On the topic of artificial intelligence, like far too many topics these days, it seems that the vast majority of opinions out there are highly polarized. Either you’re all about making fun of AI not living up to the hype surrounding it, and there are admittedly a zillion examples of this, or you’re an AI “doomer”, believing that AI is so powerful that it’s a threat to all of our jobs, and potentially to our very existence. The latter version of that can get really, really dangerous and isn’t to be taken lightly.

Stratified opinions also exist in smaller, more focused spaces when it comes to use of AI. Take the video game industry, for example. In many cases, gamers learn about the use of AI in a game or its promotional materials and lose their minds over it. They will often tell you they’re angry because of the “slop” that AI produces and is not found and corrected by the humans overseeing it… but that doesn’t tell the full story. Some just have a knee-jerk response to the use of AI at all and rail against it. Others, including industry insiders, see AI as no big deal; just another tool in a game developer’s tool belt, helping to do things faster than could be done before. That too isn’t the entire story; certainly there will be some job loss or lack of job expansion associated with the use of AI as a tool.

Somewhere in the middle is likely the correct answer. And what developer Supertrick has done in being transparent about the use of AI in Let It Die: Inferno is something of an interesting trial balloon for gauging public sentiment. PC Gamer tells the story of how an AI disclosure notice got added to the game’s Steam page, noting that voices, graphics, and music were all generated within the game in some part by AI. The notice is completely without nuance or detail, leading to a fairly wide backlash from the public.

No one liked that, and in response to no one liking that, Supertrick has come out with a news post to clarify exactly what materials in the game have AI’s tendrils around them. Fair’s fair: it’s a pretty limited pool of stuff. So limited, in fact, that it makes me wonder why use AI for it in the first place.

Supertrick attempted to explain why. The use of AI generated assets breaks down mostly like this:

1. Graphics/art: AI generated basic images based entirely on human-generated concept art and text and human beings then used those basic images as starting points, fleshing them out with further art over the top of them. Most of the assets in question here are background images for the settings of the game.
2. Voice: AI was used for only three characters, none of which were human characters. One character was itself an fictional AI machine and the developers used an AI for its voice because they thought that just made sense and provided some realism. The other two characters were also non-human lifeforms, and so the developer used AI voices following that same logic, to make them sound not-human.
3. Music: Exactly one track was generated using AI, though another AI editor was involved in editing some of the other tracks on a minimal basis.

And that’s it. Are the explanations above all that good? Nah, not all of them, in my opinion. Actors have been portraying computers, robots, and even AI for many years. Successfully in many cases, I would say. Even iconically at times. But using AI to create some base images and then layering human expression on top of them to create a final product? That seems perfectly reasonable to me. As does the use of AI for some music creation and editing in some specific uses.

Overall, the use here isn’t extensive, though, nor particularly crazy. And I very much like that Supertrick is going for a transparency play with this. The public’s reaction to that transparency is going to be very, very interesting. Even if you don’t like Supertrick’s use of AI as outlined above, it’s not extensive and that use certainly hasn’t done away with tens or hundreds of jobs. Continued public backlash would come off as kind of silly, I think.

Though the games overall reception isn’t particularly helpful, either.

Regardless, Let It Die: Inferno released yesterday, and so far has met a rocky reception. At the time of writing, the game has a Mostly Negative user-review score on Steam, with only 39% positive reviews.

Scanning those reviews, there doesn’t seem to be a ton in there about AI usage. So perhaps the backlash has moved on to the game just not being very good.

In late September, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his government’s plans to introduce a new digital ID scheme in the country to take effect before the end of the Parliament (no later than August 2029). The scheme will, according to the Prime Minister, “cut the faff” in proving people’s identities by creating a virtual ID on personal devices with information like people’s name, date of birth, nationality or residency status, and photo to verify their right to live and work in the country. 

This is the latest example of a government creating a new digital system that is fundamentally incompatible with a privacy-protecting and human rights-defending democracy. This past year alone, we’ve seen federal agencies across the United States explore digital IDs to prevent fraud, the Transportation Security Administration accepting “Digital passport IDs” in Android, and states contracting with mobile driver’s license providers (mDL). And as we’ve said many times, digital ID is not for everyone and policymakers should ensure better access for people with or without a digital ID. 

