Kinvert

Will be interesting to see what happens in this legal case with Graphene OS. I believe 5th amendment protects citizens from giving uo PINs, but no idea if non-citizens are breaking laws or if the duress PIN changes things.

Though I'd sensed something was off for years prior, COVID was the first time I realized academia had been completely leveraged as an epistemic support system for one party. If there's a crisis and the choice is between sticking to previously stated theoretical principles, versus serving the party, academics will serve the party. For example: there was a very obvious "Latourian" way to analyze the whole saga of COVID, emphasizing runaway incentive dynamics in the grant system as a way to understand the disease origins; intra-institutional political-jockeying among different scientists as a way to understand why some "finding" about origin, spread, treatment, and relationship to other social problems became Settled Truth one month and Debunked Pseudo-Science the next; what to make of masking as public health policy vs sociopolitical performance; what to make of "biopolitical" revolts like the Canadian truckers... Well, despite Latour being one of the hottest names to cite in the humanities and social sciences during the 90s, 00s and 10s, academics--including the the ones who'd built their whole careers as "Latourians"--weren't doing *any* of that! Basically they were just nervously hitting "refresh" on the NYT main page to tell them what COVID opinion this month would make them "members in good standing" of the party coalition, and then attaching their authority ("as academic experts") to that opinion. Academics were downstream of the NYT and the NYT was downstream of DNC deliberations about what side of highly contentious and ambiguous debates regarding masking, flight cancellations, lockdowns, vaccines, origins, protests and rioting, etc etc, to get on in order to best position itself against Trump. Nobody was really supposed to say anything that wasn't implicitly useful for Biden. The doubly servile partisan role academics were being asked to play--and the eagerness with which most embraced this role--was shocking to me. And the consequences have outlived the crisis. It REMAINS the case that academics cannot write an insightful account (historical, sociological, etc) of COVID. It's 2026, and it remains the case that *even* having to acknowledge in published writing that there's a very good chance the disease came from lab (with support from a US grant) completely scares almost all qualified academics away from writing about the topic. And how can you write about COVID "as history" or "as sociology" if you're scared to discuss origin?

Boys who free hand curb are the most talented motherfuckers on the site.

Shiloh Hendrix's lawyer says that on top of committing blatant felony perjury, the not one, but TWO Somali translators were nothing but a tactic for Shire Jimale to evade answering any questions under cross-examination. Says he spoke English with the prosecutors just fine.

It’s interesting how the libertarian “right” preaches high trust societies and hates degeneracy while promoting personal responsibility, yet also gets upset at self-restraint and decency in order to create those very societies. The Libertarian “right” needs to do much better in order to be actual rolemodels and organizational leaders if they want to be taken seriously.

Palestinians: “Israel is ethnically cleansing us!” 😭 Meanwhile the actual ethnic cleansing: 🇲🇦 Morocco: 265,000 Jews → 2,000 🇩🇿 Algeria: 140,000 → 50 🇹🇳 Tunisia: 150,000 → 50 🇱🇾 Libya: 38,000 → 0 🇪🇬 Egypt: 75,000 → 40 🇾🇪 Yemen: 55,000 → 50 🇮🇶 Iraq: 150,000 → 7 🇸🇾 Syria: 40,000 → 0 Arab population in Israel: 156,000 → 2.178 million 📈 Who’s ethnically cleansing whom? 🤔 The projection is Olympic-level. 🥇🤣

The post liberals believe that in order to save America, we need to abandon the principles that built it. This is like saying in order to save our house from a fire we should burn it down. (for the well-adjusted person, I think it goes without saying — if we abandon the very thing we say we’re trying to save, we’ve already lost)

This might be the most amazing one yet. More from Senator Obama on immigration. Obama not only said that illegals must not be allowed to work here, he went one step further and said that employers should be forced to prove that they offered the job to American citizens before they are allowed to hire guest workers. Democrats today would call this racist and xenophobic.

Imagine living in a country where foreign invaders have more rights than you.