nothing here but years of grift
issue 299 - 28th September, 2025
CJW: Big issue this time around, so let’s get to it!
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The Team
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Meme collector. Hates the internet.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, dust bowl.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer, full-time goth and metalhead.
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning - Elizabeth Spiers at The Nation
Charles James Kirk, 31, died on Wednesday from a gunshot to the neck at a Utah Valley University campus event just as he was trying to deflect a question about mass shootings by suggesting they were largely a function of gang violence. He died with a net worth of $12 million, which he made by espousing horrific and bigoted views in the name of advancing Christian nationalism. The foundation of his empire was the group he cofounded and led, Turning Point USA, which is a key youth-recruitment arm of the MAGA movement. Kirk was able to launch Turning Point at the age of 18 because he received money from Tea Party member Bill Montgomery, right-wing donor Foster Friess, and his own father, also a prolific right-wing donor. He was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct. He had children, as do many vile people.
A great piece on the whitewashing involved in the media response to Charlie Kirk gettin' merced.
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CJW: The American Years of Lead are Here - Jack Crosbie
The kind of violence that killed Kirk is supposed to be carried out by people who are so deranged, or crazy, or sick, or in pain, that they take an extreme action that is outside the bounds of what our society should permit. But look at where we’re at. Our society is increasing the number of people who are sick or in pain every day. It has broken down and squeezed so hard that ordinary people may feel deranged on a bad day. But most of all, for those who were already harboring thoughts of violence or hate — like so many on the far right — the chaos is an easy excuse. That the president looks fondly on their views or, at the very least, shows little interest in prosecuting them only adds to the opportunity. The country is full of loaded guns in shaky hands, swinging back and forth, from target to target.
A great summation of the state of America in relation to the shooting of racist, fascist, neo-Nazi Charlie Kirk.
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DCH: These Countries Recognized Palestine, but Still Send Arms to Israel by Jonah Valdez at The Intercept
Both the French and British heads of state said that they decided to recognize Palestine in order to pursue peace. “The time for peace has come because we’re just a few moments away from no longer being able to seize peace,” said French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday before the U.N. A day earlier, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a recorded speech, “In the face of growing horror in the Middle East, we are acting to keep alive the possibility of peace.”
What Macron and Starmer failed to mention, however, is that they — and many of their fellow nations now pushing for Palestinian statehood — continue to supply weapons and military support to Israel.
The list includes: UK, France, Australia, Canada, Luxembourg. Recognising Palestine is a welcome move but needs to be backed up by total arms embargos, sanctions, and military intervention. Thank God for countries like Spain and Italy actually sending in their navies.
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“While many would have you believe that the fiasco involving over 300 Korean workers being arrested and detained by US immigration authorities has been resolved by allowing the workers to “voluntarily depart” back to Korea, this is far from the truth. Korea as a nation was deeply shocked to witness our workers, who had traveled to the US to work at the request of American investors, shackled at their hands and feet with chains. This barbaric incident will leave a lasting stain on Korea-US relations.” - Imperial tyranny, Korean humiliation - Park Hyun at Hani
"The launch of Your Party earlier this summer was met with vastly more enthusiasm than the ISN ever achieved — a reminder of the improved position of socialist politics in the wake of the 2010s. But as the new party devolved into bitter factional warfare and even rival legal threats, it also stands to contribute to a far greater wave of demoralization." Your Party: A Left for Itself by Bhaskar Sunkara at Jacobin (DCH: I don’t think I’ve ever been more embarrassed and disheartened with bullshit insider party politics. And honestly given the DNC in the States that’s saying something.)
Just the headlines:
Disruption across Italy as tens of thousands protest against Gaza war - Ashifa Kassam at The Guardian
DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing by Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media
Tech & Design
CJW: OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws - Gyana Swain at Computer World
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, acknowledged in its own research that large language models will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering, marking a significant admission from one of the AI industry’s leading companies.
Ahahahahaha. “Our product is the future. It will always make mistakes - guaranteed! Please give us more money?”
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DCH: Microsoft revokes cloud services from Israel’s Unit 8200 by Yuval Abraham at 972 Magazine
Microsoft’s letter to the Israeli Defense Ministry, which was seen by the Guardian, noted that the company had launched an “urgent” external inquiry following our exposé, finding that the Israeli army had violated Microsoft’s terms of service by utilizing its cloud platform to store the surveillance trove. According to the Guardian, the letter stated that because the company “identified evidence” in support of our reporting, it had decided to suspend the storage and AI services connected to the project under review. It added that Microsoft “is not in the business of facilitating the mass surveillance of civilians.”
