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They think it means "words you say a lot." A lot of business/sales people seem to think so.

(I did learn something from this, though - sadly. I wondered why @dougjballoon.bsky.social, who I used to read a lot, was throwing a like to this tepid reply-guy stuff, so I took a look at some of DougJ's replies lately and... he is similarly into the "Mamdani is sucking up to Israel" thing now.)

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I'm done. I'm not here to satisfy your standards, and you clearly don't give a shit about the actual subject.

(And the rest of Mamdani's statement is about respecting Jewish New Yorkers and resisting antisemitism. "They got him" in reply to *that*... is an enormous red flag unless you have never in your life heard the way far-right creeps talk. Which maybe you haven't; lucky you!)

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When I said I didn't think you really need to know this guy's backstory for context, that's my opinion but *it doesn't matter*. The backstory and the context do exist. There's also IMO a common-sense element, but maybe that's just because I've run into way too many guys like that before.

??? If you read what Mamdani said, it's very clearly the kind of thing where a mayor says "such-and-such religious tradition, that isn't mine but is pretty big in my city, has some wise words." But whatever. Nobody cares whether you should've immediately figured this out. Give it a rest.

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When something isn't immediately clear to you, you can either argue with other people for shits & giggles, or you can look into it. I don't care what you think about my reasoning process, there is still an actual answer to the question of what that post has to do with antisemitism.

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The guy is on Bluesky under the same username, if you actually care. His posts are 50% about Palestine; cool. The other 50% are about how everything bad in the US is Israel's fault & how Mamdani is under the thumb of Israel. He absolutely thinks a respectful mention of the Talmud is sinister.

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But really you do not need that context, because there's no non-malicious reason to post any such dramatic response to a mayor making an anodyne ecumenical gesture. (Also, this guy appears to be maybe 20 going on 14, I guarantee you he hasn't heard of Paul Bremer)

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It's vaguely written because that's how those guys roll, but in context of everything else the dude has written, it means "the Jews are now controlling Mamdani". He was previously saying ZM betrayed us by not arresting Netanyahu when Netanyahu was in New York.

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Eli Bishop @errorbar.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

He posts some of his stuff on here, but has a pinned post clarifying that he never reads "this godforsaken liberal app".

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Because he is an asshole reply guy. When he's not doing it on this subject, he's defending ICE. Block and shun.

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Eli Bishop @errorbar.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It's a fair question - Simmons did use a "malevolent future machine god projects itself back in time to torture people for somewhat unclear purposes" premise when Yudkowsky was at an impressionable age. Although he might not admit to being into a lurid sf novel that doesn't praise rationality.

Eli Bishop @errorbar.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This is talking about the 2026-2027 vaccines, the latest versions.

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There's only been one actual lawsuit filed as far as I know-- not heard or decided yet. In other cases, the rights-holders made a complaint to the platform (Instagram/TikTok/etc.) which then pulled the video or muted the audio, and they didn't pursue it further.

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So, in his novel, why do people have faith in that stupid idea and keep relying on robots? Because of laziness and greed: they want to make money from someone else's labor, and they have to convince themselves that that's safe.

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I don't mean this in a "wow, Sladek was so prescient" way. His point was that the whole idea of having firm laws for AI behavior, that you could write as text (like in Asimov stories), was *very obviously stupid* and there was never any reason to think it would work. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tik-Tok...

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A very unsubtle science fiction satire by John Sladek basically pointed out the "just say 'hypothetical'" loophole 43 years ago. The villain gets a bunch of robots with supposedly strict behavioral rules to, for instance, rob a bank, by saying "we're making a movie about robbing a bank."

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Thanks for this! As someone with just enough science background to know that the press release's phrasing seemed odd (like, they entirely glossed over the question of what counts as an organ), but not enough to be sure, I appreciate the details.

JP @jpbrammer.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

(It is valid to not want to hear puns, but to be clear, a pun is what it was)

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Reposted by Eli Bishop

it's important to arrive at sturdy ethical principles that you can't be annoyed out of. people are annoying as shit

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The person who blocked me was like "don't blame Smith-- think of Tuskegee" but IMO that makes it worse. When you *know* people in your community may distrust doctors & authorities for valid historical reasons, & you have influence, then you better have more than a hunch before you say this shit.

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But either way they're massively irresponsible. Smith knew he had fame and influence, and the former ACT UPers knew people in their community would be extra respectful of their ideas - and they used that to put out an inflammatory idea that if wrong would be deadly, without checking their work.

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I *kind of* give those people a little more credit for good faith than Smith, because their belief was enough of a real belief, about an emergency situation, to make them actually try to do stuff (even unhelpful stuff). Whereas Smith was just like "heh heh, I bet I'll get in trouble."

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Some of whom were, unfortunately, people who had been on the front lines during AIDS, in ACT UP, and had either been denialists then too (unfortunately there were some even there) or learned exactly the wrong lesson-- so they told people the government was conspiring to suppress ivermectin etc.

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I was blocked by another commenter for not wanting to give Smith credit for good faith. Without rehashing that whole thread, I'll say that I don't think that is "honest" or any better than people these days. I heard plenty of identical "I can't prove it, but it Makes You Think" from COVID truthers.

