I appreciate that *someone* is trying to stop us from doing something really fucking stupid re: Iran, but the fact that its only just starting *now* after we've moved so many forces in-theater and the entire region is on tenterhooks/freaking out is not, uh, great - to say the least of it.

Honestly, the fact only *now* at least some in higher Pentagon leadership are now trying to put the brakes on what's happening re: Iran is more discouraging than encouraging because it suggests we're a lot closer to something really fucking stupid actually happening for real this time.

CANADA HAS SUMMONED SENUOR LEADERSHIP OF OPENAI TO OTTAWA ON TUESDAY- GOVERNMENT MINISTER

You’re seeing this most acutely in schools, more kids are coming back, but there’s still a lot who are at home, and patrols and rides for the vulnerable must continue apace even if people want to think all of the bad stuff has ended.

The other part is that there’s tons of cascading problems that require systemic solutions, most notably, getting people economic support who haven’t been able to work for the past two (or more) months because the federal government was trying to ethnically cleanse them. Rent is due this week.

One of the kind of fucked up parts of the ICE occupation here is that a lot of folks want to believe it’s over, and the media seems to tell us it’s over, but folks on the ground are still seeing tons of activity and vulnerable people are still (rightfully) terrified to go outside. We can’t stop yet.

Happening Now: A snowball fight is taking place at Washington Square Park in New York City

War with Iran wouldn’t just be another Iraq/ Afghanistan, it would be an empire ending mistake. And they want to do it with their hands tied behind their backs

We transitioned from a world in which the most charismatic talker won to a world in which empirical evidence & reasoning won (well, kinda). It was called the Enlightenment. We seem involved in a rapid, full-scale effort to reverse it. (Yes I realize I've never sounded so old. 👴)

From books to newspapers to blogs to Twitter to video -- each step of that evolution is doing more to discourage real, sustained, disciplined thinking & argumentation, to the point that I'm not even sure Kids These Days recognize those things in the wild or even know they exist.

They talk about audience capture, but there is also such a thing as *medium capture*. I have watched people whose work I've followed for years transition to video, and it absolutely affects the way they think & talk. It is a medium that rewards flash & charisma but has no time for real *argument*.

I remember a time when the kid hitting himself with a hammer was just dismissed as stupid

The exasperation of this doctor is palpable.

If I had a nickel for every time a cis person performed a dangerous new procedure for arbitrary beauty standards bullshit, I would have enough money to cover at least three people's surgeries by now.

So basically they tell us trans people are mentally ill & destroy their bodies while they literally hit their heads with a hammer like a cartoon character loosing their mind?

so yeah, AI just continues to be a horrendous horrible fucking technology that continues to enshitifiy everything

Death to public comment but not in the way I wanted

Frankly, it’s actually insane to call Bluesky hostile compared to the death threats, rape threats, doxxing, slurs, & literal sexual abuse material of children that happens on Twitter. Bluesky is FAR from perfect, but we don’t have Musk & Grok promoting CSAM. Do you understand how you sound here?

On Twitter, if you support a minority you will be dogpiled six ways to Sunday. Often by powerful, famous individuals who will set their followers on you. You will be harassed for days until they pick another target or you delete your account. Calling Bluesky hostile in this context is ludicrous.

It's bizarre. The site has declined to the point where it's unusable for most people but those with large followings (and monetised accounts?) still defend it because they've convinced themselves that some important discussions are still to be had there.

The fact that journalists think Nazism is fine but progressive criticism is not says everything about their values.

Mayor Brandon Johnson announced “Abolish ICE” as the winner of a citywide snow plow name contest. He had earlier given it a “full and complete” endorsement.

Note how Schank also takes credit for his former PhD student's brilliance, saying "she failed to be brilliant when I made her leave Yale; she needed a man in order to be smart; they all do." This is the logic that allows men to justify exploiting women's intellectual labor for their own gain.

Epstein responds in the affirmative, insisting "no really smart women---none." Schank, in turn, admits that his "very best Phd student was female," but laments that she "decided to quit being a professor," adding "that is the point; no matter how smart, she wanted to be liked or some such crap."

Relevant to today's conversation about AI's inherent sexism, here's an email from cognitive psychologist and early AI theorist Roger Schank, arguing to Epstein that women can't be truly intelligent, because they care too much about what other people think.

