No big whoop, just Donald Trump pissing away three decades of U.S. diplomacy due to a fit of personal pique. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/donald-tru...
Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory, Associate member of Philosophy, Coordinator of Research Group on Constitutional Studies, McGill. Senior Fellow, Niskanen Center.
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No big whoop, just Donald Trump pissing away three decades of U.S. diplomacy due to a fit of personal pique. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/donald-tru...
Hannah Arendt:
Mind you, it's really pretty bad and I'm having a hard time getting through it. "Are you a drummer?" an hour in was the first non-Dennis-Franz line to make me laugh.
It's been on my mind lately for idiosyncratic reasons, but this year I've also been intermittently filling in some of my gaps in the Cage corpus. Not going for completism— he's done too much dreck and life is too short— but sampling more broadly.
Yeah; I've spent 30 years figuring that I knew the song so didn't have to bother with the movie. Not sure I was wrong.
No; I only even know of it because I know that this was an adaptation/ remake.
I think I remember the reviews treating it that way, which is part of why I was struck. Her character has to *not* react to him the way a naturalistic Meg Ryan character in a normal world would: "hey, weird stalker dude with crazy eyes smelling my hair."
ohhhh, *that's* who that is! I wasn't successfully placing him.
Insofar as the movie works at all, which I'm still not sure about, I think it's precisely because the characters aren't quite supposed to inhabit the same universe. But eventually they're supposed to fully connect.
Watching "City of Angels" for the first time. Very struck by the juxtaposition of the rom-com heroine next door wandering into the surrealism of a Nicolas Cage movie. When Holly Hunter or Laura Dern or Cher share the screen with Cage they seem to inhabit the same universe he does; Meg Ryan doesn't.
HEY NOW.
If it's just Tina and Amy, the book would be too short, because they don't have time for that nonsense. Now if it's Liz Lemon and Cool Mom from Mean Girls...
Ok, hear me out. A Lord of the Rings re-make, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:
Ok, hear me out. A Lord of the Rings re-make, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:
Ok, hear me out. A Lord of the Rings re-make, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:
Ok, hear me out. A Lord of the Rings re-make, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:
Ok, hear me out. A Lord of the Rings re-make, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:
Dershowitz will be the latest to challenge Sullivan, but his appeal could have extra resonance because until recently he was a vocal proponent of the precedent (which he helped write). I described his sudden about-face in "Murder the Truth."
Depends how good the rumor is.
August 31st / September 1st
August 31st/September 1st
Naught but a leap to the left And thanne a clockwyse tread; Put thyne handes on thyne hippes, And be thy knees yn-gatheréd: Lo, it ys the pelvique thruste That maketh mirthe down to rayne - Let us do the Tyme Warpe agayne!
👇🎯 University presidents, take note & start getting in front of microphones, en masse, now:
I will plead guilty! I deleted so as not to propagate bad information but I will certainly take the L. (It remains true that the Houthi prime minister is not the PM of Yemen.)
Yeah, obviously I have no idea about Cook in particular, but a lot of people are responding to the allegation with "everyone knows that everyone does this" and if that's true then it likely points to an underlying problem with the rules.
Today isn't the day, but there may well come a day when my instinctive recoiling from crazy-sounding conspiracy theories runs headlong into my belief that no one in the Trump administration would hesitate for a second about covering up his being in a coma or something.
No one will care, but I suspect it's not great that there's such a strong mortgage and property tax subsidy for primary residences that it has become so common for people to lie about this. Seems like an implicit tax on renters, and connected to NIMBYist views about owner-occupied homes.
no.
(simul-posting)
somehow dodged the actual indictment-killing bullet fired by John Roberts.
I certainly spent those months being impatient. But by the time he appointed Smith, it became clear to me that he'd been indicting low-level people *as part of building an ironclad case*. And Smith's eventual indictment was stronger for it! A faster, less ironclad indictment wouldn't have...
(Sorry if some of this was already covered a ways into the podcast!)
