The Last Lazy Weekend

"Do you have any plans?" "Not really, just having a lazy weekend."

I cannot count the number of times I've had this conversation. I love lazy weekends. I like sleeping in and just vegging on the couch with my wife more than 99.9% of possible "activities" I could plan out in the wider world. 

This weekend is set to be a wonderful lazy weekend. We have no major tasks to do, no major outings planned. We might grab brunch and drop something off at the post office. I'll watch football. She'll probably play Mario Kart.

On Monday, we go to hospital to begin an induction. When we return, we'll have a baby. He will bring joy, and laughter, and growth, and no doubt many sleepless nights.

But I suspect we won't be having any lazy weekends for a while.

Goodbye, lazy weekend. You will be missed.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXXIII: Los Angeles Wildfires

The raging fires that have torn through the Los Angeles area are gripping the world's attention. Natural disasters like these don't typically have a direct culprit to blame, though of course, in a more abstract sense changing weather patterns brought on by global climate change play a role.

Or, you know, it's a Jew thing.

Jewish control over the weather is well-known trope to readers of this series, and few can forget congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene contributing "Jewish space lasers" to the antisemitic dictionary. But a variety of far-left groups now are making their own entry into the genre by tying the fires to America's support for Israel. For some, the rhetoric seems to be one of divine retribution, akin to how Mike Pence thinks of hurricanes ("When US taxes go to burning people alive in Gaza, we can’t be surprised when those fires come home."). Others play the game where America's foreign aid budget is presented as dollars out of hard-working American pockets, or, in this case, the Los Angeles Fire Department budget -- never mind that those pots of money have nothing to do with one another and in any event the widespread meme that the LAFD faced a draconian budget cut last year appears to be false (the fire budget is actually $53 million more than it was last year, but if I fact-checked every subclaim in this series I'd never get any sleep at all).

More broadly, I was just thinking about how the immediate right-wing pivot to blame the fires on "DEI" (by which they mean, the fire department has women in its leadership) reminded me of classic antisemitic conspiracy theorizing -- the immediate impulse to find the Jewish connection and shriek "this explains everything!" Whereas some pin every bad thing in the world on "the Jews", others do the exact same thing but plug in "diversity" or some other analogous buzzword as their "explanation of first, middle, and last resort". Remember when the Wall Street Journal blamed the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank on the fact that it had one (one!) Black director in its board? It's the same play. The conspiracy theory "explains everything" because it always "explains everything", because that what a conspiracy theory is -- it is a way to immediately, reflexively, and automatically explain anything and everything by reference to whatever it is you hate.

The "wildfires are caused by DEI" takes the rhythm of an antisemitic conspiracy theory and applies it to a new context. But while I certainly enjoyed basking in that familiarity, it is always reassuring to know that someone would go the OG route and blame the Jews and Jewish institutions directly. Not that I had any doubt it would go that way -- it always does, sooner or later.

A Lawsuit is Not a Press Release

If I were a judge, I think I'd be a lot more sanctions-happy than most judges.

Bad legal arguments bother me. And more specifically, lawsuits that are filed not because there's an actual colorable legal claim, but as a form of press release -- a ritualized airing of grievance trying to drape itself in the seriousness of a lawsuit -- strike me as intolerably obnoxious and abusive. Many defamation suits fit this profile (who needs SLAPP when there's Rule 11?), but there are others. And too often I see people cheer these suits (at least when they fit the right ideological profile), and I hate to see it -- these lawsuits serve no purpose other than to allow gloryhounds to chest-thump their virtue while wasting time and resources, not just of the judiciary, but of the very social movement they claim to be advocating for.

One example is the "class action" lawsuit recently filed against two Bay Area Democratic Representatives claiming that their votes in favor of aid to Israel caused emotional distress to constituents who believe that Israel's conduct in the Gaza war constitutes a genocide. As a matter of law, the suit is patently frivolous -- it is obviously foreclosed by the Speech and Debate Clause, and a moment's reflection should make anyone with half a brain recognize that enabling disappointed constituents to sue their representatives for their congressional votes is a capital-B Bad Idea. The suit has no chance of succeeding and serves no purpose other than to generate headlines, and that is not the purpose of the judiciary. I don't know if the named plaintiffs are willing participants in the charade or are genuinely deluded into thinking there is valid legal claim here, but if it's the latter, then they're being exploited in a terribly grotesque fashion. Either way, I hope the lawyers who filed it are sanctioned.

But lest anyone get too smug, this is not a sin with any particular ideological proclivity. A federal court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania just dismissed a lawsuit filed against Haverford College alleging a hostile environment against Jews on campus. The dismissal was based on the fact that the pleadings were, in so many words, a sustained rant rather than an attempt to communicate a cohesive legal complaint.

At this stage, a court would typically review the relevant facts. I cannot cogently do so here due to the sprawling and disorganized character of Plaintiffs' Amended Complaint, which appears to detail every frustration and disagreement of Jewish students and faculty that has occurred at Haverford over the last year. It spills pages of ink on lengthy frolics about events on other college campuses and about ideological debates. Rather than isolating instances of harassment and logically relating them to the elements of a hostile environment claim, Plaintiffs set forth a running list of grievances that reads more as an opinion editorial than it does a legal complaint.

I am familiar with this sort of "legal" writing, and I am glad to see a judge call it for what it is. It's written by lawyers who forget that their job is to craft a legal complaint and instead view the courts as a suitably august forum for airing every point of grievance and riding every ideological hobbyhorse they've ever encountered. In some ways, the Haverford case is worse than that Bay Area one, because in the former the judge agreed that some of the allegations might have presented cognizable claims under Title VI but couldn't move forward on them because they were buried inside such an amalgam of irrelevant ranting that they failed to present an actionable complaint. The (potentially) valid grievances of the Jewish plaintiffs at Haverford were, in effect, sacrificed so that their lawyers could play soapbox orator. They treated the lawsuit as one big press release, and everybody -- their clients included -- is worse for it.

The lawyers suing Haverford aren't stupid, at least in the traditional sense (they attended Harvard and U. Chicago Law).* But they decided that this issue was too important for them to act as lawyers, and instead decided to act as demagogues. That's despicable. It's an abuse of the judicial process, it's unfair to Haverford College, and it disserves the Jewish community they nominally purport to defend.

* They literally just took down the link to the bios of all their attorneys,

Loving the Sinner

When someone commits a crime, or otherwise breaches the moral code, there are expanding circles of victimhood.

First and foremost, there is the actual, literal victim -- the person robbed or cheated or abused -- followed by the victim's family and loved ones.

But I think after that, the persons hurt most, and hurt in a distinctive and devastating way, are the perpetrator's family.

When someone is arrested for a serious crime, it is normal for the media to seek commit from the perp's loved ones. On occasion, you'll see someone seize upon a letter written by perpetrator's mother to the judge pleading for clemency, juxtaposing the letter's description of the perp (which is, of course, written through the lens of parental love) against the usually vicious facts of the underlying offense. How out-of-touch, how classless, how blind.

For my part though, I have no idea what we expect them to say. The position they are in seems unbearably cruel, and I hate -- hate -- the people who treat the family as an easy target. It is of course true that a serious crime doesn't become less serious because a person you love committed it. And yet, it strikes me as unreasonable to demand a parent partake in what would otherwise be the obvious, perhaps even obligatory, practice of condemnation. In concept perhaps there is a tightrope one can walk of still expressing love while in no way diminishing the underlying offense; in practice I doubt it's possible to anyone's satisfaction. A columnist who concentrates on a convicted arsonist's volunteer work and urges others to see him in the light may be guilty of himpathy; the arsonist's father is not. The acquaintance who remains friends with the serial catfisher may be judged harshly for not cutting someone who hurts others out of his life; the swindler's mother should not be. This doesn't mean we abide by the parental perspective -- we know full well it is skewed -- but they're not wrong to hold it. They are in a fundamentally unfair and cruel position; the best thing we can do is just ignore them.

