that’s not what they want. what they want is for trans people to be banned from public life.

I am pretty certain Trump's approval would go into freefall if this ends up happening. It's going to be very hard to manufacture consent for this.

And a lot of your favorite thinkers, writers, and leaders decided they didn’t have to care about Black people anymore because it was déclassé, we shouldn’t let that pass without comment.

I’ll repeat anti-woke politics has been an elite backlash dressed in the clothes of populism.

Holy shit it’s not great political strategy to constantly denounce your own voters?!

this is real?

An unnerving hyper-realistic sculpture of a small, hunched, humanoid creature with sparse patches of hair.

rich coming from someone who looks like…. that

If you want to read the transcript of the February 3 hearing where Julie Le had her "this job sucks" meltdown, now you can:

drive.google.com/file/d/1FnY2...

this is the most pissed off judge I've ever come across (not that I come across a lot of them but still)

I think it would be a pretty effective way to make sure noncitizens (even those with legal status) are scared to visit polling stations. But since noncitizens do not actually vote, that wouldn’t be a good strategy for suppressing votes.

came back to apologize for slandering G Elliott Morris! i had mixed him up with someone else in my head. G Elliott Morris is very good about this actually!

yes as individuals but i think their companies generally want similar things (to reduce labor costs and maximize profit margins).

people can report behavior much more accurately than they can report beliefs/motivations, much less the impact those beliefs/motivations might have on their behavior.

you can ask people “would you support X candidate if they agree with you on issue X?” but that’s a much harder question for ppl to know/answer than “who do you plan to vote for?”

doesn’t necessarily predict 2028 voting behavior. it’s much easier to model “who will you vote for?” -> election results bc your asking a very concrete question with a defined outcome. trying to treat issue polls as similarly predictive variables doesn’t work nearly as well

yes, but i think bc some things are easy to model (eg candidate choice) it leads to overconfidence in modeling other things. there’s no model that could accurately predict 2026 support for abolishing ICE based based on 2024 election season immigration issue polls. and 2026 support for abolish ICE

there are ways surveys about those more nuanced/less salient beliefs can be helpful! figuring out the best language to use to explain your position, finding your most receptive/persuadable audiences, etc. but you shouldn’t use a survey to determine what your (candidate) position on an issue is!

questions about more nuanced and/or less strongly held beliefs produce data that 20% of Americans support bombing Agrabah.

survey questions about relatively simple preferences for things that are generally at least a little important to people (e.g. who should be president) produce data that works well in statistical models.

people will choose an answer to a survey question bc you are asking them to answer a survey question. that does not mean that they care about the topic or think about it outside the survey.

as a survey researcher it drives me crazy that all the big names in polling are statisticians.

he writes like the ceo

I think about strategic nonviolence like this: you are trying to defeat the greatest chess grandmaster in world history. The good news is you get to pick the game.

Don’t pick chess.

DHS Hunts Down 67-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Who Criticized Them in Email The Department of Homeland Security is using a little-known tool to go after its critics.

Seems real bad that the end point of ~25 years of War on Terror architecture is an agency of thin-skinned goons who will send armed men to your house if you email the government asking for compassion on behalf of someone else.

newrepublic.com/post/206088/...

Google complies with administrative warrants for Gmail accounts? Is that what this is saying?? That’s horrifying

And if you can't, if your risk tolerance can't allow for that, that's fine

But someone whose risk tolerance does let them do that, with other people whose risk tolerance is the same, all saying "here we are, fuck you" are not fundamentally doing anything wrong?

Professional athletes are being advised not to leave the hotel or go anywhere without their passports while visiting Minnesota.

This is not a country that can safely host international events like the World Cup.

Boycotting is not even a political question anymore. It is a basic issue of safety.

Seeing all the “professional” activists go after Stancil is negatively polarizing me into a stance that Minnesota is winning because it’s normal people rising to the occasion and pushing a lot of activist nonsense out of the way by doing it

I tried to keep my "👏 concert 👏 movies 👏 are 👏 documentaries" rant in check, but the Swiftie in me cannot allow the the claim that Melania had the biggest documentary opening in 10 years to go unanswered when the Eras Tour movie cleared $130 million in three days