Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

You know he’s going to shit a cat.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

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

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

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ICEd TSA

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As announced over the weekend, Trump’s private goon army is now “helping” at 13 airports around the country.

Scoop: 13 US airports will see ICE agents at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints on Monday, a source with knowledge of the plans told CNN.www.cnn.com/us/live-news…

— Alexandra Skores (@askores.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T11:50:27.824Z

Photos from passengers circulating on social media show a lot of ICE types standing around gazing at lines that unpaid TSA workers are actually managing. The independent journalist Marisa Kabas is collecting them in a thread on Bluesky, which you can click through to view:

I'm receiving reports from airports all over the country about ICE sightings. I'll be sharing updates here as I get them. ⬇️

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T14:28:10.779Z

Interestingly, these agents aren’t wearing their masks, so there’s a chance that people can add some new entries to the ICE List Wiki.

HOWLING

— Adam Parkhomenko (@adamparkhomenko.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T15:54:36.410Z

There is passenger-taken video of a violent arrest/attack by ICE agents at San Francisco International Airport, but I haven’t seen any independent confirmation of whether or not that actually happened yet. I am sure that, the day after another fatal aviation crash, having untrained, trigger-happy goons lurking on the concourses and near the Hudson News outlets will make us all feel safer.

I have some skin in the game here, as my parents are flying out of EWR tomorrow night to come here. I think there are pretty decent chances that they miss their flight for one of two reasons: over-long security lines, or my father deciding to flip off an ICE agent and getting his ass arrested.

Anyone else flying the unfriendly skies today? Let us know how it’s going in the comments. Open thread.

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The Politics of AI

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I don’t hate AI per se. I’ve used Le Chat occasionally for stuff like planning itineraries, and I know people who use AI on the job in all kinds of useful applications, including research.

My main objection is that a staggeringly high percentage of the people who are competing to build the dominant AI platforms and many of the technology’s most prominent boosters seem to be sociopaths.

That’s bad! And then there’s what’s already happening in schools:

I understand why chatbot cheating happens but every time I read about it I want to gently remind everyone that the point of schoolwork is not for the submission to exist. Teachers are not just greedy for more essays or solved equations. The point is to do the work WITH YOUR OWN BRAIN, FOR LEARNING.

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— Katie Mack (@astrokatie.com) February 24, 2026 at 2:37 PM


Prompt engineering may become a valuable skill in its own right, but it isn’t going to teach people to think for themselves. Also, I hate bullshit framing like this:

How does A.I. stack up against some of the world’s best human writers? Take our quiz.

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— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) March 9, 2026 at 6:00 PM

Fuck their stupid quiz!

It’s no coincidence that tech oligarchs and AI boosters aligned themselves with the political movement that needs to make the truth meaningless and keep people angry, divided and dumb to retain power.

But you know who else finds AI deeply suspect? Lots of voters, across the ideological spectrum. NBC News did a poll, and here’s an article about it that’s interesting if you can ignore the reflexively anti-Dem framing.

A couple of excerpts:

Voters are worried about AI and don’t trust either political party to handle the rapidly evolving technology, according to a new national NBC News survey.

A majority of registered voters, 57%, said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits, compared with 34% who said the opposite. What’s more, a plurality of voters view AI negatively and don’t believe either Democrats or Republicans are doing a good job handling policy related to the rapidly advancing technology.

Just 26% of voters say they have positive feelings about AI, compared with 46% who hold negative views.

Trump and his cronies are all in on AI because they are greedy pricks and also authoritarians. They hope to socialize the risks during the development phase, privatize any profits that emerge and then use AI to fire workers and create a surveillance state.

As noted, that’s bad, but maybe it’s also an opportunity?

Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies, which conducted the NBC News poll along with the Democratic polling firm Hart Research Associates, said the findings indicate AI is an issue that’s “up for grabs” by both parties to try to seize a political advantage.

The demographic groups with the most negative views of AI are voters ages 18-34, among whom the net favorability rating for AI is minus 44, and women ages 18-49, who reported a net AI favorability rating of minus 41. The two groups with the most positive views of AI are men over 50, with a plus 2 favorability rating, and upper-class voters, who also have a plus 2 favorability rating.

