People are now voluntarily uploading their faces and personal photos to ChatGP to create Ghibli-style images.
As a result, OpenAI is gaining free and easy access to many thousands of new faces with your consent to train its AI models.
Keep feeding the monster!
The erosion of democracy is a serious threat. The United States is not immune. Autocratization in this country has to be faced urgently and strategically...Here, I provide an overview of lessons learned from other countries: www.foreignaffairs.com/guatemala/ho...
Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist at Harvard Medical School, was detained at Logan Airport after returning from France and sent to an ICE detention in Louisiana, The Insider reports.
A big critic of Putin and the war in Ukraine, she may now be deported to Russia.
The communist regimes used to exile their dissidents, both outside of the country and internally into the gulag and the labor camps. These autocrats gave their opponents one-way exit visas, forcing them out of the countries where they worked and lived.
Obviously, this is very different.
Voter fraud is miniscule in the US, with extremely few cases stretching back to the early 1980s.
The Heritage Foundation created a database of voter fraud convictions, and tried to lie with numbers by not providing any context.
Brookings put those numbers in context (hundreds of millions of ballots b/n 1982-2024) and easily showed that fraud was nearly non-existent.
Adding Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat is good because then there’s one person who actually cares about national security
Musk complies with Turkish autocracy’s requests to suspend pro-democracy accounts to “ensure X remains available” for Turks.
He didn’t seem to care about X being shut for Brazilians last year when a democracy requested far-right account suspensions, which he rejected on the basis of “free speech”.
Compared to Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, Poland, Trump is moving MUCH faster, more aggressively, and with broader claim to power. We're not in danger of becoming those autocracies--we're very quickly surpassing them. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/w...
"Free speech, I fear, is in retreat and in the interests of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country"
–J D Vance, in Munich, last month
When your government breaks into independent non-profit organisations without a warrant, you’re not living in a state that respects limited government, the rule of law, or democracy.
We need to be frank and vigilant: US democracy could collapse into a hybrid regime by 2028.
A Project 2025 tracker by agency shows 100/300 objectives achieved & 46 more in progress:
www.project2025.observer
So who decides now if someone is a gang member or if someone has a valid asylum claim under the law? Tom Homan? A random ICE agent? A local Sheriff’s deputy? A neighbor? An informant? So they just say a person is in a gang and they get disappeared to a prison in El Salvador?
I decided to start a #thread 🧵 of stories about legal residents and tourists being (illegally) arrested, detained and/or deported by the Trump regime. I'll only post stories from serious sources, as rumors and conspiracies are really not needed in this authoritarian moment.
"You never forget the sight of children starving to death."
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
We shouldn’t normalize turning the White House into showroom for promoting the business of an individual who happened to give 250m to the presidents election campaign.
This level of corruption is beyond the pale.
I’m pretty sure the world would be a better place if the US became the 11th Canadian province
Your dignity honors the bravery of the Ukrainian people.
Be strong, be brave, be fearless.
You are never alone, dear President Zelenskyy.
We will continue working with you for a just and lasting peace.
The EU’s Kaja Kallas flew in to DC for talks with Marco Rubio and he decided to cancel the meeting the moment her flight touched down.
The biggest assholes in the world are now in one government.
Why does 25% AfD among young men spark a thousand "what is going on with young men?" posts yet Die Linke 34% among young women generates...nothing at all?
Yes, young men voting for the radical right is an important phenomenon. But so is young women going rad left *at even higher rates*.
I am keeping a diary of daily events, as they unfold open.substack.com/pub/adamprze... It is available to everyone. I am new to Substack, so please let me know if something is wrong with the link or the file.
Steve Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die
"the U.S. is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism"
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
"A failure to resist... could pave the way for authoritarian entrenchment"
www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...
Why is the far-right so obsessed with labeling Hitler a socialist?
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One postdoctoral position in my ERC Consolidator in Madrid.
Application deadline: end of February.
Job ad & details: tinyurl.com/3dwm96kb
Come and join me and my team in sunny Madrid for 5 years of intensive research and lots of publications, traveling, and fun!
Please share widely.
Very cool initiative!
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So I made this starter pack about political scientists working in threats to democracy and then it went bonkers viral 😅.
Any suggestions for this pack, pls let me know (including yourself!).
PPL have gotten ~500 follows on it since *this morning*... #polisky
go.bsky.app/9V9zguB
Young men are increasingly moving to the populist right
In the UK, 15% of young men but only 5% of young women express support for right-wing parties.
Across Europe, young men are much more supportive.
Exceptions: 🇮🇹🇫🇷
Graph by @jburnmurdoch.bsky.social