Imagine if, in the midst of the massive BLM riots this summer, the entire tech infrastructure had deplatformed Facebook because some had used that app to plan events devolving into violence. People would rightly have called that an insane act of ideological fascism.

Yet today, media will celebrate Amazon doing exactly that to Parler. The tech bros are making a horrible and dangerous moment significantly more horrible and dangerous. There are no consistent standards being applied. There is reactionary deplatforming in the name of one side.

Private companies are by law free to do what they like. That’s why I have always said that the solution to the censorship of Twitter is alternatives -- which is what Parler was attempting to be, whatever its flaws.

But when the technological instruments necessary for speech are located in essentially three companies, all of which are moving toward like-minded censorship (Amazon controls about half of all public-cloud infrastructure, Microsoft 16%, and Google 4%), that avenue closes.

I am by nature anti-regulation. But even the consumer-based theory of anti-monopoly championed by free market advocates cuts in favor of anti-monopolistic regulation if these companies are acting in de facto collusion to shut all avenues of dissent.

"In Wake of Black Lives Matter Protests, New York Attorney General Wants Federal Monitor to Oversee NYPD for Civil Rights Abuses"

@NewYorkStateAG is holding a press conference soon, and I will update this developing story. https://t.co/XuH44IdqjJ via @lawcrimenews

NYAG's federal complaint is embedded in the story.

NYAG James's press conference is ongoing.

Live stream

NYAG speaks of her investigation into civil rights abuse:

"What we found was an egregious abuse of police power, rampant excessive use of force and leadership unable and unwilling to stop it."

NYAG James:

"This lawsuit seeks broad injunctive relief, including systemic reforms to the NYPD and a monitor to oversee the NYPD's compliance with the law."

NYAG:

"Since the end of May 2020, my office has received more than 1,300 complaints and pieces of evidence about the NYPD misconduct. We have also received 300 submissions of written evidence."

This is a memo to white folks who have gotten activated to fight for social justice over the last four years, as part of resisting the agenda of the current administration:

The work isn't over. We're glad you're here, and we need you to keep showing up.

1/x Thread.

Imagine a world in which every shooting by police of an unarmed Black person was met with the energy and urgency of the 2017 Women's March or the airport protests after the Muslim Ban was announced.

Imagine people mobilizing every time a state wanted to pass draconian abortion restrictions the way they did when the Affordable Care Act was up for a repeal in 2018.

Imagine the canvassing, the text banking, the GOTV work that has happened in 2018 and 2020 happening every single time, for every single election. Imagine what might be possible.

Imagine the outcry and passion for immigrant rights, for just immigration laws that has happened over the last few years continuing to happen, in an ongoing way, until every last person yearning to breathe free is safe.

The 11th January edition of BBC Scotland's flagship morning news programme, Good Morning Scotland, was so extreme in terms of anti-SNP propaganda that we decided to analyse key segments to highlight just how bad things were.

This thread deals with untruths.

On January 11th there were several untruths. The clip below is Good Morning Scotland presenter Laura Maxwell as she introduces an interview with Scottish Tory MSP Dean

Maxwell says: "The Deputy First Minister has rejected suggestions that the recovery from the coronavirus crisis should be a greater priority than an independence referendum."

But did John Swinney *really* reject such a

Swinney said: "An independence referendum is an essential priority for Scotland because it gives us the opportunity to choose how we decide to rebuild as a country from Covid."

Swinney's words have been contorted. The interpretation is closer to tabloid caricature than truth.

But there were more untruths and misleading statements to come.

In the interview that followed Laura Maxwell's caricature intro, Scottish Tory MSP Dean Lockhart provided two in a single

THREAD: Questions to Keir Starmer's spokesperson this afternoon 🧵

Does Keir want an elected head of state? "No." Is he a proud patriot? "Yes." His past support for abolishing monarchy? "We all reflect on what we said when we were in our 20s... Keir has been proud of what the monarchy has done to help the country through the pandemic."

On use of Union Jack by Labour: "The union flag represents the country that Labour wants to govern and that Keir wants to be the PM of. It’s a symbol of the country we want to lead. You can call that patriotism, you can call it whatever you want, but that’s what we stand for."

Added: "Keir believes in our union of the United Kingdom… The flag represents that union, but also it’s the wider point of how we are better together."

On leaked Labour strategy document: "It's not right to say it was presented as our strategy. That’s not what it was, and to claim otherwise is wrong. It was an external review shared with the party… but we will write our own strategy."

Oregon Prison Report: Voices from the Inside

"It's frustrating in here right now. You have a lot of inmates literally standing up saying, 'What the fuck? Why are you guys doing this to us?'”

