alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • 427 Posts
  • 239 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • If you’re feeling that announced regret while reading this tame banter, then I apologize - but I would loved to have seen you in some of the larger forums I’ve moderated in the past - and they weren’t even about politics. The users there would have eaten you alive on the first day.

    i’m… sorry that we generally like to treat our userbase as adults capable of basic introspection when they do something wrong or sanctionable, instead of immediately telling them to fuck off? but again this is way besides the point–which is, don’t relitigate this, and stop going into every thread even remotely adjacent to Israel/Palestine and causing problems. your opinions are simply not important enough (or, in my opinion, well reasoned enough) to hear them out for an additional ten months beyond the ten months you’ve already been an issue.


  • i’m very uninterested in relitigating your temporary silencing for getting into aimless slapfights with people on here on this subject. don’t bother bringing it up again. strictly speaking the silencing should probably also apply to this thread and just result in me deleting your comments without even responding to them like i am now–but i’m being generous in not doing that here and just calling them a cringe opinion you have the right to express. please do not make me regret that and start enforcing your temporary silencing elsewhere too.

    one that very much isn’t as unambiguous as you’re trying to portray it as or have been led to believe through your little filter bubble (at least according to my little filter bubble - opinions, opinions, opinions).

    no, it’s pretty unambiguous both internationally (where Israel has been rebuked time and time again for its apartheid system and systemic discrimination and abuse against Palestinians) and morally (Israel’s current conduct toward people in the West Bank in Gaza is almost one-to-one analogous to Jim Crow and apartheid, even ignoring Zionism and its contribution to the subject)–most people just don’t care that much about a foreign conflict that doesn’t affect them and a foreign ethnic group they can’t directly do much to alleviate the plight of.

    fundamentally, though, this is an “i can see discrimination with my own eyes, and settlers from Israel will literally admit to doing the discrimination in casual interviews” and an “i don’t think 40,000 Palestinians[1] are all Hamas militants who should be annihilated with indiscriminate bombing that has leveled the vast majority of Gaza’s already crippled infrastructure, i think that is very obviously morally wrong” thing.


    1. or many more. some of the more extreme estimates now have the death toll potentially as high as 300,000 ↩︎








  • These first serious restrictions on men have come as a surprise to many in Afghanistan, according to a range of Afghans, including Taliban opponents, wavering supporters and even members of the Taliban regime, who spoke in phone interviews over the past two weeks. In a society where a man’s voice is often perceived as far more powerful than a woman’s, some men now wonder whether they should have spoken up sooner to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

    “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now,” said a male resident of the capital, Kabul, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity or that only their first names be used due to fears of drawing unwanted scrutiny from the regime. “Now, everyone is growing a beard because we don’t want to be questioned, humiliated,” he said.


    A 36-year old male driver in Kabul said the new restrictions feel “enormous” and pose a growing hardship for his work. His revenue has declined by 70 percent since late August, he said, partly because the Taliban has begun enforcing a rule that bans women from traveling alone in taxis.

    Even in some government offices, a new sense of dread has set in. A former Taliban supporter recalled how a friend, who still works for the regime, recently had his salary withheld because his beard wasn’t sufficiently long.

    “We are hearing that some of the civil servants, whose beards were shorter than the required length, were barred from entering their departments,” said a government employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.









  • Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

    It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

    The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.


    Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

    The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.

    “They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.










  • When South Korea started tackling this problem 20 years ago, it threw away 98 percent of its food waste. Today, 98 percent of food waste is turned into feed, compost or energy, according to the South Korean Ministry of Environment. It achieved this by banning food scraps from landfills and mandating that all residents separate their food waste from their trash and recycling — and to pay for the service through fees and fines.

    South Korea is one of the few countries with a nationwide system for food-waste management. While France made composting food mandatory this year — and some cities like New York have imposed similar rules — few places match up with South Korea.


