The Enlightened Centrist

The American people used to expect dignity from their president

Just another reason to be a fan of @ritchietorres.bsky.social ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/rep-to...

Ten years ago “they have public executions” was regularly cited as proof of the barbarism of countries like Saudi Arabia. Now we’re doing it. I mean, my god, what have we become

None of these AI companies is trustworthy but in terms of engagement with politics what OpenAI is doing is uniquely destructive. www.slowboring.com/p/a-simple-p...

The US president declaring himself the greatest in history, above Lincoln and Washington, would have been considered a secular form of blasphemy as little as two years ago - and a sign of profound mental instability besides. Today it’s nothing. We’re supposed to take it in stride.

One of the most toxic aspects of online discourse is that in many circles, accusations equal evidence. People will just circulate a post saying someone did something terrible as evidence that they did, no further questions asked.

The question is: why did Natalie Harp resist applying for a security clearance? What doesn't she want anyone to find out? www.ms.now/news/trump-a...

Every day of the war with Iran is Groundhog Day.

there are a lot of philosophical concepts that get egregiously misused out of the seminar room (and in the seminar room, to be fair). but in terms of sheer pernicious misuse "social construct" has gotta be top 5 somewhere and it's not number 5

Elon cares deeply about the decline of Western civilization, which is why it is *really* important for to him for it to be legal to create nonconsensual deepfake nudes. *Really* important, guys.

Thought this was a fun poll result: Free markets > capitalism www.slowboring.com/p/why-free-m...

From the mid-2010s through the early 2020s, the woke mob got to cancel basically whoever they wanted for stepping out of line from the consensus. With the rise of Trump 2.0, people learned that they can do whatever they want with no consequences. Can't believe I'm longing for the "good old days".

I've seen it before but every time I do I'm kind of staggered by just how bananas this chart is. Starting in mid-2021 or so, something began making people unhappier with the economy than you'd expect, and continued to get worse and worse nonstop until the present day, spanning all income brackets.

People will deny until they're blue in the face. But go look at something like Reels - sometimes it feels like half the site is just rancid antisemitic anti-Israel content. You can claim this is "a public debate in the wake of the faltering US consensus about Israel" but give me a break.

Trump really is the most corrupt American president of all time and I don't think it's even close.

1. NEWS Secret Service agents assigned to JD Vance are “fed up” after the vice president planned to use Marine Two, the military helicopter reserved for transporting the vice president, to fly his elementary-school-aged son to a golf lesson.

One possible explanation for MAGA’s lack of interest in trying to pass new immigration laws is they’ve radicalized against democracy and just want a pretext to murder their political opponents. www.slowboring.com/p/trump-hasn...

Maybe supporting him after finding out he had a Nazi tattoo was a bad idea after all

Trump supporter lost $32,000 on $TRUMP coin and blames Democrats. He made $1.4 billion pumping & dumping crypto on these rubes and they don’t even blame him.

Administrators charged Sanger with “off-wiki canvassing,” a prohibited action meant to influence the encyclopedia’s decisions. Sanger argued that the posts were in line with Wikipedia’s guidelines allowing actions to increase the platform’s membership. Read more on The Times of Israel

When you hate Israel so much you don’t care about what Hezbollah has done to Lebanon for 4 decades:

Unless it's pasteurized, that makes it no good

Conveniently forgets that old men who grow big post about other topics as well

This is what neat, top-down explanations of our current political insanity fail to understand. Are some social media narratives driven by an agenda top-down? Sure. But also, conspiracies form naturally when you optimize social networks for human attention & time rather than connection & wellness.

You can't be in favor of libertarianism when the opposition is in power and in favor of authoritarianism when you're in power.

Hey, maybe if every single national leader ends up immensely loathed for reasons that people can't really consistently articulate, almost irrespective of their actual policies or ideology, it points to a larger mystery about politics that we should solve

For Fathers' Day, Keir Starmer posts a photo of his own father, who died in 2018, and a non-political message. The replies are a torrent of vitriol & cruelty, all with hundreds of Likes. We complain a lot about the quality of leadership, but there's a huge problem with the way we treat politicians

Whatever you believe the world's problems are, I can guarantee that being mean to strangers online won't solve them

I'm not at all convinced that this deal will be signed. Good chance that Trump, seeing the backlash (rightly) calling this a surrender and comparing it to Obama, will start to demand new terms from Iran. This exact thing has happened twice, at least, already.

These would be humiliating surrender terms. Iran gets everything it wants, US gets nothing: nothing on missiles, nothing on nuclear, less than nothing on proxies (the Lebanon clause), Iran keeps control of the Strait of Hormuz.

David Sacks claims U.S. export controls on Anthropic’s Fable models were placed because a trusted partner found a jailbreak enabling hacking and Anthropic refused to fix it. Wild if the story becomes that the Trump administration cares more about AI safety than Anthropic.

Bluesky be like: "I can't believe Israel thinks it has the right to attack whatever country in the region it wants just because those countries are shooting rockets and missiles at Israeli civilians. The gall!"