Author of mystery novels, including DON'T EVER GET OLD, nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards. Winner of the Macavity award.
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Oct 20 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
The US and Europe operate under a legal regime governing conduct in war loosely described as "International Law." It is a relic of the Cold War order that makes no sense in modern conflicts and is unsustainable in a conflict where significant interests are on the line. 🧵
Most wars between 1950 and 1995 were proxy battles between the US and the USSR. The main concern of both sides as they fought these wars -- the US in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan -- was not to escalate the proxy conflicts into open war between the two superpowers.
Oct 12 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This really changed everything for the Israelis. There used to be a very active Israeli pro-peace left. During the Oslo process, Gazans freely crossed the border to work in Israel and Israelis shopped in Palestinian markets. There were a lot of people for whom peace and coexistence were core values.
And after October 7, most of those former leftists don’t even see the Palestinians as human anymore.
It seems very clear that the rules of engagement for this war are different from campaigns Israel has conducted in the past. There is a lot less consideration for civilian suffering. Israel’s definition of what is proportional has changed.
And that’s because of these images.
Sep 20 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
An incredible story coming out of the world of Sci-Fi/Fantasy: GenCon, the annual Dungeons and Dragons and tabletop gaming convention has fired the organizing committee for its writers’ symposium and possibly cancelled the event for 2025 after a woke meltdown. Here’s what happened. 🧵
First of all, the source for this is a run-down of Erik Scott de Bie, who seems to have rounded up the facts, but has a very different take on it than I do. You can read his account here: erikscottdebie.com/2024/09/12/the…
Sep 10 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
@asymmetricinfo Eating livestock or hunting with a license in the woods is very different than going to the pond in an urban park and strangling the ducks that the children feed there.
There is no argument that this is normal or tolerable.
@asymmetricinfo Springfield, Ohio had 40,000 residents in 2020 and then Joe Biden brought in 20,000 Haitians. In those numbers, the Haitians will not assimilate and become Americans. What happens is that Springfield becomes Haiti.
Jun 30 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The biggest lie told at the debate was Biden’s claim that the Republicans kept the border open by refusing to support Biden’s border bill. Trump pushed back but wasn’t coherent enough to decisively refute this common Democratic claim.
Border security and detention policy is in the hands of executive agencies. The policies these agencies utilize have a huge impact on the number of people who try to cross the border. Trump’s policies were very different from Biden’s.
May 24 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
The policies Elon Musk has changed since his purchase of Twitter have changed the discourse, and the way they’ve affected things has had a huge impact on the way we are discussing the war in Gaza. Here’s how it would be different if the old regime was still in charge.
First of all, Twitter had a number of staffers on the Trust and Safety team dedicated to “disinformation” and hate speech. Musk laid all these people off, unbanned a lot of odious actors and argues that more speech, through community notes, is the remedy to bad people speaking.
May 20 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
Ubisoft has decided to make the protagonist of their next "Assassin's Creed" game, which takes place in 16th century Japan, a black man.
A lot of people online are insisting that this historical figure, a servant named Yasuke was a legendary samurai. This is nonsense.
Yasuke was an African who came to Japan as a servant of Italian missionaries. When the Japanese emperor, Oda Nobunaga, saw the black man he was astonished. He made Yasuke strip to the waist and scrub his skin, because he thought he was painted with ink.
Apr 18 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Although black people are, on average, more conservative than white liberals, a significant break among black voters from the Democratic Party should be unlikely, because the Democratic Party treats black people collectively as an interest group it services, and the GOP does not.
Giving stuff to and doing stuff for black people is one of the main things the Democratic Party is about. Central to its messaging is that they do things for black people. That is why Joe Biden promised to nominate a black Supreme Court justice, and Gavin Newsom promised to fill a Senate vacancy with a black appointee.
Apr 17 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I’ve been following the drama around NPR CEO Katherine Maher, and, while lots of conservatives are dunking on her tweets and statements, I don’t see a lot of liberals circling the wagons around her. But a lot of them were just like her between 2017 and 2020.
If Maher is forced to step down over her “in this house” tweet history, a lot of other people who advanced their careers a few years ago by being performatively woke could also be in trouble. I guess their plan is to just delete their old tweets and try to keep their heads down.
Apr 11 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The reason they use graduation photos is forgotten internet lore. When Mike Brown was shot in 2014, media went to his Facebook to get pictures of him. In every photo, he was smoking blunts, fanning money or throwing gang signs. So they used photos of him looking like a thug.
Black Twitter reacted angrily. They said that the media was using images of Brown that stereotyped him. There was a trending hashtag #iftheygunnedmedown of college students or professionals posting pictures of themselves looking like thugs in solidarity with Brown.
Apr 6 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
This is an incredible article, because it shows what happens if you are a woke white man. Deck Nine makes progressive games and its CCO, Zak Garriss believed in assembling a diverse narrative team. But the people he hired hated and resented him and tried to destroy him.
In 2018, Garriss gave a talk at GDC about how he assembled a TV-style writers room for the game “Life is Strange: Before the Storm,” and how he believed “diversity of representation and perspective” strengthened the work. gdcvault.com/play/1025374/P…
Feb 5 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
This “immigration reform” proposal is insane.