  • Colorado officials are now proposing to go further. In 2023, the state adopted legislation to try something that’s never been done in this country: automatically register tribal members to vote in U.S. elections.

    The program, if implemented, would enable tribes to share their membership lists with Colorado elections officials, who’d then use that information to register every eligible person to vote, while giving them a chance to opt out. Since Colorado already mails ballots to every registered voter, this would necessarily mean getting ballots into the hands of more Native people. “We’ve made real steps forward, and we’re going to continue,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told me recently. “We always try to push the envelope.”


    And yet, Cloud is also keenly concerned that the program could make her community more vulnerable. For U.S. election officials to automatically register tribal members to vote, the tribes would need to share certain vital information about their members, such as full name, address, and date of birth. Cloud is hesitant to hand this data over to a state that has, over a long history that she knows too well, been an agent of violence.



  • The rate of stops conducted off-the-books has increased under Superintendent Larry Snelling, even as he has positioned himself as an agent of reform who is moving the Chicago Police Department away from its longstanding strategy of using traffic stops to find illegal guns and tamp down on crime. In June, Snelling reported traffic stops were down by about 87,000 over the same time last year. But behind that reduction is a pattern of thousands of unreported police encounters, which accounted for one-third of all traffic stops over the first seven months of Snelling’s tenure.

    Records obtained by Bolts and Injustice Watch show police department officials know the traffic stop data they report to state regulators are an undercount. Internally, the department tracks stops using police radio data that doesn’t rely on officers filling out the state-mandated forms.


  • Mayoral candidate Victor Miller, a bespectacled librarian with an AI obsession, stood between an American flag and a Wyoming flag, preaching what he sees as the untapped potential of artificial intelligence in government.

    Miller made this pitch at a county library in Wyoming’s capital on a recent summer Friday, with a few friends and family filling otherwise empty rows of chairs. Before the sparse audience, he vowed to run the city of Cheyenne exclusively with an AI bot he calls “VIC” for “Virtual Integrated Citizen.”

    AI experts say the pledge is a first for U.S. campaigns and marks a new front in the rapid emergence of the technology. Its implications have stoked alarm among officials and even tech companies.


  • In discussing Trump’s plan to carry out the largest deportation in US history – which the former president has called for publicly – Vought said the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants could help “save the country.”

    Once deportations begin, “you’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like,” Vought said. “And so that’s going to cause us to get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?”


    In preparation for Trump’s potential return to the White House, Vought said in the meeting that he had a team of staffers working to draft regulations and executive orders that would translate Trump’s campaign speeches into government policy.

    “We’ve got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are, we’re planning for the next administration,” he said.

    For example, “you may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation,’” Vought said. “What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it? Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not, you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.”


  • Mutual aid groups established themselves across Sudan after the war erupted. They drew members from a vibrant pro-democracy movement and brought ideas rooted in a rich heritage of social solidarity, best represented in the tradition of nafeer (“a call to mobilize”).

    The Greater Khartoum kitchens follow two different models. Under the takaya system, religious and community leaders feed people on the streets, in houses, or under trees; however, more structured kitchens are run in defined spaces by the emergency response rooms.

    Hassan, who helps coordinate assistance across Greater Khartoum, said over 350 communal kitchens have been set up, assisting 500,000 families with at least one meal a day. “We aim to save people’s dignity,” he said. “Everybody should be able to eat and not feel shame. We, as Sudanese, are still helping each other. We survive together.”


  • The only thing that makes an evil “lesser” is that there is less energy going towards supporting it. By putting it into power you make it the greater evil.

    this just seems categorically untrue, unless you think that there are no meaningful differences in outcomes even between “lesser evils” and “greater evils” (in which case i would argue your distinction does not exist here and therefore is not useful for the purposes of this argument). the idea that energy and power alone/even primarily determine “evil” in this context also seems deeply reductive–just because Nick Fuentes, for example, is not at serious risk of running the country does not mean his ideas are a lesser evil to the regular liberalism currently in power and only become a greater evil once he is.