*we have to win.* And there's a *reason* for the anti-Garland backlash. Arguably if he'd pushed the boundaries a little more, catastrophe could have been avoided. But I think I'm worrying about an attitude that isn't reducible to Stalinists. Anyway, as I keep saying, I'm torn. //
I find myself thinking about the backlash against Merrick Garland, and wondering how far the "want to win" people are imagining going afterwards. I don't want to just replace Trump's corrupt illegal retributive politicization of the justice system with (in whatever sense) "ours." At the same time,
that made the payoff of the 4th season worthwhile.
I haven't read the books. By general consensus the 4th season is the best, and then it takes a catastrophic quality dive after the 5th. But if you're not invested in the characters from a pretty early time, I think it's probably safe to quit. For me, it was precisely my investment in them...
The Alabama (!) people chanting "who pays the tariffs? who pays the tariffs" and then turning to "shame! shame!" when their rep turns tail and leaves is a keeper.
it hardly makes sense to think of a liberal party without something like a middle class/ bourgeois social base.)
in coalition with liberals against theocracy. The social bases of a liberal party, or of a liberal-plus-left coalition, don't automatically equate to supporters of those liberal meta-norms, institutions, and rules. (See also: the middle-class/ bourgeois temptation to Bonapartism, even though...
I mean, *insofar as they're liberals,* yes. But (this is one of Alec's ideas) it's unlikely that a successful anti-fascism coalition will be entirely or even mostly committed liberals in that sense. Atheists, to take one mild example, aren't just as such liberals, even though they will be...
hell, even being department chair meant I didn't do those things for three years.
mean that the victory doesn't count as liberal.
neutral rules and institutions for the coexistence of free and equal people who disagree with each other and lack epistemic direct access to the truth. There's no such *thing* as the liberal side just *winning* in the same sense as others can just win; various versions of vanquishing one's enemies..
I've lately been more interested in fighting-creed liberalism, what I refer to as the "party idea," for obvious reasons— see this paper— but I think there's something paradoxical about it too, because the liberal idea we're fighting for *is* one of... www.researchgate.net/publication/...
Vitally important thread.
Everyone replying that this doesn't sound like he wrote it himself is right. But what does it say that his aides think he'll be A-OK with this story about him wandering around the grounds yelling?
Because of some of its core tensions (which we discussed, link below!), comprehensive liberalism actually can’t satisfy the animal spirits of politics in the way other comprehensive ideologies can. Ultimately, in a fight of who can be the most angry, most bloodthirsty, I do think the fascists win.
To re-emphasize; in my heart of hearts, I think progressives are better on core institutional commitments than conservatives. But intellectual humility about this seems warranted given the last ten years, and that humility makes retrenchment, to me, seem relatively more viable as a strategy.
To put the point more tartly, using terms Toby’s used, what currently looks like a righteous anger to fight for lost rights may, among the most motivated D primary voters, be closer to the desire to enact humiliation than he realizes. Politics will unfold very differently depending on that question.
This thread helps contextualize where we landed in our conversation, but it also makes me think of this post I stumbled on yesterday, two degrees of separation from one of the podcast posts. If you’re basing your argument in “this is what the base wants”, you better be clear on what the base wants.
Did he hire Four Seasons Total Landscaping again?
1) yes 2) how would I know?
[omitted: off-color joke about how long the "gash" actually was and Trump's tendency to exaggerate the size of things.]
It's a good thing nothing is going on in the world that might require the attention of the president of the United States, otherwise he might not have time to supervise the contractors.
"WHO DID THIS? I WANT TO FIND OUT NOW!"
"Trump’s life and career are based on discrediting the distinction between right and wrong, and on convincing himself and others that the only reality is who screws whom. As of right now, he’s winning that messaging debate." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
I can
This deserves notice and applause: "2025 isn’t 1991. And although we haven’t changed [IJ's] principles in those 34 years we realize that highlighting liberalism, the rule of law, and the justice that is part of our namesake is something that makes more sense and is, frankly, more important today."
bsky.app/profile/jaco...
Written in the specific context of a round of Halloween disputes, but started to gesture at the problem of the umbrella concept.
The 11th Street Kids; Eagly.
