I’ll add, lawmakers engaged in a moral panic about kids and social media want to destroy all of this and destroy open source software generally all so they can enact a mass AI surveillance state and censorship systems. And big ppl on the left continue not to mount a challenge to this!
Abortion was phase I, trans healthcare was phase II, birth control is phase III
“We were stunned [about the prescience] for a while, but we’ve really gotten to the point where it’s really sad. It’s just sad how predictable and lame and obvious and wrong it all is. Fascism is just a total fail in the end.” www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-featur...
Trump is not an aberration. He is a symptom of a much larger disease.
You do not get to Donald Trump and American Fascism without George W. Bush and if you find yourself trying to paint him in a positive light you have absolutely lost the plot.
Zali Steggall points out the consequences of inviting Isaac Herzog given the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestine was 'highly foreseeable'
live.thepoint.com.au/2026/02/the-...
and separately Minns making excuses for cops is unsurprising but still super gross; I walked by the spot an hour before the protest was due and there were already hundreds of cops there all fixing for a fight; this was utterly predictable and avoidable, but our leaders can’t help but defend genocide
the scenes from sydney town hall last night are a reminder that cops are the defenders and enforcers of settler-colonial genocide, whether that genocide is in so-called Australia or in Palestine
The impossibility was created by the police, licensed by the NSW government, and the whole situation comes back to the prime minister's decision to invite the President of Israel to come here.
Social cohesion, Australia, 2026: hate preachers (brown) intolerable, protestors (brown) divisive, bomb-signers (Israeli) welcome, bomb-throwers (white) awkward
White racist literally threw a bomb at black people to kill them, apparently not a sufficient cause to have a moral panic, special envoy, national introspection, royal commission, terrorism declaration, new laws, 1,000 op-eds in The Australian. We're struggling to identify why that might be.
As we look at what's happening in the US, Invasion Day is the perfect time to remember these gestapo jackboot types are carbon copies of militia groups used to round up First Nations people, that being shot in the street like a dog isn't new, it's been a cruel reality for many for centuries.
rightwingers see people caring about others in their community and instead of finding that inspiring they think it’s some sort of grand conspiracy because they don’t understand what it means to care for others you don’t personally know
The pain and the outrage is correct and just and I'm glad everyone can see and understand it here, and this is also already what BLM was, if you argued for training, police reform or body cams instead of abolition this is what you sounded like, this is why people were so mad at you
We'll say it again: "social cohesion", when uttered by the holders of political and social power and privilege, means simply the maintenance of the dominant culture and silencing of any challenge to it.
Black people five years ago: you know, they can kill anyone they want to out there
Everybody today: hot damn, did you know they can kill anyone they want to out there?
the only reason AI is getting traction is cause it’s marginally better than the internet we have now, but that is SO MUCH WORSE than what it used to be!
*I'm catching glimpses of a world where self-driving cars massacre more people than the Russo-Ukrainian front, and it doesn't matter because they've all got measles and they're NonPlayerCharacters who've got no jobs anyhow
*And also the cars can just carry anything anywhere, cheap and fast, sorta
We don’t talk enough about how the AI bubble is going to seamlessly transition to tech-based state surveillance and oppression of the working and dwindling middle classes as the wealth class steals more and more resources and power and as the climate worsens.
Linking the march across the bridge to the massacre is disgusting and everyone doing so should be deeply ashamed of their giving tacit support for genocide
www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
and proving that Labor here is like the Dems in the US, in that they are firmly inside the Bastion defending capitalism against any and all resistance, and will quite happily ally with fascism to do so
by seeking to criminalise the phrase “globalise the intifada”, Minns et al are just proving that the struggle IS worldwide, and resistance MUST be globalised #AusPol #NSWPol
Similarly, the potential pitfalls of Albanese's proposal to develop a "narrow" federal offence for "serious" racial vilification depend on how these provisions are cast and what kind of speech can be caught in the net. There must be no possibility of the threshold for prohibited speech stifling legitimate discussion of sensitive but important subjects that touch on matters of race, such as immigration policy or the connection between radical Islam and terrorism. These are the kind of technical questions that the royal commission into antisemitism proposed by former treasurer Josh Frydenberg could usefully explore.
The most racist, supremacist garbage is being vomited across Australian media right now. Criticising Israel is an unacceptable threat to Jews so speech must be restricted but we have to ensure the restrictions don’t stop us from saying Muslims are terrorists or that brown people shouldn’t migrate.
every now and again I forget how bad Colbert is and watch a monologue for a few laughs and then I get hit with a «Trump is losing cause he hasn’t deported as many people as Biden» 🤦
excellent essay, and this bit on caring about the limitations of LLMs jumped at me
Leah notes: some people have “been taught not to care by the same industry that had a hand in destroying the communication skills of an entire generation and offering them quick solutions and viral success instead”
Prohibition has never previously worked as a policy for getting people to not consume something they want, but fortunately the social media ban will buck this trend by virtue of its careful evidence-based design and Albo's friendly reassuring smile every time he fails to answer the question.
news.corp wanting to ensure the only bullying of teenagers is done by them
Infinite scroll and algorithms are the problem so instead of taking them on we’re just giving up and slapping a lazy ban on a handful of platforms we have heard kids use
I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...
immediately followed by her eating a microwave dinner! amazing