Unlike some "journalists", I do not require posting on Twitter as prerequisite of doing my job. I'm here to shitpost during our Idiotic Interregnum. When every tweet devolves in either calling someone a f**, or being an unrepentant bigot, I don't care to spend my free time like that.

Moms For Liberty named RJ May the South Carolina Legislator of the Year for 2023 for his efforts to protect children from the evils of the LGBTQ community. He was just sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison followed by 30 years of supervised probation for distributing child pornography.

A column in The Washington Post today cequates lifesaving gender-affirming care to lobotomies. This extreme comparison is not new, and in fact has been pushed by conservative media and politicians for years. 🧵

Truth has inherent value.

Bold "the destruction of the concept of reality is bad actually" take.

I think that, for me, I don’t want to lose my impulse for, “Wait, this might be bullshit; let me check.” That impulse helps me avoid scams, it helps me not believe my own bullshit, it helps me double-check the patterns I observe; it is a muscle, and it needs to be maintained. It’s a practice.

This seems to be a common reply to my thread, so I'll address it here. Basically, the argument is who cares if this is a misleading attack on Newsom, he's bad so if it hurts him it's fine. And I think it's important to push back on misinformation so that when there are legitimate criticisms...

...to be made, people don't immediately think "okay, well, that's probably out of context, too." I think facts matter. I don't think I'm "laundering Newsom" by pointing out when someone's lying about something he said. I care about context.

A lot of companies pay pretty good lip service to liberal/progressive values until you actually try to democratize the workplace

"Unions are great for some workplaces, but we're a family here, and we feel that interference from a third-party organization would disrupt our mission-driven yadda yadda yadda"

progressive institutions being anti-union doesn't really *shock* me anymore because I've seen it so often, but it's still disgusting.

Also this originally went viral at the Nazi Bar because EndWokeness posted it you people mostly have good politics, but my god are you dumb

I wouldn't vote for Newsom if a gun were pointed at my head, but it's not because I got tricked by the worst people on Earth. And if your political decisions are made because you came across the right slop at the right time, you can really fall for any dumb shit. You're dangerous

it's a trend where big right wing accounts on X take clips of democrats and insert their own caption and nobody watches the video

For my money, this might be THE defining antisocial behavior of the social media era. Personally, when I get angry about something and then find out that actually, I don’t need to be angry, that is good and I feel… relief?

*sigh* The cycle: people get set off by a rage bait post, internalize the misleading framing, then when confronted with the full context, double down and insist that the deliberately misleading rage bait was right all along.

Anyway, if for whatever reason you want to watch all hour and 20 minutes of Newsom at that event (I don't necessarily recommend it?), here's a link to the full thing on YouTube www.youtube.com/live/34H4Pbe...

I'm a certified Newsom hater, but this clip and summary of what he said isn't quite right.

I don't know that any social media platform is good for you but the stated intention of the owner of twitter is to make you worse and studies are now showing that he's having some success with that. This isn't esoteric, everyone knows it. So at this point being judgmental about staying there is fine

It did get a few degrees worse imo. Like, it was crawling with nazi's at the Bluesky Transition Era, but now it's just an endless ocean of far-right, with a few stubborn celeb accounts in between. What's making it even more dystopian is all the people incessantly @ tting the AI bot.🙄

Meanwhile, as someone who still reports on X, I can assure you that the idea that normal people staying over there with the Nazis has kept the Nazis at bay is, um, not true. People on X constantly engage with Nazis who post about pop culture topics without even knowing they’re Nazis, boosting them

You can't rant about the "goddamn Canadians" anymore without people assuming you mean it in a weird way, thank you so much Donald Trump and every sub-zero IQ conservative commentard who earnestly went along with the administration's imperialist fantasies

I'll say it again: Donald Trump ruined Canada as an object of gentle, good-natured mockery, one of our nation's longest-standing and most cherished pastimes.

Back on Twitter, long before Musk bought it, when it was perceived as having a lib/left cast, journalists were always ticking users off because it wasn’t “real life”. Now it’s X, a far-right site, they tick us off because it’s “the commons” and apparently we’re missing real life by not being there?