I wrote about Punch the monkey and who, if anyone, is really to blame for the suffering of primates
defector.com/the-mournful...
26.02.2026 21:23
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I wrote about Punch the monkey and who, if anyone, is really to blame for the suffering of primates
defector.com/the-mournful...
anyway time for me to re-up my view that when you make claims like that as a journalist you should be able to answer the simple question “who said this and why do they matter?”
They keep changing tactics but keep kidnapping my neighbors. Every time they claim they’re drawing down things get a little worse.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Alberto Castañeda Mondragón says his memory was so jumbled after a beating by immigration officers that he initially could not remember he had a daughter and still struggles to recall treasured moments like the night he taught her to dance. But the violence he endured last month in Minnesota while being detained is seared into his battered brain. He remembers Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulling him from a friend’s car on Jan. 8 outside a St. Paul shopping center and throwing him to the ground, handcuffing him, then punching him and striking his head with a steel baton. He remembers being dragged into an SUV and taken to a detention facility, where he said he was beaten again. He also remembers the emergency room and the intense pain from eight skull fractures and five life-threatening brain hemorrhages.
ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.”
What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.
One of my core beliefs about villainy - real evildoers among us - is that it almost never looks as comically wicked as we would expect; it's a kind of reasonable-looking guy standing in front of a podium saying very soberly how he had no choice but to do the evil things.
It’s so heavy when you are going to get groceries and you find a car sitting with its windows broken out and it’s empty but still running and someone’s stuffed animals or pictures or papers are just laying all over the road. I have personally seen at least five of these in the last three days alone
Minnesota is the best of us.
The uncomfortable truth is that the president of the United States is a man with the mind of a spoiled child. His debilitating solipsism is a threat to the stability of the entire world. A functional Congress would impeach and remove him. But the Republican majority is in a codependent relationship with the president, unable to separate his identity from that of their party. And the president’s advisers are either cowed supplicants desperate to please or scheming viziers eager to use his power for their own ends. There is no one, then, to pressure Trump to resign like there was for Nixon. In John McTiernan’s 1990 film adaptation of “The Hunt for Red October,” Fred Thompson, in the years before he was elected as a Republican senator from Tennessee, delivers a haunting warning as he, and Alec Baldwin’s Jack Ryan, observe a deadly naval disaster. “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.” We have three years left with a mad king. It does not feel sustainable.
ICE agents are doing what they're doing because they believe in it on some level; they've been acculturated into an institutional environment that gives them permission to be thuggish, violent assholes; and they lack the moral compass to look at themselves and their colleagues and say no.
I'm sorry, doing the right thing is going to require a modicum of moral courage, and these motherfuckers manifestly don't have it. You don't need to feel bad for them. They can all eat shit, and I hope they have nightmares about what they're doing until their dying day.
State and local law enforcement organizations in Minnesota have spent the past several days telling anyone who will listen that they "stand with ICE"
If the DEA had killed 80 innocent Americans in the course of apprehending one drug dealer, there would be riots. But we are so ghoulishly indifferent to the lives and humanity of people abroad that it's barely even part of the conversation.
a required skill for being able to use an LLM in any professional capacity is discernment, essentially already being an expert in the field so you know when (and why) its outputs are incorrect.
now, LLMs are being deployed to non-expert groups in a way that ensures they will never *be* experts
the humans in the "reinforcement learning from human feedback" protocols are incentivized to have the most shallow and easy-to-articulate explanation for why an output is "good" and those people probably don't care at all about any of it
So much of contemporary American politics starts with an irritant. Something small with rough edges, often a news story framed in a way that amplifies the binaries that power conservative media. From there, through a process that involves the full-spectrum application of umbrage by cable news programming and always-on influencer types and officials who see this as the work they’ve been elected to do, the irritant becomes something like a pearl. Not exactly like a pearl—it’s worthless and disposable—but small, shiny, and hard. Media produced by this process or enthralled by these baubles does not leave the people who consume it better informed about the state of the world. That isn’t what it’s for. The point is to make people feel wary and furious and overwhelmed, and to produce noise that fills up the time it would take to actually understand things.
Given how much of that shit is out there, it’s grandiose to say that Defector is an attempt to counter it. Billions are spent making that awful noise; we’re a website of 27 people trying to put up enough good posts and podcasts that people subscribe and stick around. But the work we do is considered, humane, and curious, and as such the opposite of what the grievance machine spits out. When we write about sports or nature or France’s roadside ham merchants, we’re trying to understand and appreciate those things, and to make that understanding and appreciation real for the person reading it. We’re creating space, not filling it. In a political and media environment preoccupied with shiny, worthless, manufactured junk, it sometimes feels pointless to try to think or do or make something that isn’t like that. Our work is harder and it takes longer; it can be resource intensive and exhausting. But the opportunity to do this work has been the great pleasure and privilege of my professional life. And that chance wouldn’t exist without our subscribers, both in the sense that subscriptions keep the lights on, and also in the broader psychic sense of knowing that there are readers who want the same things we want, and who care enough and respect themselves enough to seek understanding despite how much cheaper and easier the alternatives are to find.
i asked @davidjroth.bsky.social to write a "a quick 2-3 graf sub appeal" based on his typically excellent blog earlier this week. because he can only be himself, roth turned in 600 original words, trimmed down and reproduced here. if you also liked reading this, consider a sub: defector.com/products
I think part of What's Going On with billionaires is that the daily friction of interacting with normal people is part of what anchors people to the real world, and once you have enough money to buy your way out of the friction you can knock down a load-bearing column propping up your sanity.
She's almost 80. She's never running for office again. Her ideological allies in the Party are dead, dying, or on the way out. Nobody has to give a shit what Hillary Clinton thinks about anything, and the sooner we internalize that, the better off we'll all be.
Roth. Click.
it's funny how the initialism "DEI" gets deployed to obscure its own meaning, by framing it like a policy, like ACA, or an agency, like DHS. if you write "efforts to erase diversity" instead of "efforts to erase DEI," you're describing what Trump is doing much more clearly and truthfully!
I will at least say that this is a task that generative AI systems are specifically not suited to accomplish. By definition, an LLM can only ever be right by accident.
the DHS socials are staffed by actual nazis designed to make posts that appeal to nazis, they want genuine believers in a white state. there is not a single ICE agent that “is just following orders”, they’re all buying into an intentionally fascistic project
Today is World Homeless Day, and after years reporting on this crisis, I'll just say: homelessness is neither inevitable nor intractable. It's the result of choices—political, economic, moral—that can be unmade.
And this: how we treat the unhoused is a bellwether for the violence we will tolerate.
Trump is murdering people simply because he likes murdering people and he thinks it makes him look good. defector.com/how-do-you-s...
"It's quite disorienting to watch American institutions obediently line up to display the utmost solemnity for a bigot, whose career achievements were pushing for hatred and violence toward those he saw as inferior to him." defector.com/this-is-who-...
beautiful
"'We feel proud,' the spokesperson said. The feeling across the union is one of hope, and joy. She explained that across all of @cupescfp.bsky.social, their goal is to bring back power to unions, and to stand for their charter rights."
From @therovermedia.bsky.social: therover.ca/strike-ends-...
