Is any working American writer better at exposing elite clowns than The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner? His exposure of Alan Dershowitz in the matter of Dershowitz’s alleged cancellation by the Chilmark Library on Martha’s Vineyard was a defining classic of the genre.
The thing that makes Chotiner such a great pantser is that he doesn’t sneak up on a subject and yank down their trousers. He asks questions with a straight face, and they expose their asses all by themselves.
Legal scholar Cass Sunstein is the latest victim. Here’s how Chotiner sets the stage for the interview:
Sunstein has written a new book, called “On Liberalism,” which is a defense of the idea of liberalism at a time when Sunstein believes it is under threat from both the right and the left. The book barely mentions Donald Trump or contemporary politics, however, and instead provides a defense of a general liberal belief system, which Sunstein breaks down into eighty-five features. Sunstein’s conception of liberalism is quite capacious; it includes New Deal liberals and so-called classical liberals, including Friedrich von Hayek and Robert Nozick, as well as politicians such as Ronald Reagan.
If that sounds absurd, that’s because it is, as Chotiner goes on to demonstrate. Here’s an excerpt, but go read the whole thing if you can.
Chotiner: Hayek talked about disliking “Near Eastern” students because they were “fundamentally dishonest.” He said that he had a “profound dislike for the typical Indian students at the London School of Economics, which I admit are all one type—Bengali moneylender sons.”
Sunstein: I didn’t know about that. Wow. Hayek was a very complicated figure. He wrote a lot. Some of it’s not so good. The Hayek that I admire is the Hayek who was an extremely persistent and repetitive and powerful critic of socialist planning on the ground that it couldn’t be made to work because the socialist planners won’t know enough, even if they’re competent and well motivated. And also the Hayek who would occasionally say that liberty has an economic foundation, but also a moral foundation. And, in a time like ours, Hayek as Mr. Liberty—that’s someone who we want to be in the same club with.
Chotiner: Hayek supported the 1973 coup in Chile. There are lots of things that don’t make him seem like such a democrat or liberal, correct?
Sunstein: The criticisms are either accurate or, in some sense, fair. So when I say Hayek is a great figure or a great part of the liberal tradition, I don’t mean to endorse everything he said.
Chotiner: You mentioned Murray Rothbard as another figure on your team. He was also controversial: he talked positively about David Duke’s 1992 Presidential campaign, and he said that he wanted to replace America’s government with some sort of anarcho-capitalism. Given where our politics are now, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that so many of these figures were important for the conservative movement. How do you think about that?
Sunstein: Rothbard is not my favorite by any means.
It goes on like that, and can you believe it, Justices Alito and Thomas are also on Team Liberal! The interview ends on a question about Henry Kissinger, a monster whose friendship Sunstein treasured because Kissinger was nice to Sunstein about his (Sunstein’s) book launch.
Chotiner: But your wife [Samantha Power] is one of the great human-rights experts in the world. I asked you about [Kissinger] being anti-liberal, and your response was that he was very nice to you about your book.
Sunstein: About Star Wars.
Chotiner: It is certainly a touching story. But that’s not totally an answer to the question.
Sunstein: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. What he would think of this book I’d love to know.
Chotiner: But no second thoughts about being friends with him or anything?
Sunstein: I feel generally very grateful for friendship, and he was, when I knew him, a person of immense kindness. Those who think of him as someone who was something horrible or worse, I don’t know what to say about that.
I’ve never been fond of the expression “Don’t be so open minded that your brains fall out” because, in my experience, it’s usually said by the same sort of people who believe things like “God said ‘Adam and Eve’ not ‘Adam and Steve'” are devastatingly clever witticisms.
But by cracky, the former adage seems to actually apply here with Sunstein. Here’s a bonus axiom: If Chotiner calls, destroy your phone and go to ground.
Me if I ever see “Isaac Chotiner” pop up on my phone.
— Betty Cracker of Florida (@bettycrackerfl.bsky.social) September 24, 2025 at 8:38 AM
I am grateful to be beneath his notice!
Open thread.
Mathguy
I’m beginning to think that Elizabeth Warren was a huge outlier of the HLS faculty and Sunstein is the mean. What person with a pulse would say that bullshit about Alito and Kissinger?
Baud
Liberalism could use a better defense, but 85 principles is peak liberal stereotype.
Baud
The time to make them stroke out was when Biden was president.
satby
Whoa! Chotiner filleted Sunstein like a trout about to be grilled.
“Legal scholars” everywhere just took a hit to their credibility by association.
