alyaza [they/she] @ alyaza @beehaw.org

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people.

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Colorado officials are now proposing to go further. In 2023, the state adopted legislation to try something that’s never been done in this country: automatically register tribal members to vote in U.S. elections.

The program, if implemented, would enable tribes to share their membership lists with Colorado elections officials, who’d then use that information to register every eligible person to vote, while giving them a chance to opt out. Since Colorado already mails ballots to every registered voter, this would necessarily mean getting ballots into the hands of more Native people. “We’ve made real steps forward, and we’re going to continue,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told me recently. “We always try to push the envelope.”

And yet, Cloud is also keenly concerned that the program could make her community more vulnerable. For U.S. election officials to automatically register tribal members to vote, the tribes would need to share certain vital information about their members, such as full name, address, and date of birth. Cloud is hesitant to hand this data over to a state that has, over a long history that she knows too well, been an agent of violence.

there are definitely better, more substantive articles that can make all of the points this one is; accordingly, this will be removed. you're free to find another article which makes this point though since it's likely a conversation people want to have on here

you may also enjoy Thomas Szasz on this subject and concur with some of his analyses about the validity of "mental illness" as a concept/what follows from accepting it as a concept (although i believe he was strongly right-libertarian and this informed some of his opposition to psychiatry as a practice--so you may wish to take or leave some of what he says consequentially)

you may enjoy sections of Sami Schalk's Black Disability Politics and it may be helpful to your efforts in finding people who write on this subject; here is one excerpt for example that i noted in my recent read-through of it:

On December 31, 1977, the Black Panther published a guest commentary article titled “Principles of Radical Psychiatry” by Claude Steiner, a white founder and practitioner of radical psychiatry. The article opens with a quote by Malcolm X and then asserts that “psychiatry is a political activity” because “the psychiatrist has an influence in the power arrangements of the relationships in which he intervenes.” Steiner argues that psychiatry and the psychiatrist can never be neutral because “when one person dominates or oppresses another, a neutral participant—especially when he is seen as an authority—becomes a participant in the domination.” Steiner goes on to state that psychiatry’s false and oppressive claim to neutrality makes marginalized people rightfully avoid psychiatric services. He then offers the alternative of radical psychiatry, writing, “A radical psychiatrist will take sides. He will advocate the side of those whom he is helping. The radical psychiatrist will not look for the wrongness within the person seeking psychiatric attention: rather, he will look for the way in which this person is being oppressed.”

According to Kristen McLean, an industry analyst, two-thirds of the books released by the top-ten trade publishers sell fewer than a thousand copies, and less than four per cent sell more than twenty thousand. Still, it’s generally agreed that book sales rose after 2019 and that, since the end of the pandemic, there has been a small but significant uptick in the number of independent bookstores. Explaining the first bump seems simple enough. Reading turned out to be a popular way of passing the time in lockdown, more respectable than binge-watching or other diversions one might think of. A slight decline in sales over the past couple of years suggests that people felt freed up to go out and play pickleball instead of staying home and trying to finish “War and Peace.”

The chief rationale offered for brick-and-mortar bookstores today is that they are community-building spaces. That is how Friss describes the Three Lives bookstore—forgive me, shop—and it’s how almost all the store owners in “The Secret Lives” (and many of the librarians) explain what they do and why it gives them satisfaction. They are practitioners of bibliotherapy. They introduce people to books that will help them overcome grief or minister to confusions about life choices or personal identity.

And the stores are fashioned to be neighborhood gathering places, like park playgrounds. They welcome everyone—toddlers, oddballs, and professors. They schedule author appearances and other events, often hundreds of them a year. Regulars drop in to chat about books. With any luck, there is a café. Nowadays, this is as true of Barnes & Noble chain stores as it is of Three Lives. That is what it means to run a bookstore. The rewards are not just material. The bookstore survives by redefining itself.

“As therapeutic practice, it has become a go-to,” said David A. Langer, president of the American Board of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. In his household, too: “I have 9-year-old twins — we speak about it regularly,” said Langer, who’s also a professor of psychology at Suffolk University. “Inside Out” finger puppets were in frequent rotation when his children were younger, a playful way to examine the family dynamic. “The art of ‘Inside Out’ is explicitly helping us understand our internal worlds,” Langer said.

And it’s not just schoolchildren that it applies to. “I’ve been stealing lines from the movie and quoting them to adults, not telling them that I’m quoting,” said Regine Galanti, a psychologist and author in private practice on Long Island, speaking of the new film.

The rate of stops conducted off-the-books has increased under Superintendent Larry Snelling, even as he has positioned himself as an agent of reform who is moving the Chicago Police Department away from its longstanding strategy of using traffic stops to find illegal guns and tamp down on crime. In June, Snelling reported traffic stops were down by about 87,000 over the same time last year. But behind that reduction is a pattern of thousands of unreported police encounters, which accounted for one-third of all traffic stops over the first seven months of Snelling’s tenure.

Records obtained by Bolts and Injustice Watch show police department officials know the traffic stop data they report to state regulators are an undercount. Internally, the department tracks stops using police radio data that doesn’t rely on officers filling out the state-mandated forms.

Mayoral candidate Victor Miller, a bespectacled librarian with an AI obsession, stood between an American flag and a Wyoming flag, preaching what he sees as the untapped potential of artificial intelligence in government.

Miller made this pitch at a county library in Wyoming’s capital on a recent summer Friday, with a few friends and family filling otherwise empty rows of chairs. Before the sparse audience, he vowed to run the city of Cheyenne exclusively with an AI bot he calls “VIC” for “Virtual Integrated Citizen.”

