The two broad competing ideas of human politics are the cooperation game and the murder game.

The cooperation game: can you cooperate with enough people to gain the approval of the people and the right to govern them, and can your cooperation benefit the people enough to prove your ongoing right to wield the engine of governance? The cooperation game's strength is that it actually does result in human thriving and innovation and safety and security for increasing numbers of people. It's weakness is ... well. I'll get to it soon enough.

The murder game: can you harness the engine of murder long enough to seize the engine of governance, and use it to dominate the people and rob the value they create for yourself? This is also expressed as "might makes right," which is the explicit foreign and domestic policy of the Republican Party. The murder game's weakness is that it is based on vile unsustainable lies, and will eventually eat itself with its own cruelty and ignorance and murderous wrath. Its strength is that it can murder people playing the cooperation game, as long as those playing the cooperation game go on cooperating with them.

If all parties involved in a political system are playing the cooperation game, then the cooperation game will work very well, to the extent that everyone wishes to use the engine of governance to benefit the people who are governed—that is to say, to the extent everyone is playing the cooperation game.

If any one of the parties involved starts playing the murder game, the cooperation game breaks, and a different game begins. Republicans are currently playing the murder game, and have been doing so for many decades—less obviously at first, perhaps, but now very openly, very obviously, very blatantly. At this point, it's just armed death squads summarily executing U.S. civilians.

One of the many unsettling images to emerge from the recent ICE surge in Minneapolis was that of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, in his blue bunny hat, standing in the January cold with the hand of a federal officer gripping his Spider-Man backpack.

Liam and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, an asylum seeker from Ecuador, were taken from Minnesota to Texas and held at a detention facility outside San Antonio. Lawyers working on their behalf filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, an ancient judicial principle forbidding the government from holding anyone in custody without providing a legally tenable reason for doing so. On Saturday, Fred Biery, a federal judge in Texas’ Western District, granted their petition, freeing them.

Over the past few months, President Trump has deployed an imposing military force in the Caribbean to threaten Venezuela. Until now, the president used that force — an aircraft carrier, at least seven other warships, scores of aircraft and 15,000 U.S. troops — for illegal attacks on small boats that he claimed were ferrying drugs. On Saturday, Mr. Trump dramatically escalated his campaign by capturing President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela as part of what he called “a large scale strike” against the country.

Few people will feel any sympathy for Mr. Maduro. He is undemocratic and repressive, and has destabilized the Western Hemisphere in recent years. The United Nations recently issued a report detailing more than a decade of killings, torture, sexual violence and arbitrary detention by henchmen against his political opponents. He stole Venezuela’s presidential election in 2024. He has fueled economic and political disruption throughout the region by instigating an exodus of nearly eight million migrants.

If there is an overriding lesson of American foreign affairs in the past century, however, it is that attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse. The United States spent 20 years failing to create a stable government in Afghanistan and replaced a dictatorship in Libya with a fractured state. The tragic consequences of the 2003 war in Iraq continue to beset America and the Middle East. Perhaps most relevant, the United States has sporadically destabilized Latin American countries, including Chile, Cuba, Guatemala and Nicaragua, by trying to oust a government through force.

Mr. Trump has not yet offered a coherent explanation for his actions in Venezuela. He is pushing our country toward an international crisis without valid reasons. If Mr. Trump wants to argue otherwise, the Constitution spells out what he must do: Go to Congress. Without congressional approval, his actions violate U.S. law.

Well, this fucking sucks. A federal judge has decided that Meta is not a monopolist, and that its acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp were not an illegal bid to secure and maintain a monopoly:

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This is particularly galling because Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly, explicitly declared that these mergers were undertaken to reduce competition, which is the only circumstance in which pro-monopoly economists and lawyers say that mergers should be blocked.

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The one exception these monsters of history were willing to make to their pro-monopoly posture was this: if a corporation undertakes a merger because they are seeking a monopoly, then the government should step in and stop them. This is a great standard to come up with if what you really want to do is nothing, because how can you know why a company truly wants to buy another company? Who can ever claim to know what is in another person's heart?