And that, too, is part of the cruelty. At least the primary victims have an obvious claim to our empathy, care, and concern. The perpetrator's family has, at best, a much shakier claim to emotional support. The fact that this order of prioritization is obviously justified -- of course we care more about the immediate circle of victims than we do about the feelings of the perpetrator's family -- in some sense compounds the wound; they don't even have the salve of knowing that their social abandonment is unjust. Or worse -- we know families come in for attack by people who think they must in some way be culpable too, looking for ways to accommodate a thirst for retribution that cannot be solely slaked on the body of the actual wrongdoer. They are blamed for not anticipating the misconduct, or they are blamed for somehow facilitating it, or they are blamed for not cutting loose the bad guy once his crimes became clear. 

Of course, occasionally the family really will have been complicit in a direct way (the parents who give their obviously disturbed teenager free access to firearms, for instance). But more often than not, they are victims who are not treated as victims. And I suspect there is, lying underneath everything else, a feeling of betrayal -- surely, they had to know that doing these dreadful things would hurt us; was our relationship of love not enough of a reason to refrain? What a terrible thought, and how much more terrible to have to endure it alone.

I'm soon going to start raising a son. I hope he turns out to be kind and smart and generous and every other quality one would hope to have in a person. I hope that for all the obvious reasons (I'd hope that everyone turns out that way!), but also for the more (selfish?) reason that if he doesn't turn out that way it would be heartbreaking, and I don't know what I would do. Brining a child into the world means committing to unconditionally love someone you haven't even met yet -- that is a terrifying vulnerability, when you think about it. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of the time it goes fine -- most people, whatever foibles and missteps they might make as part of a normal human existence, don't do anything so egregious as to provoke this sort of crisis. But if it goes wrong, boy does it go wrong.

As one moves away from the most intimate circles -- parents, spouses, siblings -- the obligation to be clear-eyed about the wrong waxes, while the indulgence we might concede for one who loves the perpetrator probably fades. But in any relationship of love -- familial, romantic, platonic, even political -- it hurts when someone or something you love does something objectively cruel, shameful, or even monstrous. It hurts because it is wrong, and it hurts because nobody's empathic attention will be focused on you, and it hurts because you know at some level that this loneliness and abandonment isn't even unjust, and it hurts because all of that means that even trying to articulate this sense of loneliness and abandonment and pain is inevitably going to be viewed as trying to wrongfully redirect care and concern from those who need and deserve it more.

What a terrible cruelty to endure.

Deepest Darkness

In the latest blow to the Washington Post's dying credibility, editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes has resigned after management killed a cartoon she was slated to run depicting various tech moguls (including WaPo and Amazon.com owner Jeff Bezos) prostrating themselves before Donald Trump. Telnaes says it is the first time one of her cartoons was killed because of its point of view in her tenure. The official Post line -- that they had already published or planned to publish two columns on the subject, and so Telnaes' cartoon was redundant -- is even more pathetic than the last defense they gave of obvious political interference in the editorial team's work (two whole columns!).

As Dell Cameron writes, what we're seeing now is a pattern of interference, which in turn amply justifies readers assuming the worst in future incidents -- and that sort of skepticism is toxic to a healthy relationship between a newspaper and the public it serves. Cameron suggests that there may need to be a "mutiny" in the Post in order to restore this confidence. I've written before about how these evermore overt acts of right-wing pandering by media leaders could finally disabuse the journalistic community of their illusion that "everyone" (who matters) already knows and agrees with liberal perspectives (so their main goal is not to present the truth but rather to present "the other side" -- i.e., the conservative view). It hasn't happened yet, but the stress has to eventually reach a breaking point.

Right?

Say the Magic Words

The current flap on Bluesky comes from an interview with Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, specifically the following passage:

But I think this question of language goes pretty deep. And it goes to not just being careful not to say things that are egregiously weird sounding, but it’s also the way we interact with advocacy groups. I remember saying I was for a cessation of hostilities in Israel and Palestine. And people said why don’t you say ceasefire? I’m thinking, that’s literally the same thing. I remember saying I was for a big, bold climate bill. And someone said why don’t you say Green New Deal? And this idea that there are magic words that we must be forced to say defines progressivism and political courage by essentially saying whatever a bunch of activists want us to say, as opposed to doing the thing. And I think that there are a bunch of people who see what we’re doing as performative, for that exact reason. But it’s also just alienating. This magic words thing has to go away.

He's getting dunked on for this, specifically by people mocking the notion that "ceasefire" is an example of "egregiously weird" language.

I'm actually going to come to Schatz's defense here, though, because I think he's being misunderstood, and I don't think he's saying that the word "ceasefire" is an example of "egregiously weird" language (which it obviously isn't). Rather, Schatz is saying that there is a different, additional problem on top of the use of weird terms -- the problem where (some) activists insist that if you don't use the exact term they use, you're an enemy, even if substantively you're supporting the same things.

This is what the "ceasefire" example is all about. Schatz calls for a "cessation of hostilities". Some activists get mad at him because it doesn't use the particular word "ceasefire". And Schatz's point is that's a really dumb thing to get mad about, when he supports the same basic substance contained in the word "ceasefire", just expressed in slightly different language. It would also, I think, be dumb for someone who supported "cessation of hostilities" to get mad at someone else who is calling for a "ceasefire", and to insist that they should say "cessation of hostilities" instead. They're saying the same thing, so who cares about minor differences in phraseology! It's sort of the opposite of the "egregiously weird" critique -- here the words really don't (or shouldn't) matter, but people act as if they're everything and the policy content is nothing. If you don't utter the magic words, it doesn't matter if you're in agreement on the actual substantive policy question. That sort of behavior is Schatz suggests, reflective of persons who think it's more important to "perform" being better than others (which they demonstrate by use of the "magic words", and by contrasting themselves with those who don't) than it is about people looking to build power. It is toxic, and it is self-destructive.

To be sure, the fact that this criticism is in many ways the opposite of the "weird language" criticism suggests that we're going to encounter line-drawing problems. Sometimes the use of different words meaning the same thing is immaterial, and we should ignore it; other times certain words are deemed to be outright "weird" or alienating and we should tamp down on them. Which is which? The example Schatz offers in the previous paragraph, of saying "center" (as in "I’m going to center the needs of the working class."), strikes me as thin gruel -- is that really that weird or esoteric? "Latinx" is another popular one Schatz suggests, and maybe it's more clearly on the esoteric side of the line; but again, one could easily say "I use 'Latino', you use 'Latinx', but we're clearly talking about the same damn thing so why pitch a fit over the exact language being used?"

