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silveradeptLet's begin with the story of how the industrial musical creator gave a year off of her job to someone he believed had a good novel in her, and how very, very right he was.
The Slacktivist on the death of Nicholas Brendon, and on the ways that his most famous character, Xander Harris, seemed to bleed into the actor's life (mostly to the negative), but also the ways in which revisiting Xander, Warren, and Joss, the one who created them both, provide us with a cautionary tale. Be suspicious of anyone who claims they are a male feminist. The male part, they may have, but the feminism part is almost certainly lacking, and you can tell because they have made a claim to it.
A principal who read the absolutely hilarious and entirely child-appropriate book "I Need A New Butt!" to second graders is going to get his job back, and hopefully with back pay. Because, yes, someone complained about it, and the school decided that reading the book was inappropriate to children. I suspect the people making that decision also want to make sure that there are underpants on the child in In the Night Kitchen, and that there's nothing "objectionable" in their picture book collections.
The International Olympic Committee is historically one of the worst organizations you would want in charge of international sport, and they continue their abysmal track record by announcing genetic testing to determine whether or not an athlete is allowed to compete in the women's division of a sport, with anyone that shows up with an SRY gene banned for not being a 'biological female'. Thus, they ban trans athletes…and anyone else who has this particular gene. They claim they will carve out exceptions for androgen-insensitivity and other situations where an athlete "[does] not benefit from the anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects of testosterone," but this is still the organization that used to require women athletes to parade themselves nude before a panel of doctors charged with determining whether they were really women or not, so I can imagine they will be just as good with such potential exceptions as they have been with Caster Semanya. (Not that, y'know, there's an entire contingent of trans athletes in every national sport federation looking to take the place by storm, but more than a few organizations are pretending there are so they can continue to get money from bigots, and to avoid having to take a stand on the right side of history against the forces that would ridicule them or make things harder for them to continue making their money if they actually had morals.) If you search for the evidence that supposedly backs these new tests, you are chasing vittras as they laugh at you, and often arrive at the assertion of a eugenicist who can't even prove their own assertion (and who will blame it on the test subjects instead of himself.) Or you land at the fact that these policies have been implemented and abandoned and implemented and abandoned because reactionaries want to classify people into neat boxes, and people, being constructed of multiple combinations of building blocks in nearly-infinite variations, defy being classified into neat boxes, and so the definition of "man" and "woman" is almost always political because it cannot be technical or scientific, and the IOC is certainly a political organization, perhaps even more so than the NOCs and federations that it serves as an umbrella for. We're still in this phase where we believe that women have to look a specific way before we will acknowledge they are women, and so many of our elite athletes are not in the category of being sufficiently feminine to be acknowledged as women.
The people responsible for the destruction of the school in Iran and the deaths of innocents are much deeper than the supposed use of an LLM, because they build systems that always assume they are correct, their data is correct, and therefore all the humans have to do is push the button to rain destruction. If that had been the case, and the systems were always infallible, we wouldn't be celebrating Petrov Day. But even before that, the systems are narrowing the options available such that the people who are making the ultimate decisions are doing so from a greatly-truncated list, and they are very much relying on machines being right, instead of machines being untrustworthy. The elements that slow the process down and allow for confirmation or doubt or judgment are erased in the name of efficiency, and in doing so, you end up with great mistakes that could have been averted if someone had bothered to stop and think, instead of letting the machine do the thinking for them.
Reminding certain people that retaliation does not always come with explosives and kinetics, a group of Iranian-affiliated hackers claim to ahve breached the personal e-mail of the current FBI Director in the United States.
The band Radiohead demanded that the kidnap and murder squads stop using their music in propaganda videos, with a further request for the kidnap and murder squads to go fuck themselves. The response from the kidnap and murder squads was to not address the issue at hand, but instead attempt to deflect to something they feel they have a better standing for. When confronted with a state actor who believes in violence and in trying to make you feel small and isolated, in community you can find strength and the resolve to make it as difficult as possible for the state to achieve their ends, regardless of whether the state has legalized their actions or not.
The kidnap and murder squads are part of a process meant to make everyone acclimatize to fascism, to shrug or to acquiesce, and to blame those who fight back for fighting back and attempting to remind the country that they had morals and ethics and should be fighting for them. They have to resort to murder in the moment to intimidate because the cases they try to bring through the legal system are laughed off for complete lack of evidence and obvious lies by the people bringing the charges. (Although, losing in the courts is not necessarily a total failure for them. As is noted in the piece, there is still the cost of a legal defense and all the defamation and damage the accusers get to throw while you are defending yourself, so that they can sully your reputation and make your neighbors think differently of you, even if the actual amount of case they have is thin or not there.)
