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One of the attributes of the modern condition is an inability to...

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One of the attributes of the modern condition is an inability to be bored. “In one study, nearly half of participants left alone for 15 minutes with no stimulation chose to have an electric shock.” !!!

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cjheinz
7 days ago
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Wow. Not shocking.
;->
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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One for Dave

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cjheinz
8 days ago
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LOL!
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Pluralistic: Dinkscrump Linkdump (08 Feb 2025)

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Today's links



A messy storage room whose tall shelves are overflowing with boxes, many of which have scattered on the floor.

Dinkscrump Linkdump (permalink)

Well, Saturday's come around and I have a gigantic list of links that didn't fit into this week's newsletter, so it's time for another linkdump, 26th in the series:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

My posting is about to get a lot more erratic, as I'm days away from leaving on a 20+ city book-tour, which starts in Boston on Feb 14, with a sold-out event at the Brookline Booksmith:

https://brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2025-02-14/sold-out-cory-doctorow-ken-liu-picks-and-shovels

But Bostonians get another bite at the apple: I'm appearing at Boskone, the city's venerable sf convention, a few hours before my Brookline gig, and admission is free:

https://schedule.boskone.org/62/

The rest of the tour (including a virtual event with Yanis Varoufakis on the 15th) is here, and more dates (New Zealand, possibly Pittsburgh and Atlanta) are being added all the time:

https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2025/02/06/announcing-the-picks-and-shovels-book-tour/

Of course, even as I scramble to get ready to hit the road for months, I'm regrettably forced to give some rent-free space in my head to Elon Fucking Musk. This week, I wrote about DOGE as a government-scale private-equity style plundering of the nation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/#shameless

But that was before I read Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman's Lawfare article about how Musk's seizure of payment chokepoints will allow him (and Trump) to surveil the entire economy and wield unilateral, unaccountable power:

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/elon-musk-weaponizes-the-government

In 2023, Farrell and Newman published an important book called Underground Empire, explaining how, during the War on Terror, GWB (and then Obama) weaponized global payment processing systems (most notably SWIFT) and other boring, technical systems, and then used them to wield enormous power around the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Farrell and Newman's point isn't merely that this power was used unwisely or cruelly, but also that the co-opted systems had an actual, useful, important job to do – a job that was only possible if these systems were widely viewed as credibly neutral and apolitical. The book ends with a sobering message about the chaos on the horizon if (when) other countries walk away from these system, leaving infrastructure vacuums in their wake. In their new Lawfare piece, Farrell and Newman imply not just that Musk and Trump are fashioning a powerful weapon out of the nation's digital infrastructure, but also that this could permanently undermine the vital national systems they're seizing control over, with no obvious candidates to replace them.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are still trying to find their asses with both hands, even as voters across the nation bombard them with demands to actually do something. I'm gonna call my senators and rep right after I finish this and remind them that when South Korea's autocratic president attempted a coup, lawmakers stormed the capital, leaping the fences while livestreaming to voters:

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/06/democrats-congress-trump-musk-doge-calls

But not everyone is taking Musk's bullshit lying down. The AFL-CIO has led a coalition of unions in suing DOGE:

https://gizmodo.com/americas-unions-sue-doge-launch-the-department-of-people-who-work-for-a-living-2000559998

And they've launched a counterinitiative with the delightful name of "The Department of People Who Work for a Living":

https://deptofpeoplewhowork.org/

It's nice to see some inside/outside strategy underway. After all, Musk is cruel and disgusting, but he – and the lawyers and creeps who back him – are also very, very stupid, and they're fucking up all over the place.

Take shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency charged with defending America from financial predators (e.g. would-be usurers hoping to turn their social media sites into payment processing platforms). Under Biden's CFPB chief Rohit Chopra, the Bureau was an absolute powerhouse, adopting rules, investigating scammers, and punishing wrongdoers, all in service to the American people:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/26/taanstafl/#stay-hungry