The president implemented a hundred billion dollar tax hike with a memo it’s incredible that this is even a constitutional question at all
"It’s not merely rule by the worst but an active assault on virtue wherever it exists. Trump and MAGA have turned the country over to the cruelest, most rapacious, and least honorable among us and directed the force of the state against firefighters, aid workers, civil servants, and children."
this made me think - the democratic primary electorate wanting a more aggressive posture from their political/ press elites is *in itself* kinda an argument for one like, the mood of the troops is at least relevant info for the general www.politicalphilosophypodcast.com/alec-c
(Until a few years ago the annual conference of the American Political Science Association always happened on Labor Day weekend, so that's been the rhythm of the end of summer my whole adult life up until then.)
Am I the only political scientist who remains befuddled by this "Labor Day weekend" thing?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Br...
See, in the context of the post as a whole, one might think that those words are sarcastic.
One thing I'm glad to see the article acknowledge is the leopards/ faces dynamic with respect to immigration and racism. Both in New Delhi and in the Modi-supporting right-wing parts of the diaspora in the US, there was some really willful denial about all this.
"And during this weekend’s trip to China — Mr. Modi’s first in seven years — he is expected to have a receptive audience for stronger and expanded ties with Beijing and Moscow." A+ strategic work by Trump's ego. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/u...
Gift link. Read it for the sheer stupidity of our President's reasons for wrecking our relationship with India, not to mention a chunk of their export trade.
Mac, keyboard shortcuts, but it works for me.
Just tested it. Cut and paste work as they should for me.
Was "Trump is dying or dead" just a meme-joke over the last couple of days, or was there some new event that prompted it?
“…I am infuriated that the Air Force plans to grant military funeral honors to Ashli Babbitt. She did not die defending the Constitution. She died trying to overturn it.” My latest in @thebulwark.com www.thebulwark.com/p/honoring-a...
Abolishing QI wouldn't fix policing but it's a clear lever that can be pulled by statute or even by a SCOTUS majority with relatively little effort. There's no policy to design or stakeholders consensus to establish. Just getting out of the way of our normal processes.
Hello, I am furious www.liberalcurrents.com/let-it-burn-...
11 years since #APSAonFire #NeverForget
Breaking news: A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from rapidly deporting undocumented immigrants detained away from the border without a court hearing, a setback for its mass deportation agenda.
I enjoyed Oswalt and Romijn, even though their subplot threw me out of "suspension of disbelief" and into "amused at a meta level." Agreed about whatever Mount was doing— and about what happens as soon as you think about any of it for a second. Even the best bit in the moment, La'an, is terrible!
True, and I hesitated before posting it— but the OP didn't specify "mystery." It's at least adjacent to what's under discussion, and I figured was likely to be of interest.
bsky.app/profile/jaco...
Unbelievably bad. “The CDC you knew is over. Unless someone takes radical action, there is nothing there that can be salvaged.” www.advocate.com/politics/dem...
James Hynes, _Publish and Perish_ and _The Lecturer’s Tale_.
Three cheers, Ilya!
n this post, I summarize key points from the Federal Circuit ruling against Trump's massive IEEPA tariffs, in our case against them: reason.com/volokh/2025/...
I’m really sick of the courts finding this administration broke the law in some unprecedented way, but they get to keep doing illegal things for a few months as a little treat. They’re defaulting to rewarding lawbreaking.
Ding dong, the stupid tariffs are on life support.
One of the most important and urgent pieces I have written! contrarian.substack.com/p/our-guardr...
If only Zuckerberg…
The miracle technology currently propping up the US economy has applications as varied as: plagiarism cheatbots, encouraging actual suicide, and creating fake porn of underage actresses or impersonation celebrity chatbots. Things are going just great. www.reuters.com/business/met...
Recommend! 47 mins in. Isn’t the heart of the good in millian autonomy a) that one, exercising reason, reflects on one’s attachments, endorsing/rejecting as they will and that b) doing so best tracks truth? The wisdom of one’s choices can then be epistemically, but not ethically, criticised.
BREAKING: Social Security Administration chief data officer and whistle-blower Charles Borges has resigned after bombshell report that SSA put highly-sensitive data at risk. He sent out an email to colleagues moments ago. Here is the text of his email shared with me:
Millennials are a strange and mysterious breed.
!!!!
(I also don't know what Ghostwriter is.)
... somehow I never knew that Julia Stiles had been a baby little child actor, and yet one who carried around Julia Stiles' adult face.
Tom Reagan’s Hat 
