“A bad idea doesn’t get better with age. Bad ideas aren’t wine, jeans, or your high school memories. The tax subsidies for the Post-Dispatch building redevelopment in downtown St. Louis were a bad idea back in 2019 when the development was proposed, and they are a bad idea now. Using tax subsidies for economic development rarely benefits the public. Instead, it lowers the risk and increases the returns for private investors.” (03/27/26)
“You host a website. Users can say whatever they want on this site. Next thing you know, a UK regulatory agency is sending you, an American organization based in the United States, a letter announcing a trillion-dollar fine for failure to comply with UK censorship demands. How much do you panic? If you’re 4chan, not much.” (03/27/26)
“The main theme in much writing on contemporary politics is how ideologically polarized Democrats and Republicans have become. But the truly consequential change is that Republicans have broken with their own past. Under Donald Trump, the party hasn’t just reversed its positions on specific policies. It has routinely betrayed basic tenets of the conservative philosophy that Republicans have long claimed was the bedrock of their party. No one is shocked by Trump’s betrayals. What is more surprising is that most Republicans haven’t seemed to care. I’ve been thinking about the Republican betrayal of the party’s own tradition because of a comment about my work by Glenn Loury, the conservative Black economist. When I was on The Glenn Show in December, he criticized my new book American Contradiction because of my ‘apparent disregard for the positive contributions of conservative thought and policy to American life.'” (03/27/26)
“The central risk of AI is not that machines will become malevolent. It is that human incentive structures, amplified by scalable technology, outrun our ability to govern them.” (03/27/26)
“As analysts have emphasized, Tehran ‘gets a vote’ as to when this war ends, and it doesn’t plan to stop until the U.S. and Israel learn that attacking Iran comes with high costs and shouldn’t be repeated in the future. The U.S., unable to hammer out an agreement, has been hammering Iran to coerce it to the negotiating table. … The Trump administration misunderstands the nature of the problem. To end the war, it needs to get tough not with America’s adversary, but with its cobelligerent: Israel.” (03/27/26)
“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)