#ODOCKills #KateBrownKills #FreeThemAll

“And you have a lot of officers just saying, 'Tough, can't do anything about it. Deal with it. We're in charge and you're not.'"

[Note: As of 2/8/21 there are a total of 103 positive cases of COVID-19 at SCI, 21 of which are currently active.]

(Testimony from Lane County Mutual Aid's (@eughungerstrike) Correspondence)

Santiam Correctional Institution (SCI) / February 2, 2020.

So on Monday, they gave another mass test of COVID-19, or they offered it again, and this time a larger amount of people for multiple reasons refused the test. A lot of them refused the test because they were pretty sure they have COVID-19 and they don't wanna be shipped out...

... , go to OSP and get locked down. And once again, that situation like every other institution is doing it if you refuse the test they quarantine you for 14 days. I mean that's... You have the right to refuse the test you have a right to refuse any medical...

I'm posting this paper because poor medical communication this year has resulted in a distrust in science. To improve vaccine uptake we need to understand what works and what doesn't.

Increasing Vaccination: Putting Psychological Science Into

Vaccination is one of the great achievements of the 20th century, yet persistent public-health problems include inadequate, delayed, and unstable vaccination uptake.

Psychology offers three general propositions for understanding and intervening to increase uptake where vaccines are available and affordable. The first proposition is that thoughts and feelings can motivate getting vaccinated.

Hundreds of studies have shown that risk beliefs and anticipated regret about infectious disease correlate reliably with getting vaccinated; low confidence in vaccine effectiveness and concern about safety correlate reliably with not getting vaccinated.

We were surprised to find that few randomized trials have successfully changed what people think and feel about vaccines, and those few that succeeded were minimally effective in increasing uptake. The second proposition is that social processes can motivate getting vaccinated.

🔮🃏
hahah I love this energy I'm seeing like a masculine who is waiting and day dreaming and very sweet and it's like they are both the knight of cups and the emperor but what's fascinating is the feminine is also the emperor? lmao so the way it's playing out is the masculine is

kind of like off waiting for the feminine to get their work done I see this feminine being really focused, sitting working at a computer, writing in a notebook, or a sketchpad, i'm seeing a red pen/marker, I feel like the whole month of october the feminine was very busy and this

masculine was like no it's okay I know you've got stuff to do I'm going to just wait and do my thing and I know you know I'll be here when you're done and it's kind of funny I think this feminine doesn't even realize hahaha The empress also came out 🌚 I do feel like essentially

whatever this like big push to do all this work was is coming to a place where yes like it's still there that "down to business' energy is there but this empress / emperor feminine is very balanced and it feels like someone stepping into a place of creation and manifestation and

phewwwwie that hard work has paid off with the ten of pentacles I tell you. I'm seeing that this feminine is also walking away from anyone who is like I guess not picking up the phone let's put it that way like if someone is sleeping on them or like the knight of cups can be kind

We were casteless. It was you who taught us about caste and divided us into graded hierarchies. You were the original inventors of the divide and rule policy. You created the Mala, you created the Madiga, you also created the Mahar and the Bhangi.(1/n)

We were casteless, but you blame us for being Casteist towards each other, and watch us fight from afar. Now you seek to further divide us among ourselves by subcategorising us, so that we'd have eternal infighting, so that we'd not focus on countering you..(2/n)

..by forgetting that you own a lion's share of this nation while we continue to fight for breadcrumbs. You call us heathens, yet your culture sanctified misogyny, introduced casteism that divides fellow brothers and sisters.(3/n)

You call us patriarchs, even though you invented and propagated Brahminical patriarchy. You call your culture egalitarian, yet it produced the prostitutes and manual scavengers. You had the audacity of declaring sections of society as impure and untouchable.(4/n)

You call yourself rational, yet your religion is filled with inconsistencies, contradictions and illogical falsities. You call us uncultured savages, yet you appropriated our indigenous culture and claimed our creativities, inventions & knowledge production as your own.
(5/n)

So here's something interesting about our latest 'surge'. If one goes to https://t.co/unPSmmc8Mg you can toggle between 'confirmed' cases, 'probable' cases and both of them together.

So what is a 'confirmed' case? That would be any laboratory confirmed 'case' - any positive PCR, antigen or antibody test, with all the issues of false positivity and hypersensitivity and non-infectiousness that go along with all of those tests.