Nonetheless, the underlying point is reasonable enough. When it comes to language, and different words that express the same or similar ideas, we should ask ourselves what are the actual stakes of using term X vs. Y. Sometimes, there's a real difference -- either because the underlying idea really is manifestly different, or because one set of words really is alienating or esoteric or aimed only at a rarefied elite. But most of the time, it really doesn't matter that much, and we shouldn't treat it as mattering that much -- certainly, not so much as to generate a moralized critique. "Green New Deal" might or might not be good message discipline, but if you want a big bold climate bill, and a politician supports a big bold climate bill, don't act like they don't actually support a big bold climate bill if the only basis for your skepticism is that they don't say the magic words "Green New Deal." And likewise with "ceasefire" -- there's nothing wrong with the word "ceasefire", and I don't take Schatz to be saying otherwise, but what he is saying is that if someone supports the underlying position of a "ceasefire" but for whatever reason uses slightly different language to express his view, maybe take the W rather than declare that it doesn't count unless he uses the magic word.

Out/In List: 2024-25

The other Debate Link tradition each year: the out/in list!

Out                                                    In

Biden                                                Trump

Vote Joy                                            Existential dread

DINKing                                           Childcare expenses

Polio vaccines                                   Polio

Justice Thomas                                  Justice Ho

Restore Roe                                       Restore Comstock

Major questions doctrine                  Unitary Executive

Reducing inflation                             Raising tariffs

Vice President Vance                         Co-President Musk

Bluesky is an echo chamber              X's MAGA civil war

Pac-2                                                   Pac-???

Bibi is a goner                                    Bibi somehow survives again

ADL leads the resistance                   ADL leads the acquiescence

Jews blamed for Trump losing          Jews blamed for Trump winning

“Democracy dies in darkness”          "AI bias meters"

Free speech absolutism                      Overturn NY Times v. Sullivan

January 6 was an insurrection            January 6 pardons

“Heterodox” thinkers                         Führerprinzip

Susan Collins’ furrowed brow            Susan Collins doesn't bother

I'd say I hope you're "in", but given the contents of that column that seems mean. So I'll just wish everyone the best of luck next year -- we'll need it.

New Year's Resolutions 2025

Who's ready for New Year's Resolutions? 

Before we begin, we as always recap how I did with last year's resolutions:

Met: 1, 2 (finally!), 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13

Missed: 12

Pick 'em: 11 (does avocado count?), 14 (stir-fry isn't exactly "new", but its position was solidified this year).

Wow -- if I didn't know better, I'd almost think 2024 was a good year! Now, what to strive for in 2025?

* * *

1) Bring a healthy baby boy into the world.

2) Get said baby boy his polio vaccine, and all other recommended* vaccinations (*RFK Jr. not a valid source for recommendations).

3) Submit my book manuscript.

4) Travel abroad.

5) Take baby to some sort of event at our synagogue.

6) Have accepted for publication at least one academic article (book does not count).

7) Publish at least one non-academic (popular) article.

8) Win a lot at a "real" art auction (i.e., not eBay or Goodwill).

9) Frame all or most of my art collection.

10) Take and share an appropriate amount of pictures and videos of baby's growth and various milestones.

11) Learn to swaddle the baby, preferably before he grows too big to swaddle.

12) By the end of the year, sleep adequately (I accept the first half of the year will be a lost cause).

13) Be financially secure after adjusting for new child-related expenses.

14) See friends who don't live in Portland.

15) Survive one year of fascist leadership.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXXII: Inadequate Linux Education

The whole premise of "Things People Blame the Jews For" is that Jews are blamed for anything and everything, no matter how absurd. Yet even though I created the series, I never fully comprehended the true scope of "no matter how absurd". I thought I did, but I didn't. After all, I was always able to make a snarky comment or bit of wry commentary, an endeavor which necessarily required being able to draw some connection between what Jews were being blamed for and some attribute of the real world. The connection might be tenuous or even invented, but it was there, and I could follow the thread.

Today, I may have been bested, for I have encountered a specimen on Bluesky that I really just have no comment on. I cannot make heads or tails of it. It transcends the series. It has defeated me. Behold:

"Says it all really." Indeed, it does.

This Is Your Grandpa's Democratic Party(?)

"Democrats abandoned ordinary Americans."

It's not true. But it's stuck, like a craw in the mouth of the American voter (and the American pundit). And the big question amongst Democratic strategists is how to dislodge it.

My latest idea, in my ongoing quest to become the Democratic Party's Francis Coppola, is to explicitly run with a narrative that says "yes, this is your Grandfather's Democratic Party" -- directly tying oneself to JFK and the New Deal and the civil rights era and that whole period where (supposedly) the Democratic Party was the party of ordinary Americans. Cut to lines about:

• Defending labor unions.
• Bringing back honest, well-paying jobs that can support your family.
• Taking on the billionaires robbing our democracy.
• Protecting civil rights.
• Restoring a women's right to choose.

All intercut with images of modern workers interspersed with older imagery (the March on Selma, men on girders building skyscrapers, etc.) that evokes the good old days.

What's the point of the ad? Basically, it's to create a permission structure for people who have -- for whatever reason -- internalized the narrative of "the party left me" to tell themselves things have changed again. They're not voting for the modern Democratic Party that Fox News has created for them in their minds over the past few years (latte-sipping coastal elites blah blah blah), they're voting for the mythologized Democratic Party of yesteryear that the Fox News caricature is tacitly juxtaposed against -- the party of the New Deal and of JFK, the party that was a working-class party, the party that built things and fought for everyday Americans.

"Mythologized" is important. Obviously, in reality the Democratic Party of that era (or any era) was not some clarion beacon of the worker's voice; nor was it some uncomplicated bastion of civil rights and women's rights advocacy. I know that, you know that. I also know that "ordinary Americans" is a loaded term, that the past wasn't actually that great for a whole lot of people, and so on.

But we're not writing a history paper here, we're dealing with a mood, and that mood is not especially connected to historical reality. How many times have you heard someone say that the current Democratic Party "just keeps moving to the right" (when it is beyond obvious that the Biden administration is the most progressive Democratic administration in my lifetime)? Objectively, it is impossible to defend the notion that the Democratic Party leadership is more conservative now than it was during the Clinton administration. In reality, making a show of affirming people who think "well, back then Democrats were fighting for me" is worth playing a bit of make-believe. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and just the gesture of "this is a change in a direction that makes you feel fuzzy" can have an outsized impact. The past wasn't actually that great, and modern changes are good actually. But if you can make people feel as if the things we're pulling for now are simply a restoration of the hazy memories they have when things were inchoately "better" (or "less complicated" or "less divided" or whatever), you're in a very good position.

I'm not saying the idea is perfect. In particular, even as a subversion of the "not your grandpa's ..." frame, the tagline still is a rough one at a time when many people are aggrieved at the "gerontocracy" in American politics. So workshop the hell out of this. I'm not prideful about it. But I think there's something here. The great insight of the contemporary conservative movement is in how they manage to fuse their present-day reactionary values as if there were simply a restoration of the greatness of the founders (I read one constitutional commentator describe originalism as "ventriloquizing the present through the past"). Democrats can do it too -- and as the Republican Party falls deeper and deeper into the grip of billionaire oligarchs and weird paranoid extremists, there's an opening here we can and should exploit.

Learning the Right Wrong Lessons, Part II

The major pivot point in Joe Biden's term in office did not stem from inflation or the war in Gaza. It came following his withdrawal from Afghanistan. That decision was marked by a few key characteristics:

1. It was the right call: we weren't accomplishing anything in Afghanistan, and nobody had a better plan to turn things around other than "stay for six more months, and then six more months after that."
2. It was always going to be bumpy, leaving ample attack avenues open for political opponents (and the media) to exploit; and
3. It was vocally demanded by the American left.

Three of Biden's predecessors over a twenty year period had stayed in Afghanistan, perhaps not believing the first point, perhaps fearing the second. Biden was the one who actually followed through and did the right thing, hoping that the progressive actors who enlivened the third point would rise to his defense to counteract the second.