But instead, the UK is pushing forward with its plans to rollout digital ID in the country. Here’s three reasons why those policymakers have it wrong. 

Mission Creep 

In his initial announcement, Starmer stated: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.” Since then, the government has been forced to clarify those remarks: digital ID will be mandatory to prove the right to work, and will only take effect after the scheme’s proposed introduction in 2028, rather than retrospectively. 

The government has also confirmed that digital ID will not be required for pensioners, students, and those not seeking employment, and will also not be mandatory for accessing medical services, such as visiting hospitals. But as civil society organizations are warning, it’s possible that the required use of digital ID will not end here. Once this data is collected and stored, it provides a multitude of opportunities for government agencies to expand the scenarios where they demand that you prove your identity before entering physical and digital spaces or accessing goods and services. 

The government may also be able to request information from workplaces on who is registering for employment at that location, or collaborate with banks to aggregate different data points to determine who is self-employed or not registered to work. It potentially leads to situations where state authorities can treat the entire population with suspicion of not belonging, and would shift the power dynamics even further towards government control over our freedom of movement and association. 

And this is not the first time that the UK has attempted to introduce digital ID: politicians previously proposed similar schemes intended to control the spread of COVID-19, limit immigration, and fight terrorism. In a country increasing the deployment of other surveillance technologies like face recognition technology, this raises additional concerns about how digital ID could lead to new divisions and inequalities based on the data obtained by the system. 

These concerns compound the underlying narrative that digital ID is being introduced to curb illegal immigration to the UK: that digital ID would make it harder for people without residency status to work in the country because it would lower the possibility that anyone could borrow or steal the identity of another. Not only is there little evidence to prove that digital ID will limit illegal immigration, but checks on the right to work in the UK already exist. This is nothing more than inflammatory and misleading; Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey noted this would do “next to nothing to tackle channel crossings.”

Inclusivity is Not Inevitable, But Exclusion Is 

While the government announced that their digital ID scheme will be inclusive enough to work for those without access to a passport, reliable internet, or a personal smartphone, as we’ve been saying for years, digital ID leaves vulnerable and marginalized people not only out of the debate and ultimately out of the society that these governments want to build. We remain concerned about the potential for digital identification to exacerbate existing social inequalities, particularly for those with reduced access to digital services or people seeking asylum. 

The UK government has said a public consultation will be launched later this year to explore alternatives, such as physical documentation or in-person support for the homeless and older people; but it’s short-sighted to think that these alternatives are viable or functional in the long term. For example, UK organization Big Brother Watch reported that about only 20% of Universal Credit applicants can use online ID verification methods. 

These individuals should not be an afterthought that are attached to the end of the announcement for further review. It is essential that if a tool does not work for those without access to the array of essentials, such as the internet or the physical ID, then it should not exist.

Digital ID schemes also exacerbate other inequalities in society, such as abusers who will be able to prevent others from getting jobs or proving other statuses by denying access to their ID. In the same way, the scope of digital ID may be expanded and people could be forced to prove their identities to different government agencies and officials, which may raise issues of institutional discrimination when phones may not load, or when the Home Office has incorrect information on an individual. This is not an unrealistic scenario considering the frequency of internet connectivity issues, or circumstances like passports and other documentation expiring.

Attacks on Privacy and Surveillance 

Digital ID systems expand the number of entities that may access personal information and consequently use it to track and surveil. The UK government has nodded to this threat. Starmer stated that the technology would “absolutely have very strong encryption” and wouldn’t be used as a surveillance tool. Moreover, junior Cabinet Office Minister Josh Simons told Parliament that “data associated with the digital ID system will be held and kept safe in secure cloud environments hosted in the United Kingdom” and that “the government will work closely with expert stakeholders to make the programme effective, secure and inclusive.” 

But if digital ID is needed to verify people’s identities multiple times per day or week, ensuring end-to-encryption is the bare minimum the government should require. Unlike sharing a National Insurance Number, a digital ID will show an array of personal information that would otherwise not be available or exchanged. 

