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Reposted by «Sam•Forsythe»

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 7h

this is a good thread that finally reckons with the more primordial politics at play. there is a long, rich research tradition in conflict studies about the behavior of and strategy towards influencing audiences - by state security forces, by non-state armed actors. they all apply in the US now.

Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 11h

JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom are doing something new and important: They understand Stephen Miller's theory of fascist power politics, and they've developed a theory on how to combat it. More Dems need to reckon with Miller's understanding of the moment.

New from me:
newrepublic.com/article/2014...

Inside Stephen Miller’s Secret Plan to Normalize Trump’s Dictator Rule

He wants to supercharge searing civil tensions to get low-information voters to embrace their inner authoritarian. Exactly two Democrats appear to fully grasp this.

newrepublic.com

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 11h

It's finally happened, in the latest story (archiveofourown.org/works/72116466 - kudos comment subscribe etc) I have finally Jumped the Shark, I have made the Sanguinary Utnapishtim. This story inspired by recent events in the US military circles.

The Logistician's War

Header: logisticians at work, by Ciaraíoch.

When death came for Abnu Šimé Katoguar, it found him curled in a ball, deliriously repeating his cult’s mantra with his final breath—“hut… hut… hut...” History would record this as the Battle of Gírzu, a tale of heroic Pactsmen defeating heretical fanatics in the Cult of the Operator. In places with a large Loxatl population, Gírzutide would even become a children’s holiday, its plays portraying Šimé as a buffoonish villain, gleefully vowing absurd over-the-top evils: “MWHAHAHA! Now I can bring peace and love to the entire galaxy!”, and the like.

But in truth, his end was pathetic—a broken man barely able to lift his gun, his final breath dissolving into the freezing air just as his soul vanished into the warp. How had it gone so wrong?

Having achieved the rank of Katoguar, Abnu Šimé had been reassigned from the front lines to a desk job on Atrahasis Prime. There he'd found religion and narcotics. With synthetic clarity, he became certain that Khorne was speaking to him directly — and that the Blood God had chosen him to revive the Empire.

Like many born on recently conquered worlds, Šimé despised the Sanguinary Utnapishtim being a multi-species empire. His bitterness deepened when a Loxatl rival won the promotion to Sirdar rank Šimé coveted. When he complained, colleagues replied with data proving that integration raised the integrated Empire’s Murder-Per-Moment ratio—evidence, they said, that Khorne cared not whence the blood flowed. Šimé simply took this as proof that logistical reasoning itself was the problem.

He founded the Cult of the Operator under the guise of a fight club—an innocent-looking after-work brawl circle. But in secret, Šimé preached his gospel: that the Empire’s logisticians and xenos-sympathisers were conspiring to weaken humanity, denying each warrior’s divine right to embody perfect violence. Only by purging the Loxatl could mankind reclaim Khorne’s special favour. The cult’s ultimate plan—the “Operation”—was simple: detonate a stolen thermonuclear device in Ālumušṭuru, the largest Loxatl population centre in the system.

At first, everything went smoothly. The Operators hijacked a transport ship carrying a decommissioned warhead and landed at Gírzu, the nearest void-port outside Ālumušṭuru’s defences. They simply needed to drive the bomb a few miles into the city.

Then their fuel didn’t work. The local grade was incompatible with their stolen vehicle, and, lacking appropriate boots to traverse the terrain, they could not carry the warhead by hand. Trapped in Gírzu, they searched for alternatives as an ice storm swept in. Lacking winter-wear or appropriate accommodation, Operators began dying of the cold.

Three days later, marines from the S.U.N. vessel Lamented Dawn tracked the cult to Gírzu—by tracing the serial numbers of the aviator sunglasses the Operators wore religiously. The squad stormed the “compound” and made short work of the frostbitten survivors.

