We should ban all social media for under-18s except for text based hobbyists forums (video games, cars, decorative topiary, etc.). It’s good to have the experience of being arbitrarily banned by a 35-year old basement dwelling moderator for posting a point by point refutation of their arguments

David Higham@oldtrotter.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Everything's a conspiracy

While the media reports obsessively on "trans-issues", I'm on my 19,010th consecutive day of not being negatively impacted by any trans-person. "Four UK newspapers published 17,000 articles on ‘trans issues’ in five years, averaging 9 articles a day. www.amnesty.org.uk/latest/new-u...

Anti trans organisations exerting powerful influence over media and politics, new analysis reveals

Amnesty’s analysis exposes scale of anti-trans influence in UK media and maps rapid rise of anti-trans organisations

amnesty.org.uk

lol, what!? One of the weirder Social Forces book reviews ever I've seen. Going out on a limb and guessing Wimer has a negative view of Kenworthy's book?

Last year, we shared a paper showing that Labour's accommodation of the radical right did not work. We now have a new version of the paper online: osf.io/preprints/so...

@yiqingxu.bsky.social, Jens Hainmueller and Avi Acharya have a cool paper to get political scientists to just fit structural choice models to their choice survey experiments! yiqingxu.org/papers/2026_...

how it started: how it’s going:

Graeber was wrong and jobs in the bureaucracy can be spiritually enriching, actually dissentmagazine.org/article/the-...

The Left Needs Bureaucrats - Dissent Magazine

After MAGA, the left will need to be ready with a theory of how to rebuild the federal administrative state—not as it was before Trump, but as something better.

dissentmagazine.org

Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social · 5mo ago

You cannot be saying this kind of thing when your primary job is podcaster.

It’s so funny (it’s not actually funny) how the commodities guys and economists and IR scholars and military analyst are all passing a communal bottle of bleach around while the equity dipshits are universally like “hrm, I might have to delay my Lamborghini purchase by a few weeks”

my social science masters degree was not a waste of money and has in fact made my life better and easier

One thing growing into my middle age has done has made me much less sympathetic to humanities Takes like this. A pathetic thrill of pseudo-provocation which inevitably backfires when a non trivial proportion of the audience actually just adopt and endorse the stupid read the author was winking at.

Daniel Elstein@danielelstein.bsky.social · 5mo ago

This reminds me of the thing about childhood being invented in the 17th century. As in, there could be a true claim in the neighborhood, but there's definitely an idiotic one there too.

I'm not saying you can't possibly generate a worthwhile hypothesis from your data. I'm just saying that generating a hypothesis from the entirety of human knowledge that preceded your data is a much safer bet.

I do actually think it's a bad thing to cause a bunch of death and destruction for no clear reason and in the process bring about a global economic shock. I realise the Israeli and American governments feel differently, but this is my opinion.

if you dont have nukes and give us everything we want in negotiation, we might still kill you as late night television entertainment for the demented emperor

Sisyphus, but for reducing tail latency@bluespacecanary.bsky.social · 5mo ago

the US once again sending the message loud and clear: never negotiate, just get nukes. Never compromise, just get nukes. Never give in to sanctions, just get nukes. what could go wrong

An essential article 👇

Ronan Farrow@ronanfarrow.bsky.social · 6mo ago

(10/11) Dubal’s research showed that dynamic rates are coming for wages too, with Uber drivers with identical workloads and performance getting different pay based on the lowest amount the algorithm calculated they’d accept. www.columbialawreview.org/content/on-a...

i think we all need to step back and realize that peak art was made when neolithic pot in the shape of a pig was fired

Can't wait to use it

Davis Vaughan@davisvaughan.bsky.social · 6mo ago

dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited! - `filter_out()` for dropping rows - `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats! tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...

Don't you f**king dare.

perry anderson dunking on adam tooze on the new left review over his takes on ukraine is the socialist version lowkey of when hans hermann hoppe quit the mises institute for giving milei some stupid made up award because milei is pro israel

We are at the point this week where IR scholars are mentioning things like "WWIII"

I was wondering how this might all turn out to have been my fault

Holy crap chart from Gallup

I love this

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

As an aside, I just noticed that if you google a font, google displays the entire results page in that font. Which is neat.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux@bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 8mo ago

I refuse to surrender classical antiquity or Times New Roman font to the fascists.

'Skull of St. Thomas Aquinas being transported to Fossanova Abbey.' Photograph by Daniel Ibanez

Everywhere you look there is an opening for leadership. What an irony that the Democratic consultant-pundit class fell into a poll-following Popularist obsession at a time of such volatility

The central place of the bogeyman ‘positivism’ in how social scientists caricature each other’s work is nicely captured here by @adrianblau.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...