I take a decent amount of solace in knowing that these are just the most miserable, empty people imaginable.

This is amazing and anyone who tries to diminish it in favor setting trash cans on fire is full of shit.

This post was built in a lab from pieces of lesser posts, specifically designed to please me.

After tenure I briefly leaned in to writing sloppy emails to students. Quickly realized it’s really just a thinly veiled assertion of dominance. It’s saying the other person isn’t worth the time it’d take to fix that typo. It’s pathetic. Reveals nothing but insecurity. Or illiteracy. Either way…

All future empirical research on diversionary war will need to include fixed effects for the Trump admin this is getting ridiculous

I’m calling for a total and complete shutdown of rich people until we can figure out what’s going on

“Israel violates ceasefire, killing 29” fixed it for you

Just for context this is ~10X the number of Ukrainian civilians killed by Russia since 2022.

"in theater" But yes this is simply law enforcement, not an invasion of an American city.

40% of the time, it works every time

Grand strategy is foreign policy analysis but for powerful states so they can feel cool.

WTF they're trying to bring ICE to Milan for the olympics? Best case this just highlights the cost of hollowing out the rest of the federal government to reroute funding to the Gestapo. www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/e...

Cognitive consistency is a hell of a drug

Nah this isn’t it. Sure, Bovino isn’t the linchpin or whatever. But any time someone in the regime gets punished it’s a reminder: to the public, that resistance isn’t futile; and to every faceless brownshirt terrorizing our communities that they too might one day be held accountable.

brass solidarity band performing “stand by me” in the streets of whittier next to alex pretti’s memorial. the crowd started chanting “the people united will never be defeated” so they incorporated it into the song. i love minneapolis

Tfw you collaborate with a revisionist foreign power to overthrow a personalist dictator, then try to rule the country through the old dictator’s apparatus as your foreign patron (who you damn well knew has the attention span of a house fly) goes off chasing the next car that passes by.

He knows he’s losing. He’s looking for some kind of face saving deal.

A giant preemptive "nuuuupe" to anyone who's gonna try to argue that they support mass deportation but oppose the way they're doing it. It was obvious from the jump you couldn't deport millions, much less tens of millions of people without exactly this kind of reign of terror.

Hold on hold on let him cook

I’ve been eagerly waiting for this summer since 1994, unsure for many of those years if the World Cup would ever come back to the US. But yes this needs to happen. And if it happens it’ll almost certainly be players, not politicians, driving it.

Not a dig, but we need to understand that the United States today is simply not a democratic state. It’s not a consolidated autocracy either. I believe democracy will be restored. But rule of law, separation of powers…all the essentials of democratic governance are just…in tatters at this point.

Domestic terrorist

Lulz don’t get your hopes up. The first sentence of that tweet is pretty clear that they’re criticizing one person and one person only. And it certainly isn’t Trump.

“Turns out ‘don’t tread on me’ actually meant ‘tread on them.’ You weren’t afraid of tyranny. You were afraid of losing dominance. There’s a difference, and this moment exposes it completely.” 🔥🎯

Truth and reconciliation is about perpetrators owning up to and apologizing for their wrongs. I’d happily go the t&r route if they choose that. But I’m not holding my breath. Otherwise, we’re in the realm of purging, prosecuting, aggressively stigmatizing anyone who takes part in this.

This feels a little different. Not sure why. Hoping the dam breaks soon. This can’t go on.

I firmly believe that for Trump there’s very little in the way of “interests” or “agenda” beyond power, coercion, and domination. Even wealth is about expressing dominance. They aren’t means to an end. Domination itself is the goal. Understand this and a lot of things start to make sense.

“We fed the child we kidnapped” is quite the flex.

Teaching a new game theory class and I had hoped chat gpt might save me the tedium of coming up with problem sets, quiz Qs, etc on my own. Seems like something AI could do. Nope. Absolutely sucks butts at it. Inadvertently kept one AI-generated game in my class notes and it derailed the whole class.

Impressive that the country (for now) leading the charge against a rogue US is the one that’s most exposed to it, both economically and militarily. May such courage be contagious…

Beyond dystopian

My 4 y.o. has that same kind of hat. When you squeeze the little tail thingies it makes the ears flop up and down. It’s the most adorable thing imaginable. I cannot fathom the cruelty and depravity it’d take to do this to this kid. Hell isn’t nearly hot enough for these people.

Next level self awareness

Still nowhere close to Leicester winning the premier league

Re: the Greenland/Nobel nexus, is the conventional wisdom here just that Trump doesn't know and refuses to learn the difference between Norway and Denmark?

lol wow

Would be poetic if 70 years on we get a reverse Suez Crisis

Oh nice Costa Rica up for grabs

Beyond insane that this is happening in the US, at scale, and with absolute impunity. Unironically, straight to jail for every single one of these goons. Anything short of that is quite simply inviting authoritarian consolidation.

*Kavanaugh nods approvingly*

High bar but this might turn out to be part of the single most corrupt act this administration ever perpetrates.

jeez why can't political scientists ever write about things that matter

Figure we’ll see elites of all kinds steadily abandon the MLK Day charade. If not a campaign to reestablish King as the most hated man in America. May it be a welcome clarification. Let’s think about what King stood for in his last year. 🧵

Everything else aside you just shouldn’t use the word multivariate if you clearly have no earthly idea what it means

I mean, the NSS is essentially what pepperjack here has been advocating for years. They just swapped “Western Hemisphere” in for “East Asia” and “perfidiously blowing up speed boats” in for “deterring China.”

Absolutely maddening. Lying liar lies uninterrupted for over a minute. Sensible person doesn’t even call him a liar. Just says: if that’s true, how do we explain [glaring anomaly]? Sensible person gets interrupted after ~20 seconds so lying liar can lie uninterrupted for another 30 seconds.

This is a war crime.

Oh hell yes. It’s a big miss that D ads aren’t already overlaying ICE footage with videos of police violence against civil rights activists. I think Rage Against the Machine might have a song or two that’d make a good soundtrack.

What a grift. You either defy your own incompetence and succeed, or fail miserably and blame it all on woke. Rake in another $100m from credulous right wing investors. Rinse and repeat.

All norms are violated sometimes. What matters most is whether violations are punished or tolerated. Russia is getting mauled in Ukraine. I still think if MAGA is firmly rebuked, at home and abroad, the institutionalized global order that has yielded unprecedented peace and prosperity could survive.