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The Cloister and the Starship - by Niall Ferguson
The Cloister and the Starship - by Niall Ferguson
An extreme take (and I detect some areas where Niall and I super disagree) but an interesting idea to exercise the brain through avoiding tech completely.
To quote Robert Sternberg, a psychology professor at Cornell University, “The greatest worry in these times of generative AI is not that it may compromise human creativity or intelligence, but that it already has.”
·uatx.substack.com·
The Cloister and the Starship - by Niall Ferguson
Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show | Reuters
Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show | Reuters
Sure feels like they're a business that just makes everything worse.
Together, they reflect Meta’s efforts to quantify the scale of abuse on its platforms – and the company’s hesitancy to crack down in ways that could harm its business interests.
But ongoing layoffs at Meta were hindering enforcement. A planning document for the first half of 2023 notes that everyone who worked on the team handling advertiser concerns about brand-rights issues had been laid off.
·reuters.com·
Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show | Reuters
Literary Hub » Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
Literary Hub » Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
Some great turns of phrase in here. Academics and journalists (at least at NYT) have a completely different pursuit of truth
And so, after consulting with friends a little more media-seasoned than I, and exchanging some emails with the reporter laying out what I was and wasn’t interested in speaking about, I agreed to an interview. I did this because, in ways you might think I’d have outgrown by now, I’m a fucking idiot.
The author refers to the group as “conservative-leaning,” which, ok. I guess you could say Latvia was a little antisemitic-leaning during the war.
Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two “sides,” or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling “appraisal” surgically excised.
relative evidentiary authority
·lithub.com·
Literary Hub » Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
Dick Cheney Departs The World He Made | Defector
Dick Cheney Departs The World He Made | Defector
A terrible person exceeded only by those he inspired.
Along the way, he played white America's (and mainstream media's) Islamophobia and bloodlust like arcade joysticks, to rearguard each next extension of authoritarianism and paint the administration's critics as traitors.
At its heart, American conservatism is a fantasy. It's a vision of a world too evil to be saved or cared about, and fearsome enough to justify any and every impulse toward cruelty and violence that a person might have. A world resolutely unworthy of knowing, except as a danger. A world in which you will always need a gun, and to shoot somebody with it, instead of just lusting for both.
·defector.com·
Dick Cheney Departs The World He Made | Defector
Inside one American’s year-long attempt to date alt-right men
Inside one American’s year-long attempt to date alt-right men
This sounds like it was incredibly risky.
I asked every man I messaged with about his relationship expectations and family values. Each seemed to know exactly what he was looking for in a wife and articulated it before we even met. She was typically an unvaccinated Christian white woman willing to quit her job and commit to homeschooling children. Her hobbies might include “tending to a garden” and “feeding the animals”. (I’m a vaccinated white woman who works and loves exercising at 6 a.m. and going to spas on Friday nights.)
“It’s about knowing your role in nature. It’s undesirable for women to be too independent. As a man, I want to take care of you, and I believe in that biology. The liberal women I’ve dated emasculate men with their aggressive energy.”
a lot of my dates seemed to express that they felt lost without a solid definition of what a man is
·cosmopolitan.com·
Inside one American’s year-long attempt to date alt-right men
In Which I Have a Thought on Taylor Swift and Her Latest Album
In Which I Have a Thought on Taylor Swift and Her Latest Album
Interesting comparison to his own haters.
at a certain point of notability (or notoriety) it doesn’t matter what you put out, the range of opinions about it will be so wide and scattershot that anyone looking will be able to pick and choose among them to paint a picture of wild creative success or looming artistic doom
·whatever.scalzi.com·
In Which I Have a Thought on Taylor Swift and Her Latest Album