Hapless Dave

We’re being deafened by digital noise. Pause it and you hear the sound of democracy in crisis | Rafael Behr Step offline for just a moment and you see how democratic politics is struggling to cope with the pace of technological change, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Donor List Suggests Scale of Trump’s Pay-for-Access Operation

The most corrupt White House in history. Here is an account of what people are paying, directly to a PAC called MAGA Inc, in order to meet the president, get pardons, change policy

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/u...

The Boy Genius Who Killed 14 Million Poor People What is the moral weight of responsibility for the men who carried out DOGE’s work?

What is the moral weight of responsibility for the men who carried out DOGE’s work?

The latest Triad from @jvl.bsky.social only @thebulwark.com:
www.thebulwark.com/p/the-boy-ge...

End the 'special relationship' between America and Israel. It led to atrocities in Gaza | Opinion ***

It’s time to end the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States. It once made sense. More recently, it has become a conspiracy to commit war crimes. My latest. www.haaretz.com/us-news/2025...

This is absolutely key to what's happening. The soft left fought hard to keep its house in order and to defend its values in the Corbyn era. But the soft right has basically completely collapsed, organisationally and ideologically.

Trump, Bondi & Fox all tell their sheep that they are going to release the Epstein grand jury transcripts while they are quietly conceding to the court that there’s no legal basis to unseal them. As usual, they count on their base to buy the bullshit from the propagandists. bsky.app/profile/meid...

Lots of confusion around Epstein. Hope this helps!

Under Trump, the Republican Party has become the very thing they claimed to be waging war against for years: the “Deep State”. MAGA needs to realise they’ve been played.

France has launched criminal probe of X over alleged algorithm ‘manipulation’, platform says Authorities also accused social media company of ‘fraudulent’ data extraction

The French government has launched a criminal investigation into Elon Musk’s X over “the alleged manipulation of its algorithm” and “fraudulent” data extraction @financialtimes.com
www.ft.com/content/2181...

I really don't want to go through the whole rigmarole of seeing Farage win power and then fuck everything up and have loads of sympathetic voxpops with dismayed Reform voters expressing their regrets when it was extremely fucking obvious what would happen because his platform is incoherent garbage

They never learn, I swear to Christ. The agreement is between several parties, Suella. It was negotiated by individuals whose moral & intellectual stature is beyond your fucking comprehension. You don't get to unilaterally rewrite it so it satisfies your pathological simple-mindedness.

The Epstein Cover-Up at the FBI Inside the chaotic review process of the Epstein and Maxwell files at the Bureau

EXCLUSIVE: Not only does an Excel spreadsheet of Trump mentions in the Epstein files exist, but so do training videos explaining how to flag the files for Trump mentions. Plus, the number of people who had access is larger than previously known. My latest: www.muellershewrote.com/p/the-epstei...

Remember, this is how he wanted to stop Covid
www.statnews.com/2020/07/20/t...

A big reason the Epstein story is a fiasco for Trump is that it wrecks his core narrative: That he's a member of the elite using his inside status to expose elite self-dealing/perfidy and avenge "the people." He's now in on the elite cover-up.

Some thoughts on this:

newrepublic.com/article/1981...

MAGA Influencers Don’t Understand What Journalism Is As the Jeffrey Epstein case shows, right-wing internet personalities prefer “just asking questions” to getting answers.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Every day, the same story, the same moral pit. The fall of this murderous government can't come soon enough. The only suitable place for Netenyahu is in court for war crimes.

if you took a dementia test and thought it was an IQ test you failed both the dementia test and the IQ test

The man is scum personified.

We’ve become inured to Trump’s outbursts – but when he goes quiet, we need to be worried | Jonathan Freedland Across the US, without soundbites or stunts, the president is building a police state and eroding checks on his authority, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Elon Musk's AI has turned into Hitler precisely because of his own radicalisation The billionaire has journeyed from a much-admired tech entrepreneur to a man doing the Nazi salute in public

Grok has been designed to replicate Musk's own online radicalisation process, step by terrible step. First, you treat all mainstream information as biased. Then you gorge yourself on know-nothing crap online. And then you realise you've become a Nazi inews.co.uk/opinion/elon...

Welcome to the Mafia Presidency That’s a nice business you’ve got there.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Twenty-Four Hours of Authoritarianism Donald Trump had a very busy Tuesday.

www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

What America Can Learn From Iran’s Failure The regime’s predicament shows what happens when conspiracies, rather than reality, shape decision making.

This is a really important story: on the danger of believing your own conspiracy theories. Iran did. Is the US next?
www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Trump is angry with a world that won't give him easy deals | Rafael Behr In the Middle East as in Ukraine, the president is discovering that simple bullying tricks don’t resolve complex international crises, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Trump’s latest pronouncements on military action against Iran are as reckless as they are incoherent. The musings of a 10 year old in the school playground who doesn’t want to be shown up by the smaller kid who’s much tougher than him. It’s incredible just how low the governance of the US has sunk.

You'd think Elon would be familiar with the phrase "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Having a LLM decide what the correct version of the entirety of human knowledge is, deciding what's "wrong" and deleting "errors", in a recursive fashion, is a profoundly stupid idea, even for Elon.

Britain must stay out of this insane war An American attack on Iran would be an act of belligerence and lunacy

liveapp.inews.co.uk/category/375...

The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition One professor's reflections on the end of an era, as AI tools such as ChatGPT have murdered the student essay (RIP). Here's why that threatens the future of human cognition—and how to save ourselves.

After the latest round of grading papers, I wrote about AI, ChatGPT, the death of the student essay, and what it means for the future of human cognition.

The Tyrant Test A leader who uses military force to suppress his political opposition ought to lose the right to govern.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

This feeling has naturally trickled down to much of the discourse and news around Trump’s second presidency, which feels (and generally is) direr, angrier, more intractable. The distortions are everywhere: People mainlining fascistic AI slop are occupying an alternate reality. But even those of us who understand the complexity of the protests are forced to live in our own bifurcated reality, one where, even as the internet shows us fresh horrors every hour, life outside these feeds may be continuing in ways that feel familiar and boring. We are living through the regime of a budding authoritarian—the emergency is here, now—yet our cities are not yet on fire in the way that many shock jocks say they are. The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way.

wrote about the brokenness of our media systems (what's new?!), the people who think LA is a war zone because that's what they want to believe, & the strangeness of living in an emergency but also having to refute the lies being told about our cities as hellscapes www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...