Hmm, reading through this post, I feel like I'm looking at two major tragedies happening in contemporary America right now, and honestly, it’s really hard to watch.
First, this painful question of political extremism. Left-wing versus right-wing—which one actually leaves the worse mess behind? When the boat is rocking this violently back and forth between two crazy extremes, you have to ask: have all the normal, rational people in the middle just been thrown overboard at this point?
Second, watching America turn its back on clean energy and roll back progress at such a critical moment in history. Who could have ever guessed that a single person could make such a massive mistake, driving the whole country backward like this? I guess history will have to answer this painful question down the road.
I agree with your comment on politics, but you can’t blame the failure of American consumers to buy battery powered vehicles on a single person. In a free market economy, people should be free to buy whatever vehicles they want, and whoever’s living in the White House shouldn’t be subsidizing or banning specific products, like the last resident and getting rid of mandates or subsidies is one of the few free market things the current resident actually did. American CO2 emissions have been falling (down 7% in the last decade ) whereas the biggest emitters are China (even with its leading share of EVs) and India are still growing (up over 20% in the last decade).
No, it has nothing to do with consumers—this is a failure of industrial policy and the supply side. Notice I didn't mention the environment, right?
Crackdowns on clean energy (cutting off wind and solar subsidies at the worst possible time) and boosting fossil fuels is about missing a massive tech and infrastructure upgrade. It's giving up future job opportunities, fighting the tide of history, and just showing a total lack of vision, isn't it?
We wanted to buy a replacement Nissan Leaf in April; but there was zero inventory in Honolulu. Literally zero. Even used. Multiple salespeople at the dealership told us that Nissan Japan, responding to Trump2 policies, had sharply reduced inventory sent to US dealerships. We were told that a cash pre-order *might* result in a Leaf shipped by mid-2027.
We ended up buying one of only two available Prius plugin-hybrids instead. Dealerships in Long Beach, CA (close to where Matson ships to Hawaii) also had extremely low inventory of Nissan & Toyota EV and hybrid models.
Conclusion: Since early 2025, Japanese EV's and hybrids have become very hard to find on the US West Coast market.
There aren’t many Japanese EVs at all, but I see lots of Hyundais, Kias, Teslas, Rivians, Lucius and other EVs on the west coast. I don’t think Trump added a specific tariff for EVs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. Hawaii is its own expensive market, but if you are getting an EV from Long Beach via Matson, at least Trump suspended the Jones Act shipping “tax” temporarily so you’ll save some money. But of course, there’s also the much higher prices from his tariffs and incompetent war, so it’s still very bad.
We had started looking for a replacement for our mangled Leaf in late 2025; and continued driving it until the opposing party's insurance coughed up this spring. But inventory in Honolulu and Long Beach for Toyota, Nissan and Kia EV's (my wife wouldn't let me even look at Teslas) were--according to their respective dealerships--unusually low after 2024. Hawaii is a sort of microcosmic reflection of SoCal inventories. Just add ~$4,000 retail per vehicle for shipping.
All due to Trump2 policies? Don't know.
I'm curious what effect the >6 month spike in gas prices has had on EV inventories.
I think you miss the fundamental problem of Left antisemitism. You state, de facto, that all Jews need to do is give up Zionism - a fairly important part of most Jewish teachings, at least in its basic form claiming Israel as the Jewish homeland - and Leftists would have no problem with Jews. You are essentially saying that 20% of Jews are 'good;' but the rest deserve the hate being visited upon them.
At least the Right is honest; they hate Jews just for being Jews.
The Left, at present, is more dangerous for Jews than the Right, simply because its justification for Jew hatred is more sophisticated and thus more likely to be accepted by elites.
Honest only means that they announce their intentions. The Left disguises them. I despise to the core of my being both of them, but at this moment in time I am more scared of the Left because of their greater lnfluence among the people of my intellectual world.
b. The Right is on a Long March of 60 years to eradicate all Left people and policies
c. The Right is committed to NOT co-exist with the Left, people and policies.
d. The Right has a 60 year sustained philosophy of actions based on a simple Trinity. By which all Policies, Senators, Justices and Judges must be subservient to:
God
Guns
Glory (war).
What is the cohesive, Clear and Simlle and coherent foundation of our Democrats/Liberals/Progressive?
The Cs. Chaos. Confusion. inCoherence.
I'm Left. My team utterly failed to develop leadership and a bench.
The problem with this analysis is that 'Zionism' is still a pretty broad category. It can span all the way from what seems to be the current Israeli policy of 'make life so miserable for Palestinians that they leave, and meanwhile give them no civil rights' to a two state solution or even a one state solution that includes a right of return for Jews to Israel, but otherwise equal rights between Jewish and non-Jewish residents of greater Israel.
It is certainly not true that 80% of American Jews support the current Israeli government, or its policies on the occupied territories.
And finally, living a couple of blocks from Tree of Life Synagogue, I'm not buying 'the Left is more dangerous for Jews' argument at all.
The point I am dealing with is exactly that not all Zionists wear knitted skullcaps and burn Palestinian orchards, just as you say. But the Left leaves no room for such nuance; even defending Israel’s right to exist, the mildest, most basic form of Zionism, is unacceptable to these people. You are right that in the US thus far more Jewish deaths have occurred at the hands of the Right. But the Left is taking over many institutions and denying even progressive Zionists access. I personally know of several very top Israeli academics whose invitations to present research were revoked. And in Europe, it is the Left that incites violence against Jews.
I don't see much nuance on either side, TBH. I could write 10,000 words just revisiting all the opportunities for peace that one side or the other threw away, just since 1970.
WRT revoked invitations, I'd be interested in knowing if academics from Russia were disinvited as well.
