I’m trying a new thing. Well, it’s really an old thing, but it’s new for me. About six billion years ago, people used blogs to share links they thought were cool. Then social media killed blogs and people started sharing links on Twitter. Now, social media is unbearable so I’m sharing them here.
More than a century and a half ago, this country ignored the explicit words of men who sought to raise an empire of slavery. It subsequently transformed those men into gallant knights who sought only to preserve their beloved Camelot. There was a fatigue, in certain quarters, with Reconstruction—which is to say, multiracial democracy—and a desire for reunion, to make America great again. Thus, in the late 19th century and much of the 20th, this country’s most storied intellectuals transfigured hate-mongers into heroes and ignored their words—just as, right now, some are ignoring Kirk’s.
Words are not violence, nor are they powerless. Burying the truth of the Confederacy, rewriting its aims and ideas, and ignoring its animating words allowed for the terrorization of the Black population, the imposition of apartheid, and the destruction of democracy. The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?
“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” the study said. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
Since 2022, Odessa had been governed by a group of far-right hard-liners led by Mayor Javier Joven, the owner of a local roofing company who had run for office to help Odessa “publicly repent” for its sins. Political opponents nicknamed the Joven faction “the Squad” and argued that it showed little interest in infrastructure, public safety, or business development, the traditional priorities of municipal government.
The Joven wing of the city council passed an ordinance declaring Odessa a “sanctuary city for the unborn” and banned transgender people from using public restrooms that didn’t match their sex at birth. They fired top city staff, leading to an avalanche of resignations. They packed city commissions with political loyalists and hired a former executive director of the Republican Party of Texas as the city manager. Last year, Odessa lost its bond ratings from Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s after it failed to complete two audits on time—perhaps because the leaders of the finance department had quit.
This company is spewing unfathomable quantities of AI-generated podslop (h/t, Today in Tabs):
Inception Point AI already has more than 5,000 shows across its Quiet Please Podcast Network and produces more than 3,000 episodes a week. Collectively, the network has seen 10 million downloads since September 2023. It takes about an hour to create an episode, from coming up with the idea to getting it out in the world.
Deeply depressing stuff here. These absolute ghouls aren’t even listening to the stuff they pump into the ether!
The content team, led by Katie Brown, a former lifestyle television host and home goods expert, gives each podcast a title, creates an outline of the podcast, with the content filled out by AI, and assigns it one of the personalities as a host. Other team members do a final check and add in music and sound. The shows are also spot-checked periodically.
Also, hilariously, people are volunteering their time for this:
The startup is currently bootstrapped, and employees are not yet salaried, but the company will soon seek outside funding.
Because I hate myself, I listened to a few seconds of an episode from the “Socialism” podcast. They made their AI-voiced speaker sound like Obama, which is extremely funny, and that’s the only comment I have.
Thanks for reading. If you find my writing valuable and want to help me sustain this project, you can support me on Patreon for as little as two (2!!) U.S. dollars a month. Or you could throw me a few bucks on Ko-Fi.
I suggest subscribing to my site’s RSS feed to follow my writing. (Here’s a good guide on how to do that.) To get these posts by email, you can sign up here.