WTFGhost
That is the point of the expression
The idea is, you hear a remote tribe uses poop in healing ceremonies, and instead of saying “unusual, rare, but it works for them.”
Your brains fall out when you say poop isn’t universally considered dirty and unhealthy. I’ll guarantee you no one uses poop to heal wounds, even if it’s used “to heal”.
schrodingers_cat
Chuck Grassley wants to end OPT for international students. OPT allows students to work for a US employer after graduation for a limited time (1-3 years, depending on your major and your degree)
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Gotta distract the farmers somehow.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: This was their plan all along. That they are going after illegal immigrants was just the smokescreen. MAGAs want a moratorium on all immigration.
Librettist
@Mathguy:
You’ll never get invited to the right parties with that attitude.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
100%
We were right all along, yet again.
WTFGhost
Chetan Murthy
Over at LG&M I saw that at the end of the interview Sunstein really shows his …. well, maybe not ass, but certainly butt-crack. I don’t have the text (no New Yorker subscription), but it really was funny AF. Poor Cass, so far from heaven, so close to a giant pile of his own poo.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: I’m reminded of Hillel the Elder: “Whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary. Go learn.”
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat: Governments all around the world are just salivating at this, just -salivating-. They’re all looking forward to getting their best-and-brightest back home after educations in the US, instead of losing that investment.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: As an added bonus we also destroy our system of higher education and research. They want to destroy the economy so that they can reconfigure the society as they wish.
The crusade against vaccines should also been seen in the same light.
M31
@Chetan Murthy:
nominated
Betty Cracker
@Chetan Murthy: Here’s the last few lines:
Further proof of Sunstein’s astounding obtuseness, really. He should hope everyone fixates on his friendship with Kissinger!
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: Of course that was the plan all along. You don’t think their fear of brown/black people is isolated to those who are undocumented, do you? /s/s/s/s/s/ They lie about everything, which is something the average person hasn’t caught on to yet because the press covers for them so much.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
They want a nation of serfs. Many natural serfs appear to want that too.
M31
@Betty Cracker: lol “please don’t put in the newspaper I was friends with Kissinger”
Chetan Murthy
@Betty Cracker: Thank you, Betty! He’s amazing, isn’t he?
My (cynical, ok, really cynical) take is that the reason he goes so easy on ol’ Henry K, is that he’s -jealous- of Henry’s influence and power. And you can’t hate those whose seat you would wish to assume.
Old School
@Chetan Murthy:
I assume it was this part as it made me laugh.
Baud
In all seriousness, if one were to actually defend liberalism today, one can and should acknowledge that the historical progression of liberalism flowed through many problematic figures who would not satisfy the modern American conception of a good liberal.
CS didn’t seem up to the task of making that argument.
geg6
I don’t understand why anyone agrees to an interview with the guy. He eviscerates them every. single. time.
Chetan Murthy
@geg6: That would be the case if these evildoers and hangers-on had any self-awareness, I guess? But as they say [ok, ok, I know nothing about “human systems engineering”, so this is the take from a Martian] “nobody is the villain in their own life story”, so I have to believe that all these people believe they’re heroes, and thus that the Chotiner interview will go well.
I will add that when Chotiner does interview somebody who’s genuinely decent, the result is a lovely conversation that nobody is ashamed of, and that informs the readers well.
Belafon
@Old School:
I’ve been trying to convince the dad of one of my son’s friends that Kirk isn’t someone to admire (he has been warming up to Kirk as he’s seen more of the Christian stuff Kirk said), and his response was to say that we wouldn’t want to be judged by all the stuff we have said.
Baud
@Belafon:
That was your opportunity to say some nasty things.
FastEdD
Hi, this is Ed. I was raptured yesterday and I’ve got a couple questions. Where can you get Premium Unleaded? If this is heaven I know driving has to be involved. Where can I get guitar strings? I saw a guy wandering around looking for 72 Virginians. I think he was confused. There sure are a lot of dogs up here.
bluefoot
@Chetan Murthy: A Swiss friend of mine who has lived here in the US for at least 15 years has been getting calls from Swiss universities asking if she’s interested in faculty positions.
i was just looking at a job posting that has the option of the UK or Switzerland. I’m American and working in MA (and a brown woman) but I’m wondering if the company would allow me to relocate…
Deputinize America
@Mathguy:
Sunstein is absolutely the mean of the Harvard faculty.
Dipshit legal academics just like him who couldn’t practice their way out of a paper bag have uttered many a stentorian set of mutterings about the sacred nature of SCOTUS and its doctrines for the past 60 years, resulting in inflated bullshit that hid the notion that its all sanctimonious claptrap.
jlowe
Sunstein. Whatta maroon. All the media training I’ve ever read stresses that you should know who’s interviewing you before sitting down for the interview.
