Links for March 2025 (#1)

The rule of law is a myth and Wikipedia makes the best music. Also, what the hell is a fartlek?

On Substack

1:

Ozy Brennan

suggests that effective altruists are distinguished by a quantitative mindset. People sometimes question whether EA is different in principle from any other philanthropic movement — “Doesn’t everybody want to do the most good?” — but if you look at the numbers, you understand why this critique doesn’t land. Here’s a chart Ozy reproduces from Animal Charity Evaluators:

Additionally, “[m]ore than a quarter of farmed-animal welfare funding comes from a single effective-altruism-affiliated donor, Open Philanthropy.”

2: On the above chart: The disparity is even worse if you break down farmed animal funding by species. At any moment, there are about 35 billion farmed land animals, 77 billion farmed fish, and 230 billion farmed shrimp living in confinement. The sentience-adjusted difference in experience between these species is likely around one order of magnitude. Yet, fish get only about as much funding as cows (1.5 billion alive at any moment), and invertebrates get next to nothing. (Conclusion: Dump your money into the ocean.)

3: Friend of the blog

Theodore Yohalem Shouse 🔸

is running a birthday fundraiser through Giving What We Can (announced here). It’s for the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Animal Charity Evaluators, and the Against Malaria Foundation. There’s a suggested split, but you can earmark donations if you think one of them is better or worse than the others (shouldn’t be a surprise that I donated 100% to ACE). I’d like to reiterate — again — my standing offer that anyone who makes a new recurring donation of at least $25 per month to the EA Animal Welfare Fund or a FarmKind or Animal Charity Evaluators recommended charity and sends me a receipt will get a free year-long paid subscription to the blog.

4: I’ve written before about why small-dollar donors matter. If you’re not convinced, see this EA Forum post about deference to funders. EA culture is very deferential to large funders and foundations, especially compared to other parts of the non-profit sector. This is despite funders often not having the knowledge or expertise to properly evaluate projects, and their values often differing from EA values.¹ There’s obviously no catch-all solution here, but I suspect having more small-dollar donors may give orgs some extra leeway when dealing with larger ones.

5: Also, the EA Forum Digest is now on Substack!

6: Long before United States of Exception, there was The Onion. In 2009, they bravely asked: “Should We Do More To Reduce Violence In Our Dreams?” I say they’re ahead of their time!

7: Theo interviewed Anatol Lieven, a foreign affairs expert and director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute. They discussed the war in Ukraine, great power politics in post-Cold War Europe, and the politics and ethics of spheres of influence.

8: Two incredible posts by

Richard Hanania

: “The Rightoid of the Left,” about author John Ganz; and “Liberals Only Censor, Musk Seeks to Lobotomize,” about the structural anti-intellectualism of Elon’s Twitter. I read Ganz’s book When the Clock Broke a few months ago and my impression was similar to Hanania’s. I trust Ganz to give an accurate biography of uncomplicated non-intellectual figures like David Duke and Rush Limbaugh, as well as dyed-in-the-wool nationalist authoritarians like Pat Buchanan and Samuel Francis, but his approach breaks down for any rightist with subtlety or nuance. This includes the book’s ostensible main character, Murray Rothbard, who shows up five times across 300 pages and only twice in depth. Of course, you’d never know based on Ganz’s writing that 20 years before the events of the book, Rothbard was rubbing elbows with the president of Students for a Democratic Society and making compromises with Maoists who nominated Black Panthers leader Eldridge Cleaver for president.

9: Van Jackson links to Spencer Ackerman’s article on the arrest of the Columbia student protest leader, “Mahmoud Khalil’s Detention Is A War on Terror Milestone.” Ackerman writes:

The War on Terror’s long assault on freedom of association has not only conflated Supporter of Palestine with Supporter of Terrorism but now is making a bid to erase the legal predication of actual material support that prompts a counterterrorism response. […] That is the meaning of the “activities aligned to” phrasing, and Rubio’s “supporters of Hamas” locution. […] Remember this when congressional Republicans aided by certain Democrats reintroduce a bill targeting nonprofits that serves as a backdoor domestic-terrorism list.

