string theories

what's madness but nobility of soul, at odds with circumstance?

[str-theories]

"The beauty of string theory is the metaphor kind of really comes very close to the reality. The strings of string theory are vibrating the particles, vibrating the forces of nature into existence, those vibrations are sort of like musical notes. So string theory, if it's correct, would be playing out the score of the universe."

-Brian Greene

[zvaigzdelasas]

Alright I'll bite. What's a new York

[allamericansbitch]

i love this new gen of pop stars so much

[allamericansbitch]

an absolutely humungous update they just keep getting better

[rowark]

I think this needs an important addendum:

Not only did Billie Eilish donate $11.5M, she also called out a room full of billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg, directly to their faces, saying "If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but, yeah, give your money away, shorties."

The $11.5M she's donating is about 1/4 if her net worth. Imagine if a billionaire did that? If Mark Zuckerberg donated 1/4 of his net worth, it would be about $55 BILLION... and he's still have over $100 billion left.

And, yet, unsurprisingly, people are mad at Billie Eilish for what she said and not at the billionaires for hoarding all the money and resources

[luntfontanne]

slay

[alienpapacy]

good stuff

[hotzier]

I should be there…..

[loveridden1999]

[zoesupreme]

having a ww1 Christmas day soccer game with liberals tonight. tomorrow it's back to the trenches.

[dannymans66]

Vinsmoke Sanji, third son of the Vinsmoke family

[probablyasocialecologist]

Mamdani’s victory is a rebuke to the failed strategies of the Democratic party | Moira Donegan

The Democratic party appears listless and unprincipled, unwilling to fight because they do not believe in anything. Zohran Mamdani is the op

Mamdani’s victory, above all, is a rebuke to the conventional strategies of the Democratic party, which in the year since Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election had been in a state of malaise and decline. Democratic congressional leadership seems to have replaced the work of politics with a sort of learned helplessness; alumni of the Biden administration are publishing dueling memoirs blaming everyone but themselves. Meanwhile, consultants – long the devil on the Democratic party’s shoulder – have fallen under the spell of “popularism”, a mode of politics advanced by pollsters like David Schor and bloggers like Matt Yglesias, which posits that Democratic candidates must refine their platforms by the median of public opinion; a prescription that has almost always, in practice, meant shifting right, abandoning vulnerable constituencies, and treating the public as implacable belligerents to be coddled, rather than as intelligent adults to be persuaded. It is not only pragmatism, but cynicism, and no small degree of fear, that has led to the widespread adaptation of this approach: the rapidly proliferating number of centrist and center-right thinktanks and consultancies looking to shape Democratic party strategy exist, in part, to channel the preferences of their own ultra-wealthy funders, and to signal what the billionaire class will accept. The result is a Democratic Party that appears listless and unprincipled, unwilling to fight because they do not believe in anything. Mamdani’s electrifying campaign rejected this strategy completely. Rather than define himself by what he wasn’t, via the conventional path of left punching, shifting rightward, and abandoning in the general election stances that he had taken in the primary, Mamdani ran on a remarkably consistent message of the injustice of economic inequality and an insistence on the possibility that the city could become a place where working people could live with dignity. When Cuomo and his backers launched racist attacks suggesting that Mamdani, an Ugandan-born South-Asian Muslim, would celebrate terrorism, he responded by cutting an ad in Arabic. When Republicans and other Cuomo backers tried pushing a red-baiting line promoting fear of Mamdani’s socialism, he evoked Vito Marcantonio, a socialist who represented Harlem in Congress for seven terms. “We need to look only to our past for proof of how socialism can shape our future,” he said. In a record turnout election, a majority of the people of New York City agreed with him. The Democratic party leadership, it should be said, does not. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader whose Bed-Stuy district overwhelmingly went for Mamdani, did not endorse the young socialist after he won the Democratic primary, giving only tepid, reluctant support in the days immediately before the election.

5 November 2025

[probablyasocialecologist]

We Used to Read Things in This Country | Noah McCormack

Technology changes us—and it is currently changing us for the worse.

In global polling, the United States is among the most pessimistic countries about the effects of AI. The 2025 AI Index Report states that only 34 percent of Americans are excited for the AI future. China is the most excited, with 80 percent. The lived experience of Chinese people is that the government will restrain the harmful effects of technology and living standards will rise, so they are not afraid. Americans who have watched as Silicon Valley runs rampant and good jobs disappear are rightly afraid. While Chinese schools are teaching students about AI’s impact on society—risks and biases in addition to basic learning—American schools are rushing headlong into serving AI slop as the only version of education children receive. Astonishingly, in 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English declared, “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” AI huckster-cum-revolutionary and ChatGPT front man Sam Altman says, “A kid born today will never be smarter than AI, ever.” His intention is to attract more investment into his company by the illusory promise of “PhD-level” AI, but he may be right despite himself: it is not that AI is reaching “general intelligence” but that children are not attaining it. For it is AI that has given the American ruling class the final impetus to more or less abolish education. As primary and secondary schools prepare to push AI on students, higher-education funding is basically being eliminated. For the first time in centuries, the elite no longer feel they need educated workers and soldiers to uphold and reproduce the system. National-security strategies, from Biden to Trump, are increasingly based on the idea that we can achieve the (unachievable) goal of “artificial general intelligence” in a short number of years and thus dominate China going forward. To tech-credulous military elites (and the Silicon Valley companies profiting off them), it will not matter if the junior-officer class can’t understand Clausewitz; battlefield AI will tell them which commands to give a platoon. As for the economy, in the words of fat cat Elijah Clark, “As a CEO myself, I can tell you, I’m extremely excited about it. I’ve laid off employees myself because of AI. AI doesn’t go on strike. It doesn’t ask for a pay raise.” As billboards recently spotted in San Francisco and New York City say: stop hiring humans. American society is dominated by wealthy mountebanks and literally demented politicians who are happy to take on all the risks of AI because it promises to create workers who cannot even conceptualize quitting, much less striking. The elites are ecstatic about imagining a vast, uneducated, and unproductive population forced to pay companies like OpenAI to access the written word and to approximate thought; with the unemployed illiterate and addicted to screens, they are unlikely to be politicized and join a socialist campaign. Theodor Adorno noted in the 1940s that when bourgeois liberalism is replaced by fascism, so, too, is literate culture. Some of the American elite are embracing idiocy themselves. Students at Columbia say they don’t know anyone who doesn’t use AI to cheat. A college student in Utah told Intelligencer, “I spend so much time on TikTok, hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes twelve.” Why go to college when you don’t benefit from any of your courses? To find the two helpmeets you need as a modern man: “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

October 2025

[ruebird]

handsome prince

[dcasom]

some fishe studies pt 1 orbicular batfish juvenile || rainbowfish

[defectivegembrain]

You ever just like. I agree with the basic principle you're expressing I just think you're going about it in an unnecessarily mean-spirited way that will definitely hurt people you didn't think of. But if I say that you're almost definitely the sort of person who will mock me as having some kind of outlandish misinterpretation.

[kosmogrl]

september was practice… in october I’m getting my shit together

[kosmogrl]

in november I'm getting my shit together

[kosmogrl]

september was practice… in october I’m getting my shit together

[kosmogrl]

in november I'm getting my shit together

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

writing tip they don’t tell you is that in addition to reading good books you should occasionally read one really bad one so that it inspires you to write something better out of pure rage