In competitive authoritarian regimes, the government deters and undermines opposition by using its powers to inflict costs on those who challenge it rather than recognizing their legitimacy as democratic opponents

Thanks to Bari Weiss for testing whether the Streisand Effect still has any juice.

LOL "Bari killed this meticulous story because it was unfavorable to the Trump administration" is literally the story they're giving to their stenographer

Man I had really forgotten the crazy gender dynamics of the first 20 minutes of Die Hard….

THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU

Yes, it’s illegal. Like changing it to Department of War, like ten thousand other things. Part of the Trump strategy is to break the law and convey “the rule of law is weak and feminine and laughable and should be overridden by Our Guy.” Trump is fundamentally anti-law. /1

Weird how checking this website persistently hasn't helped me grade. At. All.

The networks were afraid not to run Trump because they assumed he would use his office to punish them if they didn’t. The irony is that this is what Biden was warning about, a warning they chose not to share with America.

It’s not just that Trump lied constantly during his speech tonight; I’m not sure he said a single thing that was factually correct.

Simpler times

This really is painful to watch. I don’t know if they believe what they say or they believe they have to say it. Regardless, these are people opposed to American democracy who will be given a lifelong opportunity to corrupt it.

Just to stir the pot a bit .... If you are really, deeply against using machine learning to create synthetic survey responses, I have bad news for you about MRP.

American Greatness!

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

13 years ago, 20 children and 6 educators never came home from Sandy Hook Elementary School. They were killed in their classrooms in a shooting that changed our nation forever.

>Police body cameras equipped with artificial intelligence have been trained to detect the faces of about 7,000 people on a “high risk” watch list in the Canadian city of Edmonton, a This is terrifying.

Liberals are constantly trying to indoctrinate our young people. You can see the proof in this colorful PragerU video presented by the Young America's Foundation at a Turning Point USA school club meeting.

Friendly holiday reminder that people rush to submit before the holidays and declined reviews get even worse than usual. And editors want to enjoy holiday time, too. Patience and grace to all (and to all a good night)!

Lol at every university trustee and law firm partner who concluded they had no choice but to play ball with this bumbling fool

I was unprepared for the fact that one of the only American institutions stand against authoritarianism would be the jury system. www.cnn.com/2025/12/11/p...

missed this last week: trains in Lancaster were cancelled after AI-generated images of a bridge collapse were shared on social media following a real earthquake. god, we're really not ready to resist an engagement-driven online ecosystem empowered by AI fakes www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Now that you can't fail with the Bible, and we are moving finals for football, the questions, "Is Oklahoma in the south?" has officially been answered.

sigh

So...my undergrad thesis student is doing a quality analysis of studies found in meta-analyses. She identified a few and we contacted the authors to request their effect sizes and other variables for the studies in their papers. Here's what happened: scientiapsychiatrica.com/index.php/Sc...

The Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution and the Gettysburg Address. Liberty and equality for all in a constitutional republic. Not blood and soil nationalism. America is not an ethnostate where your rights depend on ancestry.

Heartbreaking. The University of Nebraska will terminate its entire Earth science department. One of the country's most successful and respected geology & climate programs: gone. When ideologues & politicians are threatened by the very act of studying climate change, I wonder: who of us is next?

Early 2029 will be like a post-conflict society starting a campaign of de-Trumpification.

How to buy yourself a needy malignant narcissist? Just offer him a phony, made up "Peace Prize" & he's all your's!!! No need for a formal ceremony as he'll snatch from the box & put it on all by himself. Both laughably pathetic AND pathetically laughable. 🤡 🫣

What has changed is that America is being run by a political faction that views liberal democracy as threat, rather than as our greatest legacy.

Legal/PR jockeying in advance of long-promised EU penalties? A number of US govt moves in the last two weeks have seemed to related to that. E.g. barring from the US any govt official who limits the free speech of US corporations.

Important for people to know the $75 mil payout from Northwestern to the government didn't turn on canceled grants that broaden participation in stem, physics, promote diversity etc... what this communicates about uni priorities is clear: dailynorthwestern.com/2025/12/03/c...

I would fail to develop, launch or scale a killer app for meta for the low low price of $1B

This fetid landmark, this historical stain on humanity is primarily due to the stunningly reckless obliteration of America's foreign assistance agency earlier this year. Led by the richest man on earth. In secret, on a weekend. With zero analysis or discussion of its catastrophic impacts.

"AI is more persuasive when it makes things up" just makes it sound like my family at the holidays.

I see were are going full Gattaca now.

A company that will say this is either incompetent or dishonest. Those are your two options. Either way, you gonna entrust your IVF genetic screening to them?

I am honestly somewhat perplexed as to why universities have been doing this in the first place? "For years, universities and colleges have been trying to keep the number of men and women on campuses evened out at a time when a growing number of men has been choosing not to go to college."

Holy shit. Reuters reporting that new admin instructions on visas are if you worked at a platform in trust & safety or content moderation or on fact checking or online safety at an platform you *and your loved ones* are ineligible for H-1B visa. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

That last point. Cassidy really has enormous leverage if he wants to use it. He would win this fight. Worst case is he winds up losing a primary and spends his 70s (he's 68 now) as a hero to millions. He'll likely never have as much influence over anything again as he has over this right now.

There’s no one best way to do social science research. The idea that if you use a particular design or set of designs then you get a “true” answer and anything else is a waste of time is transparently nutty. academic.oup.com/jpart/articl...

Glad to see electoral systems finally getting the attention it deserves.

“A cultural challenge”

Survey experiments' popularity in political science is getting attention. What is good and bad about them? How can one maximize their benefits and mitigate their downsides? Greg Huber and I wrote up our thoughts: Paywalled: doi.org/10.1016/bs.h... Free: m-graham.com/papers/Huber...

Democratic politicians need to stop accepting Trump’s white nationalist premise that immigration is bad and proudly and loudly make a positive case for why America’s identity and history as a nation of immigrants is so important.

Once again in re: the utterly abject poverty of the “Democrats Must Not Talk Funny because they are Alienating Real Folkz” Discourse™️ that we have suffered through in the last year while the Republicans keep Doing A Fascism & calling people “vermin” & “morons” & "piggy" & this hateful nonsense.

I think we can all agree: "There is only one way to do credible research, and it happens to be the way that I myself do research."

We really are going to need to get rid of presidential pardon power.