Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2026-05-02 11:09 pm
silveradept) wrote2026-05-02 11:09 pm
The horrors do keep coming, but we also keep meeting them - Late April 02025
The 2025 Most Banned and Challenged List for the American Library Association is out, and the most telling statistic in the report is not what books are there, or what justifications their censors gave for the censorship, but that fully 92% of challenges recorded by ALA originated in pressure and political groups, lawmakers, and administrators. Less than 3 percent of challenges were issued by individual parents. What brings all these boys to the yard? Well, think about it: Capitalists want to enclose the commons and turn it private, so they can control it and force it to their will, and the United States Public Library is a commons.
Billionaires and the wealthy who want to say that their superintelligent AIs will eventually go rogue are also trying to genetically engineer humans to be smarter than those superintelligent AIs, and just about everywhere you look that they've put their money into, it isn't into things like trying to make healthier people, it's trying to make the children of the wealthy into having all the genetic advances and traits, and the rest of us will just be left behind by their super-genius statuses.
Given that these are people who like to post manifestos about they are already the superior people in the superior culture and we all have to bow down to them and let them do whatever they want, I think this is definitely one of those situations where trust is less than the distance someone could throw.
The public bench seems humble and ubiquitous, and yet it is neither, with a long history and significant amounts of contention involved about public seating and which members of the public are allowed to be seated. When benches aren't being removed, they're often having their architecture turned hostile to try and prevent people from sitting for long or for using a bench as a place to catch a nap or to sleep off the ground for a night. Because the cause of the problem is placed in the bodies of the people who might not have a house to go home to, or whose life activities are related to crime and vice because they have no other opportunities to make a living. Those doing the placing, of course, do not believe they are doing anything wrong, or worse, callously believe that they are not obligated in any way to any other person but themselves, and therefore, they are allowed to dictate who they want to see and what they want to be reminded of in their public spaces.
The goal of liberalism is to make all bodies invisible in the eyes of the law, but the way that people are liberated from oppression and bindings often imposed by law is through mutuality. Law has a role to play in this situation, and often that role is in highlighting and making highly visible the bodies that it considers to be illiberal. Law can lay foundations for others to implement toward mutuality, but as we have seen, and as the article-writer points out, law cannot require anything by itself, and those who have been chosen to interpret and enforce law are often the ones deciding for or against mutuality.
All around the world, in pockets of the Internet, there are forums and chat channels where men give each other advice on how best to commit intimate partner violence, and in ways that leave little trace or memory of the effects on the victim. And there are more than a few websites that are willing to host the content that those people make of committing intimate partner assault. And while there's always the possibility that the numbers are wrong, or that they get exaggerated, it's very easy to bury the message in the quest for accuracy, because the people looking to discredit the message are more than happy to take any nitpick they can and claim the whole thing must be fabricated. Which makes it difficult to correct things, and even more so in an environment that rewards "engagement" over anything else. The point is the fact that these places exist, and they seem to be thriving pretty well, not necessarily whether the number is fully accurate. It is always disquieting to get a glimpse into the alternate universe where I fully went down the path of misogyny and embraced its tools and rhetoric. I would rather keep myself and all the other young ones that I have some amount of sway over from going on that path, or to help them get away from it as soon as they realize where they are and where they want to be.
Lender Wells Fargo Bank had a strong racial disparity in who they approved and who they rejected for home ownership loans. I'm sure they have all kinds of excuses as to why that is, but it's still the kind of thing where you might believe that someone is still redlining, despite that having been outlawed some significant time ago.
Because the Southern Poverty Law Center is successful at exposing and keeping tabs on white supremacist groups, the white supremacist administration wants to bankrupt it and prevent it from receiving any kinds of funding from people that support its mission and want it to continue. And the excuse this time is that somehow the SPLC having informants they pay is some kind of promotion of hate or something.
The atypically disciplined racist John Roberts and his fellow racists ruled that you can no longer use the evidence of the impacts of something to determine that it was racist, but instead you have to prove that someone acted with racist intent. In regard to drawing Congressional districts, at least, in this regard, but I suspect that would all believe it in the general case, as well, and so long as nobody spills the beans about why they did what they did, it'll have to stand or otherwise be wrangled and litigated in some other way. The pundits show that I often listen to suggested that the ruling would make more districts competitive for Democrats as a whole, but owuld ultimately prevent the election of minority candidates to office, with their voting power dissipated among other districts, instead of having districts that are majority-minority to help ensure representation of their voices in the halls of government.