It didn't happen. Biden withdrew, got absolutely pilloried for it in the press, received essentially no credit for it from the left, and to be honest his presidential tenure never recovered. As I and many others observed, any rational political observer knew what lesson to draw from the ordeal, and it's not a good one.

I think we're going through the same scenario with Biden's recent commutation wave targeting persons who were already moved into home confinement during COVID. After the Hunter Biden pardon, there were absolutely valid questions about how the clemency power was being used, and one narrative many progressives rapidly coalesced on was that if Biden is going to pardon his own son, he better use it to the benefit of ordinary, non-connected inmates in the clutches of prison system. Much like the Afghanistan withdrawal, this was a vocal demand of the left, and much like the Afghanistan withdrawal it was essentially assured that any large-scale deployment of the clemency power would yield something that political opponents could exploit. Contrary to the idyll fantasies in certain quarter, most people in prison have indeed done something wrong, and any political action to benefit the likes of "them" is a ripe avenue for political attack. This is one reason why criminal justice reform is hard.

Anyway, Biden issues a commutation order for roughly 1500 people, the largest one-day usage of the clemency power in American history. One of the beneficiaries was the notorious "kids for cash" judge in Pennsylvania, Michael Conahan. People -- including liberals who a moment earlier were demanding expansive use of the clemency power -- went ballistic. And Biden got essentially got no credit.

It goes without saying that the Conahan committed an absolutely heinous crime. But it is a testament to how bad the media culture is around this issue that when I first heard about Biden's decision I was misled twice. First I thought it was the case that Biden pardoned Conahan; he didn't, the sentence was commuted. Then I got the impression that the commutation meant that the judge would serve a negligible time in jail (time is meaningless to me right now, I had absolutely no sense of when the judge committed his crimes or was convicted and sentenced). Wrong again: Conahan was sentenced to seventeen years in prison, and this commutation occurred after he served fourteen.

Could one say that the Biden administration could have reviewed the commutations more closely to make sure a guy like this wasn't included? Perhaps -- but I'd level two notes of caution. First, if it wasn't him, odds are it'd be someone else. Again, most people in federal prison did something to hurt someone. If you support using clemency on a wide scale, you have to be willing to take that hit. Second, there is an inherent incompatibility between doing clemency at scale and adding a bunch of extra layers of individualized review. If we're talking a dozen or so people or so, it's probably possible to conduct a timely review of each of their records in depth that will assure oneself that there's nothing there that will trigger major political blowback. When we're talking about thousands of people at once, that sort of review isn't feasible without gumming up the works indefinitely. So if you think the problems in our carceral system are not just a few idiosyncratic cases of unusually sympathetic people who were caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time, but is systemic, then you need to allow for reform mechanisms that are systemic in nature, and that necessarily means they're not going to be perfectly attentive to the particularities of every inmate's case.

Here, the reason that Conahan received a commutation wasn't because someone looked at his particular case file and said "this person is especially worthy of executive grace." There was rather a broad metric the Biden administration was using -- people who had already served most of their sentences, were medically vulnerable in prison, had not been convicted of violent or sexual offenses, and who had already been transferred into home confinement -- and this man was one of 1500 or so who met the criteria. That's a reasonable metric, and if you're telling me that it's essential to add more bureaucratic barriers to the clemency process -- and, in essence, make it much, much harder to issue clemency at scale -- in order to ensure that Michael Conahan serves seventeen years in prison instead of fourteen, then I say your priorities are out of order.

But the reality is that, like with Afghanistan, any observer will see what Joe Biden did here, see the reaction, see the anemic defense he received even from many of those who demanded action just like this, and learn the only rational lesson there is to learn: stay away from criminal justice reform. Be stingy with the clemency power. Keep more people in prison for longer. That's the lesson, and I'm sure every savvy Democratic politico is internalizing it.

Racist Idiots Continue To Be Mad That Caitlin Clark Is Not Racist

It's an exaggeration to say that conservatives only care about women's sports when it gives them an excuse to be transphobic. Sometimes they care about women's sports in order to be racist too.

For example, every once in a while, idiots try to conscript Caitlin Clark into racism and then get really mad that she doesn't participate.

In college, I remember a blowup some people had over Angel Reese doing some trash talking against Clark when LSU beat Iowa in the national championship. Clark, of course, is no stranger to trash talk herself, and people rightfully understood the pearl-clutching on her behalf as highly racialized in character. But the "controversy" was entirely on the outside; Clark gave absolutely no indication that she couldn't take what she dished out. Her view was always that trash talk and the like is part of the game, whether she's on the giving or the receiving end. Racists wanted to be racist on Clark's behalf, Clark did not bite, and it was pretty clear that the folks who rushed to "defend" her resented her for not obliging.

The other day we witnessed another iteration of this, after Time Magazine mentioned ongoing frustration by some Black WNBA players (h/t: Kevin Drum) who think they're persistently overlooked because of race (and that, in turn, Clark's popularity stems in part from the "great white savior" narrative). Clark was asked about the issue, and gave a perfectly reasonable answer about the importance of celebrating and uplifting the many Black players who have contributed immeasurably to the league's success:

“I want to say I’ve earned every single thing, but as a white person, there is privilege,” says Clark. “A lot of those players in the league that have been really good have been Black players. This league has kind of been built on them. The more we can appreciate that, highlight that, talk about that, and then continue to have brands and companies invest in those players that have made this league incredible, I think it’s very important. I have to continue to try to change that. The more we can elevate Black women, that’s going to be a beautiful thing.”

A good answer, and predictably, some people went ballistic over it:

Well, it happened. Caitlin Clark finally bent the knee to the insufferable, gaslighting, disgusting, race-baiting woke mob.... Anyway, Clark got her roses, and then proceeded to bend the knee to the mob.... Caitlin Clark bends the knee to an invisible mob.... Why did the best player in the WNBA — by a laughably wide margin — crumble like a cheap tent?

Now we can concentrate on how pathetic this whine is. But I want to flag something specific, as someone who actually did follow the WNBA season this year: Caitlin Clark is not, in fact, the best player in the WNBA. The best player in the WNBA, by a laughably wide margin, is A'ja Wilson. This is no knock on Clark, who is an outstanding player and was well-deserving of rookie of the year. But let's look at the stat lines this season (all stats on a per game basis):

• Wilson: 26.9 points, .518 FG%,11.9 rebounds, 2.3 assists, 1.8 steals, 2.6 blocks, 1.3 turnovers
• Clark: 19.2 points, .417 FG%, 5.7 rebounds, 8.4 assists, 1.3 steals, 0.7 blocks, 5.6 turnovers

With all respect to Clark, this is a blowout. Wilson averaged a double-double on the season. She led the league in blocks; she set an all-time league record in points per game. She led Clark in every statistical category but assists (unsurprising, since Clark is a guard and Wilson is a center). That's why Wilson won the MVP by a unanimous vote -- only the second time that's occurred in WNBA history.

Again, this is not at all to dismiss Clark as anything other than an all-star. She had a great rookie season. She did a fantastic job leading the hitherto sad sack Indiana Fever to the playoffs, overcoming a dismal season start (where we saw Clark's own adjustment pains getting used to playing at the highest level of the sport). Her own rookie of the year honors, and fourth place finish in MVP voting, were also very well-deserved. And she plays a exciting style of basketball that's a ton of fun to watch -- I know full well that  a Caitlin Clark game is must-see TV.

