Will Roelofs

Breaking: The US government.

This is huge

Does he understand what a 'pause' is? You're paying a massive amount of taxpayer money to a company owned by a high ranking member of a foreign government that is STILL threatening crippling tariffs and talking about annexation.

To supply critical infrastructure they'll hold over our heads.

😬 this just gets worse and worse.

Some context here:

In the U.S. the tariffs are like one of 5 major political stories this weekend.

In Canada they are everything. Wall to wall coverage. The clicks on our tariff copy are setting records - never seen a reaction like this to a single-day news event.

By continuing to insult Canadians and threaten Canada’s sovereignty and economy, Trump is simply reinforcing the determination of Canadians and their leaders to stand up to him.

Also, notice what’s not in this message: anything about fentanyl, the stated reason for these tariffs.

Got nervous for a second there as Trump turned to “Manifest Destiny” - though now it apparently refers to Mars…

The crypto market keeps proving how broken it is. When a single person—or President—can tank everything in minutes, it’s clear there’s no stability or accountability. This isn’t just about volatility; it’s a system built to fail.

Big if true

Mark Zuckerberg says corporate culture was ‘neutered’ as Meta scraps DEI The move reverses a years-long approach to diversity, equity and inclusion policies that the tech giant once embraced as critical to its success.

Meta is becoming a front line antagonist to the LGBTQ community and they’re utilizing their platform in order to do that.

Using free speech as a shield to harass and antagonize a marginalized community needs to be called what it is, which is harassment.
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

The disconnect between the headline and the main chart in this article is amazing. Gen Z men have preferences indistinguishable from 2 of the other 3 male cohorts and less pro-Trump than the other one.

Fascinating data otherwise, though.

Avoiding the PR Mistakes of the Past America is having a reform moment. According to Pew Research, hundreds of jurisdictions are adopting or considering “alternative” electoral systems. Several began doing so only in the past few yea...

Please have a look at my article on the US party-list debate. It’s part of an excellent symposium on proportional representation. This is intended as a teaching piece, not advocacy. Writing it for non-specialists took a lot of time last summer. Thanks! democracyjournal.org/magazine/70/...

Drones Over Brooklyn, RICO for Cop City Protesters As the Air Force pursues AI-powered drones for combat, the NYPD uses older models to spy on Caribbean Brooklyn. What starts as military tech doesn't stay as military tech. PLUS: Georgia files egregiou...

New FOREVER WARS is about the expansion/normalization of drone surveillance over a big street party and the expansion/normalization of conspiracy and material support charges against resistance to climate disaster and institutional racism. They only *seem* like two random topics…

Moralizing Nostalgia Leads to Bad History – and Helps the Anti-Democratic Right David Brooks’ “How America Got Mean” offers an ahistorical tale that obscures rather than illuminates – and provides fertile ground for a politics of reaction

I wrote about this moralizing nostalgia, so pervasive among the nation’s elites, last week - and why such ahistorical tales not only obscure rather than illuminate the political conflict, but provide fertile ground for a politics of reaction: thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/moralizing...

Richard Hanania @RichardHanania Jimmy Buffett taught Americans to hate their jobs and live for nights and weekends so they could stuff themselves with food and alcohol. But pride in work is what gives Americans purpose and explains our success. Deaths of despair may be considered part of his cultural legacy.

Marx: The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.

Paula Fletcher: "So lucky no one hurt! Thanks so much to ⁦⁦ @Toronto_Fire for quick action last nite after second story under construction collapsed in east end. Now for Buildings Department to find why what should never of happened did happen."

Gotta love Toronto's house flippers

Polarized Speech on Online Platforms While political polarization has increased as measured through surveys, currently we lack comprehensive, longitudinal, and ecologically valid measurement of the polarization of online political...

Polarized Speech on Online Platforms

"Right-leaning users twice as likely to use polarized rhetoric about immigration as left-leaning users while left-leaning users are somewhat more likely to be polarized around healthcare."

Fulay & Roy's (2023) new preprint

Polisky

Classic 2am rushed essay.

This paper presents results from a series of survey experiments testing the effects of various arguments on relative evaluations of ranked-choice (RV) and choose-one ballots. We examine data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), allowing for comparisons across racial groups… Arguments about the impact of electoral systems are found to influence public preferences more than descriptions of those systems' key properties.

New polisky work with J. Anthony, D. Kimball, and J. Scott on attitudes toward electoral reform by partisanship and race: doi.org/10.1080/2156.... Thanks to New America ERRG and the CMPS team.

New study finds that framing pro-environmental policies in ways that appeal to people’s need for closure (e.g., we should tackle climate change otherwise it’ll result in long-term uncertainty) reduces conservatives’ opposition to those polices.

Polisky #socialpsyc 🧪

doi.org/10.1111/asap...