Aaron Ross Powell

@aaronrosspowell.com

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Podcast host of ReImagining Liberty and The UnPopulist’s Zooming In. Writer. Political ethicist. Buddhist and radical liberal.

https://www.aaronrosspowell.com

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I checked out the Amazon AI summary of the reviews of the novel I wrote during law school, and it's pretty fair.

You think you've raised your kid right—instilled not just good values, but discernment, too—and then you catch them listening to Coldplay.

Bluesky is neat tech and is great for the communities that are here, but the Verge is just wrong when they say that it's growing. Use of the platform has been flat for quite a long time, and that shows no signs of changing. Fortunately, with fediverse bridges, that doesn't much matter.

Politics needs more emotion, not less. Today's show is a conversation about how thinking more emotionally can make politics more humane, and why trying to abandon emotion in the name of reason is a mistake. Listen here: www.reimaginingliber...

One thing I liked about this season of Doctor Who is that there were no Cybermen or Daleks.

Is the new season of Doctor Who at a higher than typical frame rate? There's something off about the picture, but I can quite figure out what it is.

Politics is applied ethics. And so on this day when we're celebrating the leaving behind of one set of political institutions in order to build another, I wrote a quick essay on just what ethics is in the first place. www.reimaginingliber...

What is Ethics?www.reimaginingliberty.com Ethics is bigger than morality, and understanding the difference is central to living well.

Moral progress is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.

July 4th is when we celebrate independence. But the proper day to celebrate American freedom is Juneteenth.

Showed my daughter the 2018 film "Searching," and, man, does it hold up. Just a master class in embracing constraints to tell a terrific, nail-biting, and authentically emotional story.

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“We’re gonna install a dictator. If you don’t let us, we’ll kill you.”

Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court presidential immunity ruling: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be" www.mediamatters.org/project-2025...

Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court immunity decision: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution"www.mediamatters.org

It's shocking just how unequipped, culturally and intellectually, the mainstream of American journalism turned out to be in responding to the rise of a genuine authoritarian to the heights of American politics and the pivot of many elite institutions to wholesale support of him.

Self-inflicted unhappiness comes from aversion, clinging, and ignorance. The rise of the authoritarian right shows us how damaging these traits are when turned outward to influence politics, demanding that government weaponize that aversion, clinging, and ignorance against society as a whole.

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One of the reasons our contemporary political culture feels so broken, and why so many willingly embrace authoritarianism, is because of the rise of a mutually reinforcing perspective and a set of values grounded in the poisons of aversion and clinging. www.reimaginingliber...

The Politics of Broken Values and Warped Perspectiveswww.reimaginingliberty.com Our perspective forms our values, our values shape our perspective, and if both go wrong, out politics turns toxic.

I wrote what I hope is a helpful thought experiment to tease out and clarify some of the arguments and unacknowledged assuptions about the ethical and legal questions regarding the training and use of AI. www.reimaginingliber...

AI and Theft: A Thought Experimentwww.reimaginingliberty.com What's in the box?

There are plenty of novels staring Sherlock's brother, Mycroft Holmes. But they all seem to cast him as basically another Sherlock, solving murders and other mysteries. This is such a missed opportunity. Mycroft should instead be a George Smiley type spy master doing dreary espionage things.

Good. If you're pining for Sherlock's return, go back and watch the final few seasons, and be glad it ended. www.independent.co.u...

Sherlock actors are the ‘problem’ blocking show’s return, says creatorwww.independent.co.uk Award-winning show ran for 13 episodes over four seasons

Much of the contemporary right has come to be dominated by the idea that dislike and distrust of diversity and dynamism is a valid motivating philosophy for political action, when instead it is simply a failure of personal character.

At ska in the park with the kids—headliner: Fishbone—and I'm encouraged by how many dads are here with their families, making sure their children get exposed to the bedrock principle of "pick it up pick it up pick it up."

I still think it's a pretty clear conceptual mistake to view using a piece of content in training an AI model as "stealing" it or "copying it without permission." And the insistence by many on doubling down on that conceptual mistake makes conversations about the ethics of AI less fruitful.

Even in the easiest of times, you should work to ensure you surround yourself with people whose values are positive and admirable, and distance from the unadmirable. In times of moral uncertainty and decline, this is even more critical for your own wellbeing. www.reimaginingliber...

Surround Yourself With Those Who Are Admirable, and Distance Yourself From Those Who Aren’t.www.reimaginingliberty.com An examination of the place of admirable friendship in an ethical life.

What's exciting about the way Ghost is approaching ActivityPub is that it can bring back blogging and make it viable as an alternative to typical social media, while solving not just the distribution problem (which RSS was good at), but also engagement and community building. activitypub.ghost.org/

Building ActivityPubactivitypub.ghost.org Ghost is federating over ActivityPub to become part of the world’s largest publishing network.

Sure, I'm old and set in my ways. But also I have to say, quite a lot of the stuff on Spotify's running "All New Punk" playlist is pretty dire.

A great deal of bad and unhelpful policy and legal analysis and argument is people seeing a particular government power being helpful right now to their side, or harmful to the other side, and so supporting it, without asking what that power means if the side wielding it were to switch.

I know it's trendy to blame rising rates of youth mental health issues on social media, but have we considered that kids got more anxious and depressed as we saw a decline in the popularity of third wave ska?

Because I'm seeing it coming up in the context of today's Murthy v. Missouri decision, here's your regular reminder that Citizens United, a case about whether the government could ban a film containing political speech, was correctly decided.

The fact that Meta keeps moving forward with ActivityPub federation is one of those big deals most people won't realize were big deals until it pretty much changes everything about the social web. www.theverge.com/202...

Meta is connecting Threads more deeply with the fediversewww.theverge.com Replies from other platforms will show up in Threads.

Hasn't it demanded enough already?

Of course he approves. He's a rich guy who grifted politicians into stealing money from ordinary people so Tepper doesn't have to pay for his fancy building himself. www.yahoo.com/sports...

Panthers owner David Tepper issues statement on approval of stadium renovationwww.yahoo.com We know of one guy who was probably happy on Monday night . . .