Convolver

@convolver.bsky.social

340

Followers

714

Following

3265

Posts

What good is seeing-eye chocolate? What good is a computerized nose? What good’s Sanskrit read to a pony? Not much, I guess, not much at all.

Posts Replies Media Lists

Reposted by

Convolver

Some initial thoughts on the UK elections. 1. It confirms once again that when a center-right party veers to the hard right to weaken the far right, it ends up doing the opposite. After purging moderates and going full-on wingnuts and fever swamp, the Tories got decimated by Reform, not Labour. 🧵

NYT editorial ethics in action, Part CXVIII.

Lmao they just changed the title of the piece from “Why I don’t vote” to “Why I won’t vote” rather than tell readers that the guy actually does vote

Reposted by

Convolver

Why I Don't Vote (OK, I Do Vote, but I Would Like to Discourage You, NY Times Reader, For Doing So For Some Reason) Via @bubbaprog.ilovecitr.us

Man, if it turns out that the right winger telling NY Times readers that they should follow his example and not vote did in fact vote in the last two elections, the Times should add this to the piece. Better than a retraction, since it illustrates a willful hypocrisy.

Reposted by

Convolver

Prediction: Trump will argue that his NY conviction must be overturned because the court admitted evidence of conversations he had with his staff while President in order to prove knowledge and intent. He will argue those conversations were “official acts.” Judge Merchan and higher NY courts …./1

“In the 23 days leading up to the debate against former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden jetted across the Atlantic Ocean twice for meetings with foreign leaders and then flew from Italy to California for a splashy fund-raiser, maintaining a grueling pace that exhausted even much younger aides.”

President Biden's lapses appear to have grown more frequent, more pronounced and, after Thursday’s debate, more worrisome, interviews with current and former White House aides, political advisers, and others who saw Biden in the last few weeks show. nyti.ms/3ROa3sU

Reposted by

Convolver

This is one of the most dystopian signs I've ever seen. Republicans are quickly turning this country into an unrecognizable freakshow.

Indispensable thread from Popehat. On top of the absolute and presumptive immunity issue, the explicit conferment of evidentiary and testimonial privilege on essentially every aspect of Presidential speech is unprecedented in scope, but in keeping with the Court’s recent approach to corruption.

There are two elements to the immunity decision that are particularly extreme in a way that many will miss: (1) motive is irrelevant and (2) immune acts are not just excluded from prosecution, they’re excluded from evidence. /1

With all the other ridiculous crap going on, please take a moment to appreciate the particular judicial insanity of Judge James Cain Jr., W. D. La, who somehow found that states have a right to force the federal government to permit specific industrial facilities on a finding of generalized harm.

In a matter of days the Supreme Court has legalized corruption, legitimated mob violence, and granted to Donald Trump the powers and immunity of a king. I need to recalibrate my ability to be shocked and horrified, it obviously can’t keep up with the dissolution of American democratic norms.

Reposted by

Convolver

A few years ago, Jon Lovett floated a theory that media treats Democrats like protagonists - to be challenged, accounted, and forced to be behave in growth-oriented ways - while the GOP are treated like antagonists - immutable, expected to disrupt, thematic obstacles. Thinking about that a lot.

I don’t recall the NYT calling for Trump to step down after being convicted of 34 counts of fraud and being called by a judge at his civil trial a rapist in the common person sense

Look, we just had, back to back, a bad debate performance followed by the end of Chevron deference, decriminalization of a violent mob’s coup attempt, criminalization of being homeless, and the end of abortion access in Iowa, so maybe the strategists can consider what needs to be focused on, okay?

They don’t want to fight, they want to get credit for being the smartest boy who predicted exactly how we’d lose

Reposted by

Convolver

attn scholarly organizations, this is now considered best practice

Reposted by

Convolver

I just spoke to Paul Musgrave and he’s totally fine and just wants to take some time off social media to focus on work. All is well, it’s voluntary, and he says he’s touched by the concern.

Anthropic pretending that there's some deep demand from the US IC to use LLMs to analyze all-source intelligence or, IDK, pretend to be Hassan Nasrallah in junior analyst scenario roleplay is the funniest AI-related thing I've seen since (checks news) the R1 API token screwup from eight hours ago.

Reposted by

Convolver

Reply to

Viktor Valgarðsson

We* find that trust in "representative" institutions has been declining by ~10 p.p. among democracies since 1990, but trust in "implementing" institutions has been rising! *I, @drjennings.bsky.social, Gerry Stoker, @hannahbunting.bsky.social, @danjdevine.bsky.social, Lawrence McKay & Andrew Klassen

“Nobody has ever died from it being too warm outside.” Korey Stringer’s family would care to dispute this assertion, yes.

Thrilled to know we got water in the woke wars.

Even in the ‘90s it was clear that, for the right-wing political elite and their enablers, the canon was something to be fetishized but not actually read.

