Ex-diplomat. Interested in the polite liberals who run the US empire. He/him/او/o.
Feb 16 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
this is a great little vignette about the role experts serve (served?) in the structures of power. obviously the demand for austerity existed; but you can't just say that outright, you need the policy validated by credentials, by numbers or research or knowledge. so you find it.
it takes me back to one of my favorite talks about "the experts" which is about the field where I found myself. the fact that the excel sheet you're pointing to is wrong or the book you've written isn't accurate or whatever isn't the point.
Jan 21 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
incredible to have two presidents in a row who just go off onto free wheeling dementia reveries about the day they went into town, or their father's car or when mother said they could be the number one sports star.
maybe I'm telling on myself but I do feel like childhood and nostalgia for it is a disproportionate part of midcentury American life. I think when I'm sundowning I'm going to probably talk about the indie sleaze era, not being nine. but US boomer monoculture is about being a kid
Sep 20, 2025 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
I finished Control so I started playing the solo dev made wildly ambitious full-theater vietnam war simulator that's just called Vietnam War and its basically video game outsider art.
I started as the US Army which randomly assigned me to Pleiku- while there is apparently a way to burn your draft card so the game never actually starts I couldn't figure out how to do that- I thought about killing a dog then there was an artillery strike and we died.
Jun 30, 2025 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Okay so say there's no birthright citizenship? I've documented hundreds of transmissions of citizenship at birth (which takes place when an amcit is born not on US soil) it can be a very byzantine and complicated process.
and the United States has no unified system of national ID. "anyone who was born to a US citizen is a US citizen" okay how do we verify that? if your parents didn't have passports? with a drivers license? do you know how bad document standards are in some parts of the US?
Mar 17, 2025 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
so this isn't as bad or as simple as betar just giving lists of people to arrest to the feds, and it isn't as sophisticated as AI flagging you in a database for routine use. these ICE units will feed their "findings" into shared databases that will be used by other orgs.
and nobody using that info is going to know that it was just some ICE loser who saw an instagram like. they're plugging this into CLASS or TECS and that means the CBP or embassy visa officer will just see a material support for terrorism hit in the computer.
Jun 16, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
when I was a visa officer I was uncomfortable with the arbitrary & vindictive attitudes some of my colleagues would show, but now that I'm out and people share stories with me...man, what the hell is going on out there. refusing fully funded PhDs to Johns Hopkins?
the US visa officer is, by virtue of the doctrine of consular nonreviewability, literally an unquestionable black box capable of irreversible decisions they don't need to explain. there are maybe six weeks of formal training and then its just up to vibes after that.
Nov 21, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is making me oddly nostalgic for the visa interview stories about IRGC military service. It both a gruesome ideological praetorian guard who will 100% go into the streets to mow down protestors while also being the most Office Space-ass military organization in the world
the hardcore ideological guys, the ones who had to go on waiting lists for a chance to deploy to Syria and get martyred, those are all volunteers. but the draftees? those guys are basically a manpower slush fund for the ~20% of the Iranian economy the IRGC runs.
Nov 21, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
US visa policy towards Iranians is incredibly inhumane right now. There's nowhere for people to run. There's US money for an insane sex cult nobody supports to build a posting compound in Albania but fully funded PhD students are getting visas rejected.
Young men who were drafted into the IRGC against their will are labelled terrorists, but paradoxically this doesn't translate into much scrutiny for the children of high-ranking IRGC officials who still, as always, prefer the UC system and parties in Miami.
