Lucan Ahmad Way

@lucanway.bsky.social

Polisci Prof U Toronto. Study democracy/dictatorship & Ukraine. Books: Revolution & Dictatorship (PUP 2022); Pluralism by Default (JHUP 2015); Competitive Authoritarianism (CUP 2010)

As a Ukr specialist, I have mixed feelings on Iran: 1 A hatred of the IRI that is totalitar and supprts Russia BUT 2 an appreciat of why a small-med sized country wld want nukes in a world where nukes virt the only deterrent to invasion. Not defeating Russia encourages nuclear proliferation.

This is a very good point that I haven't seen made yet. It's not just Trump that is undermining trust in the US. It is also the inability of US institutions to stop him. And even if you make that "inability to stop him so far," it's already too far to maintain trust.

Charles Cavendish@ccavendish.eurosky.social · last yr.

From what I'm seeing in Europe, the real game changer here isn't really the Trump admin itself, but how quickly American elites - political, corporate, institutional and academic - just failed to respond and resist in any meaningful way. US prestige culture, as seen from abroad, just evaporated.

How many in the Trump administration do you suppose bought a bunch of stock just before Trump announced he was caving on tarriffs? The opportunities here for insider tradiing are truly astounding...

Really feel like I’m losing my mind: government OBVIOUSLY cannot punish an individual law firm for hiring someone it disfavors! It’s ludicrously unconstitutional and I feel like without a day of law school I could argue the case. And yet the best paid lawyers in the country are folding?

If Paul Weiss and Skadden don't think they can out-litigate the doofuses in Trump's DOJ willing to take these cases, why would any client stick with them? Have a spine. You're not going up against top legal minds here. You are the top legal minds.

The most serious Nazi shit in this extremely Nazi shit executive order may be the idea, just slipped in there, that one of the "divisive narratives that distort our shared history" is that "race is not a biological reality but a social construct." www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: Section 1.

whitehouse.gov

The decision a lot of universities face now is whether to: -- have their federal funding pulled because they stood on principle to protect their students and the integrity of their research, or -- have their funding pulled anyway just because they exist, regardless of how cravenly they submit.