noahpinion.blog

How we can beat China

The United States is simply too internally divided to engage in the sort of far-seeing, purposeful, smart kind of international competition that we pursued so effectively in the 20th century. Americans care more about fighting other Americans than about fighting the Chinese, and that state of affairs will persist for a while.

noahpinion.blog

MAGA's attack on science is even worse than it looks

When MAGA types tell you about scientists losing their credibility, or a drop in trust in science, they're only talking about themselves. Whatever left-wing politicization of science happened during the Biden administration — and there was definitely some of that — it was not enough to make most Republicans lose faith in the scientific enterprise, or favor research cuts in order to purge unwanted ideology from the system.

noahpinion.blog

The Democrats have their own MAGA now

Avila Chevalier is as much of an extremist as anyone associated with the MAGA movement. The best comparator on the right would probably be Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has made a long string of similarly extreme and wacky statements. My typical line is that "both extremes are bad, but the Republican extreme is worse". Avila Chevalier is severely testing that asymmetry.

longreads.com

Name of the Father

"Not everyone loved Jarrod's family history," explains Burchfield, Sr. "Like Ali, half of them came to see him win, the other half to see him lose."

wired.com

‘STAGED’: Conspiracy Theories Are Everywhere Following White House Correspondents' Dinner Shooting

The word "staged" exploded on social media following the attack, as both right and left-wing influencers and anonymous accounts spread unfounded conspiracy theories.

noahpinion.blog

Hasan Piker is bad for the Democrats

If the mainstream should always include extremists in the conversation — if gatekeeping is useless and counterproductive — then all you have to do in order to force extremist ideas into mainstream discourse is to grab some attention. If you get a Twitch stream or a podcast and you start screaming that the Holocaust was fake, or that the USSR was good, etc., and you manage to get a decently big audience by doing this, you should now have a say in how the country is run.

stratechery.com

2026.10: Higher Powers and Lower Macs

I find myself exhausted by the way everyone processes political controversies these days, including warnings about a dire American future that are now a daily occurrence online.