Ben Alpers

Rewrite every headline about an AI doing something illegal as the owners of the AI doing something illegal. Strict liability could end this madness.

"What have you done to its eyes?!?"

youtu.be/PyFnDf8PvmU?...

youtu.be/CMkPIW22bq4?...

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

A good metaphor also for the moral bankruptcy of the techbro slogan, "move fast and break things," that was once seen, in some quarters, as innovative and cool.

there’s no middle ground position on this. either musk is forcibly rooted out of government infrastructure or every war proceeds at the whims and dictates of a generational buffoon

No one has more contempt and disdain for the people who work in higher education than the people who work at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

New in PN: The weird rise and spectacular fall of Katie Zacharia "Zacharia is not a victim. She is a lying conspiracy theorist who desperately maneuvered herself to attract the attention of an image-obsessed fascist in hopes that she could gain money and fame by lying on his behalf."

Though nothing going on at CBS News tells us anything we didn't already know, what it reminds us about tech billionaires like the Ellisons is a lot more significant that what it reminds us about Bari Weiss and other grifters those billionaires promote.

@inbedwiththeright.bsky.social did an excellent series of Patreon bonus episodes called "TERF island" on why the UK is so much more broadly transphobic than the US is (not that we always cover ourselves with glory on this side of the pond).

that's what i'm channeling when i say vote blue no matter who—it's not, at least for me, about loyalty to leadership, it's about respecting that coaltion & being humble about one's place within it

There are so, so many verified diaries of white Union soldiers at the beginning of the war saying "I don't know about this, I condemn the deplorable violence" and then they get down there and see slavery with their own eyes and immediately go "John Brown was right we gotta kill these motherfuckers"

This morning I re-watched my video argument with the NY Times' Patrick Healy, and it's clear that the Times believes if it says explicity that the Trump regime is assaulting democracy, that would undermine its work to investigate how the regime is assaulting democracy. What an absurd position.

Prediction: a gold-buttoned double-breasted navy skirt suit worn with a neck-tied white blouse and a long blonde wig is suddenly this year's hot Halloween costume.

Katie Zacharia Reassigned to Previous Role of Posting Racist Conspiracy Theories on Social Media

Congrats to incoming White House press secretary Tilly Norwood

Maybe she can serve as press secretary to the special envoy to the Shield of the Americas...or perhaps ambassador to Greece?

Not even half a Scaramucci, apparently. Surely AI can do all the apparent requirements of this job: 1) Praise Trump. 2) Sneer at and lie to the media. 3) Be blonde. 4) Limit falsifications on your resumé to things nobody cares about.

I’m sorry to have to be the bad guy here but we need to recognize that we live in a compressed air thrusters world now. If you’re not finding ways to teach the critical use of compressed air thrusters in your classroom, you’re setting your students up to fail when you could be setting them up to fly

WhY dOn'T peOPle jUSt dO It tHe lEGal WaY?!

Yes. This is exactly like gerrymandering, though the timeline on judicial capture is a lot longer.

This. "What if the Supreme Court as we know it collapses entirely?" EXACTLY

On Supreme Court expansion, “how do we avoid touching off a race to the bottom,” you ask? What are they going to do in response? Artificially shrink the Court to 8 for a year? Attempt a coup? Reverse the Constitution and 250 years of precedent to put one criminal president above the law? What if?

1) El-Sayed absolutely has to win this race. 2) Voters themselves could learn a lot from this message. I do not agree with everything every democrat does, but I’ll always vote for them over a republican. Trump once asked “what have you got to lose?” The answer is “pretty much everything.”

That a certain prominent Blueskyer has instead responded to the crisis in higher ed by listing fields he thinks are worthwhile and fields he thinks should be scrapped ought to get everyone to finally just ignore him more generally.

BRETT KAVANAUGH: "Can you explain exactly how the consent would work?" Just saying... if *I* were Brett Kavanaugh, *I* WOULDN'T ASK A QUESTION SHOWING THAT I WAS CONFUSED HOW CONSENT WORKS! But maybe that's just me.

I left x despite having a large following bc I don’t want to make free content for the world’s wealthiest racist. It’s not worth it to me.

This is NOT an ad for @alexgibneyfilm.bsky.social’s new documentary “MUSK” (in theaters now). We are promoting it for free. Join us right here on October 20, 2026 at 9am Pacific/noon Eastern for a livestream hosted by @niedermeyer.online.

ok heres one democratic senator being clear and unambiguous about this. anyone else want to step up?

Nothing is stopping your blue state or city from renaming its waste treatment plants and sewage facilities and garbage dumps after the needy, sweaty president. They could do it today! Give the man the attention he desperately needs!

The people who don’t want you to watch miss rachel want you to watch a public execution

I, too, would have to say "other than Kwaidan"... though the first thing that comes to mind is an utterly different Japanese movie from the 1960s: Onibaba.

It is absolutely preferable to not pick up the cigarette in the first place news.berkeley.edu/2026/10/09/u...