UN, peacekeeping, peace processes, joy, screwball comedy, international relations, custodian of world’s sweetest dog. opinions mine! 🧿🦒
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saw a car with NY plates and a @vanhollen.senate.gov bumper sticker. just one tiny anecdotal data point, but i've literally NEVER see a schumer or gillbrand bumper sticker in NY. maybe they should note that politicians who actually DO THINGS get more support, i dunno?
I’m losing it, they’re AMAZING
TINY CAPYBARA SITTING IN ITS OWN SALAD BOWL
oh my GOD
The stadium Trump is in is named after Arthur Ashe, the tennis legend. What many people today probably don't know is that Ashe was literally arrested in front of the White House in 1992 for protesting the George H.W. Bush administration's treatment of Haitian refugees. www.upi.com/Archives/199...
The first episode I produced for Rethinking Humanitarianism is out! — When is the UN a force for good, and when is it a fig leaf? @tammam.bsky.social speaks with @markleongoldberg.bsky.social and @anjalikdayal.bsky.social about the global rise in illiberalism. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...
every single thing I’ve learned about Peter Thiel has been against my will
I don’t know, from peripheral chatter I pick up it seems like some can’t be
oh god, same across every one of those categories
some of us do not understand this because several years ago we filed this under stuff we weren’t going to learn more about, like the real housewives and flat earthers and labubus, and now we are just constantly baffled
NEW: The anti-Trump protest happening right now on the streets of Washington DC is HUGE! It looks like tens of thousands have joined. This is the view from 16th Street - people stretching as far as the eye can see 👏
so sad to see pandemic learning loss strike our leaders like this
it is his one true brilliance
this might be the one useful thing the piece accomplished!
this is well said. also, in my case, to spread the muppet word.
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I actually respect hating Andrew Cuomo so much that you call a press conference to explain how much you hate him
*I know there have been times and places where war was the greatest glory, I took those classes too. those were worse worlds than this one could be.
this is so profoundly immoral. just, like, a bad way to be in the world. a rottenness to believing there's glory in killing people.
Here's the full text of the report. A few initial observations: 1: It doesn't say who was targeted. This is *highly unusual* and raises huge flags. Does the administration know who it was targeting? If yes, why not say so in the formal report to Congress? If no, on what basis was it lawful?
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it's been so useful to me as an academic, too, for exactly this reason! it's a real gift
if you roll onto the internet and use only highly technical terms and never engage with anyone who doesn't know what you're talking about you're not going to be talking to many people on the internet
I always want to point out that most of academics who self-select into microblogging and public engagement reflexively try to talk like normal people talking to normal people because they are normal people talking to normal people
by my count, this makes seven confirmed no true bills from grand juries, plus three other felony cases dismissed (two gun cases, one assault of a federal officer), plus two cases downgraded from felony assault on federal officers to misdemeanor
even leaving aside the specific ridiculous claim, in what world would *anyone* of any sense be bitter about not having to be Bari Weiss
‘A Crowned Fairy King Seated on a Hedgehog Drawn by a Young Girl Holding a Giant Daisy, Accompanied by Dancing Fairies’, Charles Altamont Doyle, late 19th century. Inscription: “The seat of fairies is not always enviable.” artuk.org/discover/art...
backsliding democracy meets a democratic public
Few symbols are as Venetian as the lion on a column in the Piazzetta beside St Mark’s Basilica. But new research shows it may not be Venetian at all - its copper traces point to Tang dynasty China🦁 1/5
Caroline Kennedy warned us about her cousin #RFKJr, "a predator" presiding over "perverse scenes" of "despair and violence." His youth was the origin story of a new American Psycho. Now he is the position to inflict pain and suffering on millions. He has to go now. www.thenation.com/article/soci...
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it would obviously be less stressful to be living in a less turbulent time but we are obviously not living in that time and there’s really no outrunning that
heehee
the Department of War, Crimes
“The US government does not care if Americans die. It is a murder regime in that way. It is an actively pro-death government.” @anjalikdayal.bsky.social talks to @tammam.bsky.social about the rise of illiberalism in our latest episode of #RethinkingHumanitarianism.
