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

Something to understand about the nazi salute nonsense is that back during Reconstruction there was a cottage industry of Klan denial, where Democratic papers would pretend the KKK didn't exist or point to their stupid rituals as evidence they were a Republican delusion or otherwise harmless

submitted 1 day ago • 51 comments

Netanyahu threatens the new Syrian gov, saying its military cannot enter Quneitra, Daraa and Suwayda in southern Syria. Do you know many states who can just tell other states not to deploy their own military in their own lands? Video with English subs megaphone.news/cards/%D9%86...

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

New from me: Meta decided to stop working with U.S. fact-checkers at the same time as it’s revamping a program to pay bonuses to creators with high engagement numbers, potentially pouring accelerant on the kind of false posts the company once policed: www.propublica.org/article/face...

submitted 2 days ago • 103 comments

Theorists on the left have often suggested that socialists might be prepared to forgo some economic advancement for the sake of social solidarity. But it turns out it wasn’t socialists but Brexiteers & American Republicans. And it wasn’t for the sake of social solidarity but doing other people down

submitted 2 days ago • 7 comments

I remember reading once: never vote for someone running on an anti-corruption platform, as they typically end up more corrupt than the people they say they oppose. Instead vote for people who show that they want to build a better society.

submitted 3 days ago • 8 comments

Really awful.

submitted 3 days ago • 48 comments

After a college student finally found a treatment that worked, the insurance giant decided it wouldn’t pay for the costly drugs. His fight to get coverage exposed the insurer’s hidden procedures for rejecting claims. (Published Feb. 2023)

submitted 4 days ago • 41 comments

I’m not sure the world has seen a genuine supervillain until 2025. Of course there’ve been countless monsters: hitler, Stalin, pol pot. But a real life figure who fits the Gotham/Metropolis model. Plutocrat bigwig who is actually deeply evil & wants to run the world for cartoonishly stupid reasons.

submitted 5 days ago • 535 comments

LITERALLY EVERY FBI DIRECTOR HAS BEEN A REPUBLICAN. EVERY SINGLE ONE.

submitted 5 days ago • 164 comments

i think it is cool that de facto first consul of the united states is a drug-addled maniac and deadbeat dad with a breeding fetish

submitted 5 days ago • 545 comments

This is pretty straightforward authoritarianism: if you don't support my toxic businesses, I will use my government power to kneecap yours.

submitted 5 days ago • 30 comments

Just talked to a friend who works for the DoE and had 2 papers censored for violating an EO. One because it uses “toxicity” (about chemical leakage into drinking wells) & the other for “diversity” (as in “microbial diversity”). We are at Soviet-level stupidity censorship.

submitted 5 days ago • 7 comments

Good Lord, spare me the smort takes about how “The Long Live the King nonsense is just a distraction from what’s really IMPORTANT” etc. Faith in regimes has suddenly collapsed over much less. Besides, if what’s really important was really important, Trump wouldn’t have a career in the first place.

submitted 6 days ago • 6 comments

"even lawmakers within his party have feared for their personal safety, and at least one has told confidants that it has swayed his decision-making" "Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about 'credible death threats' when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination"

submitted 6 days ago • 225 comments

holy hell this is smart

submitted 8 days ago • 3 comments

The future depends on whether Trump's base can stay stupid longer than the US can stay solvent.

submitted 7 days ago • 3 comments

submitted 7 days ago • 1378 comments

It seems almost unavoidable at this point that we are headed for a deep, deep recession. Just based on 200K+ federal firings & pullback of contracts, the March employment report (to be released April 4) seems certain to show bigger job losses than any month ever outside of a few in 2008-9 and 2020.

submitted 7 days ago • 1053 comments

By rights, this would be another enormous DOJ scandal www.yahoo.com/news/senior-...

submitted 8 days ago • 30 comments

"Someone is always going to get hurt. It just might not be the people law professors are thinking about."

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Politico editor: FDR is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more. Just unreal!

