Hey, we need an archived link to this post. Anyone can help, everyone has an hour to post it. Rule 6.
https://xcancel.com/HunterBiden/status/2069797401078939851#m
You could’ve DMed me.
Actually seems like a really cool practice to allow anyone to pickup the ball on correction in case OP wasn’t online.
Especially with an hour time limit. I’ve come back to replies from 3, 4, 5 hours ago and I’m on here pretty regularly.
Anyone can help
It wasn’t directed just at you.
Does anyone else smell his AI collaborator?
I do not want to be led, I want someone who will act like a hammer to be wielded by myself and my fellow voters so our collective arm can nail down our rights.
I’d change that to fellow citizens, there are more people than voters in a nation. Its important a voter remembers they aren’t only casting that ballot to effect their own lives, but for all, including those that don’t have a capacity or right to vote.
Examples include children, recent migrants, certain disabled persons.
Not to be contrarian, but I think we got into this whole mess because politicians started representing the will of people other than their voters. It should be up to the people to want to help and protect children, migrants and disabled non-voters, the politicians should just distill all their will into action in the political system. The whole point is I don’t want a leader who acts on his own, I want a representative who does what he’s told by the voters, the voters should be the ones who want better for all.
You can thank Republican donors for contributing: https://www.axios.com/2026/06/15/republican-primary-meddling-democrats-midterms-ny
They’re boosting what they percieve to be “unelectable” candidates in Democratic primaries, but I think this effort will backfire.
Democrats did the same thing (boosting MAGA candidates in Republican primaries), and that backfired big time.
Um, HUNTER Biden for President?
We want less people addicted to online debate and more people active within their society. What do you think Madani was doing before getting elected. He was on the streets, in the churches, anywhere where people are. Not on a big platform making big statements.
No, we don’t want to be fucking led, we are not sheep.
We want our elected officials to do the job they were elected to do, a job they all keep promising to do, a job for which the position exists to do, to work for the interests of the people. Elected officials are public servants, not leaders and should be following the will of the people, not telling the people what that will should be.
Mamdani’s policies aren’t him leading, it’s him serving, serving the interests of the people and doing what we have wanted politicians to be doing this entire time. That you confuse serving, with leading, is a weird fucking rich kid perception of what being an elected official is and it’s exactly why rich ppl shouldn’t hold office.
You make a really good point there. We dont need leaders and theyre not leaxers. Theyre Representatives. WE tell THEM what to do. Many seem to have forgotten that
Leadership isn’t herding or commanding or necessary even guiding. It certainly doesn’t need to be rooted in authority. Leadership can be inspiration, knowledge, observation, deference and delegation. It can mean being a role model or a teacher. I’d argue that the people who are the most effective leaders are the ones who enable others first, and lead by example. Barking orders has awful return on investment compared to building people up.
This dude leaderships. That coulda been right outta my army leadership course, which was surprisingly less about barking orders and more about fulfilling requirements and enabling awesome.
This dude leaderships.
🤢
my army leadership course
🤢 🤢
and enabling awesome
🤮
Army
🤢🤢🤢🤮🤮🤮
I bet if he said PLA book instead you’d be ok with it, right?
Does China not torture middle eastern people enough for you? You think it’s cute, it’s disgusting
So that’s a yes then.
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No dummy, we don’t want military leaders for politicians.
Service vs leadership is a false dichotomy. You can (and should) be a leader who serves. Mamdani is serving NYers in a leadership position. He makes the calls and has the responsibility for decisions that serve his constituents.
You can also be a servant who leads. the difference is that centrist democrats don’t want to serve or lead. They want to rule over a compliant electorate that isn’t permitted to question their actions or judgement.
Just like the right does.
don’t want to be fucking led
Unless you are going out there and campaigning or operationally actually doing some-fucking-thing; you absolutely do want someone to lead and fulfill your desires. If you personally are not making it happen then you want someone else to take the lead on it.
You are allowed to have a belligerent sense of independence; just don’t fool yourself.
I do not in fact want to be lead.
Do you take charge in effecting political/societal change for yourself (and your community)?
