iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I'm serious when I say I've lost track of all the recent revelations of literal Nazis working in high-level positions in Republican congressional campaigns and I would very much appreciate a journalist who took the time to detail as many of them as can fit into an article.

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Hassinator @hassinator.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

a great letter in the times today. perhaps worth sharing in these troubled times. #RNLI #heroes

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Why "Cold War liberalism" (or, some of the thinkers associated with that label) is worth revisiting today. With many thanks to @jkuznicki.bsky.social and his colleagues at liberalism.org. www.liberalism.org/p/the-hard-w...

liberalism.org

The Hard-Won Lessons of Cold War Liberalism

Twentieth-century liberal intellectuals stood firm against the totalizing ideologies of left and right. Their insights remain valuable today.

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

The Trump admin had a real theory of war: Put on a show of toughness, tell people how manly you are, disdain law, do war crimes, and you win. Earlier losses came from leaders too "weak" to do that. It was a very stupid theory. But they espoused it a lot, really seem to believe it, and acted on it.

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American Political Science Review @apsrjournal.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

From our FirstView: The Politics of Privilege: Discrimination, Monopolized Social Rights, and Reform by @andysabl.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

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Zach D Roberts @zdroberts.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Urgent policing at the reflecting pool in DC. A tourist touched the water.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Many of us fall into the fallacy of assuming that, if grotesquely venal, selfish and cruel figures achieve success (political or financial), they must also be very clever. Trump and Netanyahu are salutary reminders that quite often the opposite is true.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 14/06/2026

A multicultural city of millions experiencing and sharing joy together is the quintessential symbol of why the far right's worldview is such a sad failure, one that can occasionally gain temporary power, but will always be a historical failure clung to only by failed people. Diversity is strength.

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Sarah Kay @k-interarma.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Aerial PARTIAL view of the anti racist, anti fascist crowd in Belfast right now. City Hall to the left for scale. This - this is the real Belfast. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

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Schooley @schooley.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

It's not often that a living man gets such a vivid preview of how he will be mourned.

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Stef "inclusion is a human right" Christensen @wikisteff.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

America waits for its 250th Anniversary to begin with a symbolic end to the Imperial Presidency and a restoration of both the rule of law and democracy.

Construction workers building more scaffolding above the 6th level to stabilize the structure so that when they remove Donald Trump's name from the Kennedy Center, the torques don't make the structure unstable.

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Scott Smith @canaansdad1987.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

4.3 million people have already been dropped from Snap benefits and with 14 million children already living in food insecure households they have made food pantries working past capacity. This can't continue. Vote blue everyone. #USDemocracy www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

pbs.org

Millions lose SNAP benefits as One Big Beautiful Bill’s stricter requirements kick in

SNAP enrollment has fallen sharply nationwide since the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer. More than 3.5 million people have lost access to the food assistance, as states implement...

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Gayton Gomez @gpgomez.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

It took them less time to take down the East Wing

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ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 04/06/2026

Who could possibly have anticipated the shocking revelation that Graham Platner may have harmed women? Who among us might possibly have predicted this? Surely no one. Surely this is utterly unforeseeable, with zero warning signs

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Indeed -- but there is a way to stop him. It's impeachment; and the fact that it is out of the question -- and that even with a flipped House, the Senate is unlikely to convict -- suggests something has gone deeply wrong with our system.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Well, I'd say there are several really big questions that need answering, which is one reason why making distinctions is helpful! (And I'm glad that among other things, you bring out some of those distinctions ...)

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

(or for that matter Weber's idea of modernity-as-rationalization), which seem like a kind of historicism (though not one in which any human agent, individual or collective, exercises -- to borrow a phrase from Mansfield -- rational control.)

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

(Eric in conclusion raises the question of the relationship between value pluralism and historicism. I wonder if he has thoughts on the proximity of some sort of pluralism nascent in Smith, and stadial theories of history ...

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

it seems like the value-pluralist objection isn’t incidental or eccentric, but rather central after all.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

But if the worry/objection concerning history and meaning has to do not w/collective agency but with the idea of rendering human experience coherent/comprehensible in terms of some single universal meaning (that is, not just freedom but "reason" in history) ...

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

So, “humanity” may not be brought into being by Geist's coming-to-consciousness-of-self; but by being threatened by, and the only agent that can address, the climate crisis. But that may still smack too much of the sort of “survivalism” that I take it we’re supposed to overcome!)

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

(One option: the view that suprapersonal historical agents are not “given” prior to collective action, but called into being in response to shared threats that create a historical agent – a people, or humanity itself – by threatening it.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

with less plausible claims that see suprapersonal entities as unified agents into which individuals are subsumed so that the realization of a “will” identified with the whole is identical w/the realization of the wills of each individual member (one of the things I take Berlin to have targeted)

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

(namely, that individuals don’t spring like mushrooms from the ground but are formed by social environment, and even have identities as members of large wholes)

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Intellectually, if we *are* going to reject this part of the CWL legacy, I think we need more of a justification for an ontology of suprapersonal agents that avoids the fallacy of conflating plausible claims associated with social ontological holism

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Ethically, given our continued propensity for slaughtering individuals because we identify them with one, bad, collective agent, on behalf of some other, good, collective agent, I’m sympathetic to their views.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Psychologically, this is understandable enough, as so many of them had been victims – or knew and loved people who had been victims – of actions undertaken in the name of (though seldom actually by) such supra-personal agents.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

... via the convergence of their ideas with separate currents in the social sciences which pushed methodological individualism – to the eclipse of the sort of holism involved in seeing “the people” or “humanity” as historical agents.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I don’t think it’s right to see the CWLs as doctrinaire sociological or ontological (as opposed to ethical) individualists. But I think they certainly contributed ...