I don’t know how the politics of AI will develop, but it’s something to keep an eye on. Open thread for this or any other topic.

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How to Dispel That Musky Smell

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Jason Sattler, aka LOLGOP on Bluesky, published an important essay yesterday on Elon Musk’s social engineering con to reelect Trump in 2024 and how Musk plans to use his ill-gotten gains to fuck with the upcoming elections. I almost never say “read the whole thing,” but seriously, read the whole thing.

It’s titled “America Needs to Prepare for Elon Musk Like He’s a State-Sponsored Cyber Attack.” That’s a good way to put it because in terms of resources and connections, Musk is the equivalent of a state actor. Sattler starts by reviewing how Musk pulled off the con in 2024:

Let me walk you through what it actually did, because the details would repulse a society with anything like a healthy gag reflex, and because they reveal the one thing Musk actually believes in: his power to loot America dry, a position that puts him in exact sync with the man he spent more than any individual in the history of the planet to elect.

Muslim voters in Michigan saw pro-Israel ads praising Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing Israel’s military. Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, targeted by the same operation, saw ads claiming Harris wanted to cut off U.S. arms to Israel. Young liberals got headlines about how Harris had sold out the progressive movement. Working-class white men in the Midwest were warned she’d impose race-based hiring quotas. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats were coming for their menthol cigarettes.

Every one of those messages, totally contradictory and engineered around each target’s specific fears and identities, came from the same organization, routed through a dark-money structure designed to hide that fact. 404 Media documented the Snapchat ad buys in granular detail: same PAC, same campaign, opposite messages, sorted by ZIP code, with Musk as the obscured original donor behind a dark-money nonprofit. In information security, this is called spoofing.

As Sattler points out, this kind of appeal works because it’s microtargeted and emotionally charged. Crucially, it’s also anonymous, so the recipients don’t know they’re being played for suckers.

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The Stepford Bots

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In a post yesterday that referenced the NC 4th primary, we talked about how coverage and candidate and/or supporter messaging can apply misleading labels to sandbag opponents and tempt voters to cast ballots based on bullshit vibes. Michelle Goldberg at the Times brings up an example of that in her current column, where she alleges shenanigans in the NY 12th primary for the retiring Jerry Nadler’s seat.

One of the contenders is Alex Bores, an NY assemblyman who worked as a data scientist. Goldberg says an outfit called Think Big PAC is running misleading ads against Bores ($1M spent so far). The ads show scary ICE raids, point out that Bores used to work at Palantir and claim “ICE is powered by Bores’s tech.”

Bores did work at Palantir until 2019. He says he resigned over the company’s work with ICE. Also, Bores sponsored legislation in the NY statehouse to put guardrails on AI, and regulating it at the federal level is a centerpiece of his current campaign for the House.

According to Goldberg, the tech oligarchs know this and are determined to stop Bores. She says Think Big is affiliated with Leading the Future, a super PAC funded by Trump-backing billionaires like Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, literal eggheaded VC villain Marc Andreessen and Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI.

Here’s a gift link to Goldberg’s column, plus an excerpt:

A.I. feels, to many of us, creepy and invasive — a sense that’s only exacerbated by the antihumanist pronouncements of its creators. “I suspect that in a couple of years on almost any topic, the most interesting, maybe the most empathetic conversation that you could have will be with an A.I.,” Sam Altman, a co-founder of Open AI, said last year. More recently, he said it was “unfair” to harp on A.I.’s environmental cost because “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”

There’s a huge political opportunity for the party that can stand up for human beings in the face of this alienating, machine-worshiping ethos. For Democrats to seize it, they need both the fortitude to make foes of some of the world’s richest men and the expertise to know how these technologies can be constrained. If Leading the Future fears a candidate, those of us desperate for a different future should consider it an endorsement.

I don’t know anything about that district, but I hope voters see through what looks like an oligarch-funded flimflam. I hope NY 12th constituents evaluate Bores honestly rather than falling for dark money bullshit.

