I thought I would switch things up for the new year and do the BlueSky round-up first.
January was a month of overblown plagiarism charges and way too much attention paid to a few Ivy League universities in the midst of much more important topics that get no or almost no attention. It was the month of the Supreme Court hearing on the Chevron deference case (which I already posted about here and here), but I missed a few comments, I think so those are included.
And it started with a few pure New Year's thoughts, so those are nice.
The posts are in reverse chronological order, except images which I often move up or down to get better visual balance. Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.
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The goal of most AI companies is not to solve your problems, or even to replace your workforce. The goal is to undermine and strip out your institutional knowledge and customizable tools and replace them with an inscrutable blob that you can't do your job without, that you have to pay them to use. Microsoft's consulting business exists to absorb your business inextricably into their Azure Cloud and OpenAI ecosystem so that you can't do their job without them, and you'll pay whatever license fee they ask. That's how they became a $3T company.
@scoopsstp.bsky.social
A real possibility that in my lifetime basically all cultural and media production — news, movies, video, audio — will basically become worthless as a market product.
Chris Hayes
These right wing billionaires just been stewing in their resentment since university admins did anti-racist trainings in 2020. It's actually useful for them to go mask off.
Eli Friedman
Columbia professor Ira Katzelson told the story of a lunch he had with Irving Kristol where Kristol spent a bunch of time laying out all the things he'd done to help his son Bill's education and career. Bemused, Katzelson asked Kristol what he thought of affirmative action. "I'm opposed to it," Kristol replied. "It subverts meritocracy." Plutocrats in a nutshell.
Kurt McMahon @sanjuro89.bsky.social
Beijing had no metro in 1970. Its subway system is now 5 times as long as Chicago's L
Yonah Freemark
The answer to every story about elite college admissions is to make sure every American has access to a low price high quality public education within a reasonable drive of their hometown. The wild thing is we mostly achieved this. Then destroyed it. I'm not so much worried about Harvard as worried about Penn State Erie, UW Whitewater, SUNY Cortland
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social
Thinking about how the framing of every mental illness as an individual issue rather than a societal failing very neatly reinforces just about every social cause of disparate suffering and absolves perpetrating systems of their full and continued culpability.
happify
I think people are unfamiliar with — and would probably be unsettled by — the amount of annual construction we pretty much need to clear our housing deficit
@profmusgrave.bsky.social
once tried, to no avail, to make this point on tiktok. the national deficit for housing units is somewhere north of 3.8 million, meaning, we'd have to build at least that in a year to stabilize things.
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social
3400 units in a 3 million person metro area is a rounding error, especially when San Diego is adding more new jobs downtown than housing units
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social
What you’re seeing with anti-trans laws, MeToo backlash, and abortion bans is that the right is creating an impossibly narrow definition of a woman—cis, pregnant, healthy, feminine, subservient—and subjecting those who fall outside it to both criminalization and violent hostility from vigilantes. This girl not looking cis enough for some random asshole at her game, E Jean Carroll getting death threats for naming a rape as a rape, Brittney Watts getting arrested because a nurse thought she wasn’t sufficiently upset about her miscarriage: these are all the same project.
Moira Donegan
It doesn't matter how many arrows, lines and bikes you paint on a
street, if people don't feel safe riding it's just not good enough:
Tom Flood
Trader Joe's is joining Elon Musk and SpaceX in arguing that the very existence of the National Labor Relations Board, which is prosecuting cases against both companies, is unconstitutional
Emissary Of Night
well shit, I do like Trader Joe's frozen croissants but I guess I'll be foregoing those
Tom Tomorrow
You know what we got out of the Gilded Age? Unions. That's what we got. Before unions, before labor relations, fed-up employees went to the company owner's house with torches and weapons and dragged the man out. Everyone really wants the NLRB.
Sigrid Ellis
For those keeping track, the Biden administration just stopped a dirty fossil fuel project that would make 20 times more pollution than Willow. Oh... and 16 OTHER dirty projects. President Biden is a climate leader. And Trump? He's an arsonist.
Leah Stokes
"Premature tire wear has become an unexpected black mark on [EVs] promoted as a green climate-friendly option to gas-gulping cars." "Tire wear" = tire pollution, which is deadly to fish and may harm humans. Solution: Lighter, less overpowered EVs
David Zipper
How many thriving newspapers should a nation of 350 million people have?