This is a great wheeze if you want to allow as many monopolies as possible, unless the guy who's trying to get that monopoly is Mark Zuckerberg, because Zuck is a man who has never had a criminal intention he did not immediately put to writing and email to someone else.

This is the guy who put in writing the immortal words, "It is better to buy than to compete," and "what we’re really buying is time," and who described his plans to clone a competitor's features as intended to get there "before anyone can get close to their scale again":

When Jeffrey Epstein — a man whose soul resembled a clogged hotel drain — calls you “evil beyond belief,” you’ve officially left the zip code of standard human depravity and wandered into a neighborhood where even the streetlights refuse to turn on.

Epstein did not traffic in ethics. He trafficked in everything but ethics. So when he looks at Trump and mutters that phrase, it’s not a judgment — it’s a field report from the Mariana Trench of humanity.

Have you ever felt like the government doesn’t really care what you think?

Professors Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University) looked at more than 20 years worth of data to answer a simple question: Does the government represent the people?

Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all.

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Does public opinion affect the political process? Gilens & Page found that the number of Americans for or against any idea has no impact on the likelihood that Congress will make it law.

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” — Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics

Every now and then…a political moment arrives that feels less like a headline…
and more like a pressure plate being stepped on.

You hear the click.

You feel the ground tense.
And for one long second…the whole country holds its breath because deep down… everyone knows:

A line has been crossed.

This weekend…the longest shutdown in American history grinding on like a dying engine…eight members of the Senate Democratic Caucus…walked across the aisle and helped Republicans advance a temporary spending bill.

Countries that slide from democracy toward autocracy tend to follow similar patterns. To measure what is happening in the United States, the Times editorial board has compiled a list of 12 markers of democratic erosion, with help from scholars who have studied this phenomenon. The sobering reality is that the United States has regressed, to different degrees, on all 12.

Our country is still not close to being a true autocracy, in the mold of Russia or China. But once countries begin taking steps away from democracy, the march often continues. We offer these 12 markers as a warning of how much Americans have already lost and how much more we still could lose.

“Pollingism” Has Failed Democrats and Voters. Here’s Why, and What to Do Instead

In the now-stale takes about how Democrats lost their electoral way and scuffles around their best present course, leading operatives are brandishing the same compass that led them astray last time. In assessing how to strike back at Republicans and lay tracks for the midterms, what remains unexplored in the data-laden dives are the assumptions about what works to win hearts, minds, and elections in the first place. Not to mention the reason for wanting those wins: to enact the agenda you believe in or, at the very least, blunt the authoritarian assault against Americans now underway.

There are two vastly different ideas about what it takes to achieve political victory, but only one gets real airtime in Democratic circles. This leaves us trapped in circular reasoning, arguing over permutations of a singular strategy. These arguments might look like significant beefs over what Dems should say, to whom, and by what means. But examinations of what went wrong, how to act now, and what to do next fail to even consider the methodology behind these decisions.

The dominant Democratic model views voters as rational individuals who make electoral decisions, including whether to vote at all, based on their conscious preferences about issues. Advocates of this model believe that polling outcomes within controlled survey environments equate to real-world success — that “winning” in testing corresponds to winning in the real world. Although it’s known by other names, the most apt moniker is Pollingism, as it assumes voters’ issue preferences are static, discernible via polling, and hold ultimate, if not exclusive, sway over their voting behaviors and candidate selections. Pollingism does not come with a set agenda for governance; it relies on discerning voters’ registered preferences because it views the political task as winning elections and treats the work of governance as something to be hashed out later.

Pollingism proponents believe that data “shows what voters really think, not what people who work in politics wish they thought.” (Nevermind that the proponents making this claim work in politics.) In their minds, the data have set them free from their biases, including holding fixed stances on right and wrong. The trouble with this is that data aren’t conjured but rather solicited and analyzed according to the assumptions of data collectors. In other words, you only get answers to the questions you ask. And you only get reactions to the ads you produce. And you only assess impacts in the artificial environments you construct. And you only apply findings according to your theory of how humans come to judgments.