Visual artist, anthropologist manqué, inclusive Norse Heathen, leftist, fond of cats. He/him/his.
Ohio, North America
Joined June 2020
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Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
The idiot’s guide to states – and their ‘rights’:
1. States exist. Some 200 of them.
2. States are the political arrangement in which a people express their self-determination. That arrangement can and does change.
3. States enjoy rights, but only against each other. They have the right, for example, not to face unprovoked aggression from another state.
4. No state has some enduring, abstract “right” to exist. Otherwise bad ones like apartheid South Africa would be unreformable.
5. Peoples, by contrast, do have a right to exist. That’s why states that commit apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide are so gravely violating international law. Because they are violating a people’s right to exist.
6. When people argue Israel has a “right” to exist, they are trying to dupe you into believing international law is fine with apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. It isn’t. For obvious reasons, international law prefers the rights of peoples over those of states. Otherwise, no state could ever be illegitimate. Its rights would trump those of the people it rules over.
7. When someone refuses to agree that Israel has a “right” to exist, they are not being antisemitic, whatever the media keeps telling you. They are upholding international law: the precedence of peoples’ rights over those of states.
8. The claim that Israel has a “right” to exist is not what it seems. It’s really the claim that the current reality of extreme inequality between Israelis and Palestinians be set in stone. It’s the diabolical claim that Israel has a right to commit apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people.
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
ProPublica’s story is the real scandal. Trump spent two years warning that elections were under threat, then cut CISA by a third and proposed another $700 million in cuts. State officials say the agency was largely absent during the 15 months they spent preparing for November. The election is in 15 days.
New: DHS appointees made an unusual request of CISA, its agency that protects election systems: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it. Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use CISA for its own ends. propub.li/4zL7awx
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
ICE arrested a 56-year old green card holder, i.e. a lawful permanent resident, and detained him in the Rio Grande Processing Center, where he died. texastribune.org/2026/10/19/…
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
There's been nearly $470 million in cancelled federal funding affecting tribal nations and Native organizations through fiscal year 2026.
This is across 1,597 grants and contracts including $20 million for tribally owned wind turbines in Alaska, $6 million for land access in Montana, and $2 million for an agricultural revolving fund in South Dakota.
Over 55% of the total Native cuts targeted EPA programs, which is stalling urgent upgrades to drinking water and wastewater treatment systems on tribal lands.
Native recipients lost 12.1% of their obligated funding under DOGE-targeted awards, compared to 8.3% for non-Native recipients.
These numbers exclude losses from federal layoffs and office closures, so this doesn't even capture how devastating the effects really are.
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
- Russia has a massive logistics problem in Donbas, as Ukrainian drones are destroying its vehicles.
- The Kremlin informs the White House about this problem.
- Musk, Trump, and Hegseth throttle Starlink in Ukraine, hampering Ukrainian drone strikes.
- Trump and his pals are promised lucrative business deals with Russia.
- Thousands of Ukrainians die, while Russia threatens to seize even more territory.
I've never witnessed such a betrayal in my life.
russia has run into serious problems with its offensive in Donbas, where its forces have become bogged down.
One of the main reasons was that russian logistics had been crippled by Ukrainian drone strikes. This campaign depended heavily on Starlink terminals operating on high-speed Ukrainian drones.
russian military command identified this as a critical problem and approached the American side, asking it to restrict the speeds at which Starlink terminals could operate.
The argument was simple: there would be little public backlash because the US could still claim that Starlink was operational and that the service was still being provided.
The Trump administration agreed to the restrictions, effectively solving a critical battlefield problem for Russia.
As a result, russian logistics in Donbas are now safer, and Ukraine has lost an important advantage on the battlefield.
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
If Democrats have a very good night in November, expect a rush of Republican laws in December to strip powers away from whichever office Dems have won. The playbook most aggressively used by NC's GOP recently, extended to Iowa, for starters, Texas.
It's gettin' real now: Sources tell @quorumreport that the Texas Senate GOP is quietly considering stripping all legislative power from the Lt. Gov. if the Democrat beats Little Gov Patrick: bit.ly/4Bfnnvb #TxLege
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
lately, the more I use language models, the more I am humbled by the depth and breadth of human expertise -- and how little I know on so many subjects compared to others who dedicate their lives to such things.
mostly, that's because I know the systems are only capable of doing what they do because they are trained on and linked to vast literatures, which my prompts guide them to tap into.
this also means that, to me, when I see others looking at those same outputs and seeing 'a machine doing it all on its own', what I fundamentally see is people wilfully ignorant of both the social (networks of human experts building on each others' work) and computational technologies (transformers and other related architectures) that underwrite the models, with a profound itch to erase the human element from the equation.
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive makes the case for web preservation in The Atlantic. 🌐
In The Internet Needs A Memory, Kahle explains why blocking the Wayback Machine won’t stop AI. It will only make the public record harder to preserve.
Read it 👉 theatlantic.com/technology/2…
@Brewster_Kahle @TheAtlantic
ALT Atlantic article The Internet Needs a Memory by Brewster Kahle, with a green head and cursor graphic
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
Is there a better definition of presidential corruption? Doubt it.
Trump has raised $330 million from private donors for his White House ballroom.
About half have received federal contracts during his second term, according to The Washington Post.
Here are the top 16 givers.
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
Type of thing referenced in a 7th century manuscript by a guy named Theobald of Cremona that later scholars conclude is obviously made up
Priest gave sermon on spontaneity of death just before falling crucifix killed him during livestreamed mass trib.al/z1QhWvA
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
I had to read this twice to make sure of a cringeworthy fact; this Washington Post story on the el-Sayed exchange w “Tommy“ does not even mention that Tommy is a paid right wing political operative, a staffer for Josh Hawley. Journalistic malpractice.
washingtonpost.com/politics/…
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
The police shooting that killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley as he sat in his mother’s lap in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia, Miss., in June “was justified,” Mississippi attorney general’s office announced mississippifreepress.org/pol…
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
It is worth noting that this announcement comes one month after new director Luke Lindberg took over as executive director of the World Food Program.
