Their board has Microsoft and marketing execs and a venture capitalist and their advisory council has someone from the RNC at the top, hard pass

e;

I feel like most people can find something to agree on here

Do you think a political organization might misrepresent what they’re about as a means to gain more power? Because that’s happened, like, several times in human history

It should be because, like a lot of Biden policies, the on paper win is actually shoveling tons of taxpayer money to the individuals and institutions who have caused the underlying problem he claims to be solving (see also; basically everything Biden has done with police accountability), money fossil fuel companies are going to plow right into lobbying and PR work to further ensure nobody can have a rational conversation about what our country is doing, but, yeah, you’re probably right that for the vast majority of voters it’s just that they don’t see it in their daily lives at all

It’d be great if it was a critique of our intellectual property laws and culture of paywalls and platform-anchored content, but I doubt the NYT would publish anything like that

Has there ever been this big of a decision dump at the end of a term before? And how does what decision get put out when get decided anyway?

Nice, thank you!

I’m shocked the Institute for Justice thinks the Supreme Court ruling in favor of their client is a “VICTORY,” shocked

Like, it might be a good ruling if only because Thomas is dissenting, but I wouldn’t take this website’s word for it alone

That sounds like a good principle in the abstract, and that Nieves v Bartlett case was a pile of turds that basically made it impossible to argue an arrest was ever retaliatory, but I don’t look forward to how our judges are going to actually interpret and apply this. The difference between intending to prosecute legitimate criminal behavior and intending to punish someone for political behavior is fuzzy as hell and gives judges all sorts of room to shield their friends from consequences while ensuring people they don’t like can still be punished for their speech.

Like, it’s no coincidence that it took a libertarian law firm representing a couple of seventy year old women who were trying to get a younger city manager fired to get the justices to take a second look at retaliation doctrines.

If your boss ordered you to stay late at work but said “oh, if there’s an emergency you can leave,” I’d say you were stuck at work

Actually, from everything I’ve read it doesn’t seem Cerf actually had a gun. The three students who confronted him claimed he said he had a gun and reached for his waistband, but I haven’t seen anything saying a firearm was actually recovered from the scene.

Yeah, the fact that they’re requiring people to be married by yesterday and to have been hiding out in the US for at least a decade before they can even apply to this program (and they’re still saying they’re doing a case by case review of applications, so not even everyone who meets the requirement will get it) is fucking nuts. It’s like they realized they need to do something to win back all the people they pissed off with Biden’s attacks on migrants and asylum seekers recently but this nonsense is the best they can do because they live in mortal terror of the idea that they might accidentally give an undeserving brown person legal rights.

Fuck the NYT for so many reasons, but they’d be lying to their readers if they weren’t shitting on Biden

Why did he sweep one of Trump’s turds under the rug and leave it for Reuters to clean up?

NATOpedia

About that source,

The Grayzone has downplayed or denied the Chinese government’s human rights abuses against Uyghurs, published conspiracy theories about Xinjiang, Syria, and other regions, and published disinformation about Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which some have described as pro-Russian propaganda. Grayzone staff Blumenthal and Aaron Maté acted as briefers on behalf of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations at UN meetings organized by Russia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grayzone?wprov=sfla1

First off, you should really source what you’re talking about, secondly it does seem to be entirely irrelevant to this story, but third, unlike the information DOD contractors were spreading in this story, that does appear to be a more or less accurate summary of what happened there.

I did link the article, it’s the top level link of this whole post. Might be an app or instance issue keeping some people from seeing it I guess, so I’ll add it to the body of this post when I get a chance.

Second,

and then he publicly banned the practice

[Italicization added]

That’s incorrect, the public did not know about this program until Reuters reported on it here (which is why this is news). His administration privately told them to stop this specific campaign, but

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

and

Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”

And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.

So, the accounts were still active and the posts were still visible until Reuters got involved, and the people who greenlit what should have been an obviously bad idea (anti-vaccine propaganda efforts) are continuing to work for our government.

Stopping anti-vaccine propaganda efforts was a good thing, but it was the absolute least Biden could do and wholly insufficient. These posts/accounts should have been publicly disowned and discredited, and the people responsible for them should have been prohibited from doing any further work for the US. Not doing so is a massive blow to our international credibility, which is like the last fucking thing democracy needs right now.

e; part of what I originally wrote seemed pretty irrelevant on second thought, so I deleted it to make it a bit less of a wall of text, but originally in between “Second,” and “>and then he etc.” was

the Biden Admin was made aware of this not long after he entered office

That’s not totally clear (party nominees start getting briefed on some classified things before the election to get them up to speed), but does seem to be the case given what we know now.

[Indent added for clarity]

Attention should have been drawn to this. Beyond the whole “America should practice what it preaches to every other country” thing, how is someone who was exposed to our disinformation and believed it going to find out it was false if we just try to memory-hole the whole thing?

They were only talkative after the Reuters reporters showed up with evidence of their bad behavior, so it’s not like we’re dealing with whistleblowers here. Fair point that military types tend to say a lot of bullshit and don’t like to answer questions, though, which is why what really ought to happen here is a public Congressional hearing with subpoenas that force them to answer questions with their names attached to their statements. We need to know who the people who approved and implemented this were so we can make sure their careers with our military are over (or that they’re never contracted for work by our military ever again).

Seems to me like another example of shithead moderate Dems covering up for psychopathic Republicans and normalizing their shittiest policies by coming up with a bit more paperwork instead of tearing them out root and branch like most Dem voters would want them to (see also; Biden continuing Trump’s attacks on asylum and migration, Obama continuing Bush’s drone war, Clinton continuing Reagan and Bush’s attacks on welfare programs, etc.).

I would be surprised if price wasn’t the only factor and they’re just talking about employees’ health for PR reasons

Reuters doesn’t play nice with most archiving sites, but screenshots get the job done

Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7

Except the article also notes that Twitter didn’t remove the accounts and their posts until Reuters told them about it, presumably because the Department of Defense never told Twitter or anyone else about this program.

Biden should have informed the public about this bad behavior, publicly condemned it, and publicly held the people behind it accountable. It shouldn’t have taken investigative journalists digging quotes out of nameless sources to bring this to light if the administration were serious about preventing the spread of misinformation and not just trying to sweep an obviously dumb idea under the rug before it could blow up in their faces.

e; also, the article concludes

The Pentagon’s audit concluded that the military’s primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with direct knowledge of the review. The review also found that military leaders didn’t maintain enough control over its psyop contractors, the person said.

A spokesperson for General Dynamics IT declined to comment.

Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”

And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.

He had been jailed for 49 years before an Allegheny County judge granted his request for compassionate release last month.

Bozeman had been on life support. He had a back injury that had been misdiagnosed for several years, according to his lawyer, Dolly Prabhu, and he required extensive medical care after he became paralyzed from the chest down after surgery.

An aide to Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala, whose office had opposed the release, said they had no comment on Bozeman’s death.

“You’re asking if we want to make a statement about the paralyzed prisoner who said he was innocent and said he got paralyzed by substandard prison medical care, and who we just argued wasn’t really that sick, who just died? … No.”