Read @skennedy2504.myatproto.social today!

The Next Democratic Candidate for President Should Run as a China Hawk Let’s flip the race to the bottom and reconstruct this country.

“Some Americans take comfort in China’s present woes. After all, their stumbling gives us more time to heal from our own self-inflicted wounds. By contrast, the economist and China expert Dan Wang longs for a competition that actually forces both sides to be more than they are.”

Overcoming Indifference On the political disenchantment of Gen Z.

“Young people are not indifferent to what is going on, nor has online culture completely drained our attention. Instead, Nyhan identifies a much larger problem: ingrained cynicism.” Read @josephhillyard.bsky.social today www.liberalcurrents.com/overcoming-i...

As someone who went through conversion talk therapy I'd kindly like to show Mark to the nearest cliff's edge

let's make this bitch so disappointed he leaves the site. fuck him

Mark out here thinks that my parents abusing, raping, and killing me in the process of "their talking" is fine because freeze peach or some liberal shit

Mark, "really abuse" is gonna be all your known for now. Your epitaph.

FYI: I am going to stop summarizing Supreme Court decisions on here as they come down. One comment has been plucked out of context of all my reporting, misread, and used as the basis of a mean-spirited pile-on. I am not going to subject myself to this. If this was your goal, then congratulations.

Why We Fight Politics doesn't stop in an authoritarian system and we cannot give up the struggle.

"DHS and DOJ are being made to expend a much higher percentage of their finite resources than they would without the heroic work of immigration attorneys and the commitment of federal judges—including many Trump appointees—to the rule of law." www.liberalcurrents.com/why-we-fight/

My first published piece of the year.
This is a topic I care about immensely, and one I fear is underreported in the U.S. I hope whoever reads this gains some value out of it.

These new military ads are… something.

Utilitarian Political Philosophy Utilitarianism and political philosophy essay. Utilitarianism offers an attractive approach to political philosophy that combines pragmatic attention to consequences with robust protections for indivi...

Not book length but stumbled upon this because I was interested too. Also, strangely, by a former colleague of mine. utilitarianism.net/guest-essays...

In Will Kymlicka’s Contemporary Political Philosophy there’s a pretty hefty chapter on utilitarianism.

Platner's Supporters, In Their Own Words What is going on in Maine's Democratic Senate primary?

Today @chancephillips.bsky.social writes about the Platner supporters he interviewed at three campaign events as he tried to understood who and why he is doing so well, given the tattoo, the Reddit posts, and more www.liberalcurrents.com/platners-sup...

the human body was not designed to know what the worst person in the world is doing every fifteen minutes

This isn't a stretch based on assumptions or interpretations, or just some unpublished notes and letters. He very plainly said she was the co-author at the time. This dedication is in the first edition, published a year after she had died.

My hot take is that people are really pretty bad at identifying AI generated anything. And this is often inversely proportional to their confidence in detecting it.

Iran, Slopulism, and the Eternal Innocence of the American People Popular sovereignty means we must all take responsibility for the outcomes of our choices at the ballot box.

“What unites Kent and Greene here is a sense that people ultimately have no obligation to honestly assess their own lives and actions, that one's successes flow directly from one’s own virtue and defeat always comes at the hand of nefarious forces beyond your control.”

I love this so much

Right-Wing Attacks on James Talarico Are a Reminder That Christian Extremism Is Official Republican Policy The reaction to Talarico's Christian rhetoric demonstrates the ways in which far-right theology is about underwriting misogyny and racism.

The right's attacks on James Talarico reveal the "ever-stronger fusion between extremist right-wing Christianity and the Republican Party."

Great from @aselrod.bsky.social. Really underscores importance of his campaign as an antidote to Christian nationalism:
www.liberalcurrents.com/right-wing-a...

Upholding Liberal Education Love of the world, not meaningless tests, must be the heart of liberal education.

“The indispensability of a liberal education is the freedom from being tied to the zeitgeist of one’s age or situation to love what is true, good, and beautiful, and to be initiated into the world while cultivating a love for it.” www.liberalcurrents.com/upholding-li...

Pervert Politics: Trumpism’s Body Obsessions How Republicans went from the party of prudes to the party of perversion.

“The body is the primary subject of Trumpian politics. This is true both in the affirmative sense of right-wing aesthetics and in the punitive sense of managing the bodies of others to display power and contempt.” www.liberalcurrents.com/pervert-poli...

International Relations Is Not a Morality Play: What to Expect From the War With Iran The Trump administration has no plan and no path to a good outcome.

"'If the U.S. ends up withdrawing' from the Iran nuclear deal, I wrote in March 2017, 'it sets the Middle East on a path to two possible futures: (1) A nuclear Iran. (2) War. Both are much worse than the status quo.' Nine years later, America launched a war on Iran."

What Elon Has Done Elon Musk's destruction of USAID has faded from public consciousness in America, despite leaving death and destruction in its wake.

Today, @mckay4senate.bsky.social urges us not to forget what Elon Musk do to USAID, something that is still likely to have the highest body count of the administration’s actions. McKay documents just what Elon has done in detail www.liberalcurrents.com/what-elon-ha...

Old enough to remember when Republicans thought armed agents pointing a gun at a scared little Latino boy was an outrage. "Stormtroopers," they said. "Jackbooted thugs."

a man in a suit and tie stands in a crowd ALT: a man in a suit and tie stands in a crowd

I like that framing a lot better; some of my best friends are functionalists!

I don’t know if that’s quite as egregious as getting into a conversation about this stuff without ever having heard of the entire field of philosophy of mind 😜

In any case, if Askell said LLMs feel, I disagree at this point. Doesn’t really take away from any of the broader AI points though.

I could be mistaken here but “measuring intelligence by how closely its outputs resemble the human mind” is behaviorism not functionalism.

Granted, your point about training and reinforcement is on target (I just don’t think functionalism is the target here—functionalism is catching strays!)

We’ve got another @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com banger on our hands folks

The Opposition Report #10 The occupation of Minneapolis, imperialism, MAHA, and more.

“The “physicians” and other folks now running the CDC and FDA, as well as the constellation of various advisory panels and committees, are now openly saying that they will accept a world where more children die of preventable diseases in the name of their anti-vaccine crusades.”

As more comes out in the Epstein files, it’s again remarkable how many very rich and very powerful and very connected people place no stock in having a worthy character or cultivating anything like virtue, and instead wallow in moral wretchedness and seek to socialize with others who do the same.

The original article said “AI.” Did Askell argue the point about LLMs specifically?

The fixed version.

Historians, feel free to use this for the cover of your books on the modern conservative movement.

Regardless of Askell’s specific views, the larger point, which you seemed to have skirted at this point, is that this is indeed a real discussion in philosophy and it poses serious questions not only about AI but about humans as well.