- Yes, they definitely shouldn't have hit that man in the face. Hopefully the cop gets in trouble for it, but it's Florida, so maybe not.
- If the cops ask you to get out of the car, and you sit with your arms folded and ask to speak to a supervisor, you're going to get dragged out of the car and thrown on the ground and get some extra charges. That's what they are allowed to do. My guess is that what preceded that was them asking for his ID (which they're also allowed to do) and him refusing to give it. Generally that's the way things escalate from traffic stop -> broken window -> violent arrest.
I'm not saying he should quit and go home and start watching YouTube videos while the world around him collapses into fascism. I'm saying he should fight.
Lots of federal employees did the "Okay, fire me then" game when Trump demanded various things from them. It still takes time, effort, and organization to fill the roles they left behind. It slows things down. You can sue the administration for their blatantly illegal attempt to remove you. You can show up with a megaphone outside the office, now yelling about how it's a power grab. You can do something other than just going along with it.
This isn't even "just following orders," because he clearly knows it's wrong. But, he's still putting people on cattle cars, because they told him if he didn't, he'd lose his job. THE RIGHT ANSWER IN THAT SITUATION IS, EVEN IF NO OTHER OPTION IS AVAILABLE, TO LOSE YOUR FUCKING JOB.
Dude, watch the video. You're literally doing the "Who are you going to be believe, me or your lying eyes?" thing.
You fucking ass hole.
Sure, people are getting snatched and sent away, to never see their families, maybe never taste freedom again, and in the meantime torture. But if someone wants to remove you from office, all of a sudden it's a problem.
Some say that the Black Rabbit hates us and wants our destruction. But the truth is — or so they taught me — that he, too, serves Lord Frith and does no more than his appointed task.
Surprisingly enough, the cops are often pretty reasonable about stuff like this. The first step is to interview witnesses who aren't involved, and if they all have pretty much the same story, then it doesn't really matter what the participants in the conflict have to say. If there are no uninvolved witnesses and it's just two people accusing each other of being the problem, they often can't really do anything, because there's no possible way it will hold up in court.
Oooooh! That hadn't even occurred to me. I thought it was just garden variety shitty behavior. I think you're right, though.
I also see the appearance of thelemmy.club (which as far as I can tell is now, whatever it started out as, a full-time conservative troll instance at this point) as interesting there.
Is your impression that that's what Hamas is accomplishing?
I don't know what the hell else the Gazans could do, no one's helping them and they are dying. But there is a reason Israel was making sure Hamas was getting funding for years and years and supporting them against domestic opposition: Because what they're doing doesn't work, except to provide additional excuses for Israel to keep mowing down villages. If what they were doing worked, Israel wouldn't let them do it.
Correct. The central issue is that "and powerful enough" part, since the US military will go 100% to war with them if they try to do anything about it, and no country wants that, generally speaking.
The correct choice would have been to pressure the American government to do something, but since our whole strategy for doing that was to let the person come to power who is ten times worse than even the horrifying standard of US presidents on this issue, we sorta fucked that whole thing up.
I think you have a skewed understand of what outcome "no peace" will lead to. There is only one, and that's not it, and we're moving towards it pretty quickly at this point.
The kind of dickheads who run television networks have been selling out "their own people" to the cattle car brigade since roughly 1990. This one's just a little more stark because it's now it's literal concentration camps and there's a racial component that throws it into sharper relief, but it's no different than Sinclair telling people that agitators against the cancer plant down the street are domestic terrorists. And when their kids get some of the cancer, oh well, that's not my problem.
Or, you know, whatever.
Independent game developer Paolo Pedercini wanted to announce his new game Future? No Thanks! a few weeks ago, but said it was delayed because Steam found a screenshot it planned to share “had suggestive themes.” The screenshot? A low-polygon woman in a short dress with her legs closed together.
Future? No Thanks! was meant to be announced weeks ago but the Steam page didn't pass the first review because a screenshot marked as "Suitable for all ages" had suggestive themes.
The screenshot? This one:— Molleindustria - Wishlist FUTURE? NO THANKS! (@molleindustria.org) 2025-07-30T14:31:04.532Z
Future? No Thanks!’s page did land on Steam, just a little late. “I thought the screenshot flagging was funny because they seem to have interpreted that low poly character as having no underwear, maybe due to the purple color matching the hair,” Pedercini, who releases games under the name Molleindustria, told 404 Media.
