Predator drones shift from border patrol to protest surveillance

It's sobering, in its way, to realize that there was truly nobody (save, perhaps, his children) who knew him that loved him as a man. He made himself into content, and he died as content, and his funeral is the most content of all. Soundbites to soundbites, bits to bits

There's no more fitting tribute to Charlie Kirk than the one they're giving him right now: nominally Christian survivors on the same grift clambering over one another for more publicity, capped by the shambling, lurching embodiment of everything they long to be. You couldn't write anything meaner

Who is writing the history of Wikipedia?

Just saw this super fashy ICE recruitment ad on TV, making the pitch to Chicago cops.

Sounds like this thing was five hours of idolatry.

this is the intellectual conservative two-step: pretend that because they are raising an issue where people of good faith with broadly shared principles could disagree, that we have to pretend the actually existing conservative movement consists of those people. no. we don't.

projections long term (15 years) are something like 14-21 million. I think a mass murder orchestrated by a Nazi with the intention of murdering non white people counts as a genocide. www.everythingishorrible.net/p/elon-musk-...

Yea I don't think this is the lesson of John Lewis' life and Reagan ran on the southern strategy.

Whatever AI's real use cases are, they don't require accuracy, so get it tf out of everything that does.

PSA: Thinking this is wrong doesn’t make you a “radical” — thinking it isn’t does.

UK officially recognises Palestine as a state

"[Charlie Kirk] had never attended college but was a voracious reader." Lol what? He was never a college student?

Presbyterian Pastor David Black in the trenches protesting ICE. Read liberation theologians like Gutierrez, Boff, and so many more. The time is already now. www.chicagofirstchurch.org/pastor-black/

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

Saving this list for the next time I have a student ask why I say that Watergate was small potatoes compared to what goes on in an average week with this administration.

What's one more blatantly impeachable and removable offense for the fire? There's so many.

Any statues or plazas honoring Charlie Kirk need to find their way into the trash heap with the rest of this country's monuments to white supremacy. Any monument to anyone in the Trump administrations needs to make their way to the trash heap actually.

These guys are out here taking bribes like Gus Fring.

Absolutely wild. Israel targeted and massacred 31 journalists and media staff in Yemen. The second-deadliest attack on journalists ever recorded. The Israeli regime is built on war crimes.

Today, due to the recent spread of (false) narratives about trans perpetrators of mass shootings, I decided to look up search stats for the term “trans shooter.” The term was hardly used at all before May 2022, when the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde happened.

The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks this, lists five mass shootings by transgender or nonbinary people since January 2013. That’s less than 0.1% of the mass shootings in that period.

Also, Democrats have run many pro-life candidates in the South over the last 20 years. They almost always lose. This is not some novel idea! The fact that leading figures in the party are suggesting this is an original thought further illustrates the problem. abcnews.go.com/Politics/mis...

Good chance of Israel being suspended from the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) this week. This move would have devastating implications for Israeli football, and would be the most significant move of cultural sanction against Israel in decades.

Relevant to that is another finding in the poll. A theoretical officeholder that speaks up about these issues is preferred by: ICE raids D+72 I+40 Trans D+61 I+9 Gaza genocide D+33 I-24 Guessing that Gaza one was a question wording effect, but if you're running a a Dem, those are your voters.

All the establishment Dems & pundits who are going around telling you how f'ing pragmatic & realistic they are *do not understand voters* and are counseling strategies doomed to fail.

A Dem that runs as pro trans gets a SIXTY ONE POINT BUMP WITH DEM VOTERS and a NINE POINT BUMP WITH INDIES over ones that go silent. The failure to get this is a prior beliefs/incentives problem but it's also a research problem. The current establishment's understanding of voters is utterly cooked.

It is genuinely bad to help a fascist administration mythologize one of their own like this.

I've said this before and will die on this hill: the Christian right is by far Trump's most important base, it's numerous, they're motivated to vote, they are cohesive. Lots of political reporters look to shifts on online discourse among influencers for what's going on in Trumpworld, but that's a

"President Donald Trump is expected to fire the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after his office was unable to find incriminating evidence of mortgage fraud against New York Attorney General Letitia James, according to sources."

If you wrote a "Trump distances himself from project 2025" story in 2024 you are either a dupe or one of our enemies. They are cackling with laughter that the media they're now destroying enthusiastically helped them dupe the voters

These are precedented times and the precedent is a loud ass warning www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/a...

They won't deny slavery. They'll negate it. What they'll teach is that slavery was bad, but without any contextualization (other than that Africans also contributed to the slave trade). "Patriotic history" will claim that it was an unfortunate practice of days gone by & now it's over; move on.

At least a decent chance he's worried about getting exiled from his polycule with Bari Weiss and whatnot.

This Week's Onion Magazine:

We're mobilizing 41,000 volunteers to make sure Californians vote YES on Prop 50 to fight back against Republicans’ rigged congressional maps.

This read lookin' more correct every time Klein opens his mouth.

This is what fascist scholars mean when they say "don't give them an inch."

We have to ask ourselves: are political, economic and social institutions helping us practice democracy? That is actually why the First Amendment matters so much: speech, assembly and association help us practice democracy.

I am not surprised that the big broadcast companies are failing; they have gotten too big and consolidated. I think university boards have ignored faculty senates and student government and tried to become corporations and that makes them fragile. I think politicians view voters as annoyances.

South Korean protest culture is one of the country's huge strengths and it relies in part upon having large networks of people who can be mobilized at short notice. The U.S. is at nowhere near this stage of organization but it badly needs to be.

New Mexico, long at the bottom of state rankings for child well-being and educational outcomes, is on the verge of launching a first-in-the-nation free child care and preschool program. The move would save families an average of $13,000 a year.

At least to the part about the constitution, Charlie Kirk opposed birthright citizenship and helped organize the rally on January 6 that led to the Capitol being sacked.

Coming out in trade PB Oct. 7th from @liveright.bsky.social & @wwnorton.com with a new forward by @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social. Goddamn is this book still relevant.

Cuomo may as well be endorsed by the Epstein estate.

The gentlest way to put it is that the current Republican Party, in fact, is not a normal political party as we like to envision them. It cannot be trusted to protect our democracy, the constitution, or the people residing in its borders. Actually, it's hostile to all three.

A totalitarian movement must never achieve its goals, as that would eliminate the need for the movement itself. Even in victory, new enemies must be created in order to justify further cruelty and domination.

Welcome to the study of US history once we're all successfully purged. What an embarrassment.

Conservatives want their history simple and consistent. They refuse complexity and the existence of different standpoints. In doing so they end up silencing and censoring rather than understanding the dynamics of the institutions they love. 1/3 www.city-journal.org/article/trum...