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

(This may be connected to the rejection of autonomy which, like Eric, I find bewilderingly summary)

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

One thing that occurs to me – and I’m raising this publicly so that @samuelmoyn.bsky.social can respond if he wishes – is that an important issue here, running alongside the ethical issues that matter particularly to me (and I’d argue many CWLs), is the question of social ontology.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Related to this, if the complaint is about rejection of capacity for world-making, it seems odd that Arendt is lumped in – and also subject to critique. And as Eric notes, CWLs like Popper did NOT reject efforts at collective action.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I do think Moyn blurs important differences between rejecting long-range historical determinism & teleology (“providentialism”); an ethical critique of the sacrifice of individuals to long-term, over-abstract/vague, and implausible goals; and denial of capacity for collective historical agency.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Thanks to @nescio13.bsky.social for the shoutout in this very interesting post. A thread in response: Thinking of the critique of Cold War liberalism in terms of meaning in history & collective worldmaking is illuminating.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I'm not sure what's funnier/more tellingly apt: that Vanilla Ice is the only artist who is actually willing to embrace the Trump music festival, or that the festival has booked a fake version of famous fakers Milli Vanilli.

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Alan Elrod @aselrod.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

This is outrageous. It’s just pure largesse for the president’s family, cronies, and street thugs. The corruption is mind-blowing.

According to ABC, the settlement would create a
"commission" with "total authority" to settle
"claims" brought by those who allege such weaponization. Per ABC, this not only includes the insurrectionists; it could even settle purported claims by "entities associated with President Trump himself." By all indications it would operate with little-to-no congressional oversight.

In our interview, Raskin pointed out other glaringly corrupt aspects to this. He noted that Treasury's Judgment Fund is supposed to dole out its settlements and lawsuit judgments in accordance with actually existing court or administrative proceedings involving genuine victims of the government. As Raskin's staff notes, depending on the details, the relevant agencies and government officials must sign off on these payments, and they're disclosed to Congress and the public.

But with the new fund, it's not clear the payments will look anything like this. It appears to transfer control over its payments to Trump alone, Raskin's staff says, and decouples them entirely from all those agency processes.

"The Judgment Fund exists to settle valid judgments against the United States government," Raskin told me. Trump and his allies, Raskin said, are "trying to take money from the Judgment Fund while eliminating any controls and oversight" and putting it under Trump's "direct unilateral control."

On top of that, Raskin added, this circumvents Congress in another way, since Congress never voted to create a fund structured this way.
Which potentially renders it unconstitutional, too.

Ultimately, this story also helps explain the sordid political economy of MAGA fascism. As writer John Ganz has explained, Trump uses the government in various ways to support his coalition's "material basis." For instance, the massive scaling up of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ganz notes, functions as "an employment program for the
Trumpenproletarian mob," as a key component of the "class composition of actually existing fascism."

This new MAGA slush fund seems very much in this vein, particularly if it hands out payments to January 6 rioters. As Raskin put it to me, Trump and his lawyers "are figuring out a way to refund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle."

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Adam Gurri @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com · 10/05/2026

Despite clear moral justification, the Civil Rights activists did not pick every possible fight on every possible front. This is because choosing your battles isn’t defeatist, it is the opposite. It’s the thing you do when you want to win.

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Doctor Charlton Cussans PhD @charltoncussans.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

When the people's justice includes executing lemonade sellers and nuns, something has gone badly wrong.

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Michael DeMoor @michaeldemoor.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

… what you saw as a student — imposing buildings full of imposing professors and administrators with imposing power and prestige — perhaps you can be forgiven for not knowing that universities are held together with sticks and duct tape and an almost perverse resolution to make it work.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Shoot, he's gone the full Paul Rahe!

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

By this same logic, Donald Trump bears direct personal responsibility for the murder of Melissa Hortman, the assault on Paul Pelosi, the guy who showed up armed at the Obamas, the attempted pipe bombing of several prominent Democrats, the January 6th rioters who assaulted cops, and many many more.

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Cambridge University Press Political Science & IR @cambup-polsci.cambridge.org · 27/04/2026

#OpenAccess from The Review of Politics - Between Philosophy and Culture, A Symposium on Sungmoon Kim’s Confucian Constitutionalism: Dignity, Rights, and Democracy - cup.org/4t8mZtu - Chungjae Lee #FirstView

The image features a two-toned background, with the top half in dark blue and the bottom half in yellow. The text reads "The Review of Politics" in large letters and "#OpenAccess" below.

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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 26/04/2026

Honestly, it's supremely irresponsible to the *staff* to keep this disgusting panto act going for a minute longer. No decent person should blame them if they all walked out on a wildcat strike.

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Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

From the initial vid I had noticed how quickly JD had hightailed it out; I hadn't twigged that POTUS had stumbled and fallen while being evacuated. That, plus the CBS anchor/chair of WHCA crawling on hands and knees after POTUS, is all just too apt. Reality has gotten too symbolically on-the-nose.

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