Or do you disagree with the other guy’s requirements for what constitutes someone who does not want to be led?
You kinda just said “no.”
‘Take charge’. Explain what you mean by this.
As examples (as “taking charge” can take multiple forms across mutiple goals): table and/or moderate meetings to come to consensus on goals, coordinate members for coordinated actions toward social goals, source funding for operations if funds are needed, speak on behalf of your group (or coordinate group messaging) toward other groups. To name a few generic things. Specifics depend on what you want done.
To try and sum it up: “taking charge” is providing impetus, and potentially aligning community power, toward making headway to some social/political goal.
English is not a language of domination and hierarchy you need to be careful to avoid expressing that.
You might say ‘initiative’ if you were being careful and conscious.
I don’t know what exactly you mean by “English is not a language of domination and hierarchy” or how that really relates to what I was saying or what I originally asked you. “Taking charge” is a extremely common idiom in English.
I will concede that “take initiative” is a more neutral phrase, but you have turned to nitpicking my diction, even after I spent another full comment explicating the meaning and intention of the original question.
So it is my turn to ask what you mean by sidestepping my question? If you are uninterested in answering the question, just say so. I have done with someone else in this very post. But don’t think you can confuse me with literary legerdemain. You don’t answer questions by saying “you could’ve phrased it better.”
Elected officials are public servants, not leaders and should be following the will of the people, not telling the people what that will should be.
I was going to bring in something I saw in a different thread but then I noticed you were already there.
You seem convinced that “leaders” are necessarily authoritarian. I do not believe that, so there’s not going to be much point to this.
👍
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If I pay a mechanic to fix my car, that ain’t them leading. If I hire a politician to enact my will, that isn’t them leading. You don’t have to be the one personally doing the job.
And just what is their job? You don’t “hire them” to “enact [a specific] will”, but to take charge of things for the body politic that their constituents can’t individually solve as effectively. You elect them to analyse problems or opportunities for improvement, pool resources and insights from others, propose a course of action and coordinate the collective effort to solve them.
That is leadership. It’s not rulership, nor is it strict servitude, though it is a service to their community by leading the way to improvement.
To enact the platform we agreed serves our will when we elected them. Electing them is hiring them.
That doesn’t really change the nature of their job. They’re not the ones carrying out whatever change they were elected or hired to enact. They were elected to coordinate and oversee the process, to direct the efforts, to make decisions about dealing with whatever challenges crop up.
They were elected to lead the enactment of that platform.
Then a mechanic is hired to lead my car repairs.
Your mechanic is hired to lead the Department of Car Repairs, where he has surveyors take stock of cars in need of repairs, defines rules to prioritise them, tasks subordinates with getting and compare various quotes for these repairs, allots a budget, signs off on the selected repairs, gets status reports, investigate hitches and find solutions?
Or is he hired to carry out a specific repair?
They are, if the primary was for lower house seats, representatives. Their job (in theory) is to represent the collective wants and needs of their constituents to congress and vote or introduce bills accordingly. Unfortunately in most Western democracies this little fact seems to get forgotten by those who are elected and party politics tends to take over.
And also: capitalism is failing the majority of people by continuing to funnel wealth to those who already have money. Voters are offered a choice between two options, neither of which actually want to solve this, because both major parties are controlled by wealthy corporate donors. The two-party system prevents any third party, no matter their platform, from having any chance at election.
Democratic socialist candidates got elected in NY because Mamdani is demonstrably helping people in actual, tangible ways. The most famous example is fixing potholes. This is a breath of fresh air for voter and is the same “sewer socialism” strategy used in the first half of the 1900s in wisconsin, which focused on pragmatically improving life for the general public…famously by improving the sewer system.
Capitalism isn’t failing. It’s succeeding; doing exactly what it’s always done.
“Liberal democracy” is failing, because it is an oxymoron. The concept of democracy being compatible with an economic system where every org is a plutocracy/oligarchy with enormous wealth (power) inequality, is a mass-delusional mental illness. It was never going to work on any meaningful timeline.
“Capitalism failing a majority” isn’t “capitalism is failing”.
