Quotations
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There is a FASCIST DICTATOR in the US now
This is not something to worry about maybe happening; it’s immediate and real. The orange baby actually was elected for real. Then handed a “can’t be prosecuted for anything” card by John Roberts’ court. Now it’s not going to allow any possibility (or election) to remove it from office, because that’s how fascist dictators operate.… Continue reading
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Abuse of grace
Sarah McBride is a member of Congress, representing Delaware. She’s the first member of Congress to be openly transgender, and the highest level elected official in the US to be so as well. Earlier this week she had this to say as part of a conversation on Ezra Klein’s podcast: “On social media, we have… Continue reading
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A dying empire and its assassins
Chris Hedges’ piece The Rule of Idiots rings pretty true and it’s pretty depressing. Are we really amidst the death of the American empire, the empire that never really admitted to itself that it was an empire? Or is trumpism our society can recover from? “The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots.”… Continue reading
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Lest we forget
At McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: LEST WE FORGET THE HORRORS: AN UNENDING CATALOG OF TRUMP’S CRUELTIES, COLLUSIONS, CORRUPTIONS, AND CRIMES. by Emily Greenberg and Cliff Mayotte Continue reading
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Business Idiots
“Every institution keeps its core constituents and labor forces at arms-length, and effectively anything built at scale quickly becomes distanced from both the customer and laborer. This disconnection — or alienation — sits at the center of almost every problem I’ve ever talked about. Why would companies push generative AI in seemingly every part of… Continue reading
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Originalism is always fabrication
Ben Thompson, whose site Stratechery is interesting, well-written, and afflicted with tunnel vision about “the web” being collection of business deals, just posted this: The original web that we know and love was the human web; that’s why advertising was the preferred business model, and Google was the big winner. Nonsense. I can’t tell whether he means personal… Continue reading
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The NYT appears to be wrong again
The New York Times story about the orange baby’s declaration of victory over the Houthis in Yemen is “provably unreliable in at least two ways: the timeline, and the claimed involvement of Trump.” So is Maggie Haberman just a chump who gets played constantly? Or maybe it’s all on purpose. Continue reading
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We don’t have kings because we can’t afford them
“Let me step away from current events for a moment and ask what may seem like an odd historical question: Why did absolute monarchy disappear from the Western world in the 18th and 19th centuries? How did republics or constitutional monarchies that basically functioned as republics become the norm?” “A large part of the answer… Continue reading
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Re-righting history
“There’s a kind of desperation that clings to propaganda dressed as commentary—an ache to not only rewrite the record but to salt the earth where truth once stood. The Telegraph’s April 14 op-ed, ‘Trump has been proven right about pretty much everything,‘ by former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, is one such piece.” –Joan Westenberg Continue reading
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Nonsense can get lucky
“A rational astrology is a set of beliefs which one rationally behaves as if were true, regardless of whether they are in fact. Rational astrologies need not be entirely fake or false…. Some rational astrologies may turn out to be largely true, and that happy coincidence can be a great blessing. But they are still… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!