@scalzi.com And so it shall be evermore forward. It is born… the “Scalzi Wrap.”

So about that White House pretense that Trump hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing (via @sollenbergerrc.bsky.social) substack.com/home/post/p-...

Certainly there is a sadist niche of incel/accelerationist Nazi types who take real pleasure in the sort of paramilitary torture porn Noem is building her brand around. But they want women in rape and breeding camps, not the presidency.

See, I don't even know that Trump cares that much about the suffering of the oppressed. I think the masses (including immigrants) are just ants to him, our suffering is too low stakes to be interesting. Subordinates and enemies, sure, he enjoys that. But idk about the Noem torture stuff

It's my sincerely-held belief that Trump longs to live in a gilded bubble where his only inkling of the social outside is an unending chorus of applause and praise bubbling softly from beyond the horizon. He wants to punish threats to the bubble, but mostly preserve the praise & the bubble.

/2 Anyway, this is what the Smoking Gun was reporting TWENTY YEARS AGO in 2006. It was horrifying then and it’s still horrifying and it unequivocally shows child abuse. www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/se...

Unbelievable that we still talk about withholding HIV funding as a form of political maneuvering rather than an act of social murder, as if the 80’s + 90’s never happened and we didn’t lose an entire generation to this already.

I think about this a lot. The same people that cheer shows like Andor can’t agree with us that caging kids in concentration camps and police murdering people without cause is just wrong. But swear we’re doing ‘leftism’ wrong b/c moral clarity in real life makes them uncomfortable.

If all the leftists are white, they can pretend their own people ain't been exposing some inconvenient truths the whole time

Still just hard for me to grasp how they ignore that every great Black leader they reference was far to the left of Democrats. Like, I know it’s cognitive dissonance…but you really have the nerve to talk down to us when you can’t even align politically with the heroes you champion?? It’s shameful.

sorry if this seems mean but anybody who hasn't taken a single second to consider how this tech will impact the people who get perved on most (primarily women and children)--as well as at risk individuals like mentally ill and unhoused folks--isn't a serious or trustworthy person

Which is strange since they had an OpenAI partnership... That's about as flimsy as a cartoon supervillain teamup as soon as things go south. Disney's also predictably greedy and draconic with it's IPs. It's only in it for itself.

Disney has sent a cease and desist letter to ByteDance over new AI video model Seedance 2.0 “ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable”

I really hate that it sometimes feels like the only time the needle ever moves on pushing back against AI is when Disney says no

They are merging AMST with three other departments, effectively shuttering a program that has been in existence for 85 years. www.texastribune.org/2026/02/12/t...

Devastated to learn that Univ of Texas at Austin is closing the American Studies dept. The years I spent there earning my PhD were formative, making me the teacher, thinker, and writer I am today. I've passed on what I learned at UT to thousands of students over the past 20 years. Just awful.

it’s breathtaking to see how this country is in decline by every possible metric

ICE using the same ruse that Ted Bundy used to kidnap people should tell you something.

I only even felt the need to address this because the guy in Maine who just got his Nazi tattoo covered, which means It’s Fine Now was perpetuating this stereotype online after allegedly doing totally normal stuff like conducting field studies on Black people back when he used to bartend.

The ‘Black people don’t tip’ thing isn’t even true. What’s happening is that you’re getting Read. We see you. Our inklings are survival mechanisms. Why the fuck would I throw an extra bone to a racist? It’s like how if everybody you meet is an asshole eventually you gotta start doing the math.

He broke their brains, and they're never getting over America's first Black President, and why they're so hellbent on there never being a second. 1/ www.rawstory.com/tim-burchett...

2/ Lemme break it down for white and immigrant non-white people who may not understand this. This is the core of their "unqualified" obsession. It's simply impossible that Black people can be as educated, smart (and definitely not smartER), charismatic, engaging, and QUALIFIED as white people.

Does your university use ChatGPT Edu? Please send me a DM if you do. I have identified a potential data breach affecting students' data that has not yet been fixed and I'm trying to compile further examples from other universities. Reposts appreciated!

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

Something I think about a lot re: advancement is gov does way more than corps. Internet (DOD) Space (NASA) SD cars (DARPA) Drugs (grants to uni’s) Private sector enters only after proof of concept, to add economies of scale/scope.

The subtext of chapter 4 is effectively just: “What do you mean my actions have consequences?!? MOM YOU ARE THE WORST!”

It’s good to think about unintended consequences, sure. But an alternate reading would be “maybe we should’ve regulated the nuclear plants AND ALSO demanded coal plants install way more emissions safeguards. That seems preferable to a “trust me, bro” nuclear regulatory regime, y’know?

This is a little game that climate deniers like Bjorn Lomborg have played for decades. Pretend policymakers have a fixed budget for making-things-better, and then encourage savvy cost-benefit analysis so they do the greatest good with scarce resources. Lo and behold, it’s always business-friendly!

