Anders Breivik's 2011 mass murder and accompanying manifesto represented, in retrospect, the true beginning of violent fascism's return to power in the West There had been precursors (Columbine or the OKC Bombing come to mind), but Breivik crystallized and unleashed a pestilence that now ravages us

Anders Breivik got what he wanted, he convinced the most powerful, richest white men on Earth that his project & the exact language he used in his Manifesto to describe it, was theirs to champion. As Hitler said, to stop him, his ideas needed destroying *at the root*. Once more we were complacent.

for a brief moment a few weeks ago I was using BlueSky more than Mastodon but now my social media usage has settled to X > LinkedIn > Mastodon > Bsky again. There are a lot of people I know on here but for some reason it still feels like a fifth wheel of social media.

naked admission that the point was always left-punching

it's R, obvi

huh

"Just asking Questions" revealed to be "Just asking you to disappear"

"This is what made Hinton’s speech so troubling. He presented mathematics as a low-hanging fruit, a “particularly easy” terrain for AI, because it is “a closed system with rules,” “like Go and Chess.” Yet Go and Chess aren’t ordinary closed systems. They are actual games with winners and losers.

wait what? huh. iykyk

Even by Labour's sickeningly disgusting attitude towards vulnerable individuals, this is a new low by Mahmood. Under no possible criteria could Afghanistan be classed as safe. Labour has already prevented Afghans from seeking asylum. This compounds the inhumanity. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Bluesky just sips from the intellectual lineage of crypto grifting, where you gesture meaningfully towards "decentralization" but really, 2-3 powerful players own everything.

A society that runs on this stack doesn't stop holding elections, or debating, or running investigations. The forms stay, but what goes is their capacity to constrain power. The arc bends toward simulation, carried out in the language of defending democracy.

Point 21 is the giveaway, some cultures produce "wonders," others are "regressive and harmful." Once you accept that hierarchy, you've quietly been given permission to apply different standards of verification to different actors. The form of verification stays, but the democratic function doesn't.

Healthy accountability is triggered by evidence, points upward at power, and happens in public. Disordered accountability protects insiders and aims its punishment outward. What the document does is argue for the second while calling it the first.

Points 9, 18 and 19 go after accountability directly. Scrutiny of public figures gets reframed as a kind of cultural sickness driving talent away from public life. The problem becomes the people doing the scrutinising, not the people being scrutinised.

Really? You're disagreeing with my extremely idiosyncratic take on a technology nobody understands?

While I think whale vocalizations are cool, and the inherent structure in them is even cooler, I am not sure that showing that they look like human stuff is nearly as interesting as the tendency for structure

This “-maxxing” and “-mogging” stuff comes from an ugly place and has never been particularly funny. But what about if *I* adopt it, but ironically,

i agree. ducks ARE a good shape

MULTIPLE ORBAN FAILURE

Politics has unexpectedly hit a special interest of mine so here is a quick rundown on the Avignon Papacy.

If you see this I implore you to quote skeet with an unusual image from your posting device without explanation. Still definitely use alt text, though.

so I don't understand luggage locks. airport security can open them and the key is readily available. why do suitcases even have them?

Universal Grammar? Sorry pal, I think people should have to work for their language

Poetry fans when they hear a bell tolling for them: oh shit oh fuck

If you poll populations, you find that his 5 dimensions collapse into just two: Harm reduction/Justice and Authority/Purity/Loyalty. These are correlated with "support for liberal values" and "support for conservative values", which are broadly independent ideas.

He's speaking his truth.

your last meme saved is your moral philosophy

your last meme saved is your moral philosophy (what happens to people who don't save memes?)

The conservatives correctly intuited a fairly materialist conclusion that reshaping the technological basis of society was dissolving the social categories that they hold dearer than profit or growth. Science and tech are actually turning the kids into blue-haired activists, which imo is great.

Fortunately, no other sector depends on the energy sector, so this shock will be completely isolated

it's kind of a red flag when a businessman starts getting pissy at you after you politely pass on his product

why am I *not* getting this ad? Oh, I'm not on facebook

Population per capita across the United States

i think that the essential issue is that the Israeli electorate is psychotic to a degree the average American could not possibly understand

🤭😂

Claude is short for Jean Claude Van Damme. Are you saying Jean Claude Van Damme does not have consciousness? Because I agree with you.

« D’après nos calculs, les Israéliens occupent désormais 61 % de la bande de Gaza. Chaque jour, ils déplacent les blocs jaunes et, au réveil, des habitants découvrent qu’ils sont du mauvais côté de la ligne, et sont contraints de se redéplacer » www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

spotted "herbeibomben" in Spiegel

Remember when we used to blame school shootings on violent video games?

Mom, come pick me up, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Poor families used to own my ancestors. Poor families benefitted from depressing their labor and drowning their communities after they were freed. Misdeeds often are financially attractive; it'd be pointless if they only offered moral compromises. Having integrity isn't a privilege, it's a choice.

Sweden is a morning-people country but Stockholm always surprises me how early everything closes. Even Gothenburg seems to be awake at least an hour later, and it's the second city. Stockholmare really like their bedtimes.

shadow men are vying for control of the powerful apples

the pity is that Europe at least doesn't seem to have picked up any of the slack

I grew up with stovetop basmati and other South Asian rices and never even heard of rice cookers until much later, then later discovered that East Asians think that all rice cultures use rice cookers.

it *was* a turning point, just in the opposite direction