How political arguments work in practice.

Latest

Dec
10
Dictator Trump Only Happens If We Let It Happen

Dictator Trump Only Happens If We Let It Happen

As a political professional, it's extremely frustrating to read alarmist, catastrophizing essays about Donald Trump becoming a dictator
7 min read
Aug
17
Oppenheimer and Pulling Punches: Nuclear War Without the Body Count

Oppenheimer and Pulling Punches: Nuclear War Without the Body Count

Content warning: This post includes a picture of a victim of nuclear war and links to similar pictures. It also
4 min read
Jul
22
AI and Political Email — Ethics, Practice and Labor

AI and Political Email — Ethics, Practice and Labor

As AI tools have started to get better at producing natural language communication, our community has debated how these tools should fit into email production and related applications for text, ad copy and other forms of digital communication.
4 min read
Jan
05
Reactionary Centrism: a Response to Jonathan Chait

Reactionary Centrism: a Response to Jonathan Chait

Jonathan Chait recently criticized a 2018 essay I wrote about “reactionary centrism," a term that's picked up
7 min read
Aug
26
Welcome to the Era of Strategic Trolling

Welcome to the Era of Strategic Trolling

Trolling has a bad reputation. The term is usually used to describe bad faith arguments and the most annoying types
4 min read
Aug
01
Avoiding the Process Trap — A Few Notes on the Forward Party

Avoiding the Process Trap — A Few Notes on the Forward Party

The curious case of Andrew Yang's Forward Party is a stark example of shortcut thinking in politics. Rather
4 min read
Jul
04
Stop Taking the Bait on Bad Faith Debates About Word Choices

Stop Taking the Bait on Bad Faith Debates About Word Choices

There are a lot of rolling debates about specific word choices in political discourse that have very little to do
4 min read
Jun
23

When It's Not Lying, It's Often Paltering

Recently, I was discussing some disinformation about the pandemic with a few colleagues who work in science communication. We were
3 min read
Apr
15
Participatory Vs. Transactional Politics

Participatory Vs. Transactional Politics

A lot of debates about how to win elections and Do Politics Good are grounded in different views of how
3 min read
Jan
05

On January 6th, Good Organizing Won

A year ago, a right wing mob, incited by a Republican president, stormed the U.S. Capitol in the hopes
4 min read

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