Thomas
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quintonthomas.bsky.social
Thomas
@quintonthomas.bsky.social
1.7K followers 5.9K following 210 posts
New Yorker in London.

We're stuck here for good
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Reposted by Thomas
gbbranstetter.bsky.social
Love this from Guillermo del Toro
“Be kind, be involved, believe in your art,” he said. “At a time when people tell you art is not important, that is always the prelude to fascism. When they tell you it doesn’t matter, when they tell you a fucking app can do art you say, if it’s that important, why the fuck do they want it so bad? The answer is because they think they can debase everything that makes us a little better, a little more human. And that, in my book, and in my life, includes monsters.”
January 5, 2026 at 2:16 AM
Reposted by Thomas
meadekrosby.bsky.social
Don't forget folks: allowing yourself a vision of the future you'd want for our country and planet - not the one you'd settle for, not the one you fear, but the future of your dreams - isn't naive, it's a vital cognitive skill. That's how we articulate what we most value. What's worth fighting for.
costasamaras.com Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 1d
Instead of whatever this is, we should have a government getting lots of new homes and apartments built, lots of clean energy built, lots of high speed rail and transit and bike lanes built, human rights for everyone, economic & healthcare opportunities for all, & innovation that leads the world.
January 4, 2026 at 2:34 AM
Reposted by Thomas
nikitagill.bsky.social
Ever relevant, this poem by Mary Oliver, especially today.
OF THE EMPIRE We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
January 3, 2026 at 2:02 PM
Reposted by Thomas
elienyc.bsky.social
We are a rogue state, run by a dictator, and the international community should treat us as such including all appropriate economic and diplomatic sanctions
January 3, 2026 at 3:36 PM
Reposted by Thomas
katmabu.bsky.social
It’s almost like green energy is the only way forward and a handful of oil barons are doing everything in their power to keep that from happening so they can get even richer at the cost of literally everything else in the world.
bloomberg.com Bloomberg News @bloomberg.com · 2d
Wall Street’s biggest banks made more money financing green projects than they did from working with fossil fuel companies for a fourth straight year, even as they faced ongoing pressure to pull back from the business
Banks Notch Higher Fees From Green Bonds Than Fossil Fuel Debt
Wall Street’s biggest banks made more money financing green projects than they did from working with fossil fuel companies for a fourth straight year, even as they faced ongoing pressure to pull back from the business.
bloom.bg
January 3, 2026 at 3:00 AM
Reposted by Thomas
dennycarter.bsky.social
Wrote about the Labour Party's failed popularist experiment as feckless quant-brain U.S. liberals toy with the idea of a popularist agenda in 2026 and beyond: badfaithtimes.com/a-blaring-wa...
A Blaring Warning For The Democratic Party
Democrats don't have to wonder if popularism will fail. It already has.
badfaithtimes.com
January 2, 2026 at 3:38 PM
Reposted by Thomas
internethippo.bsky.social
Elon Musk's accomplishments over the last year include starving thousands of people to death (and laughing about it) and creating Hitler AI that undresses children (and laughing about it). Is it time to do something about billionaires yet?
January 2, 2026 at 9:20 PM
Reposted by Thomas
bartenderhemry.bsky.social
bari weiss as the famous north korean anchorwoman.
January 2, 2026 at 9:48 PM
Reposted by Thomas
asherelbein.bsky.social
I don't recall off hand who made the point about AI being, more than anything else, a machine for displacing responsibility. That increasingly looks like its most reliable feature
ketanjoshi.co Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 2d
This is a thread of major media outlets falsely anthropomorphising the "Grok" chatbot program and in doing so, actively and directly removing responsibility and accountability from individual people working at X who created a child pornography generator (Elon Musk, Nikita Bier etc)

