Author | Lightnews

Reposted by Kit Connolly

Ryan Marino, MD @ryanmarino.bsky.social · 18h

Some of the details may be disputed but this man’s cause of death was determined to be dehydration. It takes over a week without water for an adult to die of dehydration. One officer’s suggestion he needed medical attention was ignored. There’s no plausible situation where this wasn’t intentional.

pdx law grrrl @pdxlawgrrrl.bsky.social · 18h

Lamont Mealy, a mentally ill man, was locked in solitary confinement in a Maryland prison. Guards shut off water to his cell. A fellow prisoner says guards taunted him. He died of dehydration after 8 days. His family's lawsuit asserts officials covered it up.

How a Maryland prisoner died an ‘excruciating’ death from dehydration

Lamont Mealy died of dehydration in an isolation cell at Western Correctional Institution in 2023. A lawsuit claims state officials covered it up.

www.thebanner.com

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 18h

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory

An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC

www.bbc.co.uk

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Taniel @taniel.bsky.social · 21h

Alabama has just executed Anthony Boyd tonight.

Lauren Gill explained so much that went wrong in his case and trial. Important to not look away.

Lauren Gill @laurengill.bsky.social · 7d

Alabama plans to execute Anthony Boyd next week with nitrogen gas for a 1993 murder.

No physical evidence linked Boyd to the crime.

He was convicted solely on the testimony of a co-defendant who avoided the death penalty by testifying against him.

boltsmag.org/anthony-boyd...

He Was Convicted Entirely On Clashing Eyewitness Testimony. Alabama Plans to Execute Him Next Week. - Bolts

No physical evidence connected Anthony Boyd to a 1993 murder. He was sent to death row on the word of a co-defendant who testified under the threat of capital punishment.

boltsmag.org

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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 21h

Because President Botstein understands the job of a university president. Protective your students.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 21h

A Bard College student was kidnapped by ICE and Bard’s administration is advocating for his release and has created a website to assist the rest of the community in joining them.

That’s what academic leaders should be doing for their students right now. www.instagram.com/p/DQKSTDJkeF...

Login • Instagram

Welcome back to Instagram. Sign in to check out what your friends, family & interests have been capturing & sharing around the world.

www.instagram.com

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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 21h

I wish people defended smeared victims of sexual violence the way they defend problematic male candidates for office

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Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com · 21h

catalystsca.org/mark-zuckerb...

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Kit Connolly @kitforkat.com · 8h

Thank you for founding this and sharing it!

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Kit Connolly @kitforkat.com · 8h

Rejecting him as a candidate is "a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life."

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Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social · 20h

Every time I sit down to write a piece I feel certain that I would rather die than actually write it and yet somehow I would rather die ten times harder before I ever let the word machine write for me.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 1d

“I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested. I'm 61, and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak. ... The other day, somebody wrote me an email, said, ‘What is your stance on AI?’ And my answer was very short. I said, ‘I'd rather die.’” 🫡

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro says 'I'd rather die' than use generative AI

Del Toro's new Frankenstein adaption reimagines Mary Shelley's 1818 Gothic novel. Frankenstein was like a tech bro: "creating something without considering the consequences," he explains.

www.npr.org

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Kit Connolly @kitforkat.com · 8h

Yes, and the Black abolitionists. I didn’t hear much about them growing up and I don’t want them to get overlooked, especially because the White abolitionists only focused on persuading. Need to get a physical copy of Force and Freedom by @kcarterjackson.bsky.social so I can better reference it.

