"EVERYONE FUCKING HATES YOU!" See what happens when unarmed, peaceful citizens put their bodies in the way of an unwarranted #ICE raid. A tense run-in unfolds between #St.Paul #Minnesota residents and ICE "agents."
add something about dramatically enhancing whistleblower protection, and that can go a long way to discovering and reducing actual waste and corruption.
somebody on linkedin keeps trying to sell me on their AI interview bot, which connects to calls and uses a virtual avatar, and i just don't have the heart to tell them that their product is a total abomination of what good working culture should be
My home was destroyed, and all we have left is a tent that protects us from nothing. 💔⛺ Today we no longer fear only bombs, but drowning too. 🌧️💦 The rain flooded our tent, and the water almost swallowed my children before my eyes. 😭 I was screaming, saving them one by one—I still don’t know how we survived.
We live without safety, without warmth, without a real shelter. 🥶
Your donation could save my children’s lives and give us a chance to live with dignity 💔🙏 gofund.me/35fdca7d
They were making fun of Italian “bamboccioni”. Now the United Kingdom it’s getting a taste of what it’s like to live in an economic crisis byteseu.com/1633508/ #Italia #Italy
New York, Dec. 16, 2025 — President Donald Trump on Monday followed through on his threats to sue the BBC over its editing of his remarks on Jan. 6, 2021, for a documentary.
The following can be attributed to Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF):
“If any ordinary person filed as many frivolous multibillion-dollar lawsuits as Donald Trump, they’d be sanctioned and placed on a restricted filers list. By my count, Trump has demanded at least $65 billion in damages from media outlets in lawsuits filed since his second term started — almost nine times his current estimated net worth, according to Forbes.
“The U.S. has laws in place to restrict litigation by prisoners, the most powerless people in our society, because of their supposed propensity to file bad faith litigation. Meanwhile, the most powerful man in the world gets away with filing more nonsense lawsuits than practically anyone, incarcerated
... show more
Trump’s BBC lawsuit is nonsense, like his others
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
New York, Dec. 16, 2025 — President Donald Trump on Monday followed through on his threats to sue the BBC over its editing of his remarks on Jan. 6, 2021, for a documentary.
The following can be attributed to Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF):
“If any ordinary person filed as many frivolous multibillion-dollar lawsuits as Donald Trump, they’d be sanctioned and placed on a restricted filers list. By my count, Trump has demanded at least $65 billion in damages from media outlets in lawsuits filed since his second term started — almost nine times his current estimated net worth, according to Forbes.
“The U.S. has laws in place to restrict litigation by prisoners, the most powerless people in our society, because of their supposed propensity to file bad faith litigation. Meanwhile, the most powerful man in the world gets away with filing more nonsense lawsuits than practically anyone, incarcerated or otherwise.
“Perhaps the interview edit in question wasn’t the BBC’s best work. The BBC has acknowledged that. But U.S. defamation law is compensatory, not punitive. You don’t get to call out any alleged journalistic blunder and demand $10 billion.
“It’s preposterous for Trump to claim those damages when he won the 2024 election and hasn’t lost a penny because of the BBC’s editing. It’s also absurd for him to claim associating him with January 6 is defamatory after he spent years insisting nothing bad happened that day and then pardoned those involved. And it’s similarly outrageous that his claims are based on supposedly damaging implications of his using the word “fight.” He sells T-shirts with that word on them.
“Putting aside the incoherence of Trump claiming election interference damages for an election he won, his damages theory also concedes that he views the presidency as a personal profit-making venture.
“Fortunately for the BBC, we’ve seen this movie before. Caving to Trump gets you nothing. Plus, Trump’s hand is considerably weaker than in the past — his authoritarian censorship antics are increasingly unpopular. People are tired of his thin-skinned bully tactics. The only way for the BBC to preserve its journalistic integrity is to fight back.”