This would create a rich environment for hackers or hostile agencies to obtain swathes of personal information on those based in the UK. And if previous schemes in the country are anything to go by, the government’s ability to handle giant databases is questionable. Notably, the eVisa’s multitude of failures last year illustrated the harms that digital IDs can bring, with issues like government system failures and internet outages leading to people being detained, losing their jobs, or being made homeless. Checking someone’s identity against a database in real-time requires a host of online and offline factors to work, and the UK is yet to take the structural steps required to remedying this.

Moreover, we know that the Cabinet Office and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology will be involved in the delivery of digital ID and are clients of U.S.-based tech vendors, specifically Amazon Web Services (AWS). The UK government has spent millions on AWS (and Microsoft) cloud services in recent years, and the One Government Value Agreement (OGVA)—first introduced in 2020 and of which provides discounts for cloud services by contracting with the UK government and public sector organizations as a single client—is still active. It is essential that any data collected is not stored or shared with third parties, including through cloud agreements with companies outside the UK.

And even if the UK government published comprehensive plans to ensure data minimization in its digital ID, we will still strongly oppose any national ID scheme. Any identification issued by the government with a centralized database is a power imbalance that can only be enhanced with digital ID, and both the public and civil society organizations in the country are against this.

Ways Forward

Digital ID regimes strip privacy from everyone and further marginalize those seeking asylum or undocumented people. They are pursued as a technological solution to offline problems but instead allow the state to determine what you can access, not just verify who you are, by functioning as a key to opening—or closing—doors to essential services and experiences. 

We cannot base our human rights on the government’s mere promise to uphold them. On December 8th, politicians in the country will be debating a petition that reached almost 3 million signatories rejecting mandatory digital ID. If you’re based in the UK, you can contact your MP (external campaign links) to oppose the plans for a digital ID system. 

The case for digital identification has not been made. The UK government must listen to people in the country and say no to digital ID.

Originally published to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

When Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner were murdered Sunday evening—allegedly by their son, who was arrested—you might (had you been living in another time with a different President) have expected the President of the United States to either stay silent or offer condolences.

Instead, Donald Trump saw an opportunity to demonstrate to the world—yet again—how truly depraved and obsessed he is.

That’s Trump on Truth Social saying:

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!

Read that again. The President of the United States is claiming—with zero evidence—that Reiner’s murder happened “due to the anger he caused others” through his criticism of Trump. He’s framing political speech against Trump as something that drives people “crazy” and justifies violence.

This is the same administration that spent months after Charlie Kirk’s death insisting that even quoting Kirk’s own hateful rhetoric was unacceptable and deserving of cancellation. Pam Bondi threatened to prosecute those who criticized Kirk, claiming it incited violence. There was a flood of think pieces demanding we “turn down the rhetoric” even as MAGA immediately ramped up “the war on the left” in Kirk’s name.

But when someone who spent decades speaking out against fascism—Rob Reiner, beloved for his work on All in the Family and for directing genre-defining films, a key player in legalizing same-sex marriage, someone whose empathy and kindness touched countless lives—is murdered? Trump claims Reiner basically had it coming because his anti-Trump activism drove people “crazy.”

Trump is mad because Reiner has been a loud, consistent, and vocal critic of the President, highlighting the many ways in which Donald Trump is unfit for office. And Trump’s obsession with that criticism is the only thing in this story that’s truly “crazy.”

The message from Trump is clear: criticizing Trump is what causes violence. Supporting Trump justifies it.

And much of the media is just letting it slide by, “reporting the facts” of what Trump said, rather than just how unhinged it is:

Thankfully, at least some in the media are calling out how ridiculous and unhinged this is, but the rush to try to normalize Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous. The underlying point remains the same: Trump just told everyone, from the Oval Office, that a murdered man basically had it coming for criticizing him too much.

Add to this Trump’s pardoning of all the January 6th criminals, the ramping up of violence by ICE and CBP in cities, and the non-stop hateful rhetoric, and Donald Trump is making it clear: violence in support of Donald Trump is noble.