We’re all choking on that bullshit to some extent, and it’s going to get worse, God help us. As Mr. Orwell said, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

***

Thinking about the man-baby sociopaths who are whisking us off to dystopia reminded me of a fascinating theory I read the other day. I was alerted to it by this Bluesky post from our own Sister Golden Bear.

Important read: “The actual automation is happening in the reproductive economy—the care, attention, organization, and emotional labor that women have always performed… The “ick” is the recognition: That’s what I was. That’s what I did. Now it’s a product. And they’re calling it revolutionary.”

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— Sister Golden Bear (@sistergoldenbear.bsky.social) February 23, 2026 at 2:50 AM

Abi Awomosu, author of “How Not to Use AI,” wrote a Substack piece (link here) that began by riffing on a startling statistic: Women adopt AI at rates 25% lower than men, and a yawning gender gap persist across countries, cultures, professional groups, etc.

Awomosu says “agentic” AI is a Stepford wife for the modern era, and she theorizes that women’s visceral rejection of the technology “isn’t technophobia or a gap to close. It’s wisdom to act on.”

It’s a pretty fascinating essay. The author reviews the types of Stepford wives each tech company is building, and she talks about the choices we can make in response to the onslaught, which is to resist or use the tool built to replace us to escape the trap instead.

I’m not a deep thinker on this (or any other!) topic. Maybe Awomosu is right about why more women than men seem to find AI repulsive. My initial wee hours-reaction after reading the essay was along the lines of, “Damn, she’s right!”

Personally, I’d feel better about AI if the people in charge of training it up and foisting it off on us (whether we like it or not!) weren’t authoritarian sociopaths or at least authoritarian sociopath-adjacent. But I know lots of guys who feel that way too.

Anyhoo, food for thought, and an open thread,

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Fighting Global Authoritarianism, Inc.

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In comments the other day, we were laughing about John’s recent misinterpretation of a BREAKING NEWS ALERT during the Olympics and musing about the personal joy we will individually experience and the spontaneous street parties, etc., that will eventually occur When It Happens.

That sort of daydreaming is harmless enough. But as we all know, the rancid orange fart cloud is merely an avatar for a much larger constellation of problems, and those problems won’t dissipate when their current mascot joins the Choir Invisible.

Josh Marshall at TPM published a piece yesterday about the global authoritarian movement that Trump is arguably leading right now but that will persist when Piggy hoofs it to hell. It includes Gulf princelings like Jared Kushner’s bone saw pal, European revanchist governments, post-Soviet autocracies and U.S.-based far-right tech and media oligarchs who control major communication channels.

The whole thing is worth reading, so here’s a gift link. Below is an excerpt:

I’ve discussed this concept in the past. So I don’t want to belabor the point of its existence. I want to point out how its forces are arrayed against civic democracy in the U.S. — quite apart from Donald Trump. This wasn’t always the case. There didn’t use to be so many U.S. billionaires. And they characteristically had economic views which aimed to preserve their wealth. But they were not clearly on the right in the way they are now. They have moved an increasingly anti-civic democratic direction as the scale of their wealth and their identity as a class has exploded. They also weren’t so increasingly allied with primitive economy petro-states of the Gulf.

The point is that they will exist no matter what happens to Trump. They command vast economic resources; they run the governments in many countries where the government never changes; they have deep tentacles into the U.S. political system and many of its key players are from the U.S. Trump didn’t create this movement precisely. But his role in global politics over the last decade solidified it as a self-conscious group and congealed it together. Any movement of civic democratic revival in the U.S. will be menaced by its continued existence. Now is the time to think about how a revived and revitalized civic democratic movement in the U.S. could combat it and avoid being destroyed by it.

Emphasis mine.

Piggy is flailing politically and deteriorating physically. He’s grasping at a “legacy” by gilding White House surfaces, slapping his accursed name on edifices and overseeing the construction of a garish ballroom.

But his real legacy is a more consolidated global authoritarian movement that assembled under his banner. Marshall asks how a revitalized civic democratic movement might combat it, but I think the answer is implied in the bolded sentence above, which is to end its existence as a threat.

