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Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 5h

People who should have been lighting their hair on fire over the insurrection were too busy making memes and figuring out how to make the Dems look bad.

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 8h

We’re not dealing with brilliant strategists cleverly laying traps, we’re dealing with impulsive whiners whose advantage is contempt for laws, norms, and morality.

They’re not pulling some elaborate trick, they’re just willing—even eager—to do things regular, principled people consider off limits.

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Scott Lemieux @lemieuxlgm.bsky.social · 18h

Kavanaugh search and seizures

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 19h

Monstrous.

"federal agents detained nearly every resident of the 130-unit building—including children and babies—placing them in zip ties and separating them by race into vans for more than two hours early Tuesday morning."

Daniel Knowles @dlknowles.bsky.social · 22h

Good reporting on the South Shore raid from South Side weekly here.

Confirms one thing I was told but didn't put in my own piece because I didn't have a second source and it seemed too insane: border agents segregated arrested residents by race

southsideweekly.com/federal-agen...

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Boston Tom Levenson @tomlevenson.bsky.social · 1d

Two things of note in today's announcement of the 2025 Nobel physics prize (besides the work being honored).

1: The US institutional dominance of the prize continues.
2: 2 of the three laureates are immigrants, drawn here decades ago by the then-unmatched opportunities for science here...

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Nobel Prize in Physics Is Awarded for Work in Quantum Mechanics

www.nytimes.com

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Adam Weinstein @adamweinstein.bsky.social · 21h

And... what would you say... *constitutes* this tradition he's bucking? What exactly is it *constituted* of?

NPR @npr.org · 1d

President Trump is bucking tradition and legal precedent in pushing to deploy the National Guard to Democratic-led cities like Portland, Oregon, and Chicago due to what he says is rampant crime and to support his crackdown on illegal immigration.

Trump's power to deploy National Guard, explained

President Trump is bucking tradition and legal precedent in pushing to deploy the National Guard to Democratic-led cities like Portland, Oregon, and Chicago due to what he says is rampant crime and to support his crackdown on illegal immigration.

n.pr

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Caleb Crain @calebcrain.bsky.social · 22h

Chilling insight by @barbarafwalter.com: "Once citizens view their own government’s security forces as an occupying army, violence becomes inevitable. Trump’s team knows this… They’re trying to trigger the very unrest that would justify further crackdowns."

via www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/o...

Screenshot from a NYT article by Thomas Edsall, quoting Barbara Walter of UC-San Diego: "The quickest way to piss people off is to send soldiers into their neighborhoods especially when there’s no reason for them to be there. It’s inherently provocative, and Trump and his team understand this. Research by the political scientist Robert Pape shows that the single most powerful predictor of suicide terrorism is the presence of foreign troops on local soil. People hate, hate, hate that. They hate the humiliation, the powerlessness, the feeling of being occupied.

"Once citizens begin to view their own government’s security forces as an occupying army, violence becomes inevitable. Trump’s team knows this. In fact, that’s the point. They are not trying to restore order; they’re trying to trigger the very unrest that would justify further crackdowns. In the end, violence serves their ultimate end: They want to create the illusion of disorder so they can tighten control and stay in power indefinitely."

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Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 21h

In Fahrenheit 451, when Beatty explains to Montag how the world reached the stage where no one read books anymore, he explains that during an intermediary stage people only read short summaries of longer books before ditching books altogether. In the final stage, even schools just showed videos.

The New Yorker @newyorker.com · 22h

Abridging has always been in vogue. Now, apps like Blinkist take entire books and crunch them down to a series of what are called Blinks—which amount to around 2,000 words. “Is that what books are coming to, a handy social lubricant?” Anthony Lane asks.

Can You Read a Book in a Quarter of an Hour?

Phone apps now offer to boil down entire books into micro-synopses. What they leave out is revealing.

www.newyorker.com

Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 21h

Appalling, but not even a little bit surprising.

Not (A.) I. @aerialeverything.cryptoanarchy.network · 22h

"If you hoped that people would be using it to create great art, prepare to be disappointed..."

Who among us ever thought that Sora would be used for anything other than the offensive slop its users are currently producing?This is its target audience & primary use case.
futurism.com/artificial-i...

People Are Making Sora 2 Videos of Stephen Hawking Being Horribly Brutalized

People are using OpenAI's Sora 2 to generate videos of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking being brutalized in ghoulish ways.

futurism.com

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Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 21h

Cocomelon for adults is essentially what all of the tech giants want for our future: imagine a world in which adults consume endless streams of slop, crud, and gunk for the mind.