And that’s fucking crazy.

The only consistency with Donald Trump is that if you support Trump, you can be as violent as you want.

The Trump Administration’s murder-in-international-waters program debuted far ahead of its legal rationale. Many people inside the administration were blindsided by this sudden escalation. Those expected to stay on top of these things — military oversight, congressional committees, etc. — found they were even further behind the curve than the late-arriving “justification” for extrajudicial killings of alleged “narco-terrorists” that used to be handled by interdiction efforts that left everyone alive and anything of value (drugs, boats, weapons) in the hands of the US government and its foreign partners.

This was something new and horrible from a regime already known for its awfulness. Even after the belated (and then hastily revised) justification was delivered by the Office of Legal Counsel, it was difficult to see how the US government could justify extrajudicial killings of alleged “terrorists” who were — at worst — simply moving narcotics from point A to point B.

The administration’s bizarre insistence that the mere existence of an international drug trade constituted a deliberate, violent attack on America was further undercut by a lot of inconvenient facts. First of all, most of those being killed had no connection to the top levels of drug cartels. They were merely mules tasked with transporting drugs. In other cases — including the one that involved a double-tap strike (which was actually four strikes) to ensure the survivors clinging to boat wreckage could no longer be referred to as “survivors” — the drugs allegedly being trafficked were headed to midpoints that suggested the narcotics were actually headed to Europe, rather than the United States.

To be clear, this administration doesn’t actually care whether or not it engages in murder or other acts of violence. What it does care about is allowing the killing to continue for as long as possible before the system of checks and balances finally gets around to dialing back the murders a bit.

A recent article from the New York Times gives the game away, even if the lede gets a bit buried. The headline mentions a White House “scramble” to “deal with” people who survived initial extrajudicial killing attempts. In one case, two survivors were rescued by the US military after failing to die during the initial strike. The White House said they should be sent to El Salvador’s torture prison. The State Department — currently headed by Marco Rubio — said this simply wasn’t possible. Both survivors ended up being sent back to their countries of origin.

Two weeks later, another murder attempt failed to murder everyone on the boat, leading to another hasty conference call between the White House, career diplomats, and Defense Department leadership. The ultimate goal was to get rid of these people as quickly as possible, which necessarily involved hasty arrangements made with government officials in their home countries.

The real reason for these hasty talks — and the secrecy surrounding them — is this: The administration definitely doesn’t seem confident that it’s fully justified in ordering military members to engage in actual war crimes; specifically, the murder of people military bylaws make clear they are supposed to be rescuing.

The two attacks discussed above happened nearly two months after the double-tap boat strike that definitely looks like a war crime. But the Trump administration definitely isn’t going to bring back survivors to face justice by charging them and giving them their day in court. If it does that, it might lose everything it likes about murdering people in international waters.

Legal cases in the United States involving survivors would force the administration to present more information to try to back up its rationale for the attacks.

[…]

“From the administration’s point of view, there are good reasons to be averse to bringing survivors to Guantánamo Bay or to the continental United States,” [former State Dept. lawyer Brian Finucane] said.

If the U.S. military brings the survivors to the Navy-run prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, lawyers defending them could file a habeas corpus lawsuit in U.S. federal court questioning whether there really is an armed conflict, for legal purposes, between the United States and cartels. Congress has not authorized the United States to engage in any such conflict.

To use the ever-popular poker parlance, that’s an obvious “tell” — something that indicates the administration has very little confidence in the legal rationale for these extrajudicial killings. If it thought it’s arguments had a very good chance of holding up in court, it wouldn’t be hastily returning “narco-terrorists” to their home countries as quickly and quietly as possible, where they’ll presumably immediately resume their “narco-terrorism.”

That’s also why the first double-tap strike occurred only days into Trump’s undeclared war on alleged drug boats. As far as we know, this hasn’t been repeated, despite everyone who hasn’t already resigned from the Defense Department (or been thrown under the bus by those whose positions are unassailable thanks to their deference to Trump) claiming either ignorance of the double-strike or saying lots of stuff about “saving” the country from being murdered by inanimate fentanyl (or whatever).

