For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote about three prospects who’ve really seen their stock rise this year and three who’ve seen theirs fall as a follow-up to last week’s top 50 ranking. I also wrote a news story (which I think is free to read) on Wake Forest baseball coach Tom Walter using a homophobic slur during a game, and his weak apology after he got caught on camera. And I held a Klawchat here on Thursday.
Over at Paste, I reviewed Zenith, an outstanding new two-player game where you fight your opponent for control of five planets, playing cards from your hand to three different areas to try to pull planets your way. You win by getting the same planet to your end of the table three times, or four different planets to your side, or five planets in any combination at all.
I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter on Friday, my third in four weeks, which for me constitutes some sort of hot streak.
I appeared on Marty Caswell’s Youtube channel to talk about the Padres’ farm system, potential trades if they stay in the race, and what to do with Xander Bogaerts; and on 92.3 the Fan in Cleveland to talk about Travis Bazzana and Cleveland’s struggling offense.
And now, the links:
- Longreads first: This undated story on the main suspect in the Tylenol poisonings and how he slipped through multiple murder investigations is the best thing I read all week. At least part of the basis of a new Netflix documentary series, this story is at least two years old, as James Lewis, the suspect in that case and at least one other murder, died in July 2023.
- Federal and Texas state law enforcement officers arrested 47 people at a house party, claiming they were members of a gang called Tren de Aragua. Months later, they’ve found and offered no evidence of any gang connections, according to a Texas Tribune investigation.
- The AP reports on how Trump’s slashing of public health budgets is destroying our national infrastructure of preventative health services, which will cost us billions more in lost lives and years while further eroding trust in those same authorities.
- Oklahoma Republicans passed a law allowing parents to opt their children out of any class subjects they believe to be “harmful.” Rational-minded parents there are now using the law to withdraw their kids from classes pushing election conspiracy theories and Christian theology. If you live in Oklahoma, the form you can use is here.
- WIRED has the story of a study on the keto diet and arterial plaque that keto proponents claim validates their position – but one of the study’s authors left the project and has called for its retraction, due to conflicts of interest and shoddy work. There’s an underlying theme here on how peer review can break down and how bad actors are increasingly trying to exploit the academic-research system.
- “Israeli gunfire” targeted Gazan civilians outside an aid distribution center, according to the Red Cross. The Guardian had a later update that raised the death toll to over 30. Israel first denied anything happened, then denied firing at civilians, then later admitted to firing “warning shots.”
- The Trump Administration has ended an NIH program that was working towards a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS – a program that also had potential in many other areas, including possible therapies for autoimmune disorders.
- NBC News interviewed several families who are leaving the U.S. because of the increasingly anti-transgender climate. I’ve assumed we’ll see, or even already are seeing, migration out of red states for LGBTQ+ families because of hate laws passed there, but adding this to the brain drain from the Administration’s war on academia is going to further erode our economic position for decades to come.
- Indeed, even in red states where voters have passed progressive ballot initiatives on subjects like abortion and cannabis, Republican lawmakers are trying to subvert the will of the voters, usually in the name of religion.
- MIT banned one of its scheduled student speakers from graduation because she gave a pro-Palestinian speech the day before.
- The GENIUS Act looks like it will prioritize crypto holders over depositors if a bank becomes insolvent.
- The New York Times reports on WelcomeFest, a gathering of so-called “centrist” Democrats who are mad that we’re all yelling at them online. The story notes on politicians taking shots at Indivisible, an important voter mobilization group with hard-left ideas like “don’t cut aid to the poor.” These people are only centrist if you ignore how much the Overton window has lurched to the right in the last decade.
- Talking Heads enlisted director Mike Mills (the C’mon C’mon guy, not the REM bassist) to film a music video for “Psycho Killer,” starring Saoirse Ronan. It’s excellent, and Ronan is both hilarious and unsettlingly weird in it.
- The Spanish publisher Salt & Pepper Games has a new crowdfunding campaign up for Battle of the Divas, a two-player game that casts the players as Maria Callas and Renata Tibaldi, fighting to be the greatest singer of their era.
My favorite part of welcome fest is Matt yglesias, serial moron and always wrong about everything, stated that the problem with democrats losing constantly is due to bad groups holding power.
Just extraordinary
How anyone could have this takeaway – “…how much the Overton window has lurched to the right in the last decade.” – from recent events is beyond me. I’ll grant you that maaaaaaybe it has shifted *slightly* back to the right the past couple of years, but only after shifting hard-hard-hard left for years, even decades, prior to that, almost to the point of dangerous overreach and dire consequences from the nation’s left flank.
Also, using the following to describe Matt Yglesias – “serial moron and always wrong about everything” – exposes just how deep, not to mention serious, the divisions are in this country and how out-of-touch the fringes have gotten. Matt has been as consistently and stridently anti-Republican/conservative/Trump as any other public figure or commentator – especially in the political economy media circles – going back as far as I can remember. Sure, maybe he isn’t as animated as someone like Elie Mystal, as unhinged as someone like Keith Olbermann, or as passionate as someone like Paul Krugman, but he is, part and parcel, every bit the progressive that those guys are and firmly in the left camp, with no love lost for anyone on the right side of the aisle or anyone even remotely “right-adjacent.” I am quite confident Brian in Ahwautukee isn’t critiquing Matt from a right-leaning perspective, so I’m very curious where exactly he thinks both he and Matt sit on the ideological spectrum?
Which makes for a good seque to my next question, which is the opinion from this group, specifically those identifying as some flavor of left, progressive, or whatever and vehemently opposed to conservative and/or libertarian principles for governance, about a national divorce? In other words, a union of blue states goes one way and a union of red states goes another, with potentially more than one split, whether based on geographical realities or deeper ideological schisms that can’t be reconciled by creating just two new options.
