John Pfaff

@johnpfaff.bsky.social

4267

Followers

394

Following

4906

Posts

Professor at Fordham Law. Prisons and criminal justice quant. I'm not contrarian, the data are. Author of Locked In. New stuff at johnfpfaff.com.

Posts Replies Media

Growing up, the only team I really followed was a keep-the-team-together near-dynasty (the 044 Bills). So never knew what it was like to cheer for a team in transition. My Nets-crazed youngest? They have: 1. Poster of Kyrie and KD on the BK Bridge. 2. Harden T-shirt. 3. Bridges jersey.

I suppose they could take requests: Anyone you think the Nets should trade away next? I can try to get them to back that player….

Reposted by

John Pfaff

Reply to

John Pfaff

Oh, the other thing I’ve started doing a LOT of is deleting my angrier posts (esp abt the whole Biden-step-down mess) abt an hour after I post. I get to vent, but deleting means the comments stop, so my urge to check stops too. And the stress? Plummets.

Reply to

Jason Lange

I just deleted everything off my phone, and that was basically enough. Over the first few days, I realized just how instinctively I would open it up, bc I kept swiping to where it was and it wasn't there. Even within a day or so, I felt the urge start to fade.

And yeah, the FNC thing in nursing homes is crazy. I have a family member who lives in a graduated retirement community, and they have a constant mission to turn off Fox any time they come across an unattended TV. They won't aggressively turn it off is someone is watching, but if not? Click.

Only Democrats have agency, example 1 billion. Republicans are allowed to just be who they are, like infants w no self control. I mean, what can you do, y’know? Or, as someone on here put it well: Dems are framed as the political protagonists, GOPers as the implacable antagonists.

"If we are calling for Biden to step aside because someone must stop Trump from bringing down the republic, then surely it would have made more sense to first call for Trump to step aside?" h/t @timothysnyder.bsky.social

As I enter wk 2 of massively reducing my time on social media, I've discovered that my stress levels are WAY down, and my general enjoyment of life is up. More surprising is that when I realize this, I actually feel guilty, like it's inappropriate not to be in a constant state of fear and anxiety.

Which ... is crazy. It's important to understand what is going on and do what one can to address it. But being *constantly* on edge is ... surely unproductive and unhealthy. That I had come to see that anxiety and stress *important* is ... def not good.

I'm increasingly convinced--and wouldn't be surprised if there is actual psych evidence backing this up--that constant exposure to news is unhealthy at best, aggressively harmful at worst. Fox News, MSNBC, Twitter, Gab, any of it. I feel like our minds aren't designed to handle 24-7 news firehoses.

Reply to

Ethan Jacobs 🇺🇦

Both. But this is beyond stupid for the latter too.

Reposted by

John Pfaff

Reply to

Nicholas Bauer PhD

They see “Biden is old” bc the media frames it that way, and then self-defeating Dems hop on board. Trump is giving speeches that are UTTERLY INCOHERENT AND DERANGED. But the media ignores, and the Dems would rather worry abt the aesthetics of their guy than attack Trump. I mean: DE. RANGED.

Apparently every time he opened his mouth he cratered among the indecideds bc they hated how he talked and how he said things. It’s not about policy. Undecideds are just … different. Care abt politics, but hate it, aren’t driven by policy args.

Don’t think this can be said #onhere enough: The fight now is over undecideds, which means ppl who think like NO ONE WHO POSTS ON HERE. Twitter was not real life, BlueSky is even LESS real life. Most “here’s what I’d like to see” takes = what appeals to high-info voters. Who are locked in already

I get this instinct, but (1) Trump can’t articulate his positions either, but again, GOP isn’t shooting down their own guy, and more important (2) I believe this mischaracterizes how undecideds get swayed. They aren’t policy-focused. But bet DEMS saying “he’s old” pushes them R.

We don't need "the right person", we need a, any, person who has full command of their faculties at all times and can forcefully and articulately prosecute the case against Trump and promote the case for Democratic goals.

Heritage is apparently already planning the legal fight to keep any possible Biden replacement off the ballot in battleground states. One win in one key state court, and the election is literally over. The replacement idea was always terrible, now it's clearly fatally toxic.

You don't see GOPers publicly pulling their hair out over Trump praising Hannibal Lecter at every speech. They just push ahead to get their guy--their policy goals--in power. Dems need the same monomaniacal focus. Is Biden old? Yes. Does it suck? Yes. Does it actually matter here? No.

And even if the Heritage lawsuits would fail--and I for one fully believe that even if the legal basis is weak to paper-thin to not-even-there, it's quite possible at least one state court would be swayed--it's just going to make this messier, make the whole media coverage "Dems in disarray."

I used to think ppl were being hyperbolic when they'd say that there seemed to be a wing of Dem party that almost had a losing fetish, but now I'm not so sure. Less snidely, it feels like there's too-big (at least on-line) a politics-as-aesthetics, not politics-as-power wing.

Too much focus on having "the right guy," or the guy who strikes them the right way, then the guy who will actually push through their policy goals. Biden has been the most progressive POTUS in a generation. He's achieved real goals, used his power to do what D's want.

Yes, he's old, he sucks on crime policy, he's too much an institutionalist to tear down SCOTUS the way firebrands like myself would like him to. But it's not about getting to 100, and right now it's about what achieves power the most in the bonkers, screwed-up voting system we have.

Reply to

roslynn.bsky.social

Conservatives Have a Devious Plan to Stop Biden From Being Replacednewrepublic.com The Heritage Foundation, a top conservative think tank, has a game plan to make sure Joe Biden remains on the ballot after that disastrous debate performancee.

That a Yale con law person wrote this on July 2 of this year, in the Atlantic, just further confirms for me that the legal academy, or at least its elite Con Law branch, simply does not seem to be up to the task the current political moment demands.

The Court has always been political, obv, but the radical nature and goals of the current majority’s politics are worth highlighting—and have been clear for *years*. Yet I feel like I’ve seen little effort to map out how that power gets *resisted*.

Like, fighting the Originalist fight on their own alleged grounds—what did the Founders *really* mean—struck me as risky, bc the Court had made it clear (and the immunity case glaringly obvious) that history mattered to them only when it helped them; it’d be ignored otherwise. So:

What I’d have liked to see is more stuff that the lower courts and other branches can turn to to resist a lawless and outcome-driven Court. Like, are there historical examples of lower courts aggressively pushing back? Of Congress or POTUS undermining Court overreach?

History not as part of a legal argument, which we know SCOTUS will ignore at will, but history as mapping out a set of tools—and providing legal, historical, and doctrinal justification for those tools—that other actors can then use to resist, undermine, and thwart six lawless judges.

And even if this was sarcastic—and in its broader context (and based on other things said abt other justices) I’m dubious it was—the piece itself seems to believe saying “this is wrong!” is a reply that might stick It will not. This is abt power, not law. So we need to empower—w PLANS—opposition.

Reposted by

John Pfaff

New post up, on how there was never an actual bipartisan push for decarceration. It's true that red and blue states alike saw prison populations decline. But within those red states, the work was done by the blue counties. The politics of punishment are local, not state, not federal.

The Local, Mono-Partisan Nature of Our Current Decarcerationjohnfpfaff.com While state-level data suggests that red and blue states alike saw prisons declines, county-level numbers indicate that this seeming bipartisanship is deceptive. Even in the red states, the declines a...