Werd I/O

[Damian Carrington in The Guardian]

Quite a headline!

"The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks, said Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. He said that without insurance, which is already being pulled in some places, many other financial services become unviable, from mortgages to investments."

Entire regions are becoming uninsurable - for example, the piece highlights home insurance in many parts of California becoming hard to obtain. Much of finance depends on insurance underwriting, so as these effects spread, so do the knock-on impacts on financial markets.

"At 3C of global heating, climate damage cannot be insured against, covered by governments, or adapted to, Thallinger said: “That means no more mortgages, no new real estate development, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.”"

De-risking the climate crisis is becoming more and more important - and this has been an imperative for decades. The call here to put sustainability goals on the same level as financial goals is smart. But we're in an era where we're turning our backs against this sort of thinking - and towards unadulterated greed, consequences be damned. Getting out of the climate mess means first getting out of this other mess that we're all in.

#Climate

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[John Markoff in The New York Times]

A lovely piece about Mike McCue, who, through Flipboard, Surf, and his general activities through the community, has become one of the open social web's most important figures.

"Three decades ago, as vice president of technology at the groundbreaking tech company Netscape, Mr. McCue helped democratize information access through the World Wide Web. Now, he’s positioning his company’s new Surf browser as part of a growing community of so-called decentralized social media options, alongside emerging platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon."

Of course, Surf is different to Bluesky and Mastodon: it sits across them, rather than an alternative to them, and demonstrates the power of the open social web by treating them both as just part of a single, connected experience. This is the point that A New Social is making too: it's not about picking a protocol, because the protocols can easily be joined together. It's about an open social web that we all own together versus a series of closed, corporate silos with private ownership.

It's gaining momentum:

"In addition to Meta’s decision to base Threads on ActivityPub, news organizations like Bloomberg and the BBC have begun experimenting with the technology, as have blogging platforms such as Medium, WordPress and Ghost."

The piece goes on to describe the enthusiasm among early adopters as being similar to the first few years of the web itself. I was there for both things, and I agree. And let me tell you: I am beyond enthusiastic.

#Fediverse

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[Laura Hazard Owen at Nieman Journalism Lab]

A good introduction to leaking to a journalist:

"I spoke with eight journalists about how to leak in a safe, smart way. Disclaimer you probably knew was coming: No method of leaking is 100% secure, and the tips here reduce risk but cannot eliminate it completely. “I know it’s appealing to be instrumental in helping a reporter break a story, and god knows reporters love breaking stories,” says Marisa Kabas, an independent reporter and writer of The Handbasket who’s been breaking one scoop after another about DOGE and the Trump administration. “But in almost all cases, your safety and physical and mental health should come first.”"

A lot depends on Signal, although some newsrooms (including my employer) also advertise SecureDrop, which is a very sophisticated tool for large, anonymous leaks.

The complete list is worth your time. If you're a source, consider using these tools. If you're a funder, consider investing in these tools. If you're a newsroom, make sure you know how to use these tools. They've become the currency of privately-sourced stories in the current era.

#Democracy

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[Mandy Brown]

A good reminder here from Mandy Brown.

"Among the people I’ve witnessed working through crises in their work and lives, the one pattern that comes up over and over again is making art. Art brings us back to ourselves, helps us root in our own agency and creative power, makes space for the joy of craft and play, and reminds us of our purpose in the world. On dark days, it’s easy to think that there’s no room for art, because the work of survival is so demanding. But art doesn’t merely take time—it gives time and energy back. It renews our spirits and the spirits of everyone who sees or hears or experiences the art, who receives the art as it’s intended: as a gift."

I sometimes have to remind myself that it's not frivolous; that it doesn't matter that it's not productive in a work sense. But it's not frivolous. It's living. It's being alive. And we all have the right to be alive.

#Culture

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[Nell Dhanesha at Nieman Journalism Lab]

This was fun to watch unfold in real time:

"The truck’s journey to that spot had begun a few days earlier, as an email with the subject line “guerilla marketing for sources” in the inbox of Ariana Tobin, editor of ProPublica’s crowdsourcing and engagement team. It came from reporter Brett Murphy, who was covering the destruction of USAID with his reporting partner Anna Maria Barry-Jester. They’d been tipped off about the desk cleanouts; was there any chance, they asked Tobin, that they could send a billboard truck out on the morning of the 27th?"

