Beautiful interview with some enraging stories along the way.

FCNL is such a good prophetic voice.

Not particularly interested in watching the video footage myself (don’t need those nightmares), so I’m glad for journalists providing descriptions of the footage and how it stands in tension with DHS accounts. Abolish ICE. Gift link.

What a story:

What stayed with Amundson most, she said, was not the adrenaline of the moment but the realization that came while she was holding the agent’s head in her hands and keeping his airway open.

“I was hit so hard with the fact that this man would not do this for me,” she said.

Big Ellulian “image vs. word” vibes here.

There are lots of stories circulating on social media that I try wait to read a full article on before I get angry about them. Here’s the article, and it’s as bad (worse?) as every post I’ve seen about it on Bluesky.

The Columbia Heights Public School district says federal agents have detained four of its students in four separate incidents over the last two weeks. One child is a 5-year old boy who attends a district elementary school and was used as “bait” to draw family members out of their home.

Holy crap, these numbers. This passage really stood out:

“This is industrial-scale abuse of women and girls,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which conducts research on online hate and disinformation. “There have been nudifying tools, but they have never had the distribution, ease of use or the integration into a large platform that Elon Musk did with Grok.”

I don’t use this line a lot, but if Biden ever slipped up like this…

A few thoughts:

First, it is almost comically mean to use the results of a project collecting AI tells to get LLMs to not sound like that. Like, of all the digital labor exploitations of AI, this might be the pettiest.

Second, AI detection is hard, and for all my concerns with AI, I think this is another good example of why policing its use can do more harm than good. I don’t blame the Wikipedia community for doing this project, but I would never recommend this approach in a classroom.

Another story that speaks to the power of Ellul’s “image vs. word” distinction. It must be trustworthy because it comes from a machine…

The whole post is good, but the first two paragraphs hit on something particularly important.

He is the shallowest man on earth.

Good read this morning.

Good overview of an enraging story.

Non, mais franchement : Quelle honte, ce pays dont je suis citoyen.

Some very important reminders in here.

Depressing read, but makes me glad I’m renewing my WIRED subscription.

The Onion is what’s going to get us through this.

This book is the perfect kind of unexpected blend. It never hides that it’s an alternate history novel, but what begins as a relatively cozy mystery story gradually becomes more and more of a reflection on unsufficiently resisting Nazis and slow decline into fascism.

It will be 20 years old this year, but it feels written for this time.

Chef’s kiss.

It’s a sign of how crazy everything is right now that this is just one of sevral political developments contributing to my current anxiety.

This is such a perfectly dumb oversight.

This book is great! I have some quibbles—I found Brueggemann a bit more literal in his exegesis than I would have expected—but I get why this is a classic, and I’ll have to buy a print copy to reference in the future.

As I noted yesterday, I think there’s a lot in here that also appears in the anarchist writing that’s appealed to me lately: refusal of the status quo, skepticism of power, and the audacity to imagine a better world. It’s good stuff.

One of the most interesting recurring themes in Jacques Ellul’s writing is one that contrasts reality (or facts) with truth. As Ellul distinguishes them, facts are what are and—implicitly—what must be conformed to, whereas truth is what ought to be. Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word explores this distinction at length, but it crops up in plenty of his other writing. In fact, I’m currently reading his Présence au monde moderne (or rereading it, depending on what one considers reading the original French after reading the English translation last year), and I’m delighted to see that he makes this distinction as early as this 1948 book.

What an embarassment.