Eric Roston
The idea that creating clean-energy jobs in red states will make Republicans vote for Democrats was concocted by people who haven't much studied the way the media and culture guide behavior. People don't always vote on the basis their economic interests:
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social
When you see stats about an increase in people identifying as trans or being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, resist the urge to see it only from the perspective of people who'd prefer those numbers be zero. Every day a trans person is free to be themselves and get the care they need is a good day.
Gillian Branstetter
ursula k leguin: would you torture a child if it resulted in utopia?
united states of america: we shouldnt expect a reward for torturing the child. we should torture the child because it is the right thing to do
@cursedsynth.bsky.social
Sort of feels like between the massive contractions in journalism, publishing and the humanities, we're just setting all our most important stores of cultural and historical memory on fire.
Ned Resnikoff
One of the fundamental principles of systems thinking is that healthy systems require timely and accurate information flows. I think about that as lying escalates, twitter withers, journalists are laid off, and the information stream is polluted by low quality AI products.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social
Have to imagine it’s a total coincidence that authoritarianism is growing as the long plan to destroy education and journalism is coming to fruition and decades of planned alienation, exploitation, and austerity have already wrought unbelievable damage.
Jared Yates Sexton
it seems like you could solve a lot of problems simultaneously by just making it impossible to make spoofed anonymous phone calls entirely. i don't really see what the legitimate reason for being able to do this is. both swatting and the thing where my elderly parents are inundated by 500 spam phone calls every day trying to rob them
Michael Tae Sweeney
"January thaw" is such a cute term for civilization-altering climate change.
Eric Holthaus @ericholthaus.bsky.social
A system tells you what its values are by what it does not what it says. Expansion of fossil fuels during a climate crisis documented during almost three decades of COPs and IPCC reports that's an indicator of values in fact versus espoused values.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social
Finally went to drive the car after a whole lot of biking around lately, and it greeted me with more warning lights than I’ve ever seen before, including some new ones I haven’t. Good stuff. My favorite one is “steering wheel surprise!”
Alex @mplsalex.bsky.social
A Texas school district superintendent defended the continued suspension of a Black student over his locs in a full-page newspaper ad: “Being an American requires conformity with the positive benefit of unity"
Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social
That's some quiet part out loud shit right there
Alisha Diane Galloway @adgwatches.bsky.social
Ok, it feels weirdly like there's stronger penalties for riding without paying fare than there are for running red lights in your car.
amityf @amityf.bsky.social
Republicans found out a while ago that if you're extreme enough, people will read an accurate description of your policies and dismiss it as obviously unhinged partisan propaganda.
EssayWells @essaywells.bsky.social
When you find yourself scolded for tone, you know you must be right on the substance.
Dallas Taylor
Decorum requires that you are not allowed to accurately describe racism
@sababausa.bsky.social
I started out my career as an office temp who did cartoons on the side, and now I am going to finish it out as a newsletter-management specialist who does cartoons on the side.
Tom Tomorrow
A conspiracy theorist who blamed the government for forest fires admitted that he started 14 himself.
Climate Tracker @climate.skyfleet.blue
[This is the] distilled pure example of the basic storyline of our times.
Eric Roston @eroston.bsky.social
There's almost no stakes involved in DEI trainings. We're talking about adults sitting through a seminar they barely pay attention to. Some trainings are radical to the left and some are radical to the right but they objectively don't matter all that much. Why have we spent years talking about them? Imagine a left-wing media apparatus that put megachurches on the agenda the way Rufo has relentlessly amplified DEI trainings. This country produces a shitload of deranged right-wing rhetoric — from people far more influential than Robin D'Angelo — but it's not treated as news.
Michael Hobbes
Everything else aside, Trump also doesn’t seem to understand that the immunity cops, prosecutors, and judges get is from civil liability. *No one* currently gets immunity from criminal liability. He’s inventing an entirely new form of immunity, and asking SCOTUS to endorse it.
Radley Balko
One of the creepiest things about modern GOP culture is the FIRM belief that families should exist as fully independent units, and your neighbors — if you are so unlucky as to have them — should be viewed as dangerous competitors you may have to fend off with semi-automatic weapons.
Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social
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They've just announced a new Manhattan Institute fellowship for young right-wing journalists to "besiege the Marxist institutions." Fine. Meanwhile, we're yelling at our young people because they're reluctant to vote for Dems. Where are young progressives' fellowships? How are we supporting them? There's a new right wing think tank fellowship to raise up dozens of propagandists... while we tell young people on our side of the aisle to "vote better," "be more respectful," and "don't be so loud." Completely unserious.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social
This is amazing: Tesla is telling people they have to literally spotlessly clean their cybertrucks daily otherwise it will corrode
Thomas Fuchs
Every single industry besides finance, weapon-making, and energy is being consumed, liquidated, destroyed, and stripped for spare parts. It doesn’t have to be like that and it shouldn’t either. We can fight this. We have to fight this.
