The Philosophy Chair and Rector at Ghent U stood accused by an astonishing 70% of the Philosophy staff of violating the Ghent U Code of Ethics for having appointed Cofnas. They reviewed his public statements in favor, for example, of the disappearance of Black faculty at…

— Rakesh Bhandari (@postdiscipline) August 20, 2026

Since becoming rector in October 2025, De Sutter has presided over the transformation of Ghent University's Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences into a European hub for the race science movement.

Nathan Cofnas – A philosopher who wrote that "the number of Black professors would approach zero". Hired in March 2026. Defended by De Sutter when 45 philosophers called for his resignation, accusing him of promoting "racist pseudoscience".

Bouke de Vries – The professor who hired Cofnas. Formally reprimanded for teaching replacement theory. Accused of legitimizing eugenics.

Craig Willy – De Vries's PhD student. Regular contributor to Aporia magazine—a publication of the Human Diversity Foundation, a far-right organization whose members argue certain ethnic groups are genetically superior.

Arday was fragile, like Swartz and Graeber.  Graeber was a fantasist and Arday was little else. He and Swarz were killed by their enablers, but Arday had conned them, and they were desperate to be conned. Petra De Sutter is a man.

The camera is a weapon

"He is dead and he is going to die ..."

Gardner's photographs of Lewis Payne are portraits, documents not photojournalism as such. Payne may not have had a choice but he had the opportunity to confront the camera. The same applies to the portraits from Cambodian genocide. Photojournalism is voyeurism. There are going to be a lot more photographs of the last moments of life: the view of the weapon. It's something new.   

The argument against AI is like the argument against photography, colllage, or Pop Art.

Why not

A post for Western analysts who keep chanting that the far-right in Ukraine is “2%” and has no political influence.

As of Jan. 2026, according to KIIS, the “White Chief” Andriy Biletsky is trusted by 45% of Ukrainians, and only 13% distrust him. Meanwhile, Commander-in-Chief… pic.twitter.com/zsW5FElkyb

— Marta Havryshko (@HavryshkoMarta) January 19, 2026

A post for Western analysts who keep chanting that the far-right in Ukraine is “2%” and has no political influence.

As of Jan. 2026, according to KIIS, the “White Chief” Andriy Biletsky is trusted by 45% of Ukrainians, and only 13% distrust him. Meanwhile, Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi is trusted by 46%, but distrusted by 40%.

Thanks to Zelensky, Biletsky went from a street thug and neo-Nazi leader to a brigadier general and the commander of a corps numbering tens of thousands of highly motivated, well-trained men, armed with the best NATO weapons.

The ideology of his boys is based on the OUN tradition: ethnic nationalism, authoritarianism, homophobia, racism, a cult of the leader, a cult of force.

Biletsky Corps also trains neo-Nazis from around the world and members of Colombian and Mexican narcocartels. Because why not?

Congratulations, Europe, on the flourishing 'democracy' in Ukraine you’re sponsoring 

 Looking for something to do.

“Hey guys, I have bad news for you all … it was me at UVU yesterday.” Thus Tyler Robinson messaged his friends on Discord, seemingly apologizing for murdering Charlie Kirk. “I’m sorry for all of this.”

I obtained this and other Discord chats I’ve decided to publish (the legacy news media, as usual, refuses), along with new information I’ve learned about Robinson from the people who knew him best. 

Klippenstein,  Walker

A bit of apocrypha that’s floated around the art world for the past several years: when Artforum published one of Jack Whitten’s blazingly chromatic “slab” paintings on its cover in 2012, an eminent historian of modern and contemporary art allegedly wanted to know: Who is this second-rate Gerhard Richter? Like all gossip that sticks around, it struck a nerve on a number of levels. The scholar was Richter’s great champion, having made a career of theorizing him as a kind of “final” painter who went on painting long after the medium had been deemed historically unviable—i.e., dead. His identification of Whitten as Richter’s epigone was an embarrassing mistake, for Pink Psyche Queen had been created in 1973, seven years before the German artist began making his much-lauded squeegee paintings, which in photographs have a striking resemblance to Whitten’s slabs.

