I worked in a Democratic presidential administration and, even then, DHS was very often the most problematic, obstinate part of negotiating a civil/human rights provision into executive branch policy. I have been thinking about this a lot in recent weeks and want to offer a short 🧵with reflections:

This thread seems to confirm my very strong prior that a big part of what's wrong with DHS is that it blurs foreign and domestic authority, and by doing so inherently promotes bringing military and intelligence behavior into the civilian world

Since no divine being made being stupid painful, the job now falls to us

this is why dems apologize for everything for five paragraphs before getting to their point. for the past ten years at least left/lib social media has had to prepare responses to every possible response and interpretation before actually making a point and it hinders communication.

Literally every post on this site needing to be prefaced with "I don't endorse this and I think it's awful" before explaining anything is literally the most tedious goddamn thing.

Physicist who thinks every comes down to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: ‘“getting a lot of 2nd Law of Thermodynamics from this”

Feel like a lot of the Discourse here comes down to is people raging at the heavens that the concept of entropy means it is always easier to destroy than create.

On This Decommissioned Aircraft Carrier We Use Subtlety and Nuance

does anyone want to move onto a decomissioned aircraft carrier and survive traveling from port to port

"Everything You Need to Know About The 20-Year-Old Influencer Encouraging Steroids, Meth, and Taking a Hammer to Your Jaw" is an actual literal headline in Slate I just encountered right now and I think, perhaps, we have lurched drunkenly into ineluctable indignity as a society

the thing about the descendants of this culture - ie my ancestors, my family, my dad - is that a discursive habit/tradition is passed down which is that it is a grave social offense to name things that are truly shameful as shameful, which is why they have to invent endless things to be ashamed of

my current working theory of internet discourse in broad strokes:

Well, remember that Hillary Clinton pointing out SCOTUS was at stake in 2016 was holding people hostage and thus they were just smol beans who couldn't know? And admitting maybe that was gender and listening to their parents' dumb shit never happens?

Online is, by default, an interpretive community, a fandom, and the bedrock precepts of that community are pretty rancid. One of the big ones, though, is that calling out bad-faith actors is worse than being a bad-faith actor.

"It's not what you said, it's what I can say you said" is the unwritten Law Of Internet Drama, and when it doesn't work on real-life figures, the too-online get Upset.

"you get to have the last word that your sycophantish ego demands!", the leftist activist on bluesky tweets in reply to me, understanding the meaning of exactly zero (0) of the words which he is using while demonstrating the precise thing of which he is accusing me

I dunno folks. Find things to do with your life that aren’t trying to hurt other people

There’s a kind of desperation under this mindset and it really affects me; I don’t want anyone to be suffering like I think these people are. I think they’re lonely and scared and need something in their lives. But it’s just not a good way to be.

And the last thing I’ll say about this: I actually feel kind of bad for people who engage in this behavior, because underneath it there really seems to be a desire for a community and to be doing something with purpose. I see it here and I even see it some in the even larger far-right swarm.

One of the terrible things about the ICE occupation of Minneapolis is that they’ve been doing stuff that is so crazy that people assume it’s some kind of exaggeration, despite being widely documented on video. Following observers home! Lurking outside elementary schools! Black-bagging citizens!

Glad this is getting covered, but also… Completely surreal to read the NYT report on this as recently disclosed info, and just an allegation. This happened to every observer I know! It happened to me twice! I have it on video both times! www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/u...

As @aselrod.bsky.social says, the reality of this administration is enough to drive you mad, when the fact is that it is reality that is mad www.liberalcurrents.com/youre-not-cr...

I can block or whatever but that’s still going to be true because it really has very little to do with my interactions with the abusive people. It’s a social pursuit for them and their mission is to seize control of your public image and turn it into something detestable

And that’s the problem! Your public reputation becomes inextricably bound up with the abuse; it becomes something that defines you. Right now if you Google me you find a cartoon about me that Nazis made; if you search for me on here it’s 1000 people saying I’m the worst person alive.

ICE’s continuous harassment of schools, forcing parents to stand out in front of their children’s school every day, collapsing attendance, transforming schools into de facto aid distribution networks - for me, that’s probably their most unforgivable premeditated crime here in Minnesota

Yes. This is it. Some people believe their politics; other people adopt politics as an excuse to hurt other people for fun and tell themselves it’s for a good cause and they can’t be blamed. The internet has let all the people in the latter group find each other and make better rationalizations.

A lot of people are searching for an ideology to facilitate their subrational libidinal desires, whether that be for violence, or abuse, or prejudice. These people are all kind of the same at the end of the day: looking for reason to indulge rather than following any kind of self-restrictive creed.

This is why the people who show up to protests ready to burn things down aren’t “allies” with “different tactics.” Overwhelmingly they’re there for the thrill of rationalized violence; they will find some way to commit some violence against somebody if they have the thinnest excuse.

These people are far too dumb to realize it, but this is the perfect illustration of the point that consumers can’t really measure inflation intuitively

Trying to understand how people form opinions about the world is not remotely anti-progressive, but attacking everyone who doesn’t recite your childishly simple narrative about eternal working-class despair is deeply, deeply anti-intellectual

"Ordinary consumers don't have reliable data on relatively subtle pricing trends and are forced to rely on secondary sources" does not mean "poor people have it good." The problem, it seems, is that you simply cannot read or think. Three-cueing is a nightmare from which we will never awaken

Your organizing involves getting people to form a committee; ours involved getting people to chase after military convoys without dying

Yes

All day every day they never stop

The Minneapolis commuters are such heroes, I wish I could tell you about them

I am gonna go out on a limb and say that a Jersey dude so horrified that he went to his first protest and is trying not to cry on camera has a pretty good chance of staying radicalized. And that while Bluesky loves to pick apart things like this, this kinda video moves the needle for OTHER dudes.

the same people screaming bloody murder at Amy Klobuchar for a dorky post about consumer good prices under tariffs spent months screaming bloody murder at Harris' campaign because nobody cared about Project 2025 and it was a distraction from the fact that each egg cost twenty United States dollars

The commander in chief telling troops who they have to vote for is itself a presidency ending impeachable scandal.

“it’s obvious I couldn’t care less”, he says, while advocating a mass strategy of strategic After Hitler, Our Turn Like yeah lil buddy it actually is, in fact, really clear that you couldn’t care less, that’s kind of my point

The failure of the far left wing to develop a theory of mind for the nonvoting public that isn't "they must be just like me" is the beginning and the end of explaining why they will never achieve power

Lot to enjoy here but I'm really fascinated by the idea of not voting yet being able to "prove" you'd have voted otherwise. What does this person think such proof consists of?

Imagine looking at the past year of American politics and thinking "yep, all going according to the CIA's master plan"

Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem are probably very happy to be described as "cultural icons" for the first time in their lives, maybe less so in the context of agreeing with a mass-murdering terrorist organization. But, hey, that's the price of being morally bankrupt.

baby boy, small child, sweetling, infant, i say this with love: you have zero likes on your post and a thousand followers, most of whom are hamsick followback bots. if you devoted the rest of your natural life to NOT being a useless dipshit you still couldn't get a few million people to do ANYTHING.

if they were trying to make this result, would they have done anything differently

You have to fuck up unprecedentedly badly to get a Calloway hat white guy out protesting, weeping with rage, like my god

I am pleased to inform you that we are going to win

millions of children will die but it might erode American soft power a little bit relative to Russia and China so who’s to say if demolishing USAID was bad or not

if you're a republican, this is, like, *the* type of guy you absolutely cannot lose like this