Jared Yates Sexton
Got my new flag today!
Micheal Foley in Saint Paul @foleymo.bsky.social
So much anti-trans propaganda assumes trans-ness is a thing people are being led towards which ignores every social, cultural, economic, and legal barrier that begs, prods, and forces you away from being trans. If anything, we should be asking cis people if they're just doing as they're told.
Gillian Branstetter
Have you noticed that being a Nazi, doing a Nazi salute, praising Hitler, and associating with people who do all of the above are no longer scandals for anyone right of center? That is one of the largest signifiers of how close to fucking oblivion we are.
@vpsreports.bsky.social
Yeah, U.S. policy here is crap and aid should be cut off to Israel until it stops killing civilians, but the position isn't "Yes, yes, kill them all!" Not to mention that there's not a single possible U.S President who would have a different policy right now, unfortunately.
Parker Molloy
since capturing the Court, conservatives have stopped discussing its institutional role altogether. when they viewed it as liberal they would often discuss how it interferes with democracy, and floated theories about the limits of Court power. now they treat it like it’s the corrective hand of God.
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social
i have pretty much been fully convinced that the right way to look at the trajectory of the roberts court is that it is engaged in a long-term, expansive and unprecedented judicial power grab
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social
the martian flag from The Expanse is so good that any eventual martian colony that inevitably has a violent rebellion against its capitalist overlord should just adopt it:
@wormwitch.bsky.social
Here are my thoughts re: Chevron. I wasted three years of law school learning about precedent, standing, actual harm, separation of powers, judicial restraint, and actual legal reasoning, when I should have been learning "find out what billionaires want and work backwards."
Norbizness
“congress doesn’t have the right to delegate authority to executive branch agencies” would be a radical rewriting of the norms of american government stretching back to the 1790s and it would have the not-incidental effect of concentrating power into the hands of the judiciary
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social
And so is the idea that the courts have more technical expertise than people hired into administrative bodies? Have people MET judges???
Tressie @tressiemcphd.bsky.social
Well, it's much easier to bribe a judge than it is a whole federal agency. It's all about efficiency.
Jeff Schult
i rag on this place sometimes but i just had an interaction on tiktok where someone insisted that we need the electoral college because urban dwellers might start to treat rural americans like white Americans treated black Americans under jim crow. so yeah, it could be crazier here
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social
It’s the biggest tell that people acknowledge structural injustice, but can’t possibly conceive of actual equality. That in their minds any attempt to change the current system could only mean turning injustice back upon themselves
Curtis Wilde
It is my pre-existing belief (so you might want to be wary of my analysis) that models of revenue sharing, shifting core curriculum requirements, and the establishment of undergraduate business majors lie at the heart of the destruction of the modern university. Today's case: U Chicago. If you look at all the "death of history" or "death of liberal arts" essays published in major outlets lately, you rarely see close analysis of core requirements and revenue models. Because they are boring. But it's where the money is, so that's where the bank robbers go. I can accept paying engineers a higher salary than history profs. I cannot accepting paying marketing professors a higher salary than history profs. If marketing profs want to go work in industry and make more money, the door is that way. For example, as best as I can tell, the annualized starting salary of assistant professors in the Booth School of Business is approximately 350 percent that of assistant professors in the humanities, a gap of nearly $250,000 (exclusive of research support, which would magnify the gap, and noting that junior faculty in Booth teach half the load of junior faculty in the humanities). More importantly, women earn less than men at every rank at UChicago: the gap is $21,000 at the assistant professor level and more than doubles—to $44,000—at the rank of full professor. This is known to University leadership. It is a feature and not a flaw of the current operation that the comfort of some is financed by the discomfort of the disfavored. But these gaps are elective
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social
Learned from Jane Mayer's DARK MONEY that this was done by design... billionaires poured tons of money into b-schools and econ departments that would support their views. And, as recent events have shown us, they've now come for the entire academy.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social
In my opinion, not enough people know that there are scores of giant, 25,000-year-old circular structures made of mammoth bones on the Russian/Ukrainian plain:
Charles C. Mann @charlescmann.bsky.social
one of the most insidious falsehoods we are taught in school is that america was a democracy before the civil rights movement. indeed, we are an extraordinarily young (and therefore fragile) multiracial demcoracy-ish-esque
Sean Kennedy @publichealth.bsky.social
As an aside: Even if we had a judiciary that wasn’t full of GOP ideologues, the court’s new obsession with history would be a bad, dumb judicial approach because judges aren’t trained historians and are in over their heads having to historical work to decide cases.
russms.bsky.social @russms.bsky.social
Nearly 40% of LGBTQ elders are chronically ill; more than half feel socially isolated from family and community. These crises are unfolding within a broader collapse: the nursing home industry is in disarray, and minority groups are especially vulnerable.
