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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 3h

Approaching fascist shock troops as literal demons to be banished or exorcised by the power of God's grace seems theologically sound to me.

The KPop Demon Hunters approach of catchy tunes & cartoon violence might seem more immediately gratifying, but the Catholics have a lot of experience at this.

Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 3h

Cool how the Republicans are openly rebranding themselves as the teen pregnancy party.

I mean, I guess it goes logically enough with being the pro-child rape and human trafficking party, but being so open about it feels kind of gauche.

But hey - Trump's party, Trump's style.

Reposted by Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile

Dave Levitan @davelevitan.bsky.social · 12h

“We can give $20 billion to Argentina but we can’t afford the CDC’s measles experts” is a hell of an argument

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 13h

It's like Aristotle's regime theory - we have degenerated to the corrupt & debased form of Silicon Valley's tech aristocracy.

Burn yourself out playing the game of selling delusions to dumb money funds.

And if you get lucky & win the game, the prize is becoming gollum.

bsky.app/profile/nycs...

southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 21h

What an emblem of the billionaire class—descending on a peaceful city in a private jet on the horn to NYT asking for the place to be invaded by federal authorities because the rent-a-cops you employ for a week to harass a few junkies outside the convention center cost too much.

Mr. Benioff spoke as his annual Dreamforce conference is set to begin Tuesday in downtown San Francisco, bringing 50,000 visitors to the city. He is scheduled to deliver a keynote address about the benefits of "agentic enterprise," a business model in which humans and artificial intelligence bots work together.
Speaking by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco, he lamented that he has to pay for nundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers to help patrol the convention area and said that San Francisco needed to "re-fund" the police.
The city never actually "defunded" its police force, and San Francisco's violent crime rates are below those in many other U.S. cities.
But San Francisco has struggled to recruit and keep officers, and it still has problems with lower-level crimes and open-air drug use, especially in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin near City Hall. It has about 1,500 police officers, and Mr. Benioff says it ne → another thousand.

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Reposted by Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile

Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

At some point in your fascist consolidation, you need to purge the ideologues whose fervor was useful in opposition but whose (albeit walleyed and insane) sincere beliefs lead them to criticize the leader.

Thankfully Trumpism has so far been incompetent at this, too.

bsky.app/profile/ronf...

Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 1d

Marge Greene yesterday, Loomer today.

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

So, thanks to a 12-day Blitzkrieg by our brutal warfighting National Guard who are now, thanks to Trump, (i) selected on merit and (ii) no longer afraid to commit war crimes, you can't get a table at a restaurant in DC?

I honestly just want to figure out what he's saying.

bsky.app/profile/atru...

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 1d

Trump: "The restaurants were all closing, now you can't get into a restaurant. They're opening up new restaurants. It took 12 days for us. We sent in not politically correct military. We sent them in based on merit."

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

When a federal judge extensively cites Federalist 29 as a legal authority in their ruling, you may take satisfaction in the certainty that you have succeeded in making them mad.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

storage.courtlistener.com

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

Because good lawyers have trouble completely disregarding the law, facts, logic, and justice for less than $1500/hour.

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

<Glances at finance headlines>

"Is Bitcoin really a safe haven from an unstable dollar? Our ETF specialists will weigh in."

I have no idea whether I am sad or glad that I only teach my Finance Capitalism class in the Spring.

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

God is testing me, but I will stand by my moral certainty that the proper venue in which to try John Bolton is the Hague and the proper charges involve war crimes.

Fascists indicting him for wearing white after Labor Day or whatever they have planned is lawless thuggery.

bsky.app/profile/kyle...

Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1.bsky.social · 1d

Breaking on MSNBC: The acting U.S. Attorney in Maryland is moving forward quickly to seek criminal charges against Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton, according to two people familiar with the case.

A complaint or an indictment could come as early as next week.

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

At some point in your fascist consolidation, you need to purge the ideologues whose fervor was useful in opposition but whose (albeit walleyed and insane) sincere beliefs lead them to criticize the leader.

Thankfully Trumpism has so far been incompetent at this, too.

bsky.app/profile/ronf...

Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 1d

Marge Greene yesterday, Loomer today.

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

"[a]nd the rules do not permit this Court - much less require it - to approve of the facially invalid grand jury indictment that the government has proffered."

Score another point for the apex representatives of Tocqueville's aristocracy.

www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

StewartOrder100925

www.documentcloud.org

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

See - this is the mistake. She is not there to run a storied TV news operation. She is there to corrupt or destroy it.

