Like the sum of 2 and 2: Only idiots think like this pic.twitter.com/FtFhnj0U3X — evan loves worf (@esjesjesj) April 23, 2024 “But if he agrees about Ron DeSantis about literally everything except whether it’s good to buy electric cars, and DeSantis is a raving reactionary lunatic, and I like Ron DeSantis because I didn’t have to wear a mask in Boca Raton during the pandemic, what does that make me?” The post Elon Musk’s politics are an unfathomable, impossible-to-classify mystery that will never be explained appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money ..read more

Any kind of music Hall of Fame that features Foreigner and not Warren Zevon is a self-refuting absurdity. Imagine, say, if the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame had Freddie Lindstrom and Highpockets Kelly but not Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens? Ridiculous, I know, but it’s vaguely possible if you try. Anyway, if you’re wondering how the arena-rock mediocrities — who, hilariously, have been touring for years with literally none of their original members because some music is so inessential that the cover band can be easily swapped in for the original — got the call, the answer is good old-fashi ..read more

I had the pleasure to talk to our friend Michael Hiltzik from the Los Angeles Times about the significance of the UAW’s victory in Chattanooga. The vote opens the door to further votes and organizing drives across the region, where political leaders have kept unions weak in part through anti-union right-to-work laws — all 14 Deep South states, as well as 12 others, have those laws. Next on the schedule is a vote by 5,000 workers at a Mercedes plant in Alabama, scheduled to take place May 13-17. “The real importance of this election is not just the organizing of this factory,” says labor hist ..read more

Minouche Shafik not only completely rolled over for Congress at hearings, she literally called the police to arrest peaceful protestors while also evicting them. Which leads us to the inevitable next stage of the story, “if you treat Elise Stefanik as a good faith actor you will get exactly what you deserve“: Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) issued a statement on Sunday calling on University President Minouche Shafik to resign immediately and the board of trustees to appoint someone “who will protect Jewish students and enforce school policies.” “Over the past few months and especially ..read more

Climate change is horrible enough in the United States. Summers in New England are so much hotter than they used to be, as we turn into Virginia, Virginia turns into Miami, and Miami disappears into the ocean. But it’s one thing to have humid, gross summers. It’s another to have be next to the Sahara Desert, not to mention the warm ocean currents that traditionally made Europe habitatable. So in Europe, climate change is worse than every other part of the world, in a place where the infrastructure in uniquely incapable of handling it because of the old buildings that trap heat and a lack of c ..read more

The Supreme Court case today over criminalizing homelessness has a lot of interest to me, largely because it comes from Grants Pass, a small town I know well in southwestern Oregon. As I’ve talked about a good bit, these issues of homelessness have multiple factors and a lot of the conversation around this tends to focus on a single-issue that is supposed to solve everything. The Build More people are fundamentally correct, yes, but when you are talking about fentanyl addicts and people who have untreated mental illness, which is a non-negligible part of the homeless population, you aren’t so ..read more

Allow me to build a bit on Paul’s post from earlier today. The thing that strikes me about the last couple of days is that, like in the 1960s, university administrations are massively overreacting to campus protests and in doing so, making them far worse. Criminalizing protest at Columbia and Yale is going to do one thing, which is lead to more protests. I agree of course that there is a huge difference between 2024 and 1968, which is that no Americans are being sent to war. So in some ways, this is more like criminalizing the anti-apartheid protests of the 80s, which is even dumber. But on t ..read more

I’ve been reading a history of the NFL to my son (he’s doing a school project on Jim Thorpe, who was actually the NFL’s first president, although this appears to have been an essentially nominal appointment for publicity purposes), and I’ve become interested in the following question: Why did it take professional football so long to establish itself as a major part of the economic and cultural landscape in regard to sports in 20th century America? The background story is this: For the first half of the century, college football was a much bigger deal in America than the NFL. Indeed the NFL di ..read more

I never met Steven in person. We came very close to meeting once in New York City, but because of a variety of transportation snafus it didn’t end up happening. In the online conversations that we shared he was never anything other than deeply cordial and remarkably thoughtful. When you have the chance to meet someone that you respect and admire, don’t let that opportunity slip away. While we were remarkably fortunate to host some of his work, LGM was only a small part of Steven’s story; he was extraordinarily prolific and spread his work across a variety of platforms. Ironically, Steven and ..read more

Historical analogies are always tricky, because analogical reasoning is always tricky. The two difficulties here are on the one hand exaggerating the extent of parallels between similar events, or on the other hand dismissing such parallels because there are differences between such events. (One style of argument that irritates me in particular is pointing out that A isn’t really like B because A and B are different. That’s what an analogy is by definition). The point of this thread is to explore the analogy between student protests against the United States government prosecution of the Viet ..read more