewind the action. Trump made his foolhardy decision and now we must live with the consequences." @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/opinion/trump-hegseth.html
i worry about whether the SAVE act would create incentives for politicians to make it more difficult for (some) people to get passports. international travel is good for people and for the polity.
if this decade we discovered that Bond villains are real, i'm holding out hope for next decade and Santa Claus.
“AI might displace some coders, but it won’t make priests redundant. Fostering such jobs might require more investment in soft skills, and perhaps even in humanities’ subjects.” #ChrisDillow https://chrisdillow.substack.com/p/wanted-a-new-blair