A lazy Saturday is drawing to a close here in the UK. It began with the discovery of a surgically detached mouse head tenderly placed on the living room carpet by the cat. I appreciate him trying to bring me snacks, but I begrudge him the bloodstains on the rug. As my mother used to say to me and my siblings when we were raising hell as kids: “It’s a good thing you’re cute.”
Anyway. I had planned to spend the day dismantling several pallets friends brought me so that I can make planters with them, but it was raining. Instead, I read two articles: “Welcome to Slop World: How the Hostile Internet Is Driving Us Crazy” by Jacob Silverman in the Financial Times (paywall-free Archive.is link here), and “Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us” by University College London scholar Carl Hendrick, who studies the science of learning (it’s a Substack, sorry). It seems to me these two go well together.
Silverman’s column goes over ground that Anne Laurie has covered for us here for years: the “enshittification” of the Internet and how that has accelerated in the age of Generative AI slop and confident misinformation. (Take this gem, for instance:)
I am watching the movie Heat and I wanted to check if the actress is a young Angelina Jolie so I went to google and-
— Nicholas Kole (@nicholaskole.bsky.social) April 19, 2025 at 5:41 AM
Anyway. Silverman bundles together AI slop and enshittification and misinformation under the label “the hostile internet”. He talks about the toll it is taking on us as individuals and as members of online communities:
The influx of hallucinating chatbots is just the latest sign of the wider internet’s descent into hostility. The internet is now optimised for metrics that have nothing to do with human enjoyment, or convenience, or the profits of anyone except the platform overseers. And it’s only getting worse, as our dependence on these flawed tools grows daily. On a mundane but practical level, I can see this playing out when I go to the website of, say, Audible, and there’s absolutely nowhere there that will allow me to resume playing the audiobook I was just listening to. No play button, no “pick up where you left off”. They prefer you to shop more, so you face a wall of new offerings, but not the thing you’ve been listening to that very day. . . . And right now, there’s little alternative if one refuses to take part in an increasingly degraded digital world. To be online today means navigating an environment whose design feels adversarial, manipulative; it means wading through toxic slop to get to the thing you want. It’s a recipe for cynicism, discontent and dysfunction, wholly in conflict with the democratising impulses that supposedly drove the internet’s development.
Hendrick’s piece seems related to this: how much of today’s Internet content (possibly even this post, being written under the influence of half an Aperol spritz) actively discourages thinking in the reader. He compares it to junk food: “ultra-processed content”:
Not all reading is created equal. Just as not all food nourishes, not all content feeds the mind. In the age of platforms and prompts, of AI authors and infinite feeds, we are reading more but understanding less. What we consume is increasingly pre-digested cognition: engineered for ease, stripped of its vital ambiguity, void of risk. Ultra-processed reading is syntactically smooth, cognitively shallow, emotionally inert. This isn’t just about TikTok or Twitter. It’s about how the medium reshapes the mind, how digital habits dull our appetite for complexity, and how a civilisation that forged itself through the long-form written word might forget what it means to think.
Reading is not natural. It is an acquired skill, hard-won, an evolutionary detour that turned the human brain into a space for rarefied thought; reflection, argument, imagination. And yet, in a digital culture of continuous partial attention, this capacity is undoubtedly slipping from us. What was once a labour of immersion is now a reflex of distraction. The words haven’t vanished, but the reader has changed. This shift from deep reading to shallow skimming, from authored insight to algorithmic noise is no accident. It is the product of platforms, of incentives, of a technological ecology indifferent to meaning. To understand what we are losing, I feel we should begin by noticing how we now read and why it no longer resembles reading at all.
A non-hostile information environment—the sort that Silverman traces the decline of—is crucial for the maintenance of the consensus reality on which democratic societies are built. And as Hendrick explains, it seems as if capacity to read deeply and critically, to care enough to struggle with things that are difficult in order to really understand them, is also in decline because of that information environment. And that too takes a toll on our actual humanity. Again, from Hendrick:
Reflection, nuance, ambiguity, these are not incidental by-products of reading. They are its gifts. And as they fade, so too does our capacity to meet the complexity of the world with anything other than reaction.
This is a complex problem with no easy answer. For me, the solution has been on the individual level: trying to read more challenging material in the hopes that it will inoculate me against becoming a reactionary myself. How we collectively fight these twin pressures, I don’t know. Communities like this one are probably part of it, though. Thank you all for continuing to be here.
That’s all I got. Enjoy your holiday weekend, if you keep it; be safe at the protests, if you’re going to one. If nothing else, enjoy this photo of my stray cat pal, Crusty Oliver:
TONYG
Yup. My facile, unoriginal thought about this is that the contemporary internet is to actual information as junk food is to nutritious food. As a result, whatever skills people had in reading and thinking is atrophying. The cult of Trump is just one manifestation of that trend.
trollhattan
Holy crap that Angelina Jolie thing is hilarious.
Rose Judson
@trollhattan: I howled with laughter. Someone followed up by asking about Marlon Brando:
oldster
Look, it was either ask Google, or go sniff her butt, and that seemed rude, okay?
