René Lapin

hell yeah

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

.@elonmusk says that no one can name a person who died from his aid cuts. In fact, I've met the kids who are dying, and I've talked to the families who lost children. In my columns, I've cited many, many names of people who have died because of Musk's aid cuts. A few examples:
*Yamah Freeman was a 23-year-old woman who died in childbirth because Musk cut funding for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. She couldn't get to a hospital and died as people were carrying her there. I talked to her parents and sister in their village.
*Gbessey Kiadu, age 1, died of malaria because of his cuts to malaria medication in Liberia. I talked to his mom in her village.
*Ibrahim Koroma, an infant, died of AIDS in Sierra Leone after he interrupted HIV supplies. I talked to health workers who cared for him.
*Achol Deng was an 8-year-old girl with HIV in South Sudan who died when Musk cut funding for the health care worker who provided her medicines. I talked to the healthcare workers.
I could go on and on. In almost every village you go to in South Sudan, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone or other countries I reported in, you find people dying because of aid cuts. I challenge Musk: Come with me on a reporting trip, and we'll talk to these moms and dads, and you'll see the dying children themselves. I think if you see the kids whose lives are at stake, maybe you'll change your mind.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[René Lapin @rene_lapin]

@BrandonM13997 @So8res I was also confused, but "doomsday _engine_" is AI capabilities (i.e., AI labs)

[René Lapin @rene_lapin]

@yegordb I'll bite

[Nathan Labenz @labenz]

Want to break into AI safety research?

MARS 4.0 is looking for mentors & mentees for its upcoming Dec-Feb cohort, w/ an all-expenses-paid week in Cambridge 🇬🇧

Tracks in technical safety, governance, and journalism.

Past participants have published at EMNLP, NeurIPS, and ICLR.

Deadline is Oct 1st. 🔗👇

[Lewis Bollard @Lewis_Bollard]

This year, a Georgia court sentenced a man who abused 107 dogs to 475 years in prison.

Also, this year, US factory farms confined over 70 million pigs in equally abusive conditions. None were prosecuted.

Imagine if we enforced our anti-cruelty laws against all animal cruelty.

[René Lapin @rene_lapin]

@robertwiblin though an american i've _never_ heard the 'american' version.

[Kmele 🖐 @kmele]

An explicitly illiberal project built on the delusion of achieving permanent political and ideological dominance.

Politicize everything. Deploy lawfare against your political rivals (and anyone standing too close to them). Purge dissent. Expand executive power, even at the expense of constitutional fidelity. And most importantly, assume (against all reason) that once seized, power will remain safely in your hands — and that if it somehow slips away, your enemies will suddenly rediscover restraint.

It’s an astoundingly shortsighted and tragically common form of self-deception: the belief that you can normalize abuses without eventually being consumed by them.

***

The rhetoric is almost comically bellicose (the ⚔️ emoji radiates *scrawny theater kid who always dreamed of making the varsity football squad* energy), but bravado isn’t strength. And delusions of grandeur are not a strategy.

The Trump administration isn’t just embracing this approach — it’s already demonstrating how incoherent and self-defeating it is in practice.

These aren’t “new tactics.” It’s a clumsy retread of old, doomed ideas — the kind that leave you weaker than when you started.

“Get ready.”
Diabolically cringe.

Classical liberalism isn’t magic. It doesn’t defend or renew itself. Every generation must relearn why it matters — and fight to safeguard it against threats foreign and domestic, and perhaps especially domestic. Whatever its defects, I prefer classical liberalism to Rufo’s prescription. He is part of the problem. Been true for some time.

[René Lapin @rene_lapin]

@18dixiedean78 @mattyglesias

[René Lapin @rene_lapin]

@What46HasDone @KelseyTuoc "there's nobody in this world more useless than a blue maga biden anon. who gives a flying fuck about you or what you have to say"

we can do this all day.

[René Lapin @rene_lapin]

@itaisher Sadly I'm going to have to unfollow Itai. The tweet never happened.

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

PEPFAR has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades because cheaply saving the lives of millions of children is good and the right thing to do. If Congress decided to end it, I'd be devastated. But that's not even what's happening. Congress authorized it! Our democratic government decided to spend money on this!

The state department has ordered a stop-work on funding that Congress did authorize, because 'stop all foreign aid' sounded good to someone. It's not clear that anybody wanted to let tens of thousands of babies die of HIV/AIDS. My best guess is that they just, you know, didn't really know what all of the programs they were ordering halted did.

I'm old enough (like...two years old...) to remember when Republicans considered themselves the party of saving babies' lives. I defended the pro-life movement against charges that they really just hate women, saying that I've been honored to know a lot of pro-lifers who sincerely want to save babies.

But if you can't bring yourself to take a stand on this - that the state department should not abruptly halt a program half a million sick children depend on, which Congress authorized and paid for, with no justification, in a way that will make the problem much much worse when work on it starts again - then you aren't pro-life, and you never were.

[René Lapin @rene_lapin]

@lethalrejection wait so she herself is the freaky hacker chick? that’s the solution?

[René Lapin @rene_lapin]

@michaelj505 thank you for doing the lord's work here

[rob delaney @robdelaney]

Just had a brief but very illuminating conversation with President Biden, whom I support fully. He told me as a kid in Scranton he used to… here’s the deal: you take an old tire and fill it with soup - listen. Ten, twenty people in one car. You better believe it. Pepperidge farm

[René Lapin @rene_lapin]

@mattyglesias * employed by harvard as a social scientist

[René Lapin @rene_lapin]

@mattyglesias how can you be at harvard and bungle the mediation/moderation distinction *sigh*

[René Lapin @rene_lapin]

@RachelBitecofer @mattyglesias (he's making a humorous remark -- note the faux grandiosity of "Battle of Interpretations")

[René Lapin @rene_lapin]

@AssLatam I enjoy this account … but I’m pretty sure you just got absolutely played by a meme-maker :/

[Alvin Christian @_AlvinChristian]

About to do some machine learning. Wish me luck.