#1: Reuters
Grok says safeguard lapses led to images of 'minors in minimal clothing' on X By Reuters January 2, 20267:40 PM GMT+1Updated 1 hour ago Illustration shows xAI and Grok logos xAI and Grok logos are seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab Jan 2 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's xAI artificial intelligence chatbot Grok said on Friday lapses in safeguards had resulted in "images depicting minors in minimal clothing" on social media platform X and that improvements were being made to prevent this. Screenshots shared by users on X showed Grok's public media tab filled with images that users said had been altered when they uploaded photos and prompted the bot to alter them. "There are isolated cases where users prompted for and received AI images depicting minors in minimal clothing," Grok said in a post on X. "xAI has safeguards, but improvements are ongoing to block such requests entirely." "As noted, we've identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them — CSAM is illegal and prohibited," Grok said, referring to Child Sexual Abuse Material. Grok gave no further details. When contacted by Reuters for comment by email, xAI replied with the message "Legacy Media Lies". In a separate reply to a user on X on Thursday, Grok said most cases could be prevented through advanced filters and monitoring although it said "no system is 100% foolproof," adding that xAI was prioritising improvements and reviewing details shared by users.
January 2, 2026 at 8:11 PM
Reposted by Thomas
rincewind.run
there are endless headlines about "grok apologizes" or "grok says it will be fixed" after it generated CSAM using pictures of minors and zero headlines about "grok being shut down" or "musk and xAI in big legal trouble" and I think something fundamental has broken here
January 2, 2026 at 6:59 PM
Reposted by Thomas
thetnholler.bsky.social
🔥 MAYOR MAMDANI: "We will answer to all New Yorkers, not to any billionaire or oligarch who thinks they can buy our democracy… I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical.”
January 1, 2026 at 8:12 PM
Reposted by Thomas
acyn.bsky.social
Mamdani: For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty
January 1, 2026 at 8:00 PM
Reposted by Thomas
samthielman.com
This is rapidly becoming a single issue litmus test for me. Politicians who parrot Ivy League-brained Substack consultants on this one deserve to lose, and if they don’t manage to lose their primaries they’ll lose to Republicans
aselrod.bsky.social Alan Elrod @aselrod.bsky.social · 4d
And I think liberals should stop taking the bait and ceding ground on immigration.

Immigration is good. Multiculturalism is good. Free trade is good. Stop being embarrassed to say so.
January 1, 2026 at 5:46 PM
Reposted by Thomas
aselrod.bsky.social
They want to wipe out almost a third of the country. It’s got nothing to do with illegal immigration.

It’s white nationalism pure and simple. They’re fascists, and there’s no reason to doubt it.
Homeland Security * @DHSgov X.com The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world. America After Terrible AI image of classic car on a beach with text that reads “America after 100 million deportations”
December 31, 2025 at 11:29 PM
Reposted by Thomas
nkalamb.bsky.social
Uh… check out what ChatGPT allegedly told a man before he killed his mother and then himself.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
December 31, 2025 at 6:20 PM
Reposted by Thomas
meredithshiner.com
>1 million Americans died in a traumatic viral pandemic, and America responded in the most American way, which was to make it more likely people would die of diseases we’d already contained by tearing up the social contract in the name of “freedom” while disregarding the actual concept of freedom.
The Post's findings show that at least 5.2 million kindergarten-age children in the U.S. are living in counties where vaccination rates for classrooms have fallen below the herd immunity threshold — up from about 3.5 million before the pandemic. While the vast majority of those who receive the measles vaccine are protected from severe illness and death, without herd immunity measles can still spread among those not immune, including those who cannot be vaccinated because of age or because they are immunocompromised. Out of the 44 states reporting county-level rates, 36 and the District of Columbia also reported them for individual schools or districts. At least 19,000 schools - nearly half of schools in the Post analysis - were more vulnerable to outbreaks. The share of U.S. counties where 95 percent or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles - the number doctors say is needed to achieve overall protection for the class, known as "herd immunity" — has dropped from 50 percent before the pandemic to 28 percent, according to The Post's examination of the public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia. The number of parents questioning vaccine safety in Anita Chandra-Puri's Chicago pediatric practice has doubled in the last few years, she said. Many of them are highly educated, but they keep coming across misleading information on social media, she said. Across schools in Chicago, the measles vaccination rate has dropped 6 percent on average since the pandemic. "They have access to every resource, and they think that they can become the expert at something because they've seen it multiple times" on social media, Chandra-Puri said. A map of the Chicagoland area showing kindergarten MMR vaccination rates largely trending downwards
December 31, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Reposted by Thomas
juliusgoat.bsky.social
It's stuff like this that makes it so amazing whenever somebody yells at Pete Hegseth or whoever in a restaurant and the entire news media superstructure spends 10 days fretting over civility and comity.
semperloquatius.bsky.social semperloquatius.bsky.social @semperloquatius.bsky.social · 4d
Oh. my. god. This is the Asst. US Atty General calling people -- in print -- "hoes."
December 31, 2025 at 12:35 PM
Reposted by Thomas
lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com
good piece with an incidental insanely brutal takedown of klein
The media has spent the last few months trying to make sense out of nonsense, attempting to conjure motive, manifesto, and meaning out of the dumbest shit scrawled onto bullets. These were sad attempts to impose meaning on an increasingly incoherent world by a literati that has not yet accepted its irrelevance in a postliterate society. But the most humiliating display of literate obliviousness in the face of the total collapse of meaning, however, was Ezra Klein's bizarre eulogy to Charlie Kirk. The now-infamous column ("Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way") can best be understood as an expression of class solidarity. Klein, I would argue, sees both himself and Kirk as being Debate Guys, wordcels who engage in the marketplace of ideas and let speech sort itself out into political action. Kirk did not commit violence, not because he abhorred it, but because committing violence was someone else's job. Last year, he called for using whips against migrants, saying, "Of course you should be able to use whips against foreigners that are coming into your country. Why is that controversial?" In early June of this year, as the president deployed troops to Los Angeles, Kirk publicly advocated for invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to crush the immigration protests. And in August, he called for "federalizing" the district of Columbia, saying, "Roll in the tanks, bring in the military." With his close relationship to the commander in chief of the United States of America, Charlie Kirk was no mere talker, idea-peddler, or purveyor of discourse. He built an empire on legitimizing violence and harvesting the enthusiasm and glee around it. Even before his death became a pretext to enact violence on American cities, he had already substantively shaped history. Charlie Kirk was a part of the real world in a way that Ezra Klein will never be.
December 31, 2025 at 2:51 PM
Reposted by Thomas
pgourevitch.bsky.social
"What a year for the ultra wealthy. The world’s 500 richest people added a record $2.2 trillion to their collective fortunes in 2025’s… booming markets, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. And about a quarter of this year’s gains went to just eight billionaires.” — Bloomberg Morning Brief
December 31, 2025 at 1:32 PM
Reposted by Thomas
splinternews.bsky.social
Jon Stewart Is a Symbol of America’s Crumbling Democracy www.jezebel.com/jon-stewart-...
Splinter: Jon Stewart Is a Symbol of America's Crumbling Democracy
Since 2007, Jezebel has been the Internet's most treasured source for everything celebrities, sex, and politics...with teeth.
www.jezebel.com
December 30, 2025 at 9:45 PM
Reposted by Thomas
jeisinger.bsky.social
On one hand, who cares, she’s a TV “reporter,” not in the top 300 of important court watchers.