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Wat hij zei was niet relevant voor de afwegingen van de rechter. Alle bewijs dat het OM aanvoerde was al niet duidelijk genoeg. Waarom heeft Borsato het dan toch gezegd? Voor het andere publiek, lijkt me. En misschien zit daar bitterheid in maar hoe dan ook had zijn advocaat dat moeten ontraden. Want denken dat te kunnen zeggen zegt al voldoende. En iemand met die positie ten opzichte van zijn fans had meerdere keren een grens kunnen trekken, alleen al op basis van die paar zinnen die we lezen
Just like this flower grew without water or care, we too try to rise amidst nothingness, among the ruins and wounds. In our destroyed home, hope tries to bloom again. But without your support, how can we grow? Stand with us — you may be our only warmth in this harsh cold.
The image displays a portion of a mobile application interface with a dark background. At the top is a horizontal progress bar with a yellow indicator showing partial completion. Below the progress bar, the text "Downloading" is displayed, followed by the text "Clean Up". Below that, there are four icons arranged horizontally, each with a label underneath. The icons, from left to right, represent "Styles", "Adjust", "Crop", and "Clean Up". Each icon is a simple white graphic with a corresponding label in white text.
Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Gemma3:27b
The youngest moviegoers today do not, of course, remember a time before visual effects could be created digitally. What may give us more pause is that, at this point in cinema history, most of their parents don't remember it either.
For fun I'm thinking of things for a TNG Bingo card/drinking game.
- Someone inappropriately flirts with Deanna Troi and she seems ok with it. - Someone abruptly cuts short Data listing things. - Riker summarises the conversation. - Picard looks confused at pretty much anything. - Wesley looks amazed at pretty much anything. - Dr. Pulaski casually insults Data. - "Magnify!" - Picard randomly speaks French.
We are about to get a "post-American internet," because we are entering a post-American *era* and a post-American *world*. Some of that is Trump's doing, and some of that is down to his predecessors.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
When we think about the American century, we rightly focus on America's hard power - the invasions, military bases, arms exports, and CIA coups. But it's America's *soft power* that established and maintained true American dominance, the "weaponized interdependence" that Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe in their 2023 book *The Hidden Empire*:
As Farrell and Newman lay out, America established itself as a more than a global *power* - it is a global *platform*. If you want to buy from another country, you use dollars, which you keep in an account at the US Federal Reserve, and which you exchange using the US-dominated SWIFT system. If you want to transmit data across a border, chances were you're use a fiber link that makes its first landfall on the USA, the global center of the world's hub-and-spoke telecoms system.
No one serious truly believed that these US systems were *entirely* trustworthy, but there was always an assumption that if the US were to instrumentalize (or, less charitably, *weaponize*) the dollar, or fiber, that they would do so subtly, selectively, and judiciously. Instead, we got the Snowden revelations that the US was using its position in the center of the world's fiber web to spy on pretty much every person in the world - lords and peasants, presidents and peons.
Instead, we got the US confiscating Argentina's foreign reserves to pay back American vulture capitalists who bought distressed Argentine bonds for pennies on the dollar and then got to raid a sovereign nation's treasury in order to recoup a loan they never issued. Instead we saw the SWIFT system mobilized to achieve tactical goals from the War on Terror and Russia-Ukraine sanctions.
These systems are now no longer trustworthy. Is as though the world's brakes have started to fail intermittently, but we are still obliged to drive down the road at 100mph, desperately casting about for some other way to control the system, and forced to rely on this critical, unreliable mechanism while we do:
This process was well underway before Trump, but Trump's incontinent belligerence has only accelerated the process - made us keenly aware that a sudden stop might be in our immediate future, heightening the urgency of finding some alternative to America's faulty brakes. Through trade policy (tariffs) and rhetoric, Trump has called the question:
One of the most urgent questions Trump has forced the world to confront is what we will do about America's control over the internet. By this, I mean both the abstract "governance" control (such as the fact that ICANN is a US corporation, subject to US government coercion), and the material fact that virtually every government, large corporation, small business and household keeps its data (files, email, records) in a US Big Tech silo (also subject to US government control).
When Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down the International Criminal Court by killing its access to Outlook and Office365 (in retaliation for the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu), the world took notice. Trump and Microsoft *bricked* the ICC, effectively shuttering its operations. If they could do that to the ICC, they could do it to any government agency, any nationally important corporation, any leader - anyone.
