They rounded a bunch of random Venezuelans with tats and pretended they were in tren de aragua, then started blowing up random Venezuelan boats they claim “carried drugs,” in order to slowly groom their base into supporting a full ground war on Venezuela that was always about oil

no fuck you fuck off

Sleazy Wes has the chance to do something hilarious here. That record is the one thing Lettuce Truss has got.

The European Commission will unveil a “digital omnibus” package later this month to simplify many of its tech laws. The draft document we’ve obtained shows EU officials are planning far-reaching changes to the GDPR to benefit AI developers. 🔗 www.politico.eu/article/brus... 

Bitcoin is still a problem, folks

Six people died from tampered Tylenol and the company pulled 30 million bottles off the market. ChatGPT is accused of urging seven people towards suicide, and OpenAI just assures us they’re still working out the kinks. Billions in investment, zero accountability.

An excellent second mention, but also: if the tariffs take out Funko Pop that will at least be one positive benefit for humanity. God, how I hate those banal, witless, overpriced lumps of plastic junk, taking up space on your shelves until inevitably they must take up space in landfill, for eternity

There needs to be trials and there needs to be people sent to die in a prison cell. Consequences must fall on the people who issued the orders and those who carried them out. We must make the punishment of these people a national spectacle that will be remembered for generations.

Of course this is the company that Keir Starmer is handing access to all our NHS data

Yes and yet several European countries are embracing a far-right worldview that would burn these policies to the ground, so let’s be not be smug or complacent here - particularly as Mamdani‘s pro-immigration stance is radical by European standards.

poppy day (War Christmas) frenzy prompted me to finally read All Quiet on the Western Front. I was expecting it to be good, it was even better. War is manmade Hell. Rather than "honour" the soldiers' "sacrifice" (and round up the next generation of victims) we can only rage against their slaughter.

So not so much "no jobs on a dead planet" as "no jobs for the dead".

Ok, this is not an easy read given the complexity and unfamiliarity of the processes explored, but if you want some penetrating and deeply alarming insights into how the future is shaping up with AI - here it is!! isj.org.uk/ai-arms-race/

Joyscrolling

An interesting point. Certainly, look at how the far right already talk about London and Birmingham. It's also one of the things that cuts them off from at least as many people as it engages, though.

The news from New York is such a joy today. Trump and the rightward turn can be defied. And to focus in on just one policy, if Mamdani can make buses free in New York, it sets an example that no other city or borough can ignore.

Dick Cheney was alive in October. Nothing is impossible

Billionaires' views aren't reported because they are correct or wise or insightful, but because they have power. So @billmckibben.bsky.social is right, we their words shouldn't carry so much weight. But then, we aren't going to change that until we start to take away their power.

No better way to find out than this.

"Giant" in the fee-fi-fo-fum "I'll grind your bones to make my bread" monster sense, right?

This seems like such an obvious move that any rational society would have taken by now but, you know, capitalism, so the poison factories got to keep pumping out those poisons.

Well we know the colour of his skin and country of his birth because that was the information police deemed it most important to share yesterday, immediately upon announcing his arrest. Which is a terrifying indictment of how far the British state has capitulated to far-right political movements.

Zohran is stone cold man. Putting out an ad in Arabic after all the Islamophobic shit that’s been thrown his way? Pure swag. Dems don’t need to copy his politics or even necessarily his campaign strategy, they need to learn how to grow a fucking spine.

We made a mistake going more or less cashless. Tapping a card is easier, and it will be hard to go back, but is it worth letting them spy on you to that degree?

elon musk: people in the uk live like hobbits. um let’s look at you for a second bro

Tony Blair needs to worry about the things history already won't forgive him for.

His argument appears to entail the premise an ethnonationalist rejection of post-1948 ethnic diversity in principle, not an argument about immigration levels bsky.app/profile/bens...

Some blamed misinformation for the racist riots after the Southport attack. But racists don't care about facts. No-one is actually concerned about "mass uncontrolled immigration". It's code for "black, brown and Asian people". We know it, they know we know it. It's a dog whistle, always has been.

Bill Gates sure picked an interesting day to downplay the threat of climate change

How do military strikes 'test' rather than 'end' a ceasefire? Make it make sense

Turned on GMB. 3 panellists (inc 2 ex chancellors) rounding on @nelsabbey.bsky.social for the radical claim that asylum seekers are human beings and need to be treated as such. Ed Balls (now a broadcaster, why?) gasted his flabber at the idea of them having normal homes and jobs. Keep it up, Nels.

I think you answered your own question. But seriously, quite. For comparison, when did an editor of Socialist Worker, New Left Review, Tribune, New Internationalist, MR, Red Pepper, Ecologist or Race and Class last get an invite? (Morning Star and Novara do I suppose get the occasional look-in)

Not much of a housing crisis for the royals, is it? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Had to look that up hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/d...

I want Starmer to go, just as I wanted Johnson to go. But I'm little more hopeful about the former's successor than I was about the latter's.

Same vibe

The Toilet could easily be the title of a Kafka novel.

Must give this a try.

If I were running Labour comms I’d come out with more than the most anodyne criticism of the Tories/Reform immigration positions.

I never again want to hear that the "centre right" Tories are a block to the far right. Katy Lam's new ILR proposal is just as racist as anything Farage says, more drastic than Trump's ICE abductions, crueller and more invasive than either. The party of the hostile environment has gone full Idi Amin

Oh goodie, another sovereign debt crisis. Reliving 2008 again, but this time premeditated. Investors have decided bailouts are a foregone conclusion, and who can blame them with the way governments are bending over backwards for big tech? Time to dig out Lenin on imperialism for the ChatGPT era.

This is the logic of Idi Amin’s expulsions at the scale of the 1923 Greece-Turkey population transfer. Ethnic cleansing by law on a mass scale.

We need to engage with the fact that unlike the flawed analogy that social media connects humans to other people, contemporary displacement AI isolates us. Disconnecting us from each other and weaving the whims and wishes of industry into our writing and thoughts, AI is corporate capture of culture.

The Guardian is reporting that since Israel and Hamas signed the ceasefire and full hostage exchange agreement, Israel has violated the ceasefire 47 times, killed 38 Palestinians, and wounded another 143 more. Meanwhile Hamas has released all remaining hostages. It Was Never About The Hostages.

Keir Starmer must condemn this antisemitism

You'd have to say "let our clearly violent hard right hooligans, who the last time they were allowed to come to a foreign city were caught on camera in multiple videos being violent hard right hooligans, come to your city or it's like the holocaust" is really up there as a classic UK media moment

A statement by who? Sounds like someone is still using his royal title. In a statement about not using his royal title. Over in the USA today is #NoKings day. Wish it was here too!

‘Don’t let Israeli fans into Birmingham’: eyewitness to Amsterdam violence A year after far right Israeli fans went on a racist rampage in Amsterdam, they want to do the same in Birmingham socialistworker.co.uk/anti-racism/...

Marketing is not destiny. Tech firms are not invincible. GenAI's dominance is not inevitable. We can resist the tide of slop.

Your racialised neighbours being terrorised with fucking England flags? Simply stick up more England flags, but the good kind this time.