The state of exception is the political point at which the juridical stops, and a sovereign unaccountability begins; it is where the dam of individual liberties breaks and a society is flooded with the sovereign power of the state.

This is Leland de la Durantaye's interpretation of Agamben's analysis of states of exception in nations. Agamben was in turn reacting to Carl Schmitt's notion. Schmitt is the notable Nazi legal and political theorist who laid the legal groundwork for the "state of exception" that permitted the atrocities that regime is known for. Schmitt was later convicted for the role he played in enabling these atrocities and prevented from ever participating in legal or academic life again. His ghost lingers, it would seem.

"Exception" can be read as "emergency" if you like. It is no accident that some of the concerning things happening in the US right now--the deportations in particular, but also the tariffs--are being done under the authority of a state of emergency. It's notable Trump claimed "America’s sovereignty is under attack" with respect to the emergency he declared to justify his administration's anti-immigration actions (my emphasis). According to Axios, 9 states of emergency have been declared in 2025, one by Biden, significantly more than any other year in recent US history. And it's only April.

It is also noteworthy that the US Congress and the Democratic party specifically has repeatedly failed to revoke these "emergency" powers in spite of having the power to do so, going so far as to voluntarily give up some of their own power. The National Emergency Powers Act was explicitly passed to put guardrails on the use of emergency powers. The stopgap funding bill that was recently passed apparently contained language stripping Congress of some of the powers that act confers--yet several US Democrats voted for it. These members not only chose not to exercise this power, they willingly gave it up.

I think at this point it's fair to edit Trump's statement: America’s Trump's unaccountable sovereignty is not under attack.

#USPol

The wonder occasioned by the fact that the things we are at present experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is no philosophical wonder.

--Walter Benjamin

When the state of exception...becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system becomes a machine which may at any moment turn lethal.

-- Giorgio Agamben

#USPol

@fm2279@social.coop Apparently Gavin Newsom characterized this case as "distraction". I sure hope the Democratic party gets its act together and chooses not to put this person forward as a candidate for anything. He's the embodiment of quadrupling down on their failed electoral strategy.

Thank you for clarifying. I edited my post to remove that comment, which now that I read it again sounded much more rude than I intended. Sorry about that. I'd looked at your Mastodon bio and saw Atlassian listed, then mistakenly assumed you worked for the company itself. This was my mistake.

@newt@stereophonic.space There is no debate here; nor is there "all or nothing" thinking, at least not on my end of things. What are you reading?

@ngaylinn@tech.lgbt I'm never quite sure if it's just that I'm getting older, but for a good while now I've felt like I don't need any more tech. I'm happy with the computers and phone I have, and those are the main pieces of digital technology I interact with regularly. They don't need to be faster or better; they work fine. I'd be thrilled if I never had to replace them, frankly. I'm mostly happy with the software on them too. I don't feel a need for regular updates with glitzy features. I'm much more excited by maintenance releases that fix particularly irritating bugs or smooth down a rough edge.

But, yes, that is not the sort of mindset that leads to explosive quarterly growth, and we've hitched our economic wagon to that expectation haven't we.

@scuti@stereophonic.space You should have the courage of your convictions and simply state outright whether you believe vaccines cause autism and that autism is a condition that needs to be prevented. The suggestive hypotheticals are a cowardly attempt at a motte-and-bailey fallacy, which I will not waste my time with.

To onlookers who care: this person is attempting to conflate a reasonable position, the motte ("it is reasonable to do what we can to prevent injury") with a controversial position, the bailey ("vaccines cause autism, which is an injurious condition that should be eliminated from society"). It's a standard technique for maintaining plausible deniability while still holding and communicating abhorrent views.

@fm2279@social.coop Yes, and this is no way to live.

@scuti@stereophonic.space Your suggestive implication is irrelevant to the topic at hand. Nice try, though.

We in the US are living in a eugenic modernity, by the way, when the putative head of "Health and Human Services" is making the kinds of statements he makes about autistic people. This is not just an anti-vaccination meme; it's an attempt to subordinate an entire class of people, suggesting they are subhuman for being who they are. This is a eugenic move. One has to wonder whether the "human services" people in HHS imagine themselves providing has to do with "improving the human stock" of the nation, the services not being provided to humans but instead having humans as an output.

