Self-aggrandizing while also diminishing the biggest human rights violations of his time? Maybe he is a law professor.
They/Zi Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats. Unitarian Universalist, multi-generation Texan, sometime climate justice organiser, cat person
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Self-aggrandizing while also diminishing the biggest human rights violations of his time? Maybe he is a law professor.
the day to day function of, e.g., criminal and immigration law, is probably *more* affected by the decay of the rule of law than fancy appellate work, not less
as always, subscribe to my newsletter, because it is (1) good and (2) not on Substack. this one is premium, but a ton of my newsletters are free. stringinamaze.net/subscribe
if you’re on the left, the question of “should you be on a platform consciously designed to turn people to the right” shouldn’t be some head-scratching dilemma
it is an unassailable truth that burning the flag looks cool and no executive order can ever change that
*johnny cash voice*
I see ya’ #Northside!
Your subject is not a "skeptic" when their views are clear, firmly entrenched, and this fact is well-documented. Retsef Levi deliberately spreads extreme false information about #Covid vaccines. Even NYT correctly labeled him a vaccine "opponent"
me when I hear anyone refer to a generative AI image as "art"
Jerusalem Catholic & Orthodox Patriarchs' statement called for ending the Gaza War There can be no future based on captivity, displacement of Palestinians, or revenge daoudkuttab.substack.com/p/jerusalem-...
This article just reminded me of this old tweet
62% of younger deaths wouldn't have happened in any other wealthy country. And Reagan is literally to blame. www.vice.com/en/article/a...
Saw HACKERS on the big screen. It holds up. Still a massively political film and more relevant now than 30 years ago. The bad guy's vision is becoming dominant.
Divest. Divest. Divest
Meanwhile, people like JD Vance have long associated themselves with neo-fascists within the Tech-Right, thinkers that dream of the US being run like a Monarchical corporate state. itsgoingdown.org/good-night-t...
Anti-Black racism lies at the center of the Alt-Right: from conspiracy theories that falsely link race to "IQ," to conspiracies about a make believe "white genocide." This pseudo-scientific white supremacy has real impacts on how the far-Right pushes policies. itsgoingdown.org/anti-black-r...
Stephen Miller pushed white nationalist conspiracy theories and publications that trafficked in claiming Black people were subhuman and the main cause of crime in "the West." Everything he's doing in DC, a majority Black city, needs to be seen in this context. itsgoingdown.org/what-you-nee...
Here's a news story covering Sean's comments & the subsequent retaliation. Judge for yourself, but to me, this is our LA public transit showing how, bit by bit, institutions let fascism take hold. This is a matter of democracy, not just a job. Please share widely: lapublicpress.org/2025/08/la-m...
Lots to choose from, but for me the most amazing part is "sorry, we didn't mean to kill the journalists, we only meant to bomb the hospital full of civilians we shot and kids we starved, which has no essential drugs or equipment thanks to our blockade" said as if that makes Israel look good
The law isn’t exogenous. It’s not self enforcing. if a law is meaningful someone has to do the hard work of enforcing it and we collectively don’t seem to have the appetite to do that. People will say “the constitution doesn’t allow x, y, or z” which is only true if someone will enforce it. 3/x
it is quite amazing how rarely we actually hear the "woke" [very broadly defined] position advocated anywhere, despite it oppressing everyone and controlling all our institutions
I keep seeing the Trump-Intel deal called socialism, but there’s a term for this. This parallels what Mussolini did—the Italian state was one of the world’s largest industrial owners while keeping private companies. Nazi Germany did this too. So did Francoist Spain. It’s called state corporatism.
We're at Maine's first radical book fair and I've had to step out to just cry a little. It's so nice to be here with the folks doing the work and making art and being in community and we've made so many glorious connections. It's so invigorating.
Amnesty said more than 10,000 civilian structures were destroyed by Israel – many of them after the ceasefire.
Interestingly, this was a problem Ezra Klein paid lip service to the next day but didn't really tackle. That column basically sums it up as AI technically doesn't have to be an environmental disaster, making the subtext that the issue isn't AI per se 1/🧵
“The language of humanity is our shared language as journalists, and we have sworn to deliver the message – even if only one journalist remains alive.” #eiGazaDispatches
Former Labour MP openly lying on national television for a second time in as many weeks. www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int...
16 - Romantic comedy. Plot: Two single moms get around Medicaid work requirements by 'hiring' each other to watch one another's kids, so each is technically employed but the money zeroes out. Naturally, they fall in love, have a fight, and then get over it in the last ten minutes
an all-trans R.E.M cover band called H.R.T
This is really about the decline of regional newspapers. If everyone had cute little public interest stories like "A Sonnet For The Streetlight Poles of Peoria" people wouldn't lose their minds when the NY paper writes a cute little public interest story about the NYC thing
I went to a talk that Jordan Peele gave when Get Out was in theaters. He talked about how comedy/horror live in the same place of tension and release. And that switching to horror was largely about wanting there to be less catharsis in his art and more leaving an audience feeling unmoored.
western media spent idk like 20 years fearmongering about china's Social Credit System (which doesn't even work the way most ppl think it does anyway) only for the US and UK to legally implement actual orwellian laws because it doesn't like you having free access to the ahegao tags on gelbooru
Twelve hours later and no one has claimed this clearly healthy, fixed, collared dog. I just don’t get it.