Baud
Your own fault for not capitalizing Heat. What’s a poor AI to do?
Baud
I do feel like my reading aptitude has gone downhill. But I think it predates AI.
Kelly
Yesterday Congresswoman Maxine Dexter, M.D. (OR-03) announced that she will travel to El Salvador to demand the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. OR 3 is Oregon’s most Democratic congressional seat. I think a steady stream of Democrats going to El Salvador is good.
geg6
AI is definitely one the signs of the apocalypse of rational thought. I, too, have taken to reading a lot of challenging stuff lately. First, to keep my mind sharp. And second to escape from the crapfest my life has turned into recently. It soothes me to read about the life of President/General Grant or re-read The Guns of August or about the life and reign of Elizabeth I. I just finished those in the last few months and am going back the Shelby Foote (yes, I’m aware that it’s problematic history) three volume Civil War history. It’s been years since I pulled them off the bookshelf and they are nice and dense. A good thing in my life these days, those super dense books. After Foote, I’ve got William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Berlin Diary teed up.
Spanky
And now when I google “Was Angelina Jolie in ‘Heat'” , the Nichols Kole bluesky post comes up, followed by Jon Voight, Heat Magazine, etc, etc. I still don’t know (nor do I care) if Anjolina Jolie was in Heat.
Enshittification indeed.
zhena gogolia
@trollhattan: I still want to know if Angelina Jolie is in Heat.
ETA: Apparently not, but Jeremy Piven is.
zhena gogolia
@geg6: For me it’s The Mirror and the Light.
Steve LaBonne
In the US the educational regime of constant punitive testing has also accelerated the decline of the ability to read with any depth and think critically about what one reads. Kids are basically getting no training in critically evaluating information and in many parts of the country teachers are likely to be punished if they try to smuggle such lessons into their classrooms.
Spanky
@zhena gogolia: IMDB’s Full Credits sez “no”.
Gin & Tonic
@geg6:
Almost any WWI history you could take off the shelf would be better.
prostratedragon
Live feed, in NYC at the moment. Near the Library?
Another Scott
When I try the first one, I get:
“An AI Overview is not available for this search”
I guess the humans there got tired of all the jokes about it?
[rofl]
People seeing, or finding out the hard way, that LLM “AI” is pretty bad may be a good thing.
I’m old enough to have used Archie and similar tools way back in the day. On had to think about how to find information, and use one’s thinking cap to evaluate what one actually found. There was no vetting of the stuff out there – it was whatever someone put on the Internet.
Maybe those days of having to actually think about what one finds are slowly returning?
Maybe the value of edited sites like scientific journals, encyclopedias, etc., will be recognized again as well (and users will be willing to pay to keep them running well)?
We can hope!
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
geg6
@zhena gogolia:
I’m not as much into historical fiction as I am biography, memoir or history. But have you ever read any of the Margaret George historical fiction? I particularly like The Autobiography of Henry VIII.
zhena gogolia
@geg6: No — but sounds fun.
I am going to do Forever Amber after this.
trollhattan
Happy that Pope Frank recovered from pneumonia in time to give JD a hearty papal fuck you. God bless ya, Pope Frank.
prostratedragon
@prostratedragon: No, down Broadway somewhere. Lots of people.
geg6
@Gin & Tonic:
Same with the Shelby Foote but they are great writers. I already know pretty everything in all these books, partially because I’ve already read them numerous times and partially due to my academic background. But I love good writing in history and biography and those are exceedingly rare things.
Splitting Image
My favourite example of AI in the wild:
Iconic Female Country Singers
An innocuous list of women country singers from the 1960s, including Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, and Dolly Parton.
It also includes Norma Jean Beasler, who was Dolly Parton’s predecessor on the Porter Wagoner show. Except that the list claims that Norma Jean’s original name was Marilyn Monroe and that she transitioned from Hollywood movies to country singing in the early 1960s. Instead of, you know, dying.
MagdaInBlack
@zhena gogolia: I LOVE “Forever Amber.” Silly as it may be, it’s the reason I became interested in the history of England.
No Nym
@Steve LaBonne: You are absolutely correct about this. I knew we were on the path to fascism when I was teaching high school in the mid-1990s and had parents successfully lobby the principal to have their darlings excused from an exam over a book written by a woman who spent a chunk of her childhood in the Manzanar internment camp. It was my student’s considered opinion that Japanese internment never happened, and the administrators supported this crap. I understood then that my job was just to keep everyone quiet and happy, not tickle their minds with challenging subjects, and I left soon after.
I am finishing up a book (Catafalque by Peter Kingsley) that points to the fact that even more than losing our critical skills, we are losing our humanity, and the consequences for this will be dire and irreversible. Part of the problem is how much we are forced to interact with and behave like machines. AI is accelerating our long divorce from ourselves.
BeautifulPlumage
@trollhattan:
Damn, go Pope.
Melancholy Jaques
Why are we dependent on them? Why should that be growing? We need to ask ourselves these questions instead of just going along.
PatrickG
@Another Scott:
results for me are slightly different than for Rose, but I’m able to replicate both Jolie and Brando responses. Also howling with laughter.
