Peter Frase
@peterfrase.com
[ERIC ADAMS VOICE]: Minneapolis is the Gwangju of America
This was just me making this comparison yesterday, but today the Korean news is calling Minnesota "America's Gwangju" and have human rights lawyers explaining how America is now living through the dictatorship Korea once had.
The Chun regime that my wife fought against in the 80s did the exact same thing. They needed a "crisis" that "only they could solve" to hoard more ill-gotten power, so they chose one city (Gwangju), declared its inhabitants enemies, sent trucks full of soldiers to violently attack and kill them.
January 26, 2026 at 12:18 AM
[ERIC ADAMS VOICE]: Minneapolis is the Gwangju of America
Glad to see this, signed by my dad along with many of his colleagues who I grew up around
Standing with 65 of my UMN Law colleagues (and counting) to condemn ICE’s lawless conduct towards Minnesotans: docs.google.com/document/d/1...
Open Letter to Minnesota Law CommunityJanuary 25
January 25, 2026 To the Minnesota Law Community: We, the undersigned faculty of the University of Minnesota Law School, write in our individual capacities to address the federal government's ongoin...
docs.google.com
January 26, 2026 at 12:08 AM
Glad to see this, signed by my dad along with many of his colleagues who I grew up around
OK, but maybe journalists could reconsider the norm of "uncritically repeat government claims, then fact check them later", when faced with a government whose first move in every situation is an immediate barrage of preposterous lies?
As a frequent NYT critic, I am going to say that you shouldn’t jump on them for *very* early reporting, because it requires a level of checking and rechecking that posting doesn’t. This is still a very fast turn.
Sometimes it takes a bit for national (or really, any) media to catch up with a story but now the New York Times is noting the video did not show Alex Pretti brandishing a gun as ICE has claimed. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...
January 24, 2026 at 8:22 PM
OK, but maybe journalists could reconsider the norm of "uncritically repeat government claims, then fact check them later", when faced with a government whose first move in every situation is an immediate barrage of preposterous lies?
Oh you spoke with the white house? I'm sure that was fun for you, you twerp, you worthless piece of shit. Just resign and go away, if this is all you can do as the death squads roam the streets of the state you claim to govern.
I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning. Minnesota has had it. This is sickening.
The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.
The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.
January 24, 2026 at 4:34 PM
Oh you spoke with the white house? I'm sure that was fun for you, you twerp, you worthless piece of shit. Just resign and go away, if this is all you can do as the death squads roam the streets of the state you claim to govern.
Today allowed Minnesotans to do two of the things we do best: coming together in solidarity and smugly acting like it's no big deal to go out in extreme cold
January 24, 2026 at 3:11 AM
Today allowed Minnesotans to do two of the things we do best: coming together in solidarity and smugly acting like it's no big deal to go out in extreme cold
Our most recent shot at prying open policing's cabinet of monstrosities was 2020, and liberal politicians responded by wrapping the whole thing tightly in "training" and consent decrees, and festooning it with body cameras. Time to take another run at it.
I’m going to keep hammering this point: the excesses of ICE we see now are entirely contiguous with our system of policing more broadly, and the reason that almost no politician wants to threaten real consequences for ICE agents is because it opens the door to making the same demands of the cops
January 20, 2026 at 12:10 AM
Our most recent shot at prying open policing's cabinet of monstrosities was 2020, and liberal politicians responded by wrapping the whole thing tightly in "training" and consent decrees, and festooning it with body cameras. Time to take another run at it.
The @nytimes.com and @washingtonpost.com knew about this in advance, but chose not to report it in order to ensure the death of large numbers of Venezuelan people
12+ hours later we finally get an estimate of how many Venezuelans were killed
January 4, 2026 at 10:25 PM
The @nytimes.com and @washingtonpost.com knew about this in advance, but chose not to report it in order to ensure the death of large numbers of Venezuelan people
This is our new baseline for how little Zohran is capable of smiling in a photo
Wild
November 22, 2025 at 1:52 AM
This is our new baseline for how little Zohran is capable of smiling in a photo
"adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for large language models", now that's the kind of cyberpunk dystopia I'm talking about
Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..."
