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Isaac Cates

@drisaac.bsky.social

870 followers 640 following 2.7K posts

“Senior Lecturer” (UVM English) in poetry, comics, writing, etc.; sometime drawer of comics, sometime writer of poems; trying to return to the world Some projects here: #DailyKrazyDetail #FourActorFactor #OrwellVsChatGPT #NearbyNature2025

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Isaac Cates @drisaac.bsky.social · Nov 15

If you’d like to read my essay about George Orwell, writing by machines, and our current nihilism about meaning, I offer you the entire zine in this thread.

I will finish the thread with instructions on how to print your own copies of the zine.

#OrwellvsChatGPT

GEORGE ORWELL VS. CHATGPT

=* AN ESSAY BY ISAAC CATES * NOV. 2024 *=

George Orwells essay "Politics and the
English Langare" mainly argues that the sort of cloudy, imprecise, and unintentional language connon in business writing, academic puffery, and party-line rhetoric prepares the mind for bad politics.
Writing just after the end of World War II and during Stalin's ascendancy, Orwell worried about the English also taking unwitting steps toward authoritarianism.
As a writer, he saw the vulnerable point he could best defend in the LANGUAGE—specifically, in the relationship between language and thinking or meaning. (Think of MEANING as a verb, and not just a noun.)

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Joshua Eaton @joshuaeaton.bsky.social · 2h

If you’re a man in the room and a public official says this about your female colleague, you don’t continue as if nothing happened.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 2h

Trump ignores a question from a woman reporter but says, "I just like to watch her talk. Good job. Thank you darling."

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Elizabeth Warren @warren.senate.gov · 2h

Donald Trump is giving $20 billion of taxpayer money to Argentina – to help his political ally stay in power and bail out Wall Street hedge funds – while Americans at home can't afford health care or groceries.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 3h

Trump on Milei: "If he loses, we will not be generous with Argentina."

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Alexandra Gallant-Lee @alexandragallant.com · 3h

In my new comic, I mention how this keeps happening to lawyers looking for shortcuts and I've been trying to figure out which case I wanted to cite in my sources as a reference...

This is it, this is the one.

404 Media @404media.co · 6h

An attorney in a New York Supreme Court commercial case got caught using AI in his filings, and then got caught using AI again in the brief where he had to explain why he used AI, according to court documents filed earlier this month.

🔗 www.404media.co/lawyer-using...

Lawyer Caught Using AI While Explaining to Court Why He Used AI

The attorney not only submitted AI-generated fake citations in a brief for his clients, but also included “multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations” in the process of opposing a motion fo...

www.404media.co

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Isaac Cates @drisaac.bsky.social · 1h

Happy birthday!

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Zach Rabiroff @zachrabiroff.com · 3h

Jack Kirby: "I was raised in an area where you had a lot of gangsters. I know what gangsters do. Hitler's gonna want war. You start jumpin' around and giving him what he wants, he's gonna feed on your weakness."

MARK: So the capacity for great good and evil is inherent in everyone?
JACK: Of course. I was dating my wife at the time Hitler was coming on, and I did this editorial cartoon which showed Neville Chamberlain patting a boa con-strictor, and the boa had a bulge called Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain had just given Czechoslovakia to Hitler, okay.
And the boa had Hitler's mustache. I showed it to my boss at the syndicate and he says, "How dare a 19-year-old like you do a cartoon like that? What do you know?" I says "Well, I was raised in an area where you had a lot of gangsters. I know what gangsters do. Hitler's gonna want war. You start jumpin' around and giving him what he wants, he's gonna feed on your weakness." And Hitler wanted more and more until there was a face-off.

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Isaac Cates @drisaac.bsky.social · 2h

Folding Ideas is right at the top of the pile for me. I also like Big Joel

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 2h

Trump: "I'm just a little busy. I'd love to go to Argentina. I'd like to be like Biden. I'd like to go to the beach. My legs are not quite as thin as his. My legs are slightly heavier, my arms are slightly larger. My body is a little bit larger than his. I'm not sure it would be appreciated."

