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Fear of a Woke AI

As though we needed some more stupid in the AI discourse, Elon Musk recently resurrected the old Woke AI fearmongering hypothetical gambit: He asked one of the leading chatbots, Google’s Gemini, whether it would be okay to misgender Caitlyn Jenner if doing so was the only way to stop

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The Liberty to Lie: Descending Into a Post-Truth World

It kind of got lost in the news cycle but it was recently, quietly, confirmed that the Dinesh D’Souza documentary 2000 Mules, which outlined the case for the 2020 political election having been rigged by the Democratic party to oust Trump, was completely fabricated. D’Souza just made that

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No, Generative AI Is Not Art

I had a different piece all lined up for this week but then I saw something annoying on social media that made me throw the draft on the backburner and settle into a nice cleansing rant. This works out fine anyway because the council has decided that the patch of

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Your Children Are Not Your Ideology

You would have seen that bizarre “pronatalist” couple making social media rounds by now. If you haven’t—Malcolm and Simone Collins were profiled in a Guardian article about the so-called pronatalist movement, whose adherents are on a mission to have as many children as possible to save western civilization

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What Is a Grifter?

As someone who spent way too much of my precious time following Gamergate, the front of the hobbyist culture war that was fought against video game developers exactly ten years ago, I was kind of amused to stumble onto this little interaction the other day. It serves as a neat

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Why is Bill Maher?

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen or met a Bill Maher fan. I’ve seen people agree with him about something, occasionally. Usually some other reactionary nitwit boomer like Elon Musk high-fiving him about how colleges and Pixar movies are turning all the kids trans. But he

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Is There Any Point to Exposing Anonymous Bigotry?

Another conservative hero donned his cape this week. At the University of Mississippi, which the media insists on referring to exclusively as “Ole Miss,” a black woman who was speaking as part of a planned protest event against the Gaza conflict was mobbed by frat boys who were way too

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Comedians Should Stop Complaining About Not Being Allowed to Do Comedy

I’ll be honest with you—when I started this thing, I thought this was going to be a funny newsletter. I’m not an expert on comedy but I did just spend the best part of a decade faking being funny and writing for a comedy website without getting

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For Free Speech to Survive, We Must Kill Twitter

Being an Australian, it’s probably notable that I hardly talk about Australia very much at all and go on instead about Elon Musk and cultural and political trends coming out of America. The fact is that Australian politics kind of bores me for the most part. I like that

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Four Challenges Tech Oligarchs Face When Solving the Underpopulation Crisis

As I’m sure you’re aware, there is an urgent crisis facing western civilisation that threatens its very future. I’m not talking about climate change, silly. I’m talking about severe, existentially catastrophic underpopulation. At least, that’s according to the tech oligarchs. And if you can’t

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The Real Origin of Woke

Is there any political word that sounds more embarrassing being said seriously by a grown adult than “woke?” A past tense verb crowbarred awkwardly into doing the job of either a noun or an adjective depending on who or what it’s complaining about at the time. It only really

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Agnostic Extremism: How Neutral Questions Become Political

The novelist, comedian, TikTok guy Jason Pargin has a bit that he’s been doing for as long as I can remember. Every couple of years he brings it up again, on TikTok or on Twitter or wherever he wants to stir shit, and I’m pretty sure he does