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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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.
Oct 10, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Most Jews are liberal and pluralist, because these are the ideologies that have enabled Jewish progress toward equality. And most of us believe everyone deserves the same rights and freedoms.
But progressive Jews are realizing this week that the Left is no longer liberal.
Many Jews recoiled in 2017 after about 500 alt-right demonstrators marched in Charlottesville with tiki torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us.” After that, President Trump made a statement suggesting there were good people on both sides. Conservatives argue this statement was taken out of context and he was not referring to the marchers, but it was interpreted that way by many.
Oct 7, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
It's worth noting that the way the terrorist attacks on Israel are being covered and viewed today, and likely the international response to what is happening, would be significantly different if Elon Musk had not bought Twitter.
Prior to Musk's acquisition of the platform, fewer than 500,000 people had blue-check status. Blue checks get their tweets positioned first under a tweet when they reply to something, what they're tweeting about gets greater weight in determining trends, and their tweets are positioned first in trending topics.
Oct 5, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
NBC News, which is an advocacy organization that uses the name of a now defunct journalistic enterprise, is trying to foment outrage over police using force to arrest a fleeing and resisting suspect with a lengthy history of violent felonies.
There was a period in US history that ran from around WW2 until 2016, when most journalists had principles that transcended ideology. They aspired to be trusted to tell the truth by people across the ideological spectrum. That is not NBC.
Jun 22, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
A pack of teenagers raped and murdered a random woman in the public park in the middle of the day in Milwaukee. One of them took video of the attack and posted it on Facebook. The reason you didn’t hear about it is because the assailants are black and the victim was Asian.
Kamare Lewis was sentenced to 26 years after he took a plea agreement that saved him from facing a life-sentence for intentional homicide. He will be parole eligible before he is 30.
Feb 25, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Adams looked at a piece of data that is important and underreported and then his analysis of it was unhinged and stupid. You cannot talk about these delicate issues in careless, stupid ways.
A large percentage of black people seem to hate white people (and Asians and Jews) and that hate has increased during the decade of BLM. A lot of progressive activists and institutions excuse black people's hatred of whites (and Jews and Asians) or even actively stoke it.
Feb 24, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It’s been ten years since Trayvon Martin, and the results of a decade of activism and media demagoguery on race is that black people say in polls that they are less comfortable in diverse settings and they’re much more likely to be victims of violent crime.
A supermajority of black people said race relations were good in America in 2013. In 2021, that number was a third. Police violence was higher through the late aughts and early 2010s than it is now, and incarceration levels were much higher. This is entirely caused by narrative.
Feb 23, 2023 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
I have finished "Hogwarts Legacy." Did all the main quests, I believe all the sidequests and hunted the rare shiny versions of the magical beasts for good measure. It is a polished open world game, and a disappointing "Harry Potter" story.
The developers of the game went to lengths to distance themselves from JK Rowling and highlight that she wasn't involved. Unfortunately for them, she contributes much of the Wizarding World's magic.
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