Tweet by Martina Navratilova. "Predator. That is how he should register. A sexual predator…" quote-tweeting a tweet by "Biology Rules OK" about Dr. Beth Upton, a trans woman

This tweet is highly defamatory and Martina Navratilova should be fired from BBC Sport for it.

It demonstrates an horrendous level of hatred for a trans woman (who was cleared of all wrongdoing in a recent tribunal) because she is a trans woman.

A truly remarkable read - a billion years of evolution created "electric motors" inside bacteria, driven by individual protons...

I keep coming back to this

Using moral-epistemic stacks, what's happening here is a blend. Authoritarian features (national identity as moral authority, accountability that only flows outward) sit alongside technocratic ones (Silicon Valley expertise presented as natural authority over security).
bsky.app/profile/elio...

This is what verification looks like once national identity sits above method. Rigorous when it's pointed at adversaries, conveniently absent when it's pointed at us. Symmetric, evidence-led investigation of allied conduct, exactly what Bellingcat does, becomes the thing the worldview can't tolerate

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

Point 21 is the giveaway, some cultures produce "wonders," others are "regressive and harmful." Once you accept that hierarchy, you've quietly been given permission to apply different standards of verification to different actors. The form of verification stays, but the democratic function doesn't.

Healthy accountability is triggered by evidence, points upward at power, and happens in public. Disordered accountability protects insiders and aims its punishment outward. What the document does is argue for the second while calling it the first.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within. 19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

Points 9, 18 and 19 go after accountability directly. Scrutiny of public figures gets reframed as a kind of cultural sickness driving talent away from public life. The problem becomes the people doing the scrutinising, not the people being scrutinised.

The 'adversaries won't wait' statement doesn't reject deliberation outright, it just makes serious deliberation always feel premature. You can debate this or that war, but the underlying question, whether to build the systems at all, is treated as settled, & that's deliberation as performance.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

The headline argument is straightforward enough, democratic survival depends on hard power, hard power is now software, so Silicon Valley owes the West an AI weapons industry. Adversaries won't wait, so we can't either, which taken at face value sounds like a defence of democracy.

A diagram showing the VDA framework and the Arc of Democracy. At the top, three icons label the essential elements of democracy: Verification (tick), Deliberation (speech bubble), and Accountability (magnifying glass). Arrows descend from each through three horizontal bands representing the arc: Substantial (truth tested, voices included, power constrained), Performative (forms remain but substance is weak, rituals without consequence), and Simulated (appearance maintained but functions inverted: propaganda as verification, polarisation as deliberation, scapegoating as accountability). A vertical arrow on the left marks the arc's direction: improvements, decline, collapse. A column on the right maps counterpublics onto the same three states: functional counterpublics act in a substantial way, hollow counterpublics in a performative way, disordered counterpublics in a simulated way. The bands shift from grey through pink to red as democracy moves toward simulation.

I've set out the framework I'm using here in an earlier thread, on VDA, the Arc of Democracy, and the moral-epistemic stacks idea, what follows applies that framework to the Palantir document directly. skywriter.blue/@eliothiggin...

Opening text of a thread by Palantir from X Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different.
twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

More serious thoughts on this in this thread
bsky.app/profile/elio...

Extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement

Absolutely incredible.

NASA Astronaut Reid Wiseman, who commanded Artemis II, took this footage from the far side of the Moon with his iPhone.

Watch with sound on.

Wie kann man überhaupt Menschen vertrauen? Die sind immer so oarsch zueinander.

wenn man es jetzt mal ohne jegliche ideologische abwägung betrachten würde (und warum sollte man das). Es ist ja nichtmal so, das "planlos" agiert werden würde, der Plan ist nur das Gegenteil von dem wofür die in den Beruf gegangen sind. Wie gesagt, diese Friktion findet keine Berichterstattung.

Keine Ahnung! Ich dachte zB an Transparenz, missbräuchliche Strukturen können ja auch von Unübersichtlichkeit profitieren, ich hege außerdem generell Misstrauen gegenüber privaten Trägern von (prinzipiell) öffentlichen Anliegen. Wollte aber nur nachfragen.

Danke!

Ist das wirklich automatisch eine Gefahr? Ich sehe die Risiken, aber in öffentlicher Hand macht das in meinen Augen schon auch Sinn.

The FBI Director Is MIA Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.

Gift link:

Screenshot eines posts von "K'Bucko" (KBucko7). Text über einem Buch-Foto: "Reading Dune. Frank Herbert was cooking." Darunter im Foto der Ausschnitt aus dem Buch: "Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with ma-chines to enslave them." —Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind,'" Paul quoted". Darunter eine Antwort von "Alan Levinovitz": "@grok please explain this post and the quote in it, what should I understand about it?"

Full Circle

#AbolishAI

Im Kampf zwischen dem Autor von Büchern wie "Generation arbeitsunfähig" und "Generation lebensunfähig" und dem "Plagiatsjäger" Stefan Weber können sich beide Seite vollumfänglich nicht auf mich verlassen. Aber ich hoffe, es wird recht giftig.

Der Sinn dieser überzeichneten Hypothese erschließt sich mir in dem Zusammenhang nicht, was soll mir das sagen?

Wenn man über Männer als Gruppe spricht, spricht man zwangsläufig (auch) von einer Gefahr. Individualisiert ist es natürlich anders. Das widerspricht einander aber mE nicht.

Kann man „Gewaltstrukturen klar benennen“, ohne dabei Männer als Gruppe als zentrale Gefahr zu identifizieren?

Kann sein dass es noch zu früh ist, aber ich tu mich grad schwer mit einem Beispiel.

Meme eines Kindes das ertrinkt, beschriftet mit „Post-Covid“, während eine Frau daneben steht und sich einem freudestrahlendem kleinen Mädchen, beschriftet mit „Timmy/Hope“, zuwendet und die Arme nach ihr ausstreckt. Ein weiteres Bild darunter: Skelett auf dem Meeresboden, beschriftet mit „ME/CFS“.

Ja, ich weiß, kann man nicht vergleichen…

Aber ich kann es fast nicht aushalten, dass ME/CFS-Patient*innen ohne jeden gesellschaftlichen Aufschrei über Monate und Jahre elendig verrecken, während sich Tausende für einen sterbenden Wal stark machen und selbst Geld plötzlich keine Rolle spielt.

relieved to have an explana—wait

#1 Peter müsste man sein Liebe Leser:innen, Sie möchten gerne eine hochbezahlte Position, Einfluss und Macht in einem großen Konzern? Dann habe ich einen genialen Tipp für Sie: Sie sollten Peter…

Wusstet ihr, dass es aktuell in sämtlichen österreichischen börsennotierten Unternehmen keine weibliche CEO gibt? Hier hab ich was dazu geschrieben.

Und das mach ich künftig generell ein bisschen öfter, wenn ich Laune hab. Abonniert und unterstützt mich gerne.

Das ist natürlich Quatsch in einer Volkswirtschaft, in der die Mehrheit dank fehlendem Reallohnwachstum gar keine Ressourcen hat, um genug für die eigene Absicherung anzusparen. Wären die Löhne an die Produktivität gekoppelt, hätten nicht 5% die Marge abgeschöpft, sondern sie wäre auf 90% verteilt.