Seva

Russia has a name for neighbors that aren’t supposed to have their own foreign policy: the Near Abroad. It’s a wonderfully dialectical term, each half negating the other to create an imperial synthesis that treats sovereignty as a plaything of the Russian imagination. new post

Really love @seva.bsky.social 's application of civ-mil and p-a to the problem of controlling AI, preventing the AI apocalypse even if he cites, gasp, Huntington hegemon.substack.com/p/were-all-g...

My interview with Yogendra Yadav: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

this is an excellent short piece - maybe the best I've seen on what Trump is doing to relations with allies. Western Europe is not, obviously, a geographic neighbor of the US, but it is stuck plumb in the middle of Trumpist's Near Abroad of the Imagination.

going to be in tokyo for a couple of weeks. the plan is to walk around aimlessly but if anyone has other suggestions I'll hear it

“This is AI’s promise to every autocratic ruler: the ability to maintain control without delegating tasks to unreliable humans,” write @seva.bsky.social and Bruce Schneier.

hegemon.substack.com/p/the-dictat...

new piece in Foreign Affairs with @schneier.com on how autocrats are using AI to deal with scheming viziers. free access t.co/4Acu9eQwSE

it's brutal. the two great prophets of international relations are now tim snyder and john mearsheimer, two men thoroughly captured by their own theories

we should let switzerland win one war...just to see...they've been so patient

a blasphemous comparison for some, but that’s part of Laruelle's point: they are two prophets opposed in substance but united in form a clever but unsatisfying analogy

first dolly parton now this

"You can’t entirely strip normative commitments out of cognition. The two process the world with moral certainty, and in that they share a temperament. Only one is a genocidal mystic." On point from Seva.

NATO condemns nuclear destruction of Berlin as a troubling escalation of Russian hybrid tactics

NATO nations have supported Ukraine since February 2022 and peace talks have rarely gotten anywhere. Nothing has changed except the war is more present "at home" for Russia. How does one escalate from genocide? Agree with Gabuev that risk of 🇷🇺 using tactical nuke is low. meduza.io/feature/2026...

responding to Marlene Laruelle's recent essay

...some forgotten street art from the early aughts

its kinda insane that marine mammals wound up as the ocean's apex predators. it turns out milk is so good evolutionarily that it trumps breathing water *in the ocean*

imagine the arrogance it takes to be a marine mammal. you crawl out of the vast dark ocean and onto green sunny land and decide to crawl back in again?

when I leave the airport lounge to go to my gate and it turns out the flight is delayed

looking for movies made for grownups that kids 4-8 would enjoy. things that have worked in the past: 2001 space odyssey fantastic mr fox 400 blows modern times the red balloon yellow submarine the spirit of the beehive others?

so tired of living in the ominous first ten minutes of a scifi movie. When do we get to the second act where me and a group of friends have an exciting adventure.

about to get controversial. an average pear is worse than an average apple, but a great pear is better than a great apple

Abraham Lincoln had that dawg in him. cc @peark.es @proptermalone.bsky.social @rickywlmsbong.bsky.social

by contrast, i think one of the most unexpected discoveries about LBJ is that, despite being famous for "the Johnson Treatment", he was very much a physical coward who, in college, would try to intimidate people with his height but then run away if his opponent refused to back down

About to go read the Gettysburg Address in my Macho Man voice.

2026: russian conscripts in the kill zone and british prime ministers battling over who can last longer

"Time is a flat circle" has to be the worst aphorism. Circles are two-dimensional they are flat by definition. jesus christ

There’s a common misconception that it’s easy to get into shark assassination, but it’s basically impossible if you aren’t independently wealthy or have family connections

the ideal academic life is being an eccentric Victorian lord. Invent a stamp licking machine at 22. Get elected to the Royal Academy for counting the beetles on your estate. Die in an arsenic explosion. The perfect life.

at this point if an undergrad asks about jobs in academia I nudge them toward something more practical like shark assassin

funny that 'mountain people' are now seen as tough and warlike considering they became mountain people only to escape the actually scary steppe people