onfocus

President Donald Trump said Friday that he will be pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who in 2024 was convicted for drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

In case you thought Trump was ever serious about stopping the drug trade this should clear that up. He has no respect for people in law enforcement and will continue to undermine the rule of law as long as he is in office.

Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.

I hope some day this entire administration and their enablers will be prosecuted. These people have no code of ethics, no respect for the rule of law, and no sense of proportion.

Many of the most influential personalities in the “Make America great again” (Maga) movement on X are based outside of the US, including Russia, Nigeria and India, a new transparency feature on the social media site has revealed.

Well, well, well. Who could have possibly predicted?

The problem is that we’re so used to this pattern that its effects are muted. This is the president of the United States suggesting that members of the opposition party should be killed because they took a relatively tepid stand against his obvious interest in exceeding his executive power. It is not as bad as actually trying and killing them, but it is a multitude of steps past what would have been considered acceptable rhetoric a decade ago. Or even ten months ago, really.

Just because this rhetoric is no longer shocking doesn’t mean we should give Trump a pass. He’s a grown adult man who is responsible for the real violence he inspires in his followers.

As Doctorow observes, these products and apps are often created with good intentions—or, at the least, designed to deliver something of value both to users and to business customers (advertisers, for example). But as the impulse to boost the bottom line becomes irresistible, the companies slowly, and then with alacrity, implement strategies to increase profits. This invariably worsens the users’ experience while benefiting business customers. And then, once all avenues for wresting value from users have been exhausted, the company proceeds to, put frankly, screw their business customers. Eventually, the platform becomes little more than a money-extraction machine—a hellscape for users and a barely profitable but inescapable black hole for business customers. In short: a “giant pile of shit” for everyone involved.

The Aristocrats!

We may never fully know the cost of MIDWAY BLITZ, which lasted just about two months, but it was surely tens of millions of dollars — probably millions of dollars a day, in fact — and in the most concentrated and violent set of raids over the better part of two months, the Trump administration managed to arrest roughly the number of people it hopes to arrest and deport every single day across the nation. These are PR stunts — not a serious strategy. The terror is real; the impact is a rounding error.

Losing in the courts, losing on the streets, losing at their stated mission while inflicting terror on communities. For what?

The US state department has announced that it will designate four European self-described anti-fascist groups as Foreign Terrorist Organisations, as the Trump administration broadens its campaign against what it portrays as an international wave of leftist violence.

They should come up with a clever name for anti-anti-fascist groups. Also "portrays" is an interesting replacement for "fabricated".

I do know quite a bit about Mastodon’s trust-and-safety mechanisms, having been a moderator on CoSocial.ca for a couple of years now. So I’m going to walk through how the same story might have unfolded on Mastodon, assuming Ms Kendzior had made the same post about the WSJ article.

Interesting look at how a more distributed moderation model might have handled a controversial Bluesky banning.

“ICE is currently deploying armed, masked agents to take people from daycares, street corners, parking lots, and even their own homes, often based on paper thin suspicion and frequently with unjustifiable use of force. It is the mothers, fathers, children, friends, neighbors and coworkers being targeted by ICE who are most vulnerable in this situation.”

Google labeling the secret police force with the power and resources of the federal government a "vulnerable group” is particularly galling.

“All uses of force have been more than exemplary,” Bovino stated in a recent deposition. He is, as Judge Ellis has stated, lying. Bovino personally threw a tear gas canister in Little Village. He claimed in a sworn deposition that he was struck in the head by a rock before throwing the canister, and when videos showed no rock, admitted that he lied about the event. When shown video of himself tackling peaceful protestor Scott Blackburn, Bovino refused to acknowledge that he tackled the man. Instead, he claimed, “That’s not a reportable use of force. The use of force was against me.”

“I find the government’s evidence to be simply not credible,” said Judge Ellis in her November 6th ruling. “The use of force shocks the conscience.”

The US secret police invasion of Chicago has been a tragedy that we should all be ashamed of. We should be trying to stop it any way we can.

If the far-right succeeds in its project, when your wife gets sick you won’t be able to afford a doctor. Your kids or grandkids won’t be able to get an education. Should you become successful in business they will force you to pay bribes. These people believe in extraction, not growth. Their goal is to subjugate, to dominate, to force everyone beneath them into a life of precarious insecurity.

If you can make it past the title, this is an excellent picture of where the tech industry and tech culture were in the past compared with where it is now.

The German lender is looking at options including shorting a basket of AI-related stocks that would help mitigate downside risk by betting against companies in the sector.

That’s probably ok when your backers start mitigating their upcoming losses. I think they teach that’s a healthy economy signal in business school.