And this quote quietly implies what a significant chunk of my job has become more recently:

"“We’re basically treating any conversation we’re having with someone who works for or used to work for the federal government as a maximum-security tip,” Tobin said. “That, frankly, is not what we used to do.”"

Perhaps we'll write more about that in the future. For now, speaking of tips, if you want to send ProPublica a tip, we now have a number of options.

#Media

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[Anthony Ha at TechCrunch]

China Miéville, who is one of the great contemporary science fiction and fantasy authors, is right on the money about Silicon Valley's tendency to create the Torment Nexus.

This is exactly why I think science fiction is so important, and why it has a lot to contribute:

"To Miéville, it’s a mistake to read science fiction as if it’s really about the future: “It’s always about now. It’s always a reflection. It’s a kind of fever dream, and it’s always about its own sociological context.”

He added that there’s a “societal and personal derangement” at work when the rich and powerful “are more interested in settling Mars than sorting out the world” — but ultimately, it’s not science fiction that’s responsible."

To me, the point and excitement of science fiction is to talk about today through the lens of analogy and extrapolation: not necessarily to warn or celebrate, but to explore. Of course, there's a broad spectrum of stories under that umbrella, and not all of them fit that mold as well as others, but that's what drives me as a reader and a writer. It's up to the reader to decide what to take from that.

I think a lot about Starship Troopers. (Really! I do. Some people think about the Roman Empire. I think about Heinlein.) The original book was, at the very least, fascist-adjacent. The movie adaptation was, at least for me, and in intent by its director, a very funny satire at the expense of those ideas. But, of course, some people took away the top-line plot and either decried the fascism or, more worryingly, freaking loved it. See also: Fight Club, which a certain kind of incel adjacent maladjusted man-child has taken on as something to model, rather than a satirical novel that pokes at them and the country they inhabit.

The reader makes their own interpretation. And if that happens to be a sociopathic world-view bent on world domination, that's on them.

#Culture

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[Brian Krebs]

Sobering roundup from Brian Krebs about how each of the five pillars of the First Amendment - speech, religion, the media, the right to assembly, and the right to petition the government and seek redress for wrongs - has been attacked during the first few months of the Trump Administration.

It's a laundry list - and we're only a few months in.

"Where is President Trump going with all these blatant attacks on the First Amendment? The president has made no secret of his affection for autocratic leaders and “strongmen” around the world, and he is particularly enamored with Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort twice in the past year."

The piece concludes with a warning that Trump is following a similar playbook to Orbán by consolidating control over the courts and decimating the free press. It played out there; we will see what happens here.

#Democracy

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[Lubna Kably in The Times of India]

Worrying stuff being reported by the Times of India (and, at the time of writing, under-reported in the domestic US press). AI is being used to flag international students because of their social media activity, among other signals, who are now being sent emails asking them to "self-deport":

"Hundreds of international students in the US are getting an email from the US Department of State (DOS) asking them to self-deport owing to campus activism. Immigration attorneys’ contacted by TOI affirmed this development and added a few Indian students may also be at the receiving end of such emails – for something as innocuous as sharing a social media post.

It is not just international students who physically participated in campus activism but also those who shared or liked ‘anti-national’ posts that are the target of these emails, said an immigration attorney."

Axios previously reported on how this was going to be done:

"Secretary of State Marco Rubio is launching an AI-fueled "Catch and Revoke" effort to cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups"

From that article:

""This should concern all Americans. This is a First Amendment and freedom of speech issue and the administration will overplay its hand," said Abed Ayoub, head of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee."

It's a clear First Amendment issue. Whether they've overplayed their hand unfortunately remains to be seen.

#Democracy

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[Allison Morrow at CNN]

It's refreshing to see this kind of AI skepticism in a major outlet:

"Apple, like every other big player in tech, is scrambling to find ways to inject AI into its products. Why? Well, it’s the future! What problems is it solving? Well, so far that’s not clear! Are customers demanding it? LOL, no. In fact, last year the backlash against one of Apple’s early ads for its AI was so hostile the company had to pull the commercial.