BREAKING, from NY Playbook PM: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul will sign an executive order allowing pharmacists to prescribe and administer Covid vaccines to New Yorkers who request them.
sometimes grad students or junior scholars will ask me how I use social media and well
A MUPPET IN EVERY HOUSE
MUPPETS! MUPPETS!
this is my abundance agenda
muppets! muppets! muppets! muppets!
the DC AG is independently elected/responsible to voters, not to the mayor
For Keya Chatterjee, the executive director of Free DC, seeking out Spirit fans to echo the group's anti-takeover message was a no-brainer. "We know from studying movements against dictators all over the world that a key element is often cultural interventions, right?" YES! (w/ commentary from me)
this is such perfect use of his social capital: he has a live audience, so he leverages his platform to call attention to this horror, he bookends it with two lovely points about his own work, and he doesn’t hesitate. elegant and urgent.
“‘No American city should have the US military—particularly out-of-state military who are not accountable to the residents & untrained in local law enforcement—policing its streets,’said Brian Schwalb, D.C.’s attorney general…”We’ve filed this action to put an end to this illegal federal overreach’”
One of the things that I said about the obsession with pandemic learning loss is that the kids are always learning. Many of us are too afraid to ask what it is they are learning. This is a pretty good summary of some of the lessons.
Thread on this paper: After civil war, who rewrites the rules? We argue ideology shapes whether and how constitutions change. Using 153 civil wars (1944–2016), we track when winners write new constitutions vs amend old ones and what they put inside. (1)
GO OFF LORD GRANTHAM
NB i should’ve noted we don’t actually know who was on the boat at all; my stronger language in the first post was driven by my own assumption that a former official was more likely to be correct in their guess than the current administration was to be truthful in their disclosure, but we don’t know
horrible either way as you say, but an important note that we don't actually know who was on the boat--and good reason to start investigating very soon, to establish exactly who they actually killed
I have to assume it was his preferred outcome.
these guys, it seems, murdered people on camera for the views. it's not even a little bit hard to make the case that each one of them should face a court for it, and soon.
I don't care if there are few institutional mechanisms for an out-of-power party to set in motion. producing and disseminating information--documenting, narrating, and contextualizing the crime--is a key part of building justice and rebuffing impunity. that's possible for a creative opposition party
this would have been a crime even if the boat was smuggling drugs and not people, but that it was likely carrying desperate people means it's even more urgent for opposition leaders to call for hearings on how this happened & under what authority, & to specify consequences for those who ordered it
A federal judge in Boston said she found it "difficult to conclude anything other than that [the Trump administration] used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country's premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of [federal law]."
omg
if she had been assigned to cover the Watergate story it would have come back as a review of the room service options
nothing like an incurious mind continually rewarded for being incurious
remember when she went to Australia on her summer vacation and then wrote a "what I did on my summer vacation" essay for the New York Times where she described Australia's politics as the hottest girl in your freshman class
this is basically a scooby doo plot. the joint goon task force is one rubber mask away from settling on their preferred scheme to foil those meddling kids.
"The firing of a State press officer reveals a system that too often punishes facts, rewards conformity, and makes it perilous for professionals to tell leaders what they need to hear," writes @sinatoossi.bsky.social internationalpolicy.org/publications...
New publication alert; this one with two former PhD students in our program at Georgetown: Simón Ballesteros and Daniel Solomon. "Formal Institutions After Conflict: Rebel Ideology and Post-War Constitutional Design." journals.sagepub.com/eprint/AB6CD...
paraphrasing @russ41.bsky.social, the score is currently Fascists: 0 Sandwiches: 7 gotta firm up our run defense to keep things going our way
crime is down everywhere but industry murder by millennials remains up
Excited to maybe add “slop” to the list of things millennials have killed
FOR WHAT, JANET? FOR WHAT?
