I honestly don't care much about Cory Booker and his speech.  It had a distinct lack of substance, and at this point I want to see some actual gameplans....and not just for four years from now, Senator, but right now in your opposition capacity.  All of these commentators so blown away by Booker are just looking for excuses to continue to ignore the far more impressive speeches, and grassroots work, of Bernie and AOC.  Booker satisfies the centrists, looking for a new Obama, looking for teary-eyed platitudes and gospel histrionics.  It all smacks of the same empty vibes.  You can already see the news pundits talking about the thrills in their legs, but as far as I'm concerned you can keep that shit in church.

What do I know?  Maybe this is exactly what these dumb ass Muricans are looking for right now, performance rather than principles.  I know the donor class must be pleased, because there's not a chance in rich man's hell that Booker would dare propose turning off those spigots.

And things could be worse.  I see where Kamala Harris' people have been busy trying to put her name back out there for a '28 run, so, you know....
 

crumbsroom wrote:

I don't watch a lot of political podcasts these days, but David Pakman did a thing about how Trump may be tanking the economy on purpose for the benefit of letting his buddies scoop up everything for cheap.

Lo and behold.  Trump knocked a huge hole in the economy, telling investers to "buy low" at the height of this past week's tariff panic, claiming "it's a great time to get rich" (*caps excluded*).  Tellingly focusing on "investors coming into the United States" as opposed to domestic American investors, which coincides with his shilling his "gold card", essentially offering US citizenship for $5 million a pop (all while eroding green card residency rights and birthright citizenship).  This focus on attracting foreign investment, at the expense of domestic investment, may seem counterintuitive to 'America First' protectionism, but the bottom line is that it's really all about the mon-eee, expecially when you have $600 billion Saudi dollars on the line, a deal almost guaranteed to benefit Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner,

Earlier this week, the Trump administration was claiming up to $7 trillion in private investment, which was odd since this was not reflected in the still flagging stock market (which lost much more value in the same week)  It certainly looked as if there were some hand-greasing backroom deals being made to perhaps shield some of these large corporations from the consequences of the tariffs.  And that's what Trump loves...deals.  And this is why the tariff scheme was essentially another shakedown grift, a way to muscle other countries into giving us more than perhaps we deserve in order to alleviate their own worst-case scenarios, and to wield influence over global policy.  Trump likes to claim that America has been the victim, "raped" as it were, taken advantage of, because for Trump truly fair markets (which they've never actually been) is for suckers.  Even given the tilted, entitled stakes in global trade towards America - more specifically for American-based multinational corporations - for Trump, it's not enough, it'll never be enough.  'Fuck you, pay me' politics.  But such feigns of grievance fit his socially insecure MAGA audience, cultural paranoiacs who see victimhood in the prospect of fairness and equality simply because it means a loss of dominance for their bias, the white male Chrstians who perceive persecution in their being denied their natural right to rule.  This isn't about fair trade, it's about "kissing my ass", and notably the countries in question are our presumed allies.  Like with Canada, Trump is humiliating those most loyal to us first as a demonstration of his power to our actual enemies.

Since this was all too predictable, it's little wonder that Trump eventually sent out the signal that his billionaire friends had been waiting all week for: "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!"  Subtle stuff.  He even added a mention of "DJT", seemingly a signature (as if one is needed for an already signified social media post) but also a reference to his social media company stock which, by god, gained about 22% when he suddenly decided to make his surprise announcement to pause the tariffs just over three hours later.  Those who bought in thie brief interim between this post and his subsequent announcement became very very rich, or at least a bit richer than they were.