The former statement is always true, because capitalism serves the winners which will always be a minority or move to become a minority if it isn’t (how it got in that state is anyone’s guess). The question is only how much it’s failing the majority. The two’s interests can align for a time, but the needs and wants of one are almost always in direct conflict with the other’s. The failures currently are massive, thus why running on helping people and actually doing the job of government (its role in a so-called “mixed-economy”) is working better than anti-socialist/communist rhetoric to combat it.
Soundbites are good, but so is replying to what the other person said(mostly so we don’t put words in other people’s mouths)
Yeah, that was some ambiguous wording on my part. To elaborate: Americans are told from birth that capitalism is this wonderful system that gives us freedom of choice, and that the free market causes the best products and the most well-run companies to prosper. This belief system is reflected in prosperity gospel, which is the same ideology but coated in a layer of religion. We americans are told that if we just work hard enough, we can be rich too.
But that’s not how capitalism really works. The division of people into working and ruling classes, and the abstraction of value means that the more money you have, the more you can extract from the workers who actually produce the value. This reality is largely ignored, or suppressed, or denied.
So you have these massive numbers of people who were told capitalism will let them be “successful”, ie financially secure and…it doesn’t. There’s only one grocery store in town so you buy what’s available. There’s no bus system so you buy a car and be in debt however long it takes. The so-called “free market” is dominated by actors who can afford to purchase their competition.
Capitalism works as intended by the elite who do more to uphold it than anyone else: they get more and more money. The nominal goal of prosperity and growth for all is never realized, and this is framed as individual failures rather than the effect of the system itself. “Just work harder and your boss will give you a raise!”
Recently, a (reputable) polling firm called me. It was about a survey on future prospects. One of the questions asked what I considered to be the most pressing problems people are currently facing. My answer was: billionaires, the ongoing centralization of the internet, and climate change.
Perhaps not the most eloquent answer, since all of these issues actually stem from the same root cause—namely, run-amok cutthroat capitalism—but off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of anything better.
I don’t want to be led. I want you to do the will of the fucking people, and not the will of the dollar.
EXACTLY! This patronizing, leading by “you’ll understand when you grow up” dogshit is not what REPRESENTATION means.
Yeah, that was the line that got to me too.
People want to be followed. Maybe there are times when the politician sees the future before the people and needs to lead. But, right now it seems like both major US political parties are stuck in the past.
What Mandami is doing is listening, not leading. That’s why he’s popular. He has some ideas, like city-run grocery stores. They’re probably good ideas. However, what’s making him really popular is doing things like making sure the streets were cleared after the snowstorms and filling potholes. That’s not leadership. That’s simply listening to the voters and fixing the priority issues.
I can smell the LLM a mile away.
It’s not the words, it’s the structure.
It’s not thing A, it’s thing B.
Thing C is nothing. Thing D is everything.
Big list generated from the prompt “establishment democrats are bullshit and NYC mayor proves it!!!”
Incredible how “its not x its y” is being weaponized against critics of the establishment. Like, I really couldn’t give a shit about Hunter Biden, he’s a joke. Also fuck AI, I wouldn’t defend it.
But what you’re describing is a teaching method. Just because it gets aped by ai doesn’t mean all comparisons are AI. Paulo Friere uses it heavily in his pedagogical method. It was also the name of a book series on teaching methods.. Both were written years, even decades, before the invention of generative text.
Its a basic way of explaining complicated concepts, where you not only have to describe what something is, but what it isn’t. You are using a negating method by saying that the text of this tweet is actually not worth considering, because it was generated by AI. Its rhetorical sophistry, presented without evidence, to create confusion and cheapen people’s ability to explain or understand complicated concepts, and criticize our own reality.
I dont agree with all of his points, but your argument is cheap and socially toxic.