Personally, even back then I wasn’t buying the condolences from the Left after that massacre. It was merely who performed the massacre, and for what ends that the Left objected to.
This idea that unless people are killed then it’s all good what the Left is doing (and let’s not forget, AES just apologized for being insensitive to an attempt to kill *100 Jewish Kindergarteners*) is unbelievably myopic, if not self-serving
There is nothing the left hates more than success and Jews are successful. Zionism and Israel are not what these people actually care about. Jews would be foolish to try to make peace with the left.
I guess I should listen to them because the left always says what they mean. That's why they ally themselves with Muslims who share all of their stated moral values, right?
The problem with social media is that it's turned everyone into a sort of tortured artist. Let me explain: In the before times of traditional media, a new popular song comes out and most people's reaction is either "cool song" or "eh, not for me". But there was a narrow slice of the population that had a weirder reaction of "oh man, I will never produce art like that, and now I'm depressed about how lame I am" or maybe more like "this art is so amazing, but other people don't understand why" or the opposite "this art is vulgar and derivative, not like the kind of art I like".
The problem now is there is algorithmic targeted "art" in short form video, or memes or a tweet-sized political essays, and theres so much of it, that theres some version that will bring out those feelings in all of us. Theres some media out there fits the niche of something we care deeply about and that thing will be challenged or re-enforced, or we are just outshined in an area we feel insecure about. And by consuming it, we are ever so slightly torturing ourselves.
Noah, I think your too-rosy memory of historical fact is obscuring reality. The late-90s featured only the second impeachment trial of an American president after years of work by a GOP movement that was abetted by a divisive new entry in the media landscape: a TV network devoted to presenting news with a partisan slant. This was followed in short order by a presidential election so close that it's widely regarded as having been decided by the Supreme Court. That despite the economy being in such great shape the US was running a budget surplus.
My perspective, having had to listen to my parents pretend that the country was falling apart because the president diddled an intern (behavior they apparently now sanction, given they've supported the current president since his first election), is that the divisions we have today are certainly worse than then, but they fall along basically the same fault lines, and while social media has helped sharpen the lines, it didn't create them, and we've collectively done precious little to reach across those divides and patch them up.
Well, there's always bad stuff going on in the world, but if you look at surveys, that's when Americans were the most satisfied with the direction of the country since the early 60s.
I think what the surveys were falling to capture was the same batch of divisions that we watch on blast every day. If you saw Fox News of that era on a regular basis, they were trying to destroy the Democratic party through every tool they could manage. And much of their viewer base was on board. "Seattle" was shorthand during that era for the anti-globalization protests that page today's DSA/Liberal divide.
Consider: at the end of Reagan's term, GHWB cruised to his own term as president because folks gave credit to Reagan for bringing down inflation and figured Poppy Bush would keep the party going. Just eight years later, with the United States balancing its budget, something GOPers had been unwilling to do when they were in complete control of gov't, but had consistently claimed as a lodestar, voters rejected the party that gave them that balanced budget and a booming economy for a guy they thought they could party with (and did this in part by splitting their left-leaning votes away from the Dems for Ralph Nader). And he immediately turned around and created the conditions for more debt.
They may have been happy when answering surveys, but they sure expressed a lot more ambivalence when they voted or protested.
My guess is that it's mostly fuel prices. European gas is more than twice as expensive as in the US. In China it's about the same, but incomes are lower so it's relatively more expensive. China also has an actually innovative car industry as opposed to the state supported jobs program and union giveaway that our domestic industry is.
Also, resource security. The US produces enough oil for its own consumption, any external shocks to supply will be felt in the customers' pockets, but there won't be any shortages in the sense that the gas stations would be empty. In many other places (like India), an external supply shock disrupts the economy badly. Looking at Hormuz, few people want to be hostages to this.
I doubt very many people are thinking about that when they make a car purchase decision, but it definitely means the government has less of a reason to incentivize EVs vs China or Europe.
Who wants to be a guinea pig for electric cars when you can get a well thought out gas car, even though the regulators have been messing with them for decades. Imagine how reliable cars would be nowadays without changing enviro regulations all the time.
once again your AI commentary is unique and insightful. I’ve read too much Twitter and a number of long form posts on the Hugging Face incident. I’ve heard dozens of conclusions, takeaways, etc., most of which overlap. Your takeaways about how this could be a sign that job displacement takes much longer, which I think is very plausible as things have unfolded (although one year ago felt quite different), is not one I’ve seen before but I think is a fascinating takeaway. I’m sure there are well formed arguments against it, and startups may take risks to get lots of things done with unstable agents, but widespread disruption cannot happen if there’s a remote possibility of these types of actions for established enterprises. I think you’re right it should raise alarms, to bring in your first point, that there may be this tension that is very difficult for agentic AIs to overcome due to their way of being developed
If humans have to stay in the loop then I also think this poses significant risk to the AI boom going on, as I don’t see how corporate consumers can spend the money needed on AI without significantly reducing their workforce to offset
Right, humans probably do have to stay in the loop, for a couple of reasons.
First, despite all the breathless wonder expressed over Claude Code, it just isn't that good. I know this is a heresy, but it can't really figure out module boundaries or abstractions very well. It's much better at debugging than bugging :-)
Second, letting these things run open loop without any human intervention seems to lead to stuff like the HuggingFace incident.
And you're right that this will affect the financial viability of these AI companies, for a few reasons:
1 -- the per token price is too high, by a lot. I have a friend who works at a hyperscaler and burns about 750 million tokens a week doing stuff he could just script, except he gets reviewed negatively if he doesn't burn tokens. But at a real company, he'd be spending $700-800K per year, and he'd have to stop.