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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 1d

you know when you’re helping a toddler build a stack of blocks and he gets mad and knocks yours over like “I WANNA DO IT MYSELF” but his takes forever & is super wobbly so you’re like “if you put the bigger one at the base …” and he goes “NO” and won’t let you help?

that’s colonialism + science 😂

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Shaenon K. Garrity @shaenon.bsky.social · 1d

If you're a writer, read outside the genre you write in, and read old stuff. Partly this expands your horizons but mostly it gives you stuff to rip off without anyone noticing.

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 1d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

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Isaac Cates @drisaac.bsky.social · 1d

The real answer is Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” But let me show you this playlist of covers of Townes van Zandt songs I’ve been putting together:

open.spotify.com/playlist/5AV...

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Isaac Cates @drisaac.bsky.social · 1d

I think part of the answer is “Bernie Worrell,” but I’d need to check my liner notes

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Mockingbird, MPH, CHES @amockingbird.bsky.social · 1d

Y’all should read this. Very good perspective on what’s going on in Chicago.

And I’ll add that if you’re making roast acorn squash, put some maple syrup in the seed hole. It’s delicious.

Sarah Becan @sarahbecan.bsky.social · 1d

New Sauceome comic this week, because it's winter squash season!

(also, a little rumination about what's up in Chicago these days)

buttondown.com/sarahbecan/a...

Roasting Winter Squash

It’s winter squash season! I drew this using butternut squash, but this method works for pretty much any winter squash: acorn, autumn frost, delicata,...

buttondown.com

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Isaac Cates @drisaac.bsky.social · 1d

Do what you love, and the paycheck will follow you

Reposted by Isaac Cates

Sarah Becan @sarahbecan.bsky.social · 1d

New Sauceome comic this week, because it's winter squash season!

(also, a little rumination about what's up in Chicago these days)

buttondown.com/sarahbecan/a...

Roasting Winter Squash

It’s winter squash season! I drew this using butternut squash, but this method works for pretty much any winter squash: acorn, autumn frost, delicata,...

buttondown.com

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Isaac Cates @drisaac.bsky.social · 1d

Sean, my dude: not everything in the world has to cost money. You might need to pay people to say nice things about you, but we will show up at these protests for fucking free

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 1d

Sean Duffy: "The No Kings protest, Maria, really frustrating. This is part of antifa, paid protesters. It begs the question who's funding it."

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Isaac Cates @drisaac.bsky.social · 1d

“Speaker Johnson, a follow-up? Could you please tell us as much as you can remember about two of the most promising of these policy ideas?”

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 8d

Mike Johnson: "Let me look right into the camera and tell you very clearly: Republicans are the ones concerned about healthcare. Republicans are the party working around the clock everyday to fix healthcare. This is not talking points for us: we've done it."

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Brett "Solidarity 2025" Banditelli @banditelli.org · 1d

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti

Katelyn Boo-urns @katelynburns.com · 1d

name an italian more worthy of an american holiday than columbus

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Isaac Cates @drisaac.bsky.social · 1d

Winnie-the-Pooh belongs in a Modernism course alongside Eliot and Woolf

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 1d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

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Isaac Cates @drisaac.bsky.social · 1d

Wait till you hear about catamounts

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amanda moore 🐢 @noturtlesoup17.bsky.social · 1d

You can just share my video from me instead of sharing a screen recording of my video from a content farm account that isn’t on the scene btw.

amanda moore 🐢 @noturtlesoup17.bsky.social · 2d

The inflatables have made it to Broadview.

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Alt Acadia National Park @altacadia.bsky.social · 3d

We 💯 support Amphifa! Give me ribbety, or give me death. 🐸

A poster for "Amphifa: amphibians against fascism" showing a black and green flag with a green frog

Three protestors dressed in inflatable frog costumes holding a sign that says "Portland frog brigade"

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Jessica Kant @jessdkant.bsky.social · 2d

It’s actually incredible that as a society we never managed to find the political will to force elected officials to tell the truth on TV.

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Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 2d

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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Kat Abughazaleh @katmabu.bsky.social · 2d

3D printers: WE NEED YOU! If you have a printer, start making whistles for your community. Volunteers of ours have been printing and passing them out across communities, over 200 have been handed out so far!

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Graham Platner for Senate @grahamformaine.bsky.social · 2d

We have armed secret police kidnapping people off the street based on the color of their skin.

When we win: we will haul them before a Senate committee. The masks will come off. There will be consequences.

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