This is a victory with full credit going to Abraham and his colleagues in the middle. Shame Unit 8200 is already shopping around at AWS instead. We now live in a time where genocidal governments have an easier time finding surveillance services than most people do watching porn.
CJW: Related: Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its technology in mass surveillance of Palestinians - Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham at The Guardian
The extraordinary decision by Microsoft to end the spy agency’s access to key technology was made amid pressure from employees and investors over its work for Israel’s military and the role its technology has played in the almost two-year [genocide] in Gaza.
Fixed that for you, Guardian. So fucking spineless.
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DCH: Elon Musk’s AI Grift by Jacob Silverman at The Nation
The merger of X and xAI helped muddy, if not obscure, X’s checkered investment history—and its troubling role as a tool of state surveillance. The blob of capital and hype that makes up the Muskonomy has helped to further insulate the platform from anything resembling public accountability. The two companies already shared personnel and investors; now they are more enmeshed than ever. The deal intensified the laundering of responsibility for the Saudi spy ring, the most prominent instance of Silicon Valley’s widespread—and growing—vulnerability to espionage.
Musk is running a three-card monte with AI, social media, and Saudi oil money — a grotesque carnival of hype and blood-soaked cash where the house always wins and the suckers clap for more. His chatbot spews fascist bile while he folds a dying Twitter into his next grand hallucination, puffing up valuations like a Vegas hustler on mescaline. Beneath the neon promises of “AGI salvation,” it’s just authoritarian cash laundering itself through the dream of a silicon god.
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"What he saw disturbed him. “Yes, it’s one show on an obscure Russian government adjacent network using deep fakes for parody,” he said. “But the fact that a television network finally made that leap, to me, is a pivotal moment that I see as the tip of the iceberg."" Russian State TV Launches AI-Generated News Satire Show by Matthew Gault at 404 Media
Just the headlines:
AI-Generated YouTube Channel Uploaded Nothing But Videos of Women Being Shot by Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media
Society & The Culture
LZ - Storm unearths medieval skeleton of man in County Sligo
This is old news from 2015, but I learned about it while reading the book Medieval Bodies (reviewed below) and found it so amazing. We tend to forget how many layers of history are just beneath us, and then something as serendipitous as a storm could uncover something like that… and the poetics of the corpse being all entangled in the roots of the birch tree. I don't know, it's occurrences like this that make me feel there's some sort of magic in life, somehow.
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DCH: The Bullet as Shitpost: Media Won’t Publish Manifestos but Reproduces Scrawls on Casing by Alain Stephens at The Intercept
In other words, the content — whether anti-fascist songs, furry memes, or snarky insults — could be interpreted largely as an ironic flourish. Michael Senters, a researcher at Virginia Tech, noted that the media sees a puzzle of “ideology,” but for “internet natives” the bullet etchings look like jargon spilled straight from a teenager’s group chat: They “only show he spent a lot of time on the computer, being terminally online.”
The goal is to spark interest, to make the uninitiated give informational chase. It’s not winning converts, but winning attention. In a country where gun violence is so common that some killings receive little news coverage, such messages can bait the media into repeating the graffiti and turning the act, and shooter themselves, into a viral moment.
Trolls never have an actual ideology. They’re almost always just nihilists. (Luigi continues to be the exception.)
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DCH: Larry Ellison is quickly becoming the biggest media magnate in America by Chris Stokel-Walker at Fast Company + Pro-Trump Billionaires Are Consolidating Media Control by Ari Paul at Jacobin
“Paramount and Warner Bros. would in essence become the biggest studio in the world with a formidable base of franchises that include DC Comics, Harry Potter, Mattel licenses like Barbie, Hasbro licenses like Transformers, Mission Impossible, Star Trek, Top Gun, Dora, SpongeBob, etc.,” wrote Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar in a report last week. Alongside all those household names, there’s another journalistic outlet that would come under Ellison ownership: CNN, up to now one of the biggest thorns in Trump’s side.
