Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Alex

@shakingstick.bsky.social

1.2K followers 580 following 3.5K posts

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Alex @shakingstick.bsky.social · Mar 12

I told youse we should have had a Royal Commission of Enquiry into the Standard of the Shit we are Expected to believe.

I fucking told youse.

But we didn't, did we?

And here we bloody are.

7 50

Reposted by Alex

Dr. Émile P. Torres @xriskology.bsky.social · 2d

"The best meme wins a $10,000 prize." Not kidding. These TESCREAL folks have so much money they don't know what to do with it, lol.

4 2 29

Reposted by Alex

André Alessi @andrealessi.bsky.social · 3h

I can understand why the people making money from aged care are denying that there's a crisis, but it's gross to see government ministers do it. It's your job to solve problems, not to look the other way.

Report 'distorted'
There has been strong push back on the report from the aged care sector and the government.

Seniors Minister Casey Costello said she had visited dozens of facilities and everyone involved was committed to providing great care.

"This report paints a very distorted picture of what is happening, and the quality care being delivered, including by nurses and other care workers. I think it does them a disservice," she said in a statement.

"The sector is not in crisis and the Government has increased spending across the sector by $270 million in the last two years to ensure that.

1 5 4

Reposted by Alex

the babahuck @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 14h

In 2004, Parisian police were conducting a training exercise in the french catacombs and found, after moving past a desk and a tape playing audio of snarling dogs, a fully functional movie theater and bar. When they returned 3 days later, the equipment was gone, with a note: “Do not try to find us.”

Members of the force's sports squad, responsible
- among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.
Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.
Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.
A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.
"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."
Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

47 980 3.6K

Reposted by Alex

Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Podcast @gonebabygone.bsky.social · 5h

Bro got so mad he didn’t misgender her

Matt McManus @mattpolprof.bsky.social · 5h

"Mamdani is bad for being a Muslim and hating trans people, who I also hate..." is reaching Aaron Sorkin levels of Republican

1 18 180

Reposted by Alex

pixelatedboat aka “mr bluesky” @pixelatedboat.bsky.social · 6h

You know who I’m sick of? Astronauts. “The eagle has landed” “I’m on the moon”. Shut the fuck up

50 130 1.3K

Reposted by Alex

Michael Edison Hayden @michaelehayden.bsky.social · 5h

“They are highly organized … [they] have purchased their own animal costumes”

Andy ngo mad about muppets again — this time in Chicago

190 870 4K

Reposted by Alex

Whaley Queen of the Woke @simonwhale.bsky.social · 7h

2 28 110

Reposted by Alex

Alan White @aljwhite.bsky.social · 9h

I ❤️ Viz

A letter to viz on why we should be removing British objects from people’s rectums, not foreign ones

8 240 800

Reposted by Alex

Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 8h

Describe the opposite of The Free Press in a sentence

Screenshot of text:

It’s a business story. [Highlighting begins] Everyone in journalism has known for years that there’s been a huge opportunity for a publication that employs the traditional methods of U.S. journalism—reporting, deep sourcing, fact-checking, fearlessness—to subjects that either don’t get covered enough or get covered only from a certain perspective. [Highlighting ends] If creating such an enterprise seems simple

14 160 1.3K

Reposted by Alex

Ian Coldwater 👻🌿 @lookitup.baby · 11h

Boss, we’ve got a problem. Users don’t want this stuff! They keep wanting to turn it off, even when we keep turning it back on!

Boss: I have an idea

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 12h

bitch what

Onedrive settings. A toggle for using AI to detect and identify faces is set to on. The caption says, you can only turn off this setting 3 times per year.

32 890 2.3K

Reposted by Alex

David_j_roth @davidjroth.bsky.social · 9h

It's striking that even in the defenses of Bari Weiss's broader thing no one ever says that she or her website does good work. Even the people that admire the success she's had selling lite reactionary shit to rich old guys top out at "people do seem to like it." You could defend Jake Paul that way.

45 240 1.9K

Reposted by Alex

Joe Patrice @joepatrice.bsky.social · 13h

Amazing

Tweet: @vexwerewolf
Right-wingers literally straight-up admitting "it's harder to discredit the left because the left is almost always telling the truth"
Scott Jennings @Lum 21h um, yes, that's really a problem
Show this thread
9 paints • 12 hrs
The problem with left-leaning media is they're intrinsically more strict with their propaganda to only using verifiable sources so it's really hard to poke holes in their ideology and arguments in comparison to a lot of low quality rightwing content.
That makes attacking their points with fact checkers not very effective unless the fact checkers use misinformation tactics as well.
In essence people on the right have to work harder and more creatively to push their agendas as statistics and studies frustratingly arent usually on our side.

