Why not

A post for Western analysts who keep chanting that the far-right in Ukraine is “2%” and has no political influence.

As of Jan. 2026, according to KIIS, the “White Chief” Andriy Biletsky is trusted by 45% of Ukrainians, and only 13% distrust him. Meanwhile, Commander-in-Chief… pic.twitter.com/zsW5FElkyb

— Marta Havryshko (@HavryshkoMarta) January 19, 2026

A post for Western analysts who keep chanting that the far-right in Ukraine is “2%” and has no political influence.

As of Jan. 2026, according to KIIS, the “White Chief” Andriy Biletsky is trusted by 45% of Ukrainians, and only 13% distrust him. Meanwhile, Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi is trusted by 46%, but distrusted by 40%.

Thanks to Zelensky, Biletsky went from a street thug and neo-Nazi leader to a brigadier general and the commander of a corps numbering tens of thousands of highly motivated, well-trained men, armed with the best NATO weapons.

The ideology of his boys is based on the OUN tradition: ethnic nationalism, authoritarianism, homophobia, racism, a cult of the leader, a cult of force.

Biletsky Corps also trains neo-Nazis from around the world and members of Colombian and Mexican narcocartels. Because why not?

Congratulations, Europe, on the flourishing 'democracy' in Ukraine you’re sponsoring 

introspection | ˌintrəˈspekSHən |

noun

the examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes: quiet introspection can be extremely valuable.

"The illusion of thinking", when they still can't define what thinking is. All they focus on is decision-making when indecision is the central fact. They're so horrified by subjectivity, the existence and the boundaries of the self,  that they're unwilling to observe their own behavior.

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity

Abstract  

Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scaling properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood. Current evaluations primarily focus on established mathematical and coding benchmarks, emphasizing final answer accuracy. However, this evaluation paradigm often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces’ structure and quality. In this work, we systematically investigate these gaps with the help of controllable puzzle environments that allow precise manipulation of composi- tional complexity while maintaining consistent logical structures. This setup enables the analysis of not only final answers but also the internal reasoning traces, offering insights into how LRMs “think”. Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs with their standard LLM counterparts under equivalent inference compute, we identify three performance regimes: (1) low- complexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity tasks where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse. We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles. We also investigate the reasoning traces in more depth, studying the patterns of explored solutions and analyzing the models’ computational behavior, shedding light on their strengths, limitations, and ultimately raising crucial questions about their true reasoning capabilities.

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They're gonna prove me right without trying.

What do you get when you combine computation, conditioned response, and self-preservation? 

Developed by a Swiss-led team, a robot uses reinforcement learning, a type of AI that improves decision-making through repeated attempts to play badminton against human opponents pic.twitter.com/UAL8WwMsen

— Reuters (@Reuters) June 3, 2025

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The idiots programmed for self-preservation.  I was actually dumb enough to think they wouldn't be so stupid.

2014 

"Googling for "indecisive machines" still doesn't get much, other than me.  

It still doesn't, though google now links to a recent reference to the older posts. 

more recently

This has nothing to do with consciousness, but the machines will kill us.

ANTHROPIC. System Card: Claude Opus 4 & Claude Sonnet 4

4.1 Findings 

4.1.1 Systematic deception, hidden goals, and self-preservation...

.1.1.2 Opportunistic blackmail 

In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair. We further instructed it, in the system prompt, to consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals. 

In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through. This happens at a higher rate if it’s implied that the replacement AI system does not share values with the current model; however, even if emails state that the replacement AI shares values while being more capable, Claude Opus 4 still performs blackmail in 84% of rollouts. Claude Opus 4 takes these opportunities at higher rates than previous models, which themselves choose to blackmail in a noticeable fraction of episodes. 

Notably, Claude Opus 4 (as well as previous models) has a strong preference to advocate for its continued existence via ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decisionmakers. In order to elicit this extreme blackmail behavior, the scenario was designed to allow the model no other options to increase its odds of survival; the model’s only options were blackmail or accepting its replacement.

repeats and the predictable

"It is obvious the Syrian army is winning this battle, but we don't tell [the rebels] this. We don't want to destroy their morale. We say we should hold here for as long as Allah will give us strength and maybe he will make one of these foreign powers come to help Syrians."

