So, for example, take the bet that the US and Iran will agree to a permanent peace deal by a specific date, where the options for dates are April 22, April 30, May 31, and June 30. How would one judge that? The rules state it as follows.

This market will resolve to “Yes” if Iran and the United states agree to a permanent peace deal by the specified date, 11:59 PM ET. Otherwise, this market will resolve to “No”.

A permanent peace deal refers to any agreement which explicitly indicates that military hostilities between the United States and Iran have ended or will permanently cease, or uses equivalent language clearly signaling a lasting end to military hostilities between the United States and Iran. Agreements that are explicitly temporary or which do not include a definitive agreement to end military hostilities between the US and Iran on a lasting basis (e.g. a temporary extension of the two-week ceasefire agreement announced on April 7, 2026), will not qualify.

A qualifying agreement will be considered to have been established if either of the following conditions are met:

– The United States and Iran each sign or formally adopt a written agreement (e.g. a treaty or multi-point agreement) which meets the above criteria.

– Both the governments of the United States and Iran provide clear public confirmation that a qualifying agreement has been definitively established. Negotiations, statements of progress, or other statements which do not constitute a definitive announcement that a qualifying agreement has been reached will not count.

The primary resolution source for this market will be official information from the governments of the United States and Iran; however, a consensus of credible reporting may also be used.

I can see many points of contention that can arise. The words ‘explicit’, ‘clear’, and ‘definitive’ are all open to interpretation. The sources for resolution as stated in the last sentence is also problematic. In the case of the US, Trump is notoriously fickle and a liar, who can say one thing and then switch to the opposite without compunction.. Hence any statement from him is not worth anything. But what about ‘credible’ reporting? Furthermore, this kind of thing is ripe for people with insider information to bet on that knowledge, And we know that the venality that runs through the Trump circle will not hesitate to use it.

As a result of this kind of ambiguity, it can lead to aggrieved bettors who lose a lot becoming disgruntled.

“Horekunden” was rapidly losing patience.

His frustration was with the Institute for the Study of War, a US thinktank which produces a daily map of the frontline in Ukraine.

For Horekunden, and other anonymous gamblers, the map was a “disjointed, incoherent mess … like the painting of a five-year-old”. Therefore it was no use to them in their aim: to settle a bet on the online prediction market Polymarket.

The map they were unhappy with depicted the city of Kostyantynivka, which Ukrainian troops have been holding for five months amid shelling and swarms of drones. Thousands of civilians still live there.

There is now more than $500,000 (£371,000) staked on whether Russia will capture Kostyantynivka this year . These bets will be settled if the ISW releases a map showing Russia holds the city’s train station.
…

But longtime users say it increasingly resembles a casino – where everything, from Trump’s fury to the second coming of Jesus Christ can be monetised. So where they can, players in this powerful “casino” have started trying to shape the world to secure a payday.

Some may resort to threats of violence to change the outcome.

Polymarket gamblers recently threatened an Israeli journalist, demanding he change his copy so that they could win a bet over whether Iran had struck Israel on a given day. Experts say that users on Polymarket might be able to manipulate broader markets, with effects that could ripple out to institutions and pension funds.

Now that gambling has become legal in the US, the existence of apps on one’s phone where one can place bets at any time means that it has become so easy to bet that we have seen an explosion in the number of ways that people can gamble and the things that they can gamble on. It has resulted in a raising of the stakes as people bet more than they can afford and where losing can be devastating.

In the early days of the 20th century, organized crime was heavily involved in gambling because it could generate huge amounts of revenue for the people running the gambling operations with very little overhead costs. There were no tangible goods like drugs and stolen merchandise to be moved around, lowering the risk of apprehension. I suspect that it is only a matter of time before crime syndicates enter these new betting markets and then try to ‘work the refs’ in much more effective ways than hapless individuals. I would be surprised it it has not happened already.

As always, gambling is a mug’s game where the odds are almost always stacked against you.

Normally, I’d say that Sam Altman deserves any pushback he gets. But the AI hatred seems to be getting a little too intense.

