doom is the potato chip of the attention marketplace.
it’s bullies who most justify their behavior as opposing bullying. not-bullies have few occasions to require so grand a justification.
Elon Musk refers to himself as both a free speech absolutist and a socialist.
"there is nothing *more* political than insisting that your own preferences and assumptions are 'empirical' while anyone who questions them is 'doing politics.'"
"...Incinerating the qualitative and doing arithmetic with the dubious quantitative residue that remains is no way to understand the world, much less run it"
~@pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/
mastodon should clone twitter’s “community notes” feature just so it could be called “well actually”.
Chat GPT seems to be evolving towards a very well-informed, but very conventional and risk-averse persona. It is like they made HR our interface to Google.
"Rhetorically, conservatives love to defend localities against an overweening state. Open any of the loftier right-wing political journals and you’ll find essays, complete with their own nomenclature—'subsidiarity,' 'little platoons'—praising the virtues of localism. In practice, conservative politicians have spent the past decade using state power to crush local initiatives." #PaulGlastris https://washingtonmonthly.com/2023/04/04/in-a-biden-desantis-race-all-politics-will-be-local/
it’s not a möbius strip it’s thinfinity.
I guess the term lèse-majesté comes from the French, but can it possibly be for real that France is prosecuting a person for "insulting the president of the republic" on social media?
This is one of those stories that apparently is real but seems crazy and implausible to me. Via Matthew Saroff.
Via Equality By Lot (a blog that in general advocates sortition-based democratic institutions), a very harsh take on France's "citizen conventions" by law professor Guillaume Drago.
It hits on real critiques (can the organizers of what are often called citizens' juries manipulate them into endorsing a ham sandwich? is the selection genuinely representative?), but is perhaps overly sanguine about *status quo* electoral democracy.
https://equalitybylot.com/2023/04/04/a-democratic-rock-bottom/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite some things just really get your goat. (sorry.)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite it’s just a helluva story.
“It’s a little girl’s goat, not Pablo Escobar.” https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-30/goat-slaughter-shasta-county-fair ht Julia Shumway
a doctor vigilante superhero: Obstetrician of Justice!
you intend it as the exception, but they take it to be the rule.
people act like it’s a big deal to identify as nonbinary but i never knew anyone who identified as binary.
if you phone the CIA, i think it can go without saying that this call is being recorded for quality assurance. but do they ask you to please hold for the next available agent?
me too, honestly. https://assortedflotsam.com/@politicsbot/110135323482384206
@design_law i will not… i will not… i… am too weak. https://youtu.be/Jne9t8sHpUc