According to Pedercini, he had submitted the game to Steam earlier this month, a process which requires a developer to send in a trailer and at least four screenshots that are “suitable for all ages.” He marked the screenshot above as suitable, but Steam rejected it on July 10.
“The trailer does have a suggestive clip with a sexbot, and a hyperbolic disclaimer…so I guess that's fair,” Pedercini said. He pushed back against Steam and asked for a review. “Both reviews took more than a week, which I think it's longer than usual. I wonder if they were figuring out how to respond to the payment processor deal.”
Pedercini’s problems with Steam came at a time when the platform was facing pressure from credit card companies to remove adult games from its platform. Earlier this month, the credit card companies Visa and Mastercard pressured video game distributors Steam and Itch to remove adult games from their storefronts.
The payment processors themselves were bowing to a pressure campaign from the organization Collective Shout, which describes itself as being “for anyone concerned about the increasing pornification of culture” and which argued that many of the adult games normalized violence against women. But a lot of games with queer themes were kicked off Itch and Steam as part of the purge, and it’s not always clear what the lines are and who is drawing them.
“We live in a golden age of independent cultural production, but digital distribution is still extremely concentrated. There are a handful of entities that can instantly make huge swaths of digital culture disappear,” Pedercini said. “We thought digital marketplaces like the Apple Store were the main agents of market censorship, but now we've found out there are even more monopolistic companies upstream from them.”
Those upstream monopolies, pressured by outside lobbying groups, are now defining what can and can’t be said online. Payment processors have pushed other kinds of content to the margins before, video game storefronts are just the latest example. “Such marketplaces may default to freedom of expression because it's cheaper to not moderate content, but they will easily bow to calls for censorship because it's less trouble than advocating for controversial products. It cuts both ways: a few years ago, major online stores removed products showing the Confederate flag,” Pedercini said.
“Conservative groups are willing to exploit these vulnerabilities and are trying to put illegal content such as child pornography on a continuum with porn and queer representations,” he added. “I think they genuinely believe that homosexuality is in the same set as bestiality or rape, as something forbidden by the Bible or whatever, but we can't let that view be enshrined into law or into commercial content guidelines.”
Pedercini has been through something like this before. His 2007 game Operation: Pedopriest, a game about the well documented abuse of children in the Catholic Church, earned the ire of an Italian Christian group which accused the game of depicting virtual child pornography. “The accusation immediately lead the provider to shut down the site, legal charges, and a point of order all the way up to the Italian parliament,” Pedercini said.
Gamers, a group that can be particularly aggressive when politically activated, have launched a counter-pressure campaign on the payment processors. It’s too early to tell if Visa and Mastercard will bend to gamers the same way it did to collective shout.
The future of video games as a form of cultural expression is at risk of massive damage. “The status of video games as culture is still being negotiated. If thematic restrictions like the ones defined by itch.io were to be applied to movies or books, limiting their distribution, it would be major news immediately,” Pedercini said. “Arguably, most video games are currently moving away from culture and morphing into pseudo-cultural objects like slot machines, or apps for wasting time and feeling nothing. The problem is that those of us who still make video games as some kind of artform will be caught in the dragnet.”
Steam did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.
8
If you want to know what a disinfo blog looks like, this is a pretty good example.
(www.councilestatemedia.uk)
27
The collective West decided to censor the entire internet instead of not doing genocide (Warning: disinfo, I guess)
(www.councilestatemedia.uk)
Since the Online Safety Act came into effect, we've seen an awful lot of political censorship and nothing in the way of saving children. Children's lives have not been improved by this bill, but all of us have seen loss of privacy and loss of information we should be allowed to access in a free society.
There is a petition on the Parliament UK website to repeal the Online Safety Act that I have attempted to sign three times. I still have not received the verification email, meaning my signature has not been counted. I suspect this is deliberate and that many more than the official 427,000 people have attempted to sign.
The government has already responded to the petition by dismissing everyone's concerns and refusing to debate this in parliament. The whole point of parliamentary petitions is to trigger parliamentary debates, but the government is no longer pretending to listen to what we want.
