RationalWiki
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rationalwiki.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy
RationalWiki
@rationalwiki.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy
150 followers 3 following 28 posts
The purpose of #RationalWiki includes:
1. Analyzing and refuting #pseudoscience and the anti-science movement
2. Documenting the full range of #crank ideas
3 […]

[bridged from https://mstdn.social/@RationalWiki on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
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rationalwiki.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy
@davidgerard Looks like the 503 errors have just returned.
November 20, 2025 at 1:48 AM
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mothninja.beige.party.ap.brid.gy
Good morning
Meme photo. In a drab soulless office setting with depressing fluorescent lighting and depressing brown industrial carpet, a person in a Hello Kitty costume - an enormous white cat head with a pink bow on one ear and a pink sparkly dress - wields a sledgehammer at an open laptop on the floor at their feet.
November 8, 2025 at 7:50 AM
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donmoyn.bsky.social
An incredibly Trump-era headline theintercept.com/2025/11/17/p...
Pardoned Capitol Rioter Tried to Hush Child Sex Victim With Promise of Jan. 6 Reparation Money, Police Say
Pardoned Capitol rioter Andrew Johnson tried to keep a child sex abuse victim quiet with claimed $10 million Jan. 6 reparations, police say.
theintercept.com
November 18, 2025 at 2:57 AM
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kenwhite.bsky.social
Deeply ashamed just because you were soliciting a convicted child predator for advice on cheating on your wife my pressuring a younger colleague into sleeping with you while sneering at her and her work?

Gosh Ross Douthat better write another piece decrying woke culture
November 18, 2025 at 4:00 AM
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skinnylatte.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
I really think that people who haven’t been poor should not give money or frugality advice to poor people. The problem with poor people isn’t money management or knowledge, it’s the insufficiency of money. This goes for anyone who wants to help people on food stamps navigate this situation […]
Original post on hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io
October 29, 2025 at 5:10 PM
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kenwhite.bsky.social
I can’t even
November 16, 2025 at 3:32 PM
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kenwhite.bsky.social
The difference between the sociopathic and non-sociopathic takes is really quite stark
November 16, 2025 at 4:00 PM
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jasonkoebler.bsky.social
I talked to librarians, authors who have had their books banned, and groups that support them for this article. The glee with which schools, libraries, governments, and companies are replacing human workers and nuance with AI would not be possible w/o the successful war on schools and libraries
“One thing that I try to make clear any time I talk about book bans is that it’s not about the books, it’s about deputizing bigots to do the ugly work of defunding all of our public institutions of learning,” Maggie Tokuda-Hall, a cofounder of Authors Against Book Bans, told me. “The current proliferation of AI that we see particularly in the library and education spaces would be possible at the speed and scale that is happening without the precedent of book bans leading into it. They are very comfortable bedfellows because once you have created a culture in which all expertise is denigrated and removed from the equation and considered nonessential, you create the circumstances in which AI can flourish.” Justin, a cohost of the podcast librarypunk, told me that the project of offloading cognitive capacity to AI continues apace: “Part of a fascist project to offload the work of thinking, especially the reflective kind of thinking that reading, study, and community engagement provide,” Justin said. “That kind of thinking cultivates empathy and challenges your assumptions. It's also something you have to practice. If we can offload that cognitive work, it's far too easy to become reflexive and hateful, while having a robot cheerleader telling you that you were right about everything all along.”
November 6, 2025 at 4:45 PM
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jasonkoebler.bsky.social
Once you start thinking of AI as a war on humanity, on human thought, on human inquiry, on human labor, on nuance and critical thinking, it slots in pretty seamlessly with the right wing ideological project, oligarchical political projects, big tech's political projects, etc
The future being pushed by both AI boosters and educational censors is one where access to information is tightly controlled. Children will not be allowed to read certain books or learn certain narratives. “Research” will be performed only through one of a select few artificial intelligence tools owned by AI giants which are uniformly aligned behind the Trump administration and which have gone to the ends of the earth to prevent their black box machines from spitting out “woke” answers lest they catch the ire of the administration. School boards and library boards, forced to comply with increasingly restrictive laws, funding cuts, and the threat of being defunded entirely, leap at the chance to be considered forward looking by embracing AI tools, or apply for grants from government groups like the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which is increasingly giving out grants specifically to AI projects.
November 6, 2025 at 4:48 PM
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jasonkoebler.bsky.social
Am obviously not anywhere near the first person to point this out, but I think it's a pretty useful framework. AI is also a nuts-and-bolts logistical nightmare for a workforce that is constantly being harassed, threatened, and forced to defend their work. They are fixing/fending off AI bullshit
“The last five years of library work, of public service work has been a nightmare, with ongoing harassment and censorship efforts that you’re either experiencing directly or that you’re hearing from your other colleagues,” Alison Macrina, executive director of Library Freedom Project, told me in a phone interview. “And then in the last year-and-a-half or so, you add to it this enormous push for the AIfication of your library, and the enormous demands on your time. Now you have these already overworked public servants who are being expected to do even more because there’s an expectation to use AI, or that AI will do it for you. But they’re dealing with things like the influx of AI-generated books and other materials that are being pushed by vendors.”
November 6, 2025 at 4:51 PM
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stevevladeck.bsky.social
The Trump administration’s military strikes on alleged drug boats are “blatantly unlawful as a matter of U.S. domestic law—and a quickly spreading stain on whatever is left of the executive branch’s commitment to the rule of law.”

