Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

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War for Ukraine Day 1,041: 189 Ukrainian POWs Have Been Returned!

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A painting of a woman's hand with brightly red painted fingernails. Around the hand are semi-transparent - ethereal - blue roses.

(Image by Olga Wilson)

I saw that a couple of folks where asking for a primer or background reading about what is going on in Georgia. I don’t have time to write one right now, but here are some links to reporting and assessments/analysis that explains what is going on. Here’s an Atlantic Council report that provides background on Russia’s 2008 invasion of parts of Georgia. This European Council on Foreign Relations report goes through how Putin aligned Georgian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili has used his wealth and control over the Georgian Dream party to disconnect what the majority o Georgians indicate they, control of the Georgian government by his political party, and what the Georgian government he controls is actually doing. And here’s another Atlantic Council report that goes through where things were as of 4 DEC 2024 with recommendations for what needs to be done. That should get you all up to speed.

The Ukrainians were able to negotiate the return of 189 POWs today.

189 Ukrainian defenders returned home from Russian captivity. t.me/V_Zelenskiy_…

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— 🦋Special Kherson Cat🐈🇺🇦 (@specialkhersoncat.bsky.social) December 30, 2024 at 10:12 AM

Joy of the Ukrainian defenders reunited with their families after PoW exchange

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) December 30, 2024 at 2:51 PM

More footage of the return of Ukrainian defenders.
t.me/c/1377735387…

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) December 30, 2024 at 1:56 PM

From The Kyiv Independent:

Ukraine managed to bring back 189 Ukrainians from Russian captivity, including military service members and two civilians, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Dec. 30.

The Ukrainian Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War (POWs) called it one of the largest prisoner exchanges since the start of the full-scale war in 2022.

“We are working to free each and every one from Russian captivity. This is our goal. We do not forget anyone,” Zelensky said on Telegram.

The freed captives included soldiers who defended Azovstal and Mariupol, the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the Snake Island, and other sections of the front.

Eighty-seven Armed Forces service members, 43 National Guard members, 33 border guards, and 24 sailors were among those released, according to the headquarters. Azov fighters were also freed during the latest exchange, Zelensky said.

Among the released were two journalists-turned-soldiers: Mariupol journalist Oleksandr Hudilin and former journalist of the Espreso channel Roman Borshch.

More at the link.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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Interesting / Terrifying Read: The Internet Is Drowning In Slop

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There’s been too much news — yes, I’ve been sitting on this story for a couple of months now. Max Read, at NYMag, on how “A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage — and it’s only going to get worse”:

Slop started seeping into Neil Clarke’s life in late 2022. Something strange was happening at Clarkesworld, the magazine Clarke had founded in 2006 and built into a pillar of the world of speculative fiction. Submissions were increasing rapidly, but “there was something off about them,” he told me recently. He summarized a typical example: “Usually, it begins with the phrase ‘In the year 2250-something’ and then it goes on to say the Earth’s environment is in collapse and there are only three scientists who can save us. Then it describes them in great detail, each one with its own paragraph. And then — they’ve solved it! You know, it skips a major plot element, and the final scene is a celebration out of the ending of Star Wars.” Clarke said he had received “dozens of this story in various incarnations.”

These are prime examples of what is now known as slop: a term of art, akin to spam, for low-rent, scammy garbage generated by artificial intelligence and increasingly prevalent across the internet — and beyond. From their weird narrative instincts and inert prose, Clarke realized the stories came straight from ChatGPT. Sometimes they would arrive with the original prompt included, which was often as simple as “Write a 1,000-word science-fiction story.”

It was relatively easy to identify an AI-generated submission, but that required reading thousands (a “wall of noise”) and manually sorting them. Clarke compared the problem to turning off the spam filter and trying to read your email: “Okay, now multiply that by ten because that’s the ratio that we were getting.” Within weeks, the problem became unmanageable. “We had reached the point where we were on track to receive as many generated submissions as legitimate ones,” Clarke told me. Eventually, on February 20, he made the decision to close submissions temporarily. Clarkesworld had become one of the first victims of AI slop.

In the nearly two years since, a rising tide of slop has begun to swamp most of what we think of as the internet, overrunning the biggest platforms with cheap fakes and drivel, seeming to crowd out human creativity and intentionality with weird AI crap. On Facebook, enigmatic pages post disturbing images of maimed children and alien Jesuses; on Twitter, bots cluster by the thousands, chipperly and supportively tweeting incoherent banalities at one another; on Spotify, networks of eerily similar and wholly imaginary country and electronic artists glut playlists with bizarre and lifeless songs; on Kindle, shoddy books with stilted, error-ridden titles (The Spellbound Quest: Students Perilous Journey to Correct Their Mistake) are advertised on idle lock screens with blandly uncanny illustrations.

If it were all just a slightly more efficient form of spam, distracting and deceiving Facebook-addled grandparents, that would be one thing. But the slop tide threatens some of the key functions of the web, clogging search results with nonsense, overwhelming small institutions like Clarkesworld, and generally polluting the already fragile information ecosystem of the internet. Last week, Robyn Speer, the creator of WordFreq, a database that tracks word frequency online, announced that she would no longer be updating it owing to the torrent of slop. “I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans,” Speer wrote. There is a fear that as slop takes over, the large language models, or LLMs, that train on internet text will “collapse” into ineffectiveness — garbage in, garbage out. But even this horror story is a kind of wishful thinking: Recent research suggests that as long as an LLM’s training corpus contains at least 10 percent non-synthetic — that is, human — output, it can continue producing slop forever.