Steve in the ATL
@Chetan Murthy:
That may be the saddest thing I’ve heard today
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Indeed, especially considering how many leading lights of liberalism were neck deep in the colonial enterprise. Their definitions of liberty only applied to white men
John Stuart Mill was a lifelong employee of the East India Company, for example.
rikyrah
The Tennessee Holler
@TheTNHoller
NASHVILLE – 2 guys in Red MAGA hats showed up on HBCU TSU’s campus uninvited, permitless, and set up a table with signs railing against DEI & undocumented immigrants. Students confronted them without violence. Police moved them. NAACP: “An intentional effort to antagonize”
x.com/TheTNHoller/status/1970824478935699876
dmsilev
@geg6: Arrogance, really.
The other thing is that not all of his interviews are eviscerations. If you’re a genuine expert in something and honest about it and the limits of your expertise, he can ask insightful and interesting questions. It’s when you’re full of hot air and preaching nonsense that he gives you enough rope to hang yourself.
People in category B usually think of themselves as being in category A.
Baud
@rikyrah:
The students or the red hats?
Chetan Murthy
@bluefoot: I’m brown, and retired. If I weren’t, I’d -already- be overseas via my employer (or having found a new job).
I feel compelled to say though: I don’t think I’d go to the UK. They’re in their own right-wing MAGA-like spiral, and I don’t know that they’ve got what it takes to pull out.
schrodingers_cat
@Belafon: For minute I thought you were speaking of James T Kirk.
Old Man Shadow
They’re all a part of the American aristocracy.
It’s a club where the wealthy can make horrific decisions that destroy dozens, hundreds, or thousands of lives and pretend they’re good people because it was all legal. People who have filled graveyards under cover of law. People who ruined lives, drained the vitality from people, and left husks behind crippled by exploitation, addiction, and poison. People who sentenced the poor to cancers, diseases, and the slow strangulation of poverty, and sit down and enjoy a nice dinner at the club with their peers.
People who can still enjoy a hearty chuckle with their political opponents even as the chaos and misery spreads outside.
The delusion is strong. And they will remain deluded about their own goodness and the harm they inflict on humanity until one of the victims strikes them back. Then they cry “terrorism!” and “Murder!” and the law trips over itself to protect them, while letting tens of thousands choke and vomit on the toxins they legally spew.
Chetan Murthy
@Steve in the ATL: Heh. I’ll be signing up for Le Monde in a couple of days (gotta practice my French).
Captain C
I mean, at some point, words have to mean something other than “whatever I want or need them to at the time.” On the other hand, you could probably cause a self-immolating rumble among a gaggle of libertarians by calling Hayek a liberal.
Also, had I known Kissinger and called him a friend, I would hope I would be smart enough not to admit that in public, even under torture.
Chetan Murthy
@Old Man Shadow: Dickensian, your comment is. [A Tale of Two Cities, wasn’t it?]
Chetan Murthy
@Captain C: Whenever somebody classes “classical liberal” and “liberal” in the same bin, I know they’re either an idiot or a gaslighter.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
This pretty much sums things up:
Old School
@Baud:
The red hats.
Captain C
@Old School:
It’s too bad Anthony Bourdain isn’t alive and wasn’t hanging around for this interview. He also has some opinions on Kissinger and Cambodia.
NaijaGal
@Old Man Shadow: Bingo.
Baud
@Old School:
Good. Thanks.
matt
The law is full of soft headed idiots like Sunstein and Turley. The whole profession is protected from competition by restrictive guard rails. Bar exams should be open exams. Pass the test, you can practice.
Captain C
@Belafon:
Presumably nor our actions. Just what’s in our hearts, which others will never know so they should assume the best, despite any and all evidence to the contrary.
Booger
@Old Man Shadow: That’s a great last graf.
Captain C
@Baud: I would like to think it was Casino style, even though security at this college no doubt has more sense than that in this circumstance.
Gin & Tonic
@schrodingers_cat: Pretty sure that’s the class of visa my now-DIL was on when she and my son met. She’d gotten an MA degree in NYC and was working there, more or less in her field of study.
Cliosfanboy
@rikyrah: ame post but on BlueSky if you want to avoid the Nazi Bird site.
bsky.app/profile/thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3lzlg4fja7c2o
Gin & Tonic
@Betty Cracker:
Another alleged “smart guy” who’s never heard of the Streisand Effect.