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

covering fascism like you're comparing goals and assists bsky.app/profile/kept...

submitted 8 days ago • 15 comments

An apology to John Rawls. I couldn’t really understand why he was so obsessed with the importance of stability as a political value. But now I do.

submitted 8 days ago • 22 comments

“Because the career incentives of elite opinion journalism are such that there will always be upwards mobility for someone like me who criticizes Democrats more than Trump”

submitted 9 days ago • 130 comments

Shadi, you’re wrong all the time, literally constantly fucking up on matters of basic common sense, but you refuse to shut up and learn from your persistent mistakes, ever. Now you want people who are right to shut up because that’s unproductive? Go walk into the sea.

submitted 8 days ago • 47 comments

One of the purposes of DOGE is to give a sheen of respectability to lies about government. A 10 minute conversation with someone who understands Social Security data - or just Cobol - would have debunked this, but the lie is more valuable to their goals than the truth. www.wired.com/story/elon-m...

submitted 8 days ago • 31 comments

A reminder that 80 years ago the United States took actions to prevent billionaires from owning our media. The creators of the FCC said that out loud. And starting under Reagan we just apparently decided that media ownership didn’t matter. We should care about it again!

submitted 8 days ago • 5 comments

1. He's right. It's asymmetric and has huge huge reach. 2. He's admitting Fox's role in the propaganda.

submitted 8 days ago • 157 comments

JUST IN: Another medical horror story in an affidavit from a USAID employee stationed overseas. Says his pregnant wife was not medevac-ed for emergency health care because of directives from DC. Took intervention of a U.S. senator to reverse — but was too late. s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25...

submitted 8 days ago • 862 comments

A just heard an interesting description of Japan from 1930 to 1945: “a country run by slogans instead of reason.” A very real warning for ourselves, in our own times.

submitted 8 days ago • 7 comments

Ding ding ding! Watch this. He’s laying it out. My team at Stanford Internet Observatory documented this process meticulously, over & over again, in 2020. The R machine retaliated against us. When Elon bought X, it became even sharper. The rest of the political spectrum needs to get in the game.

submitted 8 days ago • 39 comments

Put him on the stand!

submitted 8 days ago • 42 comments

What Trump has done for US farmers so far: -frozen their foreign aid program (and left their food to rot) -encouraged EU to ban their products -frozen legally-owed reimbursements for their energy efficiency upgrades etc. -threatened to deport half their workforce -suppressed research on bird flu

submitted 9 days ago • 191 comments

I keep seeing takes like this marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo... 1. I don't like the status quo on policy X 2. Trump is thoughtlessly blowing things up, including on policy X 3. It might turn out better after being blown up so 🤷 We're on the road to authoritarianism, not your preferred policy.

submitted 9 days ago • 49 comments

Jose Barco, a decorated U.S. Army veteran once based out of Fort Carson who served 2 tours in Iraq, was taken into custody last month by ICE because his citizenship papers, which were supposed to be processed while he was in the Army, were lost. Read his story:

submitted 13 days ago • 191 comments

#ICYMI: ProPublica has confirmed the names and roles of more than 30 Musk-affiliated staffers who are helping the world’s richest man dismantle or downsize federal agencies one by one.

submitted 9 days ago • 304 comments

It’s an unbelievable framing..

submitted 11 days ago • 12 comments

If the legitimate press just permanently stopped attending these events and were replaced by propaganda outlets, that would be both optically clarifying and improve actual journalism.

submitted 11 days ago • 73 comments

Reuters: U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire ally Elon Musk's push to radically overhaul the federal government is now reaching the U.S. court system with a demand that the judiciary justify why the administration should not cancel leases for space it utilizes at 160 locations nationally.

submitted 11 days ago • 39 comments

The IRS was a simple test for DOGE: was it really interested in efficiency and state capacity? If so, you support the tax enforcement, the biggest ROI in govt. Or did it want to minimize parts of the state that bothered billionaires? We have our answer. open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

submitted 11 days ago • 136 comments

There have been many signs of gross incompetence in the Musk-Trump sledgehammer approach. Now this: "Multiple current and former employees described the situation as 'a national security crisis.'"

submitted 12 days ago • 54 comments

Holy Shit. They're burning through people pretty fast now. After Sassoon refused/resigned, the next two people - heads of Public Integrity Section (DC) and the Criminal Division also refused/resigned. This all JUST happened. And these are all 'actings', so they're people the Trump crew chose.

submitted 12 days ago • 230 comments

So much that Wray and everyone else who stood aside could learn from here. A Scalia clerk! "Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations."

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

Emil Bove is Stringer Bell

submitted 12 days ago • 52 comments