Yes we have an opposition. I’m a political scientist in a public health school, so my professional commitments are quite precisely to democracy, science, and public health. Failing to articulate what we think and do doesn’t fool opponents, it just demoralizes friends.

It is like closely related attacks on science and public health: reasonable to have a conversation about what we might to do address them, but dangerous and foolish to talk as if the opposition is all our own fault, using our opponents’ talking points. Politics is a game with multiple players!

Oh is that how it works? One candidate is such a corrupt criminal that his own party tried to purge him, a crook who pardoned a pedophile and is loathed wide and far. But he plays the man card and now it's "front and center" in the race? "Sorry, folks, the crook said we have to talk gender!"

I don't have an exceptionally dirty mind, but this may not ome across quite the way that Johnson intended. bsky.app/profile/atru...

If you keep jamming with the Beetles in your spare time, we're going to kick you out of The String-A-Longs. bsky.app/profile/reut...

Wrote a doctoral thesis on the adoption of new technologies and worked as a startup and private equity attorney for five years. The importance of publicly sponsored research in improving life in the US is hard to overstate - this policy would destroy the world you know. bsky.app/profile/alex...

Just don't see how anyone could look at these guys and not immediately think "Master Race." bsky.app/profile/jtis...

Dude's dating Texas AOC. bsky.app/profile/leah...

Despite the corruption & mass murder, despite the destruction of the republic, you have to come back to the fact that this is just a pitiful & degraded, desperate old man who wants to fill the empty space inside of himself with praise and money because he isn't worth love. bsky.app/profile/atru...

It would be insensitive to say that the highest point in Latvia is 312 meters above sea level and I hope they didn't just practice on that before taking on Denali. bsky.app/profile/reut...

Dude's dating Texas AOC. bsky.app/profile/leah...

Just don't see how anyone could look at these guys and not immediately think "Master Race." bsky.app/profile/jtis...

The most Marxist opinion I personally hold: Bourgeois public morality is often sophistry (though sincerely believed by many) justifying the strategic use of poverty to impose discipline on the working class. bsky.app/profile/bren...

“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back to a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.” IT SAVES PUBLIC MONEY to house people.

Wrote a doctoral thesis on the adoption of new technologies and worked as a startup and private equity attorney for five years. The importance of publicly sponsored research in improving life in the US is hard to overstate - this policy would destroy the world you know. bsky.app/profile/alex...

State courts are terribly resource constrained and they don't have clerks, so I should be more sympathetic, but having been a federal clerk I literally cannot imagine a judge deciding a case without checking or having a clerk check the key citations used by the parties. bsky.app/profile/reut...

Summary disbarment? Mandatory minimum sentences? bsky.app/profile/reut...

Ending essentially all public health programs, slashing science funding, and pulling out of every form of international cooperation that doesn't provide Trump with opportunities to enrich himself through extortion will, in retrospect, probably prove to have been a bad idea. bsky.app/profile/reut...

Hoo-boy, this judge seems a lot more open to this than I expected. She has ordered DOJ to respond, including by explaining whether there was collusion, whether the parties are adverse, whether the case was "premised on deception," and if the court was a "victim of a fraud." Link in alt text

JCPOA might be the most vindicated foreign policy of all time tbh

If you keep jamming with the Beetles in your spare time, we're going to kick you out of The String-A-Longs. bsky.app/profile/reut...

If ordered to attend a Vanilla Ice concert, our military should consider a violent coup. bsky.app/profile/wash...

Don't let your entirely admirable and exquisitely sensitive moral convictions regarding international law trouble you too deeply, Exxon. Trump will re-brand this as a "safety fee" and give oil companies enough of my tax money to cover it. bsky.app/profile/reut...

This is one of those anecdotes that future students will read and smugly think "people were so stupid in 2026 - thankfully no one today would actually do that." Precisely as my students today read about the buying mania in the spring and early summer of 1929. bsky.app/profile/kate...