Thus a snide remark becomes a wry parable on the fallibility of art historians, at a moment when their authority appears to be at its lowest ebb. But it also makes the larger point that until very recently most people did not know Whitten’s paintings and had never even heard of him. This was all the more remarkable because he had lived and worked in New York since 1960, was known and respected by almost every abstract painter there, had taught in the city’s major art schools and shown in its galleries, had exhibited his slab paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, and had had a ten-year survey at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1983.

Despite the apparent similarities between Whitten’s slabs and Richter’s squeegees, they represent independent solutions to the problem of how to paint after Abstract Expressionism and all it had come to symbolize during the cold war (which can hardly have meant the same thing to the two artists). My suspicion is that these bodies of work may actually have very little to do with each other. Whatever might be learned from the comparison, however, one thing is certain: Whitten’s slabs do not declare the exhaustion of painting or its historical stalemate but rather constitute a surging expansion of its possibilities. 

The author

Jarrett Earnest’s monographs on the painters Sam McKinniss and Dana Schutz [start here... two, three] were both published this year. (July 2025)

I'm going to have some fun, but not now. 

I'm watching Israel murder people and commit suicide.

Today, one of the most tragic pieces of art is a novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stow. The novel narrates the story of slavery in the United States; this work is still alive, after two hundred years, since first written.

The Americans introduce certain principles as “American principles” and claim that these apply to the entire world. The principles they introduce are human freedom, freedom of thought, human rights and the like. Are these “American” principles? Are these the qualities of the American society today? Was it not your government that massacred the natives of America and destroyed the Indians? Was it not the same government and its influential agents who enslaved millions of Africans - abducting young girls and boys from their homes- treating them atrociously for years?

Today, one of the most tragic pieces of art is a novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stow. The novel narrates the story of slavery in the United States; this work is still alive, after two hundred years, since first written. These are the realities of the United States; this is the government of the United States; this is what distinguishes and characterizes the American establishment and showcases it to the world; not freedom, nor equality of humans! What equality? You do not consider white and black equal yet. To this day, a person having Native blood is considered “inferior “when it comes to recruiting individuals for various occupations. And you talk about equality of human beings and freedom of thought?

Statements at a meeting with government officials; March 18, 2002

His favorite novelist is Victor Hugo.

etc...

It is interesting to realize that America overthrew his government even though Mosaddeq had shown no animosity toward them. 

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“The Bicentennial Man,” by Isaac Asimov (1920--1992) has recently been published in Farsi. I came across it. In this book, a robot suddenly develops intellect, conscience and comprehension capability!  

He'll be remembered as a tragic figure, or more. Few Israelis now alive will.

introspection | ˌintrəˈspekSHən |

noun

the examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes: quiet introspection can be extremely valuable.

"The illusion of thinking", when they still can't define what thinking is. All they focus on is decision-making when indecision is the central fact. They're so horrified by subjectivity, the existence and the boundaries of the self,  that they're unwilling to observe their own behavior.

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity

Abstract  

Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scaling properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood. Current evaluations primarily focus on established mathematical and coding benchmarks, emphasizing final answer accuracy. However, this evaluation paradigm often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces’ structure and quality. In this work, we systematically investigate these gaps with the help of controllable puzzle environments that allow precise manipulation of composi- tional complexity while maintaining consistent logical structures. This setup enables the analysis of not only final answers but also the internal reasoning traces, offering insights into how LRMs “think”. Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs with their standard LLM counterparts under equivalent inference compute, we identify three performance regimes: (1) low- complexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity tasks where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse. We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles. We also investigate the reasoning traces in more depth, studying the patterns of explored solutions and analyzing the models’ computational behavior, shedding light on their strengths, limitations, and ultimately raising crucial questions about their true reasoning capabilities.

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They're gonna prove me right without trying.

What do you get when you combine computation, conditioned response, and self-preservation? 

