wes-O-matic

I can do and even enjoy small talk. I can endure loud, crowded environments. However, if I have to make small talk in a loud space,where we’re shouting to be heard and repeating questions & answers multiple times? I will shrivel like an earthworm trapped on dry pavement in full sunlight.

Hello, I understand you are an expert in the torment nexus and I would like to invite you to talk my organization about how we can be more torment-aligned

In that, there needs to be a recognition that illiberal ideologies see democracy and debate as tools to destroy democracy and debate. Erdogan's "Democracy is like a tram, you ride until you arrive, then you step off." They will use your forum to try to destroy your forum.

Our politics seems to be entering a phase of "right supremacy" where only the lives of right-wingers have value. Assassinating the leader of a state legislative body in her own damn home was business as usual, but all of America has to have a reckoning if it's a far-right online influencer.

McCarthyism was rate limited by the number of people engaged, the amount of money available, the legal frameworks in place, and the media environment, in a way that is very different from what universities will face not just in the next three years but until we find a way to contain these people

Politicians love talking about the pressure that trans people are under like it's a weather system and not something that their friends created because going on X the Everything App made them insane.

Between Musk & the Trump administration, Media Matters has been squeezed to the brink. In settlement discussions, lawyers for X demanded the organization hand over all its cash and shut down — all because MM reported ads appeared on X next to antisemitic content. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/u...

when RFK says he wants to “end chronic disease,” what people hear is “he wants to cure us” but what he means is “i want to cull the weak”

there's this bedrock assumption among a lot of people that everyone believes in the same ideals (such as free speech), we just have different ideas of what they mean this is manifestly untrue, these people believe they have the absolute right to control what everyone else says

This is what happens when neoliberal meritocratic technocracy hollows out democracy and leaves social media to fill the vacuum with outrage, distortion, and division.

Same. This is very much in the Torment Nexus zone. Once again. Because of course they did.

Pardon me, sir, but that sugary diet is load-bearing

Can’t imagine anyone who might give say federal agencies open access to this for any reason. I also can’t think of any ways that might be horrifically misused in widespread abuses of power. Nobody ever wrote a dystopian novel about this kind of thing, nope. Totally fine, highly ethical. Yep. Ethics.

They also changed the definition of “day” to prevent Congress from applying the rule that a state of national emergency declared by the President cannot be indefinite. So…

really interesting that we don’t have a cultural panic about group think and intellectual homogeneity among the most powerful money men in the country. all the more interesting when a bunch of them have clearly lost their mind.

I know this isn't the point of the thread, but we really are in the era of "yeah they made environmental catastrophe Clippy and called it AI and now search engines don't work and objective truth has been sold for parts"

I am no parliamentarian but if you can just hold the vote open indefinitely after the votes are in until you get the outcome you want that feels uhhh not democratic

There is a political satire premise in a puppet congress just holding a vote open forever because no one wants to tell the Fuhrer that they don't have the votes to pass it

Product managers and designers know exactly what they’re doing. Goals & metrics drive corporate behaviors. If you don’t agree you make your way out of big tech. Some might argue that it’s failure of leadership to define the right goals. Others might say it’s a failure of capitalism.

you can always tell when a product is a cool thing that everyone loves when they place access to it on places people will click by accident like its a scammy ad on a pirated sports stream

I don’t have any good words for this right now. Just. Good lord.

Banger thread dropped this morning

jfc

We live in the future and really it’s just wall-to-wall annoying intrusive capitalist bullshit innit? This skeet brought to you by standing in line. To leave a store. With my two-item purchase. So a man with a pink marker could put an X on the receipt without looking at it. Hadda queue up for that.

"I use the Torment Nexus for a few mundane daily tasks, taking notes, grocery shopping -- I don't see what the harm is" *Camera cuts to 3,000 souls engulfed in hellfire*

man i swear i say this a half dozen times a week "the communications channels just aren't there." there's no future for our democracy without a dramatic investment in real journalism, at all levels.

The people throttling NOAA out here giving big “if we destroy all the evidence is there even a problem?” vibes, or is it just me?

Program costing $32m (a rounding error of a rounding error in Federal Budget) and delivers $40b in annual savings to Americans, as well as being good for the environment, sure let’s eliminate that program. 🙄 The 2 F-18s we just deposited into the Red Sea would have paid for 2+ years of the program.

GenAI enthusiasts could learn a lot from the myth of Echo and Narcissus, for example how to fall into a pond and die

Reporter: I was watching your face during the meeting.. what was going through your mind when the President talked about erasing the border.. Carney: I’m glad that you couldn’t tell what was going through my mind Reporter: Oh I could

When I started posting about vaccines on social media in 2009, I tried to engage with people who posted scientific misinformation in an attempt to persuade them with scientific evidence. I quickly learned that facts can’t be used to convince someone who didn’t use them to form their opinion.

Everything is terrible, and now apparently using em dashes—long dashes that show a side thought or indicate a pause—are being flagged by people as “evidence” of AI use or whatever? Or! *Maybe* it’s evidence that all the writers the AI ripped off think it’s a useful special character? Ughhhhhhhhhhhh

“And I’m like, what do you mean, you ‘do your own research’? You running a double-blind study in your living room, dawg?” - A guy walking ahead of me with his friends on a NYC sidewalk in 2021, also my favorite overheard dialogue of the entire pandemic

A LOT of people do not want to hear it but in the United States at least, food has never been safer to eat, not to mention tastier

this would be so funny if this guy wasn’t president

More from the “pro-life” contingent. RFK Jr. and Bhattacharya have killed an NIH-funded program to reduce the number of babies who die in their sleep.

I need to print and frame this skeet on the wall over my desk so I can just stare at it when I need a pick-me-up