So naturally Musk and Trump have shut down the Bureau. But, as Adam Levitin writes for Credit Slips, this was a profoundly stupid move. You see, under Dodd-Frank – the post-2008 financial crisis law that created the CFPB – state attorneys general are empowered to enforce its rules. Those rules can't be amended or rescinded for so long as the CFPB is in a coma. What's more, any "violation of an enumerated consumer law is a violation of the Consumer Financial Protection Act," which can be gone after by state AGs. Another thing: the Truth in Lending Act has a threshold for small loans, below which the Act doesn't apply. The CFPB is supposed to adjust that threshold for inflation, but without a CFPB, that threshold will be frozen in amber like the federal minimum wage, bringing every-larger constellations of financial activity within scope for AG enforcement in any or every state in the Union. Also: none of this can be changed without a 60-vote Senate majority. Nice one, Elon:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/02/shutting-down-cfpb-is-not-like-shutting-down-usaid.html

That isn't the only way that Trump shot himself in the dick last week. As Luke Savage writes, threatening to put tariffs on Canadian goods (and to annex Canada and make it the 51st state) had a profound effect on Canadian politics:

https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/all-bets-are-off

Before last week, Justin Trudeau's political legacy seemed assured. His many leadership failures, along with a billionaire-funded dark-money hate-machine that targeted him with culture-war nonsense and climate denial all added up to record low approval ratings. It was so bad that Trudeau actually sent Parliament home (recklessly leaving Canada without a legislature on the eve of Trump's presidency) and resigned as Liberal Party leader.

A week ago, pretty much everyone in Canada figured that the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was about to romp to victory with a Ba'ath-style Parliamentary majority. Poilievre was and is an extraordinarily weak candidate, a guy who has literally never had a job except for "politician," who nevertheless ran as a political outsider, leading a coalition of racists, climate exterminationists, xenophobes, forced-birth militants, and other cryptofascists and low-tax brain-worm victims. The threat of a Poilievre government with a commanding majority was frankly terrifying. Think of him as someone with Trump's agenda and Mitch McConnell's ruthless administrative competence. Trump is bad enough – but smart Trump? Nightmare.

Then came the Trump tariffs and the annexation threats, and overnight, the Tories' 20-point lead narrowed to a two-point lead, which continues to shrink. Poilievre's brand boils down to "Make Canada America Again" – dismantle medicare, smash unions, punish immigrants, ban abortion. With Canadians booing the American anthem at NFL and NBA games and Quebecois demonstrators waving maple-leaf flags, this is not a good time to be running as the America guy.

Don't get me wrong. Trudeau is terrible. Bill Clinton terrible, say. But Poilievre? A fucking monster. Canada's political future may just have been rescued by Trump's big, stupid mouth. Thanks, eh?

Meanwhile, south of the border, our American cousins keep getting fed into the corporate woodchipper. It's been just over a year since Mainers went to the polls and voted in a Right to Repair law with an 83% majority. But a year later, the law is foundering, amid a corporate legal blitz led by the automakers, who have also put Massachusetts' massive popular 2020 Right to Repair law on ice with endless lawfare. :

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/07/automakers-sue-to-kill-maines-hugely-popular-right-to-repair-law/

This is the status quo in America. As a highly influential, widely cited 2014 peer-reviewed study found:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

In other words, the only time the American people get what they demand is when giant corporations and oligarchs want it too. But when the plutes want something that the people despise, they almost always get their way.

Speaking of which, how's things going with Uber?

This week, Hubert Horan, the aviation industry analyst whose writings on Uber are the most important analysis of the company's business, investor scams, wage theft, and lobbying, published his long-awaited 34th research note on the company:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-thirty-four-tony-wests-calamitous-legacy-at-uber-and-with-the-kamala-harris-campaign.html

This edition is devoted to Tony West, Uber's Chief Legal Officer, and also brother-in-law to Kamala Harris, as well as manager of her disastrous failure of a 2024 election campaign. West may have run a Democratic presidential campaign, but he epitomizes the corporate corruption that gave rise to Trump. As Horan writes, West's first major accomplishment at Uber was to get the company exonerated for intimidating customers who were raped by Uber drivers. But his obituary will lead with the fact that he got Prop 22 passed in Calfornia, legalizing Uber's worker misclassification gambit, which allows the company to pay well below minimum wage and evade all workplace protection laws.

It was West who tapped Silicon Valley's tech oligarchs for large-dollar donations to the Harris campaign, which presumably played a substantial role in Harri's unwillingness to take a tough line on Big Tech while on the trail, creating the (correct) impression among voters that Harris would stand up for big business over their own interests.

