Asher Desai

how it feels to say "sprezzatura"

Ex: Delia Ramirez (who’s Methodist) and Daniel Biss (who’s Jewish) both took money from J-Street employees and neither took money from AIPAC. Guess which one gets the red background with flames and a black & white photo, and which gets the green background with normal colors.

The thing about capping credit card interest is that you could think it’s good policy for people likely to get caught in debt cycles to have less access to credit. I have the intuition this is right. *But* advocates frame it as cheaper access to credit, as opposed to less access to credit.

math

Also, may I say that I don’t agree with people saying ICE and CBP need “more training.” They’re doing exactly what this administration has trained them to—impose a reign of fear in blue cities. They don’t need more training. They need to be ripped up root and branch.

I find it so frustrating that so much discourse amongst democrats is around language policing and like “abundance” vs “populism”. Idgaf what exact words politicians use. I just want authenticity showing that they 1) care about our problems and 2) have real solutions. not poll tested nonsense

For those asking why I am asking about ICE funding NOW, the government runs out of money this month and Congress has yet to pass the Homeland Security bill. ICE won’t be abolished, but Democrats can hold up the bill

Abolish ICE. Really.

These are the people the mainstream media is constantly telling us to understand and sympathize with.

Zohran actually had the binders full of women

I just want Republicans, and the right generally, to be treated as real adults with agency instead of forces of nature that must be appeased or managed. Is that too much to ask?

It was transparent what was happening. Just not to you.

Senator Kelly is correct. Plus a Public Service Announcement: KEY section of Department of Defense's Law of War Manual is 18.3.2.1. The VERY rule on the "requirement" to refuse illegal orders gives as its paradigmatic example of what is "clearly illegal: "orders to fire upon the shipwrecked."

Unfortunately, in US journalism it is considered neutral to spread a lie, but it is considered "biased" to call out a lie. So, there is a structural asymmetry that rewards colorful lies with virality.

trump has basically been robbing a bank in broad daylight, apparently hoping that the brazenness of the act will scare everyone away from sounding the alarm. but if anyone ever says "hey, wait a second!" - well, now he's suddenly just a guy robbing a bank in broad daylight. good luck with that, bozo

Writing about all this AI bubble stuff, I cannot help thinking about one of my favorite financial fictions, Émile Zola’s Money, and its brilliant deconstruction of the psychology and mechanics of an investment boom. advaitcore.substack.com/p/the-dance-...

you don’t solve the issue by eliminating the immigrants, you solve it by eliminating the racists

Not kidding when I say they should fund the free buses by actually enforcing driving and parking rules. Walk around any neighborhood of NYC for an hour and you will witness ~30 ticketable offenses. Everyone will get around faster if people follow the rules. Iron-fist it. Cameras on every stoplight.

i’m just a humble “woke” lib but it seems to me that this is a conclusion you could have picked up by skimming a quick history of 20th century american politics

it is almost as if accommodating and conceding to far right ideas legitimizes them and signals to voters that the far right is a legitimate choice for governance

not to sound like a goldwaterite, but voters want a choice and not an echo.

This take suffers from the same thing as all discourse about Trump voters: an inability to distinguish swing voters from Trump’s base. You should welcome the swing voters, people who were worried about inflation or whatever, but the chuds? The best you can do is bullying them into staying home.

pictured: the most advanced levels of Republican economic theory

democrats love all their moderate, progressive, and top-of-the-distribution leaders <3 they can all live in harmony together under a big diverse tent if they restore regional party identities and stop the circular firing squad on nationalized media <3

Maybe I just didn’t see, but did the FTC only just now update the website that the microeconomics conference is cancelled? Seems a bit late given that it’s tomorrow!

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

oh so these people do pay attention to who politicians follow on social media, they just don’t care that the vice president follows a bunch of actual neo-nazis

the most obvious way for Zohran to tie his climate and affordability promises together is to get New York to build hundreds of thousands of transit-oriented apartments

Cool. What would you call the other wing then? www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/u...

one of the things i think is that policies answer the question of “what will you do” but they don’t answer the question of “why should i vote for you” and i think there is a tendency in this broad conversation to equate the two

i don’t think you can maximin vote share with polls and spreadsheets, and i think it is a problem that the most prominent and influential political commentators right now are more devotees of data than experts in narrative

Know when to fold ’em www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/10/know...

it is never okay to take out your frustration on service people and people who do have low moral character

a friend of mine in antifa told me that antifa's headquarters is SHEIN and if the company fell the whole network would fall

A free and democratic society cannot silence comedians because the President doesn’t like what they say. This is an attack on free speech and cannot be allowed to stand. All elected officials need to speak up and push back on this undemocratic act.