@HeavenlyPossum @MissGayle

No, bro, I swear! Just a few more rules and everything will be great!

"As this government collapses under the weight of unpopularity and scandal, it is now delivering for the reactionary forces that helped to put it in place through systematic and pre-meditated dishonesty. The result is a lattice-work of legislation and practice designed to criminalise and constrain dissent in the face of genocide, war, environmental degradation and the sort of corruption that turns state murder into money and misconduct into power.

There is every chance that within a week, Andy Burnham will be challenging Starmer for power. It is plausible Burnham could be Prime Minister by September." - Paul Holden

5/6

Backrooms = furniture store circle of hell

I haven't been that uncomfortable in a movie since watching Tideland!

What's coming isn't "good"—it will be hard as fuck. Yet with the right mindset, and consistent, intentional community-building, our lives can still change in positive ways. And like I said the other day... the systems we build now have the potential to overturn our dependence on capitalism and other systems of oppression.

Let's do this.

10/

Read full post & subscribe to list:

https://buttondown.com/impureleftist/archive/the-disposable-diaper-problem

The technofascists were never going to sit idly by and let the biggest collective repository of information just run around un-enshittified.

For almost two decades, I have been amazed at how well Wikipedia has been doing, and dreading the inevitable attacks.

We've seen this pattern playing out many, many many times now. Reddit's board was colonized around 2015, for one example. Everyone can see Mozilla going down the tubes with leadership actively trying to destroy anything that could make it a good and open alternative to the megacorps browsers. The people with backgrounds in venture capital or Microsoft or Amazon etc etc moving in on good sites and services, changing the priorities, letting the poison in. Evil, making offers people can't refuse, throwing around endless money and let's face it threats too, put NOTHING past them. It's an attack-- this is war. And they're out to eat EVERYTHING.

All of our access to information, news, history, communication, they want ALL of it swallowed down an endless abyss of propaganda and surveillance.

We've got to fight like hell, or they'll take all the light and breath and light in the whole world and future generations won't even get to remember.

@JakeOrlowitz https://mastodon.social/@JakeOrlowitz/116649352150125501

"When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/billionaire-consequence-free-reality/686588/?gift=fXb4ymsFcV2ntAzqIpmYvZ5SHmVudSgCCvY8EbJPC2Q

> The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. https://tante.cc/2026/05/20/on-google-declaring-war-on-the-web/ #AI #LLM #Google

Reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future. Most of the way through it now.

It's interesting, the science and numbers are solid-- he's clearly got a good grasp of just how dire things really are-- and yet somehow even his most tortured characters fall flat. I suppose part of it could be the audio delivery, but I don't think that's it. The outrage just doesn't have much bite.

I kinda glaze over during the bits about economics, like I do, but one thing that really strikes me is how only the random terrorists are actually out to punish those responsible for wrecking the planet. Paying the Saudis to keep their oil in the ground is something they might agree to, but only if it helps them preserve their position of incredible wealth and doesn't threaten their power. What does that actually change? Okay, so the carbon in the atmosphere is lower than it might otherwise be, but.... it's not like they'd become better people or stop oppressing everything they can get their hands on.

And this touches on the book's main blind spot.

It's not just lack of will to act, convenience and opportunism and laziness that's driving this mess. It's not just greed. It's about power. The people hurling us into hell see it not just as not real or not their problem, merely an issue for future generations-- no, they are accelerationists that know damned well they'll see the catastrophes really start rolling in their lifetimes. They PLAN ON IT.

You know what I think?

The whole world is expendable to the technofascists. They'll toss away all the biodiversity, billions of lives, all of it, for a chance to build their own playground out of the rubble. It's a race, to gain enough power to engage in totally unrestricted medical testing and bring massive data centers to bear on winning immortality. Once they grab that, they figure they'll have the time to bring back whatever or make up something entirely new at their total godlike leisure.

