Cat food prices are down 700%!

I first scanned this as "Hegseth's responsibility in the Nuzzi-Lizza mess" and thought for a moment we had achieved a political scandal singularity

The road from from “Santa is just white” to war crime bloodlust is short apparently

absolutely. i think this is where the fantasy of presidentialism ends up wrecking our popular imagination...it keeps getting reduced to like one guy (President Punch, Nixon, etc.) but its really a theory of authoritarian sovereignty floated in part by that misrecognition

This is very much baked into how news orgs treat presidents, there is a kind of hushed worship of the office/occupant (+ media self-regard for its role documenting Great Men shaping History) that underlies the normalization of Trump's bad/corrupt acts. Off-base 50 yrs ago, completely wrong today

News organizations are still cramming the bad acts of the Trump administration into midcentury story formulations for how governments function, in which presidents are Men of History acting on the global stage with earnest aides scrambling to enable world-shaping diplomacy

One problem, in our current trajectory, is that while this poisonous rhetoric flows out of the White House and receives broad attention, there is no national figure attacking it (at least, with any consistency) and articulating an optimistic/historically accurate view of immigration

One striking thing about Trump II news coverage is not cover-ups/lack of transparency, it's that we often don't know why things happen at all. No official explanation, too many things for journos to investigate, and the cause may be some obscure/shifting power dynamic even the WH isn't aware of

Good to see you. I am very, very gradually reconstituting my late-2010s Twitter list

This grows in part out of the culture of AI in general, which is focused on engineering/problem-solving, "whatever works," and often operates on the assumption that some pop-psych idea is self-evidently how the mind works

Someone is going to have the write the thing about how “vibe” has become a substitute for meaningful theory in a world where the theory is so clear — grift and power — but we collectively refuse if because it isn’t sophisticated enough to generate make work for empiricists.

They appear to have taken the search/claim functions offline. Let's hope not permanently, I was hoping to file a claim too.

Her arc parallels, or is related to/subsumed in what Trumpism has done to conventional politics. I don’t think anyone really understands the scope and gravity of these changes

Perils of embracing a supposed vibe shift