Alexander Justice 🇺🇦

On the reading list:

Hart, D. B. (2019). That all shall be saved : heaven, hell, and universal salvation. Yale University Press.

(mind you, I don't really have time to read, but...)

yeah basically how my southern white great-grandparents talked about all the Italians a century ago

I /am/ loyal to both Lithuania and Scotland, which the way I see it is just a very good incentive for Scotland to never practice anti-Lithuanian politics.

Has anyone actually written something on the apparently inability of the reactionary mind to grasp the basic themes and even overt text of Tolkien?

Like at some point Gandalf turns directly to camera and says “the Men of Gondor sure are insufficient to this task, we need the hobbits to do it”

In Utah, Trump’s Vision for Homelessness Begins to Take Shape

Under Trump, the draconian future of homelessness policy is coming into focus: mass internment. Utah is building a 16-acre site to detain up to 1,300 homeless people inside locked "accountability centers." This is profoundly alarming.

Vital reporting from @ellenbarry.bsky.social and Jason DeParle:

Tressie cooked here:

"Real working-class politics does not assume the worst of working-class people’s impulses. It does not launder their concerns for political points. It certainly does not argue, directly or indirectly, that a little racism is a good thing for reaching them."

I do wonder a lot nowadays what dementia might be like were it to overtake me, and I realized this morning that when it comes to maths, I've basically had cognitive impairment all my life.

so it would be like that except for everything, I guess

#Dyscalculia

If you are reading this piece today, you may be interested to know that I found Adam Bonica on moderate candidates compelling. Ht @hakeemjefferson.bsky.social

data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-new-yo...

Feckless Workshops is brilliant, and I'm going to try to work it into everything I can

but also, didn't this start with Exodus?

It all comes down to what the military will do or not do, doesn't it? sometimes it's the officer corps, sometimes the rank and file

Wednesday's child is not "full of woe," new study finds, debunking popular nursery rhyme A University of York study has found no link between a child's day of birth and their destiny, reassuring parents that the age-old verse is simply “harmless fun.”

Area Man Born on a Wednesday Now Greatly Relieved

www.york.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

Emma Thompson on AI and writing

I love crazy late-night baseball, but let's not confuse it for objectively good baseball. There were 19 walks issued and 37 men left on base. We were given a master class in bad baserunning decisions. Bad managing. The umpiring sucked. It was not MLB's best foot forward, that's for sure.

Column: Information is the most human thing you can study "This detective work, this human ability to read between the lines and see what’s missing as well as what’s there, is the real work of information and library science. The information is all the littl...

www.dailytarheel.com/article/opin...

new rule: no walking batters in extra innings.

I mean, you are still giving it credit it does not deserve. It's not average intelligence. It's not any intelligence. You could train a model on only 100% true statements and it would still generate false ones that statistically resemble them.

It has no knowledge or discernment.

When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

I'm afraid I really do have to wonder about anyone who pops into library chat at eod or later on Friday to get assistance with something too tricky or technical to figure out on their own.

and I don't mean students.

YouTube video by PBS NewsHour Why many men struggle to maintain deep male friendships later in life

PBS News Weekend took a look at adult male friendships in the wake of a study about how 38% of men turn to friends for emotional support, while 54% of women do.
It's nice hearing from regular degular dudes on this. The way we usually talk about this makes me wanna die
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmWS...

Single-member districts make all kinds of mischief possible.
The Supreme Court would be irrelevant here if we had proportional representation. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/u...

helped Mom attend her LDS service this morning, and was amazed to hear the bishop firmy declare that the Genesis account of Adam and Eve was an allegorical narrative and not meant to be taken as “history”

Well at least Latin is winning somewhere.

's e "Blas na Gàidhlig" airson na h-Ucrainise a tha a dhith orm...

"Medicare for All" is a catchy slogan, but it's also seriously deficient. Medicare doesn't cover nearly enough.

pretty sure if it doesn't show where stress falls, it ain't a real dictionary

listen, I didn't stop listening to Nirvana when they started selling the smiley face shirts at Urban Outfitters; I'm not gonna stop using em-dashes just because chatGPT uses them

Book talk on "Constructing Religion and Defining Crime"

Santa Barbara friends! Please join me for a book talk on ARCHIVAL IRRUPTIONS tomorrow at 1pm at UC Santa Barbara, HSSB 1174. The event is free and open to the public. Hope to see you there!

All this time,Putin has been given opportunities to end the war on honorable terms:the red carpet was rolled out for him,sanctions relief was offered,proposals for profitable joint projects were made

Why didn’t he accept these offers?As I’ve said-he can’t,he hardly makes any real decisions anymore

Zack Polanski, "Last year was a huge achievement for Bristol to get its first Green MP. Time to get Carla Denyer some company"

ZP is aiming to get more MPs, and rightly so. Good luck Greens!