Benjamin Scott

an unbelievable pickup for us. our defense is already so relentless, Carrington is perfect icing on the cake

Irreplaceable bookstore and great article! Come to the Trylon on a Monday night and say hi!

W.E.B. Du Bois on Robert E. Lee:

“Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.”

If you want to remember how to properly hate GWB, please read REIGN OF TERROR by Spencer Ackerman bookshop.org/p/books/reig...

weird interaction with a student this week. they kept coming up with weird "facts" ("greek is actually a combination of four other languages") that left me baffled. i said let's look this stuff up together, and they said ok, i'll open a search bar, and they opened... ch*tgpt

and i was like "this is not a search bar" and they were like "yes it is, you can search for anything in here" the thing that made me feel crazy is like. every kid that's using this as a browser is getting new BESPOKE false "facts." this isn't "a widespread misconception about X that stems from how it's taught in schools." each individual kid is now hooked into a Nonsense Machine with the "widespread misconception about X" you can start at a baseline. like, ok, in tenth grade we all talk about X thing from history, and that leaves us with some misguided concepts about X, but we can correct that as students get broader understandings of the world but with this, each child is getting UNIQUE wrong facts they are SURE are correct... because they did what we told them to do! they "looked it up"! they got it from somewhere! it's not a kid making up a belief on hearsay and assumption... it's something they think they LEARNED

this kid was extremely combative with me, and i understood why. i was sitting in front of him and telling him that the internet, a computer, technology, all these supposedly authoritative things... were wrong. and that i, one person, was right. he basically *couldn't* believe me. 8 135 3.8K 97K ... stillorangecrushed @stilloranged. 7h he decided that i was simply a teacher who'd made a mistake. he could check it, after all! he could look it up! he could find the REAL facts. i obviously hadn't done that, i was just an adult who'd decided i was smarter than him. hence the defensiveness. like i said: i understood 5 760 3.2K 82K stillorangecrushed @stilloranged. 7h ... it was so fucking rough. i did my best, but i am one person trying to work against a campaign of misinformation so vast that it fucking terrifies me. this kid is being set up for a life lived entirely inside the hall of mirrors

Well this is grim

Texas Won’t Study How Its Abortion Ban Impacts Women, So We Did Since Texas banned abortion, no one has studied the statewide effects on pregnant women experiencing complications. Here’s how we sifted through data on millions of pregnancy hospitalizations and…

Earlier this year, ProPublica found that the sepsis rate in second-trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations increased by more than 50% under Texas’ abortion ban.

Here’s how we did our analysis.
(Published Feb.)

JUST IN: Judge James Boasberg has been assigned to the Signalgate lawsuit.

in like 20 years all these sports betting ads are going to be viewed the exact same way as smoking ads from the 50s

The institutional Democratic Party is guided by an almost pathological level of conflict avoidance in almost every direction. “What can we do to make the least number of people mad?” is just a bankrupt way to operate.

they have to tell this lie about harris running too far left because they're not allowed to say "look, we will not run on the left regardless of electoral performance because our rich donors pay us not to"

Tommy Tuberville blocked military promotions for months while his party was in the minority and he can’t read or write

Mur Murs

lmao, love 2 construct a society where basic factual knowledge of the world is fully controlled by radically politicized corporations

I am hoping this this year's Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl halftime show starts a trend of Pulitzer Prize winners getting that gig, and next year's halftime show has Robert Caro debuting the first chapter of the final volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography which would then hit stores the following day.

if I understand American politics correctly, progressivism is something that requires 60 senate votes to work, while national conservatism doesn’t require any votes at all

This is an argument for civil disobedience, not against it.

German Opposition Gambles With Far-Right on Immigration, and Loses Friedrich Merz and his Christian Democrats broke a political taboo by working with the hard-right Alternative for Germany to toughen rules on immigration. It did not pay off.

In an effort to portray himself and his party as tough on immigration, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the poll-leading Christian Democrats, pushed a series of measures tightening borders and accelerating deportations through Parliament this week. He did so with help from the hard-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD — parts of which have been classified as extremist by German intelligence agencies. On Friday, the gambit ended in a crushing legislative defeat for Mr. Merz, dissent in his own party and jubilant claims of new legitimacy from the AfD, a chain reaction that could rattle Mr. Merz’s comfortable seat at the top of the polls. Mr. Merz’s willingness to rely on support from the AfD, broke a taboo in German politics that had endured since the end of World War II.

Lessons to be learned:

1. Centrists align with far-right to look tough on immigration
2. Centrists gain nothing
3. Far-right wins more power

A bird's-eye view of a former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp showing a wide dirt pathway flanked by parallel rows of barbed-wire fences. Groups of visitors walk along the path, surrounded by the remnants of brick structures and barracks, now reduced to foundations. Green grass contrasts with the somber history of the site, as the path leads toward a guard tower in the distance.

Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. It did not start from gas chambers.

This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.

Auschwitz took time.

this is severe, untreatable, terminal lawyer brain. so many legal academics act like the constitution is not a vessel intended to secure actual human rights and dignity, but a mere matter of intellectual curiosity, meant to be batted around like a cat with a toy

You amazing beautiful and incredible humans. Thank you to everyone who showed up, to everyone who donated hats and time and to everyone who donated online. Today you helped us give out 78 tents in the wake of that fire. Fires are indiscriminately devastating, and we keep going because of you ❤️

genuinely, what does this mean?

When Families Need Housing, Georgia Will Pay for Foster Care Rather Than Provide Assistance In more than 700 cases over five years, Georgia reported inadequate housing as the sole reason for taking a child into foster care, a WABE and ProPublica analysis found. Advocates say it would be chea...

In Georgia, a mom facing eviction reached out to DFCS for help. They offered her nothing. Soon the agency took her kids away because of "inadequate housing."

The state then paid *$6,200 a month* to house her kids in foster care.

One of the most important and infuriating stories I read this year:

on a plane seated next to a flight attendant who's watching flat earth videos on tik tok. not inspiring a lot of confidence

Tweet from Alex Press: “NYPD literally locking arms to protect Amazon’s operations lol” 5-6 NYPD officers locking arms with signs from striking Amazon employees are seen in the background.

This post from @alexnpress.bsky.social is just too on the nose of how law enforcement is used and implemented to protect the capital of the obscenely rich.

BBC complains to Apple over misleading shooting headline Apple's new artificial intelligence features falsely made it seem the BBC reported Luigi Mangione had shot himself.

The AI madness is so far out of control that "Our product wrote a completely false news alert and credited a real news source" doesn't even rate a corporate comment, let alone an ashamed apology and pulling the product www.bbc.com/news/article...

If you believe political power should be wielded to harm those who are not sufficiently loyal, you are not a "bulwark" against the fascists, you are the fascist.

I owe a part of my health, my eyesight, and possibly my life to Scrubs. End.

and had no kidney damage, no nerve damage, and never came close to losing consciousness. I wasn't even underweight! But knowing what can happen to kids who walk around for months and months before diagnosis, 8/