[...] Large language models are fascinating science. They are an academic wonder with huge potential and some early commercial successes, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. But a bot that’s 80% accurate [...] isn’t a very useful consumer product."

I'm more than ready for the hype cycle to come to its conclusion. Are there some interesting use cases for AI? Sure. Should the ethical, functional, environmental, and contextual issues with current AI vendors give us all pause at the very least? Absolutely.

#AI

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[Makena Kelly at WIRED]

If you know anything about building software, you know that this is an absurd idea:

"The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk."

Moving a 60 million line COBOL codebase to another language (be it Java or anything else) is not a small undertaking, and the SSA underpins necessary benefits for millions of Americans. Doing it in months likely requires using something like an LLM - and anyone who's used an LLM to code will tell you that the output is riddled with mistakes and inefficiencies. It's not a workable plan.

Or, as Dan Hon puts it in the piece:

“If you weren't worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead.”

A project like this should take years. Most of that isn't coding time: it's analysis, writing the tests, rearchitecting, and putting protections in place to ensure that nobody goes without the benefits they need to live. Doing it as a rush job isn't just incompetence; it's indifference to the lives of some of our most vulnerable neighbors. Which, let's face it, is in keeping with everything else going on.

#Democracy

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[Joshua Kaplan and Justin Elliott at ProPublica]

I bet this practice is more common than anyone might think, and certainly isn't limited to China. As always, follow the money:

"In December, [SpaceX investor] Kahlon testified that SpaceX prefers to avoid investors from China because it is a defense contractor. There is a major exception though, he said: SpaceX finds it “acceptable” for Chinese investors to buy into the company through offshore vehicles.

“The primary mechanism is that those investors would come through intermediate entities that they would create or others would create,” Kahlon said. “Typically they would set up BVI structures or Cayman structures or Hong Kong structures and various other ones,” he added, using the acronym for the British Virgin Islands. Offshore vehicles are often used to keep investors anonymous."

The key point here is not that the Chinese investments are illegal - they probably aren't - or that anyone thinks SpaceX is being directed by the Chinese government. What's odd is that the company prefers the obfuscation: it sounds like they don't accept Chinese investment unless it's being channeled through an offshore vehicle designed to hide their involvement from regulatory scrutiny. That obfuscation is particularly important given that Elon Musk is now a part of the US government.

#Democracy

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[Sabhanaz Rashid Diya at Rest of World]

Like the author, I read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams' account of her time as a director for global public policy at Facebook during a period when the company transitioned from a largely-domestic social network to a worldwide powerhouse that ultimately enabled a genocide. It's written with a kind of ironic detachment that seeks to minimize the Wynn-Williams' own culpability, and while it's an engaging, jaw-dropping read, there are clear omissions:

"In recounting events, the author glosses over her own indifference to repeated warnings from policymakers, civil society, and internal teams outside the U.S. that ultimately led to serious harm to communities.

[...] Her delayed reckoning underscores how Facebook’s leadership remains largely detached from real-world consequences of their decisions until they become impossible to ignore. Perhaps because everyone wants to be a hero of their own story, Wynn-Williams frames her opposition to leadership decisions as isolated; in reality, powerful resistance had long existed within what Wynn-Williams describes as Facebook’s “lower-level employees.”"

The author has personal experience working for Facebook as part of the global teams Wynn-Williams presided over, cleaning up the messes that she and her colleagues created.

As such, the author sees the gaps clearly, and her review cuts to the core of the problem with the book. That doesn't mean it's valueless, and in some ways it's strongest when detailing the personalities of people like Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, and contrasting the public face of Lean In with her experiences of being a mother while working alongside them.

The fact that Facebook is attempting to suppress the book inherently makes it worth reading, in my view, and I think it should be read by everyone in the tech industry. Not only because it’s a cautionary tale in itself, but because the personalities described here are rife in the industry.

I’ve never spoken to Mark or Sheryl or Joel or most of the rest of them, but I’ve met people like them, with those same sensibilities, and they are every bit as shallow and driven by power as is laid out here. These are the people to avoid. These are the people who will lead us into hell. These are the people who, in very real ways, through genocides, swung elections, and the violence of indifference to real human suffering, already are.

