Seeing that the thesis of episode 1 of season 4 appears to be, ‘You know what? Sometimes genocide is justified and good, actually,’ I’m ready to accept that Strange New Worlds has gone fully off the rails.

Buchanan is sweating as his spot as the worst president of all time is up for grabs

Secretary of Defense Rock@sodrock.bsky.social · 3d ago

Still can’t over the fact that the president of the United States just told an entire state to pound sand after getting cyberattacked by a foreign adversary because they didn’t vote for him and it was treated like a Tuesday lol

I have been Melville-pilled.

Donations to win the Marxopoly board are live. Proceeds go to the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. Please help me spread. donorbox.org/marxopoly-ag...

A lot of people thought that The Confidence-Man was the key text for understanding Trump I (at least until they read it). But things like this make me sure that it’s more the definitive text of Trump II.

The Verge@theverge.com · last wk.

X Money is launching in the US starting today

A letter from the mother of Alex Pretti, six months after he was murdered by ICE.

Our symposium on the life and work of Kirstie McClure is now open access at _Philosophy and Global Affairs_. Thanks to Jane Gordon, Lewis Gordon, Kye Barker, Arash Davari, and Megan Gallagher for bringing this writing into print (link in first comment).

There is a lot to say about the Nolan Odyssey movie. But one point that I think has not been emphasized enough is: this is a film about living in LA, as Nolan, my erstwhile British compatriot and age mate, has done for years. I gather it’s a strange place.

If you want more of The Odyssey, besides reading a translation of the poem, I strongly recommend Olivia Belli's album, Daimon, which contains pieces inspired by Homer and I think is really nice

Men will literally spend seven years being fed lotus flowers by a sea-nymph instead of going to therapy

Nolan remains a deeply conservative filmmaker in his obsession with questions of order and anarchy but his Odyssey is a scandal to the Conservative movement as it analyzes the moral structure of guilt and shame, which the Conservative movement has completely rejected as weakness in favor of pride

"I left feeling a pooling, connective happiness. I went home and realized that I hadn’t looked at my phone for six hours." Sarah Thankam Mathews hangs out with the Luddites, NYC's tech-critical cultural youth front: www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Getting Off With the Luddites

They see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political pr...

nplusonemag.com

Thank goodness

It's surreal: the same country hosting the World Cup and singing about peace and love is simultaneously bombing another country.

So I guess that's why they don't have halftime shows

Only a brain as perfect as Melville's would devise a scene in a novel in which the Devil is trying to trick Emerson and then Thoreau into giving him money, but becomes quickly annoyed with both of them.

An unfathomable clean air act violation. I worked in this exact field for years, including in oil and gas, and i still can't get over how wanton and obvious this crime is. Just stunning

Reuters@reuters.com · 3w ago

Elon Musk's xAI has installed more than double the number of gas turbines than it has publicly acknowledged to power its Colossus 2 data center project, without federal permits, and the pollution is hitting predominantly Black neighborhoods the hardest reut.rs/4bIghEm

The Department of Political Science at Fordham University will be hiring two Assistant Professors this fall: one in Judicial Politics and one in Comparative Urban Politics. Both positions will be at Fordham's Rose Hill location in The Bronx.

🇺🇸

"A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People."

🚨Job Posting🚨 I've received funding for a project on "Rethinking the Anti-Corruption Toolkit" and am hiring a 2-year postdoc (political theory or related) to help. Ideally starting this fall, but can be flexible. For best consideration apply by the end of next week! apply.interfolio.com/188955

Summer reads so far

Trumpism will not last forever, because it is based in fraud and racist lies; and no lie can live forever.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last mo.

Tom Emmer: "Minnesotans are so afraid that you're gonna call us a racist, you're gonna call us an Islamophobe. You know what? I'm done being even the least bit careful. Somalis don't assimilate. And if they don't assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from."

Compare Alito's description of Trump's racist statements (on the left) to Justice Kagan's anthology of Trump's racist statements (on the right). These are passages from this morning's opinions in Mullin v. Doe.

The heatwave in Europe is so extreme, it's 25–32°F (14–18°C) above normal. You read that right. France recorded it's hottest day ever. The UK had its hottest ever June day. The ground is exceeding 122°F (50°C). People are dying. Tell me again why we shouldn't talk about climate change???

What is the philosophy of work and democracy that follows from the historic labour movement? In my new article, I develop a democratic defense of labour unions and show how it leads to a distinctive vision of industrial democracy. Forthcoming in the APSR stevenmklein.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.

Delighted to share my guest essay from this morning's @nytimes.com opinion section. And kudos to the Times for their excellent artwork!

New York Times Opinion@nytopinion.nytimes.com · 2mo ago

Of all the numbers David Lay Williams has seen about Elon Musk’s new status as a trillionaire, “the one that struck me most forcefully was a calculation in The Times that Mr. Musk’s net worth is five million times as large as that of the average American family,” he writes.

Important to remember that the cultural argument of his first book is that poor people are poor because they are bad people.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2mo ago

DOUTHAT: Let's be honest -- the tone of the administration is not consistently a Christian tone. There is a tone of aggressive uncharity JD VANCE: Tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working class ways of communication, and covering them in elite preferences

Nineteenth-century political theory was just writing thousands of pages about your favorite week of the French Revolution