“MySpace kicked off an era in which nearly two out of three humans on the planet use social media platforms to connect with others, share opinions and content, and, yes, sometimes scroll obsessively through everything on offer. You or I may or may not like social media. You or I may or may not use social media. And, even though it’s pretty much the unique distinguishing development of the 21st century (everything else, including perpetual war, is just variation on eternal themes), you and I don’t HAVE to use social media. Nor was K.G.M. forced to use social media. But on March 25, a California jury awarded her $6 million in ‘damages’ — half ‘compensatory’ and half punitive — from Google (which owns YouTube) and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), because she allegedly suffers from anxiety and depression and blames social media for those problems.” (03/26/26)
“Here’s a good rule of thumb, both for understanding foreign policy and also for life in general: When someone offers a bunch of rapid-fire and mutually irreconcilable justifications for a controversial decision, they’re not telling you the whole story. William Shakespeare might have invoked letting slip the dogs of war to describe the unleashing of violence, but these days we just ‘wag the dog.’ Popularized by Our American Cousin — the play being performed at Ford’s Theatre when President Abraham Lincoln was shot — the phrase took on an explicitly political meaning after the ripped-from-the-headlines 1997 film Wag the Dog. In that otherwise pretty awful movie, a fabricated military conflict was used to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. Since then, the term has become shorthand for the idea that leaders sometimes use military action to divert attention from problems at home.” (03/26/26)
“American officials and commentators are outraged that Moscow would stoop so low, helping another country to — cue manifold expressions of fury and outrage — kill U.S. military personnel. (Some have also claimed that Russia provided intelligence to the Yemeni Houthis targeting Western merchantmen and American warships in the Red Sea, and, less credibly, paid the Taliban to kill Americans in Afghanistan.) Such critics of Moscow are like Captain Renault, who famously discovered gambling occurring at Rick’s Café Américain in the movie Casablanca. Shocking! Shut the establishment! Those demanding action offer few helpful suggestions, preferring, for instance, to call on the administration to ‘respond with clarity and resolve.’ Meaning what, precisely? Perhaps provide financial and military support to Moscow’s adversary, even planning the latter’s battlefield operations. Oh, wait! That is what Washington has been doing for years.” (03/26/26)
“The Israeli-American attack on Iran has been defined more than anything by the nonsensical nature of the messaging, with statements listing any number of potential goals. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump, always eccentric and erratic, has been ranting about an endless variety of topics, with each day bringing about new unhinged statements. It is as if we have watched the White House become a Greek tragedy before our very eyes, with Donald Trump in the role of a mad king. This represents an incredible fall for a man who defeated all of his opponents and orchestrated the greatest comeback in American political history. However, his advanced age and hubris seem to have got the best of him. Trump must on some level know that his attack on Iran was a strategic disaster, hence his spiraling behavior.” (03/26/26)
Source: Foreign Policy
by Aliona Hlivco & Dalibor Rohac
“The Trump administration has been roundly criticized for a lack of clarity in its war aims and strategy. What is perhaps even more striking is the lack of imagination, by both the civilian and the military leadership, in grappling with the prospect of countering asymmetric drone warfare. The economics of the drone war are currently lopsided by several orders of magnitude. Shooting down $20,000 drones with a limited stock of multimillion-dollar interceptors is unsustainable when the United States faces a comparatively puny adversary, such as Iran; it becomes completely unthinkable in a situation in which the U.S. military would have to fight off a larger adversary with a massive drone supply, such as China or Russia.” (03/26/26)
“This month, three democracy-tracking organizations released analyses of the state of political, press, and personal freedoms around the world. The title of one report, ‘The Growing Shadow of Autocracy,’ sums up a shared view about backsliding on all these fronts. Yet the data and perspectives also reveal progress – especially in the enduring and widespread appeal of democratic ideals and values. Looking back at 2025, the Sweden-based Variety of Democracies Institute, known as V-Dem, counts 44 countries worldwide that it says are ‘autocratizing,’ including the United States. In particular for the U.S., V-Dem cites recent ‘attacks on the press, academia, civil liberties, and dissenting voices.’ On the other hand, the Dartmouth College-based Bright Line Watch finds that declining views of American democracy from earlier in 2025 have ‘largely stabilized’, and public opinion now shows ‘mild optimism.'” (03/25/26)
“It is reasonable to imagine a wave of unease washing over the members of the Imperial Legislative Council in Delhi on 18 March 1919. The council had just rushed through the passing of what would be known as the Rowlatt Act, named after the chair of its producing committee, which extended the wartime powers of the police to make use of normally extra-judicial measures to curb civil unrest. Indian soldiers played a decisive role in the British imperial forces, and there was a widespread expectation that India ought to become more self-governing as part of the settlement in the postwar period. However …” (03/26/26)
“My main qualification for talking about personal identity is that I have been around for long enough to have thought quite a lot about my own identity. I hope that what I have to say will interest other people. In any case, writing this podcast script should also help me to remember what I have learned about myself. Rather than meander through the circuitous history of my thinking, I will focus here on what I now consider to be a sensible approach to the topic. I will begin by discussing the most superficial aspects of personal identity and will end up considering whether your identity would be retained if your consciousness was uploaded into a machine.” (03/26/26)
“The joint US-Israeli killing of Iranian leaders on February 28th marked the second time in a year that the United States had used negotiations as a decoy for a surprise attack. On the pattern of Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, our own invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. under President Trump has indeed launched a criminal war of aggression. The run-up to the war, however, followed a discernible pattern. Throughout the months preceding it, the Trump administration was testing the American public’s tolerance for just such an adventure. First came the drone killings of alleged ‘narco-terrorists’ on boats in the Caribbean Sea; then, the kidnapping of the President of Venezuela; and finally, the seizure of oil tankers said to originate from Venezuela (an act of piracy by any other name).” (03/26/26)