The Freire comparison is interesting but it’s doing a lot of work here. Pedagogical numbered lists exist, sure. But Freire’s prose is dense, contradictory, occasionally frustrating — because he’s actually working through ideas in real time. This tweet is frictionless. Every point lands clean. Nothing trips over itself. That’s not a teaching method. That’s editing. Specifically, the kind of editing that removes every rough edge until what’s left is a series of punchy, shareable, individually quotable lines — each one exactly long enough to screenshot. You’re right that they haven’t provided a smoking gun. Neither have you. But “humans have written structured lists before” isn’t a rebuttal to a specific stylistic critique, it’s just pointing at the category and saying the category exists. The question isn’t whether a human could write this. It’s whether the particular texture of this writing — the evenness, the rhythm, the way it never once loses the thread or goes somewhere unexpected — feels like someone thinking, or someone approving.
Okay I agree and on second thought comparing Hunter Biden to Paulo Friere is, um, a stretch. I’m more responding to this trend where people say, oh you can tell its ai cuz there’s em-dashes, or cuz it fits the pattern of “its this not that.”
With a political subject, people can be very bad faith. Centrist Democrats calling argument a “whataboutism” or a Russian bot, are two very prescient examples. Meanwhile, I find this method of defining a subject in the positive and the negative to be very useful in political discussion, to define not just the essence but the contours/limits of a political subject. It is a good way to make a subject concrete. It makes me nervous to see these arguments more and more. People already accuse each other of being “bots” way too often.
The bot-accusation inflation point is real and worth taking seriously. Crying bot has become a way to dismiss arguments without engaging them, and that’s corrosive. But there’s a difference between “this argument pattern feels automated” and “this specific piece of text has characteristics that are hard to explain otherwise.” I’m not flagging Hunter’s tweet because it uses a rhetorical structure I associate with AI. I’m flagging it because of the evenness. The way every single point is load-bearing. Nothing wasted, nothing unpolished, no moment where the writer got carried away or lost the thread or made a point that was slightly weaker than the others. Human writing has texture. It has a sentence that runs too long, a point that didn’t quite land, an aside that reveals what the writer actually cares about. Impassioned political posts especially — people leak. They let something slip that’s more personal than the rest, or they overstate a point because they’re angry. This has none of that. Every point is exactly as strong as every other point. That’s not discipline. That’s generation.
I say it elsewhere, that I have a difficult time identifying Ai generated text, for whatever reason. Ai pictures and voices, I can spot right away. But for whatever reason its not super apparent to me when people use ai to generate text, its more of an afterthought rather than something that stands out to me. Its interesting because I have an art and music background, but I dont have any formal training with writing, even though I do it quite often, and I’m a strong reader. It makes me uncomfortable that there’s still some vector where they can trick me
This reminded me of a post I saw the other day on Bluesky.
“As a hack writer, the fact that em-dashes and the rule of three have become signifiers of AI demonstrates that they’re not just stealing my job, they’re ruining all my favorite tools too.”
It’s because computers have no chill. The nature of binary is full ham or death. If you had a robot pal and you were chilling on the porch it would immediately propose a scavenger hunt and start bullet listing meditation techniques. Failing that it would put itself on standby mode.
Absolutely. You’re right to call me out on that. It’s not helpful, it’s socially toxic. Also, and this is where truth combines with facts to create understanding &emdash; Hunter used Claude to write that post.
Well in the interest of good faith, this is the most coherent thing ive ever seen from Hunter, so I think either had AI write it or some wonk wrote it for him
Using that pattern isn’t bad, but look at that text: it’s totally over-used and the entire post has less substance than timeghost’s mockery.
Tbh I can’t really detect AI text. I can detect AI pictures and voices, but text fools me, so I’ll take your word for it
I was listening to The Idiot Bastard Son by Zappa and the Mothers when reading the post. Pretty fun timing for ai slop from a subject in the song. Give it some years and we might see a push for him in gov
HunterGPT
I am no Hunter apologist by any means, but this doesn’t look like an LLM wrote it to me.
Not saying Hunter himself wrote it either; just doesn’t look like a machine.
“The lesson under the lesson:” is a very LLM closing statement.
I mean the AIs copied it from somewhere
Seriously. AI talks like this because this is how effective communicators talk. The fact that people are getting turned off by this way of communicating and seeking out worse writing is concerning, and yet another way that AI is contributing to the dumbing down of society.