2 -- there will be cheaper LLM models available that will undercut the frontier lab LLMs.
3 -- You don't need LLMs to do most of the really cool AI tasks. AlphaFold and AlphaGo aren't LLMs, they're just regular ML programs.
Given that there is still high demand for tokens, it appears the market clearing price may just be higher than you imagine it should be. I just pay for the bundled plans myself, but I guess that isn’t allowed for organizations. I see a problem with companies that incentivize token use, but in your example, it could be an indication of the circular AI economy, where if the hyperscalers use tokens, the model runners but compute or data centers, who buy NVidia GPUs who then loan money to hyperscalers to keep growing.
Sorry, I was being too brief. The token price is too high for companies to pay, once they're off their 'all you can eat' plans. The token price is also too low if you expect the AI companies to ever be profitable.
Right now, I paid for (and then canceled) a $20/month Claude Code subscription. I gave it up because it didn't really do much for me; the code is wrote was barely usable after multiple review/reprompt passes followed by a cleanup pass done completely manually. I periodically test Gemini to see if it can find bugs that I've already identified, and I have to say it does a decent job there. So far, I've paid exactly $20 for all my AI work.
Oh about AI critics and decelerationists, I have to say they are filled with noble humanistic concern right? I get it; but also it feels like they rarely offer a clear answer to one simple question: if we slow down, then what? What actionable steps can actually compensate for the economic and societal losses during that transition? I'd love to see a practical, realistic solution, but so far, I haven't seen a technically feasible idea that really solves this.
And the point about Obedience vs. Benevolence is great! As a developer I see AI code generation works great now, but code review has become a real bottleneck. Human review can't keep up, yet handing it over to AI agents creates non-convergence issues because AI can't make smart trade-offs between speed and risk at critical moments. Just like Noah pointed out, this fundamental gap between human oversight and AI behavior is why software deployment won't go fully autonomous anytime soon. The technology keeps moving fast, but until we find better answers or AI solves this alignment dilemma, humans are stuck keeping AIs on task.
“while leftists are merely demanding that Jews prove their opposition to Israel before accepting them into the fold.”
“Merely”! Merely!
And it’s not just “opposition” to Israel they’re looking for, it’s disavowing any “Zionism” whatsoever: Jews should not have a state, despite Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc, etc
I personally have no interest in migrating to Israel, and I find the concept of “Aliyah” (“ascending” when one moves to Israel) deeply offensive. I’m very happy as an American Jew, and will fight for my right to be fully accepted *here*. That *includes* not abandoning my fellow Jews who *do* live in Israel by pronouncing the country they live in shouldn’t exist.
Surely, Noah, you understand how soul-crushing these demands are; how they harken to the worst civilizations of the 20th Century that stood for multiple generations. “Merely”!
We all remember a decade of every Muslim person being asked to disavow al quada before being allowed to speak in public. I'm assuming that's not what you meant with your last paragraph.
“So let’s now enact revenge by forcing a minority we oppose to do the same”?
I also remember President Bush explicitly calling Islam “A religion of peace”, and taking care not to use the term “Crusade”. So while deep suspicion by a large swathe the general populace of ordinary Arabs and Muslims (and Sikhs, simply due to their turbans) was bad, our leadership at least had the awareness to say, publicly, “this is wrong”. Not seeing that from the Left these days, frankly. AES’s apology is a good step in the right direction, though he can’t pretend Piker wasn’t a part of his campaign.
If the mainstream considered it fine for decades, then trying to claim now that doing so is wrong on principle is a bad joke.
Or, in other words, let me know when the 'he's going to implement sharia law!' claims against AES or Mamdani stop getting made by the same people complaining about 'having' to disavow Zionism.
Acemoglu also today has an oped in the NYT calling for Democrats to replace Woke 1 with big-tent populism (I guess let in the commies, but definitely keep out the robots).
In the same week that Piker made these comments about attacks on Jews which can be almost defended by saying that Jewish establishment types have said the same thing and made clear that attacks on Jews are bad he gave an interview to Haaretz where he entirely failed to redeem himself in spite of being much more civil and nice than his typical social media persona. Behind paywall, Piker condemned such things as attacking the Shalom Aleichem Center, clearly a Yiddish cultural institution, for being Jewish but said, "I do believe that [Zionism] was exterminationist and supremacist from the beginning. I guess my perspective is that it was an experiment inevitably going to reach this maximalist conclusion. I think the warning was always there because the violence was always there [refers to Deir Yassin and Jewish terrorist groups under the Mandate] The driving principle behind it was very cold and very sober: that we have to rid the land of its current inhabitants if we want to create this." I.e. he wants people to believe that the evil reified ideology, Zionism, produced everything that some of us have literally seen since October 7 and disregard the history of actual Israeli political leaders who knew that the occupation was destroying the Israel that they had believed in. He will get away with this because even some of the most AIPAC-friendly public officials cannot muster complex defenses of Zionism and they do not really fit into 60-second political messages in an election that is about Trump and the economy. Arno Rosenfeld, hardly a hysterical conflater of antisemitism and anti-Zionism when he was at the Forward, then wrote, "Piker told Haaretz that [Jews' attachment to a Jewish state] was a product of "social conditioning" no different from the support white nationalists feel for a white ethno-state. But this gets it backwards. Jews are attached to the existence of a Jewish state precisely because white nationalists want a white ethno-state. This is a key difference between Zionism and Nazism. Some recognition from Piker that many American Jews are grappling with their relationship to Israel as a minority group struggling to stay safe in a historically hostile diaspora--and gauging their actual political views, rather than their abstract degree of attachment to Israel--would go a long way toward reassuring them he views them as more than would-be Nazis or terrorists."
I am getting 2-3 emails a day from the el-Sayed campaign (and some immediately after the primary that showed that the party was entirely behind him) and was tempted to write back that I will not give a dime to anyone who campaigned with Piker but I am sure he is hearing plenty of that in person. I did not really consider "Block Sender" because I will delete all the candidate emails after the election anyhow. (I will probably designate $50 for the sum total of my donations for this election and it will go to two TBA individuals in October depending on the state of polling.)
Piker is clearly an antisemite. Now, he may be right that “anti-Zionists” will blame American Jews for the actions of Israel Jews, because that is how antisemites think.
There was an increase in of anti-Muslim hate crimes immediately after 9/11 (and some unfortunate Sikhs), which were terrible and unacceptable. But the raw annual numbers were in the hundreds, in a country of 284 million at the time. Anti-Jewish attacks still outnumbered them! But if Piker’s “logic” applied to other groups, we would have seen far greater levels of violence and bloodshed. In fact, most Americans are not bloodthirsty Islamophobes who blame the actions of one group of foreign Muslims.
The idea that Jews in the United States are responsible, or should or will be blamed for the actions of Jews in Israel is classic antisemitism- because clearly Jews are clannish and work together to achieve their goals. (Something something Protocol of the Elder of Zion).
Jews are the victims of the majority of religious motivated attacks, despite representing 2% of the population, in the US. This is a dynamic that has been the case for decades.
He is also a Mao fan, who writes off the…40-60 million killed as a direct result of Mao’s policy whims as a minor thing. I see him as a significantly dumber and less verbally capable Chomsky for our modern era. The jury is still out on who denies more well documented genocides. My money is still on Chomsky, because he actually just knows about more genocides to deny.
On Jews/Israel, Piker has almost perfect overlap with Tucker Carlson, but with far less verbal sophistication. Because he dumb! Vicious, dangerous, and so dumb!
What Piker is plausibly saying is that there are going to be very stupid people who believe that Jews are responsible for the actions of the Israeli government simply by believing in Zionism even if polls show that this government appalls most American Jews. I happen to personally know that I am the butt of the joke that is Ted in Amos Oz's "Fima" but I am sure that Oz personally knew many other Teds who had no choice but to see Israel through a frame that is so American they don't even know it.
In the days when the Other Israel Film Festival substantially existed they showed the documentary about AIPAC, "Kings of Capitol Hill", which I promoted on Twitter and am even more convinced that every citizen needs to have watched because it showed even former AIPAC officials being very disillusioned with what AIPAC has become and how indefensibly it has moved to the right. Citizens would see that it is not as simple as AIPAC taking orders from a foreign government but is about ordinary Americans choosing a very absolutist vision of what Israel means.
(Thanks Noah for giving me the opportunity to rant about Hasan Piker and forget all about commenting to David Sessions information that should not be on Substack for the public to read)
What do you think is going to be capable, if anything, of getting the US to take the electric stack seriously? I'm in Europe right now, and while I constantly complain about the entire slate of European technology — up to and including the abominable slate of apps and manual logins you need to drive and power an electric car here — it's inarguably true (at least in France anyway) that they're outpacing the US on distributed infrastructure and potentially on the drive-train, at least on a per capita basis. You can feel the leading edge of a phase change in a way you just can't in the US. I was optimistic that something like Iran would be a forcing function for us, but it doesn't look like that's playing out. Do we think anything can jostle us out of our inertial default?
At least in France the EVs are nuclear powered, even if you have to manually accept the cookie policies every time you start it. I see that 20% of the EVs in France are made in China, do they actually manufacture EVs and batteries in France? I see that Renault, Stellantis, Tesla, VW and BMW as the top selling EVs in France, the last 3 I assume are built mostly in Germany.
Ten years ago I would have agreed with you, but I don't live in the 2010's. I live in 2026, and in 2026, pretty much all of the murders of Jews in the US and Europe since 2023 that I know of were committed by Leftists or their allies. So while I'll definitely be keeping a worried eye on the far right, they aren't the ones I worry most about murdering me in the street. All that being said, it sure is something that there is a reasonable debate to be had about which group of extremists is more likely to murder us!
Most definitely the latter. Technically they're one and the same because I only hear about the murders of Jews committed for ideological reasons, but had I heard about crime-related killings, then I'm sure my statement wouldn't hold.
Hmm, reading through this post, I feel like I'm looking at two major tragedies happening in contemporary America right now, and honestly, it’s really hard to watch.
First, this painful question of political extremism. Left-wing versus right-wing—which one actually leaves the worse mess behind? When the boat is rocking this violently back and forth between two crazy extremes, you have to ask: have all the normal, rational people in the middle just been thrown overboard at this point?
Second, watching America turn its back on clean energy and roll back progress at such a critical moment in history. Who could have ever guessed that a single person could make such a massive mistake, driving the whole country backward like this? I guess history will have to answer this painful question down the road.
I agree with your comment on politics, but you can’t blame the failure of American consumers to buy battery powered vehicles on a single person. In a free market economy, people should be free to buy whatever vehicles they want, and whoever’s living in the White House shouldn’t be subsidizing or banning specific products, like the last resident and getting rid of mandates or subsidies is one of the few free market things the current resident actually did. American CO2 emissions have been falling (down 7% in the last decade ) whereas the biggest emitters are China (even with its leading share of EVs) and India are still growing (up over 20% in the last decade).
No, it has nothing to do with consumers—this is a failure of industrial policy and the supply side. Notice I didn't mention the environment, right?
Crackdowns on clean energy (cutting off wind and solar subsidies at the worst possible time) and boosting fossil fuels is about missing a massive tech and infrastructure upgrade. It's giving up future job opportunities, fighting the tide of history, and just showing a total lack of vision, isn't it?
We wanted to buy a replacement Nissan Leaf in April; but there was zero inventory in Honolulu. Literally zero. Even used. Multiple salespeople at the dealership told us that Nissan Japan, responding to Trump2 policies, had sharply reduced inventory sent to US dealerships. We were told that a cash pre-order *might* result in a Leaf shipped by mid-2027.
We ended up buying one of only two available Prius plugin-hybrids instead. Dealerships in Long Beach, CA (close to where Matson ships to Hawaii) also had extremely low inventory of Nissan & Toyota EV and hybrid models.
Conclusion: Since early 2025, Japanese EV's and hybrids have become very hard to find on the US West Coast market.
There aren’t many Japanese EVs at all, but I see lots of Hyundais, Kias, Teslas, Rivians, Lucius and other EVs on the west coast. I don’t think Trump added a specific tariff for EVs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. Hawaii is its own expensive market, but if you are getting an EV from Long Beach via Matson, at least Trump suspended the Jones Act shipping “tax” temporarily so you’ll save some money. But of course, there’s also the much higher prices from his tariffs and incompetent war, so it’s still very bad.
We had started looking for a replacement for our mangled Leaf in late 2025; and continued driving it until the opposing party's insurance coughed up this spring. But inventory in Honolulu and Long Beach for Toyota, Nissan and Kia EV's (my wife wouldn't let me even look at Teslas) were--according to their respective dealerships--unusually low after 2024. Hawaii is a sort of microcosmic reflection of SoCal inventories. Just add ~$4,000 retail per vehicle for shipping.
All due to Trump2 policies? Don't know.
I'm curious what effect the >6 month spike in gas prices has had on EV inventories.
More thought should be paid to how the internet has trended towards functioning as a hive mind more and more.
I think you miss the fundamental problem of Left antisemitism. You state, de facto, that all Jews need to do is give up Zionism - a fairly important part of most Jewish teachings, at least in its basic form claiming Israel as the Jewish homeland - and Leftists would have no problem with Jews. You are essentially saying that 20% of Jews are 'good;' but the rest deserve the hate being visited upon them.
At least the Right is honest; they hate Jews just for being Jews.
The Left, at present, is more dangerous for Jews than the Right, simply because its justification for Jew hatred is more sophisticated and thus more likely to be accepted by elites.
The Right is "honest" is laughable.
The Left antisemitism is not, absolutely not, as dangerous as the Right.
Honest only means that they announce their intentions. The Left disguises them. I despise to the core of my being both of them, but at this moment in time I am more scared of the Left because of their greater lnfluence among the people of my intellectual world.
The simple truths are as follows:
a. The Right desires to eviscerate the Left.
b. The Right is on a Long March of 60 years to eradicate all Left people and policies
c. The Right is committed to NOT co-exist with the Left, people and policies.
d. The Right has a 60 year sustained philosophy of actions based on a simple Trinity. By which all Policies, Senators, Justices and Judges must be subservient to:
God
Guns
Glory (war).
What is the cohesive, Clear and Simlle and coherent foundation of our Democrats/Liberals/Progressive?
The Cs. Chaos. Confusion. inCoherence.
I'm Left. My team utterly failed to develop leadership and a bench.
Fails by Clintons immensely. And Obama et al
What coexistence is on offer from the Left for the overwhelming majority of Jews who simply believe that Israel should exist, as a Jewish state?
The problem with this analysis is that 'Zionism' is still a pretty broad category. It can span all the way from what seems to be the current Israeli policy of 'make life so miserable for Palestinians that they leave, and meanwhile give them no civil rights' to a two state solution or even a one state solution that includes a right of return for Jews to Israel, but otherwise equal rights between Jewish and non-Jewish residents of greater Israel.
It is certainly not true that 80% of American Jews support the current Israeli government, or its policies on the occupied territories.
And finally, living a couple of blocks from Tree of Life Synagogue, I'm not buying 'the Left is more dangerous for Jews' argument at all.
The point I am dealing with is exactly that not all Zionists wear knitted skullcaps and burn Palestinian orchards, just as you say. But the Left leaves no room for such nuance; even defending Israel’s right to exist, the mildest, most basic form of Zionism, is unacceptable to these people. You are right that in the US thus far more Jewish deaths have occurred at the hands of the Right. But the Left is taking over many institutions and denying even progressive Zionists access. I personally know of several very top Israeli academics whose invitations to present research were revoked. And in Europe, it is the Left that incites violence against Jews.
I don't see much nuance on either side, TBH. I could write 10,000 words just revisiting all the opportunities for peace that one side or the other threw away, just since 1970.
WRT revoked invitations, I'd be interested in knowing if academics from Russia were disinvited as well.
Personally, even back then I wasn’t buying the condolences from the Left after that massacre. It was merely who performed the massacre, and for what ends that the Left objected to.
This idea that unless people are killed then it’s all good what the Left is doing (and let’s not forget, AES just apologized for being insensitive to an attempt to kill *100 Jewish Kindergarteners*) is unbelievably myopic, if not self-serving
There is nothing the left hates more than success and Jews are successful. Zionism and Israel are not what these people actually care about. Jews would be foolish to try to make peace with the left.
Lol. Way to miss entirely what your opponents say and make up an entirely different set of motivations for them.
I guess I should listen to them because the left always says what they mean. That's why they ally themselves with Muslims who share all of their stated moral values, right?
Yeah, you might have a better idea who the left is allies with if you listened to them.