Sad to report that I’m not famous enough to have AI evaluate my current fecundity status.,
Lyrebird
@No Nym: Hi, did any of that denial of history end up in the news? I am writing an essay, without LLM input, about teaching kids to think.
If there’s nothing that was made public, no prob, I like my privacy and I respect yours
ETA: Ms. Rose J, if No Nym would like to write to you or comment here that it’s okay for me to contact them, you are welcome to share my email addy with them.
Eric K
Besides the being unable to understand the question part this also highlights how silly AI is, even if it works, if it had gotten the answer correct was it any easier or faster than simply looking in IMDB? Which has the advantage of not consuming enough power to run a house for a day like AI processes do?
No Nym
@Melancholy Jaques:Why are we dependent on them?
Because we’re lazy (in general) and have lost our ability to think critically. Not sure which one came first.
Professor Bigfoot
I’ve been reading a lot more since last November- nothing particularly deep; but still thoughtful— The Peripheral, Murderbot, several of Harry Turtledove’s alternate history/fantasies, including his latest “Twice as Dead” which I can heartily recommend. Oh, and Sir Terry Pratchett, bless his memory.
I may go back to read General Grant’s memoirs again; I might even resurrect The Baroque Cycle.
Anyway, what I hate the most is the constant pushing of video if you want to learn about something. Sure, YouTube is great for figuring out how to specific things (like resurrect the cabin temperature controls on a classic car) but watch some video about… well, anything?
I have a Millenial friend that I tease because he’s always sending me podcasts and videos and I never watch any of ‘em. “DO YOU YOUNG PEOPLE NOT WRITE ANYMORE?”
The answer appears to be “no.”
NotMax
On topic, a Titanic rant.
;)
No Nym
@Lyrebird: As far as I recall, it did not make the news because our school admin considered the matter closed once the parents were pacified. I wrote a couple of unsolicited opinion pieces in the local newspaper back then, but don’t remember if I included this incident in any of my screeds. It is an event I remember vividly from my years of teaching, but there were some others that were extremely discouraging. OK with me if Rose gives you my email address.
PatrickG
I sent Rose a couple screenshots for funsies, but what AMAZES me is that when I ask google “is Angelina Jolie in the movie heat” the AI not only can’t provide an answer, but the top search result is to the Wikipedia page for Angelina Jolie.
Enshittification describes what came before. I like “dead internet” as a general term, but new words will have to be invented for whatever google is doing here!
KSinMA
@Lyrebird: I’d love to read your essay when it’s done.
trollhattan
@No Nym:
Ugh.
My congresswoman was born in the Poston, AZ internment camp and might have thoughts on the matter.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
Try this before the internet.
A basic premise was the local library and in my case the head librarian who thought that no one can ever read above the library age limit per section. IOW I couldn’t check out adult books because. Mom had a discussion with her, with me there. I almost had to laugh at this woman. Her ideal was that no one under 21 could read anything above See Spot Run. I, at about 11-12 yrs old almost told her what she could do with herself – 3 words, one of which starts with a capital F. I managed to keep my mouth shut. I got my adult library card.
My point is that none of this is new. What we read/watch may be but the restriction of information, of learning is taken by some to mean that no one can be smarter than them. Which often gets proven wrong on a daily, or even minute by minute basis. We all have levels of exposure to knowledge and information and in this day and age that is a dramatically larger basis than over half a century or more ago. Over 50 years ago I had a discussion with a new captain of the ship I was stationed on in the USN, about a piece of communications gear. He was left handed and asked if I could move a piece of wall mounted gear from the right side of the desk in his room on board the ship. I told him yes but it would take a written request because it would take 3 departments getting work orders. Mine to rewire the phone, someone to move and weld on new mounts and then someone to repaint the walls after the welder burned off the paint. He looked at me as if I might be insane. Then he nodded his head in understanding, it would involve 6 people to get his phone moved 18 inches to the left. That and a small pile of paperwork. Efficiency means different things to different people. Some don’t understand this at all.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: probably from reading too many opinions by Texas judges
Rose Judson
@trollhattan: Ah, fantastic. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving FashCath.
Tony Jay
1) Thank you, AI, for encapsulating all that is wrong with you in one easy to understand face-pie. You can sink beneath the molten steel now. Thumb up. Job done.
2) I’m torn. Is Crusty Oliver wearing a lamb’s skin as a onesie, or is Crusty Oliver a lamb that wears a cat’s face in order to scrounge tuna and belly rubs? Oh, Kingdom of the Animals, Attenborough himself could not plumb all your mysteries.
3) Good to see thousands of trans folk and their allies rallying in London to stick two fingers up to the arseholes on the UK’s Not-So-Supreme Court and their ugly ‘None But Women Born’ ruling. Also good to see the creeps running the increasingly misnamed Equality & Human Rights Commission outing themselves as the hard-right culture warriors I’ve long known they are with their threats to drag any organisation that doesn’t rush to institute discriminatory rules into its kangaroo court for a good old telling off.
Let everyone see who you are. Life is more honest that way.
