SAM JARED BONAR
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SAM JARED BONAR

sam rants

Sam's got some huge problems

The data behind Trump and Brexit

1/26/2017

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This is a great article about psychometrics and Cambridge Analytica - the UK firm behind the data behind the surprisingly successful shitshows of 2016. Psychometrics is the attempt to measure a person's personality, only made possible (and useful) recently thanks to facebook likes. 

"The strength of the model depended on how well it could predict a test subject’s answers. Kosinski kept working at it. Soon, with a mere ten “likes” as input his model could appraise a person’s character better than an average coworker. With seventy, it could “know” a subject better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than their parents. With 300 likes, Kosinski’s model could predict a subject’s answers better than their partner. With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves."

I am not a machine. I am not a machine. I am not a machine. I am not a machine. I am not a machine. I am not a machine. .

Update 1/30/17: Finally picked up by an English-language source... Vice. Oh well.
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4.1 Miles

1/25/2017

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An Oscar-nominated documentary short - 4.1 miles is the distance from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos. Great if you're looking for a healthy dose of despondent devastation today that doesn't have to do with our federal government. Though, really, it does when you think about it, so never mind. All news is Trump news now. Ugh.

Anyway, watch the movie.
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"You cannot deport our minds"

1/19/2017

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This is still the only thing that has truly, passionately, vibrantly fired me up and made it all seem ok lately. I want to tattoo it as many places as possible. Please read this poem.

Revenge

Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war.

I could’ve swung either way? But now I’m definitely spending
the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism;
I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel
and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table;

I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies.
With fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars,
my legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck
and your swastikas will not be enough to save you,

because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming.
You just delayed our coronation.
We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday;
we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business
because it’s still nobody’s business;
there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic
for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing,
and that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it:

we didn’t manifest the mountain by speaking its name,
the buildings here are not on your side just because
you make them spray-painted accomplices.
These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck.
Even the earth found common cause with us
the way you trample us both,

oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles,
and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them 
but I won’t, because they’re my family,
in that blood-of-the-covenant sense.
If you’ve never loved someone like that
you cannot outwaltz us, we have all the good dancers anyway.

I’ll confess I don’t know if I’m alive right now;
I haven’t heard my heart beat in days,
I keep holding my breath for the moment the plane goes down
and I have to save enough oxygen to get my friends through.

But I finally found the argument against suicide and it’s us.
We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder
the longer they spend burning us,
we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading, 
by refusing to die: what are we but a fire?
We know everything we do is so the kids after us
will be able to follow something towards safety;
what can I call us but lighthouse,
​

of course I’m terrified. Of course I’m a shroud.
And of course it’s not fair but rest assured,
anxious America, you brought your fists to a glitter fight.
This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw.
You cannot deport our minds; we won’t
hold funerals for our potential. We have always been
what makes America great.
By Elisa Chavez (from kottke.org)
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"Dinosaurs" is surprisingly prescient

1/12/2017

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Donald Trump IS the corporate trisceratops business B.P. Richfield from the 90's TV show Dinosaurs.
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See for yourself:
My delight is limited only by my absolute terror, sir. (from films for action)
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Counterinsurgency against progressives

1/10/2017

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Here's a great article/interview with Dean Spade (an associate professor at Seattle University School of Law, founder of the the legal collective Sylvia Rivera Law Project and author of the book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law.) on how our government treats progressive movements as insurgencies. Counterinsurgency responds with repression, then with recuperation ("increasing the legitimacy of the government and marginalizing the views of resistant movements"). This recuperation involves absorbing the cause, which we see with the widespread co-opting of progressive causes by governments, causes, and companies that really only superficially support them. When a movement grows, they first ignore, then marginally acknowledge the problem and finally say it's a problem and that they will handle it. The problem persists, but sinks into the unsaid. Preservation through transformation.
n the face of a powerful, disruptive, widespread movement for black freedom, the United States made the concession of civil rights laws, which formally make racism and racial segregation illegal. So, the surface of the law changed, and the story the U.S. tells about itself changes (“racism is a thing of the past”). But the material conditions facing black people did not change much. Schools are wildly segregated and unequally funded, the racial wealth gap continues to widen and the imprisonment of black people and other people of color has skyrocketed in the last half-century. This is a major danger of reforms—that they change the surface, but the injustice and suffering that movements were raising hell about goes mostly unchanged.
As much as it pains me to say, Obama has done this by embracing LGBT rights, repealing DADT, and allowing women to serve in combat - meanwhile, the American military is still the most powerful and potent force of violence in the world, drone warfare is widespread and unchecked, and Gitmo is still open. 
​However, understanding counterinsurgency will be just as important for shaping our resistance during this period, particularly because with Trumpism on the scene, so many elected officials, corporations and institutions will be declaring themselves progressive or “anti-hate” since he makes it a low bar, meanwhile continuing to take actions that harm people and the planet.
The big question for any progress we've achieved, will attempt to eke out in the next (hopeully only) 4 years, or will attempt to strive for in the future: "how you tell whether a reform (that we’re proposing or that the powers that be are proposing) advances our struggle or recuperates their institutions?" No easy answers, but the gist is to follow the money. Is more money going to the police for police reform? Be wary of it. 

In the end: "The work we need to do is deeply local. It is not glamorous, but it is satisfying and radical."

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    Disturbia, dancing, detritus, huge problems

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