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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉

@benjaminvandyne.bsky.social
1.1K followers 1.2K following 2.7K posts

Benjamin not Ben Papa not Dad Union Organizer Hand-tool Woodworker Theology PhD Dropout He/him/él

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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 9h
Welcome back!!
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Keegan 🎃sinski @keeganosinski.bsky.social · 18h
🫠🫠🫠 Glad folks are making connections between the "Declaration of First Principles" and the threatening of the Div School's future.
religionnews.com
Vanderbilt Divinity School is under receivership. No one seems to know why.
(RNS) — One of the most prominent centers of theological education in the country, Vanderbilt Divinity School has been known for its social justice advocacy. Now students, faculty and alumni wonder wh...
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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
knowing we live in a society
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Which sucks because the great thing about having kids is that they are their own people
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Every AI parenting thing is like "what if I didn't like my actual kids at all"
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Kristian van der Vliet @vanders.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I drew a face on a paper plate and sellotaped it to broom. It's answers may surprise you.
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I'm sorry is Digger not about the Diggers?
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Not the main thing but he’s giving direction to… himself?
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escapedexplorer.bsky.social @escapedexplorer.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
"A Staten Island judge" stop right there we shouldn't have those
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I mean like half of me believed it
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
This came up in my files today
a pot labelled "UUs" talking to a kettle labeled "Evangelicals", with the pot saying to the kettle "wow you've got some were puritan shit to work through"
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Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Mamdani meets with trump in part to try to buy his city — an open target of the federal administration for military invasion — time. What does meeting with Jared do
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John Smillie @johnsmillie42.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Facts worth repeating: It would be cheaper to pay the ~40,000 or so people employed by the coal industry $1M a year to do nothing than to pay for the health damages (not including climate change) caused by burning coal in the U.S. publichealth.hsc.wvu.edu/news/story?h...
publichealth.hsc.wvu.edu
Counting up the costs of coal
Regular readers know that WVU’s Dr. Michael Hendryx has done work on that issue (subscription required), reporting that:
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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
a lot of people act like there's a trade being offered where we give up trans athletes in sports and in exchange fascism is defeated forever
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Olivia Messer @oliviamesser.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
If only everyone had stood behind The AP, we maybe could have effectively deterred this from ever happening. Now we’ll never know.
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Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
On the other hand, the blowback is so intense that even Kraft is feeling the need to do damage control. He is apparently not invulnerable.
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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Literacy crisis: everyone is mad at Ed Sheeran, but if you actually read his statement he specifically said he’s not complicit
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The trend toward replacing “terms and conditions with “Ts and Cs” is one of those things that’s symptomatic of just how little consumer protection there is
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 15/09/2026
The U.S. AI industry is being run by a batshit rationalist sex cult, and no, I am not being hyperbolic - they’re genuinely Like That:
Erin Redwing
@realizingerin
I went to an rationalist/EA Al doomer event last night with the goal of meeting someone who could calmly explain to me the argument for how they get to the conclusion that Al will kill everyone.
Because these are rationalists, I expected to find people who could lay out a serious extinction pathway, walk through the assumptions and intermediate steps, identify choke points where negative pathways could potentially be regulated, and entertain disagreement about where their assumptions might break down.
My experience was the exact opposite.
The people I spoke to seemed psychologically unable to entertain the possibility that their conclusion (that Al literally kills everyone, which was a point that many would not even budge on) might be wrong.
Their most extreme conclusion was treated as an axiom.
I had multiple people walk out of conversations with me when I questioned their inevitable extinction premise.
At one point during a panel, the moderator asked everyone in the audience who was still skeptical of Al doom to raise their hands. About half the room did. He then told all of the skeptics to leave the panel and go with one of the speakers, who would answer their questions separately. They filtered out all the skeptics, and continued the panel only with the subset who accepted their extreme position.
I genuinely felt like a heretic just for questioning whether superintelligent Al inevitably leads to the extinction of humanity, or entertaining the possibility that the future might actually turn out well.
That does not mean Al safety is fake. Obviously there are serious questions about rapidly advancing Al systems and what happens as they become much more capable. Those are exactly the conversations I went there hoping to have.
But what I encountered was an apocalyptic death cult. These people are not rational. They are deeply afraid, they reinforce that fear in one another, and they have become so emotionally committed to apocalypse
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Mike Black @mikeblack114.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I do not think will stancil is getting paid by Big Rock to argue that we don't definitively know if rocks are conscious
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Emily @suika.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
AP reports: "Ed Sheeran’s tour of North and South America was plunged into chaos Tuesday when four of his supporting acts—including his touring band—abruptly quit in solidarity with the rapper Macklemore, who was dropped for making pro-Palestinian comments onstage."
seattletimes.com
Ed Sheeran’s tour in trouble after opening acts drop out in solidarity with rapper Macklemore
Ed Sheeran has addressed the removal of Seattle rapper Macklemore as his opening act after the rapper made pro-Palestinian comments during a performance.
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
People are wild.
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I came of age in a particularly acute period of stranger-danger moral panic, and it shaped me to feel like I would be regarded as vaguely suspicious if I enjoyed caring for children—to the point that I first held a baby when I held my own baby. It was in every respect a loss to me and to others.
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
"I am not complicit. As the saying goes, he who remains silent is definitely not choosing a side"
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Joshua Eaton @joshuaeaton.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
