Felipe De La Hoz

I personally don’t love it that getting fired for publicly hurling slurs now seems to be a pretty solid career move for white workers

I am deadly serious when I say that any liberal Project 2028 people should be taking names of the civil servants who go way past their authority to do stuff like this.

That is very much not me saying that normal employees following bad orders should be fired. But there’s a line. This crosses it.

The internet, once heralded as a global domain for connection and the ultimate victory of knowledge-sharing and expertise, has decayed into online spaces controlled by fascist-friendly billionaires, rife with propaganda, where chatbots are driving people to madness and suicide or are pretending to be dead loved ones. It is increasingly difficult not just to parse information but to determine what — and who — is real. These systems have been built on brazen, wholesale theft of the collected output of human endeavor, which is thereby cheapened and discouraged. The platforms promise a world of your own making, friction-free and just pleasant enough, no human connection necessary. We all, deep down, know how that movie ends. Then, of course, there’s Donald Trump. Someone close to me recently used a metaphor that I found very apt, which had to do with cows’ digestive process (their stomachs have four parts). Trump is the omega of this process — the violent id of the country, the vile byproduct of its ambitions processed, regurgitated and reprocessed until what’s left is just ugly mush stripped of all nutrients and complexity. You really can find a reflection of everything that’s rotted through in our culture in the man, whom I don’t even think of so much as a sentient agent as a manifestation of our national filth, acting out of instinct to enrich and pleasure himself and his friends and family. Even in this, he is certainly not original, just another in the long line of repositories around the globe of jingoistic grievance. What’s notable here is that he’s not the leader of El Salvador or Bulgaria but the United States, which had so long fancied itself not just superior but inherently superior, incapable of these base acts of democratic immolation. To our country’s credit, 250 years of relatively peaceful transfers of power and liberal norms (emphasis on relatively) is a significant achievement, and the U.S. spent much of the last century as both global example and s…

Feeling cheery looking in the rearview of this year 🤗 epicenter-nyc.com/the-year-we-...

John Eastman, now best known for his leading role in Trump’s 2020 attempted coup, was like a one-man freak crusader for this for decades. It was laughable, ridiculous. The manufactured “debate” here is completely artificial

As I wrote for @theverge.com when the “anti-Americanism” push was first rolled out, the vagueness is also part of the point, forcing people to way over-correct, in a process that will almost certainly use “AI” for screening

There are a lot of problems with the industry these days; I don’t want to cast any particular aspersions on Zeteo and these two reporters, whose work I respect. These things are just complex and it can be easily to overlook

I mean, they’ve tried pretty blatantly speech-related green card revocation already, but it hasn’t worked out

I understand that these things are confusing but I’m begging non-immigration reporters to take some time parsing the details. This piece refers to them both having visas and being green card holders, but those are *not* the same thing. Green cards aren’t visas and it’s a pretty important distinction

Do they have visas or green cards? The article says both, but those are not the same thing and have very different structures under the law

This would be like an Iran/Contra-level scandal in any other time and administration

The year is 2005. You’re a young student who’d joined the military as your sole shot at an affordable education. Instead, an imbecile president puppeteered by corrupt viziers leans on obviously false pretexts to gin up a war and send you to kill and die for oil abroad

The year is 2025…

It’s also soooo funny that they had to alert the U.S. Navy that she was leaving on a fishing boat so they wouldn’t summarily blow it up, right before she dedicated her peace prize to Donald Trump. Irony has been picked clean by vultures

To be clear I think Maduro is an illegitimate, criminal loser, but it’s crazy to be the Nobel peace laureate out here like “bomb them!”

It’s so funny that Machado did not make it to Oslo in time to actually receive the Nobel peace prize but still made it out to go on a media tour calling for an aggressive right-wing regime to militarily invade her country

It’s kind of crazy how they’re not even striving to shoehorn in some bullshit excuse about lethal drugs or whatever. It’s just, “yeah our military seized this boat because we just figured we wanted to and like maybe it’s contraband oil or something? Who cares, cool video”

Tasteful

Trump says the US has seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela President Donald Trump says the United States has seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela amid mounting tensions with the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

BREAKING: Trump says the U.S. has seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela amid mounting tensions with the Maduro government.

Also a violation of immigration law (the president has no power to just create new visas)

What the fuck! I don’t think I’d ever seen this word used Ina by official communication from any agency, let alone one purporting to justify an arrest

Personally I love that downtown bound trains can be labeled both N and W at the same time and you just have to guess. It’s a fun surprise!

Intellectual Diversity on the Middle East: We heard from many students that an academic perspective that treats Zionism as legitimate is underrepresented in Columbia’s course offerings, compared to a perspective that treats it as illegitimate. The University should work quickly to add more intellectual diversity to these offerings. Columbia lacks full-time tenure line faculty expertise in Middle East history, politics, political economy and policy that is not explicitly anti-Zionist. We recommend the University address this imbalance through the establishment of new chairs at a senior level in Middle East history, politics, political economy and policy.

Columbia's Task Force on Antisemitism has dropped its final report. They're advocating what seems to be affirmative action for Zionist scholarship (resonant with "viewpoint diversity" push for e.g. pro-racism scholarship from anti-higher ed activists)

www.columbia.edu/content/repo...

Think you can do business without giving the president’s family and friends a taste? Think again

U.S. journalists at this point should do trainings with LatAm counterparts to better understand how to cover Ruling Families totally enmeshed in the government and corporate uni-state

The gear? Graflex Speed Graphic with Schneider-Kreuznach 150mm f/5.6 and Catlabs X film 80 in 4x5. The subject? A very interesting tree

No, 4x5 film! So sheet film, but not plates

It was chilly but we suffer for art

Nothing like large format!

Me in an orange shearling jacket crouched beside a tripod in snowy woods. The tripod has a graflex speed graphic 4x5 view camera, and swung over my shoulders are a 35mm rangefinder and a 35mm SLR. I’m wearing brown leather gloves and look decently focused

We out here

Fairly sure this is plainly unlawful. Naturalization isn’t a discretionary grant. When someone has fulfilled the criteria the government is compelled to grant it

Counterpoint:

The Supreme Court lacks the authority to change the text of the Constitution.

So either it affirms the text or (further, and more completely) nukes its authority as Constitutional arbiter.

There’s no third option. Art III (courts) can’t just usurp Art V (amendments).