Michael Sappir

A 2023 tweet: every european election The People’s Democrats (center-right) 31 per cent Soviet Worker’s Party (center/center-left) 22 per cent Citizen’s Forum (fascist) 19% Wow! (Center) 11 per cent Friendship is Magic (left) - nine per cent Green Partt - eight per cent

This remains a good, tongue in cheek guide, though the centre-right is doing worse across the board than it was then, while the Greens are taking the “Friendship is Magic” vote in addition to their traditional core.

I think you are 100% correct about them.
A fun way to explore what online "rationalism" can mean is the Behind The Bastards series about the Zizians, highly recommend

Yes!

I feel like these views are easier to identify in online discourse than in philosophy, in part because they are barely coherent and would not stand up to any serious philosophical prodding...

This seems to often be coupled with a crude sort of physicalism or behaviorism, a view that does not take feeling or thinking seriously, but only its observable outside effects, considering subjective experience as secondary, incidental, or epiphenomenal. >

The dualism I have in mind is not necessarily committed to any ontology, but comes down to thinking our mental experience is somehow separate from our physical experience, and could be replicated by software without losing much. >

Thanks, these are interesting points.
I think fundamentally though, I really wasn't respond to philosophers of mind, but to the much less sophisticated ideas circulating among folks who don't think about this too hard. >

And my argument is less about necessary conditions for believing in chatbot sentience, more about one sufficient condition: if you are inclined to think of humans only in terms of their outside behavior, and perhaps view subjectivity as epiphenomenon, you are more able to mistake chatbots for people

I will grant that. It's less about Descartes as such, more about "Cartesianism" as a line of thought.
And yes, this is not a general claim about possible machine consciousness. I pretty much agree with this:
bsky.app/profile/tess...

I had a phase like that too! But the coolest thing about growing up is you just keep growing. It's fine :D

You only get "the chatbot has anxiety" after starting to think of people as objects, comprehensible only in terms of their outward behavior, against your intimate knowledge of your own subjectivity. But you can only miscomprehend people as object. And then you can mistake an algorithm for a person.

There is just no such thing as unfeeling, cold rationality. That's just a specific way of clenching your gut and sharpening your mind into a tool of careless harm. Your body knows you are causing pain, and feels it, and you are fooling yourself.

The shallow version of rationalism that was popular online in the early 2000's is a key part of how we got this dystopia. If you believe feelings are an external distraction to good thinking, get out of the 18th century, think harder, and get back in your fucking body. We are not brains in jars.

This is so so key. You really can't get the whole anti-human "chatbots are just as conscious as I am" bullshit without radical mind-body dualism that gets you forgetting that feelings are in the body and also an inseparable part of your thinking consciousness.
Kill the Cartesian in your head.

By our count at @prospect.org they have killed at least 28 people since Trump's second term started.

Es zieht ein neuer Ton ein in die Redaktionen. Die Bombardierung von Zivilist*innen ist «Drecksarbeit», das Völkerrecht nicht mehr als «Gerede». Doch ist man keinesfalls gefühllos und ohne Empathie. Wenn Faschisten öffentlich weinen, ist man ganz gerührt …

Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Under Fire, NLR 157, January–February 2026 One of modern Iran’s leading historians provides a critical anatomy of the power structures of the Islamic Republic, on the eve of war—and a scathing denunciation of the long-incubated American-Israel...

Incredibly timely & informative longread, incl.: how the US outsources its Iran policy to Israel; how the '79 revolution differs from others (and learned from them); why monarchism has made a comeback; why the Revolutionary Guard is key to Iran's future – and more.
newleftreview.org/issues/ii157...

Netanyahu’s Iran War Is Also the War of Global Neocon Elites The war on Iran is a joint effort by segments of the US, Israeli, European, and Arab ruling classes that are committed to global and regional domination — not just the result of Israeli pressure on Do...

This by @nimrodflash.bsky.social helps correct the most typical misunderstanding of imperialism: it is not something certain "bad states" do, but a global system in which capitalist factions forge cross-border alliances to tilt the playing field to their own advantage.
jacobin.com/2026/03/neta...

"While it is clear that Netanyahu’s persistent lobbying for an attack influenced Trump to make decisions in June 2025 and now act against Iran, the idea that Israel dragged the US into war…is wrong. This war represents the peak of efforts by a neoconservative alliance within global elites…"

Netanyahu’s Iran War Is Also the War of Global Neocon Elites The war on Iran is a joint effort by segments of the US, Israeli, European, and Arab ruling classes that are committed to global and regional domination — not just the result of Israeli pressure on Do...

...The statement, was interpreted by many as an admission of guilt; the United States is doing Israel’s bidding in the current joint bombing campaign. The idea that Israel dragged the United States into war, or that this is solely Israel’s war with the United States blindly following, is wrong.

Here’s an easy place to start: consciousness is both embodied and affective as well as fundamentally bound to the unconscious. Humans are not thinking machines, because thinking is bound to embodiment and the unconscious.

Do you need a neuroscience degree to understand that a calculator is not conscious? How about a statistical model? Why an LLM?

They should invent a way out that isn't through

So according to the WSJ a US Senator conspired with another country to manipulate the US into starting a war, am I getting this right

It is still happening. No country is stepping in. Cuba has helped so many movements and people around the world and they are being abandoned to die

They've now killed four people -- three U.S. citizens and a Mexican national. They've shot several more.

They've lied about all of them. They haven't shaded the truth. They haven't "misled" us. They've brazenly, knowingly lied while in possession of the evidence disproving their lies.

Shutting an oil well isn’t like turning off a faucet.

It’s a huge engineering risk, difficult to reverse — and an indicator the Kuwaitis don’t see choke points improving anytime soon.

This woman, US citizen living in Skokie, was detained at Ohare yesterday, taken to Broadview, then transferred to a detention facility in Wisconsin, now released. We know all this not because of DHS, who repeatedly denied that they even had her, but because her phone was pinging in those locations.

Pete Hegseth's murderous buffoonery, coming amid a lifetime in which he's betrayed everyone close to him and failed up from one disaster to the next, is a perfect example of how the appeal of Trumpism is that it creates a permission structure for people to openly be their worst selves

there's so much bad in the world but there's also people who lift up and carry an elderly bat around every day so he can pretend he's flying again, and that's the part of the world I think is worth fighting for