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David Simon Profile picture
David Simon
@AoDespair
Author, journalist and TV writer/producer. Angriest Man in Television is faint praise indeed.
18 subscribers
Mar 22 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
A tell: Strategically, this weeks raid on Al-Shifra hospital, however successful or exaggerated it proves to be, gives the lie to the entire Israeli operation in Gaza. If Israel secured the hospital in November and was compelled to raid and empty it again five months later... ...is this not a miserable metaphor for what a counterinsurgent war of attrition can and can't achieve in Gaza? The illusion of ending Hamas or Islamic Jihad and restoring some alternate civil stability in the vacuum is revealed by the inability to secure a single hospital...
Jan 16 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
A brief history of my alma mater:
When the Abell family sold the Baltimore Sun to an out-of-town newspaper chain, we fretted, but were told that Times Mirror was a good chain, not like Gannett or whatever. We would be fine.
When the good chain brought in an out-of-town... editors and publisher for whom the Baltimore Sun was no longer a vehicle to fully cover a distinct metro region, but rather a waystation in which they might sniff up a Pulitzer or two and then depart for higher positions in the newspaper chain, I took the third buyout offered...
Dec 24, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
You in your rancid rhetoric use Jewish immigration is an ahistorical punchline. In the prewar era, when accompanied by land purchases and geography proscribed by the British, it resulted in pogroms and cries to kill the Jews; postwar, when it was postwar... ...and a remnant of slaughtered millions coming from the DP camps and a Europe that had proved them truly stateless, it was a declared war and cries to drive the Jews into the sea: post-48 when it was every Muslim country spitting out their entire Jewish populations in a...
Dec 24, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Context is king. The entire history of the Levant from Mandatory Palestine on is NOT one in which coexistence with the Jewish population was sought or assured. Jerusalem '20, Hebron, '29, the Mufti journeying to Berlin to urge Hitler to do what he would with the Jews in '43.... ...and then the plan. assertion that the UN partition plan should be rejected and the Jews driven to the sea by combined Arab arms in '47, the flip side of the Nakba that often goes unspoken when Palestinians speak of that tragedy. None of this is written to obscure the Israeli..
Dec 17, 2023 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
If you ever work with someone of great spirit and talent, and you are one of those people who carry an emergency ration of guilt and shame in your back pocket, then when that great soul is suddenly gone the memories that rush up first will not be the best ones... I've had some days to reflect on Andre Braugher and his passing, and with time and a bit more effort, I've been able to summon a variety of recollections and some real pride at for a time having the chance to write lines -- some of them good -- for a magnificent actor...
Dec 15, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Words have meaning. For example, the murders on October 7 were not indiscriminate, but discriminate. Hamas hunted and butchered women and children with full purpose. And it military efficacy is your measure of amorality, I have no problem continuing to condemn both sides... ...for their excesses, because efficacy for me is irrelevant to that condemnation. Based on Its entire history of blowing up civilian buses and cafes and murdering as many random people as it can, we can be certain that Hamas, if it could destroy Tel Aviv with a single...
Nov 30, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Adding a small drop of personal reflection to what will be today's cascade of tribute and memory to the immortal and poetic spirit of Shane MacGowan.
We met twice only -- once backstage in D.C. and once for a dinner in Dublin and only because I owed him -- and still do -- ... ...the book on a musical featuring the Pogues songbook. The damn thing has already been through about fifteen drafts and still isn't sufficiently wonderful to stand with Shane's own magnificent storytelling. And if you think George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman and I are not...
Oct 31, 2023 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Time for bed and I've wasted a day arguing with seemingly every useless, part-of-the-problem, I-know-half-of-this-story shitmonger on this hellscape of a platform, and by that I mean every mook who thinks you can rationalize the barbarism of Hamas, or every scrote who thinks... ...that the affront of the settlement policy and the increasing ruthlessness of the West Bank settlement policy is anything but a disaster for any peace process, or every submoron who thinks Jew or Arab, Israeli or Palestinian has a clean, clear purchase on this complicated...
Sep 18, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Mini-thread: Some inside baseball for you. The Wire's numbers look decent for the first two seasons but it's all illusion. Until season three the Nielsens counted all HBO viewing -- HBO 1, HBO 2, HBO Spanish, HBO Fam -- under one single number.... ....beginning with our season 3, the ratings entity began to break down viewing into each distinct HBO platform. So our numbers tumbled dramatically. The honest fact is that probably 40 percent of our perceived ratings the first two seasons were actually watching other HBO....
Sep 13, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
1) Not to excuse Hunter Biden from trading on his father's name -- or the Kushner couple from trading much better on Trump's, but it's about time to admit that influence peddling is not at all a crime under the U.S. code. It is legal. Congress has left it as a hole that.... 2) ...all parties involved in our governance and their friends and relations can drive a truck through. Extortion is a crime under the law. Bribery is a crime. But earning money by talking horseshit about how you know and who will listen to you is the premise of the K Street....
