I would date someone who disagrees with me on the federal budget or trade policy or a bond issue. I would not date someone who believes it's appropriate to refer to human beings as "illegals" or votes for a rapist or believes in detaining people for their non-violent speech. That's the difference.

A 2023 analysis of the effects of CIA-sponsored regime change in five Latin American countries found the interventions caused “large declines in democracy scores, rule of law, freedom of speech, and civil liberties.”

Without exception, each instance of contemporary fascism emerged through the institutions and processes of liberal democracy.

If you need a break and have 49 minutes, Rosalia’s Lux album is a masterpiece, the likes of which contemporary music has not produced in living memory. It is stupefying, and I don’t think I have ever used that word in earnest in my entire life.

I could also use some time off

It’s hard to explain that growing up there were two different Raisin Brans, both called Raisin Bran and both in purple boxes, and to the untrained palate identical cereals. But if your mom brought home the wrong one you’d be like WHAT IS THIS SHIT YOU ARE GIVING ME

I will uncouple this, so as not to bother Sean, whose posts I enjoy very much. In my experience, recounts are fascinating processes, but are exercises detached from elections in important ways. And when I say recounts, I include election contests, which are court cases about the counting. /1

Oh no is it a constitutional crisis? I won’t do anything unless it’s been established as a crisis. And even then I’ll argue about whether it really is a crisis, under a shifting definition of crisis that will undermine any appeals to get me to do anything later either.

As we descend into Auto-Pen inanity, let’s remember Trump’s people said he could declassify documents with his thoughts.

Debt is infinite and unpayable. —Mauricio Lazzarato

James Mason gives you 50 years of cinema—suspense, Shakespeare, early sci-fi—and closes his case with Heaven Can Wait, Boys from Brazil, and The Verdict.

Fuck this program and fuck every person who uses it

I spent a lot of time in Honduras when I was younger. In the mid-90s, I considered it my second country. Since that time I’ve watched it survive devastating hurricanes, incomprehensible levels of violence, and a golpe d’estado endorsed, if not directed, by a Democratic US administration. :1

Porque no se calle

This is a reminder that I will judge your bookstore based on where you shelve Vargas Llosa.

High-order political malpractice is, of course, the one red line no American would ever dare cross

REMINDER: A socialist act by a New Yorker was a major reason why polio was eliminated in the US.

I have in my papers somewhere (a relic of a former life) a draft of a review by James Oakes of Wood’s Radicalism of the American Revolution, that for one reason or another never got published. It’s ruthless and devastating.

And did God even say thank you?

“The girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa”

I’ve heard no one, not a single person, voice this “impression”

It’s a literal blip from thinking of random Venezuelan fisherman as murder-able to thinking the same of immigrants or protestors in Chicago and Portland.

Gratitude to the Cuban people for protecting Assata Shakur to the end.

R.I.P. Assata Shakur 🙏🏽❤️✊🏽

This is an important short thread at this moment:

September 1, again Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.

“and we’re giving him a gun now, too”

I, for one, can’t believe that relying on the regime to simply hand over incriminating records somehow came to nothing. So outrageous. Have to resort to a *very* strongly worded objection now, hoped it wouldn’t come to this.

Quirky legal-writing view of mine: 84% of uses of "failed to" are improved by changing it to "did not."

Those who make these claims stubbornly insist upon maintaining a view that our elections are like student council elections in middle school, anybody can just put an X by Ricky or Cynthia’s name, fold the paper, stick it on the box, and boom it gets counted.

Burbank is like flying into 1979, both good and bad.

Are people almost ready to make the connection that consolidation of authoritarian power is either independent of “winning control of the House,” or implies the irrelevance of winning the House as a goal?

Oh no! Boy, we should urge Congress to address this state of affairs, in its wisdom, and state our policy preferences regarding redistricting standards, immediately. Maybe an op-ed.

I mean, if we’re going to start in on what Congress *could* do, well fuck. But I exist on earth, in this country, and at this moment.

The Texas Constitution, like most states’, has a clause that permits only the respective leg houses to judge the qualifications of its members—or to expel them. Quo warranto does not lie here, and no legitimate court cognizant of the separation of powers would grant relief on these facts.

"... the Government faces a greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty" is a judgment obscuring so terribly much

Should they? They should be pressed to denounce things? That’s nice.

A short thread about Spain at the moment. Leaving aside that I feel like Spain in the 1930s has a lot to teach us about where the US is right now, Spain at present is in a very tenuous state. 1/

You know he’s been dead awhile when people be calling him Chris

I have been as clear as I can for many, many months. He is not a smart man. He has a Newsmax-level understanding of politics, elections, and public policy. He is not so much a dangerous person as he is a lazy, simple one with no genuine interest in anything but being flattered.

Remarkably strong correlation between pundits who told me the Supreme Court upholding Texas’s abortion bounty hunter law was technical and not a sign it would overturn Roe, and pundits assuring me birthright citizenship is fine because people can “just file a class action” or whatever

Fifty years as a fan. I think I’m done with this team, its ownership, and its fans.

The corollary to Mark’s cogent phrase is that liberal democracies have poor records in defending themselves against determined attackers from within. Democracy will be there, ready for restoration one day, but fight now or prepare for a generation of this. We’re not exceptional; examples abound.

Fight them.

The Marquis of Cadiz on Ferdinand:

Fight them.

Fight them.

It may just be me, but the formulation “I am calling on the Trump Administration to…” seems not to result in concrete achievement of political goals.