The administration has decided to dismiss the entire governing board the the National Science Foundation, for some reason that I'm sure could be boiled down to "eggheads keep contradicting my unserious claims, therefore they must be political enemies."
Or perhaps it's judges calling the person who believes that gender-affirming care needs to be stopped because it's not been studied enough "unserious" and tossing out the policy that intended to implement such a stop.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decides that the state laws banning abortion in all forms are more important than the FDA's determination that mifepristone is sufficiently safe to be mailed to a person for the purposes that it is prescribed for. Which is certainly going to get appealed to a higher court, which, based on Dobbs, might rule in the same way as the Fifth Circuit has, that state sovereignty is more important than the decisions of the federal government, in defiance of whatever they feel like defying.
The Centers for Disease control and Prevention are pausing their testing programs for rarer but still dangerous viruses like rabies, mpox, and Epstein-Barr, because the dismantling that started with the techbros still continues on, even if they have been sent away long ago.
That dismantling also extends to the people whose job it is to provide government documents and transparency when requests are made of the federal government, which certainly suits the administrator that routinely tries to (and probably succeeds at this point) destroy documents that might provide information to someone else, whether in the present or the future.
And it also extends to an arts and cultural center named for John F. Kennedy that the current administrator thought he could remake in his own image and apply his own name to. Like so many other things he thinks he can remake in his own image and apply his name and style to.
Because they are ghouls who do not believe that the disabled should be allowed to live full lives, the current administration intends to cut the Social Security Disability Insurance payments of persons who live with family members, including those whose family together still qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Aid Program, colloquially known as "food stamps". SSI, of course, is not enough for a person with severe disabilities to live independently and with all of the careworkers and aides that a person would need to do so. This administration and their contempt for disabled bodies is well and truly known, and they continue to do their worst to make it so that people with disabilities can't live any life at all, whether supported by family members or not. That's what they mean when they talk about "healthy" people: eugenics and trying to ensure the disabled die and decrease the surplus population bringing their metrics down. (This particular instance is also especially vile because it intends to put a family into the bind of either having their income and assets counted as support for a disabled person, the value of which will be deducted from the SSI payment, or to turn out the disabled person or turn them into someone who has to find some way of paying "rent" to the family or loved ones so as not to bankrupt the family's assets with them.
Oh, how much better we could treat our fellow humans if we weren't obsessed with destruction, war, and letting the rich compete among each other as to who is the wealthiest, instead of who can support the most people with their wealth. (Or taxing their wealth into oblivion as support for others if they won't do it willingly and according to the principles and commandments they supposedly follow.)
The Supreme Court of the United States seems poised to rule that if a company demands data from you as a pre-requisite to using their services, then you cannot claim that data is protected against unreasonable search and seizure, because the company that didn't give you a real choice about whether to surrender that data has it, and therefore it's been voluntarily disclosed. Which is another reason that the law needs to be reformed significantly so that one-sided contract demands such as that are not enforceable, and that everyone must have real choices about sharing or not sharing their data.
If you are not fond of pervert glasses that record you without your consent, know that the kidnap and murder squads are developing pervert glasses of their own, and will take your biometric data without your consent and store it somewhere if one of the kidnap and murder squad observes you enough with their pervert glasses.
At least the kidnap and murder squads aren't getting any additional appropriations in the newest budget bill. There will be other ways of attempting to get them their money, but it's not in this particular bill to fund the rest of the increasingly inaccurately-named Department of Homeland Security.
The State of Texas's state education board gave a first approval to a new standardized and required reading list to be used across all schools in the state, a list the includes cherry-picked and context-free Bible quotes and dismisses away many nonwhite authors who could probably give a better sermon on those passages than the texts themselves will.