Rose Judson
@PatrickG: Ooh, where’d you send them? I didn’t see. Try rose[dot]judson[at]gmail etc.
trollhattan
@Ruckus:
Heh. I remember librarians, or at least assistants like that. Once presented my stack ‘o books to checkout and the gal questioned their suitability and had me read a passage of her choosing aloud.
I guess to her credit she checked me out with no further interrogation.
My big brother had it worse back in Iowa. He taught himself to read when two, and on his first day of kindergarten brought books to school. The teacher refused to allow them “because nobody reads yet.” Mom was not pleased and later advised by the family doctor we needed to move away, or bro would not get any kind of education. Lucky for me, that’s what happened a few years later.
Steve King country. (The congressman, not the author.)
Ruckus
@No Nym:
AI is accelerating our long divorce from ourselves.
It is if we let it.
We are not automatons, robots, or idiots. OK at least most of us aren’t. But humans do often follow and with an increase of populations and far more communications it is more and more likely that we will lose some of our individuality. We don’t have to lose it, but if we don’t recognize that it is extremely likely we could, we will.
rikyrah
This is the most Boston thing.
And, it brought 😢😢
Considering where we are as a country.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8jCbH2j/
Betty
@zhena gogolia: Ashley Judd is the only actress he may have mistaken for Angelina, but how??
Steve in the ATL
@geg6: style guide says the proper name is “that asshole Shelby Foote”
karen gail
@No Nym: A number of years back belong to a group that included a retired teacher who continued to tutor; she said as a new teacher what she was once teaching at grade school level became what was taught at high school level. Then as she did more outside tutoring she discovered that information was now being taught at college level. She believed a large part of the dumbing down was happening at the same time as standardized testing become the focus of most teachers.
What stuck in my mind was “we no longer teach students to think, we teach them to answer standard tests.”
Betty
@trollhattan: I do love Pope Francis. I hope he can hang around for a few more years. So much more he should do to bring the Church out of the Middle Ages.
Baud
@Steve in the ATL:
I don’t even want to know what those decisions are doing to AI output.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: my reading comprehension got so bad that I had to limit myself to Bazooka Joe comics. When I needed something even dumber than those, I switched to Brad Thor novels.
Lyrebird
@No Nym: Thanks!
And a rather self-centered thanks for helping me feel better about my choice not to go into HS teaching this past decade, either.
@KSinMA: Wow, thanks! I’m pretty slow but it’s a topic I care about for sure. Are you also an educator? Either way, if you are also okay with being in email contact IRL, please let Rose Judson know.
Ruckus
@Tony Jay:
I believe that many humans believe they, or at least the gang they belong to is the head of humanity. While quit often, as in 99% of the time, they are the asshole of humanity – IOW full of shit. Or at least the output port of shit.
I also believe that with “better” communications among humans, like what we are doing here, CAN put people into groups, separating them into – if you will, boxes of others like them. Decades ago the one neighbor in a town that is certifiably insane would be somewhat rare. Now with world wide communications, and larger populations, we see that the groups of the certifiably insane are larger than one might imagine.
Also good to see you again!
Baud
@Steve in the ATL: I’m in worse shape. Most of my reading is Balloon Juice.
Downpuppy
@Betty: Heat had an amazing cast. Jon Voight was near the top of it. He could have easily got her signed on.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: [shutters]
No BellaPea
@geg6: Margaret George’s Autobiography of Henry. VII is one of the best books I have ever read. It took her 19 years to write that novel. The Nero books are interesting also.
zhena gogolia
@Betty: I was thinking Amy Brenneman?
PatrickG
@Professor Bigfoot:
based on your other recommendations, my immediate response was to order Twice as Dead. Good company that book keeps in your comment!
then I noticed HT is a prolific author*. Assuming I like this one, any recommendations on reading order? Should I read something else before reading this one? Help me Obi-wan Professor! You’re not my only hope but you’re more trustworthy than the internet, to stay on topic :)
* you know those bastards well, I assume. Oops! There went my next month! Too many new books to catch up on!
Miki
@geg6: “I’ve got William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Berlin Diary teed up.”
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a really good read, all 1,200+ pages. I read it after I quit a shitty job and took some time off to re-orient. I was craving reading something other than legal writing, and it totally satisfied me. (Also read all of Henry James and Jane Austen.) Be sure to read the endnotes – makes it twice as good, imo.
Another Scott
@Ruckus: Good points, and a great story.
Lots of people decry paperwork and bureaucracy, but they don’t too often think about why we have the systems we do and what might have caused them to evolve the way they have.
I’m sure that captain would have loved being able to ask that the phone be moved and having it in its new spot the next morning. But he probably didn’t want to think about what that would mean for crew readiness or morale or having to justify having personal techs at his beck and call to his bosses and his bosses’s bosses… We’ve been very fortunate in the USA that one generally can’t snap their fingers and have something done for us (if only we pay a little bribe to help them out)…
That’s not to say that things can’t be more efficient. Of course they can. But one of the iron-clad laws of the universe is Fast, Cheap, Good – Pick 2, and there’s no getting around that.
Similarly, one cannot stop thinking when one uses the internet, no matter how convenient it is!
