Yeah at this point, I am more than confident that it’s pretty safe to just lump every loyalist still following orders being given from the war criminals (who are the face of being) in charge of the government under the shared title of secret police.

If the CIA and plenty of other powerful conservatives didn’t want Trump to be doing the things he’s doing, he wouldn’t be sitting in the fucking white house right now taking a shit on the constitution.

Ok, thanks for the update! We will cancel the BNB reservation we had waiting for you.

To be clear, this doesn’t change how we feel about you, carol.

With the added bonus of keeping track of the public response to videos of children crying when being separated from their parents?

And using AI to build psychological profiles in order to continue to target them with a tailored algorithm?

Earlier this year, The Intercept wrote about surveillance contractors sought by ICE, who would be expected to perform algorithm- and AI-aided deep dives into social media users’ post histories, searching for, among other things, “proclivity for violence,” which could include “empathy with a group which has violent tendencies,” among other things. Hope you haven’t expressed “empathy” at any point for any group with “violent tendencies,” right? How does it feel to know that you’d be at the mercy of a freelance surveillance contractor’s mastery of “social and behavioral sciences” and “psychological profiles,” according to ICE’s statement of objectives?

How fucking creepy is it to think about this psychological manipulation pre-crime bullshit and take into account that one of the briefings released yesterday took note of people in New Orleans seeming especially disturbed by videos with the sound of crying children.

Officials track public sentiment, noting negative impact of ‘videos with sounds of children crying’ as parents arrested

It seems very unlikely this is being noted in order to answer questions like “How do we tone it down a bit and keep things from boiling over?”

Imo (and obviously feel free to take that with a grain of salt since I’m totally “overly-paranoid” about how evil these people are and the levels they would stoop to) it seems more likely this is to answer a question of “How do we use psychological warfare against the American people and send them closer to their breaking point?”

I’m like 3 episodes in so far and have had a hard time not binging it all at once.

Ukraine’s defense relies increasingly on huge volumes of civilian data stored on cloud platforms. An adversary’s military may supply their targeting algorithm with an individual’s location, health, and online behavior. Military actors regularly mine, analyze, and repurpose social media posts.

It is not clear, however, that the deep learning systems integral to some of these new weapons can overcome the fog of war. These systems treat all data as objective representations of reality, when in fact information drawn from social media platforms is shaped by users’ emotional and cognitive experiences in ways that can skew its utility for wartime intelligence. The “learned knowledge” generated by analytic systems is probabilistic, not causal—leading to the risk that algorithms are “enforc[ing] their version of ‘reality’ from patterns and probabilities derived from data.”

These venture-backed firms view contemporary conflicts as live testing grounds.

Global digital platforms such as TikTok and Telegram illustrate the wider environment in which these dependencies are forming. Though neither company develops military technologies, both shape the information environment surrounding war. TikTok’s recommendation algorithm influences how audiences perceive the conflict in Ukraine, shaping global narratives and public opinion. Yet its complex ownership structure, rooted in Chinese parent company ByteDance and entangled with global venture capital, has sparked geopolitical concern. … These concerns highlight how platforms created for civilian use can also become entangled in the political and informational dimensions of war.

The overlapping interests of finance capital and private technology corporations transcend national borders, creating forms of influence that do not fit neatly into binary friend-or-enemy distinctions. ByteDance’s global investment network, spanning Chinese state-linked entities, American private equity funds, and international investors, illustrates this transnational ownership model. It complicates national regulatory and security responses, as policymakers must ask not merely who owns a given platform, but who controls the data, infrastructure, and decisionmaking power that states increasingly depend on.

This illustrates a deeper shift in the relationship between the market and the military. The problem is not that defense firms are publicly traded—Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics have been for decades—but that contemporary defense-tech companies retain proprietary control over data-driven systems central to military operations. Their technologies are not merely delivered to the state; the companies are embedded in the decisionmaking architecture of warfare. When a firm’s market value depends on its perceived wartime success, its incentives may diverge from those of the state it ostensibly serves. This intertwining of commercial strategy, military dependency, and investor confidence represents a new kind of vulnerability for states.

