For decades US media was like “the GOP is full of racists but that doesn’t make them the party OF racism” which was always stupid and now even that kayfabe is untenable

As a long time fan of On Cinema at the Cinema I can't fully explain how bizarre yet fitting it is to see Alex Jones, who plays a character as himself and rants about crisis actors, confuse the "Tim Heidecker" from OCAC and Tim and Eric Show with Tim Heidecker the actor

Was just talking to a student yesterday about the internal tension in liberal, hyper-capitalized universities; they want to both protect free thought as an educational mandate and restrict or even punish free expression (beyond some invisible line) as an institutional mandate

If you look carefully at this photo you can see the patrons scowling or trying to ignore it completely. Who is this for

When you work with the archival papers of historical figures you get good at spotting the middlemen who make their careers out of repackaging others' life's work and reselling it, as opposed to historians who reinterpret and reintroduce the past to the present 1/3

Anyone who's ever been bullied or even discriminated against knows exactly how "humor" is a tactical weapon. It's all the GOP does now. So fuck you Dave et al, the blood's on your hands too

The Trump administration is officially more progressive in this specific area than the university where I work

when you talk to people dealing with these things up close you realize how radically fictive most of the world painted by public discussions of “higher ed” is and how long it has been which is to be expected when it’s a niche thing but it’s been at the center of politics for years now

Funny thing about using the doomsday weapon is that whoever seriously threatens, let alone plans, to use it instantly disqualifies that person from being considered a rational actor. Dr. Strangelove covered this pretty well in 1964

Daughter failed her driving test on the first try b/c of nerves, felt like a failure b/c they want to be an adult. Had to explain that no one "is" a failure, we sometimes fail at things, and unfortunately the experience of failure is very much Being An Adult

general strike? turn around? would like to be wrong, but the litmus test for intolerable war crimes imo was gaza, and the crimes committed there and tolerated by vast majority of countries and individuals desensitised and dehumanised all of us against war crimes

This is an underrated decline-and-fall indicator btw. Basic management of fundamental natural resources is a baseline for nation-states & it looks like we're just not going to bother doing it anymore, replaced by extraction/looting

yeah man i'll circle back to you on that agenda item from yesterday's all hands in just a sec. our pedophile king just threatened to destroy a whole civilization

Sorry to be one of the Nothing Ever Happens guys but I just have a feeling that tonight Nothing Will Happen. Also Trump won't be removed because no one has the courage and/or stomach for it and the R's aren't going to rig the midterms, just pretend Congress doesn't matter (like they have been doing)

I've come around on the idea that there's basically nothing that policymakers can do to encourage an increase in marriage or birth rates other than "make the world a better place"

if you invented public libraries today, every opinion page in the country would be arguing for means tested subsidized Amazon Prime memberships

unsettling aside the intended effect of campus crackdowns: seeing a lot of posts on here about what levels of repression students ought to be willing to weather for the cause. I assume I'll be seeing these posters at the barricades

even setting aside the intended effect of campus crackdowns: one difference between now and two years ago is that half or so of them are gone, having received their four year degrees, and "students" (2026) and "students" (2024) refer to two largely different populations of people

I have the stomach to say one more thing: as meaningful as what students saw in response to their protests (repression) is what they didn't (US shifting away from support for genocide). describing this as *their* failure as opposed to the supposed adults in the room is a joke and not the funny kind

Just heard that whitey is back on the moon. cool. great

The viciousness of issuing this ruling on Trans Day of Visibility is so profound. Just filled with anger and sorrow for kids across this country who deserve love, respect, and safety instead of this foul hatred.

US history heads will wonder if these are the same planes Reagan sold the Saudis back in the late 80s to the consternation of the Israelis en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US%E2%8...

What stage of hypernormalization is it where the President solely interacts with the wider world via his TV screen and its short form clips curated by his scheming viziers, or is that just old school end of empire come back around again

Speed Racer (2008) is like live-action anime + Fast and the Furious + last 20 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, prob the most visually anarchic big-screen movie I've seen except 4 House (1977). Came out the same year as Iron Man and now that capeshit is RIP maybe we can have fun again at the movies

BU like many higher ed institutions can get paranoiacally "risk averse" and Trump has them scared of their own shadow, so the "neutral" position becomes appeasement of homophobia. Pretty sure this approach was taken to prevent anyone from displaying Palestinian flags, originally

If I was paranoid I might think it was weird that the government was pushing the newest weight loss drugs on the general population right when the food supply chain was totally screwed up through my insane decisions

This is quite something from Singapore's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vivian Balakrishnan, in an interview with Reuters. The end of the post-war order, diagnosed in technocratic language. www.mfa.gov.sg/newsroom/pre...

