iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by 🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃

Blayne Haggart @bhaggart.bsky.social · 27m

4 What does the Carney government‘s inability to withstand pressure over a few panels at a conference tell us about its willingness to actually regulate US tech companies, or to pursue “digital sovereignty”? Does Mark Carney’s digital sovereignty include predatory and monopolistic US corporations?

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 9h

So this is now confirmed. Canada, as well as the EU and Lithuania, withdrew due to American pressure. Just complete cowardice, and an unwillingness to accept the threat staring us in the face.

theguardian.com

EU drops sponsorship of disinformation conference at Trump officials’ request

Lithuania and Canada were also pressured to withdraw, and days before #Disinfo2026, logos were wiped off website

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 22h

We really need more brainstorming about what a Trump-style takeover would look like in this country and what stops it. What stops a PM from appointing his cousin as the Chief Electoral Officer? What stops a PM from nullifying the Charter through routine use of the nwst clause? Besides of course:

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 22h

Obviously it depends who's in the role, and I'm not saying we should count on King Charles III riding to our rescue. But given how overwhelmingly Canadian democracy relies on norms it's worth flagging the GG as one of the few people who could, actually, push back if things went buckwild Trump-style.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 22h

It might sound silly, but studying democratic resilience has actually made me much more of a monarchist. When you start to actually think through the mechanisms of authoritarian takeover, the fact that so many roads lead through the Governor General actually does present a speed bump.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 22h

(in line with the misinformation theme, I should add the caveat that these are early reports and we haven't heard a proper statement from the organizers but... this is not normal for a conference: bsky.app/profile/robi...)

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 22h

For goodness sakes - we’re being inundated with news stories about U.S. interference in Quebec and Alberta. This is not a hypothetical. Are we really not capable of having an adult conversation about the threat profile as it actually exists?

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 22h

Early reports suggest Global Affairs Canada has withdrawn sponsorship of a disinformation conference over a panel discussing the U.S. as a threat vector. If true, this is utterly embarrassing, and a sign Global Affairs is woefully unprepared to engage with the geopolitical context we are in.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Yeah they’re cooked. The asymmetric nature of the risk from Republicans vs Democrats is a big reason the U.S. is where it is. If there’s no consequences for authoritarian-coded industries it’ll be 2021 all over again.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

These are also the same people who complain incessantly about assimilation and cultural compatibility when the image on the left is a pretty perfect visual of both concepts.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"I cannot overstate how little he wanted to talk about this". If this is how she engages with friends/acquaintances it does help explain her further radicalization. I'm sure it's a vicious cycle where her nuttiness drives people to disassociate with her which further fuels her sense of persecution.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I get it. You don't like the protests. You don't agree with them - fine. What I can't get my head around is this collective psychosis that's treating kids with signs like an existential threat that warrants the most extreme response we've seen from universities in living memory.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Universities all around the world are losing their damn minds over anti-war protests and it's utterly incomprehensible.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

That said, from a foreign policy perspective, I don't know that it really matters. The UK isn't going to dictate the solution. For internationals the question is whether you're focusing on propping up the husk of the PA or on pressuring Israel to make real concessions to its Palestinian population.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I don't know. The Greens4Palestine posts seem self-contradictory. If I were writing it, I would have added something along the lines of "with equal rights for all religious and ethnic groups". I think asking for clarification on that point is perfectly fair.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I completely understand why some folks, especially pro-Israel ones, are freaked out by the One-State Solution, but given how settlement growth has effectively eliminated the viability of an independent Palestinian State, that's basically what we're left with. It's that or permanent apartheid.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I have no comment on the political wisdom of this one way or the other, but if a State would be destroyed by allowing universal suffrage it says a lot about the character of that State and what we've been complicit in.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The other reason stories like this are so frustrating is that it speaks to a core of Trump supporters whose belief in his policies won’t be shaken unless they literally see a guy going under a truck and that’s obviously not a solution that scales.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This is a great example of governments following popular sentiment as opposed to working to guide it. They're still on X, presumably, because they feel a need to be where the people are. But by pushing major announcements on that platform they entrench it as the focal point for the public discourse.

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Reposted by 🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃

Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

this is by far the best "I quit my AI job over safety concerns" essay yet because it is the first one that is able to talk about safety concerns in practical terms and that understands "safety" as a topic with extensive literature in analogous fields www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Two changes are urgently needed. First: AI companies need to rely more on the safety expertise that already exists in other fields. And second, before we create systems significantly more capable than the ones we have today, we need new science to ensure that more capable models (and their successors) will make safe choices when we aren’t looking.

Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster. Right now, AI companies don’t know how—but other people do. In a nuclear-power plant, the technical systems and rules people follow are set up so that, if equipment breaks or someone pushes the wrong button, we still won’t risk a meltdown. OpenAI and other labs are growing and deploying frontier AI with far less redundancy and rigor than this, even though the harm from an irreversible loss of control would be much greater than the harm from any single meltdown. Even short of a full loss of control, we could see autonomous swarms of AI agents that act without human permission. Imagine “rogue” agents that work like teams of hackers (for example, holding hospital computer systems for ransom) but never need to sleep.

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Reposted by 🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃

Innsmouth Looksmaxxing @gonebabygone.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Sr. Producer/Editor – “Preditor” (Social Media/Short Form)
National Geographic

Washington, DC

$139,200 - $186,600 a year

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This was absolutely what propelled Trump through the primaries in 2016. Republican voters couldn't get enough of hearing him mock and belittle Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. It was like 80% of his intraparty appeal (with the other 20% being the racism, obv.).

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Literally Trump’s only redeeming quality as a political leader is his capacity to humiliate and torment the absolute worst people in the world.

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Reposted by 🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃

tante @tante.cc · 03/10/2026

Really tired of the "I worked at the kitten crushing factory for years, made a fuckton of money and now I found my conscience and get to tour the stages of the world telling people how to be ethical" grift.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I understand why this is a fun marketing idea, but if these machines were recognized as having consciousness (and, presumably, rights) then wouldn’t an immediate implication of that be to severely restrict the kind of testing and research Anthropic can do?

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Do you like mergers? How do you feel about acquisitions?

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Mfer has less respect for the President of France than I have for a random undergrad who wants to figure out if law school is the right path for them.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I mean yes the level of damage he’s doing is catastrophic but it’s just objectively very funny they continue to allow him to be President.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

$10 says we hear a toilet flush before this thing’s over.

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Reposted by 🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃

Hannah Shelley, MLIS (Maggots, Lycanthropes & Ice Skeletons) @hannahshelley.site · 02/10/2026

Please stop anthropomorphizing computers. They cannot "run" a program, because they don't have legs

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Reposted by 🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃

Adam Radwanski @aradwanski.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I won’t belabour this because I’ve written about it before, but the part of Carney’s pipeline pivot that I find impossible to justify is the government taking on the demand risk.

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Reposted by 🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃

the abbot of unreason (an archaeologist) @merovingians.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

'sooner or later, everyone will have been against this' is unbearable to live through but actually a lot better than 'half the activated voting population supports this'

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It's not even that uncommon for democracies to regress into authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian states. Look at Russia, Myanmar, Hungary, etc. The UK is sort of an outlier in that regard, but I think that's explained by the way their democracy emerged very gradually from a monarchial system.

Thinking Man Meme - captioned: Can't have a dictator when you already have a king.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I mean, it's not exactly unheard of for democracies, even stable and advanced ones, to produce bad leaders or bad policy outcomes.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That one's a gimme because he actually demonstrably does.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I mean they'd have to give you some good draft picks after that.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

What a coincidence, that's exactly the same argument people make when citing "The Bell Curve".

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Jokes on you. Canucks were playing an away game against the Leafs when it happened.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

If your point is that somehow Arab countries are incapable of robust democracy I think that's way too fatalistic and frankly kind of racist. And in Egypt, in particular, even aside from the obvious foreign interference, there were a bunch of avoidable mistakes that got made.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Hang on - if U.S. nukes are hard-coded against striking NATO states how will President Trump credibly threaten to annihilate Toronto during the next round of trade negotiations with Canada?

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Messy. But you'd be disingenuous if you ignore the role we very clearly played in the military's return to power.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

In some cases, these same people were even bullish about Ben Ali getting tossed out in Tunisia. It was genuinely very funny to watch them tie themselves into rhetorical knots explaining how Egypt was different.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I noticed this back in 2011, where the very same people who for years had been waxing on about Israel's status as "the only democracy in the middle east" were utterly terrified when they realized Mubarak was about to get overthrown.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I'm pretty sure you'd face charges if you did this to a dog or a horse.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Fine, views differ on the death penalty. But at a certain point, if a state demonstrates they can’t execute someone competently, I don’t understand why they can keep trying. This is literally how people are tortured. I’m sure given the choice she’d rather have her fingernails pulled out than this.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I’m not an expert on this area of law, but it really seems like bringing someone to the brink of death multiple times and reviving them meets the definition of “cruel and unusual” on a plain reading of the text.

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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The reason we keep seeing these increasingly credulous attempts to rehabilitate Biden's Gaza policy is that the people who were responsible are desperate to worm their way back into power in a future administration. That's why it's so important to respond with the contempt these arguments deserve.

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Reposted by 🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃

Emmett Macfarlane 🇨🇦 @emmettmacfarlane.com · 30/09/2026

POLITICAL SCIENCE JOB AD: Tenure-track position in International Relations at the University of Waterloo. We're *very happy* to announce this. Applications due Nov. 1st; job start date July 2027. Details here (pdf): uwaterloo.ca/arts/sites/d...

uwaterloo.ca

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