Jesse Spafford

What's going on with Labour in the UK seems to support this skepticism: tacking hard to the right on immigration seems to have only added fuel to Reform's fire.

Could embracing anti-immigrant rhetoric be enough, even if low-immigration policies don't placate the electorate? I'm skeptical. If everyone agrees immigrants are a big problem, why settle for the Anti-Immigration Lite? Particularly if that's who has been in charge up to now?

Part of the problem is suggested by the third tweet in the thread: if you have even a few immigrants behaving badly, the far right will seize on those examples and amplify them. Hard to see how you stop this unless you expel basically all immigrants from your country.

Japan has one of the strictest immigration policies in the developed world. If the far right can still make big gains there, this suggests that bringing about low absolute levels of immigration isn't enough to stop the far right.

Not sure what the best way to counter the far right is, but this thread on the rise of Sanseito in Japan suggests to me that the accommodationist approach—i.e., the approach endorsed in the thread—is a dead end.

Jesse Spafford on X: "This expressed sentiment represents a common psychological tendency that causes all sorts of trouble in free-thinking communities (e.g., the rationalist community, the left, etc.): an obsession with finding world-changing, heterodox secrets hidden in obscure books." / X This expressed sentiment represents a common psychological tendency that causes all sorts of trouble in free-thinking communities (e.g., the rationalist community, the left, etc.): an obsession with finding world-changing, heterodox secrets hidden in obscure books.

Here is the ideas hobbyism thread linked to in the third screenshot: x.com/jessespaffor...

With all the details coming out on Cremieux/Jordan Lasker, I’m reminded of an email I wrote to a friend explaining why I’m not interested in the rationalist social movement (wherein Jordan has become an influential figure): x.com/rivertamydn/...

What Can Zohran Accomplish? - Dissent Magazine What distinguishes Zohran Mamdani's socialism is not its aims. It’s his willingness to take seriously the problem of how to get there.

Nice piece discussing the merits, politics, and practical implementation of Zohran's policies: www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

Abrego Garcia describes conditions at CECOT:

“He and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9pm to 6am with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. During this time, he was denied bathroom access and soiled himself.”

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

If you don’t know anything about libertarianism or the Cato Institute, don’t post about them!

Ironically, this post is breaking my brain a little. bsky.app/profile/kend...

Stancilism partly undefeated

These are the kind of arrests that you know are just driving while brown arrests.

Palestine Action to be banned after RAF base break in The home secretary will move to proscribe the Palestine Action group in the coming weeks, the BBC understands.

Pretty grim the extent to which the UK is descending into fascism. The willingness to label non-violent protests “terrorism” is particularly troubling (though this is also just one of many troubling shifts in the country): www.bbc.com/news/article...

Border Patrol truck with a spare tire in the bed

Noticed that ICE in Los Angeles has started carrying spare tires in the bed of their pickups

From a dear comrade who was kind enough to let me share their video.

Veterans stage a sit-in on the US Capitol steps and say, “Military off our streets!” Hell yeah!

it’s cool how the whole trump coalition is a circular firing squad of grievances. this guy thought trump was homophobic/transphobic but mostly joking about the immigration stuff lol

This is exactly what happened with the tariffs: Trump implements a pointless policy based purely on malice and then has to immediately walk it back once he finally realizes what effect the policy will have on his supporters.

This administration is marked by not just its cruelty but its complete inability to craft coherent policies or consider the obvious consequences of those policies. bsky.app/profile/phil...

It seems like the only option left is to show that it implies something significant and surprising! www.cambridge.org/core/books/s... bsky.app/profile/last...

The piece has a lot of one-sided hippie punching, but its ostensible point is that RCV is undemocratic. Yet the arguments for this conclusion are embarrassingly thin, often boiling down to the boomerism of “this isn’t how we did things when I was growing up!”

Striking how so many of the pundits from this cohort have become simultaneously more conservative and less thoughtful: t.co/6vS6KhptpH

It’s been almost eight years since Alex Pareene wrote this piece, and it looks like he was 100% correct: www.splinter.com/charlottesvi... bsky.app/profile/whst...

It’s the biggest story in the country that the media is ignoring - how this explicitly white supremacist and antisemitic ideology has consumed the minds of virtually the entire organized right, from Elon Musk on down

To give you a sense about the ideological drift being caused by Twitter, here's Noah Smith talking in 2021 about the account that would become "i/o" and "avidseries." And then here's a screenshot from today, where Noah Smith has constant friendly interactions with him.

Every day the authoritarianism grows worse - Christopher Rufo calling for the Trump administration to "dispatch unmarked vans to follow key agitators and snatch them from the streets while the media are not looking" christopherrufo.com/p/trump-shou...

This is not a good sign.

It increasingly seems like democracy is on its way out in the US. In which case, the question becomes who ends up in the driver’s seat when things head down that new path.

Elected Dems need to start grappling with the fact that the official GOP position is that elections should be stolen when the opportunity presents itself: bsky.app/profile/eili...

My friend just got arrested blocking the highway in Joshua Tree to try and prevent the Marines from making it to LA