The level of overreach in the Online Safety Act is off the chart. Section 179 bans people from saying something false that could cause "non-trivial psychological harm", potentially banning humour and satire. It could also ban any speech that counters a government narrative and is therefore deemed false.
If your government decides there is no genocide and you say there is, there is nothing stopping them deeming this misinformation and banning you. While you might not think things would go this far, you should remember that at the start of the Ukraine war, social media users were banned for challenging the narrative, including popular YouTubers like Lee Camp, Glenn Diesen and Rachel Blevins. Their message was peace and many of the things they were banned for are now accepted as true, such as arguing the war was unwinnable and could lead to World War III.
The Ministry of Truth now gets to decide which online content is factual or harmful and that will always be a political decision. There is no impartial way of doing this, and aside from anything else, people in a free society are allowed to say what they want. No one needs to be protected from speech.
It is incredibly easy to label any challenge to the official narrative as harmful. Those who opposed the Iraq war were being harmful because they were "Saddam sympathisers". Those who opposed the Afghanistan war were "terrorist sympathisers". Those who oppose Israel's genocide are "antisemites". Those who oppose the Online Safety Act are "paedos". You see how easy it is to label opposing views as harmful?
Your right to speak is at the discretion of bureaucrats, artificial intelligence, and social media bosses, all of who can silence anyone under the guise of protecting the public. So much for the marketplace of ideas.
Predictably, the backlash against the Online Safety Act has been enormous, so it's going to be interesting to see Labour's standing in future polls. In all likelihood, it will not even be one of the top three parties, and for a party of government, that is insane.
The government is now so desperate that it is resorting to calling people paedophiles for opposing the Online Safety Act. Given most people oppose the implementation of the Act, they are accusing a majority of the population of paedophilia. It's hard to see how their messaging could be worse.
Peter Kyle is a guy who reportedly once called the police on a constituent who wrote to him about Gaza, resulting in a 4am raid on his home. It seems Peter is greatly concerned about the safety of children, unless those children are in Gaza...
A government that has contempt for its public and acts with sheer disregard for their wants and needs cannot reasonably be described as democratic. A government that is giving itself increasing powers, instead of responding to public opinion is, by definition, authoritarian.
And this authoritarianism is hardly confined to the UK...
Have you considered it strange that countries across the world suddenly decided online safety measures were needed simultaneously? Almost like this was coordinated... Even the US is trying to get around its pesky first amendment with multiple bills aiming to censor online speech, such as the Kids Online Safety Act.
If the US can't introduce such laws, it will depend on so many of its allies introducing censorship rules that they become the new global standard. It will reach a point where it's easier for big tech to censor the entire planet than have different sets of rules for different countries. This means we will be subjected to the most draconian interpretation of the most draconian rules from around the globe.
The US has already banned foreigners from criticising Israel which is ironic considering Marco Rubio goes around the world lecturing other countries on free speech. Now it is trying to ban its own citizens from criticising Israel through the Stop Hate Act - a bill backed by the Anti-Defamation League that would fine social media companies $5 million a day for not removing posts critical of Israel.
It's not just the ADL that is demanding censorship, there are all kinds of shady groups that have been engineering this for years, such as the Global Coalition for Digital Safety. One member of the GCDS, Melanie Dawes, just happens to be the head of OFCOM.
While they're pretending this is all about "safety", these censorship measures are putting you at risk. Your personal data is being processed by companies that are registered abroad and therefore do not come under our jurisdiction. There is nothing stopping those companies handing your data over to hostile governments or selling it on the black market, and even if they don't, your data is now an easy target for hackers.
The UK government has not made the slightest attempt to protect your data or your right to free speech. It has instead ignored every recommendation that could have kept you safer and focused on measures that have nothing to do with child safety. As the Adam Smith Institute points out, “80% of the legislation [is] more concerned with censorship, the powers of Ofcom, and non-safeguarding matters.”
Age verification has already gone so much further than pornography sites and social media companies. Even Spotify is demanding age verification, for god's sake. If you fail to verify your age, or the facial recognition AI thinks you are under 18, your account gets deactivated!