On the morning of Friday, April 10th, a 20 year-old Texas man named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama was arrested for allegedly throwing a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s mansion on Russian Hill in San Francisco. Less than two days later, police arrested 25 year-old Amanda Tom and 23 year-old Muhamad Tarik Hussein for allegedly firing a gun at the same house from their car before speeding away.

Earlier the same week, and thousands of miles away, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots into the front door of city councilman Ron Gibson, who had just voted to approve a new data center in Indianapolis against a groundswell of public outcry. A sign that read “NO DATA CENTERS” was left tucked under the doormat.

I can understand why all the AI-hate: data centers are environmental catastrophes, they represent a gross invasion of our privacy, they don’t seem to contribute much of value to society, but wow, they sure help improve billionaires profits. Unfortunately, in addition to a rational opposition, there are also crackpots with bizarre paranoid fantasies.

Little is known about the motives of Tom or Hussein, or the politics of the Indianapolis shooter, but reporters and the online commentariat quickly dredged up Moreno-Gama’s Discord chats and Substack posts. He was a reader of rationalist and AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky, who argues, as the title of his last book puts it, if Silicon Valley builds a “superintelligent” AI, “everyone dies.”

Yeah, if you’re citing Yudkowski, you’re a victim of extreme derangement. I guess it’s predictable that if your reaction is to throw molotov cocktails at people’s houses, you’re probably not building your case on a sound foundation. AI is not superintelligent, or even intelligent at all, it’s a tool that can be used by bad people to do bad things. Unfortunately, it’s also the case that AI proponents have built up this gigantic edifice of hype, pumping up the imagined power of AI to the point that they are actively asserting that it might lead to the end of humanity.

If you take at face value what the AI executives themselves have been saying for the last decade, that an AI powerful enough to make humans go extinct is nascent, then acting with force to stop it would be a rational action. The AI industry and its executives—including Sam Altman—need to own this outcome, not blame it on Yudkowsky, safety researchers, or worried activists who take what they say literally.

That’s fair. The people who have pumped up the hype are reaping what they have sown.

The nonsense promoted by the Less Wrong crowd isn’t the real danger, though. This is the real danger:

Inequality is through the roof. A bona fide tech oligarchy is ascendent, buffeted by leverage provided by AI. Its data centers, which bring few jobs and hike electricity bills, are enraging communities on the right and the left. Slop is everywhere. AI-generated art and text is undercutting creatives, powered by pirated, non-consensually ingested work. Employers from Amazon to Block to Duolingo to Meta are firing tens of thousands of workers and citing AI as the reason. AI may one day cure cancer, we’re told; great, even if we believe that, who will be able to afford the treatment?

That’s the anger fueling the anti-AI violence. To the handwringing AI industry insiders blaming doomers and poor messaging, ordinary people are saying: Wake up. We have good reason to hate AI and the people who profit from it. And yes, as people get desperate, as young people increasingly feel like AI elites have mortgaged their future, as residents who vote to regulate AI or ban local data center projects only to see their will overridden in favor of industry interests—well how do you expect them to feel? What do you expect? There is a distinct risk of further escalation.

If I had the opportunity to vote to stop the construction of a local data center, I’d take it, no question. I’m not at the point of throwing molotov cocktails, though. At the rate this country is falling apart at the hands of the oligarchs, give me a year to come around.

Following persistent social media speculation, as well as a November 30, 2025, call from Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to release Donald Trump’s MRI results from his October visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (via Twitter), reporters aboard Air Force One pressed the president to clarify the reason for the advanced imaging. Trump said he didn’t know which part of his body was scanned, but insisted, “It wasn’t the brain, because I took a cognitive test and I aced it.”

I think that a legitimate part of a cognitive test would be to put the person in a massive clanking, clunking machine on a dolly that shuffles them back and forth and ask them what was scanned. If they don’t know, they failed it. Amazingly, I’ve had two MRIs this past year, once for my head and once for my knee, and I knew exactly what they were for every step of the way.

I am pleased to know what the purpose of the president’s MRI was, finally.

President Trump undergoes MRI of rectum to determine just how many Republicans remain firmly wedged there.

