iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Translation: bond markets are trying to use fiscal austerity to make sure the French govt does not expand the welfare state and improve schools

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This odd, bad take does at least prompt me to argue Marty is not Zionist propaganda, rather a sly, immanent critique: Marty’s belief in myths of transhistorical Jewish continuity re pyramids, his incorporation into Cold War thru TTennis at end & most of all, his ruthless drive for dominance

HAHAHAHHA
ok yeah this is 100% zio propaganda

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

UK Greens pass resolution declaring Zionism as racism and call for a full arms embargo of Israel. For a European left party, this is not small news and suggests momentum for BDS is growing internationally in places once thought not possible

U.K.'s Green Party Votes to Classify Zionism as a Form of Racism
HEADLINE OCT 05, 2026

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

even the barbarism machine no longer works in this country

Tennessee Inmate in
Critical Condition After
'Torturous' Botched
Execution, Lawyer Says The inmate, Christa Pike, is "alive right now" after surviving an attempt to execute her by lethal injection, her lawyer said. He called on Gov. Bill Lee to reduce her sentence to life in prison.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The entire NPR interview w Mahmoud Khalil, about his new memoir, is worth listening to, but I esp loved his description of the Columbia encampment and the feeling of solidarity during the Palestine encampment mvt

KHALIL: I believe the Palestinian movement or the movement for Palestinian liberation at Columbia was really rooted in dignity, safety and equality for everyone. And we are so proud to have built this movement with our, you know, Jewish peers, whether they are students but also faculty. And to me, the movement itself - absolutely, there was no antisemitism. There was no place for antisemitism there.
And that's why I keep repeating again and again against, like, the narrative that Columbia itself helped push, because, you know, we must take antisemitism seriously, like all forms of bigotry. We have also to acknowledge when antisemitism is being used or weaponized to chill or, like, to protect Israel from criticism. And I went to Shabbat dinners. At the encampment, there were Seder meals. And that's where I learned a lot about the Jewish faith, about why these Jewish students were also protesting Israel, because they refused - all these crimes that Israel is committing was basically committed in their names. And they refused that to happen.
WBEZ
OPEN ^
On Air Now
anusemiuc inclaents tnat nappened trom - mostlv from individuals

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There is exactly one large, well funded organization in NYC that makes me feel unsafe specifically as a Jewish person, and it’s the ADL

•@NYCMayor Mamdani's antisemitism strategy finally landed and only confirms what we already knew: this mayor does not treat the hate facing Jewish New Yorkers as an emergency and refuses to acknowledge the different shapes it takes. Since he took office 271 days ago, ADL has recorded hundreds of antisemitic incidents in NYC, nearly 40% of which were related to Israel.
After throwing out the IHRA definition on his first day in office, nine months later, his signature strategy still refuses to replace it with any working definition of antisemitism. He has looked the other way as flags glorifying terror groups have been flown outside synagogues, a deliberate act meant to intimidate families walking in to pray, and as crowds gathered outside houses of worship voicing support for the same groups. At the same time, he continues prioritizing his anti-Israel agenda over the basic promises he made to Jewish New Yorkers.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I imagine for some ppl it’s easier and less painful to imagine anti-Zionist Jews are all crypto-Zionists holding back the movement than acknowledge that the entire world has failed to stop a live streamed genocide

JVP is zionist please stop supporting and platforming an org whose prominence is due entirely to their utility to zionism and the racism against Palestinians that prompts westerners to prioritize and defer to "jewish voices" on the subject of Palestine
7:24 PM • 9/25/26 • 14K Views

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Marx described commodity fetish as the imaginary of capital being more alive, having greater agency, and requiring more deference than the worker who produces it

For people who deny Al personhood for any Al model at any point in the future, you're going to need better arguments than this. There are arguments out there, but once agents can solve Navier-Stokes, write music and poetry, and provide people with seemingly fulfilling life advice, this kind of line is just not going to be persuasive. "YOU'RE CRAZY" no longer lands.
Claire Lehmann
@clairlemon • 1d
Thinking Al might be conscious is like thinking that there are real people talking to you from inside the
TV, or that there is a tiny band playing music inside the radio....
Bentham's Bulldog
@Benthamsb...•1d
Why? Do you think it's insane to think Al might be conscious?

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

What are “defensive attacks” on Iran, esp coming from a US airbase in the UK?

