SPLC Union Logo: Yesterday, the Department of Justice leveled outrageous allegations at the Southern Poverty Law Center. In so doing, they maligned the integrity of the SPLC workers who have labored tirelessly for decades to expose the dangerous cruelty of extremists and hate groups in the United States.

SPLC Union Logo: This work is punishing. It takes a toll on our health and on our safety. But we persist because we believe in our mission to advance justice for all, and we believe that investigating, naming, and alerting the American people to the activities of those who seek to harm our neighbors is a moral imperative and an essential public service.

Today our colleagues are facing abuse and harassment from the far-right figures emboldened by this attack. But we will not be deterred, we will not be intimidated, and we will continue to name racism, sexism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and all hate for the blight that it is.

Below is a statement from the unionized workers of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Palantir's Manifesto Is as Subtle as a MAGA Hat Palantir's 22-point manifesto is nonsense, writes Dave Karpf. But it at least it is short enough to be clarifying, he says.

So much of Silicon Valley has reached the conclusion that there is money to be made from American authoritarianism, writes Dave Karpf. With its ‘manifesto,’ Palantir wants to remind you that it reached that conclusion first, he says.

Opinion | Trump Corrupts, and Absolute Trump Corrupts Absolutely

“To say that President Trump is corrupt is to somehow understate the size, scope and magnitude of his corruption.

It is as if you were to describe a modern thermonuclear device as a ‘bomb.’ That is true enough, but it is not quite the truth. It does not capture the nature of the thing in full.”

Years ago @mikeduncan.bsky.social told me "you can rewrite shit but you can't rewrite nothing" and it's made every draft easier since.

Hartzog said lawmakers need to create more specific rules tailored to the unique threat posed by the combination of facial recognition and nearly undetectable surveillance technology before it becomes ubiquitous. Those laws need to target not only people using the technology, but also the companies behind it, he said. “A lot of these conversations tend to focus on, ‘is it OK to use these glasses or this tool to surveil other people?’” he said. “What often gets lost in this conversation is, ‘is it OK for companies to design these really socially hostile tools in ways that will foreseeably lead to massive violations of privacy?’”

🛎️🛎️🛎️

The beauty of the suburban brewery is being surrounded by babies and also groups of childfree adults drunkenly discussing the finer points of k-pop (this is extreme-earnest posting btw)

This is my kind of liberalism.

Same!!!

Opinion | Why the Stock Market Makes No Sense Right Now

Doesn’t entirely get at what your thread is about @kjephd.bsky.social but still recommend this www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/o...

This won’t work. The stock and futures markets can fuel themselves on vibes for quite a while, but supply and demand for tangible goods and services are stubborn things.

Opinion | Why the Stock Market Makes No Sense Right Now

“The problem isn’t just the war, or the energy crisis, or the debt levels, or the trapped Fed, or the fragility of the A.I. supply chain. It’s all of them simultaneously, potentially compounding one another, processed by a market that believes it will be saved.”

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/o...

Sam Altman's Creepy Eyeball-Scanning Company Gets in Bed With Zoom and Tinder Will your boss require an eyeball scan the next time you need to jump on Zoom?

“Basically, every version of World’s approach to verification requires people to go along with invasive biometric scans…”

OpenAI Executive Kevin Weil Is Leaving the Company The former Instagram VP is departing the ChatGPT-maker, which is folding the AI science application he led into Codex.

Three OpenAI execs announced their departures today, including Kevin Weil, who had joined as chief product officer in 2024. scoop from @mzeff.bsky.social

Dario meeting with WH Chief of Staff

archive.is/r4tdy

Rümeysa Öztürk. Text on the card reads: “Rümeysa Öztürk, Tufts grad arrested by ICE agents last year, returns to Turkey”

Breaking news: Tufts University graduate Rümeysa Öztürk, who was arrested by masked immigration agents last year, has returned to her home country of Turkey, citing the "state-imposed violence and hostility" she said she experienced in the United States. trib.al/7GKyEiz

Nothing screams hotel lobby in a blue dot in upstate NY like Fox News on the TV and MUNA on the stereo

The Vladeck Tragedy Why our most careful defenders of the rule of law can’t see the crisis clearly

And just to link to the actual piece more directly, again worth the read but if you want more read Shklar’s Legalism too open.substack.com/pub/bbaumann...

All who are NOT at the conference: You can scan this QR code and order Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship with the 40% conference discount putting the book's cost at $17.99. Go to that page and then search for my book by title.

I’m overall really like this piece, and recommend it as a good articulation of why rule of law liberals need democracy. But disappointed by its use of “liberalism of fear.” Generally the term (though not how it’s used here) is associated with Judith Shklar who criticized legal liberalism

App Stores Push Users Toward Nudify Apps, New Research Shows Findings from the Tech Transparency Project claim that Google and Apple’s app stores not only host harmful apps that can undress images of women, but encourage users to find them.

Findings from the Tech Transparency Project claim that Google and Apple’s app stores not only host harmful apps that can undress images of women, but encourage users to find them.

Defending the Democratic Backstage “Defending the Democratic Backstage: Jeremy Bentham's Sotimion as a Critique of Surveillance”  Kristen Collins, Senior Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, an...

Excited to be giving a lecture on my book on how surveillance, from each other, private companies, and the state, undermines liberal democracy at Hamilton College this Thursday. It’s open to the public, so if you’re in the area come by!

www.hamilton.edu/academics/ce...

Everyone wants there to be a way to use AI so that you continue to get the credit but you can blame it for mistakes but there isn't one; society just hasn't agreed to this kind of accountability sink.

I think people attempt to claim Singapore as such an example, right? Of course, that’s still not very convincing compared to the larger empirical/historical evidence in favor of liberal democracy

One can’t help but wonder if such an interlocutor simply means less to analyze reality than to assert democracy simply refers to majoritarian rule, as defined by the state’s formal authorities, and the point is to reaffirm its inferiority to liberal private property regimes as essential to freedom

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Why aren't students protesting?

In the very least*

Been absolutely losing it over the liberals who do not realize that they should in the very lease selfishly care about democracy for this very reason

“The friction of participatory democracy creates a pathway for legitimate resistance. If you do away with that friction, the illegitimate alternative you’re left with is firebombs…Democracy is an incredibly good deal for elites, one that they ought to stop taking for granted.”

Highly recommend this piece. “Populism” is a notoriously slippery concept—and it is a terrible term to use for grouping together extremist violence and peaceful democratic deliberation and bottom-up political reactions about AI