#dsa

[liberalsarecool]

Zohran Mamdani is using New York City to show the world how progressive policies work for everyone. #DemocraticSocialist

[progressivemillennial]

"We are watching maybe the biggest example of why capitalism doesn't work and why these billionaires are actually often the least deserving people you know."

-Brennan Lee Mulligan

[aruviwrote]

People, my wonderful transfem friend is taking students for her class. Do your thing and help her find students. The relative value of a dollar and a rupee means that just ten international students can help her make rent.

[metaenira]

Look, I don’t do this ever, but my buddy Beth Andres-Beck (any/all) is running for Congress (MA-06) and we could really use some help getting a trans queer into the halls of power.

They decided to run because Seth Moulton was being a dick about trans kids in sports. As a trans person who did sports as a kid, this offended them.

He fucking understands that shit is fucked up up and we cannot act as if just voting in the midterm elections will save us.

Beth is a senior software engineer and actually knows how the internet works. You want a reliable vote against KOSA and AI fuckery? She’s it.

She signs ASL and uses a cane.

They once bought me two (2) beers in 2016.

Beth does not go in for aggressive needy donation asks. You’re not going to get spammed with emails or texts begging for votes.

Beth is a genuinely cool person and I am so goddamn tired of politics as usual.

Beth Andres-Beck (@beth4ma.bsky.social)

We’re in the lead! A new poll found that after voters are read bios of each candidate, Beth leads the field. This include as a 5-point lea

[mostlysignssomeportents]

EU ready to cave to Trump on tech

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next

Crises precipitate change. That's no reason to induce a crisis, but you'd be a fool to let a crisis go to waste. Donald Trump is the greatest crisis of our young century, and the EU looks set to squander the opportunity, to its own terrible detriment.

For more than a decade, it's been clear that the American internet was not fit for purpose. The whistleblowers Mark Klein and Edward Snowden revealed that the US had weaponized its status as the world's transoceanic fiber-optic hub to spy on the entire planet:

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-11-26-difficult-multipolarism-eurostack-5a527c32f149

US tech giants flouted privacy laws, gleefully plundering the world's cash and data with products that they remorselessly enshittified:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

American companies repurposed their over-the-air software update capabilities to remotely brick expensive machinery in service to geopolitical priorities:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Then Trump and his tech companies started attacking key public institutions around the world, shutting down access for senior judges who attempted to hold Trump's international authoritarian allies to account for their crimes:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

If Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't need tanks or missiles. He can just tell Microsoft and Oracle to brick the entire Danish state and all of its key firms, blocking their access to their email archives, files, databases, and other key administrative tools. If Denmark still holds out, Trump can brick all their tractors, smart speakers, and phones. If Denmark still won't give up Greenland, Trump could blackhole all Danish IP addresses for the world's majority of transoceanic fiber. At the click of a mouse, Trump could shut down the world's supply of Lego, Ozempic, and delicious, lethally strong black licorice.

Now, these latent offensive capabilities were obvious long before Trump, but the presidents who weaponized them in the pre-Trump era did so in subtle and deniable ways, or under a state of exception (e.g. in response to spectacular terrorist attacks or in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine) that let bystanders assure themselves that this wouldn't become a routine policy.

After all, America profited so much from the status quo in which America and its trading partners all pretended that US tech wouldn't be weaponized for geopolitical aims, so a US president would be a fool to shatter the illusion. And even if the president was so emotionally incontinent that he demanded the naked weaponization of America's defective, boobytrapped tech exports, the power blocs that the president relies on would stop him, because they are so marinated in the rich broth that America drained from the world using Big Tech.

This is "status quo bias" in action. No one wants to let go of the vine they're swinging from until they have a new vine firmly in their grasp – but you can't reach the next vine unless you release your death-grip on your current one. So it was that, year after year, the world allowed itself to become more dependent on America's easily weaponizable tech, making the tech both more dangerous and harder to escape.

Enter Trump (a crisis) (and crises precipitate change). Under Trump, the illusion of a safe interdependence crumbled. Every day, in new and increasingly alarming ways, Trump makes it clear that America doesn't have allies or trading partners, only adversaries and rivals. Every day, Trump proves to the world that American tech isn't merely untrustworthy – it's a live, dire, urgent danger to your state, your companies, and your people. The best time to get shut of the American internet was 15 years ago. The second best time is right fucking now.

NOW!

The result is the burgeoning movement to build a "post-American internet." In Canada, PM Mark Carney's announcement of a "rupture" has the country rethinking its deep connections to the American internet and asking what it could do to escape it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/27/i-want-to-do-it/#now-make-me-do-it

Europe, meanwhile, has multiple, advanced, well-funded initiatives to leave the American internet behind and migrate to a post-American internet, like "Eurostack" and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/edic

But status quo bias exerts a powerful gravity. A reactionary counterrevolution is being waged in the European Commission – the permanent bureaucracy that executes Europe's laws and regulations. Within the EC, an ascendant faction has announced plans for a "dialogue" with representatives from the Trump regime to let them direct the enforcement of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), Europe's landmark 2024 anti-Big Tech regulations:

https://www.politico.eu/article/fatal-decision-eu-slammed-for-caving-to-us-pressure-on-digital-rules/

The DMA and DSA require America's tech giants to open up their platforms in ways that would halt the plunder of Europeans' private data and cash. US tech giants have flatly refused to comply with these rules, relying on Trump to get them out of any obligations under EU law:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers

That's a sound bet. After all, the last thing Trump did before his inauguration was publicly announce his intention to destroy any country that attempted to enforce these laws:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/us/politics/trump-davos-europe-tariffs.html

He's making good on his threats. He's already sanctioned a group of officials who helped draft the DSA:

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5655855/trump-administration-bars-5-europeans-from-entry-to-the-u-s-over-alleged-censorship

And he's ordered his tech companies to turn over the private emails and messages of other European officials, so he can identify the ones most dangerous to US tech plunder and sanction them, too:

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-congress-judiciary-committee-big-tech-private-communication-eu-officials/

The quislings and appeasers in the Commission who've been spooked by Trump's belligerence (or tempted by offers of cushy jobs in Big Tech after they leave public service) are selling out the EU's future. Caving to Trump won't make him more favorably disposed to Europe or Europeans. Trump treats every capitulation as a sign of weakness that signals that he can safely ignore his end of the bargain and demand twice as much. For Trump, the "art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: reneging.

Within the EU, there's fury at the Commission's announcement of "dialogue." As Politico's Milena Wälde reports, lawmakers like Alexandra Geese (Greens) say that this is a move that eliminates the "sovereign path for Europe" by letting tech giants "grade their own homework." She calls it a "fatal decision for our companies and our democracy."

Moving to the post-American internet is hard – but it will only get harder. Sure, Europe could wait for the next crisis to let go of the Big Tech vine and grab the Eurostack one, but that next crisis will be far, far worse. The EU can't afford to wait for Trump to brick one or more of its member states to (finally, at long last) take this threat seriously:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

[federal-reserve-bonds-dog]

DSA wasting no time celebrating the firebomb/molotov cocktail attack on Jews in Colorado today

[thoughtportal]

Zohran Mamdani's first week as mayor proves that politicians can actually do good things.

Mayor Mamdani signed 12 executive orders in just over a week — a much, much faster pace than his predecessors.

The number one goal of these orders is housing affordability. He aims to protect tenants, build housing, and slash red tape.

Meagan Day explains. via More Perfect Union

[nyancrimew]

zohran mamdani could reunite the balkans #yugoslavia2