A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about a growing risk that we will lose access to the world’s knowledge, because of a failure by traditional academic publishers to place copies of the articles they publish in key backup archives. Although unacceptable, that oversight is more a matter of laziness and cost cutting on the part of […]
We’ve noted more than a few times that media and streaming execs are all out of original ideas. Now that the market has saturated and subscriber growth has slowed, streaming companies have decided to stop giving the public what it wants (few restrictions, low prices, better quality content) in order to provide Wall Street with […]
It’s a bit jarring to be reminded that it was only on June 10th that RFK Jr. decided to fire every member of ACIP, the CDC’s immunization advisory panel. Those 14 experts had a variety of backgrounds all related to and demonstrating industry experience specifically dealing with vaccination science and policy. They were replaced by […]
There are a few thousand military troops in Los Angeles now, thanks to Trump’s Martial Plan. Local law enforcement officials pointed out they had the situation under control, what with most of the violence (what there was of it that isn’t police violence) limited to a few blocks in downtown LA. The rollout of National […]
Here’s a fun corporate governance puzzle for you. Suppose you’re a foreign company trying to buy an American steel producer. The previous administration blocked your deal. The current president promised during his campaign to block it too, saying he’d stop it “instantaneously. Absolutely.” How do you get the deal approved? If you guessed “write the […]
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Using statistics to lie is so commonplace, it’s hardly worth noting. But the DHS can’t even be bothered to use statistics to lie. Instead, it just repeats the lie and uses this lie to engage in circular reasoning. Washington Post columnist Philip Bump angered ICE by asking a simple question: why are so many ICE […]
Republicans are currently trying to force through a massive and cruel new legislation package that will impose historic cuts in public services to the benefit of the nation’s richest assholes. The bill will add $3.8 trillion to the deficit over a decade and includes an unlimited number of major hand outs to the wealthiest individuals […]
There’s an old joke that dog and cat owners may be familiar with that goes something like this. What is the difference between dogs and cats? With a dog, you give it a comfortable place to live, give it lots of love and attention, feed it food and water, and it therefore assumes you must […]
The Trump Administration(s) aren’t simply content to declare satire dead. Trump’s reappearance in the Oval Office demands we dig up the corpse and desecrate it. And while we’re desecrating that corpse, why not desecrate a few national landmarks? That’s the pitch from the National Park Service under Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Spring-boarding off Trump’s revisionist […]
Support us on Patreon » This week, we’ve got a cross-post episode of Mike’s appearance on Kevin Williamson’s How The World Works podcast. Kevin conducted a wide-ranging interview that covers some of the earliest days of Techdirt, the blog’s evolution, and many of the important topics we cover today — and you can listen to the […]
I’m going to say something that will make many of you deeply uncomfortable: our culture has confused ironic detachment with intelligence. We’ve mistaken cynicism for sophistication, distance for depth, and the refusal to commit to anything for wisdom itself. This is killing us. Not metaphorically. Not in some abstract cultural sense. It is literally destroying […]
The cops are rioting and the military is swarming. That’s how things are going in Los Angeles, despite anything resembling a “violent protest” being confined to a few blocks near federal buildings in the downtown area. ICE, meanwhile, continues to carry out Trump’s mass deportation plans by acting like drug cartel members. Agents wear masks, […]
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The Supreme Court just gave the Trump administration a green light to traffic humans to random countries around the world—including war zones where migrants face torture, slavery, or death. And they did so while offering literally zero explanation for why this is legal or constitutional. In a shadow docket ruling yesterday, the Court stayed a […]
When last we checked it with the feckless execs at CBS/Paramount, they were preparing to pay Donald Trump tens of millions of dollars to settle a completely bogus lawsuit designed to bully the media giant into compliance. CBS desperately wants the Trump administration to sign off on their pointless $8 billion merger with Skydance. Trump […]
By now, it is common knowledge that RFK Jr. had a brain worm that consumed a portion of his brain. It’s actually not as rare or crazy as it sounds at first blush, mind you, but it’s also not terribly common in the United States. And, at the end of the day, a worm ate […]
After months of what can only be described as government kidnapping, Mahmoud Khalil is finally out of detention and released on bail. The Columbia grad student and green card holder was detained by ICE for the heinous crime of participating in pro-Palestinian protests—or as Marco Rubio apparently sees it, having opinions Rubio doesn’t like. It […]
What a surprise. The most intellectually dishonest people in the nation still have the biggest bullhorns. That’s why a regular-ass drug raid that occurred in Tucson, Arizona somehow makes headlines in New York City. Here’s the New York Post, disingenuously reporting the (Arizona) news: A massive raid on a suspected cartel member found in Arizona […]
The normalization of authoritarianism is happening in real time in federal courtrooms. While district court judges try to apply actual legal standards to Trump’s near constant attempts to find ever more constitutional crises to create, appeals courts are busy treating the wholesale dismantling of constitutional constraints as just another political disagreement. Take, for example, what’s […]
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