Deputinize America
@Old Man Shadow:
Enjoy this little scribble….
Cliosfanboy
@Captain C:
Ace Rothstein: I want you vacate this guy off the premises, and I want you to exit him off his feet and use his head to open the fucking door.
Captain C
@Cliosfanboy: Come to think of it, that’s what Kissinger probably deserved everywhere he went.
Jeffro
eighty-five features in this ‘general liberal belief system’…why…it’s practically designed (by Sunstein) to find something, or several dozen somethings, to hate!
Old Man Shadow
@Deputinize America: I like it.
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
Omnes Omnibus
If you want to go back to the 1840s, Sunstein is correct about all of these schools of thought coming out of liberalism. It’s also why some Euro types (and leftists) don’t understand US liberalism.
OTOH, it’s fucking useless for discussing left of center politics in the US in 2025.
Darkrose
@geg6: The people he eviscerates invariably think they’re the smartest person in every room, and that they’ll be able to outwit the silly journalist. What they don’t realize is that Chotiner is just doing basic journalist and asking follow-up questions. This people are so used to a media that fawns over them and accepts their intellectual posturing as brilliance that they let Chotiner trap them with their own words.
Citizen Alan
@matt: Perhaps, but the guard rails for aspiring lawyers are nothing compared to the guard rails for doctors. I think the primary reason for the existence of the AMA is to keep the number of people who can legally practice medicine artificially low so that doctor salaries will remain high compared to what a physician will make in a European country with universal healthcare. And just the other day, I was reading a fascinating article about the role the AMA played in the early criminalization of abortion in the mid-19th century, which I knew nothing about. They wanted to become the national gatekeepers for public health and saw midwifery as a rival paradigm. So they used a lot of bullshit anti-abortion arguments to get it criminalized nationwide and drive midwifery underground.
Belafon
@Baud: I gave him the list I had. The guy is trying his hardest not to do politics, though he has come around to saying he doesn’t like Trump.
Belafon
@rikyrah: “I agree. I’m completely against mediocre white guys getting placed in positions they’re not qualified for just for the sake of diversity.”
rikyrah
@Baud:
the red hats
Omnes Omnibus
@matt: A bar exam tells exactly fuck all about a person’s preparedness to practice law.
Baud
Reddit post inks to court order
Steve in the ATL
One of my friends took his class at HLS (Sunstein is a deity in the exciting world of administrative law) and reports that it was the worst class he has ever had and Sunstein the worst professor. When I told him about this interview, he dropped what he was doing and picked his phone to read it on the New Yorker app (which I assume is de rigeur for Balloon Juice aficionados). I look forward to our debrief!
Matt McIrvin
Chotiner is like the Eye of Sauron, but in a good way. Don’t stare into that palantir.
hitchhiker
TIL that Samantha Power is married to a schlub.
glc
Chotiner calling
Mathguy
@FastEdD: I shouldn’t have been eating when I read this-almost coughed up a lung laughing.
Ishiyama
So I was reading that half the students in law school these days (51 years after my first year) have no debts when they graduate, due to having family wealth. The other half are saddled with unsustainable obligations that take a lifetime to pay back.
I remember the changes to the bankruptcy laws that allowed the infliction of debt-peonage on two generations of students. It was a bipartisan collaboration by the Democrats and the Republicans. Phooey.
Josie
@Omnes Omnibus:
My son agrees with you. He also says that law school does not prepare you to practice law.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Baud:
Hilarious and true.
laura
That Sunstein is an alumni of U of Chicago Law is all the information I need to know that he’s fucked in the head- though it’s mirrored in the Econ department too. Human misery for profit and hegemony is their brand. And there he was, just led down the garden path, and his whole, filthy, unwashed ass just hanging out for all to see.
Marc
Of course, academic and corporate America have also been told they will be investigated for any pattern of selecting non-white people and women over white men, not that most of them need much of an incentive to return to ’50s style admissions/hiring demographics.
This is not just about immigrants, white immigration will not be limited.
Omnes Omnibus
@laura: Richard Cordray is a U of C law grad. Just saying.
Steve in the ATL
@Josie: law school teaches you how to think like a lawyer, which is rather important, and the basic concepts of the law. It sure as hell doesn’t teach you about managing clients or case loads or litigating or taking depositions or drafting any legal document other than appellate briefs–which, in turns out, very few lawyers actually do in their practices–or interacting with judges/clients/opposing counsel/the other people in law firms/the real world, and a million other things. Which is why some law schools have turned the otherwise useless third year into a clinic.
Nettoyeur
@Old Man Shadow: Tom and Daisy in the great Gatsby.