Because they can't get enough black and brown people to practice torture and fascism on, the kidnap and murder squads have been kidnapping anyone who has an indication they are an immigrant, regardless of skin color or documentation, and holding them for as long as they can, even despite the usual processes that would release someone on a bond. And they're going after people who are on tourism visas, because they need to prove to everyone that the numbers must be met, no matter how ridiculous the actions are.
They're doing it because the people who run the prisons that the kidnappers fill are profiting handsomely from the misery and violence done to others. Because they feel entitled to the bodies of those who have been kidnapped and warehoused, and that they will not ever face consequences for their actions against others. And the rot is not just for the federal kidnappers and murderers, but the state and local police officers are similarly people who enjoy being everyday sadists and who indulge in their sadism because they are protected from the consequences of it.
People who believe they and people who look like them have been ordained to run the world and improve the human race by passing on their genes were definitely darlings of noted pederast (and plenty of other isms) Jeffrey Epstein. So it's not just the underage women, it's also the racism, the sexism, and the belief that being rich means one is inherently smarter and more fit to rule.
Having removed as much money as they could from international aid programs, the government is now choosing to use that aid money to instead pay for the security detail of the person who architected the destruction of using aid for aid purposes.
There appears to be a study affiliated with Northwestern University recruiting for people who "think" they might be trans, but the funders and the principal investigators make it seem like the AYAGDOS study has already determined its conclusions before any research is done.
The Supreme Court of the United States allowed a lower court ruling to stand that said a therapist could use a banned and unethical practice with their gender-questioning or trans clients so long as they only talked, with an 8-1 decision allowing the lower ruling to stay in place. Which said that the therapist's free speech rights would be restricted if they were prevented from doing conversion therapy through talk therapy, instead of, y'know, saying that professional organizations have the power to regulate unethical practice, regardless of what form it takes.
A federal judge has issued a permanent injunction against the enforcement of the executive order demanding defunding of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, saying the government is not allowed to take actions that constitute viewpoint discrimination. The victory may be mostly symbolic, depending on appeals and that the destruction is already done, and therefore there would have to be a demand of restitution to go along with the rest.
A federal judge rejected the claim that the current administrator was acting in his official duties and therefore immune from consequences when he orchestrated the riot that then attacked the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. I should like to see some consequences befall him for that, and for all the other things he has done that are in contravention of the laws of the United States, many of which likely fall into the definition of the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that should warrant impeachment proceedings.
Another federal judge ordered a halt to the destruction and reconstruction of the White House's east wing until Congressional approval arrives, saying that the administrator is not the owner of the place and is not allowed to do whatever he wants with it. Whether this will actually stop him in any meaningful way is yet to be determined. And since it said Congress has to approve, the quislings are probably working on giving him that approval, possibly even with legislation.
Afroman won against the cops who sued him for defamation because he included them in satirical musical videos. That doesn't make Afroman a good guy, not at all, but it does mean that protected speech is still protected. And it means that a small amount of accountability comes to the police for doing what they did in such a way that a rapper with a platform was able to shed light on it and ridicule them for it.
Robert Mueller, the man responsible for the investigation that confirmed interference toward a preferred outcome in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, has died at 81 years of age. He was also a head of the FBI in earlier presidencies. The administrator chose to post a celebration of the death, because he wanted to, and never mind anything he's previously said about how great the report supposedly was at clearing his involvement in the election interference.
It certainly appears as though the current administrator's grip upon consensus reality is slipping further away, since he seems to be having greater trouble keeping even his own slogans straight. He also called the use of mail-in balloting as "cheating," despite having used such himself not that long ago, which is less about hypocrisy at this point and more about the idea that whatever he says in that moment must be objectively correct, but it does not persist past that moment, so whatever he says in the next moment is also objectively correct, regardless of what he had just said.
And as you might expect, the people in charge of major agencies are similarly peddlers of conspiracy theories and appear to be equally disconnected to reality. And some of them are responsible for extremely prolific white-supremacist accounts on the extremely white-supremacist websites.
