"The State Department released its annual reports on human rights around the world on Tuesday, and revealed an administration set on whitewashing the records of some of the world’s worst violators of human rights. The hollowed-out reports on roughly 200 countries and territories omit references to LGBTQ+ discrimination and curtail information on government abuses, including gender-based violence and government corruption. They no longer include sections focused on systemic racial or ethnic discrimination and violence, child abuse, or child sexual exploitation. The congressionally mandated human rights reports, which are used to guide U.S. decisions on diplomacy and aid, have been turned into wholly political documents that target countries with whom the Trump administration has clashed and soft-pedal abuses by the administration’s allies. Israel, and countries like El Salvador, South Sudan, and Eswatini, which have agreed to accept and in some cases imprison U.S. deportees as part of Trump’s growing global gulag, got a soft touch. South Africa, which has led the war crimes case against Israel at The Hague, received a more pointed report." https://theintercept.com/2025/08/14/state-department-human-rights-reports/ #USA #StateDepartment #ElSalvador #SouthSudan #Israel #HumanRights

"Of course there have always been Christians in Silicon Valley; they just knew better than to advertise their faith. This is to say: The Christians were effectively in hiding. And one specific place they were hiding was, according to Tan, on a spreadsheet made up of Christians in tech, which was passed around for years among a dozen or so of the techno faithful. One of them was Trae Stephens, cofounder of the defense tech company Anduril and a partner at Founders Fund, the venture capital firm cofounded by Peter Thiel. Stephens, like Tan, has lately been speaking publicly about his faith in the context of Silicon Valley. He has hosted a Bible study reflecting on the teachings of René Girard, a French philosopher popular in certain libertarian-leaning tech circles; spoken at his church about the connection between Christianity and innovation; and written, in what seems a slightly contorted interpretation of the gospel, about how basic venture investing principles are an exemplar of divine forgiveness." https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/christianity-was-borderline-illegal-in-silicon-valley-now-its-the-new-religion #Religion #SiliconValley #Christianism #Christianity #Palantir #Anduril

"[T]he vast majority of MCP servers are a waste of time. And that’s normal because the MCP spec is only months old. People jump into it, and they start building for MCP without really thinking it through or understanding what it should be. The vast majority of MCPs that you can see now are reflections of APIs. I think that’s a complete waste of time. This might be offensive, but let’s take Kubernetes. As an example, Kubernetes is an API-driven platform of sorts. Now let’s say you have a Kubernetes MCP server that basically allows you to get resources, to describe resources, and to see the logs and so on and so forth. They’re basically reflections of the Kubernetes API, just as kubectl is a reflection of the Kubernetes API. Now, does an AI agent really need that MCP server? Absolutely not. It’s perfectly capable of using kubectl directly. And even if there weren’t a kubectl CLI, it’s perfectly capable of talking to the API as is. And it’s not hard for an AI backed by an agent to execute the URL commands to go to some API, and effectively do the same thing that that MCP server is doing. What we need is MCPs that are actually providing additional value around user intents. Instead of having a Kubernetes MCP server that is a reflection of its API, have a Kubernetes MCP that will have certain logic or workflow or this or that, that will help you combine resources to get an application up and running. So, something beyond just a one-to-one reflection of an API." https://nordicapis.com/why-internal-developer-platforms-need-apis/ #APIs #APIFirst #MCPs #AI #GenerativeAI #AIAgents

"Emerging from the backdrop of Marx’s attempt to demonstrate impersonal agency being operative at all levels of society, there is an increasing tendency in Marxist scholarship to interpret the fetish character of capital not only in an epistemological framework, as the NML did, but also in ethical and political terms as a problem of freedom and domination. North and Reitter endorse this scholarly trend by including an essay by William Clare Roberts on the French translation that underscores the unfreedom of “market-dependent producers [that is, wage earners], who must sell in order to buy and buy in order to live” (RC, 722). This unfreedom in the market resembles the worker’s domination in the factory, and it suggests that Marx subscribed to a socially and politically comprehensive concept of freedom that is incompatible with social-democratic attempts to ameliorate the plight of workers by creating better working conditions. In other words, Marx’s imagination of what it means to be free is not exhaustively understood merely by citing his attention to struggles over the length of the working day and the alleviation of human toil through more rational coordination of the work process. Marx’s expanded concept of freedom will be at the center of a sequel to this essay, a review of contemporary scholarship exploring the evolution of Marx’s thought from his early journalism to his late scientific notebooks." https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/more-marx-less-marxism-reconsidering-capital-volume-1-retranslated-by-paul-reitter/19E259370B761E527FB4ED8E68C344A3 #Marx #Capital #Capitalism #CriticalTheory #PoliticalEconomy #CommodityFetishism

