Desperado Philosophy

March 29, 2026

Meta Mendacity & Malice

By DP

Here at DP, it will come as no surprise to longtime readers that we exuberantly celebrated the recent major court victory against the poisonous social company that began as Facebook and now hides behind the idiotic pseudonym Meta.

Below, a press release from the esteemed nonprofit, The Tech Oversight Project:

This was the first product liability case to go to trial that any Big Tech company has faced and was brought forward by plaintiff K.G.M., who experienced dangerous mental health harms after becoming addicted to social media platforms run by defendants Meta and YouTube. Her case against TikTok and Snap was settled before the trial began.

“The era of Big Tech invincibility is over – this ruling is an earthquake that shakes Big Tech’s predatory business model to its core. After years of gaslighting from companies like Google and Meta, new evidence and testimony have pulled back the curtain and validated the harms young people and parents have been telling the world about for years. These products were purposefully designed to harm, addict millions of young people, and lead to lifelong mental health consequences,” said Sacha Haworth, Executive Director of The Tech Oversight Project. “This trial was proof that if you put CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg on the stand before a judge and jury of their peers, the tech industry’s wanton disregard for people will be on full display. We have the documents, we have the evidence, and now is the time for Congress to step up and finally pass the Senate’s Kids Online Safety Act, so that we can finally protect kids and save lives.”

More than 2,000 plaintiffs are alleging social media companies like Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and Alphabet knowingly designed addictive products that expose children to predators, exploitation, and self-harm. The trials are considered the most significant Big Tech accountability litigation to date, drawing parallels to precedent-setting products liability cases against Big Tobacco.

The evidence now in the public record shows how companies knowingly engineered products with design features such as infinite scroll, push notifications, and algorithmic amplification. For Big Tech companies, youth engagement is a financial imperative. Social media platforms generate billions in annual ad revenue from U.S. youth. According to new Pew Research Center survey data, 36% of U.S. teens say they use TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and/or Facebook “almost constantly.”

The trials have already produced an unprecedented public record of damning internal company documents.

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Social media are as addictive as nicotine & crack, and equally as damaging to individual mental health; they also have massively contributed to the social fragmentation, divisiveness and rancor infecting our polity and our democracy.

Let this past week’s victory mark the beginning of the end for these dangerously toxic, predatory and manipulative media!

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Leave a comment | tags: addictive social media, delete facebook, facebook toxic, opt out social media | posted in bearings, buoys, DP

March 23, 2026

Beneath the Geopolitical Mayhem

By DP

Saturated by wave after wave of updates chronicling violence inflicted by humans upon other humans, we tune our attention to all the additional damage inflicted upon the whole of life by the gradually accelerating violence of the Climate Emergency and the Sixth Extinction. Of course, the two levels of violence are deeply linked via human supremacism, and appear to be feeding energy into each other, with no end in sight.

Below, excerpts from today’s press release from the World Meteorological Organization, together with a link to the full report. It makes for sober reading; hence our ongoing focus on the theme of lifeboats!

Geneva, Switzerland (WMO) – The Earth’s climate is more out of balance than at any time in observed history, as greenhouse gas concentrations drive continued warming of the atmosphere and ocean and melting of ice, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These rapid and large-scale changes have occurred within a few decades but will have harmful repercussions for hundreds – and potentially thousands – of years.

Key messages

WMO State of Climate report confirms 2015-2025 hottest 11 years on record
Earth’s energy imbalance is highest in sixty five-year record
The ocean has been absorbing about eighteen times the annual human energy use each year for the past two decades
Extreme weather impacts millions and costs billions
World Meteorological Day: observing today to protect tomorrow

LINK TO THE FULL REPORT

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Leave a comment | tags: climate breakdown, Human Supremacism, slow violence, the great acceleration | posted in bearings, DP

March 19, 2026

Rule of Law Under Attack

By DP

Now comes Earthjustice, with a recent press release:

The ability to hold wrongdoers accountable in court is foundational to our democracy, environmental protections, and the rule of law. When large corporations release toxic pollution into our air and water, our legal system should empower people to seek justice and fight back against polluters and harmful industries that threaten the health and well-being of our communities.

Under the second Trump administration, that right is under threat. The administration and its allies in Congress have spent the last fourteen months working to dismantle our access to the courts in five key ways:

Eliminating or undermining judicial review
Limiting who can sue wrongdoers
Making it too expensive to sue and harder to win
Limiting judicial discretion
Blocking meaningful case settlements

That’s why we released our new report,Access to Justice: Defending the Public’s Right to Seek Justice in Court. It outlines these attacks, provides specific examples of how the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans are working to codify them into law, and details the ways we’re fighting back.

