Josh Barro of the NYT Opinion page says sometimes when you're mad, you just gotta take it out on something. Ok. If there's anything more annoying about sensible centrism than acting like you're the adult in the room, in control of your emotions, I don't know what that might be. 1/

Whitehouse means well, but this sort of thing just has to stop. Someone's feelings *are* wrong--saying that everybody is right or everybody has a point is just a polite way of condescending. Unity takes real agreement--and willingness to say "We screwed up". The Dem leadership screwed up.

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women 🧵

Democrats who've made statements on caving making it worse. Shaheen thinks that negotiations on ACA extensions can start now. Kaine thinks this will protect federal workers from "baseless firings". Either they believe these things (appallingly stupid) or they don't (gross cynicism).

I will say this for Senator Fetterman. Every time I think he's shown PA voters his maximum capacity for cowardice and political incompetence, he manages to do it one better.

Schumer said the Dems will "keep fighting". Keep fighting their own voters? Keep fighting off effectiveness? Keep fighting being held accountable for anything? As far as I can tell the Democratic leadership is good at one thing only now, which is sending fundraising messages to my phone.

Democrats have been fighting for months to address America's healthcare crisis For the millions who will lose coverage For people with cancer who won't get the care they need For working families who can't afford to pay $25K more a year for healthcare We will keep fighting

Proceduralists get screwed in negotiations because they don't have any goals or values in the first place. The negotiation IS the goal. The Democratic leadership is proceduralist in this sense. They never lose because they aren't trying to win anything in particular.

I use em dashes and parenthetical asides a lot, especially in my online writing. I get kind of irritated by the idea that em dashing is an obvious AI tell. Where do you think LLMs learned it?

HAPPY FOUR SEASONS TOTAL LANDSCAPING DAY TO ALL WHO CELEBRATE

Welp, I'm not exactly surprised, but guess what, this turned out to be right on the money.

You know what I'd vote for as an actual platform? A party where everybody believes it's an important general obligation to say "I made a mistake, sorry."

Look, honestly, among the things that left-liberalism has just got to take on board is that constitutionalism, proceduralism, institutionalism, were all death traps. Honestly, the pre-liberal republicans won this argument: virtue, culture, etc. matters more than systems and designs.

Considering that Mikie Sherrill's major TV ad in the NJ gov race was just her flying a helicopter over NJ as a demonstration of military prowess, I'm not sure where the mainstream take that she's run hard on being anti-Trump is coming from--she's been very wary of making that a central thematic.

Somewhere around 8pm tonight, the New York Times and other legacy newspapers are going to pivot towards "Zohran Mamdani: why his initiatives are failing". The first thing he tries to do concretely is going to have a swarm of hostile press all over it from the first second of its existence.

Watching the NYT keep trying to figure out what angle to play in trying to make Mamdani's candidacy look bad has been a fascinating exercise in polite dishonesty. I'm particularly struck by the mutability of the "but this candidate is inexperienced" argument, however. 1/

I'm a Dodgers fan from my earliest childhood until now but I gotta say two things: 1) that was a great World Series and 2) honestly, the Blue Jays were a better team than the Dodgers in the Series itself and lost only by the sum total of maybe six plays determined by inches.

From here on in, expect any historical quotation, speech or evidence that contradicts or embarrasses Trumpism to be erased, lost, or changed. Materials held by government agencies including the National Archives are especially vulnerable. Digitized material also. Hold on to published books you own.

Can anybody think of a person as desperate for power as Andrew Cuomo who has turned out to be a person who did really great things with the power if they achieved it? Desperate at the level of "go ahead and do some racist AI that also steals Idris Elba's image likeness, I'll just say I didn't know?"

The reason we fall for people like Platner and Fetterman is that we're hungry for someone who stands for the right things and doesn't sound like a neoliberal robot who consults polls to decide what they're for. But that's what sets those guys up--they read the hunger and project into that space.

It does feel like the skew at both No Kings protests was towards older participants. If young people weren't there as much as they might be, what could be the reason? timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-news-w...

When we to the point where citizens tell ICE, accurately, that they're on private property without a warrant; when they are detaining American citizens without allowing them access to counsel or making any charges, and they are lying to and ignoring judges, let's face it: the Constitution is over.

Has anybody else experienced the NYT never posting comments on stories if your comment criticizes the NYT's coverage of the story? It seems pretty systematic to me--if you talk about the issues that the story is about, you're ok; if you criticize the way it's covered, your comment is not posted.

Yesterday I wrote about the effort by center-left pundits to police what people are passionate about. www.pbump.net/o/sincerity-...

Mike Johnson is as empty as one of those cheap chocolate bunnies you can buy at Easter. Morally hollow but also wholly evacuated of knowledge. I don't even know what he does all day since he seems to have no information about anything that's going on.

