“The dragnet now reaches far beyond the crack-era stereotype, ensnaring women across racial and class lines. But the underlying premise remains the same: Alleged risk to a fetus can be used to justify state scrutiny of the person carrying it.”
NEW: They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth.
Two Florida women had to attend virtual court hearings while in labor to argue for their right to choose their own medical care.
By @amyyurkanin.bsky.social
On this year’s long covid awareness day, I want more people to read and think about what the late Shafiqah Hudson said before it killed her. Because she was right, as usual, and also early, as usual. Perhaps too early for a lot of people to listen.
“What are we pretending not to know today?”
—Toni Cade Bambara
Twitter user eoghan: How dare poor people get free medical advice <quote tweet from Twitter user Polymarket: BREAKING: New York bill would ban AI from answering questions related to medicine, law, dentistry, nursing, psychology, social work, engineering, & more.> Twitter user YBrogard79094: JUST MAKE HEALTHCARE ACCESSIBLE Twitter user eoghan: AI is literally free healthcare. Being a communist must be exhausting
Homelessness is a policy choice
The head of the US health care system:
“I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.”
The thing is "take it seriously" often means "accept that we're creating Skynet," rather than grappling with real, concrete, well-established concerns around bias, deskilling, unemployment (not the same as "replacement"), and ecology.
75% of my students are future health professionals. Do you really want a physician or nurse or pharm. who has no critical reading/thinking skills, who cannot communicate worth a damn or knows enough to ask questions/problem-solve when something feels off? Would you put your life in the hands of AI?
Facebook plans to put facial recognition in its glasses and they think we’re too stupid to fight back.
Their internal memo: “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”
While this is better than the current CDC process, this is not a good outcome. The AMA can’t match the capacity and impact of the federal government. Measles is already out of control. Playing with fire.
good thread documenting what's going on here but I think it's important to emphasize this is 100% on the judges. If every DoJ attorney headed into federal court knew that this sort of behavior would result in immediate sanctions or recommendations for disbarment from a federal judge, it would end.
even if you think you “have nothing to hide”, you have a lot to lose from these practices. They work just as effectively from their INaccuracy—people would be remiss to think they’re just about sorting risk or about knowledge. they are about producing categories of people, like “enemy of the state."
The false positives + overly-generic categorizations like “domestic terrorism,” already have significant precedent in phenomena like the 9-11 travel bans and “gang member” databases, both of which included babies. Communities of color have long experience with these practices and *warned everyone…*
There is huge risk to our privacy in terms of the data we *did* produce, the use of our faces, tracking, etc. AND we also need to draw on these important insights to understand how the risks include the dangers of *misrecognition* weaponized against people.
Black surveillance scholars including @hypervisible.blacksky.app and @wewatchwatchers.bsky.social have long warned of the dangers of simultaneous hypervisibility AND invisibility, long known to the Black community. Being always seen and watched, but as a “type,” not recognized as a person.
I am trying and failing to find the article from 2 months ago that adds one more terrifying layer: about the successful altering of a facial recognition database such that the photos no longer “read” as someone’s face to a computer, although they look unchanged to a person.
A manager for the Immigrant Defense Network told MPR News that back in November, 2,500 people were trained as constitutional observers. Now, the total is nearly 30,000 trained observers in 77 of Minnesota's 87 counties.
What makes Gavin Newsom such a skilled politician is that he stands up to Trump’s bullying with piping hot memes AND is able to agree with Trump about policy
www.sacbee.com
Free Liam, and his father.
Not going to lie, just very much filled with dread on reporting on Medicaid cuts this year :(
Needless suffering sucks.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), run by Oz and his boss, RFK Jr., will no longer require physicians to report vaccination rates.
Instead, they plan to start having doctors report if they’ve discussed “alternative” vaccine schedules.
Keeping the social safety net as small and as punitive as possible helps to ensure that there will always be a steady stream of people for employers like Bezos to exploit--people in such a precarious position that have no choice but to take whatever underpaid, overworked job they can get.
Washington Post Opinions @postopinions.bsky.social I "The purpose of entitlements is not to spend as much as possible," the Editorial Board writes. "It is to make sure the truly vulnerable get the help they need without becoming dependent on government handouts. Scrutinizing food stamp rolls is a small step in that direction."
No. No. No.
Punitive processes make narrowly targeted programs *less* efficient and *more* costly. Because more scrutiny requires more bureaucracy.
Punitive processes also make it *less* likely that people will get aid for which they qualify. Because of the roadblocks and stigma scrutiny creates.
Fact-checking one of the single most effective convincing-sounding lie generation machines = trying to sweep the ocean back into the sea (or capture emissions after they're released)
We don't solve this without regulating, attacking and delegitimising the slop firehose
wait THAT is the concern?
“damn the calipers worked so well before people got the ability to alter their face shape!"
