Tom Pepinsky

@tompepinsky.bsky.social

2029

Followers

464

Following

407

Posts

I teach comparative politics, political economy, and Southeast Asian studies at Cornell. I'm also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and editor of the Journal of East Asian Studies. Banned from Russia. tompepinsky.com

Posts Replies Media

NY Times:

Oh come the-fuck on.

When in the course of human events something fucking something

More anti-democratic thoughts from 2018 the NYT allowed this writer to exclude from his current piece. Delivered with an air of detached irony, as if he miiight be joking or exaggerating. But is he?

Dan is correct. It is the patriotic duty of every American to support the party that defends freedom, liberty, and the rule of law

I wrote patriotically today. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/a-republic...

"A Republic If You Can Keep It"danieldrezner.substack.com Some Independence Day thoughts about some very un-American ideas.

If they did not allow it, he could just order them to be killed

Random thought while chopping veggies for dinner: Would this SCOTUS let Trump cancel the 2028 election if he got into office again in 2024

This has a logic. The New York Times knows that Trump is the favorite to be the president, that he demands favorable news coverage, that he is personally obsessed with the Times, and that he will have total immunity to whatever he wants to the editors on January 22. Backwards-induct

I have been saying since February that major media are 100% devoted to But Her Emails 2, but I didnt imagine it would get this bad. The day after SCOTUS stops the law applying to Trump, we have to scroll thru 4 fucking top stories on “Biden old” & an ad before getting to anything on SCOTUS decision

Not sure what to do? Here’s a rule of thumb that I have followed for 20 years: in any U.S. election, vote for the pro-choice candidate. If they’re equal on that, choose other issues. But being a single issue voter on abortion rights will never steer you wrong, and will help you save democracy too

Reposted by

Tom Pepinsky

it's a deep betrayal when you cannot trust the people whose job it is to interpret the rules. America has been let down today, and we will not forget

As the author of something that once made people lose their minds, I am telling you that I was talking about exactly this. I was correct then and I am correct now and I am terribly sorry about that

Lol when Vox ran a piece to that effect people LOST THEIR FUCKING MINDS www.vox.com/the-big-idea...

Life in authoritarian states is mostly boring and tolerablewww.vox.com Americans have an overly dramatic view what the end of democracy looks like.

Americanists and lawyers ask, what does the Constitution say? Comparativists ask, who controls the High Court, the militia, and the clerics?

6-3 for total immunity is devastating. This isn’t a ruling for 45, this is permission for 47.

My most conservative country cousin watched the debate. By this I mean, Southside Virginia, middle age and class, woman in a country courthouse town (hint hint) She concluded, “I don’t know why they let them debate. Just answer the question.”

You all must know that it won’t play like this. So now it is time to get serious. Biden is old and it’s a problem; how does one win such an election?

Biden: looks old, does bad Trump: lemme one up you by being extremely insane If it plays like that, status quo

New GPT will spout impenetrable nonsense while its advisers overpromise and exaggerate? I can see it

New issue of the Mekong Review came to my mailbox today. Opens with this piece, which hits super hard and is a serious intervention mekongreview.com/political-no...

Political nostalgia - Mekong Reviewmekongreview.com Decades after the end of Suharto’s New Order regime in Indonesia, a collective nostalgia for the supposed ‘good old days’—driven by historical revisionism and propaganda—is influencing contemporary In...

I think I finally understand Alexi Lalas in 2024

Many observers of Indonesian politics lament the weakness of partisanship in Indonesia's consensus-based presidential system. But voters vote as if partisanship really matters. Check it out 👇 tompepinsky.com/2024/06/21/t...

I know this isn't the main point, but reading the French phrase "wokistes séparatistes" made my brain immediately think of Lennox Lewis describing himself as the "pugilist specialist." That's all I got.

Hard to sum up the level of anti-left vitriol from Macron’s party right now. This is Borne, Macron’s prime minister from 2022 to 2024. She calls Left coalition “separatist wokists who support Islamism & communitarianism.” After that word vomit, she criticizes far-right for… having a vague platform.

In partial defense, I cannot think of a single state whose conservative voting base needs more of a daily reminder of what the ten commandments are. I seem to remember some specific injunctions against coveting, stealing, bearing false witness, and idolatry

When you’re completely inept at governing you do stupid symbolic shit that wastes taxpayer money in order to performatively stick it to people your base hates.

Turns out that Chomsky may or may not have died, which is entirely consistent with the Minimalist Program and inconsistent with whatever you just said

RIP Chomsky. I choose to remember him as a linguist who asked outstanding questions and had lousy answers for them, but who nevertheless transformed a discipline and inspired decades of critics to make linguistics into a modern science

Japanese hotel room comes equipped with a tidy little drip coffee packet and I swear, we Americans must overthrow the regime of hotel coffee pods

Indonesia now has its own high-speed rail, and dammit I want one too 🇮🇩

Someday the world will discover Javanese smashed fried chicken (ayam penyet = “smashed chicken”) and we will be closer to world peace and harmony.

The ridiculous mascot of a sports team, from the first capital of a large former colony, mocking one of the most hallowed institutions of a fading empire -- this is extremely funny and should be treated as such

This is truly awful. We must not look away from what is happening.

My friend @jeffkopstein.bsky.social , one of the most prominent researchers on contemporary antisemitism active today (and someone whose rigorous *empirical* work on the phenomenon is sorely needed), shared a photo of a "Wanted" poster targeting him on the UC-Irvine campus. Despicable.

More than two years into the war, it’s still astounding that the America First!/Hard-Hearted Realist position is that the only way to protect American greatness is to lose to Russia

I spent a crazy amount of time making a ternary plot to visualize the results of Indonesia's 2024 presidential election. But it worked, with a meaningful color scheme and everything. tompepinsky.com/2024/06/04/v...

Having now actually finished the book, the parallels are wild. Kuang's Babel is not just enjoyable for anyone who cares about historical fiction, Oxford, language, light sci fi, and empire. It's also a sprawling commentary on the university in our times, as explicit as it could possibly be

I am finishing R.F. Kuang’s thoroughly enjoyable novel Babel. And I cannot stop noticing the parallels with spring 2024 campus protests: I wonder how widely this circulated among activist university students