10: Also see Ackerman’s interview on Danny Bessner and Derek Davison’s podcast American Prestige (Apple, Spotify, Supporting Cast).

11:

Andrew Doris

once again brings overwhelming clarity to bear on America’s toxic political culture and foreign policy — and it is America’s, as he rightly points out — in part one of “What You Should Think About Ukraine.” I highly recommend it and agree with every word, except…

12: I don’t think it’s obvious that the plain text of the Budapest Memorandum (as opposed to the intention) —

— only obligates the United States to seek Security Council action in situations where nuclear weapons are employed (meaning fired or detonated) and thus that U.S. obligations can’t obtain in any other scenario. It’s plausible to say “nuclear weapons are used” absent a nuclear or even conventional attack if a state is emboldened by its possession of nuclear weapons to engage in coercion against another state. Moreover, you can read the phrase “threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used” in either of two ways, where the restrictive relative clause “in which nuclear weapons are used” modifies either the word threat or aggression. If it modifies “threat” (which seems more natural to me), and a threat is distinguishable from an “act” in the sense that it involves speech and not action, then it only makes sense if the word “use” refers to all coercive uses of nuclear weapons and not just direct employment.

13: If you think this is all stupid and the nuances of legal texts don’t matter because parties are going to interpret them however they want, I partly agree with you. See the greatest law review article of all time, “The Myth of the Rule of Law” by John Hasnas.

Our Norms and Institutions™

14: So it’s actually happening this time, right? The end of the Pax Americana? I only ask because I’ve been hearing experts and academics cry wolf for my entire life. Just take a look at the great Christopher Layne’s CV (which appears to be many years out of date, but you get the idea):

15: Actually, in the earliest of these articles, “The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise” (1993), Layne suggested the United States might remain the world’s sole superpower for 50 years, which he described as “a reasonably short time.” But if you take Layne literally, his prediction for unipolarity’s lifespan was actually significantly longer than the academy’s foremost exponent of unipolar stability, Bill Wohlforth. As Wohlforth put it in 1999: “Three decades is probably a better bet than one.”

16: One rare fortuitous sign for liberal internationalism is the recent arrest and extradition to The Hague of former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte. On March 7, Duterte was indicted by the International Criminal Court on 43 counts of crimes against humanity for having unleashed police and death squads to kill more than 30,000 drug users and suspected criminals during his presidential term. He withdrew the Philippines from the ICC in 2019, but the Court still has jurisdiction over atrocity crimes committed in the Philippines prior to the withdrawal. The Philippines government technically isn’t bound to enforce ICC warrants, but Duterte was apprehended anyway after his arrest warrant was submitted through Interpol because his family has recently been feuding with the ruling Marcos administration.

17: Maybe you’ve seen this chart lately:

I read the Financial Times article it comes from to try to figure out what the methodology is, but all it says is it’s adapted from the World Values Survey — it’s not even clear which questions they adapted or how they aggregated them. I’m inherently skeptical of any attempt to quantify and compare “democracy scores” cross-nationally because the judgments that go into them are highly subjective and influenced by highly controversial political values (as Hanania has written about before). But also, nothing about the above finding strikes me as being obviously wrong.

18: The article has another chart that didn’t go viral, presumably because it doesn’t lend itself so neatly to the “Trump bad” narrative that people are understandably looking for right now. Basically, the illiberalism of the American right dates back to George W. Bush and the war on terror, not Trump and MAGA. From 1999 to 2006, the U.S. right dropped from -0.29 to -1.62 on the “liberal democratic values scale” (again, not clear what precisely this is supposed to mean). From 2006 to 2017, it only dropped from -1.62 to -1.71.

19: As of November 2024, a whopping 33 of 102 counties in Illinois have approved a non-binding ballot referendum to secede from Illinois (or at least separate from Cook County). Republicans in both the Illinois and Indiana state legislatures have introduced bills to annex the counties to Indiana.

