iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Wallenstein Appreciator @marbleliberal.bsky.social · 7h

No that was literally Assad killing his own people, we debated going to war with him and didn't

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finrodsauronvorecommissionfolderabsurdres @yungdreyfusard.bsky.social · 10h

to be perfectly honest i think assad and his allies probably have more to do with the half a million dead on account of them being the people physically dropping the bombs and shooting the bullets

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Wallenstein Appreciator @marbleliberal.bsky.social · 4h

The global industry of feeding Saudi race horses shouldn't exist

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Zoomer Antimillenarian @surcomplicated.bsky.social · 7h

Cool, you can feed the whole world without exporting obscene amounts of alfafa to Saudi Arabia and spending colossally more water than all the data centers in the world use in the process.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 4h

any ways this person was complaining about how "is this the best we can do? you just look at him and cringe you can't really imagine him as a Senator" while a particularly annoying version, I've been hearing softer versions of doubt about Jackson's ability to win and professionalism all over

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 4h

had dinner with a fairly insufferable liberal family member, the kind of upper middle class who was excited for Platner because he'd be the upstate Republican voter whisperer,

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 4h

This starts with her aggressively trying to link him to the Muslim Brotherhood. I'd like to see someone turn the tables on this. "You're Christian, right? Did you support Timothy McVeigh? Did you agree with Dylann Roof? Or Eric Rudolph? Robert Lewis Dear? No? Even though you share their religion?"

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I suppose there would be an important argument at that juncture about if that moral obligation was a parent-child obligation or one of equals (with the connected moral peril that paternalism was very often a justification for slavery).

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Like, every so often, someone comes rushing out to say 'I think we invented AGI' and, if that were true, the next words out of your mouth ought to be "and so we now have moral obligations towards this new being we created" and somehow that is not generally what I see comes next.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Right, they're saying, "I made an intelligent being and then told it to make 10,000 copies of itself to try a problem and to delete itself if it failed and then iterate its mass-self-suicide until it solved the problem" and, uh, buddy, I don't think you made a being but if you did, ho boy...

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I wrote about this ecosystem of dim-witted classical enthusiasts and their bigotry earlier this year: www.thebulwark.com/p/why-stone-...

thebulwark.com

Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong

Online bigotry masquerading as a love of history in the fever swamps of Elon Musk’s X.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The fortress of their bigotry is immune to new facts and evidence, because their racism composes the first principles through which they interpret all other facts - racism is for the helmet crowd *more true* than the historical evidence, in that sense.

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 20h

the evidence was crystal clear, so instead of saying "oh shit kick the bums out," the left briefly decided "actually it's leftist to rob the government and take tens of millions of dollars in filthy money from the richest people in the country."

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 21h

there is no leftist literature as embarrassing as the "anticorruption is bourgeois and you have to understand that the politics of the working class are inherently patrimonial" literature which followed Lavo Jato and PT's total failure to do literally anything to reform.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 6h

And in the USA it really is a direct competition: one party is running on government reforms and restraint and the other party is running on, "if you vote for us, we will give the people we like $5000 in cash." It is not subtle.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 6h

Indeed the frequently accurate stereotype of developing world politics was that the political choices were between different corrupt and patrimonial parties. The USA traditionally avoided this but we now have one patrimonial party; what remains to be seen is if a non-patrimonial one can compete.

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Zoomer Antimillenarian @surcomplicated.bsky.social · 7h

This is not a joke. We could make huge progress on water problems just by not exporting alfalfa to places that should have huge livestock industries in the first place and who use slavery as part of the industry to boot.

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Andy3E @andy3e.bsky.social · 5h

Had a work trip this week out to Miami, and so decided after to take the opportunity to travel up to KSC and finally tick Atlantis off the list, I have now visited every Shuttle. I need to go back and revisit Endeavour now its stacked vertically, but that's for another time.

The Shuttle Discovery in the Smithsonian

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Queen of Halloweentown MetaBlueSky ♨️ @metabluesky.bsky.social · 8h

Ironically modern scholarship has shown that the real Imperial Japan made the shambolic Nazi kleptocracy look a relative model tyranny, which shows anything's possible if people are determined to fail hard enough.

