Baktash Ahadi: "Before long, U.S. troops will be back in Afghanistan, and for the same reason we invaded in 2001 ..."
\n" }, { "id": "1630299290", "url": "http://faisal.com/a/2021/08/30/1630299290.html", "title": "Force, Future and Thinking Seriously About How Governments Fall", "date_published": "2021-08-30T04:54:50+00:00", "content_html": "Josh Marshall: "The control exercised by an occupying military or a state is always an interplay between current force and force played out into and expected in the future."
\n" }, { "id": "cleverness", "url": "http://faisal.com/a/2021/08/05/cleverness.html", "title": "Clever Vs. Insightful Code", "date_published": "2021-08-05T16:52:35+00:00", "content_html": "Hillel Wayne: "Regardless of the other merits of their argument, they’re all arguing from the perspective of an expert. Experts are more easily able to work around problems. This doesn’t mean their arguments are wrong, nor does it mean they shouldn’t rely on their insight. It’s just something we have to be conscious about."
\n" }, { "id": "the-box", "url": "http://faisal.com/a/2021/06/13/the-box.html", "title": "On Marc Levinson and His \"The Box That Changed the World\": Hoisted from the Archives", "date_published": "2021-06-13T03:43:43+00:00", "content_html": "Brad DeLong: "The world is certainly not 'flat,' as the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman believes. But, in an economic sense, it is extremely small for non-perishable, non-fragile goods. Every modern factory with outgoing volume large enough for container traffic and a suitable loading dock is next door to every modern warehouse with similar features."
\n" }, { "id": "1623296834", "url": "http://faisal.com/a/2021/06/10/1623296834.html", "title": "Just mention “WWDC” in a blog post this week to unlock it.", "date_published": "2021-06-10T03:47:14+00:00", "content_html": "Manton Reese — because I once asked an acquaintance Douglas Hofstadter's to ask for the definition of recursion and let me know the reply.
\n" }, { "id": "predatory-precarity", "url": "http://faisal.com/a/2021/05/22/predatory-precarity.html", "title": "Predatory precarity", "date_published": "2021-05-22T20:26:44+00:00", "content_html": "Steve Randy Waldman: "If you cut doctors’ salaries in half tomorrow, they would have to sell their mortgaged, absurdly expensive homes. At half their present salary, doctors would no longer be able to afford to live amongst 'peer' professions like lawyers, management consultants, middling corporate executives, and the employees of surveillance monopolists. Doctors would fall precipitously from the social class, embedded in geography and consumption habits, to which many of them even now cling only precariously. More calamitously, they would lose the capacity to produce or reproduce membership in that social class for their children, often the most expensive amenity American professionals seek to purchase."
\n" }, { "id": "the-quiet-end", "url": "http://faisal.com/a/2021/05/19/the-quiet-end.html", "title": "The Bombs That Never Went Off", "date_published": "2021-05-19T08:52:12+00:00", "content_html": "David Frum: "Yet newsworthy or not, you have been living more safely these past three decades thanks to the Nunn-Lugar program—and thanks to the hard work of hundreds of career federal employees whose names you will never know."
\n" }, { "id": "tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept", "url": "http://faisal.com/a/2021/05/14/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept.html", "title": "Tolerance is not a moral precept", "date_published": "2021-05-14T03:37:57+00:00", "content_html": "Yonatan Zunger: "Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats. It means that we accept that people may be different from us, in their customs, in their behavior, in their dress, in their sex lives, and that if this doesn’t directly affect our lives, it is none of our business. But the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact."
\n" }, { "id": "herd-immunity-elusive", "url": "http://faisal.com/a/2021/05/05/herd-immunity-elusive.html", "title": "Herd Immunity Is Humanity’s Great Hope, and It’s Proving Elusive", "date_published": "2021-05-05T01:34:57+00:00", "content_html": "Bloomberg: "...died down once they’d burned through a certain percentage of a herd, so long as new animals weren’t introduced." ... "Humans aren’t cows"
\n" }, { "id": "vaccinations-are-plateauing", "url": "http://faisal.com/a/2021/05/02/vaccinations-are-plateauing.html", "title": "Vaccinations are plateauing. Don't blame it on 'resistance'", "date_published": "2021-05-02T19:24:59+00:00", "content_html": "STAT: "In fact, 'having more information' is the single most important concern expressed by those unsure about the Covid-19 vaccine, according to almost every poll that asks this question."
\n" } ] }