Take a minute to watch this clip. It's well worth your time. Phillip: We compared Trump’s debate answers from 2016 to the ones he gave this week after the very first question on immigration.. He veers off topic several times.. watch pic.twitter.com/AnNO3EVtgr — Acyn (@Acyn) Septe … | Continue reading
Hold up. This is ok?? pic.twitter.com/4y0mS7TkJX — Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) September 16, 2024 Serious "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" vibes here. This man is a dangerous, degenerate influence within the American state. This is only a half step … | Continue reading
It's interesting what pops out at you ten or so years and look at what we were all talking about. The thing that stands out for me here is how optimistic everyone was (including us pessimists) that autonomous vehicles were about to revolutionize transportation. This is a 2014 pos … | Continue reading
This is a funny story, but it might be considerably more than that. The Daily Show torched Donald Trump for bringing Looney Loomer to the 9/11 ceremony and Marjorie Taylor Greene for calling her a racist. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥&#x … | Continue reading
i've had a bunch of very exalted people from many walks of life ask me this in recent days. like as a genuine question, and thinking i'll have the answer — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 21, 2024 Obviously, this is anecdotal, based largely on the sample of journalists and blogge … | Continue reading
It's Labor Day weekend so let's stop by Emma Goldman's ice-cream shoppe in Worcester for a hot fudge sundae and some anarchy. pic.twitter.com/LgPLuxkmWG — Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) September 4, 2021 Look for the Union Label The ILGWU sponsored a contest among its member … | Continue reading
Things have gotten a little better with prescribed burns, but not nearly enough. Saturday, August 25, 2012 Megafires, incentives and the inactivity bias One of the recurring themes of my conversations with Joseph is this country's growing disinterest, bordering on antipathy, in g … | Continue reading
[This project appears to have stalled, but don't worry, there are plenty of other plans for badly placed, car-dependent exurbs waiting in the wings.] Don't get me wrong. This document has lots of ideas, some impractical, some with a horrible real-life track record, some silly, an … | Continue reading
Hey look everybody! The paper that told us that Trump crushing DeSantis in the polls was actually good news for DeSantis, Dobbs wouldn't be that big of a deal, and that it was a mistake for the Democrats to go all in on Harris has some political advice for us. It's important to n … | Continue reading
Picking up from yesterday's post, the sane-washing of the Trump-Kennedy alliance continues. Of all that was said at Friday's Arizona rally, this might have been the most newsworthy. DJT : "That is why today I am repeating my pledge to establish a panel of top experts, working wit … | Continue reading
[This appeared in a slightly more skeletal form as a Twitter thread early Sunday morning.] The “All Else Equal” Fallacy: Assuming that everything else is held constant, even when it’s not gonna be. We will see how this pans out, but I think most of the mainstream media is badly m … | Continue reading
This seems like a good time to remind ourselves that for the past four years the standard narrative has been that Kamala Harris is hopelessly inept both as a politician and as an office holder, not to mention being a little weird (what is it about the wired earbuds?). Lots of ver … | Continue reading
Distorted headline stories were so last Thursday. The hot new trend with the cool kids today is seeing who can come up with the most ludicrous fact check from the DNC. the fact check got fact checked pic.twitter.com/sSqGaWltTQ — Matt Binder (@MattBinder) August 21, 2024 The NYT d … | Continue reading
I went back and forth over posting this. It is one of those topics where pundits and their poor relations, bloggers, tend to read in too much. I was also concerned that, since the establishment press seem to be ignoring the story, the smaller and more partisan sources I was left … | Continue reading
In case you don't keep up with these things, for the past couple of weeks, there have been various theories floating around MAGA social media about the Democratic national convention, specifically about Harris or Walz being forced off the ticket. As is often the case, the most ov … | Continue reading
[I wrote this about a month ago. It fits nicely with our ogoing thread, but the fact that JD Vance was a far right extremist on abortion is not quite the breaking news it was a few weeks ago.] Here's the full quote, where Vance clearly calls for a national ban. This is journalist … | Continue reading
