For all my own criticisms of American media being horrible brown nosing cunts who love to suck up to power, there is a strong American tradition of standing up to The Man when he comes and threatens you.
The UK press's culture is very sycophantic to power, very connected, and is terrified of doing anything that may be too disruptive or embarrassing the British "establishment" (I am loathe to use that word but I can't think of a better one.) I have never doubted for even a moment that the BBC would go grovelling to the Don.
If anything, I'm far more surprised that US media outlets chose to settle with Trump than I am to see that the BBC is bending the knee like this. Not to say that American media does not have its own issues with power, it does, but is is trillions of times worse in His Majesty's United Kingdom.
Israel commits horrendous crimes and they cannot be justified no matter the circumstances. It’s very important that they don’t focus their Israel coverage on anything to actually do with Israel itself, instead they need to worry about protests happening an ocean away.
If you look at Bari Weiss's website you'll see that almost all of the Israel-Palestine coverage is about made up fictitious "antisemitism" in the United States and on university campuses. There is very little actual coverage of what Israel is doing and I think there might be a reason for that.
The current BlueAnon conspiracy theory is that Trump is looking to expand the crime crackdown into numerous democrat cities in advance of the 2026 elections
ok....
This LA/DC enforcement action has proven massively popular
Another issue with AI scraping that's overlooked is that it completely fucking hammers the people's compute resources.
I run a website and I have been dealing with the onslaught of AI scrapers for months, they reduce the hardware I'm running the site on to skin and bones. They intentionally try to make themselves blend in with other users. I've had to create incredibly complex rulesets and stuff, completely ban lots of crawlers, make users on certain ISPs and even entire countries fill out a captcha before accessing the website, etc, to be able to alleviate the load that these scrapers put on the website. The end result is that my users now have a way worse experience and many of them have to fill out captchas.
Another website I use quite frequently that allows people to make freedom of information requests in New Zealand is also suffering from AI scrapers. For months its been incredibly slow and sometimes even completely down at times, and recently the admins put up a notice saying the websites issues are being caused by the load AI scrapers are putting on their resources.
These AI scrapers are the devil and are completely killing the Internet by making it incredibly difficult for independent website operators to be able to run without being concerned about this nonsense.
I like preferential voting one of the few things I feel some sense of nationalistic pride in about Australia is how great our electoral system has been since federation. However, whenever I hear someone across the pond saying that something like preferential voting is going to fix their issues, I think about how whichever party lost the most recent election is complaining about preferential voting and insists that we need to move to FPTP or MMP or something.
This article gives far too much credit to Peter Thiel, going as far as to describe him as "brilliant". He's an actively malicious billionaire trying to create a digital panopticon.
To be fair, a lot of countries have had a very unbalanced relationship with the USA in the post-war period, this is hardly the first time the US govt has demanded their ass be kissed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The White House usually just tends to be more "presidential" about it, but it seems like this government does not care about being respectable in the slightest.
If you look at The Free Press’s Israel-Palestine section on their website the entire fucking page is about tiffs that happen on university campuses in the United States.
Even if this is illegal, and there is a court ruling written by John Roberts himself saying that the White House mustn’t condition funding in this way, they are still going to condition funding and nobody will do anything about it.
The lines between the trump administration and these PayPal mafia, Peter Thiel and other venture capital tech people are incredibly blurry which is pretty terrifying
I’m sure that cutting regulation and regulators that stop the common man from being scammed or swindled is going to cost the taxpayer a lot more, even if the federal budget somehow does shrink as a result of this
There is something strange about how there’s so little in existing welfare programs in the United States that when they try to do austerity they have to cut things like the State Department, tax man, and other stuff that needs in order for the state to function.
Although I would like if DOGE fixed Pacer, but that will never happen.
Lone wolf violence will never fix the problem. I seriously doubt Bolsheviks wouldn’t have taken power if it was a lone gunman that killed the Tsar Nicholas.