The thing is, Sarah Wynn-Williams was one of them.

#Technology

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[Gaby Del Valle at The Verge]

I appreciated this deep-dive on whether it's safe to travel through US borders with your phone. Journalists and anyone who's made overt political statements should take particular note.

"The government maintains that it doesn’t need a warrant to conduct “basic” searches of the contents of a person’s phone. During these searches, Hussain explained, agents are supposed to put your phone on airplane mode and can only look at what is accessible offline — but that can still be a lot of information, including any cloud data that’s currently synced."

The EFF maintains a pretty great pocket guide that is also worth checking out.

The constitutionality of searches is "still an open question" - but that doesn't matter in the moment. My advice at this stage is to sign out of important apps (like your work email and encrypted messaging apps like Signal), turn off biometric logins like Face ID, and switch your phone off. That does mean you need to print out your boarding card, for example, and do a little pre-work to make sure your data is backed up. Clearly, this is a pain. But if you deal with any sensitive information, or have any vulnerable people in your family or community, you need to change your security stance to be a good steward of their safety.

#Democracy

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[Brandon Vigliarolo at The Register]

In the wake of the French and German governments joining forces to build an alternative to Notion and Google Docs, the Dutch government has passed eight motions to avoid US software and move to a home-grown stack.

""With each IT service our government moves to American tech giants, we become dumber and weaker," Dutch MP Barbara Kathmann, author of four of the motions, told The Register. "If we continue outsourcing all of our digital infrastructure to billionaires that would rather escape Earth by building space rockets, there will be no Dutch expertise left."

Kathmann's measures specifically call on the government to stop the migration of Dutch information and communications technology to American cloud services, the creation of a Dutch national cloud, the repatriation of the .nl top-level domain to systems operating within the Netherlands, and for the preparation of risk analyses and exit strategies for all government systems hosted by US tech giants."

Inevitably, these will be open source solutions that offer stronger privacy (with GDPR compliance from the beginning rather than as an afterthought) and fewer dependencies on third party centralized services. I see this as a very strongly good thing: everyone will see the benefit of such tools, and if you have values like "software shouldn't spy on you" and "you should have full control over your data", there will be more options for you to choose from.

The context is important:

"The motions passed by the Dutch parliament come as the Trump administration ratchets up tensions with a number of US allies – the EU among them. Nearly 100 EU-based tech companies and lobbyists sent an open letter to the European Commission this week asking it to find a way to divest the bloc from systems managed by US companies due to "the stark geopolitical reality Europe is now facing.""

It's sensible. I agree. This is what Europe should be doing.

#Technology

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[Ella Yurman in Teen Vogue]

This interview with Musk's daughter Vivian Wilson is everything.

"The Nazi salute sht was insane. Honey, we're going to call a fig a fig, and we're going to call a Nazi salute what it was. That sht was definitely a Nazi salute. The crowd is equally to blame, and I feel like people are not talking about that. That crowd should be denounced.

But other than that, I don't give a f**k about him. I really don't."

Wilson is a refreshing, no-nonsense voice on Threads, and that same no-BS attitude comes through here like an avalanche.

And this, of course, is vitally important:

"As a trans woman, I am terrified of losing access to guaranteed medical care. If I didn't medically transition at the age I did, I don't know what would've happened. I don't feel like people realize that being trans is not a choice. I'm so sorry to break it to you.

Transitioning as a minor was something that was medically necessary for me to do in order to be not suicidal, and it is really important that we protect access to trans care for trans youth."

Wilson is an example of someone this healthcare not only saved but helped thrive. It's exciting to see her use her insightful, attentive, sometimes hilariously-sharp voice.

#Democracy

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[Meredith Whittaker in the Financial Times]

A great op-ed from Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal on the ludicrous demands by the British government for Apple to backdoor its encryption:

"Imagine a government telling a car company to secretly weaken the effectiveness of the brakes on all the cars it sells, recklessly endangering the safety of millions. It would be an unthinkable undermining of public safety. 

Sadly, this is what’s happening in the UK in cyber security, where Apple was forced to strip the vital privacy and security protection of end-to-end encryption from its backups storage service — exposing people and infrastructure to significant vulnerabilities."