There is no "3D Chess" at work here.  It's Checkers with the constant tacit threat of knocking the board over.  It's chaotic, but hardly ambiguous.  In the past 10 days or so, Trump was able to bring a number of countries, mostly allies like Japan and the EU, to heel and squeeze an undetermined amount of compromises and compensations from, and was able to demonstrate his power to manipulate, destroy or to rally, the market at his whim, which also puts investors and corporations on their heels and willing to "make deals" in order to placate the wild hungry bear.  It's the same playbook Trump is using against the big law firms, and against the elite universities, and against the large media corporations.  It would be called extortion in a more civilized time.  Trump has finally figured out how to weaponize federal influence over the markets, over the courts and over its grants and funding programs to place all of these institutions firmly under his thumb, and he's realized that he doesn't need to tolerate anyone around him with decency or common sense who would stand in his way.  It's not that America has been so victimized and powerless this whole time, as Trump suggests, it's that he's awoken to the fact of just how much power America actually has that previous presidents somehow had the dignity and discretion not to fully exploit due to our society's previous presumptions of integrity and what the previously educated electorate was willing to swallow.

Rampop II wrote:

Well it's lukewarm comfort that SCOTUS ordered they "facilitate" his return.

It's colder than that.  The SCOTUS ruling is absolutely toothless and, if anything, effectively watered down the district judge's more forceful order.  The language is tellingly flaccid: "with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs", which is what Sotomayor criticized as "discretionary equitable relief". 

Kimberly Wehle wrote:

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, to “facilitate” is to “help bring something about,” whereas to “effectuate” is to “cause or bring about” something. In other words, it’s the difference between trying and doing.

The Supreme Court told Trump to try to get El Salvador to release Abrego Garcia back to U.S. custody, but made clear that Trump doesn’t actually have to if he doesn’t want to, so long as he cites “foreign affairs” as an excuse.

And obviously, this is exactly the way in which the Trump team is treating the ruling, as being in their favor: "As the Supreme Court correctly recognized, it is the exclusive prerogative of the President to conduct foreign affairs.  By directly noting the deference owed to the Executive Branch, this ruling once again illustrates that activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the President’s authority to conduct foreign policy."

Equally obviously, Trump has made it clear today that he has no intention of facilitating Garcia's release, and is suggesting the deportation of US citizens "next".  Will SCOTUS have the spine to stand up to Trump if he tries to claim this as under his exclusive foreign policy prerogatives? 

"So how does a reasonable federal judge respond to such committedly proud lawlessness and lying?  It’s a hard question."

On the bright side, the Cubans aren't being sent to a foreign gulag which we happen to be subsidizing.
 

A deep dive from Mother Jones on the prominent use of facial recognition software by ICE - and several other "clients" both in government and the private sector - from a shady company called Clearview AI, which, as this article shows in detail, has deep ties to various extremist elements, listed here under the convenient umbrella of "neoreactionary" but including anti-democratic, post-liberal, ethnocentric sectors of Silicon Valley's radical libertarianism which seeks to overthrow (a "soft coup" as so-called prophet Curtis Yarvin as described it) liberal democracy - which they see as a failed and "malignant" form of government - in favor of a technocratic aristocracy, what some are calling "technofeudalism", led by the self-anointed "best and brightest".  These tech-bros have a lot of different cute names for their coalition: alt-tech, dark enlightenment, human biodiversity (which sounds fairly quaint until you realize that the concept is being used to justify a form of hierarchy based on genetic worth; or otherwise 'white supremacy' in disguise).  "Neoreactionaries consider themselves a high-IQ natural aristocracy and long for a corporatist strongman—a CEO monarch—to usher in what [Peter] Thiel calls a 'futuristic' version of the past, one in which technocrats rule as an ennobled caste."

