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Brent

@bk4us.com
393 followers 181 following 894 posts

Cold War Liberal. Peace if possible, truth at all costs.

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Reposted by Brent
Jane Coaston @janecoaston.bsky.social · 7h
the funniest thing about the "we don't trust the media" people is that they will trust literally anyone else. like, if you have an image and text, they'll buy it. shaking keys at babies type logic.
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 5h
Again, a constitutional order that cannot prevent this - literally, the most minimal, baseline standard of the rule of law & the plain meaning of the text of the document - is not really worth saving.
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Dan Nexon @dhnexon.net · 5h
Is multiparty democracy is a panacea? No. Can it be designed in ways that make it worse than two-party democracy? Yes. Is our current system preventing a fascist government from destroying the country? No. That's all you need to know.
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Dan Nexon @dhnexon.net · 5h
U.S. politics are better with MAGA getting a 32% vote share in a PR House than a MAGA-controlled Republican party getting 46–54% vote share in an FPTP system.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 17h
i think cox should spend less time weeping about polarization and more time working to convince his co-partisans not to abandon pluralism and liberal democracy
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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is the Western leftist experience of the Cold War. It's one reason why *The Jakarta Method* is so infuriating. The US was not the sole actor in the world from 1945-1991. Local governments (Suharto, Operation Condor) were responsible for their own actions.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Trump expressed support for the Iraq war as it started. He later criticized Bush for not stealing oil or doing enough war crimes (namely targeting innocent family members of insurgents). Then he acted on that vision of war with Iran, and it's failing badly. Enough Trump-absolving revisionist BS.
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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Man, you have to be just...really racist...not to come away from spending basically any time at all at an American university with a nearly boundless faith in the power of American assimilation. All sorts of students whose ancestors came from all over, utterly and completely American, all the way.
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Matthew Gertz @mattgertz.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
🇺🇸
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Brent @bk4us.com · 30/09/2026
Somehow 2026 feels as long as 2020
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Aunt Fancy @auntiefancy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Arguably the civil war was as much about northern states not wanting to be legally required to enforce the slavery laws of southern states as it was about the south wanting to continue enslaving people. Just mentioning that for no particular reason.
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Brent @bk4us.com · 30/09/2026
Psyops: DECEPTICON
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Brian G. aka urbanbohemian 🪩🥂💖 @urbanbohemian.com · 30/09/2026
We're on Bluesky, put the link in your post. Put the link in your post. Put. The. Link. In. Your. Post. Links in posts aren't buried or de-prioritized here. This is one of the last platforms you don't have to make interested users do detective work to find the link. Just put it in the post.
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Kyle Orland @kyleor.land · 30/09/2026
[SENATOR ERIC SCHMITT]: So you’re telling me under oath that you've never played World of Warcraft? [JACK SMITH]: Correct [SCHMITT]: WELL THEN *unveils poster* please explain this picture of you farming gold in Eversong Woods! [SMITH]: That is Elden Ring, sir.
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
👇🎯
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
It's not just that it's a false dichotomy. It's also that "culture wars" is yet another example of how we are only able to discuss Every. Single. Topic. In. 🇺🇸. Politics. using the talking points & terminology of the right. We & the media are under no obligation to do that: bsky.app/profile/mcop...
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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Incredible chutzpah from a Congress whose one major legislative act was a budget bill that among other things imposed significant new administrative burdens on Medicaid recipients
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Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
People used to see philosophical ethics and philosophy of mind as flights of fancy that we, as a society, funded because they were abstractly interesting. In the AI era, they've become two of the most relevant fields of inquiry to the human future. A pretty good argument for academic freedom!
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Nick Kodama 🌳👻 @nickkodama.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
hey is the strait open yet
Six hundred of our finest warriors joined SECWAR
 for morning PT at the Pentagon ahead of his HISTORIC State of the Force address.
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Dan of the Year @downwithdan.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Ah yes the circle of life
• Dispatched
Sep 25 23:03 pm
In Transit
Sep 26 09:52 am
Delayed
Sep 26 10:57 am
Held By Carrier
Sep 26 15:07 pm
Destroyed
Sep 26 15:08 pm
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Again, he doesn’t follow laws or court orders, so the solution cannot be more laws or court orders, & we need to stop deluding ourselves about that: bsky.app/profile/mcop...
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John Oxley @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk · 30/09/2026
Said this before, but you could write an interesting book on the books/films/music that were huge in their time but rapidly disappeared from any collective knowledge. Only hardly anyone would read it, because they wouldn't recognise them.
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
These ads go in the same category as brazen, easily disproven lies after ICE killings. It’s not about persuasion. It’s a display of power. They could have passed them off as PAC-funded. They added “paid for by the U.S. government” because they want us to know they can break the law with impunity.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
US withdrawal from Iraq was scheduled a few years in advance. But with Iran hitting US bases there, and Iran-allied Iraqi militias launching drones at Saudi Arabia, the withdrawal looks—to everyone in the region, and the wider world—like the US under fire ceding more of the Middle East to Iran.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Buying fast food for my family, it’s over $50, which feels like a lot. Not unreasonable from the restaurant, but like going out to dinner, not grabbing something cheap. So I looked up fast food prices, and they’ve risen faster than inflation. Add that to the why people say stuff’s expensive list.
crews.bank
Chart of the Day: Fast Food Inflation
Today’s Chart of the Day shows the inflation of fast-food prices over the last of 10 years vs. actual inflation of everything else.
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Greg Pak @gregpak.net · 29/09/2026