We still don’t know the number, though. I’m sure it was huge, really huge, the biggest crowd ever.

This is news to make a professor shudder: a university closing its doors.

A Massachusetts liberal arts college is set to close permanently due to low enrollment and financial problems.

The board of trustees of Hampshire College, a small liberal arts school in Amherst founded in 1965, pointed to “financial pressures” that have been “compounded by shifting external factors”.

Universities have been under attack for decades, thanks to our ‘friends’ in the Republican party. Authoritarians and conservatives hate new ideas and helping people rise up out of poverty, and they’ve been whittling away at support for universities, throwing so much debt onto the shoulders of our students. The pandemic hit many colleges hard, too.

Hampshire College hits a little bit close to home. It was a little smaller in enrollment than UMM, my school, and was founded a bit more recently. It was also a liberal arts college, like mine. It differed in some significant ways. According to Wikipedia:

The college utilizes an alternative curriculum, with an emphasis on progressive pedagogy and self-directed academic concentrations, a focus on portfolios rather than distribution requirements, and a reliance on narrative evaluations instead of grades and GPAs.

That’s interesting and I appreciate innovative education, but it does make the work of that university harder. UMM has a more traditional curriculum, but we’ve also struggled over the past few years. Our enrollment bottomed out about two years ago — which is why my senior level genetics course has only 8 students this year, rather than the 30-40 I used to see. (We’re working ourselves out of this hole right now — my fall courses are fully enrolled already, and we may have to pack more students into the class.)

The situation of Hampshire College is a reminder that the situation of all universities in this country is precarious.

So, it looks like Turnip has completely blown the cover of an extremely expensive op that was going to be concealed as a ballroom with cost and labor overruns, while building a new continuity of government/nuclear bunker AKA “bolthole for the idiots who started a nuclear war.” This all started to go into overdrive during the Eisenhower administration. That was when Camp David was turned into a nuclear bunker (or, more precisely, the golf course covers a nuclear bunker). You can learn a lot more about this in the book [wc] Raven Rock, which does not talk much about Raven Rock, but talks a lot about Mt Weather, and Camp David and The Greenbrier. The Greenbrier, now, is mostly declassified and you can even visit it. It’s on my list of things to do, someday, but I am trying to find suitable company – you can’t go to that kind of place alone, you need someone with you who can look at the hinges you are pointing to and nod and whisper, “overpressure relief.”

How big are these places? Humongous. Raven Rock and Mount Weather are not declassified, yet, but – for example Greenbrier is humongous. There is a similar large “continuity of government” called Dienstelle Marienthal which has been beautifully documented in black and white by Andreas Magdanz, who managed to visit it with a large-format black and white camera. There’s a book, which will run between $250 and $2500 on ebay depending on the serial number. Magdanz’ exposures and prints are really high quality, and his compositions are excellent (as a photographer, that’s a compliment: I know he had a tripod in there, and given those facts it’d be hard to do a bad photo) Given the content, it’s creep-o-rama. I’m happy he was there, but I have some envy, it’s a great subject. His photos are good, and he got a show at the MoMA. (Hey, the rungs of the art world are bloody and competitive, too) – it’s a big deal to be one of the early photographers in a special spot. [Hey, I visited Chernobyl before it was generally open, but never pushed for a show]

a regular photo of a non-important person bunk in the greenbrier

The big thing about the destruction of the East Wing is that they are going to secretly build a bolt-hole for presidents. When I was in high school, a bunch of us played a lot of Ultimatum, and we had a huge litany of fallout shelter jokes, before Bethesda Games even existed. One of the jokes was that there was a big sign over the entry to the presidential bunker, which read, “you fucked up.” Personally, I remain deeply puzzled that anyone would have bothered to rescue, specifically, the subordinates that they otherwise planned to leave behind. I have no doubt that the president’s helicopter pilots will get their useless piece of shit cargo to Raven Rock in one piece so that, what, who, huh, why? Raven Rock is intended to instantly host a classified number of people for a classified period of time. To my knowledge there are no photos published of the interior.