Obviously, at one level this only validates the complaint by Wilson and others regarding how they're overlooked for clearly racist reasons. But I also raise this because the sort of racist morons out here demanding Caitlin Clark be racist also, very clearly, pay absolutely zero attention to the WNBA -- Caitlin Clark included -- for any reason other than looking for an excuse to be racist. They know nothing about the game other than that it might provide a vector for various racist and transphobic projections. So it's no surprise that when the game and the players don't indulge them in their bigotry, they throw a tantrum. It's literally the only reason they care about women's sports.

With Great Blocking Power ....

As everyone knows, one of the main differences between Bluesky and even "old Twitter" is the blocking culture. One of my favorite stories from when I first joined Bluesky came in the wake of a series of negative interactions with a semi-prominent journalist figure. I considered blocking her but then I thought "no -- while this wasn't pleasant, there was nothing abusive here, so I'm going to be better than that." The next morning I woke up and discovered ... she had blocked me! Moral of the story: block first. At least that way you get the satisfaction.

The block-happy culture of Bluesky has led to a lot of chatter about Bluesky turning into an "echo chamber" -- an accusation which, ironically enough, is one of the fastest ways to get yourself blocked on Bluesky. For my part, I think the echo chamber complaint is overblown (in part because very often what we tell ourselves is "exposure to diverse views" actually is a way to reaffirm "wow, those people are maniacs"). But I do think that it is important to start thinking about best blocking practices in a informational system where "block early, block often" is normal and not frowned upon.

Take block lists, for example. These can be valuable tools to ramp up blocking of entire suites of bad actors quickly. But they're also easily abused. I've seen reports of trolls and other bad actors setting up block lists seeded with an assortment of the "usual suspect" controversial accounts and then, once people adopt them, adding in (say) trans rights activists. If you're not paying attention to who is curating the lists, it is easy to get taken in by that sort of move. That doesn't mean "don't use block lists", it just means be mindful when and how you use them. The mantra of "block early, block often" shouldn't be used to disavow one's own responsibility over the choices you make -- rather, it should accentuate it.

A similar concern attaches to "secondary" block lists -- that is, those populated not by the primary bad actors, but by people who follow those bad accounts. Again, it's not that I can't see the use case for these, but they're fraught with danger. Most obviously, people who research, say, antisemitism (to use a random example) may follow all sorts of unlovely accounts for research and monitoring purposes. Follows do not equal endorsement. And the broader version of that insight is that who people follow is their business.  People make follow/unfollow decisions for an infinite number of reasons. We have absolute autonomy over what shows up on our feed, but we shouldn't start claiming authority over other people's feeds. If they start being unpleasant in their own voice, block them, but the moralization over who one follows strikes me as problematic. Tend to one's own garden.

Maybe you have quarrels with either of the above examples. But the bigger picture point I'm trying to make is this: a social media culture in which blocking is normal also has to be one where we take responsibility for the choices we make when blocking. A social media culture where blocking is rare can get away with people being less mindful about it, because they're only going to be acting in the most clear-cut cases -- one doesn't need to do a lot of deep reflecting to justify blocking RandoNazi1488. It's when we move beyond those cases that thought and consideration becomes important. And precisely because there are not and cannot be rules about blocking -- it is, ultimately, a matter of personal discretion -- it is especially important to cultivate a suite of good virtues around blocking. Block people who are abusive, but not people who just disagree. Block people for what they write, not for what the people they follow write. I don't think these are especially onerous, and I think most people are trying to follow them to one degree or another. But it can be easy to conflate Bluesky's quite healthy "block early, block often" mantra into an unhealthy belief that the actual ethos of the community is "I shouldn't have to think at all about my blocking choices." That isn't our ethos, and it shouldn't be our ethos.

A willingness to block often is not the same thing as being cavalier about blocking. Ideally, a healthy blocking culture will entail thinking carefully about how to balance hearing from a range of views and avoiding epistemic silencing with having a pleasant experience and not being inundated with worthless troll blather. I do think most people are capable of striking that balance in a reasonable way, but it isn't something one can do thoughtlessly. With great blocking power comes great blocking responsibility, and that's something we should embrace.

Saturation Ad Air War

One aspect of political culture I very strongly believe in is that most voters' knowledge of political affairs is primarily one of ambiance. They don't know much in the way of facts (what is the inflation rate, has crime gone up or down). They know a "mood". They feel that things are getting better, or worse. They hear a lot that America basically has open borders, or they hear a lot that abortion rights are going away. The connection to reality is pretty well unimportant (we definitely don't have open borders; abortion rights really are under threat). It's the sensation, the steady drumbeat of narrative, that moves them.

To that end, I've long thought that a good progressive billionaire project would be to continually air issue ads that are not tied to a given political race or even an election, but are just part of the backdrop every time one turns on the news or watches Monday Night Football. The goal of these ads should be to make certain hopes, fears, and moods simply part of our backdrop -- something "we heard somewhere." It should not cast itself as expressly political -- an effort to elect this or that politician. In fact, "issue ads" is probably the wrong moniker. It shouldn't present itself as political at all. It should be simply a story, told over and over again, until it seeps into the national subconscious.

What sorts of ads do I have in mind? I pitched one about abortion a few years ago. I had another idea for one about trans and gender non-binary issues:

A family is at home in classic suburbia: mom, dad, and a gender non-conforming adolescent kid. The scene is utterly mundane and ordinary, but with a touch of danger lurking in the background. Mom is cooking, but beside her one can see a newspaper headline announcing the latest right-wing attack on trans kids. Dad is telling a dad joke to the kid (who rolls their eyes), the TV news on mute in the background but the subtitles have a talking head calling families who provided gender-affirming care to their children sexual predators who should be thrown in jail.

Interspersed with each shot, we have a quick cut of heavily armed police massing outside the house. Right as everyone is getting ready for dinner, the door is battered open and the scene goes black. All we hear is the police demanding everyone on the ground, then demanding the child come with them as the family screams frantically. The last we hear is the kid pleading to their parents "don't let them take me!" 

What's the point of the ad? To put people (and particularly suburban parents -- political hell hath no fury like a suburban schoolparent scorned) in a mindset where families are in danger. Maybe their family. Maybe their neighbor's family. There's no lie here -- these are the stakes, and families are in danger. But the point is to prime them with that sensation in advance, so that it's what they immediately think of whenever the Trump administration announces policies that will be all about threatening families.

The ad is just an idea (and nobody wants my advertising ideas). And not all the ads need to be negative, necessarily (though as the opposition party, that's probably going to be the bulk of it). But the broader point is that liberals need to do everything they can to just saturate their narratives into the American bloodstream, not as part of a discrete political campaign, but simply as a background feature of what the world is right now. We can't wait for election season, and we certainly can't wait for an increasingly infirm legacy media to the job for us. These stories should be mainlined into every American home, by any and every medium available, and should start right now.

The Making of a Murder-Cheerer

Last week, I spent some time at the eye doctor to address periodic swelling, irritation, and pain in my left eye. This happens periodically, but it got especially bad during my trip to Florida (to the point where airline attendants asked if I needed paramedics to meet me once we landed). The doctor was quite nice but suggested that incidents like this are a symptom of my keratoconus worsening and there probably wasn't much to be done at this point other than hope it doesn't happen too often and ride it out when it does.

