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Jeff Lazarus

@jlazarus

On here way too much. Political scientist at Georgia State University. Congress & elections. My feed is mostly politics but you’ll get some sports takes and terrible dad jokes along the way.

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Latest posts by Jeff Lazarus @jlazarus

I mean, it's REALLY fancy. Really REALLY R E A L L Y fancy.

But brass tacks, what it does is the same thing as what a calculator does. And it has as much chance of gaining sentience.

06.03.2026 20:40 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Claude is a fancy calculator.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

06.03.2026 20:38 👍 13 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0

If you truly believed Graham Platner is not antisemitic at all, you would be sending him to synagogues in Maine to speak to Jews and reassure them of that. That is what Mamdani did during the NYC mayoral election. The fact they are not doing that is... telling.

06.03.2026 19:41 👍 252 🔁 43 💬 11 📌 5

the biggest coverup of the biggest scandal in Presidential history

06.03.2026 18:48 👍 326 🔁 63 💬 6 📌 0
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Let’s talk about Graham Platner’s Big Lie, finally. In 2009, at the height of the Gulf War, the Marines barred him from active duty. Platner claims it was his forearm tattoos. But his one forbidden tattoo was the Nazi symbol on his chest. He knew - and he left the Marines rather than give it up. 1/

06.03.2026 14:26 👍 2910 🔁 1274 💬 97 📌 407

👇🎯🧵 Trump is destroying our diplomatic capacity & credibility in ways orders of magnitude worse than any of his predecessors.

But also, this is downstream of how we have decided to glorify our military in 🇺🇸 society on <every holiday> & <at every sports event> while totally ignoring our diplomats.

06.03.2026 16:47 👍 141 🔁 32 💬 7 📌 2

The unifying feature of Trump administration foreign and security "policy" is a failure to understand anything at all about strategy, like even at a conceptual level

06.03.2026 12:15 👍 224 🔁 32 💬 4 📌 0
Preview
ICE detains reporter Estefany Rodríguez in Nashville - Nashville Banner Reporter Estefany Rodríguez, detained by ICE with no arrest warrant, may face deportation. Her attorneys seek immediate review of the legality of her case.

ICE has arrested and detained a Nashville journalist who reported stories critical of ICE. She’s married to a U.S. citizen and has been seeking asylum here after fleeing death threats in Colombia because of her journalism there.

They’ve already sent her to Louisiana.

05.03.2026 23:41 👍 12091 🔁 7324 💬 288 📌 334

37 pages

06.03.2026 03:15 👍 1877 🔁 729 💬 53 📌 14

In every respect, and by a country mile, the worst president in American history.

06.03.2026 03:32 👍 47 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0

The case for gender studies programs has never been stronger.

06.03.2026 02:51 👍 37 🔁 17 💬 2 📌 0

I vote private jet.

06.03.2026 02:10 👍 6 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Dammit now I’m pissed I didn’t think of this one. 😂

05.03.2026 23:54 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Or that I was briefly possessed by the spirit of Vincent van Gogh.

05.03.2026 23:53 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Selfie of a middle aged white guy standing in an elevator with one ear entirely wrapped in bandages.

Selfie of a middle aged white guy standing in an elevator with one ear entirely wrapped in bandages.

Had a small carcinoma removed (please don’t worry, I’m fine) but I’m very tempted to go around telling people I got into a fight with Mike Tyson.

05.03.2026 23:52 👍 13 🔁 0 💬 4 📌 0

what i think is going on w/ graham platner fwiw: a certain cohort of D pundits & self-appointed leaders, disproportionately male and gentile, have decided that in order to appeal to low-trust men (whose votes they seem to think count more) it's necessary to allow a little antisemitism, as a treat

05.03.2026 21:54 👍 616 🔁 89 💬 16 📌 15

I don't think it's arguable that AI is better at *some research-relevant tasks* than humans are. But that's absolutely not the same thing as saying it's better at research.

That's like saying Mat McClung is better at basketball than Nikola Jokic because he's better at dunking.

05.03.2026 22:54 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

These claims confuse me. What does it mean to "do social science better". Can AI code better than a person? Clean up a dataset better? Scrape better? Sure.

But is AI better at identifying important questions? Deriving relevant hypotheses? Adjudicating between competing theories? I'm skeptical.

05.03.2026 22:52 👍 8 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0

*Probably her performance in front of the committee, given the timing.

05.03.2026 21:11 👍 11 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0

Trump didn't care that Noem was incompetent or corrupt. He fired her because he thought something she did made him look bad.* But if he was going to fire her for the ICE murders of the fuck plane she would've been out a month or more ago.

05.03.2026 21:11 👍 40 🔁 8 💬 1 📌 1

Less likely, but not impossible!

05.03.2026 19:02 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I'll bet money it's code for "Are they Christian?"

05.03.2026 19:00 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

I'm sure Noem's only regret is that she and Lewandowski never got to break in their Mile High plane.

05.03.2026 18:58 👍 9 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

The Iron Law of the Trump Administration is that everyone who leaves gets replaced by someone worse.

Always be careful when wishing for someone to get fired.

05.03.2026 18:50 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Remember when we used to have a Congress? That was nice.

05.03.2026 16:47 👍 8 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0

Supreme Leader Barron.

05.03.2026 16:41 👍 7 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0

I did keep it for a while but it got lost somewhere along the way. It was, unfortunately, unfailingly polite per our office policy.

05.03.2026 16:31 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

🤷‍♂️

If he read my response he would’ve found out.

05.03.2026 16:22 👍 6 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Antisemite with a large following.

05.03.2026 16:21 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0