It's an important read, and it's a reminder that the Democrats lost the last election every bit as much as Trump won it, and that their paralysis in the face of a national crisis is absolutely in character for the Democratic Party.

But on the other hand, the antitrust surge in the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and China (!) over the past five years are all the more remarkable and heartening in light of the dismal and corrupt state of world governments. After all, there is no billionaire-backed dark money lobby whipping up support for smashing corporate power. The antitrust victories of the 2020s marked a turning point – the first time in my memory when extremely popular policies that the wealthy hated triumphed.

Decapitating the agencies that made those policies won't change the enormous political rage that led to the antitrust surge. If anything, it will only feed it. Enforcers like Rohit Chopra, Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter did brilliant, important work – but they were only able to do it because of us. They're out of office, but we're still here. Don't ever forget that.

I certainly won't. This week, I turned in the edited manuscript for my next book, a nonfiction title called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next October:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

The day I turned it in Ars Technica ran a huge package called "As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders," reeling off the most disgusting high-tech ripoffs trying to worm their way into your home and wallet:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/as-internet-enshittification-marches-on-here-are-some-of-the-worst-offenders/

This sparked an epic Reddit thread on r/NoStupidQuestions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1ij42yh/what_are_some_other_examples_of_enshittification/

I love to see how giving a name and a description to this phenomenon has captured and directed some of that rage. And for the record, it doesn't bother me at all that some of these people are using "enshittification" to mean "corporations fucking shit up" without regard to my formal definition of the process. As I wrote last October:

Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

And also: there's a lot of stuff that's just shitty right now, which is one of the reasons my word's putting up such great numbers. People are getting fed up with it, in ways large…and small. Take the post-pandemic trend of using your phone in speaker-mode in public places. I'm a prison abolitionist, but I'll make an exception for people who do this. Display 'em in stocks. Chain 'em up by their wrists. Or, you know, do what they do in France: fine them €150 for using a speakerphone on the train:

https://www.thelocal.fr/20250206/french-train-passenger-fined-e150-for-using-phone-on-speaker

Speaking of gruesome tortures, the essential Long Forgotten blog has posted its extensive, thoughtful review of the changes to Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. Very few people can write about built environment entertainment like Long Forgotten (the only other person who comes to mind is the excellent Foxx Nolte). Long Forgotten's verdict is "mostly good, but man, that new gift shop *suuuuucks:

https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2025/02/beyond-bride-other-changes-in-2025.html

OK, it's time for me to go and make my packing list for the tour. I'm going to leave you with a song. Last night, my pal Cynthia Hathaway turned me on to the Shotgun Jazz band, led by trumpeter/frontwoman Maria Dixon. If you like Louis Prima-style shout-singing, you'll love 'em – I bought everything they had on Bandcamp this morning:

https://www.shotgunjazzband.com/

(Image: i ♥ happy!!, CC BY 2.0)



A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Toronto subway station badges cum route-map https://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/4497496/

#20yrsago Flickr CEO interview on O’Reilly Network https://web.archive.org/web/20050209034531/http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/5607

#15yrsago Iceland’s paper of record bans linking https://web.archive.org/web/20100207133022/http://mbl.is/mogginn/hofundarettur/

#15yrsago Sony Pictures layoffs explained https://web.archive.org/web/20100210071332/http://themediawonk.com/2010/02/04/alarm-bells-come-too-late-for-sony-pictures/

#10yrsago An Adventure To Pepperland Through Rhyme & Space: hip hop/Beatles mashups https://monkeyboxing.com/the-beatles-vs-hip-hop-legends-an-adventure-to-pepperland-through-rhyme-space-2015-free-download-double-album-exclusive/#more-31098

#10yrsago Charles Addams, uncredited co-creator of the Haunted Mansion https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2015/01/charles-addams-and-haunted-mansion.html

#10yrsago Modern farm equipment has no farmer-servicable parts inside https://www.wired.com/2015/02/new-high-tech-farm-equipment-nightmare-farmers/

#10yrsago Having the brakes removed from your car is a personal decision https://robertmoorejr.tumblr.com/post/110101466091/im-an-anti-braker

#10yrsago I PARKED IN A BIKE LANE stickers https://iparkedinabikelane.bigcartel.com/product/i-parked-in-a-bike-lane-sticker

#10yrsago Cop who switched off traffic cam in order to make illegal threats will keep his job https://web.archive.org/web/20150208070715/http://wkbn.com/2015/02/05/niles-cop-disciplined-after-questionable-traffic-stop/

#1yrago Big Tech disrupted disruption https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/08/permanent-overlords/#republicans-want-to-defund-the-police


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.



