Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org

One of the copy-and-paste #antivax talking points is that #polio was caused by #DDT. For everyone repeating this vile lie:

My grandmother was a polio survivor. She caught the disease in childhood, before DDT was in use as a pesticide. When I was a small child, she could walk, sort of, with crutches. By the time I was in high school, she was wheelchair-bound, as she would be for the rest of her life.

Consider this an engraved, gold-plated, personally delivered invitation to go fuck yourselves.

@TerryHancock You might say it's a real dog's breakfast.

"You picked up the leash and said 'walkies!' Then you got distracted and I never had my walk. I'm sorry it's come to this, but I really have no choice."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/26/dog-shotgun-nebraska-convenience-store

Context: https://www.quora.com/What-species-of-bird-did-the-Tyrannosaurus-rex-evolve-into-Do-evolutionists-know-which-one-You-d-like-me-to-believe-that-dinosaurs-existed-and-they-all-evolved-into-talking-parrots-but-it-s-not-that-easy-is-it/answer/Daniel-Dvorkin-3

"Also, you’re not any kind of street fighter, or 'Str33t F1ght3r' either. I guess you think calling yourself that, and spelling it in a way that was amusingly quaint around the beginning of this century, makes you sound cool and badass. Take it from someone who’s actually been in a few fights, it doesn’t. Mainly it makes you sound like someone who will get his ass kicked the first time he pokes his face outside his Mom’s basement. Tell her I said hi, by the way."

@joannaholman yeah, I'm thinking that apology isn't going to cut it.

@moira excellent choices!

@falcennial [solemn nod]

Definitely need some old rubber bands that are so dried out they'll snap the first time you try to use them. Bonus points if they hit you in the eye.

Or is that just me?

FB Memories just reminded me that I've been working on The #Silmarillisaurus for over a year. [sigh] #Worldbuilding is fun, but I really want to get back to telling *stories* soon. ✍️ 🚀 🦖 🦕

Lots of #MAGAts are gleefully commenting about #Polis getting censured. "They're eating their own," "circular firing squad," etc. Yeah, we already know the idea of a political party that punishes bad behavior on the part of its members is difficult for #Republicans to understand.

@isaackuo It actually does help to be reminded of that. Thank you.

So I just saw an anti-Trump political cartoon that showed #Trump wearing a #yarmulke. Not waving an #Israeli flag or anything like that, you understand. Just wearing a blue yarmulke, emblazoned with a white Star of David. There are probably millions such caps floating around, all over the world.

This is not an attempt to tie Trump to #Israel. This is an attempt to tie all #Jews, everywhere, to Trump.

I have lately spent a lot of time defending the political #left against blanket charges of #antisemitism. I often say that while there are certainly #leftist #antisemites and always have been, antisemitism is deeply and permanently embedded in #right-wing ideology in a way it never has been on the left. And I still believe that practically everywhere in the world *except* Israel, this is true.

You motherfuckers aren't making it easy, I gotta say.

@fatsam Guess I'll start brushing up on my slow knife-fighting skills. The good news is, that shouldn't be difficult.

Another addendum. (Does that make it an addaddendum?) I don't automatically dismiss all #AI #writing as "slop," because I think that with proper training, AI models can produce useful writing under circumstances where repetition is the goal.

Right now I'm cranking out a bunch of documentation files on a string of data sets where the analysis is almost exactly the same, with just a few little differences between them. I want the files to look and sound like each other, because my goal is not to surprise the reader. My main frustration has been training the AI *not* to try to get "creative." But I wouldn't do that in a paper or full-scale tech report, and I really wouldn't do it in a story.

Of course a lot of #advertising was repetitive slop long before #ChatGPT et al. came along. There is such a thing as good ad copy, though, and I suspect it's going to have to come from human brains for quite a while yet.

In fairness, I will note that it's possible to go too far in the other direction with trying for variety in sentence and paragraph structure, and human writers often do. This is to grammar what "hey guys, I just learned about this cool thing called a thesaurus" is to vocabulary. But right now, I think mind-numbing repetition is by far a bigger problem.

From a post on #AI #writing "tells." Both of these can be useful devices, but they're best as seasoning, not main ingredients. AI doesn't get that, of course. Sadly, neither do a number of human writers who have started using a more robotic style.

Oh, they'll comply with the #virus, all right. See, viruses don't ask nicely for compliance.

There are not words.

Okay, I have plenty of words. Most of them would get me banned for life, so I won't say them. You can probably guess.

I can say this, though: #Polis' political career had better be over forever.

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/15/nx-s1-5690286/tina-peters-polis-commutation-trump