Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 1h

when i die and my thoughts are slowly flickering out, the last thing jangling around in my brain will be "he wears a straw hat like christ's crown of thorns"

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ICE must be destroyed 🏳️‍⚧️🏴 @miawong.bsky.social · 2h

The One Piece one is so funny because the point of the series is that Luffy is the son of anarchist Fidel Castro leading a left wing revolutionary movement and his second in command is a person who's power is transing people and Thiel goes no yeah this is Jesus

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 8h

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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samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 2h

it sucks even more to have people who used to be my friends glibly calling me and everyone else mourning their lost futures "incoherent" stupid gullible sheeple rubes bc "well *EYE* like it so no scale of harm is enough for me to stop boosting it"

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The Everything Machine @everythingmachine.bsky.social · 5h

Going to invent a Time Machine and show this to Tolkien and tell him it was God punishing him for being a Francoist.

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samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 5h

arguably guy who has read neither the bible nor one piece

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 7h

antifascist and anti-capitalist organizers need to understand space as one site of struggle because our opposition definitely understand it as one

IEEE Spectrum @spectrum.ieee.org · 2d

Low Earth orbit is filling up. Not just with #satellites, but also with dangerous, tumbling debris. As they collide, they multiply. If we do nothing, satellites will crash, creating chaos on Earth below. Meet the people trying to prevent this disaster. spectrum.ieee.org/kessler-synd...

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Jacob Geller @jacobgeller.com · 23h

I sometimes read old gaming magazines and stumbled upon this "babe of the year" section from Playstation: The Official Magazine.

If I was the editor I would have gently suggested this writer be put down like a rabid dog

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samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 5h

peter thiel not realizing he's exactly the kind of guy luffy would punch so hard his body turns into a loony toon to accommodate the impossible physics of such a punch

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samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 5h

"a straw hat like christ's crown of thorns" caused me to spit take so hard i ascended to another plane of existence

Jake Flores @feraljokes.bsky.social · 14h

I can't believe this is real

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samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 5h

they still make that beyond steak that is by far their worst product but not god's gift to me specifically (plant based jerky)

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samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 6h

they used to sell beyond jerky at the nearest convenience store and i subsisted off that shit. now it seems to have been entirely discontinued because capitalism hates me specifically

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samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 6h

the fact that no store anywhere in my town sells plant-based jerky anymore is an actual crime and an injustice that must be rectified

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C. Buckthorn @cbuckthorn.bsky.social · 13h

This is amazing. I laughed out loud www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

As 32-year-old Rich points out, though, "it's not like using ChatGPT guarantees success".
When he met someone in a bar one Friday night and swapped social media handles, he asked AI what his next move should be.
ChatGPT discerned that sending an initial message on Monday midmorning would set the right pace. "Then it gave me some options for what the message could be," says Rich.
"Keep it light, warm, and low-stakes so it reads as genuine interest without urgency," the bot advised. "Something like: Hey Sarah, still laughing about [tiny shared moment/reference if you've got one] - good to meet you!" Rich went back and forth with ChatGPT until he felt they'd hit upon exactly the right message ("Hey Sarah, it was lovely to meet you") but sadly she never replied, he says. "It's been two weeks now."

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Adia Benton @ethnography911.bsky.social · 18h

TIL that ICE tried to detain a colleague’s teenaged son, asked him about his “color,” held a gun on him as he produced ID

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samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 15h

your technofascist utopia fucking sucks and i don't consent to being the acceptable cost for it's "inevitable" bulldozing forward

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Vyria Durav, Dragon Princess of the Night @vyriadurav.bsky.social · 1d

People will try to excuse/defend the chuds by saying they've just watched too much porn but I'm a dyke who watches porn all the time and don't have this problem. Chuds do this because forcing every woman into their ideal sex doll aesthetic is the power fantasy.

Ana Valens | 🔞 | Comms Open @acvalens.net · 2d

Gamers’ brains are so cooked dude. The woman on the right is gorgeous and beautiful. Straight gamer men literally can’t find normal women attractive anymore.

Designed With
Gamers In Mind Designed With
Activists In Mind

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Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.bsky.social · 23h

When I compare what they insurrected over to what we haven’t insurrected over it makes perfect sense to me why they feel empowered to kidnap kids in broad daylight

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samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 15h

i'd say "the technofascist obsession with blotting out the stars must be studied" but studying things is also increasingly impossible thanks to technofascists

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samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 15h

yada yada late capitalism and the end of sleep by jonathan crary, starlink is a crime against humanity, etc maybe i should just end it

Dr Space Junk (Alice Gorman) @drspacejunk.bsky.social · 2d

Do we really want 250,000 mirrored satellites in Low Earth Orbit? Hasn't the Starlink megaconstellation already done enough damage?
🧪 @mjibrown.bsky.social

A US startup plans to deliver ‘sunlight on demand’ after dark. Can it work – and would we want it to?

Satellites beaming sunlight down to Earth sound like science fiction – and they have astronomers very worried.

theconversation.com

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รℓσαɳε ℓყรɓεƭɦ 🏳️‍🌈 @sloanelysbeth.bsky.social · 16h

imagine you’ve written a script and it gets picked up by a studio. they put a bunch of money in to it. you’re super excited that your movie is gonna get made. then the studio is like ‘…and jared leto will star!’.

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Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.blacksky.app · 19h

No money in the red kettles. Mutual aid instead.
(And no, I'm not taking questions about this.)

kat, ghost of helenruthsghost @chaoskat.bsky.social · 21h

Salvation Army seen feeding ICE today. For anyone who doesn't already know about their bigotry, here is more, No need to give them your money this Christmas, or ever.

unraveled @unraveledpress.com · 22h

It’s dinner time for the police. Appears to be pizza from a Salvation Army van.

Broadview’s “free speech” curfew starts soon, at 6pm.

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moby spookgirl 🎃🏳️‍⚧️ @eigenvectrix.myatproto.social · 17h

Given that the list of people Jay is willing to endorse and promote includes Laurelai Bailey I am forced to view any other endorsement by her in that light

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samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 16h

"liberating you from having a future or the ability to imagine yourself alive in 5 years"

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samus aran enjoyer @riotlinguist.bsky.social · 16h

trying to rebuild a life at the exact intersection of basically all pursuits (intellectual labor, research, art, writing, teaching) that technofascists desire to be make futureless with genAI actually sucks

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 16h

Very funny considering this was about six months ago

bsky.app/profile/edzi...

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · Apr 29

Under attack from Nate Silver, "the man who is always right"

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