YouTube is now using AI to monitor your every key stroke without your consent. Are you comfortable with this? Is it making you feel safer? What about if your government demands access to this information?
YouTube's surveillance still isn't enough for Australia which is about to ban under-16s from using the platform, a platform that already does not allow adult content and demands age verification for anything remotely sensitive.
If you're still unclear why that might be, just consider that TikTok has hired a former IDF instructor to decide what its users can and can't say about Israel's genocide.
All these measures are primarily about monitoring and censoring critics of Israel and western imperialism. Peter Kyle let the cat out of the bag when he pleaded with the public to not use VPNs. He insisted that verifying your identity keeps children safe, but it literally doesn't.
It makes no difference to a child whether adults access restricted content by age verification or a VPN. The only relevant factor is that if you use a VPN, the government can't spy on you. Kyle is mad that you are circumventing government surveillance. That's it.
VPNs are seeing a huge surge in users because people do not want to be spied on or put their personal information at risk. The government does not give a crap about what they want and is trying to force them to do something without their consent.
A ban on VPNs would not help children in any way because your nine-year-old isn't signing up to a VPN. A ban on VPNs would simply enable your government to spy on you.
Some internet service providers are already blocking access to VPNs, even though there is no legal requirement to do so. They implicitly understand what is expected of them so they're doing it anyway.
As if all this isn't enough, the government is looking at introducing a digital ID called BritCard, a move that could give them real-time data on every website you visit, every person you interact with online, every company you do business with, every real place you go.
Imagine having to inform the government every time someone visited your house, every time you went to a shop, every time you made a telephone call. You would call that totalitarianism. What we are seeing here is the emergence of digital totalitarianism.
What has come so far from the Online Safety Act is only the tip of the iceberg. Next year, websites will be required to let the government access their source code and algorithms and even your DMs. It's a matter of time until they are enforcing the algorithmic suppression of content they dislike and arresting people for private conversations.
If you still believe the Online Safety Act is about protecting children, there truly is no hope for you. This bill is not making a safer world for children, it's making a world in which they cannot see unauthorised opinions and are not entitled to privacy.
This explains why the bill has attracted criticism from across the political spectrum, from the likes of @owenjonesjourno to Alex Armstrong. Only the most pro-establishment weirdos, who would be happy for the government to put cameras in their bathrooms, could think the Online Safety Act is okay.
Thank you for reading. All of my content will always be freely available, but if you wish to support my work, you can do so at Ko-fi or Patreon. Likes, shares and comments also help massively.
15
'They are instruments of terror' — Parents in occupied Kherson Oblast who refuse Russian passports threatened with losing parental rights
(kyivindependent.com)
Occupation authorities force parents in occupied Kherson Oblast to obtain Russian passports or risk losing parental rights, the Center of National Resistance reported on July 30.
"These are not documents. They are instruments of terror," Kherson Oblast Governor Ivan Dudary told the center.
Russia conducts forced passportization in the occupied territories as it aims to establish its control and erase the identity of Ukrainians living under occupation.
In the village of Askaniya-Nova in occupied Kherson Oblast, parents have been threatened with the removal of their children or loss of parental rights if they do not obtain Russian passports.
Askaniya-Nova is located deep within occupied territory and about 52 kilometers (32 miles) from Ukrainian-held territory in Kherson Oblast.
Without obtaining a Russian passport, Ukrainian civilians living under occupation cannot receive medical assistance, pass military checkpoints, and risk mobilization, the Center of National Resistance reported.
"Parents are manipulated because of their children, and children are manipulated because of their education. As of today, it is just impossible to survive in occupied territories without Russian documents," Kateryna Rashevska, legal advisor at the Regional Center for Human Rights in Kyiv, previously told the Kyiv Independent.
A map showing Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine's Kherson Oblast as of 2025. (The Kyiv Independent)
The news org Axios launched in 2017, just as the first Trump administration began, created by some ex-Politico folks, claiming that they would be “an antidote to this madness” and talking about how “the world needed smarter, more efficient coverage” of important news stories.
The reality is that Axios launders rightwing talking points in ugly short form vignettes that not only hide nuance, but reveal how their version of “neutral, objective” coverage actually means normalizing Donald Trump’s madness.
