"When in doubt, draw a distinction." Not sure where he got it, but in grad school one of my teachers taught me that. This (long) thread is about the key distinctions I rely on as a critic. There's a Twitter version from 2021. This one builds on that one. I will post them one at a time. Ready?

Nisi Shawl is a visionary brilliant author, editor, critic and teacher, who is working on a book of otherworldly philosophy that sounds incredible. Not surprisingly, this project has grown and flowered, and Nisi needs a bit more support. Please help if you can! www.gofundme.com/f/help-nisi-...

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free

I am. But there are three things at play here regarding ICE collecting private data. Quick rundown on the issue, why you should be paying attention, and what I'm doing about it:

Bad-vibes coding an app that will doomscroll for me while I get some sleep.

A reminder that ICE hasn’t slowed down in Minneapolis at all. Outside of Minnesota, it might feel like everything has changed since Alex Pretti’s murder. But ICE hasn’t actually lost any power and they’re continuing to terrorize our communities.

After being held in two of them as a boy, I fought for decades urging America to never again build concentration camps and put human beings in them. It breaks my heart to watch this happen twice now in my own lifetime.

Here's what ICE is up to in Northeast Minneapolis today. Absolutely heartbreaking. Warning: video is hard to watch

Street art memorializing Alex Pretti in Seattle. Per r/Seattle, it was painted on a building facing Swedish Hospital in the First Hill neighborhood www.reddit.com/r/nursing/co...

AOC: I want everybody to understand that the cuts to your health care are what’s paying for this. You get screwed over to pay a bunch of thugs in the street that are shooting mothers in the face.

Seen in Los Angeles (Credit: Zurita Carpio)

Federal law enforcement agents shot and killed a man in Minneapolis on Jan. 24 according to local police officials. DHS told Fox News that the man was “armed with a gun”. A video of the shooting appears to show that a gun was taken from the man before the first shot was fired. x.com/BillMelugin_...

A coworker took this from her apartment. I haven't seen a crowd this size before. Maybe the first Women's March? But it was much much warmer that day. ICE OUT OF MINNESOTA!

Short thread Today in MN is a perfect example of why I ask y'all to subscribe to my human rights advocacy. Corporate media knew MN interfaith leaders were coordinating a historic protest with thousands of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus & non-believers working TOGETHER. And none showed up. 1/3

Minnesota is the best of us.

“This country would not exist if Black women had not birthed it from their wombs on the blood-soaked earth of Native people. Enslavement, lynching, Jim Crow, genocide, the prison industrial complex aren’t footnotes in American history. They’re the main text. Trump isn’t some un-American aberration.“

In case you missed it: One of the ICE observers was pulled out of her car by CBP, who used facial recognition on her. Three days later, she learned her TSA-Pre clearance had been revoked.

Y’all’s grandfathers flew around the world to fight Nazis as hard as they fought Black people moving into their neighborhoods. Miss me with the theatrics.

Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KckG... www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...

You and your wife drop your 6-year-old off at school. You just moved here. You see ICE terrorizing your new neighbors. You film them, as is your legal right. Your wife complies with orders. She is then shot in the head. You still have to pick up your child later today. This could be you.

Renee Macklin Good's wife, Becca Good, released a statement and it moved me to sobbing tears: archive.is/ur35j

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Minnesota investigators say they can't access evidence after fatal ICE shooting and FBI won't work jointly on probe. @reuters.com

👉 ICE Abusing Protesters After Murdering Driver 1/7/26 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnfi...

Nothing could better sum up where we are as a culture

Fifteen Years xkcd.com/3172/

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed -- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask, Charlie Brown.

I made this clip to illustrate my 10 year love-hate experience on Twitter and what made me finally walk away. 🤣😂

I’ve seen just one counter-protester at No Kings San Diego. He’s got a Trump 2024 flag and this guy has been following him around for probably an hour playing Benny Hill and circus music.

I am just so fucking proud of her.

GOP Senator Cynthia Lummis: "Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right... I don't feel that way anymore." www.semafor.com/article/09/1...

"Lies, damned lies, and AI." -- Mark Twain

A reimagining of William Hogarth’s ‘A Rake’s Progress’ with Trump as the titular rake. Plates 1 to 4.

NEW: The contractors working at Alligator Alcatraz are illegally covering up the USDOT numbers on their trucks.

Surprised they didn’t say: “We’ve tried red. We’ve tried blue. Let’s try white.”

We must not leave this out of the account of what they have done. What Musk and Trump and Vought did. What Johnson and his band of sycophants allowed them to do. What tens of millions of fellow Americans endorse.

Update on our trip to Alligator Alcatraz. We are being denied access.

weird that jamelle pointing out that the reporters didn't do their due diligence and were platforming a eugenicist violates social media standards

It’s so frustrating that there is this illusion that we are all 49%/49% right now. Us versus them, good versus bad, and it’s all because of the BS that is the electoral system. It’s very likely 70% versus 30% and we’re just not seeing representative government.There’s just no common sense right now

This is why they didn’t want him back: He is a witness.

NEW: Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s lawyers seek permission to file an amended complaint in his civil case in Maryland. Among other things, the amended complaint “includes Abrego Garcia's first-hand account of torture and mistreatment at CECOT…”

Wow. Watch this from Zohran Mamdani. It looks like the exact "fight" and "conviction" people are hopelessly asking for from the people in charge of the Democratic party:

"The conservative majority knows what it's doing. These same justices would never have allowed a Democratic administration to take similar actions. Yet when Trump bulldozes constitutional limits, the Court waves him on," writes @adambonica.bsky.social. data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-suprem...

The key, as ever, is the corn meal

Republicans are trying to sell off your public lands in their budget bill to pay for their tax cuts for billionaires and corporations.

Yeah. The thing that worries me most is that these models were taught to be convincing before they were taught to be right.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Some thoughts about the military parade in my hometown of Washington DC today -- specifically, the route. Military parades in DC are quite rare. But when they happen, they have always begun, symbolically and geographically, at the Capitol and moved outward. 1/

This was just posted by @tbretc.bsky.social on another platform. The Chicago Sun-Times obviously gets ChatGPT to write a ‘summer reads’ feature almost entirely made up of real authors but completely fake books. What are we coming to?

Hate this a lot. Value human creators, writers, artists, narrators, editors -- everyone in the chain of making a book and putting it out into the world should be a human being. Humans make art for humans. P.S. fuck AI -- eat shit, artbarf robots www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...