everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, and for the last five years or so, we have been extremely yip-y. I think the linchpin moment is the Andrews drop against the Titans in the 2019 playoffs...we have not been meaningfully the same team since.

you can see this unfold in real time—whenever a Bad Football Thing happens, all the players look immediately stunned and clueless. a whole sideline of hangdog expressions starting with Harbs down. zero fight or mental resilience. like they're looking for excuses to give up. after which we get rolled

the other component to this is lefties broadly viewing hard-power/Applied Int'l Relations types as potential ops/traitors, which ...is not totally unfounded. Agree, though, that the left lacks a cohesive theory of power and is poorer for it

well this team has caused me nothing but pain for years and I am somewhat glad to see it end. Fire everyone and start over

honestly the only heuristic i use is that trump’s adhd is a strong determinant of what is going on. if he focuses attention on something the chances of it happening go up

so one question here is why the hell are there DEA agents on board the Iwo Jima

Relatedly: can we find 218 votes to repeal the 2001 AUMF?

I think you don't—not directly. Rather, you take the HL Mencken approach:

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Trump's foreign policy is a chain of such 'answers'

Dems will use force prudently as an element of grand strategy—not as the strategy per se

man, I hate that he and I are members of the same diaspora

who could have imagined that halting nearly all federal contracting, mulching entire agencies, and engaging in 10 months of tariff flip-flops (read: "supply chain uncertainty") would have systemic effects

they don't need anyone to actually buy anything—they need theoretical future market expansions to justify future capital investment at gradually higher YoY valuations

[citation needed]

Maybe not precisely, but having been in collegiate political circles in the early aughts, the Venn diagram of "Young Republicans" and "IRL edgelords" was then almost a perfect circle. These people are in fact weird

Apologies—I'd argue that because most mainstream political journalism is beholden to existing in an ideological nowhere-space, where having concrete views is a hindrance, contrarianism (and its close cousin, nihilism) are somewhat natural results