@joeldick.bsky.social
Slaves. Taylor Farms, uses slaves.
Chad Loder@chadloder.dev · 4d agoThe diarrhea lettuce company, Taylor Farms, uses slave labor contracted from the Arizona Dept. of Corrections. The backbreaking labor is often performed by imprisoned Mexican nationals who would be otherwise ineligble to work in the US. They are paid $1.50 an hour.
“Trump has rejected disaster aid for Democratic-run states at the highest rate in the 47-year history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” Right now people in blue states are basically paying federal taxes as if they’re colonized territories of red states. www.politico.com/news/2026/03...
i think about perspective in terms of time that help people understand how recent some “history” is and one of those pieces of perspective is that today Emmett Till would have turned 85 today.
i'm sure someone has drawn this parallel but taco bell seems to be getting screwed in a similar way that spain did with the 1918 flu. not their fault that they're the ones who did the responsible thing.
What’s sad to me… is that Lindsay Graham probably thought he could outlast Trump and then reconcile his morality after that. There is no after that now. It’s a good reminder… always do what you know to be right, right NOW. And when you recognize you crossed a line, that’s ok, but come back.
It’s surprisingly hard to convince otherwise reasonable people to take lightning danger seriously. When I was at Princeton, I had to argue MORE THAN ONCE with the rest of the astrophysics dept softball team that we shouldn’t be waving metal bats around in an open field when we could hear thunder 😑
Musk says not a single person has died due to him axing USAID. Sadly, part of my job involves tracking aid spending. So here’s a thread with just some of the people who lost their lives because of USAID cuts
Governments claim risk profiling systems help identify potential criminals or fraudsters but in practice they reinforce discrimination & inequality. A new @amnesty.org report shows how their use in law enforcement, social security & migration violates human rights. www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...
I don't really have much to say about the NY Times covering that NYU students don't want Jon Haidt as their graduation speaker beyond the fact that the paper has not covered this case (or more like it) which involves state censorship of faculty speech. It is monumentally more important.
Justin Weinberg@dailynous.com · 3mo agoA federal court judge ruled today that Texas State University must at least temporarily reinstate philosopher Idris Robinson, whom the university fired from his assistant professorship over a talk he gave about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Embarassing capitulation. The academy has completely embarrassed itself across the board.
Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 3mo agoIf this is leadership, I would hate to see capitulation. If the Republican's drummed up opposition to gravity, the National Academy would stop speaking about it. 4/4
I continue to be flabbergasted that other (non-insane) governments aren't making similar changes. The Canadian government won't shut up about how important "digital sovereignty" is, and then it pours resources into posting everything to Twitter and Facebook.
Alice Stollmeyer@stollmeyer.eurosky.social · 3mo agoEuropean Commission has updated its follow buttons. ✅ Mastodon and Bluesky are in; ⛔ X, Facebook, YouTube are out. (Only when you scroll all the way down, FB and YT are still there, but no longer X.) commission.europa.eu/index_en
Once again: close an area to cars, business *increases*. Every time. And yet every new proposal to close an area to cars meets the same resistance from business owners. I'm starting to wonder whether business owners really are rational self-interest maximizers, I tell you!
Urban Truth Collective@urbantruth.bsky.social · 3mo agoMadrid closed its central business district to cars for the first time during the 2018 Christmas period. The result was a 9.5% increase in retail spending on Madrid’s main shopping street, the Gran Vía. Plus there was a 71% drop in air pollution. Via @carltonreid.com in @forbes.com. #UrbanTruth
A detail I didn’t know: “The Herald entered the Epstein series for a Pulitzer Prize that year, but it was not a finalist. Alan Dershowitz … who helped broker Epstein’s original deal, wrote a letter to the Pulitzer committee that year, urging them not to honor Brown’s work.” share.inquirer.com/THMiUZ
Julie K. Brown receives Pulitzer Prize special citation for her work on Jeffrey Epstein case
Brown's 2017 and 2018 reporting was cited at the awards ceremony. “Her work, and the government’s release of the Epstein files, continue to reverberate around the world.”
share.inquirer.com
#ResistanceRoots Today in history, 1945: The all-Nisei 522nd Field Artillery Battalion halts a death march from Dachau to the Austrian border, saving hundreds of emaciated prisoners. As they freed victims of Nazi persecution, many of their own families were being held in U.S. internment camps. /1
It's not hyperbole in the least to say Musk purchased a six-month shadow presidency for $280 million and used the power of that shadow presidency to 1. Steal the government’s data, 2. Permanently damage the state’s ability to regulate his businesses, and 3, kill non-white people.
