Friday morning, I was gardening when I checked my phone. A request had gone out for help. For 25+ hours, ICE had been laying siege to a quiet neighborhood in Frederick, MD. Community members were afraid, some didn’t want to leave their homes. ICE vehicles seemed to be lurking on every corner.

Our society's unfathomable cruelty to homeless people is not just morally unjustifiable, but more expensive than housing people would be. Cruelty against the homeless is an unaffordable luxury. Abandoning homeless people to avoid offending the Protestant work ethic is an unaffordable luxury.

ProPublica@propublica.org · 3d ago

ProPublica spoke to dozens of people who had lived in homeless encampments when cities cleared them out in “sweeps.” We distributed notecards so people could tell us about the toll in their own words. ➡️ This is what they wrote:

Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe.

Hackers Had A Live Feed Of Every ID This Verification Company Scanned. For Over A Year.

From the very beginning of this recent obsession with identifying everyone online (yes, they like to call it "age" verification, but it always ends up as identity verification), we've been pointing out that it was a huge privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Or maybe it wasn't waiting. Maybe it was already happening. This week a...

techdirt.com

Even aside from Rowling being an insane monster, Jesus fuck I am sick of hearing about Harry Potter

There are endless studies showing this and also the financial and societal benefits of universal basic income and or housing-first policies but the U.S. never goes for any of it because it would require allowing the poor to receive benefits that the rich consider “undeserved”

Jen Taub@jentaub.bsky.social · 3w ago

“A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.” ysph.yale.edu/news-article...

The media gave more coverage to a totally fake, invented idea that the federal government was withholding aid to Hurricane Helene victims in 2024 than to Trump actually doing it in 2025/26. Why did the fake story get more coverage than the real one?

Steve Benen@stevebenen.com · 7d ago

Ahead of the midterms, Trump isn’t even being subtle about his brazen politicization of federal disaster relief aid, explicitly tying approvals to campaign endorsements and election results. It’s one of the underappreciated scandals of his second term. www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

This is pretty fucking wild. I had assumed in a worst case scenario he would target blue zip codes and toss ballots based on technicalities but this is even worse than I imagined.

SpacePrez@spaceprez.bsky.social · last wk.

The polls are super bad for Trump so he's definitely going to try to cheat www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/u...

tbh if youre still using google i think youre insane

oh hell yeah! guess who just stepped in dog puke!

Its been compared to the great migration.

Evan Urquhart@evanurquhart.bsky.social · last mo.

One of the frustrating things about reporting on trans internal refugees is that the people who you're able to interview tend to be ones who managed to find some level of stability - the people moving from couch to couch to street to couch are harder to reach and more interview-avoidant.

wanted to make mac and cheese but i only have choco milk. do you think that would be ok

"Neutral in the culture war"

CNN@cnn.com · 2w ago

"At a time when no American celebrity seems immune from the country’s many divisions, Dolly Parton was a crossover icon who stayed neutral in the culture wars while still speaking her mind," writes Zachary B. Wolf. | Analysis

What horseshit. She embraced gay people at the height of the AIDS crisis, embraced trans people at the height of the war against them, supported Black communities and artists, and wrote the most pro-worker's rights feminist pop song of all time. Neutral my ass

CNN@cnn.com · 2w ago

"At a time when no American celebrity seems immune from the country’s many divisions, Dolly Parton was a crossover icon who stayed neutral in the culture wars while still speaking her mind," writes Zachary B. Wolf. | Analysis

We are unquestionably sending people to their deaths, all because the President and his appointees are making policy based on pure racism and bigotry.

The Washington Post@washingtonpost.com · 3w ago

The first deportation flight to Haiti since the Trump administration ended humanitarian protections has landed. Deportees from the U.S. are vulnerable to kidnapping, extortion and murder, said Guerline Jozef from the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

Glad to see some reporting on this. When I first posted on July 17 about these incidents where an airline worker is asked or tricked into helping ICE, person who told me was too afraid of being identifiable for me to report it out. Bottom line: If you are not a citizen, do not use US air travel rn.

JJ in DC@jjindc.bsky.social · 3w ago

“I know this is going to sound extremely radical, or crazy,” she recounted telling the woman, “but ICE is there at the gate, and they're looking for you."

Casual reminder that the myth of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is a cruel hoax designed to convince poor people from all walks of life that the injustices they face are a result of their own actions, rather than an oppressive system rigged against them.

baby

there is no such thing as "age verification." All "age verification" is actually "identity verification." You can coat it in glitter and "privacy-preserving" wrapping paper. But in the end, mandating age verification means mandating surveillance be built into software and hardware. Period.

New in PN: Transgender athletes are a red herring "None of this discourse happened bc there is a new high-profile trans athlete in the news. Instead, Republicans are starting a culture war to rile up their base, co-opt Dems into agreeing with them, & push trans people out of public life altogether"

Transgender athletes are a red herring

It's a non-problem meant to exclude people from public life.

publicnotice.co

People say we can't compare this to the Third Reich because of the atrocities but we only found out about the atrocities after the fact when it was all said and done and we're not done with this yet so I am sure the worst stomach churning shit has yet to be revealed.

awkword@awkword.bsky.social · 7mo ago

ICYMI: The US is currently holding three times as many people in immigrant detention as were detained in the Nazi concentration camp system in spring 1939 — six years into the Third Reich, and just before the start of World War II.

define pro-cop

N.S. Dolkart sans nap@nsdolkart.bsky.social · 4w ago

Among other reasons. I don’t know how to break this to you all, but a ton of people who aren’t white or fragile are still very pro-cop. The reason police departments didn’t see budget cuts after the summer of 2020 is that most constituents—in all demographics—didn’t want that.

"saudi arabia owns EA" is going to be the headline you see basically everywhere for this one but "jared kushner is about to use EA as a vehicle for trump administration bribes" is equally relevant imo

Wario64@wario64.bsky.social · last mo.

EA Announces Completion of Acquisition by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners www.ea.com/news/ea-anno...

It’s important to understand that when 1.2 million Americans are dying from a disease, any government action is excessive and tyrannical, but if a dozen trans women want to play soccer no government action can go far enough

I am making it a habit to always look for the labor story behind these nasty scandals. The consumers are almost never the only ones being harmed.

The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor

The lettuce-producing Taylor Farms was linked to the widespread use of prison labor before its involvement in a cyclospora outbreak.

futurism.com

if you want to see normally sclerotic do-nothing local governments suddenly snap into action, do some quietly beneficial tactical urbanism type thing like this and watch how quickly they race to remove it

wishda@wishda.bsky.social · last mo.

The DSA in Wilmingotn, N.C. has created a "crisis" by putting benches at city bus stops, after literal decades of the city promising and failing to do so.

whenever someone tells you that it's simply impossible for police to be charged with misconduct or criminal charges, you can tell they're wrong because some cops do get charged regularly — when they are whistleblowers or reformers prosecutors are actually extremely eager to help drum them out!

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · last mo.

Prosecutors charged an LAPD officer with felony eavesdropping for making secret recordings of his colleagues’ racist, sexist and homophobic comments on the job

"WE THE FUCKING JUDGE SON" New York, I love you. I love you so fucking much. Via wali_talks on IG