What is at stake, beyond the conflict itself, is the nature of state sovereignty. The ability of states to govern, defend, and act independently is increasingly mediated by private technology firms and global finance. This is not entirely new. States have long relied on private contractors, but the kind of dependency has changed. Unlike traditional arms manufacturers, today’s defense-tech firms control the digital platforms, data flows, and algorithmic systems that underpin military decisionmaking. At the same time, civilian platforms like Telegram and TikTok shape the informational terrain of conflict, influencing how wars are perceived and fought.

I just want to make sure I’m understanding this.

•You have companies like Meta (just an example) working for both sides of a conflict via government contract, but not necessarily bound to either side of a conflict because of global venture capital/transnational ownership model

•We know Facebook/Meta has been intentionally manipulating the emotions of social media users for over a decade now

•That social media data is then collected and used to train military platforms, which may be directly or indirectly linked to the social media company

•These companies very likely have an incentive to create an endless war (and endless profits for themselves) by manipulating the emotions and behavior of social media users, knowing that data will be used to train military platforms

Basically, a private tech company could manipulate data to give one side of a conflict an advantage over the other, but it could also intentionally pit adversaries against each other in an endless loop by manipulating social media content, and by extension, manipulating the military platforms being trained.

A company could potentially profit from both sides of a conflict it’s manipulating because the states have turned to it and other big tech companies to help them reach “victory” in the endless conflict the company helped create. Correct?

I mean they want a one government, they just want to be the ones in charge of that one government.

The entire argument is that it’s somehow safer bc it’s a private corporation/business, and not the government. Except it’s a private monopoly protected and contracted by the fucking government!

The only way that argument could possibly make the slightest bit of sense would be in an imaginary world where there was legitimate competition between other corporations (but if that was the case corporations probably wouldn’t exist) and the American people actually had some say in which private company got government contracts.

Instead, government officials (who are allegedly the reason we have to turn to private businesses bc we can’t trust the government) are buying stock in private companies, and then handing government contracts to the fucking private companies where they own stock.

Creepy ass conservatives: Stay asleep so I can keep doing stuff to you while you’re unaware.

Remember when he did that Nazi salute, and we kept hearing it totally wasn’t a Nazi salute, and the Trump administration kept saying that we were all just looking for imaginary things to be outraged over?

Then why is he having Grok rewrite Wiki and calling Hitler the Führer, Bart?

Not sure if you heard but according to the CEO of Palantir in an interview he gave a few weeks ago, there is now “woke left” and “woke right.”

Basically anybody on the right who wakes up and smells the bullshit in the narrative is “woke.” Like if you believe in those “crazy conspiracy theories” that say Palantir is up to some evil villain shit, you’re woke.

It’s the size of the box not the fact that there’s no information about the candidates jfc

The size of the text for the names of the candidates is smaller than even the text of the small individual Yes/No boxes for the propositions.

It’s not that they’re less important. These were very important propositions, but normally the election and proposition boxes are the same size.

This was an election where an incumbent candidate from a local political family had already done some things that seemed to undermine getting people to vote in the election.

There is a common misconception in Louisiana that if you have a felony conviction that you cannot vote – this is wrong (check out if you are eligible). Mr. Lombard promised to update the Clerk of Court’s website with the eligibility criteria a potential voter must meet if they have a felony conviction. As of today, the Clerk’s Website fails to share this essential voting information. This is not a great look for the City’s Chief Election Officer.

Up until September 5, 2025, under Mr. Lombard’s leadership, the Clerk of Court’s website listed wrong dates for the next election, and listed the wrong voter registration deadlines.

It’s either coincidental incompetence of the guy up for re-election, or more examples of the much bigger problem Louisiana has historically had when it comes to undermining the democratic process.

Nobody is (usually) standing at polling booths armed in order to intimidate people, but can you really call these passive aggressive attempts to test the boundaries and undermine equal participation “respect” for democracy?