Ellison is a big Trumper, joining in the reactionary denial of the 2020 presidential elections. Like some of the others in the deal, he is part of the inner circle of Trump’s favorite corporate ideologues. This TikTok deal is not just about money. It’s about control of the political narrative.
Emphasis mine. Bannon has long argued that politics is downstream of culture. That’s why the right loves all this culture war nonsense and why right-wing billionaires have been gobbling up media companies. Ellison has been a right-wing crank for decades and in addition to being part of the strategy team that formulated the stop the steal charade he’s also personally financed much of Netanyahu’s legal defenses in various cases. Never mind his bullshit propagandistic archeological digs in Palestine
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"A bill introduced by Michigan lawmakers last week would ban pornography, ASMR, depictions of transgender people, and VPNs for anyone using the internet in the state." Michigan Lawmakers Are Attempting to Ban Porn Entirely by Samantha Cole at 404 Media (DCH: emphasis mine) (CJW: So I couldn’t post selfies in Michigan? What a fucking joke.)
Health, Cooking, and Related
CJW: The Story - Doc Impossible
Stryker’s Transgender History describes the founding of several gender clinics across America, following [Harry] Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon, expecting that maybe 1 in 50,000 people were trans. They were immediately inundated with an initial wave of applications for their programs that far, far exceeded that estimate. Terrified at what this might say about society at large, they banded together and used Benjamin’s Scale to begin “weeding out” those they didn’t believe to be “True Transsexuals.”
And how did they justify this? Here, our other source presents itself: these doctors demanded from their patients The Story, specifically seizing upon the Wrong Body Narrative as being the heart of True Transsexualism, and thereby denying access to anyone who didn’t magically produce the right words in the right order.
Words most of their patients couldn’t possibly have known.
And now we come to the most important part of this history: the whole, entire purpose of this was to artificially shrink how many trans people they thought existed. This is not in dispute. We have their notes, their letters. They admitted to these things privately, to each other. These doctors were terrified at the possibility that there might be vastly many more trans people than they thought. So, they drew from Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon and minted The Story, out of whole cloth, to turn away most of their applicant pool.
To deny them care.
A long pull quote, but that's because I think it's important. At the very beginning of modern trans healthcare, the doctors who wanted to work with trans people still wanted to gatekeep that care, and it's a tendency that has only continued - and in the US and UK in particular, gotten worse. There's a lot more to this essay too, check it out.
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CJW: AI medical tools downplay symptoms in women and ethnic minorities (Archive Link) - Melissa Heikkilä at FT
The findings by researchers at leading US and UK universities suggest that medical AI tools powered by LLMs have a tendency to not reflect the severity of symptoms among female patients, while also displaying less “empathy” towards Black and Asian ones.
Years ago we shared articles and research about the racism and sexism embedded in LLM systems because of the biases in the training data fed into them, and of course none of those issues have been addressed in the rush to get these shitty systems into as many industries and workplaces as possible.
The warnings come as the world’s top AI groups such as Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI and Google rush to develop products that aim to reduce physicians’ workloads and speed up treatment, all in an effort to help overstretched health systems around the world.
The problem isn’t “overstretched health systems,” the problem is underfunding of health systems, largely due to privatisation, or at the very least the conservative tendency under neoliberal capitalism to defund health services (because fuck the people you’re meant to be serving, I guess).
Books
LZ - Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages, by Jack Hartnell
Very interesting book that shows how medieval people and doctors understood the human body. The chapters are divided in body parts and senses, and there are several illustrations that also show how doctors worked back in the day, how some unhinged techniques were used in order to cure and ended up killing the subject etc. Despite tackling an enormous topic such as that, I felt that the book was quite thorough – perhaps because I'm not that versed in the topic, or because it is indeed a good piece. I also love that the author brings up relics, so that made everything even better.
Currently, I'm also reading The anatomy of melancholy, which is a good complement to Medieval Bodies. I can't remember if Hartnell brought it up in his book, but it's nevertheless a very famous title that worked as a sort of compendium to understand what is melancholy from a medieval perspective – thus, many assessments are currently known to be wrong, such as using humors to understand the human body and conditions. It's still an extraordinary book with about a thousand pages. Definitely not a light nor an easy read, but it's my next project haha.