I say "at this point" because at an earlier point there was something to be done -- a surgical proceeding called corneal cross-linking. Cross-linking surgery doesn't "fix" keratoconus, it just stops further deterioration, but since keratoconus is a degenerative condition that's no small thing. I was slated to get cross-linking surgery while at Berkeley, but at the last moment my insurer denied coverage as not medically necessary since I could still see with contact lenses. Again, remember that what cross-linking does is stop degeneration -- that is, the surgery would preserve the status quo where I could see with contact lenses -- so the fact that I currently could see with contact lenses is exactly why the surgery was being recommended to me. Nonetheless, even though the surgery had been scheduled for months, the insurer issued its denial just a day or two before, giving me essentially no time to appeal or gather additional medical information to support why the surgery was, in fact, necessary.

Several years later (now in Portland), I was able to get the surgery -- but only in my right eye. My left eye had, in the intervening years, deteriorated to the point where it was no longer a candidate for the procedure. And that deterioration is likely permanent, and (given the periodic swelling etc.) possibly still ongoing. My doctor said that if things continue to get worse in that eye, the only real treatment option available is a full-blown corneal transplant -- quite a bit more intense (and expensive) than cross-linking would have been, and not something I'm especially excited to pursue. There's not even the karmic satisfaction of the insurer having to pay more, because I'm on different insurance now compared to when the surgery was initially denied!

My experience is, of course, not uncommon. We've all been swapping stories on this subject prompted by the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. My case is not to the degree of being denied life-saving care, but permanent vision loss in an eye is not exactly frivolous either. Like many Americans, I have persistent ambient anxiety about what would happen if I faced a major medical crisis, and that anxiety is less about the crisis itself and more wondering in what ways will my insurer try to screw me over in my most vulnerable moment in order to financially ruin me.

There are very, very good reasons for Americans to loathe their health insurance companies. But even still, it is alarming how many people are outright thrilled to have witnessed a street murder. The cause of this excitement is, no doubt, in significant part justifiable fury at the injustices health insurers wreak on regular people. But that more systemic explanation I think has to be cut with acknowledgment that a significant portion of people seem to be excited at the prospect of being justified in cheering a murder. They are luxuriating in this feeling of justified schadenfreude, and are encouraging others to feel similarly, and are hoping to feel it again and again.

No matter how one identifies the cause, such a situation is not a sign of a healthy society. For me, there were eerie echoes of the days after October 7, where we also saw too many people be not just thrilled at seeing Israelis murdered, but thrilled at their mutual, collectively reinforcing justifications at why they were right to be thrilled. Certainly, Thompson was far more directly complicit in injustice than a group of teenaged concertgoers, whose "complicity" was basically being Israelis full stop. But to the celebrators, this is a difference of degree and not kind -- they labored hard to establish why being Israeli was a form of culpable complicity for which the proper punishment was death and the proper affect was a hearty cheer. And that effort to stretch so one can properly enjoy the murder is powerful evidence that the desire to enjoy murders is the actual driving motivation, with the political or strategic apologias just epiphenomenal window dressing. How far down the pecking order at UHC is it warranted to be excited at extermination? To the adjusters? To the HR professionals? To the janitors? We all know the Tumblr accounts who would rush to point out we should cheer not just the death of the Himmlers but every German Nazi, top to bottom -- so why not apply that logic to UHC? Or to Israel? Or to any other institution complicit in systemic injustice -- a category which can include without too much in the way of struggle every institution? (This was one of the lessons of The Good Place -- while everyone has an obligation to try to do the right thing, overindulgence in "complicity" arguments makes everyone guilty and places everyone in hell).

The terrible realization many of us had, and are having again, is that for many the orientation towards Israel/Palestine or the American healthcare system isn't "let's create a just political structure for all" but rather "I want to see the right people be hurt," and the thirst for the latter is what drives the nominal political commitments rather than vice versa. Even where one can sympathize with the causes, this sort of outlook never leads anywhere good; more often than not, it's just people coming up with stories for why they should be permitted to revel in the misery of others. As a species, we should know well that our problem is not that we are too skittish about justifying brutality and violence, and so we should be hesitant about any political momentum which takes the form of accentuating and accelerating a popular desire to enjoy murder.

It is no answer to point out the many, many more people whose lives have been ruined by unjust insurance denials (UHC has the highest denial rate in the country, denying a full third of all filed claims). For one, anyone who reads a story about one of these denials and lets out a whoop and high fives would be a bad person too. More fundamentally, I also return to one of the most outstanding articles I've ever read, Robin West's "Sex, Law, and Consent," which does a superb job explaining how direct interpersonal injustices are qualitatively different than "systemic" ones even when the latter cause greater tangible loss than the former. We experience being robbed or burgled differently from being on the receiving end of wage theft, even if the latter might actually take more dollars from our pocket; West extends this analysis to how we think of rape vis-a-vis the broader suite of patriarchal norms which regularly generate "consent" to sexual activities that are not truly or enthusiastically desired. Again, this doesn't mean that UHC's conduct in the healthcare system isn't an example of serious injustice -- it is, just like wage theft is and just like structural sexism is -- but the point is that we're not simply delusional in viewing street murder as qualitatively different notwithstanding the fact that it is but one dead body.

I say all this because there is not, or should not be, a tension between "the murder of Brian Thompson is bad" and "we are obligated to create a more just and humane healthcare system that is not liable to the exploitations and predations of entities like UnitedHealthCare." Anxiety about insurer-driven financial ruin notwithstanding, and direct experience with insurer manipulation causing permanent medical injury notwithstanding, I never wanted Brian Thompson to die, and I cannot relate to thousands of internet strangers who did want him to die. What I want is for our health care system to work for us and to take care of us. That's all. My first response to Thompson's murder was to write:

The murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO is outrageous. We as a society must do everything in our power to ensure that a tragedy like this never occurs again. If that means implementing national universal healthcare so that anger over a failing private system isn't displaced onto violence, so be it.

And while yes, that was intentionally snarky, I also meant it with total earnestness. We should hate murder. And we should commit ourselves to creating a just healthcare system that doesn't generate justified seething hatred amongst ordinary Americans.

Yet here we see another element of our despairing time, which is that the proof is in the pudding in terms of what drives social change. Just like it may be sadly true that manipulative echo chambers are a more effective political strategy that earnest and honest engagement with people of diverse political views, it may be sadly true that violence and social disruption are able to drive necessary political change where persuasion and law fail. It is a bad precedent when we let terroristic violence drive even salutary social change, and the lesson to draw from that is to make salutary social changes without being prompted to do so by terroristic violence. And if we can't learn that lesson, then I'm at a loss except to say that it inherently puts us in a very grim place, and nobody should be excited to live there.

I have no answers here. But I again cannot help but feel that it is fundamentally unhealthy when people feel, and are encouraged to feel, excitement over murder. For too many people, the murder of Brian Thompson isn't about murder or even about generating justice in the healthcare space. It rather is an opportunity to enjoy the spectacle of a murder, and feel righteous in doing so. That instinct is one we should be very wary about letting flower unchecked, in ourselves or in others.

We Who Are About To Die

The Romans loved their gladiator games.

I actually have no idea if that's true. Most of what I know about gladiators comes from how they're portrayed in Ridley Scott movies. For all I know, Romans did not actually enjoy seeing innocent people torn apart in the arena by wild animals or what have you.

But, to quote Philip J. Fry, "it's a widely-believed fact!", so we'll run with it.

It seems clear that a huge part of the second Trump administration will be vindictive political prosecution of his "enemies". This was a recurrent campaign theme of his, from proposing "military tribunals" for the likes of Liz Cheney to alleging "COVID crimes" by Anthony Fauci. Willingness -- implicit or explicit -- to engage in such thuggery has been a theme of his early announced appointees, from Kash Patel to Brendan Carr to Pete Hegseth. Concern over such tactics was expressly raised by Joe Biden in his pardon announcement for his son, Hunter. How deep down the list will he go? Unclear, though normalcy will not save you. The hammerfist coming to smash American rule of law is something unprecedented in my lifetime.

