Sharon
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sharonk.bsky.social
Sharon
@sharonk.bsky.social
37K followers 7K following 43K posts
political theologian at the ministry for the future

interests: classics, history, philosophy, conflict + IR, economics, foreign policy, climate change, east asia (korea + japan)

words: Foreign Policy + LiberalCurrents
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sharonk.bsky.social
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors Mankind would have been spared by him who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out in kind: Beware of listening to this impostor; You are lost if you forget that the fruits are everyone’s and the Earth no one’s. jean jacques rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (trans. Victor Gourevich; 1755)
November 23, 2025 at 3:31 AM
sharonk.bsky.social
yang's read of thiel is sort of fascinating
Balfour doesn’t understand, but he also doesn’t care. After the main text, many smaller addenda follow: This is why I’ve said before that the Maverick campaign matters. If 3rd party voting becomes something that people do, it will explode. Hatred of the other side is currently the only reason people vote for their own parties. That system seems locked and intractable. But a single crack can suddenly blind with its light. Politicians in general are scapegoats. We give them power exactly so we can blame them for all of our sins. This is the line we must ride. The appeal of Cooper Sherman and the Maverick Party is that they’re outside of the rancor and stupidity. We must put them inside the violence. Mission: Scapegoat.
November 23, 2025 at 1:18 AM
sharonk.bsky.social
when i've read most of the books people have recommended to me in the replies:
fine i'll do it myself
November 22, 2025 at 8:30 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
was Nuzzi... working on pre-launching her and Mark?
November 22, 2025 at 7:31 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
November 22, 2025 at 6:33 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
red mirror shades
November 22, 2025 at 6:07 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
Trump touching ear
November 22, 2025 at 4:57 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
he also wrote a novel where he dunks on Peter Thiel
A smiling nurse behind a reception desk greets him. “Mr. Sevre is expecting you, Mr, Balfour. His treatment is about to end, and he can see you then.” “T didn’t know Sevre was sick.” She smiles condescendingly. “Oh, he’s not sick.” “I don’t know what you mean.” “This is a radical life-extension lab.” “I thought this was Mr. Sevre’s home.” “It’s become a home to him. We deal in mitochondrial renewal,” Balfour vaguely remembers a story in Wired: Sevre, among his vast businesses and political entanglements, is a leading amortalist, He believes he can buy his way out of death. While Balfour waits, he looks up the story on his phone. Sevre is only a reference in a single paragraph: “The most serious of the ‘anti-deathists’ is Max Sevre, tech billionaire and conservative activist. He owns and operates a longevity campus with a single patient: himself, He pioneered the use of the diabetes medication Metformin and cell-scraping to reduce senescence caused by mitochondrial decline. He fights intellectual as well as physical decline. A team of personal mental coaches create a ‘very difficult’ problem for him to solve which uses a different neural pathway every day.” Money is wonderful, Balfour thinks. It allows the generation of so much astonishing waste.
November 22, 2025 at 2:48 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
checking on what Andrew Yang is publishing now
Hey Yang, Where's My Thousand Bucks?
November 22, 2025 at 2:39 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
lmao Dort
A sitting U.S. Senator: “….pick a fucking side.” Children. Mere children. Playing with fire while the rest of us are doused in gasoline. Previous generations got: “United we stand, divided we fall.” We get: “Pick a fucking side.”
November 22, 2025 at 1:34 AM
sharonk.bsky.social
this image lives in my mind rent free