AI experts say the pledge is a first for U.S. campaigns and marks a new front in the rapid emergence of the technology. Its implications have stoked alarm among officials and even tech companies.

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has ordered a review of the UK's counter-extremism strategy to determine how best to tackle threats posed by harmful ideologies.

The analysis will look at hatred of women as one of the ideological trends that the government says is gaining traction.

Ms Cooper said there has been a rise in extremism "both online and on our streets" that "frays the very fabric of our communities and our democracy".

The review will look at the rise of Islamist and far-right extremism in the UK, as well as wider ideological trends, including extreme misogyny or beliefs which fit into broader categories, such as violence.

[...]government policies and movement tactics could work in tandem. Ending subsidies cuts into profits, as does blockading, occupying, or sabotaging physical plants; in the face of compounding action, desperation might weaken fossil fuel’s resistance to state takeover—and would certainly lower the price tag of compensation, should policymakers decide to soften the blow. (Or they could go Salvador Allende’s bold route: when the democratically elected socialist leader nationalized U.S.-owned copper mines in 1971, he deducted “excess” profits from their valuation, effectively canceling out any expected compensation.)

Such coordination between radical movements and their allies in the state might seem far-fetched at this moment. But the same could be said about all transformative processes before they took hold. Six months ago, I would not have predicted that an unprecedented, months long mobilization in solidarity with the cause of Palestinian freedom would bring well over a million Americans into the streets, including most recently nearly 400 demonstrations on college campuses. While the protests have not yet secured their immediate goal of a permanent ceasefire, they have certainly had an impact. Relentless organizing has finally pushed Biden to threaten to withhold U.S. weapon shipments, helped shift public opinion, pressured some institutions to divest, forced politicians to choose sides, and, most dramatically, called into question the president’s reelection in November.

I am not understanding what you want from me

i think the basic confusion people are having is that, when you phrase it like "I use it/its in spaces where I do not plan on engaging with people as individuals" and "This space is not a chat room and there is no reason to treat it as such. It is a forum.", how that comes off to some people is you are kind of treating this place like a dumping ground for what you want to talk about and then ignoring other people jumping off of your posts. that may or may not be what you intend to do; so that's why people are trying to clarify the intent of your posts.

i'm honestly not sure Trump knows anything about the FTC, and if his campaign was smart these are the kinds of things they'd propose instead of "IVF should be illegal but also you're a degenerate for not having children"

unclear (they don't tend to announce enforcement mechanisms in these and it's not a final rule until it's a final rule), but it's not like the FTC is lacking in power as an agency

Along with prohibiting reviews written by nonhumans, the FTC’s rule also forbids companies from paying for either positive or negative reviews to falsely boost or denigrate a product. It also forbids marketers from exaggerating their own influence by, for example, paying for bots to inflate their follower count.

Violations of the rule could result in fines being issued for each violation, according to the rule. This means that for an e-commerce site with hundreds of thousands of reviews, penalties for fake or manipulated reviews could quickly add up.

i've been a little busy and by the time i noticed i'd missed the date again i was like "it just makes more sense to wait until Monday to keep the thread on schedule and useful"--not much sense in having one up for three days tbh

In discussing Trump’s plan to carry out the largest deportation in US history – which the former president has called for publicly – Vought said the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants could help “save the country.”

Once deportations begin, “you’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like,” Vought said. “And so that’s going to cause us to get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?”

In preparation for Trump’s potential return to the White House, Vought said in the meeting that he had a team of staffers working to draft regulations and executive orders that would translate Trump’s campaign speeches into government policy.

“We’ve got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are, we’re planning for the next administration,” he said.

For example, “you may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation,’” Vought said. “What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it? Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not, you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.”

Mutual aid groups established themselves across Sudan after the war erupted. They drew members from a vibrant pro-democracy movement and brought ideas rooted in a rich heritage of social solidarity, best represented in the tradition of nafeer (“a call to mobilize”).

The Greater Khartoum kitchens follow two different models. Under the takaya system, religious and community leaders feed people on the streets, in houses, or under trees; however, more structured kitchens are run in defined spaces by the emergency response rooms.

Hassan, who helps coordinate assistance across Greater Khartoum, said over 350 communal kitchens have been set up, assisting 500,000 families with at least one meal a day. “We aim to save people’s dignity,” he said. “Everybody should be able to eat and not feel shame. We, as Sudanese, are still helping each other. We survive together.”

The only thing that makes an evil “lesser” is that there is less energy going towards supporting it. By putting it into power you make it the greater evil.

this just seems categorically untrue, unless you think that there are no meaningful differences in outcomes even between "lesser evils" and "greater evils" (in which case i would argue your distinction does not exist here and therefore is not useful for the purposes of this argument). the idea that energy and power alone/even primarily determine "evil" in this context also seems deeply reductive--just because Nick Fuentes, for example, is not at serious risk of running the country does not mean his ideas are a lesser evil to the regular liberalism currently in power and only become a greater evil once he is.

Again, this may not be that, but I think it’s a mistake to pretend that Beehaw is somehow immune to this technique that the right is demonstrably using on other platforms.

nobody here is pretending that it is, the issue is this is clearly not an example of this so you are functionally asserting the OP is an asset for any number of foreign disinformation and division campaigns. also the framing of "derail the Democratic party" presumes it's not correct to do this, but that's also a thing people can disagree on. for example: i'm a socialist--so yes, i support doing that in the long term.

This may not be that, but it’s not appropriate to scold users for calling out dead obvious political manipulation.

you can find it cringe--and i certainly don't agree with most of the people here proposing third-party voting (which i think is total dead-enderism and morally pointless)--but people disagreeing with you is not political manipulation and it devalues the term to use it in such a cavalier manner