why don't you call it America Intelligence mr trump i guess you hate America huh
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Toby Buckle @polphilpod.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
like idk if you've met people, but getting really emotionally invested in minor things & refusing to back down is kinda what we do
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Sherrod Brown @sherrodbrownoh.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
NEW AD: Listen to this sh*t.
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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
So much of Silicon Valley has the need to cloak themselves in a mystique of one form or another, when the truth is that Thiel got lucky during the dot-com bubble making a direct-to-pay app. He has no special moral or intellectual authority, he just wrote some code for PayPal.
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Brent @bk4us.com · 28/09/2026
Wouldn't surprise me. bsky.app/profile/bk4u...
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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This box was opened when the dot-com bubble enriched the most antisocial people on Earth, it's indirectly why Lord of the Rings and Marvel were mainstream blockbusters rather than cult films. The solution is just "take money away from Silicon Valley and the oddballs who run it."
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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
What’s even wilder is how VT (where I live) & WY are such mirrors: tiny population, hard weather, heavily armed, little policed, rural mountain states that are big on hunting and make a big deal of their cow heritage but survive on tourism.
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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I imagine some of this kind of work, if maybe not as much, got done in other administrations. But you wouldn’t know about it. How can so many politicians not understand that politics involves making the work visible, with an emphasis on who it’s for, not who did it?
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Tim Daw @timdaw.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Historic England vanishing archive - details of why it is broken : www.sarsen.org/2026/09/hist...
sarsen.org
Historic England’s Vanishing Archive
Not just the aerials. The lot. Historic England still holds the negatives, the prints and the scans. What the public lost, in early Sept...
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Nit Nurse With Wound @dannybirchall.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Sweet Jesus. So concerned about stopping people right-clicking your public collection of images that you put the whole lot in a private DRM provider that goes under, and the whole lot is fucked. Sweet. Jesus.
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Brent @bk4us.com · 28/09/2026
Something I always think whenever I see a center vs. left debate on Bluesky: "[...] such operations are more successful when they exploit pre-existing and often genuine fault lines within coalitions that authoritarians want to see fracture."
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Under Trump, the U.S. went “who cares that these relationships are mutually beneficial, you need us, pay us tribute.” And in response, most countries are going “no, what we need are mutually beneficial relationships with reliable partners, and there’s a whole world out there, we’ll go elsewhere.”
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Brent @bk4us.com · 27/09/2026
I'd like to see Kai Winn's response
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
A rich person can never be held accountable. Therefore, a rich person must never make a societal decision
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Brent @bk4us.com · 27/09/2026
I'm too young to remember the 89 Batman outcry, so I can't compare. And I didn't pay as close attention as my friends, so I might remember it as bigger than it was. But he still had a reputation as a pretty-faced heart throb when he was cast, so the choice was surprising at least
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Brent @bk4us.com · 26/09/2026
Or twenty years later, when they announced Heath Ledger as the Joker
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Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Trump is raging at news orgs for refusing to cover his reception of Xi after he banned three from the White House. The real lesson here: When institutions join together to resist his abuses of power it actually works, sending him into a helpless fury. New from me: newrepublic.com/article/2158...
newrepublic.com
Trump’s Angry Tirade Over Failing Press Ban Reveals His Achilles’ Heel
Trump is furious that news organizations are fighting back against his vile efforts to punish their colleagues—because collective resistance to his authoritarianism actually works.
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Ed Burmila @edburmila.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The meaningful divide in the Democratic party for the foreseeable future is going to be a lot less about center vs left ideology and a lot more about people who grasp this vs people who don’t.
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Rachel Hallie @dazedrachel.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Ngl, it does really frustrate me that the media narratives surrounding the Dem party are inevitably controlled by people in the least competitive districts, who project their local politics on everyone else. Where are the opt-eds saying how national Dems can learn from Abigail Spanberger?
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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Link to "'Tremendous Hypocrisy:Dartmouth provost accused of using AI to write op-ed about AI use" in @bostonglobe.com. Our prez says, "Thoughtful people on our campus can and should disagree about those norms." What? We can disagree about violating ethics codes w/out disclosure? archive.is/JoJbA
archive.is
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Daniel Gilmore @gilmored85.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
"Democrats are about to win big but I dont feel anything except for dread." Yeah, I get it man. Talk to a therapist. Its not normal to respond to good things with thinking that you're being tricked.
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
You can’t write about every other country’s far right party like this, & then continue to not call the Republican Party a far right party & write about them as if they’re the 🇩🇪 Christian Democrats or 🇬🇧 Tories. It’s both factually wrong & bad journalism. And yet, it keeps happening every day.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Any China hawks, especially the “can’t support Ukraine because we need all that equipment in case of China-Taiwan” types, objecting to Trump kissing up to Xi? They were awfully quiet when Trump allowed AI chip sales to China, and when he used up way more munitions in Iran. So I’ll guess no.
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Biggie @biggienotsmalls.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Should be reposted every month....
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
On top of the immorality of casting Russian aggression and Ukrainian self-defense as the same, there’s a huge practical problem: doing so prolongs the war. Putin and Russia are the ones choosing war. They’re doing it in pursuit of conquest. We get peace only when they’re forced to choose otherwise.
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