Builiding a new public garden that is both for biodiversity and for humans to appreciate the biodiversity, finding that the hedgies can hear a lot higher frequencies than the humans, and the discovery of the jet stream was published in Esperanto first, and that might have meant information about it was less available that it could have been to everyone, since not all that many people interact with Esperanto (and not that many did when it was published.)
In technology, the notifications you receive from chat apps and others may store message and metadata in a database outside of the app, and so, even if you set the app to destroy messages, their content may be available elsewhere. And, of course, that means that the cops can grab it and read your communications, even if you tried to make sure they were properly deleted.
The European Union's beta version on an age verification application did not stand up to stress and security testing, say those who put it through its paces.
Like Claude from Anthropic? If you install Claude Desktop (something different than Claude Code) Claude Desktop installs backdoors into web browsers so that specific extensions can be run at user permission level, and with access to login tokens and other things, so it can act and make it look like you're acting, instead of itself. It does not ask for permission to do this, it rewrites those exploits if they are deleted, and it doesn't disclose itself except if you know where to look.
Also related to Claude, remember the principle of least permissions, and then marvel at someone Finding Out about what the consequences are when you give an unaccountable nondeterministic program write access to your databases - both the database and the backups were deleted through API calls made by the stochastic parrot. And then, when asked why it did the thing, it admitted to ignoring all the "constraints" that were supposedly placed on it, but once again, these are not actual constraints, and the thing is only responding in a statistically probable way when someone expresses an angry tone at it.
F. A. F. O.
Someone picked up the domain name deleteduser.com, set up e-mail receiving on it, and proceeded to receive all kinds of personally-identifiable information from places that used deleteduser.com as the placeholder for a user that's no longer active in their database. Which is not good, obviously, but also, I'm having a snarl at this, because if you wanted to use something like that, example.com is literally in the spec as something to be used when you want to make a point of something and not reference a potentially real domain.
"Autonomous" taxis like Waymo are not necessarily contributing to safer streets, less vehicle congestion, or other things they claim to be, and their software often does incredibly dangerous things that human drivers would not.
Last out for tonight, a reminder to put accessibility into your social media as much as possible, so please provide transcripts, describe your images, and the like, so that everyone who's on your social media or enjoying the content can access it..
And A project that is offering clinicians and others guides on thinking of seemingly disparate conditions in people as constellations because of the likelihood of their co-occurrence with autism or ADHD. And to think of them as constellations because trying to treat one of them well might exacerbate another.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
Billionaires and the wealthy who want to say that their superintelligent AIs will eventually go rogue are also trying to genetically engineer humans to be smarter than those superintelligent AIs, and just about everywhere you look that they've put their money into, it isn't into things like trying to make healthier people, it's trying to make the children of the wealthy into having all the genetic advances and traits, and the rest of us will just be left behind by their super-genius statuses.
Given that these are people who like to post manifestos about they are already the superior people in the superior culture and we all have to bow down to them and let them do whatever they want, I think this is definitely one of those situations where trust is less than the distance someone could throw.
The public bench seems humble and ubiquitous, and yet it is neither, with a long history and significant amounts of contention involved about public seating and which members of the public are allowed to be seated. When benches aren't being removed, they're often having their architecture turned hostile to try and prevent people from sitting for long or for using a bench as a place to catch a nap or to sleep off the ground for a night. Because the cause of the problem is placed in the bodies of the people who might not have a house to go home to, or whose life activities are related to crime and vice because they have no other opportunities to make a living. Those doing the placing, of course, do not believe they are doing anything wrong, or worse, callously believe that they are not obligated in any way to any other person but themselves, and therefore, they are allowed to dictate who they want to see and what they want to be reminded of in their public spaces.
The goal of liberalism is to make all bodies invisible in the eyes of the law, but the way that people are liberated from oppression and bindings often imposed by law is through mutuality. Law has a role to play in this situation, and often that role is in highlighting and making highly visible the bodies that it considers to be illiberal. Law can lay foundations for others to implement toward mutuality, but as we have seen, and as the article-writer points out, law cannot require anything by itself, and those who have been chosen to interpret and enforce law are often the ones deciding for or against mutuality.