:-)
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
PatrickG
@Rose Judson: sent to your ballon juice account but will send to your Gmail too.
Another Scott
Happy 250th Anniversary of the Shot Heard Round The World!
Auspicious timing??
Best wishes,
Scott.
Professor Bigfoot
@PatrickG: I followed him on X and now on Bsky— and I’m working my way through his oeuvre.
I can’t bring myself to read “Guns of the South” because fuck them confederate sonsabitches; but his WorldWar series was captivating (exclamatory cough).
I have “Three Miles Down” in my library but got bogged down about a third of the way in, so I’ll have to go back to that.
Both “The Peripheral” and “Anathem” by Stephenson were really difficult at first— until I understood the different timelines in Peripheral, and only about halfway through Anathem.
I was discussing books with someone around that time and told ‘em I couldn’t get to it and he said, “just trust me, keep going and you are going to LOVE it.” He was right.
Let me discommend “2034.” That one I threw aside after it had the United States Navy do the absolute stupidest goddamn thing any military could possibly do. (Of course, then Hogsbreath got made SecDef and stupidity does roll downhill, doesn’t it?)
No Nym
@Ruckus: I was speaking in generalities, of course, but the trend of western civilization has been in the direction of making us less and less capable of thinking and doing for ourselves. As with all things, the trend has its upside–washing machines, cars, etc.–but its downside is our lack of reflection and interiority (again, in general). I agree that we don’t have to surrender our humanity, just that we are headed in that direction.
@karen gail: Agree 100% about the decline in curricula over time. Also, standardized tests are for ranking the schools, not doing anything to help kids. They are another way we make people serve the system they are in instead of the system working to advance the people in it. Schooling has become just another conveyor belt, though certainly some kids and teachers connect in wonderful and important ways in spite of it.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Professor Bigfoot: I get so impatient if I have to watch a video, where people talk at whatever speed. Give me text which I can read at my own speed. Also, I’ve noticed whenever I seduced by some video on Instagram which is supposed to reveal a 4 ingredient drink to lose weight or some such, they natter on and on and never get to the point. I always quit before they either give the core info, or ask you for money.
Professor Bigfoot
@No Nym: The purpose of education is not to educate, but to train a workforce.
To train an obedient and submissive workforce.
geg6
@zhena gogolia:
OMG, I haven’t read that since college!
Steve LaBonne
By the way, anyone who hasn’t yet read William Sheridan Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power- The Experience of a Single German Town 1922-1945 is strongly urged to do so. The echoes of what is happening here and now are frightening.
Sister Golden Bear
A bit of good news on the US trans front:
A federal judge ruled that transgender people’s passport changes do not, as the Trump executive order stated, deprive the “dignity, safety, and well-being of women” and issued a preliminary junction to block the administration from forcing trans people’s passports to list the sex that they were assigned at birth — including those who had already legally changed their gender.
FWIW, the current advice if you’re a trans or non-binary person who needs to get or renew a passport is to wait for the moment until 1) the order is broaden, and 2) see how the appeals go.
Steve LaBonne
@Sister Golden Bear: I will take any little bit of good news I can get. I hope the reach of this order will indeed broaden.
PatrickG
@Professor Bigfoot: thanks for the recommendations! Appreciate it!
Captain C
@Rose Judson: I asked if Queen Elizabeth II was in Heat, and got this reply:
Tony Jay
@Ruckus:
I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I think I’ve boiled the Being of Human down to the simple equation of –
Q) “Shall I be a dick right now?”
People who answer Yes will do dickish things and, while the next time they ask that question they can answer No and not do dickish things, they still have to own the results of their initial dickishness and, in whatever way they can, make up for it.
And the Being of Human is that we ask ourselves this question every minute of every day, for as long as we live. Turns out, it’s just less exhausting not to be a dick. And good practice, too.
arrieve
@prostratedragon:
I was there! Yes, it started at the library on Fifth Avenue, then headed up Madison Avenue. I don’t think there were as many people as two weeks ago–I can’t begin to judge a crowd of that size–but I would guess that at least 15 blocks of Madison were packed with people.
Unfortunately someone heading the wrong way in the crowd knocked me over (I’m fine but I’m going to have some fine bruises tomorrow) so I left earlier than I wanted to. The crowd was younger than I expected, which is good.
Steve LaBonne
@Tony Jay: Also “don’t be a dick” is a good concise summary of the Golden Rule.
Miss Bianca
@Professor Bigfoot: You could say that about the American public school system ever since it became mandated, and yet I think what people here are saying that is that even given that premise, students’ literacy levels have declined from what they were Back in Tha Day.
geg6
@No BellaPea:
I love that book. Probably read it at least ten times. All her stuff is good. But the Autobiography is a masterpiece.
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Golden Bear: More good news, yesterday the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the administration’s emergency motion for a stay in the trans military ban case — upholding the existing preliminary injunction in fa vor of the plaintiffs that blocks the government from enforcing its ban on transgender people in the military.
trollhattan
@Miki:
The William Shatner version is punchier.