Which doesn't mean that the people who are openly and proudly showing their -isms aren't dangerous and anachronistic, too. And you can say with complete accuracy that their most pet conspiracy theory got its name in the later part of the 20th century, but has since sprawled and metastasized into something that permits the dictators and the autocrats to believe they have a winning message, and the people who believe in it will still believe in the conspiracy, no matter how you slice it, because it suits them to believe it.
They will lose. They have lost before, and they will lose again. Because when you take abstract issues and suddenly make them about the people who are your friends and neighbors, then there's a resistance that appears to stop a government from trying to mess with the neighbors.
A general reminder: The origins of the people who will claim they came out to protect the unborn are not being truthful. If they claim they came out to fight communism, they're still wrong. If they said they came out to fight in favor of racial segregation, that would be the honest answer. And would probably get them immediately excommunicated by their peers.
The book banning squadrons are more than happy to embrace machines that have no tether to reality and will happily construct whatever result the book banners determine for them, so they can fabricate "evidence" that books are inappropriate for children. Because the Avian Intelligence is supposed to be intelligent, and therefore its results can be trusted. The parameters being used, however, are context-less and are meant to classify solely on whether the things present would be offensive to conservative values, making sure the bias gets baked in properly.
The state of Tennessee allowed for payday lenders and sports gambling operations to be run by the same company and people, and the Speaker of the Tennessee House seems to have gone to bat for one such entity when the gambling side was struggling. Despite, you know, the other half of this operation being predatory lending at exorbitant interest rates, the story and the investigations are about the gambling side and inadequate firewalls between the gambling and the predatory lending.
Proving that there is no degree of ingenuity that will not deploy when the result is erasing not-striaght people from the public eye, the State of Texas and the federal government passed laws and regulations forcing the city of Dallas to remove the rainbow-colored crosswalks in the parts of the city that have queer history. Also, buried in that article is that the laws and regulations were written in such a way as to also exclude Black Lives Matter crosswalks and other "decorative designs," so there has to be someone very pleased with themselves that they got all the speech they didn't like removed without having to get plastered for removing speech they didn't like.
A curriculum that the State of Texas made available to school districts, with a carrot of additional funding if they adopted it, that is almost certainly more rooted in specific views of Christianity than anything resembling an educational curriculum, is receiving significant numbers of corrections. The people are trying to insist that the corrections are not mostly factual, but even so, if you have a curriculum that requires such significant amounts of updates, even just for catching typos, that suggests a shoddiness of work product that should put the rest of it under suspicion. (And hopefully give the students a field day and license to examine that curriculum with their very best magnifiers to see what other mistakes have been made.)
The state of North Dakota demanded and got the extradition of a Tennessee woman on charges of fraud because an algorithm decided her face was what it was looking at. The story is less that the technology was wrong, but that the police departments involved didn't care that it was wrong, didn't try to figure out if it was wrong, and when it was proven wrong, didn't care what happened to the person whose life they just ruined over a computer being wrong.
Being successful at or even desirous of growing organic food in your home yard often invokes the NIMBYism of the neighbors, even more so when they think you're ruining their vibe of being so above it all. Or you're not white.
In a place where a coal fire still burns underground, the proof that sometimes the best thing to do when you want to rewild a place, or bring back the plants, is to boot the humans out and let nature do the work.
In technology, something that we can look forward to in the future, unless there are rather strict requirements about technology use in the courtroom - witnesses in a court case receiving real-time coaching from a party outside the courtroom through a connection in their smart glasses, which appears to have been an audio one once the phone started speaking after being disconnected from the glasses, but I wouldn't be surprised if people start sending them as visual updates and such, assuming that the overlays of the glasses don't become immediately apparent to the person examining the witness. I won't be surprised if judges start requiring the surrender of devices for anyone who isn't court staff or news reporters with press passes, so that smart devices and the like are not permitted to be used in the courtroom.
A New Mexico jury found Facebook's parent company deliberately designed their products so as to take advantage of the inexperience of children and teenagers and to damage their mental health. What that means for the company is not yet determined, but presumably there will be fines assessed for this.
Samsung has made it more difficult to enter the download mode and use the tools for flashing alternative operating systems to their phones. Which is likely part of a greater amount of handset manufacturers that are tightening up the ability to install your chosen software on their phones instead of only their software. Google has decided that their Android operating system is enough of a monopoly that they can now force users through a long process with a mandatory wait time before they can unlock the ability to load whatever software they want on their phones. Including a question about whether someone is being "coached" through this process - supposedly meant as a scam deterrent, but also, the process is sufficiently technical and full of scary warnings that someone would have to coach a nontechnical user through it and to reassure them that they're not actually giving unfettered access to the worst attackers in the world.
