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Asim Ali

@asimali.bsky.social
2K followers 1.7K following 668 posts

American studies prof. Erstwhile economist. Sometime musician. Habitat builder. Pro-bunny. Earthling. Trying to make more darkness. Ⓥ He/him

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Asim Ali
Butlerian Jihadist of House Dornick @shimminykricket.blacksky.app · 08/10/2026
Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf
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Dread and Rosie @rosiemund.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The groups of people most commonly cited as arguments against addressing car dependency - disabled people, elderly people, children, poor people - are, in fact, in a multiplicity of ways disproportionately harmed by car dependency.
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The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart @weeklyshowpodcast.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Corporations have hoarded wealth and the only viable counterweight is government intervention. Jon and Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards discuss UBI, wage insurance and other ways to protect workers. @kedseconomist.com
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Erica Ifill @wickdchiq.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The French police are so militarized they blew up a 15-yr-old’s hand and took the eye of another one. Why are grenades being used to quell student protestors who are unarmed? Now the labour unions are stepping in to protect the students
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Linda UWSⓥ @lindavt.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Imagine being so insecure that a person choosing not to hurt an animal is your only punch line.
IMAGINE BEING SO FRAGILE, YOU GET OFFENDED BY ANOTHER PERSON CHOOSING NOT TO HURT AN ANIMAL.
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It's Going Down @igd.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
"The defendants union may be the first effort of its kind in the modern history of political protest in the US..." Follow, boost, and support the folks at @nspm7union.bsky.social. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
theguardian.com
Trump 2.0 is targeting US protesters with ‘antifa’ charges. Activists started a union to fight back
NSPM-7 Defendants Union plans to offer legal clinics, media training and more to people facing prosecution for protest
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Mat Brunet (AniMat) @matbrunetvo.com · 06/10/2026
The fact that David Ellison is another story of a privileged guy who failed to get into art / entertainment because money can't buy talent explains SO MUCH about who he is today.
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Feena van @feenavan2099.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
They love doing this sort of thing. bsky.app/profile/feen...
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Max Granger @maxgranger.info · 05/10/2026
They cut down the "grandmother" tree.
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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Do we teach what we teach because it is preparation for some general 21st-century future? Or do we teach it because this is the knowledge that work in our various fields of study has yielded, which includes, but is not exhausted by, knowledge of the methods and sources and so on that will make more?
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Adam Isacson @adamisacson.com · 05/10/2026
Here's what's replacing four 200-year-old cottonwood trees, the last of which went down today after a 71-day tree-sit protest ended with aggressive arrests. So bleak. Mason Kumet photo from azluminaria.org/2026/10/05/f...
Double border wall running off to the horizon
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Rami Ismail (رامي) @ramiismail.com · 05/10/2026
yeah but the way out includes taking accountability for committing almost a century of systematic theft, ethnosupremacism, apartheid, illegal occupation, torture, rape, military brainwashing & genocide and given that this fascist faux-mocracy has only existed as such, that would be remarkable
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Paul Darwin Picklesimer @101darwins.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
While America Is Blanketed in Flock Surveillance, Factory Farms Get a Free Pass www.commondreams.org/opinion/floc...
commondreams.org
While America Is Blanketed in Flock Surveillance, Factory Farms Get a Free Pass | Common Dreams
Federal agencies are protecting abusive industries while monitoring decent members of the public, hoping that we turn a blind eye to their assault on democracy and civil liberties.
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Chris Kluwe, Candidate for Assembly District 72 @kluweoc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
BALLOTS DROP TODAY! Remember to check your mail for your ballot, fill in the box next to Chris Kluwe along with our other fantastic local candidates, and turn it in to your nearest ballot drop box. Make your voice heard early!
Ballots drop today. 1. Check your mail for your ballot Today!!! 2. Make sure to vote for Chris Kluwe 3. Return your ballot to the nearest ballot drop box.
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Vegan FTA @veganftaofficial.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Keep speaking up. Until all are free. ✊🌱 📸 weanimals (IG) | joannemcarthurphotography (IG) | EAST  #veganshare #quote #inspirationalquote
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Bill McKibben @billmckibben.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
according to their own statements, "some bad things" includes a non-trivial chance of human extinction. why on earth do we let these companies continue to operate?
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Francesca Bouaoun @francescabouaoun.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
It’s been two years since Ontario Place West Island was destroyed for a planned private spa. Hundreds of trees were cut down - here’s a snapshot of the many species who lost habitat. 🧵
Side-by-side comparison of a landscape on the Toronto waterfront. In one scene, an island is covered in trees reflected in a still channel of water. The other image of the same place shows a barren stretch land with a pile of rubble in the centre.
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 03/10/2026
but really, this post is just me reaffirming that I am not interested in whether they can do math because the primary function of LLMs is to help centralize, justify, and validate power, and they are doing that successfully already
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Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 @josephpolitano.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Sort of insane fact about how broken US urban planning is—America now spends more building *just the lights for roads and highways* than on all subways & ground mass transit combined Spending on roadway *pavement* is 18x transit spending
a graph of roadway and mass transit lights
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Mark Harris @markharris.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I feel like the debate about what parts of AI are good and what parts are bad should wait until we solve the worldwide crisis caused by the fact that almost of all of its evangelists in both tech and govt are morally, intellectually, and ethically unequipped to oversee it, when not downright evil.
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Skydog Sanctuary @skydogsanctuary.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Slate & Dune were turned out to meet Apollo’s #wildhorse herd. Slate rejected the best efforts to domesticate him. Dune is not a fan of being handled by humans. With Wilson as their guide into #Skydog #wild, their dreams of #freedom have come true.
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Todd Wolfson @proftwolf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
My PhD advisor, Peggy Sanday, published Fraternity Gang Rape (1990). She found gang rape functions as male bonding through domination: men use women to prove masculinity, gain status, & demonstrate loyalty. Group norms normalize coercion, erase consent, & institutional privilege shields perpetrators
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Lyle Lewis @race2extinct.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
What makes this quote even more interesting is Einstein wrote this during World War I, decades before nuclear weapons.
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Truthout @truthout.org · 02/10/2026
Notably, support for socialism in the U.S. is polling at its highest levels ever seen. According to a recent Gallup poll, 43 percent of Americans have a positive view of socialism, surpassing the 40 percent line for the first time since the polling organization started asking the question.
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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 03/10/2026
Federal judge: "Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society & it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts ... Why is it the govt's business where everyone goes all the time?" www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
washingtonpost.com
A police search using Flock was a form of ‘mass surveillance,’ judge rules
A federal judge said that police conducted an “unconstitutional warrantless search” by using Flock cameras to reconstruct a woman’s travels without probable cause.
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Judge Sara Hill, N.D. Oklahoma, issued this decision on Thursday —>
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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The primary objective of journalism is supposed to be telling the truth. It is a DECISION on the part of USA Today to know that new details have emerged about this case and to refuse to update an old story that is still circulating and still shaming Jane Doe.
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Yard Gone Wild @yardgonewild.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
When your mom is hanging by her toes off the porch again and your little squirrel arms are not quite long enough to reach her tail
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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I've heard people make claims that AI would lead to a new Renaissance, but I didn't imagine it'd happen like this:
Screenshot of a Tweet from Pope Leo XIV. It reads: 