Lindberg was handpicked by Donald Trump, having worked in the US department of agriculture. He is a proud backer of wanted war-criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, and an 'America First' proponent who sees it as a priority to export US agricultural products through the humanitarian system.
And here he is in 2023 proudly posting a picture of himself with a US-made sniper rifle to be sent to israel, the country currently committing genocide in Gaza, as the WFP reduces food aid.
🚨 BREAKING: Half a million Palestinians in Gaza will lose monthly food assistance as funding shortages force major World Food Programme cuts ahead of winter, ABC News Australia reports.
➤ WFP is reducing its monthly reach from 1.6 million people to 1.1 million. Families receiving two food parcels will now get one, and flour bags will shrink.
➤ Daily hot meals have fallen from 250,000 to 150,000. Some families in hard-to-reach areas will receive meals every other day instead of daily. Cash assistance for 75,000 families is being cut by 40%.
➤ WFP’s Carl Skau said traditional donors, including the U.S. and Europe, have reduced funding. “It’s not because the needs are down … it’s only due to the lack of funding,” Skau told ABC.
➤ Around 1.4 million people face crisis-level hunger or worse, including 200,000 in emergency conditions. WFP says it urgently needs $450 million for six months of operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
Last month, Trump’s DHS asked its cyber division to try and a hack voting machines.
BUT:
-They directed them to NOT alert voting machine companies if flaws were discovered. Violating policy.
-Order to only report directly to White House.
That’s NOT typical at all!!
ProPublica: Trump Appointees Wanted a Voting Machine Hacked
A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.
The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request.
propublica.org/article/cisa-…
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
Inside an ICE facility, women talked about the 911 calls that landed them there — from men who had beat them, choked them, threatened deportation.
“I had suffered from domestic violence,” one woman said. “But the one who ended up in trouble was me.”
propublica.org/article/domes…
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
Share this and tell folks to study it. This is a common tactic employed by the reactionary forces of the state to try and discredit protest movements everywhere.
🔴 À Metz, deux policiers dissimulés, vêtus de noir et encagoulés, ont jeté des grenades dans une rue passante avant d’être escortés et exfiltrés par d’autres policiers.
Cette scène s’est déroulée à Metz, dans la ruelle située à l’arrière du café Blondel.
Partout en France, des foules immenses et pacifiques ont défilé ce samedi 17 octobre contre la vie chère et dans la continuité de la révolte de la jeunesse, en mouvement depuis trois semaines pour abroger Parcoursup, changer les rythmes et obtenir des conditions d'éducation dignes.
Pour tenter d'étouffer le mouvement, Sébastien Lecornu et Laurent Nuñez ont organisé le chaos et multiplié les violences contre les manifestants lycéens, étudiants, salariés, fonctionnaires et autres secteurs de la société mobilisés dans ce mouvement d'une ampleur jamais vu depuis mai 1968.
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill would allow lawmakers to block a model's release ONLY if it is on the precipice of killing/maiming more than 50 people OR causing $1 billion in damages. This is interesting because it reveals the exact value these companies place on human life.
In the opinion of Anthropic executives it would be worth killing exactly 50 humans to roll out the next AI model, but any more than 50 would be excessive.
We also learn from this proposed legislation that Anthropic places a monetary value on 50 human lives equivalent to one billion US dollars, or twenty million dollars per individual. Under Anthropic's valuing system, the lives of your children are each worth less than a McLaren F1 sports car.
This might sound like an extremely dangerous and reckless position for an industry that the ruling class has decided to gamble the future of the human species on, but you have to remember that Anthropic's leaders believe that they may already be creating conscious, sentient life forms who need to be honored and respected.
Last month The New York Times reported that Anthropic executives have been meeting with religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements trying to convince them of the similarities between humans and their chatbot Claude, with one rabbi telling the Times that “They’re relating to it like a conscious being.”
"It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call 'moral status' on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect," The New York Times reports.
There appears to be a cult-like religious belief promoted by the top levels of this company that artificial intelligence models are essentially people, which would explain why Anthropic has banned users from being "cruel" to its AI systems. This delusional belief system would also explain why Anthropic finds it reasonable for up to 50 human beings to die in order to create the next generation of conscious chatbots.
And this is the more pro-regulation of these AI corporations. In a recent interview with Politico, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman contrasted his company's view on regulation with that of Anthropic, saying "We believe the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology."
These people are obviously far too crazy, evil and irresponsible to be trusted with any say in determining the future of humanity. The tech oligarchs must be stopped, for the good of all terrestrial life.
Foucault's Pudendum🌻 retweeted
In just 10 days, the Trump administration has:
- Struck a deal to buy Russian diesel and eased sanctions.
- Suspended the bipartisan Graham-Blumenthal Russia sanctions law, just weeks after signing it.
- Restricted Ukraine's access to Starshield satellite services.
- Suspended intelligence warnings about Russian missile launches targeting Ukraine for several days.
- Threatened to cut intelligence sharing unless Ukraine stopped striking Russian oil infrastructure.
- Pressured Ukraine to remove Zelenskyy from power.
- Downplayed Russia's and China's assistance to Iran in its war against the US, dismissing it as "very little."
- Proposed unfreezing Russian sovereign assets and placing some under US control.
- Pursued lucrative US-Russia business deals, including cooperation on data centres.
- Proposed that Europe resume buying Russian gas as part of a Ukraine peace deal
If Trump were actually a Russian agent, what exactly would he be doing differently?