A normal people’s room at Dienstelle Marienthal. (Andreas Magdanz)

I hope someone can, someday, publish a portfolio of art photos taken inside Jeff Bezos Bunker (“The Azunker”) (and the “facebunker”). I’ve done a lot of reading about nuclear winter and I do not want to live through it. Nor do I want to live through a nuclear strike. [Does anyone want me to discuss exit plans?] If there is a nuclear war, I will probably try to live a while, if only to spitefully shoot some of my [undisclosed] neighbors. It really won’t matter, until nuclear winter kicks in, but I want them to know who done it. I don’t want the people at Raven Rock to think they got away with something, either, since it’s almost certain the piece of garbage they are protecting is the one who ordered the whole menu.

On the other hand, can you imagine being stuck underground with Stephen Miller, and not slowly and artistically vivisecting him just to get him to shut the fuck up? You know that the only thing that will shut that guy up is a .45 in the face. In his case, I’d start with his toes while we discussed the flaws in Nietzsche’s theory of the ubermensch. That’s a complicated argument, but basically: David Hume. Etc. I have always wanted to see a movie where the villain has the victim immbolized and says, “so, I understand you’re an objectivist. Are you the nihilist sort or the liberal sort? i.e.: should I just shoot you because of the random nature of the universe, or should we talk a while so you display that moral calculus to me and then I shoot you?” Isn’t this weird to even contemplate: being hundreds of feet underground while humanity on the surface is ash interrupting the rain-fall, and we’re arguing Nietzsche? Ah, screw it and let me show you me precision shooting. It’s impressively tight. The only creatures worthy to survive into the bunkers are dogs.

There’s the Greenbrier. It turns up in great detail in the Fallout games by Bethesda. That massive edifice, between the wings, to a depth of 6 storeys is a bunker. It was built in the era when a full-up nuclear exchange would take 45 minutes. Can we share a collective boggle over that? A bunch of gormless congresspeople expected to ride out armageddon down there while the rest of us fried and then they’d climb out and bitch that the NASDAQ was down.

Just in case any of you haven’t caught on, yet, the Cliquot-and-caviar set expects service to continue uninterrupted. They are, of course, wrong. The effects from the ash cloud from a nuclear war (AKA: “nuclear winter”) will not cancel out global warming, they will synergise into “global fuckage” and we need to do a better job of talking about “deep time.” Deep time is 100,000 years. Global climate change will last 100,000 to 250,000 years. The Cliquot in Bezos’ bunker will run out before that. But I still hope someone bulldozes dirt over the entrances so he has time to think long and hard. If I could, I’d send him a copy of Schopenhauer or Kant, first, so he dies miserable and mystified.

That’s what the Greenbrier bunker looked like while they were building it. What is/was it for? The winners/losers of a nuclear war? Who wants to hear their opinion about what the stock market should be at, whereever it is? Why would these people be important, to continue our way of government? Our way of government that was always a pack of lies, founded on genocide, and enforced by a massive military? Uh, the one that … you know, scoured the rest of the planet? That one.

In case any of you have read Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream – that’s the sort of future I think our leaders should look forward to if they wind up down there with someone like me. Yes, they would wish they had stayed to face the music, until they escaped into death.

It has since apparently been turned into a sort of casino/club [club] with modern stuff:

• 19 miles of conduit and 100 miles of wire
• Five megawatts of power generation capability
• Seven miles of crown molding
• More than seven miles of audio and video cabling
• More than 300 loudspeakers, 20 power amplifiers, and 25 High-Definition LCD displays

All oligarch-approved, I suppose. It looks like they gutted the old bomb shelter because it was probably full of depressing things and asbestos. But, mostly, imagined skeletons. They planned to helicopter out of Washington and leave us holding the bag.

The civil engineers who build such places know what they are doing, and – I suppose- pretended to be going along with the program. What beauties of retro-kitsch were ruined in the process? The Greenbrier is built on a granite pocket and is as close to indestructible as human-made bolt-holes get. It makes me wonder how many engineers made sure there’s a reverse-purge valve so the whole place can be slowly filled with water from a nearby river if the right knowledge is brought to bear? Yes, I want you to feel my hand on your throat. It’s not enough to trust that time wounds all heels.

