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Our 17th most-read article of 2023.

Originally published April 17, 2023.

“Guillermo Rubio has found that his job as a copywriter has changed markedly since he started using ChatGPT to generate ideas for blog posts, write first drafts of newsletters, create hundreds of slight variations on stock advertising copy…”
— New York Times

Please, no more. I beg of you.

If you force me to generate one more “eye-catching email subject line that promotes a 10 percent discount on select Bro Candles and contains an Earth Day-related pun,” I’m going to lose it. What do you even mean by “eye-catching”? What are “Bro Candles”? What do they have to do with saving the environment? Why are we doing any of this?

If the United States is serious about liberty and justice for all, respect for international law, and a rules based order that treats everyone fairly and even-handedly, it’s time to ditch the doctrine and its corollaries. When those of us of a certain age were in school, we learned that the Monroe Doctrine committed the Continue reading »

The random assignment plus masking are supposed to make it likely that the two groups have the same distribution of causal factors. It is controversial how confident these measures should make us that they do this. This issue bears on the trustworthiness of causal claims backed by RCTs. As we noted, trustworthiness is the central […]

America loves a fighter Polls we reported on Tuesday suggest that a large swath of maybe-Trump supporters are looking for an excuse to abandon him in 2024. A criminal conviction is what they’re waiting for: An October Times/Siena poll indicates the conviction gut-punch for Trump would be stronger in swing states, leading to Biden victories in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania as well as Wisconsin where Biden is already favored. The shift would be “seismic,” with Biden winning by 10 rather than losing by four percentage points. Democrats are their own worst enemies in this situation. Three years ago on the date the Electoral College met to officially elect Joe Biden president, I posted: It is never a good bet to think Donald J. Trump won’t stoop that low or lower. But the question Democrats have to answer now both for others and for themselves is what they will do to defeat the New Confederacy that announced itself last week. Democrats’ first instinct will be to put the Recent Unpleasantness behind them…. To refresh memories, mutliple post-election protests by thousands of Trump supporters resulted in violence.

“Profound losers” Readers may enjoy an older video making the rounds again from the show “Letters Live.” Contrary to JoJoFromJerz’s description (social media sometimes strips context), the words are not actress Edie Falco’s. She came to read them in 2018. Via YouTube: In the wake of violence in Charlottesville in 2017, a Salt Lake City resident named Jonna Ramey wrote an open letter to white nationalists that was titled, “What Is Wrong With You?” Her letter was published in The Salt Lake Tribune and was soon read by millions. At Letters Live at New York City’s The Town Hall back in 2018, acting legend Edie Falco joined us to read it. The Salt Lake Tribune, Aug. 19, 2017: Letter of the week: What is wrong with you, white supremacists? I am a 67-year-old American white woman. My parents enlisted in World War II to fight fascism. They both served; my mother was a nurse, my father navigated bombers. They lost friends in that bloody war so that all the world could be free of fascism. They did not fight so that some white people could claim supremacy or that Nazis could openly walk the streets of America.

A look at those Doctor Who "multiple Doctors" team-up events over the decades and how the show's storytelling style evolved over time.

. Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound masterpiece. And that 1960s choreography! I just love it.

Our 18th most-read article of 2023.

Originally published March 24, 2023.

Josh, I can’t believe that our big day is finally here. Today, I’m the luckiest woman in the world, because I get to marry you, Josh, my best friend.

To be clear, the five women to my left aren’t my best friends. Even though they’ve spent a cumulative total of sixty-seven years supporting me from elementary school until right now. They have been with me through thick and thin, including those six years when you refused to be exclusive, which really messed with my self-esteem. Yes, these ladies did all that and so much more, but ever since we became official last June, I’ve known that it’s you, Josh. You’re my best friend.

In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Echo, Taylor Swift/Skip Bayless, CM Punk/WWE, Superman: Legacy, Halo, Smiling Friends, Doctor Who, and more!

Blog posts on topics including inflation, wage growth, banks, U.S. debt and population growth were among the most popular for two of our blogs in 2023.

