ABrockwell @aebrockwell@social.cleverlibre.org

Parenting is fucking weird.

Days you just want to be over. Followed by days you want to stand still, where you want to freeze time. And you hate yourself for how you felt the other days.

But you need to feed them and it makes you fucking tired. And you see someone else and you go "I have fucking nothing to complain about".

On holidays with them now and it's magic but you want to freeze time. Magic little people you were blessed with. And still a confused child myself in a lot of ways.

“Human progress isn't measured by industry, it's measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege. The boy who died on the river, that boy's value is your value. That's what defines an age. That's what defines a species.” 

— Twelfth Doctor, Thin Ice

Trump is already talking about using the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, if he is reelected, to put down any civil protests. I can’t stress this enough. No matter what you think of Biden, his age, his policies, he is no dictator. He believes in democracy. We cannot let Trump anywhere near the White House again.

From focus on the 'soft voice' of extremist #MikeJohnson to soft-selling #Trump's dictatorial plans to calling killing civilians 'a crater,' something's very wrong with the #media today

It's called cowardice

From Gaza City to Capitol Hill, a cowed media is chronicling the death of democracy in a passive voice

If @willbunch wrote it, you should read it.© & I thread it. 1/...🧵

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/journalism-free-press-gaza-extremism-20231105.html#loaded

Big Tech’s “attention rents” by @pluralistic
“In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, the algorithm was invented to make advertisers richer, and then went on to pervert the news (by incentivizing “clickbait”) and finally destroyed our politics when its persuasive powers were hijacked by Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, and QAnon grifters to turn millions of vulnerable people into swivel-eyed loons, racists and conspiratorialists.”

#bigTech #politics

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-techs-attention-rents-fe97ba3fad90

🔥 This is really important news from @indivisibleteam - it is the first progressive org of its size to do this in the US, and think they will set the model that many others will follow. They deserve our kudos and a warm welcome from the Fediverse for this choice.

If you are at all interested in progressive US politics, it is an immediate must-follow.

cc: @fediversenews @fediversereport @spreadmastodon #Indivisible #TwitterMigration

Microsoft, after laying off human news editors, has been spotlighting false and bizarre stories.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/02/tech/microsoft-ai-news/index.html

“We are Jewish writers, artists, and activists who wish to disavow the widespread narrative that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic.”

A Dangerous Conflation
An open letter
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/a-dangerous-conflation/

#Palestine #Israel #IsraelPalestine

Tuberville’s harm to our military warrants his immediate expulsion.

REMINDER: ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other large trained neural models are NOT "artificial intelligence", they're just stochastic parrots, remixing and regurgitating what they've been fed. There's no theory-of-mind involved, so no understanding: there's no "there" there. (A real live parrot exhibits more intelligence than this.)

Don't call it AI; call it parrot-tech. That way you'll have a better perspective on what it can (and can't) do.

When a newspaper says "tilts right" or "less woke" they mean "racist as a klan rally."

Enough with glad-handing. We have to call things what they are.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/27/elon-musk-twitter-x-anniversary/

Poor Anthony Fauci. The dude dedicated his life to working long hours for immunology research, and made very significant contributions to research and treatments for HIV, SARS, Ebola, influenza and COVID and literally saved tens of millions of lives, and became one of most hated people in america.

What a weird time to be alive.

Hot take: When people say they're going to do a "deep dive", they're usually about to do a brief overview.

If you poison the information pipeline to voters, you can kill democracy — it relies on informed consent of the governed, built on a shared sense of reality. That shared sense is splintering in ways that are tearing apart our societies, often based on widely held delusions. Musk made it way worse.

"In fairness, we should be forcing Mike Pence to carry his campaign to term."

Mrs. Betty Bowers

I'm not big on middle eastern politics but I do think it's important to register my disapproval of the genocide being perpetrated by the Israeli govt. That's not to excuse or support Hamas in any way, but their heinous terrorist acts don't justify the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinians, many of then children. The refusal of many western politicians to condemn this is shameful.

Drew this one just before an insurrectionist was elected Speaker of the House

#uspol #cartoon #politics #fascism #democracy #authoritarianism

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

– George Orwell, 1984

A reminder as we wake up to the news of another mass shooting: One party’s members walk around Congress with AR-15 pins on their lapels. They aren’t there to help solve the gun violence crisis. They are there to help enable it.