I too remember the earlier, woke wars. tons of spent microaggression munitions strewn about everywhere, friends crying out for God as they were slowly cancelled...look, if you weren't there, you'll never understand
Peter Thiel can give a series of lectures where he speculates on Greta Thunberg being the anti-Christ and very few people frame it as someone wholly disconnected from regular life, though it clearly is
The Diameter Of The Bomb The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded. And around these, in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard. But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from, at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers, enlarges the circle considerably, and the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle. And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
amichai.
🫠
I have never seen a politician more directly copy this speech in my life
things every single republican president of your lifetime has done
- started a war in the middle east
- completely destroyed the economy
this is good. underrated problem with popularism: it is--openly and explicitly--a pathetic, wimpy school of thought www.gelliottmorris.com/p/new-poll-d...
Gave this one the usual punched up typesetting wherever possible. Really pleased with the eyecatch logo especially.
Mobile Suit Gundam (1979)
After the arrests of powerful men across the world, you might be asking why the US has so much trouble holding its leaders accountable for lawbreaking. Since Nixon, all three branches of government have worked hard to ensure they can break the law with impunity www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
[guy who sang baby beluga] the festering belly is splitting, each half digested soul fumbling for a knife
watched this for the first time a couple days ago and it's outstanding, excellent to get a discotek release
I first thought "there aren't words" when I first saw this story. but there are
Warning from Space (1956)
i see people taking this way too seriously and I think it's important to remember anno is one of the most successful trolls in the industry and often self-deprecates in deadpan sarcasm. everyone he namechecks are his bffs/idols.
"an old political order juddering to a stop, the elites of that order unable to navigate the new, uneven terrain; desperate and opportunistic grabs for power in the vacuum; a sense of being swept up into chaos and disorder as subterranean forces brewing for decades erupt to the surface."
i've decided not to listen to the audio of a teacher reporting a kindergartender because frankly I don't want to become the person that that event would turn me into. but one thing I hope we are collectively coming to grips with is what it meant that we have lived among such people this whole time
Even has the red goatee! I've built the gunpla and I don't think I could get close to this
The WSJ reports that the Trump administration has massed "significant" air power in striking distance of Iran, but hasn't yet decided what the purpose of an attack would be.
www.wsj.com/world/middle...
UK: Prince Andrew arrested.
South Korea: Former President Yoon sentenced for life.
Brazil: Former President Bolsonaro serving a 27-year sentence.
USA: President Trump demands $10 billion payout from taxpayers.
Awfully hard to square the claims that ICE is focused on removing violent criminals that are so dangerous we can't let them be around with the fact that ICE tricks their targets by pretending to need help and waiting for neighborly types to respond by offering to help a stranger for free.
A photo of an ice cream machine with a sign reading, "Anything is possible with ice cream." Beneath that is a hand lettered sign reading, "No ice cream".
2026 basically
okay you know what we're doing this
why rise of skywalker is the worst crime ever committed against cinema and the very concept of a coherent fictional universe: a thread
Article: The political effects of X’s feed algorithm Abstract: Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
Figure 2. ITT estimates of feed-setting changes on engagement and political attitudes. ITT effect estimates of switching the algorithm on and off (in s.d.). Left, effect of moving from the chronological to the algorithmic feed for users initially on the chronological feed. Right, effect of moving in the opposite direction for users initially on the algorithmic feed. For each outcome, the results of two specifications are reported. Blue, unconditional estimates with robust s.e., controlling only for the initial feed setting and, where applicable, pre-treatment outcome levels. Orange: conditional estimates, controlling for pre-treatment covariates using GRFs; 90% and 95% CIs are reported. Numerical effect sizes and P values correspond to the conditional estimates (all tests are two-sided). The unit of observation is respondent. From top to bottom, sample sizes are n = 4,965, n = 3,337, n = 4,965, n = 4,965, n = 4,596, n = 4,596 and n = 4,850. Tests are described in Methods. Supplementary Information Table 2.16 reports the exact numerical point estimates, s.e., CIs and sample sizes for every specification. All outcomes are standardized. Additional results are presented in Supplementary Information section 2. PCA, first principal component from principal component analysis.
X's algorithm is in fact doing what you think it's doing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The decline of right wing cultural production is just due to the fact that they don’t like culture, they like the signifiers of culture, ie “classic sculpture means white people are better.” They don’t like art at all except for this purpose. They don’t even like the nerd stuff they whine about
I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland.
And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.
They raided the jailed children to steal their letters.
The problem, in federal officials' minds, wasn't confining children in prison-camp conditions; it was that the children could tell the public about it.