David Roberts@volts.wtf · 3mo agoStill feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.
Absolutely fascinating result in this morning's NBC News poll, and I wonder how has been tracked over time. Given the choice of whether to live in the past, present, or future, way more people (45%) would choose the past than an uncertain future (12%). www.documentcloud.org/documents/28... 1/
Orbán's electoral crushing is a far greater achievement than most people outside Hungary realise. He systemically consolidated power for 16 years, fixed the electoral map, abused govt power for political purposes & censored media. The hurdles that Hungarians overcame for this moment were immense.
Someone recently asked me what I thought of the Prairieland case, where defendents were convicted on terrorism charges for possessing leftist literature. It reminds me very much of the ways the state historically criminalized knowledge of abolition. @awkword.bsky.social
Since March 2025, at least 1,243 people, incl. 17 children, were killed by drone strikes carried out by #Haiti |an security forces and private contractors working with them. 👇
Human Rights Watch@hrw.org · 5mo agoNEW: Haitian security forces and private contractors working with them have conducted extensive and apparently unlawful lethal drone strikes. Dozens of ordinary people, including many children, have been killed and injured in these drone operations.
These lawless immunity rulings are what fascism looks like, kids, brought to us not by a coup or vigilante violence, but by the system WE ALREADY HAD.
Chris Ingraham@cingraham.bsky.social · 5mo agoA St. Paul police officer fabricated a massive sex trafficking case and had multiple people locked up under false charges. The Supreme Court yesterday affirmed a ruling that she can't be sued by her victims. She appears to still be employed by the St. Paul PD. ij.org/press-releas...
I do not fear the Menswear Guy. what's he going to tell me about myself that I am not already acutely aware of. "you dress like you don't respect yourself" good eye ace
George Pearkes@peark.es · 7mo agoThe fact the Menswear Guy is actively dunking on the Bsky user base now instead of just cross-posting the threads where he does that to Twitter users should terrify all of us.
Two things are true. 1. American prisons are horrible, filled with human rights abuses and outright torture. 2. CECOT is others of magnitude worse.
It may well be worse now than in the past, but this is extremely typical. I’ve had clients detained by ICE, and it’s like they fall into a black hole. Getting in touch with people in state or federal prison, or even county jail, is easier by an order of magnitude.
The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 8mo agoThey are disappearing people. Listen to this. Nightmare. (And the longer they stay the more money core civic makes)
ICE and CBP, among others, have violently retaliated against ICE Watch in part because the agencies correctly understand what many do not: Organized neighbors are mounting an effective defense, and an organized movement is a formidable adversary. My new feature: newrepublic.com/article/2042...
Inside Chicago’s Neighborhood ICE Resistance
Residents have organized a formidable network to protect immigrant communities from Trump’s brutal deportation program. Their efforts are making a genuine difference.
newrepublic.com
Next, we tested the effects of sycophancy. We find that even a single interaction with sycophantic AI increased users’ conviction that they were right and reduced their willingness to apologize. This held both in controlled, hypothetical vignettes and live conversations about real conflicts.
I wrote about Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein, why swallowing live frogs is a bad idea, and how context and history can release you from bright-kid syndrome, the illusion that you yourself are going to have every answer or fix the world.
You don't have to swallow frogs
Klein and Coates show that if you don't know what your core beliefs are, you're going to get played.
degenerateart.beehiiv.com
hey @nytimes.com: there is no counterpoint here. There are no credible legal experts who would EVER say that the US military has any right or authority to blow civilian craft out of the Caribbean and kill their crews from afar without any provocation. There is no other side to this question.