The New York Times @nytimes.com · 21h

Meta’s new A.I.-generated video app, Vibes, launched last month to overwhelmingly negative reception. The “Hard Fork” co-hosts discussed why. "It’s essentially like TikTok, but if TikTok were populated just by little animated AI-generated shorts." nyti.ms/4mStFZi

"My take on Vibes is that this is Cocomelon for adults. ... It’s just creators making these somewhat fantastical, surreal, unsettling images. And they just sort of wash over you in this endless feed." - Casey Newton, co-host of "Hard Fork"

Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 1d

Mush, muck, pap, gruel, soylent, crud, dross, drek, gunk.

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Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 1d

If and when the Democrats regain power, there will be a group of people already eager to find fault with whatever ways they respond to the Trump years. In fact, there will one group predisposed to find whatever they do inadequate, and another group predisposed to find whatever they do excessive.

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Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 1d

This, and even more severe sanctions against Russia, should have been done a long time ago.

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Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 1d

The feckless, do-nothing Democrats failed to duplicate the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals.

Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 1d

If and when the Democrats regain power, there will be a group of people already eager to find fault with whatever ways they respond to the Trump years. In fact, there will one group predisposed to find whatever they do inadequate, and another group predisposed to find whatever they do excessive.

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 2d

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Francis Fukuyama @frankfukuyama.bsky.social · 2d

Moldova Chooses Europe Over Russia
www.persuasion.community/p/moldova-ch...

Moldova Chooses Europe Over Russia

The recent election result brings hope—but the country needs EU support.

www.persuasion.community

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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 8d

Obviously there are plenty of powerful contenders for all-time worst Supreme Court opinion, lots of them from the Roberts Court, many of them this year, but in terms of how much of the opinion was proven how wrong how fast, Kavanaugh and his Kavanaugh Stops are really in rarefied territory

Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 8d

Sup Brett Kavanaugh

Screenshot of text:

But like in Lyons, plaintiffs have no good basis to believe
that law enforcement will unlawfully stop them in the
future based on the prohibited factors—and certainly no
good basis for believing that any stop of the plaintiffs is
imminent. Therefore, they lack Article III standing:
“Absent a sufficient likelihood” that the plaintiffs “will
again be wronged in a similar way,” they are “no more
entitled to an injunction than any other citizen of Los
Angeles; and a federal court may not entertain a claim by
any or all citizens who no more than assert that certain
practices of law enforcement officers are unconstitutional.”

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Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 2d

Where is this debate coming from? Who is claiming that robots (or intelligent machines or whatever) deserve rights and the status of persons? What is the goal of such claims?

Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 3d

Robot personhood/rights is conceptually bogus and legally puts more power/rights in the hands of those that develop and deploy robots/AI systems

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

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Alice Stollmeyer @stollmeyer.bsky.social · 4d

🔥 Finally an EU leader says it out loud:

“We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies.”

Defend Democracy @defenddemocracy.bsky.social · 4d

President Macron: “Europeans, let's wake up!

We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks.”

defenddemocracy.eu/macron-democ...

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Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 3d

Good politics requires explaining to people what they need to know in terms that they can understand. I suspect that the social media era has warped many people's understanding of politics. Memes, jokes, slogans, and buzzwords will only take you so far. There needs to be a solid core of substance.

Pete Buttigieg @petebuttigieg.bsky.social · 3d

Republicans like to claim they aren't actually cutting Medicaid.

Which is an easily disproven lie.

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 3d

In the American system of government, a legislature of the people’s elected representatives decide how to allocate the people’s money, then an unelected appointee in the executive branch called “OMB Director” decides if he feels like distributing the people’s money that way or if he’d rather not.

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Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 3d

Congress is not even a rubber-stamp legislature at this point. It has become an inactive ingredient, a non-moving part of the government.

www.notus.org/trump-white-...

Billions in Taxpayer Dollars Have Become Virtually Untraceable

The Trump administration’s aggressive approach to overhauling the executive branch has obscured how federal dollars are actually being spent — even for the members of Congress.

www.notus.org

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Nicolas Henin 🇪🇺💙💛 @nicolashenin.net · 3d

French politics for beginners.

Sysiphe. How it started:
How it's going:

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Utopian Incrementalist @meliorist.bsky.social · 3d

The content is for MAGA sadists who enjoy watching ICE goons brutalizing people they hate. It keeps the base happy by providing them with violent, entertaining spectacle.

Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 3d

A few hundred officers and some videographers can't come close to controlling a city. But they can produce content. Which seems to be the primary goal (along with violating rights and hurting people for the sake of violating rights and hurting people).

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 3d

I think often about the Amazon engineer who wrote in an open letter to the company that Ring was “incompatible” with a free society.

Analysis | Amazon’s Ring plans to scan everyone’s face at the door

For the first time, the company is putting facial recognition into its home security doorbells and video cameras.

www.washingtonpost.com

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