"At the cusp of a possible Skydance sale, The Free Press faces a challenge: It is difficult to position yourself as the voice of the sensible unheard when the “anti-wokeness” your publication feeds on is unequivocally in power. As officers from unknown agencies and the National Guard set up checkpoints in DC and ICE abducts children from their schools, The Free Press asks us to preserve our free speech by stepping back, chilling out, and learning how to party. As children go hungry in Gaza, The Free Press asks us to consider whether those children in Gaza “might have been sick or worse even if there was no war.” To paraphrase Adorno: The Free Press offers itself as a device for orientation in a cold, alienated, largely incomprehensible world. It is a device for casting oneself as reasonable: Gays (like Bari Weiss) are fine, sure, but maybe those claims of malicious Midwestern doctors force-transing children are worth interrogating. Democrats are fine, sure, but that Zohran Mamdani made a rap song once." https://www.thenation.com/article/society/i-went-to-the-free-press-party-for-under-30s-all-i-got-was-ennui/# #USA #Liberalism #RadicalCentrism #Zionism #FreePress

I don't know how Europe and United States can be diverging. After all, both sides are outlawing any kind of speech that is against Israel's genocide and land-theft in Palestine... As a matter of fact, I don't think the U.S. has any kind of legitimacy to point the finger to European governments when they are doing probably the same or worse. "Now Europe and the United States are diverging. Never mind enduring disagreements about how to treat Nazis and other would-be totalitarians. Europe today, in both its individual countries and its shared continental governance, is criminalizing more and more speech that doesn’t come close to American thresholds for incitement or harassment. James Kirchick: What happens where free speech is unprotected The shift has been gradual, emerging in landmark cases at the European Court of Human Rights, as well as in legislation at the national level. But the new reality is stark. Last year, Amnesty International (hardly a Trump-administration ally) published a report about what the organization’s secretary-general, Agnès Callamard, called a “Europe-wide onslaught against the right to protest”; the report documented examples of restrictive laws, use of excessive police force, and arbitrary arrest. It’s not just protests. European judges have signed off on the criminalization of the kinds of hate speech that, while easy to revile, pose nothing like Hitlerite peril. When a middle-aged mother lashes out at asylum seekers in a social-media post (later deleted), or a pro-Palestinian marcher chants a slogan that some but not all see as genocidal, or a flyer calls gays “deviants,” a tolerant society can exercise forbearance and respond with counterspeech. European states are often deploying handcuffs instead. And European leaders are pushing to expand the speech that can get a person thrown in prison." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/europe-free-speech-republicans/683915/ #Europe #EU #FreeSpeech #FreedomOfExpression #Censorship #USA

"I try to show that the Left in Europe, both the radical and the institutional, was caught in a bind by the strategies of employers, conservative political forces, and elements of the state. In both cases they were forced to choose between unappealing options. Perhaps the most pressing was to radicalize or moderate their strategies. They’re of course not the only agents in this story, and the Left is not in total control of the situation. But the ultimate outcome of the decisions taken at this critical moment was the evacuation of the working class from left structures and a weakening of labor more broadly. There are clashes over what to do about economic restructuring and automation, participation in management structures and government, and media and communication technologies. An older generation of self-educated industrial worker activists rub up against a younger generation of educated, often white-collar members, each with different views on priorities and conduct. I mainly focus on the main electoral parties of the Left because they were the main organizations that workers joined and voted for at the time, and the ones that shaped how millions of people thought about the world. The radical left had sparser influence even if they suffered a broadly similar outcome. In brief, the West European left went into decline not because of an unstoppable neoliberalism and a weakened manufacturing-based economy, but because it failed to recognize and mobilize new constituencies of workers, including migrants and women, and instead embraced a kind of “third way” social capitalism." https://jacobin.com/2025/08/european-socialism-left-1970s-defeat #Europe #Socialism #WorkersMovement #ClassStruggle #ThirdWay

RT @IEthics "The public has a right to know what surveillance tools the #government is using, no matter whether the government develops its own products or purchases them from private contractors": https://eff.org/deeplinks/2025/08/victory-pen-links-police-tools-are-not-secret #ethics #law #tech #privacy #business