These prosecutions will be lawless along every possible dimension. The people driving them won't care about the law. The venues will be selected based on political convenience (I bet one will be amazed at how many of the "crimes" in question will center on the Western District of Texas). The "crimes" themselves either will be frivolous or nakedly selective. It will be undisguised authoritarian thuggery: the apparatus of law enforcement entirely perverted to immunize the president's allies while harassing his enemies (the almost-assured pardon of the January 6 insurrectionists is also part of this story).

I won't here venture a prediction as to how the judiciary will respond to these endeavors. It's possible they'll hold the line, as they largely did in 2020. But it's also the case that in 2024 the conservative legal movement has embraced and assimilated into full-blown MAGAism to a far greater degree than in 2020; even if they don't actively embrace the conspiracism (which they might), one can very easily imagine them hiding behind rules of deference to enable Trump to run wild.

The open question I want to consider, though, is how the public will respond to all of this. Of course, Trump's base will love it -- they've been baying for blood since 2016. And equally obviously, people like me will hate it. But I have a bad feeling -- maybe doom-mongering, maybe not -- that these spectacles of prosecution will go over better than one would think with low-information independents.

The reason isn't because they necessarily have strong opinions that Joe Biden or Anthony Fauci or various military generals actually are criminals. Rather, it is a more inchoate desire to see "the powerful" get their comeuppance. It almost doesn't matter whether they're guilty or not; the mere practice of seeing people one is accustomed to thinking of as "above you" laid low, ripped apart by the animals in the arena, is desired in of itself.

Consider what is for me one of the most infuriating aspects of Trump's victory: that he will not be held accountable for his many, many blatant crimes. No sentencing for the New York felony convictions, no consequences for the attempted 2020 insurrection, no pursuit of the document theft case, no nothing. It is maddening, to see such naked abuses of power result in nothing simply because Trump is powerful enough to evade responsibility for anything. If you take that indignant sensation and shear it from any substantive political knowledge, you're just left with the boiling resentment that a vague "they" keep "getting away with it". And the mere performance of going after a "they" can appeal to those resentments -- a fascist essence where the struggle is valuable in of itself, to show oneself to be the tribune of the people.

This suggests that Democrats could have leveraged this same atavistic desire to get at a powerful "them" by, for example, a fast Garland or prosecuting big bankers for the financial crisis or going after Elon Musk. And much like with echo chambers, I'm of two minds on this: torn between thinking that (for better or for worse) this is the strategy that works, versus thinking that it is a bad thing to encourage this sort of political climate (to be clear: I have no quarrel with "going after" big bankers or whoever when they commit crimes, but performatively going after an "enemy" class -- no matter who it is -- untethered by normal rule of law constraints strikes me as bad both morally and also conducive to a political environment that ultimately helps the right).

So once again, I'm at a bit of a loss here. But if we're relying on a natural popular revulsion to politicized sham prosecutions by the Trump administration, I'm not sure we're going to get it. We are going to be entering a very, very dark time.

Did Bluesky Win or Did X Lose?

"She only won because I lost. That's not a winner."

"Network effects" refer to situations where a product becomes more valuable to individual users the more total users there are. It's commonly applied to social media platforms -- one wants to be on, for example, Facebook because that's where the people are; a Facebook that had a small user base wouldn't be a lot of fun even if its features and product functionality were vastly superior. On a darker level, network effects are often cited as a reason why it's so difficult to leave even bad or malfunctioning social media platforms -- we're "stuck" there, even if there's widespread agreement that another platform would be better, because of the collective action problem of coordinating a mass decamping to an alternative.

For a long time, Twitter was held out as the epitome of a network effect in action -- because everyone was there, everyone had to be there; leaving Twitter for a competing platform was the equivalent of leaving a bustling party and deciding to shout into a boundless void. This sense of Twitter as a de facto monopoly gave at least some measure of credence at efforts to regulate it as a "common carrier" or "public square" -- the idea being that if Twitter "censored" (banned, throttled, or deprioritized) certain people or views, it was tantamount to blocking them from the premier domain of public conversation.

Now, of course, we are seeing Bluesky ascend as a truly viable alternative to Twitter X. For my part, I've been exclusively on Bluesky for several months (I joined in July 2023, but like many for a long time I straddled both platforms). By now, I'm close to my peak follower account on Twitter, and my engagement on Bluesky is at least as robust (if not better) than it was on Twitter. And while Bluesky isn't wholly immune to some of the worst elements of "old" Twitter, it is generally in my experience a nicer and more humane place (arguably compared to the Twitter of yore, certainly compared to the cesspool its devolved into as of late).

From my vantage point, seeing Bluesky challenge and, in certain domains, topple Twitter is unprecedented territory. The closest analogue I can think of is Facebook dislodging Myspace, but I don't know (genuinely, I don't) if Myspace was as ubiquitous and dominant in its domain as Twitter was. Outside of that, it's hard to think of a titan that's fallen as far, from as high, as Twitter did. How did this happen? How did Bluesky overcome the network effect hurdle to emerge as a viable alternative? 

I have two stories, and I'm genuinely unsure which is more persuasive.

Story #1 is that Bluesky's emergence shows that the network effect, while certainly real, isn't as big of a hurdle to change as people thought. We're not actually stuck with incumbent social media providers come hell or high water. There's inertia militating against change, but it's not insurmountable. Bluesky is winning because it is fundamentally better than X is right now, as well as better than the other X competitors (Threads, Mastodon, Post) that emerged over the last few years. It's making better choices about the use (or not) of algorithms, it's making better choices about doing content moderation, it made better choices about growing responsibly, and it's reaping the fruits of making those better choices that appeal to more people.

Overall, the moral of this story is that the concerns about Twitter as a functional monopoly that could singlehandedly manipulate the public square without any possibility of public recourse or accountability have been falsified. And that, of course, has implications for the rest of the social media space -- many of our worries about undislodgeable tech monopolies maybe seem overblown. What a relief!

Story #2, which is probably less hopeful but might generate more primal glee inside of me, is that the basic narrative of network effects creating entrenched monopolies is still true, but Elon Musk so epically and catastrophically mismanaged Twitter that he managed to destroy it anyway. Keeping in mind that Musk didn't actually want to buy Twitter in the first place (he made his offer as a troll, only to be forced into a sale when Twitter's leadership realized this was their best chance to cashout at inflated prices), every choice he's made since assuming ownership has been a disaster borne out of his own infinite depth of arrogance and boundless need for public affirmation. 

He had a company with universal brand recognition; he renamed it for no reason. He complained about Twitter allegedly censoring speech to put its thumb on the political scales; he converted X into an explicit megaphone for Donald Trump and far-right MAGA politics. He whined about bots taking over the platform; bots are even more ubiquitous than they were before. Ad sales are down because advertisers don't like their brands being associated with neo-Nazis, to the point where Musk is suing on the theory that it's illegal for people not to give him money. Neutering the utility of the block function served mostly to make harassment and brigading easier. Changing "verified" accounts into paid promotional material nuked the ability of Twitter to serve as a trusted outlet for anyone. 