I ask this seriously because the present trajectory, with irreconcilable differences and bitter antipathy from the red and blue “bases” toward one another, will lead to something very dark within the next 5-10 years, I am quite confident in that. We have moved past the point where saying something like that isn’t idle speculation. It is a mathematical certainty, and I am curious if left-leaning people are starting to see a path to just go their own way and do their own thing, and allow a measure of reciprocity for right-leaning people, or if people feel trapped and desperate and start leaning more into violence and bloodshed.
Two requests:
1. Can you share one or two specific examples of this “dangerous overreach and dire consequences”?
2. Can you share one or two specific examples of Matt Yglesias’ work that would, in your opinion, classify him as a “progressive”
I’m reluctant to play this game of semantics and demanding quantitative examples in response to a qualitative assessment, because I’m near certain you’ll play the no-true-Scotsman card, pull a motte-and-bailey, and/or retreat behind some other logical fallacy to validate a difference of opinion as you holding the “correct” one, so I’ll split the difference and answer one as directly as I can while politely pushing back on the other by answering your request with a question, Ron Swanson-style:
1. The border and, mostly illegal, immigration. Plain and simple, the Democratic Party and everyone to its left have grown completely apathetic about the border and regulating who is crossing it and remaining on US soil over the past several years (and that’s at best, as there is a small faction that has been actively subversive about abusing it). I’m no fan of Trump, but his comments on illegal immigration as a political candidate and office-holder going back to 2015 are practically indistinguishable from Bill Clinton’s when he was in office and even most other Democrats prior to, say, 2010. There used to be a bipartisan consensus that unchecked illegal immigration had negative consequences for the country, for obvious reasons, but Democrats abandoned that position at some point along the way, and the problem has festered into a crisis in some areas. Disagree if you must, but your opinion does not hold a candle to the lived experiences of millions of people dealing with breakdowns in the academic, health care, and justice systems, not to mention disruptions to the labor market, because of an overrun of undocumented migrants*.
*In case you want to respond that most of the problem has been the US government/CIA meddling throughout Latin America and creating so much instability that fleeing and asylum-seeking are seen as the only remedy for some, then I wholeheartedly agree. But that doesn’t change the underlying problem with unchecked illegal immigration.
2. Can you share one or two specific examples of Matt Yglesias’ work, or just him personally, being lauded or welcomed by other, presumably “fellow,” conservatives or libertarians as a champion for their causes? Feel free to disown him as an ally on the left or for progressive causes, that’s fine, but my bigger point is that he is not seen as a public figure representing anything remotely right-leaning and is actively disdained, mocked, etc. in those circles. That would give credence to the notion that not everything or everyone falls neatly in the left-right binary and that we have more than two “camps,” but all I’m saying is that just because people on the left deride him as a “moron” – when people on the right also view him as one, but specifically a “left-wing moron” – but disavow him as one of their one because he isn’t sufficiently left-wing, it doesn’t automatically make him a “right-wing moron.”
The specific reason I seek “quantitative examples in response to a qualitative assessment” is that it is very hard to productively respond to your qualitative assessment without understanding its material basis. Of course I disagree with your assessment and find your reasoning in the original post to be suspect, but I don’t see the use of responding to that post in any detail without further inquiry. More generally, I don’t really think it’s a “game of semantics” to be asked to justify your assertions by those who disagree with you.
1. I do not think the Democratic Party has grown “apathetic” about the border in any way. The Biden budget proposal from 2024 included increases to DHS/CBP/etc. Deportations were higher under Biden than under Trump (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/us/trump-biden-immigrants-deportations.html). Harris and other Democrats ran explicitly on challenging the Republican’s seriousness on border security (see the whole rigamarole around the Border Act of 2024). And several Democrats joined the Republicans in voting for the horrid Laken Riley Act.
I say all of this in part because I very much dislike all of this! I wish there was a political entity in our country that was actually opposed to inflicting pain and suffering on those that seek the fiction that is the American Dream. I think your assertion that there is a “crisis” at the border is mistaken and that the “breakdowns” you mention are not caused by immigrants but by 50-odd years of austerity and retrenchment on behalf of capital. And I think the reason for the persistence of this myth of a border “crisis” is that it serves the aims of both parties; both to absolve them of any responsibility for creating these “breakdowns” and to keep us fighting against our fellow man rather than against those that subjugate us.
2. I am confused about your counter-question, given that the reason we are talking about Yglesias is his appearance at “WelcomeFest,” where he derided (per BlueSky) “school closures during covid,” “paralysis on women’s sports,” “candidates running on late-term abortions,” and “the negative influence of “The Groups”” exemplified by “Democrats visiting Trump’s gulag in El Salvador.” All of these positions are far from “progressive” and most are outright revanchist. And more specifically for your counter-question, it is very clear that the whole thing was an exercise in determining how to further subsume the will of the Democratic Party to the whims of capital. Given that Yglesias was invited to this, it sure seems like this is a prime example of being lauded by anti-progressive forces as a champion for their cause.
There used to be a bipartisan consensus that unchecked illegal immigration had negative consequences for the country, for obvious reasons,
I’m curious what those reasons are, when most academic research on the subject shows that so-called “illegal” immigration produces large net positives for the U.S.?
It’s a perfect example of the shift. Republicans are arguing for very strict limits on legal immigration and severe crackdowns on illegal immigration. Democrats aren’t arguing for open borders or unlimited legal immigration or the like; they’re arguing for moderate positions like paths to citizenship for people who are already here and participating in our society & economy. As President, Biden even reduced access to aslyum at the US-Mexico border.
The sense I’m getting is that you don’t see the way the Overton window has shifted because it has shifted towards views you espouse.