Well said, thanks!

Thanks very much for excerpting that!

Reparations aren’t just a cash payment – the article lists five different aspects of reparations, and it’s very compatible with investing in Black communities. There’s debate iover who should be eligible but it’s not an unsolvable problem. And sure some people will use it as an excuse to declare racism’s over, but the same was true when Obama got elected … so that’s not a reason not to do it!

In terms of support in general, do you support the 1988 decision by the US to pay reparations to Japanese-Americans who had been sent to internment camps?

The House GOP leadership pulled both FISA bills!

Instead, a four-month extension is attached to the NDAA – unless it gets removed. Dozens of civil rights and racial justice groups oppose extending FISA in the NDAA.

If you agree, call your Senators TODAY and with a simple ask: “DO NOT put 702 in the NDAA.”.

(The Congressional switchboard is at (202) 224-3121, or you can use the Senate directory to find their direct number and web contact form.)

You’re right … but tech has a lot of lobbying power and they are very very very strongly against a strong privacy bill, or even a bill that would regulate algorithms. So it’s easier for legislators to pass something like KOSA – or pass a weak privacy bill that will actually make the situation worse by getting rid of laws like California’s – and claim they’re doing something.

Yeah really. Think of the children!!!

It’s all true. WTF indeed. Here’s a letter from over 90 LGBTQ and human rights organizations with more detail. EFF’s article from in May, which is the one they linked to in the original article, has good info to.

Not exactly. These bills cut across party lines and there’s a lot of desire to be able to pass something – “think of the children!” So if anything the overall gridlock makes it more likely that these bills will pass. So the dynamics that led to stopping the bills last year was a combination of activists making enough noise, and privacy and digital rights groups pressing the case in meetings with legislators (as well as some grassroots groups with good relationships with their legislators). As a result, that Dem leadership decided not to move the bills to the floor, so the vote never happened.

It turns out that crossposting to Lemmy works better from Lemmy communities. So, a Lemmy community is useful. Since I had already crated the kbin magazine and there’s no way to delete magazines (!), looks like we’ll experiment to see whether or not having two of them makes sense. Here’s the Lemmy community I created, I’m using it for now to cross-post from other communities so that there’s a single place to go for everything. [email protected]

Exactly! Have you considered a career in politics?

Alas, that’s par for the course. But, the email they receive gets counted (and they’ll often run some kind of sentiment analysis software on it) and staffers pay attention to how much mail they’re getting, so it still makes a difference!

Thank you very much, that’s a great point – I’ll update the post to include it!

Not sure about the hashtags, good question. There will also be separate posts on Mastodon – here’s an early example, guaging awareness – and it’ll be interesting to see what gets traction where

Very good point, thanks much!

It used to be a slang term people trying to sound hip would use, but that was many decades ago – 1930s or 1950s I think.

Thanks!

Yeah, the current thinking is just to have the one magazine for now unless people have good reasons why that won’t work. Of course a lot depends on whether there are any active bugs federating between the two systems but I think right now things are copacetic.

It’s a great point. This kind of legislative activism is frequently done in public on Twitter, Facebook, etc. as well so the risks are low in general but it’s still something to make people aware of. It’s a real contrast with anything that’s direct action, where the fediverse is a non-starter.