I'm ok with JK Rowling being given the ultimate British honor

The public reflecting pool being carelessly and corruptly wrecked leading to literal scum rising to the top protected by armed guard is such a stupidly on the nose metaphor for the Trump Years

Been with my wife for 30+ years, once the romance starts to wear off you start to help process each others’ trauma and heal and nurture each other. That’s the real corny soul mate shit we need in the long haul

had an prof of economic history who said Greenspan's job was to periodically get in front of Congress & Wall Street and create complex verbiage that amounted to "our unprecedented massive inequality is fine, do nothing", a message they liked right up until the entire global economy utterly collapsed

Who says liberals hate violence? They are always the first in line when it comes to violence against trans people.

Is Mossad going to slip Trump an exploding Diet Coke or what

Israelis 4 all their bravado have inflicted death and destruction on southern Lebanon 4 generations with nothing to show for it, while Trump's impulsive Venezuela coup was such routine US policy toward Latin America that it's mostly forgotten 5 months later. Militant client state vs decadent hegemon

There's a subversive element to the "dark pact" in Widow's Bay that suggests all American colonialism is a kind of immoral bargain of present horrors for future prosperity, but without a reckoning that deal just perpetuates the horrors through time. Also Kate O'Flynn is amazing in the show

Rebranding a hallucination as a ‘critical confabulation’ that can fill archival gaps is a big no from me.

Keep in mind that “Effective Altruists” politically allied themselves to these tech fascists.

We've been doing a family read through this summer of Dante's Inferno in Pinsky's great translation and it's very satisfying that he puts the fraudsters and the corrupt way down in the lower circles of hell

Adam Curtis B-roll

Between this and shrinking the LDS-heavy intel services it feels like a purge that could have some truly weird consequences

english isn't for cowards. if you're not saying 'torpify,' that's a skill issue. there's no Académie Française telling you what to do. if you try to type 'pallific' and freak out when you see a little red underline, maybe you're not ready to roll with the big dogs.

I hate to be over optimistic but I'm starting to feel like this will be the Summer It Finally Happens

It seems incredibly obvious to me that datacenters are a synecdoche for the whole process of having our lives and environments transformed according to the interests of capital as represented by a set of tech companies

As an archivist I truly hate that Palantir is finally forcing all data to be interoperable, but with the ultimate goal of annihilating all free thought on earth

Three lifetimes exceed the existence of this country. That is how stark today’s connection is to America's founding. This isn't ancient history. This is contemporary reality. 2/2

As we just surpass the 105 year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, I am reminded that survivor Ms. Viola Fletcher (1914-2025) was born only 1 year after Harriett Tubman died (1822-1913), who herself was four years old when Thomas Jefferson died (1743-1826). 1/2

The Backrooms concept connects a bit b/c it describes the 2020s vibe of being trapped/lost in endless nonrepeating infrastructure w/no outside, indifferent/hostile to life, just adjacent to reality but still outside it, governed neither by higher meaning nor natural law, & utterly lonely

Peter Theil fled to Argentina because that's where fascists flee to. Like the rest of us he can see the Era of Trumpism winding down, time to retire to the Casa de Mengele estate and settle in behind the security perimeter to the long twilight of drugs, pedophilia, shell corps, and insane screeds

"This change of scale is discernable everywhere: the human body, our body, seems superfluous in its proper expanse, in the complexity and multiplicity of its organs, of its tissue and functions, because today everything is concentrated in the brain and the genetic ..." - The Ecstasy of Communication

attempts to label the future as confidently as one might the past — and even there, these labels are only accepted for so long under any given definition, and not without argument — are so much branding in historiographical dress. The attempted browbeating of “would you reject the IR??” is hilarious

the Industrial Revolution was neither a tool, nor “chosen” as such, nor a simple inevitability; it’s a retrospective label for a mass of contingent changes, some perhaps still ongoing; and it’s not at all obvious that all their legacies are necessary to (much less justified by) all the others

this is where attempts to fuse two incompatible but equally simplistic formulas — “it’s inevitable because tech drives history,” and “it’s just a tool, you are free to use it or not” — into some kind of historical/moral monster argument highlights “pro-AI” incoherence