I respect this galaxy's choices and identity and will be glad to use its preferred name and pronouns. www.nasa.gov/image-detail...

One of the things that makes being a lawyer bearable is that California law contains very little actual malice. People are sometimes hurt by the law, but that is generally not the law's purpose. American immigration law, as applied, is not like that. bsky.app/profile/chri...

So the plan is that we, the American taxpayers, give $300b of our money to the murderous fundamentalist regime in Iran, Donald Trump takes a fraction of that as a personal bribe or kickback, and Iran gets to control 1/5 of the world's oil supply in perpetuity. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/w...

I remember when Yale Law first employed a Therapy Puppy for students . . . bsky.app/profile/bloo...

To be scrupulously fair, Iran does understand Donald Trump bettet than almost anyone in the American political, economic, or higher education elite. bsky.app/profile/ship...

Post of the day:

Just think - both the decision regarding war or peace and the planned timing of the announcement are largely driven by Trump's ability to make personal gains by front running the reactions of securities markets. bsky.app/profile/reut...

This will last . . . no, sorry - I shouldn't assume the rule of law. This *should* last exactly long enough for a lawyer to find someone harmed, walk to a federal court, and point to Art. I, Sec. 9, Cl. 6 of the Constitution. But during that time it will be staggering. bsky.app/profile/atru...

It is honestly impressive that after all these years, Trump's corruption and cartoonish evil still have the capacity to shock me. Using tariffs to extort Vietnam to desecrate a graveyard for your corrupt personal real estate deal is just unworldly. bsky.app/profile/bgru...

Yea, that's a real shame. Have you seen the outright fascist segregationists who represent millions of African American voters across the old Confederacy? And hey, California doesn't even use administrative tricks to stop the good people of Huntington Beach from voting. bsky.app/profile/reut...

"I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.'" - Dwight Eisenhower We are running the concentration camps. bsky.app/profile/mmfa...

Personalist regimes fucking suck. I have a PhD in comparative politics, so I can say that with scientific certainty. bsky.app/profile/fina...

Fucking lawless psychopaths

Ahh no wait sorry let me fix that

Oooh! Oooh! Pick me! Pick me! It's number 2! bsky.app/profile/maxk...

In the conflict between "momentum" and "if a trend cannot continue, it will stop," the latter always wins. It's just a question of how long it takes. bsky.app/profile/reut...

Lectured at West Point once on European politics (way back when I was, after a fashion, a scholar of European politics) - the students were very engaged and asked excellent questions. Glad that their civilian faculty will be able to continue to answer them. bsky.app/profile/reut...

Wish I could show this video to Teddy Roosevelt and watch him personally beat the hell out of Trump. bsky.app/profile/jacq...

Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton has numerous scandals to his name, including affairs, impeachment, and felony indictments. As an unbiased political reporter, it's my job to find an equal number of scandals linked to James Talarico, including but not limited to his ordering vegan tacos.

Computer: "Identify for retina scan." Shatner: "Hooker, Sgt T. J." bsky.app/profile/ryan...

The war in Ukraine has made me so accustomed to just scrolling past huge explosions that it took me a few repetitions of seeing this video before I realized that it wasn't another Russian oil refinery but piles of Jeff Bezos' cash igniting in an enormous fireball. bsky.app/profile/azin...

Wow. The bloopers and out-takes reel of 21st century private spaceflight is arguably as impressive as NASA and the the Soviet space program of the 50's and 60's. bsky.app/profile/usil...

On behalf of Silicon Valley, I would like to sincerely apologize for incubating this Nazi asshole and unleashing him upon the world. I hope that some small measure of justice catches up with this man. bsky.app/profile/nyti...

Not yet willing to say that the great American postwar scientific research apparatus has acquitted itself collectively as well as the legal profession, but at least they will not be destroyed in silence. www.science.org/content/blog...