Hey, Houston, anyone know this dog?
This lady loves to lose. I can't wait for she and Briscoe to cannibalize each other.
Also: if anyone inside DoJ, or a court reporter, or a clerk, wants to leak the names of the AUSAs who did this, my signal handle is in my profile.
HEY friends: recently seen heaps of "disclosures" from AI companies of the energy cost per question you type into chatbots (most recently from Google)? Presenting per-query 'efficiency' is part of big tech's efforts to hide its extremely real and happening-right-now climate impacts! NEW POST -->>>
Terrible shit www.bbc.com/future/artic...
So many lefty white guys who just want you to be cool with their transphobia already and reassure them they’re still one of the good ones in response to their lengthy personal essays on the merits of a transphobe for president.
being afraid of the subway is so fucking funny. you mean the choo-choo train???
NOW: U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro's office said today a *third* grand jury has refused charges against a woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent during an ICE arrest. Instead, they'll now try to push ahead with a misdemeanor version of the charge. www.wusa9.com/article/news...
Honestly between this, the Turkish embassy stuff in DC, Jamal Khashoggi, and the Israelis bombing the Iranian embassy in Damascus it feels like the norms around diplomatic missions are coming apart
that's right reposting w alt text
"Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone" (credit Astra Taylor) is a line I keep thinking of.
hey anime nerds (complimentary)! get mad and get on the phone
Fair call. So now we know that the antisemitic attacks in Australia have come from two sources: a foreign regime and organised crime, both acting opportunistically to foment exactly the moral panic we've been enduring. If only a little circumspection had been exercised by our governments and media.
this is fixable and the way you fix it is with public trials
read trump's new executive order on domestic military dplymt + vigilante "portal." one of the reasons i am happy to be an independent journalist is so I can say that this is crazy, fascist, brownshirts shit without getting pulled into a meeting with PR for "opening us up to criticism from the right"
Is the basket big enough to hold even our smallest cat? No. Have all three cats done their best to sleep in and on the napkin basket. Every single day.
Burning Man is lame, let the desert shrimp live in peace. Stop driving on their mud and spilling stuff. Go to a convention center for your art party and leave the delicate alkali lakes alone.
Dem Leaders Are Pretending that U.S. Weapons Don’t Enable the Slaughter in Gaza
In 1931 Jabotinsky broke from the Zionist Org over its refusal to declare that Israel should extend to "both sides of the Jordan River". For the past 50 years his Likud descendants have ruled Israel, relentlessly colonizing what's left of Palestine. And today the NYT discovers Greater Israel.
"Mariam Dagga, a visual freelance journalist for The Associated Press, chronicled the stream of wounded and dead that every day flowed into southern Gaza’s main hospital, where she was often based. [...] Dagga was killed Monday by Israeli strikes on Nasser Hospital, according to health officials."
Asimov was a first-rate idea guy but not a first-rate anything-else guy
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” said then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Oct. 9, 2023… This was not a secret. It was the proclaimed policy. And it has been followed as such, on and off, ever since.”
If you want a weird but true fact to talk about: Dexter Holland, lead singer of The Offspring, was instrumental in this. His doctorial thesis in molecular biology was sequencing mRNA in HIV. The paper was also heavily cited in creating the COVID-19 vaccine.
she posts videos of them trying to get away from her on tiktok that are sped up yakety sax style and scored by norteno music, theyre hilarious
A great thing about physical books is that they seldom stop working
Niemöller was asked by his concentration camp cellmate why he had ever supported Hitler and the Nazis. Reportedly, this is what he had to say for himself:
If an individual offering consensual nudes of themself on OnlyFans is considered “illicit” but a program generating nudes of women without their consent is fine, the powers that be have made their priorities clear. And they’re the same as they ever were.
The NHS are forcibly detransitioning trans kids in Brighton and calling it “managed withdrawal.” Their own impact assessment acknowledges trans kids will be at increased risk of harm as a result, don’t want this, and are likely to just use DIY hormones instead
shame about grima wormtongue, he could have been a great political analyst for the labour party
This is a rare article that realises what the firm is. A standard clunky enterprise data/services thing like SAS, Cloudera, PowerBI etc with silly marketing - like those "tactical" versions of normal products with camo or extra pockets on them www.wired.com/story/palant...
this is also why I had such a good time when i quit reading books by cis white men in 2017. you get to skip all those people who were playing on easymode. fast-forward to the good shit.
this survey is easy & fairly short, please fill it out if you're in the US
The sound of people in this thread scrupulously not mentioning Quentin Tarantino casting himself as the guy to drink tequila off Salma Hayek's toes is deafening. It's like the Listeners. You're not fooling anyone comrades.