When you see the way Republican men talk about women you can understand why they are trying to end no fault divorce. — Melanie D'Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) August 15, 2024 For at least a couple of years now, we've been talking about the politics of abortion and critiquing the narra … | Continue reading
I'm not going to talk about crowd sizes as an indicator of support or campaign momentum. Commentators and analysts have spent too much time on that already, but Donald Trump's recent North Carolina speech does nicely dovetail with a couple of at work ongoing threads. As we observ … | Continue reading
It all comes down to that 93%. This is key. If the Times et al plan to cover hacked Trump emails differently from hacked Clinton emails, fine. But then they owe the public a detailed mea culpa for their conduct in 2016, including transparency over how and when they decided they w … | Continue reading
Looks like I was a bit premature suggesting that the Overton window was moving at the New York Times. We've already established that New York Times and the considerable segment of the establishment press that follows its lead would rather not talk about Donald Trump at all, so it … | Continue reading
There are subtle but definite signs that the internal Overton window at the New York Times may be shifting. A news piece over the weekend almost addressed some of Donald Trump's more erratic behavior and Nicholas Kristof (one of the well-established old guard), in reaction to a p … | Continue reading
From Josh Marshall. The Post’s and the Times‘ pieces on Tim Walz service record are more egregious and spurious than you’re probably able to imagine. The accusations come from two members of his unit who are clearly MAGA partisans and who floated them during his 2022 reelection c … | Continue reading
The only way I'm going to get free of this thread is to stop looking at the New York Times. Remember a few days ago when the New York Times was called out for a grossly misleading headline about the election? Well, here we go again. This example is quite as egregious and it has p … | Continue reading
When Elon Musk promised a big robotaxi reveal, we broke our no predictions rule and suggested the following possibilities: To be blunt, the industry is nowhere near the level of self-driving functionality and Tesla in nowhere near being the leader in this field. Assuming we do no … | Continue reading
The past few weeks, particularly since the debate, I have been collecting a largely anecdotal and entirely unscientific sample of opinions and reactions of Democrats. Part of it comes from conversations with a group of acquaintances that is at least geographically diverse, includ … | Continue reading
Saturday morning Twitter, or at least the corner of twitter that obsesses over politics and political journalism, started furiously exchanging takes triggered by this headline from the online version of the New York Times. Political scientist Amy Fried appears to be the one who g … | Continue reading
Written on 7/29/2024. Lots to criticize here (the embarrassing "code switching" article alone would be good for a couple posts), but I am going to try stay on topic, and use the Harris 2020 headline to illustrate how the NYT is manipulated and how you can spot it. Keep in mind is … | Continue reading
Let's start with representative Kimble. Democrats had better cool their jets and understand that the Trump campaign will not agree to a VP debate until the Democrats announce their VP nominee and Trump decides who he is going to have for his VP nominee. — Rep. Jack Kimble (@RepJa … | Continue reading
Let's start with representative Kimble. Democrats had better cool their jets and understand that the Trump campaign will not agree to a VP debate until the Democrats announce their VP nominee and Trump decides who he is going to have for his VP nominee.— Rep. Jack Kimble (@RepJac … | Continue reading
This is quite the piece of work. Sanctimonious and self-serving. It is such a platonic ideal of New York Times editorial board posturing that, if it were to come in tweet sized bites, you would assume it was actually written by the Pitchbot. Vice President Kamala Harris, now the … | Continue reading
I have to confess that, when I talk about narratives in the press, the term is often inconsistent, ambiguous and inchoate. Along with conventional narrative elements, I might be talking about shared beliefs, attitudes, and all sorts of related concepts. With that caveat out of th … | Continue reading
While the New York Times is not as influential as it used to be, it still has a big direct impact and an even bigger indirect impact on the discourse. Along with a handful of other major players such as Politico, it largely sets the narratives that drive the majority of mainstrea … | Continue reading
