Asshole of Champions
I was right: it spent about 90 seconds on class analysis. For the amount of footage filmed at UMKC, you’d think they’d have stopped by Michael Hudson’s office, but I guess interviewing a Marxian economist would be a bridge too far for normies. Still it was well made and worth a watch.
- Atlantic Council
- Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web
- Report: Scaling Trust on the Web
- Annex 5: Collective Security in a Federated World (PDF)
- Report: Scaling Trust on the Web
- Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web
Many discussions about social media governance and trust and safety are focused on a small number of centralized, corporate-owned platforms that currently dominate the social media landscape: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and a handful of others. The emergence and growth in popularity of federated social media services, like Mastodon and Bluesky, introduces new opportunities, but also significant new risks and complications. This annex offers an assessment of the trust and safety (T&S) capabilities of federated platforms—with a particular focus on their ability to address collective security risks like coordinated manipulation and disinformation.
Centralized and decentralized platforms share a common set of threats from motivated malicious users—and require a common set of investments to ensure trustworthy, user-focused outcomes. Emergent distributed and federated social media platforms offer the promise of alternative governance structures that empower consumers and can help rebuild social media on a foundation of trust. Their decentralized nature enables users to act as hosts or moderators of their own instances, increasing user agency and ownership, and platform interoperability ensures users can engage freely with a wide array of product alternatives without having to sacrifice their content or networks. Unfortunately, they also have many of the same propensities for harmful misuse by malign actors as mainstream platforms, while possessing few, if any, of the hard-won detection and moderation capabilities necessary to stop them. More troublingly, substantial technological, governance, and financial obstacles hinder efforts to develop these necessary functions.
As consumers explore alternatives to mainstream social media platforms, malign actors will migrate along with them—a form of cross-platform regulatory arbitrage that seeks to find and exploit weak links in our collective information ecosystem. Further research and capability building are necessary to avoid the further proliferation of these threats.
Tripwire if true.
Al Mayadeen, two weeks ago: France's Ukraine adventure could snowball into nuclear war, VIPS warns
Devoid of certain clarity, France could be "leading the American people down a path toward a nuclear conflict" with Russia, according to an alert memorandum from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) to the US President, published by the Ron Paul Institute.
The memorandum, titled "On the Brink of Nuclear War" the VIPS warned the White House that French President Emmanuel Macron's dispatch of approximately 2,000 troops to Ukraine "in the not-so-distant future," could snowball to become a NATO war, and ultimately, a US war. According to the memorandum, the French troops will largely hold symbolic significance and would be ineffective in a modern, large-scale conflict like the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Its deployment, according to the VIPS, would not be in active conflict zones but will rather function as "a screening force/tripwire to stop Russia’s advance" or " a replacement force deployed to a non-active zone to free up Ukrainian soldiers for combat duty."
Additionally, the memorandum duly noted that the French Brigade will be augmented by smaller units from the Baltic states.
The French and the Baltic troops, thus, would be considered NATO troops deployed in a Ukrainian warzone, making them "lawful targets" based on the Law of War, said the VIPS. However, the troops would technically lack a "NATO mandate", a difference that VIPS argued would be a "distinction without a difference" from a Russian perspective.
Second Thought: Why The Government Has Infinite Money. As usual his links in the description are also very good.
ETA: I haven’t seen the new film I referred to in another comment yet, but I’m hopeful that it’s good as well. It may not have the Marxist angle that Second Thought brings, though; we’ll see.
I’d never heard of Jared Bernstein. It seems he’s been Biden’s economic advisor for over a decade.
The interviewer is Stephanie Kelton, and her film, Finding the Money, was released to the US & Canada today. I see that it’s available for sale & rent on Apple TV. Hopefully it will get released on Kanopy soon, because some public libraries allow free access that way.
State-affiliated media
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because they are cockroaches.
davel
joined 1 year ago
The Intercept: “Between the Hammer and the Anvil” The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé
No awards for the Intercept, though 🤷 https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2024