85 1.2K 3.4K

Reposted by Alex

Jesse @requiemarm.bsky.social · 13h

this is by far the worst reading of Alan Moore’s Watchmen I’ve ever seen and if you spend an appreciable amount of time online you will know what a crowning achievement that is

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 15h

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.

31 200 1K

Reposted by Alex

ceej @ceej.online · 10h

someone with a billion dollars no longer experiences the world as 99% of humanity would recognize it, and so any “analysis” or critique of society they offer is fatally, irrevocably flawed. dracula complaining about the price of groceries

ceej @ceej.online · 12h

the disastrous refusal of the self-styled silicon valley technokings to keep anyone in their lives capable of questioning their increasingly incomprehensible politics has lead to a crisis of thinking so severe that a fifty-eight year old man believes something is important because he knows about it

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 15h

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

13 150 780

Reposted by Alex

Old White Nepo Hat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 11h

Every time someone makes me read something Peter Thiel said it’s like “Scrooge McDuck is Jesus Christ and Huey, Dewey, and Louie are Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel and Daisy is Mary Magdalene and that’s why women voting has lowered American sperm count.”

210 1.9K 9.1K

Reposted by Alex

Dmitry Grozoubinski @explaintrade.com · 18h

This is an exact encapsulation of why I moved to Bluesky.

No amount of handwringing in the Atlantic about how I owe some eternal Promethean suffering to the discourse is going to make me stay on a site I hate, that stopped doing anything for me professionally years ago.

Well – no. Bluesky may or may not be, as one centre-right friend who felt unwelcome put it, “self-righteous island”. But the idea that’s why we went is nonsense. That I’ve largely stopped posting on a site that’s done more to shape my career and social circle than the rest of the internet combined is less about avoiding rival opinions (I love arguing with people who are wrong!) than with the fact the site simply became unusable. It stopped generating the things (good jokes, interesting debate, clicks) I wanted; it became extremely good at generating the things (racists, pornbots, racist pornbots) I did not.

100 590 2.8K

Reposted by Alex

Ms T 🐘💙🎵📚 @elephantlass.bsky.social · 20h

Sunday

4 130 350

Alex @shakingstick.bsky.social · 20h

Current silly shit in watching with kid on Netflix: Nero. On account of in the trailer it has a dude going into melee duel wielding a hammer and sickle

1 3

Reposted by Alex

Chairman Kefka @chairmankefka.bsky.social · 1d

@cascoinfoundation.org

Lmao

1 12 59

Reposted by Alex

Francesco Francavilla @ffrancavilla.bsky.social · 23h

This cartoon is by the guy that designed the DeLorean Time Machine, the Conan The Barbarian sword & title, several aliens in the cantina sequence in the first Star Wars, the guy who worked on ALIEN, DARK STAR, TOTAL RECALL, TRUE LIES, among many other movies. That guy, the legendary RON COBB!

Joltin’ Johnny Lucas @joltinjohnnylucas.bsky.social · 23h

4 79 340

Alex @shakingstick.bsky.social · 20h

And even if true, 'not being taken advantage of by your backers with ideas you don't understand or approve of' is core political leadership skills

2 11

Reposted by Alex

Berny Belvedere @bernybelvedere.bsky.social · 5d

fellas is it gay to live in a city

260 330 3.4K

Reposted by Alex

LostArcNZ @lostarcnz.bsky.social · 20h

The solutions proposed for New Zealand's (and virtually every other country's) problems are always like:
"We need to make people work for more years"
"We have to cut back on services, I'm sorry, there is just no other way"
"We have to cut benefits for young people"

never:
"We need to tax the rich"

79 590 2.3K

Reposted by Alex

Just Call Me Amanda🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛ @amandabf.bsky.social · 23h

Dogs when they did something wrong: guilty meme
Cats when the did something wrong: Samuel L. Jackson staring daggers into your soul

1 25 97

Reposted by Alex

👁🌻🦊⚙️⚓ Bob, Engineer, Pusher of Paper @navmecheng.bsky.social · 1d

> It is 2025 BC. I am a soldier from one of the outlying provinces called to defend the pyramid in Memphis

> It is 2025 AD. I am a soldier from one of the outlying provinces called to defend the pyramid in Memphis

Soldiers at the Bass Pro Shops pyramid in Memphis, TN.

68 3.4K 11K