Mike Ferdinando
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mikeferdinando.bsky.social
Mike Ferdinando
@mikeferdinando.bsky.social
I'm an GenX IT manager in higher education, whose passion is tabletop role-playing games. I'm also a leftist and antifascist. I'll mostly be posting about gaming and politics. Twitter refugee.

I'm also on Mastodon: [email protected].
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
Part of my theory of change is to share the words white men need to hear, spoken by white men. This is because creating defections is crucial to stopping authoritarianism and democratic backsliding. This is because almost everyone else is already off the Trump train.
"I never want to see a child ever run away from our own government ever again"
Notes on changing brains. And Brians.
www.thefarce.org
February 16, 2026 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
This is something we should think about across all writing intensive fields. Even if you're using the AI to turn notes into drafts, you are offloading the kinds of creative and epistemic decisions that drive the organization of your writing to a machine.
Thinking about the many decisions that get made when you turn your notes into a draft and what that looks like when the bot is making all of those decisions, even if you get the "final say" after the decisions have been made. www.cleveland.com/news/2026/02...
February 16, 2026 at 4:52 AM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
holy shit. hell of an analysis
This Brazilian woman hates AI
February 16, 2026 at 1:15 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
Welcome to the Plutocracy
February 14, 2026 at 2:03 AM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
1k followers on this before launch isn't too much to ask is it?
February 16, 2026 at 3:50 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
The President, two of his current Cabinet secretaries, his former strategist, his biggest donor, and his pending Fed Chair nominee are all in the files of a pedophile who ran a sex trafficking ring, while the attorney general and a former Cabinet secretary let him get away with it.

Seems kinda bad?
At least half a dozen top Trump administration officials appear in the Jeffrey Epstein files
The degree to which each individual was connected to Epstein varies significantly, from a single email to years of communications.
www.nbcnews.com
February 14, 2026 at 8:43 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
Creep tech for stalkers.

Meta is a garbage company and I wish progressive groups would work to build audiences over here.
Meta is putting a "Name Tag" feature in Ray-Bans - facial recognition through the glasses' camera. You look at someone, AI tells you who they are.
In an internal document, the company wrote that the timing is good because civil society groups are busy with politics and won't cause problems.
February 15, 2026 at 12:01 AM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
If Dems made demand to get all kids & their caretakers out of concentration camps, grinding all Congressional business to halt plus using their massive texting lists to organize caravans to create Occupy Dilly encampment, I would give them every dollar I have. And so would many.
February 14, 2026 at 4:10 AM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
Some people are calling it the flag of Woke 2
February 14, 2026 at 11:23 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
I know Kevin knows this, but the explanation for this is clear: It's racism. Racism and xenophobia and misogyny.

A white native-born American, living in the parts of the country where white native-born men still hold disproportionate power, is the only fully "real" American in the eyes of many.
It really is amazing how much of political punditry, *especially* elite outfits in NYC and Washington, still embrace this bizarre idea that rural spaces represent the "Real America" while metropolitan areas, where most (presumably real) Americans actually live, should be held in contempt.
Just going to point out again that our arbitrary political rules permit Republicans to attack urban areas with impunity but strictly forbid the faintest whiff of condescension toward rural areas by Democrats
February 14, 2026 at 10:50 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
The best case scenario is that Trump will waste $38 billion. The more likely outcome is that these will become warehouses of human suffering, and a permanent stain on America's history.
Breaking news: ICE expects to spend $38.3 billion on its plan to acquire warehouses across the U.S. and retrofit them into immigrant detention centers that can hold tens of thousands of people, according to agency documents.
ICE plans to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into detention centers
ICE plans to spend $38.3 billion converting warehouses into detention centers, according to planning documents, more than the annual budgets of 22 states.
www.washingtonpost.com
February 14, 2026 at 3:09 AM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
Words fail me when it comes to describing this sort of evil done very clearly and simply for evil's sake.

"Depravity" is maybe the only one that comes close
On Thanksgiving, the immigrant children held at the Dilley detention center gathered in the gym for what they thought was a holiday feast.

The kids salivated over a spread of turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, a family told me.

But the food wasn’t for detainees — it was for the staff.
February 14, 2026 at 12:38 AM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
February 13, 2026 at 11:01 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
These are concentration camps and its our duty as citizens to ensure these things don't get built.
Breaking news: ICE expects to spend $38.3 billion on its plan to acquire warehouses across the U.S. and retrofit them into immigrant detention centers that can hold tens of thousands of people, according to agency documents.
ICE plans to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into detention centers
ICE plans to spend $38.3 billion converting warehouses into detention centers, according to planning documents, more than the annual budgets of 22 states.
www.washingtonpost.com
February 14, 2026 at 12:28 AM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
I need folks to understand this. The idea that local police forces will intervene at scale against ICE is a utopian fantasy totally disconnected from how policing has always worked
Police departments across the US are quietly leveraging school district security cameras to assist Donald Trump’s mass immigration enforcement campaign, an investigation by @the74.bsky.social reveals.
February 13, 2026 at 5:12 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
When Ds are back in charge, they have to change everything. No moderate half-measures. Just relentless razing of the corrupt institutions that enriched the worst people in the world and propped up fascism.

A few suggestions...
February 13, 2026 at 1:38 AM
Read this whole thread from a Minnesota attorney who recenly started taking immigration cases.
I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it.

I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.”

1/
February 12, 2026 at 1:56 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
Impeach, arrest, and prosecute them all. Anything less is being complicit.
February 11, 2026 at 4:16 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
having your city noticed by the president is now a natural disaster on par with a hurricane or major flood
February 11, 2026 at 2:12 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
Notice how the popular media narrative has moved on, while people on the ground in Minneapolis are still struggling and crying out that things are as bad as ever. This is how fascist regimes operate — overreach, recalibration, normalization. Get louder, not quieter.
February 11, 2026 at 3:54 AM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
People on Reddit are getting Amazon to refund their Ring products because of their partnership with Flock and that creepy Super Bowl ad
www.reddit.com/r/FlockSurve...
February 10, 2026 at 9:55 AM
Companies cramming AI into all sorts of things that ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT HAVE AI makes me think that Frank Herbert was on to something when he wrote about the Butlerian Jihad in his Dune novels, when everyone destroyed all computers.

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
When AI was added to a tool for sinus surgery: “Cerebrospinal fluid leaked from one patient’s nose. In another… a surgeon mistakenly punctured the base of a patient’s skull. In two other cases, patients suffered strokes after a major artery was accidentally injured”

www.reuters.com/investigatio...
As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts
Medical device makers have been rushing to add AI to their products. While proponents say the new technology will revolutionize medicine, regulators are receiving a rising number of claims of patient ...
www.reuters.com
February 11, 2026 at 12:39 AM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
Rowling is no Lovecraft, whose bigotry is mitigated on account of him being a big dead bitch. Rowling is alive and uses the money earned through things like this to fund a transphobic hate campaign. There is no excuse for buying anything with Harry Potter branding.
February 10, 2026 at 6:34 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando
Schumer: ball’s in your court

Republicans: stab the ball, tear it apart, set it on fire, rip up the court and sell the turf to Bahrain

Schumer: hey you guys are out of balls

Republicans: we’re gonna kill your families

Schumer: ok we’ll pass funding for new balls but you’ve GOT to read the rules
February 10, 2026 at 1:34 PM
Reposted by Mike Ferdinando