“Sanctuary cities and states have been a major focus of political conflict in the second Trump administration, perhaps even more than in the first. These jurisdictions refuse or severely limit assistance to federal efforts to detain and deport suspected illegal immigrants. Most only provide such assistance in cases involving undocumented migrants who have committed serious crimes. Regardless of the politics, the 10th Amendment protects sanctuary jurisdictions from compulsion by the federal government. And their policies are also well justified on moral and pragmatic grounds. This is particularly true at a time when many federal immigration enforcement efforts are cruel and illegal.” (02/19/26)
“The premise of socialism is ‘worker control of the means of production,’ and the gig economy is far and away the most successful experiment in human history when it comes to achieving that. Gig workers own their tools. Gig workers set their own hours. Gig workers choose who they work for, where they work, and what kind of work they do. Gig workers even set their own salaries by accepting the individual tasks that meet their pay requirements and rejecting those that don’t. Mamdani and friends hate that worker control with a passion. To them, worker happiness and welfare only matter to the extent that they can claim credit for, and gain power from, that happiness and welfare. … if anyone, anywhere, somehow manages to make a living without Mamdani’s permission, why, that’s ‘exploitation.'” (02/19/26)
“[P]eople hate crime and think it’s going up. But actually, crime barely affects most people and is historically low. So what’s going on? In our discussion yesterday, many commenters proposed that the discussion about ‘crime’ was really about disorder. Disorder takes many forms, but its symptoms include litter, graffiti, shoplifting, tent cities, weird homeless people wandering about muttering to themselves, and people walking around with giant boom boxes shamelessly playing music at 200 decibels on a main street where people are trying to engage in normal activities. When people complain about these things, they risk getting called a racist or a ‘Karen.’ But when they complain about crime, there’s still a 50-50 chance that listeners will let them finish the sentence without accusing them of racism. … might this explain why people act like crime is rampant and increasing, even when it’s rare and going down?” (02/19/26)
“Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is upending professions as diverse as art, cinema, accounting, national defense, and education. Some even argue that AI will render almost all work obsolete. They say its ability to ‘think’ and accomplish tasks previously solely in the realm of human ability will mean that humans will not need to work; the machines will do everything for us. Whether this would be a good thing or a bad thing depends on the story one wants to tell.” (02/19/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Eldar Mamedov
“lexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to the Munich Security Conference to introduce herself to the world as a foreign policy thinker. She returned having demonstrated something else entirely: that the Democratic Party’s progressive star has absorbed the establishment’s worst ideas while shedding only its least popular rhetoric.” (02/19/26)
“‘I’m not scared, you’re scared!’ is the repeated line in a children’s story we recently read to the kids at the Unitarian Universalist version of Sunday school I attend with my children. In that story, a scared bear and a brave rabbit, who (naturally!) are best friends, go on a hike together. Rabbit has to cajole and encourage Bear through every imaginable obstacle, but in the end (of course!) it’s Rabbit who gets stuck at the crucial moment and has to call on Bear for help. Bear (no surprise) sets aside his fears to rescue his friend and (tada!) finds new depths of bravery and adventurousness in the process. After we read the story, the kids worked together to build paths from blocks and Legos through the imagined obstacles in the story — a bridge over a rushing river, a path through a dark forest, a staircase up a steep mountain.” (02/19/26)
“There is no cause for war. The U.S. government is preparing to attack another country not because of anything that its government has done or threatened to do to us, but solely because the president feels like doing it. The president created the current crisis by making reckless threats and then by ordering a massive buildup in preparation to carry them out. We know that he has been goaded into doing this by the Israeli prime minister and hardliners here at home, but in the end the decisions and the responsibility are his and his alone. No one can explain what the president wants to achieve by attacking Iran.” (02/19/26)
“When Jonathan declares his artistic ambitions are anti-capitalist, it clashes with everything the show has relied on for five seasons. The finale demonstrates better jobs, bigger dreams, and individual agency rely on voluntary exchange.” (02/19/26)
“For MAGA Republicans, the root cause of every problem is immigrants. Populist Democrats, by contrast, prefer to scapegoat billionaires and Big Business. But lately, President Donald Trump has started to bogart Democrats’ favorite villains, too, by casting them as the baddies conspiring to increase housing costs. There’s now bipartisan (and yet wrong) agreement that Wall Street’s ‘institutional investors’ are to blame for high home prices, and Congress appears on the verge of making the problem worse.” (02/19/26)
“Attorney General Pam Bondi’s contentious House hearing about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files offered a clear message to the nation: Sex trafficking of women and minors is perfectly acceptable as long as wealthy white men do it. Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced late sex trafficker, fixer, and political networker, was found to have ties to huge number of the world’s elites on both sides of the political aisle—including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, and of course, Donald Trump. For years, Trump’s conservative backers have attacked LGBTQ+ people, drag queens, immigrants, and others, claiming a desire to protect women and children from rapists and groomers. Trump even boasted that ‘whether the women liked it or not,’ he would ‘protect’ them from migrants, whom he slandered as ‘monsters’ who ‘kidnap and kill our children’.” (02/19/26)
