Jake Wobig

@jwobig.bsky.social

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Associate prof of political science at Wingate University in Wingate, NC. Interested in human rights, democracy, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. All opinions are my own.

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Jake Wobig

"Institutions" is just the word that we use to refer to the current political equilibrium

I am just a small town political scientist teaching classes that have "autocracy" and "violence" in their titles, and lemme tell you, if the only thing that stands between us and autocracy is institutions, we are toast

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Man, if it turns out that the right winger telling NY Times readers that they should follow his example and not vote did in fact vote in the last two elections, the Times should add this to the piece. Better than a retraction, since it illustrates a willful hypocrisy.

He voted in both 2020 and 2022.

This makes it crystal clear how far the majority had to go to circumvent the plain text of the Constitution to get their ideologically-preferred result.

The Constitution says that in cases of impeachment, "the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law." It does not except the president. But what impeachable offenses aren't covered by the new doctrine of immunity?

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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.

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However, the Court’s GOP majority did not issue a test for “official” v. “Unofficial” acts so that it can remain the ultimate arbiter of what can or cannot be prosecuted

***SCOTUS rules 6–3 that Trump is immune from prosecution for "official acts" during his presidency. NOTE: This does not sink Trump's prosecution altogether, because as Justice Barrett noted during argument, Trump is being prosecuted for many *unofficial* acts www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23p...

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Just remarkable how "old person won't retire" has driven history for the last 15 years. Kennedy not resigning after brain cancer diagnosis -> Scott Brown Feinstein staying on past prime and bungling hearings -> Kavanaugh/Barrett RBG Biden

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fuck i'm gonna have to teach my own fucking class now

2002: "Careful, kids, the Internet is forever!" 2024: "Oh, hey, all the work you did for a decade of your life was just deleted from the Internet for Business Reasons." latenighter.com/news/paramou...

Paramount Axes Comedy Central Site, 25+ Years of Daily Show Clips Gonelatenighter.com One of the richest repositories of late-night videos—including 25 years of clips from 'The Daily Show' and the entire run of 'The Colbert Report'—is no longer.

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The first guest on every Sunday show today was an election denier The news media has not just allowed but fully embraced Republicans' position that the 2020 election was not definitively won by Biden

I don’t remember Twitter ever being the relentless parade of horrors that I see in my Bluesky feed. Not sure if it’s differences in who I’m following or if the pace of disaster has increased significantly

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The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court said Monday that he was seeking arrest warrants, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

ICC prosector seeks arrest warrants for Israel’s Netanyahu and Hamas’s Sinwarwww.washingtonpost.com The prosecutor is also seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as two other top Hamas leaders — Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri and Ismail Haniyeh.

There’s no way the spokesperson is dumb enough to believe a textbook is a tool of radicalization, but that’s scarier because it shows a deep cynicism and contempt for reason and the public

"Let's talk about Hamilton Hall. A book on terrorism. I've said it before.. there is somebody, paid, not-paid, but they are radicalizing our students." Hosts: "Wow." [The book, again, is a commonly used textbook on campuses across the country, including at Columbia.]

DAUGHTRY edit2www.youtube.com

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Hard to believe that the harsh crackdown on campus protesters only caused the protests to spread to other campuses and to become more aggressive in their tactics, just like every historian has been predicting for the past month.

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Throughout the morning, conservative justices have been citing infirmities in the criminal justice system writ large as reasons to give former presidents immunity, rather than things that ought to be fixed for everyone.

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This is an interesting interview. The young people are more mature than the adults in the room.

What Is Really Going On at Columbia University? Not What You’ve Been Told.slate.com Are Jews under siege on campus? “I think that's honestly ridiculous,” a prominent Jewish student said.

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Here’s what the national guard bullshit is really about. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

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We progressed from "students are apprentice learners" to "students are customers" to "students are enemies of the state" pretty quickly

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College admins are making student protesters look like the wise, pragmatic adults in the room.

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Universities teach students that the activist histories of their campuses and nation are admirable (and we aren’t the first people to teach them that!) and then I donno this thing happens where some of them really take that to heart

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An analysis by University of Michigan researchers of more than 30 million grading records from U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades. This is due to sequential grading biases and the default order of students' submissions in Canvas. #AcademicSky #EduSky #Bias

Researchers find lower grades given to students with surnames that come later in alphabetical orderphys.org Knowing your ABCs is essential to academic success, but having a last name starting with A, B or C might also help make the grade.

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I would say this is a memorable milestone in the far-right trajectory; fundamentally GOP pols have fully internalized that there are no legal or political consequences for preaching violence and extremism, but dire political consequences for tacking to the center, enforced mainly by one guy.

Tom cotton now is posting videos of drivers assaulting protestors saying this is how it’s done…. This is starting to spiral out and the moment people act we are going to face a massive inflection point.

There is a fantasy finance series called the Dark Profit series, and it is outstanding

‘Some exciting new literary genres’ My latest Guardian Books cartoon.

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This week, Uganda's Constitutional Court upheld a law that makes homosexuality punishable by death. To justify it, the Court cited the US Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs as an example of using "the nation's history and traditions...to overrule the broader right to individual autonomy"

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When you're a comparativist at MPSA and see other comparativists posting photos together at ISA

Just watched Anatomy of a Fall, and my primary reaction is that it is very dangerous to travel to France if that is really how their legal system works

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This has been the fundamental problem the political press has had with Trump. They’ve been conditioned to believe it’s only a scandal if it’s a secret that’s been exposed, so all the crimes that Trump does brazenly out in the open — bragging about them on camera even — somehow don’t count.

They are continuously digging to find the sort of dirt on Biden that Trump just does out in the open.

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The main upshot of this technology is that voice authentication is now dead. Companies that use it need to stop. More unfortunately, this also means when someone you know calls you, even on a number you recognize, that too will very soon be untrustworthy.

A new OpenAI tool can recreate human voices — from just a 15-second recording. The technology, called Voice Engine, is currently available only to a small group of early testers. nyti.ms/3TGZIyS

OpenAI Unveils A.I. Technology That Recreates Human Voicesnyti.ms The start-up is sharing the technology, Voice Engine, with a small group of early testers as it tries to understand the potential dangers.

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Indeed. In 2022, the GOP went heavy on anti-LGBTQ in Pennsylvania and Michigan. The result: PA - Dems easily held Gov (+10.6), took House MI - Dems easily held Gov (+14.8), took House & Senate The "pragmatic" case for throwing LGBTQ people under the bus is a fiction pushed by dimwitted bigots.

The cost-benefit is that Democrats tried to triangulate on gay rights in 2004 and lost and Republicans went all-in on transphobia and had the worst outparty midterm since 9/11

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this but public universities in the United States

I love this whole deal we've got now where every month some piece of advanced technology fails spectacularly due to mindless cost-cutting and the guys hoarding all the money in the world are in a twitter space together talking about how it was actually because of DEI