Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 13h

I definitely cracked up at this but I suppose the Graeber article about giant puppets makes a compelling case that there's also a grain of truth here...

Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 15h

The fact that it looks so harmless is only further proof to them of how real the threat must be

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 15h

The way AI boosters keep trying to paint skeptics as engaged in a form of racism also feels like Quite The Tell...

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Reposted by Geoffrey Hughes

William Carruthers @williamcarruthers.bsky.social · 16h

The subtext of ‘we should be more like Dubai’, beyond the obvious racism, is ‘I should have a servant’.

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 17h

Seeing people posting about how life-changing their humanities degrees have been for them and (alas) that is exactly why they want to shut this whole thing down. We are ruled by small-minded sadists who are extremely afraid that people are starting to get Ideas...

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 18h

On the one hand it's bonkers but on the other hand I could easily imagine someone actually close to power floating a lot of these ideas too...

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 19h

I suppose everyone knows that this is really just classist gatekeeping--mostly from people who themselves have humanities degrees that led to fun, remunerative jobs. Point is they want YOU to pay 30,000 quid for a degree in "prompt engineering" or whatev so that you can make their coffee

Naadir @randomvariable.co.uk · 19h

Once again, the sensibles find themselves on the wrong side of history

Helen Lewis

@helenlewis

Corbyn: "There is a poet, a painting, a novel, a play in all of us." DON'T ENCOURAGE THEM JEREMY.

8:22 pm 21 Aug 16

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 19h

"English is a ripoff degree" is something that should mark you out as a complete nutter unless your point is that our current leadership is so incompetent that you'd be better served getting on with it and learning Chinese.

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 19h

Seems utterly deranged at a moment when the future of work is so up in the air to lean so hard into gutting the humanities in favor of rigid vocational degrees pitched at jobs that may not even exist in a decade...

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 19h

The guy somehow knows how to show up on every picket line in the country. I may disagree with him, but he's never gonna stop being a lefty.

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 1d

What we seem to have here is a primarily subjective understanding of "security" that (at best) works well for those with the luxury of living in the "short term" (like Trump and Netanyahu), but few people have that luxury...

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 1d

I'm reminded of the Fred Moten line about how settlers build forts on other people's land only to complain about how they're "surrounded"...

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 1d

A lot of these supposed "wins" look a lot less impressive when you look at a map and see Israel has a shrinking population proposing to occupy more people. Indefinitely. With no political horizon...

Daniel Drezner @dandrezner.bsky.social · 1d

In the long term? Probably not.
In the short term? Absolutely.
Which was what I said back in August. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

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Reposted by Geoffrey Hughes

Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes @tarquinhh.bsky.social · 2d

"You're a promptophile, you're a slop badger, you're a parrot perv, you're a small LLM regarder, you're a bot botherer, you're the Crazy World of Sam Altman, you're a ChatGPT bottler, you're a grok rocketeer..."

"...Yes, well, it's just another form of racism"

Scene from Brass Eye of Chris Morris on left in grey suit reading a list out to a bearded man on right wearing sunglasses, tie and a dark suit (bushes in background).

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 2d

I think a lot about how prolonged exposure to a consequence-free environment is so cognitively damaging not least because it destroys your ability to assess risks. Embarrassingly middle class of me, perhaps, but I like to say I come by it honestly.

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 2d

Another thing I suspect the last few years have left her unprepared for: employees who have zero respect for her and know how to make it hurt. If you see something, say something:

Parker Molloy @parkermolloy.com · 2d

If anyone works at CBS News and would like to leak to me about whats unfolding over there, my Signal is ParkerMolloy.86

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 2d

You'd think CBS and its parent company would be more concerned about libel litigation given its uhh... recent history... but instead they seem to be embracing a pattern of behavior that--again--is fine when you run a blog but not so good when you have deep pockets...

ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 2d

who could forget when TFP published a totally dishonest hatchet job on a youth gender clinic from a bilious transphobe that (again) turned out to be bullshit, and she refused to take that down too prospect.org/blogs-and-ne...

The Useful Idiots Fueling the Right-Wing Transphobia Panic

Today on TAP: Prominent center-left journalists were swindled by obvious nonsense about a St. Louis gender clinic.

prospect.org

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 2d

She's benefited a lot from the lack of scrutiny that comes from running a lavishly funded glorified blog, but this stuff might hit differently coming from a storied brand like CBS--and all the more if and when the public sours on people with her politics in general...

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 2d

perhaps the biggest story TFPever ran was a catastrophically shoddy argument that George Floyd ackshully died of an overdose. When confronted with irrefutable evidence that the piece was simply wrong, Weiss didn’t take it down, she asked her critic, @radleybalko.bsky.social, to come on a podcast.

max tani @maxtani.bsky.social · 2d

David Ellison’s note to staff on Paramount’s acquisition of the Free Press

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Reposted by Geoffrey Hughes

Tammi Gaw @tammigaw.bsky.social · 2d

Never cheered so hard for the Glass Cliff in my entire life.

Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 2d

I remain suspicious that for all the birthday girl treatment she's getting here, she's also been promoted far beyond her level of incompetence and that she's being set up to fail in a pretty spectacular way...

Anna Merlan @annamerlan.bsky.social · 2d

Let it never again be said that a woman with no real reporting experience who fell for a Twitter account called "Official Antifa" cannot be the head of a huge news organization

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 2d

I remain suspicious that for all the birthday girl treatment she's getting here, she's also been promoted far beyond her level of incompetence and that she's being set up to fail in a pretty spectacular way...

Anna Merlan @annamerlan.bsky.social · 2d

Let it never again be said that a woman with no real reporting experience who fell for a Twitter account called "Official Antifa" cannot be the head of a huge news organization

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 2d

I like to call this the "hard problem" of established liberal democracies: it's not hard to envision a popular political program that could induce a majority to vote for it by improving their economic conditions--but there are so many more well paid jobs in frustrating any attempt to implement it.

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 2d

A lot of people will say that more a radical politics is unrealistic and utopian--that it pales in comparison to their strategy of expecting powerful people to act against their own self interest--and then fail to even offer a compelling reason why those powerful people would do that...

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 2d

Not hard to see why: any media funded by dem-aligned donors without extremely stringent editorial controls would eventually begin to question the right of those wealthy donors to hoard our society's resources and exert outsized political power...

Oliver Willis @owillis.bsky.social · 2d

as free press effectively takes over cbs news, keep in mind that democratic investments in media have been minimal -- at best -- and the party and its donors continue to light money on fire for dumb campaign bullshit that makes consultants rich but doesnt win elections or change the narrative

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 2d

Such is the respect for tradition, though, that they still open a bottle of wine afterwards (at 1pm) even though it inevitably sits there, otherwise untouched, like an offering to Elijah...

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 2d

It's funny having worked for three years in this guy's department because I can definitively say that while some people thought this was what was going on, it certainly wasn't everyone...

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