joshuastein.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Had some more to say on the "riots" and "invasion" in LA. If it’s a "riot," it’s the police who are rioting. If there’s an “invasion” of LA, it’s the US military that is invading.

submitted 1 day ago • 13 comments

My strong instinct is that Trump's threats against Americans' first amendment right to peaceably assemble is going to massively juice attendance at Saturday's protests. www.nokings.org

submitted 3 days ago • 350 comments

Newsom: This Saturday, he's ordering our American heroes, the United States military, and forcing them to put on a vulgar display to celebrate his birthday, just as other failed dictators have done in the past

submitted 2 days ago • 767 comments

The founding fathers did not live and die to see this moment. It’s time for all of us to stand up peacefully.

submitted 2 days ago • 869 comments

Whether it's right ending democracy and turning the United States into a military dictatorship or the left slapping a flier onto Chris Cillizza's Tesla, both sides have descended into nihilistic lawlessness.

submitted 2 days ago • 9 comments

I've spent much of my career studying the legal institution known as "the posse comitatus" as well as "The Posse Comitatus Act." Here's a quick thread. Cites at the end. Posse comitatus is Latin for "power of the county," or temporarily deputized people obligated to assist law enforcers.

submitted 3 days ago • 12 comments

State troops sent to Los Angeles by the Trump administration, without the approval of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, were expected to sleep on floors or outdoors, a source told the Chronicle.

submitted 3 days ago • 394 comments

LAPD when they think no one’s looking

submitted 4 days ago • 780 comments

Ok, time for a short thread about this paper. My sense over the past six months or so is that chain-of-thought prompting as used in e.g. ChatGPT o.3 improves substantially upon previous systems such as ChatGPT 4.o, at least for certain tasks. But how revolutionary is it?

submitted 4 days ago • 17 comments

“Tasted a little tear gas— tasted like fascism”

submitted 5 days ago • 733 comments

the white house thinks brute force is, no pun intended, a trump card. they don’t anticipate pushback and they don’t know how to handle it with anything other than escalation. the issue is that each escalation is itself a gamble. if protesters refuse to back down, you’ve lost face. (1/?)

submitted 5 days ago • 171 comments

Bleed, bleed, poor country! Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure, For goodness dare not check thee

submitted 5 days ago • 4 comments

"it's not an illegal lottery because we are committing fraud"

submitted 221 days ago • 85 comments

Around the time that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was indicted in the Middle District of Tennessee, the chief of the criminal division in that district posted this on LinkedIn: “Earlier today, after nearly 15 years as an Assistant United States Attorney, I resigned…”

submitted 6 days ago • 275 comments

I just want to say that the DoJ attorneys handling the DOGE cases deserve every bit of how humiliating this is going to be. I hope they suffer.

submitted 7 days ago • 22 comments

This is not a reason for Trump to stop threatening. This is a reason for Trump to try to nationalize SpaceX and Starlink.

submitted 7 days ago • 12 comments

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/u...

submitted 10 days ago • 161 comments

We really don’t talk enough about how much universities subsidize big business…

submitted 11 days ago • 10 comments

Let me put it this way: Apple has all the money it could ever want. It can afford to pay the full cost of making iPhones. Instead, Harvard et al. subsidize Apple by educating its future employees. But … (1/2)

submitted 11 days ago • 5 comments

Yes. First of all, we’re all in this together. And second of all, the humanities need and have needed our help and support for a long time now.

submitted 11 days ago • 5 comments

Vivek Murthy, who worked for Obama and Biden, called for more data transparency from social media companies so researchers can study the internet’s effects on kids.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Have you supported your local degenerates today?

submitted 18 days ago • 18 comments

The answer should be yes.

submitted 18 days ago • 5 comments

Integrity. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/b...

submitted 20 days ago • 16 comments

The very unimpressive new president of Yale, Maurie McInnis, has been silent to complicit during the repression. But now she's alarmed. Reminds me of Marx: "The English Established Church will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income."

submitted 21 days ago • 2 comments

The Democratic Party is literally dying -- which is both a personal tragedy for the dead and symptom of a political problem. www.thenation.com/article/poli...

submitted 21 days ago • 32 comments

The most frustrating thing about the last 6 months is just how much my colleagues and fellow students at Harvard have consistently underestimated the threat Trump posed. I was told I was overreacting and things won't be that bad. And yet, it is and it can still get so much worse.

submitted 21 days ago • 53 comments

cheeky Time for some game theory. I think it’s possible that at least 2 of the Republicans on the Court would happily apply unitary executive theory even to the Fed. So what if the 3 Democrats simply said, in writing, “If you do this, when the Fed is before us, we will apply this as precedent.”

submitted 21 days ago • 22 comments

My mood brightened a bit yesterday when I realized, had it explained to me that Musk himself has some of the deepest criminal exposure over events of the last 4 months. and 5 yr statute of limitations.

submitted 30 days ago • 80 comments

“I think it’s very scary to a lot of Jews that someone can be whisked off the street and sent away because of the whim of the government... It’s in our DNA to believe in the rule of law, and that’s very scary to see that flagrantly abused.” religionnews.com/2025/05/14/p...

submitted 29 days ago • 2 comments

Eric Lipton in shambles

submitted 29 days ago • 8 comments

Very sad about Tatum. I wish him all the best. That said, I still think we can win this series.

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

Next dem admin could confiscate it.

submitted 33 days ago • 1 comment

submitted 38 days ago • 3 comments

I like telling authoritarians where to shove it in multiple languages

submitted 41 days ago • 1401 comments

Rubio and Vance tweeting in defense of the German far-right party, the AfD. We are in a very, very dark place.

submitted 41 days ago • 317 comments

A reminder that he was unanimously confirmed, so Dems were complicit. Nothing in Rubio’s makeup ever suggested he would stand up to Trump or serve as some kind of grown up in the room. He’s been glazing him for years, so the Democrats have to absolutely own this.

submitted 41 days ago • 19 comments

recent polling is just a total repudiation of the idea that full spectrum opposition to trump across every area was/is a bad idea

submitted 48 days ago • 189 comments