Reckonings within the DC policy establishment never happen but the following should be recognized: Liberal champions of Venezuelan democracy got played and gave cover and legitimacy to amateur neo-imperialists, helping them birth a dangerous and destabilizing new order.

decades of “national security” people treating those concerned about US imperialism as wacko commies while intoning gravely about a supposed liberal/rules-based order under threat by a rotating cast of someone else.

Trump is going to declare victory and leave the Maduro-regime-without-Maduro in place, isn’t he? The dumbest possible ending.

Coup Dynamics and Escalation Risk in Venezuela Air strikes offer little guarantee that Maduro will be ousted. Maduro is unpopular and illegitimate. But its not clear why this matters. Air strikes do not trigger a popularity contest. 1/

I get why Team MCM/Edmundo makes this argument yet its still hugely annoying to be told that anybody who believes democracy might not magically materialize in an already failed state after US sponsored regime change via force is simply providing cover for Maduro. www.wsj.com/opinion/what...

Opinion | What Comes After Maduro Falls

Disregard the warnings of civil war. Venezuela stands united behind democratic leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González.

wsj.com

Swarthmore is hiring in Comparative Politics with an emphasis on China! Apply by 9/15 for full consideration: apply.interfolio.com/170741 Feel free to reach out if you have questions! #polisky #poliscijobs #poliscijobmarket #psjminfo #academicjobs

Swarthmore is hiring in Comparative Politics with an emphasis on China! Apply by 9/15: apply.interfolio.com/170741 Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. I know its rough out there. Best wishes to all on the market. #polisky #poliscijobs #poliscijobmarket #psjminfo #academicjobs

JOB! Please RT. Swarthmore is hiring for our Social Science Quantitative Lab Associate to support & do teaching quant methods to undergrads. Especially looking for people familiar with sociology and/or political science, and R. Apply by 4/18. apply.interfolio.com/165892 Happy to answer questions.

We simply had to intentionally destroy the world’s strongest economy while dismantling our scientific and educational infrastructure to ensure that a team with a trans girl would never finish second place in the Mountain West volleyball standings again

this pic from the turkish protests goes insanely hard

I’m told this is a real letter. It basically says, “We’ll destroy Columbia unless you destroy it first.”

This phenomenon deserves its own name in which otherwise smart elites engage in all sorts of insane theorizing to rationalize what Trump is doing. DOGE is the disruptive force government needs. Trump is a savvy geopolitical strategist. Recessions are actually good. 1/

Pavithra Suryanarayan@pavisuri.bsky.social · 2y ago

Elites of a certain generation are having a hard time seeing Trump & Co as mafia goons. They insist he must have some philosophy of power that America has already been through & is returning to. The failure to update is going to be very costly. Pirates have boarded the ship & you can’t mildly argue

How many federal workers would DOGE need to fire to make up for Musk not paying his fair share of taxes? Answer: 677,000. That's 44% of the entire non-DoD federal workforce. Again, this power grab is not about the budget. It’s about politics.

How much Elon Musk makes from the government a day: $8 million. How much a senior on Social Security gets a day: $65 Guess which budget Musk and Trump want to cut?

This will blow up university budgets and one effect is that the job market will be very very bleak for a while.

Daniel Espinas@despinas.bsky.social · 2y ago

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Every one of these guys thinks they’re Oppenheimer mixed with Andrew Carnegie and they own something called SplortDotCom that got bought by Boozoo

Adrian Daub@adriandaub.bsky.social · 2y ago

2025 will go down as the year when all the subtext became text

So many mainstream journalists got snowed into repeating the obviously farcical story that Trump's envoy made such grave threats that he got Netanyahu to fold. Netanyahu gave Trump a "win" and now Trump will turn a blind eye to the annexation of the WB and shrug when the war returns to Gaza.

Ryan Bohl@ryanbohl.bsky.social · 2y ago

Trump will not use US leverage to preserve the ceasefire; he will not even use US sanctions leverage to weaken the far-right in Israel as Biden did. US strategy with Israel/Palestine will switch to Maximum Bystander, allowing the Israelis to do what they see as necessary.

The news of a deal in Gaza is an immense relief, first and foremost. It is convenient for both Trump and Bibi to claim that the former wielded sticks and forced the latter's hand. Far more likely is that Trump offered some awful carrots, like support for the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

Your location data going back years may now be in the hands of any random cybercrime syndicate willing to pay for it. Gravy Analytics claims to collect on 1b mobile devices daily and the hackers say they've been inside their systems since 2018.

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan.com · 2y ago

Holy shit. 404 reporting that Gravy Analytics (Unacast) has been breached, hackers might leak location data www.404media.co/hackers-clai...

We're going to need separate Milei and non-Milei categories but this thread should be a banger regardless.

Crazy Ass Moments in LatAm Politics@asslatam.bsky.social · 2y ago

We're hosting a competition to decide the Craziest Moment in LatAm Politics 2024. This is our second edition after the widly popular contest of 2023. We now want an input from our followers, please send sugestions. We will try to include moments from every country of LatAm.

Amazing thread, follow to the end.

Juan Diego Rodriguez@juand-r.bsky.social · 2y ago

Still blown away by GPT-4o’s images. It does dark fantasy very well. I saw a statue of a frog doing yoga and wondered what it would look like as ornamentation in a baroque cathedral. It only really worked when I asked to zoom in…

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Political scientist: Whatever. Can you make a valid causal inference about how it got that way?

Alondra Nelson@alondra.bsky.social · 2y ago

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty STS researcher: The cup is an affordance

This is insane and probably only the beginning in public higher ed.