Elon Musk secretly used control of his Starlink network to cripple a Ukrainian military operation while it was under way, in defiance of American foreign policy.
He is an oligarch working against U.S. interests, benefitting his fellow oligarchs in Russia. His biographer seems to think this is just Musk being Musk, quirky and idiosyncratic.
Simon Tisdall is rather caustic about UK #foreignpolicy:
'The UK once had a reputation for skilled diplomacy... But as its economic power & geopolitical leverage have diminished, along with the quality of decision-making, so too has traditional foreign policy realism. Now is the age of British foreign policy unrealism. Between fantasising post-Brexit Tories & the world as it truly is a huge, growing gap yawns'
Never was a Foreign Secretary's name so inaccurate!
China’s economic woes are not new, but have become visible. Back in 2018, after Xi Jinping became president for life, I pointed out the beginning of the end of China’s rise.
The inevitable, dangerous X factor. 1/...🧵in part, via David Frum:
NYT reports that Elon #Musk personally thwarted a #Ukraine military operation he disapproved of.
At this point, Musk's interference to thwart Ukraine battle plans is not any kind of economic action. It is an assertion of a personal foreign policy, in defiance of the United States, whose citizenship he sought and to which he swore loyalty in 2002.
@GottaLaff pretty awesome #billionaires can just screw over #foreignpolicy fund coup attempts #jan6th and nothing is done but god forbid a poor person shoplifts or a black person drives a car and happens to get pulled over either could get a non billionaire killed or sent to prison
Very interesting read ! How the Communist Party penetrates all forms of cultural and foreign exchanges and its various fronts and what happened to those who didnt know about it ....
This quote is so sharp and pithy, it sounds like it would come from a comedian, not a diplomat. But, it's also true and important to the point he's making:
“The Kremlin often claimed it had the second-strongest military in the world, and many believed it. Today, many see Russia's military as the second strongest in Ukraine.”
For several years, Turkey has played both sides of the geopolitical divide, belonging to NATO but nurturing closer ties with Russia.
The question is how much — or whether — that changes after today's presidential runoff.
A question about what states were most-frequently represented on the HN homepage had me do some quick querying via Hacker News's Algolia search ... which is NOT limited to the front page. Those results were ... surprising (Maine and Iowa outstrip the more probable results of California and, say, New York). Results are further confounded by other factors.
HN provides an interface to historical front-page stories (https://news.ycombinator.com/front), and that can be crawled by providing a list of corresponding date specifications, e.g.:
So I'm crawling that and compiling a local archive. Rate-limiting and other factors mean that's only about halfway complete, and a full pull will take another day or so.
But I'll be able to look at story titles, sites, submitters, time-based patterns (day of week, day of month, month of year, yearly variations), and other patterns. There's also looking at mean points and comments by various dimensions.
Among surprises are that as of January 2015, among the highest consistently-voted sites is The Guardian. I'd thought HN leaned consistently less liberal.
The full archive will probably be < 1 GB (raw HTML), currently 123 MB on disk.
Contents are the 30 top-voted stories for each day since 20 February 2007.
If anyone has suggestions for other questions to ask of this, fire away.
NY is highly overrepresented (NY Times, NY Post, NY City), likewise Washington (Post, Times, DC). Adding in "Silicon Valley" and a few other toponyms boosts California's score markedly. I've also got some city-based analytics.
HN Front Page: Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers (2014)
I pulled a copy of the "global thinkers" list I'd used as an indicator of website salience in a 2015 study.
The HN front page offers a limited opportunity for matches --- titles are 80 characters only, and HN's editorial policy is to not list authors of works, so what will show here is likely a subset of actual mentions.
That said: nearly a quarter of the list (23 entries) appear, from 1 to 11 times each. Paul Krugman (11), Lawrence Lessig (10), and Richard Dawkins (10) top the list.
1 Paul Krugman: 11<br></br> 2 Lawrence Lessig: 10<br></br> 3 Richard Dawkins: 10<br></br> 4 Freeman Dyson: 9<br></br> 5 Daniel Kahneman: 8<br></br> 6 Noam Chomsky: 8<br></br> 7 Jaron Lanier: 6<br></br> 8 Steven Pinker: 5<br></br> 9 Daniel Dennett: 4<br></br> 10 Christopher Hitchens: 2<br></br> 11 Craig Venter: 2<br></br> 12 Edward O. Wilson: 2<br></br> 13 Jared Diamond: 2<br></br> 14 Richard Posner: 2<br></br> 15 Steven Weinberg: 2<br></br> 16 Thomas Friedman: 2<br></br> 17 Gary Becker: 1<br></br> 18 Hernando de Soto: 1<br></br> 19 James Lovelock: 1<br></br> 20 Larry Summers: 1<br></br> 21 Martha Nussbaum: 1<br></br> 22 Peter Singer: 1<br></br> 23 Salman Rushdie: 1<br></br>
Biden and the US MIC are selling arms to the majority of the world's autocracies. Biden has surpassed Trump on this. Don't fall for rhetoric about the US exporting democracy.
I’ll preface this that #RFKJr has a lot of harmful views when it comes to #vaccines and #autism. He sucks. But apparently today he decided to add a new reason to dislike him. #RobertFKennedyJr cited his grandfather, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. in his ideas about #ForeignPolicy. Anyone who even has passing knowledge of the Kennedy patriarch knows he was extremely #antisemitic, vocally concerned about “#Jewish influence” and referencing the “Jewish problem.”