The questionable ethics of face recognition software goes beyond its lack of efficacy (as we've seen from DOGE and deportations, accuracy is absolutely not the point or the goal), but the manner in which it collects the images for its database.  As we've also seen from other forms of "training" generative A.I. software, there's an ongoing controversy about whether or not a private company like Clearview has the right to "scrape" up its millions of images from the internet, most especially social media, given that such collection is done completely without user knowledge or consent, or even (as it currently appears) without the consent of the social media platforms themselves, which, in their ToS, claim to retain copyright on any images posted on their platforms.  Whether or not these social media companies, but especially Meta's Facebook and Instagram, have secretly been cooperating with Clearview in this image collection is a potential imminent scandal.  Or whether or not local law enforcement, which makes up a large bulk of Clearview's clientele, have also cooperated in sharing images at their disposal - taken from public cameras on the street, mugshots, security footage from government buildings, etc. - is also an open and alarming question at this point.  And even such private institutions, like certain rental properties.  We see this little tidbit from this article describing "a real estate firm whose CEO was considering investing and wanted to test the [Clearview] tech, which the team piloted using a surveillance camera in the lobby of an apartment building to secretly harvest images of tenants and visitors."  Or consider any potential cooperation from, I dunno, Bezos' Amazon, whose products ranging from phones, Alexa or Ring could happily profit from such a contract to submit intimate image data, and it isn't difficult to imagine a rather consolidated, centralized surveillance database within this single corporation, and a corporation with significant ties to anti-liberal enthnonationalists.  Such open-ended ambitions as its "outreach to political clients interested in using what company promotional material characterized as 'unconventional databases' for 'extreme opposition research'", and any potential abuses are really only limited by one's capacity for paranoia or sense of humor.

And obviously when such a vast image-collection network is utilizing A.I. algorithms to sift through America's millions, it helps if, perhaps, these algorithms are also informed by, say, Meta's Cambridge Analytica psychological profiles and behavioral models based on every Facebook and Instagram user, or by Amazon's consumer predictive analytics.  And Elon Musk has most likely just scraped the deepest of our government bureaucratic databases for his own A.I. profiling software.  There's no reason to be frightened by any of this, unless you're a criminal or an immigrant, or possibly even a liberal dissident or something wild like that, but it may be worth keeping in mind that these architects of this surveillance state just happen to believe that they deserve to rule over us all, an agenda by their own admission.

You may have heard something or other about the 'PayPal Mafia' - again, not a perjorative but a moniker they themselves adopted because isn't that cool? - which refers to several OG execs and programmers at the startup online payment system who collectively became billionaires overnight, and now form a cadre of venture capital funds, "super angels" which "seed" a number of tech start-ups and whose financing now consists of the virtual nervous system of Silicon Valley.  If you substitute the name 'Kevin Bacon' with 'PayPal billionaire', the game of degrees is basically cut in half in this environment.  But not all PayPal billionaires are so extreme to cosign the worst anti-democratic aspects.  Indeed, some may even call themselves "liberal', like Reid Hoffman who is a major Democrat donor, but this doesn't mean he isn't also inclined to techno-aristocracy, as when Hoffman immediately publicly demanded that Kamala Harris fire the FTC head Lina Khan after donating to Harris' campaign.  The whole 'Master of the Universe' thing is way too flattering to completely shake off among the swine.  But it's useful to focus instead on the folks who are most influential, and therefore troubling.

Elon Musk is the clear frontrunner here, as the world's richest man, and bitchiest man-baby, the single largest political donor in a single election cycle, at nearly (reports vary a bit) $290 million, in I believe the history of for-profit democratic politics.  Musk's sense of technocratic entitlement should be clear as crystal at this point, with a rabid instinct to remake the world around him into his own image, including siring some dozen or so offspring which, like his father before him, he refuses to care for.  Musk's demonstrated pettiness and fragile ego are evidence enough that he's quite likely and willing to use the vast trove of personal data at his disposal to launch character attacks against his perceived enemies, and equally willing to weaponize disinformation - half-truths culled from sensitive data - in order to do so.  This alone makes him a drastic threat for an incipient surveillance tyrant.  His most dangerous company just might be Starlink, which gives him access to siphoning untolds amount of user data, especially from troubled and politically sensitive areas of the globe, the kind of places where it's easier to drop some dimes if need be.