Two recent examples show how this works in practice. Last week, we wrote about how Tulsi Gabbard was trying to mislead the public into believing President Obama had “faked” Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election.
We went into great detail about how she misrepresented documents she had declassified to imply things they did not say. From the documents, it was entirely clear that (as multiple bipartisan research efforts had determined) Russians had tried to influence the election via social media, but had not been able to hack election infrastructure to change votes. Gabbard conflated the two things, using reports of the failure to attack election infrastructure to pretend it meant that there was no intent to influence the election.
So how did Axios cover this story? By focusing on how MAGA folks played their role in buying into Gabbard’s false narrative, talking about how they were calling for Obama’s arrest for treason.
The entire framing of the article is all about people who are believing the misrepresentations Gabbard made, and it literally takes 25 paragraphs (I counted… twice) before they add in a “reality check” admitting that Gabbard is lying:
Meanwhile, Gabbard’s accusation of Obama-era “treason” hinges on a claim that no serious investigation ever made: that Russia hacked and altered vote tallies in 2016.
I fail to see how this is “smarter, more efficient” coverage when it uses Gabbard’s misleading and dangerous framing for the first 24 paragraphs of the article, before adding in the kinda important fact check down towards the end of the article.
Doing it this way reinforces the false MAGA narrative and framing, and leaves people with the impression that there must be some sort of legitimate reason for the accusations.
But the more damning example came the same day. Two of Axios’ founders, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, published a column claiming that Trump was “winning” in his accomplishments while seeming genuinely perplexed why his approval ratings were at historic lows.
The column opens in a hilariously disconnected-from-reality manner:
President Trump, in terms of raw accomplishments, crushed his first six months in historic ways. Massive tax cuts. Record-low border crossings. Surging tariff revenue. Stunning air strikes in Iran. Modest inflation.
Yet poll after poll suggests most Americans aren’t impressed. In fact, they seem tired of all the winning.
This isn’t just bad reporting—it’s active propaganda dressed up as analysis. Here’s how that same paragraph could easily be rewritten by someone whose brain hadn’t been pickled in a MAGA brainwash stew:
President Trump has failed to do basically anything to make American’s lives better, while focusing almost all of his attention on culture war nonsense that decidedly is making lives worse. Massive tax cuts for the wealthy paid for by slashing Medicaid, sending the military in to our cities to silence protestors, kidnapping students and farmworkers, increasing the cost of most goods through foreign import taxes, breaking his promise to avoid costly military entanglements in the Middle East, and generally destroying American good will throughout the globe.
Trump promised a ton of shit he hasn’t accomplished: lower prices on day one. An end to the war in Ukraine. An end to fighting in Israel/Gaza. Oh, and the release of the Epstein files.
This kind of analysis only makes sense if you’ve completely bought into Trump’s own framing of success, and believe that his culture war conspiracy theory claptrap were actual real issues.
The mass deportations his base celebrates for their performative cruelty frequently target asylum seekers who did, in fact, follow the law, not the “criminals” Fox News obsesses over. The fact that Trump shipped many of them to foreign gulags without any due process seems to have escaped VandeHei’s and Allen’s notice. The tariffs that supposedly brought money into US coffers did so by raising taxes on everyday items—because, contrary to Trump’s claims, American consumers pay those tariffs.
Yes, he cut taxes. But mainly for the extremely wealthy, while stripping Medicaid from those who need it most.
And that doesn’t even touch on how he destroyed things like funding for cancer research, has made public health in the US a joke leading to a revival of measles, how he is pardoning criminals, and much, much more.
This is the Axios formula: adopt Trump/MAGA framing wholesale, present it as “neutral” analysis, then act bewildered when Americans reject policies that a cowed Congress rubber-stamped. They’re grading on a curve with a rubric set by the MAGA faithful.
Judd Legum, over at Popular Information, calls out how Axios has “rebranded conservative ideology as objectivity” and it’s quite true. Legum documents how VandeHei and Allen repeatedly invoke “neutrality” and “objectivity” while pushing transparently MAGA-friendly analysis.