I’m keeping my fucking god-damned em dash
Just use a regular dash. It’ll be fine.
I don’t think it’s great writing. To me, regardless of AI involvement, it sounds like it’s trying hard to be punchy. Big ideas, big impact! But the lack of structural variation and generic vocabulary make it bland, and bland writing doesn’t tickle one’s imagination or stick in one’s memory.
It’s not necessarily great writing, but this style is an effective communication mode. There’s a reason that AI uses it, and it’s because it works. 🤷♂️
Bland can have an impact. The man turned to hookers and blow instead of dusty libraries, cut him a break.
It’s genuinely making me want to make mistakes just to seem human
YouTube videos… It’s getting harder. If they don’t make mistakes, I can’t tell anymore.
My CTO and I had a fun convo at 7am about em dashes before a big client preso. We all know we all do it. Why do we care at this point? It’s just being transparent.
I don’t use AI at all, but I refuse to change my writing style just to avoid the appearance of AI use. After all, AI just copies human writers, and if it becomes the norm to write in a style that is distinct from typical AI output, then AI output will just change to the new style and we’ll be back at square one.
Yall bitch about Ai slop and you can’t even see it when it’s served in front of you by an ex drug addict. Lol and I don’t mind Hunter, but he doesn’t speak like this, the cadence is clearly AI, and the writing fucking sucks it just sounds profound to minds as deep as a puddle. Not to mention, who gives a fuck what he has to say?
I hate AI slop as much as the next person, but some people become so obsessed with finding and pointing out that something is AI that everything starts to look like AI. They also tend to use it to dismiss the messaging, as you are doing. In this case, we’ll never know if this is AI or not, and it really doesn’t matter, because Hunter is correct, and he’s using his platform to point out a systemic issue that needs to change.
And the multiple “It’s not [x], it’s [y]”
“sword | question mark”
“strategy | empty room”Now you’re just quoting redditors.
An LLM probably didn’t write it but it reads so painfully like the LLM dialect I cringed the entire time even though I agreed.
Same here. I’ve likely personally cost openAI tens of thousands of dollars as a consumer user. I’ve seen tens of thousands of responses across a wide range of LLM voices and I know it in my bones that Hunter used AI for this.
Every single point is the same length and ends with an aphoristic zinger. It’s not X it’s Y (people know to avoid this and em dashes since it’s a lazy LLM tell.) there’s a consistent cadence to it but little substance. The cave man version of his points use less than 10 syllables. The prose is extremely even. Humans have variation in how they write especially when making impassioned bluesky posts lol.
To demonstrate here’s my argument from above processed through clause
I’ve spent years as a heavy AI user — we’re talking tens of thousands of interactions across models and voices. Pattern recognition at that scale becomes intuitive in the same way a sommelier stops consciously analyzing and just knows. What flags this for me isn’t any single element. It’s the consistency. Every point is approximately the same length. Every point ends with a punchy, quotable closer. The prose quality never dips or spikes — there are no throwaway lines, no moments where the writing gets lazy or overexcited. Humans don’t write that way, especially not in impassioned social media posts. Strip each point to its core claim and you’re left with less than ten syllables of actual content. The rest is rhetorical packaging. Elegant, even packaging — but packaging nonetheless. People have learned to avoid em dashes and “it’s not X, it’s Y” constructions because those are known tells. But the underlying architecture remains. The fingerprint isn’t any single phrase. It’s the absence of variation. It’s the fact that nothing here is accidental. Hunter Biden’s documented voice is the opposite of this. This tweet is what happens when you prompt a model to sound like him.
It sounds a lot like Claude to me.
Sucks that we can’t give credit to people who could just have good writing skills.
It’s not good writing. That’s part of it. “They aren’t a sword, they are a question mark.” That’s just bad.
It’s definitely AI.
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He did the “It’s not X, it’s Y” thing twice in a single tweet. Lol
It’s a common rhetorical device, especially for politicians. I don’t think it’s a smoking gun for LLM-ness at all.
Anyone who’s taken a tech writing course - it’s not on writing for techies, it’s the technical bits of writing - will use that all the time. Ya frame the assumption and show the reality.