The problem is, the worst attackers are usually the ones who are slurping up the data of their users for the purposes of marketing, ads, and Avian Intelligence. Tinder, the dating app, intends to require users to give permission to the app to scan their pictures, to determine what kind of interests and people a user might be into, supposedly for the purposes of making better matches, and it will do this through "AI," which probably also means that the camera rolls of Tinder users will be in the hands of attackers and the government within a short amount of time. And Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go, used the images that players took of various research locations to help delivery bots get more accurate at finding their destinations, which is probably not something that Go players really wanted their pictures to be used for, if they wanted their pictures to be used for anything other than noting the stops and Gyms in the game.
The makers of the Android fork GrapheneOS have publicly stated their refusal to comply with age-verification laws that demand verification be baked into an operating system. That's their right, although It's not going to make much of a splash unless they can expand the compatibility of their operating system to more than the Google Pixel series and whatever phones they have a partnership with Motorola over. That, and the part above where plenty of carriers are locking down their materials and refusing to allow for other OSes to be installed on them might mean that even if aftermarket OS providers refuse compliance, they're not going to get a lot of traction in their refusal, because nobody will be able to put their operating systems on phones, or will have to import phones with that ability from overseas or other places that have compatible wireless bands. It's not looking great for anyone who wants a smartphone, unless they're willing to do some serious research into finding a handset that's compatible with their bands, and that has the ability to unlock the bootloader, and has a manufacturer willing to support or release the information needed to build those aftermarket OS for the phone.
The United States Federal Communication Commission has made the curious decision to prevent the importation of consumer-grade network routers, believing that the importation of foreign-made routers is a security risk. They did not bother to prove that routers manufactured in the United States are any more secure than those made overseas, so I suspect this is someone doing a thing they think will please the administrator, rather than for any reason that might be considered sound or sensible.
A startup app is claiming that it will give someone the best augmented reality erotic experience, specifically because all of its creations are machine-generated, rather than having any connection at all to any humans. There are some obvious glitches in the test review, and the rhetoric makes it sound like these are people who believe firmly that no woman would ever consent to erotic content if they had the choice not to.
Researchers at CERN have successfully modified a particle trap to carry antiprotons, and transported them across a relatively short distance without losing them. This is in service of eventually being able to transport them several countries away to a laboratory where the antiprotons can be further studied with greater precision.
The WalMart corporation, which owns Vizio, is now requiring you to create and use your WalMart account to access any of the "smart" features of the Vizio televisions. At this point, if you want to watch any kind of video content that isn't safely in your own vault, expect that someone is siphoning data off of that using your "consent" that you had to give when signing up for the video service, or choosing to use it. (I should very much like to be able to enforce that kind of "consent" against these companies, saying they've "consented" to pay me a percentage of their net revenues every time they use data in this way.
Unsurprisingly, if you give a machine that operates on probabilities permission to create real-world consequences, it acts according to probabilities, which often means it will completely ignore what are supposed to be specific instructions not to do things, because it's treating them as input tokens, not as instructions. Which is why, unless they disable the ability to do the end result entirely in the code, we will continue to have people wondering why their chatbot said one this and did another, or did something it was supposedly expressly forbidden from doing.
Last out, Ms. Solnit points out that we are still in the middle of the story of feminism, and reports of its death are greatly exaggerated, even if we suffer setbacks in the current era. Going forward many steps and then back one or two still means lots of forward progress, and those who remember what freedom used to be will not so willingly go back into the cave.
Have kindness and empathy with all that you meet, lest you cause unintended consequences. The framing is in academics, but it is true everywhere - be kind and empathetic, and your act may be the thing that helps someone else succeed, and you are usually remembered more kindly if someone says they succeeded because you helped, rather than to spite you. (And also, the dangers of being authentic when your authentic self is the antithesis of kind and empathetic.)
