Please stop calling Trump and the Republicans “economic populists”

A Centrist tells fellow centrists to Chill open.substack.com/pub/digressi...

One of the problems I have with Engaging with Discourse is there are too many intelligent people I want to read more from and it really seems to require wasting precious time on reading dumb people who get more public attention than they deserve instead

It's something @nescio13.bsky.social called early - early modern absolute monarchists running mercantalist regimes is the best historical analogue.

What Bastiat called the "broken window fallacy"; a pretty shocking indictment of GDP measurement. I wonder how this compares to other countries www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

ICE isn’t just tapping into government databases — it’s also tapping into local police scanners, EFF’s @MGuariglia.bsky.social said on an @nyu.edu panel. “ICE is buying millions of people’s geolocations and weaponizing all government data toward immigration.” nyunews.com/culture/ieq...

my latest investigation for @consumerreports.org is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day (🧵) www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...

“These findings follow previous research which concluded that the more people learn about how AI works, the less they trust it. The opposite was also true — AI’s biggest fanboys tended to be those who understood the least about the tech.”

On the coast, my parents don’t have internet. There is no cell phone coverage. I have parked the minivan outside a library at 4am to take a work call more than once. We have to fight for rural America or there will be no more rural Americans.

Thanks very much to the GW Hatchet for this write-up of my talk at the GW Museum and Textile Museum @gwu1821.bsky.social gwhatchet.com/2025/08/28/p...

I really feel like millennials especially resent the copyright theft part of these AI data centers because of this.

@himself.bsky.social talking sense, as usual. Notably: “The administration would have played its cards differently if it had a stronger hand.”

The primary political danger with genAI deepfakes is the same as what disinformation has long been used to accomplish: total apathy and cynicism that makes collective action and coordination impossible. Basically what you don’t want in a moment of authoritarian consolidation of power

there’s some evidence that the fact that pets lick their dead owners’ faces off first before consuming other parts of their bodies that they are actually trying to “wake up” their owners indicating particular affection for them rather than apathy www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

1/Striking speech by Macron: The future of European democracy depends on taking back its digital information space. A remarkable turn from Silicon Valley as source of enlightenment to being a purveyor of slop. And the stakes aren't just ad revenue but the nation. defenddemocracy.eu/macron-democ...

Type of guy who likes to talk to erotic chatbots but only he because he cares deeply about Elon Musk and he wants him to succeed www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/t...

~*Just dc things*~

so the US government just forced a tech company to delete an app it doesn’t like, which is totally normal stuff www.404media.co/iceblock-own...

Nicholas should screaming “Witness me, blood bag” as he prepares to explode himself captures twenty-first century politics so perfectly it is enough to make Fury Road one of the best movies of our time. Good morning

Gotta say “Tilly Norwood” has got to be one of the most comically bad stage names a company could come up with for trying to market their AI avatars as substitutes for human actors

Very proud of my colleagues right now--especially @ramyakrishnan.bsky.social and @alexabdo.bsky.social. But we could not have got this far without the superb trial lawyers at Sher Tremonte. Grateful to them for all of the time and energy they put into this case. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/u...

WE WON: "This case -– perhaps the most important ever to fall w/in..this district court squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in US..have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally “yes, they do.”"

BREAKING: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media. 🔗 www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

Over a two-year period, prosecutors across 16 states charged more than 400 people with pregnancy-related crimes, with most of the charges originating in states with near or total abortion bans, according to a new report released Tuesday.

Tired: not having kids because of lack of protections for reproductive healthcare Wired: not having kids because of widespread military occupation of American cities

No longer on a weekly basis, but I could not resist .... open.substack.com/pub/adamprze...

This is my regular reminder to everyone that jstor is open to the general public now; a free account there will give you access to 100 papers a year.

Not engaging in discourse today but am sharing my new letterboxed profile (kstarr84) in case anyone wants to share movie reviews boxd.it/gg3FX

stunning development in transatlantic anglophone politics as liberals get St George in the partisan divorce

Fine: 1) What’s happening to the U.S. is part of a transnational far-right, autocratic wave and it cannot be treated as a purely domestic issue 2) A major subset of these dynamics is globalized kleptocracy/oligarchy; tackling that requires rebuilding & enhancing int’l anti-corruption mechanisms

jimmy kimmel rapture supreme court nvidia tylenol autism

That’s an awful lot of words to say “bootlicker”

a few thoughts (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/o...

As someone who was working in downtown Boston the week following the marathon bombings I can’t emphasize enough how stupid it is to have military all over all the DC metro stations. Like I’m constantly reminding myself that no don’t worry there aren’t terrorists on the run, Big Ballz got beaten up

Wow rough day at the “western civilization discourse” factory isn’t it

"Connecting the facts of a particular act of political violence to a partisan polarization frame is tempting. But we have to work toward making other kinds of explanations more legible. Sometimes the story is complicated and uncomfortable, and that’s another price of living in a democracy."

Hard agree with @juliaazari.bsky.social here. open.substack.com/pub/goodpoli...

to state the obvious, immediately leaking personal details to the press about somebody cooperating with a murder investigation is a great way to encourage people to not cooperate with future investigations

The most important immigration fights right now are about the Constitution. None of it has anything to do with the substance of immigration policy. If you stand with ICE, you stand against the Constitution. Can the govt... 1. racially profile? 2. set up checkpoints wherever they want?

Judith Butler on being named to a list of UC Berkeley faculty & students provided to the Department of Education to be investigated for anti-semitism, w/ zero transparency about what they're being accused of or by whom. Pure McCarthyism & totally indefensible. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

On a serious note, the right is out for revenge on this one. Trump talked about it on Wednesday night. If you leverage bullshit and nonsensical accusations that prove to be misinformation or downright lies, you're just feeding that.

I feel like I've spent today sorting through accusations of this guy being a groyper, only to find that those aren't based on anything. There isn't an indictment yet. The cops haven't handled this better, but seriously—posting without verification makes you no better than the right yelling "antifa."

I've worked on the far-right beat for nearly 10 years now, and I've had to handle sorting through a lot of misinformation on politically motivated violence. And this is by far the worst instance of it, including from a lot of people who should really know better.

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