Anonymous At Work
I’ve read a great deal of Sunstein’s work as a legal scholar and proponent of Law & Psychology movement to counter the Law & Economics movement. When he is writing his own research, he is pretty concrete. When he is writing about his experiences as a world-traveler and seer of & into the depths of humanity, well, if that sounds like the beginning of a bad Thomas Freidman column, that’s the point.
Anonymous At Work
@laura: He was on the same floor and possibly next door to Professor Obama, so there is that.
And Sunstein helped get Law & Psychology taken more seriously. It analyzes legal situations based on how people actually think, as opposed to how Law & Economics based on how mathematical models prefer human act to keep the graphs clean.
OGliberal
@Chetan Murthy: I think the “white people gone crazy” phenomenon goes well beyond this country and the UK. Half of Europe seems wrapped up in the immigrant hatred….and, yes, it’s mostly focused on those immigrants who tend to be non-white.
Old School
Reposted by DougJ:
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve in the ATL: Third year was the best year of law school.
Chetan Murthy
@OGliberal: A friend suggested that maybe Europe wasn’t so great, b/c of this. My response is pretty much that yes, there’ll be racism everywhere (just as there is in the US). What matters, is that there be rule of law. There used-to-be rule of law in the US. Ah well.
OGliberal
@Old School: I’m a relatively recent new resident of Nashville but it – and Davidson County, in general – is very blue so I would be surprised if it was the other way around. The MAGA folks were probably not from the city or even the county. While I don’t have a lot of experience with/exposure to the Metro cops here, it looks like it was TSU police who did the removing and it would be shocking if the school employed wing nuts on their force.
Gin & Tonic
@Omnes Omnibus: Is that the year you finally have enough time to get laid?
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: I did better second year. Thanks for asking.
Marc
@OGliberal: I have to ask (and I know it applies to all people), but when exactly were the leadership of the US, UK, most of Europe, and Russia anything other than “white people gone crazy”?
jonas
The major impact I’ve seen of this is that most foreign students feel like they have to major in a STEM field if they want to stay and work in the US after graduation, because the visa requires finding employment in computer science, engineering, medicine, etc. I’ve talked to a number who love history or poetry or theater, but think their visas will be yanked if they want to study those subjects.
The agenda here, of course, is not to open up more fields of study/work to foreign students, but simply discourage foreign students from applying to study in the US at all. They think this will open up more slots for native-born students or something, but of course what it will really do is send a bunch of institutions into financial crisis and reduce the financial aid universities can offer everyone else. So your local college will probably close, and the next nearest university won’t be able to fund your scholarship. Well done, idiots.
Chief Oshkosh
@Captain C: Still pains me that Bourdain committed suicide. I still can’t watch any of his old shows or re-read his books. Such a waste and I’m so sorry his demons got the upper hand one too many times.
pajaro
Here’s my Sunstein story: In February 2020, he wrote an article in Bloomberg, on the subject of “probability neglect” which is his view that when significant risks can occur from a choice, people tend to neglect the low probability of an outcome when choosing. His example was individuals avoiding attending congregate events because of the slight risk of harm from a new respiratory virus that has started to appear. I read the article at the time my 75-year old wife was making the decision whether she should cancel her trip to New York to attend a wedding to which she had been invited that was to be held in the first weekend in March. She eventually decided not to go (our daughter actually cried, begging her not to go). As it turned out, one or more people at the wedding unknowingly had covid. At least one person attending ended up dying from exposure. A dear friend (who was at the table where my wife would have been sitting) got covid, nearly died, and ended up with an extended stay in the emergency room.
In March, Sunstein wrote another article on risk and covid, pointing out how sensible it might be to take precautions, now that the danger was evident. He never even referenced his prior article, which made light of the danger, at precisely the time it was most threatening, since the prevalence and lethality of the disease were most uncertain.
He’s a true ivory tower guy, ignorant of the fact that the numbers he’s crunching in many of his studies involve living breathing human beings.
Jackie
The classless FFOTUS:
The WH is being run by kindergartners. The link itself is X – which I don’t belong to, so I can’t open.
Baud
@Jackie:
And the press club laughed.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@schrodingers_cat: they also seem to want a moratorium on good food.