Nico Robin, as a character in the melodrama of One Piece, and how she's, at least to the poster, who has intimate knowledge of what they speak, an entirely accurate description of what the feelings are when you have suicidal ideation. Or, perhaps, the precursors to it and/or the effects of it. I think a lot of people can see something of themselves in the arguments that get made, and also in what it takes to beat back that particular weasel.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
The Slacktivist on the death of Nicholas Brendon, and on the ways that his most famous character, Xander Harris, seemed to bleed into the actor's life (mostly to the negative), but also the ways in which revisiting Xander, Warren, and Joss, the one who created them both, provide us with a cautionary tale. Be suspicious of anyone who claims they are a male feminist. The male part, they may have, but the feminism part is almost certainly lacking, and you can tell because they have made a claim to it.
A principal who read the absolutely hilarious and entirely child-appropriate book "I Need A New Butt!" to second graders is going to get his job back, and hopefully with back pay. Because, yes, someone complained about it, and the school decided that reading the book was inappropriate to children. I suspect the people making that decision also want to make sure that there are underpants on the child in In the Night Kitchen, and that there's nothing "objectionable" in their picture book collections.
The International Olympic Committee is historically one of the worst organizations you would want in charge of international sport, and they continue their abysmal track record by announcing genetic testing to determine whether or not an athlete is allowed to compete in the women's division of a sport, with anyone that shows up with an SRY gene banned for not being a 'biological female'. Thus, they ban trans athletes…and anyone else who has this particular gene. They claim they will carve out exceptions for androgen-insensitivity and other situations where an athlete "[does] not benefit from the anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects of testosterone," but this is still the organization that used to require women athletes to parade themselves nude before a panel of doctors charged with determining whether they were really women or not, so I can imagine they will be just as good with such potential exceptions as they have been with Caster Semanya. (Not that, y'know, there's an entire contingent of trans athletes in every national sport federation looking to take the place by storm, but more than a few organizations are pretending there are so they can continue to get money from bigots, and to avoid having to take a stand on the right side of history against the forces that would ridicule them or make things harder for them to continue making their money if they actually had morals.) If you search for the evidence that supposedly backs these new tests, you are chasing vittras as they laugh at you, and often arrive at the assertion of a eugenicist who can't even prove their own assertion (and who will blame it on the test subjects instead of himself.) Or you land at the fact that these policies have been implemented and abandoned and implemented and abandoned because reactionaries want to classify people into neat boxes, and people, being constructed of multiple combinations of building blocks in nearly-infinite variations, defy being classified into neat boxes, and so the definition of "man" and "woman" is almost always political because it cannot be technical or scientific, and the IOC is certainly a political organization, perhaps even more so than the NOCs and federations that it serves as an umbrella for. We're still in this phase where we believe that women have to look a specific way before we will acknowledge they are women, and so many of our elite athletes are not in the category of being sufficiently feminine to be acknowledged as women.
The people responsible for the destruction of the school in Iran and the deaths of innocents are much deeper than the supposed use of an LLM, because they build systems that always assume they are correct, their data is correct, and therefore all the humans have to do is push the button to rain destruction. If that had been the case, and the systems were always infallible, we wouldn't be celebrating Petrov Day. But even before that, the systems are narrowing the options available such that the people who are making the ultimate decisions are doing so from a greatly-truncated list, and they are very much relying on machines being right, instead of machines being untrustworthy. The elements that slow the process down and allow for confirmation or doubt or judgment are erased in the name of efficiency, and in doing so, you end up with great mistakes that could have been averted if someone had bothered to stop and think, instead of letting the machine do the thinking for them.
Reminding certain people that retaliation does not always come with explosives and kinetics, a group of Iranian-affiliated hackers claim to ahve breached the personal e-mail of the current FBI Director in the United States.
The band Radiohead demanded that the kidnap and murder squads stop using their music in propaganda videos, with a further request for the kidnap and murder squads to go fuck themselves. The response from the kidnap and murder squads was to not address the issue at hand, but instead attempt to deflect to something they feel they have a better standing for. When confronted with a state actor who believes in violence and in trying to make you feel small and isolated, in community you can find strength and the resolve to make it as difficult as possible for the state to achieve their ends, regardless of whether the state has legalized their actions or not.
The kidnap and murder squads are part of a process meant to make everyone acclimatize to fascism, to shrug or to acquiesce, and to blame those who fight back for fighting back and attempting to remind the country that they had morals and ethics and should be fighting for them. They have to resort to murder in the moment to intimidate because the cases they try to bring through the legal system are laughed off for complete lack of evidence and obvious lies by the people bringing the charges. (Although, losing in the courts is not necessarily a total failure for them. As is noted in the piece, there is still the cost of a legal defense and all the defamation and damage the accusers get to throw while you are defending yourself, so that they can sully your reputation and make your neighbors think differently of you, even if the actual amount of case they have is thin or not there.)
