😬😬😬😬😬😬

For those in the Hong Kong area, I'll be giving a public talk at New Asia College about status, olympic hosting and japan's status concerns induced by a changing international order. Come if you can!

It has been >10 yrs since I studied the legal system, but yea, case selection is the major deciding factor. Cases go to trial when prosecutors are almost certain they can convict and they rely/ied on (too often coerced) confessions to get there But current legal scholars feel free to correct

No more forever wars? No, more forever wars!

I am so sorry Yorgos Lanthimos for not immediately seeing the vision with Bugonia the first time. I hear you loud and clear, now

yeah the reality is unless the US loses all function to project power and influence internationally, it won't become a pariah until a viable alternative with about equal amounts of political, economic, and diplomatic infrastructure in place. that's part of the bleakness of the situation

The scale of the LDP’s victory is hard to overstate: • 316/465 seats (68%) — biggest win in party history • Swept 31 of 47 prefectures • With Ishin: 352 seats (76%), swept 33 prefectures Results: www.asahi.com/senkyo/shuin...

Takaichi's snap election gamble has clearly paid off. Snap elections tend to benefit incumbents — especially when opposition parties are caught off guard and the campaign period is particularly short. I've written about this dynamic before: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

what a gamble Takaichi and the LDP made and unequivocally won

Reposting again as the abstract submission deadline for this conference is Feburary 13th!

National media should really be covering the fact thay every major school, museum, and arts institution in the Twin Cities, and hundreds of local businesses are closed tomorrow to protest federal occupation. Nothing like this at this scale has happened anywhere in America anytime in living memory.

International status and prestige scholars continue to be well-fed during this administration

US foreign policy analysts choosing to ignore or downplay when racism and white supremacy (or identity and ideology in general) are primary motivators of American int'l policy? Must be a day that ends in y

The University of Arkansas's law school just withdrew the appointment of its new dean six days after hiring her because conservative politicians complained that she filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of transgender students

!!!! CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT !!!! Yale's Council on East Asian Studies will be hosting the second annual Japan Conference for Social Scientists this spring. Details at the link. Funding is available to NA-based participants for travel and lodging! Early scholars encouraged to apply!

The destruction doesn't make for a photo-op like tearing down the East Wing of the White House or bulldozing the Rose Garden, but it's every bit as bad. Generations of American children learned to spell and count, learned the Preamble to the Constitution, from watching shows produced by the CPB.

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The US attempting regime change in Latin America...time is a circle

People ask what happens next with Venezuela and Maduro and the answer is, politely, we don't know But as a Haitian-American, I gotta tell you, the vibes feel familiarly dreadful. Power vacuums do not last and what/who comes next frequently breeds instability

What a time to know anything about the history of American imperialism and its consequences

Universities must do better in protecting the people they employed, especially when they are from already marginalized communities. Seeking a diverse labor force only to leave them out to dry is exploitative and just ensures that those folks stop showing up.

One funny thing about being a recovering perfectionist is that you will often fall back into perfectionism on a project and stress yourself out for weeks/months about it just to hit the "wall of clarity" and hit submit in the 11th hour, when you realize you are actually driving yourself insane

To keep the Indo-Pacific “free and open”… You need: Forward-deployed naval power Coordinated deterrence with Japan, Korea, Australia, Taiwan Shared strategic planning Intelligence, basing access, presence But the document says: “The days of the 🇺🇸propping up the entire world order are over.”

• Allies must assume primary responsibility for their own regions. • The U.S. will help only if allies first help themselves and align policies with U.S. interests. This is not alliance management. This is transactional outsourcing of security obligations.

Northwestern’s leaders will likely try to justify their choice to appease fascist extortion with some BS about needing to help researchers get federal funds that were illegally withheld, so it’s important to note that virtually all of the researchers said not to.

So apparently the administrators at Northwestern have caved to the extortionist demands of the Feds. Faculty voted 595-4 AGAINST this measure.

