Eric Conklin

Security red teamer. Independent researcher. I study when political identity starts doing emotional regulation work. Building falsifiable tests for PER.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

My paper is now live in Social Sciences & Humanities Open:

“Attachment Dysregulation and Political Identity: A Developmental Framework for Understanding Ideological Fusion”

It asks when political identity becomes more than belief or group membership and starts doing emotional regulation work.

The paper is the framework. The next step is testing whether PER can actually be measured.

https://t.co/cUOzPrOMCZ

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@nickgillespie @billybinion @reason Once government owns the stage, politics fights over the microphone. That’s the problem. Culture stops being art and becomes symbolic territory.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@thedispatch @stephenfhayes When a coalition is built around a person, policy stops being policy. It becomes a loyalty test. That’s why the position can flip and the emotional demand stays the same.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@TheFive @greggutfeld A lot of political commentary is just moral sorting with better lighting. Decide who gets complexity, decide who gets contempt, then call it analysis.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@michaelshermer @sapinker Progress can be real and still not feel emotionally available to people. That’s the part raw trend lines miss. People don’t only ask, “Is the world better?” They ask, “Am I safe, do I have standing, and can I trust the future?”

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@mattyglesias The old version was: say the dumb thing, then govern around it. Now the dumb thing creates its own constituency, staffing pipeline, media ecosystem, and veto points. At some point it stops being rhetoric.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@PeterDiamandis People don’t experience risk as math. They experience it as control. A human driver making bad decisions can feel less threatening than one machine making one visible mistake.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@dpakman They are not defending the clip. They are defending the mythology around the clip.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@kylegriffin1 The scariest part is how administrative it sounds. Just change a status field, and suddenly a living person has to prove they exist.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@Acyn The man building a ballroom has discovered fiscal restraint at the printer tray.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@HunterBiden People are rarely only the worst thing they’ve done. Sometimes the most human thing online is watching people remember that.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@Acyn The rule was never “scandals matter.” It was “scandals matter when the wrong kind of candidate has them.”

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@MeidasTouch It’s amazing how fast a vanity project becomes “national security” once taxpayers might be asked to help cover it.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@GrantHBrennerMD Yeah, “agency battery” works. It stores human intention, incentives, defaults, and institutional choices. Then later everyone acts surprised when it discharges in a particular direction.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@seanhannity The useful standard is simple: classified material should be handled lawfully no matter whose name is on the indictment. The part that breaks trust is when accountability starts looking selective.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@GrantHBrennerMD That’s why "borrowed agency" feels right. AI isn’t magically showing up in people’s lives. Humans are putting it there, deciding what it measures, what it optimizes, and which parts of life get turned into a dashboard.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@Acyn A lawyer can survive proximity to power. The harder thing is surviving proximity to a client who teaches everyone that courts are legitimate only when they serve him.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@mehdirhasan Funny how the budget is always tight for the people who built the place and surprisingly flexible for the people brought in to remake it.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@SpeakerPelosi The question is not only whether America supports Ukraine. It is whether aggressors learn that democracies get tired faster than dictators do.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@CREWcrew A verbal assurance is not accountability. If the fund is really dead, the administration should say so in writing and end the legal theory that made it possible.

[Eric Conklin @EricConk32]

@kylegriffin1 Amazing how often “luxury development” means everyone else gets the environmental risk while connected people get the view.