See @tressiemcphd.bsky.social response to Anthropic's recent policy that forbids anyone from being mean to Claude.
Love: "Talking word toaster"!
Joel Elliott
@bubbanoze.bsky.social
384 followers 864 following 116 posts
IT admin & academic adjacent. Fishing, humanities, academic study of religion, cats, technology, tacos, Alabama/SEC football, photography. Takes stuff apart, puts it back together. Proliferates entities beyond necessity.
![[Condensed Version] I just got off the phone with Mitch McConnell. We spoke for just shy of 20 minutes. We covered a wide range of topics, including:
The Textual Integrity of the New Testament: He wanted to drill down into the transmission history of the longer ending of Mark (Mark 16:9–20). Mitch was particularly hyper-focused on whether the sudden shift in vocabulary and the introduction of snake-handling and poison-drinking suggest a 2nd-century scribal insertion. He noted that the Senate often operates on a similar kind of apocryphal logic.
Offshore Sportfishing Strategy: We had a vigorous, deeply technical back-and-forth about the mechanical toll of vertical jigging for amberjack. He was highly curious about using a slow-pitch 200-gram pink-and-silver butterfly jig over deep-water wrecks. He agreed that trying to bring a ninety-pound "reef donkey" up through a tax collector shark zone requires the exact same kind of relentless, exhausting rod-bending endurance it takes to break a Senate filibuster.
Regional Culinary Infrastructure: He asked a flurry of questions about the current state of the fried chicken at the Chicken Hut in Durham. He wanted reassurances that the chopped BBQ and the mac and cheese were maintaining their legendary standards, calling the restaurant a "critical pillar of southern cultural stability."
Continental Philosophy and Temporal Loops: To wrap things up, we had a brief, rather intense reflection on Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence. Mitch chuckled and remarked that the terrifying thought experiment—where you are forced to live your exact life over and over again for all eternity down to the smallest detail—is not actually a profound existential burden, but rather a standard Tuesday on the Senate floor during a debt ceiling debate. He noted that navigating the same repetitive institutional gridlock century after century requires a pure, unadulterated amor fati.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:emia4z64axnsqlxsnr32v2nk/bafkreihxskc7564jiw4ykhhnb6uah33dwpecfucqndpkiwa3syc3i6hvcu)
