@oldstermag.bsky.social in the Sundayprint edition of the @nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/s...
@oldstermag.bsky.social in the Sundayprint edition of the @nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/s...
I find the 'how many weeks will the war go?' questions odd.
The war is going to continue until Iran no longer has the capacity to block shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz or chooses to stop doing so.
Given the economic impact of strait closure, it really cannot end before that.
If you are a client of a firm that folded in this fight, you should know that not only were they morally wrong, but they were also strategically dumb www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...
02.03.2026 19:37 — 👍 1450 🔁 327 💬 31 📌 16President Trump says he is committed to ending an authoritarian regime run by a combination of extremist theocrats and elites intent on enriching themselves.
28.02.2026 17:22 — 👍 46 🔁 8 💬 4 📌 0
15.02.2026 04:16 —
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They talk and act exactly like Nazis in pursuit of the exact same objectives as Nazis using the exact same tactics and rationales as Nazis but it would be wrong to call them Nazis until they grow the little mustache.
15.02.2026 00:43 — 👍 2653 🔁 732 💬 62 📌 8Is it just me or has every day of 2026 been Friday the 13th?
13.02.2026 12:56 — 👍 41 🔁 6 💬 2 📌 0we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad
10.02.2026 20:18 — 👍 31325 🔁 13773 💬 972 📌 1689I fear with all the controversy around the halftime show we lose sight of why we actually have a Super Bowl in the first place, the commercials.
08.02.2026 18:13 — 👍 111 🔁 19 💬 5 📌 1We got fascism and AI instead of replicators and flying cars. I will never forgive technocrats for this
08.02.2026 15:30 — 👍 294 🔁 79 💬 5 📌 7
The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!
This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
Erasing history one agency at a time.
05.02.2026 01:01 — 👍 8 🔁 4 💬 2 📌 0
Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.
![Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime).
We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ybkylffhwhn2an2ic2lxh76k/bafkreifucubotcz54scclzmnpxlnv6x5olf2zb6ow5xufzdyqbflhuzcn4)
Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.
In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.
For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.
Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:
30.01.2026 01:23 — 👍 988 🔁 476 💬 2 📌 0
A page adapted from a document for animal husbandry depicting a cow grazing. Instead of describing the lifecycle of stomach worms, it describes the Right-Wing News Life Cycle.
27.01.2026 17:54 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
ICE has now carried out two summary executions of innocent people in the streets of an American city.
If you work for ICE, there's no denying that's the mission you're supporting now. You don't get to claim in one year or ten or twenty that you didn't know what ICE was doing. You're complicit.
🚨Border Patrol whistleblower outraged by ICE's conduct exposes over a dozen secret ICE programs in documents leaked to me:
www.kenklippenstein.com/p/21-secret-...
We need more, we can't depend on just @scottjshapiro.bsky.social to give the worst fake hot takes.
13.01.2026 19:21 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0That's the good stuff right there.
13.01.2026 17:43 — 👍 30 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 1
semi-regular reminder that ICE was only created in 2003
when you are asked to imagine a world without ICE, you're basically being asked to remember where you were when Lilo & Stitch came out
Enjoyed seeing this wholesome guy just noping all of Fox's leading questions. It was like
Q:Don't you thinks she was wrong?
A: No obviously ICE was wrong
Q: What about the people who shouldn't be here?
A: Obviously they should be here
Q: Anything el--
A: I have a bell!
The Trump administration has repeatedly targeted small and politically disempowered populations—Haitians, Somalis, trans people—in order to justify abuses of power. But its abuses of power are not limited to those communities. What the government can do to the most vulnerable among us, it can also do to you.
The shooting in Minnesota is a reminder that while authoritarian governments may justify abuses of power by directing them at scapegoats or vulnerable populations, the goal is ultimately to deploy them against anyone they wish to www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
08.01.2026 18:45 — 👍 2193 🔁 651 💬 26 📌 21
When The Spectator ran the same lie, and I asked THEM for a correction, their editor said they wouldn’t correct — because Matt Taibbi and the Free Press intern had said these things were true, and that was their sourcing.
Right wing media is about laundering bs for your friends.
And it's punishment, according to Trump. And it's about revenge, according to Trump. And it demonstrates US power, according to Trump.
Trump offers no noble cause, no just reward. He is a cynical warlord unconstrained by even the need to appear decent.
Once again, one of the primary reasons we have arrived at this point (completely out-of-control & unconstitutional abuse of executive power to conduct wildly illegal foreign policy) is that no one, including the most senior people involved, went to jail for the rest of their lives for Iran-Contra.
03.01.2026 14:12 — 👍 3183 🔁 946 💬 70 📌 85
I'll take it...
02.01.2026 19:02 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Brigitte Bardot young.
Brigitte Bardot older.
🚨Black folk, post carefully!🚨
Brigitte Bardot, another notorious white nationalist, has died after living a life of wealth and luxury.
So you know the rules: if you post any of her own words or are in any way insufficiently deferential it will be considered very rude! You could lose your account!🤡
A rendering of Trump's proposed battleship the USS Defiant oddly located in an impossible NYC harbor with the Statue of Liberty and skyline in the background. Text, mockingly adapted from annual appeals against holiday pets, reads, "Please do not buy battleships as gifts. A battleship is not a toy or a seasonal surprise. It's a long-term commitment that takes time,care, patience, and money. Admire battleships, don't gift them."
Remember this holiday season, battleships aren't gifts.
23.12.2025 18:55 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
As i wrote back when this story first broke www.readtpa.com/p/same-scrip...
23.12.2025 13:09 — 👍 1309 🔁 156 💬 5 📌 4
Lots of great ones already called but I'll offer Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) in Cape Fear (1962)
20.12.2025 19:46 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