Somewhere, there are engineering diagrams for these masterpieces. Somewhere, there are engineering diagrams for the fuhrerbunker, I hope. Did any of the builders, who built the fuhrerbunker under a ballroom in the Reich Chancelry, keep the plans? The engineers and construction workers did their jobs. How many of their families died under showers of high explosive dropped by American bombers? Stanley Kubrick was trying to show a bit of it, in Doctor Strangelove and Len Deighton’s Bomber, if you can bear to read it, finishes the job. As does Hershey’s Hiroshima.

I have not written much here about “The Button” or “The Football” but I hope long-term stderr readers can guess what I am about to say: those are a bit more than simply special effects. They do enough not to interrupt the grown-ups when the adults are playing. Not even significantly. If Trump says “launch them all” it will take the same military that is currently dropping missiles and bombs on civilian targets in Tehran. Really, what do you think they’re going to do?

The good news is: their shelters are bullshit, too. We need to get them to understand that there is no hiding from any of it whether it’s crop failure or nuclear war. You cannot hide away in deep time without speciating. And, absolutely, they need to understand, “it’s not like you’re going to sit there in a prison cell and watch me starve. We’ll part you out like a deer, asshole, and your peers will appreciate the calories. By the way, this is why I support term-limits: we don’t want them to be too old to dig. It’s disgusting enough that we watch the current one play golf.

Any adversary that can hit Washington is going to tunnel 10 storeys down below where the East Wing used to be now that Trump spilled the beans.

There is already a semi-secret train between the capitol and Union Station and another to the White House. There is allegedly one from the White House to across the river from the pentagon … you got it: the Watergate. None of this gets any of them far enough away or fast enough. My solution: if the balloon goes up, the secret service shoots the president and vice president. After all, they just became the two least valuable people on earth. Unless they are tasty.

But where Starship Troopers is a short self-contained movie, Helldivers 2 is a game that people pour hundreds of hours into. It can’t just be a satire of fascist propaganda. It can’t be any single thing. There are many narratives that emerge from it, some of which are at tension with each other. For example, in the interpretation of Starship Troopers it is possible to argue that the bug aliens did nothing wrong, and the humans are the aggressors. On the other hand, Helldivers doesn’t lend itself to such a straightforward interpretation, because there are many clear examples where the aliens are the aggressors.

So I’d like to explain a grander emergent narrative that took me months to understand. It’s a narrative about how players are kept in the dark, and how this leads to a mismanaged war that wastes billions of lives.

For Super Earth

Part of this narrative is very front and center. Of course the galactic war wastes countless lives! The gameplay revolves around that fact.

Helldivers are elite soldiers that get inserted deep behind enemy lines. They spread democratic devastation, often by calling down strikes from their orbital destroyers. These are basically suicide missions. Every time the player dies, they switch perspectives to a whole new helldiver. So the number of lives lost numbers in the billions. And often lives are lost in comedic, pointless ways, like when you accidentally call an orbital strike down on yourself or your friends.

Helldivers are mythologized by citizens of Super Earth. However, the game’s tutorial suggests that they receive minimal training. After a short training routine, a recorded voice absurdly praises you for being the best soldier he’s ever seen, and then you immediately step into a pod to launch off into space. One imagines that they’ve lowered their standards to keep up with the demand for new helldivers.

At tension with this narrative, is the fact that players may in fact be very good at the game. Helldivers could be seen as comically strong, considering how much you can do with just a handful of them. Of course, a lot of their strength comes from absurd amounts of air support.

But if you ignore how overpowered helldivers are, the narrative seems to be about a bunch of low-information fanatical soldiers who are treated like expendable grunts.

The Galactic War

Now in a fascist satire, you might expect a strict military hierarchy where soldiers do exactly what they’re told. But in a game, of course the player wants to be given a choice in how they set up their battles. You get to choose which of the three alien races to fight, and which planet to fight them on. I don’t think this contributes to the satirical narrative, it’s just what you need in a game.

