The Delusion of ‘AI Justice’ As AI seeps deeper into our judicial system, boosters insist it will bring both fairness and efficiency. But can we really trust Judge Grok?

Here's my print feature piece in @thenation.com about the rise of AI-justice. Judges are already relying on AI, more than you probably think, and with some countries *replacing* human judges with bots, we will soon have to ask: Would you rather Justice Alito or Justice Mech-Hitler?

Re-upping in light of this latest report:
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

70 powerful Bay Area men were accused of sexual misconduct. What happened next? Since 2010, scores of prominent local men have faced allegations ranging from sexual harassment to rape. Most have returned to the highest echelons of public life.

Also: "We did not include allegations against local clergy, because there are too many."
sfstandard.com/2026/04/20/7...

Fractures Emerge Between GOP’s Pro-Pedophilia, Extremely Pro-Pedophilia Wings

And RFK Jr. can espouse it so easily and discuss it so bluntly because, generally speaking, it has bipartisan support.

so that’s called “social murder”

To Fight Heat, NYC Sets 2040 Tree Canopy Deadline, With Riskiest Areas First How the plan will be funded is unclear. The Mamdani administration has not earmarked money for its tree-expansion initiative.

trees as cooling infrastructure! this is a fascinating story from @smaldo.bsky.social:

Globe showing the Atlantic Ocean with arrows depicting the AMOC circulation: warm surface currents (pink/red) flowing northward from the tropics toward the Arctic, and cold deep return currents (blue/purple) flowing southward. The background shows sea surface temperature trends, with a prominent blue cold patch, the "cold blob", south of Greenland, contrasting with warming (orange/red) across the rest of the ocean.

1/ There's a system of ocean currents in the Atlantic that shapes Europe's #climate, drives monsoons, and keeps sea levels stable along the US coast.

In the last 5 years, the scientific evidence that it could collapse has shifted dramatically.

Most people have no idea. 🧵

Power without accountability: The Palantir manifesto The problems with our tech philosopher kings

New, from me: Take the Palantir manifesto seriously, if not literally.
It reveals that our tech philosopher kings want public money, but without public accountability. This creates a dilemma for governments unaligned with its techno-fascist vision. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/palantir-w...

So we kicked Native Americans off of their land + imposed restrictions on how they could use it for the sake of "environmental conservation," and now hyperwealthy Americans are retreating to that land while profiting from ecological destruction + exploitation? Cool.

inthesetimes.com/article/yell...

Fool of a Took: Palantir’s Fascism on Campus This week it was revealed that White House deputy chief of staff and avid White nationalist Stephen Miller, the man behind the brutal escalation of ICE raids all over the country, owns between $100,00...

Really excited to see my and @ardenthistorian.bsky.social 's pieces on the nerdy fascism of Palantir up @religiondispatches.org -- give it a read, those people are weird and awful.

religiondispatches.org/fool-of-a-to...

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...

Also: bsky.app/profile/eile...

Kenyan firm sacks more than 1,000 workers after losing Meta contract Meta paused work with Sama last month after allegations about staff viewing private scenes filmed by smart glasses

I’m sure this is unrelated to the fact that last month data workers revealed they were asked by Meta to review video from Meta Ray Bans of user’s intimate moments like having sex or using the bathroom.

Keep Pushing: We Get 10 More Days to Reform Section 702 In a dramatic middle-of-the-night stand off, a bipartisan set of lawmakers pushing for true reform and privacy protections for Americans bought us some more time to fight! They are holding out for, at...

If you haven't been paying attention to niche national security law, you should now. This surveillance program collects communications from all over the globe--and when folks talk to people in the US, the US side of the convo is stored and the FBI can sift through it without a warrant.

A lil 🧵:

Meta Is Warned That Facial Recognition Glasses Will Arm Sexual Predators More than 70 organizations, including the ACLU, EPIC, and Fight for the Future, say the AI smart glasses feature would endanger abuse victims, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people.

“People should be able to move through their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities," as face recognition on smart glasses would enable. www.wired.com/story/meta-r...

The Posse Comitatus workaround: ICE expands into domestic policing Congress gave ICE a $75 billion budget with few strings attached, allowing it to operate beyond its intended scope and bypass traditional checks on power, raising constitutional concerns.

I think this is correct. Congress gave Trump the personalist, violent paramilitary force he's always wanted, but without the statutory hurdles, internal accountability, resistance from the courts, and institutional pushback that would come with deploying the actual military.

“People already hate the police.” No, they don’t. They love the police. They can’t imagine life without the police. They’re giving as much money to the police as they can.

Same goes for every "genius" academic or scholar.

there is no politician so irreplaceable that we must overlook sexual misconduct because nobody else could possibly fill their shoes

i have an idea for weeding out extremists, it's called defund the police

URGENT! The Massachusetts House just passed a "social media ban" that would force YOU to upload a government ID or submit to a face scan to post online. CALL YOUR STATE SENATORS! 978-485-4694

Okay bluesky I need your help

I live in Massachusetts. You might think we're a bastion of lefty intellectualism but our state government a clusterfuck of post-puritan real estate bros

Reskeet this. Text it to your "friends from home"

Help this find every masshole poster who will know what to do

In general, (re)orienting education wholly or chiefly to specific perceived market needs is always going to produce disaster once the near term passes. It also eviscerates institutions that might otherwise help people weather change, intellectually and in other ways

Families across the U.S. are getting college acceptance letters — and tuition bills NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks with economist Judith Scott-Clayton about the cost of college in the U.S. They discuss the difference between sticker and net price and the opaqueness of tuition costs.

I just listened to an extended NPR interview w an education economist about 40 yrs of rising college tuition & student debt, and not a single mention that 40 yrs ago was about the time all states cut higher education budgets, privatized tuition, in order to pay for tax cuts and prisons

Wild that Altman is being sued by his sister for repeated sexual abuse and that doesn’t come up in basically every conversation about him. I get that it’s alleged but if that shit was happening to someone else I feel like that would come up, particularly if that person had a history of lying a lot.

I see it's time for some "facts about sexual assault" discourse again, so here's a short rant/🧵

Sexual assault cases are some of the most challenging in the criminal legal system

1/3

I just don't understand how we've managed to get ourselves into a place where having a home - something I would have as a child seen as a baseline - is felt as an enormous position of privilege, something you spend half your life working for and still can only achieve with help or luck.

People will dead ass look you in the eye and tell you this stuff doesn’t matter.

So, cases come down to the credibility of the victim, in a society that does not believe victims and has historically (and continually) cast women as liars and vengeful, and has codified these beliefs into laws governing sexual offenses.

3/3