20: The last time a U.S. state changed borders was in 1977, when the United States ceded the Horcón Tract from Texas to Mexico. In 1967, it was discovered that the 400-acre parcel had been cut off from the United States by an unauthorized diversion of the Rio Grande in 1906. This resulted in one populated settlement, Río Rico, being de facto governed by Mexico even though it was (unbeknownst to anyone) de jure U.S. territory. The two governments corrected the mistake in the Boundary Treaty of 1970, but the United States was forced to recognize the birthright citizenship of hundreds of residents of Río Rico. See this 10-minute BBC documentary for more info.

21: The legislative authority of the U.S. House of Representatives is symbolized by the Mace of the Republic, a ceremonial mace placed on the dais when the House is in session. Per the House rules, the Speaker may order the Sergeant at Arms to present an unruly member with the mace to restore order. The former Assistant Sergeant at Arms and Keeper of the Mace, Joyce Hamlett, received widespread tribute from members of the House when she retired in 2023.

22: Saint Patrick’s Day is one of the biggest drinking holidays in the English-speaking world, likely resulting in hundreds of excess deaths per year. According to the foremost scholarly history of the holiday, The Wearing of the Green: A History of St. Patrick’s Day, this tradition dates back to at least the late 17th century:

The tradition of wetting the shamrock was referred to by [Thomas] Dineley in 1681 and [Caleb] Threlkeld in 1727, and appears regularly in Irish literature and engravings during the nineteenth century. At the close of the festive day, the piece of shamrock, which had resided upon the wearer’s clothing, was placed in the bottom of a glass or cup, then covered with punch, whiskey, or any other available alcohol.

Liberal indulgence of food and drink was a central component of St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. The 17 March usually falls within the period of Lenten abstinence, but Patrician tradition has decreed that the faithful are, for that special day, free from this constraint. Hence they could […] drink freely as they commemorated the life of the apostle of Ireland.

However, Saint Patrick’s Day drinking culture was curtailed by the temperance movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries:

Incredible as it might seem today, a decision was made to close all public houses and other licensed premises on 17 March. The first committee to debate the issue of a ban on drinking on St. Patrick’s Day came together in March 1922 […] In 1927 the Irish Times, in congratulatory spirit, was delighted to report that, “it was a dry St. Patrick’s Day, since all the public houses remained closed, and not a single case of drunkenness was seen in the streets during the Day.” […] The only place to get a drink on St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland was at the Royal Dublin Society Dog Show, which had a special alcohol licence, and was therefore always sure to attract a large crowd.

[I]t was not until 1961 that the government repealed the prohibition on alcohol. As the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph reported, curiously: “For the first time since the proclamation of the Irish republic, bars were open — legally that is — on the feast Day of Ireland’s patron saint.”

Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia

23: This month, I started using Suno AI to generate music. I’ve primarily used it to turn Wikipedia articles about topics of interest into songs I can listen to during workouts. Favorites so far include Jim Belushi, According to Jim (and my reboot mockup According to Cheryl), the Juche idea, lint, racism, twink, and George W. Bush’s Oval Office address on the evening of 9/11.

24: The main image on the Wikipedia page for twink used to be a model from Lucian Wintrich’s 2016 “Twinks4Trump” photo shoot, with “Make America Great Again” edited off the twink’s hat. Speakers at the event included Milo Yiannopoulos and far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders. The Wikipedia caption read: “This model, photographed for a twink-themed series, is a typical embodiment of the twink visual archetype.”

25: There is a Wikipedia page called “List of hoaxes on Wikipedia.” The longest-running hoax article, “Donovan Slacks,” was up for 19 years and 106 days. Slacks is described as “[a] [f]ictitious British revolutionary created to seemingly promote a low budget film.” Other highlights include:

• Eduardo Corrochio, “[a] [f]ictitious 1890s New York tap dancer; tap dance as a style did not originate until 1928,” up for 16 years and 48 days. (This is actually the name of a character Elaine makes up in an episode of Seinfeld.)

• A claim that the U.S. Naval Academy’s mascot used to be a gorilla, up for 12 years and 313 days, added by someone who needed to wear a costume for a school project on the Naval Academy but only owned a gorilla costume.