Abnu Šimé Katoguar was shot by a warm, well-fed, marine of average skill, who later enjoyed a distinguished career in the Office for Ceremonial Calculations as Assistant Deputy Sub-Prefect for Skull-Stack Audits.

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«Sam•Forsythe» @polymetis.bsky.social · 14d

terrifying myself by imagining that, somewhere out there, someone with more security clearance than brain cells is planning covert operations using chat gpt

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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · Aug 18

religiondispatches.org/latest-ice-r...

there it is. it is really out in the open

Latest ICE Recruitment Materials Include Overt Neo-Nazi Reference and Nazi-Nazi Script

It’s not the first time we and others at Religion Dispatches have had to point out that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is firehosing the internet with white supremacist propaganda. And it wil...

religiondispatches.org

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Reposted by «Sam•Forsythe»

Olivier Jutel 🇵🇸 @ojutel.bsky.social · Jul 30

This is wild but I went on my fav podcast
QAA Pod to harp on about the phoney baloney NatSec social science of Disinfo Studies. Big thanks to @travisview.bsky.social and Julian! www.patreon.com/posts/135278...

The Problem of Disinformation (E334) | QAA

Get more from QAA on Patreon

www.patreon.com

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · Aug 18

*The "Ljublen Set" Ancient Roman Multitool was unearthed from a dual grave with a married woman in it, while the "Ventimiglia Set" Ancient Roman Multitool came from a grave with an alleged woman's hairpin in it

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«Sam•Forsythe» @polymetis.bsky.social · Aug 18

starting to think we might need an Ingrate Man Theory of History

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Vincent Traag @vtraag.bsky.social · Jul 4

Surprisingly, we find that users who share unreliable URLs are more likely to share science. Moreover, this is particularly concentrated in more untrustworthy domains classified as fake/hoax or conspiracy theory. (3/10)

Pairwise overlap percentages between reliability categories. Each row shows the percentage of users who shared content (i.e. at least one tweet) in that row who also share content (i.e. at least one tweet) in the category in the column. Note that percentages do not add up to 100% because users can share multiple types of content.

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Reposted by «Sam•Forsythe»

Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · Jul 7

Good account of a KGB "dangle" to the CIA in the cold war. "GTPROLOGUE exemplifies CIA’s troubled experience with hostile double agents during the 1980s, when a few select services—particularly the Soviets, East Germans & Cubans—badly burned the agency." www.cia.gov/resources/cs...

Beautiful in Another Context: A Counterintelligence Assessment of GTPROLOGUE - CSI

www.cia.gov

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«Sam•Forsythe» @polymetis.bsky.social · Jul 2

Just arrived in Kraków for the 2025 'EISA European Workshops in International Studies Conference'. Any friends fancy some pierogi? #EWIS2025

Reposted by «Sam•Forsythe»

Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · Jul 2

CIA has published a lessons-learned review into the tradecraft behind the intel assessment that Russia "aspired" to help Trump win in 2016. The review highlights "multiple procedural anomalies" in that assessment.
cia.gov/static/a336f...

cia.gov

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«Sam•Forsythe» @polymetis.bsky.social · Jun 24

Do you think Trump’s insistence that it be called the “12 Day War” is because someone briefed him on the Six-Day War and he wants ‘his’ war to be bigger?

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Elke Schwarz @elkeschwarz.bsky.social · Jun 23

Another short piece from me (apologies) on the pitfalls of military tech and VC logics and their fraught relationship to the realities of war. In this piece, I bring back Norbert Wiener to illustrate that technological progress should have ethical limits. untoldmag.org/when-war-bec...

When War Becomes a Tech Product: How Silicon Valley Logics are Reshaping Military AI - Untold

AI-driven weapons born from venture capital logics treat war as a beta test and failure as progress.

untoldmag.org

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Dan Öberg @warrhizome.bsky.social · Jun 20

I’m halfway into this amazing work by Erik Rechborn-Kjennerud that just dropped. I assume it will quickly become a go-to book in the genre. If you are interested in how and with what consequences militaries wage war, do yourself a favor and grab a copy.

direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

The World According to Military Targeting

A revealing account of the prevalence—and alarming ubiquity—of military targeting, and how it has become a self-propelling worldview driven by dominance, v

direct.mit.edu

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Reposted by «Sam•Forsythe»

Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · Apr 26

This is one of the worst violations of research ethics I've ever seen. Manipulating people in online communities using deception, without consent, is not "low risk" and, as evidenced by the discourse in this Reddit post, resulted in harm.

Great thread from Sarah, and I have additional thoughts. 🧵

Sarah Gilbert @sarahagilbert.bsky.social · Apr 26

The mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically. tinyurl.com/59tpt988

From the changemyview community on Reddit

Explore this post and more from the changemyview community

tinyurl.com

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«Sam•Forsythe» @polymetis.bsky.social · May 28

excellent thread on our present political economy from my pal the Wolf

Pete Wolfendale @deontologistics.bsky.social · May 26

I recently finished both McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead and Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism. I am not entirely unsympathetic to their aims, but I have some thoughts. Not unlike Mason’s Postcapitalism, there’s a weird fetsihization of information doing far too much work.

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Pete Wolfendale @deontologistics.bsky.social · May 28

@thelastinstance.bsky.social weighing in on LLMs as symbolic prostheses: codepoetics.substack.com/p/ai-as-symb...

AI as symbolic prosthesis

Where LLMs might take us next

codepoetics.substack.com

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«Sam•Forsythe» @polymetis.bsky.social · Apr 28

i also like following the reconstruction of the author's own on-line reasoning. it presents their whole inquiry, and not just deductions from the results

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«Sam•Forsythe» @polymetis.bsky.social · Apr 28

it's strange to read a scientific or scholarly paper and not find a single question mark. i can understand wanting to avoid a rhetorical style, but isn't addressing doubt the point of any inquiry?

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«Sam•Forsythe» @polymetis.bsky.social · Mar 15

All eyes on Serbia today. Time for the EU to end its cynical & anti-democratic cooperation with Vučić—a man who was Milošević’s actual propaganda minister.

No deal with Vučić & Rio Tinto for lithium (DE); no sale of fighter jets (FR); no cooperation with repressive Serbian intelligence.
#pumpaj

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IrenaShe @irenashe.bsky.social · Mar 15

Standing with #belgrade - at least live on TV.
The estimated number of 800,000 participants has just been announced on N1 - that was compared in percentage terms to 4,000,000 people taking part in a demonstration in Germany.
#pumpaj

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News Eye @newseye.bsky.social · Mar 15

Extraordinary scenes in Serbia’s capital Belgrade right now.

Around 500,000 people are on the streets in what may be the biggest protest in Serbian history. All demanding the resignation of President Vučić & his government.

What began as a student protest is now a full democratic uprising.
🇷🇸

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PRIF @prif.org · Mar 13

A digital ‘withdrawal’ from Europe? The U.S. halted all cyber operations – marking a stark shift from the previous administration’s cybersecurity strategy. On #PRIFblog, @cyberpeace1.bsky.social takes a close look at the consequences and why this policy shift matters. blog.prif.org/2025/03/13/u...

US Halts Defensive Cyber Activities Against Russia: A Digital ‘Withdrawal’ from Europe - PRIF BLOG

In a major shift in U.S. cybersecurity policy, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to halt all planning against Russia, including offensive cyber operations. This policy chan...

blog.prif.org

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Reposted by «Sam•Forsythe»

Cold🪦Sam @pdfmerchant.bsky.social · Mar 12

the only thing that can stop a Bad State with a weaponized security apparatus is a Good State with a weaponized security apparatus

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«Sam•Forsythe» @polymetis.bsky.social · Mar 6

sending thoughts and prayers to my CIA #FOIA request. this was already the expected completion date even before the current regime

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