Talk of Lotara Sarrin reminded me I actually had questions for Aunt Agony, in particular one from a woman who wishes to remain anonymous but has feminist concerns! (sherdenpact.neocities.org/AgonyAunt#eq...) Obviously I gave what is in 40k world the most controversial issue the treatment it deserved
The fact that Y'ALL GOT TAUGHT what Victorian and Edwardian scholars thought (white) people should think about the past does not mean that's actually what the past and its people were like. And it's not like the idea of civil rights kicked off in the 1960s.
American chattel slavery is literally why there there is a Wall Street. And those enslaved folks actually built the wall. www.bbc.com/news/busines...
People still: Look, we can't read history through a contemporary lens. There wasn't a consensus that slavery was wrong. Every 18th c. pamphlet: How can they do this? Are we SLAVES? In SLAVERY? The worst things you can be? Are they gonna put us IN CHAINS? Like in SLAVERY? Which is EVIL? Like SLAV-
from chandra manning's wonderful book "what this cruel war was over"
Do they realise that apartheid South Africa could have posted something like this about themselves also
I love jargon, i think it's often both very useful and very beautiful language, and i have a crazy working theory that if you just stop having the reaction of a whiny baby when confronted with something you don't immediately understand then you will learn to love and enjoy jargon too
TIRED: The Radical Republicans were wrong to impeach Andrew Johnson WIRED: They should have impeached him for undermining Reconstruction, not for violating the unconstitutional Tenure of Office Act. INSPIRED: The TOA was constitutional & convicting him would have saved us a lot of trouble today
Think about this: 14% of all the people who have died of starvation in Gaza over the past 22 months have died in *the past week.*
With alt-text!! #chicago
Dr. Tarek Loubani, who is in Gaza right now, was invited to give a talk to emergency workers about the attacks on health care facilities in Gaza. But he was instructed - get this - not to say who was doing the attacking. Take a look at how this hero of a human responded: vimeo.com/1112115018/c...
For folks not in DC: - There are full-on police checkpoints most nights - Gangs of 30+ federal agents roam DC - National Guard folks w/ guns patrolling a Harris Teeter - Every day, multiple friends see ICE kidnapping ppl - Daycares are scared to have kids go on walks due to ICE
It’s undeniable at this point that we’re no longer a democracy on the federal level. The big question is whether we’re still in a state of competitive authoritarianism (where there are elections, but they’re not free) or whether we’ve crossed over into an autocratic regime.
I've been mainlining a bunch of history about grim parts of 20th century US history and do you know how often I come across the formulation: 'and then the NYT published an editorial calling for/praising an atrocity/injustice'??
it was always infected but is now virulent
Japan Post just announced they will no longer deliver mail to the United States, joining Germany, Austria, Denmark, Italy, France, and Sweden.
Credit to @npr.org for reporting this LIsa Cook fiasco accurately: "Trump SEEKS to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook" Unlike the @nytimes.com that went with "Fed member removed" & this: "The president has dismissed Fed board member Lisa Cook for “cause.” COME ON www.npr.org/2025/08/25/n...
Updated this piece to reflect that Trump said he has fired Lisa Cook, something the Supreme Court said he does not have authority to do.
also HE IS THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE and has BEEN a Democratic state senator for a couple of years now. why do centrists have a theory of creation ex nihilo for Mamdani that he doesn't have a record
Using ChatGPT
I saw one teacher say they assigned the students to have chatGPT write an essay on a topic, and then go research why it was wrong. Seems like that could work well in law.
“NPCs” is the 2025, glib, smarmy version of “untermenschen.” I know it’s generally meant as “mindless followers,” but there is a pointed dehumanization behind the tossed-off reference— “I’m real; they’re not.”
The way to deal with this issue is to get meaner towards Republicans who obsess over this stuff, not trying to police the language of everyone left of center. bsky.app/profile/clay...
he literally thinks he is a king. i mean, this entire media blitz for when he signs executive orders is meant to create the impression that they are royal decrees
my thought process: 1. oh, United 173 is a good one 2. if they had written a fake aviation disaster I would be so mad right now
I dunno man maybe we should all talk about patriarchy more
"I was clicker trained by James Gun on the set of Superman" - new novella out now.
It was bad from the jump, but that's where it started reminding me of the interminable anti-trans "science debates"
There's two kinds of parents, dads and political
Yes. Truly, I’ve answered this a thousand times. The answer is yes, the costs absolutely do outweigh the benefits. To put it the other way so the sentiment matches my meaning: No, innovation is not worth the costs.
MyKidsMomBB8 