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The Decider @vibinthrghhistory.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

it becomes ambiguous when you get to Japan in 1945. Another thing that annoys me is we talk about nuclear war in 1945 in *post-1945* terms, when there’s a qualitative difference between thermonuclear weapons and the ones dropped on Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

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The Decider @vibinthrghhistory.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I really do think it’s bad for public understanding and discourse to treat the atomic bombs as separate from the unprecedented levels of violence contained within the Second World War. Like, people will treat the rest of the conflict in black and white terms then suddenly

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Queen of Halloweentown MetaBlueSky ♨️ @metabluesky.bsky.social · 8h

Yeah, and at the end of the day unlike every other strategic air campaign after it, there are two points with the WWII version. The Axis started it and whined when it boomeranged back on them, and nobody actually *tried* a strategic air campaign or knew what it'd do.

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Queen of Halloweentown MetaBlueSky ♨️ @metabluesky.bsky.social · 4h

Of course it's not really presented that way that the US and Mexico had simultaneous major instability, overmighty generals wanting roles in politics (nor that the US versions knew when to quit and the Mexican ones didn't) and that this was a direct overlap in time and cultural aspect.

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Queen of Halloweentown MetaBlueSky ♨️ @metabluesky.bsky.social · 4h

Mexico's great trial of the Reform War and the Second French Intervention directly overlapped in time with the War of the Rebellion, itself a literal case of 'nations, as well as men, paying the price for their transgressions' as Grant put it.

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Queen of Halloweentown MetaBlueSky ♨️ @metabluesky.bsky.social · 4h

Even then the Articles of Confederation running into a buzzsaw of its own making, the various rebellions in the Founding Fathers' own era, and of course that little skirmish from the 1850s-77 make for a history rather more parallel to its contemporaries than anyone wants to remember.

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Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · 6h

look at my environmental advocacy coalition, my green transition is so fucked punchbowl.news/permitting-r...

Re: Broad Environmental Coalition Urges Opposition to Permitting Reform Package
Dear Leader Schumer, Leader Jeffries, Senators, and Members of the House,
Our organizations and millions of supporters urge you to not support or move forward the
Senate-negotiated “permitting reform” legislation in the last remaining months of this Congress.
We all agree that reducing U.S. emissions is a vital policy objective that must be achieved in
order to avoid a climate catastrophe, and that meaningful and durable solutions, more often than
not, require compromise and bipartisan agreements to make progress.
However, each of our groups believes that this particular compromise does not strike an
acceptable balance, and the environmental damage that will occur due to the rollbacks and
weakening of the nation’s environmental laws outweigh the potential emissions reductions that
would occur in the future. While each of our organizations might disagree on the level of
objectionableness or acceptableness of each provision within this legislation, we all collectively
agree that now is not the right moment and this is not the right legislative compromise needed to
achieve what we all collectively hope to see from Congress to address the climate crisis.

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George Pearkes @peark.es · 6h

NYC DSA on the list, fml

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Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · 6h

yeah the hopeful take is that this is definitely not the full spectrum of national environmental advocacy groups and they lost a whole bunch of the big ones: bsky.app/profile/klei...

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 6h

It's difficult, because after a certain point atrocity has its own momentum. Refusal to prosecute or punish has tremendous social costs, which is why those who are uninterested in peace engage in atrocities that make the inability to punish them equal further negation of the victims.

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 7h

And idk, it seems to me like you can only really have one: either you're ok with mass death & punishments to an essentially ubiquitous extent across a society to purge a politically noxious ideology, or you reject the notion of collective punishment or collateral damage.

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 7h

People somehow manage to simultaneously cry out in horror at the mass suffering in Gaza carried out at Israel's hands, ostensibly to extirpate Hamas from a society where it is at least as entrenched as the Nazis were in Germany, and then hungrily call for similar no-tolerance extirpation.

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 7h

Also bluntly, it's usually coming from people who get real squeamish about civilian casualties even as they insist on a policy of absolute no tolerance that would invariably cause vast, vast civilian casualties. "Hang every Confederate/Nazi/collaborator/etc" looks, in practice, like mass death.