“The. Nazis. Could. Not. Be. Stopped. Bones?”
geg6
@Miki:
Thanks for the advice. I agree with your comment. This will probably be at least my sixth time reading it. It has a treasured place on my shelves.
PatrickG
@Professor Bigfoot: kind of curious about 2034, though. Do you think if you re-read it now you might not throw it away, in light of our current military “leadership”?
not exactly sure where I’m going here, other than that it’s one thing to read about historical malevolent incompetence, and quite another to live under it.
CaseyL
I got into the habit of reading ebooks during Covid lockdown, because I could check them in and out of the library as fast as I can read (which is pretty damn fast).
But I did notice that reading online, the book just didn’t stick with me, not in any detail. This alarmed me, and I have gone back to reading “real” books. It does make a difference in how much I retain, and I figure it must also make a difference cognitively.
I am also trying – with, admittedly, scant success – to spend less time on the computer. With spring really and truly here, I plan to revive my container-grown vegetable garden. Something very nice and real.
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Golden Bear: However, in the shitty trans news department, Republicans have filed a record 867 state and federal anti-trans bills so far this year — more than 8x back in 2020 when Republicans started aggressively targeting trans people.
THIS is why I no longer feel safe in the US.
I’ll also note that many of the bathroom bills, and some of the others, would be classify violations as sex crimes, which would prevent trans people from leaving the country.
Redshift
@Professor Bigfoot: I agree so much. I accept that some people learn better from video, so it’s fine that it exists as an alternative, but there are so many things now where it’s hard to find a non-video explanation.
The things that drives me the most nuts are videos posted about programming questions. Even if you learn better from video, what you’re doing is text-based, and there’s no world in which you’re better off not being about to cut and paste from the answer or search for the specific thing you care about.
PatrickG
@Sister Golden Bear:
good news where we can get it!
I’m also heartened by the clear language many judges are using here, albeit could be stronger in my opinion
“… that is rooted in prejudice and not law”
Just my $0.02, as Another Scott would say. Thanks for sharing!
No Nym
@Professor Bigfoot: Truly! I told my students once that the bells that rang every 50 minutes and forced them to disengage and move to another classroom was training them for factory work. A few also noted how similar the school setup was to prison. We had a great, lively discussion about the way schools do things, and why, and when the bell rang they all groaned because they wanted to, for once, continue the conversation. School was training them for life in the late Industrial Revolution, at best.
Steve in the ATL
@TONYG: @Tony Jay: it’s confusing having you both on the same thread. Like with the multiple Paul W’s that we have, but they agreed to settle it in the octagon. May be a solution for you two as well.
Until then, I am assuming that you both have Arabic names but Tony G is Egyptian and Tony Jay so not since the letter G is pronounced as a J in Arabic except in the Egyptian dialect where it’s a hard G. Problem resolved—shukran, habibis!
Now we wait for the real B-J Arabic speakers to weigh in with “well actually…”
Steve LaBonne
@Sister Golden Bear: We need a lot more cis people to grasp that bathroom bills are flagrantly eliminationist. One we make it so it’s very difficult for you to leave your house the remaining steps to making you not exist at all are much easier. (I know you know this only too well but far too many cis people who want to think of themselves as well-intentioned refuse to get it.)
Steve LaBonne
@CaseyL: My eyesight makes it much easier to read ebooks, and I have adjusted. Not saying there is any reason for people to adjust if they don’t have to.
Steve in the ATL
@Sister Golden Bear: why do they care so much?! Assholes.
Steve in the ATL
@Steve LaBonne: do you find yourself trying to change the font size on regular books after years of using a kindle, or is it just me?
Old School
Steve LaBonne
@Steve in the ATL: I have never understood the emotional energy behind so many anti-human moral panics. I guess I really don’t want to on the principle tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.
Steve LaBonne
@Old School: Octarine, obviously.
SiubhanDuinne
@MagdaInBlack:
For me, it was Anya Seton’s Katherine.
Old School
@Steve LaBonne:
(Couldn’t get phone to add link.)
It’s olo.
https://bbc.com/news/articles/clyq0n3em41o
PatrickG
@Sister Golden Bear: and a follow up comment acknowledging the bad news. Thanks again for sharing.
Will keep donating and supporting the people in my life. No substantive comment, just wanted you to know I appreciate your updates, even if I mostly lurk.
sab
@Steve in the ATL: TONY and Tony are two very different names. Then add the G and the Jay and they are even more different.
Sheesh.
In your defense, I called werebear Wearbear a couple of days ago.
Steve LaBonne
@Steve in the ATL: It’s been quite a while since I even tried to read a regular book. Between the tiny type and the shitty paper that results in very low contrast, it’s just not happening. Even to read a magazine (which I don’t do often) I need reading glasses that are more powerful than the reading part of my progressives. The big problem is a huge floater in my left eye that resulted from a posterior vitreous detachment.
Another Scott
The TV is playing commercials in some tennis match break.
Some Jardiance ad (involving softball) has a bunch of actors doing various dance moves, as one does.
Part of the fine print…
“… may increase the risk of lower limb loss …”
The side effects of these new drugs seem to be getting more extreme!
:-/
Best wishes,
Scott.
