Oh hell yes @ifbookspod.bsky.social did Three Cups of Tea, where we learned that “don’t be an asshole” was so much better tactical advice than the entire counterinsurgency manual that a conman figured it out before David Petraeus did.

Three Cups of Tea

Podcast Episode · If Books Could Kill · August 5 · 1h 52m

podcasts.apple.com

Whew. Damn.

Wario64@wario64.bsky.social · 20h ago

EA Announces Completion of Acquisition by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners www.ea.com/news/ea-anno...

I tried to make some sense of why people love getting upset about fake threats.

Trans Girls and the State of Exception

Why do bigots invoke imaginary threats?

joshuafoust.leaflet.pub

Lotta this happening

Aesthetic Gender Roles

ALT: Aesthetic Gender Roles

static.klipy.com

daryl "crap mode aesthetic" b 🏳️‍⚧️@hypercubexl.bsky.social · 20h ago

why is there a new manfluencer every week getting their reach boosted and promoted just for dropping shitty takes like this but combined with misogyny or transphobia

This is excellent. I used to have to deal with this type of data back in the day, and Faine lays out both challenges and workable solutions for how to begin doing it. But they also point to a key problem: what organization can keep track of single strikes against civilians? It’s a massive task.

Jonathan Aul@mudshark58.northsky.social · yesterday

"The people who are tasked with monitoring drone threats... need to have a keen sense of exactly what they're looking at, the implications of what they're seeing, and the various nuances of the technologies that are involved." How does that work? Read this article, for starters.

I tried to make some sense of why people love getting upset about fake threats.

Trans Girls and the State of Exception

Why do bigots invoke imaginary threats?

joshuafoust.leaflet.pub

Screaming, crying, vomiting, begging people to remember who the president was in 2020.

Jonathan Howard@joho.bsky.social · yesterday

These guys are freaking out over their own imaginations again.

🔴🟡🔵 BIG WALK 🔴🟡🔵 Out now on Steam, Nintendo Switch 2, and PlayStation 5. Hooray!

"Today is August 4, 2026" There Will Come Soft Rains By: Ray Bradbury

"don't make enough money" is a fig leaf All those degree programs--social work, art, etc.--have disproportionately female student bodies. This is designed to make it harder for women to attend college--college education being a key factor in women's autonomy from men & left-leaning voting pattern.

The New Republic@newrepublic.com · 2d ago

President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/aaAEu6v

This is such a frustrating mirror of the media bias ref-working from 20 years ago: Have journalists demanded the CEO of any other social platform dominated by conservative influencers to repudiate their users’ politics and work to attract more liberals? Why are liberals defaulted to being so bad?

The Verge@theverge.com · 2d ago

Bluesky's new CEO Toni Schneider on the platform's reputation for being a liberal bubble: "Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people."

Can’t imagine a more literal torment nexus example than just doing for a real a Rick & Morty bit that was mocking this very thing

All of Lovefinderrz Episode 2 season 4 (Rick and Morty)

YouTube video by 2187 Coconut

youtu.be

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2d ago

“Dubbed the ‘Missed Connections Booth,’ the photobooth is a collaboration between Matchbox (a dating startup), Meet Cutes NYC (a popular social media account), and Faceplace (a photobooth vendor).” ToS on this thing must be a sight to behold.

I think we can say this is the spiritual opposite of Biden’s loan forgiveness program, which targeted public service degrees for debt relief. I don’t think he needs much defending, but the way people blamed him for SCOTUS and the GOP stonewalling debt relief was a real low point in our politics.

The New Republic@newrepublic.com · 2d ago

President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/aaAEu6v

Oh, we’re doing fish analogies

Columbia Journalism School is pleased to announce the appointment of award-winning journalists Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley as Journalists in Residence for the 2026–27 academic year.

There are 7 PR people for every journalist in the US. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Great timing: “…[A]nalysis revealed that clickbait tactics like exaggeration and teasing were positive predictors of daily views, whereas higher information quality (GQS) was a negative predictor. These findings demonstrate a ‘credibility paradox…‘” where platforms value clickbait over accuracy.