EXCLUSIVE: When elected officials and advocates in Danbury, Connecticut, said ICE arrested a parent at a school bus stop Aug. 26, federal officials denied their accounts. I got video that appears to show such an arrest. My latest at @ctinsider.bsky.social — www.ctinsider.com/news/article...
ctinsider.com
Video appears to show ICE arrest near CT school bus stop, despite federal denials
ICE has denied it made an arrest at a school bus stop, but confirmed it made 118 arrests in Connecticut that week.
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the babahuck @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
some official macklemore “support the artist NOT the art” merch with proceeds to gaza would go triple platinum easy rn
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
My position on the lesser evil is that sometimes it’s OK to vote for it but it’s never OK to pretend that it’s not the lesswe evil. It’s the demand for enthusiasm that rankles.
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jae holzman @jael.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Human Rights Campaign days after the candidate they endorsed backed national ban on surgeries for trans minors & sports ban legislation
morganwcox O and hre_houston
Houston, Texas
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RICA TALARICO LARICO TALARICO TALARICO
TALARICO TALARICO TALARICO TALARICO
RICO TALARICO TALARICO
LARICO TALARICO
O TALARIE
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morganwcox The LGBTQ Community knows an ally when we see one and we are FIRED UP to elect and send James Talarico to the Senate!
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The American Prospect @prospect.org · 10/09/2026
Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence. buff.ly/kyaaTUD
prospect.org
Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists - The American Prospect
New hires and comments in interviews show that the AI giant is using its capabilities against dissenters.
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Nathan Kalmoe (he/him) @nathankalmoe.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
GEO was my grad union. Outrageous is too mild to describe it. mondoweiss.net/2026/09/the-...
mondoweiss.net
The U.S. government is going after a Michigan labor union over its Palestine activism
The U.S. government is criminalizing a campus labor union at the University of Michigan for supporting Palestine. We are calling on fellow labor organizers to resist this dangerous act of repression
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Julia Serano @juliaserano.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I have never once dragged or piled on WS before, but this is an absolutely fucked-up take. rather than considering that a marginalized group may have a very different perspective & experiences than you, smear them all as a "cult" of sorts instead. that way you can dismiss their opinions en masse
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Atkinson @maddavenport.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Okay, I think I figured out why there are so many cis liberals yelling at the trannies this week Ethical living usually comes down to: do you want to think of yourself as a good person, or do you want to actually do good Actually doing good involves a fair amount of feeling like a shitty person!
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Night of the Abigail @popeguilty.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
The problem with trying to hide your true beliefs is that eventually you have to say things out loud. For example, "Let's find ways to advocate for feminism that don't alienate men!" okay well eventually you're going to say that women are oppressed by men, or abandon the project of liberating women.
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 11/09/2026
whenever I’m discussing child safety laws with a mentor they remind that a lot of people think women (and others) are like children and will extend those rules
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Part of what is funny about this as a cis man is knowing the extraordinary efforts cis men go to to look manly
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Dan of the Year @downwithdan.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
- you get that tour pricing page up? - sure did, boss. real fuckin suggestive like you asked
The Predator Tour
Discover the iconic predators of the animal kingdom, and their prey in our very unique guided tour.
i Complete Ticket Details
Adult Predator Tour -
Tour only
£30.00
- 0
+
Child Predator Tour -
Tour only
£25.00
0
+
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Seldom attained in practice
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Yeah my day job is people and words and the woodworking lets me do hands and math
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Jesse Raub @jesseraub.online · 08/09/2026
PEOPLE WITH LIBERAL ARTS DEGREES: so while i see there is utility to the system, i’m more or less morally opposed to their current constructs and have big concerns over the business structure and environmental impact WEB CODER: so i met God today,
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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
New: a secretive DHS predictive policing unit is analyzing Americans' financial activity, feeding those names to police, then having cops pull them over. Not suspected of any particular crime We're revealing the unit name too: Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team www.404media.co/a-secretive-...
404media.co
A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over
404 Media is revealing the name of Border Patrol's predictive policing units, which analyze financial data and have local cops pull people over. The people are not suspected of any particular crime.
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I observe the act of criticism, god-like, transcendent
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Yes. Islamophobes don't want him to attend 9/11 commemoration because he's Muslim. Full stop. No need to "try to understand."
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I had to reorganize the columbarium at St. John the Divine. I discovered columbarium fraud (a thing that it turns out exists) in the process.
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
It's perfectly fine for universities to study AI, wrestle with the emergence of "AI studies" and everything else that comes with new technologies/modes of production/ways of being. It does not follow that one discipline—an immature one at that—should just be handed methodological hegemony .
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I have exactly nine hate-quanta for this idea.
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Molly White @molly.wiki · 05/09/2026
Huge congratulations to the US-based Wikimedia Foundation employees who voted with 92% support in favor of unionizing, and shoutout to the tireless work of the organizers.
wikiworkersunited.org
Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA
U.S. workers form first recognized unit as global union movement builds across Wikimedia Foundation
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
It's not even false! How on earth is one claiming to have measured the "amount" of communication?
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
pants pocket
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
sorry to be the "hey! Marx!" guy
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Benjamin Not Ben 🍉 @benjaminvandyne.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Marx is really good on this! Unalienated work, that allows people to "objectify themselves" —that is, make something of themselves into an object that has a kind of intelligibility and permanence to themselves and others—is a humanizing thing, and it's the structures of alienation that are bad.
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