Indeed, VandeHei and Allen have political opinions and express them publicly. VandeHei simply redefines his right-wing ideology as patriotism. “The American miracle rests on untamed democracy, the animal spirits of capitalism, the magic of unrestrained innovation, and the soft power of a vigilant and vibrant free press,” VandeHei wrote in a December 2, 2024, Axios column. “I’m a believer in — and beneficiary of — all four.”
On January 20, 2025, the day Trump was inaugurated for the second time, VandeHei and Allen wrote, “Think of the U.S. government as a once-dominant, lean, high-flying company that grew too big, too bloated, too bureaucratic, too unimaginative.” The piece says Trump has a vision to remake government that “binds Trump with leading innovators.” The pair wrote that an “optimistic scenario” is that the second Trump presidency could “jar lawmakers and the public into realizing how a slow, bloated, bureaucratic government handcuffs and hurts America in the vital race for AI, new energy sources, space and overall growth.” They stated it is “correct” to believe “America’s government is so vast, so complex, so indebted that it makes fast, smart growth exponentially more complicated.”
VandeHei and Allen then outlined a plan for fixing the federal government’s problems — “cut workforce,” “cut costs,” “break stuff,” and “ignore the whiners.” While this is presented as a common-sense approach that a CEO would take, it essentially parrots the plans from the early days of the Trump administration.
Legum further notes that the “Trump is winning” article incredibly only quotes (anonymously, of course) from Trump insiders:
Notably, in the piece, Allen and VandeHei cite conversations with “Trump advisers,” “a longtime Trump aide,” and “Trump aides” concerning Trump’s record over the first six months. There is no mention of views expressed by Trump’s critics or even anyone not working for Trump.
The old “liberal mainstream media” narrative was always mostly bullshit—most mainstream outlets bent over backwards to seem “balanced,” even to the point of platforming the most disingenuous nonsense peddlers. But now we’re seeing the real thing: a media ecosystem where rightwing and MAGA-friendly outlets dominate the conversation.
Fox News dominates cable news by far. Tons of people get their news from blatantly pro-Trump right-wing podcasters. There are tons of openly pro-MAGA news organizations out there. And even the supposed “liberal” mainstream media seems to bend over backwards to normalize Trumpism and MAGA nonsense. The NY Times and the Washington Post go out of their way to de-crazify anything Trump does. ABC and CBS have both paid Trump bribes and promised to be more MAGA-friendly. Same with Facebook and Twitter on the social media side.
Into this landscape steps Axios, insisting it’s the grown-up in the room. When Legum pressed them on their obvious bias, they offered this laughable response:
Axios provides essential clinical reporting drawn from conversations with top leaders and experts. The analysis — never opinion — in these columns reflects that, and we stand by our journalism.
Call it what it is: stenography masquerading as journalism. Taking insider talking points and presenting them as “clinical reporting” isn’t analysis—it’s propaganda with better fonts.
Axios represents everything wrong with how media has responded to Trump: the pretense of objectivity while actively normalizing authoritarianism, the elevation of access over accuracy, and the complete abdication of journalism’s fundamental responsibility to challenge power rather than fluff its ego.
In the end, there’s nothing “neutral” about laundering fascist talking points through slick presentation and insider access. That’s not journalism—it’s complicity.
Dude it is in your citation:
The case law's super clear. You don't get to ask for a supervisor before providing ID, you don't get to argue the grounds for the stop before providing ID. They're not even required to explain why they pulled you over first, although almost all cops will do just because it's a reasonable question. If you want to have a conversation instead of give your ID, they're allowed to ask you to get out of the car. If you want to have a conversation instead of getting out of the car, they're allowed to use force to grab you out of it. Most cops will take at least some time for the argument, it makes their case easier the more clearly it's laid out what happened and the longer the person refuses to ID, but it looks from the bodycam timestamps like there was about 6 minutes of arguing before they broke his window, which is a little shorter than usual but still not like "ID" "no" (smash).
If you want to have a whole separate conversation about what the law should be, that would be fine, but there's a whole genre of YouTube videos where people learn that's not how it works and get arrested for it. Absolutely you should not be giving this as legal advice. It's actually a common feature of that genre that people will while they are being arrested cite what people like you on the internet told them, as where they got their legal knowledge, and sort of ask for a do-over now that they understand that they can actually be arrested because of following that advice. I have never seen the police agree to the do-over.