Aug 7, 2023 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
Thread: Very sad to learn that Bill Friedkin, one of the finest directors of the 1970s American film insurgency is no longer with us. He was a master. And while others are better equipped to assess his life and legacy, I have a small, personal anecdote to contribute. It will... ...sound at points like a humble-brag and maybe it is, but I promise, in the end, the joke is on me. In any event: It is April of 1991 and I am working a weekend rewrite shift at the Baltimore Sun and trapped in the doldrums of a slow night. To my memory, I was filling in...
Jun 30, 2023 • 24 tweets • 4 min read
1) Thread for today: I am not going to opine on the Supreme Court's ruling except to tell a story about a late and valued friend. The story will suffice for the sum of my thoughts about affirmative action.

I was working at the student newspaper at the University of Maryland... 2) ...a broadsheet daily, when I meet a young man from Prince George's County named David Mills. He, too, wanted to write and edit for the Diamondback. I had grown up in a more affluent county and attended better public schools, but David had done well in high school...
Jun 29, 2023 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
1) Thread: This is fun, and I can add a bit of trivial material that while highlighting my early incompetence as a newspaperman, makes the Free State look a smidge better for it's tardiness. So let's go back to 1983 when I was a skinny lad with hair and ambitions to write... 2) My way on to the Baltimore Sun. I was still a student at UM, covering College Park and the suburban Maryland counties as a stringer, meaning they paid me by the story. I was looking for any byline possible and I came upon a rape case in Prince George's County...
Jun 5, 2023 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
Small thread: So last night, with a DeMille-like bat mitzvah in the rear-view and the laundry done, I settled in to watch something by my lonesome. Randomly picked "The Story of Emile Zola" with the great Paul Muni. Academy Award winner for Best Pic... ...Knew of it and its place in cinematic lore, but never actually watched it. Bottom line: Muni, who was Brando before Brando, is naturalistic and great and worth the watch. But when you get to the Dreyfus Affair the entire thing shits the bed...
May 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Backwards. The reality here is that American policing should have achieved some sort of dividend from thirty years of integrating urban departments and turning leadership over in many cases to black commanders. But no, the brutalization, corruption and incompetence is rampant... ...why? Was integration a mistake? Is black political leadership incompetent? No. In those thirty years, America committed to draconian drug war and mass arrest that not only brutalized vulnerable communities but rendered the skill sets required...
May 15, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
1) He's an asshole, but you're doing no one any good service by using him to hyperbolically declare that any and "all" argument for sound policing is racist in origin or intent. It isn't. And a deterrent based on competent retroactive investigation of felonies works. Addressing.. 2) violent crime by seriously probing incidents -- especially those in the most vulnerable neighborhoods -- and arresting repeat offenders may in fact be the most definitive thing law enforcement can do to reduce serious crime. This has been demonstrated dramatically..
Nov 4, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Just spitballing, @elonmusk, but maybe the advertisers -- and the activists, and some of the blue checks, and regular users, have already seen your arrival, marked by a spike in racist, anti-Semtic trolling. And maybe... ...your immediate cite and embrace of the venal and vicious disinformation campaign about the brutal assault on an elderly man debased this entire media platform and brought everyone to realize that you were not only serious about opening it up...
Oct 24, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Thread: How many times are you going to pratfall your way through this self-made disaster? Here we go, fucknuts: Longitudinal study of Baltimore homicides by Johns Hopkins University, 2005-2017. So thirteen years, just so you don't worry that there are anomalies here.... 6 percent of victims are white in that span for a total of 202. That means an average of over 15 white residents a year slain in a city that in those years averaged about 615,000. So in Baltimore, where your chance of being white and slain is about 2.4. Or a difference of...
Sep 29, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
And now after some considerable patience with this account, I must, again, lose it: No you fucking ideologue, it's an actual construct and studies have been around for 30 fucking years showing that a relatively small number of people are responsible for a plurality of a city's... ..violence. You can look it up before spouting what you think the phrase means, but you won't. But if American policing had not spent the last decades indulging in such race-based policies as drug prohibition and mass arrest, and teaching the marginal skill set for that work...
Sep 27, 2022 • 31 tweets • 6 min read
1) When a shitbird mangles an opponent's language into his own rhetoric, you can be assured of one thing, he's stuffing a strawman weak enough so he can wrestle with it. Two things can be true at once and in this case are: 2) Mass incarceration and the drug war have filled too many American prisons and have done so as an overly of systemic racism and class warfare. That has to stop and I've been arguing and writing about it for 25 years.
Sep 25, 2022 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
1) Fucknuts, I was a journalist for twenty years before any of the television. I covered these issues in detail for a daily newspaper and wrote two non-fiction accounts on violence and the drug war.... 2) The submoronic trope that compares the modern police culture burdened by the corruptions and brutalities of the drug war to the policing culture previous studiously avoids one fundamental reality: