I wrote about unit self defense in this piece in a very different context. It’s always been a slippery slope. But whatever the contours, unit self defense is not an available defense to invading a country without legal cause. A state can’t use it to backfill a defense to their armed attack.

Saying personhood is "realized through participation in the community's social life" is exactly Vermeule's position

leftists stop getting mesmerized by "steven miller but with more Theory" challenge level Nightmare+

There is more than just a tension between liberalism and traditional European modes of thinking. Sometimes we forget as much though because Liberalism thrashed a lot of those modes into submission

not to be snide, but eeeeeverybody hates gesellschaft until it's time to actually live in gemeinschaft

The author here persuasively asserts a tension between liberalism and traditional African modes of thinking. I remain unconvinced, however, to prefer a world where liberalism yields to traditional thought rather than the other way around. aeon.co/essays/decol...

And I think liberals should stop taking the bait and ceding ground on immigration. Immigration is good. Multiculturalism is good. Free trade is good. Stop being embarrassed to say so.

The conditions in Central Islip were so inhumane that even the Trump administration has admitted they were wrong. That says a great deal about how bad things really were.

pound for pound this might be the funniest thing ever written

Honestly how they actually did it is not far off from this

The author makes some important points here, but also some very wrong ones, most notably the tiring canard that Democrats “abandoned the working class.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Political parties are a coordination mechanism. They are not your Emotional Support Dog. If you don't like the direction of the Party, get in there and turn the ship around.

Interesting anecdote for those who like to insist class/economic conditions explains all.

New, from me: The NYT reporter who specializes in profiles of beleaguered right-wingers on campus went to New College...and found out that things were going ok! So let me explain some pretty massive errors of omission: 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nyt-re...

The Hunt (2012)

The metric system makes more sense overall but Americans are correct on floor naming conventions and temperature. “I’m on floor 0” No. You are on floor 1.

I just cracked the code on this whole "6-7" thing. The kids are reminding us just how difficult it is to remove anyone via impeachment.

Classic move. This is also, for example, where you can tell the nonsense begins in Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind,” as he stops relying on others’ research and shifts to only his own.

Wait, Wynton Marsalis signed the Harper’s Letter? This is the first I’ve heard he has any involvement in the Discourse.

there are also--as we talk about in the podcast--some Very Interesting parallels with the structure of the chinese economy: the role of suppressed consumption, entrenched interests, and the recurring belief that "scientific and technical revolution" "new productive forces" will save the regime

at the end of the day, the party--and especially the big men in the party--*liked* an economy forced into heavy industrial production. it gave them swagger on the world stage and legitimacy at home. and controlling those big industrial combines was how they maintained their patronage networks.

Nature is healing.

For those asking--I do not advocate CB because it paints a better picture--consumers are still feeling pretty glum, it is because the sample size is 3x (3000 vs <1000 in UMich) and the methodology is more consistent over time whereas UMich went to online collection resulting in a known downward bias

🚨USE THE CONFERENCE BOARD MEASURE OF CONSUMER CONFIDENCE! IGNORE MICHIGAN--DO NOT RUN AWAY WITH GRANDIOSE INTERPRETATIONS OF THE WORLD BASED ON UMICH!🚨

Bring back implied remedies!

this is also why I think bsky is more influential than twitter at this point (which I know is a bit of a controversial position) - there's a lot of influential people spending time here!

This is extremely important

Thank you Paul Krugman, very reassuring.

I hate that every week there's something stupid like an Everyone Has To Drink Pee Now Bill and the alert sounds to CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES THIS IS NOT A DRILL and you really wish you could just trust them to not go for the pee drinking bill

"Counterintuitive as it sounds, I think a better life is one with more disappointment in it." www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Originalism taken to the limit just sucks every universal aspiration and value out of the constitution and turns it into, essentially, Johnson vs McIntosh's courts of the conqueror.

Best essay I've read in a while. www.liberalcurrents.com/they-were-al...

The test in Bivens cases remains, "Are you Bivens?"

Tales are emerging of strange happenings in The Fog. Tricks of the eye revealing brief faces in the fog peering through windows. Fog trailing and tugging at you. Muffled thumps chokes off moans heard beyond vision. Cars found empty and abandoned on the side of the road. An In-N-Out with no line.

The argument here seems to miss a few things. Tik Tok was already spreading right-wing sentiments even before the ban. And with over 200m users on the app, letting an adversary nation run an influence campaign at that scale becomes a real security concern. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The conceit of this musical--a show that aims to finally teach the dreadful wokescolds the lesson they so obviously deserve--is at best braindead, and at worst highly disgusting. www.newyorker.com/culture/pers...

Here's Sandra Day O'Connor endorsing News Max levels of voter fraud conspiracies in the 2000 election.

Maybe this new blog can respond, in one of its first posts, to the argument that the term “interim docket” is a deliberately misleading attempt to minimize the (very permanent) doctrinal and real-world consequences of #SCOTUS’s rulings on emergency applications? www.stevevladeck.com/p/177-the-no...

Does NYT ever apply this level of scrutiny to Republicans?

Confederate Broadcasting System

The idea that any person born with the rare genetics enabling them to be a top professional athlete would complain about fairness in sports is just beyond rich.

i think an overriding theme of american politics today is that so many elites think politics is gamesmanship; that its intra in-group signaling and posturing without any severe material effects. that there is a hard floor we can't actually sink beneath, that the bottom can't fall out. and buddy

Not a great answer. This undermines the “don’t follow illegal orders” message by shifting to “well it’s just a shame he was given illegal orders.” No use in prevailing on Hegseth and Trump, they’re not gonna listen. Shame the generals.

It really is amazing that the president has a noticeable an unexplained physical ailment that is disfiguring his right hand and there's no reporting about it. The White House's line is that it's from Trump shaking too many hands! Something is clearly being covered up.

This Farage moment is an object lesson in the media's power to determine what a scandal is. American media has a tendency to only see a scandal when the politicians themself seems embarrassed (leading to impunity for the shameless), but British media right now shows that's not true.

One thing I always want to ask these masculinity entrepreneurs is why men can’t look to women as role models, and can’t see in women models of human virtue and thriving that are worth emulating. After all, women look to men for these all the time.

Why would you accept the premise of Donald Trump's lie and then lie FOR him to further advance his political project? None of this is true, why are you talking?

No-strings-attached, zero-means-testing, no-questions-asked cash payouts have been proven, over and over again, to be the most effective form of charity/aid going. It gets people in housing, and it saves the state money. We know this. It's fact, not theory.

lol at this NYT article. They billed this piece as taking readers’ questions to explain why they cover Trump the way they do. Instead of offering a defense to substantive critiques, though, they lob this absolute softball at the editor.