Cedar Riener

Like Satchel Paige

One of the big tidal forces of the coming years is that the baseline reliability of things you see on a screen is going to decline.

I think this has not been adequately metabolized.

This is one version, but there are a bunch of them.

I think certain organizing trainings did some of us real psychological damage in teaching us that YOU, ORGANIZER, PERSONALLY have responsibility for going out and making people leverage organized power and ultimately saving the world.

And not for nothing, if a campaign lives or dies by *you personally as an organizer,* it is not a good campaign.

Effective large-scale campaigns (and orgs, and movements) have to be resilient. That means some level of redundancy in leadership, in case of incapacitation, death, arrest, vacation, etc

one of the coolest things about ChatGPT is how you can actually just never use it. you can fill your whole entire life with simply not once using it. it's incredible.

"It is against the TOS to be talked into suicide by our LLM" is possibly the most evil tech bro thing I've ever read

idiot guy: i'm like the wolf i'm stalking my prey alone through the forest and being raw as fuck even if i'm in a group i'm the alpha
actual wolf: i love my friends so much!!! i love to romp and kiss my bros and work together as a family <3 awooo etc etc have you seen the puppies oh my god come see

I once asked a bookseller at a large indie store how many people would have to buy a book for it to get the attention of the store buyer and cause an additional order and they said: Three.

"My mentor always tells me, 'Kim, dogs don’t bark at parked cars." They’re coming after critical race theory, 1619, intersectionality because these ideas mobilized people. They gave them the language to actually articulate what they were seeing with their own eyes," says Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Damn:

Although the views started dropping when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released, it wasn’t until Google launched AI Mode in search that her traffic collapsed, she said. Since then, she’s gone from employing about ten people to letting everyone go. “I’m going to have to find something else to do.”

this is mesmerizing

The minimum wage is not a cure all — we’re asking too much of business Politicians spend too much time uttering cheap rhetoric about cheap labour

Ultimately the minimum wage is a brilliant tool, but it can’t compensate for “we haven’t built any housing”, “we have cut cash transfers to the bone” and “all the third spaces have been cut to pay for social care”.

Gender-affirming care saves lives

In Search of Van Halen's Brown M&Ms Contract riders and the meaning of a modern pop star

* You know how Van Halen had a contract rider demanding bowls of M&Ms with the brown ones removed?

They later claimed that was all a test to make sure venues were reading their contracts. Clever!

BUT WAIT, that claim itself is actually false. I fact-checked it.

Snack Stack exclusive:

Consider the experiences of the last few years. The racial justice movement that peaked in 2020 ended in disappointment and backlash. The Gaza protests provoked intense conflict without delivering clear political or policy victories for their organizers. Maybe most important, Mr. Trump himself is back in the White House, suggesting a futility to opposition and activism among young people who have only ever known him as the central figure in our politics. He first took the oath of office when today's first-year college students were in elementary school. The electoral choices offered to young people are not much better. Given the realities of our dysfunctional two-party system, the only alternative to a Trump-dominated G.O.P. is the Democratic Party, which is dominated by a decadent gerontocracy whose elites were more likely to attend a wedding in the Hamptons than a No Kings protest on the same day.

@brendannyhan.bsky.social is right: young people are reluctant to come to the defense of institutions that have excluded them, ignored them, and crushed their movements

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/o...

Abstract for "The truly isolated: Spatial isolation of advantage in the United States" by Shannon Rieger, Angela Li, and Patrick Sharkey, published at Urban Studies

👉 Our new paper uses daily mobility data to show that spatial isolation is much more common today among those living in advantaged neighborhoods than the converse.

👩🏻‍💻 Lots of massive data wrangling and careful assumptions about mobility data needed - but check it out here! doi.org/10.1177/0042...

I honestly find the MensWearGuy inspirational for what I think a good kind of cultured humanism can look like. This is the sort of presence I would like to have in the world.

He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend.

