Joan Westenberg

24/02/2025

AfD may have captured 20% of the vote, but they reached their high watermark with every possible advantage—Trump endorsement, Musk amplification, economic anxiety, immigrant attacks—and still fell short of expectations.

What's left for Europe's fascists to exploit?

Despite unprecedented backing from Trump and Musk, AfD's political surge falls short of expectations in a divided Germany still resistant to far-right dominance.

24/02/2025

Want to find a new book? Ask your friends for recommendations. Ask your family. Ask your librarian. Ask an indie bookstore. Ask Reddit. Don’t ask some half baked chat bot.

24/02/2025

goodnight, to my beautiful followers who said i would never amount to anything. im amounting all over the place. unstoppable. unfathomable. Sleep Mode

24/02/2025

linkedin posts 2015: excited to announce my new position
linkedin posts 2024: in the depths of winter, i found within myself an invincible summer (i got a job)

24/02/2025

Outside of waving a chainsaw in front of a crowd of 2-bit N***s while high af on Ketamine, what did Elon Musk get done this week

24/02/2025

therapist: and how does that make you feel?
me: sends reaction gif
therapist: please stop doing that

24/02/2025

I took two pieces I wrote on my Freewrite, from start to finish, and one piece from The New York Times, and ran them through AI detectors.

They're only 50% certain that one of my pieces is human.

The other, AND the NYT reporting, are flagged as AI.

Be careful with this s**t.

24/02/2025

yeah im going bankrupt & drinking puddle water now. yeah i got frostbite from burning all my shoes. yeah my lungs sound like a broken kazoo. but at least the libs are in SHAMBLES. LIBERAL TEARS.

23/02/2025

We're both relentless consumers and the relentlessly consumed. We've presided over the death of our private moments, as social validation has become our new oxygen. We've started changing and reshaping our behavior to meet the desires of the invisible audience that's always watching.

I broke one of my personal rules today and spent half an hour or so scrolling through Instagram. Most of the content was largely innocuous, if almost entirely mindless. But one video stood out: a blonde-haired influencer in a broad-brimmed hat laughed from a straight-to-camera video with her 4-year-...

23/02/2025

Trump has turned U.S. foreign policy into a crude mafia shakedown, holding Ukraine hostage for an impossible $500 billion ransom while gutting America’s credibility on the world stage.

It's the Sopranos, run by an idiot.

Trump has turned U.S. foreign policy into a crude mafia shakedown, holding Ukraine hostage for an impossible $500 billion ransom while gutting America’s credibility on the world stage.

23/02/2025

I can’t see that we’ve achieved any great end by trashing local, physical, connected spaces and replacing them with a giant, contextless mass of artificial discourse shaped and controlled by for-profit entities.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-false-promise-of-digital-public-squares-was-always-a-scam/

23/02/2025

How fu**ed are we as a species that it was just too much work to read our emails so we had to sacrifice democracy to build an AI to write bad summaries of them