Willem challenged us to ask ourselves what we would do if we were living under Nazi occupation. Before all of this, I doubt anyone thought they would be complicit. I doubt anyone said to themselves, "nothing. I would cower in fear and do nothing."
But for 4 years or so we all answered that question again and again with our lives. Now here we are, answering it again... Every day. But it's no longer "what would you do during the rise of Hitler?" It's now, "what would you do after the invasion of Poland," and "what would you do after you knew about the concentration camps?"
For some people, the answer is still, "nothing."
But a lot of people have been brave in the face of it all. A lot of people have died, and a lot more will die. He will die, perhaps after a ruling by some court or other but, honestly, probably not. That's just how these things work out. Lots of people die, some for no reason, some because they stood up against injustice. A whole lot of people do nothing, until it's safe to claim victory... Until it's no longer safe to be on the other side.
That's just how these things go. Fascism is self-defeating, but it causes incredible harm on it's path of self-destruction. The more people who stand up, who risk themselves, the faster it collapses and the fewer it can hurt. That's also just how these things go. It's incredibly dangerous for everyone until enough people take some extra risk and make it safe for everyone again.
But that question still stands... Which one of those groups are you in? Are you proud of what you are doing, or will you look back with shame? Some of y'all have a lot to be proud of, but, if you're not, it's never too late to earn your way into that proud group.
A real “my shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” sort of moment
#uspol
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/09/melania-trump-epstein-speech-puzzle
Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon
Trump nominates Cameron Hamilton to lead FEMA, a year after he was fired from the role (Gabriela Aoun Angueira/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/fema-cameron-hamilton-trump-disasters-navy-seals-e1ef0f6c81f6ea992a2213714f6743b1
http://www.memeorandum.com/260511/p99#a260511p99
“Can you reassure our NATO allies and make it clear to Putin that if a NATO ally is attacked and Article 5 is invoked, that we will defend them?”
“The United States is still in the NATO alliance,” he said, before adding that “NATO needs significant changes” and that Trump “is very disappointed in NATO.”
'You Won't Let Me Answer!': Rubio Thought He Had an Easy Way Out — Then a Congresswoman Blew Up Every Spin Attempt and Sent the Exchange Off the Rails
https://atlantablackstar.com/2026/06/09/rubio-thought-he-had-an-easy-way-out-then-a-congresswoman-blew-up-every-spin-attempt-and-sent-the-exchange-off-the-rails/
What are Out-of-band Application Security Testing (OAST) domains? Out-of-band application security testing (OAST) is a method for finding exploitable vulnerabilities in a web application by forcing a target to call back to a piece of infrastructure controlled by the tester. OAST domains (sub-domains most often) are often free and hosted by OAST tool providers like interact.sh. What happens when something is free on the Internet? It gets abused.
Let’s make tOAST of the most commonly ab…
I spend a lot of time being worried or angry or annoyed at the way that generative ai fervor is undermining our ecosystems (environmental, cultural, epistemic, digital, etc).
But right now I'm just feeling mournful. Seeing project after project, institution after institution run enthusiastically into a future where we boil our oceans to better insulate ourselves from one another is ... tragic. We're losing a lot right now, and we're going to have to come to terms with that.…
«KI-Modelle sind anfällig für wiederholte Angriffe:
Laut Forschern von Cisco versagen KI-Modelle bei realistischen Multi-Turn-Angriffen und lassen an Sicherheits-Benchmarks auf Basis weniger Prompts zweifeln.»
Der moderne Widerspruch ist die KI oder was ist es sonnst? So klug wie KI angeboten wird ist es einfach nicht.
🤖
my “Leather man” t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions that I feel like are already answered by my last name