WSJ has a piece on the merchant sailors stuck aboard ships inside Hormuz. There are 20,000 of them (many from less privileged nationalities), effectively held hostage and running out of food. www.wsj.com/world/middle...

In the words of Dave Wasserman, I’ve seen enough. open.substack.com/pub/danieldr...

Also IF IT IS FRONT PAGE NEWS THAT WE ARE AT WAR WITH IRAN, it is ALSO FRONT PAGE NEWS THAT THE PEOPLE WHO TOOK US TO IRAN ARE TALKING LIKE THIS. The war does not exist in a separate, more serious universe than its leaders! This is the guy who decides if it happens and how many people die!

thread and comments...

Best screen villains

I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but usurping the power of the purse isn't just one constitutional violation among all the many others. It is, uniquely and singularly, the death of constitutional government altogether. Game over, end of story, you now live in an autocracy.

Happy Easter, everyone.

Will someone please tell me to get over my completism and stop hate-watching Discovery? (I'm early in s4.) It won't work; the compulsion is fully in place now. But it still might be good to be told.

I subscribe to Hell Gate, but this study they're pushing is just plain fucking wrong. The study was, to use a technical term, bad.

for all the critical commentary on Sauer’s performance, I think citing slave state law favorably hasn’t received adequate attention

Bears repeating that he is threatening Iran over something that wasn’t a problem until he bombed Iran. In this sense it’s very much like many other problems he’s promised to “fix” bsky.app/profile/pale...

Do you mean this horse because it is a great story bsky.app/profile/dors...

Not today, Satan.

In the unlikely event that anyone on here would like to pay good money to hear me talk about Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and ideas about freedom (or knows anyone who might): roundtable.org/live-courses...

A single long fixed term for Supreme Court justices, mandatory retirement age (but not term limits) for Congress, term limits plus a mandatory retirement age (to complement the minimum age) for president. Plus a ban on insurrectionists in any of these offices.

Rightwing dudes: "Women shouldn't be in leadership. Women shouldn't vote. They're not rational like men." Also, somehow, rightwing dudes: "The hand of God teleported me to a Waffle House."

Just remembering the letter Pete Hegseth’s mom sent him, calling him an abuser of women and telling him their family is “broken by your behavior and lack of character.”

New from @tomgpalmer.bsky.social at @theunpopulist.net www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-leadin...

I was wrong to hedge on "Jacobin Teen." Not a joke. (Not a deliberate one, anyway.)

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/u... So, we're just not doing that whole Article 1 thing anymore, is that it?

Okay so here’s my actual Bluesky-is-dying hypothesis: The entire web is dying. Users aren’t going from BlueSky to another site (x/insta/threada/tiktok). Users are going to chatbots. I know traffic to news sites has cratered (like 90%). My hunch is traffic to all the social platforms is down too.

I haven’t seen this called out so I’m just going to do it: Justice Sotomayor doesn’t seem to know what SG Sauer is referring to here and it‘s a bad look for both of their knowledge of highly relevant federal Indian law:

Dammit, I had genuinely planned to make this joke this afternoon

I occasionally teach about "liberalism and its critics" analyzing argumentative texts and try to write about liberalism and a-liberalism in terms of ideas and arguments but sometimes I just think liberals and non-liberals are just wired differently.

Bluesky is dying, being devoured by the Nothing. In order to save it you must seek the counsel of Morla, the Ancient One; find him by travelling through the Swamps of Sadness with your faithful horse...

A really fun article from @shalmarr.bsky.social about sitcoms as inculcators of liberal virtue.

i was off by a week

guys, bluesky is dying. if we don't start getting more likes, a greedy developer will bulldoze the site to put up a parking garage. the only thing that can save it is for a ragtag crew of misfits to put on one last big concert at the community center.

Having grim thoughts today about pardons. We dress them up as mercy for the weak but their political purpose is often impunity for the strong, especially those who are strong enough to disrupt constitutional or social orders: ex-Confederates, Pinochet. 1/

No one dies with dignity www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/04/no-o...

This & the cancellation of Title VI/FLAS funding for foreign language & area studies pose existential threats to the social sciences at every R1 university in the country. And it's been ~total 🦗🦗 from our university presidents/chancellors & a total lack of public collective action.

Striking for this to appear at AEI. www.aei.org/op-eds/birth... “Birthright Citizenship and the Making of Citizens”

"She suggested that it was legal to prosecute an Office Depot employee for declining to print flyers for a Charlie Kirk memorial vigil. She made utterly bogus claims about hate speech.... Bondi was simply unmoored from any sort of coherent constitutional view" of free expression. Not good in an AG!

Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs were explicitly imposed to reduce the US trade deficit, but it reached an all-time high (in real terms) in 2025. Check out the new analysis from Cato Institute scholars. https://ow.ly/HzxH50YCvKy

It’s been ten years. I think this has aged well. www.niskanencenter.org/authoritaria...

I’ve always liked Robert Paul Wolff’s image of struggling with texts, ‘to wrestle with it like Jacob with the angel’. It’s how I sometimes feel when I’m trying to think with someone across time who is much smarter than me.

being able to sit patiently with other people's thoughts, sit patiently with your own, and make both of those processes legible to someone who is not you is very valuable. if you can find a new way to do this that is fantastic news but I suspect it will at least resemble the model we've inherited

It turns out that breaching the wall between church and state means that some branches of Christianity are officially elevated over others. Who could have known? When in the last 500 years could such a lesson possibly have been learned?

you may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like

It was the US that decided to limit the North Atlantic treaty to *defensive* obligations in *Europe and North America* because we didn't want to be drawn into imperial wars! The reasoning below could just as well be Anthony Eden shouting at Eisenhower in 1956.

The other point, obviously, is that he is declaring in advance that he won’t comply with this law, which sends a message to the country and to posterity: “You will never find out what we did here.”

Noem and Bondi were, I think, the third- and fourth worst of the Senate-confirmed figures in this administration. I'm not sure of the order between them, and maybe Patel is in the mix with them. But I do know that numbers 1 and 2, Hegseth and Kennedy, are still in place.

Liberal Currents has quietly become one of the few outlets taking male supremacy seriously, either as a foundation of Trumpist fascism or as a system of oppression in its own right.

I hope this is driving home to folks that anti-DEI/anti-woke are functioning mostly as a way to make racism more palatable by framing it as a kind of defensive reaction to an imagined unfairness.

Guys, is it good when you fire the head of the army in the middle of a war ahead of a possible controversial ground invasion? It's a thing you do if you're winning, right?

Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey