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I think everyone knew that CNN’s very special episode of The Trump Show on Wednesday night was going to be a fiasco. How could it not be? Donald Trump lies as easily as he breathes and he was going to be given a live platform to do that. We’ve seen him do these events for years now and there was no reason to believe this one would be any different. If there was anything startling about it was the friendly audience that cheered and jeered as if they were at a Trump rally. But we should have expected that too. CNN said the town hall was for Republican primary and “undeclared” voters and there’s no mystery about what kind of people show up for campaign events with Donald Trump. All that was missing were the red hats and the awkward line dancing to “YMCA.” I won’t go into the full litany of rhetorical atrocities. You can read more about them in these pieces by Amanda Marcotte [need link], Brian Karem and Igor Derysh. Suffice to say that he was as obnoxious and crude as always reminding anyone who’s forgotten, just how unfit he is for the office of president of the United States.

The Worst Crime of the 21st Century Chomsky and Robinson in Current Affairs May 12, 2023. Current Affairs. Content warning: Descriptions of graphic violence First, a story from the years of the American occupation of Iraq , one of thousands that could be recounted. This one appears in Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War: “The most basic barrier was […]

“Merely rearranging their prejudices” Day-laborers like Joey on the construction site were not an educated bunch. But they had opinions. Lots of them. When Joey began a sentence with, “Now, I’ll tell you what’s the truth …”, it was time to buckle up. Here it comes. Brian Klass does not invoke truthiness in writing this morning about knowingness, but the two are cousins. An essay by Jonathan Malesic at Aeon provoked Klass to explore the latter. “We know there is something wrong with the way we know,” Malesic explains:  Knowingness, as the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear defines it in Open Minded (1998), is a posture of always ‘already knowing’, of purporting to know the answers even before the question arises. When new facts come to light, the knowing person is unperturbed. You may be shocked, but they knew all along. In 21st-century culture, knowingness is rampant. You see it in the conspiracy theorist who dismisses contrary evidence as a ‘false flag’ and in the podcaster for whom ‘late capitalism’ explains all social woes.

With buzz about a preview hitting this weekend growing, here are some new first-look Doctor Who images of Millie Gibson's Ruby Sunday.

Nelson Mandela’s grandson and member of the African National Congress, Nkosi Zwelivelile Mandela, joins Mnar Adley in this exclusive interview to deconstruct Africa’s rise against colonialism, and its fight against Israeli apartheid.

The post Africa Rising: Nkosi Mandela on South Africa Resisting Israeli Apartheid appeared first on MintPress News.

Sometimes with legislation. Sometimes with guns. Pundits and news sites are still analyzing fallout from CNN’s Trump “town hall” spectacle. We learned nothing about the former president we did not already know. The fiasco changed no minds. James Fallows invoked “shocking but not surprising” to summarize the show. “Don’t say you haven’t been warned” sits atop Susan Glasser’s review. The jeers and laughter from the Trump mob, she writes, “was the tell, the most revealing part of the whole exercise.” Without “the approval of the mob, his mob,” Trump “would be just another angry old American man” shouting at his TV instead of being on TV. It is the audience for his shtick that gives it power, and us pause. The relationship is symbiotic, but Trump is not telling them anything they don’t want to hear. Trump has his grievances, but he validates theirs, gives them permission to wear “Fuck Your Feelings” tee shirts in public. He reads the room. He sees them and makes them feel seen in all their dark seething. He is their retribution.

James Connolly was born on June 5, 1868, to a working-class family in the Cowgate ghetto of Edinburgh. His father John was an unskilled labourer, working first collecting manure and then managing public toilets in the city. He and his wife Mary were Irish famine emigrants from Monaghan, moving to Scotland at a time when […]

New evidence reveals that Ukraine's infamous covert “kill list” is a product of the Ukraine regime, effectively funded by the CIA, amongst others, and hosted by NATO.

The post “Independent” Ukrainian “Kill List” Actually Run By Kiev, Backed by Washington  appeared first on MintPress News.

FROM: Jason Finch, senior associate
TO: All partners, Quartz Oak Venture Fund
MEMO: Incredible early-stage startup for our AI tranche: Allison Miller

Intro: Everyone in the VC space is scrambling to find the next OpenAI and revolutionize the field. I present for your consideration the most promising investment opportunity I’ve seen in my whole time with the fund: Allison Miller. While competitors are pouring billions of dollars into incremental AI capability gains, Allison developed a multimodal general intelligence in just 9 months with 0 compute budget and only one collaborator (who just contributed some of the startup code). Extraordinary superunicorn potential.

Product: Allison’s minimum viable product is LIAM (no official explanation, but I’m guessing this may stand for Logical Intelligent Agent Model). The launch announcement is already generating massive buzz among those who’ve gotten hands-on. Key features of this state-of-the-art model include:

Karam Bales looks at the COVID-19 pseudoscience and the anti-vaxxer conspiracies that propelled the former Conservative MP out of his party

Merve Pehlivan explores the different reasons increasing numbers of women are choosing not to stay covered

Ryan Grim and guests discuss Turkey’s upcoming election, Imran Khan’s arrest in Pakistan, and recent airstrikes on Gaza.

The post Around the World Update: Turkey, Pakistan, and Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

Full of implicit rules and paradoxes, sulking is a marvellous example of intense communication without clear declaration

- by Rebecca Roache

Read at Aeon

Hugh Pope reports from the provincial Turkish town of Kumluca ahead of an election which is predicted to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan from power

The Prime Minister's attempt to stop the clock on social progress is backfiring as Britain becomes increasingly tolerant and open-minded, reports Adam Bienkov

. Simpson’s paradox is an interesting paradox in itself, but it also highlights a deficiency in the traditional econometric approach towards causality. Say you have 1000 observations on men and an equal amount of observations on women applying for admission to university studies, and that 70% of men are admitted, but only 30% of women. […]

In our COLOR issue, we asked The Nib’s Inkwell members. Illustrated by Maki Naro.

America gets an injection of pure Trump.