Bravo to this NY Times journalist asking hard questions that go against normal “national security” deference. Hopefully this will be a revival rather than a one off. This war is illegal at the root. Nuancing further potential crimes doesn’t make sense.
www.pbs.org/newshour/amp...
Repeat after me Democrats: oppose the war on substance, not process.
This is a crisis moment, and any Democratic leader who won’t step up should be asking why they’re in the role. The rest of us should be asking why we let them stay there.
"Nazis were just regular people" is not a statement meant to evoke empathy or to excuse their crimes. It is a statement of warning.
The capacity to be part of and perpetrate atrocities is not limited to "monsters," it is wholly human. It is what we must always be aware of.
Isn’t this perjury?
US journalism is demonstratively weaker now than even a year ago: public media federal funding rescinded; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette closing; billionaire-owner eroding news independence (WaPo, LA Times, CBS), & now massive WaPo layoffs. Those in power know that our watchdogs are less watchful.
That Tom Llamas @nbcnews.com Trump interview was so shameful. Having the conversational filler of “yeah” as he impatiently waited to ask his never weak question. Trump gets to say lie after lie and Tom just says “yeah”. Is NBC just following CBS now?
ICE tear gassed a bunch of children on Saturday. This was a massive escalation of force. They were shooting tear gas at the back of the crowd, it took these unmasked people maybe 3-5 minutes in the cloud of tear gas to escape in without trampling. www.theverge.com/policy/87278...
I heard last night @emmavigeland.bsky.social on the @majorityreport.bsky.social ask if Pizzagate (and QAnon) was a MAGA psyop. An interesting thing to consider how post-2016 in reaction this taught liberals to feel like this type of stuff is too conspiratorial to consider
Jeffrey Epstein emailing Peter Thiel: Finding things on their way to collapse was much easier than finding the next bargain. ... Return to tribalism. Counter to globalization. Amazing new alliances.
Definitely seems like they destroyed the country on purpose.
It is odd that Stoller needs to dramatize this with ties to Soviet-era. Surely there are examples of this type of sophisticated network “fixer” pre-1917 and certainly in the US.
Do criminal investigations into obvious corporate wrongdoing take too long ?
I only say “sketchy” because this investigation started in Jan 2025 long before the Grok illegal images started. There was a lot to be concerned about before that event about the way X was being run.
TBD what will come of this intervention but it is encouraging to see that this obviously sketchy (even by tech oligarch standards) company is being investigated.
Pretty horrific shit from ICE out in Salem, but i gotta say it’s extremely heartening and good for the movement that her union is stepping in to help elevate her story, that so many large Oregon unions organized yesterday’s march, and are now appropriately responding to ICE’s tear gas escalation
I join my City Councilors in calling for prosecution of ICE for this flagrant violation of city and state law. This is illegal, and if ICE does this to families and children on a sunny peaceful daytime protest, I shudder to think what they do without that kind of daylight and public scrutiny.
Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centers and reservoirs of moisture. When, on the southern slopes of the mountains, the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, with the effect that these would be able to pour still more furious flood torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons... Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.
Engels writing about human impact on nature in “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man.” A key part of historical materialism’s development was understanding the contradictory impacts of production on nature.
The people of Minnesota have executed one of the most impressive civil resistance campaigns I can remember:
- Organized a city wide general strike
- Maintained nonviolent discipline amidst violence
- Mobilized 10,000s in subzero temps to protest and watch ICE
- Flipped public opinion against ICE
Remember that literally every single one of the billionaire freaks behind generative AI has very publicly aligned themselves with trump and his policies
Their CEO's are in and out of the oval office for photo ops, they're donating mountains of money to him, they're literally getting military titles
no matter how hard Greg Bovino tries to exude rugged masculinity he always comes off like Don Knotts in a Portlandia sketch
I miss him too
I just love that. It’s hard to express outrage about bathroom breaks and yet it’s probably one of the most effective disruptions you could think of
Fawning over Elon was a red flag of low critical thinking to me before he bought Twitter. In this day and age, they should be fully discredited as being respectable.
absolutely insane to see Musk feted at Davos as the icon of a boldly "optimistic" future in 2026, as if he hadn't just spent the last year buying elections for fascists, making Nazi salutes, condemning millions in Africa to death, and building "Mechahitler," and a nonconsensual porn/CSAM generator
"The junkification of research"
"Our essay explores the political economy of academic publishing ... in terms of how the commodification of academic research has opened avenues for the same mechanisms that underpin the deterioration of digital marketplaces to infiltrate online academic publishing."
To put a slightly finer point to it: LLMs industrialized nonconsensual nudes. @santi4dc.bsky.social and I found in May that AI nudifiers make as much as $36 million/year.
As with many other online harms, what X has done is shifted the Overton window to make more shitty behavior acceptable.
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one takeaway from the grok noncon porn thing is that much of the media just isn't interested in an issue they can't pretend has two sides or that doesn't give them an opportunity to shit on the left. Also it would be uncomfortable to justify remaining on twitter after acknowledging it
A list of presidents (only on this single) issue never held accountable for unconstitutional actions. The joke is on everyone who continued to pretend the US is an example of democracy and balanced powers despite mounting evidence before Trump. Precedence leads to
I fear we are going to have to say this a lot again:
Int law prohibits bombing countries for the sake of democracy. FOR VERY GOOD REASON. It tends not to work.
Attacking a country because its leader lacks legitimacy - whether as pretext or sincerely held rationale - is still just an aggression.