MagdaInBlack
@SiubhanDuinne: Oh! I loved that one too. I think I probably read it while reading a history of the Plantagenet’s
Steve in the ATL
@Steve LaBonne:
Then do it Balloon Juice After Dark style and skip the articles!
@sab: I’m sticking with Arab Tony and EGYPTIAN TONY
Professor Bigfoot
@PatrickG: When an unknown agency take over one of your most advanced aircraft, remotely, then flies it to another adversary airbase despite the efforts of the pilot; then having lost 3 Arleigh Burkes to PLAN forces… I’d like to think the USN would stop and figure out WTF just happened, ESPECIALLY on your externally pirated aircraft, before they committed NOW KNOWN UNRELIABLE SYSTEMS into a combat situation.
You don’t just flush the docks and send your entire fleet directly into a fight when you know damned well you can’t trust your own damn systems. Not without *thorough* review and analysis of every single line of code on every dang ship and every airplane in the Fleet.
I want to believe no American admiral would be that stupid.
Steve LaBonne
@Another Scott: I take Jardiance. Thanks for making my day. ;)
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
Oh it could have been done in one day no problem it just might not have been the day he wanted. Or even close to it. And no, he was not the type to want everyone at his beck and call. He actually was one of my best captains because he saw and understood how bad the roadblocks were. We got along fine, far better than most high officers I met in my time in. A side note. I was in charge of that department on that ship, and he knew it and he also treated everyone far better than most officers I knew, because he wasn’t a pompous arrogant ass who thought he was better than everyone else. He understood that in some cases, like mine, I was in charge of a department as the highest rated person in it. I just wasn’t a lifer. And that department and what we did made somethings possible, like the ship knowing where we were going, how fast we were going, where from and how fast the wind was blowing, his ability to talk to the men on the ship and the men to discuss what they needed to know. I’m not saying that other departments weren’t important, they all were, just that this one was also. We had gear high up the mast, we had gear that worked in the water several feet below the hull. We had gear in every compartment.
Also, my experience with the USN over a half a century ago is that Fast, Cheap, Good were not 3 words that often were even thought about. EVER. Now you do have to understand that this was during Vietnam and while some wanted to go and be involved, others wanted to be a half a world away, and lifers often just wanted to be dicks. Sure not all of them did but far more than a few seemed to have being an asshole as their life’s mission. I have no real concept that it was about war, mostly it just seemed they wanted to be assholes. Some of them succeeded far beyond their wildest hopes and dreams. A few of them actually wanted to be real human beings. And some of them actually managed that.
Steve in the ATL
@Steve LaBonne:
Isn’t that the name of brendancalling’s band?
Another Scott
@Steve LaBonne: Don’t let your lower limbs walk off!!
Best wishes,
Scott.
Miki
@Steve LaBonne: I switched to e-books and a Kindle Fire when I couldn’t read a hard back version of Team of Rivals for more than 10 minutes because it killed my hands/wrists. I flew through it on my Kindle Fire, in spite of taking timeouts to do web searches for further information. I was and remain hooked on e-books, although there are things I hate about them (e.g., libraries get fucked by e publishers).
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
I doubt they’ll ever top “might lead to uncontrollable gambling” but they can try.
OTOH waking to to find your legs have fallen off is its own kind of surprise.
trollhattan
@Steve in the ATL:
Cleopatra was a tony Egyptian.
Steve in the ATL
@trollhattan: well played!
Salty Sam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmPnULZFbG4
Gin & Tonic
@CaseyL: Nothing to do with retention or comprehension, but since I am directly involved with municipal budgeting, e-books from the library are great for the reader, but a huge cash cow for the publisher(s), and a real fiscal problem for the library. The e-books they can purchase are *much* more expensive than what you pay, and come with significant restrictions. It’s a tough spot for them, since they are a popular service, but very costly.
Support your local library! It is staffed with intelligent, caring people, who very likely make barely above minimum wage.
Gin & Tonic
@Steve in the ATL: No, that’s like having eyes in the back of your … never mind.
Steve LaBonne
@Steve in the ATL: And Mark Antony, when he was dallying with Cleopatra, was an Egyptian Tony.
Tony Jay
@Steve in the ATL:
I’ve just looked it up and discovered another modern meaning of ‘Tony’ is ‘stylish and sophisticated’, as a name it means “priceless one” or “highly praiseworthy“, and to be ‘Toniest’ is to be ‘marked by an aristocratic or high-toned manner or style’.
Now I’m not sure how this helps differentiate between TONYG and myself, but I am now sure that we’re both super awesome and absolutely, well, ‘Tony’.
Also, I’m not Egyptian, but I know a wonderful footballer who is.
Ruckus
@Professor Bigfoot:
I want to believe no American admiral would be that stupid.
My experience in the USN was over 50 yrs ago so anything I know may be very outdated. But.