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We also note the death of distinguished philosopher Jürgen Habermas, with whom DP was fortunate to study while an unruly undergraduate.

A thoughtful review of his philosophical legacy accessible via clicking on the below photograph:

A TIRELESS ADVOCATE FOR PEACEFUL NEGOTIATION AND DIALOGUE

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Leave a comment | tags: defend rule of law, earth justice | posted in bearings, buoys, DP

March 6, 2026

Across All Data Sets

By DP

Now comes a press release from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research:

Global warming rate (in °C per decade) from the Berkeley Earth global temperature data: The blue line shows the linear trends for the time before and after 2015 (light blue the uncertainty range). The red line shows the linear trend for 10‐year windows of the data, at 1-year intervals. Figure: PIK

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2025GL118804

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Leave a comment | tags: climate emergency | posted in bearings, DP, riptides

February 20, 2026

Hungry Mungry

By DP

We borrow our title from a poem by Shel Silverstein, in which a boy sits down for a bowl of mushroom soup and proceeds to munch his way though his neighborhood, his town, his state, his country and the rest of the world; and who then decided, for dessert, to eat the universe:

According to Nicholas Carr, who has long understood the severe consequences of our insatiable appetite for technological “innovation”, so it goes with the relentless AI eating machine.

Below, we relay a few paragraphs from a recent post on his excellent New Cartographies.

Until, that is, there is nothing left to eat.

Not only a world without us.

Not only a universe without a world.

Just nothing was,

nothing was,

nothing,

nada,

nicht.

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Leave a comment | tags: AI, Günther Anders, Human Supremacism, inverted utopia, world without us | posted in bearings, DP, riptides

January 30, 2026

In Praise of Wirecutters

By DP

We are grateful to an esteemed DP correspondent for guiding our attention towards a recent lecture delivered by London Review of Book’s US editor Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. A brief excerpt below:

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The entire lecture is worthy of close consideration, and is available here.

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Leave a comment | tags: Adam Shatz, American alternative futures, racism in America | posted in bearings, buoys, DP

January 25, 2026

Of Lies & State Terror

By DP

Following the most recent Minnesota murder committed in the name of “law enforcement,” we relay the following few paragraphs from Timothy Snyder, truth-speaker and author of On Tyranny:

The lies begin as clichés, memes that are pounded into our heads by the government and by those in the media who repeat them, mindlessly or with malice.

One of these cliches is “law enforcement,” which is uttered over and over like a incantation. “Law enforcement” is not a noun. It is not a thing in the world. It is an action.

And action is something that we have a right to see and judge for ourselves. People enforcing the law do not wear masks. And people wearing masks who trespass, assault, batter, and kill are not enforcing the law.

They are violating it.

It is indeed the job of some local, state, and federal authorities to enforce the law. It is a disservice to them when federal employees carry out public executions. It is a greater disservice to them when such actions are defined as “law enforcement.”

The lies continue as provocative inversions, as what in On Tyranny I called “dangerous words”: these are, precisely, “terrorist” and “extremist.” These two words are known to us from history as those used by tyrants. And these are the words used by the Trump people to defame those killed by their polices.

This is their “messaging,” their banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt called it.

Or the evil of banality, as Václav Havel said. Words turned into reality with the complicity of those who hear them.

Those who actively lie are directly complicit in the deaths that just happen and in any deaths to come. But those in media who choose to treat propaganda as the story, to begin from lies rather than from events, are also complicit. The border is the crack, the lie is the wedge, and the wedge is made up of people — of us.

Words matter, uttered first or repeated. They create an atmosphere, they normalize — or they do not. We can choose to see, to call things by their proper names, to call out people who lie. We have to.

The moral horror of those killings is enough. But there is a political logic as well. And the two are connected. Those who resist the lawlessness and the lies are doing right. And they are giving a second chance to the endangered American republic.

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OUTING THE LIE: EXHIBIT A

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OUTING THE LIE: EXHIBIT B

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OUTING THE LIE: EXHIBIT C

UNARMED VICTIM ON KNEE SHOT IN BACK BY MASKED “LAW ENFORCEMENT”

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VIGIL FOR ALEX PRETTI

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Leave a comment | posted in bearings, DP, riptides

January 14, 2026

Twilight of the Self

By DP

Now comes Michael J. Thompson, Professor of Political Theory at William Paterson University, with a few excerpts from the introduction to his book, Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism. Though published in 2022, the truth and dire implications of his central thesis have become ever more apparent with each passing year.