A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Canada shouldn't retaliate with US tariffs https://craphound.com/overclocked/2025/02/02/canada-shouldnt-retaliate-with-us-tariffs/


This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.


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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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cjheinz
9 days ago
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Must read.
Gawdamn, Doctorow is The Bard of The Revolution. Keep on keeping on!
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Five ways in which the last 3 months — and especially the DeepSeek era — have vindicated “Deep learning is hitting a wall"

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No other essay I have ever written has been ridiculed by as many people, or as many famous people, from Sam Altman and Greg Brockman to Yann LeCun and Elon Musk, as Deep Learning is Hitting a Wall, published nearly three years ago.

In hindsight, I wrote the essay too soon; the world wasn’t ready for what I had to say. But an awful lot of what it had to say has borne out, and the last three months, especially the last few weeks, have been especially in line with the essay’s conclusions.

Here are five observations:

  1. A key claim of the paper was that pure scaling of LLMs – just adding more data and compute to extant LLM architectures – would not bring us to AGI, and that so-called scaling laws were merely empirical generalizations rather than physical laws. For a long time few people believed me, but these conclusions are so widely accepted now that Satya Nadella himself recently repeated them, almost word for word; Marc Andreessen of all people also came close. So did Ilya Sutskever in his NeurIPS talks. (Of course I was given no credit for foresight, by any of these people; politics and economics preclude.) To be sure, there is now a new proposed scaling law, not about adding to pure LLMs, but about adding more time to so called test-time compute. For a while, anyway, that’s working to some degree (though see below), but the fact that we needed new techniques actually bears out another central claim of Deep Learning is Hitting a Wall (DLHW), which was that we would need new techniques besides pure LLMs.

  2. Another of the key suggestions I made in 2022 was that we should use neurosymbolic techniques, combining neural networks with classical symbolic techniques such as rules. To some extent newer models are doing that. OpenAI has not revealed exactly how o1 works, but, for example DeepSeek’s R1 model (which OpenAI has acknowledged resembles their test-time inference system o1) explicitly includes a “rule-based reward system” for verifying some classes of answers. Neurosymbolic for the win! (AlphaFold’s Nobel victory is another victory for neurosymbolic techniques.)

  3. We got one more huge advance since the 2022 paper (I was agnostic then as to how many more leaps there would be), but we still don’t have a system that would really merit the name of GPT-5. Altman himself recently said 4.5 is coming soon, but gave no date for GPT-5. People have been adding data and compute left and right since August 2022 when OpenAI demo’d GPT-4 to Bill Gates, but despite literally hundreds of billions of investment, pure LLM scaling has not produced the fruit some people imagined. (Note that test-time compute systems are not across the board improvements like GPT-4 was relative to GPT-3 or GPT-3 was relative to GPT-2, but rather improvements in certain domains such as coding and math.) DLHW didn’t specifically say “one more giant-across-the-board leap and no more”, but that’s what we have gotten, and it’s broadly consistent with the warnings I issued there, and very much against the spirit of the hundreds of billions of dollars that were invested on the notion that rewards for more data and compute were essentially limitless.

  4. Even the latest systems like Deep Research are still struggling in a few ways – and those ways pretty much correspond exactly to the places that I warned would be LLM’s Achilles’ Heels: hallucinations and reasoning errors. The much ballyhoo’ed Deep Research tariff paper apparently made up a bunch of its numbers, and experiments by Colin Fraser have shown problems with temporal reasoning (e.g., with reasoning about athletes and what teams they played with over time). An article in Science by Derek Lowe that looked carefully at DeepSeek concluded that the fluent output of Deep Research was not to be trusted (“As with all LLM output, all of these things are presented in the same fluid, confident-sounding style: you have to know the material already to realize when your foot has gone through what was earlier solid flooring. That, to me, is one of their most pernicious features. I know that these things were not designed per se to glide over or hide their weak points and their mistakes, but they do a terrific job of it, and that's not really what you want. So as much as I found some parts of the Deep Research output impressive, I found its deeper research problems hard to deal with.”)