ELLIOTT: Now remind us what the
connection is to the U.S. military at that base.
FRAYER: Yeah. So RAF Fairford is one of the bases that the British government has long allowed the U.S. to use. The British government opposes the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran but has allowed the U.S. military to use British bases for what it calls defensive attacks on Iran. And Fairford has attracted a lot of attention because of this. I mean, members of the public often gather there to see these big American bombers roll down a runway in the otherwise bucolic Cotswolds.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It’s funny how scholars invent whole new theoretical terms to avoid just saying they miss communism:

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Nobody. Nobody in the entire Jewish world Mattel: We made a Hanukkah Barbie, w a shirt in the colors of the Israeli flag Jews, all of them: You did what? Mattel: Oh we gave her a big nose too

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Even as Netanyahu calls Mamdani an antisemite it’s good to be reminded that American Jews feel safer w Mamdani than do w Netanyahu

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I miss the days when the right just hallucinated White Jesus in olive oil stains

What's one word that comes to mind when you hear the name James Talarico?

Jeffrey, 34, independent, Latino, school counselor

Progressive.

Dennis, 62, Republican, white, retired

Neutral.

Jennifer, 50, Republican, white, stay-at-home parent

Same-sex bathrooms in high schools and grade school.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Trump threatened to commit genocide against Iran: is that fact or fiction?

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Some critics have posed the reasonable question: why write about radical anti-Zionist Jewish history now, in the light of a genocide of Palestinians? There are complex answers but I’ll answer w a v simple one: bc ppl such as Ungar-Sargon lie about this history repeatedly

Batya Ungar-Sargon: "Only 13% [of Democrats] stand with Israelis against the Palestinians..."
"The thing that makes this so appalling is that Jews built the left in this country. We built the labor movement. We wrote the New Deal. 70% of the lawyers who worked on civil rights cases were Jews!"
"We've been at the forefront of every liberal and leftist issue in this country!"
X @INFOLIBNEWS

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

There is something far beyond hypocrisy expressed in the queer camp of Trump admin: hot troops, ballrooms, steamy & lurid affairs. The far right promises to its members not order but transgression, the power to be the racially & class defined exception to the rules the masses must follow

Pentagon demands only fittest and most 'impeccably' groomed troops attend Hegseth speech: report
Joe Sommerlad
Thu, September 17, 2026 at 10:57 AM CDT

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

An under theorized aspect of generational loyalties to Zionism among Jewish boomers has been the historic way in which Zionism opened up previously elite and exclusively German-Jewish non-profits to parvenu Eastern European ostjuden: nationalism was a great leveler for a generation of U.S. Jews 1/2

Arguably, this shift also allowed the ADL to move concretely away from its outdated construction as a German Jewish institution (as it had begun already to do in the 194os) to an institution inclusive of upwardly mobile, rightward-moving Eastern European Jews, embracing a more democratic vision of community without diminishing its hold on class and political respectability.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It really does feel like the end of an era, the end of an institution-specific Reconstruction: embattled, incomplete & often compromised, ethnic & gender studies were nonetheless attempts to address centuries of erasure. & like Reconstruction, ppl have been waiting a long time to end it

UT Austin Axes Several Ethnic, Gender Studies
Majors
Some faculty members consider the decision the next step in a broader effort to gut what remains of ethnic and gender studies at the university.
By Emma Whitford

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Not only is this boycott an attempt to bring accountability to the architects of the genocide in Gaza, it also reveals how much we take for granted the cozy relationships among think tanks, Ivy Leagues, & boardrooms w the imperial planners of mass murder www.democracynow.org/2026/9/18/he...

"Drop the Genocide 20":
Progressives Target Biden Admin Officials Who Aided Israel's Assault on Gaza
HEADLINE SEP 18, 2026

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Sometime from the start of the pandemic to now, I’ve gone from thinking university admin are no better or worse than other bourgeois management to thinking they are the most craven, shortsighted, ignorant mfers on earth who, unlike CEOs, hate the actual institution they serve

An M.I.T. Report Warns A.I. Is Causing 'Cognitive Surrender. Universities Are in a Bind.
As A.l. upends education, university leaders have been all over the map about how to respond. It can be very confusing for students.

The worries that artificial intelligence is degrading education have been building for months. Students are using it for everything, including cheating, and a recent report out of M.I.T. said it is triggering "cognitive surrender."
Many university leaders are embracing A.I. with enthusiasm anyway.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Oh no AI might harm things we v rich ppl care about, such as our internet service, not just useless crap, like yr job or education or water supply

"Given the accelerating rate of Al capability
development, it's my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if Al becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails."

