alyaza

joined 2 years ago
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But this is only part of the story, and it gets awkwardness wrong in important ways. Yes, awkwardness is caused by a failure to conform to existing social norms. But this failure isn’t individual and, rather than think in terms of awkward people, we ought to think in terms of awkward situations. And yes, awkwardness can be painful, and unpleasant. But it’s not embarrassing, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Contrary to popular belief, our awkward moments aren’t cringeworthy. Rather than cringing inwardly about them, we ought to examine them more closely. Because once we realise the true nature of awkwardness, we can stop seeing it as an individual failure and start seeing it as an opportunity for social change. In short: we should take awkwardness less personally, and more seriously.

 

Stacking rocks. That’s how Diné and Mexican rainwater harvester Carmen Gonzales plans to rewater the high desert of Dziłíjiin, or Black Mesa, the roughly 256,000 acres of juniper-and-pinyon-dotted hills of northwest Arizona that span Diné and Hopi lands.

Through her organization, Indigenous Water Wisdom, Gonzales implements low-tech erosion control structures that draw on ancestral techniques and permaculture designs. These structures often look like stacks of rocks laid across desert washes in swirls, bowls, and waves, all designed to slow the flash floods that wash out main roads and carve arroyos into canyons.

Gonzales returned to her Diné homeland to lead an erosion-control workshop in July, kicking off a water restoration project that will last decades. Bringing water to a desert may seem impossible, but historically, seeps and springs bubbled up to water sheep herds, households, and farms. She intends to recharge the shallow springs across the land.

 

Every cell you’d go to, someone would be begging you for toilet paper or for water. These are “wet cells” with a sink and toilet, but the person inside can’t flush the toilet or open the faucet to get drinking water themselves; someone outside the cell has to press a button to do it. So as a fellow incarcerated person, who’d been in similar cells myself at previous facilities, I’d usually spend the next two hours walking back and forth filling up people’s cups from the mop sink, because it’s midday and there hasn’t been officer around since 5 pm yesterday.

You can land in these cells for months for talking back to an officer, or being in a fight even if you were just defending yourself. If you have a mental health episode, or report that you were sexually assaulted, they might stick you in there for a year. Purportedly for your safety, but really to shut you up. These inequities are wielded most harshly against trans women of color like myself.

There should be an external civilian review board that audits the process, with members who rotate out every six or 12 months and are paid for their time. There should really be multiple boards—one for general housing conditions, one for use of force, one for mental health care, etc.

 

Workday Magazine: This book is largely about the failure to collectively acknowledge the losses we face. But there are so many stories of people in the book who are acknowledging their losses as well as collective loss. I imagine this book is going to open people up to talking about it more and more.

Jaffe: So many people have a story that we’re not sharing and we’re not talking about publicly, not even with close friends. We do things alone, and I am super guilty of that. I’ve been trying very unevenly to get better at talking about things. It’s really hard to insist on the space to talk about it when it can often really seem like nobody wants to talk about it when the world says “go back to work, go back to normal, everything’s fine.” I tell a bunch of stories in the covid chapter, but you know, particularly these two women who lost their fathers. Cristina lost her father in that first awful wave in Italy. Kristin lost her father when politicians said, “everything’s fine, open up.” It was a political fight, right? He did not want to listen to her. It reminded me so much of my relationship with my own father. Both of them got really involved with political organizing in different ways.

 

Rooftop solar, backup batteries, electric vehicles, and smart thermostats and appliances are all crucial to the energy transition in their own right. But if utilities are able to combine these distributed energy technologies together to form so-called virtual power plants, the result could be greater than the sum of its parts — and make the energy transition tens of billions of dollars cheaper.

Solar United Neighbors, a nonprofit that has helped organize more than 30,000 households to secure lower-cost rooftop solar, worked with clean energy boutique law firm Keyes & Fox and industry partners including leading solar-battery installers Sunrun and Sunnova to craft the model tariff and legislation.

The goal is to bring a standardized approach to what’s now a fractured state-by-state landscape for VPPs — also referred to as distributed power plants.

 

The name of the third-highest summit east of the Mississippi River has been restored to its original name. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) approved an application on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024 that restores the name of Clingman’s Dome, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), to its original Cherokee name, Kuwohi (mulberry place).

Lavita Hill and Mary “Missy” Crowe, both members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), started this effort in 2022 and received widespread support for the initiative.