The problem we have right now is that anyone who claims asylum is entitled to a hearing to determine whether they deserve to be classified as a refugee. We are now getting millions of these claims every year and actually granting asylum to maybe 25k refugees.
The vast majority of asylum claims — about 97 percent of them — are transparently invalid, but the reason people who know they are not entitled to refugee status are claiming asylum is because they will be allowed to remain in the US while their claims are pending. For years.
Dec 24, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
A lot of weird Marvel fanboys are coming out with this. The difference is that Warners is burning off the last of the DCEU properties before completely rebooting the property. Aquaman is the last gasp of a dead franchise, and everybody involved is already fired.
They cut costs finishing the movie and released it with an attenuated marketing spend. They basically dumped it.
The Marvels is a disaster. Marvel is supposed to be the blue chip franchise. The production budget on this was $270 million and they did a major marketing push for it. And even though it was one of the most expensive movies of all time, it didn’t look like it because so much was spent on reshoots and VFX shortcuts to stitch the pieces of the film together.
Dec 4, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I would like to share my experience being radicalized by the YouTube algorithm which sends you down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme content.
At the start of the pandemic, I was cooking a lot at home, and I started watching YouTube food videos. I became a fan of a YouTuber whose channel is called “Binging With Babish.” Babish, whose real name is Andrew Rea is a personable video editor and amateur chef whose food channel in which he attempts to construct food items from movies and TV shows became very popular.
However, I ultimately was interested in more technical cooking, and I began watching a YouTube chef named Joshua Weissman, who was cooking in a fine dining restaurant pre pandemic and started a YouTube channel that has become extremely popular. Many of his recipes are technical and challenging, but I did make his famous birria tacos, and they were very, very good.
Nov 4, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The reason a lot of young progressives are so mad at JK Rowling is that they read the books as kids, and they thought they were Harry or Hermione. But they grew up into people like Percy or Dolores Umbridge or Cornelius Fudge or Rita Skeeter. And they know it. And on some level, they’re ashamed.
I’m reading the fifth book with my niece and it’s kind of astonishing how well it tracks to contemporary controversies. And Rowling is on the same side now that she was when she wrote it. Which is the side of people who tell the truth, against people who suppress and deny the truth in service of their ideology.
Oct 28, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Media figures all seem to agree that Twitter has gotten much worse since Elon Musk took over. If you aren’t seeing what they’re seeing, it’s because your experience of this website has historically been very different from theirs.
Prior to Musk’s Twitter, a curated group of about 500,000 users out of Twitter’s 368 million users had blue check status. The message many of them broadcast was that this wasn’t very important, but it absolutely was, and it’s the reason they had a special experience on Twitter.
Oct 27, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
One of the biggest let downs of doing research for crime fiction was learning what serial killers actually are. Real serial killers nothing like Patrick Bateman or Hannibal Lecter. A serial killer is just what happens when a psychopath has a particular sex fetish.
There are two kinds of serial killers: Killers who get off on torturing and causing victims to suffer, and killers who kill people to use their dead bodies or parts of their bodies or mementos or trophies to gratify themselves sexually.
They call the first kind “process killers” and the second kind “product killers.”
Oct 16, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Admissions rates at top universities have plunged, and extremely strong candidates are being rejected from what would have been safety schools a few years ago. That doesn’t mean admissions are more “competitive.” It means they’ve become arbitrary. .abc7news.com/high-school-gr…
When a high scoring student (nearly always Asian) racks up a bunch of rejections, advocates for subjective admissions note that several thousand students each year get high scores (out of about 3.5 million high school graduates) so, therefore students with perfect scores are unremarkable.
Oct 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This Washington Post puff piece on Artemis Langford, who identifies as a transgender woman and joined a sorority in Wyoming, is long article, and most people aren’t going to read all of it. So I just want to point out a few interesting elisions and narrative tricks in the text.
First of all, the only thing Langford has done to become a woman is identify as one, and sometimes wear women’s clothing. This is the most lengthy article ever written about this person, and there is no mention of treatment or assessment by any gender clinic, hormone replacement therapy or any sort of medical transition process. Sometimes, Langford wears facial hair.
Oct 13, 2023 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
For years, pro-Palestinian demonstrators have chanted “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” and “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.” These are explicit calls for genocide. Yet we were surprised when activists celebrated that 260 unarmed people were massacred at a concert, that elderly people were executed on Facebook live and that babies were burned alive and beheaded.
Why were so many people surprised that activists who have spent years chanting for genocide were in favor of atrocities? Because we didn’t think they really meant the things they were saying. But they did.
Oct 12, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Senator Wiener is having a bad day but he’s on the cusp of an important realization.
He knows the people who drafted these tweets. He’s met with them. He’s worked with them on progressive advocacy. He’s probably invited them into his home, and considered them his friends.
And now he is figuring out that these folks are breathtakingly evil, that they hate him, and that they want him and his entire family dead.
It’s really hard to recognize that the people you thought were your friends would shoot your mother in the face and feel nothing and believe they were doing justice.
It’s got to feel incredibly isolating and frightening.
