Category: Politics
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Calulus, Guarantees, and the Remainder of Freedom: A Davos Ukrainian Breakfast as an Event of Alliance Reasoning
The recorded discussion staged as a “Ukrainian Breakfast” at Ukraine House on the margins of the World Economic Forum at Davos offers a compact laboratory for examining how contemporary Euro-Atlantic public reasoning tries to hold together heterogeneous registers: humanitarian witnessing, alliance management, legal-financial constraint, technocratic reconstruction, and strategic coercion. Its governing ambition, as the sequence…
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Instruments of Order Under Pressure: Alexander Stubb’s Values-Based Realism and the Re-Specification of Europe at Davos 2026
The recorded session stages Finnish President Alexander Stubb at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as a a compact, highly mediated instance of public geopolitical reasoning in which a head of state and a policy-intellectual moderator attempt to render “order” thinkable under conditions of accelerated volatility. The central problem-space is articulated as a transition…
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Procedures of Autonomy: NATO Integration, European Capability, and the Public Grammar of Defense at Davos 2026
The recorded session titled “Can Europe Defend Itself?” stages a concentrated test of what “defense” means when it is spoken in the same breath as alliance law, industrial capacity, fiscal mobilization, health sovereignty, and the management of intra-alliance conflict. Its governing ambition is practical—assessing Europe’s ability to sustain security under conditions of strategic uncertainty—yet its…
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Permanent Change, Structured Independence: Ursula von der Leyen’s Davos Address as a System of European Self-Authorization Across Trade, Security, and Arctic Sovereignty
The recording of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Davos, Switzerland, stages a distinctive problem-space: how a supranational executive voice can reconceive “Europe” as an agent of durable self-determination within a world presented as structurally and irreversibly altered. The address, framed by the World Economic Forum’s theme of “a spirit of dialogue,” treats…
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Europe as Rule-Form Under Pressure: Macron’s Davos Address on Sovereignty, Multilateralism, and the Political Economy of Protection
The event of Emmanuel Macron at Davos is a case study in how a head of government tries to convert a diagnosis of systemic disorder into a program of institutional retooling, while speaking inside a venue that is simultaneously a deliberative forum, a media stage, and an investment-facing showcase. The address is framed as a…
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Dependence and Dominion: A Critical Description of Trump’s Davos Address as an Economy of Security, Tariffs, and Ownership
The event was hybrid: a presidential address staged inside a global business-and-governance convocation, then partially reframed as a conversational “fireside” exchange whose very possibility is jokingly placed in doubt by the speaker. Its central problem-space is the relation between economic narration and sovereign claim: prosperity is asserted as an accomplished fact, then treated as warrant…
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Syria at a Precarious Hinge: Ceasefire Fragility, Kurdish Inclusion, and the ISIL Detention Risk in the Northeast
At a United Nations Security Council briefing on 23 January 2026, senior UN officials and national representatives described a rapidly evolving security and humanitarian landscape in Syria, with particular emphasis on the volatility of the north and northeast, the fragility of recent ceasefire understandings between the Syrian authorities and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and…
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Thermostatic Alliance: Sovereignty, Procedural Reason, and the Re-Coding of Greenland into NATO’s Arctic Grammar
The press briefing staged in Stockholm with Sweden’s foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergård, and Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, constitutes a compact but conceptually saturated instance of public reasoning under alliance pressure. Its central problem concerns how Nordic actors can affirm principled commitments—sovereignty, territorial integrity, self-determination, and the authority of international law—while managing an…
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Ending Europe’s Groundhog Day: Zelenskyy at Davos and the Critique of Actionless Order
The event can be read as an attempt to convert a familiar diplomatic lament into a diagnostically organized indictment of European agency. The speech treats political paralysis as a repeatable form of life, and then tests that claim by moving across disparate crises—Greenland, Iran, Venezuela, frozen assets, sanctions, tribunals, maritime oil flows—so that “Europe” appears…
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Cleareyed Partnership in an Age of Force: Friedrich Merz at Davos on Power, Trust, and European Competitiveness
What appears under the title “Special Address by Friedrich Merz, Federal Chancellor of Germany | WEF Annual Meeting 2026” is an event that stages, in compressed form, a particular European self-description under conditions of accelerated geopolitical drift: a self-description that tries to hold together, within a single rhetorical economy, the language of rules and partnerships…
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The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free
At the center of The War on Warriors lies a problem that is neither narrowly political nor merely institutional but existential: the degradation of the very principle by which a republic sustains the moral and functional distinction between those who defend it and those who are defended by it. The book examines the dissolution of…
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Entrepreneurship After Repeatability: Peter Thiel at USC Annenberg on Uniqueness, Monopoly, and the Search for Secrets
The USC Annenberg event titled “Zero to One: Peter Thiel speaks at USC Annenberg” presents itself as a public exercise in how entrepreneurial discourse tries to claim conceptual seriousness without turning itself into a repeatable recipe. Within a format that begins as an institutional welcome, shifts into a semi-prepared lecture, and then is reworked by…
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From Zero to One: Peter Thiel on Monopoly, Differentiation, and the Politics of Innovation
At an event hosted at USC Annenberg and livestreamed to additional viewers on campus, Peter Thiel was introduced as an entrepreneur, investor, and author whose career had moved from PayPal’s early ambition to rethink money and payments to the creation and funding of technology companies across Silicon Valley. The moderator emphasized Thiel’s role in PayPal’s…
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From Zero to One, and Then to Nowhere Else: Thiel’s Case for Uneven Technological Progress
At Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, the Institute of Politics and Harvard’s Program on Constitutional Government convened a public conversation in which historian Niall Ferguson moderated a wide-ranging discussion with technology entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel. The exchange unfolded as a structured interview followed by audience questions, moving across the near-term condition of Silicon…
