The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

Imagine a politician giving a speech down the street from an ICE processing center, telling protesters to "fight like hell," and those protesters then breaking into the center and smashing stuff. Clearly that wouldn't be his fault.

David Letterman réagissant à la répression gouvernementale à l'égard des talkshow de fin de soirée, son emploi pendant des décennies :

🧵 Who's the most informed about American politics? Very lefty seculars. My new FREE study @sfjournal.bsky.social finds atheists/agnostics, especially if they are politically sorted, score higher on knowledge of basic civics & current politics than other groups. 1/ academic.oup.com/sf/advance-a...

DJT: I am using the state to punish criticism and extort people WH: this business decision was driven by DJT: No I am using the state to punish criticism and extort people WH: Unitary executive theory implies that DJT: I SAID I AM USING THE STATE TO PUNISH CRITICISM AND EXTORT PEOPLE FOR MONEY

Tout est devenu tellement con.

“They studied 51 populist presidents and prime ministers who were in power between 1900 and 2020 and found that after 15 years, GDP per capita was 10% lower when compared with a plausible nonpopulist counterfactual.”

This essentially means the end of the US as an international hub for virtually everything that has driven economic growth over the past 70 years.

By next spring, they'll be bragging about the passenger airliner they shot out of the sky because it was filled with "antifa commandos"

This commentary offers a clear, powerful statement of why freedom of speech is at the heart of democracy and must be defended, whether the speaker is Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel, MAGA supporters or MAGA opponents.

Democracy, more than anything is a practice. I always think that the Civil Rights Movement succeeded because from the Civil War black Americans built institutions: universities, fraternities and sororities, churches, that engaged them in democratic practice.

Respectfully disagree: 1) in fact it is unusual for a democracy w/ this level of GDP to turn authoritarian & so quickly; 2) the weakness of both institutions (congress & courts) and individuals (Schumer etc) is shocking. Would take less than 10 people in congress or 2 SC justices to stop all this.

It seems increasingly clear that the US corporate ladder has not been selecting for courage, integrity, or moral standing. So what has it been selecting for?

😳

incredibly dangerous speech here from the vice president. likely it will make violence worse, not better. (also happens to be a complete lie) www.gelliottmorris.com/p/americas-r...

"…and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel.”

Quand le récit MAGA s’écroule devant la réalité

luigi mangione murdered a healthcare executive and opposed "wokeism." i don't know why people insist that killers need some coherent ideology. most people don't even have coherent wardrobes, let alone a coherent worldview.

Huh an awful lot of rhetoric shifted from Old Testament to New Testament over the past few hours

Seen in 3rd grade classroom. Good reminder for social media users.

I wrote something for The Nation about how Republican style has changed over the last fifty years. But first, let me tell you a short story. 🧵 www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Thanks to @kmezdoesit.bsky.social for this. open.substack.com/pub/professo...

The Asch Conformity Line Experiment, MAGA edition.

Édifiant…

We might be “experiencing an AI bubble,” Rogé Karma argues. “If that bubble bursts, it could put the dot-com crash to shame—and the tech giants and their Silicon Valley backers won’t be the only ones who suffer.”

#SCOTUS all-but overruled a unanimous, 90-year-old precedent through an unexplained "administrative" stay this morning, and that's only the second-most-problematic thing it did before lunchtime.

Sorry if this was posted here already, just a hot new Berkeley Econ joint www.nber.org/papers/w34170

trump is very unpopular, in both absolute and comparative terms. it should be easy for any reasonably popular dem figures to use this fact to drag Rs down in 2026/beat Vance in 2028 www.gelliottmorris.com/p/data

Looks dumb, right? Too often, this is how we design cities. #CarDependency

But we were bored.

Most social phenomena boil down to systemic selection effects. Which makes it striking that so many with immense economic power are caving in like this. It kind of reveals what the system has selected for.

US stocks vs. rest of the world: worst underperformance since 2009. @mikezaccardi.bsky.social @dailychartbook.bsky.social

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Next they'll be rewriting textbooks to say Japanese American internment camps were delightful summer resorts.

1/ I worked at DoD. I literally cannot imagine lawyers coming up with a legal basis for lethal strike of suspected Venezuelan drug boat. Hard to see how this would not be "murder" or war crime under international law that DoD considers applicable. Read expert analysis by @bcfinucane.bsky.social⤵️

Thread.

You know that boat the administration blew up? A former law enforcement official told the NYT the boat seemed to be carrying not drugs but *’migrants * www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...

Incredibly important thread. Constitutional Courts are basically wizards that caste legal spells. Everyone else will tolerate them so long as these spells follow precedents and public reasoning. When they conjure spells without such reasoning, eventually people will simply stop listening to them

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

If it helps anyone sleep tonight, we don't find these percentages in our own data across Europe (May-June 2025). Largest shares of 'ambivalents' are found in Poland (30%) and Spain (34%), but overall a majority supports democracy while rejecting autocracy.

Europe is engaged in a battle for freedom and democracy. It must build its geopolitical power to participate as an equal player. That’s why we have embarked on the biggest military undertaking in recent history. Extract of my speech at EUISS conference ↓

Lethal force against a civilian vessel in international waters is a war crime if not in self-defense. If not in self-defense, only non-lethal actions, such as warning shots or disabling fire, are allowed. "Not yielding to pursuers" or "suspected of carrying drugs" doesn't carry a death sentence.

This guy gets it. This is the way.

Pritzker: "We've gathered information from unauthorized, patriotic officials inside the government and from-sourced reporters about Donald Trump's plan, which is to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago."

Which is why we've been the richest country in the world while tariffs have been at their lowest levels.

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You guys see where this is going? Right?

Thief warns of 'embarrassment' if burglary ruled illegal

RFK Jr. taps his top deputy, Jim O’Neill, to be the new CDC director. Both men appear to wear skinny ties from Otaa. Otaa's ties are made in China from microfiber, a kind of plastic that, under the right conditions, can migrate to your balls.