Any survivor is just another chance to prove the US government wrong. And if it isn’t immediately clear survivors have somewhere to be hastily dumped, you can probably assume the military will resort to Plan B: mob-style “hits” to make sure these witnesses can’t talk.

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We’ve talked about the Australian social media ban that went into effect last week, how dumb it is, and why it’s already a mess.

But late last week, some additional news broke that makes the whole thing even more grotesque: turns out the campaign pushing hardest for the ban was run by an ad agency that makes gambling ads. The same gambling ads that were facing their own potential ban—until the Australian government decided that, hey, with all the kids kicked off social media, gambling ads can stay.

Really.

That’s the latest in this incredible scoop from the Australian publication Crikey.

The big marketing campaign pushing the under-16 social media ban was called “36 Months”—framed (misleadingly) that way because they claimed that raising the social media age from 13 to 16 was keeping kids offline for an additional 36 months.

But, as Crikey details, the entire 36 Months campaign was actually planned out and created by an ad company named FINCH, which just so happened to also be working on a huge gambling ad campaign for TAB, which is a huge online betting operation in Australia. And, it wasn’t their only such campaign:

FINCH has worked on at least five gambling advertisements since 2017, according to public announcements and trade magazine reporting. Its clients include TAB Australia (a 2023 campaign called “Australia’s national sport is…”), Ladbroke, Sportsbet and CrownBet (now BetEasy).

There was staff overlap, too. Attwells’ LinkedIn lists him as both 36 Months’ managing director and FINCH’s head of communications from May to December 2024. FINCH staff worked on the 36 Months campaign.

Now, add to that the missing piece of the puzzle, which is that Australia had been investigating bans on online gambling ads, but just last month (oh, such perfect timing) it decided not to do that citing the under-16 ban as a key reason why they could leave gambling ads online.

The Murphy inquiry suggested bookmakers were grooming children with ads online, but Labor’s new social media ban on under-16s is viewed as a solution because it would, in principle, limit their exposure to such advertising online.

How very, very convenient.

This is exactly the false sense of security many ban critics warned about. Politicians and parents now think kids are magically “safe,” even though kids are trivially bypassing the ban. Meanwhile, the adults who might have educated those kids about online gambling risks—a problem that heavily targets teenage boys—now assume the government has handled it. Gambling ads stay up, kids stay online, and everyone pretends the problem is solved.

Crikey goes out of its way to say that there’s no proof that FINCH did this on behalf of their many gambling clients, but it does note that FINCH has claimed that it funded the 36 Months campaign mainly by itself, which certainly raises some questions as to why an advertising firm would do that if it didn’t have some other reason to do so.

Incredibly, Crikey notes that part of the 36 Months campaign was to attack anyone who called the social media ban into question by calling them big tech shills, even without any proof:

Spokespeople for 36 Months had previously accused an academic and youth mental health group of being bought off by big tech because of their unpaid roles on boards advising social media platforms on youth safety.

When Crikey asked them what proof they had, citing denials from those they accused, Attwells said he “hadn’t looked into it” but that they’d heard of a trend where technology companies would indirectly fund people to support work that supports “their agenda”.

“The money doesn’t go straight to them,” he said.

Yes: an ad agency funded by gambling clients, running a campaign that benefits those gambling clients, accused critics of being secretly funded by tech companies—without evidence—while claiming indirect funding is how these things work. Such projection.

There’s a famous concept around regulations known as “bootleggers and Baptists,” as a shorthand way of denoting some of the more cynical “strange bedfellows” that team up to get certain regulations in place. The canonical example, of course, being the temperance movement that sought to ban alcohol. Bootleggers (illegal, underground alcohol producers) loved the idea of prohibition, because it would greatly increase demand for their product, for which they could cash in.

But, no one wants to publicly advocate for prohibition on behalf of the bootleggers. So, you find a group to be the public face to present the cooked up moral panic, moralizing argument for the ban: the Baptists. They run around and talk about how damaging alcohol is and how it must be banned for the good of society. It’s just behind the scenes that the bootleggers looking to profit are helping move along the legislation that will do exactly that.