Because they can't get enough black and brown people to practice torture and fascism on, the kidnap and murder squads have been kidnapping anyone who has an indication they are an immigrant, regardless of skin color or documentation, and holding them for as long as they can, even despite the usual processes that would release someone on a bond. And they're going after people who are on tourism visas, because they need to prove to everyone that the numbers must be met, no matter how ridiculous the actions are.
They're doing it because the people who run the prisons that the kidnappers fill are profiting handsomely from the misery and violence done to others. Because they feel entitled to the bodies of those who have been kidnapped and warehoused, and that they will not ever face consequences for their actions against others. And the rot is not just for the federal kidnappers and murderers, but the state and local police officers are similarly people who enjoy being everyday sadists and who indulge in their sadism because they are protected from the consequences of it.
People who believe they and people who look like them have been ordained to run the world and improve the human race by passing on their genes were definitely darlings of noted pederast (and plenty of other isms) Jeffrey Epstein. So it's not just the underage women, it's also the racism, the sexism, and the belief that being rich means one is inherently smarter and more fit to rule.
Having removed as much money as they could from international aid programs, the government is now choosing to use that aid money to instead pay for the security detail of the person who architected the destruction of using aid for aid purposes.
There appears to be a study affiliated with Northwestern University recruiting for people who "think" they might be trans, but the funders and the principal investigators make it seem like the AYAGDOS study has already determined its conclusions before any research is done.
The Supreme Court of the United States allowed a lower court ruling to stand that said a therapist could use a banned and unethical practice with their gender-questioning or trans clients so long as they only talked, with an 8-1 decision allowing the lower ruling to stay in place. Which said that the therapist's free speech rights would be restricted if they were prevented from doing conversion therapy through talk therapy, instead of, y'know, saying that professional organizations have the power to regulate unethical practice, regardless of what form it takes.
A federal judge has issued a permanent injunction against the enforcement of the executive order demanding defunding of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, saying the government is not allowed to take actions that constitute viewpoint discrimination. The victory may be mostly symbolic, depending on appeals and that the destruction is already done, and therefore there would have to be a demand of restitution to go along with the rest.
A federal judge rejected the claim that the current administrator was acting in his official duties and therefore immune from consequences when he orchestrated the riot that then attacked the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. I should like to see some consequences befall him for that, and for all the other things he has done that are in contravention of the laws of the United States, many of which likely fall into the definition of the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that should warrant impeachment proceedings.
Another federal judge ordered a halt to the destruction and reconstruction of the White House's east wing until Congressional approval arrives, saying that the administrator is not the owner of the place and is not allowed to do whatever he wants with it. Whether this will actually stop him in any meaningful way is yet to be determined. And since it said Congress has to approve, the quislings are probably working on giving him that approval, possibly even with legislation.
Afroman won against the cops who sued him for defamation because he included them in satirical musical videos. That doesn't make Afroman a good guy, not at all, but it does mean that protected speech is still protected. And it means that a small amount of accountability comes to the police for doing what they did in such a way that a rapper with a platform was able to shed light on it and ridicule them for it.
Robert Mueller, the man responsible for the investigation that confirmed interference toward a preferred outcome in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, has died at 81 years of age. He was also a head of the FBI in earlier presidencies. The administrator chose to post a celebration of the death, because he wanted to, and never mind anything he's previously said about how great the report supposedly was at clearing his involvement in the election interference.
It certainly appears as though the current administrator's grip upon consensus reality is slipping further away, since he seems to be having greater trouble keeping even his own slogans straight. He also called the use of mail-in balloting as "cheating," despite having used such himself not that long ago, which is less about hypocrisy at this point and more about the idea that whatever he says in that moment must be objectively correct, but it does not persist past that moment, so whatever he says in the next moment is also objectively correct, regardless of what he had just said.
And as you might expect, the people in charge of major agencies are similarly peddlers of conspiracy theories and appear to be equally disconnected to reality. And some of them are responsible for extremely prolific white-supremacist accounts on the extremely white-supremacist websites.
