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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦

@danielloxton.bsky.social

4.7K followers 680 following 5.4K posts

Author, illustrator, and researcher of misinformation and fringe claims. Former Editor (2002–2021) of Junior Skeptic, and author of Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be and other science books for kids and adults. https://www.danielloxton.com

www.danielloxton.com

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · Nov 9

A very incomplete list drawn from accounts I follow:
go.bsky.app/DyXUn9n

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 18h

Honestly it would be handy if everyone could keep re-upping their disinformation-themed podcasts, I have a lot more drawing to do

Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 18h

Lovely shots!

Reposted by Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦

Lindsay Beyerstein @beyerstein.bsky.social · 19h

Conspiricism can build coalitions because it can unite people with different obsessions. The conspiracy is always unsolved so you can agree to disagree about whether the Jews are a front for the Communists or vice versa, or whether they're both a front for the Illuminati.

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Reposted by Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦

Alex Wild @alexwild.bsky.social · 19h

A textbook image I did a few years ago showing a trap-jaw ant (Odontomachus rixosus) with her mandibles held open and trigger hairs forward, and then in the closed position.

The snapping shut of the trap is one of the fastest measured animal movements.

A split-screen image showing (top) a face view of an elongated ant standing on a reflective surfave, facing us with toothy brown jaws held 180 degrees open, and (bottom), the same ant with jaws closed, the bluntly toothed tips held together.

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 20h

Anyone can get scammed, but the part that jumps out at me is “sponsored ad on Facebook.” Major platforms are crawling with scams they also profit from. Twitter was overrun with paid crypto ads with Elon’s face on them when I bailed

Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 5d

I FOIA'd the FTC for consumer complaints about crypto scammers who pretend to be Elon Musk.

People are cashing out their retirement accounts and losing ridiculous sums of money.

Elon Musk Fans Are Still Losing Ridiculous Amounts of Money to Crypto Scams

gizmodo.com

Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 20h

I was out to visit my brother in Cape Breton a couple years ago, and the variety in accent was interesting: lots of kind of North American standard, lots of mild Nova Scotia accents, and then a few accents so strong I could barely understand them

Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 21h

My dad’s Australian, and I can’t always tell those accents apart (and certainly can’t mimic either). There’s so much variation within any country and between regions and age groups etc, too. I find accents and dialects really interesting, but don’t have a great ear or any skills relating to accents

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 21h

I miss the old TAM era a lot. I always came out of those full of ideas and enthusiasm for the year ahead

Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 22h

She puts out a lot of content, but it’s always well worth following. People up here really under appreciate the far right extremism issue in Canada

Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 22h

I’m so grouchy to have professional work to do today, and more lining up for coming months, yet still be bouncing bill payments in the immediate present

Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 22h

I was already grumpy today, so… in for a penny, in for a pound?

Anna Merlan @annamerlan.bsky.social · 1d

NEW: I talked to scholars who study political contagion about how America’s freefall could affect the rest of the world. They are… concerned. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Is America contagious?

Scholars in political extremism are documenting the global spread of right-wing populism.

www.motherjones.com

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 23h

The kitchen sink approach to illustration is something I picked up from the movies, where the question is always “what mix of techniques and tricks can be layered to pull off this shot in particular?”

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 23h

I have a handful of illustration styles you could point to and say, “yeah, that looks like one of his,” but I’ve always mixed things up a lot: puppets, plasticine, full CGI, various kinds of digital painting & photo manipulation, etc… Better for each project than for self promo, but whaddayagonnado?

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 1d

I have to discipline myself from just putting them everywhere all the time

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 1d

When your drawing project turns into such a complicated layout project that you have to go looking for a protractor (and, um, presumably also math skills)

Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 2d

youtu.be/keWnPZOd2cw?...

The Foggy Dew - Sinéad O’Connor & The Chieftains, 1995

YouTube video by CR's Video Vaults

youtu.be

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 2d

You’re CNN—you have cameras. Why is this framed like “he said, she said”?

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 2d

Stephen Miller claims that in Portland "ICE officers have to street battles against antifa, hand to hand combat every night, to come and go from their building"

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Reposted by Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦

Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 2d

learn to identify health and wellness fads, grifts, and panics, and avoid falling for them.

a very basic knowledge of stats and good methodology will serve you well.

essencesimmone.blacksky.app @essencesimmone.blacksky.app · 5d

Those who are 35+, what advice do you have for people just entering their 30s?

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Reposted by Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦

Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 2d

Teen daughter is unraveling an entire (commercially produced) blanket for yarn

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 2d

With everything burning down, it is some satisfaction that we somehow wound up with the Rolling Stone from Firestarter

Rolling Stone @rollingstone.com · 3d

‘They Need to Suffer’: Inside Trump’s War on Dissent

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, Trump expanded his war on free speech, the left, and ordinary Americans.

It’s going to get worse.

Story: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Reposted by Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦

Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 3d

Where Is the Line?

On Ezra Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the struggle to define the boundaries of what is acceptable in America. If we can’t even agree to hold the line against Trumpism, democracy must perish.

New piece:

steady.page/en/democracy...

Where Is the Line?

On Ezra Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the struggle to define the boundaries of what is acceptable in America

steady.page

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 2d

Teen daughter is unraveling an entire (commercially produced) blanket for yarn

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 2d

Luckily I’m not influential in any way, so I was free to bail on that site as soon as the people I wanted to follow did. (I’m not super prescriptive about what other people with other calculations should do, though it’s obviously harmful for political leaders to drink from that fire hose)

Rachel Gilmore @rachelgilmore.bsky.social · 3d

I’m honestly so torn about what to do about posting on X.

Like Kat makes such an important point here.

That said, in Canada at least, many important decisionmakers and public pundits exclusively scroll there — and seem to derive some understanding of public sentiment from it (terrifying, I know).

Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 3d

As an internet culture journalist, I think it’s important for me to continue to observe the depravity that goes viral on X, but one of the reasons I’m glad I stopped posting there is because I think it helps me avoid normalizing the rhetoric celebrating the political brutality in America right now

Reposted by Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 3d

As I've said many times, this culture desperately needs to rediscover the ancient wisdom of "Footloose." It's always the preachers, the fundies, who want to control your speech and behavior. It's always the right! Like, for fucking centuries now.

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Reposted by Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦

Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 3d

Fixing America's democracy problem is intimately bound up with fixing our information/media problem. bsky.app/profile/seth...

Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · Oct 7

We are living under the conditions of epistemological neoliberalism where each individual has to be their own gatekeeper and misinformation expert because most of the institutions that used to do that work have either failed or been destroyed.

Quinta Jurecic @qjurecic.bsky.social · Oct 7

after forcing election administrators to become misinformation experts, after forcing doctors to become misinformation experts, after forcing federal law enforcement officials to become misinformation experts...

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