I know these "updates" are to keep the sales flowing, but as an archivist I've noticed that American culture has developed both an obsession with "the past" coupled with a broad contempt for learning and context; maybe related to the decline in literacy

Today for @prospect.org, I highlighted the labor strike aspect of the Delaney Hall strike. GEO Group is able to keep their overhead low and their profits high because they force prisoners to do a lot of jobs for $1 a day -- or for free.

Probably shouldn't have let a handful of weird business perverts unwind the cultural miracle of American research universities

University administrators two years ago: we can’t allow social justice movements to change the university as we know it University administrators today: in order to accommodate the new probabilistic bullshit generator no one likes we must change everything about the university

The good news is that antifascism, Reconstruction 2.0, the abolition of billionaires, and the Butlerian Jihad are all one project now

far be it for me to gas up a billionaire but this is a good fucking opinion and should be the universal Democratic messaging

They need special plates so the Flock cameras will know not to track their cars

Trans people are not “fighting for unpopular positions that society isn’t ready for.” Trans people are fighting to KEEP the rights we have enjoyed for decades. We have been able to legally change our gender markers since the 70s and before. Same with bathrooms, sports, youth, all for decades.

Allowing third parties to curb trans people's rights to participate in society opens up everyone's manner, clothing, physical appearance to intrusive scrutiny and potential challenge. History also shows allowing erasure of rights for one group soon sees others targeted. This is not a 'them' issue.

Taught a fun class recently where I carefully walked some kids through this chart and by the end it was like I had opened the ark of the covenant

The conservative dissents in this case slot perfectly into the long, deep history of eugenics in America

Real possibility of a temporary left-right alliance around disgust with Flock cameras and data centers, and contempt for the developers/lobbyists-turned-city-councilors who keep pocketing the kickbacks to make them happen

Dennis Hastert was a Republican Speaker of the House, the longest-running Republican to ever hold the position, and he was sentenced to prison for paying off children he sexually abused. Nobody associates this with the Republican Party because they’re the “law and order” party, because they’re white

I like that the crux is the DoorDash deliverers using the real time info to arbitrage their own product - delivery service, not pizza - for more profit, breaking the service model of two companies. AI really is the future

Don't see it discussed much but the manager class' affection for AI feels linked to the ongoing post-COVID Revolt of the Bosses against fair wages, remote work, flexible schedules, and social welfare in general

This is totally and completely literal Nazi eugenicist medicalized horror

One weird trick for preventing your documents from being scraped and regurgitated by LLMs is to put them into PDF format. Turns out LLMs hate PDFs for all sorts of reasons

Future Adam Curtis B-roll alert

It might help older people to understand that what trans Americans are living through right now is as bad as the AIDS years were for gay men: medical discrimination and disinformation, state sanctioned violence, social death, witch-trial level paranoia.

This migration happened in the 80s and 90s with queer people moving to avoid violence and oppression; wherever they relocated to, the economy boomed, which is how we got pridewashing by the 00s. Here we go again

To be very clear, I'm not trying to use the AI — I'm just trying to read the court documents. It's clear that the AI is programmed to replace offensive language. But what does that mean when it's being used to summarize historical documents? What happens when people rely on the summary?

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.

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.

It's 2026, technofascist jim crow secret police pedophile rape camps run by city-size CPUs selling genocide sims to kids everybody broke and about to be jobless food and oil running out missiles flying hackers shut the school down insects dying out assassination betting pools it's 2026, it's lit

For decades US media was like “the GOP is full of racists but that doesn’t make them the party OF racism” which was always stupid and now even that kayfabe is untenable