FORCE AND FREEDOM
Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence
Kellie Carter Jackson
READ BY MACHELLE WILLIAMS

The era of revolutions set an early example for understanding violence as both a rhetorical and physical weapon to maintain the status quo, as well as the means to overthrow it. The historian François Furstenberg argues that, during the nineteenth century, Patrick Henry's famous mandate "Give me liberty or give me death" was the greatest revolutionary slogan of all time." Thus the idea among black abolitionists that freedom denied should be taken by force was not new. The contagious egalitarian language of the eighteenth and nineteenth century erupted in a set of expectations and bore serious consequences. The revolutionary rhetoric and force deployed by the Founding Fathers offered black abolitionists an opportunity to present themselves as equal men whose struggle mirrored that of American rev-olutionaries. Inadvertently, the Founding Fathers supplied the language and ideology for black abolitionists to rationalize a violent overthrow of slavery. Meanwhile, Haitian revolutionaries provided the precedent.

The successful overthrow of slavery during the Haitian Revolution supplied the first example of a black revolutionary victory achieved through violence? For black aboli-tionists, an independent Haiti represented the impossible made possible. The Haitian Revo-lution, and the slave rebellions more generally, served to illustrate the fact that political violence was a direct and inevitable consequence of slavery and oppression. Black abolitionists

Frederick Douglas recognized that the years of moral suasion had failed to reach the masses, by appealing only to the elite in society. He claimed that the voice of reason would not influence the masses, but that what was required was the force of events.
He added, 'the American public discovered and accepted more truth in our four years of Civil War than they learned in forty years of peace! He believed the that without the threat and aid of violence, American slavery could easily have persisted for another hundred years.

Force and Freedom
Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence
Kellie Carter Jackson

"They cannot elevate us. Whenever the colored man is elevated, it will be by his own exertions," declared Rock. He insisted that friends and allies could help as much as possible, but he was quite emphatic concerning who must do the heavy lifting.
For Rock, the prime mover was the colored man who, by dent of perseverance and industry, educates and elevates himself, prepares the way for others, gives character to the race, and hastens the day of general emancipation.

Force and Freedom
Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence
Kellie Carter Jackson

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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 20h

A very incomplete list of things we wouldn't have done if we waited for the normies to care:

- abolish slavery
- child labor laws
- votes for women
- social security
- fdic
- welfare
- medicare
- medicaid
- desegregation
- women's sports

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 20h

"normies do not care about this thing and so it is no use raising a stink" is imho just an excuse for not doing politics, which is the job of making normies care about something

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Kit Connolly @kitforkat.com · 8h

I thought the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas special did a good version of it

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Kit Connolly @kitforkat.com · 9h

Diagnosis Murder and Matlock are high up there for me

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Kit Connolly @kitforkat.com · 9h

Or defense attorneys like Matlock. He and his team had to figure out whodunit to prevent an innocent person from going to jail.

I read an analysis of how media shifted the protagonist perspective from defense to prosecution and I can’t unsee it now.

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Kit Connolly @kitforkat.com · 9h

Like it just gives me flashbacks of women trying to share concerns and men dismissing them without any due diligence. And like maybe this has worked for Bernie or other candidates in the past but I’d like a better culture where men take warnings seriously.

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Kit Connolly @kitforkat.com · 9h

a) that he rejected the claim as absurd and didn’t look into it immediately is a major red flag

b) I don’t see how he could be unaware of it based on his own participation in this Reddit thread

bsky.app/profile/purp...

Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 1d

also, how does Platner claim that he had no idea what a Totenkopf was or that his tattoo was one until a week ago when this Reddit conversation he was part of 6 years ago was all about a soldier with a Totenkopf where people discuss the difference between an SS Totenkopf vs. a Punisher skull etc.

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Rose Schmits @roseschmits.bsky.social · 12h

Brianna keeps getting written about, even if not especially her own mother, like she tragically killed herself rather than was murdered in a transphobic hate crime

Edith @edithcharles.bsky.social · 1d

Most of us have pathologically useless parents who don't care to learn about protecting us properly, but this dogshit really takes the cake.

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Kit Connolly @kitforkat.com · 9h

It’s purity culture victim-blaming ex: she was assaulted because of what she was wearing. It’s parental ownership and responsibility, caring about protecting and defending versus changing society. It’s enabling the hate, not holding those responsible for it accountable.

bsky.app/profile/mark...

