Timothy Burke
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timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke
@timothyburke.bsky.social
6.5K followers 920 following 1.4K posts

Professor of History at Swarthmore College. Writes at timothyburke.substack.com, continuing from his old blog Easily Distracted. Remembers when there was no Internet, and stays up late because someone is wrong on it.

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Political science 50%
Sociology 17%
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timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 2d
The single feature of capitalism that most sets it against human flourishing is how misguided egomaniacs can take hold of a business that works well and produces steady value, blow it up in the name of some transparently dumb idea and walk away clean. www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/i...
HBO Max’s Big Plan: Be HBO Again
Casey Bloys is embracing a brand position for TV's crown jewel as a complement, not a replacement, for Netflix — kind of like how it was back when it was a premium cable add-on.
www.hollywoodreporter.com

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
The puzzle to me with any multiplayer game that has a lot of children playing is why the solution that Toontown used a long time ago didn't become an industry standard. No chat, no open communications, identify nothing about players, other than standard speech bubbles for coordinating play action.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
Well, when a tech CEO can't handle an interview with Kevin Roose, one of the most tech-friendly journalists in the history of IT, that says something about the company.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
There was an amendment that failed, etc. but honestly, if they couldn't stop a dumb resolution like this, they should at least have the party discipline to be registered as Present and not cast a vote. But the Democratic leadership has never seen a rake it didn't want to step on.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
Yup.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 4d
In finishing Tony Benn's diaries, I read about a group called the Elders that had been convened by Nelson Mandela at the urging of Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel in 2007. I had no memory of it. I was more surprised to find it still exists. All very nice people, but it's rather absurd.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 4d
I think I know who the noisy weakling is. Hint: he is an opinion columnist for the New York Times.
sethcotlar.bsky.social Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 4d
Ross Douthat: Don’t Worry. Trump Doesn’t REALLY Want Democratic Officials to be Executed.
OPINION There Will Be No Trump Coup A final pre-election case for understanding the president as a noisy weakling, not a budding autocrat. Oct. 10, 2020 Oliver Contreras for The New York Times By Ross Douthat Opinion Columnist

Reposted by Laia Balcells, Timothy Burke

sethcotlar.bsky.social
Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 4d
Ross Douthat: Don’t Worry. Trump Doesn’t REALLY Want Democratic Officials to be Executed.
OPINION There Will Be No Trump Coup A final pre-election case for understanding the president as a noisy weakling, not a budding autocrat. Oct. 10, 2020 Oliver Contreras for The New York Times By Ross Douthat Opinion Columnist

Reposted by Cas Mudde, Shannon Vallor, Nina Jankowicz , and 25 more

chrismurphyct.bsky.social
Chris Murphy @chrismurphyct.bsky.social · 4d
The President of the United States just called for Democratic members of Congress to be executed. "HANG THEM", he posted.

If you're a person of influence in this country and you haven't picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a fucking side.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 5d
The billionaires can buy a lot of press fluffing--though I kind of suspect the NYT at this point doesn't even need to get paid off, because they're fully in courtier mode. But all the fawning in the world does not a real thing make.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 5d
Good. But as always in these situations, the lingering question is "why did it take this circumstance to produce this outcome?" Why do the investigations always focus just on the particulars of a given accusation and not on the inability of an institution to live into what it claims as values?

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 5d
Here's a top lesson of the last year. Everybody who every said "don't leave a bad law sitting around on the books and don't ignore the potential misuse of a legal precedent that hasn't been misused yet" is 100% on the money, especially for people who think law and norms are important.