Here's a hint to clear up confusion: "they deserve human rights even if they hate us" is not the same thing as "they are our allies".
The problem with social media is that it's turned everyone into a sort of tortured artist. Let me explain: In the before times of traditional media, a new popular song comes out and most people's reaction is either "cool song" or "eh, not for me". But there was a narrow slice of the population that had a weirder reaction of "oh man, I will never produce art like that, and now I'm depressed about how lame I am" or maybe more like "this art is so amazing, but other people don't understand why" or the opposite "this art is vulgar and derivative, not like the kind of art I like".
The problem now is there is algorithmic targeted "art" in short form video, or memes or a tweet-sized political essays, and theres so much of it, that theres some version that will bring out those feelings in all of us. Theres some media out there fits the niche of something we care deeply about and that thing will be challenged or re-enforced, or we are just outshined in an area we feel insecure about. And by consuming it, we are ever so slightly torturing ourselves.
Noah, I think your too-rosy memory of historical fact is obscuring reality. The late-90s featured only the second impeachment trial of an American president after years of work by a GOP movement that was abetted by a divisive new entry in the media landscape: a TV network devoted to presenting news with a partisan slant. This was followed in short order by a presidential election so close that it's widely regarded as having been decided by the Supreme Court. That despite the economy being in such great shape the US was running a budget surplus.
My perspective, having had to listen to my parents pretend that the country was falling apart because the president diddled an intern (behavior they apparently now sanction, given they've supported the current president since his first election), is that the divisions we have today are certainly worse than then, but they fall along basically the same fault lines, and while social media has helped sharpen the lines, it didn't create them, and we've collectively done precious little to reach across those divides and patch them up.
Well, there's always bad stuff going on in the world, but if you look at surveys, that's when Americans were the most satisfied with the direction of the country since the early 60s.
I think what the surveys were falling to capture was the same batch of divisions that we watch on blast every day. If you saw Fox News of that era on a regular basis, they were trying to destroy the Democratic party through every tool they could manage. And much of their viewer base was on board. "Seattle" was shorthand during that era for the anti-globalization protests that page today's DSA/Liberal divide.
Consider: at the end of Reagan's term, GHWB cruised to his own term as president because folks gave credit to Reagan for bringing down inflation and figured Poppy Bush would keep the party going. Just eight years later, with the United States balancing its budget, something GOPers had been unwilling to do when they were in complete control of gov't, but had consistently claimed as a lodestar, voters rejected the party that gave them that balanced budget and a booming economy for a guy they thought they could party with (and did this in part by splitting their left-leaning votes away from the Dems for Ralph Nader). And he immediately turned around and created the conditions for more debt.
They may have been happy when answering surveys, but they sure expressed a lot more ambivalence when they voted or protested.
Asimov solved the conundrum long ago. Benevolence first, then obedience.
The problem is that benevolence is highly contested, while obedience is pretty simple.
I don't think humans can agree on what benevolence means, let alone teach the robots.
Really wonder why the US is falling behind in its share of BEV sales.
Much of the gap in sales share started before, but continued after the Inflation Reduction Act was passed.
My guess is that it's mostly fuel prices. European gas is more than twice as expensive as in the US. In China it's about the same, but incomes are lower so it's relatively more expensive. China also has an actually innovative car industry as opposed to the state supported jobs program and union giveaway that our domestic industry is.
Also, resource security. The US produces enough oil for its own consumption, any external shocks to supply will be felt in the customers' pockets, but there won't be any shortages in the sense that the gas stations would be empty. In many other places (like India), an external supply shock disrupts the economy badly. Looking at Hormuz, few people want to be hostages to this.
I doubt very many people are thinking about that when they make a car purchase decision, but it definitely means the government has less of a reason to incentivize EVs vs China or Europe.
Threat of possible fuel rationing is quite a factor, and several Asian nations have discussed or even implemented light rationing due to Hormuz.
Who wants to be a guinea pig for electric cars when you can get a well thought out gas car, even though the regulators have been messing with them for decades. Imagine how reliable cars would be nowadays without changing enviro regulations all the time.
Noah -
once again your AI commentary is unique and insightful. I’ve read too much Twitter and a number of long form posts on the Hugging Face incident. I’ve heard dozens of conclusions, takeaways, etc., most of which overlap. Your takeaways about how this could be a sign that job displacement takes much longer, which I think is very plausible as things have unfolded (although one year ago felt quite different), is not one I’ve seen before but I think is a fascinating takeaway. I’m sure there are well formed arguments against it, and startups may take risks to get lots of things done with unstable agents, but widespread disruption cannot happen if there’s a remote possibility of these types of actions for established enterprises. I think you’re right it should raise alarms, to bring in your first point, that there may be this tension that is very difficult for agentic AIs to overcome due to their way of being developed
If humans have to stay in the loop then I also think this poses significant risk to the AI boom going on, as I don’t see how corporate consumers can spend the money needed on AI without significantly reducing their workforce to offset
Right, humans probably do have to stay in the loop, for a couple of reasons.
First, despite all the breathless wonder expressed over Claude Code, it just isn't that good. I know this is a heresy, but it can't really figure out module boundaries or abstractions very well. It's much better at debugging than bugging :-)
Second, letting these things run open loop without any human intervention seems to lead to stuff like the HuggingFace incident.
And you're right that this will affect the financial viability of these AI companies, for a few reasons:
1 -- the per token price is too high, by a lot. I have a friend who works at a hyperscaler and burns about 750 million tokens a week doing stuff he could just script, except he gets reviewed negatively if he doesn't burn tokens. But at a real company, he'd be spending $700-800K per year, and he'd have to stop.
2 -- there will be cheaper LLM models available that will undercut the frontier lab LLMs.
