Very wise counsel from @williamhogeland.bsky.social : beating everyone might look effective but it undermines “the real strength of government [that] always lies not in coercion but in the affection of the people.” I’d add this applies equally to foreign policy.

It’s like someone yelling foul insults at you from a car, knowing that they can say anything because you’re on foot. And seriously getting off on that power imbalance. And you, you keep your head down.

“What’s clear is they’re faking engagement because it doesn’t happen organically anymore.”

“Meta’s conclusion that it can avoid scrutiny by releasing a privacy invasive product during a time of political crisis is craven and morally bankrupt.” What horrible company Meta is.

So cool!!

Close-up photograph of "Ate ΠΑΓΙΣ" with Eris "ΦΑΓΟΝ" in the background. Ate was the goddess who caused humans to make stupidly selfish decisions, while Eris was the goddess who inflamed and spread the discord that flowed from those decisions. #BlueskyArtShow #two #art #assemblage

Nuclear reactor regulation.

Trump claims the Supreme Court has given him "the questioned right" to "destroy foreign countries"

Trump: "I can do anything I want to do to them ... I'm allowed to destroy the country."

❤️ Callistoctopus luteus Octopus 🐙✨ Clay & Paint 🎨 #ArtYear #Art #Artist #Handmade #ArtGallery #Octopus #CoralReef #Ocean #Underwater #Nature #MarineLife #FebruArty 🦑🐡

In honour of Brâncuși day, here is Odysseus and Telemachos, each containing a reference to the Endless Column.

I love Historically Thinking, and the topic of Lutheranism in the Civil War-era US is fascinating, but boy is the guest interrupted too many times in this episode. Grundmeier loses his train of thought in several places. substack.com/@alzambone/n...

True. Quiet compliance always makes me think they've founded a secret resistance movement and will attack en masse while I'm asleep.

The same thing applies to making art, too. There’s a certain moment when the painting takes over and starts telling you what to do.

This is a moving apologia for the virtues and possibilities of images. And this “seeing what others see” is one of the things that’s closed off by AI generated images. Philippe Descola, Forms of the Visible. (2021/25), Polity.

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

But I didn’t think the bullshit machine would ever bullshit *me*

Supervillain-level bothsideserism.

Every issue should be understood as isolated from every other issue. If you try to put together a worldview, then you’re “ideological,” and that’s bad. 2/2

The idea that you can deeply understand slavery but that that understanding won’t influence your politics is a great example of how the reactionary centrist brain works. 1/

If I were advising AOC on forpol, I'd recommend following up on her 2023 visit to LatAm, this time with a focus on meeting/workshopping with feminist, indigenous and environmental movements for knowledge-exchange on rights activism, and how the US can play a more constructive role in the region.

Columnists in Haaretz were predicting this in 2022.

you know, it still seems like it should be an even bigger issue that the president has been sending armed forces to kidnap and assault people in an ethnic cleansing campaign, with a specific geographic focus on regions that didn't vote for him in the last election

After a trial over the last few years, Ireland has launched a permanent scheme giving a basic income of €325 a week for artists. 2,000 will be eligible, and successful recipients will be chosen at random from applicants, who must be "professional artists" (definition tbc).

Upsetting flatware continued

It's this kind of day. 1946, Archives nationales à Montréal, Fonds La Presse, photographer unknown.

That weasel has some tail! Watanabe Katei (1913) Rijksmuseum, Netherlands

The conditions is ICE/CBP centers are going in an Andersonville direction. www.battlefields.org/learn/articl...

This is not about immigration. It never was. They’re already hovering up or killing anyone they don’t like. They lie to and ignore the courts. They just tried to charge members of Congress. The good people of Minneapolis get it, but much of the US hasn’t grasped how dangerous this moment is.

Originalism at work! Or should I say UET, which has conveniently muscled it aside.

Good Lord, it didn't even occur to me that like 60% of the population of New Hampshire is probably Canadian by this definition

Hey wait -

Goodnight. A girl and her kitten, 1955 - by Walter Chandoha www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/08/walt...

Good thread. As much as I’m quite pessimistic about the fairness of the midterms, I do want @angus.bsky.social to be right. And he knows a hell of a lot more than I.

The risk of malfeasance in the November election is real, and serious. But the Trump administration doesn't have a magic wand. It has tools of repression. And we have tools of resistance.

The big picture to keep in mind is that modern destabilization and foreign interference usually isn’t about invasion. It’s about: undermining trust, amplifying division, convincing people their own system is illegitimate. Once enough people believe that, outside pressure becomes easier to justify.

To reject the US as a fundamentally American country with a deep shared history and commonality with the rest of the Americas, including that Spanish has long been our de facto national second language, is on a deep level anti-American. It's hating actual American culture and history and tradition.

8. Evil city / pure countryside is an example of what Jeremy Lent calls a “root metaphor”: an idea so deeply implanted in our minds that we don’t even recognise it as an idea.

An excellent thread on the long history of the hay to be made, and spun into gold, by politicians peddling anti-city rhetoric.

“The camps are already here.” @mskellymhayes.bsky.social

This Super Bowl Sunday, I’d like to introduce you all to the magical curse bowls used in Upper Mesopotamia and Syria in late antiquity. Written in Mandaic (as here) or Syriac Aramaic, they trap demons who trespass on a household by sucking them in with spiraling spells to the center of the bowl.

Concentration camps: “For 280 days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh. We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick."

Good thread! It’s sad that it can be both true that you can make people’s lives significantly better and save taxpayer dollars and that this program can be canceled because of, well, ideology.

you've lost 60% of your voters & coverted 0% of reform ones - yes, that is an actual statistic, 0% but sure, keep at it, i'm sure this latest wheeze will bring em all over

Serious trivia I heard today. There is no stone in the London bedrock. Everything made of stone in London is from stone quarried elsewhere.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

@theresthistory.bsky.social Outstanding episode on the Arnolfini Portrait. Laura Cumming is the perfect guide! Looking forward to Las Meninas. And did Philip IV paint the cross of Order of Santiago on Velásquez after the painter’s death?

I get the, “Saying the midterms will be rigged only gives them more power,” argument, but: 1. The Don is a huge narcissist. Losing would injure his ego. 2. For Miller and Vought this administration is the dream of a lifetime. 3. They’re willing to do anything, law be damned. Why wouldn’t they?

Chris Murphy: “He’s telling you he wants to federalize national elections — he's telling you that he thinks he won Minnesota & Georgia & California, that the 2020 elections were rigged— He’s trying to rewrite history & trying to make sure that nobody other than him & his allies win in 2026 & 2028”

I hope lawyers, secretaries of state, and state attorneys general are preparing for what’s coming.