https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1
https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1
November 20, 2025 at 6:06 PM
"adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for large language models", now that's the kind of cyberpunk dystopia I'm talking about
So, postliberal in just the same way Boris Yeltsin was postcommunist
one thing i want to emphasize is these "illiberal" and "postliberal" authoritarians are just thieves and crooks! trump is thief. orban is a thief. putin is the biggest thief of them all.
wrote about the president’s flagrant and destructive corruption in a column that references street fighter, the simpsons, machiavelli, and a host of revolutionary-era americans (gift link)
November 20, 2025 at 3:28 AM
So, postliberal in just the same way Boris Yeltsin was postcommunist
Lots of good stuff here, but a key bit, missing from a lot of critiques, is that it attempts to wrestle with what the viable alternative is, given that you need to keep the cops from going into all-out revolt from day 1. I don't know if this is it specifically, but it's at least a concept of a plan.
November 17, 2025 at 9:50 PM
Lots of good stuff here, but a key bit, missing from a lot of critiques, is that it attempts to wrestle with what the viable alternative is, given that you need to keep the cops from going into all-out revolt from day 1. I don't know if this is it specifically, but it's at least a concept of a plan.
I first encountered George Packer back when he was letting Paul Berman shit directly into his brain and then vomiting out liberal odes to George W. Bush and the war on terror. He's wack, and he's always *been* wack, is what I'm saying
in the actual real world secret police are disappearing americans on behalf of an openly white nationalist government but george packer’s latest is a novel about a world beset by woke totalitarianism
What Happens When an Empire Falls? This Novel Has Some Ideas.
www.nytimes.com
November 16, 2025 at 3:11 AM
I first encountered George Packer back when he was letting Paul Berman shit directly into his brain and then vomiting out liberal odes to George W. Bush and the war on terror. He's wack, and he's always *been* wack, is what I'm saying
Reposted by Peter Frase
One of the coolest things about #TeslaTakedown is that it's not just about "sending a message." It's about attaching a stigma to driving a certain make of car, which is the one source of profit for a financial bubble that props up the most powerful racist alive.
It's protest as direct action.
It's protest as direct action.
November 12, 2025 at 7:25 PM
One of the coolest things about #TeslaTakedown is that it's not just about "sending a message." It's about attaching a stigma to driving a certain make of car, which is the one source of profit for a financial bubble that props up the most powerful racist alive.
It's protest as direct action.
It's protest as direct action.
I was 17 when I reached a high enough level of math to hear my professor (a Republican btw) answer an eager grad student asking how he knew he had proved something by saying, "it's a proof if I believe it"
When I’ve talked to people who do really advanced math, they’ve basically crossed back into the humanities through high-level abstraction and do not sound like these freaks at all because it’s not simply the aesthetic of competence for them.
November 12, 2025 at 5:13 AM
I was 17 when I reached a high enough level of math to hear my professor (a Republican btw) answer an eager grad student asking how he knew he had proved something by saying, "it's a proof if I believe it"
They're all lies, especially the truths
November 3, 2025 at 12:00 AM
They're all lies, especially the truths
If I had a nickel for every time my TV asked me to confirm I was still watching during the world series, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but
November 2, 2025 at 3:55 AM
If I had a nickel for every time my TV asked me to confirm I was still watching during the world series, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but
My read on Kristol is that he's as much of a bloodthirsty imperialist as ever, but on some level he recognizes that one lesson of historical fascism is that, when you fully turn the tools of empire and colonialism inward, it pretty quickly leads to the collapse of the whole project
If I told 14 year old me this had happened hed say "time to cut back on the beer old man."
November 1, 2025 at 12:29 AM
My read on Kristol is that he's as much of a bloodthirsty imperialist as ever, but on some level he recognizes that one lesson of historical fascism is that, when you fully turn the tools of empire and colonialism inward, it pretty quickly leads to the collapse of the whole project
Post-bubble, this stuff is going to look like 2021-era crypto hype (it's the same terrible journalists doing it in many cases.) Ascribing "memory," or "planning," or "values" to an LLM is like talking about the rich emotional inner life of your toaster.
if you engage in this sort of AI Anthropomorphism in the pages of a prominent media organization (or anywhere else) you are loudly advertising that you don't know how this technology actually works
October 30, 2025 at 1:08 AM
Post-bubble, this stuff is going to look like 2021-era crypto hype (it's the same terrible journalists doing it in many cases.) Ascribing "memory," or "planning," or "values" to an LLM is like talking about the rich emotional inner life of your toaster.