Meredith is (as usual) right. She points out that not only is this a wildly dangerous thing to do in general, but it undermines the technology industry that the British government sometimes says it wants to support.

Americans shouldn't be complacent. This may be a battle that's heading our way next - and one that was already fought in the nineties. We can't let these erosions of civil liberties take place here; they should not happen anywhere.

#Technology

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[Jasmine Mooney]

A nightmare account from a Canadian citizen detained by ICE:

"I was taken to a tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights and a toilet. There were five other women lying on their mats with the aluminum sheets wrapped over them like dead bodies. The guard locked the door behind me.

[...] After some research, the reality became clear — ICE detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.

Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain. The more prisoners, the more money they make. They don’t lobby for stricter immigration policies in the name of national security — they do it to protect their bottom line."

There is so much to fix here, but perhaps this is the crux: people are making a profit from tightened immigration rules that keep people detained for months or years without due process. That shouldn't be allowed to happen.

#Democracy

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[Freedom of the Press Foundation]

Wired is going to stop paywalling articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

This approach makes a ton of sense:

"They’re called public records for a reason, after all. And access to public documents is more important than ever at this moment, with government websites and records disappearing, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency doing its best to operate outside the public’s view, and the National Archives in disarray."

Paywalls have long presented a challenge for service-based journalism: stories make the most impact when they're available to everybody, but newsrooms also need to cover their bills and make enough money to continue operations. When stories are based on public data, like FOIA requests, another level of public responsibility is added to the equation: these are public documents that belong to all of us.

I wish more online newsrooms would move to a patronage model (see The Guardian), but this isn't always possible. Someone always brings up micropayments in these conversations, but they do not work and have never worked. This hybrid model - public service articles for free, the rest behind the paywall - may point to a way forward.

#Media

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[Scharon Harding at Ars Technica]

Don't keep an Amazon Echo (or any smart speaker) in a room where you'll be having sensitive conversations, either with your family or on a work call. Particularly if you're a journalist or activist - but privacy is something everybody should be guarded about.

"Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud."

As the author points out, even if you trust Amazon (and, to be clear, you shouldn't trust any vendor with your private conversations), there's reason to worry:

"In 2023, Amazon agreed to pay $25 million in civil penalties over the revelation that it stored recordings of children’s interactions with Alexa forever. Adults also didn’t feel properly informed of Amazon’s inclination to keep Alexa recordings unless prompted not to until 2019—five years after the first Echo came out."

It was a nice idea, but it's time to give them a rest. There are plenty of use cases for smart agents, but they don't need to be listening to you all the time like you live in some kind of science fiction movie. You don't know who else is listening with them.

#Technology

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[Ghost]

Ghost has released its ActivityPub social web integration in beta:

"Today we're opening a public beta for our social web integration in Ghost. For the first time, any site on Ghost Pro can now try out ActivityPub."

Those of you who are, should. And everyone in the space should take a look. This is a really big deal. Congratulations to everyone involved on the Ghost team - and everyone in the Fediverse, who will see the benefit.

#Fediverse

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[Benedict Collins at TechRadar]

This was always inevitable, but in the current environment it makes sense that it's accelerating:

"Several major European tech companies are pushing for greater action from the European Union to reduce the bloc’s reliance on foreign-owned infrastructure by buying and building locally.

[...] Essentially, the European Union has become overly reliant on foreign-owned infrastructure - especially US Big Tech - and if nothing is done soon, EU countries will become subservient to foreign tech companies. The solution therefore is to foster growth at home."

The implication is that there's already a market here. Hosting in the US puts you at risk of certain kinds of subpoenas and other actions by the state, and the current political environment makes that even less desirable. (I've certainly personally had plenty of advice from security experts this year to not host in the US.) But if the only really great cloud hosting providers are US-based, that's a problem (even if they offer non-US hosting zones).

To be competitive here, the EU needs to consider privacy and freedom from surveillance as paramount values. That's not always been the case for it: there have always been voices who have pushed for things like backdoors in encryption and greater monitoring from police and security services. Those things will kill any EU effort to provide alternatives. The EU's great strengths in comparison to the US are greater openness and stronger protections of human rights; it should lean into those.

