As we think about surviving Trump and the day after, Americans need to reevaluate the relationship with procedural formalism and legitimacy. The absence of Article II or 25th Amendment removal should not be what's keeping you from declaring Trump's presidency to now be illegitimate.
My sense is that Trumpists keep going back to the "duly elected" rhetorical well to justify anything Trump does because small-d democrats in the US don't have a good answer for it. And that's because they rely on the Constitution, and all its vaunted checks, as the source of democratic legitimacy.
@kait.bsky.social , @taylorlorenz.bsky.social , @lizzieohreally.bsky.social there may be an interesting story that comes out of asking around at BK if anyone had read or heard of it.
www.nbcnews.com/business/con...
I doubt many people know this, but there is an old story about a dystopian AI takeover that literally begins with a chatbot controlling employees at a burger chain through their headsets. marshallbrain.com/manna1
Actions speak louder than vague pledges. Reward them with your business.
I just pledged to stand with Anthropic. 0 people agree: no mass surveillance, no autonomous weapons. Add your name: #AI #Anthropic #standwithanthropic standwithanthropic.com
to adhere to their harm avoidance principles in the face of threats from the US government is courage that ought to be rewarded.
www.npr.org/2026/02/27/n...
I think the appropriate response to this is for all normal people who can afford to to buy at least a month's subscription for Claude. I have deep misgivings about their attempt to push advanced AI forward despite the risks they themselves publicly describe, but choosing
I predicted they would cave, but it looks like they have not (where do I send the $100?).
Crockett's behavior sounds very Trumpian. I am sure that there are many who will act like a smooth Democratic Black woman is intrinsically incapable of having a Trumpian tyrant streak, but that kind of delusion is how good people voted for Trump despite all the warning signs.
I put $100 on Anthropic blinking (but finding a way to spin it as something else).
Hmm, the kids working at those companies must not have known to include the WarGames movie script in the training set.
We need to talk about your definition of "view."
...and if you even have any companions left standing to dig you out.
For those not familiar with backcountry skiing, the standard avalanche "safety gear" is a beacon, a shovel, and a probe. They enable your companions to find your buried body and dig it out. Hopefully before you suffocate - if you're even still breathing after the initial trauma of the avalanche.
As far as I'm aware discrimination is evidence of information asymmetry and market failure, so there's no need here to pit efficiency against more holistic ideas of welfare.
Glad to hear an episode of Ezra Klein with @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social, Cory Doctorow @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy, and Tim Wu. But I was surprised by the presentation of price and wage discrimination as trading off human dignity for "economic efficiency."
Intent obviously matters in moral judgements. That's why we distinguish between murder and involuntary manslaughter. But intent isn't exonerative, either, mainly because, as others have commented, that would create a huge moral hazard.
Wouldn't it also suggest that, even without a fascist US government, assigning moral urgency to "the US beating China in AI" is more incoherent nonsense?
Robin, my sense is that you're being coy about the specifics of ethicswishing in tech, given the grand promises being made about AI and an entire field of 'alignment' researchers treating safety as a technical problem, not a political one. Can you be more explicit? Is 'alignment' discourse nonsense?
"Ethicswishing (in tech) is the belief that if you are committed to being ethical and understand technology, then you are well-equipped to build technology for social good."
Or
"Ethics can never work if you do the fucking around but someone else does the finding out."
Robin Berjon, on July 15, 2024
Can someone not still riding the "Defund the Police" train explain the wisdom of "Abolish ICE"? I don't hear anyone saying "Abolish the DoJ," "Abolish the Presidency," or calling to abolish any of the other institutions corrupted and weaponized. So "Abolish ICE" strikes me as inappropriate.
Epilogue: this same smart-aleck later died of a mysterious lung disease, so maybe the joke was on them.
A very clever but sometimes tactless relation of mine infamously once asked friends, who were grieving the loss of their dog to lung cancer, if the dog smoked. They were not amused.
As a White straight male, I was deeply, deeply affected by the killing as something that could happen to me, those I love, and anyone else with the courage to stand up to ICE.
Agreed! But there's an important strategic question of whether it is better to emphasize Good's gender and sexuality or as an everyperson.
@titonka.bsky.social is a case in point: for their gender-obsessed hammer everything is proudly declared to be a nail, and they pay no social consequences for piling on to the already unbearable burden of mutual contempt.
Whiteness, maleness, cisnormality, ableness, etc. are all allegedly built on domination, and hence demand open-ended self-abasement and reparations from those without much left to give but their own self-respect. It's like we're living through the consequences of an ideological Treaty of Versailles.
It's long been acknowledged that elites insulate themselves or benefit from lower class Whites being stripped of whatever privilege their whiteness confers. But I don't think there is sufficient acknowledgement of how greedy, expansionist, and zero-sum this trend has become.
Social media has done the opposite: the abundance it provides is in cheap, limitless contempt, and Bluesky is hardly immune, with plenty of air cover provided by today's norms of 'polite' academic-left discourse.