Reposted by Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Saunders, David Brady , and 22 more

theharvardcrimson.bsky.social
The Harvard Crimson @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social · 5d
#BREAKING: Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers will immediately leave his role as an instructor at Harvard while the University investigates his ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Dhruv T. Patel and Cam N. Srivastava report.
Summers Will Not Finish Semester of Teaching as Harvard Investigates Epstein Ties | News | The Harvard Crimson
Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers will immediately leave his role as an instructor at Harvard while the University investigates his ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey E. Epstein.
www.thecrimson.com

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 5d
I dislike the observation that Trump has accelerating cognitive problems. It lets him off the hook for the raw malevolence behind his increasingly incoherent expression. 40 years ago, he would have had the same depraved moral indifference to a journalist being violently murdered, just more clearly.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
The NYT is not subtle when they're trying to do someone a favor or when they're out to destroy someone. The story on Summers today goes out of its way not to mention the unsavory specifics of "seeking romantic advice" from Epstein and only quotes one email exchange, at the very end of the story.

Reposted by Rebecca Solnit, Richard S.J. Tol, Dorothy Bishop , and 23 more

themorrancave.bsky.social
Chris Morran @themorrancave.bsky.social · 7d
NEW: When Andrew Tate landed in the US, Customs & Border Protection seized his electronic devices. But @propublica.org found that a White House official told DHS to return the devices, emphasizing that the request came from the White House.

By @robert-faturechi.bsky.social & Avi Asher-Schapiro
The White House Intervened on Behalf of Accused Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation
Federal authorities were chided for seizing electronic devices from Tate and his brother, and told to return them, records and interviews show. Experts said the intervention was highly inappropriate.
www.propublica.org

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
Like, wow, bad. The other stuff is kind of Whole Foods-expensive-not-great, but the instant ramen is WTF happened here.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
I think we're probably a year away from Trumpworld people just hiring militia leaders and donors to be Justice Department officials and arguing that they don't need to be lawyers or know anything about the law, just to be loyal to the Supreme Leader.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
When you think about any of these movies, it is absolutely impossible to imagine people loving them if they didn't have animated precursors--if this was the first time you'd ever seen these and had no knowledge of the animated, I honestly think you'd go "meh".

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
I can say one NOT to buy, and that's the Momofuku chili crisp. I dunno what happened with Momofuku's brand products, but imho none of them are very good.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
"The bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible."

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
Look, at this point, the news story would be, "What aren't they going to destroy or decimate?" I'm hard-pressed to think of any major aspect of American life that they're not working hard to turn into total failure and shit.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
"They chose favorite parts of each other, she writes: He chose her mouth. She chose his nose. They shared a 'common language, common skepticisms, common ideas about what was beautiful, common beliefs about what was valuable.' ...She liked him just the way he was."

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
"They both 'moved through the world with amused detachment and deep sensitivity, contradictions that worked somehow in concert'".

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
You know, this from Nuzzi is not half-bad: "What is a politician? Any man who wants to be loved more than other men and through his pursuit reveals why he cannot love himself."

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 8d
Summers' last email to Epstein before Epstein's arrest discloses that a family gathering at Cape Cod was a "bit of an Ibsen thing", so I have a sneaking suspicion that this is just a worse morning in a long series of not-great ones. Tho she's got her own not-great emails in this latest batch.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 8d
I can't imagine being naive enough to marry Larry Summers without having a very clear idea of what he is and how he had and would conduct his life going forward. But self-deception is a mighty thing, and the intellect can fuel it to remarkable heights.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 8d
I think Vought, Miller, Vance and a cloud of associates like Rufo, Thiel, etc., have an actual ideology and are deploying it through Trump. Bondi, Patel, McMahon and many others are just grifters and toadies, yeah, but they're largely pliant to the ideologues unless Trump himself demands something.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 8d
Yes, and I think you also do a great job at pointing out is why professionalism--despite its historic weaknesses--is abhorrent to personalist rule, which is basically that professionals are defined by a loyalty to their training and practice. It's their source of economic value and self-worth.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 8d
Everything about Summers in the detailed Crimson story about his emails with Epstein is gross, though that's just a coda to a career full of gross behavior. But that he and Epstein gave a racist nickname to an East Asian woman he was sexually harassing is particularly grotesque.
premiumsteve.bsky.social Premium Steve @premiumsteve.bsky.social · 8d
I feel like the racism of the nickname they used for her really should have made the headline