Pride events in the name of the right to freedom of assembly.
“Hungary wants to be a country where no one is stigmatized for thinking differently, or for loving someone different from the majority, or for believing something different from the majority,” he added. /7
“We clearly said that, according to Tisza and the many million Hungarian people supporting it, everyone can live with whoever they love as long as they do not violate laws and they are not harmful to others,” Magyar said in the aftermath of his election win, also backing
Today's winner of the Internet. Congratulations!
X suspended Gil Duran, author of this forthcoming book for calling Palantir and the recent manifesto it published, fascist
📽️ Our Editor in Chief @hardeepmatharu.bsky.social will be hosting a Q&A with Noelle Cook and Liz Smith at the London premiere of their thought-provoking film 'The Conspiracists' – following the lives of women involved in the Jan 6 insurrection – at the Bertha Dochouse on 21 April.
Book your ticket:
🟨 Print Edition — Finally, Big Tech is Being Put on Trial
Two recent verdicts finding social media companies liable for harms suffered by users have, for the first time…
subscribe.bylinetimes.com/edition/85/finally-big-t...
Lord Mandelson, who received covert donations of $75,000 from child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and provided advice to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon on subverting UK banking regulation while business secretary, resigns from the Labour Party
This is definitely worth a read. In their last statement they talk about how we get out of this mess. These options need further consideration and discussion. They don’t all happen at once and people need a roadmap for what they can do to cast off Silicon Valley themselves
Problems caused by closure of Strait of Hormuz are not a temporary blip - more a sign of things to come as we reach fossil fuel tipping point warns @nafeez.bsky.social
@goldbergradio.bsky.social @bylinetimes.bsky.social
open.spotify.com/episode/7MJp...
Reform UK now says it is merely "looking into" Byline Times' revelations that one of its candidates authored a conspiracy theory article in a 9/11 Trutherb' journal.
It effectively claimed the COVID pandemic was a Pentagon-led scam. Bereaved families are furious.
uk.news.yahoo.com/reform-uk-lo...
David Edgar's 1976 play 'Destiny' follows neofascist group Nation Forward in England, against the backdrop of worker struggles for pay and racial equality.
Then. Now. Still incredibly urgent. Join us May 3rd for an anniversary revival reading at The Cockpit.
👉 www.thecockpit.org.uk/show/david_e...
"Uncomfortably familiar... the modern echoes are hard to ignore."
- Emma Manton (RSC, The Office UK) on her role in the upcoming reading
"Sadly more prescient and necessary than ever"
- Geoffrey Streatfeild (Royal Shakespeare Company)
🔴EXCLUSIVE: The Conservatives are standing a candidate who:
- Praised Tommy Robinson
- Said man who Robinson allegedly assaulted “deserved it”
- Said far-right MP Rupert Lowe is “the only MP fighting for us”
- Called Boris Johnson a “traitorous scumbag” who “will be jailed the second we take power”
The U.S. has significantly reduced its weapons stocks after it launched the war on Iran seven weeks ago. As a result, deliveries of weapons purchased by European countries have been postponed.
news.err.ee/1610000377/e...
And can I just add… No one at Palantir seems to be able to read or write.
“We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism”
Take out the vapid tautologies and you get:
“We must resist pluralism”
Great tell.
Seen quite a few people I highly respect recommend this.
?? I was writing about Facebook tech control 10 years ago
This is such an insightful, wide ranging and ultimately hopeful interview with @quinnslobodian.com
How Elon Musk and the Tech Billionaires Hijacked the State and Our Minds
With Matt Gallagher on @bylinetimes.bsky.social
bylinetimes.com/2026/04/17/h...
I have just been listening to @peterjukes.bsky.social brilliant podcast Untold, about the murder of Daniel Morgan and corruption in the Met. In one of the later episodes, this is discussed briefly. I hold no hope for this to ever happen.
It's also worth being clear about who's doing the arguing. Palantir sells operational software to defence, intelligence, immigration & police agencies. These 22 points aren't philosophy floating in space, they're the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it's advocating.
9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within. 19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.
Points 9, 18 and 19 go after accountability directly. Scrutiny of public figures gets reframed as a kind of cultural sickness driving talent away from public life. The problem becomes the people doing the scrutinising, not the people being scrutinised.
5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.
The headline argument is straightforward enough, democratic survival depends on hard power, hard power is now software, so Silicon Valley owes the West an AI weapons industry. Adversaries won't wait, so we can't either, which taken at face value sounds like a defence of democracy.
A diagram showing the VDA framework and the Arc of Democracy. At the top, three icons label the essential elements of democracy: Verification (tick), Deliberation (speech bubble), and Accountability (magnifying glass). Arrows descend from each through three horizontal bands representing the arc: Substantial (truth tested, voices included, power constrained), Performative (forms remain but substance is weak, rituals without consequence), and Simulated (appearance maintained but functions inverted: propaganda as verification, polarisation as deliberation, scapegoating as accountability). A vertical arrow on the left marks the arc's direction: improvements, decline, collapse. A column on the right maps counterpublics onto the same three states: functional counterpublics act in a substantial way, hollow counterpublics in a performative way, disordered counterpublics in a simulated way. The bands shift from grey through pink to red as democracy moves toward simulation.
I've set out the framework I'm using here in an earlier thread, on VDA, the Arc of Democracy, and the moral-epistemic stacks idea, what follows applies that framework to the Palantir document directly. skywriter.blue/@eliothiggin...
Opening text of a thread by Palantir from X Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.
Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different.
twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...
Why are we giving Foreign state actors an off switch for our entire society?
Peter Thiel giving the world a lecture on far right politics is not something you expect from a company CEO who wants to take over our defence and NHS data management…
Trevor Phillips said on Sky News this morning that "everybody in the country who could read a newspaper" knew in advance of the Mandelson appointment that he was problematic
is this the same Phillips who interviewed Mandelson on October 08 2023 and didn't ask any questions about Epstein friendship?