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- Curtis Yarvin: A Life Against Democracy
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- Tournier on Desmond Ford
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- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
* Mr. Burge Draws The Line (6-23-26)
* 'Improving on Democracy' (6-17-26)
* People Leak To People Who Are Fun (6-11-26)
* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
* Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists (6-3-26)
* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
* Show Me How It Travels (6-2-26)
* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
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* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
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* What It Would Mean for The New York Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* Why Wembanyama Lives on the Perimeter (5-31-26)
* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* SF v LA Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles (5-27-26)
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Category Archives: Iran
Gurri’s Avalanche Has No Blueprint
Martin Gurri’s column arrives like the Category 5 hurricane he invokes. The post-Cold War rules-based order was never rules or order, he argues. It was a polite fiction masking American decline and elite self-preservation. Trump has torn the fiction away. … Continue reading
Posted in America, Elites, Expertise, Iran, Martin Gurri, Stephen Turner
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The Three Layers: Stephen Turner, Tacit Knowledge, and the War in Iran
Stephen P. Turner spent his career arguing against a comfortable assumption in the social sciences: that knowledge is a thing people possess, store, and transfer. His critique of practice theory cuts deeper than most readers realize. Knowledge is not a … Continue reading
Posted in Expertise, Iran, Stephen Turner
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Caldwell’s Premature Autopsy of Trumpism
Christopher Caldwell writes: Contrary to its portrayal in the newspapers, Trumpism was a movement of democratic restoration. At its center was the idea of the deep state. In recent decades, selective universities created a credentialocracy, civil-rights law endowed it with … Continue reading
Posted in America, Christopher Caldwell, Donald Trump, Iran
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Why isn’t the world convulsed with anti-American riots now given the Iran War?
The world knows about the Iran War. Protests have broken out from Karachi to London, from Baghdad to New Delhi. A U.S. consulate was breached in Karachi, leaving more than twenty people dead. Since Operation Epic Fury began on February … Continue reading
The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Elite Attention in the Iran War
The Iran war is not just a military conflict. It is a competition for attention among high-status actors. Journalists, think tanks, politicians, academics, and influencers are not merely analyzing events. They are competing to define what the war means, and … Continue reading
Posted in Elites, Epistemics, Expertise, Iran
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The Skittle Boy Problem: Weber, Bureaucracy, and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy
Max Weber never intended his analysis of the 1905 Russian crisis to serve as a forecast. He thought he was describing a limiting case, a political situation so extreme that it clarified the general mechanics of bureaucratic power in ways … Continue reading
The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Iran’s Master Institutions
Iran’s high-status actors do not compete for power by admitting they want it. They compete by invoking moral languages that make their authority appear sacred, necessary, or inevitable. This is the logic David Pinsof‘s Alliance Theory makes visible. Moral vocabularies … Continue reading
Posted in Iran
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Are any of the players around the Iran-Contra Affair Still Prominent?
Gemini says: Several figures from the Iran-Contra affair remain active in American foreign policy, law, and media. Elliott Abrams, who was an Assistant Secretary of State during the Reagan administration, continues to be an influential voice in conservative foreign policy. … Continue reading
Posted in Iran
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Decoding The Institute for National Security Studies
The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv sits at a particular point in Israel’s alliance ecosystem. If you look at it through David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, the key question is not “what is the think tank’s ideology?” … Continue reading
Is Iran Comfortable Now?
I see Iran experts such as Alex Vatanka (Middle East Institute) claim that Iran is comfortable where they are right now in this war. A Foreign Affairs podcast (March 2026) quotes analyst Nate Swanson: “Iran is very comfortable engaging in … Continue reading