Peter Thiel is far scarier than Musk because, among other skills, Thiel has the discipline of discretion and patience.  Thiel, at least publicly, has yet to display any of the overt messianic compulsions which Musk can barely inhibit.  Thiel also seems, in interviews, to be a lot more philosophically and emotionally disciplined than Musk, which must convey to his many minions, even those not directly his financial benefactors, a sense of rational indifference which can be translated as reason for those who don't have to think too hard about what he says.  The tentacles of Thiel both in Tech and the political realm are of Kraken-proportions.  In fact, everything you've ever heard about a scourge like George Soros can be aptly applied to the investments and operative interests of Peter Thiel, but probably none more that his Palantir, which is basically a private intelligence agency, and has been essential is helping to secure the increasing surveillance state, not just in America (we still have some laws), but globally.  Recently, Palantir has been the hand in Elon's glove in Musk's DOGE efforts, and has taken the reigns in immigration surveillance specifically.  But somehow Thiel has avoided the optical inconveniences of his gloriously thirsty partner by staying quiet and out of the Oval Office.  Why does he need to, when he has JD Vance as his blue-eyes and ears?

PayPal-adjacent Marc Andreessen is another cone-headed asshole with financial fingers in nearly half of our tech industry, and who is happily anti-democratic.  He's recently bragged that he wants to have A.I. replace every worker except venture capitalists, which is worth repeating.  Andreessen was perhaps the most significant "super angel" investor in Facebook before it went exploded by the late '00s.  In addition to "most" workers, I suppose Andreessen also agrees with Mark Zuckerberg's prediction that we're all going to need to A.I. outsource all of our friends and lovers as well.  You see, Zuckerberg profits off making its users lonely and depressed.  These users tend to become more engaged with the site, more desparate to feel connected, more willing to respond to ads promising happiness and fulfillment.  These friend-bots will not alleviate loneliness, only exacerbate selfishness, the kind of self-absorption which is incapable in a mutually-attentive relationship.  But the real benefit?  These bots will also act as extremely useful informants and psychological data-harvestors with which to feed you more coercive ads and more self-confirming ideological stagnation.  In terms of social control, it's a win-win, even more effective than shame and confession!

We're getting in the weeds here, and I haven't even gotten to the real rot of the meat.  What do all of these tech-bro, paypal mafioso have in common besides all of the above?  Musk, Thiel and Andreeseen particularly all happen to be adherents of some cultish little cunt who self-describes as a "moldbug", Curtis Yarvin, who might at first seem like a strange unremarkable figure to have risen to the rank of prophet among this technofeudal clergy.  But it does help to understand Yarvin, his thought, his oversize influence and what he represents and signifies among the technofascists, whether it's called "dark enlightenment" or the more curt "NRx", to really begin to glean the essence of the tech-leviathan that we're dealing with. 

I'll go into some of the necessary details regarding this ideology later, because christ I have to piss.
 

What the fuck is really going on here, man?  Is he about to crack?  Has his blistered heart finally had enough?  Are his tiny hands straining under the invisible weight of the world on his chest?  Has he been waking up at night, finding JD Vance sitting bedside, watching, waiting?

If he finally does put the gun in his mouth, can he please take out Vance first?  Just tell him it'd make a great season cliffhanger.
 

I'm going to chalk it up to great minds thinking alike, but it looks like Naomi Klein (of Shock Doctrine acclaim) posted an essay about a month back which pretty much lays out all of the major beats that I've been meekly trying to lay out here, involving the Tech oligarchy and their methods, mindings and motives in engaging in their quest to suppress their mass consumer serfs, but I only just read her essay in the last couple of days, as she's amping up an admirably combative campaign against them.  It's probably best then for me to highlight her thoughts on the matter.

She starts with the premise of "freedom cities" or "start-up cities", which would be extralegal carve-out enclaves for these superwealthy tech elities, but provided, by patron Trump presumably, with previously public federal land.  Klein is taking note of the fact that some of the billionaires triumphantly staged behind Trump's inauguration are entering into the "moat-building" phase of their clandestine class war:

...championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.

Otherwise known as Ayn Rand's most blessed hot flash.