It was an act of blatant cyberwarfare, no different from Russian hackers bricking Ukrainian power plants (except that Microsoft didn't have to hack Outlook, they *own* it).
The move put teeth into Trump's frequent reminders that America no longer has allies or trading partners - it only has rivals and adversaries. That has been the subtext - and overt message - of the Trump tariffs, ever since "liberation day" on April 2, 2025.
When Americans talk about the Trump tariffs, they focus on what these will do to the cost of living in the USA. When other countries discuss the tariffs, they focus on what this will do to their export markets, and whether their leaders will capitulate to America's absurd demands.
This makes sense: America is gripped by a brutal cost of living crisis, and contrary to Trump's assertions, this is not a Democratic hoax. We know this because (as *The Onion* points out), "Democrats would never run on a salient issue":
President Trump continues to make misleading statements about affordability despite the Consumer Price Index indicating an increase in costs for many goods and services. The Onion assesses the veracity of the president’s claims.
It also makes sense that Canadians and Britons would focus on this because Prime Ministers Carney and Starmer have caved on their plans to tax US Big Tech, ensuring that these companies will always have a cash-basis advantage over domestic rivals (Starmer also rolled over by promising to allow American pharma companies to gouge the NHS):
But there's another, highly salient aspect to tariffs that is much neglected - one that is, ultimately, far more important than these short-run changes to other countries' plans to tax American tech giants. Namely: for decades, the US has used the *threat* of tariffs to force its trading partners into policies that keep their tech companies from competing with American tech giants.
The most important of these Big Tech-defending policy demands is something called "anticircumvention law." This is a law that bans changing how a product works without the manufacturer's permission: for example, modifying your printer so it can use generic ink, or modifying your car so it can be fixed by an independent repair depot, or modifying your phone or games console so it can use a third-party app store.
This ban on modification means that when a US tech giant uses its products to steal money and/or private information from the people in your country (that is, "enshittification"), no one is allowed to give your people the tools to escape these scams. Your domestic investors can't invest in your domestic technologists' startups, which cannot make the disenshittifying products that also cannot be exported globally, to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method.
It's a double whammy: your people are plundered, and your businesses are strangled. The whole world has been made poorer, to the tune of trillions of dollars, by this scam. And the only reason everyone puts up with it is was that the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't.
So now we have tariffs, and if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow orders, and then they burn it down anyway, you really don't have to keep following their orders.
This is a point I've been making in many forums lately, including, most recently, on a stage in Canada, where I made the case that rather than whacking Americans with retaliatory tariffs, Canada should legalize reverse-engineering and go into business directly attacking the highest margin lines of business of America's most profitable corporations. 18/
This would make everything in Canada cheaper and better, and turn America's trillions in Big Tech ripoffs into Canadian billions by selling these tools to everyone else in the world:
There's lots of reasons to like this plan. Not only is it a double *reverse* whammy - making everything cheaper and making billions for a new, globally important domestic tech sector - but it's also *unambiguously within Canada's power to do*.
The EU - a far more powerful entity than Canada - has been trying to get Apple to open up its App Store, and Apple has repeatedly told them to go fuck themselves:
Maybe Canada can't order Apple, Google and Facebook to pay their taxes, but it can *absolutely* decide to stop giving these American companies access to Canada's courts to shut down Canadian competitors so that US companies can go on stealing data and money from the Canadian people:
Funnily enough, this case is so convincing that I've started to hear from Canadian Trump appeasers who insist that we must not repeal our anticircumvention laws because this would *work too well*. It would inflict *too much* pain on America's looting tech sector, and save Canadians *too much* money, and make *too much* money for Canadian tech businesses. If Canada becomes the world's first disenshittification nation (they say), we will make Trump too angry.
Apparently, these people think that Canada should confine its tariff response to measures that *don't work*, because anything effective would provoke Trump.
When I try to draw these critics out about what the downside of "provoking Trump" is, they moot the possibility that Trump would roll tanks across the Rainbow Bridge and down Lundy's Lane. This seems a remote possibility to me - and ultimately, they agree.
The international response to Trump invading Canada because we made it easier for people (including Americans) to buy cheap printer ink would be…intense.
