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normative.bsky.social
He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. juliansanchez.com
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Bookmark this in case you ever start complacently thinking right-wingers are uniquely gullible & susceptible to con artists.

Good. In the interests of basic human charity, I hope his passing was less painful than he deserved. abc7ny.com/post/bernard...

Also a recurring Trump theme is insisting that it would be an unthinkable catastrophe if he were denied powers or immunities that no other president has ever enjoyed, or indeed, even had the chutzpah to claim.

Still thinking about how we were tsk-tsk’ed for daring to suggest that the President receiving a 400 million dollar gift from a foreign head of state might qualify as corruption

‘under the thumb of a real “sleazebag” named Leonard Leo’

Elon leaving the government

elon watching someone he paid to play his video games for him:

Watching these witless gutter trash bully their betters is awakening aristocratic impulses I didn’t even realize I had.

Trump is deliberately killing one of our strongest exports: higher ed www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

PBS censored out a passage of a new documentary on Art Spiegelman because he said things that the network felt would anger Donald Trump. It is symptomatic of creeping political censorship driven by fear of Trump and his penchant for revenge. www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...

In order to follow through on their evil mass deportation schemes, they are reassigning people doing actual crime prevention.

remigration is neo-nazi speak for ethnic cleansing. wrote a whole story about the origins of the word here: www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...

Sort of curious how long we've got before online trolls start telling unemployed programmers "learn to do journalism". www.understandingai.org/p/claude-pow...

I think ANOTHER problem (and I consider this a species of Toxic Savvy) is that analysts who want to seem like pragmatic court whisperers will conflate the legal question “what is the best reading of the law?” with the realpolitik question “what will federal courts as currently constituted do?”

Holy shit! An NYPD detective on Mayor Adams' personal detail was also working for the alleged crypto torture guy and reportedly brought the Italian vic from the airport to the luxury Manhattan townhouse where he was tortured for 17 days to give up his bitcoin password.

New from 404 Media: a cop in Texas performed a nationwide search of license plate reading cameras for a woman who got an abortion, according to multiple sets of data we've reviewed. Included cameras where abortion is legal, like Washington and Illinois www.404media.co/a-texas-cop-...

If "mental anguish" from watching the news is an actionable tort WE'RE ALL GOING TO BE RICH, BOYS!

Seen a couple headlines now referring to the trade court’s “surprise” ruling yesterday, which I think is Journalese for “we failed to inform readers about how dubious and unprecedented Trump’s legal theory was, and would now like to pretend it was totally unforeseeable the whole thing was illegal.”

Part of the problem here is that “Trump has ordered the federal bureaucracy to act like he has this power” is “hard news” while “he doesn’t have that power; all this is clearly illegal” is “opinion” until a Court says it.

WSJ EDITORIAL BOARD: “.. The Trump EOs are an abuse of executive power that isn’t justified under any fair reading of the Constitution. “.. he would be wise to cut his losses before he goes zero for nine at the Supreme Court.” @wsj.com www.wsj.com/opinion/rich...

They attacked, traumatized and fired the competent public servants, and now want your sympathy for being out of their depth.

Sigh. I don’t know why we’re defaulting to “the president presumptively gets to exercise unlawful authority while it winds its way through the appeals courts.”

I think this points up some of the failures of coverage of Trump's lawlessness: You could've read dozens of articles on Trump's tariff policy with no inkling of how unprecedented & legally dubious was the legal authority he claimed to impose them. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/b...

A point I wish had been hammered harder during the campaign is that, whatever you think the ideal policy would be if you could implement it by waving a magic wand, in practice deportations on the scale Trump was promising require a police state.

Immigration control and the logic of the totalitarian state. "As Kukathas makes clear, a large and at best modestly accountable enforcement apparatus engaged in the surveillance, regulation, and intimidation of citizens is a logical necessity for immigration enforcement per se. It is the price.”

I am convinced those “In English we say/In poetry we say” videos Instagram insists on showing me are some weird stealth campaign to make people hate poetry, because it is the most insipid junior high treacle every. single. time.

I guess it’s harder to get AI slop supporting predetermined conclusions through peer review.

Treating a new Covid strain like a crime and not a public health issue is deranged.