The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.

That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.

And I want to point this part out for Democrats, especially those who have not been as willing as Bernie or AOC in calling out these truths to their own donor class....or maybe especially to someone like Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, who has purged 'oligarchy' from her vocabulary and thinks she can sustain a future leadership career by engaging with citizens playing Call of Duty :

Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.

To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.

Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.

With immigration:

Bukele has offered to provide the same fee-for-service system for US citizens the administration would like to drop into a judicial black hole. “I love that,” Trump said recently, when asked about the proposal. No wonder: Cecot is the sick if logical corollary of the “freedom city” fantasy – a zone where everything is for sale and due process does not apply. We should expect much more of this sadism. In a chillingly candid statement, the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, told the 2025 Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a more “business”-oriented approach to these deportations, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”.

With our neighbors:

If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse.

With DOGE:

It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.

With A.I.:

Trump 2.0’s economic project is a Frankenstein’s monster of the industries driving all of these threats – fossil fuels, weapons and resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI. Everyone involved in these sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world – these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of equilibrium. This month, the former Google executive Eric Schmidt admitted as much, telling Congress that AI’s “profound” energy needs are projected to triple in the next few years, with much of it coming from fossil fuels, because nuclear can’t come online fast enough. This planet-incinerating level of consumption is necessary, he explained, to enable an intelligence “higher” than humanity, a digital god rising from the ashes of our relinquished world.

And because Naomi Klein has bigger balls than I do, what is her ultimate unadulterated diagnosis here?

To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.

But this counternarrative requires its own mythology, properly understood as such:

....we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.  This basic sentiment, of course, is not new....

.....


We need to upend the current consumerist zero-sum FOMO selfish convenience status-contest mythologies which our broke-buck media corporations are desperately trying to distract us with while they're busy figuring out how a zero-gravity space-spa works.
 

The "sword of Damocles" mentioned in a previous post's quote from Lawrence Tribe about the more passive potential power of the police state refers to the extent which surveillance can alter our behavior implicitly, the idea, core to the concept of the Panopticon, that the bulk of the work of social control can be effected through the normalization of the citizens' presumption that they are constantly being watched.  Note that, like the Panopticon, this does not necessarily require any actual active surveillance of citizens to achieve, instead only the perception, or presumption, by citizens that they are being observed.  Those who are inclined to take an "optimistic" view of this normalization claim that this presumption will encourage good behavior, which is somewhat of a modern, technocratic version of the parochial notion that belief in God is directly necessary to discourage sinful behavior.  Maybe I'm a bit more pessimistic, but I also feel that this new surveillance-coercion of citizen behavior will not likely be any more successful than the medieval Church in eradicating awful behavior.  But, motives aside, it is worth being mindful of how psychological coercion is so inherently central to the operative design of so much of our digital technology.

So it's helpful to review the available scientific studies regarding the more implicit psychological changes which result from constant surveillance:

...Being watched doesn't just change our behavior; decades of research show it also infiltrates our mind to impact how we think. And now a new study reveals how being watched affects unconscious processing in our brain. In this era of surveillance, researchers say, the findings raise concerns about our collective mental health.

But over the past few decades, researchers have found that being watched also affects cognitive functions such as memory and attention. For one thing, it can be very distracting. One study found that participants performed worse on a working memory task when they were presented with pictures of people looking at them compared with when they were shown pictures of people with averted eyes. The researchers concluded that a direct gaze grabs participants' attention and diverts their attentional resources from a given task. Other studies have found that more functions, ranging from our spatial cognition to language processing abilities, are similarly taxed by a watchful stare.

Surveillance, then, seems to shift our social processing into high gear. "The conclusion would be that being watched drives this hardwired survival mechanism into overdrive," Seymour says. "You're in fight-or-flight mode, which is taxing on the brain."

