Sharon

hey someone ask the Secretary if he understands that Guam and CNMI are US soil

200K or so US citizens between Guam and CNMI, not counting expats elsewhere (or the COFA states, that we have a legal responsibility to defend, well beyond a mutual defense treaty)

I’m gonna say it again, we’re gonna manifest 2027 out of sheer ego.

K-Pop Demon Hunters is legitimately the global cultural phenomenon of 2025 and honestly there are far worse things to be a cultural touchstone this year than a trio of young women fighting literal soul-sucking hegemony through the power of their art

The Picus News broadcasts in Mankind Divided are invariably *less* incendiary than what is routinely shared on Facebook by people I went to school with a decade ago. Or anything posted on Twitter by 2025's leading opinion shaper accounts

its worth noting that there is a convergent theme in many of these dystopias of both predatory companies/authorities that make citizens resentful and afraid coexisting with populist social prejudice against the inorganic

A month later, meeting in Geneva, the incoming secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, presented Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov with an actual red plastic button. Lavrov agreed to put the gimmick on his desk, though only after politely pointing out that it was mislabeled with the Russian word for “overcharge,” not “reset.

lol

The Dragons and the Snakes

Once upon a time Eidos Montreal teamed up with Open Bionics for a Jensen-themed arm to hopefully avert the Eidos Montreal Deus Ex games' own critiques of people being locked into proprietary augmentations for the sake of their career progression, or even having a career

lmao

Trump is now 57 minutes late for his speech but at least we're getting an emo version of Hulk Hogan's theme song

BiDeN was DiSrEsPeCtFuL to the TrOoPs

So the argument is that Congress giving *judges* this power ≠ Congress giving *courts* this power?

Umm…

This is a recurring tactic: use strangely fine distinctions to create logical epicycles which then function as wedges to disrupt settled law. He did the exact same thing by arguing that technical international law principles historically explain (and thus drive) how the Citizenship Clause operates.

Portland is not burning to the ground. It isn’t on fire at all. This is delusional.

It "shouldn't"--they're outside the core rationale, robots and LLMs are not conscious--but it does because humans are not wholly rational (or even all that rational), we have to internalize our moral constraints at the level of feeling and perception too

I'd like to think that we can have a world where people can be mean to, say, the droid army of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and not to real people. That's the big goal I aim for.

seriously what the fuck does this mean

this single video 180ed me on the "it's being used as an N-word analogue" argument (it IS, despite what people say - come on, someone there says "what's up my clanka" let's not be dense here)

Astounding that the weakest of the Deus Ex series, which was pilloried at the time for using Augs as stand-ins for the treatment of migrants in the EU, ends up at least somewhat prescient. Dumb Timeline confirmed.

That is why, though Kant is wrong about nonhuman animals (nonhuman animals have rights), Kant is right that lacking rights is not enough for you to be justified in treating something cruelly. Cruelly treating something with apparent humanlike characteristics undermines the norm

It's not enough to ask how far the core rationale for a norm goes. You also have to ask: when you operationalize this norm, when you turn it to something psychologically real as a constraint on behavior, how do you sustain and reinforce that

In our day, Pope Francis has written of the impacts on the environment and society of the dominant techno-economic paradigm: It can be said that many problems of today’s world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society. The effects of imposing this model on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of the environment, but this is just one sign of a reductionism which affects every aspects of human and social life. We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build

"judges, not courts"

what the fuck do you mean, wurman.

The idea that Congress gave "judges" but not "courts" the power to do something is total gibberish.

"judges but not courts"

Allowing POTUS a couple of bad-faith bites at the apple with the armed forces on American soil before we determine the constitutionality of his conduct is anathema to our constitutional tradition. Prof. Wurman is wrong about the judicial power, but he's also abandoning our most cherished values.

Anyone who knows even the basics of Anglo-American constitutionalism between 1685 and 1789 would tell you that the abuses of a standing army were a significant concern for leading legal minds and the public at large.

The idea that courts have some special deference to the *domestic* deployment of military personnel despite an entire statutory regime is absurd. The Founders would have rejected the idea that courts must take a back seat and wait for the public to be injured before tort law would protect liberties.

The weird snipe at @stevevladeck.bsky.social aside, Ilan misses the entire point that even the framers accepted the general idea of judicial oversight re: the president's deployment of military forces. Congress enacted a statutory regime. The president is bound by it. Courts have equitable powers.