Figuring out how to do that is above my paygrade, but taxing billionaires out of existence seems like an essential component, along with reestablishing a global democratic movement, hopefully with less cynicism and a more sincere commitment to human rights. I have no idea if that’s possible, but defining the opponent and understanding their weak points is a good start.

Whether deliberately or not Trump strengthened that alliance, but it’s possible his buffoonish flailing might provide opportunities to undermine it. I think Senator Ossoff is onto something here:

Ossoff: We were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans. But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. It’s the wealthiest Cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class. They are the elites they pretend to hate.

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) February 7, 2026 at 2:57 PM

What Ossoff says has the advantage of being true, but I have no idea if the message will break through. We’ll learn more as we live through these interesting times.

Open thread.

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The Struggle Is Real

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My sister, a fellow liberal and able tag-team partner during arguments with our wingnut relatives, alerted me to this SNL skit that ran over the weekend. I think it depicts something real:

Is it goddamn maddening when disillusioned Trump voters say things like “I didn’t vote for this,” and “no one could have seen this coming,” and suchlike? YES!!! Profoundly! To the extent that this is happening, is it also a good thing? YES!!! Profoundly!

Relatedly, I want to highlight a comment from RevRick in the morning thread regarding the Texas special election stunner this weekend. Democrat Taylor Rehmet defeated Trump-endorsed Republican Leigh Wambsganss in a Trump +17 district, and RevRick added the following context:

Whoa! In the election that Rehmet just won 57-43, the partisan turnout was 51% Republican, 35% Democratic. In other words, assuming that Rehmet essentially swept Democrats and Independents, but he also flipped about 20% of the Republicans!!!

Piggy had plugged the Wambsganss candidacy multiple times on his social media sewer, pompously conferring his “Total and Complete Endorsement” and urging Republicans in the district to vote. But as is typical, he knew her not when reporters asked him about the trouncing, mumbling, “I’m not involved in that.” Pathetic loser talk right there.

Anyhoo, I’ve seen some evidence in real life that non-cult Republicans are beginning to wrinkle their noses and fan away the orange fart cloud, at least a little bit. That’s a positive development, as inexcusably belated as it’s occurring. Anyone else seeing this offline, where real life lives?

Maybe it means nothing, but I’m adding these anecdata to my HOPE file, along with the string of special election results and Emperor Tang’s horrendous polling and accelerated public deterioration. Friends, I do not regret to inform you that I believe we will win! But I am reliably told that I’m almost always wrong about everything, so take my optimism with the recommended fuck-ton of salt.

Open thread!

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Years of the Vampire (Open Thread)

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Well, this sucks. Just generally, you know, all of this.

2025 was a global trash fire and 2026, just 11 days old, looks like a case of a little bit louder and a lot lot worse. My job was finally smacked with the AI stick in early 2025. It left me scrambling and stressed, given there were moths in my bank account after buying my house. By mid-summer I had secured more work, but I was struggling to stay on top of life. Deadlines slid by. The garden ran wild. The Child vanished into her screens.

During Biden’s interregnum I had begun to refer privately to 2017—2021 as the vampire years for the way they drained the mood and focus of anyone who was paying attention. And while Trump II was shaping up to be an order of magnitude worse than those years—the Nosferatu to Trump I’s Colin Robinson—surely my lassitude and lack of focus couldn’t all be attributed to the toxic background radiation of our times.

I figured I must’ve hit that mid-40s aging cliff they talk about. I supposed I needed to learn new ways of managing my energy. Then I passed out in a Sainsbury’s, and it turned out that I had iron-deficiency anaemia to the point of having a red blood cell count my GP called “fairly alarming” (that’s some of that British understatement you hear about). The underlying cause is nothing sinister—just an acute case of being a 46-year-old lady who tends to do everything the hard way—and I have been receiving treatment, slowly recovering over the course of the autumn and winter. Wish I could say the same for either of the countries I pay tax to.

Anyway, I’m back. Have some terrible photos of foxes by way of apology:

Years of the Vampire (Open Thread) Years of the Vampire (Open Thread) 1

Open thread!

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