#Technology

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[Om Malik]

This is an ongoing trend. Om Malik has now moved to sharing on his blog first rather than posting directly to social media:

"The inspiration for the newly rebooted “daily blog” comes from Dave Winer, who maintains a “Links” blog. I’ve been using his new project, Wordland, for publishing to the “links” blog, in addition to using MarsEdit. I have also taken a cue from Marc Weidenbaum. The plan is to use this as a permanent archive for everything I share on social media. From here, I’ll route information to relevant channels — mobile apps, social networks and RSS feeds. The experiment continues."

This is, of course, very much in line with indie web sensibilities. The more social media fragments and turns into a toxic place to be, the more people will carve out spaces that they truly own on the web. As well they should. I'm excited to see this; if you haven't made the leap to posting on your own site first yet, the best time to start is now.

#Indieweb

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[Mike Monteiro]

On whether it's always been this bad in America:

"America was born in blood, genocide, kidnapping, and death. Behind every story we were told about America’s greatness, there is a secret second painting. A thing America doesn’t want you to see. Behind every “from sea to shining sea” there is a Trail of Tears. Behind every first pitch at Dodger Stadium there’s the destruction of Chavez Ravine. Behind every moonshot there’s a Nazi V2 rocket. Behind every “liberation of the camps” there’s a Nakba. Behind every interstate highway system there’s the destruction of a thousand Black and immigrant neighborhoods."

Although it's front and center, much of what we're experiencing isn't actually new for lots of communities across America. Treating the current moment as completely new doesn't serve us: it erases those struggles and historic injustices. That's not to say that everything is good right now - it's obviously not - but the road that led us here is clearly marked throughout American history.

#Democracy

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[Erin In The Morning]

While America is destroying the ability for trans people to participate in public life, over in Europe they're (rightly) improving care for trans people.

"In recent years, U.S. politicians have selectively framed European healthcare policies to justify restrictions on transgender care, seizing on a handful of conservative policies to claim that “Europe is pulling back.” The most extreme example, the United Kingdom’s Cass Review, has been wielded to justify a near-total ban on puberty blockers and even cited in U.S. Supreme Court arguments. But new medical guidelines from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland tell a different story. These countries have reaffirmed the importance of gender-affirming care for transgender youth and issued sharp critiques of the Cass Review, calling out its severe methodological flaws and misrepresentations."

They contain this specific recommendation:

“If, in individual cases, the progressive pubertal maturation development creates a time pressure in which health damage would be expected due to longer waiting times to avert irreversible bodily changes (e.g. male voice change), access to child and adolescent psychiatric or psychotherapeutic clarification and medical treatment options should be granted as quickly as possible.”

Once again, a rejection of the Cass Review is good news here: the widely debunked study was essentially propaganda for anti-trans interests and didn't represent broader healthcare perspectives.

But the bigger good news is that Europe is a safer place for trans people to live and be supported. I hope, one day soon, America comes to its senses and puts itself on a more supportive path.

#Democracy

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[Jake Offenhartz, Cedar Attanasio and Philip Marcelo at The Associated Press]

This seems completely in line with the First Amendment's protections against restrictions on speech and assembly by the US government:

"President Donald Trump warned Monday that the arrest and possible deportation of a Palestinian activist who helped lead protests at Columbia University will be the first “of many to come” as his administration cracks down on campus demonstrations against Israel and the war in Gaza."

Protesting Israel's right-wing government is not in itself anti-semitic. And Mahmoud Khalil's status as a resident student rather than an American citizen does not make him any less subject to constitutional protections.

"Khalil, who was born in Syria to Palestinian parents and has an American citizen wife who is eight months pregnant, emerged as one of the most visible activists in the protests at Columbia.

[...] “The Department of Homeland Security’s lawless decision to arrest him solely because of his peaceful anti-genocide activism represents a blatant attack on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, immigration laws, and the very humanity of Palestinians,” said the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national Muslim civil rights advocacy group."

This seems like the very opposite of what America is supposed to be (or at least purports itself to be). Hopefully applied pressure will work - for this particular person, and as a precedent for American civil rights into the future.

#Democracy

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