…That "Generative AI" does not tell you the truth, that it doesn't give you facts, & that when its outputs conform to factual reality, it's by fucking happenstance. These systems are not all-in-1 answer production machines, they are collections of stats & regularities spat out via fucking dice rolls

I think about how when they sang La Marseillaise they were still in the midst of a war they did not know they were going to win.

i love the littlest valentine we worked so hard to make

i really like being married to you @louisathelast.bsky.social 💞

And do we think Trump is doing his social media posts to not influence public opinion? His rallies? His TV interviews? We are fighting one of the most effective (if criminal) media manipators of all time and the proposed solution is to ignore that, roll over, and play dead?

Yes. One reason popularism is collapsing is because the status quo positions are becoming unpopular, yet the ”popularists” still hold them. It’s exposing the true motivation.

it’s valentine’s and it was just my wife’s birthday and i just want to say…..i love her so much. let’s be obsessed forever 💖@louisathelast.bsky.social

"the elite of the antebellum South were degenerate gamblers who financed their lifestyles with industrialized rape and would kill you for pointing this out" is a straightforwardly accurate statement

Moneta Sleet's photos should be much better know. But he worked mostly for Ebony, an African American magazine & so was ignored by taste-makers for much of his career. Just as importantly, he didn't own his archive. The magazine did, & it was a poor steward.

i’ll end this little brainstorm by just asking what it is, exactly, that the MAGA right likes about the United States, since it explicitly rejects those things that make this nation distinctive — its pluralism, its revolutionary heritage and egalitarian aspirations, and its republican institutions

Historian of abolition here. Only resistance works and always has. Read this great piece by Prof Ananya Roy of UCLA IN Jewish Currents jewishcurrents.org/fugitive-san...

slavery is one of the rare things historically where the more you learn about it the more you realize your initial assessment was correct and it was in fact one of the most evil things ever to occur

The anti-trans propaganda push is one of the best examples I know of real-world disinformation in action.

Oh nooo that thing literally everyone warned me could happen has happened, how could I have ever anticipated such a turn of events

basically, we've utterly erased the rights & healthcare access of a vulnerable minority because a very small group (of apparently very well-connected) of people became fanatical about it & the (also very small) group who decide press coverage decided they needed relentless coverage

a stat i always cite is the number of anti-trans articles in the press went from 60 in a year, to 7,500

the idea that this was a popular backlash to a socially dominant 'woke' worldview, pushing pronouns down all of our thoughts is absurd a decade ago most brits did not hold well defined views on this, there was a bi-partisan consensus for tolerance

Yes it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass who was born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped from slavery & rose to become the most eloquent and forceful voice for the abolition of slavery & for Black voting rights in the U.S.

I'll let David Walker, a 2nd hand clothes seller in Boston who grew up the son of an enslaved man in Wilmington, NC, have the last word. This is from Walker's blistering, 1829 abolitionist essay. "America is as much our country as it is yours." docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/wa...

We are a nation in which thousands of Black people were "legally" kidnapped with the assistance of the federal government & sent back into slavery. We are also a nation in which thousands of white & Black people organized in their local communities to try to stop those kidnappings. "We" are both.

Yesterday the students in one of my classes discussed this excellent 2018 article by historian Chris Bonner which opens with this incredible story of direct action from 1837 that, sadly, hits especially hard in 2026.

In 1854, after watching the federal government deploy 2000 federal troops and spend $40,000 sending Anthony Burns back into slavery, Boston's Amos Adams Lawrence said “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

Happy Valentine’s Day! 💕 Based on a painting of Yael by Artemisia Gentileschi

no foreign foe has ever dreamed of being able to sack and pillaging this country the way Trump admin and its congressional and scotus enablers do every day.

the number of real MFs who just insisted that "nothing matters who wins, it'll all be the same" should tell that to Renee Good

related to the view among the professional commentariat that only students at ivys and boutique liberal arts colleges actually matter

AI cannot direct its awareness or attention toward objects, it doesn't have any capacity to feel anything, it doesn't have a stable and continuous model of itself in relation to the world, it displays no self-ownership, and it doesn't have any of the neurological correlates of consciousness.

it’s so wild how true this is

NEW: Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found. The government keeps doing it nonetheless. www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

this stuff - like Rubio’s comments - is so absolutely goofy to me. who cares how many white people there are??

all-time great letterboxd review from @bransonreese.bsky.social

"Abolishing those programs and the lessons about gender they have taught, will, TFG and his acolytes hope, undermine our ability not just to condemn, but also to critically analyze the policies and practices they want to impose.” ~Joan Wallach Scott

genuinely these bots are too dangerous to be sold as consumer products

I am LOSING IT this is so good

warning: gay trans people are out here looking good

Nuremberg

Trump has lost the culture. But what if the universal conventional wisdom—that he won the culture in the first place—was never true? What if our warped media environment, then Trump's victory, created an illusion of MAGA cultural dominance that is now slipping. This is a long one, so strap in.

This comes two weeks after the Council of Europe banned conversion therapy. The right wing and activist press like the nyt have worked hard to promote the false narrative that transphobic policies are sweeping Europe. They were pushing a lie. Europe speaks for itself

I remain hopeful that we're on the cusp of a blowback that won't stop until sociopaths like this are stripped of everything and permanently barred from our societies.

Meta should be destroyed and the earth should be salted where it once grew.

"Mothers are uncelebrated, overworked, and made to endure thankless drudgery" and "Society equates womanhood with motherhood and romanticizes the role of mothers to push women towards domestic confinement" are both true statements about patriarchy by the way

Have never, ever seen anyone, let alone the Chief Investment Strategist at Bank of America, talk about the potential for hyperscalers to cut capex. Reciting the Fire Walk With Me poem as the Smiling Man appears on every screen at the NASDAQ m.investing.com/news/stock-m...

Been using this blocklist for awhile now and it's wonderful. A return to a better internet. Highly recommended.

If more people studied history, they'd know that the things present-day rightwing arseholes say about women are just the things the Nazis said about women, which are just the things that a bunch of 18th-century pricks said about women, as soon as modernity started to give them opportunities.

The largest meta-analysis ever conducted on trans athletes just found no significant strength or aerobic differences after 1-3 years of hormone therapy. A separate brain imaging study found HRT restructures cortical architecture through receptor-mediated pathways. open.substack.com/pub/aridrenn...

Can’t stop thinking about the gargantuan gulf between the kid glove, caveat-laden, “having your name all over the Epstein files doesn’t mean you did anything wrong”-treatment of the men in Epstein’s inbox… and the brutalize first, ask questions later policing in Minneapolis.

there’s an astonishing amount of stuff to hate them for and i want everyone to read the whole thing archive.ph/PJjws

literally impeach her just for this

lemon pig please