drew beck

Sarah Kendzior • 4m I've been suspended from BlueSky. I don't know why. I wasn't online much today, and the last things I posted were excerpts from my substack newsletter articles. The suspension followed without explanation. It seems there's a crackdown. If you enjoy my work and want to make sure you can access it, subscribe! It's free - I would never paywall in times of peril — and voluntary paying subscribers keep it going. It would be great to have your support at this time. Thanks!

In a rare case of Substack notes usefulness, I just learned that Sarah Kendzior (author of They Knew and a brilliant writer) got bounced from Bluesky. What the hell? new @sarahkendzior.bsky.social

It’s ACAB even after we end qualified immunity

Stuart Hall took up cultural studies cuz “I didn’t think life was purely economically determined... I lived my life as an argument with Marxism.” But in its challenge to economic reductionism, cultural studies “sort of forgot that there was an economy at all.” We need to understand these together!

Is there more to the quote than what’s in the article?

Here’s the entire quote. Nothing about “sold out the cause”:

“There’s no ‘scourge of antisemitism’ in NYC. Acts like these, while reprehensible, are often weaponized to justify Zionist narratives and repression of Palestine solidarity. Mamdani shouldn’t be validating this framing.”

Nothing in the article says that the group thinks he’s “sold out the cause”. That’s your own shit.

They really stuck the landing on this one.

what if we’ve been pronouncing “coop” wrong and chicken coops are actually chicken co-ops and all the chickens are partial owners and have lil ownership meetings inside about hay distribution and what not

Figuring out how to navigate between feelings of safety and actual safety is crucial. I don’t think we know how yet.

IMO writing like this is for other men; women as readers and as people worthy of respect doesn’t enter into the writer’s process at all.

I know the skies used to be filled with birds that are now extinct.

I know that change can happen and that it is usually permanent. That is the real status quo.

What we do matters. It’s counter intuitive but often inaction leads to change and it takes effort and energy to maintain stasis.

We have friends everywhere

Now comes the even harder work. But for tonight, let's celebrate.

[Exit Clown.]

Zohran Got New Yorkers to Hope. What’s the Plan to Deliver? Organizers who brought him to the verge of victory are looking ahead to the challenges of democratic governance.

He knows

hammerandhope.org/article/mamd...

10k/day to constantly validate your persecution complex …

Realism, hope and strategy.

Inject it into my veins

it gets tiring to keep explaining what it means to be poor to people.

it is not that poor people don’t know that cooking is cheaper:

cooking costs time. it costs pots and pans. it costs a working stove and your utilities on. it costs you’ve been on your feet all day and your babies are tired.

Stuart Hall said intellectuals should speak truth to power to a wide(r) audience.

But "to speak it, however, in its full complexity, never to speak it in too simple a way because the folks won't understand because, you know, then they will understand but they'll get it wrong, which is much worse."

A Shark Tank environment: people of modest means present ideas to billionaires who decide which one is most valuable to their portfolio.

Checks out.

"There's a case to be made that Al isn't just a bubble, or even a huge bubble, but something like the platonic ideal of a tech bubble."

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”

Entirely rage bait!! I do know folks who actually use it and my guess is once you’re spending time there the algo doesn’t just show that stuff. But man that initial experience is so bad

It’s still not clear how this pencils out in any way. Inference is expensive and doesn’t seem to be getting cheaper on the scale of “feed every tweet into the LLM”.

IMO the ability for musk to modify the heuristics on ideological grounds is probably a huge driving force.

Laws are for other people

Smothies

Yes 100. Institutionalism at its finest; when the perpetuation of the thing is more important than the ostensible goals of the thing. Principles are handwaved away: yeah yeah we all want that but it doesn’t matter if we’re not in power.

In New York these would be the same store

“Personal experience is a great place to generate hypotheses but it is a lousy place to test them.” - Melissa Harris Perry