I had a baffling conversation with a rideshare driver on my way to an airport. He's from West Africa; we talked for the first half about his anger with his own country's dictatorial ruler and the hunger he and his peers feel for democracy and reform. Then he talked about why he likes Trump.

What's next, using surveillance video to charge Trump's enemies with aggravated jaywalking? Driving 5 miles an hour over the speed limit?

Trying to think about the hard problem of diversity at its deepest: that many of us don't like working or living with people who aren't aligned with us emotionally and temperamentally. (Maybe even worse, we don't even like people who are too much like us!) timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-t...

Like, we're going to have "oh this isn't so bad" enablers telling us that really this is not the worst fascism ever even when they get detained. "Hey, they only waterboarded me twice and shocked my testicles once about something I never did, it was way worse somewhere else".

Sick of this kind of "oh sweetheart, it's not fascism until you get thrown out of the helicopter or get tossed in a death camp" thing. Nichols has as much experience of real fascism as I do, which is to say it's all intellectual, analytic. Don't worry, Tom, the real deal is coming.

This sums it up perfectly. Injustice that is a result of indifference, exhaustion, the contradictions of flawed systems is one thing. We are now governed by people for whom injustice is the objective, cruelty is the point, and they're so far executing those goals comprehensively.

"So that a government of Donald Trump, by Donald Trump, for Donald Trump, shall do whatever he desires whenever he desires it. Everyone else just exists to service him."

Cawthorn-Santos Presidential ticket incoming in 2032. Though I'm surprised that Cawthorn isn't taking the shorter route to right-wing welfare and offering himself up as a Trump appointee. He'd fit right in.

It's becoming clear that this is not an administration that is popular or skilled enough to do the consolidation needed to implement actual fascism, so they've decided that constantly creating fascism-flavored content is good enough

If we come out of this dark era as an intact nation capable of producing reflective history about what the hell happened in the 2020s, I guarantee Hegseth's speech is going to be an iconic example of the incoherence, incompetence and dysfunction of this regime and this moment.

I don't know if Hegseth is just gonna do some dumb ego thing with the military, but at the least it pays to have some eyes on the situation. At the same time, we all have to remember that the entire MO of these guys to to have Prez Le Petomaine do dumb shit while the Hedley Lamarrs do evil shit.

The Democratic leadership in the House and Senate are moving forward as if the people who are about to have their ACA costs dramatically increased (and the people who've already suffered from Medicaid cuts) are going to blame the GOP and turn to the Dems. Bad assumption on both counts.

More rebranding from the Trump Administration! DOJ will become Department of Vengeance. HHS will become Brainworm High Command. Commerce Department will become Big Piggy's Bribe Bank.

All those cautionary tales about the dangers of winning the lottery plainly have to include J.K. Rowling as one of the prime exhibits. She could be having fun and travelling, she could be heading a foundation, anything--but she's obsessively online trying to win the game of "everyone is wrong".

Let's just suppose that an entirely random process identified an individual who a federal prosecutor was told "Secure an indictment of them by any means necessary". How many American citizens could not be indicted regardless of that order? My guess would be close to zero.

Apparently a lot of serving top military officers have been called to Washington DC for an urgent face-to-face meeting. I wonder what Operation Never Heard Of Epstein is going to be about. Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. Martial law? Greenland invasion? Seizure of all escalators in NYC?

Sherill in NJ is running as if she might get Trump supporters votes as long as she doesn't mention that she's a Democrat or has any opinions at all about national politics, presumably because they'll like her military experience. It's like they think they can sneak past the election.

Holy shit, it's an accusation that Senator Van Hollen had margaritas with an unjustly confined prisoner in a hellhole in El Salvador? I'd give him a humanitarian award if he'd somehow managed to arrange that on purpose.

Everything the American right has complained about since 1992 or so has been the equivalent of producer's notes. They weren't complaints, they were bookmarks on policies and actions that weren't oppressive but COULD BE, if you did them with that intent. As they are doing now.

David Frum and David French and even Tucker Carlson are showing up more on Kimmel and the awfulness of state repression of speech than most of the assholes who signed the Harper's letter about cancel culture. I guess those guys are still more worried about Oberlin undergrads.

Over the borderline into sycophantic. But they haven't used the full toolbox yet! The Times will have to think of new ways to slobber enthusiastically when people get sent to work camps or detention for saying bad things about the President and his friends. "Going all-out!" "The fully monty!"

Is now the time to start cancelling subscriptions and services? Yes it is. You can do without Disney+ even if you've got young kids. Make it conditional, like any boycott should be. Do the right thing, stop knuckling under, defend your freedom and ours? Then we'll be back as your customers.

Well, we are off the map now, folks. It's a long way down once we hit the edge.

I genuinely want to hear the names of public intellectuals you think are "debaters"--who listen patiently and seriously to opposing views, credit them, allow those critiques to affect their own thinking. Charlie Kirk was not one of them, but who are they? I will start with one name: Garry Wills.