This reminds me of Cardinal John Henry Newman's book Definition of a Gentleman. I often cite Newman's book because it's so instructive. The term gentleman is so overwrought and frequently abused, but to the degree it means anything at all, I think Newman captures it here:

bad manners. When, as often happens, they break it defiantly in order to shock or embarrass others, they are not necessarily being unchaste, but they are being uncharitable: for it is uncharitable to take pleasure in making other people uncomfortable. I do not think that a very strict or fussy standard of propriety is any proof of chastity or any help to it, and I therefore regard the great relaxation and simplifying of the rule which has taken place in my own lifetime as a good thing. At its present stage, however, it has this inconvenience, that people of different ages and different types do not all acknowledge the same standard, and we hardly know where we are. While this confusion lasts I think that old, or old-fashioned, people should be very careful not to assume that young or ‘emancipated’ people are corrupt whenever they are (by the old standard) improper; and, in return, that young people should not call their elders prudes or puritans because they do not easily adopt the new standard. A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.

Let's move on with the rest of the passage.

Lewis recognizes that modesty raises thorny issues, but he sweeps them aside to focus on the more important spirit. I want to bring your attention to the last sentence here:

Yep, one of the biggest drivers of the elite panic around “wokeness” was the increasing prominence of Black people and particularly Black women in their fields and we’re seeing that coalition rewarded with the targeting of Black workers.

Doctor here. Her story is that of tens of thousands of Americans.
Another example: When Chad Boseman was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer, his 5 yr survival was <14%: he died in 2020. Today his 5 yr survival would be >55%. So tragic.
RFK Jr HALTED PROGRESS.
🤬😭

If you are applying for grad school, I recommend you build time into your process to get feedback on your materials from someone with experience evaluating application documents.

My hot take is that over the next 10 years, we're going to see more emphasis on and investment in the humanities at Ivy League and other fancy schools just as state schools and small privates continue to decimate and even eliminate the humanities.

An account called Godly Nation tweets an AI-generated image of a Latin American family holding a sign. The sign reads "Yes we are undocumented, do you really want to deport us" The tweet got 13k comments, 1.6k retweets, and 8.1k likes. The account is based in Africa

13k comments on one tweet is a massive payout. All of the tweets follow a certain formula, so the content is likely automated using AI technology (e.g., AI generated images and text). Basically running it as a money printing machine. But for those in the US, it translates to low simmering rage.

A Twitter account called Ivanka News tweets an AI image of a young woman wearing Muslim garb. The woman is holding a sign that says "I came here illegally. Should I be deported?" Ivanka News writes: What is your response to this person ?? In the "About this account" tab, it appears the account is based in Nigeria

An account called MAGA scope writes: Who, in your view is the great enemy of the United States? Communism, Islam, Democratic Party, or Satan? The account is based in Nigeria.

An account called MAGA Nadine writes: You go to work and find this. What would you do? The attached pic is an AI image that shows a microwave. The microwave has a sign that says "For religious reasons, this microwave is now making halal food only." The account is based in Morocco.

An account called America First posts an AI image of Tulsi Gabbard. They wrote: How would you rate your trust in Tulsi Gabbard on a scale of 1-10?

Twitter pays people based on engagement (views, retweets, comments, etc). It appears that many MAGA accounts are based abroad and they use AI technology to generate low-effort rage bait.

My guess is that this will get worse as AI tech improves. For instance, fake videos of minorities doing crime.

SIFT for AI: Introduction and Pedagogy Once I thought more deeply about what people had been asking for it made a lot of sense

I know I shared this yesterday already, but it took me a week to write so I'm sharing it again. It answers the question that I've been asked as a well known inventor of an information literacy model -- what does information literacy with ai look like open.substack.com/pub/mikecaul...

I once knew a Federal bank examiner, and one time someone asked him why we had to KEEP inspecting banks over and over. He basically said every new batch of business school grads invents bank fraud from first principles.

Iran president says capital move now a necessity as water crisis deepens Iran’s capital must be moved because the country “no longer has a choice,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Thursday in remarks carried by state media, warning that severe ecological strain has mad...

'Iran’s capital must be moved because the country “no longer has a choice,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Thursday in remarks carried by state media, warning that severe ecological strain has made Tehran impossible to sustain'

#Iran 🇮🇷

And this is not an Ivy League thing, you could go to any random state university or even a community college and take a course with an expert!