@mfenzl.bsky.social
Asst Professor (tenured) of political science @Maastricht. Previously postdoc in Zurich; PhD in Govt from Essex. Interested in political behaviour, political economy, comparative politics, EP elections, and everything experiments.
We are opening an investigation into Grok because we believe that X may have breached the DSA.
We have seen antisemitic content, non-consensual deepfakes of women, and child sexual abuse material.
In Europe, no company will make money by violating our fundamental rights.
link.europa.eu/Fh8h84
Italian journalists of RAI (the Italian major TV and public station) stopped and threatened by ICE. This should not be the narrative the US government wants to send abroad.
Good news! The OSCE Democracy Office suggests sending a full election observation mission to Hungary, with 200 observers on election day. Highly necessary, considering the charged situation and persistent fairness issues. @europarl.europa.eu should send a mission too!
odihr.osce.org/node/661804
"Minneapolis has become a petri dish for his hardline immigration policies, zeal for militarized law enforcement tactics and attempts to use immigration as a cudgel to crush progressive values in cities that reject his strongman leadership," writes Stephen Collinson | Analysis https://cnn.it/4aWuNJg
Tensions flared in Minneapolis again Thursday in the wake of a second shooting by a federal immigration officer in just one week, as President Donald Trump threatened to invoke a centuries-old law that would allow the deployment of US troops to Minnesota. https://cnn.it/3Nm3sGG
ICE Agents enter Target with no warrant and violently tackle two American citizen employees, evidently because they didn't "look American" enough. (DHS refused to explain their rationale, so we have to guess.)
The injured Americans were later dumped in parking lots miles away in sub-zero weather.
Scenes from a personalist regime: the president’s personal lawyer threatens to arrest the elected leaders of an occupied city
Watch my address on the ongoing federal presence in Minnesota:
youtu.be/fGTsYXBWQgU
What could go wrong?
Greenland PM Jens-Frederik Nielsen:
"If we have to choose between the US & Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU."
"Greenland does not want to be owned by the US. Greenland does not want to be governed by the US" he later added.
@gideonrachman: "what the end of Nato would mean for the US. The continued existence of American military bases in Europe would immediately come into question."
"The arms sales to Europe...would also collapse."
www.ft.com/content/5690...
Literal propaganda for the sitting president
Kristi Noem, while governor of South Dakota, supplemented her roughly $130,000 salary by secretly accepting $80,000 donated to a political nonprofit she was affiliated with, records show.
She never disclosed this income on federal ethics forms.
(Published June 2025)
Rep. Angie Craig: "We were told because this facility is being funding by the 'Big Beautiful Bill,' not the congressional appropriations act, that we would not be allowed to enter the facility. That's complete nonsense ... I informed them they were violating the law. They said they didn't care."
"We are very well aware of the fact that X for Grok is now offering a spicy mode showing explicit sexual content.
This is not spicy. This is illegal. This is appalling. This is disgusting.
I can confirm we are very seriously looking into this matter."
— Spokesperson @thomasregnier.ec.europa.eu
Time to stop writing articles about the "security" or "economic" reasons to capture Greenland, they are irrelevant
🚨We've got two tenure track posts in political philosophy @maastrichtu.bsky.social.🚨 Deadlines are 31 January and 26 February.
#philosophy #academicjobs |
@apaphilosophy.bsky.social
www.academictransfer.com/nl/jobs/3566...
www.academictransfer.com/nl/jobs/3574...
Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).
Hegseth's attack on Mark Kelly reveals a dangerous core belief, @dgraham.bsky.social argues in The Atlantic Daily: Criticizing Trump and defending the rule of law is sedition.
A reminder that the US killed 80 people in Venezuela, and it would be nice if the US media cared enough to think that the life of a grandmother in Caracas whose building is destroyed by a US bomb matters as much as the life of a person in the US.
Congrats again to John Mearsheimer for once again winning the eponymous John J. Mearsheimer Award For Demonstrating To People Who You Really Are:
bsky.app/profile/mcop...
Ladies and gentlemen, the brilliant mind who’s been called the “philosopher behind JD Vance”
Gaza City's landscape was once packed with concrete residential blocks. In the weeks before a ceasefire in October, Israel widely deployed a new weapon: M113 Armoured Personnel Carriers repurposed to carry between 1 and 3 tons of explosives, Reuters found reut.rs/49fw0cd
DOGE was A LOT less likely to cancel contracts from companies that donated money to Republicans than companies that donated to Democrats.
📢 Happy that the Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Communication has just been published ! Have a look at my chapter on “Digital Intra-Party Democracy,” on how digital tools & AI are reshaping internal party processes and political participation. Link to my entry 👉🏻 www.elgaronline.com/display/book...
🫵WE WANT YOU 🎓
Are you interested in political communication, negative campaigning, and social norms? Are you experienced in quantitative methods? Do you have good rain clothes?
Then our postdoc position might be just for you: werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...
Thank you for sharing. Merry Christmas
Not that it will but the willingness of Americans to obey is a very funny contrast with our self-image and should probably prompt some reflection bsky.app/profile/jonf...
Thank you Federica!
✨✨ Grant self-celebration ✨✨
Super happy I have been awarded a NWO XS grant to study how inequality affects political information! The grant will allow me to develop multi-country experiments and better understand how we read political information when our countries get more unequal! Stay tuned 👨💻
Some of the nearly 1,600 people who received clemency from Trump over the Jan. 6 attack have met with Justice Department officials and provided advice on how to retaliate against those who helped put them behind bars, a Reuters investigation finds reut.rs/4qeX9mu