Essay by Jonah Siegel makes an interesting point: if you hold that critiquing the canon is a mode of resistance to the powers that be, you must grapple with the fact that *our* elites no longer go to art museums, see plays, attend film festivals, or read books. Moreover, they hate the people who do.

There is nothing in American political science theory that can account for “refugee bumfights as a legitimate Presidential policy difference.”

I'm just a simple country political scientist but I'm pretty sure if any other major presidential candidate said this it'd be covered none stop for weeks and everyone would agree that their campaign was over

Reposted by

Convolver

"The Skilcraft pen is indeed more than a pen. It’s the physical embodiment of New Deal social policies; it’s the product of disabled people’s labor, labor which has long been a site of contestation."

The Government Pencontingentmagazine.org As a child, I thought it was extremely cool that working for the U.S. government meant that you could get a pen that said “U.S. Government.”

Reposted by

Convolver

Hard to sum up the level of anti-left vitriol from Macron’s party right now. This is Borne, Macron’s prime minister from 2022 to 2024. She calls Left coalition “separatist wokists who support Islamism & communitarianism.” After that word vomit, she criticizes far-right for… having a vague platform.

The American meatpacking industry is based on maiming and injuring enslaved child laborers. We can fix this, but it requires turning the clock back to pre-1986 unionized wages and working conditions and a concomitant increase in prices. Revealed GOP voter preferences are for cheap meat and cruelty.

I think my favorite flavor of Trump voter is the person who a) is very upset about high grocery prices and b) is fired up about Trump's plan to deport 50% of the nation's agricultural workforce.

Reposted by

Convolver

The Federal Trade Commission, of all entities, is out here writing absolute bangers about AI snake oil. www.ftc.gov/business-gui...

Reposted by

Convolver

You may have opinions on COVID19 origins, but Eddie Holmes brings the evidence. He's one of the world's top scientists working on viral emergence. This is worth, actually required, reading for anyone interested in the subject. There will be a quiz afterwards. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

The Emergence and Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 | Annual Reviewswww.annualreviews.org The origin of SARS-CoV-2 has evoked heated debate and strong accusations, yet seemingly little resolution. I review the scientific evidence on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and its subsequent spread throug...

Waiting for the Atlantic to jump on this full-throated government attack on campus free speech by (checks assignment desk) ordering up 5,000 words on how a randomly-chosen 32-year-old associate professor of sociology at Iowa State is the true face of fascism in America.

This kind of argument about schools is a classic sign of authoritarianism. It’s the opposite of how officials who value individual rights and free society should speak about education.

make a band less mild the undead kennedys

make a band less mild hyperpartisan milk hotel

This is horrifying. This is a photojournalist killed by American police while doing her job, and she’s bearing it with grace and dignity.

When cops shot Linda Tirado in the George Floyd protests, they destroyed one of her eyes with a rubber bullet. The subsequent brain damage is proving fatal. Linda needs funds for hospice Venmo: Linda-Tirado-3 PayPal: Bootstrapindustries@gmail Zelle: 806.433.6075

Police Blinded Her With a Foam Bullet. Suing Them Was When the Pain Beganrubberbullets.longlead.com When less-lethal weapons are misused, journalist Linda Tirado learned, there are no consequences — except for the people at the wrong end of the launcher.

Spirit Aerosystems is the apotheosis of the MBA-brained makeover of Boeing and its destruction of engineering culture, so buying a bunch of cut-rate aircraft parts with dodgy documentation and no supply chain traceability is just BAU for that crew.

F.A.A. Investigating How Counterfeit Titanium Got Into Boeing and Airbus Jetswww.nytimes.com The material, which was purchased from a little-known Chinese company, was sold with falsified documents and used in parts that went into jets from both manufacturers.

“We didn’t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners,” a senior U.S. military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia told Reuters. “So what was left to us was to throw shade on China’s.”

Remember when we banned TikTok because our autocratic adversaries might use propaganda to try and undermine faith in institutions and erode trust in the very idea of objective truth - using covert, subversive tactics on social media?

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to incite fear of China vaccineswww.reuters.com The covert effort began under Trump and continued into Biden’s presidency, Reuters found. Health experts say it endangered lives for possible geopolitical gain.

Thing about a one-party state is that the things you would correctly call out as batshit far-right knee-jerk authoritarianism anywhere else gets folded into mainstream Democratic party policies and people just shrug at it.

UPDATE: NY Governor Kathy Hochul said on CNN last night that she is considering a ban on masks. This is absolutely shameful! New York has suffered so much from COVID, and COVID is not over. We should be normalizing and depoliticizing masks, not banning them.

/Of course/ Erik Prince is teaming up with the PRC to sequester and control developing state natural resources.

Idk maybe everyone with power should have listened to me before we got here but what do I know

‘The big story of the 21st century’: is this the most shocking documentary of the year?www.theguardian.com Six years in the making, jaw-dropping new film The Grab shows a secret scramble by governments and private firms to buy up global resources