If you want a "keeping it real" story of how the airline industry evolved to it's current state of tiered levels of service with discomfort at the bottom end, I'll walk you through it. It has no relationship to the things the industry's critics say.

A thread.

https://twitter.com/dilanesper/status/2000244188928245855

1. 31 inches pitch in coach and 17 inches seat width has been basically standard among major airlines for over 40 years. If there is shrinkage in legroom it is a very slow process and mostly on budget carriers.

What I wish people would realize about anti-semitism is that it isn't enough to say "it's theoretically possible to harshly criticize Israel without being anti-semitic".

Yes it is. But lots of Palestinian Cause types traffic in anti-semitism and don't face sufficient opprobrium. And again, hashtag "not all Palestinian Cause types". Absolutely right. Some strident advocates for Palestinians and even some one state solution types do express proper horror about October 7, Bondi Beach, etc.

But lots of others look immediately to justify and minimize.

Folks, if the air travel market said "we're sick of the bad cramped seats" and refused to fly in them, instead filling up premium while economy went unsold, airlines would respond to that by adding room.

But that's NOT what most people do. They want cheap fares more than space! The real objection is "I should get a high class product while paying a rock bottom fare", but, no, you actually shouldn't, and what actually happens is when the airlines give you the option of paying more for more space, most travelers prefer paying less for less space.

A lot of followers responded to my sex positive thread about the Internet and young women by asking "what about porn?".

It's a very good question. And I might as well say it-- I think the right wing and feminists have a point about porn as we stand in 2025. To be clear, "as we stand in 2025" is crucial here. Part of the problem with critiques of pornography is there really was a "crying wolf" phenomenon. The religious right, after all, opposed Henry Miller novels and tried to ban the shipment of dildos under the Comstock Act.

I am going to once again say, this is BS, people are scaring you, a lot of commentators claim the legal system and the parties and the voters will allow things that are actually impossible, and repeating these claims is highly irresponsible.

https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1981829942959837508

There's no third term. See this thread.

https://x.com/dilanesper/status/1906815125216244106

i mentioned awhile ago how i think the second Trump term has completely refuted the unitary executive theory. Media regulation is a PERFECT example. You want antitrust regulations of media mergers, and the President CAN'T be allowed to run them.

https://twitter.com/CGasparino/status/1981496719863955913

I know people claim the Constitution requires the President have personal control of everything in the executive branch but the text of the Constitution says no such thing. ALL it says is the executive power vests in the President, which is entirely vague.

I think this has to be taken on directly. "Genocide scholars" have entirely discredited themselves over the past 2+ years over Israel and academics need to understand this because it is directly tied to why the public no longer trusts them.

https://twitter.com/KundunIlikedit_/status/1980171503414255773

There are very few people on the far left in society. But there has long been a concentration of such people in academia. There were lots of Marxist professors way back when William F. Buckley complained about Yale right after World War II. That isn't new.

I think both parties, given their druthers, will do culture war stuff rather than governance, and with today being No Kings day (and given President Trump's love of the culture war), I might tell a story that shows how deep the rot in our politics goes. It's bipartisan. In 2024, the California legislature passed, and Gavin Newsom signed, this law that takes effect in 2026 and effectively bans any California high schools from having Native American mascots.

actionnewsnow.com/news/a-new-cal…

Inspired by a recent @whignewtons podcast, I want to talk about a part of the "conversion therapy" case that I think legal conservatives have been way too dismissive of-- professional speech.

To tee this up, let's talk about my profession, lawyers. We write and talk for a living There are all sorts of restrictions on the content of lawyers' speech. In a couple of areas, we get some First Amendment protection, though less than ordinary people get. In other areas, nobody even thinks the First Amendment applies to our speech.

The "concert tickets are too expensive" discourse, for some reason, has really stuck in my craw for the last couple of days.

People really have to come to grips with what living in a prosperous society means. It means there's more disposable income chasing limited quantities. The reason why you could see Sinatra for $5 in a lounge in Vegas in the late 1950's (as you could) is (1) a lot of Americans couldn't afford to travel to Vegas, and (2) it wasn't easy for most Americans to get there. For many, a "vacation" meant a park or beach 20 miles away.

this. all of it.

I was arguing earlier today with one of these left leaning types who thinks America is teeming with white supremacists. No, we aren't. This is, for all of our laws, still a great country, based on Enlightenment values.

https://twitter.com/dhaaruni/status/1968912210249273612

some people online in the Discourse either (1) have personality disorders that cause them to massively overstate areas where we fall short or (2) think lying and deliberately overstating America's problems will serve their goals.