"Crypto billionaire Justin Sun has sued Bloomberg for publishing details about his wealth that he himself provided to qualify for their Billionaire Index. While Sun was initially eager for Bloomberg to publicize his multibillionaire status, he became furious when he learned they planned to publish a rough breakdown of the assets comprising his crypto fortune. This may be because it reveals an inconvenient detail: the majority of his assets are TRX, the cryptocurrency issued by his company Tron — and he owns most of the TRX in circulation (63%). This concentration is somewhat reminiscent of the 2022 revelation that Sam Bankman-Fried had built his crypto empire on a foundation of FTT, the token issued by his own company FTX, sparking concerns about the solvency of his businesses and the value of FTT that ended in the collapse of both. Sun’s fury could also stem from Bloomberg’s reporting that Sun owns the HTX cryptocurrency exchange (renamed from Huobi in late 2023 [I40]). Though it has long been clear that Sun holds more control over the exchange than he claims to have as a mere adviser, he has refused to admit he owns the company. This is a pattern with Sun, who has also denied ownership of other companies with which he’s heavily involved, such as Poloniex (which he later acknowledged owning), BiT Global, and Techteryx." https://www.citationneeded.news/justin-sun-bloomberg-lawsuit/ #USA #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #PonziScheme #TRX #Tron #HTX

"Hiring has been relatively dormant since Trump took the oath of office. Only 597,000 jobs have been added in the first seven months of the year, a 44 percent drop from the first seven months of 2024, as former Biden economist Heather Boushey notes. The year has seen low hiring and a low quit rate, as people hunker down in the jobs they have. There are fewer entry-level positions and Americans aren’t moving very much for work. That’s a housing story but it’s also a job security story, and the expectations are even worse: The University of Michigan survey shows expectations for a higher unemployment rate next year at the highest level since the Great Recession. Maybe artificial intelligence is playing a role here, though concluding that for sure seems premature. Or maybe the behavior of the ill-fated Department of Government Efficiency is filtering down to corporate boardrooms. But the most likely reason for sluggish hiring is the tremendous uncertainty from the tariff announcements, regulatory policy, and Trumpian wild cards. An economy based on individual whim is not one where businesses can plan for the future; indeed, 37,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since the “Liberation Day” tariff announcement in April, and the subsequent flurry of trade adjustments. I think you can see the consequences of uncertainty come forward in the explosion in corporate stock buybacks; that’s a sign of retrenchment, where money that could be deployed or invested is instead pushed out to shareholders. No wonder markets are near all-time highs while ordinary workers feel miserable. The only area where this investment retrenchment and uncertainty is not in evidence comes from the insane capital expenditures for AI computing power, which is propping up the economy almost by itself. That’s why municipal pushback to data centers will be one of the more fascinating developments." https://prospect.org/economy/2025-08-19-what-us-economy-really-looks-like/ #USA #Trump #Economy #Crisis #AI #GenerativeAI #PoliticalEconomy #Unemployment

"The recent book by Marcelo Vieta, Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestion (Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2020), provides a wealth of information and analysis on the emergence of worker-run production cooperatives in Argentina’s crisis-ridden industries. It highlights workers’ prominent role in occupying and self-managing factories that were either shut down or on the brink of closure following the economic crisis of the 1990s. The book also offers fascinating examples of how these worker-managed units were established. Argentina’s labour movement provides valuable lessons for understanding the complexities of workers’ self-management. To better understand the economic and political conditions that led to these labour movements, it is crucial to briefly consider the historical context of labour organization in Argentina, as discussed in the book and other related sources, particularly its relationship with the state and capitalists. A special focus will be placed on ‘Peronism,’ which significantly shaped labour politics. After that, we will explore some key aspects of the book and conclude with reflections on the concept of workers’ control and its (in-)conceivability under capitalism." https://socialistproject.ca/2025/08/workers-self-management-struggle-against-neoliberalism/ #Argentina #SelfManagement #Autogestion #Cooperatives #Cooperativism #Neoliberalism

"There’s so much AI news that it’s impossible to keep up. It seems like we’re racing toward a Singularity of AI enshitification, beyond which the enshitified world is hidden by the enshitificatory “event horizon.” The aim of this post is to aggregate some notable news stories relating to AI that you might have missed — some of these are quite hilarious, while others are disturbing and deeply tragic. I’ve said before that, with respect to climate change, the weather right now is more stable, less extreme, and colder than it will be, on average, for the rest of our lives. (So, you know, savor that heatwave, because things ain’t getting better!) Perhaps something similar applies to AI: the present moment might be the least terrible that things will be moving forward. If so, then yikes." https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/why-you-should-never-use-ai-under #AI #GenerativeAI #Enshittification #AISlop #AIBlops