Rather than get mired in the thought-terminating arguments around political parties or political factions, though, I think we'd do well to reflect on what sorts of other ways of thinking feed into this one: the measured life; standardized testing; the internet of things (sensors); tracking apps of various kinds; electronic health records; data science as a profession and Big Data generally; predictive modeling; generative AI and other optimization-oriented or productivity-promising technology. All of these function to render life as an object of knowledge in one way or another. All of them trace their origins through eugenics and the patterns of thought that led to it, and all of them threaten to enable and enhance further eugenic thinking. This is not to say these things are always all bad; this is meant to be a reflection on what exactly they're for.

Why read the number of steps your FitBit told you you took today, unless there were some sense in which you want your future self to be better than your present self? It's not an accident that this is called "physical fitness", "fitness" being the Darwinian concept describing which organisms should survive. Why subject children to standardized testing unless there were some belief it made them better students? To what end tends to be left out. Why adopt a technology meant to improve productivity, unless you're of the belief that improvement (optimization) were even possible?

Generally speaking, if one is able to bring oneself to believe that a human being is made better by a data-informed technical intervention, isn't one playing the same game as these anti-autism anti-vaxxers, just with different terminology? If your answer to this provocation is that your data is better than theirs or that you're more aligned with reality than they are--some variation of "the science is on our side"--you've ceded the territory: this is more of the same optimization logic that brought us to this point to begin with. I think we have no choice but to do better than this.

That's my reflection anyway.

#USPol #autism #vaccination #vaccines #antivax #eugenics #BigData #AI #PredictiveModeling #DataScience #science

Quote of the day:

Reflection is at once a creative endeavor and a fundamental refusal. The task of reflection in the face of eugenic modernity is not only to resist biopolitical operations that disallow life to the point of death, in the name of protecting the population and its production, though this is crucial. More fundamentally it means attempting to uncover the limits of the metaphysical apparatuses that render life as an object of knowledge.

@ngaylinn@tech.lgbt Yes, I think so too. I'm not surprised by the attempt to slap the label "agent" or "agentive" on LLMs; the hype words are losing their shine and they need to recruit some fresh ones. That's how these cycles tend to work. I think it muddies the meaning of the word "agency", since none of the hyped AI systems have agency but it's hard to imagine a truly intelligent system that lacks it.

"AI" is Google's "pivot to video" moment:

Google AI Search Shift Leaves Website Makers Feeling ‘Betrayed’

The now-ubiquitous AI-generated answers — and the way Google has changed its search algorithm to support them — have caused traffic to independent websites to plummet, according to Bloomberg interviews with 25 publishers and people who work with them.

From https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-07/google-ai-search-shift-leaves-website-makers-feeling-betrayed

Remember when Facebook told everyone they should change all their content to video, because it got more traffic? And then that turned out to be such a blatant falsehood that companies went bankrupt trying to do this?

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #Google #Gemini #AISlop

Software "agents" were a hype-y topic when I was a graduate student 25 years ago. I wrote one for a class. I feel like what's being called "agents" or "AI agents" these days are even less capable than what seemed possible a quarter of a century (1) ago when I was in school.

What I thought then is still true today: to make something like a software agent legitimately useful for a lot of people would require a large amount of low-level grunt work and non-technical work (2) of the sort that the typical Silicon Valley company is unwilling to do. (3) The technology is the absolute easiest part of this task. Throwing a Bigger Computer at the problem leaves all those other pieces of work undone. It's like putting a bigger engine in a car with no wheels, hoping that'll make the car go.

By the way #AI companies and VCs, I'm available for contract work and have done due diligence research before if you ever want to stop wasting everyone's time and money!