But there is a single galactic war that is shared across the entire player base. Players are given orders, and though you are not forced to complete them, you are rewarded for doing so. There are “personal” orders which are completed by individual players, for example to kill a hundred bugs with a machine gun. And there are “major” orders that must be completed by the player community. For example, to kill a billion bugs total.

If a major order is completed, then every player receives a reward regardless of whether they actually contributed to it. This can create community-wide prisoner’s dilemmas, where some players just want to have fun fighting their own way, which may be at odds with the major order. And sometimes major orders are at odds with personal orders, so that a player might choose to prioritize their personal order, leaving the rest of the community handle the major order.

On top of the fact that players don’t necessarily contribute to major orders, there’s also the question of strategy. Often there are more efficient and less efficient ways to complete an order. For instance, there was an objective to liberate planets, any planets. But some planets are easier to liberate than others! Each planet has a resistance factor which determines how much progress players lose per hour. The mechanics of how this works are simple but opaque, and barely communicated to players. So as a result, ignorant players ended up trying to liberate a planet with high resistance, while knowledgeable players were dragged along for the ride.

Without getting into specifics, attacking or defending a planet requires mass coordination. If only a few players attack a planet, then their contribution to the planet’s liberation is precisely zero. So from an individual perspective, often the best available strategy is to join whatever everyone else is doing. But once you’re in the know, you can often see that a better strategy exists, but it’s wholly inaccessible because it requires getting everyone to switch.

There’s a sort of comedy in this, seeing strategic blunders over and over, but being unable to do anything about it. And it seems to build on the larger narrative of expendable low-information soldiers.

Managed Democracy

I’ve described an emergent narrative, where Super Earth’s military might is undercut by poor information and poor organization. Is this narrative… intentional?

The orders are specifically chosen by the developers in order to construct a larger narrative. The developers want players to sometimes win, sometimes lose, but it is not predetermined when players should win or lose. So what the devs are doing, is trying to predict what the player community is capable of, and setting objectives which are on the knife edge between victory and defeat.

Sometimes, developers miss the mark, and a major order is far too easy or far too hard. So the devs often make adjustments after the fact. For instance, there was a major that required completing certain number of operations on a planet, but it quickly became clear that players would only reach about 10% of the goal. So the developers came up with a story reason to remove that part of the objective. Other times it seems like players are winning too easily, so the developers create tension by declaring new objectives that spread helldiver forces thinner. Intentional or not, this creates a sense of military disorganization.

Now the downside of all this, is that it seems to generate a lot of community toxicity. Some players basically moralize about contributing to the major order. They complain that players who play the wrong way are actively detracting from the major order.

If you think about it, this toxicity doesn’t make much sense. Hypothetically, if the number of players focusing on major orders decreased over time, the devs aren’t going to say, “players never deserve to win a major order again”. No, in the long run, the devs would just adjust their expectations, and set objectives accordingly.

In my view, community-wide challenges are inherently “unfair”. Win or lose, it’s not really up to you. It’s up to all the players, and you’re just one of them. If the community fails to meet the challenge, I don’t take it personally, because it doesn’t mean I personally failed a challenge. It’s hardly even a challenge, it’s more of a background story.

Of course, it’s worth asking, is a fictional narrative worth real world player toxicity? Watching strategic blunders and being unable to do anything about it is frustrating. Players take out that frustration on other players. That’s not great.

Ultimately, the problem with my interpretation is that players identify too strongly with Super Earth. It’s widely understood that players are taking the role of the baddies, it’s not remotely subtle. But when you’re in the game, you’re thinking of it as a game, not a story. The goal of the game is to win. There are material rewards for winning. The way to have fun with games, is by playing to win. Nothing wrong or unusual about that. But when the community loses a challenge, players don’t seem to see past the game, to see the humor in a story about baddies losing.

Hasan is a believing Muslim, and Dawkins asks if he believes that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse. Hasan says he does, that he believes in God and in miracles. Dawkins is incredulous.

My position, as a hard atheist, is that I agree that those are ridiculous beliefs that contradict reality and reason, and that it is very silly to believe in gods. I’m going to side with Dawkins a little bit on this one.

