they very famously were chanting something other than "*YOU* will not replace us" 🫠

One of the things living abroad taught me is that a) it’s very nice to have servants and b) a society which makes it possible for an upper-middle-class person to have servants is deeply unjust and inequitable.

IMO the biggest priorities would have to be 1. Parliamentary democracy with a no confidence motion 2. Some type of PR electoral system (party list within states?) 3. Curbs on judicial review 4. Hard donation limits/public financing of campaigns I'd be interested in other political scientists' takes

There is a whole system in place to ensure that Supreme Court Justices live long and happy lives, with free vacations, extraordinary perks, lucrative and important jobs for their spouses, and now their kids.

[trying to explain richard hanania] you must imagine a man so committed to the calipers that he concluded whites are the inferior race

This is still a preferable bar environment to most suburban bars which are packed with racist and sexist "man" children

My in laws live across the street from a children's hospital in a big city in China and there are always parents on the street corner begging for money with posters covered in pictures of their sick kids

I don't know where this bizarre idea that China has universal health care comes from, but it very much does not by any normal standard. It has a highly tiered system that brutally discriminates against rural patients and imposes often crippling financial costs.

"Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) is facing calls to resign from Democratic colleagues who say she expressed agreement with a radio host's remark that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) should get his 'cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.'" I am sorry, she did WHAT?

And it wouldn't even lead to lower prices at the pump! Here's the legendary @pkrugman.bsky.social writing in 2000.

Good stuff. But important to remember that even though proportional representation is constitutional, it is quite likely that this Supreme Court will strike it down anyway. In many areas, we already pretty much know what Congress should pass. The harder question is how to deal with SCOTUS.

sure hope somebody takes a look at SCOVA’s financials

Michael Lewis's book The Fifth Risk is all about how the modern federal government was set up to reduce & eliminate a vast array of invisible problems, which it has done so well that it opened a door to wreckers who claim it did nothing, & are now making that lie true—with disastrous results

correct. the reason you have to do that with mafia cases is crime bosses tend to carefully insulate themselves from direct participation in the crimes. that is not what happened on January 6

The Senate better not vote for this. It's now become a ripoff monstrosity.

i have said this before but the hate you have for citizens united is imo more properly reserved for buckley v. valeo

Pierre Bourdieu once argued that the question of whether something is art isn't answered by the artist's intention or even the object itself. Instead, the quality of being "art" is conferred by a community — curators, dealers, auction houses, audiences, etc. 🧵

My AI chatbot is conscious. I know because it is always telling me how smart and pretty I am;

Woof. I've been critical of this Urban Institute study since it first dropped, but it turns out that the methodological errors were even more serious than I understood. econjwatch.org/file_downloa...

the basic problem with like 90% of science fiction combat these days is authors radically understating how lethal modern militaries are

As my colleague David Rosnick puts it: the Roberts Court is just calling the balls and strikes. The problem is that they do it before the pitch is thrown.

media 1970s vs media 2020s

Lunch break thought: it remains profoundly sad how much of the economy has been turned over to scams that pretend to be gambling which pretends to be an investment. Do you want to gamble your money with odds that are actually good? Index. Funds. But I guess that's not masculinity-affirming enough.

Upshot here is that if 2026 goes well for Dems, they’ll be able to offer Republicans a take-it-or-leave it ban on partisan gerrymandering nationally. And if Republicans decline, 2028 will be a bigger bloodbath, ahead (hopefully) of a Dem trifecta and principled democracy reform.

👇🎯🧵

@besttrousers.bsky.social Do you remember that ridiculous thread about gas prices and presidential approval? Do you remember where it is?

Actually the dumbest shit I've raad today: rename American English to "American" www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/int...

The Texas legislature rammed through a gerrymandering bill at the request of Trump. Virginia actually voted in favor of redistricting to counterbalance what Texas and other Republican-controlled states have done. Yet only one is considered a "power grab." Oligarch-owned media in a nutshell.

The NYT big expose on SCOTUS today pairs well with @ariberman.bsky.social and @pemalevy.bsky.social's cover story on how ~everything wrong with this country today can be laid at the feet of John Roberts: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Agree. Also—this is how & why Juan Linz Was Right™ that presidential regimes invariably commit suicide. When an opposition controls the legislature with a solid mandate to fight a lawless executive & uses all available means to do so, the executive tends to fight back extraconstitutionally—via coup.

You know how Rome had republican institutions but in times of crisis they'd appoint a dictator with absolute power? What if we did that but we appointed our worst guy in a time of relative peace and prosperity? Now I know what you're thinking: why would we do that? Well it's to mix things up

If folks are interested, I've just posted an updated draft of The Chadha Presidency, with revisions accounting for the Supreme Court tariffs case, Iran WPR resolutions of disapproval, and more. ssrn.com/abstract=536...

That's right

Harris lost because of inflation.

the reason hegseth lobbied trump to pardon war criminals in his first term and why he has done everything possible to make war crimes more likely is that hegseth believes war crimes to be Objectively Good. war to him, in fact, consists of committing indiscriminate war crimes.

Term limits do nothing good for governance or democracy, and harm it in many very important ways. They’re probably the worst institutional innovation America has tried in the post war era.

Just a reminder that this account just makes things up and presents them as news. It's lib fan fiction. Nothing from the Halfway Post is real. They pretend it's satire, but what is this even satirizing? What's the commentary? What's the joke?

“Although President Donald Trump says he has ‘destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military Capability’, the 0% that remains is playing havoc with the global economy.” — The Economist

2008 proved that we cannot leave Americans on the hook to save a failed industry. That’s why today I’m introducing the No Bailout for Crypto Act to ensure that taxpayers aren’t left holding the bag when the crypto industry inevitably crashes.

TO be quite blunt, I think we'd even be better off with "the purpose of a university education is to acquire upper-middle-class signifiers" rather than the current "it is entirely about a premium in expected lifetime earnings" even though both are inferior to, y'know, learning as a telos.

Other things that can be clarity traps. Stochastic parrots. Weaponized interdependence. www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-median...

@wmata.com Why are blue line trains so infrequent

Now, and I realize I sound like a goddamn broken record, if Chadha had come out the other way, majorities in both chambers could, in fact, block a lot of this stuff. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

i've probably watched tinker, tailor, soldier, spy probably a dozen times over the years and every time i pick up something new that i wouldn't have understood when i was younger. tonight it's that Control must have been a fucking nightmare to work for

Antivirals for influenza aren't miracle cures, but they can make the flu less miserable. Americans aren't taking enough of them—including a lesser-known drug that is better than commonly prescribed Tamiflu. @sarahzhang.bsky.social reports:

so while even a lot of Trump's base are complaining about his gross attack on Rob Reiner, there are always going to be those who cheer *any* attack on people more successful and more decent than them. there's a lot of rancid little souls who find virtue + talent actively offensive.

the pmc is achieving self-consciousness as a world-historical class