• Jar’Edo Wens, “[a] [f]ictional Australian Aboriginal deity, presumably named after ‘Jared Owens’,” up for 9 years and 278 days, and cited as an example of “gods and religions in history that have fallen out of favor” in a book by an atheist philosopher.

• A claim that there was once a flavor of soda called “Canada Dry Sunjizz Cream Soda,” up for 7 years and 69 days.

• A claim that Henry David Thoreau wore a “neck-beard” and that Louisa May Alcott once said his facial hair “will most assuredly deflect amorous advances and preserve the man’s virtue in perpetuity,” up for 6 years and 87 days.

26: Disgraced ex-Congressman George Santos (remember him?) created a Wikipedia user profile in 2011 under the alias “Anthony Devolder.” It says:

Born into a Brazilian family with european backround on july 22nd 1988,Anthony Devolder first startted his “stage” life at age 17 as an gay night club DRAG QUEEN and with that won sevral GAY “BEAUTY PAGENTS”!althought after meeting hollwood producer Ling kiu known for producing INDEPENDENTS DAY BY STEVEN SPILBERG) an older Anthony then took his step into the begining of his carrer in witch he started in a few T.V shows and DISNEY Channel shows such as “the suite life of Zack and Cody” and the hit Hanna Montana”.but it wasn’t untill he taped his very first movie in 2009 startting Uma Turman,Chris Odanald ,Melllisa George and Alicia Silver Stone in the movie “THE INVASION”.

Minnesota Politics: More Than You Wanted to Know

27: I registered to vote for the first time this month. In April, I’m going to caucus for my YIMBY pro-business mayor, Jacob Frey, and my neoliberal city council member. The local DSA has had a majority on the council since 2023, and they’ve obsessively tried to pass rent control (which the mayor has heroically blocked) and ban Uber and Lyft unless they operate at a loss. I don’t like how chummy the mayor has been with the police union, but his leading opponent is a cartoonishly corrupt state senator who calls himself a socialist. So Frey it is!

28: Minnesota and North Dakota do not have state Democratic Parties. Minnesota has a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and North Dakota has a Democratic-Nonpartisan League. They were formed in the mid-20th century as mergers between the state Democratic Parties and local agrarian socialist movements, so it made sense to keep the names until about a decade ago when the DFL/Dem-NPL stopped winning rural districts. Here are the results of the Minnesota state House of Representatives elections in 2012 and 2024:

Also, North Dakota had an entirely Dem-NPL Congressional delegation from 1987 to 2011. But last November, no Dem-NPL candidate received more than 33% of the vote in the U.S. House, U.S. Senate, or gubernatorial election.

29: From 1975 to 1995, Minnesota didn’t have a Republican Party either. The state party changed its name to “Independent-Republican Party of Minnesota” to distance itself from the Republican brand after Watergate. They reverted back to “Republican Party of Minnesota” following Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1994.

30: Minnesota also claims the only Reform Party candidate to ever win major elected office, former governor Jesse Ventura, who clinched a single term in 1998. But after Pat Buchanan won the Reform Party nomination for president in 2000, the state affiliate broke away and became the Independence Party of Minnesota. It remained relevant long after the national Reform Party collapsed, exceeding 15% of the vote in the 2008 U.S. Senate election (beating the margin of victory 1,400 times over) and 10% in the 2010 gubernatorial election (28 times the margin).

31: Former Congressman from Minnesota Dean Phillips is arguably the most vindicated and most punished character of the 2024 election. He mounted an ill-fated primary challenge to Biden from October 2023 to March 2024 in which he called on Biden to participate in debates and said the Democratic Party was “delusional” for moving to nominate him despite his age. Since the election, Phillips has been reduced to a political nonentity, lost his seat in Congress, and ruled out a run for Senator or Governor of Minnesota. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune:

When asked if he would ever return to politics, Phillips said it’s more about whether politics “come back” to him. He said fellow Democrats are still upset with his public criticism of Biden’s re-election.

