Sam Jackson

Elissa Slotkin arguing in a post on X to end the presidential pardon.

A moment of appreciation for Democrats who -- in this moment of Jim Crow policing -- are just doubling down on making the criminal system MORE harsh.

"The collapse of American democracy is like the pandemic: Whatever you say at the beginning will sound alarmist – but likely prove inadequate by the end."

Stuart Stevens

I keep thinking about assigning the Declaration of Independence in week 1 of my Survey of Homeland Security class.

We used to call this security theater - but in this context it’s authoritarian theater

I don't have a good answer for what the alternative looks like, but asking 18 years to bet their future on highly specified training for jobs based on which they think will be in high demand 5-10 years from now turned out to be a very bad way to structure higher education

every single time

Still waiting for ambition to counteract ambition.

The sheriffs who spend so much time huffing and puffing against federal overreach sure are quiet nowadays when the overreach matches their agenda.

I've never been the target audience for this particular media enterprise, but we have to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's due: The Free Press was early to spotting and cultivating the reactionary turn among American elites that snowballed over the past decade, culminating with Trump's re-election last year. Wherever there were liberal orthodoxies to be resisted, they now seem everywhere in decline or defeat. But standing on the sidewalk, I marveled at the hubris of a freedom-branded publication that need not bother sloganeering against the waves of masked men abducting my neighbors from the surrounding streets. The people getting disappeared into vans aren't the target audience.

Who The Free Press is for:

mattdpearce.substack.com/p/how-to-be-...

The Power of the Badge A sobering exploration of the near unchecked power of sheriffs in the United States. Across the United States, more than 3,000 sheriffs occupy a unique position in the US political and legal systems. ...

If you wanted to buy The Power of the Badge by @emayfarris.bsky.social and I but were waiting for a sale, good news! Chicago is offering 75% of all e-books with code EBOOK75. Get our book for $6.25! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

If Campbell had been hit by a bus in 1929, the "golden age" of US science fiction would be different, as would what's "classic" in the genre, because *what was allowed to be published* in the genre would have been filtered in another way through another (probably) man, with other specific tastes.

Does someone know about a good history of DHS/ICE since its 2003 incarnation (like how it was formed and what people were thinking etc etc)?

👇👇👇👇👇

Also strange: Growing up in a world where the Internet didn't exist at all, watching it expand from a seed into an incredible resource, then watching it collapse into utter shit in less time than it took to arrive.

But ChatGPT 5 doesn’t… I seem to remember that strawberry was a thing on ChatGPT (whichever version) and Gemini. How strange that this is a problem for some (but maybe not all?) LLMs….

bsky.app/profile/jack...

bsky.app/profile/mmas...

Does anyone know why LLMs are so bad at telling how many letters are in a word? I know it’s not actually counting the letters, but it seems to be consistently wrong in this way about this type of prompt.

Speed running the dystopia encyclopedia

I can’t say it enough: U.S. culture is scam culture. It pervades everything we do. We don’t notice it because it’s the water we swim in. A party would do well to remind everybody how awful this is and propose to fix it.

I have academic thoughts about this... www.jstor.org/stable/27185...

a man with a mustache is smiling and looking at the camera . ALT: a man with a mustache is smiling and looking at the camera .

Easy to beat those pesky evidence-based arguments if you just hire the perps.

I'm glad someone wrote up the thoughts I keep having about the inversion of antigovernment extremism. These dummies support the same sorts of actions they breathlessly panicked about for years.

"rhetorical edifices of gossamer bullshit" is such a great phrase.

I feel like "caution" implies *not* onboarding a Hitler bot

Can you tell I've been reading a ton of Doctorow recently?

I think that's true for a lot of them, but these kinds of comments suggest that some technologists are just so blind to anything other than 1s and 0s that they can't imagine someone who wants to use the tool differently. Technology that can be used for "security" will be used that way!

"Gaggle's CEO, Jeff Patterson, said in an interview that the school system did not use Gaggle the way it is intended. The purpose is to find early warning signs and intervene before problems escalate to law enforcement, he said."

Why are technologists so naive about how their tools will be used?

Also, how cool! @mirya.bsky.social @simko.bsky.social