Dewb

Hey just a philosopher noting that the original academic meaning of “performative” is that words aren’t just symbols but DO things in the world.

The Tasty Burger original or the Five Guys single might qualify? Locations might not be convenient though.

There is a lot of existing practice & insight around how generativity enables new kinds of art (some of us have been doing this for a while). There are a lot of deadends already mapped out. Then again I don't have a gun made of capital aimed at my head, so what do I know

putting everything else aside, this is just so artistically wrongheaded. even in the most warmed over crap put to tv/film I'm always amazed at how good humans are at acting, and how much of a spark live action visual media has because of it. I do not understand this impulse

kayfabe remains undefeated as a frame for understanding modern American politics

screenshot of text from Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: "The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they're the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive - because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about "Western civilization," while armed brutes try to tear it down by force."

bars

sadly the cobbler’s children go unshod

The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.”

That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.

At the end of the day, the Black Lives Matter era was about whether people should be killed in the street, and lots of people decided yeah and put those little blue flags on their cars. It spread to everyone because it stopped for no one.

A pessimist would say that the the US has zero track record of actually holding its powerful monsters in any accountable, from confederates to Kissinger to Bush.

An optimist would say that it can always start doing so any time it actually wanted to.

Thesis: ICE is un-American and the Minneapolis protestors are real Americans.

Antithesis: Ackshually ICE is operating in a long American tradition of racist terror.

Synthesis: Minneapolis is now the epicenter of a clash between two distinct but historically grounded American political traditions.

If ICE is now training new officers that they can forcibly enter residences based on an administrative warrant, "more training" is not the solution to our ICE problems.

This is a global far right power grab, so the sooner everybody realizes that and puts aside their deeply outdated notions around national identity, which got us here to begin with, the better. The only way out is through, but the only way through is all of us fighting these climate warlords together

The average American cannot imagine life getting worse and that lack of imagination has really bit us in the ass.

The longer *this* all goes on and it is not aggressively called out by Dem AND GOP politicians—even if “nothing happens—the more the rest of the world will know the US can never be trusted again to make reliable trade deals or be military allies

We are fucking around with the fundamental trust in the decency of Americans and it is farcical.

No one seems to understand that trust can be lost, and that lost trust takes active effort and significant cost to regain (or maintain in the face of betrayal).

Society parried the ozone layer, acid rain, and Y2K back to back and instead of going "wow, parrying is badass" a lot of people went "society didn't even get hit so I guess there's no need to learn how to parry" and instantly took a thousand hits

Bo Nix, tonight’s beau, nixed with bone icks

The Left has a whole raft of ideas for improving birth rates:

DON’T DESTROY THE ECOSYSTEM!

MAKE IT LESS EXPENSIVE TO HAVE KIDS INSTEAD OF MORE EXPENSIVE!

IMPROVE ACCESS TO HEALTH AND CHILD CARE!

Also frankly the Left should not be overly worried about “where are all the white babies at?”

This should be more obvious to everyone, but we cannot let the people comfortable with the mass slaughter of children further shape our culture, our democracies, our future as a species. It's the path to a depraved fascistic hellhole.

There was a startup here in Boston working on this over a decade ago. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but in the end they pivoted into using their tech for networking and border surveillance. We get what funders like the federal government decide to prioritize.
leedpoints.com/green-buildi...

Not necessary to construct hypotheticals, this literally happened bsky.app/profile/musi...

This approach, of course, is quite familiar to communities that have been dealing with police abuses for as long as there have been professional police forces. In 2000, then–New York City Mayor and future Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani justified the killing of the Haitian American Patrick Dorismond by police by quipping that he was “no altar boy.” Embarrassingly for Giuliani, whose capacity for shame was overestimated even then, it turned out that Dorismond had literally been an altar boy. Dorismond’s mother responded to the campaign to justify her son’s killing with an observation that continues to haunt me decades later. “They kill,” Dorismond said, “and after that, they kill him the other way—with the mouth.” Taking Good’s life wasn’t enough. The moment she died, it became imperative for the administration to also destroy her memory.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

This is the end of open source innovation.

If you make anything innovative, you can't open source it anymore, or even keep it on a public git host because it'll just be stolen by AI scrapers and put in the public domain by them.

Not only okay, but necessary because it demonstrates an extension of a logic of violence that SOME citizens have always been subject to.

Being a citizen has never been a guarantor of protection from state violence. They're just making this more and more obvious.

Black people five years ago: you know, they can kill anyone they want to out there

Everybody today: hot damn, did you know they can kill anyone they want to out there?

Thucydides did not write the Melian Dialogue for people to forget Athens lost the Peloponnesian War.

In general I think there should be more truth in advertising/marketing, but did people really expect the Rib Simulacra to contain actual rib meat from directly off a real bone? That would defeat the whole purpose

Doc is speaking (correctly) about cyberpunk, but I see the same pattern these days with, like, fans of the New York Times