"And now, the oppressive hour. One hour of oppressive music."

#oppressive #music

Downright #Evil Palantir

Peter #Thiel, one of 1st prominent #Trump supporters, known for declaring #freedom & #democracy are incompatible

It's named after the seeing stones (palantíri) from The Lord of the Rings: magical crystals that let their owners observe distant places

Palantir makes same promise:

- Enable remote monitoring of data to reveal patterns, links that would otherwise remain hidden

https://www.republik.ch/2026/02/18/how-tenaciously-palantir-courted-switzerland

#privacy #oppressive #dystopian #authoritarianism #surveillance

How tenaciously Palantir courted Switzerland

The controversial tech company Palantir provides surveillance technology. In Switzerland, however, its pitches have been rejected.

Republik
“Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real #resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly #nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an #oppressive #state.” www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong
Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong

The pushback against ICE exposed a series of mistaken assumptions.

The Atlantic

@alt_in_uk @toychicken

Due to the greed of outsourcing, the #ukgovernment including local government does not have joined up computing.

Communication is fraught.

As illustrated by the debacle of the #oppressive one-login, each service has its own entry system, separate database, and possibly runs on an out of date operating system.

When the 'mainframe' was replaced by first mini-computers and then the PC, the uk descended into chaos.

Considerable consolidation and update is needed

#Data is control: what we learned from a year investigating the #Israeli #military’s ties to big #tech

Our reporting revealed a symbiotic relationship between the #IDF and #SiliconValley – with implications for the future of #warfare

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/30/israeli-military-big-tech

#Gaza #genocide #WarCrimes #AI #Israel #war #HumanRights #BigData #privacy #Orwellian #1984 #dystopian #authoritarian #oppressive

‘Data is control’: what we learned from a year investigating the Israeli military’s ties to big tech

Our reporting revealed a symbiotic relationship between the IDF and Silicon Valley – with implications for the future of warfare

The Guardian

Digital #ID to become law in U-turn from #Labour Government
#ToxicLabour

#DigitalID is to be made law for all adults in the #UK in a screeching U-turn from the Labour Government. [Not in Labour #Manifesto]

Keir #Starmer is expected to announce the full plans later this week, with LBC speculating an announcement could be made on Friday

https://www.thenational.scot/news/25495657.digital-id-become-law-u-turn-labour-government/

#authoritarian #LabourLies #dishonest #Orwellian #oppressive #ToxicStarmer

Digital ID to become law in U-turn from Labour Government

DIGITAL ID is to be made law for all adults in the UK in a screeching U-turn from the Labour Government.

The National

For #comedians around the world, the laughs often end as #democracy fades

#Trump diminishing space for #FreeSpeech shows Trump’s America is moving towards #authoritarianism. Senator Bernie Sanders, speaking to MSNBC, said the country was on a path towards becoming more like #oppressive #regimes in #Russia and #Saudi Arabia. “This is just another step forward,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/19/for-comedians-around-the-world-the-laughs-often-end-as-democracy-fades

#DictatorTrump #USSA #ComradeKrasnov #ThoughtPolice #threats

For comedians around the world, the laughs often end as democracy fades

Silencing of Jimmy Kimmel sets US on course similar to that charted by authoritarian regimes from Egypt to India

The Guardian
Dictators and Strongmen: Opressive Regimes in Historical Fiction

These 9 historical fiction books about oppressive regimes will remind you of the importance of standing against tyranny, no matter how hard.

BOOK RIOT
Fact Check: Are White South African ‘refugees’ fleeing racial persecution?

Afrikaners, a White minority who ruled South Africa with an oppressive grip, dispossessed the Black majority during the colonial era and apartheid.

The Emancipator

#Check out : #Israel is a #democracy, perhaps in the way that all our so-called democracies evolve, more #authoritarian, more #oppressive, more #oligarchic, more #differential and #unequal - anyway #Israel is an #occidental #invention

« The next morning I left the festival and made my way from Ramallah to Jerusalem. I had to wait an extra hour or so for a taxi with the right color license plate, yellow, and so be allowed to cross through a checkpoint in Israel’s wall and onto the road to Jerusalem on the other side. I made small talk with my driver, then retreated back into my thoughts of the journey so far. It was my sixth day in Palestine, but I felt like I had been here for months. The days were filled with tours, the nights with talks—even the meals felt like seminars. Some of this is just being abroad somewhere far from home. But most of it was the specificity of this place—how much it seemed to embody the West and its contradictions, its claims of democracy, its foundations in exploitation. Of all the worlds I have ever explored, I don’t think any shone so bright, so intense, so immediately as Palestine.
But when the light cleared I had new eyes, and I could see my own words in new ways—and the words from which they were derived—the stories, columns, speeches, and talks presented by “willing intellectuals.” So much seemed obvious. I now noted a symmetry in the bromides—that those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state. Riding in that taxi toward Jerusalem, the truth of this struck me as undeniable. I’d spent most of my time in the Occupied Territories, a world of minority rule. But even in the state proper, caste reigned. Palestinians living in Israel have shorter lives, are poorer, and live in more violent neighborhoods. Certain neighborhoods in Israel are allowed to discriminate legally against Palestinian citizens by setting “admission committees.” The committees, operating in 41 percent of all Israeli localities, are free to bar anyone lacking “social suitability” or “compatibility with the social and cultural fabric.” Openly racist appeals are the norm, as when Benjamin Netanyahu warned in 2015 that “the right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” For all my talk of being fooled by the language of “Jewish democracy,” it had been right there the whole time. The phrase means what it says—a democracy for the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone. »

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message