this piece has been in the works a while but honestly i could not have asked for a better foil than ezra klein's interview with ta-nehisi coates. klein longs for peacetime--but you don't get to decide when you're in a fight. www.liberalcurrents.com/democrats-mu...

@patrickwyman.bsky.social's Dumb Guy Theory of History remains undefeated

I wrote about the take-home essay and whether it has a future in the age of AI. What are we actually testing when we assign them? What alternatives do we have? You can read my thoughts here: lucaspoy.substack.com/p/the-last-d...

damn :/

they think liberalism is a set of rules for a discourse game, and not a fighting faith and a vision of the good

@massgovernor.bsky.social @massago.bsky.social please take note

Political violence is bad because civil conflict is absolutely fucking terrible for everyone. It empowers the worst people within a society and feeds into endless cycles of escalating violence that get harder and harder to stop.

It is encouraging to see some institutional checks working as designed. And it’s notable here that everyday citizens seem to understand what many of our government reps and media do not— the Constitution is not self-enforcing

@massgovernor.bsky.social this but for Massachusetts and Boston

from chandra manning's wonderful book "what this cruel war was over"

"Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, a voice of iron, could I tell all the forms of wickedness or spell out the names of every torment."

Last week, Boston received a letter from AG Bondi threatening to prosecute officials and withhold funds unless we cooperate with carrying out mass deportations. The US Attorney General asked for a response by today, so here it is: stop attacking our cities to hide your administration’s failures.

great take!

We are a mongrel nation, and so long as we remain so purely impure, we will continue to eat the world's lunch

every single day I log on and see Takes

I am against robot Hitler and think the decision to create him was bad.

I think it's really important to mock and ridicule the people responsible for all these American crimes. That's not because what they're doing is funny or lighthearted; it's because poking at their deepest insecurities and exposing them to public shame is absolutely essential to winning this fight.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

1) it was always fascism and fascism was the right word to use 2) they are building concentration camps and concentration camps are the right words to use 3) they are banning books and book bans is a fine way to describe the myriad ways they are banning them

the stories that come out of the ICE camps are going to look like the stories that come out of every camp system; rampant corruption, epidemic disease, physical and sexual abuse on a vast scale, a death rate far higher than normal, and medical abuses.

Oh hell yea!

one of the most incomprehensible to me things that a lot of people appear to believe about pop culture is that a bad movie can be made good if its supplementary material is good, or that it is somehow OK to make a movie that demands you to watch hours of other material to make sense

Based on crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don't have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6 million people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday. That's nearly 2% of the U.S. pop! Mobilized anti-Trump resistance is exceeding 2017 levels

the story today is of a profoundly low energy military parade being met with millions of americans in nationwide protests denouncing the dictatorial pretensions of the president

This is what Trump's government thugs are willing to do in broad daylight, to a US Senator, with cameras on. They are sending the message that anyone who disagrees with Trump isn't safe in America. This is authoritarianism.

why is the Ring the size of a donut 😭

The founding fathers did not live and die to see this moment. It’s time for all of us to stand up peacefully.

that did not take long

God cursed me with a lot of stuff but he did bless me with thinking oatmeal tastes absolutely decadent

🚨Spread the word! MA is launching an open call to members of the public to participate in the effort to redesign the state’s seal, flag & motto. The deadline for submissions is June 18, 2025. Ideas can be submitted using this link: maexecutiveofficeofeconomicdevelopment.formstack.com/forms/massac...

!!!!

Reconstruction Dems ascendant 🤞🏼

Pritzker: The reckoning is here. And now that this culture of timidity is on display, these same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on the defense of Black people, trans kids, and immigrants, instead of on their own lack of guts and gumption.

great, now my fiancée are eyeing each other with suspicion every time one of us offers the other a little treat

my kingdom for a horse as consul (preferable)

@democrats.senate.gov @housedemocrats.bsky.social take note— this is what we want

David Brooks quoting the Communist Manifesto and calling for a general strike Bill Kristol wants to abolish ICE Mayor Pete out here talking about "being creative about other means" AOC barnstorming the nation Kilmar is alive THEY DON'T BREAK US THEY BREAK UPON US

“We are powerless to ask Bukele” Well Van Hollen has him in street clothes in a restaurant, so start with that

top-notch senatorship. well done 🫡

Tolkien: [writes book that warns against an all-consuming lust for power and domination, inspired in part by the author's personal experience with the horrors of mechanized war] Tech: "what if we built Barad-dûr, in honor of Tolkien "

what a horrible day to be literate

I had been doubtful that we were going to have a "this is the crisis moment" with Trump, as opposed to "everything about this is a destructive catastrophe." But the Abrego Garcia case is the crisis moment. 1/

I don't really have anything especially profound to say, but yeah man this is it. They won't obey even the most milquetoast SCOTUS orders and are talking about sending US citizens to foreign gulags. It's happened here.

We're in The Bad Place, folks. The existence of an overseas gulag to which you - yes, you personally - can be sent with no recourse marks the end of a whole period of American history. There's no going back after this. Even if these guys are defeated, the new order will have to look much different.

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

I just learned about Jim Thorpe, PA-- a town that acquired the remains of the athlete from his widow and changed the town name in a hail mary bid for tourist dollars. Very medieval, cult-of-relics vibes. But in the 20th century!

I've got a piece up at @liberalcurrents.com clarifying whether Trump is trying to install merely an authoritarian regime or a properly fascist one in the federal government. My conclusion: we're facing Actual Fascism. www.liberalcurrents.com/yes-its-fasc...

An early medieval historian once wrote "The Roman empire was not murdered and nor did it die a natural death; it accidentally committed suicide," and that line is straight-up haunting me now

— “Backbreaking work on turnip farms and factory lines is good for you, actually” — Destroying universities — “You don’t need so many things” — Elites attacking elitism — Hate/contempt for cities — “Suck it up for the greater good” Am I crazy, or is MAGA starting to sound kinda’ Mao-y?