Social Scientist (Mostly) in Exile

Anyone who has read a biography of General W. T. "Cumpy" Sherman would find this prospect something between bracing and terrifying.

bsky.app/profile/inse...

It is a truism that courage under authoritarianism is the exception, and America is proving more exceptional in many areas of society than I expected.

More willing, certainly, to risk their safety and property in service of those values on the ground.

But do not forget the lawyers litigating against the DoJ despite explicit threats the judges ruling against Trump, or the institutions that have chosen not to kneel.

bsky.app/profile/jame...

We as a society have had to recalibrate our collective assholometer to accommodate the immense public assholishness of Donald Trump.

Scientists fear that some low level assholes previously condemned by society may no longer even be detectable after this recalibration.

bsky.app/profile/atru...

Can I like this more times and lament that the point is not central to how business entity law is taught in law schools?

Note to self: do not rely on ChatGPT to diagnose mental illness or reliably identify fraud.

Remember - Wile E. Coyote will never catch the Road Runner.

He may, however, destroy much of the interstate highway system and kill thousands of innocent people in the attempt, while also triggering a second Great Depression when the ACME stock price bubble finally bursts.

bsky.app/profile/timo...

Is it just a manifestation of pitiful, Gen-X nostalgia that I'm excited about this?

I mean, if it is that's fine with me. I'm just wondering.

bsky.app/profile/bill...

How the Pentagon is Quietly Building Trump’s Concentration Camps SCOOP: A repurposed Navy contract is funneling tens of billions into a "ghost network" of detention camps that can materialize anywhere in America overnight.

"$45 billion [...] converts the U.S. into a “geographic region” for expeditionary military-style detention [...] it is the difference between a temporary surge and a permanent infrastructure."

Concentration camps. If not now, they will be harder to stop later.

migrantinsider.com/p/how-the-pe...

To be fair, they didn't need Harvard's help with that.

bsky.app/profile/karl...

Is it too early to start a draft movement for the 2028 campaign?

bsky.app/profile/kenk...

If a sociologist or historian becomes Professor John Gill from Star Trek, they might just be a fool; if a political scientist does it, they are presumptively a monster.

Which is not to say that political scientists don't become or support evil . . . just that they have no valid intellectual basis to say that they didn't realize what they were doing.

Political scientists (at least comparativists) deal knowingly with evil people as participants in & architects of their institutional objects of study.

And, unlike economists, they generally have little professional interest in morally excusing or valorizing such people.

bsky.app/profile/kevi...

Remember - Wile E. Coyote will never catch the Road Runner.

He may, however, destroy much of the interstate highway system and kill thousands of innocent people in the attempt, while also triggering a second Great Depression when the ACME stock price bubble finally bursts.

bsky.app/profile/timo...

What an odd thing for a United States Deputy Attorney General (and (disputed) Acting Librarian of Congress) to go on TV to say . . .

bsky.app/profile/acyn...

Score another big moral point for the legal profession.

If you're an attorney and put forward bad faith arguments for the administration (or advocated for their claims in legal academia or civil society), I suspect that your professional reputation will not recover.

bsky.app/profile/froo...

Politics in the Anglophone world since 2016 has been the working out of a plot by international pedophile sex traffickers funded and supported by Russia to overthrow democracy and destroy the peaceful and prosperous American-led international order.

I am not a crank.

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Choose the hill you want to die on carefully, because future generations are likely to always associate it with your corpse.

bsky.app/profile/carl...

So wait, does this mean that we actually have to send Spain the Statute of Liberty now?

bsky.app/profile/tama...

I submit to you that the glorious future of space data centers can be treated as somewhat less certain than the prospect of Mexico paying for Donald Trump's border wall.

Testifying to the technical feasibility of "space data centers" (despite problems of energy, latency, cooling, & maintenance) is one Elon Musk, who's been announcing FSD vehicles annually since 2016 & just merged xAI & SpaceX with the objective of building a "sentient sun."

bsky.app/profile/prop...

Trump Drops Demand for Cash From Harvard After Stiff Resistance

I spent [X] years as a PhD student at Harvard and 3 years on the faculty, and I have never said any variation on the words "Go Crimson" unironically until today.

I'm not sending you bastards money, though, so stop asking.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/u...

At some point, you escalate from "sales pitchbook for investors" to "power-mad rantings of a cult leader shortly before distributing Kool-Aid."

I personally have no doubt upon which side of the dichotomy this statement falls.

Donald Trump's lifelong principled devotion to stiffing contractors and not paying staff may not work very well when the job you are contracting out is "regime secret police" with an option to escalate to "death squads."

bsky.app/profile/carc...

*Evil Overlord List, Item 61.

www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlo...

SpaceX acquires xAI, plans 1 million satellite constellation to power it This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission."

"“This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!”

But my Lord, why are you risking everything on such a mad scheme?*

arstechnica.com/space/2026/0...

Which system of robbing one to pay another will be replaced by a much more efficient and streamlined process of robbing them all to pay himself.

And Musk believes that he is going to be able to IPO this shambling mound of opaque obligations and broken fiduciary duties.

And he might be correct.

Sloppy redactions in Epstein documents are traumatizing survivors An abuse survivor whose sensitive personal information was released in latest drop calls the Justice Department’s mishap “profoundly distressing.”

"initial review found more than 40 known or suspected survivors’ identities were revealed in some manner in the files produced on Friday."

But the admin defends the privacy of ICE agents who murder protesters and their right to wear masks to conceal their identities.

www.ms.now/news/sloppy-...