Movies + TV
MJW: Wayward - Netflix
Wayward is Mae Martin’s (of Feel Good fame) new show - the non-binary Martin created, wrote and stars in it. It’s about an ‘Academy’ for troubled teens in the weird town of Tall Pines, Vermont. Martin plays Alex, a trans cop in the small town police force, new to the beat. He’s followed his pregnant wife back to her hometown, and it’s an odd place. Toni Collette plays Evelyn, the leader of the culty Tall Pines Academy, whose aim is to rid her teenage charges of their intergenerational trauma. It’s a creepy mystery show with a few little twists and turns, and I liked it very much. Martin and Collette are both great in their roles, as are Sydney Topliffe and Alyvia Alyn Lind as Abbie and Leila, two teens who are constantly trying to escape the academy. While I felt like it could have explained a little more, I was still really happy with the fact that it is a limited series that tied itself up very nicely.
Podcasts
LZ - the forgotten codes of love i'll teach my daughter, by back from the borderline
I found out about this podcast on Instagram, with one of those very relatable and engaging posts where you have a photo and a quote that is edgy and that resonates with our own toxic or at least questionable behaviors.
Like I have said before, I'm not a fan of podcasts, but I've been trying to give them more chances and I have learned that my dislike was caused by the large number of examples where the hosts only talk a lot of shit they have no idea about. This is why I was a bit concerned when I saw that back from the borderline is labeled as self-help, but Mollie is actually very knowledgeable, experienced, and a great communicator. I love how she curses all the time, too, which is always refreshing. Her husky voice is also very comfy to my ears.
This episode, in particular, discusses archetypes in dating. She has dated only men, and the archetypes are mostly masculine, but they serve both men and women. She describes The Player, The Eternal Child, The King-in-Exile, and The Devoted Partner, and also talks about attraction/chemistry vs trauma response, she uses examples in movies, and also addresses the difference between choosing someone and simply settling down.
While her takes might be obvious for people more experienced in dating, this was all very enlightening to me. Coincidentally, I had my therapy session right after finishing this episode, which has a second part, and we discussed how the points raised by Mollie actually reflected many conclusions I have been taking throughout this year, being single for the first time as an adult and after 18 years.
The fact that she is putting all of this together for her daughter, who is just a few months old, is amazing, because like her and many others, I also wasn't able to talk about relationships with my parents, and my mom also didn't have much experience before marrying my dad. She actually started exploring more after her divorce and that in itself was quite traumatic to me, so much so that it took me a long time to feel safe about intimacy, and I still carry this distrust these days.
Since I don't want to do like Mollie (or my mom) and just throw myself into the world to experience it and learn everything the hard way, this episode was really helpful and I'm looking forward to listening to part 2.
The Self-Promotion
CJW: Do Motorcycle Centaurs Dream of Five Stars and a Tip? in Interzone #303
‘Babe, the guy who used to be called Alejandro died when he got run over by a 36-wheel, AI-driven, caterpillar truck carrying edible nuclear waste to Megasydney-2. Despite the chunks of grey matter inside your titanium skull, HR has determined that you lack a human mind and all subsequent emotions and entitlements.’
I didn’t respond, system still initializing, messages scrolling down my field of view, obscuring my vision. Finally, they cleared.
‘You’re RoboBro now, babe, and you’re going to revolutionise the food delivery business,’ the cybertwink in the turtleneck and labcoat said, taking a brief, professional look down at the breast-shaped protrusions bolted to my chest. ‘The Tits for Tips program turned you into a GothGF CyberCentaur™ to improve earnings with the “Male 15-35” demographic and generate a sense of safety and camaraderie with other women.’
‘Okay, babe,’ I said.
‘No. I call you “babe”, you don’t call me “babe”, babe.’
My processor struggled to parse that, but before I could waste any time spontaneously developing feminist philosophy in the workplace, Brolivery Corporation assigned me my first package.
The latest collaboration from myself and Maddison Stoff has been published in Interzone issue 303 - Do Motorcycle Centaurs Dream of Five Stars and a Tip? is a piece of absolutely wild neon-drenched hyperpop/cyberpunk madness. We crammed it full of over-the-top descriptions and sfnal concepts.
Subscribe to Interzone to check it out (I highly recommend subscribing - Gareth is doing amazing work with Interzone), or you can buy the individual issue direct.
We also wrote about our inspirations behind this story and some of our other work, which is available to read for free at the Interzone Patreon: Five(ish) Things Inspiring Corey Jae White & Maddison Stoff.
The Memes
