Julian Sanchez

“Swing voters are just responding to their material conditions” does indeed seem obvious to many people, which is why it’s widely accepted as conventional wisdom DESPITE THERE BEING ESSENTIALLY NO EVIDENCE IT’S TRUE. That’s the whole point: people find it pleasurable to believe and don’t question it

Now That They’re Free, Venezuelan Men Want the World to Know What They Endured in CECOT Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration say they endured months of physical and mental abuse inside a Salvadoran prison. Though happy to be home, they say the fact that they were released…

Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison.

He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him.

I mean, that’s a build choice. But goes back to the original point: RAW incenticivizes optimizing for combat efficacy.

Random D&D kvetch: DMs complain about parties being “murder hoboes” but RAW incentivize that behavior if you’re XP leveling. Butchering a batallion of paladins nets you a fat XP reward; tricking them out of needing to fight with deception and magic does not.

Conservative DEI is orders of magnitude worse than anything any of them have ever accused liberals of doing.

according to roberts, the 2024 presidential election represented an expression of some rousseauean general will, embodied in the person of donald trump. as such, any political unit which deviates from that will is illegitimate and must be disciplined.

A solid litmus test of authoritarianism is if your reaction to not liking the accountability brought by transparency is to get rid of that transparency.

Shaping the narrative of govt & media reports, for example, is what China does.

That’s worse than a third rate country—that’s not a free country.

Discovered today that not everyone considers this nine year old viral tweet a seminal text in the field of social media studies but I do

‘Alligator Alcatraz' detainees on hunger strike for 10th day, protesting conditions One of the detainees, Pedro Hernández, was hospitalized during the strike but continued to refuse food, he said on Thursday.

A hunger strike at a South Florida immigration detention center state officials have named “Alligator Alcatraz” enters its tenth day, as detainees protest what they call inhumane and dangerous living conditions.

The Radio Right by Paul Matzko Libro.fm

Current listening to The Radio Right by @paulmatzko.bsky.social, and his description of the key role conservative broadcasters played easing the transition of segregationist democrats to the GOP hauntingly mirrors how modern right-wing podcasters do the same thing today for transphobic liberals.

America is suffering through an era of rule by jerks who are now inflicting their jerkiness on everyone because they have enough power that we can't ignore or walk away from them anymore.

EXCLUSIVE: Someone Waived Ghislaine Maxwell's Sex Offender Status to Move Her to a Minimum Security Camp in Texas According to sources, you can't move someone with a Public Safety Factor (PSF) designation - which Maxwell had - without waiving it. That's what happened here.

BREAKING: EXCLUSIVE: A higher up at the Bureau of Prisons WAIVED Ghislaine Maxwell's sex offender status in order to transfer her to a minimum security camp in Texas, per source. My latest: www.muellershewrote.com/p/exclusive-...

I'm really curious what kind of standards YouTube sets for the ads it runs, because a shockingly high percentage of the ones I see appear to be some flavor of fraud or snake oil.

Me three months ago:

Trump has lived this odd charmed life where lying & bullshitting constantly has been economically great for him, especially in sectors where creating the perception of value creates actual value. The illusion of being a business genius made him lots of $. But you can't gaslight an entire economy.

Still think the top priority of how Trump has organized his 2nd presidency is to prevent him from having to confront information that could challenge his impulses and biases. Even this BLS thing is probably less about public opinion than about keeping Trump comfortable.

No. Revisions happen all the time as more complete data come in. These are unusually large, but there’s no reason whatever for thinking that’s somehow due to the personal incompetence of the commissioner.

Firms & investors would be crazy to put too much stock in or plan around rosy economic reports when Trump has made clear that reporting bad news accurately gets you fired.

Written about this before, but Trump really doesn't seem to grasp the extent to which chaos and uncertainty are economically harmful, independently of the intrinsic badness of his policies. That goes for "pick this week's tariff rate from a hat" & also for making it impossible to trust gov't data.

Former Obama Official Blasts Trump's Latest Move As 'Preposterously Stupid' "There is absolutely no chance that the BLS commissioner manipulated the jobs and unemployment data to hurt Donald Trump," a former labor official says.

Obama's deputy labor secretary on Trump firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief because he got a bad jobs report: "Preposterously stupid and deeply dangerous for our economy." www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-... via @jamieson.bsky.social

Jen Easterly was a supremely effective leader of CISA and you would be very hard pressed to find anyone who's a more qualified and quietly competent professional than her. This administration and its gormless hacks continue to cut off our collective noses to spite our face.

YouTube video by emptywheel Tulsi Gabbard makes the case for her own firing and Jim Jordan's imprisonment!

My super quick summary of what the latest document dumps from Tulsi are.

I explain why:
1) Tulsi must fire herself
2) Jim Jordan must go to prison
3) John Durham and Chuck Grassley are being dishonest

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr65...

So now, the Trump administration’s primary effort — at which they’re throwing vast federal resources and manpower — to turn the page on the Epstein debacle is to collectively promote a far-right conspiracy theory about how a secret cabal of Trump-loathing deep state subversives and liberal villains…

Dersh has been banging this drum since Trump1 & the really good news is: ostracism works, even on the shameless.

Tons of people miss this--the shameless are hyper-sensitive to stigma.

Civil society should use this free, non-violent tool to punish destructive people a lot more often. It works.

‘Welcome to hell’: Inside the megaprison where the U.S. deported migrants Interviews with 16 former detainees of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center offer the most complete view yet of conditions inside the notorious prison.

One was beaten unconscious. Others were covered in bruises, struggling to walk or vomiting blood. Another said he’d been sexually assaulted.

These are the stories of 16 former detainees who were deported to El Salvador’s mega prison.

Stalin ass shit

It is nontrivially related to all of those things.

Once in a blue moon there’s a plausible story about why they’re wrong! But mostly I’m not that smart and neither are you.

If you think you’ve discovered that the vast majority of specialists on a topic you don’t have a doctorate in are fundamentally wrong in a way that can be explained in a YouTube video, your first instinct should be to ask “what do they know that I don’t that caused them to reject this argument?”

A serious source of sociopolitical pathology is huge numbers of people being terrible Bayesians about expert consensus. Is it possible that your half hour of Googling led you to insights that escaped the vast majority of people who devoted their lives to studying a topic? Sure. Is it likely? No.