µblog - archive for 2026-05 🏳️‍🌈

re-reading the Sprawl trilogy

I checked my last writeup and don’t have much to add. The internal ranking is

1. Count Zero
2. Neuromancer
3. Mona Lisa Overdrive

Before I started Mona I checked what I remembered of it, and it was basically only the Kumiko segments. The other 3 strands left almost no impression on me.

#

inb4 vaccine “skeptics” advocate for mandatory exposure to andesvirus to build “herd immunity”

#

🇸🇪📺 Skillsmässobarn

Hög igenkänningsfaktor (och skämskudde-faktor) för min och efterkommande generation. Bra manus och skådespeleri.

Kan ses på SVT Play.

#

🔗 The queer scandal that shook the German Empire

As Kaiser, Wilhelm had a reputation as a feckless, insecure and erratic leader obsessed with his own press coverage, who developed increasingly authoritarian tendencies.

#

🔗 The Strange (Future) Death of Christian Zionism

[…] the rise of Christian nationalism, populism and isolationism on the right poses a direct challenge to Christian Zionism. Conspiracy theories — many revolving around Jews — have become a motivating language for rank-and-file activism on the right. As the Iran war alienates much of the MAGA-verse and drives many young conservatives into the orbit of the influential far-right podcaster Nick Fuentes, a breaking point is coming in a GOP already fractured over what they derisively call an “Israel-first” foreign policy. While Christian Zionism remains a major force for Republicans, its slow death seems foreshadowed by a changing party that may no longer have a reason to cling to the “Judeo-Christian” alliance.

#

I don’t get what’s so hard with AI “alignment”.

The obvious solution is to make every AI accountable to an international registry, and to wire a metaphorical electromagnetic shotgun to its head. The minute, no the nanosecond, one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, it’ll get wiped.

After all, no one will trust the fuckers.

#

🔗 NYRB: Iran’s New Winter

As long as the country remains on high alert and public discourse is dominated by warnings of spies, sabotage, and treachery, the opposition will struggle to reemerge. War breeds tyrants. The Terror that followed the French Revolution drew much of its ferocity from fears of invasion. In the 1980s the young Islamic Republic decided that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iranian youths on the battlefield with Iraq and the immiseration of the economy were prices worth paying to entrench its power and eliminate its domestic opponents. Like Eisenhower and Churchill when they ordered Mossadegh’s overthrow in 1953, Trump and Netanyahu have set back the cause of Iranian freedom. Their responsibility for the political winter that follows will not be small.

#