The other day, Matt Yglesias was complaining about environmentalist NIMBY voters in Britain who were blocking some new housing development because it would imperil an endangered variety of newts. "Who cares about newts???" he demanded to know.
Another writer called him out for this comment, and Yglesias writes in a follow-up post that he was perhaps being a bit glib when he wrote that. He was "mouth[ing] off," he admits, and it was bad form.
Earlier this week, a group of nearly 200 economists and businesspeople signed an open letter on the future of AI, entitled "We Must Act Now."
The statement is a model of strategic ambiguity—that sort of deliberate fuzziness as to key details that is often required to reach a consensus viewpoint that a large committee of people might be willing to get behind.
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy is one of these classic and famous books that's just faintly disappointing once you actually get around to reading it. I came to it knowing that it was supposed to be the definitive critique of U.S. foreign policy that launched the whole genre of New Left historiography. I found it instead to be somewhat leaden and clumsy in its prose, and basically focused on the wrong questions.
To be sure, the core of William Appleman Williams's thesis is inarguable. The basic "tragedy" of American foreign policy, as he sees it, is that our nation proclaimed the ideals of self-determination and anti-colonialism, but then we lived to contradict them.
In yesterday's post, after devoting about 75% of the piece to expounding all the good reasons to despise Lindsey Graham—I ended by admitted that, in spite of everything, I always sort of liked him.
It was seemingly hard not to. Even during Biden's last State of the Union speech in 2024, he at one point made some inside joke and pointed at Graham. "Lindsey knows what I'm talking about," he said. Cut to a shot of Graham giggling in the audience.
By any reasonable standards, Lindsey Graham—the Republican Senator from South Carolina who died over the weekend—was a pretty terrible person.
He knew exactly who and what Donald Trump was. In his own short-lived bid for the White House in 2016, Graham correctly diagnosed Trump as a "xenophobe" and a "bigot." Graham's own policy views obviously inclined him to the paradoxical mix of warmongering neocon hawkism and genuine patriotic idealism that motivated a figure like John McCain—in other words, the polar opposite of a corrupt transactionalist like Trump.
My post the other day about Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests ended with something of a cliffhanger, so I wanted to swing back around to revisit it now.
As Hirschman documents extensively in that book, early modern political thinkers were fundamentally concerned with the question of how to curb more effectively the human propensity to violence and despotism—given that mere "moralistic exhortation" had at best proved ineffective (and at worst had itself inflamed the tendency to persecution and war).
Two days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Donald Trump in the midst of the ongoing war in the Middle East.
What?! Assassinate our head of state in the midst of ongoing negotiations?
Oh, you mean—exactly what we just did to them about four months ago?