can't believe this was made in earnest

truly one of the images of all time
postliberal boy summer
November 22, 2025 at 1:15 AM
sharonk.bsky.social
every MAGA pundit:
WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?
November 21, 2025 at 11:31 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
Trump if Mamdani was WH chief of staff:
November 21, 2025 at 9:25 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
chat did this "100%" happen
. Elon Musk recently announced that Tesla will be offering a freight truck as of November 2017. Musk also proclaimed that by 2019, all new Teslas will be self-driving. “Your car will drop you off at work, and then it will pick other people up and make you money all day until it’s time to pick you up again,” Musk proclaimed. “This will 100 percent happen.”
November 21, 2025 at 7:39 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
lmao
November 21, 2025 at 5:22 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
"the UK Your Party lost another MP?"
[you've lost another submarine? image from Red October]
November 21, 2025 at 5:03 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
You're too online, okay? You've lost context.
November 21, 2025 at 4:05 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
lower prices plz
depressed wojak
November 21, 2025 at 3:59 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
it's going to be darkly funny to look back on this if the US gets into a conflict with Venezuela and ends up not realizing the levels of blowback from Hegseth leading the charge
We were doing a field problem, a company attack, out on the Drum range when the company commander summoned the platoon leaders to accompany him to the rear. The battalion commander had called for “Guidons” – that’s the company flag – and it meant that all the company leadership had to go back to the battalion headquarters. I figured it was for another ass-chewing about how we were screwing up, but instead, the battalion commander told his assembled officers that the President of the United States and the vice president had been assassinated and that we were on alert. He ordered us to pack our stuff and get back to garrison. It was shocking. We had no idea what we might be called upon to do, and it turned out we weren’t called on to do anything, not then. Things changed under the Holmes Administration very quickly. The hard-core guys who Pete Hegseth brought in started getting fired. “We are reimagining the military,” the new president told us. Our new Secretary of Defense was a 290-pound former sociology professor from Berkeley who announced that the US military was “too straight, too white, and too right.” Our brigade commander, an airborne Ranger with a Combat Infantry Badge, was replaced by a chubby female colonel named Little – we joked that even her name was a lie. She had no combat patch and hadn’t been branched Infantry until she transferred to the branch from the Adjutant General Corps a month before as part of the new initiative to “redefine combat arms.” She redefined it as something other than the combat arms; her first of many, many email memos to her command included her observations that “empathy is our most effective weapon system” and “diversity is a combat multiplier.”
November 21, 2025 at 3:01 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
guys this has to be seen to be believed
Every institution was failing. Every single one of them had lost its way. Let me give you an example. The military was America’s most respected institution, and it was corrupted. I was in Afghanistan, executive officer of an infantry battalion, second in command. My call sign was “Danger 5.” The colonel commanding was a West Pointer being groomed for stars – and in fact, he was a blue general during the war. He was about as effective then as he was in Afghanistan. We were tied up by rules of engagement and limitations on what we could do, and our men were getting killed because of it. We knew who was hitting us. He was sitting in a house across the border in Pakistan, every bit of knowledge about the enemy networks locked inside his head, and we couldn’t touch him. They hit one of our patrols, killed three of our guys, and I had it. I went over the border with a small team. We shot our way in, and then we shot our way out with our prisoner. I probably would’ve been court-martialed and still sitting in Leavenworth right now if there hadn’t been a Fox News reporter there with a camera crew who filmed us returning and put out the story. That got me some attention. I thought the colonel was going to have a stroke; he didn’t care that we caught the bastard who was killing our men. He cared that he wasn’t the guy in the spotlight. Typical woke Army. They weren’t sure whether to throw me in jail or pin a medal on me. President Trump came along and pinned the Medal of Honor on me, though it was my guys who did the real work. They’re the ones who deserve the credit. The brass was furious; they should’ve sent the warlord to the Afghans to be interrogated by people without any rules, but they decided to keep him, babied him, and got nothing out of him. It was all a waste. And so was my career. I knew that as soon as all the attention faded, I would be lucky if I was stationed in Adak, Alaska. I got out and went back to Mississippi. I have deep roots there on my father’s sid…
November 21, 2025 at 2:40 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
guys help if i keep reading this i'm going to run out of oxygen from laughing so hard
After George Floyd, there was a lot of pressure not to have any pro-law enforcement shows or movies. That led to Defunded, I Can’t Breathe, and I Can’t Breathe 2: Second Wind. We had to cancel production on The Police Puppies Movie; when we eventually made it, after the war was over, the puppy heroes Bitey and Barkey were sniffing out communists. I was always red in my heart, you know? That was always my political orientation. I was really proud of that film, and the folks in the government loved it. Plus, Alec Baldwin partially earned his rehabilitation certificate by voicing the villain, Dr. Pinko. Things started to get bad after the assassinations and when President Holmes went after the Republicans. Most of Hollywood was cheering her on when she banned GOP candidates and silenced people. I was totally against it. There was a sense that something bad was going to happen, and eventually, something did. You remember what happened to Rupert Metcalf, the actor who played FBI Special Agent Orlando Thaddeus Strong in the CBS show FBI: Insurrection Hunters? He was always out there in the media and on Twitter about how arresting right-wingers and banning Republican politicians was a great thing. And then, one day, he was at a stoplight on Rodeo Drive, and one of the red death squads shot him to pieces in his Aston Martin. That sent a chill through the industry. Things got real. And a lot of actors and others got real quiet.
November 21, 2025 at 2:34 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
the entire thing is a RW fever dream
As you know, President Trump forced us into a peace treaty. We won a victory holding the Russians off, but we had to settle for defeat. At least Putin hadn’t taken the entire country. We resented it. We are a proud people. We couldn’t demobilize immediately, but there was nowhere to go because the economy was shattered. I was more concerned with surviving than with the news that a civil war had broken out in America. Ukraine, of course, supported the blue forces. The red forces, your Republicans and conservatives, were associated with President Trump, who was associated with forcing us to capitulate to Vladimir Putin. Was it wise to pick a side? Our leaders had done so in the past, and when the power changed in Washington, the people we sided against felt no obligation to help us. Some people urged us to stay neutral, but anger won out, and we assisted the blue forces. Many of the things they did, like arresting opponents and banning them from office, were inconsistent with democratic principles, but who were we to talk? President Zelenskyy still holds office with emergency powers to this day.
November 21, 2025 at 2:22 PM
sharonk.bsky.social
LOL
The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system. The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.‌ The company‌ ‌pulled out in 2011. “There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.” Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.
November 21, 2025 at 4:50 AM
sharonk.bsky.social
[bush voice] is our fettermans learning
“I strongly reject this dangerous rhetoric,” Fetterman wrote on the social platform X. “Do not threaten Members of Congress. Republican or Democrat. It’s deeply wrong with no exceptions—ever.”
November 21, 2025 at 12:43 AM
sharonk.bsky.social
The New Right has concluded that to have any hope of forcing real change in the system, it must aim, as JD Vance once put it, to “genuinely overthrow the modern ruling class” by seizing the institutions from them. Only by delivering a decisive blow to the unity and control of the bureaucratic “deep state” through evicting swaths of the managerial class could the left’s structural power be successfully undermined. This is what the Trump administration set out to do, embracing Mr. Buchanan’s view that “only the White House has the discipline and resources to conduct siege warfare against the bureaucracy.” Hence the administration’s determination to reassert presidential authority over the administrative state, seeing this as an urgent restoration of democratic accountability. It has had some success, including in a recent case in which the Supreme Court tentatively sided with the administration’s challenge to Humphrey’s Executor, a New Deal-era precedent establishing the notion that agencies could operate independent of executive control. We shouldn’t expect this siege to be limited to government, though, because in a managerial system, there is no clear separation between public and private branches of elite power. To the administration, as Mr. Vance put it, “the universities are the enemy,” for example — not because they are independent bastions of free thought but precisely because they are no more independent than any other managerial institution, staffed by the same class of people with the same interests.
November 20, 2025 at 9:59 PM