This constant surveillance could tax cognition in ways that we don't yet understand. The faculties compromised by surveillance "are those that allow us to focus on what we're doing: attention, working memory, and so on," Belletier says. "If these processes are taxed by being monitored, you'd expect deteriorating capacity to concentrate." This body of research suggests that bringing more surveillance into workplaces — usually an attempt to boost productivity — could actually be counterproductive. It also suggests that online testing environments, where students are watched through webcams by human proctors or AI, could lead to lower performance.

The parallel between this Panopticon and Tribe's description of the "sword of Damocles" police state is clear enough:

In the Panopticon, inmates always know a guard could be watching but never if one truly is. This is the key to the prison's power, argued French philosopher Michel Foucault: it becomes omniscient and internalized by the prisoners themselves. This may be why Bentham's prison feels so relevant in our digital age of algorithms, data brokers and social media, when we frequently feel watched — but we don't know who is watching.

And it's worth considering the distinction between such surveillance being used by a government for "good behavior", or political and moral control, and whether it's being used by corporations for predictive consumer control, and whether this difference really even matters at all.  And obviously there's overlap, where corporations wish to profit off of aiding such government efforts, and to bring it all back to the A.I. facial recognition company which I used to kick off this train of thought, Clearview A.I., there just happens to be this helpful article also linked on that Live Science site:

As I digested what Clearview claimed it could do, I thought back to a federal workshop I'd attended years earlier in Washington, D.C., where industry representatives, government officials, and privacy advocates had sat down to hammer out the rules of the road.

The one thing they all agreed on was that no one should roll out an application to identify strangers. It was too dangerous, they said. A weirdo at a bar could snap your photo and within seconds know who your friends were and where you lived. It could be used to identify anti-government protesters or women who walked into Planned Parenthood clinics. It would be a weapon for harassment and intimidation. Accurate facial recognition, on the scale of hundreds of millions or billions of people, was the third rail of the technology. And now Clearview, an unknown player in the field, claimed to have built it.....

We tend to believe that computers have almost magical powers, that they can figure out the solution to any problem and, with enough data, eventually solve it better than humans can. So investors, customers, and the public can be tricked by outrageous claims and some digital sleight of hand by companies that aspire to do something great but aren't quite there yet....

Concerns about facial recognition had been building for decades. And now the nebulous bogeyman had finally found its form: a small company with mysterious founders and an unfathomably large database. And none of the millions of people who made up that database had given their consent. Clearview AI represents our worst fears, but it also offers, at long last, the opportunity to confront them.

Hopefully, we - as a society - will begin to start confronting all of these forms of psychological/behavioral coercive technologies as well, but one of the main impediments to this has been an organized attempt (either usually from both government and corporate voices who have an invested interest in surveillance) to discourage our respect for "privacy" as a social value.  The above effort to claim that less privacy promotes "good behavior" is one such campaign.  The increasing effort to make maintaining one's privacy ever more of an inconvenience (which is a major factor designed into modern technological coercion) gives a false sense among the consumers that such a choice is voluntary.  And finally the application of shame: "Do you have something to hide?", the implication that only the "sinners" would even need privacy in the first place.  Or the similar accusatory invocation of paranoia: "Why do you think you're so special that your privacy is so valuable?"  (Maybe ask these corporations why it is so valuable for them to feel entitled to my private data?)

But as we can already begin to see, and I feel will continue to understand - and yes I am even so intuitively convinced - such erosion of privacy, both as a matter of practice and as a moral value, entails some profound psychogical changes which we would be well to start asking ourselves whether or not are healthy or even truly desirable.

I mentioned this aspect over a decade ago, writing about the NSA warrentless surveillance scandal, on the intimate value of privacy:

Jinnistan wrote:

Personal privacy has a number of benefits that deserve to be championed. Perhaps most importantly, emotional abstracts such as "intimacy" and "trust" become meaningless without it. If everyone is automatically privy to everyone else's private details, then it no longer requires a confidential bond of trust to allow another person into one's intimate sphere. When a friend reveals a very personal aspect of their life, it carries a valuable emotional weight, precisely because that person has the choice to not divulge their intimacy. These choices of who we allow to be "close" to us become irrelevent when these disclosures become involuntary. To lose the intrinsic exchange of each other's intimacy as a voluntary act of affection and discretion is a high price to pay for a timid, though obedient, society.