Wolfgang Schäuble was the embodiment of the political project of buttressing a monetary union in which he himself did not believe. To do so he had to impose violent austerity even in Germany and to dismantle democratic institutions in countries like Greece. In other words, Schäuble personified the explosive contradiction that gave birth both to […]

The post Wolfgang Schäuble (1942-2023) appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Ο Βόλφγκανγκ Σόιμπλε ήταν η προσωποποίηση της πολιτικής στήριξης (με μέσα βίαιης λιτότητας και κατάλυσης των δημοκρατικών θεσμών) μιας νομισματικής ένωσης στην οποία ο ίδιος δεν πίστευε. Προσωποποιούσε δηλαδή την εκρηκτική αντίφαση που γέννησε την Κρίση του Ευρώ και τις (αναπόφευκτα αποτυχημένες) πολιτικές αντιμετώπισής της που οδήγησαν, από τη μία μεριά, στην φτωχοποίηση της Ελλάδας […]

The post Βόλφγκανγκ Σόιμπλε 1942-2023 appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

As I often do, I made a poll on the fediverse about two concepts I am interested in: Big Fedi versus Small Fedi. Although I think these are interesting topics, I couldn’t come up with exact summations of what the “Big Fedi” and “Small Fedi” positions are. So, I wanted to write down what I … Continue reading Big Fedi, Small Fedi →

The Daily Mail released a poll showing that Trump is up 4 points from Biden (with a margin of error at 3.5, which is undoubtedly very generous.) They also did one of those questions asking “what word do you associate with Trump and Biden.” He’s apparently very proud of the word cloud they made of it: He likes it! I assume he thinks all this is a huge compliment. And I think we can be sure that he’s going to give them more of what they want. Here’s the Biden word cloud which he didn’t post: When I went looking for this I fully expected that the biggest word in that cloud was going to be “old.” “Nothing” is actually a happy surprise. It’s not even particularly negative, it’s just … neutral. People aren’t thinking much about him one way or the other. We can work with that. The rest of the words are largely positive. Trump’s fascism, on the other hand is making a huge impact. And it appears that a whole lot of people think his fascism is just great. They want this orange make-up wearing, yellow cotton-candy haired, imbecilic monster to be their dictator.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Ron DeSantis’ epic failure Here’s a Christmas present for all of you who don’t have subscriptions to the NY Times: a free link to this delightful bit of holiday schadenfreude: the story of Ron DeSantis’ precipitous fall. Grab an egg nog and add a double shot. It’s just so much fun: Boxed in by a base enamored with Mr. Trump that has instinctively rallied to the former president’s defense, Mr. DeSantis has struggled for months to match the hype that followed his landslide 2022 re-election. Now, with the first votes in the Iowa caucuses only weeks away on Jan. 15, Mr. DeSantis has slipped in some polls into third place, behind Nikki Haley, and has had to downsize his once-grand national ambitions to the simple hopes that a strong showing in a single state — Iowa — could vault him back into contention. For a candidate who talks at length about his own disinterest in “managing America’s decline,” people around Mr. DeSantis are increasingly talking about managing his. Ryan Tyson, Mr.

We’re at $8,700, unlocking three more chapters. The next milestone is $10,500, which unlocks the final chapters, and the full fundraising goals is $12,500, in which case there’ll be an article on the medieval university bubble and what it tells us about ours, including some commentary on the idea of elite overproduction.

I appreciate everyone who’s given so far. Times keep getting harder for most of us. This is a reader supported blog. Everyone reads for free, but the work and food and so on aren’t free. If you value my writing and you aren’t in money trouble, I’d appreciate it if you give. Could be I’m wrong, but it seems to me that this blog and my writing is right a lot more often than wrong (way more than most establishment pundits or big influencers) and I hope you consider it worth keeping around.

Babies dig the beat, a new study shows, offering a cool insight into the origin of music.

The post We Were Born to Groove appeared first on Nautilus.

All the most hopeful political strategists I read have one big caveat as they contemplate the upcoming election: the third party threat. That could throw a monkey wrench into everything and usher in another Trump flukey win. I’ve written before about No Labels, which is nothing more than a grift of dumb big donors. But this one is something else and it’s kind of terrifying: The super PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential bid is narrowing its ballot access campaign focus to seven states — including crucial battlegrounds that will determine the outcome of the presidential election. American Values 2024 will now prioritize helping to get Kennedy on the ballot in Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York and Texas, according to plans first shared with POLITICO. Half of these target states were decisive in the 2020 race, and won by now-President Joe Biden by narrow margins. The promotion of a third-party candidate in these battlegrounds could change the pathways for victory for the major parties’ nominees — even if Kennedy only garners single-digit support next November.