Also, he seems to think the dotcom crash was just, like, bad luck. Which again leaves me suspecting that the dude is secretly twelve. He definitely doesn’t understand anything about the economy or finance. 🤷‍♂️

But the point here isn’t to self-promote. The point is JAMES PETHOKOUKIS I AM CALLING YOU OUT. YOU WANT TO TALK WIRED FUTURISM FROM THE 90s AND THE LESSONS FROM THE DOTCOM CRASH? PISTOLS AT DAWN, MOTHERFUCKER.

(For those who don’t know: I read the entire WIRED back catalog in 2018 and wrote about it for their 25th anniversary issue. I have read the whole back catalog a second time and have a book coming out on all the things the techno-optimists persistently get wrong.) www.wired.com/story/wired2...

Okay yeah he’s just an idiot. Chapter 2. Economic growth has declined. We have let down our brilliant sage, Alvin Toffler. If only economic growth had stayed high, we would have had underwater cities and a Mars colony! James, you preteen, your bedtime is 10pm. No video games. Lights out.

James Pethokoukis makes Bret Stephens look like a deep and original thinker. This is just so bleak.

Okay so James thinks economic productivity was awesome in the 1950s and 1960s, which was all because of technological advances and cultural optimism. Look, I’m no economist (neither is he), but I kinda think part of U.S. economic growth was because Europe was, y’know, destroyed and rebuilding.

Pethokoukis describes the period from 1955-73 as a time of “can-do techn solutionism and cultural future-optimism.” This is… not how ANY historian ever describes the cultural clashes of the 1960s? It’s possible that James is just being very white and sheltered here. Or he might just be an idiot.

I keep reminding myself that this book is taken seriously by supposedly-serious people, despite passages like this reading like they were written by a 12-year-old. “We could’ve had exponential growth forever, but then the optimism came to an abrupt, shocking end.” Sure, kiddo. Whatever you say.

Oh FFS. James says the problem is that we lost our bold, optimistic vision. After the Apollo mission, there was no “massive and aspirational project devoted to advanced energy, biology, etc.” WHAT ABOUT THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT, JAMES? EVER HEARD OF THAT, YOU DUMBASS???

Twentieth-century futurism was largely a project of “don’t worry about the problems of the present. Corporations will build you such a lovely future.” 21st-century futurism has mostly been billionaires and their courtiers whining about the mean environmental movement blocking their cool ideas.

I suspect I may have some opinions to share about this next book I’m reading.

Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” essay in 1991 urged that we focus on fighting AIDS, reducing homelessness, and developing green energy sources instead of trying to colonize space. Pethokoukis mentions all this but then says that today we have Elon Musk, so he thinks a Sagan would be psyched for Mars now.

bee tee dubs hopefully obvious in the first post but I definitely don't mean I'm mad at people who got tricked by the fake alt, I'm mad at people who tricked y'all! just a friendly reminder to watch out because that's how they getcha

for anybody just joining us who may be earnestly confused about what we're talking about and isn't familiar everybody first hears of something somehow nbdsville welcome aboard we try to encourage doing this here, are more likely to quote or engage or like if you add it to your images and screenshots

alt text I've seen lately: . (just a period so the alt label will show!) photo (yep the word photo) article (people if it's your screenshot copy/paste the text and if it isn't google free OCR you don't have to retype it or some bsky app versions let you select text from a pic) alt text 😡 lol 👎

not looking to start a fight with any particular accounts but when reposting a post with alt text check if it's fake, filled in gibberish or few word empty garbage like "a tweet" to fool everyone into thinking they give a shit about people. I block em because it's even more enraging than no alt text

Transparency is a step but outlawing surveillance pricing, dynamic pricing, etc., is also right there. It’s available. And consumer have to start demanding better instead of swallowing the bullshit as the price of convenience. A better way is possible but you gotta respect yourself first. W/alt text

I love how he honors street vendors. Bad Bunny had vendors in his Super Bowl show, too. "In every major city, you see families and vendors selling fruit, food, and water [on] the streets and in subway stations. They're a necessity for survival and a way to make an honest living." - Victor Quiñonez

“With its contempt for the humanities, Edge offered intellectually insecure reactionaries a pass. Without even opening a book, they could dismiss all of feminism, postcolonial theory and queer studies.”

I am very wary of new punitive carceral legislation, because as I have learned from listening to folks like @tamaranopper.bsky.social for years, right wingers will eventually weaponize any new law against the people it's supposed to protect. So I'm trying to keep that in mind here.

Destroy the ability of public equity firms to destroy companies and communities. This seems like a good start: www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/pre...

When Ds are back in charge, they have to change everything. No moderate half-measures. Just relentless razing of the corrupt institutions that enriched the worst people in the world and propped up fascism. A few suggestions...