I haven't even wanted to touch on this whole Qatar jet plane business because....what the fuck can I add?  Nobody's getting fooled here.  Either you like the grift or you don't.

But a couple of interesting (ie irritating) points from Trump's recent interview with FOX News' Brett Baier (who - lowbar - is at least pushing a little).  Let's just do away with the obvious bullshit, "it's not a gift for Trump but for America, kinda like the Statue of Liberty, by god".  Never mind that Trump will get to keep the plane after he leaves office, commissioned (*wink*) to his presidential library.  Which, who knows?, maybe means he'll be parking it in one of his bathrooms?  He uses the Reagan library receiving a previously decommissioned Air Force One plane as a justifying example, but (crucially) Reagan did not fly that plane after he left office.  That plane served seven presidents before being decommissioned.  But the entire reason for why Trump feels that having this spanking new plane is even neccessary in the first place, is that, quoting the right-leaning Hill: "he is uncomfortable with the image of the U.S. having a plane that isn’t as 'impressive' as the ones other world leaders use".  So...if the plane is that new and impressive, then why would it have to be decommissioned within just four years?  Trump assures, of the brand new Boeing-commissioned Air Force One planes already being built which he seems incapable of waiting for, "They should be able to knock them off in no time".  Great!  So....what's the fucking urgency?  Exactly?  (And, sure, Boeing may have a spotty track record of recent....which must be why Qatar just secured a deal for 160 brand new Boeing planes in receipt?)

So long as we can acknowledge the utter lack of necessity for this new plane, why else would Trump need it so badly as to bypass all of the security issues involved?  It couldn't be because of 'quid pro quo'' because, as it's claimed, the Qataris have asked for nothing in return!  Slam!  Case closed.  Except Trump himself said that the Qataris "made a gift to help somebody that has helped them".  Hm!  Interesting.  What specific kind of help are talking about???  So (in terms of SCOTUS-aided corruption), is this more of a gratuity than a bribe?  Is that what we're going with now?

I suppose I need to address the issue surrounding the recent White House ambush of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa about what is and isn't factual about the so-called "white genocide" taking place in South Africa.  Suffice it to say that "white genocide" is definitely, absolutely not something that is happening in South Africa (or anywhere?).

But it may be worth explaining, for those who may be easily confused about anything involving an issue that does not conform to an easy B&W, either/or type of paradigm, that most of these worries of white genocide that I can determine seem to be based around the South African political entity known as the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by some cunt named Julius Melema.  Make no mistake, this organization, as well as Melema himself, are totally abhorrent to any good sense.  Outside of their stated preference for white genocide in South Africa, they also align themselves with Hamas, with Putin in his invasion of Ukraine, and with China because the EFF is a fundamental Marxist/Leninist orgainistion who sees the CCP as the "torch-bearer for all Marxist–Leninist formations in the world".

As alarming as this is, and should be, here's some sobriety on the issue: the EFF has a very marginal influence on contemporary South African policy., even, say, inconsequential.  In the last general election in South Africa, the EFF managed about an average of 13%, reaching only a high of 17% in one of the country's nine provinces.  Seen here:





Simply stated, the EFF is an atrocious and racially hateful organization, but they are in no way in any capacity in a position to dictate or formulate South African domestic policy.  So using the platforms of this highly marginal group is extremely misleading as an example of the popular political will of the nation.  And finally, as a debunk of claims of disproportionate murder rates in the country, allegedly at the expense of white farmers, here's the actual figures showing a far more equitable and distributed victimhood.

We should be alarmed by some of these trends in this country, but we should also maybe be hesitant about feeding into the narratives from the same kinds of folks (Musk, Vance, etc) who have proven to be more ethnocentric in their own disingenuous racial provocations.