  5. A consequence of what I argued in DLHW (that I didn’t really spell out until later articles in the second half of 2023 and early 2024 ) was a kind of crowding at the top: if the scaling of pure LLMs ran out, you would expect to have multiple teams competing and reaching a point of diminishing returns, with essentially no moat, and a lot of competition over price. That era, too has, been clearly reached. Most recently, DeepSeek, which more or less matched OpenAI’s o1, accelerated those price wars, and OpenAI was forced (already) to drop prices. LLMs, once novel, are largely a commodity. How that bodes for the economics of generative AI remains to be seen.

I think it is fair to say that “Deep Learning is Hitting a Wall” didn’t anticipate how well a system like Deep Research might work, but in most other respects, ranging from anticipating the slowing of pure LLMs to the need for neurosymbolic AI to the continued troubles with reasoning and hallucination, the paper was bang on. The ridicule, on the other hand, was deeply misplaced, and emblematic of a new regime in which oligarchs try to impose their beliefs on a science, moving markets but not actually solving the underlying research challenges that still loom before us.

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Gary Marcus wrote this on his birthday, because there is no sweeter gift than vindication.

Marcus on AI is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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cjheinz
9 days ago
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Dude, it's all some techbros thinking they are owed the next massive liquidity event. I so loved the Chinese completely popping the latest bubble - that was supposed to make some more techbro billionaire assholes.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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‘When we fight, we win!’

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‘When we fight, we win!’

The Louisville Democratic Party announced on Thursday that they would hold a rally on Saturday at the IBEW 369 Hall on Preston Highway. With the last-minute notice, there was worry that the crowd would be slim, especially with the rain forecast for the day.

As it turned out, the only thing they organizers needed to worry about was the size of the room – it was not large enough for the crowd.

You can see it in the cover photo: the room is full to the brim, with people still standing outside trying to get in. Estimates placed the crowd at 500 people.

Lots of attendees brought signs, as shown below.

‘When we fight, we win!’
Peggy Kannapel, Lydia Grossman, Patty Kannapel, Carol Edelen, and Carolyn Stansbury pose with their signs. (photo by Bruce Maples)
‘When we fight, we win!’
And some more signs from Melissa Mitchell, Leslie Witten, Jean Lally, and Lisa Dettlinger (photo by Bruce Maples)

And even more signs, plus an appropriate costume:

Warming up the crowd

Roz Welch, the vice-chair of the Louisville Democratic Party, got the crowd going with chants and call-and-response.

  • “Hey hey, ho ho, Elon Musk has got to go!”
  • “Tell me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!”
  • “Today, Louisville stands up and says ‘We will not go back!’”

Then, it was on to the speakers.

Speaker notes and quotes

Logan Gatti

  • Chair of Louisville Democratic Party
  • Welcomes everyone.
  • Asks people to get involved in their precinct (1,900 positions available as precinct captains)
  • Proceeds to introduce other speakers.

Sarah Standfield

  • Treasurer of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 611, serving with the Veterans Administration
  • “Those of us who served, our oath was to the Constitution, not to a dictator.”
  • “Musk wants to force all federal workers back in the office. But the truth is, federal workers are more productive, cost less, have less turnover, and get more work done from home.”
  • (talking about AFGE) “We’re seeing more growth than ever. We are up from 302,000 members a month ago to 321,000 now.”

Dustin Reinstedler

  • President of the KY AFL-CIO
  • “Unions have always hated billionaires, okay?”
  • “We got electricians, we got teachers, we got teamsters, we got iron workers. There’s been times in history where we laid our tools down. Where we stopped production lines, where we turned off the breakers. We took our stand and we hit the streets. And we’ll do it again if we have to.”

Rhonda Mathies

  • Long-time civil rights activist
  • “Musk is the nightmare – we are the dream!”
  • “When the people get together, we rule the world!”

Ricky Santiago

  • Secretary of the Louisville Democratic Party
  • “I’m slightly bothered ... no, I’m PISSED that my family is in the line of sight of this bulldozer called DOGE. He laughs to our faces. My mother’s a teacher. My father works for the federal government. And most importantly, my son is on the autism spectrum. Collectively, we are a Latino family that has given nothing but service to Kentucky and the country. And now, a tech bro wants to gut our departments and institutions that keep us safe. ... Who does he think he is? ... He’s going to find out real quick what real Americans can do, because these colors don’t back down.”