I'm not American but as I understand the Espionage Act only covers the person that has the classified material to begin with and leaks it. When the Pentagon Papers were published, it was Daniel Ellsberg who was prosecuted, not the Washington Post. When Snowden leaked all those NSA documents, he was prosecuted, not Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald or Ewan MacAskill (although reportedly the CIA did try to prosecute Greenwald and Poitras, the Obama administration didn't want to do so and they pushed back on that.) When Reality Winner and Daniel Hale leaked to The Intercept, nobody at The Intercept was prosecuted.
I want to reiterate that I am not an American let alone an expert in American law, but the late Daniel Ellsberg always argued the Espionage Act was unconstitutional. I don't know if his argument towards that is any good though.
But most importantly if it is illegal to disclose that your government just bombed an entire apartment building full of people on a casual whim, you should man up and do the stint in jail. I'm currently in journalism school and one of my lecturers was a reporter in Nigeria under a military dictatorship and frequently tells stories of times when harassed and even detained by the military. He frequently tells us that "you need to be willing to die for the job". (I do understand that it's not as easy for reporters to do risk their own livelihood and possibly that of their families and colleagues as it for me to insist that they should.)
It was pretty horrific when Biden started bombing Yemen but usually when that happened the death toll was 3 or 4 per round at most (may be lower or higher but this is just to my recollection.)
I remember when I saw the media reporting numbers in the 50s I was thinking that the only way they aren't targeting civilians is if they were targeting residences of high ranking Ansar Allah officials but the actual reasoning is so much worse, and it's pretty sickening how casually these guys are agreeing to it and not seeing anything wrong with this.
Of course he only has the authority to pardon people for crimes committed against the United States, but aren’t these matters being heard in federal courts? And wouldn’t these existing orders and any future orders concerning the federal govt and the executive branch be heard in federal courts?
I'm not sure if we're seeing the collapse of American hegemony right now, but if we are, I imagined this being way less stupid. That's all I can really think, this is all so god damn stupid.
For all my own criticisms of American media being horrible brown nosing cunts who love to suck up to power, there is a strong American tradition of standing up to The Man when he comes and threatens you. The UK press's culture is very sycophantic to power, very connected, and is terrified of doing anything that may be too disruptive or embarrassing the British "establishment" (I am loathe to use that word but I can't think of a better one.) I have never doubted for even a moment that the BBC would go grovelling to the Don. If anything, I'm far more surprised that US media outlets chose to settle with Trump than I am to see that the BBC is bending the knee like this. Not to say that American media does not have its own issues with power, it does, but is is trillions of times worse in His Majesty's United Kingdom.
Marc Andreessen once said this about people in small towns
https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-24-my-dinner-with-andreessen/Israel commits horrendous crimes and they cannot be justified no matter the circumstances. It’s very important that they don’t focus their Israel coverage on anything to actually do with Israel itself, instead they need to worry about protests happening an ocean away.
If you look at Bari Weiss's website you'll see that almost all of the Israel-Palestine coverage is about made up fictitious "antisemitism" in the United States and on university campuses. There is very little actual coverage of what Israel is doing and I think there might be a reason for that.
Another issue with AI scraping that's overlooked is that it completely fucking hammers the people's compute resources. I run a website and I have been dealing with the onslaught of AI scrapers for months, they reduce the hardware I'm running the site on to skin and bones. They intentionally try to make themselves blend in with other users. I've had to create incredibly complex rulesets and stuff, completely ban lots of crawlers, make users on certain ISPs and even entire countries fill out a captcha before accessing the website, etc, to be able to alleviate the load that these scrapers put on the website. The end result is that my users now have a way worse experience and many of them have to fill out captchas. Another website I use quite frequently that allows people to make freedom of information requests in New Zealand is also suffering from AI scrapers. For months its been incredibly slow and sometimes even completely down at times, and recently the admins put up a notice saying the websites issues are being caused by the load AI scrapers are putting on their resources. These AI scrapers are the devil and are completely killing the Internet by making it incredibly difficult for independent website operators to be able to run without being concerned about this nonsense.
