When a democratic president is underwater on approval the media interviews republican voters and when a republican president is underwater the media interviews republican voters

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

This focuses on her interactions and spends most of its argument trying to deny racism by claiming MAGA had inroads with Men of color before Obama This is what I anticipated but the fact the Atlantic published it is ghastly White women specifically helped us get here and this is how

We are gonna be well into white women having the “but women are next” Meanwhile DEI and Affirmative Actions biggest beneficiaries have always been them. Project 2025 AND Project Eve explicitly mention them And women of color are women This isn’t “privilege” it’s abusers demanding comfort

“Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience … More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves.”

I wish I didn’t know as much about the end of Reconstruction as I do. If you understood what is being unleashed now, how it will touch every aspect of our civic life, and how difficult it will be to undo it, you wouldn’t be able to think about anything else.

But he’s going to make some shameless grifters a lot of money and that’s what it’s all about these days.

I admire the hell out of these Texas Tech students, who held a funeral for academic freedom: pen.org/texas-tech-a...

Books I Need

The kids are alright

Stop being villains.

This is Amerikkka

NEW: Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth The vitamin K shot, a lifesaving injection given to newborns to prevent uncontrollable bleeding of the brain and intestines, has become collateral damage of the anti-vaccine movement.

The University of Iowa paid this bigot 34k for an hour of anti-intellectual (and anti-higher ed) propaganda. It is embarrassing that he has a platform outside of right-wing message boards, let alone at a state flagship.

This isn’t like letting kids use a calculator, this is more akin to letting kids smoke. The whole point here is pushing an addictive product and getting kids hooked on it early—not educational best practices. www.newyorker.com/culture/prog...

thank you sam alito for ending the unconstitutional racial discrimination against white conservatives and allowing them to obliterate federal representation for as many black people as they can manage, as the reconstruction congress intended

If party representation were equally distributed in Tennessee without gerrymandering, Dems would likely hold two or three House seats. Still, that didn't stop Gov. Lee from calling a special session with the goal of eliminating the only Democratic seat left in the state. --- @tennesseelookout.com

I miss words meaning things.

This reads like parody. As this administration shreds the Constitution, takes aim at free speech, and takes a hatchet to democracy, your last act on earth will be . . . a book condemning people who advocate for "open borders" and "defunding the police?"

Teachers: "Please help us get AI out of schools, it's ruining education!" Students: "Please don't make us use AI, it's ruining our lives!" Politicians: "We hear you and we want to help you harness the power of AI." #NihilismAndTechnology

The Department of Holy War www.vox.com/videos/48756...

🫠

Okay, so do "left-leaning" people get to have rights or not? Is it now taboo to have a "political stance" if you are not the government?

Once again wrote about the bad faith jurisprudence that defines the Roberts era

New from me at the @brennancenter.org: Once again, Alito uses disingenuous reasoning and bad data to take an ax to the Voting Rights Act.

In celebration of May Day and the radical history of the working class, we've put together this Class War Reading List. See you in the streets tomorrow!

Pete Hegseth has refused to rule out sending troops to polling stations during November’s midterms.

i was told by john roberts and sam alito that racism is over so i won't worry about white republicans in the south jumping over themselves to end black political representation wherever they can

I’m giving this as a gift to all the people in the last year who have said “I think [XYZ use] is bullshit, but some of the medical AI applications seem to be impressive…" where radiology is the most frequent example

Here's a transcript of this portion of Trump's speech. Startling to see such unabashed, settler colonial blood and soil stuff being spoken from a WH podium in the 21st century. FWIW, roughly 20% of the population of the colonies in 1776 was comprised of enslaved people of African descent.

The white nationalist undertones in this speech have been dramatically underreported. Trump says the colonists had British blood, the 1776 revolutionaries’ “veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage,” and criticized the notion that America is an idea. Echoed Vance’s blood and soil speech from last year.

This is *extremely* the way.

In this #newblogpost I extend my arguments about the (im)possibility of decolonial GenAI. I specifically focus on the points of divergence between GenAI reliance on colonial structures of flattening what makes us human and decolonisation's refusal of those structures folukeafrica.com/being-human-...

A new edition of Edward Said's "Representations of the Intellectual" is out. Free link: archive.ph/2026.01.21-0... In his lectures, Said examines the motivations for thinkers, commentators and teachers… the ways in which they serve knowingly and unknowingly certain national or corporate interests.

“Of all art forms that I partake in, I feel like zines are the ones that make the least amount of sense to use AI for. They’re supposed to be handmade and scrappy.”

there is something genuinely clarifying and useful about this kind of stuff. they are totally hoods off and proud of it, which means we should not hesitate to describe them accordingly

At a 2013 gathering of Oregon Republicans attended by many OR GOP officials, this Koch funded org set up a punching dummy featuring Obama with a black eye. I suspect more than one attendee took a swing, just in jest of course.

This is bad bad bad and it's a point in favor of SAG-style fights over "digital likenesses" not just our usual terrain of "academic materials" or "intellectual property"

I'll remind you that they were apparently fine with this from December.

I found this really enlightening as to how Magyar was able to unseat Orban

When folks are selling AI as an accommodation tool for disabled students, they are selling individualism. This individualism is infused with neoliberal whiteness where the disabled person is a consumer & producer only focused on their needs, not part of of a collective political identity.

It’s a new form of “you can’t be smart enough to write this so you must be cheating” that Black & Brown students have been experiencing throughout the history of schooling. But what makes it more dangerous is that those accusations are now being mechanized through AI, giving it an air of authority.

Why so many Americans are Done with the British Royal Family. Why so many Algerians are done with the Presidency of France. Why so many Slashes are done with Axl Rose.

New, from me: Take the Palantir manifesto seriously, if not literally. It reveals that our tech philosopher kings want public money, but without public accountability. This creates a dilemma for governments unaligned with its techno-fascist vision. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/palantir-w...

Microsoft and other US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide the environmental toll of their data centers, Investigate Europe reports in collaboration with Tech Policy Press and other media partners.

“Google has created a misinformation crisis. Studies have shown that people tend to trust what AI tells them without question…Another experiment found that users still listened to AI when it gave them the wrong answer nearly 80% of the time—a grim trend the researchers dubbed “cognitive surrender.”