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From Stanford to Harvard: Campus Conflict as a Proxy for Civilizational Legitimacy
At the inaugural Conservative and Republican Student Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Peter Thiel—introduced by the host as a prominent technology entrepreneur and investor—used his keynote to revisit a set of campus conflicts from his years as a Stanford student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that those disputes anticipated larger and more enduring…
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The University Against the Future: Peter Thiel on Stagnation, Risk, and the Return of Total Control
At a Stanford Academic Freedom Conference in early November 2022, Peter Thiel was introduced by Stanford faculty member Russell Berman as a technology entrepreneur and investor with an unusually visible public profile, associated with PayPal, Palantir, Founders Fund, and early involvement in Facebook. Berman situated Thiel’s presence within a longer arc of campus controversies and…
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Stagnation, Founders, and the New Machine Intelligence: Peter Thiel at Aspen on Risk, Power, and the American System
In a wide-ranging conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival, investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel presented a composite view of Silicon Valley that joins venture practice, institutional critique, and a set of political and cultural interpretations about the United States’ present trajectory. Interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Thiel framed his central investment thesis around a particular…
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“Operational AI” and National Power: Alex Karp’s Case for American Technological Primacy
At the Economic Club of Chicago on May 22, 2025, Palantir Technologies co-founder and CEO Alex Karp held a wide-ranging conversation with moderator Sean Connolly, the president and CEO of Conagra Brands, moving between autobiography, corporate culture, the operational use of artificial intelligence, and what Karp framed as the strategic requirements of American power in…
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Agency Under Acceleration: Peter Thiel on Risk, Innovation, and the Next Discontinuity
In a wide-ranging onstage conversation at the All-In Summit 2024—later published by the All-In Podcast under the title “Peter Thiel: The Coming Collapse No One Is Prepared For”—technology investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel frames contemporary politics, geopolitics, and technological change through a single organizing preoccupation: the distribution of agency under conditions of accelerating uncertainty. He…
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The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State
Michael Steinberger’s The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State offers a rare, methodically reported, philosophically alert portrait of a firm whose practical vocation consists in rendering heterogeneous worlds legible to power. Its contribution lies in treating Palantir’s rise neither as a purely technical success story nor as…
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Inside Palantir: How a Secretive Tech Titan is Shaping the Future of AI, Warfare, and Global Data
J. Hayden Elsen’s Inside Palantir: How a Secretive Tech Titan is Shaping the Future of AI, Warfare, and Global Data puts forward a claim about contemporary power: the decisive institutional transformation of the present is realized through software platforms that convert heterogeneous data into actionable, governable, and contractible forms of knowledge. The book’s contribution lies…
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Peter Thiel at Cambridge Union
Peter Thiel appeared at the Cambridge Union on May 8, 2024, for a talk and extended discussion that combined institutional critique, political economy, and a characteristic skepticism toward fashionable explanatory frames. Speaking as a technology entrepreneur and investor—known for co-founding PayPal and Palantir and for early involvement with Facebook—Thiel used the setting to revisit arguments…
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Peter Thiel on Classical Liberalism
At a bicentenary event of the Oxford Union—an institution that frames its mission around debate, scrutiny of entrenched assumptions, and protection of free expression—Peter Thiel delivered an address that positioned the contemporary university, and “classical liberalism” more broadly, as systems under sustained stress. Thiel, a U.S. technology entrepreneur and investor known for co-founding PayPal and…
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The Outside Within: Kant’s Unjust Enemy as an Institution of Peace Through Exclusion
Petar Bojanić’s lecture intervenes in a persistent fault-line of modern practical philosophy: the way juridical language, political theology, and strategic reasoning converge upon a figure—the “unjust enemy”—that promises to secure peace by authorizing destruction. Its distinctive scholarly contribution lies in a reconstruction that is simultaneously genealogical and diagnostic: it treats hostis iniustus less as a…
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‘America Against America’ by Wang Huning
In 1988, a young Chinese scholar undertook a research trip to the United States at a moment when the world was undergoing profound political and economic realignments. Over the course of six months, he traveled through 30 cities and visited 20 universities, observing not only institutions of learning and government, but the texture of everyday…
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The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism
The distinctive contribution of Andrew Arato and Paul Breines’s The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism lies in its rigorous reconstruction of a problem: how a singular, crisis-formed synthesis of German idealism and revolutionary Marxism emerged, condensed, and fractured in and around History and Class Consciousness, and how that synthesis founded an intellectual…
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The Dark Enlightenment
Nick Land’s The Dark Enlightenment enters the scene as a document of cold lucidity and nocturnal exactness, neither sermon nor simple polemic, but a protracted autopsy of the Enlightenment’s living corpus carried out under artificial light. What appears at first as a blog-born accumulation of interventions arranges itself—once read with patience and method—into a single,…
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Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
Slavoj Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce appears, on first approach, to be a slender intervention into the disorientation of the first post–Cold War decade, yet it insists on staging a wholesale rectification of how that decade should be named, remembered, and used. It is a book anchored in the shock of two emblematic…
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Žižek’s Heaven in Disorder | 天上大乱
Comrades of the interval—neither before nor after, but in the thickening middle—what follows keeps faith with a specifically 2021 mood: an in-between composition framed by emergency, written when vaccination queues braided with border queues, when lockdown routines folded into supply-chain algorithms, and when a pathogen taught political economy at scale. The temporal setting matters. Numbers,…
Simon Gros 