Here we’ve got a textbook case. The gambling industry, facing its own potential ban, appears to have had a hand in funding the moral panic campaign, complete with think-of-the-children rhetoric, that convinced the government to ban kids from social media instead. Now the gambling ads flow freely to an audience the government has declared “protected,” while the actual kids slip past the ban with zero new safeguards in place.

Instead of Bootleggers and Baptists, this time it’s Punters and Parents, or maybe Casinos and Crusaders. Either way it’s a form of regulatory capture hidden behind a silly moral panic.

In the enshittification era, companies rushing to profit off the gold mine of mass commercial surveillance are routinely intent on pushing their luck. Automakers spy on your driving habits (without telling you) to sell that data to insurance companies that raise your rates. Your ISP, phone, and even electrical meter all report on your every movement and choice, often with only middling consent.

So of course this has also now expanded to your toilet. Kohler is under fire now after a researcher discovered that the company’s smart toilet devices record all manner of sensitive data, then don’t do a particularly good job securing that information.

This entirely predictable story is centered around Kohler’s $600 Dekoda toilet attachment, which uses “optical sensors and validated machine-learning algorithms” to deliver “valuable insights into your health and wellness.” Read: it tracks how often you poop, in case you had difficulty with that.

But while Kohler explains this data on your pooping habits is “end to end encrypted,” a researcher named Simon Fondrie-Teitler found that description to be… inaccurate:

“Responses from the company make it clear that—contrary to common understanding of the term—Kohler is able to access data collected by the device and associated application. Additionally, the company states that the data collected by the device and app may be used to train AI models.”

“End-to-end encryption” (E2EE) secures transmitted data so both the recipient and the sender can read it. Ideally, it’s supposed to prevent everybody else, including the developer and host company, from reading it. Kohler’s “end to end encryption” doesn’t do that:

“I thought Kohler might actually have implemented a related data protection method known as “client-side encryption”, used by services like Apple’s iCloud and the password manager 1Password. This technique allows an application to back up a user’s data to the developers servers, or synchronize data between multiple devices owned by a user, without allowing anyone but the user to access the data.

But emails exchanged with Kohler’s privacy contact clarified that the other “end” that can decrypt the data is Kohler themselves: “User data is encrypted at rest, when it’s stored on the user’s mobile phone, toilet attachment, and on our systems.  Data in transit is also encrypted end-to-end, as it travels between the user’s devices and our systems, where it is decrypted and processed to provide our service.”

Why is Kohler pushing its luck here and distorting the definition of end to end encryption? Because it’s not satisfied with charging you $600 for the hardware. It wants in on the cash flow generated by selling data on your every habit to a vast, largely unregulated cabal of dodgy data brokers, who in turn historically have done a piss poor job securing private data from bad actors.

And while your electrical usage, pooping habits, and daily movement habits individually may not seem like much of a threat, this data is often unified under profiles by both corporations and global governments (which refuse to regulate these markets because it allows them to avoid warrants) as part of our ever-expanding mass, hyper-commercialized surveillance state.

Why does the government and an unregulated coalition of global corporations need data on how often you poop in a system with almost zero real world accountability for privacy abuses? Why ask why! Just sit back and enjoy the innovation.

Companies, like Kohler does here, will often try to dodge responsibility for bad choices by also insisting this data is “anonymized,” but that’s always been a gibberish term. Here in the States, it’s the inevitable enshittified outcome of our corrupt inability to pass even basic internet privacy protections, or implement meaningful corporate oversight. So this sort of shitty behavior will only get worse from here.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is drew repeating an important point about how ICE keeps deporting people while blowing off court rulings:

Nothing will change

Until the courts charge some people with contempt and issue some prison time.

In second place, it’s MrWilson with thoughts on the assertion that calling someone a Nazi is not a verifiable statement of fact:

Ironically, I’d actually dispute this. There are indeed a lot of poorly chosen usages of the terms, but they’re not all imprecise and many are verifiable according to several academic definitions.

