Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 1h

I didn't even know about the Homeless Industrial Complex

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 5h

They had nothing to do with MAGA, they were definitely antifa, and I had to pardon them because they were patriots.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 6h

Q: There's compelling proof that antifa did infiltrate on January 6 dressed up like Trump supporters and incited violence. Is that something you'd like the new J6 committee to look at?

TRUMP: Well I've heard that. Yeah. We will be acting on some of that.

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Reposted by Clayton Littlejohn

Jenny Judge @jennyjudge.bsky.social · 5h

Tidal is cheaper than Apple Music & they pay artists more. And the sound quality is SO MUCH BETTER. I actually laughed out loud when I played a track on Tidal and then on Spotify: the difference is that noticeable.

Also v easy to import playlists from Spotify.

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 1d

We probably haven't figured out what Heidegger said yet.

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 1d

We've definitely figured out what Locke said by now.

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 1d

Have we figured out what Kant said yet?

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 2d

My hypothesis is that all the people who say that the 2nd amendment is there to protect freedom and guard against tyranny are in an epistemic bubble and just don't know about Portland and Chicago.

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Deva Woodly @devawo.bsky.social · 2d

This is extremely irrational and a huge waste of resources. Like most means testing, it explodes administrative costs and restricts care in the name of policing imagined crimes of access. It’s loony and we just need to start saying it.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities @centeronbudget.bsky.social · 2d

Reports raise red flags: Georgia spent $54M on admin costs for its #Medicaid waiver, nearly twice the $26M spent on care, while enrolling under 3,500 people. CMS still extended the costly program that ties coverage to work requirements. www.cbpp.org/research/fed...

CMS Extends Georgia’s Medicaid Waiver Program, Despite GAO Report Raising Concerns with Costs | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

September 23, 2025: A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) raising concerns about the cost of Georgia’s Pathways to Coverage Medicaid waiver program is a forewarning about how ex...

www.cbpp.org

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 3d

Type II nimby

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Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 4d

Trey Reed, a student at Delta State University in Mississippi, was found hanging from a noose. Mississippi police ruled the death a suicide. Now an autopsy reportedly concludes that he suffered extensive blunt force trauma across his body before he died, meaning he was beaten before he was lynched.

Kaepernick-Funded Autopsy Reportedly Finds Trey Reed Didn’t Die by Suicide — Family Attorney Ben Crump Hasn’t Confirmed

According to a source who isn't authorized to comment publicly, the autopsy of Trey Reed reveals that his death was not caused by a suicide.

www.blackenterprise.com

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 4d

Bought tickets to see a musical about the life of this man.

"This is democracy manifest!"

"What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?"

www.google.com/search?q=suc...

Google Search

www.google.com

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 5d

Visit Ballarat 😅

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ACLU @aclu.org · 6d

BREAKING: Our client Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning journalist detained by ICE in retaliation for livestreaming law enforcement activity, will be deported tomorrow to El Salvador.

Mario and his family are being punished for his reporting. This cruelty is meant to stifle our free press.

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 7d

"An ice cream lid, for example, might be a good Frisbee, without being a Frisbee."

Claude wasn't buying it. I'm sceptical. I could see going contextualist (ala Travis), but then I'd expect it to be true that it's a Frisbee.

Also:

This lid isn't a Frisbee, but it's a good Frisbee. (Bad!)

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 9d

I fully understand how difficult it is to remain focused on any one particular atrocity but this really ought to be a serious scandal and people need to pay heavy prices for this

Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 9d

I think the Trump admin assumed no one would try to find out who the people on the boats they blew up really were

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 9d

This is a great thing to pay attention to instead of orders of extra-judicial killings. Distraction as #disinformation

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 9d

Khanna: "We have to understand how abnormal this is. You don't mock someone and put a video out about how they look. You don't ever mock people's ethnicity. How do you negotiate with that? And how have we made this normal?"

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okay Kelly @kmdoublev.bsky.social · 9d

It only flies away.

Green🐍 @everest-green.bsky.social · 9d

Light is kind of like a bird

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molly conger @socialistdogmom.bsky.social · 10d

i don’t think he was supposed to post this. this is a company lobbying for medical cannabis, specifically for medicare coverage of it, and i think they made a whole commercial for an audience of one. “YOU will…” “cementing YOUR legacy,” millions will
thank you… this was just for trump

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Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com · 10d

This is dangerous.

Trump’s taking cues from Laura Loomer, an extremist conspiracy theory-pushing racist, to pressure a major publicly traded company — a direct threat to corporate independence.

What’s even more alarming is she’s aware of her power.

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 10d

Panopticons sometimes work

Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 11d

Larry Ellison envisions a surveillance state in which techbros rule. '“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Ellison said in an hour-long Q&A during Oracle’s Financial Analyst Meeting last week.'

Larry Ellison predicts rise of the modern surveillance state where ‘citizens will be on their best behavior’ | Fortune

Oracle's Larry Ellison believes citizens and police alike will be under constant surveillance of each other.

fortune.com

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 11d

"The likelihood of lethal force being used against Antifa members appears moderate to high in the near term" - Claude

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 13d

"Are we getting dumber?" is quite the question to ask

Institute of Art and Ideas @iai.tv · 15d

What does quantum physics have to do with history? How can philosophy illuminate us about politics? Are we getting dumber as we enter a post-human era? | https://bit.ly/4gFZXW4

Join this packed exclusive interview with globally renowned philosopher Slavoj Žižek, to find out.

#philsky #polsky

Slavoj Žižek on the madness of reality

What does quantum physics have to do with how we think about history? How can philosophy illuminate us about politics, from feminism and capitalism, to our everyday lives? Are we getting dumber as we ...

bit.ly

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 13d

If, like me, you want to misunderstand physics more

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Reposted by Clayton Littlejohn

Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social · 13d

"sexual matador" is the kind of fantasy you come up with if your homeschool had an abstinence-only sex ed unit.

"my favorite part is the dance with the weapon, by second favorite part is how he's always moving away from my touch while playing to a crowd and talking about Franco's campaigns."

The Daily Beast @thedailybeast.bsky.social · 14d

Katie Miller joked about her husband being a “sexual matador” in an interview with Jesse Watters.

Stephen Miller's Wife Drops Cringe-Inducing Sexual Brag

Katie Miller joked about her husband being a “sexual matador” in an interview with Jesse Watters.

trib.al

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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