Me on “extrajudicial killings” in the latest issue of “One First”:
188. Five Questions About "Extrajudicial Killings"
There is no obvious legal argument to support President Trump's expanding campaign of strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. And the implications are even scarier.
www.stevevladeck.com
November 6, 2025 at 1:51 PM
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pclimatologia.bsky.social
Trend in global ocean heat content into different depth layers from 1940 to 2050

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
November 6, 2025 at 6:24 PM
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dangillmor.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
All corruption, all the time in Trump world, Exhibit 54,667:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/11/fda-described-as-a-clown-show-amid-latest-scandal-top-drug-regulator-is-out/
arstechnica.com
November 5, 2025 at 12:18 AM
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dangillmor.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Suburban Chicago mayor calls Trump's violent thugs “a bunch of liars" after they "forced this car accident, and then they started literally beating up innocent bystanders.”

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/02/us/evanston-border-patrol-arrests-investigation
November 5, 2025 at 2:48 AM
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stevevladeck.bsky.social
It's impossible to overstate how much of what ICE is doing on the ground reflects this completely preposterous conflation of hostile *speech* and hostile *conduct.*

The First Amendment protects—or, at least, is supposed to protect—the former up and until it's a "true threat," which none of this is.
robertscotthorton.bsky.social Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 15d
From Bovino's deposition: (1) he calls protestors "violent" if they articulate views hostile to ICE, even if no violence is manifested; (2) he instructs his forces to attack and arrest protestors who express "hyperbolic comments," which is to say, criticism of ICE and Bovino.
November 4, 2025 at 5:19 PM
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kenwhite.bsky.social
Woke intolerant school punishes student for dressing as Trump supporter for Halloween

www.wctv.tv/2025/10/31/l...
October 31, 2025 at 11:30 PM
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parkermolloy.com
So there were some AI-generated videos that purported to show Black women ranting about SNAP benefits, and... Fox News is reporting on this like these are real people. They're not! They're AI!

This is truly insane. Total unreality. www.foxnews.com/media/snap-b...
CULTURE TRENDS SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown One mother claims taxpayers must feed her children as SNAP benefits face cuts By Alba Cuebas-Fantauzzi • Fox News Published October 31, 2025 2:16pm EDT
October 31, 2025 at 10:33 PM
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ecosdelfuturo.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy
Now it turns out that Dawkins thinks Nature is becoming too woke. He'll end up consulting Grokipedia as a reliable source. Just wait and see.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/nature-journal-accused-of-abandoning-science-for-social-justice-kzlgv3qjb