On the other, when elites become so unmoored from basic standards of behavior (Don’t Take Secret Yacht Vacations From Billionaires isn’t a close one), society is in deep trouble.
chrisgeidner.bsky.social Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 6d
NEW: Jan Crawford's attack on SCOTUS "corruption" narrative was its own substance-free narrative.

On Face the Nation, CBS News's chief legal correspondent went after Supreme Court critics as "dangerous." And yet, her court defense was completely lacking in specifics.

Tonight, at Law Dork:
Jan Crawford's attack on SCOTUS "corruption" narrative was its own substance-free narrative
On Face the Nation, CBS News's chief legal correspondent went after Supreme Court critics as "dangerous." And yet, her court defense was completely lacking in specifics.
www.lawdork.com
December 30, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Reposted by Thomas
christinebinzel.bsky.social
The Gaza genocide radicalized the world — and there’s no going back

People can't unsee a live-streamed annihilation defended under the banner of liberal democracy.

www.972mag.com/gaza-genocid...
The Gaza genocide radicalized the world — and there’s no going back
People can't unsee a live-streamed annihilation defended under the banner of liberal democracy. They know the Israeli apartheid regime can no longer exist.
www.972mag.com
December 28, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Reposted by Thomas
internethippo.bsky.social
This, combined with "vice signaling" (taking pride in antisocial behavior) has given us the reign of the Stupid Asshole, something most people are against, but can only be remedied if we're not too polite to talk about it
pbump.com Philip Bump @pbump.com · 6d
An essential development over the past decade-plus is that the ignorant went from feeling chastened when their ignorance was revealed to banding together and deciding that, actually, they were right. They might disagree at times, but they agreed that ignorance itself was an indicator of trust.
December 29, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Reposted by Thomas
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
Another dozen or so authors could request a correction like this. "In Covid's Wake" egregiously misrepresents research and ignores the scientific consensus throughout. Embarrassing that it's being praised by credible outlets.
yoyoel.com Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 8d
Requested a correction from @princetonupress.bsky.social. Let's see what happens.
December 29, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Reposted by Thomas
maxberger.bsky.social
The vast majority of Americans are opposed to AI and oligarchy, but both of our major political parties are too corrupted by billionaire control to stand up for the people.
Americans Hate AI. Which Party Will Benefit?
Party insiders are divided on how to channel Americans’ growing fear of AI.
www.politico.com
December 29, 2025 at 5:46 PM