When I call Trump or Musk a fascist, I’m referencing my knowledge of Eco, Britt, and other standards covered in academia on the subject. We can check off the list of criteria easily. It’s not loose wording. It’s not a substitute for “people I don’t like” or “people I disagree with politically.” Not everyone I disagree with is a fascist. Every fascist is a person I disagree with. If the Hugo Boss fits, then it’s an accurate term.

Ironically people claiming that calling a fascist a fascist is defamation are twisting the meaning of the word defamation to mean “label I don’t like,” rather than “intentionally maliciously untrue label.” And more often, fascists are anti-intellectuals so they don’t even understand what fascism is academically speaking, so they’re not in a position to dispute if the definition is accurate.

Although I wouldn’t say that’s quite the same thing as a “verifiable fact” as distinct from a reasonable and well-supported opinion, it’s a good point and one that’s succinctly summed up by Thad in our first editor’s choice for insightful:

Motherfucker gonna sieg heil and endorse great replacement theory and then get mad when people call him a nazi.

Next, it’s Arianity with a comment about the notion that Rep. Haley Stevens filing articles of impeachment against RFK Jr. is just a way to raise her profile and build voter turnout:

Not only do I not care, this is a good thing and is how representative politics is supposed to work. Doing good things that voters want to raise your profile is literally how politics is supposed to align incentives!

Hopefully it pays off, both because she deserves it and as a reminder to others that actually doing your job comes with benefits. The most remarkable thing has been Dems complete lack of self interest in the face of their constituents begging them to use the limited tools they have.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is n00bdragon with a comment about Greg Abbott’s fears that the release of his communications with Elon Musk would reveal “intimate and embarrassing” exchanges:

Call me old fashioned but the sorts of people that I send “intimate and embarrassing” messages to are pretty much limited to my wife.

Is Mr. Abbott meaning to imply that he and Mr. Musk know each other in the biblical fashion?

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment even more succinctly summing up the points made by MrWilson and Thad about calling someone a Nazi:

If not Nazi, why Nazi shaped?

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from BernardoVerda about a currently popular theory for explaining the state of our culture and the discourse:

Well… “Everyone is 12 now” would explain why more than half of Americans can’t read or write at the 6th grade level.

Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about the EU hitting ExTwitter with a massive fine:

Odds are that $140M is more that what Twitter actually worth right is now.

That’s all for this week, folks!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, the ACLU told congress not to add a terrible copyright bill to the must-pass government funding bill, Senator Tillis was trying to slide a dangerous felony streaming bill in as well (the details of which showed it was a weird gift to Hollywood at the expense of taxpayers), and Trump was doubling down again on his threat to veto the NDAA if it didn’t include a repeal of Section 230 (among other things). Meanwhile, as a parting shot on her way out of congress, Tulsi Gabbard introduced yet another attack on Section 230, while Biden’s top tech advisor trotted out his own dangerous ideas for “reforming” 230.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, it was Hillary Clinton doubling down on attacks on tech, in this case demanding a “solution” for encryption and a clampdown on free speech, while Mitch McConnell was asking Obama to spell out a law that would ban encryption so the Senate could deliver it, Rep. McCaul was proposing a “commission” to “force” Silicon Valley to undermine encryption, and James Comey was teaming up with Dianne Feinstein to mislead the public about encryption and promise new legislation. Meanwhile, in the wake of the shutdown of the NSA’s Section 215 program, Senators were calling for mandatory data retention for telcos, the Associated Press was making disingenuous claims about the program, and it turned out the NSA would still be accessing the old phone metadata it collected.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, the Wikileaks fallout continued. The more people tried to kill it, the more it spread. Twitter decided not to block it as a trending topic but stayed silent on whether it would shut down its account, while Senator Lieberman was saying the NY Times should be investigated for publishing Wikileaks documents (and we pointed out how strange it would have been if the paper had ignored them), and the State Department repeated its bizarre demand for Wikileaks to “return” leaked cables. Visa and Mastercard cut the site off after its latest leak was about them, the Defense Department appeared to be blocking any website with Wikileaks in the title, and amidst all this the State Department was going ahead with… hosting World Press Freedom Day.