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Hufflepuff/Slytherin

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Erin Reed has a piece [gift link] detailing the ever more radical anti-trans comments of JK Rowling:

In recent years, millions of LGBTQ+ fans of the Harry Potter series have watched with dismay as its author, J.K. Rowling, has become a prominent figure in anti-trans activism. Her increasingly hostile rhetoric has ranged from referring to a transgender woman journalist as “a man… cosplaying” to dismissing the historical targeting of transgender people during the Holocaust as “a fever dream.” On Saturday, Rowling escalated her attacks further, making the baseless and easily disprovable claim to her millions of followers that transgender youth do not exist at all—a falsehood that directly contradicts decades of research and lived experiences of transgender people.

Rowling, responding to a commenter who implored her to “use her power for good” and end her “hateful focus on transgender youth,” denied the very existence of transgender youth. She replied: “There are no trans kids. No child is ‘born in the wrong body.’ There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.”

It used to be that rich idiots didn’t have an immediate way to transmit their verbal diarrhea to the masses.  Perhaps their publicist, or remaining sane friend from the pre-wealth days, would sometimes intercept their word vomit and chuck it in the trash where it belonged.  Now we get it fast and hard, directly from the source.

I read all the books and watched all the movies and, by the absolutely debased standards of a parent who saw mostly terrible books and movies marketed to my kid, they weren’t bad.  She could have built a dozen homes and jetted around between them, with breaks for fan veneration at Comicons and the like. Instead, she decided to travel to TERFlandia and document her travels in the form of tweets.

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TikTok

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I’d like to start this post with an off-topic shoutout to the Kwikset company for requiring a certain size Allen wrench to take the knob off of a door, which I’m sure was immediately lost 15 years ago when the knob was installed.  I shall be searching for this tool for probably a long fucking time all over this little town.

My second shoutout is to Marcie Jones at Wonkette, for doing all the legwork on the possible closing down of TikTok.  The basics are: Trump signed an executive order saying that ByteDance (owner of TikTok) had to divest within 90 days or else.  The “or else” never happened for complicated reasons, and Trump has now changed his tune since a big shareholder in ByteDance made a big investment in his social media turd.  Unfortunately for Trump and probably also Democrats, the bipartisan bill that was signed into law in April will kill TikTok on January 19 unless ByteDance divests.

The background music to this fairy tale drama is Mark Zuckerberg working the refs because Facebook is now just for grandma to share pictures of her grandkids, and also to fall for every hack or scam known to man, Instagram is for skinfluencers to hock fashion trash, and Threads apparently exists only to remind us that BlueSky is way, way better.  TikTok is eating his lunch so he did what every capitalist does:  made big political contributions to get his way.

Anyway, anti-fans of the Progressive Caucus will be happy to know that they were part of the bipartisan consensus on the Tik Tok ban.  Just kidding, they voted against it in the House, and Voldemort voted against it in the Senate.

That was the right vote, in my view, for two reasons. First, if you’re going to regulate social media, fucking regulate all of the things, not just the one that supposedly spews Chinese propaganda, because, I’m sad to report, all these platforms get abused by foreign governments.  Second, don’t take a vote that makes you look like an out-of-touch old person, and shuttering a popular social media platform is the 2024 equivalent of the stupid satanic-panic driven music nonsense of the 80’s and 90’s.

What’s going to happen now is that there will be a lot of drama around TikTok possibly closing, and the Supremes will probably do what Trump wants, which is to delay the shuttering, and then the Art of the Deal to Grease His Palms will once again put money in Trump’s pocket as some shell company buys out ByteDance in a way where everyone gets rich.  Trump will look like the savvy savior, I’m guessing.

Another huge distraction that we didn’t need, over a platform that is no bigger threat than any other, at a time when we should be concentrating on something else.  Welcome to Trump 2.0.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: The Week Between the Years Begins

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Honestly, I’m glad the poor man passed before we all had to put up with the Incoming Felon turning his henchmen loose at a state funeral.

well played, sir. well played.

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— shauna (@goldengateblond.bsky.social) December 29, 2024 at 5:48 PM


 
Our joint political life, such as it is, goes on…

“i voted to hurt other communities, not my community” is going to be a sentiment we hear a lot in the next few years

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— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) December 28, 2024 at 5:12 PM

well done, sir, your mutilated nose has certainly rendered your face spited

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) December 28, 2024 at 5:14 PM


 

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Sunday Evening Open Thread: Elect A Clown, Expect A Circus

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Let’s see if The Convicted Felon decides to try and sue over ‘Mr. Boinks’…
 
STOCKPILE - Mr. Boinks
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And Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire, on The Consequences of Believing Nonsense:

As we enter upon Year Less Than Zero, there is a lot of earnest chin-stroking about why Americans seem so dedicated to believing their government to be capable of anything, why appeals to fight “the Deep State” have become popular enough to install a convicted felon into an office from which he can appoint an anti-science dead-whale collector to run the country’s public health system, and an unblinking demi-fascist to run the FBI.

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