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(And it's extra depressing for me that some of these speakers probably aren't creeps and just weren't clear on the nature of the event they were invited to - it's promoted as a "humanities" thing and originally had the creepy names scattered within a huge list of famous non-creep alleged invitees)

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The event (avalon.institute/exposition/) has a Silicon Valley AI-cultist angle too, and they're not really promoting it anywhere that I can see, so I'm guessing it's more of a "party for a few of our rich friends" type deal and not something that'll affect Lasker's reputation. Still depressing.

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By the way, a group in Berkeley is having Jordan Lasker speak at their event next month (along with some other "race science" creeps), and the title of his talk, "Gathering Cognitive Ability Data from Medical Practices", seems pretty clearly aimed at whitewashing his specific abuses in this area.

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I'll stop now. I don't want to seem like I'm trying to dismiss your whole original point, I just had a problem with applying it to this particular asshole in this way, and it reminded me of a whole world of other shit that I find it hard not to take personally. This whole episode really hit a nerve.

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The reason I'm nitpicking about this is that when you bring generational trauma and racism into it, you're talking about people dealing with shit that definitely does matter to them, and treating it as such. Smith's nonsense about everything under the sun just makes it clearer that this isn't that.

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To what degree it's conscious, God only knows, but - a Qanon dude can say that literally millions of children are being kidnapped and sacrificed all the time in every community and nobody has noticed because satanists control everything, but it doesn't *matter* to them like it would to you or me.

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OK, we are talking about two different things. There are lots of people, like with Qanon, who consistently say their bullshit and have a belief system in that sense - they just don't act like someone who gave a shit about anything would act if those things were true. They're living a game full-time.

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Will Smith in the 80s didn't care about people with AIDS - he talked shit about them, like all the other assholes who treated it as a joke. If he thought they were victims of a government conspiracy, that'd be an even worse way to behave. As a former AIDS nurse I have no patience for that shit.

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Gallows humor is one thing - people can talk about hideous real shit and be like oh well what can you do. But you can still tell when they actually think it is hideous and real. This is the other thing, edgelord shit where they think it's a game.

There's still no such thing as "genetic warfare", and I can't read Will Smith's mind but I do think he was bullshitting, because he was saying a secret sci-fi genocide was killing millions of people and he just tossed it off with a chuckle in a TV interview, like ha ha people will be mad at me.

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True on the first 2, but I don't know what you're saying I'm wrong about. I never said "it was just Tuskegee". Even the syphilis study atrocities weren't just Tuskegee - the Guatemala experiments in the 40s were even worse - and I never said the government has never done any other scary germ shit.

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Yglesias is sparing them both the pain of finding out how many people would cross the street to avoid any chance of seeing or hearing such an event.

Like, no one is actually saying or thinking that we have this in the bag & can't possibly lose. And everyone who would make an effort is making an effort. And if we lose, I'm pretty sure everyone will feel like shit whether they said "I won't count on it" or not. It's just some weird reflex.

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People just remember having been hopeful about a thing and then being disappointed, they don't think about it in terms of actual circumstances being the same or different... and (I guess) they think that you can immunize yourself against the pain of loss if you just act cynical ahead of time.

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Will Smith isn't an idiot, and he wasn't expressing generational trauma there, because he didn't believe this. He wasn't trying to warn people about ongoing secret genocide. He thought it was a fun little thing to toss out there and then go "oh, people are gonna come after me", and do nothing else.

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Medical abuse and syphilis are real things that existed before and after Tuskegee. The Terminator is not a real thing, and neither is "genetic warfare". If either of those existed and *were killing millions of people*, they would not be secrets for people to speculate about in this cute way.

If instead of Tuskegee, you were talking about police shooting people, then yes OF COURSE Black people are readier to believe other stories of police committing violent abuse, rightly so. But this is like "I believe the cops have created a Terminator cyborg that literally rips out our hearts."

I understand what you're saying but... anyone who is deeply interested in and horrified by the Tuskegee experiments knows what happened in them, and can easily see why the kind of conspiracy theory Smith is talking about doesn't follow from them. The only theme in common is "government + disease."

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Fuck off. I won't block you, since you value the sound of your own voice & you'd be sad if your rant thread disappeared, but I'll mute this since I don't really need to hear you insult me for bullshit. The defeatist here is the one who's insisting that nothing short of total victory matters at all.

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Also, it's true that delivery jobs used to be better than this in some ways, but it's wild to follow that up with "1099 workers don't have unions" as if restaurant delivery used to be a union job, or subject to salary negotiation. Hating Doordash doesn't require romanticizing the past.

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If your point is just that Doordash & similar gig jobs are an inherently exploitative system - yes, I agree. I was replying to what sounded like a claim that they were going to be able to exploit them *just as much* as before, that is, that they'd be able to keep shorting the contracted pay.

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Yes, when you're at the bottom of the barrel, every win is big. That sucks, and it means we still need to fight for more - not just sneer & mock anyone who's happy about a thing moving in the right direction. If you imagine the other commenters said "everything's great, we won"... that's on you.

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