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I’ve long maintained the certitude that anti-pornography campaigners aligned with the far-right and conservative Christian movements are directly or indirectly transphobic and anti-LGBTQ.
A body of evidence in my own reporting and experiences covering the rights of sex workers and the online pornography business has built out this schema of anti-LGBTQ and anti-pornography campaigners being tied...
The collapse of our democratic institutions isn’t unstoppable. Saving them requires understanding what we’re fighting for—and how human freedom actually works in our technological age.
Truth isn’t complicated. It lives in simple principles we all understand: People deserve a voice in decisions that shape their lives. Our ability to think and choose depends on accurate information. Democratic...
Last week, we highlighted how the richest person on the planet — Elon Musk, who currently appears to have unparalleled, Constitutionally-violating control over the US government — was running around repeating every confused 4chan dipshit’s conspiracy theory about USAID, all of which were easily debunked if you… understood how reality worked.
Now it turns out that someone actually was getting...
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Early Saturday morning a judge imposed an emergency temporary restraining order in response to the State of New York v. Trump litigation. This particular lawsuit was brought by several (blue) state attorney generals against Trump, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and the Treasury department itself. The order, in short, tells DOGE to get out of Treasury systems.
[T]he defendants are (i)...
A stunning 54% of Americans now believe we’re in a Constitutional crisis, according to recent YouGov polling. They’re right. As a tech billionaire effectively dismantles federal agencies without Congressional authority — agencies that Congress explicitly created and funded — we’re watching in real-time as our system of checks and balances crumbles.
Yet supporters of the current administration...
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about the assault on the idea that laws have any meaning at all:
A lot of people—especially in right-wing circles—tend to forget that the process of civilization is the process of everyone forgetting that they can grab a rock and bash someone’s skull in for little to no reason at all. Modern society as...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, Facebook paid out a hefty settlement in a facial recognition lawsuit in Illinois, which looked like bad news for the also-just-sued new kid on the block: Clearview AI, about whom we were learning lots of disturbing new things. In an ongoing attempt to avoid its own similar problems, Ring updated its privacy dashboard to allow users to block all law enforcement...
Last June, Louisiana became the third state to decide the US Constitution was subservient to cops’ wishes that they not be filmed while performing their public duties.
Arizona had already tried this twice, starting at 25 feet before trimming the “halo” to an 8-foot diameter. It didn’t matter. A federal court permanently blocked the law due to its obvious unconstitutional nature. Florida has...
And there you have it. It was a mere couple of weeks back that I wrote about the Kansas City Chiefs potential to reach the Super Bowl and go for a third straight title and how that would mean you’d start hearing a whole lot about Pat Riley. I don’t want to say I told you so, but I’m coming across articles about how Pat Riley is about to get paid all over the place. If you didn’t read the previous...