Which doesn't mean that the people who are openly and proudly showing their -isms aren't dangerous and anachronistic, too. And you can say with complete accuracy that their most pet conspiracy theory got its name in the later part of the 20th century, but has since sprawled and metastasized into something that permits the dictators and the autocrats to believe they have a winning message, and the people who believe in it will still believe in the conspiracy, no matter how you slice it, because it suits them to believe it.
They will lose. They have lost before, and they will lose again. Because when you take abstract issues and suddenly make them about the people who are your friends and neighbors, then there's a resistance that appears to stop a government from trying to mess with the neighbors.
A general reminder: The origins of the people who will claim they came out to protect the unborn are not being truthful. If they claim they came out to fight communism, they're still wrong. If they said they came out to fight in favor of racial segregation, that would be the honest answer. And would probably get them immediately excommunicated by their peers.
The book banning squadrons are more than happy to embrace machines that have no tether to reality and will happily construct whatever result the book banners determine for them, so they can fabricate "evidence" that books are inappropriate for children. Because the Avian Intelligence is supposed to be intelligent, and therefore its results can be trusted. The parameters being used, however, are context-less and are meant to classify solely on whether the things present would be offensive to conservative values, making sure the bias gets baked in properly.
The state of Tennessee allowed for payday lenders and sports gambling operations to be run by the same company and people, and the Speaker of the Tennessee House seems to have gone to bat for one such entity when the gambling side was struggling. Despite, you know, the other half of this operation being predatory lending at exorbitant interest rates, the story and the investigations are about the gambling side and inadequate firewalls between the gambling and the predatory lending.
Proving that there is no degree of ingenuity that will not deploy when the result is erasing not-striaght people from the public eye, the State of Texas and the federal government passed laws and regulations forcing the city of Dallas to remove the rainbow-colored crosswalks in the parts of the city that have queer history. Also, buried in that article is that the laws and regulations were written in such a way as to also exclude Black Lives Matter crosswalks and other "decorative designs," so there has to be someone very pleased with themselves that they got all the speech they didn't like removed without having to get plastered for removing speech they didn't like.
A curriculum that the State of Texas made available to school districts, with a carrot of additional funding if they adopted it, that is almost certainly more rooted in specific views of Christianity than anything resembling an educational curriculum, is receiving significant numbers of corrections. The people are trying to insist that the corrections are not mostly factual, but even so, if you have a curriculum that requires such significant amounts of updates, even just for catching typos, that suggests a shoddiness of work product that should put the rest of it under suspicion. (And hopefully give the students a field day and license to examine that curriculum with their very best magnifiers to see what other mistakes have been made.)
The state of North Dakota demanded and got the extradition of a Tennessee woman on charges of fraud because an algorithm decided her face was what it was looking at. The story is less that the technology was wrong, but that the police departments involved didn't care that it was wrong, didn't try to figure out if it was wrong, and when it was proven wrong, didn't care what happened to the person whose life they just ruined over a computer being wrong.
Being successful at or even desirous of growing organic food in your home yard often invokes the NIMBYism of the neighbors, even more so when they think you're ruining their vibe of being so above it all. Or you're not white.
In a place where a coal fire still burns underground, the proof that sometimes the best thing to do when you want to rewild a place, or bring back the plants, is to boot the humans out and let nature do the work.
In technology, something that we can look forward to in the future, unless there are rather strict requirements about technology use in the courtroom - witnesses in a court case receiving real-time coaching from a party outside the courtroom through a connection in their smart glasses, which appears to have been an audio one once the phone started speaking after being disconnected from the glasses, but I wouldn't be surprised if people start sending them as visual updates and such, assuming that the overlays of the glasses don't become immediately apparent to the person examining the witness. I won't be surprised if judges start requiring the surrender of devices for anyone who isn't court staff or news reporters with press passes, so that smart devices and the like are not permitted to be used in the courtroom.
A New Mexico jury found Facebook's parent company deliberately designed their products so as to take advantage of the inexperience of children and teenagers and to damage their mental health. What that means for the company is not yet determined, but presumably there will be fines assessed for this.
Samsung has made it more difficult to enter the download mode and use the tools for flashing alternative operating systems to their phones. Which is likely part of a greater amount of handset manufacturers that are tightening up the ability to install your chosen software on their phones instead of only their software. Google has decided that their Android operating system is enough of a monopoly that they can now force users through a long process with a mandatory wait time before they can unlock the ability to load whatever software they want on their phones. Including a question about whether someone is being "coached" through this process - supposedly meant as a scam deterrent, but also, the process is sufficiently technical and full of scary warnings that someone would have to coach a nontechnical user through it and to reassure them that they're not actually giving unfettered access to the worst attackers in the world.