The “not A but Z” thing and variations thereof was pretty common before LLMs. The noticeable thing about their usage of it is they’re trying to use language meant to take the reader from something they might genuinely be confused about to a surprising conclusion, and using it in a way that’s entirely banal. It relies on distance between A and Z, and genuine possibly of either. Humans tend to have way better intuition about what is surprising to other humans, and don’t make insane mistakes like LLMs do.
Rather than have “Z” be self-evidently interesting, the LLM need to tell us that it’s not “A”. Except no one thought anything was “A” in the first place, and the “Z” is barely a “B” let alone a “Z”.
This also goes for couplings of three short descriptors (“Simple. Intuitive. Seamless.”) and summations (“the important part to realise is:”), bullet point lists, etc. All techniques to say: here’s the important part, here’s the bit you should listen to.
This all being said: the tweet smells like ai to me. Wtf does he mean by sword
We are seriously about 18 months away from people thinking punctuation and complete sentences are AI because they have literally never read anything not posted on Twitter or Facebook.
And in 18 years?
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He didn’t say Middle EAST. He said the Middle, as in the middle of the field or in the middle on issues.
Wow holy shit my eyes fully read a word that wasn’t there lmfao
happens to the best of us
Good on you for admitting it instead of doubling down!
Indeed, it’s very common for this to happen to anyone.
Turns out the establishment dems were the real conservatives all along. Imagine that. 9_9
I mean, from the outside looking in the USA has a conservative party and a fascist party. What America says is left wing politics the rest of the world calls centrist.
What America says is left wing politics the rest of the world calls centrist.
Center-right.
It’s not that you don’t have an actual left in the US. It’s that they’re either being categorically ignored and/or shunned into social obscurity by everyone else.
exactly. The Overton window is shifting back to normalcy, but the “centrists” still want to call themselves “liberals” because they have morally normal views on the wedge isssues.
The Overton window is shifting back to normalcy,
Is it? What does “back to normalcy” mean in a country that has been bibartisan far right for decades?
I dont know what bibartisan is but I like it. It sounds halfway to bribartisan?
but the “centrists” still want to call themselves “liberals” because they have morally normal views on the wedge isssues.
Which they abandon at the first hint of pushback.
You know that meme of Carry Elwes as Robin Hood chuckling? I did that just now, because you’re not wrong. (which is the funny part)
I mean you’re absolutely right, but on the other hand this is what it’s always been. This country was founded by the first great, and most successful liberal Revolution. Liberals only believe in capitalism. They believed in private property, and by that I mean slaves. They believed in only rich white land owning males voting. And the definition of white was a lot fucking more narrow. Anglo-Saxon motherfuckers. Frankly the country’s always been fairly far to the right. Other than a handful of very brief time periods, in which left leaning liberals were dragged kicking and screaming towards decency, the Overton window has always been somewhat to the right. Not this far obviously but still.
Liberals 0.5 seconds into the DNC being criticized for losing elections and not inspiring interest: “Did an AI write this? Only a robot would want the Democrats to win elections.”
If progressives take over the party then wouldn’t you want Democrats to win the elections at least they want a democracy. The right wing has decided if it is a choice between democracy and power they want power.
Democracy isn’t an end in and of itself; if you’re ever choosing between democracy and weilding power to do the things you were elected to to, that would benefit the people, you don’t have a democracy.
This is relevant when the corporate democrats find all the red tape they need to justify not taking actions their voters want, but their donors don’t.
It does read like bullet points that I have gotten out of ChatGPT before.
Thats not to say he didn’t get his thoughts down and then have AI arrange them
AI writing.
7 is the one a lot of people on the left will miss is targeted at them. Cynicism is the path to defeat, pragmatism is the path to actual change, and it almost always routes through the status quo, not around it. Mamdani didn’t sit around bitching about the DNC, nor did he try to run as a third party. He met voters where where they are, and in NYC that’s the Democratic party. Now he looks like a king maker. This took him barely a year, during which time showed that the establishment’s power to enforce preferences is actually far more limited than many believe.
