conductometrist.bsky.social

The Fellowship of Melania
The Two Melanias
The Return of Melania

Things have gotten so bad that even *hilzoy* is considering using profanities in print! 😬

"Funded by taxpayers yet dominated by left wing voices"

Um did either Downer notice how the last election turned out?

(Yes I know the ALP is hardly left at all any more, but still...)

The Aus govt needs to rethink our web of connections with the US. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. No one should walk past official thuggery and murder on the street.The US should be ostracised not allied.

Piranesi is good but JS&MrN is an out and out masterpiece. One of the best written and most creative books I've ever read.

NB it's a bit of a J curve in terms of its pacing

The timestamp came up wrong for me - key bit starts around 28:00.

100% agree @alicefraser.bsky.social, amazingly raw and honest words 👏👏

This has been made available, so for purposes of commenting on Bari Weiss's decision to spike the story, here's a live-post of that segment.

It begins with a "you may recall" summary of the deportation to el Salvador. Describes the admin's claim that it could deport the men without due process

He's basically a flesh and blood LLM at this point - just spitting out a statistically likely response to a prompt. That response may or may not bear any relation to reality.

"The suspect is in custody" is a typical thing for a president in this situation to say, so he said it

I know this is about 127th on the list of objectionable things here but if you're doing many things, you're more or less by definition not focused

DOOCY: Is Operation Southern Spear about drugs or oil?

LEAVITT: The Trump administration is focused on doing many things in the Western Hemisphere

Australian here, we have mandatory voting and it's our best *protection* against voter suppression.

It's very hard for a govt to make it hard for you to vote when they themselves have told you that you have to.

Move elections to weekends while you're at it

The best English translation of the final six words of Goethe's Faust is basically the original German reprinted, plus about a page of footnotes. There simply isn't a concise way of saying it in English

Absolutely! Both had their own take on it

Not Wagner for that specifically. There are a bunch of Ring Cycle references in LOTR apart from the Ring itself - eg the reforging of the ancestor's broken sword - but Gandalf's name is not one of them.

Wagner's Ring is a hugely rich work in its own right, even if Wagner was a world class arsehole

???

There's no Gandalf in Wagner's Ring, though there is (rather more obviously) a cursed Ring of Power

Circular Quay Station viewed from the outside

Behold the majestic beauty of this same train station when viewed from the outside:

All the resources that life would need to evolve from scratch are already being used by existing life, which is exceptionally good at filling the available niches.

Any new form of life, with no chance to evolve defences against existing life forms, would get literally eaten alive immediately

Literally summertime

I honestly feel sick. Seeing a assassination, followed by reckless, bloodlust-driven reaction that I really fear will lead to more violence. There's no adults in charge, no one bringing the temperature down.

The Sheriff of the Rings

They're also the crazy people's streets dickhead.

They're public streets. The public includes the crazy as well as the sane. Where else are they supposed to go if we don't provide shelter for them?

From a distance, it's beginning to look to me like they realised that they didn't need to actually burn down the Reichstag before they did the whole 'response to the burning of the Reichstag' bit

Works the other way too - you can work out what your argument is by going through the process of writing it clearly.

This is why LLMs are so problematic - they can fake clarity for people who don't understand their own argument

Either @thesaturdaypaper.com.au used the wrong lead paragraph in their newsletter this morning or their politics have taken a surprising sharp turn to the right

Ten dollars says Albo is breathing a deep sigh of relief

I think the PRC took over China some time ago already

All luggage contains spaces into which things can be inserted, therefore packing a suitcase is an explicitly sexual act

I suspect it's as simple as that they're a bunch of people who perceive anyone with talent, skills or training as threatening (b/c they might point out that they're wrong sometimes).

So they have gathered enough power to make those people feel unwelcome to the point that they leave

The parliamentary LNP's problem now is that it is composed almost entirely of people who a) know intellectually that they need to seek out the Australian mainstream but b) also believe that the Australian mainstream is immoral and wrong.

Hard to see how they square that circle

inside.org.au/are-the-libe...