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 6h

The revanchist knows that the screams of his victims can never be erased in the ears of their neighbors and kin; he knows that if you do not punish him, he continues to inflict the psychic harm of his crimes to a far vaster population. His victory is even more complete if peace is established.

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 6h

This is why for most of human history the ability to fight back & demand satisfaction in blood was so crucial to a population's notion of basic dignity. It's also why human history is a nightmare spiral of violence, oppression & sectarian violence, of course.

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 4h

This is also one reason that the I/P sectarian conflict continues to be irreconcilable, because the ultimate territory fought over is whose historical narrative of grievance is "right" - the necessary salve to accept you're not going to get to wipe out the other side's perfidious revanchists.

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 4h

This is why at the very least you need some highly symbolic justice of chief perpetrators, which is also why the wholesale adoption of the language of punitive atrocity and Maoist "anything is justified to win the revolution, let the people be martyrs" is so catastrophic.

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 6h

* and of course this "we" applies only to a portion of the population; many of their actual victims simply fucked off and were never satisfied and never felt any justice had been doled out. because, well, a lot of it hadn't, and in many cases it was literally unsafe for them to live there anymore.

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 6h

I think it is, at best... DIFFICULT, & can only be maintained by a position of political & economic power. We* were only able to tolerate the Marshall Plan & the impunity of most of Europe's perpetrators after the Holocaust by either indifference or the mythology of Nazi as pathetic ur-villain.

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 6h

In my most cynical moments I think that the whole mythology around nonviolent protest and the dignity of those victimized by the wicked is all lies. To be a victim of atrocity & unable to demand satisfaction by fist is, as the kiddies, say, being cucked, and has been for most of human history.

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Preeti Chhibber @runwithskizzers.bsky.social · 4h

bye zaslav you're leaving us all worse off and i still hate you and i hope you have a really bad time in whatever you end up doing next

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 4h

Almost no one goes from first principles and thinks through an idea or a belief, even fewer people hold their principles in the face of stiff opposition from "friends" and most shrink back if it seems like the majority thinks something different no one believes in ideas.

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 4h

Ayup, though - amusingly for a vampire story - Dracula is like one of the only cases where the antisemitism isn't actually tied to the vampire, it's just represented in the leads' own casual antisemitism. Dracula HIMSELF is profoundly Christian, & mostly just an individual unfortunate asshole.

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Chad Loder @chadloder.dev · 5h

The "parental rights" movement which treats children as the direct property of parents, having neither autonomy nor rights, rejecting communal interest in children's wellbeing, is deeply connected to the cultures of abuse we associate with pedocon theory. @swordsjew.bsky.social had a good bit on it.

liberalcurrents.com

Neon Liberalism #37: The Authoritarian Logic of Child Abuse

Join Samantha and guest Talia Lavin, author of Culture Warlords and Wild Faith, as they discuss Donald Trump's connections with Jeffrey Epstein, the broader problem of child sexual abuse among Republi...

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 5h

Holy shit.

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 5h

I could hug @anandwrites.bsky.social for this. This is so true but you NEVER hear it in US media. Never. Truly doing god's work.

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Amanda Katz @katzish.bsky.social · 5h

It's been such a long few years, I'd forgotten this particular rape accusation against Hegseth. The woman told police she may have been drugged. Hegseth, who was married to one woman and had just had a baby with another, said it was consensual but paid her $50k to settle. He was confirmed anyway.

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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 7h

“There’s something of Thomas De Quincey to Lorenz, who has credited an adolescent fixation on Tumblr for beginning her journey to turning her extensive use of social media into a prolific career writing about it.” www.liberalcurrents.com/portraits-of...

liberalcurrents.com

Portraits of an American Dopamine Eater

Our attention economy incentivizes the profane degradations of fame-seeking and celebrity culture.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 8h

we need yang wen-li to knock some sense into him

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Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 12h

I try to answer, as best I can, the key questions we are facing now – including: Can we trust the polls and the prediction models? What schemes and strategies have the Trumpists already tried to subvert the election - and why have they, so far, failed?

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Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 12h

Also: The Trumpists have built their claim to authoritarian power on the myth that they represent the “will of the people,” that Donald Trump is the “tribune” of the “authentic” American Volk. A massive defeat in a national election would significantly undermine those bizarre claims.

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