If magas get their culinary way, all steak will be bland, boiled or burned. All curries will be prohibited. Nothing spicier than ketchup will be consumed. Pho is right outta here. Only peppers of the bell variety will be allowed. These people want a world so drab even our food must be as dull as their own existences. I don’t even think brown mustards will be safe. Sad
HopefullyNotcassandra
@schrodingers_cat: one day it should dawn on this regime if they destroy every goose that lays golden eggs in America there will be nothing left for them to pilfer.
bluefoot
@Chetan Murthy: I agree about the UK. The US and the UK seem to be leapfrogging each other when it comes to insanity. They started w Brexit, we elected T, etc…
I need to get serious about researching working overseas. I live in MA but that’s only delaying the inevitable, so to speak.
rikyrah
Olga Nesterova
@onestpress
Character.
Macron, President of France, was forced to walk NYC streets after cops blocked him for Trump’s motorcade, despite him literally calling Trump asking to cross the street.
So he walked around. Went to a coffee shop, took pics with baristas and NYers. No tantrum.
x.com/onestpress/status/1970874022545297464
mali muso
@jonas: To be clear, OPT as it is currently structured is available to all F-1 (international) students who complete a degree. It allows them to obtain work experience within the field they studied for up to 1 year. For those in STEM fields, there is an option to apply for an extension of a 24 months. Rational governments try to make their countries attractive to the best and brightest by providing some kind of pathway from study to work (see Canada, etc.) but that’s never been the American way. And now it sounds like we’ll just close the doors entirely.
rikyrah
Yashar Ali 🐘
@yashar
The White House has placed a photo of an auto-pen signature instead of a portrait of former President Biden on the “Presidential Walk of Fame”
x.com/yashar/status/1970905244357017730
rikyrah
The “Debate Me Bro” Grift: How Trolls Weaponized The Marketplace Of Ideas
…”The “debate me bro” playbook is simple and effective: demand that serious people engage with your conspiracy theories or extremist talking points. If they decline, cry “censorship!” and claim they’re “afraid of the truth.” If they accept, turn the interaction into a performance designed to generate viral clips and false legitimacy. It’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition that has nothing to do with genuine intellectual discourse.
The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling. When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration alongside established facts and expert analysis.”…
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/17/the-debate-me-bro-grift-how-trolls-weaponized-the-marketplace-of-ideas/
HopefullyNotcassandra
@FastEdD: question
Did you fly straight up or was there a downdraft?
rikyrah
CNN Breaking News
@cnnbrk
Two ICE detainees were killed in a shooting at a Dallas facility, a Homeland Security official says. A third is in serious condition. Follow live updates:
x.com/cnnbrk/status/1970896546339107009
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: OPT is optional practical training. It lets you work in the US for a year or three after you graduate.
Marc
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I remember the bland food days (although my family was into spicy BBQ). One day, a woman named Joyce Chen opened a small restaurant two blocks away from my childhood home. The whole neighborhood was a very different place within two decades.
OGliberal
@Marc: Yeah…pretty much goes without saying.
Gin & Tonic
Interesting, if hyper-local, lawyer story. Rhode Island has a body called the Coastal Resources Management Council, whose responsibilities are pretty much what you’d expect from the name (public access to beaches is a very important thing here.) For the last couple of years there’s been a dispute between a country club (i.e. golf course) on the coast and the CRMC about actions the club has taken to try to protect part of their property from encroachment by the sea. The dispute reached some kind of a climax yesterday when a rock wall emplaced by the golf course was (again) deemed illegal and mandated to be removed.
Turns out that the former chair of the CRMC, an attorney, who resigned in 2021, is currently representing the country club in its battle with the CRMC.
Principles? You stupid child. Like Ray Liotta said, “fuck you, pay me.”
Eunicecycle
@Jackie: I hope the next President puts up a picture of shit instead of Trump’s portrait. I know that would also be classless, but JFC.
iKropoclast
Still classier and more appealing to the eye than an actual photo of Trump.
gene108
@schrodingers_cat:
Will also hurt university enrollment. A double win for the white Christian nationalists.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Eunicecycle: They should just use the mugshot.
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: “Creation science” advocates were the pioneers of this– they’d often snooker scientists into having public debates with them in front of their preferred audiences, which never went well for the scientists (who were usually used to tough but good-faith debate among scientists, not bad-faith trolling from religious grifters). Eventually advocates like the NCSE’s Eugenie Scott had to warn them not to do it.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Marc: better food equals happier people. The joys of fusion cooking are just being discovered too.
geg6
@dmsilev:
You’re right. But the arrogance and lack of self awareness of some of these people that he manages to uncover with such ease is, to me, astounding. No one gets past him. No one.
Josie
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: I think the picture Trump used for himself is the mugshot. He thinks it makes him look tough, I guess.