The author of this book isn't thinking about that. He isn't recognizing just how unhinged and depraved the monsters in charge really are.

Granted, this was written before COVID-19 hit. The ensuing depraved disregard for public health was a big lesson (for me anyway) in just how thoroughly we'll be hung out to dry. And it was written before this whole DOGE, Epstein Files, Iran war, bizarro clownshow.

Still. Naive.

In the book, the sense of the "international order" being under attack doesn't kick in until YEARS down the line, well after major disasters have been killing tens of millions and vigilantes are taking down private jets by the dozens-- and even then, no major military conflicts. No recognition of it having been a lie from the start. No acknowledgement of just how heavy the pollution impacts are from the US military in particular-- it blames various states in general, but without any mention of how the military has always been exempt from regulation. The bit I'm listening to right now is actually carrying on about how remarkably respectable and fair and normal the Navy is. Ugh.

I am definitely enjoying the communist permaculture stuff the book has going on in India, at least.

It's a nerdly indulgence mostly, way too verbose and not helpful to anyone new to the subject.

“Transcripts created by 12 of the 20 programs contained incorrect information like capturing a different drug than was prescribed by the doctor.”

12 of 20 is a 60% failure rate.

Seventeen of the 20 systems missed key details about patients’ mental health issues. “

17 of 20 is a 85% failure rate.

THESE SYSTEMS ARE NOWHERE CLOSE TO ACCURATE AND SHOULD NOT BE USED FOR HEALTH MATTERS OR ANYTHING ELSE THAT IS IMPORTANT.

#AI #CanPoli #CdnPoli #Medical #HealthCare #Doctors #AIHallucinations

in a just world - if meta wins, all papers are open access, piracy is legal, and society dies. if elsevier wins, the fundamental conceit of the bet that all of capital is riding on is ruled illegal, the economy collapses, and society dies.

in this world - they will settle, the information cartels will be allowed to steal all of human culture while it remains illegal for you or I to merely access it, the intellectual property holders still get to own our collective creative and intellectual energy, and society dies.

Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size. It's done without consent, it's not visible in the settings, and removing it will reinstall it later.

https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/

Shifting baseline syndrome ( #SBS ) is what happens when we forget how vibrant the natural world used to be. Each generation grows up with a more depleted environment and calls it “normal,” simply because it’s all they’ve ever known.

Researchers warn that this shift lowers our expectations, increases our tolerance for decline, and reduces our urgency to protect what’s left.

#climatechange #climate #timeisup #theworstisyettocome

ON THIS DAY

❝ Benito Mussolini, the deposed Italian Fascist dictator, was summarily executed by an Italian partisan in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra in northern Italy on 28 April 1945, in the final days of World War II in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Benito_Mussolini

the biggest mistake? not going after #USA and #Eu #oligarchy that kept Hitler and Mussolini in power for so long.

#antifa VPOTUS Wallace said as much ―and that’s why he was ousted, so he wouldn’t succeed a dying #FDR.

#OTD #history

The media response to fascism shouldn't be giggles, cocktails, and hors d'oeuvres. If you care about functional journalism and the truth, the response should be active, outward revulsion and hostility. You don't share a cocktail with fascism, you destroy it. Else there is no journalism.

This IS the circle of hell we now inhabit.

Keep breathing, we have to deal with this.

@MissConstrue https://mefi.social/@MissConstrue/116424250363768679

feel free to fuck off with the “it’s just a field in a database, distros will make it a simple age gate during account creation” horseshit unless you come with an explanation of why that’ll work in a regulatory landscape where porn sites with age gates are currently under legal threat from states where an age gate isn’t a sufficient proof mechanism, to the point where some of them have started partnering with companies like (Thiel-backed) Persona for identity verification

Omg DO IT

@smutmag https://mstdn.social/@smutmag/116417295119617348

2a. “Screen time” is a misleading concept. Talk to me about “billionaires manipulate your brain” time.

All you had to do was pay us enough to live.