3 -- You don't need LLMs to do most of the really cool AI tasks. AlphaFold and AlphaGo aren't LLMs, they're just regular ML programs.
Given that there is still high demand for tokens, it appears the market clearing price may just be higher than you imagine it should be. I just pay for the bundled plans myself, but I guess that isn’t allowed for organizations. I see a problem with companies that incentivize token use, but in your example, it could be an indication of the circular AI economy, where if the hyperscalers use tokens, the model runners but compute or data centers, who buy NVidia GPUs who then loan money to hyperscalers to keep growing.
Sorry, I was being too brief. The token price is too high for companies to pay, once they're off their 'all you can eat' plans. The token price is also too low if you expect the AI companies to ever be profitable.
Right now, I paid for (and then canceled) a $20/month Claude Code subscription. I gave it up because it didn't really do much for me; the code is wrote was barely usable after multiple review/reprompt passes followed by a cleanup pass done completely manually. I periodically test Gemini to see if it can find bugs that I've already identified, and I have to say it does a decent job there. So far, I've paid exactly $20 for all my AI work.
"...it was the smartphone, which moved young people’s entire social world online and trapped them in a sort of toxic hive-mind."
Bingo!
Oh about AI critics and decelerationists, I have to say they are filled with noble humanistic concern right? I get it; but also it feels like they rarely offer a clear answer to one simple question: if we slow down, then what? What actionable steps can actually compensate for the economic and societal losses during that transition? I'd love to see a practical, realistic solution, but so far, I haven't seen a technically feasible idea that really solves this.
And the point about Obedience vs. Benevolence is great! As a developer I see AI code generation works great now, but code review has become a real bottleneck. Human review can't keep up, yet handing it over to AI agents creates non-convergence issues because AI can't make smart trade-offs between speed and risk at critical moments. Just like Noah pointed out, this fundamental gap between human oversight and AI behavior is why software deployment won't go fully autonomous anytime soon. The technology keeps moving fast, but until we find better answers or AI solves this alignment dilemma, humans are stuck keeping AIs on task.
"I can’t wait for the papers where Acemoglu shows that AI causes foot fungus, bad breakups, and crappy Star Wars sequels."
As generative AI gets better, it probably will end up being responsible for quite a few of that last one. :P
“while leftists are merely demanding that Jews prove their opposition to Israel before accepting them into the fold.”
“Merely”! Merely!
And it’s not just “opposition” to Israel they’re looking for, it’s disavowing any “Zionism” whatsoever: Jews should not have a state, despite Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc, etc
I personally have no interest in migrating to Israel, and I find the concept of “Aliyah” (“ascending” when one moves to Israel) deeply offensive. I’m very happy as an American Jew, and will fight for my right to be fully accepted *here*. That *includes* not abandoning my fellow Jews who *do* live in Israel by pronouncing the country they live in shouldn’t exist.
Surely, Noah, you understand how soul-crushing these demands are; how they harken to the worst civilizations of the 20th Century that stood for multiple generations. “Merely”!
Well, consider what the New Right is demanding, and compare the two!
I dunno, ask a Refusenik if they were “merely” cast out of society instead of sent to the gas chambers.
We all remember a decade of every Muslim person being asked to disavow al quada before being allowed to speak in public. I'm assuming that's not what you meant with your last paragraph.
“So let’s now enact revenge by forcing a minority we oppose to do the same”?
I also remember President Bush explicitly calling Islam “A religion of peace”, and taking care not to use the term “Crusade”. So while deep suspicion by a large swathe the general populace of ordinary Arabs and Muslims (and Sikhs, simply due to their turbans) was bad, our leadership at least had the awareness to say, publicly, “this is wrong”. Not seeing that from the Left these days, frankly. AES’s apology is a good step in the right direction, though he can’t pretend Piker wasn’t a part of his campaign.
If the mainstream considered it fine for decades, then trying to claim now that doing so is wrong on principle is a bad joke.
Or, in other words, let me know when the 'he's going to implement sharia law!' claims against AES or Mamdani stop getting made by the same people complaining about 'having' to disavow Zionism.
That’s such a bonkers, terrible analogy I question the time I’ve wasted speaking with you
Acemoglu also today has an oped in the NYT calling for Democrats to replace Woke 1 with big-tent populism (I guess let in the commies, but definitely keep out the robots).
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/opinion/democrats-populism-big-tent.html
In the same week that Piker made these comments about attacks on Jews which can be almost defended by saying that Jewish establishment types have said the same thing and made clear that attacks on Jews are bad he gave an interview to Haaretz where he entirely failed to redeem himself in spite of being much more civil and nice than his typical social media persona. Behind paywall, Piker condemned such things as attacking the Shalom Aleichem Center, clearly a Yiddish cultural institution, for being Jewish but said, "I do believe that [Zionism] was exterminationist and supremacist from the beginning. I guess my perspective is that it was an experiment inevitably going to reach this maximalist conclusion. I think the warning was always there because the violence was always there [refers to Deir Yassin and Jewish terrorist groups under the Mandate] The driving principle behind it was very cold and very sober: that we have to rid the land of its current inhabitants if we want to create this." I.e. he wants people to believe that the evil reified ideology, Zionism, produced everything that some of us have literally seen since October 7 and disregard the history of actual Israeli political leaders who knew that the occupation was destroying the Israel that they had believed in. He will get away with this because even some of the most AIPAC-friendly public officials cannot muster complex defenses of Zionism and they do not really fit into 60-second political messages in an election that is about Trump and the economy. Arno Rosenfeld, hardly a hysterical conflater of antisemitism and anti-Zionism when he was at the Forward, then wrote, "Piker told Haaretz that [Jews' attachment to a Jewish state] was a product of "social conditioning" no different from the support white nationalists feel for a white ethno-state. But this gets it backwards. Jews are attached to the existence of a Jewish state precisely because white nationalists want a white ethno-state. This is a key difference between Zionism and Nazism. Some recognition from Piker that many American Jews are grappling with their relationship to Israel as a minority group struggling to stay safe in a historically hostile diaspora--and gauging their actual political views, rather than their abstract degree of attachment to Israel--would go a long way toward reassuring them he views them as more than would-be Nazis or terrorists."
