I am an often very spiritually/theologically brained person who, in that context, believes in a lot of ideas that aren't empirical/scientific. I also believe in a shared reality where facts exist and science has authority on things in its domain. Post-truth is like the worst of both worlds for me.

If you walk into a bathroom and can tell what genitals anyone has, that person is doing things incorrectly.

Building off of this: an implication from "people will turn on Trump/MAGA for firing the economy (or at least the vibeconomy) into the sun" is that a decent slice of those people would be cool with all this shit if they got cheaper treats again.

I don't know what this is about but it's true for a lot of things (I'm guessing the Portland stuff but that could be recency on my part)

Been thinking of this post in conjunction with a few torrents of lunacy I've recently been regrettably privileged to witness On Here--

note how the content of the screenshot is comically typical of AI slop but also it's just, like, something you can imagine a human with a technical concept of language, but no respect for esoterica like "meaning" or "truth" or "useful information" also writing, with no need for an LLM.

I feel like this needs to be repeated ad nauseam, in like a dozen different contexts minimum, for at least the next few years

It is, in the more general case (thinking stuff like supermarket checkout lanes here), frequently insane to me how little some people care for basic self-awareness and courtesy in the way they move through the world, vs how much I do, or try to.

I feel bad for quoting this to say something irreverent, but: this is half of a drake meme just begging for someone to draw the other half

Damn, really? She was always an obvious cloutchaser, but there are ways to chase clout without lying and I never pegged her as lying.

It's so awesome that the bots trying to sell random crap from Amazon are in the bluesky discover feed now

Literally everything this choad does will be reversed once sanity is restored.

I agree, in a technical sense, that something should be learned from hearing these views, but I suspect that the galaxy brained centrists may not like what the lesson-to-be-learned is

I cannot stress how much I appreciate the writers for having the admin try to give a $20 billion bailout to the country whose soybeans are getting bought instead of ours

"Nothing matters because they'll just do whatever they want" stays losing

Gotta say I've become more of a Kat Abughazaleh fan since we've seen her walking the walk on something other than chicken restauraunts. Still don't think she'd be my first choice in a primary but I'd feel better about voting for her in a general

I do not believe the literal Antichrist is alive on Earth right now, but I do think that the right wing and the tech bros are, collectively in the aggregate, close to what you would get if you ordered a knockoff Antichrist from Temu

one thing I think this sort of (understandable) sentiment kind of skims over is, it's not the case that only one pan of the balance has people's lives in it. 'Let the Rs keep getting away with it' has been & will negatively impact a shitload of lives, just in a way much harder to point to & quantify

Really interesting tidbits in this latest NYT focus group

1) I agree more people should say these things 2) a noticeable minority of people, those concerned with intellectual honesty and accessing the truth, already *are* inclined to say these things, so the scope of "we" matters a lot

Just blocked an account for a post I actually liked and agreed with because they'd disabled all ability to engage with it. I'd really like to see all the "stop people from engaging with your posts" turned to "make your posts invisible." Seems like it would make everyone happier.

this dead end leftism is just completely beyond parody. I share the goals of the left but I also want to actually accomplish those goals based on the real world political, institutional, and resource constraints that we face, which apparently makes me a heretic to the dumbest leftists on earth

BEING PAID,—what will compare with it?

General observation: saying that "the algorithm" creates problematic sorts of people is like saying that a magnet creates iron filings

In re: Ezra Klein

What if we all agreed that no one who chose not to vote for the email lady gets to have any opinion or influence on anything ever again At least not without going through some sort of rigorous rehabilitation process

I wish people got that assuming no one likes you isn't always a self-esteem issue I think I'm pretty dope, I like myself. But I don't expect anyobe else to like me bc past experience has proven that. So when someone likes me I go "What, why? Since when do you chumps get how cool I am?"

Hillary was never my ideal candidate and would probably never have been my ideal President but holy shit the gulf between her and the alternative And it was completely obvious. No obscured information, hindsight necessary, just not being a complete screwup moral-alignment wise

there's a certain genre of bad (in the sense of groanworthy/tasteless) joke that I can no longer enjoy, not because I don't enjoy groanworthy/lame jokes but because I've learned there are people who can't do the right thing when it's no longer a joke. Who can't tell when things are serious.

People genuinely cannot process the not-actually-a-contradiction that basically all the US foreign policy horror stories are true and that still leaves us in strong contention for the kindest and gentlest hegemon in recorded history.

Tbh rapture discourse (complete with seeing the same set of jokes and takes get posted over and over again) is almost more annoying to me than the actual rapture believers, at this point. Granted, that's partly because Bluesky isn't full of evangelicals for my discover feed to decide I want to see.

Periodic reminder that the walls of our four-dimensional space-time will not contain a punishment dire enough for these people, which is, of course, no reason not to aspire to it

The thing about this is that none of the Black journalists were in anywhere near the same position of prominence as Kimmel. (ofc, there's still racism in that, just a little further upstream)

This is from a WaPo/Ipsos poll that just came out. (and don't totally panic yet, they're doomfarming us here - the generic ballot in this is 53 D-42 R) The issue trust gap is very real and a big ongoing problem, and there is no possible mechanism by which "moderating on cultural issues" fixes it.

'a significant number of people don't view net progress as winning' explains so much about our current situation as nations and as species

In addition to all the problems with this that others have pointed out, the country had literally just said that a majority of them despised her enough to let Donald Fucking Trump win versus her. Not sure why that would make her the ideal public face of a resistance.

Cool, how about taxing all those tech companies for resources to help offset the massive amounts of evil they're perpetrating

There is, in theory, no finite limit to what I can forgive someone for. But to me, forgiveness isn't just something that I go around doing to inert, passive recipients. It's a process including *both* extending the forgiveness and being in the right state to accept it. Without both, it's invalid.

hate when clicking 'log in' takes you to a page that says "you have been logged out. you need to log in" like yeah way ahead of you pal that's why i clicked that

I could buy it as some sort of nightmare mashup thing like how the doom 3 spiders have inverted skulls for bodies, but you know nobody who designs this shit is employing that many neurons

Me when I get into the first pumpkin spice of the season

it also is/has been illuminating how many people's problem with the bullshit-and-deception machines were that they needed to get better at bullshit and deception

I don't understand why so many ostensibly educated people, like the ones writing the Economist article, are fundamentally incurious and intellectually dishonest. Even stuff that I am strongly inclined against, I would like to have a satisfactory understanding of, to make sure I'm not wrong.

This millennial does his best to live within his means and I can confirm that this means quite few sales get made to me

Legit surprised that oai themselves would admit this

It's a counterfactual that I don't feel very confident speculating about, much less trying to conclude anything definite about, but I can't help but think there's a meaningfully-greater-than-0 chance Harris joins us in on this

Nobody cares about that. You just make us tired. Go away.

this is true, but also 99% of bluesky already wasn't interested in constructive and enriching interactions, so really the main difference is in a single field of the character sheet for whatever cognitive trashfire you're hitting the block button on