The Baffler
The nuclear family is the only care network our government will
support—whether for children, the disabled, or seniors—and this punishes
anyone who falls outside of it
Gillian Branstetter
Part of growing up is realizing you don't hate everything; you love everything, you're just disappointed in it
Eric Roston
Remember last year when CNN invited Trump for a town hall shortly after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll? And he used the platform to mock Carroll as the handpicked audience members laughed and laughed? That is my lasting impression of a Trump rally.
Gillian Branstetter
New CBS News poll: nearly half of all voters, and the vast majority of Republicans, agree that immigrants entering the US illegally “poison the blood” of the country:
David S. Bernstein
“Where light traffic knits a community together, heavy traffic rips it apart.” –Donald Appleyard.
Curbing traffic leads to a more compact and attractive urban form; enabling active and sustainable travel, and supporting spontaneous social and economic activity at street level.
Melissa & Chris Bruntlett @modacitylife.bsky.social
Ending Car Culture in media: stop expressing distance in time travel via car, as in “A small town 1 hour south of Detroit,” from a story this morning on NPR. If something is 65 miles away, say 65 miles.
Dan Marshall @danmarstp.bsky.social
Presidents can't end birthright citizenship. They'd need to amend the Constitution, and in order to do that, you need two-thirds of both houses of Congress and 75% of the states have to ratify it.
There's no path forward for this that isn't autocratic. It's nonsense and it is offensive.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social
From “technically it isn’t fascism” to “technically it wasn’t an insurrection” to “technically it’s not a genocide,” our intellectuals are really making a bold show of their commitment to sophistry and semantics above any meaningful confrontation with the realities of their time.
Moira Donegan @moiradonegan.bsky.social
Normalization: “The term ‘accident’ has normalized road deaths to the extent that it is difficult to create buy-in for action... When crashes are framed as accidents, people view road carnage as a fact of life, a cost society pays for the ‘luxury’ of travelling by automobile.”
Post-Denialism: “Engineers know wider roads lead to higher speeds and longer crossing distances, both of which result in more deaths. Yet corporations lobby for wider roads, smoother surfaces, and other speed-inducing measures, under the smokescreen of ‘improvement projects.’”
Melissa & Chris Bruntlett @modacitylife.bsky.social
Why do people let economists talk about poor countries this way? Malthusianism. I was lucky in my human rights career to spend a decent amount of time in Zimbabwe and nothing about it resembles the 14th century. Zimbabwe is poor due to a number of easily identifiable modern trends, not 1300s-style:
Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social
I also find it astounding how the GOP has largely succeeded in brushing the whole “the January 6th insurrectionists repeatedly said they intended to kill members of Congress, had the tools required to do so, and came horrifically close to doing it” thing under the table
Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social
I feel like we haven’t fully reckoned publicly with the fact that people in the Capitol were looking for specific members of Congress, calling their names, finding their offices. What does a column like this suppose would have happened if they’d found them?
Linda Holmes
It sure has been fun to watch "Ashley Babbit" trending cyclically on Twitter every few months to reinforce the narrative that she was an innocent little girl who was killed for NO REASON in a situation where no other lives were at risk.
Edward Carney
Baseline:
Tom Flood
“Republicans work exclusively for wealthy fanatical religious creeps who want to control your bodies and your lives through punishment and pain.” Put that message on the airwaves in every media market. Use the 100s of thousands of real-life stories proving that it’s true.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social
Look around. Does it *feel* like a meritocracy?
David Roberts @volts.wtf
desantis ranting about “disney making kids trans” is a good example of why this particular political position is a total electoral loser. he sounds like a freak.
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social
Sunlight is not the best disinfectant. I personally quite like bleach. But fire also works well. Whiskey isn't bad if you're trying to disinfect your insides. Lots of options. Sunlight ain't one of them.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social
I somehow always had the idea that if someone were to manage to ruin this country, they would have to have some level of intelligence and creativity to do it.