A 'probable' case does not even have a positive test result associated with it. All it requires are symptoms. Maybe an epidemiological link. We are now in the middle of what used to be referred to as 'flu season' when there is a wide variety of respiratory illnesses that exist -

- and are passed around, creating symptoms in individuals that count under one of the 44 symptoms of 'COVID' in Ohio.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ So how big of a deal are the probable cases in Ohio? On the left are just the 'probable' cases/hospitalizations/deaths. On the right are the total assigned cases/hospitalizations/deaths -

when I was a teenager, the dominant criticism my closest friends had of me was that I was too arrogant, and they were right. I was too caustic, abrasive, eager to nitpick, quick to criticize, and I was way too certain of myself. I spent my entire 20s trying to correct for this

the social niceties stuff were relatively trivial for me to address. learning to be gracious, patient, I could manage all of that. But "too certain of oneself" goes order of magnitudes deeper. It goes into philosophical territory about risk, certainty, the nature of knowledge

I very seriously experimented with beliefs like "almost everything I know is wrong to a degree I do not understand", "my mental models are contaminated beyond repair", "I have been indoctrinated and need to be deradicalized", I subjected myself and my mind to radical rewrites

Over 8+ years I wrote over 800,000 words of introspective journaling, investigating my own mind, investigating the investigator. I read & talked to thousands of people from around the world to seek out different ways of thinking, seeing, being, believing, knowing, understanding

I tried to think of myself as a robot that needed debugging. I actually made substantial progress with that

I tried to think of myself as a garden that needed tending. I made substantial progress with that

I tried not to think of myself at all, and I transcended progress itself

Since you're all about sea shanties these days, WHO WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT GAY MARRIAGE IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF PIRACY?

Now, a lot of what we're about to tell you is the subject of debate, because history, when written down, tends to elide homosexuality. Therefore, there's nothing in history which outright says "these pirates were hella gay and marrying each other all across the high seas".

So, among pirate communities during the golden age of piracy, there was an arrangement called "matelotage". Crew members could form a bond together where one would inherit the other's wealth - rather like a marriage.

Now, some say that matelotage was a strictly economic arrangement for division of assets, but tbh, that's what a conventional marriage is, so.

There was definitely passion involved in some matelotages - for example, when Captain Bartholomew Roberts stabbed a crewman for being rude to him, the dead man's matelot got VERY angry, confronted his captain furiously... and Roberts stabbed him, too. Then had him beaten.

THREAD: Today ONS has published a report on how it decided that the Census question "what is your sex" should *not* mean the sex you were born

The ONS considered 5 difference concepts of sex:
Sex registered at birth,
Sex recorded on birth certificate,
Sex recorded on legal/official documents,
living / presenting sex,
Self-identified sex.

/2

A big part of their evidence for why asking 'sex registered at birth' was unacceptable was that trans people won't like it and might boycott the Census. /3

From this they concluded "The highest negative impact on accuracy & reliability is anticipated if sex registered at birth was collected due to the likely negative impact on response rates caused by the perceived invasion of privacy" /4

and that "The data need [for birth sex] is not considered to be strong enough to justify collecting this" /5

A few weeks ago @ClareCraigPath, @RealJoelSmalley and I wrote a short piece on endemic Covid, and what it might look like.

It seems particularly relevant to current

Consider the possibility that all our naso-pharynxes together make up a single ecosystem, in which only one predator can be completely dominant.

We are not saying that this has definitely happened with Covid - but it would explain the disappearance of flu this year.

Every winter, we see "excess deaths" in the sense that more (mainly elderly) people die in the winter than in the summer.

This is a worldwide phenomenon.

It is now thought that all or nearly all of the extra deaths in Winter are due to infection with winter respiratory viruses, mainly

However, we do not - and never have - extensively tested for the presence of such viruses in the critically ill elderly population, so we really have no idea how frequently infection is present, or in fact what its contribution to death is.

Awareness is the key metric to bring the change in society. As a law student, I see many educated women in society, don’t aware about their basic rights. So, this thread will help you to know your basic rights.

Legal Rights of Indian women

A Thread 🧵👇

1/ Women have the right to equal pay - Acc. to the provision listed under the Equal Remuneration Act, one cannot be discriminated on the basis of sex when it comes to salary, pay or wages. Working women have the right to draw an equal salary as compared to men. Ask for equal pay.

2/ Women have the right to dignity and decency - In an event that the accused (a person who has been arrested) is a woman, any medical examination procedure on her must be performed in the presence of another woman.

3/ Women have the right against workplace harassment - The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, gives a female the right to file a complaint against any kind of sexual harassment at her place of work.

4/ Under this act, she can submit a written complaint to an Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) at a branch office within a period of 3 months.