Next, they mumble something about tariffs. When I point out the US is *already* imposing tariffs on Canada, they say "it could be worse," and point to various moments when Trump has hiked the tariffs on Canada, e.g. because he was angry to be reminded that Ronald Reagan would have hated his guts:
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But of course, the fact that Trump's tariffs yo-yo up and down depending on the progress of his white matter disease means that anyone trying to do forward planning for something they anticipate exporting to America should assume that there might be inifinity tariffs the day they load up their shipping container.
But there's another way in which the threat of tariffs is ringing increasingly hollow: American consumption power is collapsing, because billionaires and looters have hoarded all the country's wealth, and no one can afford to buy things anymore.
America is in the grips of its third consecutive "K-shaped recovery":
Working people in America have gotten steadily poorer since the 1970s, even as America's wealthiest have saw their net worth skyrocket.
The declining economic power of everyday Americans has multiple causes: stagnating wages, monopoly price-gouging, and the blistering increase in education, housing and medical debt.
These all have the same underlying cause, of course: the capture of both political parties - and the courts and administrative agencies - by billionaires, who have neutered antitrust law, jacked up the price of health care and a college educaton, smashed unions, and cornered entire housing markets.
For decades, America's consumption power has been kept on life-support through consumer debt and second (or third, or fourth) mortgages.
But America's monopoly credit card companies are every bit as capable of price-gouging as America's hospitals, colleges and landlords are, and Americans don't just carry more credit-card debt than their foreign counterparts, they also pay more to service that debt:
The Justice Department filed a civil antitrust lawsuit today against Visa for monopolization and other unlawful conduct in debit network markets in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act.
A dollar spent on consumption has the potential to generate multiple, knock-on transactions, as the merchant spends your dollar on a coffee, and the coffee-shop owner spends it on a meal out, and the restaurateur spends it on a local printer who runs off a new set of menus.
But a dollar that's shoveled into the debt markets is almost immediately transferred out of the real economy and into the speculative financial economy, landing in the pocket of a one-percenter who buys stocks or other assets with it.
The rich just don't buy enough *stuff*. There's a limit to how many Lambos, Picassos, and Sub-Zero fridges even the most guillotineable plute can useful own.
Meanwhile, consumers keep having their consumption power siphoned off by debt-collectors and price-gougers, with Trump's help. The GOP just forced eight million student borrowers back into repayment:
The most affordable of all the federal repayment programs is ending sooner than planned after Trump conspired with red-state attorneys general to kill it.
As Tim Wu points out in his new book, *The Age of Extraction*, one consequence of allowing monopoly pricing is that it reduces spending power across the entire economy:
Take electricity: you would probably pay your power bill even if it tripled. Sure, you'd find ways to conserve electricity and eliminate many discretionary power uses, but anyone who can pay for electricity *will*, if the alternative is *no electricity*.
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 • Tech platforms manipulate attention, extract wealth, and deepen inequality. In this new book, Tim Wu (The Attention Mer...
Electricity - like health, shelter, food, and education - is so essential that you'd forego a vacation, a new car, Christmas gifts, dinners out, a new winter coat, or a vet's visit for your cat if that was the only way to keep the lights on.
Trump's unshakable class solidarity with rent extractors, debt collectors and price gougers has significantly accelerated the collapse of the consumption power of Americans (AKA "the affordability crisis").
But it gets worse: Americans' consumption power isn't limited to the dollars they spend, it also includes the dollars that the government spends on their behalf, through programs like SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid/Medicare. Those programs have been slashed to the bone and beyond by Trump, Musk, DOGE and the Republican majority in Congress and the Senate.
The reason that other countries took the threat of US tariffs so seriously - seriously enough to hamstring their own tech sector and render their own people defenseless against US tech - is that the US has historically bought a lot of *stuff*. For any export economy, the US was a critical market, a must-have.
But that has been waning for a generation, as the Lambo-and-Sub-Zero set hoarded more and more of the wealth and the rest of us were able to afford less and less.
In less than a year, Trump has slashed the consumption power of the an increasing share of the American public to levels approaching the era of WWII ration-books.