Nightmark on Elm Street @markgrimshawtism.bsky.social · May 4

Like, I don’t know, I just don’t think that, when someone is the victim of hate-fuelled murder, the entire focus should be on the fact they were depressed. I would go so far as to say it is actually completely irrelevant for the public reporting of a murder influenced by bigotry.

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Martin @kameraten.bsky.social · 9d

Really worth reading the full essay.

Graeber argues that capitalism didn’t replace slavery -- it rebranded it. A key mistake of the mode-of-production model was reducing “production” to making things instead of also producing people and social relations that constitute social reproduction.

David Graeber Institute @davidgraeberinst.bsky.social · 9d

Modern capitalism has more in common with Feudalism and the oldstyle slave-system than most people realize.

From: davidgraeber.org/articles/tur...

"In the case of slave mode of production,
the exploiters directly own the primary
producers; in feudalism, both have complex
relations to the land, but the lords use direct
jural-political means to extract a surplus; in
capitalism, the exploiters own the means of
production and the primary producers are
thus reduced to selling their labor power.
The state, in each case, is essentially an
apparatus of coercion that backs up these
property rights by force."
.
- David Graeber

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David Graeber Institute @davidgraeberinst.bsky.social · 2d

Dancing frogs have become a symbol of resistance in the USA.

Interestingly, over a decade ago David Graeber wrote a piece on the power of such symbols in protest movements.

The piece is called - On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets. Here is an extract.

I also want to ask why it is that American police seem to hate the giant
puppets (at protests). As many activists have observed, the forces of
order in the United States seem to have a profound aversion to giant
puppets.

Often police strategies aim to destroy or capture them before they can
even appear on the streets. As a result, a major concern for those
planning actions soon became how to hide the puppets so they would
not be destroyed in preemptive attacks. What’s more, for many individual
officers at least, the objection to puppets appeared to be not merely
strategic, but personal, even visceral. Cops just hate puppets
.
- David Graeber

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PeterGelderloos @petergelderloos.bsky.social · 4d

We need to shift back towards an anti-surveillance culture! Surveillance helps ICE, it helps the cops, it helps the Nazis cops often work with, it makes you more vulnerable to identity theft and getting your credit cards or personal photos stolen and it puts others at risk too!

PeterGelderloos @petergelderloos.bsky.social · 7d

A lot of surveillance infrastructure is put up by the State. But these days the vast majority is by consumers. We need to spread the idea that constant surveillance is not okay!
No more Teslas, no more Rings, leave your phone at home when you go out!
Don't go to friends or family's houses if...

Ryan O'Horo @redteamwrangler.bsky.social · 7d

Destroy every Ring camera. Straight into the fires of Mount Doom.

www.yahoo.com/news/article...

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Harlem Toots @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 12h

They tortured him to death.

Ben Conarck @conarck.bsky.social · 1d

New: Correctional staff at a Western Maryland prison shut off the water to a mentally ill man’s cell, then allowed him to suffer for eight days before he finally died of dehydration, according to a recent court filing.
www.thebanner.com/community/cr...

How a Maryland prisoner died an ‘excruciating’ death from dehydration

Lamont Mealy died of dehydration in an isolation cell at Western Correctional Institution in 2023. A lawsuit claims state officials covered it up.

www.thebanner.com

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Imani Gandy Corn 🎃 @angryblacklady.blacksky.app · 12h

AI can pry Oxford commas and em dashes from my cold, lifeless, and dead hands—and I dare someone to say something to me about it

ana street rat @uldahstreetrat.bsky.social · 1d

"Oxford commas are a sign you write with ai" I will find such a unique way to rip out your spine that they'll make a movie about it

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Coffee III: Saison of the Witch @unlox.bsky.social · 1d

“oh so you think the east wing being demolished is worse than-“ it’s a synecdoche, man. a visual metaphor. there’s a reason the aliens in Independence Day don’t aim a huge laser at SNAP benefits

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it's gita time @xoxogossipgita.bsky.social · 1d

you can get a book at the library for free

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