#dawkins #Nature
Nature journal accused of abandoning science for social justice
The publisher has defended its efforts to boost the diversity of researchers after it came under attack from Richard Dawkins and other academics
www.thetimes.com
October 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
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jasonkoebler.bsky.social
This is so bleak:

www.404media.co/a16z-is-fund...
Last week, I wrote about Doublespeed, essentially a click farm that sells “synthetic influencers” to astroturf whatever product or service you want across social media, despite it being a clear violation of every social media platform's policy on inauthentic behavior. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. a16z’s Speedrun is also backing: Creed: An AI company “rooted in Christian Values” which produces Lenny, a “Bible-based AI buddy who's always got your back with wise words, scripture-inspired guidance, and a listening ear whenever you need it.” Zingroll: The “world’s largest Netflix-quality AI streaming platform,” which is another way of saying it’s a Netflix populated exclusively with AI Slop. Vega: which is building “AI-powered social orbits.” What does that mean? Not entirely clear, but the company has produced one of the most beautiful Mad Libs paragraphs I’ve ever seen: “We’re building the largest textual data moat on human relationships by gamifying the way people leave notes for each other. For the first time, LLMs can analyze millions of raw, human-written notes at scale and turn them into structured meaning, powering the most annotated social graph ever created.” Moona Health: an AI-powered Sleep care app the company says is covered by insurance. “Our AI-powered platform automates insurance claims and scheduling and analyzes sleep data – providing personalized session guidelines to therapists,” Moona says. Jooba: “The world’s first autonomous recruiting firm.” Margin: “The World’s first AI powered credit card.” Margin says “Customers earn points, with dynamic rewards that adapt to their preferences in real time.” First Voyage: A wellness app that gives you AI “mythological pets that turn wellness into play.” Axon Capital: billed as “DeepMind for Finance,” Axon says it has “pioneered brain-inspired, low-latency AI for financial markets.”
October 28, 2025 at 6:26 PM
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mmasnick.bsky.social
Of all the justifications that people had been trying to make to justify the Brendan Carr / Jimmy Kimmel nonsense, the absolutely most misleading and stupid was the claim that the Supreme Court blessed that kind of jawboning in Murthy v. Missouri. They did the literal opposite.
techdirt.com Techdirt @techdirt.com · Sep 23
Trump Supporters Are Lying About Biden ‘Censorship’ To Justify Brendan Carr’s Unconstitutional Kimmel Threats

Trump supporters cycled through increasingly desperate explanations for why the Jimmy Kimmel situation was totally legitimate. First came the absurd "low ratings" defense—because sure,…
Trump Supporters Are Lying About Biden ‘Censorship’ To Justify Brendan Carr’s Unconstitutional Kimmel Threats
Trump supporters cycled through increasingly desperate explanations for why the Jimmy Kimmel situation was totally legitimate. First came the absurd "low ratings" defense—because sure, networks routinely cancel shows minutes before taping due to sudden ratings revelations and just hours after the chair of the FCC threatens them with “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” And also, if it was low ratings, how do you explain why they brought the show back after less than a week?
www.techdirt.com
September 23, 2025 at 5:50 PM
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kenwhite.bsky.social
Confidential to person mad that I blocked you: I did it because I was intimidated by your intellect, your righteousness, your charisma, and your smoldering masculinity. They make me feel small and dumb and ugly. It was because of how cool you are. Please don’t tell anyone.
September 23, 2025 at 9:31 PM
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dangillmor.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Democracy Docket explains how Texas Republicans corruptly stole 5 House seats from Democrats with the help of a dishonest charade -- with lead roles played by a lying governor and Trump regime […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
September 24, 2025 at 4:43 AM
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dangillmor.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
The once-peerless BBC has followed in the footsteps of American media by normalizing extremism. Now it's planning programming changes so that fascists will trust it more.

Downside is that people who want integrity from their media organizations will trust it not at all […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
September 23, 2025 at 3:37 AM
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solarbird.solarbird.net.ap.brid.gy
## Write Disney a LETTER.

WRITE DISNEY-ABC A LETTER TODAY.

Not email, don’t @ them on social media – or do that, that’s fine, but it’s not a substitute. It’s not as good. Do that too, but mostly…

WRITE DISNEY A LETTER. On PAPER. Put it in an ENVELOPE and […]

[Original post on solarbird.net]
Me, feeling buff back from the gym before the pandenic. A business-format letter to Disney-ABC about their censorship of Jimmy Kimmel, likening it to Putin's destruction of independent Russian media, with my return address and signature hidden.
September 22, 2025 at 3:44 PM
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briankrebs.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy
Happy DDoS-a-Versary to me. Today's Mirai-based botnet attacks are now launching attacks that are 20x the size of that first big Mirai attack.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/krebsonsecurity-hit-with-record-ddos/

Not long after I published that story, the Mirai botmasters turned up the […]
Original post on infosec.exchange
infosec.exchange
September 20, 2025 at 7:07 PM