Very slowly reading “The Lion Women of Tehran” & having to stop every now & then bc emotions. Also got lost down a “1950s Iranian women’s fashion” rabbit hole & apart from the outlawing of westernization, realizing that the regime also eliminated a beautiful multicultural arts & fashion tradition.+

-A living wage -Guaranteed healthcare -The right to join a union -The right to vote -The right to choose when, how, and with whom you start a family -The right for you and your family to live free from gun violence These are the foundations of real freedom.

If anyone wants an example of the kind of stuff I wish more Democrats would do when it comes to defending trans rights, look no further than this from @jayapal.house.gov

On that note, today we also told him that as he gets older, some ppl (esp other boys) might start trying to tell him that liking things they believe are for girls means they’re gay. Friends, the confusion on his face made me so proud. “What?! That makes no sense,” were his exact words.

The transphobic panic around childhood social transition is absurd for many reasons but one that I personally find hilarious is that my 7yro who is very bright & has an interest in biology still doesn’t fully believe that women don’t have penises or that breasts aren’t clothing, as in part of a bra.

HELLO I WAS A QUEER TEEN IN THE 1990s AND THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST SOCIAL TRANSITION NOW ARE INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST "LETTING" US BE (at the time, for me) GAY OR LESBIAN THEN. They all rest on the belief that it's inherently better to be straight (then)/cis (now) and that's BS.

Literally, as in on the high school newspaper, or in English class, or OSSLT prep, or the basic Literacy course for those who didn’t pass…

FWIW, I just emailed NYT's standards editor to ask about the paper's policy on this. Will update if I get a response.

Might be in the GOAT conversation for parts in some of the great underrated dramas: Falling Down, The Paper, Network. He was in so many good movies, maybe only Network shows up in the obit. That's a full-ass 95 years, RIP.

One of the most interesting things about the way ppl talk about AI is how many people are proud of the fact that they hate being literate. For everyone who would kill for a job that consists of mainly reading & writing, there seem to be a dozen more who actually have those jobs & despise them.

The fact that these sentences always end with "... which we will cram with more work for them" and not "... so we moved to a four-day workweek" really illustrate the hollowness of some AI evangelists' promises that AI will deliver us to some kind of post-work utopia.

The disastrous results of social media on the roughly-over-55 mind is a far more urgent issue while they have all the voting power.

I would have absolutely done this if I’d had to when I was a kid.

Speaking as an Australian, all I see since the social media ban for kids is complaints about kids being in parks and riding bikes and being nuisances in public. Pretty much all the pre-social media complaints about kids. It does nothing

Having just lost a niece to a rare genetic condition that no one knew she had, I cannot fathom anyone willing to risk going through this (to say nothing of the suffering they’re willing to see their child endure) for any reason. It’s unbelievable that some ppl are willing to FAFO wrt to this.

If children were more politically active they would be quite pissed to be told that their screen time is “the most urgent public health issue” while the largest measles outbreak since the vaccine sweeps their schools because of conspiracies that the adults in their life believed from social media.

This is where it helps to remind myself that “conman” is short for “confidence man,” because these are just people whose confidence in themselves (ego) inspires & gains confidence in others (trust)

This bizarre slide into eugenicist beliefs and neofascism appeared like some kind of pseudo academic folly, but now we see it's a concerted operation funded by active pedophiles. Oh and attended by leading figures from British culture like Richard Dawkins, amongst others.

This. This is 25 years of the media being obsessed with having a talking head on call 24 hours a day, getting ‘both sides’ even when they know one side is just hot air, allowing personal hobby-horse riders to be presented to the public with the same credibility as genuine accredited experts.

Sadly the media seems to be stuffed full of superannuated simpletons with misplaced delusions of wisdom - fossilised into conformity through social circles and failures of education - you and a handful of of others are sadly massively outnumbered.

I've often wondered how Steven Pinker's amazingly sloppy research and baseless claims* have for so long received a free pass. I wonder whether it could have something to do with a. his connections with the rich and powerful; b. his claims often aligning with what they want to hear. *See next post.

The wellness to eugenics to fascism pipeline is well documented. It’s why disabled people beg you to stop treating us as expendable. Health supremacy devalues other human beings. It leads to deciding some lives are “worth” more than others. It paves the way for atrocities.

"AI detectors" are themselves AI, and yet are endlessly trusted by people on here if they say that a newspaper article is AI. AI detectors are snake oil. None of them reliably works. And UK broadsheet are not yet using AI to write articles. No, that link to the deal you found doesn't prove it.