"In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgen to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."
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Karen Attiah @karenattiah.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Mike Pompeo has been rewarded with a teaching fellowship at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. The same school that canceled my class on media, race and international affairs. @columbiasipa.bsky.social share.google/KEvTy5yER71U...
share.google
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to join SIPA faculty
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will join the School of International and Public Affairs as a fellow at SIPA’s Institute of Global Politics in March, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
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Lyle Lewis @race2extinct.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Technology allows humans to dissipate concentrated energy and reorganize matter at rates that biological systems cannot repair.
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Andrew Whitehead @andrew-whitehead.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
ArE wE sUrE cHrIsTiAn NaTiOnaLiSm Is ReAl?????? Christian nationalism: A cultural framework that idealizes and advocates for the fusion of a particular expression of Christianity in US civic life & demands the gov't at all levels protect and preserve this fusion. kettering.org/five-element...
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Eli Valley @elivalley.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Democrats caved and/or facilitated this monopolization of practically every major media property in the US into the hands of a MAGA fascist psychopath. If the US had an opposition party, each of its presidential contenders would would vow to dissolve this monopoly by any means necessary.

DiscussingFilm
@DiscussingFilm
David Ellison has shown an official graphic of everything Skydance will own after acquiring Warner Bros and Paramount.

Assets:

• TNT
• CBS
• CNN
• MTV
• TCM
• Showtime
• Adult Swim
• DC Studios
• Paramount+
• Nickelodeon
• HBO/HBO Max
• Comedy Central
• Cartoon Network

Film Rights:

• Star Trek
• Gremlins
• Beetlejuice
• DC Comics
• Tom & Jerry
• Harry Potter
• Citizen Kane
• Transformers
• A Quiet Place
• Looney Tunes
• The Conjuring
• Mortal Kombat
• Game of Thrones
• Dora The Explorer
• Mission Impossible
• The Lord of the Rings
• SpongeBob SquarePants
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Dune 3 (distribution rights)
• Minecraft (distribution rights)
• MonsterVerse (distribution rights)
9:34 AM · Oct 2, 2026
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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
It's not bigotry, it's just an intuitive preference for racial homogeneity. 🙄 Congratulations to @yale.edu for citing Rufo twice in the report justifying their decision to make the institution a trashy MAGA factory where stuff like this is the only legitimate form of scholarship or discussion.
“Successful assimilation is precisely that you wouldn’t notice it, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about,” he said. “The mere fact of us being able to notice that, no, this is not an assimilated group, this is just a bunch of Indians at the game, is itself sort of definitionally the case that they’re not yet assimilated.” 

Keeperman then explained that many white Americans, like French, simply have “this fundamental intuition” and a “preference” for “homogeneity” and “they wanna fight to preserve that” as the U.S. inches towards becoming a “majority-minority country.” 

