The Trumpist Intellectuals Wake Up
Trump and Musk's history obsession
The frenemies' strange obsession with historical "accuracy" has disturbing connections to big AI
Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield@mastodon.social)
🧵 As a former Republican consultant who left in 2015, I'm often asked why Trump and his minions are willingly destroying science, K12 education, universities, international organizations, public broadcasting, and social welfare institutions. There are many reasons, but the main ones are psychological rather than ideological. They struggle with abstract thinking and are afraid of the world...
Isaac Asimov Laments the “Cult of Ignorance” in the United States (1980)
Rochester Institute of Technology, via Wikimedia Commons In 1980, scientist and writer Isaac Asimov argued in an essay that 'there is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.' That year, the Republican Party stood at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, which initiated a decades-long conservative groundswell.
An American Tragedy
The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness.
AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event
Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.
‘A Bible-sized blind spot’: congressman sounds alarm on rising Christian nationalism
In his new book, congressman Jared Huffman argues that theocratic insurgency has only grown more powerful after Donald Trump returned to the White House
"AI Psychosis" in Context: How Conversation History Shapes...
Extended interaction with large language models (LLMs) has been linked to the reinforcement of delusional beliefs, attracting clinical and public concern. Yet most empirical work evaluates model...
The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites
I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column: On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.
annotations: La grande illusion de Trump
traduction française du billet de blog "Trump’s Great Illusion" de Paul Krugman
Technically Radical
They're so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of global capitalism that they can't surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term. – Charles Stross, Accelerando One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that: look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back [to the world], not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts. – David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology Over 2024, we saw major tech investors and company owners overtly turn toward the right, overtly backing Donald Trump in his electoral campaign....
Technically Radical
They're so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of global capitalism that they can't surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term. – Charles Stross, Accelerando One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that: look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back [to the world], not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts. – David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology Over 2024, we saw major tech investors and company owners overtly turn toward the right, overtly backing Donald Trump in his electoral campaign....
The Anti-Mamdani 9/11 Bigotry Has Become the Stupidest News Cycle Yet
Bigoted City councilmembers and pathetic Wall Street Journal blowhards are melting down over the stupidest nonsense.
Elon Musk: The Normalizer of Fascism
The world's richest man needs you to believe fascist parties are part of the democratic spectrum
the viability of many right-wing intellectuals and intellectual spaces is enormously dependent on the largesse of reactionary billionaires and foreign governments, who help them circumvent a marketplace of ideas where they would otherwise post extraordinarily poor sales
Don Moynihan
Its fair to ask if Orban's successful cultivation of the Western right wing intellectuals reflected that their networks were already dependent on patronage. Rod Dreher was funded by a weird billionaire, and when he stopped paying his salary, Orban did. Dreher already looking for a new gig.
i am finishing up the book REGIME CHANGE and the only real takeaway from it should be that the president is legitimately delusional and that the entire White House is structured to feed and defer to his delusions
Arbaz Kakkar5
It's a scandal that the president of the United States is out of his damn mind. It's also a scandal that major news media aren't telling you that, loudly and often.
