iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

But anyone who objects to having some citizen-voters have more representation than others is presumably also vociferously opposed to the existence of the Senate. Unless they’re just a special-pleading partisan hack, that is.

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Even Democrats Oppose Letting Foreign Citizens Tilt The House

Apportioning Congress based on a census count that includes non-citizen residents does give more influence to citizen-voters in immigrant-rich locations, but it in no way “dilutes the voting power of Americans.” This latter point is either stupid or a lie. thefederalist.com/2026/09/30/e...

thefederalist.com

Americans overwhelmingly believe congressional seats should be distributed solely based on the number of U.S. citizens in each state.

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Brazil: The Future of the Far Right • EQUATOR

"The heirs of dependency theory historicized modernization theory, arguing that it had been the ideology of a period of capitalist expansion, when the horizon of expectations was permanent growth." Now that consensus about "the horizon of future" has been deranged.... www.equator.org/articles/bra...

equator.org

The limits of Lulismo, the sons of Bolsonaro and the new politics of disintegration

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Opinion | I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think.

I sharply disagree with this. Several reasons. “Engaging students through messages, searching conversation” can certainly generate ideas and reveal what parts of an argument need elaboration, but only writing forces you to be precise. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/o...

nytimes.com

If I do not treat writing as essential for achieving thought, it is not clear why I should force my students to.

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Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich to help Pentagon with warfare initiative, Hegseth says

In completely unrelated news, Luckey’s Anduril signed a contract with U.S. Army in March 2026 worth up to $20 billion and Musk’s Starlink & SpaceX signed in May 2026 signed $6.45B in Pentagon contracts to build satellites & a satellite communications network. www.cnbc.com/2026/09/30/m...

cnbc.com

Pete Hegseth, in remarks about the state of the military, announced a project led by two GOP-supporting tech executives to examine military capabilities.

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Reposted by Nils Gilman

Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

“A mother described to me that she had prepared her child’s snack and placed it in her backpack, kissed her face, and sent her to school. What was returned to her was her child’s backpack with an uneaten sandwich.”

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The Kennedy Center was solvent when Trump took over. Then its finances collapsed.

Hard to imagine how a short-fingered vulgarian who once managed to bankrupt an Atlantic City Casino might have trouble with the finances of a snooty high culture institution defined by its Establishmentarian self-regard. www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/0...

washingtonpost.com

The Post examined 15 years of the institution’s financial records to see why it went south after the president took over.

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Given how obsessed MAGA is with depicting Joe Biden as Jimmy Carter redux, it’s darkly hilarious and deeply poetic that Trump’s presidency is foundering on (a) his impotence in the face of Iran & (b) his inability to do anything about stagflation.

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Ned Richardson-Little @historyned.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Most historians today argue that the key policies that made possible the US’s economic resurgence under Reagan were mostly initiated by Carter: military buildup, deregulation, taming of inflation, support for the strong $, etc. Reagan’s main policy innovation—tax cuts for the rich—was a net negative

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Reposted by Nils Gilman

A feature of post-war German democracy has been that the left has traditionally had far more of a firewall to the far left than the center right has had with the far right. The central role of anti-communism in Cold War West Germany created a structural asymmetry that has not been reckoned with.

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What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now

“Under NY State law, voluntary intoxication does not preclude consent unless it is completely immobilizing.” The DA “described the students’ behavior as morally reprehensible but not necessarily illegal on the basis of the info they had about the case at the time.” www.thecut.com/article/what...

thecut.com

As a professor at the Ivy League school, Kate Manne has known many, many victims. There’s a palpable feeling on campus, she writes, that this is big.

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And guess what nationality his wife and son are? Always the grifting angle….

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Why didn't electricity immediately change manufacturing?

Implementation & diffusion of general purpose technologies always takes longer than boosters expect because taking full advantage of the new affordances requires transforming institutions, skillsets & protocols—& those things are hard/slow to change. Consider electricity: www.bbc.com/news/busines...

bbc.com

The internet shows, as with electricity, that real technological change takes time and imagination.

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Texts about alleged Cornell gang-rape released after investigation reopened

Ten years ago I briefly oversaw Berkeley’s Title IX office, which investigates sexual misconduct cases. One misconception is that the evidence in such cases is always (only) “he said/she said”; in fact, as at Cornell, there is often quite a lot of other evidence. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

theguardian.com

Texts, including unnamed male defendant appearing to apologize, reportedly sent days after alleged 2024 assault

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First Encounters with AI | Nina Beguš

“AI not as a monolith, but as a dynamic field of possibility and tension between creativity & computation, where longstanding human questions about intention, desire, authorship, labor & value gain new urgency” — and making the liberating arts more important than ever press.umich.edu/Books/F/Firs...

press.umich.edu

First Encounters with AI gathers some of today’s most original literary minds to explore one of the central artistic and cultural questions of our era: What happens to writing when language is no long...

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Fiat justitia, ne pereat mundus

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Editor's Notes: Gaming Out Antidemocratic Tactics

Four ways to subvert an election: 1. Disqualify citizens before they vote 2. Stop qualified voters from casting the ballot 3. Stop cast votes from being counted 4. Overturn the results after you’ve lost, 4ex by refusing to seat winners (Expect them to try all) www.liberalcurrents.com/editors-note...

liberalcurrents.com

How worried should we be about election interference in 2026, exactly?

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A Broligarchy of Neoreaction Figures, seeking to build a Nerd Reich inspired by the Pseudointellectual DARC Web to complete the Dork Enlightenment project

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Every problem we face was once upon a time the solution to something else.

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In 1927, Siegfried Kracauer wrote of photography, “For the first time, the inert world presents itself in independence from human beings,” and in 1931, Walter Benjamin spoke of photography’s “optical unconscious.” AI is doing the same thing for lexicality & agency, as someone has surely observed.

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Fiat justitia, ne pereat mundus

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Calling what humans are doing to the Earth "terraforming" is sort of like calling what an arsonist does "urban renewal."

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I’ve been saying this for years: the difference between (western) billionaires and (eastern) oligarchs is that the billionaires enjoy complete impunity, whereas the oligarchs do not. This is the financial dimension of that.

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Apparently, a great predictor of whether one is MAGA is if there’s no sidewalk in front of your house

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A sobering thought as one considers the unwinding scenarios for the AI bubble: the English Civil War under Cromwell, the French Revolution and the Terror, the triumph of Nazism in Germany, and the rise of Putin in post-Soviet Russia were each one the consequence of a financial collapse.

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“What he lacked in technical knowledge he compensated with conviction. Put simply, he believed that ‘the foreigners are out to screw us and therefore it's our job to screw them first.’”

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‘I Taste Ashes in the Wind’ | Jerry Brown

Nuclear weapons are the most dangerous near-term existential risk we face — by ANY definition of “we.” Yes, they have purchased a cold peace between great powers (though this has merely moved great power conflicts to proxies) but IMO that reward ain’t worth the risk. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

nybooks.com

Ever since the end of the cold war, the subject of nuclear war and the profound threat it poses to humanity has suffered a “peculiar invisibility.” This

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Fun fact: the global population has increased more since my children were born than the total global population when my grandparents were born

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In a careful review of worries of their lives, most men’s finding must be, neither that there is nothing to worry about, nor that worry can’t be on occasion, a valuable, profitable exercise, but that all or nearly all those fervid past anxieties of doubt or anticipation were to no purpose.

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