lol

If history is any guide, criminalising anti-fascism in Germany should work out just great for everyone. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

The International Criminal Court is ditching Microsoft Office, saying it’s too dependent on US tech, in favor of Open Desk, a German open source alternative. The move comes after Microsoft revoked ICC head Karim Khan’s email access when he was sanctioned by the US for the warrant against Netanyahu.

In 2023, Chomsky told WSJ about his relationship with Epstein: “First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally.” Epstein: you are of course welcome to use apt in new york with your new leisure time, or visit new Mexico again

What a sentence.

Something absolutely perfect about Larry Summers riffing about the scourge of woke cancel culture being unfair to predatory men in a friendly email to his pal JEFFREY EPSTEIN.

thinking about how i get anxious writing emails because i don't want to sound like a moron while larry summers is apparently typing emails like this: u kno she dint want to talk tomorrow. make me bad pheel.

BREAKING: Trump reportedly met with Epstein in 2019 in London, per House Oversight Committee. Trump previously said he stopped talking to Epstein in 2004. In 2019, Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges.

“Only in a greedy one-party state could things get this chaotic,” re: pandemic response, according to FLG media. Not sure I entirely agree with him if he did say that, but would defend to the death etc etc.

What exactly did Wong Kar-wai say in the leaked audio that was so politically sensitive?

Just spent week in Beijing talking to officials, scholars. Their msg: 2nd term Trump=opportunity for China. He’s not ideological, sees Xi as a peer, bungled his trade war and can stare down DC China hawks. But he’s unreliable, so a debate on how to use him. economist.com/internationa...

The current (now quietly broken) version of the Ads Transparency Center was launched in 2023 in order to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act, which is something these American platforms have apparently decided they don’t have to worry about any longer.

Twitter has launched and then killed an “Ads Transparency Center” before, but at least for the last one they updated an old blog post to say it was dead:

A few days ago X broke the X Ads Transparency Center by shutting down the endpoint that handles search for the ads repository. Type e.g. “apple” here and it will spin indefinitely, with the search requests returning 404s behind the scenes:

Bluesky should steal this idea, and build on it by allowing independent journalists to prominently link to their pubs/newsletters from the their profiles Bonus points is they add a profile tab for original content— so it's easy for followers to find links to their latest article or podcast episode

'Eltis said the party’s constitution was fully drafted and one plank of its policy platform was the mass deportation of people of Jewish faith.' www.theage.com.au/national/nsw...

"Western governments seem to be trending in the direction of recruiting young people to intelligence professions at younger and younger ages. For example, the CIA has a clandestine officer internship for students as young as 18" www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Recommender algorithms controlled by unfriendly foreign powers threaten democracy and security. They artificially boost authoritarians and break society apart. They silence the rest of us.

Big story from Sky news. It is a mistake to think the DSA alone is going to fix this. This requires more, including and most particularly enforcement of GDPR Art 9 news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

OpenAI did not ask for government support, unless I have missed something. Their cfo, who keeps saying stuff that no cfo should say, said some bizarre shit.

To be clear this is a misread of the situation. Was Friar testing the waters? Sure. Did she think the waters would be fully of angry fish? No archive.ph/2025.11.06-0...

seems bad! www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Go back a decade and tell someone that a Bill Kristol publication would say this... and they'd never believe you.

"What we see, I think, are a bunch of rich guys who have been comically out of touch with normal people for many decades, and more recently have blowtorched their brains into a smoking pile of ash on Elon Musk’s Twitter/X and in various group chats." prospect.org/2025/11/04/a...

Right wing propagandists are going to do what they do, and what they always do. But we can see their hyperventilating for what it is: a defense of an existing power structure that reproduces extreme income and wealth inequality. If you're against that inequality, you might well be a socialist.

This is the socialism of the early Labour Party and German SDP. It is not "extreme" or "far left," but, rather accommodationist and incrementalistic. Perhaps this is not a winning political framework for other parts of the US, but neither is it some sort of existential threat to American life.

This is a canard. Socialism in those contexts is fused with Leninism and is emphatically anti-democratic. Mamdani is squarely in line with Eduard Bernstein, early theorist of democratic socialism (see his book: Evolutionary Socialism, 1899), as well as LaGuardia and Marc. x.com/i/status/198...

The point here is to pursue socialist goals - most notably to lessen economic inequality - through democratic means. Right wing propaganda will, and always has, try to equate this with the socialism of the Soviet Union or China. They will call socialists like Mamdani "communist." 2/

A quick review of political meanings of socialism. When Mamdani invokes socialism he is doing so in the tradition of European democratic socialism (there is really no difference with word order here: call it socialist democracy, or social democracy, if you like). 1/

Bluesky won't be in Australia's teen social media ban. www.esafety.gov.au/a...

Disturbing.

'In seeking to project strength, Lai risks diminishing Taiwan’s moral capital.' Good read by Nathan Attrill & Astrid Young.

I was extremely underwhelmed by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his recent interview with Ezra Klein. Here, Cal Newport breaks down why Yudkowsky's arguments feel so vague and unconvincing.

White Christian Nationalism

Amazing set of photos of Trump showing Xi a note that cracks him up, and more, from their meeting this week. Source: www.whitehouse.gov/gallery/pres...

I wrote this month’s Monthly Update on why GPT-5’s muted debut shows the limits of AI’s “scaling laws”, and why China’s more grounded, applied approach may ultimately prove the smarter play. aspicts.substack.com...

ladies and gentlemen...we got him

I finally got around to reading Ben Smith's article on US-China relations. I had assumed it would be lengthy and deeply reported, but it's just pure vibes-based speculation.

Congratulations, Elon Musk.

Excuse me? So the company the President currently owns is teaming up with a cryptocurrency company to create a prediction market, which will take bets... on things the President himself has quite a lot of control over? Gosh, I'm sure nothing bad will happen. www.ft.com/content/4855...

I'm excited to share the launch of CoTerran, a new #climate and #security advisory. coterran.co/newsletter/launch Stay tuned for updates on analysis, products, and services by subscribing through coterran.co as I build it out.

omg, I cannot believe this is an actual line of attack from Sussssan.

Angus: Canada is reconsidering that relationship with China. Why? Because we can no longer trust the US. And we know that we have 150, maybe more, Canadians in custody at ICE detention centers. We had two Canadians under Chinese custody and it caused a huge outcry. We now have over 150 in the US.

Consider how few anecdotes it took for the media to declare a Free Speech on Campus crisis. Every day we get more evidence that the Republican Party is teeming with white supremacists yet elite institutions refuse to frame this as a crisis that needs the nation’s attention.

I think that the next step in the civil resistance campaign to Trump should be inflicting punishment on elites and institutions who cave. They need to understand that there are costs to compliance

Every now and then I get sad about scholarly sidekicks: people whose solo work isn't as well known as the collaborations where they were the second author what about Guattari what about Horkheimer what about Engels who's your favourite sidekick?

It’s made even worse that you can’t clock it’s AI-generated within the first moment, so you think you’re watching a man say hello to an old lady, and then he aggressively charges and pile-drives her into the floor

I’m not on TikTok a lot, but lately when I’ve booted it up I’ve been randomly confronted with Sora videos of wildly violent things happening to old women. It’s so upsetting I might just never use the app anymore

‘Australian officials confirmed that after the meeting Mr Rudd offered a new apology to Mr Trump, who said he was forgiven.‘

A network of former intelligence and security officers says democratic decline is accelerating under Trump’s rule.