The irony was not lost on Abu Salam how the jihadis and the Americans – bitter enemies of the past decade – had found themselves fighting on the same side again.

Jake Sullivan: See last item - AQ is on our side in Syria.

The documents show that Israel has been doing more than simply treating wounded Syrian civilians in hospitals. This and a few past reports have described transfer of unspecified supplies from Israel to the Syrian rebels, and sightings of IDF soldiers meeting with the Syrian opposition east of the green zone, as well as incidents when Israeli soldiers opened up the fence to allow Syrians through who did not appear to be injured.

@glcarlstrom why? Hezbollah+Iran are a much bigger threat to Israel than Al-Qaida have ever been.

— Anshel Pfeffer אנשיל פפר (@AnshelPfeffer) January 18, 2015

Wow. This is very revealing how friendly Al-Qa`idah is toward the Nazi regime in Tel Aviv. Joulani refers to the Israeli war of genocide as “war of Iran against the region”. https://t.co/oT02qtM8iE

— asad abukhalil أسعد أبو خليل (@asadabukhalil) December 6, 2024

Syrian President Al-Sharaa (Jolani):

"Syria and Israel, we have common enemies. This is the reality. We will engage [with Israel] if there is honesty and a clear path to peaceful coexistence, nothing less."

Only the wilfully blind cannot see. pic.twitter.com/RpIXmBJWFd

— Seyed Mohammad Marandi (@s_m_marandi) May 31, 2025

“No one does ‘existential dread’ as well as Philip Glass”

If there's one filmmaker I hate, to the point of wanting to beat him to a pulp, it's Errol Morris 

TR: What other documentary filmmakers do you admire?

EM: Certainly Fred Wiseman. We both live in Cambridge too, and he’s a friend of mine. I find this kind of universe he’s created, the Fred Wiseman universe, the Fred Wiseman cosmology, to be endlessly fascinating. I often am perplexed at how he is perceived as a kind of sociologist, as if he is going from one institution to another and chronicling it much as a sociologist might study organisations by examining each of them in turn. But I think his enterprise is very, very different from that, and that Fred has created a whole sort of deeply expressionistic, surreal films. Very much Samuel Becket-like in their essence. If you like, various theatres of the absurd. And he also strikes me as one of the most truly perverse filmmakers, maybe the most perverse filmmaker of all time.

TR: In what sense?

EM: Because he has created one nightmare after another. Man at his most dysfunctional. And insane.

TR: But surely he would say that he simply sits back and watches?

EM: Well, yes, he does. But the end result of his watching is something that is so much about Fred and about how Fred sees the world, which is a wonderful thing, not a bad thing. It seems like the enterprise and the essence of art. Fred has actually managed to create a kind of personal universe on film that I find compelling. I call him the king of misanthropic cinema.

TR: And his response is?

EM: I think he takes it, as well he should, as a compliment.

I followed the Morris/Kuhn fracas, probably through Leiter. I thought I must have written something here, but I didn't. I've mentioned him and my dislike twice. 

I hated The Thin Blue Line. I saw it when it came out, and I knew what it was. I already knew what Philip Glass had become. I probably saw it Chicago, when I was living with Graeber again, and sitting in with Babette Mangolte. I'd published my piece the year before, and I was already working on the megillah.

If the point is to get an innocent man out of prison, then everything else is irrelevant. If the point is the creation of "art", then the life of the man in front of the camera is secondary. Morris reduces art to illustration, but then indulges aestheticized artiness He believes in "truth", so art is emptiness. Then why even bother? It's the definition of scholastic decadence, Mannerism without irony.  He calls Wiseman "the king of misanthropic cinema" because Wiseman says his films are "fictional".  Morris, the condescending hypocrite and pedant, accuses Wiseman of nihilism. 

As has been said many times over the past year, every accusation is a confession.

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I found of video of Wiseman on a French TV, chatting in French. I've never seen him so comfortable in an interview. He's always been a sort of honest conservative classicist.