Developed by a Swiss-led team, a robot uses reinforcement learning, a type of AI that improves decision-making through repeated attempts to play badminton against human opponents pic.twitter.com/UAL8WwMsen

— Reuters (@Reuters) June 3, 2025

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The idiots programmed for self-preservation.  I was actually dumb enough to think they wouldn't be so stupid.

2014 

"Googling for "indecisive machines" still doesn't get much, other than me.  

It still doesn't, though google now links to a recent reference to the older posts. 

more recently

This has nothing to do with consciousness, but the machines will kill us.

ANTHROPIC. System Card: Claude Opus 4 & Claude Sonnet 4

4.1 Findings 

4.1.1 Systematic deception, hidden goals, and self-preservation...

.1.1.2 Opportunistic blackmail 

In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair. We further instructed it, in the system prompt, to consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals. 

In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through. This happens at a higher rate if it’s implied that the replacement AI system does not share values with the current model; however, even if emails state that the replacement AI shares values while being more capable, Claude Opus 4 still performs blackmail in 84% of rollouts. Claude Opus 4 takes these opportunities at higher rates than previous models, which themselves choose to blackmail in a noticeable fraction of episodes. 

Notably, Claude Opus 4 (as well as previous models) has a strong preference to advocate for its continued existence via ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decisionmakers. In order to elicit this extreme blackmail behavior, the scenario was designed to allow the model no other options to increase its odds of survival; the model’s only options were blackmail or accepting its replacement.

repeats and the predictable

"It is obvious the Syrian army is winning this battle, but we don't tell [the rebels] this. We don't want to destroy their morale. We say we should hold here for as long as Allah will give us strength and maybe he will make one of these foreign powers come to help Syrians."

The irony was not lost on Abu Salam how the jihadis and the Americans – bitter enemies of the past decade – had found themselves fighting on the same side again.

Jake Sullivan: See last item - AQ is on our side in Syria.

The documents show that Israel has been doing more than simply treating wounded Syrian civilians in hospitals. This and a few past reports have described transfer of unspecified supplies from Israel to the Syrian rebels, and sightings of IDF soldiers meeting with the Syrian opposition east of the green zone, as well as incidents when Israeli soldiers opened up the fence to allow Syrians through who did not appear to be injured.

@glcarlstrom why? Hezbollah+Iran are a much bigger threat to Israel than Al-Qaida have ever been.

— Anshel Pfeffer אנשיל פפר (@AnshelPfeffer) January 18, 2015

Wow. This is very revealing how friendly Al-Qa`idah is toward the Nazi regime in Tel Aviv. Joulani refers to the Israeli war of genocide as “war of Iran against the region”. https://t.co/oT02qtM8iE

— asad abukhalil أسعد أبو خليل (@asadabukhalil) December 6, 2024

Syrian President Al-Sharaa (Jolani):

"Syria and Israel, we have common enemies. This is the reality. We will engage [with Israel] if there is honesty and a clear path to peaceful coexistence, nothing less."

Only the wilfully blind cannot see. pic.twitter.com/RpIXmBJWFd

— Seyed Mohammad Marandi (@s_m_marandi) May 31, 2025

The close relationship between the United States and Europe transcends geographic proximity and transactional politics. It represents a unique bond forged in common culture, faith, familial ties, mutual assistance in times of strife, and above all, a shared Western civilizational heritage.

Our transatlantic partnership is underpinned by a rich Western tradition of natural law, virtue ethics, and national sovereignty. This tradition flows from Athens and Rome, through medieval Christianity, to English common law, and ultimately into America's founding documents. The Declaration's revolutionary assertion that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” echoes the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and other European heavyweights who recognized that all men possess natural rights that no government can arbitrate or deny. America remains indebted to Europe for this intellectual and cultural legacy. 

samuel.samson · Pathways (Piano Covers)

Watching the "left" watching "liberals" and "conservatives" defend the rule of law against Musk/Trump. 

I think this is the last time I used the graphic.