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #agents #hype #SiliconValley #VentureCapital #dev #tech

(1) Which we've been told repeatedly is essentially infinite time in the tech world.
(2) Establishing semantic data standards and convincing a large enough number of people to implement them being an important component. LLMs do not magically develop protocols and solve all the ETL-style problems of translating among different ones. The Semantic Web didn't really stick for a lot of reasons, but one reason is that it's hard!
(3) Back when I was still in the startup world I was asked several times by VCs to tell them what I thought about some new startup that claimed to be able to magically clean and fuse data. I think they're still very keen on investing in this style of magic, because it requires an intense amount of human labor, but I think where companies landed was invisibilizing low-paid workers in other countries and pretending a computer did the work they did. Which has also been happening for well over a quarter of a century.

@fox@social.lol I hadn't seen this. Looks like I'll be using uBlock Origin then. It works well enough most of the time.

@fox@social.lol Fair enough, but please take the feedback from me that your post sounds condescending and splainy. If you've read any of my other posts, or my background, you'd see that I'm well acquainted with both historical uses of AI as well as modern trends. It's not "nice" to tell someone you don't even know and have never spoken to before something they already know quite well. That's my feedback.

If you legitimately do want to be nice, pester Atlassian tech support to answer my emails. I wouldn't be using uBlock Origin for this and ranting about it if there were configuration options in Jira to turn these features off.

@fm2279@social.coop @CartyBoston@mastodon.roundpond.net Same. I find him to be a repugnant individual, profoundly uncreative and unintelligent in stark contrast to the wide latitude he's allowed in society.

Just to clarify, in case anyone needs it like this guy seems to: https://social.lol/users/fox/statuses/114341376957732341

Using uBlock Origin to hide the AI buttons in web applications will not make the AI stop functioning. Rather, it will spare you from having to see it smeared across everything, and it will reduce the chance you unintentionally click on it. Clicking a button is frequently taken to indicate consent even when it's done accidentally, so don't give them that.

Edited to remove an inaccuracy and a needless rude comment!

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #Jira #Atlassian #NoAI #GitHub

@fox@social.lol What led you to think I'm not aware of this and would appreciate being informed?

@fm2279@social.coop I know one person who's ardently claimed chatbots help them, but I find their judgment dubious because when I've asked exactly what's improving for them by using it they can't pinpoint anything tangible (!). I find that weird.

Whenever I'm feeling cranky I send Atlassian feedback about their "AI" features, but so far they've never responded and they seem to be adding more each week.

It's fascinating to me that I'm literally going through the same steps to remove AI dark patterns from web apps as I go through to remove ads, auto-play videos, and other such stuff that mucks up the web. In my head these are in the same category ("potentially dangerous nuisance that interferes with what I want to do"), and I even use the same tools to clean them up.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #Jira #Atlassian #NoAI #GitHub #dev #web #tech

Atlassian decided to vomit AI all over Jira so I decided to mop it up with uBlock Origin. So far so good. One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to get it out of the context menus (right-click menus).

I also noticed a new Copilot button in GitHub so I zapped that one too.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #Jira #Atlassian #NoAI #GitHub

@datarama@hachyderm.io @Craigp@mastodon.social The wet, salty onions are often covered with bread and/or cheese. What's not to like??

"During COVID" is today.

#COVID #COVID19 #COVIDIsStillHere #COVIDIsNotOver #MaskUp #pandemic

We've gotten about an inch of snow up here overnight and this morning, and it looks like we're in for a bit more.

Last year around this time (Apr 4 2024) we lost power because of a storm a bit like this one. It snowed much more heavily, and since the temperature hovered near freezing the snow was a heavy wet mess that tore down power lines and trees. Our power was out for around 4 days. If I recall correctly over 300,000 people were without power at some point, around 1/4 of the population of the state. We'd had a 2-day power outage only a week earlier, right at the end of March, and were feeling pretty rough by the time the power came back on. We were putting buckets of ice and snow into the refrigerator to keep the food cold that we hadn't put in the coolers on the porch. It's looking like we're in for some more snow yet but I don't think it'll be like the storm last year.

The tree in the foreground of this picture was crushed by the ice and snow of that storm last year. I had to take off a couple of limbs that were broken almost completely through.

#maine #spring

@fm2279@social.coop Military, surveillance, and police are safe bets.