I like preferential voting one of the few things I feel some sense of nationalistic pride in about Australia is how great our electoral system has been since federation. However, whenever I hear someone across the pond saying that something like preferential voting is going to fix their issues, I think about how whichever party lost the most recent election is complaining about preferential voting and insists that we need to move to FPTP or MMP or something.
This article gives far too much credit to Peter Thiel, going as far as to describe him as "brilliant". He's an actively malicious billionaire trying to create a digital panopticon.
To be fair, a lot of countries have had a very unbalanced relationship with the USA in the post-war period, this is hardly the first time the US govt has demanded their ass be kissed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The White House usually just tends to be more "presidential" about it, but it seems like this government does not care about being respectable in the slightest.
If you look at The Free Press’s Israel-Palestine section on their website the entire fucking page is about tiffs that happen on university campuses in the United States.
Even if this is illegal, and there is a court ruling written by John Roberts himself saying that the White House mustn’t condition funding in this way, they are still going to condition funding and nobody will do anything about it.
The lines between the trump administration and these PayPal mafia, Peter Thiel and other venture capital tech people are incredibly blurry which is pretty terrifying
I’m sure that cutting regulation and regulators that stop the common man from being scammed or swindled is going to cost the taxpayer a lot more, even if the federal budget somehow does shrink as a result of this
There is something strange about how there’s so little in existing welfare programs in the United States that when they try to do austerity they have to cut things like the State Department, tax man, and other stuff that needs in order for the state to function. Although I would like if DOGE fixed Pacer, but that will never happen.
Lone wolf violence will never fix the problem. I seriously doubt Bolsheviks wouldn’t have taken power if it was a lone gunman that killed the Tsar Nicholas.
I'm not American but as I understand the Espionage Act only covers the person that has the classified material to begin with and leaks it. When the Pentagon Papers were published, it was Daniel Ellsberg who was prosecuted, not the Washington Post. When Snowden leaked all those NSA documents, he was prosecuted, not Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald or Ewan MacAskill (although reportedly the CIA did try to prosecute Greenwald and Poitras, the Obama administration didn't want to do so and they pushed back on that.) When Reality Winner and Daniel Hale leaked to The Intercept, nobody at The Intercept was prosecuted. I want to reiterate that I am not an American let alone an expert in American law, but the late Daniel Ellsberg always argued the Espionage Act was unconstitutional. I don't know if his argument towards that is any good though. But most importantly if it is illegal to disclose that your government just bombed an entire apartment building full of people on a casual whim, you should man up and do the stint in jail. I'm currently in journalism school and one of my lecturers was a reporter in Nigeria under a military dictatorship and frequently tells stories of times when harassed and even detained by the military. He frequently tells us that "you need to be willing to die for the job". (I do understand that it's not as easy for reporters to do risk their own livelihood and possibly that of their families and colleagues as it for me to insist that they should.)
It was pretty horrific when Biden started bombing Yemen but usually when that happened the death toll was 3 or 4 per round at most (may be lower or higher but this is just to my recollection.) I remember when I saw the media reporting numbers in the 50s I was thinking that the only way they aren't targeting civilians is if they were targeting residences of high ranking Ansar Allah officials but the actual reasoning is so much worse, and it's pretty sickening how casually these guys are agreeing to it and not seeing anything wrong with this.
I am sure that this will shock regular readers of this esteemed publication but Bari Weiss hasn't said anything about this for some reason.
Of course he only has the authority to pardon people for crimes committed against the United States, but aren’t these matters being heard in federal courts? And wouldn’t these existing orders and any future orders concerning the federal govt and the executive branch be heard in federal courts?
I'm not sure if we're seeing the collapse of American hegemony right now, but if we are, I imagined this being way less stupid. That's all I can really think, this is all so god damn stupid.