 

i am working with people to co-launch a new social media platform and that launch happens tomorrow so we've been putting the finishing touches on it all week and it's been incredibly busy. hopefully it will not be starting tomorrow-ish

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

at least for this specific wording change: we can get around to this eventually, but it's on the backburner for now

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

there is a comment on the article to this effect, for what that's worth:

Angel

Hello Kris,

A lovely idea, but I won’t be visiting any public bathhouse any time soon. For many of us, the pandemic isn’t over. It’s contagious, airborne, and still killing and disabling people (including healthy people who have previously been infected and been ok) every day. Some ways to address the transmission of covid in bath houses can include rigorous HEPA filtration; required testing (using LAMP tests, for example, which are €10/test once you have the machine to read the results (another few hundred euro), and you can pool several people in one test); and maybe masks (I’ve read that they don’t work if they get wet, but I also read an article where someone tested several and went swimming with them. From memory, a regular Aura (~€1) worked nearly as long as an intentionally waterproof model). None of these are cheap by my standards. Not sure what you do about warts, foot fungus, and many other common bath house diseases.

Thanks, Angel

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

Despite receiving racist emails and comments and suffering a swatting attack — a false report of an ongoing serious crime in order to elicit a response from law enforcement — journalists at The Haitian Times have kept reporting on what is happening in their community, including compiling a list of ways to help.

A nonprofit group in Springfield, the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, which has been inundated with requests for support from Haitians worried for their safety, has given voice to community members by speaking to media outlets on their behalf.

Multiple Haitian groups, such as Ayisyen pou Harris — Creole for “Haitians for Harris” — are harnessing that spirit of fighting back and channeling that frustration and outrage into political action. They are rallying behind Harris’ presidential bid and encouraging others to do likewise.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

yeah, chiming in to say i think this is an acceptable case of US news in the World News section. obviously don't go overboard with edge cases, but there's really no dilution of World News from stories like this which do have some multinational significance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

this thread is a disaster from front to back, so it's being locked.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (6 children)

It would have been much wiser of him to support his cause elsewhere instead of at and against the institution that he relies on for his degree and visa.

personally i think people should be allowed to exercise basic freedom of speech (especially for unambiguously morally correct causes) without being violently deported over it, but you have what i would consider consistently bad takes on this subject so i'm not surprised you've taken another bad line here.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

this appears to be the first time anything like this has happened or been tried; unsurprisingly, students have been mobilizing against it and it's been condemned by dozens of student groups. it's also probably union busting, as Taal is a member of the Cornell Graduate Student Union and they have a memorandum with Cornell that any suspensions like this have to be mediated with the union--which of course was not done here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

basically, put it this way: if a cop stops you and asks you for your phone--what are you realistically going to do in that situation the moment they don't respect your "no" and begin to pressure you, threaten you, and decide to throw the legal book at you (however dubious) for saying no? for most people, the answer is going to be "just give up the phone and start complying with the cop" even though that is not something the cop should be able to do. because at the end of the day they have a gun, and can put you in jail (or at least make your day hellish) more-or-less unilaterally, with very little recourse for you unless you want to do expensive litigation.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

But if we’re talking about a law that actually says the cop cannot take your phone no matter what, and they do, then any public defender would be able to point it out and the judge would certainly have to enforce it. I can’t think of a way the cop would abuse their power because, in this case they don’t have it.

they can abuse their power because they're a cop, with a badge and gun, and the right to maim or literally kill you with it (and probably get away with it even if it's not strictly legal) if you don't comply with their demands in the moment. again: cops consistently do not care about or follow legal procedures they're supposed to, frequently fuck up those procedures even when they do, and most cops probably don't even think of it as their job to secure some airtight case that stands up to legal scrutiny. it's not a profession that lend itself to the kind of charitability that's being given here, and the record of the profession makes it even less deserving of that charitability.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (4 children)

The MyColorado FAQ explicitly states that an officer cannot take your phone, even if they think your digital ID is fraudulent. This whole article is a ton of fear mongering.

no offense but: even if you were to grant the notion that this is an exaggerated problem--cops are not well known for their rigorous adherence to the law or proper legal procedure. they routinely fuck up and violate civil liberties, up to and including murdering people for arbitrary reasons. and unless police are held accountable (which they almost never are for a variety of systemic reasons), what a state says they cannot do is effectively meaningless. it's just words on a screen, really.

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