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Julian Sanchez Profile picture
Julian Sanchez
@normative
He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.
🇺🇦🇺🇲☕️Coffee&Robots🤖🌊🇺🇦🇺🇲 Profile picture eDo Profile picture Adam Smithee Profile picture Brett Neumeier Profile picture Annette Profile picture 20 subscribed
Sep 1, 2023 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
It’s… not a “novel legal theory,” it’s a 155-year-old constitutional provision that explicitly disqualifies people from federal office, and which a bunch of prominent conservative legal theorists believe applies squarely to Trump. The “novel legal theory” would be that an express Constitutional clause doesn’t apply when it’s politically inconvenient.
Jun 18, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
As someone who was a pretty successful formal debater in college, I can say very confidently that live public debate is a terrible way of discovering truth, and being good at debate has almost nothing to do with being correct. It appeals to the sort of shallow lazy thinkers who get suckered by conspiracy theories because it flatters the soi-disant “critical thinker” that a lay audience can listen to a couple experts talk at each other for an hour and apprehend truth with their unschooled native savvy.
Apr 29, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
TIL that in France, Batman baddie Two-Face is called “Pile ou Face” (Heads or Tails), and now I can’t stop imagining Mike Lindell as a supervillain called PillowFace. You can just hear that perpetually vaguely drunk sounding bellow: “IT’S NO USE DARK KNIGHT! I’VE CAPTURED THE PACKETS! ALL OF THEM!” Then he pokes a big red button on some remote detonator contraption… and nothing happens.
Apr 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Dear Built to Spill: Your fans are at this point getting a little long in the tooth for a Thursday night show that starts at 9:30 Turns out I still remember all the words to “Center of the Universe” tho
Mar 30, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I love FIRE, but this is a disappointingly mechanical recitation of the generic case for welcoming controversial speakers on campus, which doesn’t really account for either the special nature of commencement addresses or the particular objections to Youngkin. Above all, it’s a reflexive effort to squeeze the student objectives into the Procrustean bed of “censorship,” which is almost completely irrelevant here.
Mar 26, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A lot of responses to this seem to be deeply confused about the function of a commencement speech. It’s not like some guest speaker who’s there to provoke discussion and debate. It’s meant to honor the students, but also incidentally it’s an honor for the speaker. It is fundamentally unlike other kinds of college talks, and students are absolutely in the right to say “this guy is garbage and not a person we wish to honor on an occasion dedicared to celebrating our achievement”
Mar 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I agree with basically all of this, but it has a whiff of "no true Scottsman" about it. I think the honest way to frame this is that while these cronyist tendencies ought to be fought and minimized as much as possible, it's a fight that never ends because those tendencies are products of dynamics intrinsic to the system...
Mar 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Good segment from @chrislhayes on one of my hobbyhorses: Behind the camera, the opinion peddlers who draw audience by bashing “mainstream media” are almost totally parasitic on that media. I was present for the Tucker speech at CPAC that Chris references, and it’s worth mentioning again a very telling exchange from the Q&A after.
Mar 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"We don't know how to adapt to changing consumer tastes, so we're going to try and create regulatory headaches for the competition on the ludicrous premise that people who buy oat milk don't understand that oats aren't mammals." I propose all dairy milk be required to carry the label "BOVINE UDDER SECRETION" in 36-point bright red impact font, lest some unwitting consumer be tricked into thinking they are purchasing delicious human milk.
Mar 7, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The law responsible for this is crap, but... how much do we care whether history teachers pass moral judgments like this? If you teach the facts of slavery, it should be obvious to the students it was wrong. If it isn't (God help us) is the teacher saying so going to matter? The tacit model of education sounds a lot like the dumb one implicit in the conservative attack: Students are passive vessels waiting for teachers to provide them with a moral response to historical events, and then unquestioningly embrace the teacher's judgment.
Mar 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
So this, but also, I know of no plausible theoretical argument that the useful intelligence we want out of AI would entail consciousness. I'm not worried we're anywhere near being able to build a version of ChatGPT that's capable of experiencing suffering, but if we WERE capable... why would anyone do that?
