Patrick van Kessel

Seems relevant

And

See also

BAAA 🐑

When the historians in whatever's left of the free world later write about the key geopolitical paradigm shifts of the past century, it'll be 1945, 1991 and 2025

Yep, whole thing was a set-up to signal to the base that Ukraine are the baddies

Hi, hello. In order to grasp the significance of Trump crowning himself a King, you have to understand that he is literally carrying out a plan crafted by Curtis Yarvin, a right wing extremist, to overthrow democracy and replace it with dictatorial rule by a monarch-CEO.

And back to the phones we go...

This reads like the opening paragraph of a novel so bleakly dystopian you'd put it down after five pages

Illegal Immigrants and Crime – Assessing the Evidence This issue will be resolved when states and localities keep better records of the immigration statuses of people convicted in their states – just like Texas does. The crime data are so complicated and...

And yet a Cato study found that legal immigrant incarceration rates are half that of illegal immigrants... who in turn have half the rate of native-born Americans. So the public just fundamentally doesn't grasp reality. The power of propaganda, folks. www.cato.org/blog/illegal...

6 in 10 See Illegal Immigration As Very Serious Problem | Monmouth University Polling Institute Majority now support building a border wall

Wow, yep, here's another poll: "The shift in opinion that illegal immigrants are more prone to violent crime has grown most dramatically among Republicans – from just 29% in 2015 to 45% in 2019 and 65% in 2024." www.monmouth.edu/polling-inst...

How Americans View the Situation at the U.S.-Mexico Border, Its Causes and Consequences Americans overwhelmingly see the situation at the border as a problem and rate the government’s handling of it poorly. But partisans disagree about its cause and best solutions.

Found this, which shows that 57% of Americans think immigration is driving crime while 39% say it isn't. For Republicans, 85% buy into the immigration-crime narrative. AFAIK there's no real evidence to support that, and legal immigrants actually commit less crime. www.pewresearch.org/politics/202...

I'd love to see survey data on the general public's estimate of how many undocumented immigrants are criminals vs not. I'd bet good money that for a sizeable proportion of the population, the numbers in their head are downright inverted from the truth.

Might in part be due to constant rhetoric like, oh I dunno, "When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. […] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists."

INTRODUCTION

This course on AI "bullshit" from @carlbergstrom.com and @jevinwest.bsky.social is an absolute masterclass and should be essential reading for EVERYONE. Share it with your children, friends, family - far and wide thebullshitmachines.com/index.html

A group of anonymous authors has published this well-sourced memorandum on Musk and the Neoreactionary movement. Please share widely. The threat is not well understood. Take a moment to read the one page executive summary now; then call Congress.

america2.news/content/file...

Look, I am just a small town scholar of mass murder, so let me ask a simple, naive question: And then what?

Anyone have a more optimistic option #4... please?

3. Project 2025 / MAGA extremism - the cruelty is the point, the plan is to purge the country of the intelligentsia and the poor

2. Musk / Dark Enlightenment accelerationism - the plan is to crash the economy and buy everything up in a fire sale ala post-Soviet Russia, privatize the country

Between the semiconductor tariffs and the grant freezes, one of three things is happening, depending on who's really leading the charge behind the scenes. Any guesses on which one?

1. Classic Trump grifting - the plan is to hold the economy hostage for blackmail, easy enough via $TRUMP coin

Yup, social media rewards nastiness - back in 2017 I found that Congress members received notably more engagement on Facebook when they went on the attack, with an extra boost for being particularly "indignant." Also replicated the findings on Twitter. It's almost certainly gotten worse since then.

We missed a milestone.

On January 15th, the 2-year running mean for the global surface temerpature anomaly reached 1.55°C above the 1850-1900 baseline.

Goodbye Paris, we hardly knew ye.

something Republicans do all the time to great effect - they are pulling it now with CA disaster aid - is “I am not supporting <thing I ostensibly support> until you do <unrelated thing I want>”

just stop voting for anything at all until he stops doing flagrantly illegal shit, gum up the works

YouTube video by MSNBC Trump hedges on declassifying Epstein files

In case anyone was wondering why he didn't include the Epstein files www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJor...

How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days He used the constitution to shatter the constitution.

Lots of fascinating details in here that I wasn't aware of. Worth the read. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

it’s becoming increasingly clear the goal of the far right is to defund and buy up every source of reliable information until there is no more objective reality to counter them

So when I left DC for NY I didn't ever expect to live again somewhere without congressional representation - but I'm okay with it this time 🫠

OpenAI is an impressive company and I'm glad it's not going to be consumed by Microsoft. But it's clearly a company; they all are. Advanced AI is going to be owned and controlled by mega corps. As a society, we need to either reconsider or prepare for that future now. /end

AI safety and alignment are important issues, but we should all be *at least* as concerned about big tech, regulatory capture and inequality right now. General or not, disruptive AI is already here, and its current mission is to maximize shareholder value. /11