chad black 💚

In addition to this danger... one of the LLM's most insidious effects its the ease with which it appears to offer users an escape from freedom, an escape from the burdens of freedom.

Witt's AI is the functional equivalent of the Satanic panic's demons. Not real, but the fantasy creates devastating real world effects.

And if you read Stephen Witt's replies in the comments, you can clearly see he's already fallen for it. He is the danger.

Opinion | The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World

Everything about this article misses the actual danger of AI... which is redefining what it can do as intelligence and forfeiting our own humanness out of some psychoanalytically fucked up relationship to machines. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o...

Are law school professors and lawyers going through the kind of emotionally painful deconstruction we usually associate with ex-evangelicals, as SCOTUS and the administration repeatedly violates sacred assumptions about The Law?

Memo to Bari Weiss Re: CBS News: You’re doomed Bari Weiss has sold her company, The Free Press, to manage the decline of broadcast news at CBS. How many ways can it go wrong?

please read my memo www.theverge.com/business/793...

This, but for me it's specifically cream cheese icing.

We want to highlight the release of Katharine Gerbner's groundbreaking book, Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica. Duke University Press, 2025.

Pete Hegseth is exhibit A that defense against symbolic castration does nothing but expose castration.

It’s this kind of thing that is a reminder that the designers behind proquest’s UI have clearly never done original academic research or taught using books.

There’s also BJJ -> Bolsonarismo in a broader scale.

YouTube video by tomtscotland Let The Mystery Be - Iris DeMent H.Q.

Apropos of literally nothing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlao...

YouTube video by tomtscotland Let The Mystery Be - Iris DeMent H.Q.

Apropos of literally nothing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlao...

Wallace Shawn as Vizzini in The Princess Bride with the text "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line."

Never go against a cycling fan when PEDs are on the line.

Thanks, Peter!

Thanks!

Revisiting some old classes I taught, and this is still my favorite website I ever made for a class... The Social History of the Bicycle chadblack.net/499F2017/

“Klein’s interest here isn’t honesty but flattery. It shows Klein isn’t writing about Kirk at all. He’s writing about himself and saying, ‘I’m doing politics the right way because I’m lauding someone who disagrees with me.’”

Though it’s traumatic for me to bring this up, I was targeted by a group allied with Turning Point USA in 2018, with the help of Tucker Carlson on Fox. My home address circulated online and I got death threats. 1/

It is disciplinarity that makes this kind of debate possible, and that the other kind of debate wants to repudiate.

It's not that political implications of historical arguments should be avoided or disavowed, or even celebrated. Rather, its that the charged nature of this kind of historiographic debate is always constrained or contextualized by the standards and ethics of the discipline.

We don't only follow the developing arguments around convivencia, but how over time historians bring new questions, theories, and sources to this protracted arc of competing interpretation. This is an inherently political process, in that "history" is always historicized in the present.

The fault lines of the debate over convivencia, since the concept was coined by Americo Castro, aren't about provocative takes, but serious consideration of the meaning of violence, the nature of toleration, and the historical contingencies that brought religious groups to close proximity in Spain.

For example, I'm teaching a course on The Spanish Inquisition now, which began with the debate over "convivencia" in medieval Iberia. There are serious debates over the meaning/applicability of the term, but not over whether or not there were pogroms in the 1390s.

A good thread. History is a discipline that advances on "debates in the literature" -- but that kind of debate is not what is associated with the term in the bad faith "free speech" discourse at all. It would be a category error to imagine them the same.

I mean really, who gives a shit what it means “to be a man”? You love your partner or your kids? Great, you should, and it shouldn’t be because of some sense that you do that because you are A MAN.

Alienation is constitutive of subjectivity. We could posit “non-toxic masculinity” as a kind of harm reduction, but no masculinity will close the void. And it’s that failure itself that draws people into the uglier side of things because it promises a kind of wholeness.

Now that it’s likely the shooter was radicalized into right wing ideologies online we get to have another round of, if only the left advertised a competing positive masculinity! Which is exhausting, and a disavowal of the dead end of vesting identity in gender in the first place.

You made it!

Or rather, the rationality of electrical generation in the US is the rationale of protecting utility profits and dividends.