It has to be said: the NBA on NBC kind of fucked up. They thought all we needed was the music, but no: we also needed the Bob Costas monologue leading into the intro sequence. I can't believe they just totally dropped that part of it. What a waste

It would be funny if baseball players were allowed to wear just, like, whatever hat

Continues to be very funny that Jill Biden insisted people call her "Dr." even though she doesn't have an MD Why does the NYT indulge her? Or do they call everyone with phD "Dr."?

this is so good theonion.com/shai-gilgeou...

Part of what makes this moment uneasy is that the day-to-day political scuffling is so small, but lurking in the background are these huge, world-historical ruptures It is a time for starry eyed philosophers, utopians, and visionaries to show us alternatives. But where are they?

Feels like what happened with higher education is just Goodhart's Law: - higher education was originally intended to instill civic virtue, teach manners and customs of the elite, foster specialization - it wasn't seen as a way to make money; more like, something you did if you had money

This is so funny, and very indicative of the compromised ethics of our time. What a massive dumbass

it sure doesn't seem like SGA is the most valuable player in the league

AI displacing workers is a real problem. One solution is the Luddite approach of banning the technology. But I don't think this is reasonable for two main reasons. First, it would stunt our overall economic and technological development and we'd rapidly fall behind competitors like China. Even if

As a Liberal, probably my most heterodox view is that Cybertrucks are cool I think they look cool and I appreciate that they take a huge aesthetic risk, which is sorely lacking in most of the rest of the auto industry

This is the key political insight of our time. We have unprecedented concentrations of wealth, and AI is now enabling unprecedented concentrations of power married to that wealth. And when I say "unprecedented", I mean unprecedented in *human history*

this is peak bluesky posting. what even is this. who is it for

A lesson for me in the last several years is that the left is just as susceptible to group think and false beliefs as any other group. Below you can see someone who seems to think the covid vaccine reduced transmission, but it didn't--it just reduced the severity of symptoms

I would be in favor of laws punishing law enforcement for lying in a court of law

Listening to the Tucker Carlson podcast has been fascinating. I think I can see what his project is. He's really trying to activate white Christians as an identity group, and leaning heavily on in-group/out-group framing--i.e. grievance, i.e. "hate"--to achieve it.

Seems cruel to schedule the Blue Jays to play the Dodgers so early on in the season--and in Toronto, too. The scene of the crime. Like, are those fans going to be ok

Some people are fighting wars I never knew existed

What kind of murderous government do we have now where they are killing heads of state and openly boasting about it. They are really bringing shame on this country

I don't understand how you can be trying to negotiate an end to the war if you keep assassinating its leaders. Like who are you negotiating with, a smoldering hole in the ground? You have to wonder if Israel is doing these killings in defiance of the US to keep the war going

Bernie's still got it. You can see why a lot of Trump voters were former Bernie bros; he's able to communicate with a wide swath of working class people in a way that cuts across party lines

This is something @dril.bsky.social would repost

I mean, it pretty clearly justifies it

If Trump proceeds to deployment of ground troops he's going to need Congress to pass the $200B in funding. If Congress doesn't pass it--then what happens? If Trump disperses the payment anyway then we're pretty clearly not operating within the Constitution anymore and all bets will be off

There is a certain kind of brain worm that I think inhibits human freedom and autonomy: the inference from someone's success that they must have meritocratic qualities that generated the success. What makes it particularly insidious is that it it is often true, and--holding all variables steady--

Courtesy of an old friend, a new meme format

This Mearsheimer interview from a week ago is good www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl-s... Remember after they killed Khamenei and Trump was musing about how he'd have to be personally involved in selecting the predecessor lol What a world historical fool Trump is. Played like a fiddle

Been listening to the Tucker Carlson podcasts since the Iran War started. It's so interesting. A big part of it is very effective anti-war arguments/discussions. Some episodes, like the one directly after the war started, are 99% indistinguishable from the most vanilla antiwar leftist you know

I think there's an opening for a very particular brand of populist politician that I'm not sure I've quite seen yet. It would be something like this: - universal healthcare - electrification/transition from fossil fuels - "industrial policy" i.e. selective protectionism - hardliner law and order

It was hard to imagine we'd see anything surpass W in terms of sheer stupidity, but this Iran War thing, boy I don't know - attacks Iran with no plan for the strait - has no allies to come help because he alienated all of them and didn't line up support ahead of time

Aside from the utter lawlessness and cruelty of it--and the total lack of popular or Congressional support--what makes this war so odd is the absence of reporting. US and Israel are run by compulsive liars; there's little news or images coming out of Iran or Israel; and AI fakes muddle everything

The Trump people probably also didn't realize that starting a war with no popular support or Congressional auth or funding means that Iran has the advantage. Iran can wait out Trump and turn the screws on world oil prices until he folds

Apart from everything else, it's just stupefying that Hegseth initiated the war with apparently no plan at all for securing the strait. Probably the #1 reason you would need actual ground troops to attack Iran is so you could immediately seize control of the strait, right? This is all so stupid

I was talking with a guy who has a container-ship leasing business and he was saying that even if the war ended tomorrow it would be months before the strait could open up Takes a ton of time for minesweepers to remove all the bombs Figuring out how to buy some oil futures, we're headed to $200..

The US attack on Iran was an unprovoked act of aggression against a country that poses no immediate threat to US safety or even its interests generally. It is therefore a morally reprehensible--some would say evil--act

I'm sure others are saying it, but I don't know where, so I'll say it here: - autonomous AI needs to be regarded as a weapon of mass destruction similar to nuclear weapons - it needs to be handled the same as nukes diplomatically: treaties to ban its use by the major powers

Re Claude Code, the metaphor most people reach for is that we are horse-carriage drivers, but now must learn how to drive automobiles. But this isn't quite right. We are the *horses*. And now must learn how to drive automobiles despite our clumsy hooves and awkward necks

To me there's a weird resonance between the NBA scandal and Trump's run at an American dictatorship: they are both downstream of a severe moral rot, where suddenly honesty doesn't matter, no one has courage, and nothing anyone does is wrong.

I think the specific reason why the AI bubble will burst soon is because all of the money is going into construction of data centers, but that aspect of AI--the quality of the AIs--is already in diminishing returns. The actual money is now in deploying, scaling, and productizing the technology..

Vance might have just ended his political career with that quote about this Iran war not being something that's going to be a long term thing Every terrible long slog of a war happened because the side that started it thought it was going to be over quickly

It is worth noting that the Trumpist movement--and the Trump administration itself--are so intellectually weak and anti-American that the entire edifice would crumble in a sustained cross examination from an earnest tenth grade speech and debate kid.

Non-citizens should enjoy full protection under the First Amendment; but setting that aside, in the present case, Trump is completely lawless since the statute under which he is deporting students (like Rumysa Ozturk) requires the US to be at war, and it is not. A flagrant abuse of power.

There are two main arguments for why non-citizens should be afforded full protection under the First Amendment. First, the underlying model for why free speech is beneficial to society is the so-called "marketplace of ideas" metaphor envisioned by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which makes the

Very generally, here's why I think we should have optimism: motivating affect of reactionaries is FEAR. This is useful for organizing themselves and asserting hierarchic control, but it attracts mediocre cowards. And it's not very sustainable in the long term. People don't want to be scared forever.

Something I haven't heard Democrats say at all: what they are going to do, exactly, to curb Presidential power if and when they get majorities in the House and Senate. At the very least they should rescind the President's power to levy tariffs, suspending the Senate filibuster if need be