Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 1m

Repeat a thousand times; Liberal Arts are not a panacea for sociopathy.

Reposted by Felonious Monk

Noah Berlatsky @nberlat.bsky.social · 1h

Heidegger, Pound, Webern, Jung all supported the Nazis.

fascism is a moral error, not an intellectual one. being educated isn't a prophylactic.

Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 3h

Most of these people are deeply trained, or at least highly educated, in humanities. Knowing isn’t being.

brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 9h

Anyone who claims that Silicon Valley would be better with more humanities education has to grapple with the fact that Peter Thiel was a philosophy major.

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Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 1m

It was. It truly was.

Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 3m

tfw you realize all that lobbying didn't buy a thing

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Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 5m

I am starting to appreciate the role given her by God

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Reconstructionist @unavaleable.bsky.social · 6m

oh things must be bad bad

Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 2h

Crazy week.

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Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 8m

bsky.app/profile/mart...

martin_fff @martinfff.bsky.social · 39m

Things were a little febrile on the financial markets yesterday as Trump initiated Tariff Shock 2: Neodymium Boogaloo, with US stocks and oil both taking a beating.
Away from these debased fiat-priced securities, there was further excitement: shortly after the closing bell in New York, a lot of second-tier cryptocurrencies massively crashed out, with a bunch of favourites such as Dogecoin, Cardano and Trump coin nearly halving.

As of today, þe werste is paste (for now), with most top coins down a mere fifth or so over the 24 hours to noonish London time, wiping a mere $388bn off the market cap of the top 100 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies:
Now, we know what you’re thinking: this is all very stupid and funny.
And we agree.

Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 29m

I haven’t seen the guy put a foot wrong yet

James Talarico @jamestalarico.bsky.social · 6h

The most dangerous form of government is theocracy.

Because the only thing worse than a tyrant is a tyrant who thinks they're on a mission from God.

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Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 34m

They’re just not having it.

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Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 40m

Damn, did that one already hit the free reads ceiling?

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Reposted by Felonious Monk

Ghostin this Hell @hoovybaby.bsky.social · 1h

no quarter given lmao

Matt Stoller & @matthewstoller • 2h
UPS had seven months of warning about the de minimis change, but is still taking packages w/o getting required customs info & is making tariff charge errors.
Nice use of passive voice though!

derek guy
@dieworkwear • 2h
i apologize using a passive voice. i was not born in london to a wealthy bank executive, sent to an exclusive private prep school in new hampshire, and then studied at harvard before larping as a champion of the people. you have to work with my low upbringing.

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Reposted by Felonious Monk

Andrew Blum @ablum.bsky.social · 1h

We had Angela Davis speak at my university a couple of years back. One of the many insightful things she said - protest in the way that aligns with your passion. If that’s poetry do poetry or music etc. Because then you will be able to sustain it. If naked bike rides are your passion, 100% do that.

Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 1h

Someone in my mentions is upset because these people haven’t suffered the worst at ICE’s hands and therefore they shouldn’t be praised for being out on the streets?

Yeah, no. To push back on these people we need everyone — especially those with relative privilege — to get up and get involved.

Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 3h

Portland, you magnificent weirdos

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Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 49m

I truly enjoy the FT’s open contempt on.ft.com/3JaY1IN

Behold the trash crash

Pray for Dogecoin

on.ft.com

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Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 3h

I suspect a lot of Israelis are in for a very rude awakening.

Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 3h

Remarkably, there’s not a word about what it will take to restore the shattered goodwill of the Americans on whom Israel depends.

No mention of truth and reconciliation, of prosecuting war crimes, of reparations, or a sovereign Palestinian state on historically Palestinian land.

It’s just…PR.

Dr Seán Ketchem @cskwriter.bsky.social · 5h

"Israel’s reputation in the United States is in tatters, and not only on campuses or among progressives. For the first time since it began asking in 1998, a New York Times poll last month found that slightly more voters sided with the Palestinians than with Israelis."
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/w...

A Test Now for Israel: Can It Repair Its Ties to Americans?

www.nytimes.com

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Reposted by Felonious Monk

Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 @josephpolitano.bsky.social · 4h

God you gotta love Ulysses Grant

As for provisions, Grant remembered what he had learned after Van Dorn’s destruction of his supply base the previous December. This time he intended to cut loose from his base, travel light, and live off the country. Although civilians were going hungry in Mississippi, Grant was confident that his soldiers would not. A powerful army on the move could seize supplies that penniless women and children could not afford to buy. For the next two weeks the Yankee soldiers lived well on hams, poultry, vegetables, milk, and honey as they stripped bare the plantations in their path. Some of these midwestern farm boys proved to be expert foragers. When an irate planter rode up on a mile and complained to a division commander that plundering troops had robbed him of everything he owned, the general looked him in the eye and said “Well those men didn’t belong to my division at all, because if they were my men they wouldn’t have left you that mule”

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Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 4h

You Will (but we won't)

Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 4h

In a better age he could simply post and move on

Nat Cassidy @natcassidy.bsky.social · 1d

This photo of Robert Bloch is the most writer photo to have ever writer photo’d. It is Pure Writer Photo.

Reposted by Felonious Monk

Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news · 5h

Did not know this about Old Bay

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Reposted by Felonious Monk

Tero Kuittinen @teroterotero.bsky.social · 5h

There is no amount of open corruption that will wake up Americans. That family has realized this crucial truth. They broke Senate, media and Supreme Court. Nobody dares to stand up. We live in a Republic of fear and cowardice.

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Reposted by Felonious Monk

Tero Kuittinen @teroterotero.bsky.social · 5h

It is amazing that this article treats this grotesque grift as perfectly normal, even making the very deliberate choice of calling the guy who floated this insanity “genius”.

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Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 6h

World historical levels of cognitive dissonance

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Djinn & Tonic 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇲🇽 🇬🇱 @djinnandtonic.bsky.social · 7h

Great bit of Thiel lore was that as the 2008 financial crisis was unfolding, he sent out a company wide email (Thiel Capital) musing that this may be the start of the Biblical apocalypse, and that everyone receiving the email should spend time with their families and read the Bible

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 13h

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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Reposted by Felonious Monk

Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 7h

This is a good catch. The statutory authorization supposedly being used to transfer R&D funds to regular payroll is, in fact, expired, just like the regular appropriations are also expired.

Ira 'Bluebeard Homer' Goldman @kdbyproxy.bsky.social · 8h

Not that Trump/Vought/Hegseth gaf, but among other ways in which the law says this may NOT be done:
A) The part of 8005 I've underlined in green says money transferred to another account is "available… for the same time period" as that other account; that other acc't expired on Sept 30.

1/

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Felonious Monk @alexqgb.bsky.social · 8h

And yet it cannot figure out mom Donnie

I said mom, Donnie

Jesus fucking Christ, the next mayor of New York mom Donnie

Fine, I’ll do it myself. Mamdani.