It's been an utter, unmitigated, arguably unparalleled trainwreck -- and that's why Bluesky was able to overcome the network effect headwinds and establish itself as a competitor. It's not so much "popular discontent can overcome anything," and more "even the biggest ship can sink if its drunken captain insists on ramming it into an iceberg". I don't want to say that's never going to be replicable, but we won't always be so "lucky" as to have someone this incompetent at the helm of our big tech outfits. To take one example, there is plenty of negative things to be said on how Mark Zuckerberg has run Facebook as of late, but as bad as his choices have been and as aggravating as Facebook often is as a platform, nothing Facebook has done has come anywhere close to the abyss of incompetence that characterized how Elon Musk ran Twitter into the ground -- and for that reason, we haven't seen a true competitor emerge to Facebook in a manner akin to Bluesky.

So which story is right? I don't know (and of course, it's more of a spectrum than a binary). I do think Bluesky made some smart choices that it deserves credit for -- there's a reason it is the main competitor (and not Threads or Mastodon). But there's little doubt it got a huge assist from the dizzying array of unfathomably boneheaded choices Elon Musk has made at the helm of X -- a unicorn event that to my eyes stands out even amongst a sea of overconfident, underperforming tech bros.

Fictional Character Ideological Turing Test

If you're a Democrat, which fictional television character do you think most "embodies" contemporary Republicans? And if you're a Republican, which television character do you think Democrats would pick to answer the above question?

(Then do it vice versa -- what character do Republicans think embodies Democrats, and what character do Democrats think Republicans would pick to embody Democrats?).

I'm weirdly obsessed with thinking about this thought exercise. Unfortunately, I think it isn't really doable, if for no other reason than it presupposes a shared media culture that doesn't really exist, and in particular in my head it involves everyone sharing my particular Peak TV cast of potential characters, which definitely doesn't exist.

But nonetheless, the concept is interesting to me. Under conditions of negative polarization, I think we can assume that the selected character would be one who embodies the perceived vices of the "other side". And so one thing we'd be measuring is to what degree people have a handle on what the "other side" perceives as their most salient and emblematic vice.

For example, I've written that for me the character that most embodies the contemporary MAGA right is Jerry from Rick & Morty. But I doubt that most Republicans would guess that Jerry would be my pick. I'd guess that they'd guess I'd choose someone like Homer Simpson ("they think we're oafish idiots"), or Boss Hogg ("they think we're racists"). I don't think they think that I think (boy, that's a mouthful) that their emblematic vice is whiny entitlement and crippling beta male insecurity, which is crystallized into the character of Jerry Smith.

Who do I think Republicans would choose to embody Democrats? I'm thinking one of the characters from Lena Dunham's "Girls" (again, bracketing the fact that most Republicans have never seen that show -- and in fact, I haven't seen it either -- the point is to identify an archetype). I think they think of us as self-obsessed and self-absorbed, performatively "woke" (but massively hypocritical about it), and generally unproductive leeches who wouldn't know a "real job" if it chafed our uncalloused, manicured hands. But maybe I'm wrong, and their emblematic Democrat is epitomized by a completely different set of vices! And again, it would be interesting to learn the mismatch.

Anyway, as I said, it's an exercise that -- even just as a thought experiment -- I've always found fun to ponder. And I'm curious at people's thought processes here -- so feel free to play in the comments (i.e., if you're a Democrat say which character most embodies Republicans, and also give guesses as to which character you think Republicans would choose to embody Democrats as well as which character you imagine Republicans would guess Democrats think embodies Republicans)!

What If Echo Chambers Work?

A few days after the election, I remember seeing a Washington Post column that said something like "You can't win an election if you're going to shun or denigrate half the electorate." And I remember wishing I could ask the author, in all earnestness: Why not?

After all, hadn't we just seen someone win an election while shunning and denigrating half the electorate? Clearly it's possible! The Post's hypothesis had been decisively falsified less than a week before!

This came up again today with the ongoing "echo chamber" discourse about BlueSky, paired against the fact that Republicans did in fact manage to win an election while generating an almost entirely cloistered epistemic bubble for themselves. The belief that echo chambers are antipathic to good electoral strategy is a comforting belief for people of a certain political persuasion (myself included!), but it just seems not to be true.

So the real question, and I think harder question, for Democrats is -- what if echo chambers work? What if one can win an election by constructing an epistemic fortress and just mainlining as many conspiracy theories and wild accusations about the other sides as humanly (or AI-ing-ly) possible?

It's a harder question because, at least for someone like me, this would be a very sad reality to come to grips with. I very fervently don't think democracy should be about scratching your way to the thinnest possible plurality and then steamrolling the other side. If you asked me what I would hope to happen to MAGA Republicans in rural Idaho or whatever after a Kamala Harris win, I'd have answered "I hope they get good healthcare, decent jobs, and well-funded schools." I have no desire to unleash recriminations upon "enemies", and I hate the idea of politics as a lawless bloodsport where all is fair if it wins you an election.

But maybe people like me are naive, and the lesson that has to be learned from 2024 (and 2016) is that brutal, no quarter, snarling attacks are an electorally winning play, and that for Democrats to win they need to harness their inner demonization machine and find some people to vilify. Of course, one could respond to this by saying that even if such a strategy is electorally superior at the margins, it's just plain wrong. That's always a valid response, and one might notice that it's the same response given to arguments that Democrats need to throw trans persons under the bus for electoral wins. There, of course, the retort is "well, enjoy feeling morally pure as you lose the Senate for the next decade" -- it's of course fascinating that the Post would never apply a similar retort to those who demand foreswearing scorched-earth electoral tactics against the GOP ("have fun patting yourselves on the back for your moral purity!"). It goes to show which moral commitments are truly seen as sacrosanct by the mainstream media, and which aren't.

But if we leave the moral objection aside, there remains one circle I cannot quite square. I've never been one to think, contra some narratives, that Democrats have just preemptively surrendered at every turn (e.g., as far as I know I'm the only person who thinks Chuck Schumer has done a pretty good job keeping a very thin majority dependent on some very unreliable actors relatively unified over the course of his tenure). Nonetheless, I am, with great reluctance, coming to believe that Democrats cannot win elections solely by taking the high road and demonstrating sober commitment to good governance and rule of law, when pitted against the emotional fever-dream populist pitch that characterizes the modern GOP. Again -- this is not a conclusion I'm happy to accede to. There probably are some people whose every instinct is to destroy the opposition at all costs and have to be persuaded to stay within the lines; but as noted above that's not me. My sensibilities are extremely wedded towards sober technocracy and good governance, and I reflexively recoil at the sort of hardball, "crush the enemy" tactics we're talking about here.

But here's my problem: if over the short term I think Democrats need to compete with the GOP on the level of back-alley brawl politics, over the long term I think that a politics that takes that form is inherently slanted towards the right. We will never be able to out-hate the GOP. We'll never be better than them at conjuring up some shadowy enemy to put people into a frenzy. There are absolutely ways to pitch distrust towards established institutions and a belief that "They" are out to get "Us" in a left-ish manner, but ultimately those narratives are going to benefit the right more (and we're already seeing how that pipeline flows from left-to-right in the form of folks like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard). So even if I may believe that my fighting faith of good governance liberalism just isn't winning elections, I'm also very concerned that the punchier left-wing populist alternatives will generate a political environment that is even more systematically slanted towards the right. Conspiratorial populism is home turf advantage for the right -- if that's the field we're playing on, we're always going to be starting from behind.

As I said, I don't have a way to square this circle. I'm not a political strategist, and I'm trying to avoid the temptation of "just agree with me and of course we'll win elections." But it's something I'm feeling very glum about.