I am getting 2-3 emails a day from the el-Sayed campaign (and some immediately after the primary that showed that the party was entirely behind him) and was tempted to write back that I will not give a dime to anyone who campaigned with Piker but I am sure he is hearing plenty of that in person. I did not really consider "Block Sender" because I will delete all the candidate emails after the election anyhow. (I will probably designate $50 for the sum total of my donations for this election and it will go to two TBA individuals in October depending on the state of polling.)
Piker is clearly an antisemite. Now, he may be right that “anti-Zionists” will blame American Jews for the actions of Israel Jews, because that is how antisemites think.
There was an increase in of anti-Muslim hate crimes immediately after 9/11 (and some unfortunate Sikhs), which were terrible and unacceptable. But the raw annual numbers were in the hundreds, in a country of 284 million at the time. Anti-Jewish attacks still outnumbered them! But if Piker’s “logic” applied to other groups, we would have seen far greater levels of violence and bloodshed. In fact, most Americans are not bloodthirsty Islamophobes who blame the actions of one group of foreign Muslims.
The idea that Jews in the United States are responsible, or should or will be blamed for the actions of Jews in Israel is classic antisemitism- because clearly Jews are clannish and work together to achieve their goals. (Something something Protocol of the Elder of Zion).
Jews are the victims of the majority of religious motivated attacks, despite representing 2% of the population, in the US. This is a dynamic that has been the case for decades.
He is also a Mao fan, who writes off the…40-60 million killed as a direct result of Mao’s policy whims as a minor thing. I see him as a significantly dumber and less verbally capable Chomsky for our modern era. The jury is still out on who denies more well documented genocides. My money is still on Chomsky, because he actually just knows about more genocides to deny.
On Jews/Israel, Piker has almost perfect overlap with Tucker Carlson, but with far less verbal sophistication. Because he dumb! Vicious, dangerous, and so dumb!
What Piker is plausibly saying is that there are going to be very stupid people who believe that Jews are responsible for the actions of the Israeli government simply by believing in Zionism even if polls show that this government appalls most American Jews. I happen to personally know that I am the butt of the joke that is Ted in Amos Oz's "Fima" but I am sure that Oz personally knew many other Teds who had no choice but to see Israel through a frame that is so American they don't even know it.
I am not personally in that book since I was a teenager when it was written.
In the days when the Other Israel Film Festival substantially existed they showed the documentary about AIPAC, "Kings of Capitol Hill", which I promoted on Twitter and am even more convinced that every citizen needs to have watched because it showed even former AIPAC officials being very disillusioned with what AIPAC has become and how indefensibly it has moved to the right. Citizens would see that it is not as simple as AIPAC taking orders from a foreign government but is about ordinary Americans choosing a very absolutist vision of what Israel means.
(Thanks Noah for giving me the opportunity to rant about Hasan Piker and forget all about commenting to David Sessions information that should not be on Substack for the public to read)
What do you think is going to be capable, if anything, of getting the US to take the electric stack seriously? I'm in Europe right now, and while I constantly complain about the entire slate of European technology — up to and including the abominable slate of apps and manual logins you need to drive and power an electric car here — it's inarguably true (at least in France anyway) that they're outpacing the US on distributed infrastructure and potentially on the drive-train, at least on a per capita basis. You can feel the leading edge of a phase change in a way you just can't in the US. I was optimistic that something like Iran would be a forcing function for us, but it doesn't look like that's playing out. Do we think anything can jostle us out of our inertial default?
At least in France the EVs are nuclear powered, even if you have to manually accept the cookie policies every time you start it. I see that 20% of the EVs in France are made in China, do they actually manufacture EVs and batteries in France? I see that Renault, Stellantis, Tesla, VW and BMW as the top selling EVs in France, the last 3 I assume are built mostly in Germany.
Please tell me "you have to manually accept the cookie policies very time you start (an electric car)" is a joke.
Sorry yeah I was being ambiguous - I meant “Europe generally”, w/French nuclear + charging infra and exactly, German battery drive train
Ten years ago I would have agreed with you, but I don't live in the 2010's. I live in 2026, and in 2026, pretty much all of the murders of Jews in the US and Europe since 2023 that I know of were committed by Leftists or their allies. So while I'll definitely be keeping a worried eye on the far right, they aren't the ones I worry most about murdering me in the street. All that being said, it sure is something that there is a reasonable debate to be had about which group of extremists is more likely to murder us!
The 2010s were not so long ago.
> pretty much all of the murders of Jews in the US and Europe since 2023 that I know of were committed by Leftists or their allies
Is that statement true, or do you mean "all of the murders of Jews specifically because they were Jews were committed by ..."?
Most definitely the latter. Technically they're one and the same because I only hear about the murders of Jews committed for ideological reasons, but had I heard about crime-related killings, then I'm sure my statement wouldn't hold.
Is Elon Musk a leftist? How about Nick Fuentes? How many of the murders you cite were committed by non-Muslims?
What Jews have Elon Musk and Nick Fuentes killed?
Wait, if a Muslim kills you it doesn’t count? Can you clarify what you’re trying to say?