Anthropic is weird, and their conscience is focused in some directions at the expense of others (Claude is trained on pirated copies of my research), but at least they have a conscience.

Excellent jokes to distract from the real horror.

Habitant au Kentucky, ce n’est pas souvent que j’éprouve un coup de cœur pour un livre francophone. Pourtant, j’ai lu un article sur ce livre à la RTS, et il arrivait qu’on fasse une commande chez Fnac quelques jours après, et c’est comme ça que j’ai décidé de commander ce livre au lieu sans trop le connaître,

Je ne dirais pas que je regrette l’avoir lu. J’avoue pourtant que j’ai eu des moments difficile avec lui. Mon vocabulaire n’était pas toujours à la hauteur, et puis ce n’est pas mon genre préféré, le roman très, mais très littéraire. Je me suis demandé quelques fois au cours de la lecture si j’avais fait un mauvais choix.

CEOs’ silence is indication of a moral vacuum.

Heartbreaking read but better for it.

Strategic ambiguity is as much an indicator of far right influences as any of these references. Gift link.

Good rage in this post.

FCNL is such a good prophetic voice.

Big Ellulian “image vs. word” vibes here.

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

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

He is the shallowest man on earth.

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

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

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.

What an embarassment.

This shooting is making me panicky, and I’m honestly trying to not read any more about it, but this is important.

One of my political science professors in undergrad studied Chavista populism in Venezuela and, with the rise of figures like Sarah Palin, was considering pivoting to populism in the US when I TAed for him. Anyway, wondering what’s going through his head this morning.

ProPublica does good work, and I haven’t been reading enough of them lately.

Bookmarking this so that I can return to it and quote the man verbatim when necessary. Gift link.

Good on the publisher, and what a dumb world we live in. Also, “narco terrorist” reminds me of the poli sci class I had where we spent an entire day (week?) talking about the difficulty of clearly defining terrorism. It was mostly an abstract conversation, even with a GWOT backdrop, but I feel like it was preparing me to detect nonsense from this DoD.

There are many terrifying things happening right now, but let’s not forget about this spectacularly dumb thing that is also, somehow, continuing.

Some good observations worth bookmarking.

I’ve been waiting for this one for a while, and I got weak and ceded to Hoopla rather than wait for the TPB to arrive at my local library.

I continue to appreciate this series, and Issue 43 (the real horror is what’s going on in the world right now) is really good, a highlight of the whole thing. I have to admit, though, that it didn’t otherwise feel worth the wait. Maybe I got my expectations too high, or maybe there are just diminishing returns. I’m not giving up on the series, but I feel like it’s uneven.

Technology, efficiency, and growing public and private power—this has Ellul written all over it. Gift link.