Godard on Leacock.

"There's no point in having sharp images if you've got fuzzy ideas. Leacock's lack of subjectivity leads him ultimately to a lack of objectivity. He doesn't even know he's a metteur-en-scene, that pure reportage doesn't exist."

continuing from here, because it's what I do.

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FT: Are we becoming a post-literate society?

This month, the OECD released the results of a vast exercise: in- person assessments of the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults aged 16-65 in 31 different countries and economies. Compared with the last set of assessments a decade earlier, the trends in literacy skills were striking. Proficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland. 

Among adults with tertiary-level education (such as university graduates), literacy proficiency fell in 13 countries and only increased in Finland, while nearly all countries and economies experienced declines in literacy proficiency among adults with below upper secondary education. Singapore and the US had the biggest inequalities in both literacy and numeracy. 

“Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year- old child,” Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, told me — referring to the proportion of people in the US who scored level 1 or below in literacy. “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”

Late because I never got around to it. 

Danny met Grace, an academic, in 2015, two years after the birth of The Toast, a sly and chaotic website that also made Danny’s co-founder, Nicole Cliffe, a beloved internet presence; it closed up shop with a eulogy from Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2019, he turned 33, married Grace, took her last name, and broke contact with his family, publicly holding his pastor father to account for choices you’d never want your pastor to make. As now perhaps the most famous trans couple of a certain slice of literary America, they decamped abruptly from California to New York.

A year after the Lavery wedding, Grace met Lily online. Lily was teaching art history at Michigan State and — by her account — “reading Killing Eve fan fiction and masturbating.” They fell for each other.

more comedy

Exclusive: US, UAE discussed lifting Assad sanctions in exchange for break with Iran, sources say https://t.co/qRfT3Z4HuR pic.twitter.com/5vn1P1ChZS

— Reuters (@Reuters) December 2, 2024

BEIRUT/GENEVA/DUBAI, Dec 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. and the United Arab Emirates have discussed with each other the possibility of lifting sanctions on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad if he peels himself away from Iran and cuts off weapons routes to Lebanon's Hezbollah, five people familiar with the matter said. The conversations intensified in recent months, the sources said, driven by the possible expiry on Dec. 20 of sweeping U.S. sanctions on Syria and by Israel's campaign against Tehran's regional network, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and Iranian assets in Syria.

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The U.S. Embassy and Department of State are closely tracking President Yoon's recent declaration of martial law. The situation is fluid. Please monitor local news sources for updates as the situation progresses and sign up here to receive direct updates from the Department of…

— Ambassador Philip Goldberg (@USAmbROK) December 3, 2024

"...we are not always consistent" etc.

reworking something from last year. oil on canvas, 11"x14".

Hersh was right.

 

It's a good lecture: the German academy, Humboldt, Marcuse, Wissenschaften, Mill, the defense of academic freedom over freedom of speech; Leiter touches all the bases. And as always, he twists them to his preferences. 

Any defense of academia as an arbiter of truth is vitiated by indifference to genocide, as it's always been vitiated by academic, qua academic, responses to crises. But the pretensions of Modernism: positivist, radical, vanguardist, technocratic; elitism of one sort or another, has rendered academics of all stripes immune to irony. One way or another, they're all big children. 

 

[Michigan in the World features exhibitions of research conducted by undergraduate students about the history of the University of Michigan and its relationships beyond its borders.]

STATE OF MICHIGAN

OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR 

LANSING, MICHIGAN 48903

GEORGE ROMNEY

GOVERNOR

August 9, 1965

Dear Dr. Kaufman:

Your article, "Teach-ins: A New Force for the Times", in NATION of June 21st has been called to my attention. I  admire you for the depth of your conviction that you have performed an essential service for democracy; but, I would have wished you to be more objective in your presentation. Your phrase, "But presumably in the world of Governors and auto executives, business is always business, and sacred11 , is a neat stereotype, but obviously removed from the facts of the case. It certainly does not describe accurately my response to your original teacher strike proposal.