Kumar Rashad

  • Vice-President of the Jefferson County Teachers Association and former Teacher of the Year
  • Does call and answer with the crowd: “When we fight ...” “We win!”
  • “Anyone know the last three words Frederick Douglas said when he died? The first word was ‘Agitate.’ The second word was ‘Agitate.’ And the third word was ‘Agitate!’”
  • (Calls out Jimmy Carter for his compassion, for strengthening our standing in the world. And, for setting up the Department of Education.) “Now Trump wants to dismantle that as well. But this doesn’t come as a surprise, as Trump and his ghost-writers from Project 2025 explicitly stated their intentions.”
  • “They’ve come after our students with their immigration policies, when what needs to happen is ICE needs to go over there and deport Elon Musk.”
  • “Tell Elon Musk that we don’t want our public school resources going to private schools – which we just defeated decisively in all 120 Kentucky counties.”
  • “Tell him that educators and our allies are committed to resisting attacks on public education, because our power is in our numbers, and our faith. Our power is in our families, our power is in our unions, our power is in our communities.”

Rep. Morgan McGarvey

  • Member of U.S. House from KY-3
  • “I saw somebody on the streets last week and he said ‘Thank you for being there and standing up for us.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s going to be a long four years.’ He looked at me and said ‘Hell, it’s been a long four minutes. We don’t know what they’ve done since we started talking.”
  • “The time for being nice is over. ... We’ve seen what they truly want to do. So we don’t have to be nice. Doesn’t mean we have to be them. The truth still matters. A government that works for the people still matters. And calling out their bullshit still matters.”
  • “How we do things matters. So even if you agree with the policy, or you like the person, please look five minutes beyond where we are right now. We set up a system where we would not have a king. We set up a system where we would not have a dictator.”
  • (Notes Congress established the Department of Education and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and says Trump and Musk can’t just unilaterally get rid of them.) “And if we allow them to do it, they are remaking American democracy and turning it into a dictatorship.”
  • “You think they’re stopping there? Project 2025 called for getting rid of birth control. You think they’re stopping there? They are, honest to God, putting Medicaid on the chopping block.”
  • “The two questions I’ve been asked for the past two weeks are ‘What are you doing?’ and “What can we do?’ ... We’ve got a three-part plan. We’ve got to legislate. We’ve got to litigate. And we’ve got to agitate.” (Lists three bills House Dems have filed to stop what is happening.)
  • (In a letter to his kids, after starting in Congress) “I know I’m not home for you. I know I’m going to miss games, and recitals. But I hope, when my time on this earth is done, you will think that what we did mattered.”
  • “We cannot let this moment pass us by. This is the time that we must literally put it on the line.”
  • (Quotes Thomas Jefferson) “When injustice becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”
  • “So here’s what you’ve got to do: Call your representatives. Call your senators. Do not tell people you were silent in this moment. Do not let your kids know you were silent at this time.”
  • (Goes into detail about the three upcoming special elections in the House: Matt Gaetz, Michael Waltz, and Elise Stefanik. Notes that if Dems win all three, they take back the majority.) “You know what that means? It means Jamie Raskin is chair of the Judiciary Committee, and has subpoena power to drag these Teenage Mutant DOGE Boys in front of the committee and ask them what they’ve been doing with our information! ... It means Hakeem Jeffries is Speaker of the House!”

Roz Welch

  • Vice Chair of the Louisville Democratic Party
  • (Goes into detail about party reorganization, and about finding three people in each precinct to be the precinct officers.) “So you can knock the doors in your neighborhood. So you can let people know. So you can have coffee and tea at your house, or maybe walking in your neighborhood, and have conversation about how this is affecting us, and how it affects you. But it requires your involvement.
  • Tells everyone to go to the website at LouisvilleDems.com and sign up for the newsletter, and look for ways to get involved.
  • (Closes with the opening call and answer) “When we fight? We win!”

--30--

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cjheinz
9 days ago
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Nice! Do it!
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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David Kurtz argues that we should refer to Trump’s mass removal of...

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David Kurtz argues that we should refer to Trump’s mass removal of federal employees as purges, not as “firings” or “layoffs”. “Business terms provide a totally wrong conceptual framework for the purges underway.”
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cjheinz
10 days ago
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Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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