If we give up one of us we give up all of us. As soon as we say "it's ok for these people to be made lesser based on inherent traits", they will start salivating, and immediately and inevitably ask "well what about THESE traits?"

The Project 2025 architect who promised to put federal employees “in trauma” is spending $15 million of former USAID funding—money that would have gone toward fighting HIV, polio, malaria, and other diseases—to bankroll his security detail. trib.al/TSV3cmb

Flabbergasted by the fact that over the last 15 years we’ve been convinced that we should extend tolerance to hateful bigots while at the same time not tolerate those advocating for the rights we’ve allowed said bigots to openly attack. I called this. A lot of us called this. And we’re being gaslit.

Feel the need to point out that this is happening to Canadian accounts too, bc a ton of ppl here seem to think it’s only impacting Americans, when in fact the way the entire platform operates now has fundamentally shifted. This is Twitter-X all over again.

Unfollowing & possibly blocking a lot of folks calling transphobia anything other than a legitimate human rights issue that should concern all of us greatly. Wanting folks to defend human rights for all ppl isn’t a purity test. Human rights for all should be a non-negotiable. No one is expendable.

Never, if I don’t use them I’m leaving those ketchup packets to my heirs

This thread is the we are going to win thread, is the kids are alright thread, is the STOP ICE thread, is the civil society rising thread; read it through.

I wish people understood how much unseen labor goes into every visible ounce of activism and how much labor by so many people towards change is deliberately invisible and never meant to be known

Even if you fully intend to vote for whoever the Democratic nominee ends up being, there’s a huge difference between doing that quietly in November 2028 and loudly announcing it years in advance with zero conditions attached.

"due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering" <- a lot of linguistic gymnastics to say that "hallucinations" are a feature, not a bug

(11/11) In this new normal, costs are individually adjusted to a consumer’s maximum threshold and wages to a worker’s minimum floor. The next time you see a price, know that it may not reflect what the item is worth—but what the algorithm believes *you* are worth.

(2/11) You know dynamic pricing—think Uber rides, flights, or concert tickets that surge based on supply and demand. “Surveillance Pricing” takes this to the next level: using your data to set a “price for you” based on your predicted breaking point. This is, increasingly, everywhere.

Pretty sure everyone here is aware but none of this moon shit is what scientists refer to as "actually going to happen"

I’m so tired of being expected to dole out butt pats to guys who can’t even write an email without Dark Clippy whispering to them.

The more I hang around with this crop of computer scientists, the more I realize that many of them are mad at: A teacher somewhere in their early education who made them read Their mom, who told them to do their homework A girl they wanted to date except she’s in the humanities, ugh

That's how the robots take over. Not with laser eyed death squads, but by being spectacularly incompetent at the things we used to do for ourselves but have forgotten how to...

douglas adams was our most accurate futurist

Thinking of the grandma who used Excel as knitting pattern software! (which was inspired, and I've done the same myself!) www.reddit.com/r/thatHappen...

That's similar to what initiated my question, actually. The folks with less formal "technical" knowledge are assumed to know less, but in fact they often know more about how a tech can/should be used *to actually make their lives better*.

Bluesky was literally meant to be a cryptobro social network for grifters, LinkedIn sludge, and libertarians who know way too much about age of consent laws. Jack Dorsey *left* when instead of weird and off-putting cryptonerds, trans people started hanging out here.

with alt text, because everyone needs to be able to read this 😭

Measles is one of those nightmare diseases that, if it hadn't been killing people for hundreds of years, people would ABSOLUTELY be pushing conspiracy theories about right now. It's too nasty in too many different directions to seem natural. But oh, boy, it sure is.

I’ve seen the critique that making these hats isn’t “doing anything” but I’d say raising 3/4s of a million for their local food shelf and rent assistance org seems like doing a lot.

I miss when you could post Brave Norman Rockwell Townsperson and the caption could be, like, “R.E.M was wrong to leave ‘Fretless’ off of Out of Time” instead of “The secret police should stop murdering people.”

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

Crashing hard bc I didn’t pace myself following a demanding morning on Friday, so now I’m occupying that horrible in-between space where doing anything at all is painfully exhausting & doing nothing at all is painfully boring but I can’t fall asleep bc I’m too restless bc I pushed myself too much.

“DHS traps people with serial killer methods” arrives in the news one (1) day after “DHS taunts jailed children with Nazi methods,” for those keeping track