Mar 1, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I am hard pressed to think of a mindset more damaging to both journalism and the public credibility of journalism. The irony, of course, is that by undermining the basis of journalism's credibility, it also makes it into bad and ineffective activism.
Feb 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Here’s the thing: In the sense the framers used the term, you ARE a militia. Or at any rate, part of the militia. Image The trouble with most of the attempts to wish away the Second Amendment is that if you don't want it to protect individual firearms ownership, you need to offer a more plausible alternative account of what it DOES do. The answer can't be "nothing."
Feb 27, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I don’t know, the line he draws actually strikes me as an intereresting one that captures an important element (beyond raw disagreement) of what people are anxious about when they complain about “cancel culture”… The line being: Is this something any reasonable person should be well aware is widely considered beyond the pale, or something that would quite recently have been seen as maybe controversial but within bounds for civil debate or discussion.
Feb 27, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
It seems like a bunch of folks were mercifully unfamiliar with the racist troll meme "it's OK to be white" recently dragged into the spotlight by the Dilbert Guy. It's interesting to examine because it parallels closely some more mainstream rhetorical strategies. Lemme 'splain. A close analogy is to "white pride": It's supposed to sound innocuously parallel to phrases like "black pride" and "gay pride" which emerged as a reaction to a social context that told people those identities are shameful. But, of course, it means something very different.
Jan 20, 2023 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Yesterday I expressed some frustration at a headline confusingly stating that George Santos had “refuted” allegations against him—meaning that he had denied those (likely true) allegations, when “refute” has traditionally meant “to disprove.” A… mastodon.social/@normative/109… Or, if that sounds too paradoxical for you: The editors and usage panels that opted to accept “deny” as a secondary meaning of “refute”—rather than labeling it as a common but incorrect usage—have made an error in judgment that’s bad for… mastodon.social/@normative/109…
Jan 10, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
So I’ve been mainlining a bunch of old Kitchen Nightmares episodes the last couple weeks, and one thing belatedly jumping out at me is that like 80% of the U.S. episodes have a bunch of Latino line cooks in the kitchen who are just weird… mastodon.social/@normative/109… I assume this is mostly a language thing—Ramsay doesn’t seem to speak much Spanish and subtitles or translators would slow down the drama—but once you start noticing it, it becomes really glaring and feels pretty weird.
Jan 5, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Everything about this story is just appalling: University administrators, and apparently even student journalists, have apparently decided that material a particular religious group considers “blasphemous” is therefore “harmful.” … mastodon.social/@normative/109… One activist claims that students who merely HEARD about “blasphemous” material being displayed in an art history class were harmed, and that it “impacted their grades, it impacted them finishing off the semester.” Well, if… mastodon.social/@normative/109…
Dec 28, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Elon is clearly increasingly frustrated that serious media outlets aren’t playing along with his clumsy attempts to manufacture fake Twitter scandals. The irony is, there were a few newsworthy tidbits in there that might have gotten more attention if he hadn’t poisoned the well by making his pet journalists ineptly push a Biggest Scandal Evar narrative so clearly unsupported by his own evidence.
Dec 22, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
So George Santos is now saying he totally has answers to all the questions that have been raised about his fabricated background, which he’ll provide… next week. Which does not inspire a ton of confidence. “Sir, can you establish that you are not, in fact, twelve squirrels in a trenchcoat?”
Oh, absolutely. It’ll just take me a few days to gather the nuts… I mean evidence!
Dec 22, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It doesn’t seem that complicated. They debased themselves slobbering over Putin and defending Trump’s attempt to extort Ukraine. The only way they’re not monstrous moral cretins is if Zelensky is somehow a supervillain. Here’s a familiar psychological phenomenon I bet you can think of plenty of examples of: Sometimes when we’ve wronged someone and don’t want to admit it, we perversely resent that person. We double down and invent ways they are the real villain and probably deserved it.