ABrockwell @aebrockwell@social.cleverlibre.org

It is striking to me how some people (too many) think that there is something egregious enough that Trump will do to turn off his ardent supporters. There is no such point.

-He stole money intended for children with cancer.
-He had sex with and paid hush money to a woman while his wife was pregnant.
-There was that whole NBC Access Hollywood tape where he was grabbing women by the p***sy
-He has stolen classified documents and lied to investigators and his own lawyers about it
-He refuses to accept the results of a lawful election
-He tried to start an insurrection.

If you were not moved by any of these actions what do people think will move them?

My fundamental point is that we’ve already tumbled into the epistemic abyss – and as the major search-engine products foolishly fold in LLM functionality, it will get much, much worse. Soon it will effectively be impossible to definitively determine the answers to simple questions of fact without sustained investments of investigative time and energy. Above all, as I keep saying, *no assertion of fact that was not committed to physical media prior to the fall of 2022 can be considered reliable.*

Why is AI research so much sexier than education research? Sure it’s cool to study how machines learn but wait until you hear about PEOPLE.

The challenge faced by science in the United States isn’t that scientists are awkward and bad at communication. It’s that we’re beset by propaganda and mass media channels funded by corrupt billionaires to sow confusion.

We need big, generously funded communications channels dedicated to verifiable reality. Scientists who are slightly better at talking isn’t going to cut it.

I feel like Moms for Liberty could call itself a fascist organization on its website, add a swastika to its logo, and announce that none of its members were parents but all were proven to be Aryan for four generations, and the national media would still be calling it "a conservative parents' organization"

Does anyone know what kind of hummingbird this is?

it's genuinely wild how we heard nothing but long winded platitudes on how innovative silicon valley was for like 20 straight years and it's all culminated in a bunch of the dullest, most petulant billionaires imaginable all just copying each other's version of a very basic chat app

The idea that there exists such a thing as 'unskilled labor' is a pernicious one, and we have to reject it - consciously and deliberately.
Any experiment you care to carry out will trivially demonstrate that. Go try digging a ditch or flipping burgers or slinging fries for one shift.
It's not 'unskilled' it's 'undervalued'.

Total student loan debt that would have been erased for millions of Americans: $400 billion

Total cost of the Trump tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy and corporations: $1.9 trillion

This is what I mean when I say the system is rigged.

Cool. So the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a christian woman is a victim who should be protected from a gay couple seeking web design services based in large part on a web query for her services that is fraudulent. The guy cited tells the news he isn’t involved, never contacted the woman, and furthermore is a married straight man. This whole thing was a farce, and SCOTUS jumped on it to save christians from persecution from…a non-existent man. This is the dumbest timeline.

We've all had a day or two to process what the Supreme Court just did.

The battle for our country and for the rule of law, not of oligarchs, lies ahead of us. Let us recommit to it now, and with grave determination resolve to turn this tide back in 2024.

I am ready. Are you?

To recap: Supreme Court justices nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by Senators representing far less than half the country have eliminated abortion rights, green-lighted anti-LGBTQ discrimination, and ended affirmative action.

In one year.

#WritingWonders 6.29 — How would you feel if your book got banned?

The whole idea of banning books fills me with anxiety and rage. It's one thing to prevent your children from reading something, or to persuade your family and friends to choose not to read something, but to presume you know well enough to prevent strangers from being able to choose?

In my experience, actions like banning books are to show solidarity with a group in which an individual wants gain power, or to gain power by preventing other people from thinking for themselves. It disgusts me.

I write stories that push the limits, though I'm no Lenny Bruce or Judy Blume. In a story, you might read passing references to a morning-after "potion" being available from the school nurse, or see race-biased language spoken—purposefully, not gratuitously. If you never encounter the devil, will you truly appreciate a saint?

I always worry about offending people who don't understand cautionary tales in fiction or are incapable of recognizing satire. Worse, I worry about people who do recognize this and want to protect their social position or power base by censorship.

How I'd feel about my book? Until it happens, I really don't know. Wanting to know the reasons, at very least, to fix if I made a mistake. Not happy, at very least.

#BoostingIsSharing
#CommentingIsCool

#fiction #fantasy #sf #sff #sciencefiction #writing #writer #writers #author #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #book #books #Bookbans #bookbanning

me: sorry but i can't sign this NDA

them: why not?

me: i signed an NDA that prevents me from signing NDAs.

them: wow. with who?

me: i'm not allowed to say

If you ask people why we don't see more high-risk science, you get different answers. Researchers tell you that granting agencies won't fund it. Funders tell you that researchers won't propose it.

Many non-artists don't seem to realise that just sitting staring into space is an integral part of the creative process.

#art

Y’all — let’s challenge Joe Rogan and RFK Jr to publish a peer-reviewed paper in JAMA or NEJM showing vaccines are harmful. If they can come up with funding, design a study, pass IRB, recruit participants, collect data, analyze those data, write a paper, get it through peer review, and pay for publication, maybe then we can talk. Otherwise they’re just a bunch of cowards too scared to do research.

If #Putin goes today, who will lead the #Tories and the US #Republican Party?? 🤔

#GOP #tories #ToryCorruption #TorySleaze #Russia

The good news about the Titanic submarine situation is we’re going to start major search and recovery operations and rolling news coverage for each migrant boat incident, right?

Dr. Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine has been attacked all weekend by Musk and Rogan on the bird site. Dr Hotez is a vaccine scientist and a threat to disinformation con artists like the two twits mentioned above. He will have a new book out soon and it is important to spread his book title message far and wide.
#FactsMatter #DisinformationKills #VaccinesWork #Science #Medicine #Canada #USA