The enemies of our constitutional government are indeed laughable and incompetent, but this is not evidence of that.

bsky.app/profile/donm...

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 1d

Bari Weiss making plain she knows as much about journalism as Elon Musk knows about government. What will be the CBS equivalent of USAID?

Oliver Darcy @oliverdarcy.bsky.social · 1d

News: Bari Weiss just sent a memo to staffers at CBS News asking them to produce a memo explaining "how you spend your working hours—and ideally, what you've made (or are making) that you're most proud of."

One CBS News staffer puts it like this to me: "We just got Elon Musked."

Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

Don't make the mistake of believing that this represents bad management. She has been hired to corrupt or destroy CBS News in the service of billionaire oligarchs, and this is one step on that path.

Can't judge a man's marksmanship unless you know what he is aiming at.

bsky.app/profile/oliv...

Oliver Darcy @oliverdarcy.bsky.social · 1d

News: Bari Weiss just sent a memo to staffers at CBS News asking them to produce a memo explaining "how you spend your working hours—and ideally, what you've made (or are making) that you're most proud of."

One CBS News staffer puts it like this to me: "We just got Elon Musked."

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

Done that and more for one date referenced in a footnote.

And I'm just a social scientist.

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

Albert Speer presents - the District of Columbia!

bsky.app/profile/atru...

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 1d

it's giving Germania

"On Trump’s desk in the Oval Office today was a plan for a triumphal arch on the other side of the river from the Lincoln Memorial"

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 1d

Elon Musk was never going to directly profit from the Twitter acquisition - you didn't need to be an M&A lawyer or financial analyst in 2022.

But it's hard to judge a man's marksmanship unless you know what he's aiming at.

bsky.app/profile/mich...

Michael E. Mann @michaelemann.bsky.social · 1d

Must-read piece in @theguardian.com (h/t @dpcarrington.bsky.social). In #ScienceUnderSiege, we describe how petrostates Saudi Arabia & Russia leveraged Musk's buyout of twitter so they could weaponize it for climate denial propaganda & attacks on renewables.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Money talks: the deep ties between Twitter and Saudi Arabia

The long read: Saudi Arabia’s investment in Twitter increased its influence in Silicon Valley while being used at home to shut down critics of the regime

www.theguardian.com

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 2d

Pepe the memetic fascist frog has been met and defeated by Portland's pelvic thrust frog.

With uncontested amphibian superiority belonging to the alliance of free and democratic peoples, I think that the tide may well be turning against Nazism.

bsky.app/profile/stev...

bsky.app/profile/wise...

Wiseowl374 @wiseowl374.bsky.social · 2d

This man is your friend he fights for freedom poster but it’s portland frog hero

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 2d

We may well plumb that and find out how much there is in some schools.

And I suspect that it will be a "slowly at first, then all at once" kind of thing.

Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 2d

Something kind of majestic and simultaneously ridiculous about watching a truly enormous data breach.

Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 2d

This hideous, ridiculous, ataviatic weed emerging in their midst and threatening to choke out every other fruit and flower has caused a kind of disbelieving despair among liberals.

Like the Krell in Forbidden Planet, they cannot fight it because they had long forgotten that it had ever existed.

Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 2d

At a basic level, this is what is terribly wrong with the Trump administration.

It is not just personalism or patrimonialism, it is the most decayed and despicable extreme form of those things blooming unexpectedly in what most US elites thought was a garden of Enlightenment constitutionalism.

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 2d

1.) Who do you think is the greatest political leader in history?

2.) Ask yourself if that person was ever treated with such grotesque sycophancy.

3.) Ask yourself if that person would have appreciated or tolerated this insincere, moronic, and obsequious flattery.

bsky.app/profile/atru...

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 2d

Rollins: "We had an amazing cabinet meeting. President Trump walked in before the cameras were there. We all stood up & gave him a two minute standing ovation. There's so much love in that room & respect & just appreciation for him. No one could do what that man is doing today. So I was so grateful"

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 2d

Ban devices.

Tell students that they are on a journey of enlightenment that can only be completed if they turn off the choruses of demons and monsters that they carry around in their pockets.

Truth is so quiet that you need to silence even the most pleasant and seductive lies in order to hear it.

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Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile @exiledsocscientist.bsky.social · 2d

Aa a famous Harvard faculty member liked to say:

<thwaps grad student> "Read more history, then try to tell me with a straight face that your argument makes any sense!"