All around the world, in pockets of the Internet, there are forums and chat channels where men give each other advice on how best to commit intimate partner violence, and in ways that leave little trace or memory of the effects on the victim. And there are more than a few websites that are willing to host the content that those people make of committing intimate partner assault. And while there's always the possibility that the numbers are wrong, or that they get exaggerated, it's very easy to bury the message in the quest for accuracy, because the people looking to discredit the message are more than happy to take any nitpick they can and claim the whole thing must be fabricated. Which makes it difficult to correct things, and even more so in an environment that rewards "engagement" over anything else. The point is the fact that these places exist, and they seem to be thriving pretty well, not necessarily whether the number is fully accurate. It is always disquieting to get a glimpse into the alternate universe where I fully went down the path of misogyny and embraced its tools and rhetoric. I would rather keep myself and all the other young ones that I have some amount of sway over from going on that path, or to help them get away from it as soon as they realize where they are and where they want to be.
Lender Wells Fargo Bank had a strong racial disparity in who they approved and who they rejected for home ownership loans. I'm sure they have all kinds of excuses as to why that is, but it's still the kind of thing where you might believe that someone is still redlining, despite that having been outlawed some significant time ago.
Because the Southern Poverty Law Center is successful at exposing and keeping tabs on white supremacist groups, the white supremacist administration wants to bankrupt it and prevent it from receiving any kinds of funding from people that support its mission and want it to continue. And the excuse this time is that somehow the SPLC having informants they pay is some kind of promotion of hate or something.
The atypically disciplined racist John Roberts and his fellow racists ruled that you can no longer use the evidence of the impacts of something to determine that it was racist, but instead you have to prove that someone acted with racist intent. In regard to drawing Congressional districts, at least, in this regard, but I suspect that would all believe it in the general case, as well, and so long as nobody spills the beans about why they did what they did, it'll have to stand or otherwise be wrangled and litigated in some other way. The pundits show that I often listen to suggested that the ruling would make more districts competitive for Democrats as a whole, but owuld ultimately prevent the election of minority candidates to office, with their voting power dissipated among other districts, instead of having districts that are majority-minority to help ensure representation of their voices in the halls of government.
The administration has decided to dismiss the entire governing board the the National Science Foundation, for some reason that I'm sure could be boiled down to "eggheads keep contradicting my unserious claims, therefore they must be political enemies."
Or perhaps it's judges calling the person who believes that gender-affirming care needs to be stopped because it's not been studied enough "unserious" and tossing out the policy that intended to implement such a stop.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decides that the state laws banning abortion in all forms are more important than the FDA's determination that mifepristone is sufficiently safe to be mailed to a person for the purposes that it is prescribed for. Which is certainly going to get appealed to a higher court, which, based on Dobbs, might rule in the same way as the Fifth Circuit has, that state sovereignty is more important than the decisions of the federal government, in defiance of whatever they feel like defying.
The Centers for Disease control and Prevention are pausing their testing programs for rarer but still dangerous viruses like rabies, mpox, and Epstein-Barr, because the dismantling that started with the techbros still continues on, even if they have been sent away long ago.
That dismantling also extends to the people whose job it is to provide government documents and transparency when requests are made of the federal government, which certainly suits the administrator that routinely tries to (and probably succeeds at this point) destroy documents that might provide information to someone else, whether in the present or the future.
And it also extends to an arts and cultural center named for John F. Kennedy that the current administrator thought he could remake in his own image and apply his own name to. Like so many other things he thinks he can remake in his own image and apply his name and style to.
Because they are ghouls who do not believe that the disabled should be allowed to live full lives, the current administration intends to cut the Social Security Disability Insurance payments of persons who live with family members, including those whose family together still qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Aid Program, colloquially known as "food stamps". SSI, of course, is not enough for a person with severe disabilities to live independently and with all of the careworkers and aides that a person would need to do so. This administration and their contempt for disabled bodies is well and truly known, and they continue to do their worst to make it so that people with disabilities can't live any life at all, whether supported by family members or not. That's what they mean when they talk about "healthy" people: eugenics and trying to ensure the disabled die and decrease the surplus population bringing their metrics down. (This particular instance is also especially vile because it intends to put a family into the bind of either having their income and assets counted as support for a disabled person, the value of which will be deducted from the SSI payment, or to turn out the disabled person or turn them into someone who has to find some way of paying "rent" to the family or loved ones so as not to bankrupt the family's assets with them.