Look, every single “deal” reached by a university with the Trump administration is a moral stain that will be seen with deep embarrassment once we’re through this. But for Northwestern to do this now, when the administration is visibly weakened, is even more shameful and inexcusable.

I hope people understand that as gross as this is, it's not unique. Not by a long shot. Senior male academics abusing their position and power to pursue younger female students has been and continues to be a PROBLEM

gotta say this whole business about ‘electing a muslim mayor is basically pissing on the graves of 9/11 victims’ is just…just shockingly racist stuff i mean what else is there to say about it

I remember when this article came out and how huge swaths of the internet dismissed it on its face. Eight years later and "digital blackface" has proven itself to be such an important concept. www.teenvogue.com/story/digita...

The intellectual critique in this thread is great but on a bit more of a personal note, as an alum, it is LAUGHABLE to paint Bowdoin as a hotbed of leftist ideology. I don't have the numbers, but consulting and finance were some of the top job placements for grads in my year (2015)

probably a bit edgy for academic circles, but everyday the voice in my head that whispers "Robert Putnam was right" grows louder and reading this article about gooning culture made that voice SCREAM harpers.org/archive/2025...

This is exactly how the Turkey's Erdoğan dictatorship succeeded in remaking all mainstream media into regime media. Not mainly by overt censorship. Mostly by making it clear that media firms clearly communicating the truth about regime actions would be targeted by selective/perverted 'regulation'.

One thing the AWS outage should show is that these companies are far more embedded at the institutional level than people think and that’s precisely why students were asking their universities to disinvest rather than pushing individual boycotts.

Dutch intelligence suspends sharing arrangements with the US after concluding that high level intel was routinely being shared by the White House with their friends in the Kremlin. www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/n...

He's from my hometown ❤

We have posted an event report for the Japan Conference hosted at the Centre for the Study of Global Japan ealier this year. Thanks to all the participants for a great conference! munkschool.utoronto.ca/csgj/news/ev...

The subtext of this comment is that the Mayor of Boston is Asian-American, whereas the Mayor of Chicago (like almost everyone else that Trump refers to as “a low IQ person”) is Black.

UPDATE: Following the firing of the director of the student newspaper, Indiana University has now cut the print edition of the newspaper entirely. www.idsnews.com/article/2025...

a lot of people want to read Trump and team's fossil fuel obsession as being about *money* but while there is of course a corruption element, it's primarily pure culture war stuff. even many of the big fossil fuel companies want to get into renewables because it's so obviously the future.

Director Christina Davis, Charles McClean @cmcclean.bsky.social (2020-21), Kristi Govella @kristigovella.bsky.social (2017-18), and Sheila Smith @sheilasmithcfr.bsky.social (Distinguished Visitor, 2013-14) are quoted in The Dispatch article, "Japan's Iron Lady." tinyurl.com/yf3vmjpt

Jack collaborated with neo-Nazi twins to make a documentary. He was a fan of white supremacist Richard Spencer. He has tweeted 1488, the alphanumeric code for Heil Hitler. He wrote an unreadable anti-antifa book. Last year he wrote a book abt the left called “Unhumans.” That he’s now speaking here…

I have no less than 30 at any given moment bc I love the multi desktop feature and make LIBERAL use of it

Getting strong "glass cliff" vibes

Trump's higher ed ransom note is here - everyone would have to acquiesce to their unprecedented demands or not be "given priority for grants," plus they can demand "reimbursement" for "violations" www.wsj.com/us-news/educ... A mechanism to enforce fealty. An attack on academic freedom and democracy

it is just a straightforward statement of fact to say that the trump administration sees any black student at an elite institution as one too many

WaPo: Pentagon says it will require reporters "to pledge they won’t gather any information — even unclassified — that hasn’t been expressly authorized for release and will revoke the press credentials of those who do not obey."

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.