I think it says a lot that they keep bothering with this passive aggressive shit. Why bother trying to stack the deck in your favor if you truly didn’t need to worry about how it’s stacked?

Democracy is trapped under the boot of oligarchy and corruption, but I don’t believe it’s quite dead yet. Looks like Duncan won by ~67%

Calvin Duncan projected to win hotly contested criminal court clerk race against Darren Lombard

Haven’t you heard? Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race.

Trump’s current Science Advisor (who was selected by Peter Thiel) gave an interview back in 2019 where he kept insisting the U.S. was at a disadvantage to China in the AI race bc we didn’t have access to the level of surveillance data China had (which it turns out, is possible thanks to a surveillance system we fucking created and sold to them). He also used this point to argue against any regulations for facial recognition tech in the U.S. because again, it would put us at a disadvantage.

But don’t worry, because the goal is to have an authoritarian surveillance state with “baked in American values,” so we won’t have to worry about ending up like China did with the surveillance tools we fucking sold them.

I’m not sure what values he’s claiming will be somehow baked into it (because again, we created it and sold it to China). My mind conjures up a scenario of automatic weapons and a speaker playing a screeching bald eagle, but maybe we’ll get some star spangled banner thrown in there too.

Spoken like somebody with the sloping brow of a common criminal.

Beneath his fiery defense of Palantir, I sense that Karp yearns to be understood. He noted that all anyone wants to talk to him about is ICE, Israel, and Ukraine.

Please understand I’m so much more than the genocides and oppression I enable and profit from 😢

Could magnets be the dark(er?) gipper’s jelly beans?

Beyond controversy around the Texas self-managed abortion case, Flock has had to respond to evidence that local law enforcement agencies have used their data to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It now has offered assurances that jurisdictions proactively banning data sharing related to immigration status or abortion seeking will be excluded from national searches, as long as the local yahoo with tactical undershorts is dumb enough to put “ICE” or “abortion” in the required reason field.

But it turns out that once you’ve built a massive distributed surveillance network, it’s hard to rein in its use. The state of Washington explicitly bans sharing data or equipment with federal officers for the purpose of immigration enforcement, yet the University of Washington found dozens of examples of exactly that. Some local departments explicitly opened up their Flock data to the feds despite the state law; others had their information siphoned off without their knowledge via an unspecified technological error.

The university study and an investigation by 404 Media found another category of information sharing that also subverted state attempts to fend off immigration overreach: federal officers just asking really nice if the local guy could run a search on their behalf and the local guy happened to use “ICE” or “ICE warrant” or “illegal immigration” in the local search (tactical undies recognizes tactical undies, you know?). Worth noting: A local officer well informed about jurisdictional data-sharing limitations would just not enter “ICE” as the reason for the search, and we have no idea how many of those cannier cops there are.

We have this built in safety net that makes every user list the reason they accessed the data.

Reason for search: Not ICE

Checks out.

Already terrified? It gets worse: Flock is turning over more and more of its monitoring to AI, a feature that Flock (and the entire technology-media industrial complex) sells as a neutral efficiency. But the problem with AI is how deeply human it really is—trained on biased data, it can only replicate and amplify what it already knows. Misogyny and white supremacy are built into surveillance DNA, and using it to search for women seeking abortions or any other suspected “criminal” can only make the echo chamber more intense.

This month, an AI-powered security system (not Flock, surprisingly) tossed out an alarm to a school resource officer, and he called the police to the scene of a Black teenager eating chips. The teen described “eight cop cars that came pulling up to us [and] they started walking toward me with guns.” You can fault the resource officer for not clocking the chip bag; at least we know the point of failure.

I agree, the potential for what AI could be is extraordinary.

The mess that the broligarchs/“technocratic elite” have created in the U.S. by insisting they be handed full control and be allowed to treat the entire country like their personal playground, has only proven exactly why oversight and regulations should exist and why monopolies shouldn’t.