The US used to have a population of people much like the Israeli settlers in the West Bank. We used to call them "pioneers" & millions of Americans are proudly descended from them. These "heritage" Americans are the only people Steven Miller considers human, on the further condition they're white

The Harry Potter series has apparently been rectonned into a refuge for lonely nerds, not a global publishing/branding phenom so big it was once going to rescue the future of the printed word from the Internet etc. Rowling is a hateful bigot and her work is mediocre at best, time to grow as a person

if you watch and support the new harry potter show you are funding trans genocide globally by the way

I see a lot of people saying this is "like the Nazis" but it's also very much in the US tradition of eugenics, forced sterilization, and medicalized torture of queer people; this tradition was mostly ended by the late 70s but conservatives have been trying to bring it back for decades & here we are

Not a coincidence that the Gulf states get $ troubles and suddenly OpenAI does too

Here is my pride flag everybody! I hung one up yesterday in my office at Boston University, as they seek to enforce and defend a policy of removing them (along with other banners in public view, they say). This is a small act of love for my corner of the world, in a dark time. This flag goes deep.

We need to acknowledge that science has always emerged from a mess and a lot of misunderstanding. That is the constitutive character of the scientific process. Failures of understanding at the individual level can even be critical for collective progress. Science is a distributed activity.

So anyhow, we suggest not reducing scientific progress to the accuracy of an individual scientist's models of science, dropping the "convergence on truth" assumption as a gauge to assess progress, and actively committing to a pluralistic view of science as an epistemic virtue, not a concession.

But the government told me the agents' lives would be worth nothing if their faces and identities weren't completely obscured at all times! Could it be that was bullshit??

Say maybe ICE will do what they do in their field kidnapping sorties and raids: laugh derisively at everyone's gov issued IDs, throw them in the garbage, and run their faces through their janky Palantir app

I think it's a cool idea to send the masked roided strung-out fascist legally-untouchable brownshirts to loom, glower, bellow at, and physically assault underfed tired stressed out American air travelers, what could go wrong

Why, after years of scrutiny, isn’t there any evidence that large numbers of children were given irreversible treatments without assessment? “The journals are corrupt! And the doctors are corrupt! And the debate was suppressed! And the data is coming out any time now!” Like listen to yourselves

I don’t choose that word lightly. The idea that an entire field of medicine, as well as numerous academic journals, systematically suppressed evidence that gender-affirming care doesn’t work is a conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, none of these people can provide a shred of evidence for their core claim

Weird how every journalist writing ‘balanced’ feature stories on this issue turns out to be a deranged conspiracist and ideologue the second you hear them speak off the cuff

At some point, maybe in the late 2000s or early 2010s, the Californian Ideology fully merged with fascism

I think I can honestly say that this panel from Uncanny X-Men #134 altered the trajectory of my life

Every single thing named after Cesar Chavez should be renamed for Dolores Huerta

This is me on BlueSky.com

relatedly, this "frisson of transgression" thing convinces me that if Trump had gone to prison MAGA would have abandoned him wholesale

This, to me, is the root of it: the left is always going to be more stuffy, constrained and dogmatic because *the left believes that oppression exists and matters.* This is a turnoff to a certain sort of person who does not wish to believe this. But reality wins eventually.

The other side of this is, in some ways, actually the more interesting one: that conservative men have increasingly completely given up on even paying *lip service* to the idea being constrained by defined social roles, even when there are women who are amenable to that

If some Verso intellectual wants to write A History of Dubai: The Dystopian Global City as Late Capital Hyperobject (1966-2026) I promise to buy it and read the heck out of it

🚨NEW: Last year, the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. increased again. The driving factor? President Trump’s deportation agenda. Our annual report, The Whole Pie, gives the big picture of mass incarceration. Here are some key takeaways 🧵