you're young, you're in grad school reading textbooks on survival models while they warn you against Kremlinology, and then somehow just a little while later you're one million years old and you have to learn who laura loomer is so you can get up and do your silly little job
Occasional reminder that if you're teaching a class that touches on American empire/colonialism or issues of American identity, I wrote a book about the US territories. History, politics, culture, thorny legal issues, barbecue. I'm always up to discuss it with classes! wwnorton.com/books/978039...
think about how rotten your soul has to be, how broken your moral compass, to think drag queen story hour is a sign of social decay but snuff films of war crimes is exemplary, stand out, should be shared far and wide. these people are sick
that’s right. it shouldn’t be this rare to hear this from a high-ranking elected official but it’s so good he’s saying it
the interesting question to me in these situations is always whether the man knows he has an exact type or not, and whether it’s better or worse if he doesn’t
thoughts and prayers to Rosario Dawson, because a dozen people are going to text her thinking it’s her in these photos
Let’s see a dozen Democratic governors arm in arm behind Pritzker tonight expressing their absolute commitment to stand against this together.
BREAKING: Gov. JB Pritzker says the Trump administration has sent the Texas National Guard to Great Lakes Naval Base outside Chicago, awaiting orders to deploy to Chicago. Trump administration officials will target Mexican Independence Day (Sept. 16) celebrations. @wttw.bsky.social
Pritzker: "We've gathered information from unauthorized, patriotic officials inside the government and from-sourced reporters about Donald Trump's plan, which is to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago."
after All Of This, it will not be enough to turn DC into a state: we must turn DC into at least twenty states: each DC neighborhood deserves two senators
🚨 SAVE THE DATE: OCTOBER 18. Millions of Americans took to the streets in June to drown out Trump’s birthday parade. As Trump’s regime escalates his authoritarian power grab, we’re gathering again on 10/18 for a nationwide day of peaceful protests to say NO KINGS: www.nokings.org?SQF_SOURCE=i...
we’re having a real normal one in these united states
I feel like you can be late for your own wedding but not for your own proof-of-life presser
Trump II never even tried to build the mass consent necessary for authoritarian consolidation, they just assumed it was there because they won the popular vote
fwiw this is the opposite of being on our own—what we have is each other
It’s somehow always the post with a critical word missing that immediately gets reposted
a nation of everyday heroes, if you will
There’s a missing “better” there, sorry!
again we’re seeing how the glide path toward authoritarian overreach here is disrupted by regular people than by big institutions or the powerful people who run them
BREAKING: Trump, Hegseth violated the Posse Comitatus Act with their troop deployment to Los Angeles, Judge Charles Breyer rules after trial. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
If you’re outside the U.S. or never had a presidential fitness test, imagine a giant skinny twelve year old in a medical device stuck on her back in a middle school gymnasium being rolled over by some other twelve year olds while her gym teacher marks down “failed!” and that’s basically it
I was a giant child—5’8” by 11—and I wore a giant back brace, and I failed the presidential fitness test every year, despite being a pretty active kid. One year I fell on my back like a turtle doing the dreaded pull-ups and got stuck. My lovely classmates rolled me over; I still failed the test
GREGORY, a Lahori, wearing a tuxedo, sporting fluffy spats, waiting for the train
I guess Eat was fine
Eat Pray Love was ALSO berserk and it seems almost inevitable that the maniacal mind behind that book would have graduated to attempted murder
She remembered it was August and they say August brings bad luck. But September would arrive one day like an exit. And September was for some reason a lighter and more transparent month. Clarice Lispector (t. Katrina Dodson) #everynightapoem #september As ever
If you know Dorothy Shea, feel free to ask her on my behalf what it profits a career foreign service officer to gain the whole world and lose her own soul etc
My statement on @nadler.house.gov’s decision not to seek re-election next year.
we recorded this on Thursday, right after the US essentially single-handedly forced a death-date for UNIFIL, the UN’s 47-year old mission in southern Lebanon, and a day after the US stood alone at the UNSC in denying famine in Gaza. We also talk about Antonio Guterres’s thin resume as peacemaker.
“A babka and the Constitution”