When I said Democrats wanted another 1964, that included a desire for the kind campaign that LBJ ran, unapologetically aggressive and most of all, willing to call a spade a spade. That's one reason why this... Before I became vice president and before I was elected as U.S. senato … | Continue reading
[Gelman addresses some similar points here.] I've been meaning to talk about this exchange since it happened, but it's just as well that I waited. Difficult to beat the timing on this one. Fair question. Here's the answer: -@VP defeated an incumbent Democratic DA in SF. Started o … | Continue reading
What follows is a grossly oversimplified mental model based on flawed and arguably past their sale date historical analogies. I'm giving you a lot to criticize, but consistent with the maxim that all models are wrong but some are useful, I found this very useful for organizing my … | Continue reading
Yesterday morning I posted some thoughts on the elite press's fixation on open primaries under the title, "Straussians* of the Center Left" which concluded with... There is an Orwellian freedom-is-slavery quality to arguing that following the will of the party's voters somehow su … | Continue reading
God, the lust for an “open convention”among the punditariat is embarrassing. — Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 21, 2024 Democratic voters chose Harris. While technically there may only be one name on the ballot, when primary voters pull the lever for the incumbent, they … | Continue reading
Don't get me wrong. This is a great strip. But Oumuamua's old news. These days everyone's overreacting to Dyson swarms. (You have to get about halfway through the articles to find out that the researchers have said that these anomalies have more mundane explanations and probably … | Continue reading
Don't get me wrong. This is a great strip.But Oumuamua's old news. These days everyone's overreacting to Dyson swarms.(You have to get about halfway through the articles to find out that the researchers have said that these anomalies have more mundane explanations and probably ar … | Continue reading
Weigel Broadcasting is getting a lot of getting a lot deservedly positive press for its launch of MeTV Toons, the company's latest typically classy over-the-air superstation, Arguably the last of the independents in the television industry, Weigel has managed sixteen years of ext … | Continue reading
[Apologies for going into reruns so heavy this week, but it's another topic people need to be paying attention to this week.] Concern over the white right people not having enough babies has become one of the main issues bringing together the Silicon Valley Billionaire wing and t … | Continue reading
Back in 2021, the national press was desperately trying to convince itself that Trump was losing his hold on the Republican Party. This was behind the wishful analytics that launched a thousand "DeSantis is Dominating a Sinking Trump" stories. It was also why journalists and pund … | Continue reading
Every predictive model relies on at least one of two things. The first is the assumption that patterns and relationships will in the future look basically like they did in the past. The second is first principles, the idea that we have such a trustworthy and complete understandin … | Continue reading
Finally got around to watching this video by physics post-doc Angela Collier, recommended by frequent commenter David, and I'm giving it a strong recommendation as well, albeit with a caveat or two. It is (as mentioned in David's comment) too long, partly because it could do with … | Continue reading
I've been thinking about the similarities between the education reform movement we spent so much time discussing a dozen years ago and the YIMBY movement we've been focusing on for the past few years. I had originally intended on doing a medium length post on the subject, but the … | Continue reading
Even more than usual, the best political commentary over the past few days has been coming from Josh Marshall. Though I want to wait until the dust settles before weighing in on the politics and political journalism of the moment (taking a pause in times of confusion is a good po … | Continue reading
Lots of threads colliding on this one. First off, it's a 1961 documentary about what researchers and technocrats thought the future would be like. Postwar beliefs and attitudes about progress and technology are a long-standing obsession here at the blog. As the title quote indica … | Continue reading
However, the East Solano Plan, as proposed, can offer a model for how to build new cities with the whole ecosystem in mind, intentionally: dense housing, paired with walkable and transit-accessible necessities and amenities like jobs, parks, daycares, shops, and services. — Calif … | Continue reading