“Don’t proudly announce an international war crime for at least 20 minutes” Pentagon challenge.
Modern Republicanism is making up a thing to be scared about and then using that as the basis for policy
🇷🇺🇭🇺 Meet Hungarian politician Péter Magyar – same name as the opposition leader, tons of photos with Viktor Orbán and his cabinet members, running as an "independent" in a West Hungarian constituency. A Russia-style spoiler candidate, designed to deceive voters. More on 444.hu: 444.hu/2026/03/12/v...
I knew that the Department of War shot a missile into a school & killed 175 civilians, mostly children.
This is learned today:
Secretary of War Hegseth had cut the teams assigned to prevent such tragedies by 90%.
www.npr.org/2026/03/11/n...
I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public.
I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are.
1/ Here's what I can share:
OMG they released the deposition videos where they revealed that these two DOGE bros were just feeding grants into ChatGPT and saying "tell me if this is DEI in less than 120 characters."
www.techdirt.com/2026/02/19/d...
Part of Trump’s mass appeal (and of why he’s so dangerous) is that he really seems to share Joe Barstool’s worldview that there are no complex problems: Everything has a simple brute solution, which previous leaders were somehow too stupid or weak to deploy.
Iran's government is more hardline, its people are poorer and more isolated, the region's on fire, and the global economy feels like its about to go into shock
If you want to know why people wanted to avoid war with Iran for so long, you're finding out in real time
Hegseth needs to stand trial after this as a war criminal. Between this attack and the girls' school, there's no ambiguity. He is responsible for mass murder and must be held accountable.
I’m a little confused because the economists on my timeline are like “oh yeah we’re facing a generational energy crisis because Trump is a madman who started a war he can’t control” while the politicians are like “it’s important to make clear we support the troops until it all blows over next week”
I'm not kidding that this shit is making me lose my mind, I have to log out I'm like foaming at the mouth
Now that they're trying to pretend their war is not a war, they've gone back to calling it the Defense Department.
Trump has fully shattered the world we all grew up in. It’s a dramatic break from how things worked before, even compared to the Iraq War and other misadventures - the United States abruptly tumbling over a cliff and becoming literally more reckless and domineering than Putin’s Russia.
We are solidly back to the days of "WE are the civilized, makers and beneficiaries of the rules, and THEY are the uncivilized, entitled to no protections"
That mindset never really went away, some of just pretended it did. No denying it anymore
It’s so sick how the US openly celebrates war crimes now
The WH is making no effort at all to convince the American people how or why military action in Iran will keep them safe or improve their circumstances. They're not even trying to sell this, because nobody cares about anything beyond cashing in and keeping Trump happy.
Israeli filmmakers sign letter in defence of #TriciaTuttle:
“Do not touch the #Berlinale”
www.screendaily.com/news/israeli...
For the first time since @projectsaltbox.bsky.social launched their DHS warehouse acquisition tracker, the number of canceled sales is higher than any of the other warehouse-related figures. We've reached a tipping point, folks.
lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/b0...
Gunman shot dead in Mar-a-Lago was ‘fixated on Epstein files’ and avid Trump supporter, friends say.
5/ That, and the fact that the uncritical approach a lot of the political right have to their leadership doubtless extends to these new technologies. There's little curiosity about how they even work - just a blind, desperate faith that they can deliver us from evil.
4/ But with rising economic uncertainty and the overall environment of constant fear and moral panic the right cultivates in its base, it's hard to not to imagine this desire for a magic technology that can save us all is becoming more and more appealing.
3/ In the US especially, I think such QAnon narratives were always appealing in evangelical demographics, to whom such moments feel compatible with their preexisting worldview.
2/ The utopian promises of AGI maps pretty well onto well-established narratives of imminent salvation prevalent in these communities, such as "medbeds" a "great Reset" or the cathartic "Storm". All assert that we are mere months away from a single saving movement sweeping away all earthly woes.
1/ I've been curious about the political right's enthusiastic and uncritical embrace of AI for some time. While there are a lot of different actors in these spaces, I can't help but shake the thought that a large explainer is the prevalence of QAnon-style conspiracism in these movements.
New: A comedian set up a fake ICE tip line as a joke. Then 100 calls flooded in: neighbors ratting on neighbors, a teacher reporting a kindergartener. Fans say the viral TikToks revealed deportation's "banality of evil." Conservatives say he should be in prison wapo.st/4kM4qbF
Generative AI is the production of synthetic content based on existing content. It's, almost by definition, a zombie technology, and turning us all into online zombies, neither alive nor dead, endlessly churning out content, is its perfect use case
#PlatformRealism
"Operation Absolute Resolve was monitored in the same manner as a livestreamer who watches their stream’s chat for reactions." www.liberalcurrents.com/killing-for-...
A court in Germany yesterday ordered Elon Musk's social media site X to hand over data related to the upcoming election in Hungary to researchers for scrutiny.
Huge news from Berlin! The court has ruled in favour of our organisation in our lawsuit against X 💪
www.politico.eu/article/berl...
After X's repeated refusal to comply with the Digital Services Act, Democracy Reporting International lands a win for research and civil society.👇
"The court in Berlin ruled in favor of rights group [DRI] in its bid to access data to research influence campaigns and disinformation in the election."