FastEdD
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I was driving with the sunroof open. Otherwise I’d go splat. No guitar strings either. Only harp.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Eunicecycle: I am hoping for a revival of Damnatio memoriae. Think how grand it would be to not have to hear anything about this pathetic, pitiful president again.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@FastEdD: that was smart.
Thank you for the chortle, too
geg6
@Darkrose:
Yes and it’s delicious.
Gretchen
Speaking of terrible takes, JD Vance claimed that the space program was so successful because we didn’t rely on immigrants. He’s unaware that we went Nazi-scientist shopping after the war to pump up our rocket expertise.
They Call Me Noni
@Cliosfanboy: I don’t understand what the heck they thought they were going to accomplish. All they did is reinforce the fact that they’re ignorant.
laura
@Omnes Omnibus: attending Oxford for an economics degree probably prevented him from the U of C ick.
Also, too, happy birthday to Ragnorak Lobster!
Matt McIrvin
@Gretchen: oh, Nazis don’t count, they’re JD Vance’s kind of guys.
Matt McIrvin
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes, and it’s where the descriptor “neolib” came from. (Like I said recently, neoliberalism is a legit term for a legit thing, but if someone uses it and implies that the only neoliberals around are Democrats, I smell a rat.)
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
JUST RIDICULOUS
Matt McIrvin
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Did you see the guy who complained recently that sourdough was woke bread?
They Call Me Noni
@Jackie: They make time for the most petulant bullshit.
Belafon
@Gretchen: Now explain why you hate women, especially black women, JD.
billcoop4
@Steve in the ATL: Re: Third year
@Omnes Omnibus:
I recall enjoying 3rd year of law school (W&L ’86L — I seem to recall Steve is W&L, too, but I don’t remember if undergrad or law) because I was able to treat it mostly like graduate school with some actual intellectually interesting topics, include Professor “Lash” Larue’s course on Ancient Law (Greek, Roman, and Hebrew notions of law).
Also too the Trial Practice Seminar taught by a Circuit Judge, which was also engaging and of some practical benefit.
BC in NY
iKropoclast
The bread that you start by preserving the remains of a potentially diverse set of prior breads? Sounds right.
Marc
German people were already white, therefore not considered immigrants.
Belafon
@Gretchen: Someone should also ask him about the Chinese immigrant that started our space program, who we drove out of the country back to China where he helped them start their space program.
Marc
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Better food sometimes means happier white people, as our original multi-cultural neighborhood is almost completely gentrified (I do have one relative left there).
Matt McIrvin
@Gretchen: Also, the Apollo astronauts were trained in geology by an Egyptian-American scientist, Farouk El-Baz.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Gretchen: the vice president is also ignoring the fact that everybody, but native Americans, is the child of immigrants. Funny how this obvious fact has been sifted out of the maga mind.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Marc: turning vibrancy into blandness is the founding skill of nurse ratchet types everywhere.
Matt McIrvin
@Belafon: Yes! Qian Xuesen, or as he was known here, Hsue-shen Tsien.
Marc
@Belafon: Better yet, ask him about the white literal devil worshiper who worked with said Chinese immigrant to found both JPL and Aerojet General (big manufacturer of solid fuel rocket motors), then blew himself up in his home lab (or was he blown up?).
Matt McIrvin
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Some of those guys draw a distinction between “settlers” (good, because imagined as conquering heroes) and “immigrants” (bad).
Another Scott
@Gretchen: HappyToast (who lives in the UK) has a great picture on his Patreon thing today.
Just about everyone “British” that you know fits in that category.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
counterfactual
@Gretchen: I just shouted, “What the FUCK!” Yes, the Operation Paperclip Nazis, but also Tsien, refugees from Europe, a bunch of Canadians after the Avro fighter program was terminated….
Old School
@Another Scott: To view Happy Toast’s Patreon, you need to subscribe, so here’s the BlueSky version.
Matt McIrvin
@FastEdD: wait… This IS the bad place!
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Marc: Have you been to Devil’s Gate? I think there were condors roosting there recently.
Matt McIrvin
@counterfactual: Before that, the Manhattan Project depended heavily on Jewish refugees from Europe and the children of same, and of course one of the big scientific names was an Italian-American.
MisterMix reader
Posted @ MisterMix blog
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Matt McIrvin: You are right, of course. Folks like our VP just seem driven to turn this country into the same corrupt pits of despair from which most of our ancestors emigrated. It looks apparent these same folks want to export this corrupt misery to the world. How very unoriginal of them.
lowtechcyclist
@Jeffro:
Eighty-five, huh?
Martin Luther says, “nice try.”