Oh, how much better we could treat our fellow humans if we weren't obsessed with destruction, war, and letting the rich compete among each other as to who is the wealthiest, instead of who can support the most people with their wealth. (Or taxing their wealth into oblivion as support for others if they won't do it willingly and according to the principles and commandments they supposedly follow.)
The Supreme Court of the United States seems poised to rule that if a company demands data from you as a pre-requisite to using their services, then you cannot claim that data is protected against unreasonable search and seizure, because the company that didn't give you a real choice about whether to surrender that data has it, and therefore it's been voluntarily disclosed. Which is another reason that the law needs to be reformed significantly so that one-sided contract demands such as that are not enforceable, and that everyone must have real choices about sharing or not sharing their data.
If you are not fond of pervert glasses that record you without your consent, know that the kidnap and murder squads are developing pervert glasses of their own, and will take your biometric data without your consent and store it somewhere if one of the kidnap and murder squad observes you enough with their pervert glasses.
At least the kidnap and murder squads aren't getting any additional appropriations in the newest budget bill. There will be other ways of attempting to get them their money, but it's not in this particular bill to fund the rest of the increasingly inaccurately-named Department of Homeland Security.
The State of Texas's state education board gave a first approval to a new standardized and required reading list to be used across all schools in the state, a list the includes cherry-picked and context-free Bible quotes and dismisses away many nonwhite authors who could probably give a better sermon on those passages than the texts themselves will.
Builiding a new public garden that is both for biodiversity and for humans to appreciate the biodiversity, finding that the hedgies can hear a lot higher frequencies than the humans, and the discovery of the jet stream was published in Esperanto first, and that might have meant information about it was less available that it could have been to everyone, since not all that many people interact with Esperanto (and not that many did when it was published.)
In technology, the notifications you receive from chat apps and others may store message and metadata in a database outside of the app, and so, even if you set the app to destroy messages, their content may be available elsewhere. And, of course, that means that the cops can grab it and read your communications, even if you tried to make sure they were properly deleted.
The European Union's beta version on an age verification application did not stand up to stress and security testing, say those who put it through its paces.
Like Claude from Anthropic? If you install Claude Desktop (something different than Claude Code) Claude Desktop installs backdoors into web browsers so that specific extensions can be run at user permission level, and with access to login tokens and other things, so it can act and make it look like you're acting, instead of itself. It does not ask for permission to do this, it rewrites those exploits if they are deleted, and it doesn't disclose itself except if you know where to look.
Also related to Claude, remember the principle of least permissions, and then marvel at someone Finding Out about what the consequences are when you give an unaccountable nondeterministic program write access to your databases - both the database and the backups were deleted through API calls made by the stochastic parrot. And then, when asked why it did the thing, it admitted to ignoring all the "constraints" that were supposedly placed on it, but once again, these are not actual constraints, and the thing is only responding in a statistically probable way when someone expresses an angry tone at it.
F. A. F. O.
Someone picked up the domain name deleteduser.com, set up e-mail receiving on it, and proceeded to receive all kinds of personally-identifiable information from places that used deleteduser.com as the placeholder for a user that's no longer active in their database. Which is not good, obviously, but also, I'm having a snarl at this, because if you wanted to use something like that, example.com is literally in the spec as something to be used when you want to make a point of something and not reference a potentially real domain.
"Autonomous" taxis like Waymo are not necessarily contributing to safer streets, less vehicle congestion, or other things they claim to be, and their software often does incredibly dangerous things that human drivers would not.
Last out for tonight, a reminder to put accessibility into your social media as much as possible, so please provide transcripts, describe your images, and the like, so that everyone who's on your social media or enjoying the content can access it..
And A project that is offering clinicians and others guides on thinking of seemingly disparate conditions in people as constellations because of the likelihood of their co-occurrence with autism or ADHD. And to think of them as constellations because trying to treat one of them well might exacerbate another.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
(Anonymous) 2026-05-03 12:23 pm (UTC)(link)9:30-10:30pmくらいにスタート？