I was, as stated here prior, a member of the USN during Vietnam and served on 2 quite differing ships. The first was a DDG, a guided missile destroyer and the second a helicopter landing ship and stored them in hangers ahead of the landing deck and had a tailgate opened and the ship would take on water in ballast tanks and then landing craft could enter/exit. The water tanks would then be pumped out and the tailgate closed. It was fairly new in the 1970s when I was stationed on it for my last 2 weeks in the navy. A side note. The captain of the second ship had been the group commander of the DDG I was stationed on in the Atlantic. He was the kind of human that absolutely believed his shit didn’t stink. It didn’t. It reeked – over whelmingly. Walking off that ship after only 2 weeks on board with my discharge paper in hand was the most fun I had in 3 1/2 years. OK checking out with an ear to ear grin was pretty good as well.
Steve in the ATL
@Tony Jay:
Inshallah!
sab
@Gin & Tonic: My county library system is funded much by our local property taxes. Our library issue is up in May. I love that I can vote for the library (or whatever issue: schools, parks, mental health) and if it passes the money is there despite whatever local, state or federal government gets voted in.
In Ohio all of these issues are separate. I have to pay my property tax to keep my house, but I get to vote on individual issues ( library, mental health, schools, extra for schools.) They mostly always pass in my city and county.
Our state government hasn’t done diddly for much of anyone except lobbyiest pets and rich Catholics wanting reimbursement for parochial school tuition. DeWine did do Medicaid expansion but I am not sure the legislature is bright enough to keep it.
With term limits, our legislators really don’t know much of anything about how things work and how essential services in their district are funded. The Democrats are as clueless as the Republicans.
sab
@Steve in the ATL: Steve is not Tony. Steve is a fluffy pissed off cat in Arizona dreading his cross-country trip back to WestByGod Virginia. If you have never been to West Virginia it is a very attractive state. Forests, rushing rivers, small mountains.
Cats hate travel.
WaterGirl
@trollhattan:
I love that! My loud guffaw scared the kitty.
sab
Newsom isn’t my governor but agriculture and shipping/ transport are huge parts of his state’s economy, currently the fourth biggest economy in the world. I understand why he feels it is first and foremost.
That is the advantage of a federal system. Newsom wants tarriff relief. Other public officials don’t want their constituents renditioned. Both are important.
My Congressperson knows her job. My Senators are Trump flunkies. Government is complicated, and some of them will fail us. So help the others!
PatrickG
@Professor Bigfoot:
Ouch. to use the appropriate metaphor: that ship has
sailedsunk.Bulgakov
That mouse head is a gift of love.
Randal Sexton
@geg6: Barbara Tuchman is one of my favorite authors – Im currently re reading ‘The Proud Tower’ as it is a period of history where oligarchic power and wealth inequality gave rise to a lot of violence, similar to now sort of. Good protest today in Seattle !!!
Citizen Alan
@Miki: Speaking of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, precocious young readers, and declining educational standards, i distinctly remember reading that book and giving a book report on it in 6th grade. I would have been about 12 or so, and do not have any particular difficulties in reading it that I recall. Furthermore, i clearly remember that it was in the elementary school library, not the high school library, in north mississippi. This would have been around 1979 or 1980. IOW, before reagan and the rest of those bastards could get their claws into our educational system.
Citizen Alan
@Old School: is it out of space?
chemiclord
@Ruckus: This is the truth. The internet has not made people less critical thinkers unwilling to challenge themselves. We’ve never wanted to challenge ourselves. The only thing the internet has done is allow us to air the ignorance we’ve always had to an army of fellow imbeciles.
Issac Asimov noted the existence and belligerence of the anti-intellectual masses long before the internet became a thing. It’s always been in us; we’ve just never particularly had an audience for it.
frosty
@geg6: I’ve got Shirer’s The Nightmare Years on my shelf. I think it was about the early years of Hitler’s takeover. In other words, current events.
Kayla Rudbek
@PatrickG: Harry Turtledove books in my house: Videssos series, A Different Flesh, The Case of the Toxic Spelldump, the one where the Eastern Roman Empire never fell because Mohammed converted to Christianity instead of founding Islam (I think its title is Departures and it’s an anthology of short stories all with the same protagonist), the Gerin the Fox books (Gerin is a warlord who is living in a world much like the post-Fall of Rome history), and I do have Guns of the South (although nowadays I think that Turtledove was far too soft on Robert E. Lee and was inaccurate in his characterization, even if it is alternate history). I have a few of his alternative WW2 series with the invading lizard aliens, and I should go check out his alternate Civil War/WW1 series and the one where AIDS hit Renaissance Europe
Kayla Rudbek
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): same here, I am a GenXer, I don’t want to watch videos for information when I can read it much faster and retain more information. Unless it’s PBS or my required continuing legal education, and both of those are better watched with simple knitting in hand to keep me awake.
Facebook/leisure video watching is generally cat videos, furniture or art restoration, Elle Cordova, rug cleaning, garden work on zip speed, music, dance, fashion, Elizabeth Wheatley doing her Book Goblin, home renovation, or history (Amy the Englishwoman with the upper class accent that can cut glass, I forget her last name)
KSinMA
@Lyrebird: I taught fresman composition with a great bunch of fellow teachers who loved to talk about teaching—hence my interest. I’ve emailed Rose. Sorry so late getting back to this thread.