BTW, this whole thing with Bivens shows you why hard core originalism, with no regard for pragmatism, is such a bad judicial philosophy.

There's no text in the Constitution prohibiting a Bivens remedy. Both sides of the debate are making up the law on this.

https://twitter.com/dilanesper/status/1965117521654415737

The originalists are just saying there's this implied rule against courts implying causes of action, because that's part of the Article I "legislative" power. It's all by implication, not clear in the text, and yet the Court's conservatives treat this as some unbreakable rule.

This morning is probably the first day many people will learn that for almost 50 years, going back to US v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U.S. 543 (1976), SCOTUS has allowed racial profiling by immigration officers.

It was shameful then, and it is shameful it is still good law. Michael Kinsley used to say the scandal in Washington isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. I actually think this morning's order is rightly decided under the controlling precedents.

The problem is those precedents.

This isn't actually intersectionality (an overused term) because it's not due to the intersection of identities, but I think the conclusion is somewhat right if the reasoning is wrong.

What has happened is the American left has celebrated anarchy/rulebreaking since the 1960's

https://twitter.com/petespiliakos/status/1964733954835227067

A lot of traditional socialist ideas were based on the notion of COMMUNITARIANISM-- that we were in this together, we had obligations to each other, we needed to build a high trust society.

In contrast, the right was more INDIVIDUALISTIC. Think about, e.g., gun rights rhetoric.

Folks, some of the reactions to my thread on shooting the innocent North Korean fisherman seem to be based on a misconception that the only thing that matters is the safety of US spies.

But that's completely antithetical to hundreds of years of customary law on espionage.

https://twitter.com/dilanesper/status/1964221766420877497

When a country sends spies into another country, they are unlawful combatants. Indeed, they are almost the paradigm of what an unlawful combatant is. They are violating the host nation's sovereignty. They are not wearing identifiable insignia. They are often committing sabotage.

A reader asked Matt Yglesias this morning "why did the outsider nerds in DOGE fail while the outsider nerds in baseball succeeded?".

Matt gave a good answer about the backgrounds of the baseball nerds, but there's something about the whole "Moneyball" story that's a bit toxic. The Moneyball story is essentially that baseball managers and front offices had made bad decisions for years, and some baseball fans who were also brilliant statisticians came in with their disruptive paradigm and turned out to be right about all this stuff the insiders got wrong

This deserves a thread.

Imagine if on September 12, 2001, Osama Bin Laden announced that if we don't go into Afghanistan to get the perpetrators, he would sign a binding pledge not to attack America again.

Should Bush have taken that offer?

https://twitter.com/_TimBarker/status/1962700290412438009

Or imagine if on December 8, 1941, Emperor Hirohito announces that Japan will ensure the safety of the US' Pacific territories if we agree to take no action in response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Should FDR accept?

Two things that do a lot of work in the mind of Palestinian Cause types are (1) they think all Israeli Jews are far-right religious types who want to kill or remove all the Arabs and (2) they don't really believe Israel has a democratic culture where public opinion counts. So I am getting a bunch of replies from them saying "no way would the war end if Hamas released the hostages. Israel would just go in and drive all the Gazans out or kill them".

But of course, in the real world Israel IS a democracy and public opinion counts there.

A quick thread about something bothering me about l'affaire Lisa Cook. Which is, the type of mortgage fraud she is accused of is common, and rarely gets prosecuted. And it's a type of crime-- involving the ways rich people get privileges the rest of us don't-- that should be. So what is it that Cook is accused of? Well, when you buy a home and take out a mortgage, the bank will ask you if it is your primary residence. The reason for this is the actuarial risk is lower-- buyers are much less likely to default on the loan on their primary home.

Thing that annoys me, inspired by Matt Yglesias' column this morning.

I went to Hong Kong just before the handover, in May 1997. I spent a lot of money to go- it was a lot more expensive then.

I did it because I knew China was a Communist tyranny and would ruin it. I was telling everyone who would listen back then that China was obviously the modern Nazi Germany and all the claims about how free trade would democratize them were BS seeded and spread by folks who had vast sums of money they wanted to make.

It's late at night (not where Claire is, of course), and it might be worth exploring this hypothetical and what it really tells you about pro-lifers and pro-choicers, religious types and secular types.

So first, I'll state the obvious, you of course save the baby. Why?

https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1957238830408548771

Well, I'm going to state something at the beginning that's going to surprise you-- it's not because human life doesn't begin at conception, although that question is more complicated than pro lifers say it is. (There's an identical twins hypothetical that gets at that.)