“And Indians are like this conspicuous case,” he said, “where they see a difference and they go, ‘I just don’t like that.’ And it’s not because they don’t like Indians or anything like that. Now it may be expressed in, like, vulgar, lurid bigotry of whatever kind, but it also is just a case that they prefer homogeneity.”
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Joe Dunman @joedunman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Meanwhile, deep in the bowels of the liberal propaganda machine (a state university), academic departments get yearly budget cuts and staffing reductions but somehow there's always extra money for edtech scammers and real estate acquisition.
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@NewsJennifer (Jennifer Schulze) @newsjennifer.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Much needed reality check on Chris Rufo. The mainstream media gave this guy oxygen, treating him like he was raising legit questions when he's always been the nasty racist you see exposed here.
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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
What they’re hoping for and acting for is germinating the seeds of extreme acts of violence against South Asians. That’s why they use the explicitly Nazi framing of the ‘Indian question’. They want the same results. Their followers are pretty open it on social media, too.
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Covie @covie93.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
hegseth: No beardos, weirdos or fatties. Also hegseth: These three will co-lead the military's Project Meridian.
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Dr Hannah M. Rowland @hannahmrowland.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Hope your day was better than Darwin’s, on this day 165 years ago
I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody &everything.

Charles Darwin
Letter to Charles Lyell
1st October 1861
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The Xylom @thexylom.com · 02/10/2026
In 2003, the U.S. military bombed Iraq’s national seed bank in Abu Ghraib, effectively eliminating hundreds of varieties of indigenous seeds adapted to growing in the drought-prone desert climate. A year later, U.S. law prohibited Iraqi farmers from seed saving. (First published in 2025 by Prism)
thexylom.com
Saving Iraq’s Seeds, One Garden at a Time
Comprising a diverse range of backgrounds and ages, the collective fosters a space for voices of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian seed stewards from the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region…
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Abdul El-Sayed @abdulelsayed.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Mike Rogers wants to put a data center in your backyard because he's getting rich off of them.
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Deborah Teramis Christian 🌈 🎲 🇺🇦 @teramis.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Militant Christian Nationalism now feels so emboldened in this country it's mask off at the highest levels. Someone should introduce this asshole to larping and medieval combat reenactments, so he can get his ass kicked in the style he so clearly yearns for.
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Nancy Levine Stearns @nancylevinestearns.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
No one wants Hegseth’s extremist holy war. VOTE
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Josh Shepperd @joshshepperd.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Feels like universities might also want to wait to liquidate hundreds of years of educational practice before transforming themselves into single-corporation stewarded data centers.
cbsnews.com
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: "For too long the industry lied" about AI risks
The head of the artificial intelligence company calls the exponential rate of AI developments a "warning sign," with risks for humanity, and says, "We need to slow down." He talks with "Sunday Morning...
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
👇🎯 If you send kids the message that the only majors that are good are business & STEM from the time they’re in middle school, & then you don’t find the humanities & social sciences at the college level, it all becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy & that was clearly the point in the first place.
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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Bob Holub (RIP) was our former Chancellor at UMass and also an organizer of German Studies in Ohio for over a decade. He would always say: "University budgets are primarily personnel, so 'budget cuts' always means 'firing personnel.' It's best to cut away the euphemism."
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Denis - The COVID Info Guy @thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
"Repeated Flu And Covid-19 Infections Linked To Higher Parkinson’s Risk, CCMB Study Finds" Dr Swasti Raychaudhuri said "not every viral infection leads to Parkinson's disease." However, she warned that "the risk increases significantly with repeated infections" as biochemical reactions can change.
etvbharat.com
Repeated Flu And Covid-19 Infections Linked To Higher Parkinson’s Risk, CCMB Study Finds
Dr Swasti Raychaudhuri, who led the research, noted that although cells possess protective mechanisms, biochemical reactions can undergo changes depending on the circumstances.
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Asher HELLbein @asherelbein.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I think that ultimately the problem with uprooting fraternities from American colleges is that the individual chapter houses full of kids are, essentially, mushrooms: the fruiting bodies of a much larger mycelial network of alumni donor money and cultural control. That's what you have to attack
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David J. Bier @davidjbier.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Most of the targeted nationalities have never had anyone from their country carry out a deadly terrorist attack in the United States, and they are over 80% less likely to have committed crimes in the United States for which they are serving time here. www.cato.org/blog/legal-i...
cato.org
Legal Immigration from Majority-Muslim Nations Was Cut 96% Since 2024
In 1965, Congress explicitly prohibited discrimination based on national origin in issuing immigrant visas, but it should go further to protect Americans’ right to associate freely with people born in...
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GaⓋen Kind. 🌱 🌱 🌱 @gavenkind.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Make the unadulterated truth about the animal agriculture industry the headline in all newspapers and the lead story on broadcast news every day. See how long the animal agriculture industry lasts. If you have to hide what you do because you know it would disgust people you should do something else.
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