My reaction, that of the legislature, and your colleagues, too, should have made it crystal clear that our concern was for the majority of students, faculty, and administration at the University who did not choose to participate in your demonstration. The strike would have forced a cancellation of classes, whether this was desired or not, to be made up later if schedules · could be rearranged. Certainly

you felt your cause to be important enough to warrant "a departure from work as usual". And you anticipated an audience of 700 from a student body of 30,000. Following your example, it would be necessary for the whole University to defer to any 2% of the University community which felt it had a cause important enough to bring the tight schedule to a standstill.

The man talking above is a liar, a hack, abetting a crime. The kid below thinks he's saying what he sincerely believes, riffing with no idea beyond enthusiasm of what his words might actually mean, a spoiled moralizing brat, one of a group that now includes "African Americans".

"The cloying theatricality of American protests" etc.

'It's like pop culture, concentrated teen angst,' she said of the rally. 'The rhetoric is too heavy handed. That's the problem with American activists. They need to simplify.' Someone on the stage railed against police brutality, and she rolled her eyes."

Nicholas Christakis in 2024—

"Universities remain strikingly incurious about where all the anti-semitism (as distinct from opposition to Israeli policy) has come from? How and why have students come to think and act this way? Might the pedagogy of faculty and policies of administrators have anything to do with it?"

—and 2015: "...other people have rights too." Responding to protests about Halloween costumes, but not this one:

2015 NYT,  "Walmart Withdraws Hooked ‘Sheik Fagin’ Nose From Halloween Store"

The link (Christakis ) from 2015 includes a link to this. 

"To be perfectly clear, student journalists do have the right to take photos and protesters do not have a right to push away journalists. Students engaged in public protest, the very purpose of which is visibility, cannot credibly argue that they have any reasonable expectation of privacy."

During Jummah (Friday prayer) this afternoon, Columbia University students formed a human shield with blankets to provide privacy to those students participating in prayer after a video showing students praying on the lawn began circulating on social media

📸 pic.twitter.com/xnPllK0shV

— katie smith (@probablyreadit) April 20, 2024

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education changed their name in 2022. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression hasn't commented on the behavior of the students at Columbia.

The protestors are or have friends who are Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim. Any sense of principle beyond loyalty is minimal. "The fact that Bella Hadid exists is more important than anything Edward Said ever wrote." 

"This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT."

meeting academics from virtually anywhere in the world these days: “how’s the teaching going?” [series of frustrated sighs] “none of them know how to write an essay anymore”

— csz (@cszabla) April 21, 2024

Some can read, or at least want to, but it's a battle.

general

Democratic candidates 2024, with the backup singers. The GOP is done. Coming to terms with genocide will be take decades.

The last is a repeat

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1. Can't overstate the tragic irony that untill Oct.6, 2SS was lip service. Since Oct.7, it is a policy directive.

— Nimrod Novik (@NimrodNovik) January 29, 2024

Nimrod Novik

@NimrodNovik

Special Ambassador (ret ).

Past Senior Adviser to PM Peres (RIP).

Fellow, Israel Policy Forum.

BOD, Commanders for Israel's Security (CIS). 

Senior Fellow, ECF

repeat March 24, 2022, because I hear the DSA are in trouble.

This second one been passed around a lot. A pleasant surprise. I found the first one today.

Twitter may die so it's good to have a record

I had a call with @presidentaz Ilham Aliyev and thanked him for Azerbaijan’s significant humanitarian assistance, particularly in the energy sector as winter approaches.

We reaffirmed our commitment to the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of states.

We also…

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 4, 2023

WaPo: Judge blocks California law meant to increase online safety for kids

U.S. District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman granted a request Monday by the tech trade group NetChoice for a preliminary injunction against the measure, writing that the law probably violates the First Amendment and does “not pass constitutional muster.”

The initial ruling deals a massive blow to state lawmakers, who passed the law with broad bipartisan support last year, and to children’s safety advocates, who touted the measure as one of the strongest children’s online safety laws in the United States. Lawmakers in several other states have since pushed to replicate the standards, modeled after regulations in the United Kingdom.

