Will Badger

Treasure hunter ◦ כל העולם כלו גשר צר מאד

[The J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature @TolkienLecture]

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this year's Tolkien Lecture, 'On Fantasy', delivered by @BrandSanderson! If you missed it live, the full recording is now available on YouTube. Don't miss this insightful discussion of the role and significance of fantasy literature.

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

The USA have blocked the Somali Referee Omar Artan from entering the USA, the Referee who is rated the best in Africa was blocked at entry, so he got the Somalian embassy to give him a Diplomatic Passport.

But the USA still refuses to let him in.

The USA need to be disqualified

[Will Badger @antiphonus]

@HigherEdSpeak @Manhattva You mean you learned it was the DoD

[Will Badger @antiphonus]

@BasedMikeLee Maybe you should have foreseen this when you started hacking at the branch of pluralism that your people were sitting on

[Will Badger @antiphonus]

@BasedMikeLee Um yeah because of your Christian nationalist buddies and the culture of intolerance you’ve fostered

[Will Badger @antiphonus]

@tedcruz Wait, 4 bucks is good now?

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Will Badger @antiphonus]

@BasedMikeLee Wow, you guys know that the Prez’s gas prices don’t look great, huh?

[Will Badger @antiphonus]

@SecWar “Rededicate the Republic to…country” what the hell does that mean, you two-bit fundamentalist charlatan?

[Will Badger @antiphonus]

@SenMikeLee Gadianton

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Tom Nichols spent nearly 20 years teaching just war theory at Harvard. He is precise about what Vance got wrong.

The just war tradition does not tell Christians when God is on their side. It regards war as evil and every life taken - ally or enemy - as a tragedy. Its conditions - just cause, right intention, proportionality, last resort - are not a permission slip. They are questions a leader must answer before risking his mortal soul by sending people to die.

After Vance's remarks, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops doctrine chairman put it in writing: Pope Leo is not offering opinions. He is exercising his ministry as Vicar of Christ. That is Bishop Massa's clarification, addressed directly to this situation.

Vance told the pope that theology should be "anchored in truth." Nichols identifies that phrase correctly: it means nothing. Whose truth? The bishop of Rome, whom Catholics believe speaks with charism on matters of faith and morals, was told by a recent convert that he should go do his theology homework.

The Catholic tradition Vance cited has a name for this disposition. Pope Gregory the Great called pride the queen of all vices. The Latin word is superbia. Proverbs 16:18 has been in the text considerably longer than the Iran war.

[Will Badger @antiphonus]

@JordanUhl @Mr_Andrew_Fox Guess it’s Mammon, then?

[Veterans For Responsible Leadership @VetsForRL]

A sitting US Vice President traveling to Europe to stand shoulder to shoulder with an authoritarian who is dismantling democracy in his own country. Dark times we live in.

[Jvnior @Jvnior]

Marco Rubio 2 days ago: “Imagine if Iran funded the well-being of its people, rather than its military”

Trump today: “We can’t fund daycare or Medicaid, we need more money for our military”

Sometimes the jokes write themselves.

[Gregg Carlstrom @glcarlstrom]

Again, it never fails. Trump's defenders say "trust the plan, of course he didn't go into the war with such a stupid assumption", and then Trump himself says actually yeah that was my assumption

[Catherine Rampell @crampell]

Quite the midterm message: we can afford wars and ballrooms, but not your “daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things”

[Will Badger @antiphonus]

@BasedMikeLee https://t.co/8O89SNLJyj

[Senator Marco Rubio: Archived @SenMarcoRubio]

No U.S. President should be able to withdraw from NATO without Senate approval.

Thankful my colleagues in Congress passed this bipartisan measure.

[Will Badger @antiphonus]

@ClayTravis https://t.co/Rou9ffVUsm