lmao Martinelli

the day today tier paragraph

i'm not joking when i say the only reasonable assumption anyone can make is that everybody *in the world* with any power actively supports all of this.

As someone who embedded at Warlord for my dissertation research AMA. (Please don't it's all in print)

"Faith in machinery is our besetting danger; always in machinery, as if it had a value in and for itself. what is population but machinery? what is coal but machinery? what are railroads but machinery? The use of culture is that it helps us to regard wealth as but machinery." Matthew Arnold

One of the things about this is the slippage when talking about AI. Framing at first: Grok apologized, Grok made image. Framing now: People make the images. Consistency is that it's whatever is necessary for media and political classes to justify staying on the child porn app.

I can’t get over all the journalists and centrist pundits who sneered that “Twitter isn’t real life” when it was full of weird leftists but now insist it’s a vital window into the public mood when the entire site is Nazis, illegal porn, bots, and Belarusians calling themselves “Iowa MAGA Farm Guy”

Tommy Dreamer gazing down from heaven

I know every frame about how we got here, why it persists, why it's all so ugly. I'm not naive or stupid about any of it. But I'll just be out walking my dog or something, in the quiet, like I was just now and the weight of how nonsensical it is just hits me. Senseless violence for mean reasons.

This reframes that earlier reporting on Walz talking about the NG quite a bit

Once again, and I'm breaking my no quote to dunk thing because I'm not dunking, but what does this insistence that everything was always the same, always as bad in exactly the same ways as now, that there was no degradation actually get us?

It's an MTV simulator with almost 30,000 videos, organized by decade, with special sections for Headbanger's Ball and Yo! MTV Raps. This is so good.

To be fair if the Plato thing happened in a blue state it would just be because they shuttered the philosophy department.

I appreciate the poetry here and it the last sentence is a satisfying payoff but I wish that they would spend less time characterizing Grok as a trickster demon that’s been let loose on the world and more time stating flatly that Elon can send one email and end all of this in 30 seconds.

Re: last repost. It's worth asking what the flattening effect of "things have always been this bad" does to politics and thought. Also worth asking why the broad swathe of center-left to left tends to go so hard on some variation of it.

This is why it annoys me when people try to make it seem as if this is how things have always been. There was a time when greater literacy and reading as a part of everyday life for people of every class was a national mission. Then it changed drastically and now we’re here.

Teach the controversy (unhinged laughing)

The job market in comm is weird this cycle. I don't think it's disastrously worse re: number of jobs but it has a lot of bad jobs, mostly in Texas and Florida, where people are clearly fleeing. And you read that Texas A&M banning Plato thing and lol.

They're trying to pivot pretty hard to robots now that nobody but universities (lol) bit hard enough on AI. I saw it referred to as physical AI then watched a clip of a robot fold a paper towel at an excruciatingly slow rate.

Some quick thoughts on my current favorite rock band, High Vis, and the white guys getting back in the garage. stuckness.ghost.io/high-vis/

I'm not the first person to say this, but I believe we've concluded that the funniest number is "68±1".

yet 420 remains eternal

The supplanted of 69 by 67 as the funny number is an indication of Gen Z's absence of erotic desire. In this essay I will

Putting my foot into one of these as a little kid made me feel fancy

I saw this after I saw your post and it really seemed apropos of your broader point.

And I just think you have to understand that about these people, they're barely capable of formulating the question "why should I do this?" - the fact that other people don't want them to but they can and therefore they're demonstrating their power over them by so doing, that's it, that's enough.

Some quick thoughts on my current favorite rock band, High Vis, and the white guys getting back in the garage. stuckness.ghost.io/high-vis/

The right's appropriation of "neoliberalism" from left-wing critique is a perfect symptom of our conjuncture. Just when the term was starting to gain salience following the financial crisis, it became an undefined catch-all used to dunk on political enemies on social media. And now here we are

this is small comfort given he has state power and i don’t but i am struck by what an obviously weak and fragile man miller is. a blubbering piss baby whose entire affect and personality is an attempt to make up for his profound feelings of inadequacy

this often means tons of people who let’s be clear, basically agree with each other and would get along just fine, just kinda get assigned a side in a giant flame war based on what posts they happened to already see

the number one rule of twitter and its descendants is that individuals make posts with no context, to no one, as one off thoughts. but the audience reads posts in the context of every other post that has come before and with responsibility for every post that comes after

The more your legal theory starts to resemble "The hacker's exploit that caused our website to spit out customer credit card details is just user-generated content, and thus we are protected by Section 230," the more I you should be questioning your legal theory.

As tech companies try to sell us on the idea that life itself is an inconvenience, "an orientation toward friction is really the only defense we have against the life-annihilating suction of technologies of escape," @kjezermorton.bsky.social writes. www.thecut.com/article/broo...

Head in my hands at some of the routine admin things becoming snafus three days before the semester.

I don't get the refusal to leave Twitter. I didn't get it years ago now. We're all old enough (or most of us are) to have lived through multiple sites. Just me: I've left at least six forums, Livejournal, G+, Facebook (mostly), Myspace, Twitter. Mastodon. This is all transient. It's baked in.

Thompson is so back

Incredibly awkward EU Commission press conference, with representatives unable and unwilling to answer questions on Greenland. To the extent they just ghost journalists insisting on the issue. ~AA

People are reposting this complaint about child porn by Elon Musk's Grok - "This problem + exploitation of children could be fixed in a matter of minutes " - without noting the relevant context. The person charging Musk with enabling chld exploitation is the mother of one of Elon Musk's children.

There's a reason the justification for anything and everything is fentanyl.

i don't think science academics have really faced up to is just how bad the prescription opioid crisis really was, how many people suffered because of it, and how much it implicated "business as usual," the processes of science, medical professionals, and government institutions. it rankles still

2/3 of the way through the Thompson William Morris book. It's turned into minutiae of socialist meetings in 1883 (unsurprising fact: they devolved into factionalism). Which is probably a ripping read for some, and maybe me later, but not me right now.

My path of least resistance read to nobody doing anything about CSAM on Twitter isn't that everyone is scared of Elon but too addicted to Twitter to do anything lest their fix disappear. It's an infinitely more perverted instantiation of people refusing to leave because of their "engagement".

Put something on, you look ridiculous.

The discourse about the 1998 modern rock list will be correct that the list mostly sucks but I will not hear of Loreena McKennitt slander