The remaining American economy is a collection of cheap gimmicks that are forever on the brink of falling apart. Most of the economy is propped up by building data-centers for AI that no one wants and that can't be powered thanks to Trump's attacks on renewables.
The remainder consists of equal parts MLMs, Labubus, Lafufus, cryptocurrency speculation, and degenerate app-based gambling.
None of this is *good*. This is all *fucking terrible*. But I raise it here to point out that "Do as I say or Americans won't buy your stuff anymore" starts to ring hollow once most Americans can't afford to buy *anything* anymore.
America is running out levers to pull in order to get the rest of the world to do its bidding.
American fossil fuels are increasingly being outcompeted by an *explosion* of cheap, evergreen Chinese solar panels, inverters, batteries, and related technology:
As President Donald Trump's administration targets the U.S. Agency for International Development for closure or major downsizing, the White House and social media posts have highlighted four projects as examples of the agency's "waste and abuse.
What's more, it's gonna be increasingly difficult for the US to roll tanks *anywhere*, even across the Rainbow Bridge, now that Pete Hegseth is purging the troops of anyone who can't afford Ozempic:
And Congress just gutted the US military's Right to Repair, meaning that the Pentagon will be forced to continue its proud tradition of shipping busted generators, vehicles and materiel back to the USA for repair:
Eventually, some foreign government is going to wake up to the fact that they can make billions by raiding the US tech giants that have been draining their economy, and, in so doing, defend themselves against Trump's cyberwar threat to order Microsoft (or Oracle, or Apple, or Google) to brick their key ministries and corporations. When they do, US Big Tech will squeal, the way they always do:
But money talks and bullshit walks. There's a generation of shit-hot technologists who've been chased out of America by mask-wearing ICE goons who wanted to throw them in a gulag, and a massive cohort of investors looking for alpha who don't want to have to budget for a monthly $TRUMP coin spend in order to remain in business.
And when we *do* finally get a disenshittification nation, it will be *great news* for Americans.
After all, everyday Americans either own no stock, or so little stock as to be indistinguishable from no stock. We don't benefit from US tech companies' ripoffs - we are the *victims* of those ripoffs. America is ground zero for every terrible scam and privacy invasion that a US tech giant can conceive of.
No one needs the disenshittification tools that let us avoid surveillance, rent-seeking and extraction more than Americans. And once someone else goes into business selling them, we'll be able to buy them.
Buying digital tools that are delivered over the internet is a hell of a lot simpler than buying cheap medicine online and getting it shipped from a Canadian pharmacy.
For an America First guy, Trump is sure hell-bent on ending the American century.
This is the legacy of ARPANET and something that the Internet Elders used to fret about in the '80s and '90s. The assumption they were challenging was that now the cat was out of the bag and the internet transcended borders, there would always be a management-level consensus that would impel everyone to do the Right Thing. The consensus would be driven by technical arguments and (of course) the moral ones would follow.
"The rich just don't buy enough stuff. There's a limit to how many Lambos, Picassos, and Sub-Zero fridges even the most guillotineable plute can useful own."
I've often looked at this from the other side. the Toilet Paper Objection to Trickle down theory. There's only so much toilet paper any one human of any class status can use to wipe their backside.
The thing is, as most paper companies figured out a long time ago or they would have done this, is this is a nondurable consumer product that must function 100% correctly. Anything fancy and you have toilet, wastewater lines, or septic system clogging or an inability to absorb what it is supposed to, and the consumer of any class will go back to the normal product which has plenty of options. Ironically one product you can't enshittify is the one that cleans it up.
I've mentioned it a few times to friends from the EU, but, I think trump has given them a near-ideal situation to leverage to claw out from the US's shadow *and* deal with their tax haven (Ireland) problem, and still come out looking like the heroes/good guys for it on the global stage.
@thefyuuri how would that happen in practical terms though? It's not like Canada or Europe spent time building out their own domestic infrastructure the way China did. Realistically, it will take years to do even leveraging existing open source solutions.
Disisdeguey🔻PalestineAction🇵🇸
in reply to StacesCases2 🇨🇦 📎 • • •Good for the ones standing for Juan.