The problem is, the worst attackers are usually the ones who are slurping up the data of their users for the purposes of marketing, ads, and Avian Intelligence. Tinder, the dating app, intends to require users to give permission to the app to scan their pictures, to determine what kind of interests and people a user might be into, supposedly for the purposes of making better matches, and it will do this through "AI," which probably also means that the camera rolls of Tinder users will be in the hands of attackers and the government within a short amount of time. And Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go, used the images that players took of various research locations to help delivery bots get more accurate at finding their destinations, which is probably not something that Go players really wanted their pictures to be used for, if they wanted their pictures to be used for anything other than noting the stops and Gyms in the game.
The makers of the Android fork GrapheneOS have publicly stated their refusal to comply with age-verification laws that demand verification be baked into an operating system. That's their right, although It's not going to make much of a splash unless they can expand the compatibility of their operating system to more than the Google Pixel series and whatever phones they have a partnership with Motorola over. That, and the part above where plenty of carriers are locking down their materials and refusing to allow for other OSes to be installed on them might mean that even if aftermarket OS providers refuse compliance, they're not going to get a lot of traction in their refusal, because nobody will be able to put their operating systems on phones, or will have to import phones with that ability from overseas or other places that have compatible wireless bands. It's not looking great for anyone who wants a smartphone, unless they're willing to do some serious research into finding a handset that's compatible with their bands, and that has the ability to unlock the bootloader, and has a manufacturer willing to support or release the information needed to build those aftermarket OS for the phone.
The United States Federal Communication Commission has made the curious decision to prevent the importation of consumer-grade network routers, believing that the importation of foreign-made routers is a security risk. They did not bother to prove that routers manufactured in the United States are any more secure than those made overseas, so I suspect this is someone doing a thing they think will please the administrator, rather than for any reason that might be considered sound or sensible.
A startup app is claiming that it will give someone the best augmented reality erotic experience, specifically because all of its creations are machine-generated, rather than having any connection at all to any humans. There are some obvious glitches in the test review, and the rhetoric makes it sound like these are people who believe firmly that no woman would ever consent to erotic content if they had the choice not to.
Researchers at CERN have successfully modified a particle trap to carry antiprotons, and transported them across a relatively short distance without losing them. This is in service of eventually being able to transport them several countries away to a laboratory where the antiprotons can be further studied with greater precision.
The WalMart corporation, which owns Vizio, is now requiring you to create and use your WalMart account to access any of the "smart" features of the Vizio televisions. At this point, if you want to watch any kind of video content that isn't safely in your own vault, expect that someone is siphoning data off of that using your "consent" that you had to give when signing up for the video service, or choosing to use it. (I should very much like to be able to enforce that kind of "consent" against these companies, saying they've "consented" to pay me a percentage of their net revenues every time they use data in this way.
Unsurprisingly, if you give a machine that operates on probabilities permission to create real-world consequences, it acts according to probabilities, which often means it will completely ignore what are supposed to be specific instructions not to do things, because it's treating them as input tokens, not as instructions. Which is why, unless they disable the ability to do the end result entirely in the code, we will continue to have people wondering why their chatbot said one this and did another, or did something it was supposedly expressly forbidden from doing.
Last out, Ms. Solnit points out that we are still in the middle of the story of feminism, and reports of its death are greatly exaggerated, even if we suffer setbacks in the current era. Going forward many steps and then back one or two still means lots of forward progress, and those who remember what freedom used to be will not so willingly go back into the cave.
Have kindness and empathy with all that you meet, lest you cause unintended consequences. The framing is in academics, but it is true everywhere - be kind and empathetic, and your act may be the thing that helps someone else succeed, and you are usually remembered more kindly if someone says they succeeded because you helped, rather than to spite you. (And also, the dangers of being authentic when your authentic self is the antithesis of kind and empathetic.)
Nico Robin, as a character in the melodrama of One Piece, and how she's, at least to the poster, who has intimate knowledge of what they speak, an entirely accurate description of what the feelings are when you have suicidal ideation. Or, perhaps, the precursors to it and/or the effects of it. I think a lot of people can see something of themselves in the arguments that get made, and also in what it takes to beat back that particular weasel.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
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Date: 2026-04-04 08:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-04 04:05 pm (UTC)