I'm watching the World Series and so getting rare exposure to TV ads, and they're really spamming the AI bullshit. Feels like that Super Bowl with all the crypto ads, good thing that turned out well for everyone involved.
There's been endless talk about an AI bubble, but less about exactly how, why, and how much it's a bubble. So I turned to the framework put forward by scholars Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch, authors of "Bubbles and Crashes," for assessing tech bubbles.
Spoiler: On a scale of 1 to 8, AI is an 8
Spoiler: On a scale of 1 to 8, AI is an 8
AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All
I talked to the scholars who literally wrote the book on tech bubbles—and applied their test.
www.wired.com
October 28, 2025 at 12:52 AM
I'm watching the World Series and so getting rare exposure to TV ads, and they're really spamming the AI bullshit. Feels like that Super Bowl with all the crypto ads, good thing that turned out well for everyone involved.
This seems unquestionably true to me, although it's not that new. The last few years of LLM nonsense for sure intensified it, but the peak of the Internet as an information gathering tool was probably 15+ years ago.
I don't think we understand just how bad the decline of the Internet is to knowledge.
3 years ago, I could perform a very basic search in any engine and get an absurd number of relevant links, research articles, etc.
Today, I can perform the same search and find absolutely nothing.
3 years ago, I could perform a very basic search in any engine and get an absurd number of relevant links, research articles, etc.
Today, I can perform the same search and find absolutely nothing.
October 26, 2025 at 11:30 PM
This seems unquestionably true to me, although it's not that new. The last few years of LLM nonsense for sure intensified it, but the peak of the Internet as an information gathering tool was probably 15+ years ago.
Look, I'll try to put this in terms the dorks on here can understand: you can be a Yoda Democrat or a Karis Nemik socialist, up to you
“Do you really expect Mamdani to get everything he’s promising done?”
No. I’m sure a lot of what I want won’t happen. But I’m ready for someone who’s willing to actually fucking try rather than tell everyone why trying is pointless and must be saved for an undefined later moment
No. I’m sure a lot of what I want won’t happen. But I’m ready for someone who’s willing to actually fucking try rather than tell everyone why trying is pointless and must be saved for an undefined later moment
October 26, 2025 at 4:18 AM
Look, I'll try to put this in terms the dorks on here can understand: you can be a Yoda Democrat or a Karis Nemik socialist, up to you
"All films about crime are about capitalism. Because capitalism is about crime...at least that's what I used to think. Now I'm convinced." - Abraham Polonsky, blacklisted Hollywood director
October 25, 2025 at 11:32 PM
"All films about crime are about capitalism. Because capitalism is about crime...at least that's what I used to think. Now I'm convinced." - Abraham Polonsky, blacklisted Hollywood director
This is hilarious on its own, but if you listen to the recording you can hear in an un-transcribed aside that the interviewer is confused about both what DSA is and what American political parties are, which sets up his next, even more ignorant and bungled question.
October 16, 2025 at 9:42 PM
This is hilarious on its own, but if you listen to the recording you can hear in an un-transcribed aside that the interviewer is confused about both what DSA is and what American political parties are, which sets up his next, even more ignorant and bungled question.
If there's one thing Democrats stand for, it's that you should be able to get a good look at your local ICE stormtroopers before they shove you in an SUV and disappear you
This is good: Rep Eric Swalwell tells me House Dems are now discussing making an end to mask-wearing a precondition for ICE funding.
"When we are in the majority, the masks are coming off," he says.
This is the next frontier in anti-Trump resistance.
New piece:
newrepublic.com/article/2018...
"When we are in the majority, the masks are coming off," he says.
This is the next frontier in anti-Trump resistance.
New piece:
newrepublic.com/article/2018...
Trump ICE Raids Take Horrific Turn in Chicago, Handing Dems an Opening
There’s one simple pledge Democrats can make to voters about ICE that’s easy to understand and will have broad support.
newrepublic.com
October 16, 2025 at 12:34 AM
If there's one thing Democrats stand for, it's that you should be able to get a good look at your local ICE stormtroopers before they shove you in an SUV and disappear you