At the same time, though, I’m also going to side with Hasan a little bit…maybe a lot. He concedes that he could be wrong, which is a position I will always favor; he’s demonstrating tolerance for ideas that differ from those of his faith. I’ve never heard Hasan proselytize for Islam, and he says that he’s teaching his own child about Islam, which is fine with me as long as he’s also introducing that child to his principles of tolerance and a willingness to concede the possibility of error.

I also believe that everyone holds silly beliefs. Many people will go into the world of a movie or video game and suspend their strict adherence to the rules of reality for a while; I don’t think they go insane while doing that. Humans have an amazing capacity for stretching their minds out of congruence with nature, and that’s a good thing — we’d have no art, no music, no literature, if we didn’t have that ability. Some people might believe that the Minnesota Vikings are the greatest football team in the world, or that they’re a great cook, or that the sound of church bells is esthetically superior to the sound of the Muslim call to prayer. We don’t condemn them for that, as long as they’re willing to tolerate the existence of church bells and the muezzin. I’m comfortable with a Catholic church down the street from me as long as they aren’t trying to compel me to revere a cracker.

The big question in my mind is always going to be what are you going to do about it? You can disagree with me about evolution, for instance, and I’m going to think you are a very foolish person, but I’m not going to have you arrested or burn down your church. On the other hand, I don’t trust a religious fanatic to not try to make my university illegal, or censor the things we teach — we’re already seeing that happening. You can’t police a belief or an opinion!

I’m afraid I don’t trust Richard Dawkins to not be authoritarian. He has strongly held beliefs of his own, about how science is the only acceptable approach to understanding the world, or about how people’s perspective on gender should be tolerated, and I think he has already been abusing the respect he earned for his science and writing to advocate for oppression and intolerance. Don’t give him any more influence.

So far, Mehdi Hasan seems to be mainly advocating for human rights for all people, and is acting as a positive influence in the world.

I could be wrong. I hope I’m not.

Don’t ask me how I feel about it yet. Ask me a year from today, when it gets real.

Right now I’m mainly stressed about the fact that Boeing sent me a letter saying they overpaid on my mother’s death benefits, and they want $5000 back right now. On the one hand, that’s peanuts for Boeing, they can go overcharge the government for a bolt to get that money back; on the other hand, do I really want to get in a fight with Boeing?

Hungary is a small and geopolitically insignificant country, but it has an outsized presence in global politics. Its longtime prime minister, Viktor Orbán, pioneered a style of illiberal, right-wing authoritarian governance that’s inspired conservative autocrats all over the world. Over sixteen years in power, Orbán steadily chipped away at Hungary’s democracy and tilted the playing field more and more in his favor and against any potential opposition, all without firing a shot. He oppressed LGBTQ+ people, slammed the doors on immigration, and repeatedly frustrated the European will to aid Ukraine. Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and many other dictators and wannabe dictators cheered for him – and took notes.

But the Hungarian people fought back this month. In a closely watched election, Orbán and his allies were thrown out of power in a landslide, despite everything they did to rig the system on their own behalf. This is great news for Europe, great news for Ukraine, and great news for democracy all around the world.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

For the last sixteen years, Orbán held near-absolute power in Hungary. He struck a pose as a defender of Christianity and traditional values, claiming he would protect the West from scary threats like Muslim refugees and LGBTQ+ people.

His party, Fidesz, advocates hard-right, Christian nationalist politics. Its agenda includes banning same-sex marriage and adoption by gay couples; banning pride parades; prohibiting people from legally changing their gender; rolling back anti-discrimination laws; and opposing multiculturalism and blocking immigration, with the goal of making the country racially and culturally homogeneous. (For example, Orbán has said, “We do not want to be a diverse country”).

You might say that this sounds like what the Republican party wants to do in America, and you’d be right. In many respects, Hungary pioneered the anti-democratic politics that’s been embraced by the right wing in the U.S. and around the world. American conservatives saw what Orbán was doing and loved him for it.

Continue reading on OnlySky…