I. B. Cole

Stop leaning on that compiler, coward.

Top 40 '90s albums, #40: Silver Jews — American Water (1998) A classic from one of his generation's greatest lyricist

I've started a bit of a project today recounting my top 40 albums of the 1990s. (And I've tried out Leaflet, which has been roundly positive.)

Pretty cynical, Chris. Tulsi's on the case.

Power concedes nothing without a demand.

So many red state races are something like..

Democrat: War hero with a master's degree in public policy who was caught on camera running into a burning building to rescue orphans.
Republican: Adjudicated sex pest who inherited dad's car dealership.

Election result: R +18

"Yes, but is it Platonically elegant?"

Seeing "The Dems" as some kind of coherent political entity that decides to do X--rather than a shaggy, loose coalition driven by competing impulses and interests--is a really damaging category error.

this is like vibe coding but for international relations

feels like the core competency is increasingly "knows when llm is spiraling into lunacy"

Wish the people who legitimately care about political change would reflect on *why* they can't get political traction despite pushing "incredibly popular positions." It's a question of building trust and credibility over time.

Is this Kash Patel's girlfriend? (honestly don't know and don't want to look it up)

"I think political Zionism was a both a movement that provided refuge to Jews in distress, an experience of national liberation AND a movement with clear settler-colonial features. The early Zionists themselves often used the term colonial to denote what they saw as a movement that brought Western civilization to the Middle East. (Said's The Question of Palestine is good on this). And Zionism, like other settler-colonial movements, dispossessed the native population. (Yes, Jews have a profound connection to the land of Israel but European Jews are native in a radically different way than Palestinians whose families have lived there continuously for centuries). Does that mean I want Israeli Jews to suffer harm? Of course not. I oppose Palestinian violence but also recognize that it will not end until the massive violence that Israel inflicts upon Palestinians ends."

What follows: Peter Beinart is clearly 'anti-Jewish' because he has read history and knows it's complicated. In a sense, Israel is a settler-colonialist state fwiw. BUT: Hitler himself would NOT qualify as 'anti-Jewish', clearly not, because he wasn't a Holocaust denier (I don't suppose.)

I'm getting so much insight into how the other half lives. I lead a tiny team that must justify any time not spent putting something in front of the customer. "This is bad because it's centering for the team to spend a couple of sprints tidying up our unit tests and LLMs take that away from us."

You'll notice how the fascist wing of the GOP isn't immediately screaming about how "Republicans are no different than Democrats!!" because they understand how politics works.

It's hard to get a man to understand a thing when his monthly cash payment from the Kremlin depends on him not understanding it.

Big "Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the freshwater system, and public health… what have the Romans ever done for us?" Energy

i think wider ai discourse would be wildly different if everyone actually understood that Claude and ChatGPT are “eldritch creations via petajoules of stochastic optimizations” rather than “chat bot programmed by a san francisco tech company’s engineers”

But you'll feel a lot more alone if your default is "I'm the only one who Truly Understands The Mess" and a lot less alone if your default is "my fellow humans must also be in versions of The Mess" and guess what

The default is a learned skill.

For all the parents out there who brought their kids to adulthood fully actualize and free from all trauma, this award's for you!

Wish Bluesky had been around 19 years ago. Good stuff.

"My policies are so compelling, if Dem candidates would adopt them they'd never lose another election."

"Why not just run for office and win then?"

"No. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is too powerful."

Did you do it while amplifying this fascist agitprop?

Eh, not like Homeland Security's going to be all that important now that we've launched an asymmetric war against the "biggest exporter of global terrorism."

99% of the BS goes away when you properly frame "The Democrats" as just another name for "the broad left electoral coalition." "Schumer didnt give me my perfect
candidate." No shit.

it has been brought to my attention that many of you think only shills and the uneducated take this question seriously. here is the guy who invented the term p-zombie writing in 2023

someone suggested to me the other day that the biggest ai haters are the "smartest guy at thanksgiving dinner" types, because LLMs actually displace their social role of being stuck up know-it-alls to uninformed people

it's sort of obviously true if you look at certain banner examples

I'm kinda being constantly tortured online bc I both think

1. It's extremely unlikely current AI models are conscious.
2. Almost every argument I scroll by for my side is insane and is just steamrolling decades of philosophy of mind work.

"Hell, I didn't even vote. No my responsibility to get me motivated to go to the polls. Guess who's responsibility it *is*?" Jesus, these people suck.

The entire operating theory of a large strain of leftist thought is that a relentless focus on class will get Nazi and Nazi-adjacent right-wing white men to turn socialist instead. Any evidence of that theory is passionately embraced as an article of faith, no matter how absurd it actually is. 2/x