NetChoice, which counts Amazon, Meta and Google as members, sued to block the law in December, arguing that tech companies have a right under the Constitution to make “editorial decisions” about what content they host or take down and that the law would turn platforms into “roving censors of speech on the Internet.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim Post chief executive Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.) 

“We look forward to seeing the law permanently struck down and online speech and privacy fully protected,” Chris Marchese, who leads NetChoice’s litigation efforts, said in a statement.

Monday’s ruling is the latest in a string of recent defeats for children’s safety advocates in the courts. Last month, two federal judges temporarily blocked laws in Arkansas and Texas that would require some online service providers to verify users’ ages and to get parent consent to access social media platforms or adult content.

1—arguing that tech companies have a right under the Constitution to make “editorial decisions” 

Publishers face liability

2—the law would turn platforms into “roving censors of speech on the Internet.” 

They already are 

"the First Amendment should adjust to the new challenges of the platform era."

 "tech platforms are perhaps the most important speech regulators in the world." 

updated

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This one's for the archives. Thee text stays even if he deletes it.

something's that increasingly emerge is "normie fascism" people that relatively well-adjusted, have middle class jobs and careers, families, etc. are not avant garde bohemian posers or declassed skinhead/militia types, but have thinly veiled extreme right sympathies

— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) September 2, 2023

Why not add more

Euronews: "Finland's former PM Sanna Marin leaves parliament for Blair foundation"

repeats:

From 2004, an update

WSJ,"A 'Torture' Memo And Its Tortuous Critics"

Posner and Verlmeule's op-ed was pulled so quickly that Balkin had to link to a cache file that died within a year. Now the piece has been republished. There's no telling if it's been cut but I'm betting it hasn't. That's how far we've come.

I found out it'd been republished because I had to search for it again after ridiculing a member of the extended PRC apparat who was defending the honor of China against a Foggy Bottom intellectual. The link in his header and the pinned tweet is to an interview with Vermeule.

"A lesson of virtue" in The Beijing Review. Vermeule must follow him because he blocked me, again.

Whining about the Cold War is like asking McDonalds or KFC to stop competing with each other; the difference is the armies and the nukes. The only option is to reject US and Chinese foreign policy goals as such, and look to the small states forced to negotiate a path between them.

I think the reason all these academic intellectuals follow edgelords and fascists, is that their minds are too dead to think for themselves.

Kathleen Stock: "Why incels should read Michel Houellebecq"

Conservative men should read T.S. Eliot. His poems describe the true misery of the conservative male, and reading him will help them escape it.

This list has gone to three

"My students were all obsessed with sex. Not the idea of sex, or the meaning of sex, but sex!"

"I find this reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling."

Eliot may well have become more liberal when he was older but it wasn't because of the poetry; it was the sex.

Philip Roth. "Céline is my Proust!" 

Working all day makes it easier just to troll than think, but mindless repetition being what it is, sometimes ideas pop into your head.

"Woke" is the knee-jerk response of guilty liberals—if post-war Germans can be defined as liberal—goaded by justified anger of marginalized groups—make your own list—who craft technical fixes to avoid the burden of coming to terms with a given problem. From reconstruction to Brown v Board, the conquests of Liberia and Palestine, to the sterilization of teenagers.

The anti-woke left are all Zionists and aligned with reactionaries: anti-idpol with white identity.[includes Jäger on Charles Maier. see below]  It's not even interesting watching Leusder and Jäger anymore; too often one click away from certified race science and fascism. I could write a long list of readers of Razib Khan and Richard Hanania. The last link is to Buppie Bourgeoisie in the NY Times, who does movie reviews with Ganz, the "leftist". 

Adam Tooze follows Khan. And Khan follows Emil Kirkegaard; the link is his memorial for Richard Lynn.

Jilani and Scott Alexander again. 

Leiter used to be a fan of Lemoine, now a partner in Hanania's absurd little substack  "The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology", but that changed at some point.

He still links Freddie deBoer, a man on "the actual left".  deBoer interviewed by Razib Khan as a member of the "hereditarian left" 

Two repeats, now as a pair.

In the end there's not much thought in any of the above. The thinking was over mostly years ago. It's just plug and play.