Another Scott
@Old School: 👍
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Betty
Cass Sunstein, one of those on my list of Obama blind spots. He had a lot of say in that administration but it waa kept low-key for the most part. Rahm is number one on the list, and Arne Duncan isn’t far behind. Happy to see him exposed pompous ass he is.
lowtechcyclist
@Gretchen:
“‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department’ says Wernher von Braun.”
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Betty:
Didn’t know that, should have known.
Don’t forget other luminaries like Larry Fucking Summers, Timothy Fucking Geitner and Austan Fucking Goolsbie.
Gretchen
@HopefullyNotcassandra: The University of Illinois has so many Chinese students that there are about 2 dozen businesses near campus serving authentic food, groceries, bakeries and tea shops. The town is wondering what will happen if there are no more visas for Chinese students. The vibrant restaurant scene has been a recruiting tool to get Chinese students to go there. nytimes.com/2025/07/14/dining/chinese-food-urbana-champaign-student-visa.html?unlocked_article_code=…
cain
@rikyrah:
I swear to god, if some asshole media person starts talking about how a democratic president should reach out to GOP and do kumbayaa or whatever, they should get the message of “we don’t play that way, anymore”
Jackie
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
FFOTUS LOVES his mug shot. He considers it a badge of honor and thinks he looks tough.
I’d use the infamous pic of him leaving the helicopter with a hangdog loser expression with his red tie unknotted and dangling – after his dismal Tulsa rally 2020. The rally that killed Herman Cain.
rikyrah
@Gretchen:
Hidden Figures tells how much that is a lie….we got those running from Nazis and actual Nazis at NASA
Betty
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I did forget Geithner, my bad. Sunstein is out now crying that he is getting hate mail because of the interview. Boo hoo!
Jacel
@Jackie: So was a portrait of Jefferson Davis included alongside other Presidents in Trump’s Walk Of Fame?
Jackie
@Jacel: I wouldn’t doubt it.
JML
@Betty: much as I love Obama, Barack is a bit of an ivory tower liberal himself, despite his background as a community organizer.
glc
@Anonymous At Work:
Just tightening up the prose, don’t mind me.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Gretchen: I hope that scene survives! What is wrong with people that they demand the imposition of drab sameness on others? These are the same folks who look at the wilderness and think “what this needs is miles of hot asphalt and concrete.” It must be fear.
Pyre Light
85 effing points to define liberalism and he still couldn’t narrow it down to less than “not fascist or communist” apparently.
Manyakitty
@schrodingers_cat: this is exactly right.
Kayla Rudbek
@satby: the thing with legal scholarship is that the law school journals are edited and selected mostly by the students, not the faculty. It seems to me that there’s less peer review by experts than there is in the sciences (weirdly enough for such an adversarial profession as law).
Kayla Rudbek
@matt: I’m glad that I went to law school in the state of Wisconsin, as the two law schools there had to actually teach the law instead of relying on preparatory courses to get the graduates to pass a bar exam, and letting the professors get too theoretical. This was due to diploma privilege aka the three-year bar exam (automatic admission upon graduation, so our professors knew that they couldn’t rely on a bar exam to weed people out).
Kayla Rudbek
@Ishiyama: yeah, I’ve seen that a lot more people who want to write patents are going the patent agent route instead of the patent attorney route in recent years, I would assume because of the cost of law school.
Granted, some people start out at a law firm or other employer as patent agents first and then get reimbursed for going to law school by their employer, but it’s a longer process to go part-time and generally the more prestigious schools don’t offer part-time programs as an option. Although considering what the Supine Six and now this clown Sunstein are like, I would be willing to bet that the top students at a less prestigious school would be better lawyers than a snooty Harvard or Yale Law graduate who’s convinced that the sun shines out of their ass…
Kayla Rudbek
@laura: I only know two people who I really like who went to University of Chicago, and I think they went there for undergrad…
Paul in KY
@Baud: The good Lord only had 10…
(apologies to Mr. Clemenceau)
Paul in KY
@Old School: Now Kaganovich, what a cutup! I’d definitely be friends with him! Jewish too (tho an athiest).
Paul in KY
@Jackie: It’s like the 6th grade meanest girl is making these decisions. It’s so so lame.
Paul in KY
@rikyrah: There’s a classy dude. I hope we get one of those someday….
Paul in KY
@rikyrah: This guy was so anti-ICE that he murdered the detainees for them…
Paul in KY
@Jackie: That would be a better pic.
Paul in KY
@Jacel: It’ll be there tomorrow!
Paul in KY
@Kayla Rudbek: I liked Lip, but he flunked out.