300ps.bsky.social
When trans rights is described as a "wedge issue," it's important to note the wedge being driven isn't between liberal and conservative voters but between moderate Republicans and their far-right primary opponents. What we do with our own bodies is an obsession on the right and nowhere else.
Gillian Branstetter
A Florida Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would make it defamation to accuse someone of racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia
Phil Lewis
Truth as a defense is a thing. Happy discovery!
Citizen E
Proud co-owner of a CO2 meter and it's been fascinating to bring with to different places. So far, the public locations with the highest CO2, by far, have been grocery stores. A single data point at a high traffic time, but 1910ppm at one TJ's.
happify
we’re 5 DAYS into 2024 and *125* anti-trans bills have been filed across
the US. do cis people know this map? this is risk for *adult* trans
people across america. FL is already “do not travel.” i must have a few
cis followers. please share this. consider if you could live in a
country like this:
jamie quinn @threnody.bsky.social
Trump didn't just call and ask state officials to fix the election, he called and called and called and pressed and pressed and pressed. The New York Times published a complete timeline.
Eric Roston
It should not go unnoticed that the very same billionaires conducting the Plagiarism Crusade against non-white, female university presidents have their entire life savings tied up in a Plagiarism Machine.
Ben Collins
"Declining trust" isn't some universal, nationwide problem we all need to do our part to address. The majority of Republicans think that climate change is fake, abortions should be illegal and the last election was stolen. It's extremely reasonable to distrust people like that! It's such a bizarre understanding of personal morality, the idea that it's up to me to endlessly extend good faith to people who think I'm a groomer just so the country as a whole can address its (fake) "polarization" problem. It's immoral to ask people to do this!
Michael Hobbes
conservatives seem to have replaced “CRT” with “DEI” as a catch-all vessel for their complaints about the feeling they get when someone makes them think about racism
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social
Trump running again after he should have been banned from politics forever is going to make 2024 like one long slow motion end-of-the-horror-movie jump scare
Tom Tomorrow
The acting president of the University of Minnesota was formerly the CEO of Hormel. I’m sure he’s a very nice man. Blue state public university leadership and trustees are participants in the degradation of American higher education, when we need them to resist those forces.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social
Elon Musk's specific point is xenophobia on its own is insufficient to prevent this "collapse"--you also have to boost birth rates by banning abortion, limiting contraception, and punishing queers for leading lives that don't center reproduction. This is what's meant when they rail against "gender ideology"
Gillian Branstetter
A new 5-year Belgian study shows the BIG impact of increasing vehicle weight on road deaths and injuries. When a person on a bike or walking is hit by a pick-up, the risk of serious injury increases by 90% compared to a car. The risk of death goes up by 200%.
Brent Toderian
Trying to keep score, where are we now... Ah yes: ...then they came for the university presidents, but I didn't protest, for I am not a university president...
Eric Roston
At some point we just need to acknowledge that nothing will satisfy other than the near-total resegregation of elite and governing institutions in the United States.
Adam Serwer
I just get tired of how relentlessly car-centric everything is. Like the little things. Waiting for a massage appointment but she's finishing up with a client and can't buzz me in the building. Suggested I wait in my car. So, I'm standing in the cold
Hecate @danademaster.bsky.social
the ability of conservatives to invent stories and then create constant news coverage in ways that serve their agenda has been a constant, for me, since whitewater. Which is when I started paying attention. I'm sure @sethcotlar.bsky.social has already posted a dozen older examples.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social
In a little over two decades we've seen the most elite media in the country fall for the Iraq War lies, for James O'Keefe's bullshit and for Rufo and somehow they retain their credibility (ok not with you or me but with many). and of course not only "fall for" but actively fucking promote
Tom Tomorrow
Entering the public domain like a boss:
Chris Steller
Something I learned making You're Wrong About is that mobs rarely come after women and minorities for nothing. There's alway some minor transgression that gives the far right an excuse — and elite institutions cover for appeasing them.
Michael Hobbes
The obvious answer will be to never hire an academic for a university administrative post ever again. No one ever accuses a hedge fund manager of plagiarism.
Convolver
remember: Climate Change IS Geoengineering
Build Soil Plant Chestnuts
Seeing some takes that are like "Rufo isn't an evil genius" and like one of the biggest things people are going to have to understand about the coming years is that wielding power and harming others rarely requires cleverness or intelligence to do.
Michael Tae Sweeney
Mormons are no longer in the majority *in Utah* according to new research. The trends aren’t in their favor either.
Hemant Mehta
Kamakura, Japan. Chocolate-covered bananas for New Year's:
Charles C. Mann
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