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

And ofc if you can’t work, you can also die: but let us not bother our forward march to progress w a discussion of eugenics, some ppl might get upset

The future of
retirement? Work until you die.
Social Security, once seen as 'old-age insurance,' will eventually disappear, this author predicts
By Jessica Hall
FOLLOW
Updated Sept. 13, 2026, 3:56 p.m. ET

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

“Due to a wave of negative articles and studies misinforming humanities students about their job prospects and draconian state and administrative cuts to humanities programs, humanities programs are now suffering the result of a manufactured crisis.” There fixed it

Report: Humanities Majors Disappearing
Anxiety about job prospects and heavy reading loads have led to dramatic declines in humanities majors since 2012, according to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. https://bit.ly/4gXoVRb

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

It’s 25 years after 9.11 and we are still waging war on the “Axis of Evil.” The Cost of War Project conservatively estimates that 4.5 million have died as a direct result of America’s Global War on Terror, not including recent conflict w Iran

Casualties and losses
Per Costs of War Project:
4.5-4.6 million+ people killed note 8][a]
937,000+ direct deaths including 387,000+ civilians, 3.6-3.7 million indirect deaths) [note 9]
[b]
At least 38 million people displaced c]

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

folx who imagine disability activists are coming for their lululemon & gym shoes when they discuss eugenic ideas of “fitness” remind me of folx who think the state is coming for grandma’s silver spoons when Marx critiques “private property”

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

AfD support in Germany. I can’t tell you how glad I am the state silenced pro-Palestine protestors in order to preserve Jewish safety. I feel so much safer now, w the Nazis poised to again to take power

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Organized arsonists investigate local pyromaniac for matches

ADL trains security to spot anti-Semitic symbols at Ye's Chicago shows

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

The funny thing about the Jewish safety panic is that those most aggressive about defending Jews against the left often end up saying things about Jews that would make David Duke blush

Vivek Ramaswamy says antisemitism is an
"attack on capitalism."

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

“globalization” was the short-lived fantasy one could separate imperialism from direct military intervention, economics in other words, from politics. That brief third way ideological construction seems to have been long discarded

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Ofc the House Resolution denouncing socialism was introduced by Mr Crank bc who else

H.Res.1490 - Providing for the condemnation and denouncement of socialism in all its forms, and for other purposes.
119th Congress (2025-2026) | Get alerts
RESOLUTION
Hide Overview X
Sponsor:
Rep. Crank, Jeff [R-CO-5] (Introduced
08/27/2026)

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The full text of the HR "providing for the condemnation…of socialism," for which 8 Ds & all GOP voted. Note, it pivots, 1/2 way, from a panic about how un-democratic socialism is, to fears that brown ppl & immigrants vote, ie, that democracy represents the wrong ppl www.congress.gov/bill/119th-c...

House votes to condemn socialism, with 8 Democrats joining Republicans
By Caitlin Yilek
Updated on: September 1, 2026 / 8:49 PM EDT /
CBS News

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

A liberal is just a conservative who has been sent to a concentration camp

"If I had any clue that anything remotely like this was even possible, I would never have got involved in supporting Trump," Yiannopoulous told Piers Morgan.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

There is nothing that will satisfy these critics until El-Sayed says he has acknowledged his inner antisemite and now loves Israel like…his big brother

I Made a Mistake: El-Sayed Apologizes for Comment About Synagogue Attack
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, faced criticism from Jewish Democrats after remarking, "hurt people hurt people."

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

The 20th C liberal critique of socialism was that it limits choice & more substantively the freedom to become a moral actor. Ofc they were describing capitalism as it exists, a system that inverts the relationship btw human & commodity, turning labor into things, machines into ppl

""Luckily, the A.I. trolley will decide who to kill all on its own."

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Among scholars who study international law and state-sponsored atrocity, there is very little debate about whether Israel's actions constitute genocide.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

A remarkable story: pentagon gives a half-billion dollars to a private company to make artillery shells and fours yrs later, they have not made one. This is 100m more than the yearly state budget for the Indiana University system

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Since I can’t respond to all comments here, I’ll mention as others have that Piker’s response to an anti-Zionist Jewish caller’s ? is essentially what Arendt sd in 1944: Israel’s war on Palestine & its neighbors risks turning the country into a pariah state & the diaspora into unwilling accomplices

If a Jewish commonwealth is obtained in the near future-with or without partition-it will be due to the political influence of American Jews.... But if the Jewish commonwealth is proclaimed against the will of the Arabs and without the support of the Mediterranean peoples, not only financial help but political support will be necessary for a long time to come. And that may turn out to be very troublesome indeed for Jews in this country [the U.S.], who after all have no power to direct the political destinies of the Near East. It may eventually be far more of a responsibility than today they imagine or tomorrow can make good.

[Tlhe Zionists, if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean people and watch out only for the big faraway powers, will appear only as their tools, the agents of foreign and hostile interests. Jews who know their own history should be aware that such a state of affairs will inevitably lead to a new wave of Jew-hatred; the antisemitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence of foreign big powers in that region
but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the
consequences...