Marc Veldhoen@marcveld.bsky.social · 2d ago

I'm a full Professor of Immunology and fully vaccinated. I didn't get vaccinated out of obedience, but after decades of studying the immune system and evaluating all evidence. Calling that "lack of critical thinking" is not an argument. It's ideology masked as pretend intellect.

When the “I hate being around my family too much” caucus runs public discourse and shapes the terms under which people get to participate in it.

mtsw@mtsw.bsky.social · 3d ago

It's absolutely insane we've somehow let the Covid recriminations debate become like "why didn't we reopen in person schools before there was a vaccine" and not "why did none of the trump guys go to jail for stealing PPE from New York hospitals in March 2020"

The university was made by solidarity between faculty and students against outside political pressure. We can remake it and must www.cnn.com/2024/04/30/o...

Opinion: Student protests are what created the university as we know it | CNN

Seeing current campus protests unfold is a reminder that solidarity between protesting students and their teachers in medieval Europe was the origin of the modern-day university, write historians Davi...

cnn.com

Max Kennerly@maxkennerly.bsky.social · 2d ago

Time to add another formerly respected institution to the garbage pile, this time @aau.edu, which just worked with the Trump admin to endorse resegregation in high education, embedding MAGA fraudsters as faculty, and banning student expression. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

“Will you accuse Republican officials of lying when they are obviously lying” is a much bigger problem for the future of news under its current system of elites than how they handle invisible watermarks in fabricated imagery. Its fascinating to see them obsess over the latter and ignore the former.

Time to add another formerly respected institution to the garbage pile, this time @aau.edu, which just worked with the Trump admin to endorse resegregation in high education, embedding MAGA fraudsters as faculty, and banning student expression. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Tulane's Muira McCammon documented how Google turned off reviews for 90+ ICE detention facilities, erasing accounts of conditions inside. Google says disabling ICE facility reviews was "unrelated to a government request." But McCammon argues the effect is the same: dissent rendered invisible.

As Google Scrubs ICE Detention Reviews, Platform Power Serves State Interests

Google’s content moderation choices threaten to render accounts of treatment inside federal detention centers invisible, writes Muira McCammon.

techpolicy.press

Happy Monday, I’m going to say something that sucks: it’s worth understanding that the clips of RFK on CNN are circulating in MAHA / MAGA world as an absolute fucking victory lap. Looks bad to us, but to them, it’s aura farming content gold. We have no idea how to counter that so far tbh

"It also detected an “unintended consequence” of the ban: the proportion of parents who didn’t know their child had used social media increased by 10%." Spookily enough, this complacency side effect is precisely one of the things we warned about with this and the Online Safety Act in the UK.

Ben Schwarz@benschwarz.bsky.social · 2d ago

Australia’s eSafety commissioner buried a report (released Friday afternoon) that shows the under 16 social media ban didn’t tangibly reduce teen social media use, and also resulted in parents tuning out of kids usage. We traded our privacy for no reason. theconversation.com/more-than-80...

Would suggest it also depends on newsmakers deciding to value facts and thus have to evaluate claims in their coverage, or if they persist in arguing their job is to just capture the discourse in which case facts and officials lying won’t matter. So far, the “nothing matters” movement is winning.

Tech Policy Press@techpolicypress.bsky.social · 2d ago

Drawing on a new report, Princeton CITP’s Hilke Schellmann & Mihir Kshirsagar see two futures: one where we lose confidence in facts and settle into rumor, another where trusted producers hold the line. Which wins depends on whether newsmakers and technologists actually talk to each other, they say.

#CommSky

Camila Mont'Alverne@camilambpp.bsky.social · 2d ago

Many news organisations across the world have created WhatsApp channels to distribute news. But can these channels help people navigate today’s complex information environment? This question is at the heart of our new study, co-authored with @patyrossini.bsky.social and @antoniskalog.bsky.social

This is my first time watching Devil Wears Prada 2, and… I want to like it. I really want to. You know? It sort of feels like Zoolander 2. You know?

People stare at me like I’m insane, but I think it’s perfectly fine for a middle aged homosexual to dote lavishly over his elderly dog in public.