Matt Baldwin

Only two of the 11 presidential elections held between 1980 and 2024 were won by a person who wasn’t already a celebrity, or an incumbent president, or an incumbent or former vice president, or the son of a president/vice-president.

Stop telling your children that “anyone can be president.”

Here is the mistake we are making: we keep thinking that national politics in America is something other than a result of celebrity, charisma, and the incumbency and nepotism of elite power.

During the remaining 16 years the office was held by two centrist Democrats whose popular appeal was rooted in charisma; but their national name recognition and support would have been impossible without the support of media elites.

The fact that both celebrity presidents were converted Republicans is curious I think.

During 1/3 of those years the president was the former vice president or the son of a vice president, men whose name recognition stemmed from a coat tails effect: incumbency and legacy/nepotism.

Look at American Presidential Politics 1980-2028 … during fully one third (16/48) of those years the office of president (will have) has been given to a Republican celebrity whose national name recognition stemmed from time spent on “the silver screen.”

You can read these words and agree or disagree, and argue all you want that “freedom of speech” exists. But this is the media equivalent of freedom of speech using one’s own telephone. Reaching a few thousand people with a debatable statement is nothing in a national media landscape.

And though the internet offered the promise of a new era of “free speech,” with expanded reach for the views of non-elite and local interests, again only a handful of national or even global interests control the platforms and algorithms, sculpting exposure and limiting access via search and feed.

Over the past fifty years control over American media was consolidated; once upon a time an expansive landscape of local newspapers, magazines, and radio stations represented the competing interests of a diversity of elites. Now just a handful of national corporations control that entire space.

This is just like the old days!

Getting into office requires support from the masses, but reaching the masses requires the support of the wealthy.

It is the oligarchs controlling media empires who determine what the masses see, and select those who will compete for power, and size the “Overton window” for political ideas.

Pink Levi’s t-shirt and a sparkly fedora

In every recent presidential election, with the exception of two, the candidate who spent the most money won the race. Can you guess which two? And what is the common factor? Think thrice before you answer.

I can’t help but notice how spending even a few minutes on “social media” makes me feel incredibly shitty. Y’all, we need to spend a lot more time walking outside and having real face to face conversations with friends and neighbors. This snarky apocalyptic doom scroll realm is not helping anyone

Half a billion people— the whole of the EU’s citizenry— owe their right not to be casually surveilled en masse by their governments to Karlin’s reporting on Data Retention.

We literally cited it to the court in the DRI data retention case.

And would you believe... that all "religious sounding language" is produced by "secular people"?

A religion writer argues that "religious sounding language" isn't "actually" "religious" because it is produced by "secular people" "with zero ties" to "church" or "theology."

What if I told you that religion itself is nothing more than "religious sounding language" and the social effects thereof?

I mean… depends on what you mean by “nation.” The only thing the Stele proves is that the term was used by the Egyptians as an ethnonym for some group in the Levant.

yep its a bad scene... requires a complete retool of college teaching

Ahh the mythical three year Bachelor’s degree. Surely that will solve the problems

A member of my University’s administration came in to tell us that society has no respect for higher education anymore. I asked him if the administration planned to lower tuition and stop building useless, empty buildings. He informed me that instead we would make four-year college “optional.”

I’m still on Facebook… still go there time to time. I have hundreds of friends who teach college. Right now my FB feed is like a stream of suffering because the friends are grading, and the sheer volume of AI generated work from students is killing their souls. That’s it. That’s the post.

Some mornings more than others I miss #academic #religious-studies. And some mornings I wonder what motivates the field, and where it is going. Curiosity and wonder drove me into it; I do miss focusing my day on understanding stuff. But the futility of it drove me out. What keeps you going, #AcREL?

It’s like in a DC universe movie where the Joker has taken over the city and starts to divvy up the spoils among his henchmen and the also-ran supervillains. Where is Batman when you need him?

There isn’t much to say anymore since it’s been proven that it’s useless talking to these people.

Cryptography … is it tedious or is it glorious ?

Ok if you think statistics are like just so cool then explain the difference between log odds and probability to me in a way that suggests you actually want me to understand

Not gonna lie, a lot of the stuff they talk about in statistical modeling circles kind of feels like BS to me.

What is an example of something that one shouldn’t even try to measure that nevertheless they tried to measure?

I remember them