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The full text of Hasan Piker's statements, denounced by ppl from Hakeem Jeffries to Ben Shapiro. I am not sure the best way to respond to a moral panic, launched to stop progressive candidates & derail nec conversations re Israel's crimes, other than to call BS: there is nothing anti-Jewish here.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I know the "secret Jewish history" of everything from margarine to post-modernism is Der FWD’s money-maker, but you know what? With Rocky Horror Picture Show, I'll take it

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

This is one of the worst stories regarding public higher education in a terrible year of stories on public higher ed: in addition to banning students from even writing about gender, Texas Tech is combing syllabi & course content w AI to ban courses

A Texas University Becomes a Petri Dish for a
Conservative Overhaul
Texas Tech is using A.I. to cut left-leaning content in its curriculum. Some say the effort to ferret out forbidden topics is a dystopian academic nightmare.

Politics aside, Mr. Creighton has said an A.I. fueled wave will forever reshape higher education in the years ahead. He said he wanted the campus to be well positioned to take advantage of that paradigm shift by focusing on degrees that employers want and eliminating low-enrollment programs. He touts a partnership with Nvidia to invest in A.I. infrastructure.

Memos in December and April outlined the closures of programs centered on sexual orientation or gender identity, required the recognition of only two sexes and outlawed student dissertations on gender identity.
The administration also created a portal in which professors must submit their course materials for review.
The strictest prohibition at Texas Tech is on classes in the core curriculum, which are a menu of lower-level courses that students must select from in order to graduate. Mr.
Creighton has banned any course in the core that includes material related to sexual orientation and gender identity.
Sonja Stojanovic, a French studies professor, worried about her core course, called Holocaust in Literature. Because it mentions that gay and bisexual men were also targets of the Nazis, university leadership suggested that the course become an upper-level course.
"Now the Holocaust becomes an elective," she said.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

that is, work w the Trump admin to block a left agenda should the DSA and DP left win a solid bloc in the House

Jeffries and Kushner Meet
Privately as Midterm
Attacks Fly
President Trump's son-in-law and the man in line to be speaker of a Democratic-led House discussed how Democrats and the administration could work together.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Climate shock abandonment - esp in cities already abandoned by deindustrialization and years of disinvestment - is here, now

Desperation Mounts as Thousands in Indiana
Endure 10 Days Without Power
Floods from powerful thunderstorms devastated Gary, where a third of residents live below the poverty line and full restoration isn't expected until next week.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Funny I cannot think of a politician who has actually paid less attention to Israel in NYC's recent history than Zohran Mamdani

NY governor says Mamdani should focus more on NYC and less on Israel

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Since the IHRA claims that comparisons btw Israeli crimes & crimes of the 3rd Reich are antisemitic, I’ll just say it’s truly remarkable how little writing numbers on Palestinian detainee foreheads reminds me of something Nazis might do

The Palestinian Authority and Britain have criticized Israel's move to
advertise a tender for over 1,200 new homes in the occupied West Bank as part of its E1 settlement plan. The scheme would join thousands of settlement units in illegally annexed East Jerusalem to the West Bank's Maale Adumim bloc, severing East Jerusalem entirely from the West Bank and effectively splitting the territory into two halves.
Palestinians have long sought East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
This comes as Palestinian detainees claim that Israeli forces marked some of them with numbers on their foreheads during a raid in the occupied West Bank. One detainee said troops had assigned numbers to some of those held, apparently to keep track of them and manage the questioning.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

It’s curious to think in an educational or cultural setting, *plagiarism wld be considered a productivity gain: it’s the elimination of a category of work, intellectual/cultural labor, bc it is deemed unproductive. AI is a social relation masquerading as relation of production

How do the Marxist opponents of Al deal with the fact that history has never been kind to those who stand against the development of the productive forces?
That's a genuine, obvious question. I've just not seen particularly good answers. Suggestions?

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Can winning against the odds portend future losing? we asked five moderate candidates who lost Democratic races against the GOP what their strategy for victory was...

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

I wholeheartedly believe in exactly one supernatural ghost story:

The Curse of Timur or the Curse of
Tamerlane (Russian: Проклятие Тамерлана)
is the rumor that the tomb of Timur is cursed such that whoever disturbs it will face a calamity. A popular version of the story of the curse holds that when Soviet anthropologists opened the tomb in June 1941, al they found an inscription saying that whoever opened it would unleash an invader worse than him. The tomb was opened on June 20, 1941. On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa commenced, leading many people to believe that it was caused by the curse. In addition, the Soviet victory in the Battle of Stalingrad has been credited to the curse being broken by Timur getting a reburial about one month before the victory in the battle.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I did not think it was possible to actually miss the days when J Edgar Hoover felt enough shame to hire COINTELPRO informants on the DL www.thirdway.org/careers

As the Director of Anti-Extremism, a typical day might include...
• Assembling and updating a database of the DA's most extreme ideas and statements and a repository of voting records, affiliations, and issue positions to make available to allies and partners;
• Leading public opinion research to identify and test the contrasts that move base voters away from these extreme candidates;
• Overseeing the development of memos, talking points, rapid response materials, and other products that make the case against these extreme forces in American politics;

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