Genuine Miscellany

32: Yes, the wild animal welfare movement is real, and yes, it’s making progress right now. A Washington, D.C.-based 501(c)(4), DC Voters for Animals, has launched a new coalition to press the city to reduce rodenticide use and instead “focus on waste management solutions as a key strategy for reducing rodent populations at the source.” This follows a report by the Washington Post about the serious negative welfare effects of rat poison on D.C. wildlife:

From September 2023 through May 2024, [a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center] collected tissue samples from 101 animals that were dead upon arrival at City Wildlife or so sick they had to be euthanized or died in the center’s care. The animals — found in all four quadrants of the District — included 40 squirrels, 30 crows, 18 hawks and other species including opossums, owls and a Canada goose. Of those samples, 85 percent tested positive for rodenticide.

33: You may have heard you’re supposed to elevate your legs after a workout to drain lactic acid, which is responsible for muscle soreness.

Like this.

Apparently, that’s not true. Lactic acid does not cause muscle soreness, and even if it did, you wouldn’t need to drain it because your body circulates blood on its own.

34: There’s a running workout called a fartlek (yes, like “fart lick”) where you alternate between moderate and high intensity running. The idea is it improves both aerobic and anaerobic endurance, but it’s more fun than doing conventional intervals. Is it scientifically supported? Depends on what you mean. It’s better than not doing anything, but it’s not clear if it’s better for you than regular interval training. The Washington Post’s exercise science reporter extolled the benefits of the fartlek earlier this year, but the journal article she cites doesn’t have anything to do with fartleks and just studies exercise intensity. I read a few abstracts on Google Scholar and they all seem bullish, but I didn’t care enough to look at the methodology or compare it to other intensive exercises.

35: I listened to Chappell Roan’s new song “The Giver” and it is NOT giving.

36: From River Page of The Free Press, probably the best (and only-est) analysis I’ve seen of Lady Gaga’s new album Mayhem, which came out on March 7:

On Friday, millennial pop diva Lady Gaga released her sixth studio album, Mayhem. Mayhem, indeed. A weird mix of disco, mom rock, dance pop, and singer-songwriter ballads, Gaga’s latest is completely incoherent, with no consistent thesis, theme, or sound. There’s a reason for that.

In my latest for The Free Press, I explain that nobody buys albums anymore, and increasingly, artists don’t really make them, either. All of which poses a question: Can the album survive the Spotify era?

There’s no way I would ever pay to read The Free Press, but if you’re one of the poor saps who does, you can find the article here.

37: Kamala Harris is weighing a run for Governor of California in 2026. Pete Buttigieg is considering running for U.S. Senate in Michigan. They’re also both considering running for president in 2028. Realistically, this is an either/or proposition. The 2020 Democratic primary race started in January 2019. If it starts that early next time, Harris and Buttigieg will have been in office for less than a month before starting to run for president. Besides looking like they had just lied to voters about wanting to govern instead of adding another line to their résumé, they would face a logistical nightmare transitioning between campaigns so quickly.

38: I wrote the above paragraph a week ago, and now Buttigieg says he’s not running for Senate. Get ready for the return of that god-awful dance and the worst Panic! At The Disco song you’ve ever heard. According to Politico:

[Buttigieg’s] decision was framed by several allies and people in his inner circle as putting him in the strongest possible position to seek the presidency, and based on a belief it would be exceedingly difficult to run successive campaigns in 2026 and 2028.

39: And for some reason Rahm Emanuel is also running?

40: But first! We have to get through the midterms! I’m getting very excited about the race in Colorado’s 8th congressional district, where the winner of the Democratic primary will probably be slightly favored to win the election. The only declared Democrat so far is Manny Rutinel, a very smart freshman state representative who’s already racking up endorsements. I won’t divulge too many details, but if you’re a good enough internet sleuth you can probably put the pieces together on your own. Suffice it to say he’s our guy. If you’re an eligible U.S. citizen, this may be the one donation opportunity I encourage you to consider that’s not an effective longtermist or animal charity.

1. This isn’t mentioned in the post, but I think it’s also part of the problem that whether an org is even identified and legitimated as EA depends in large part on whether they receive a seal of approval from evaluators and funders like Open Philanthropy.