Posts from beehaw.org

The Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW) is an organization of workers in the low-wage, high-turnover service industry of the U.S. South, with members in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia. From the beginning, the union has placed political education at the center of its strategic vision. USSW understands that to transform workplaces and communities, workers must understand the roots of the system that exploits them and develop the skills necessary to fight back. As with any union or community organization, USSW runs campaigns to win concrete, material victories. But the real fruit of the union’s organizing work lies in the constant political formation within an expanding base of dedicated worker militants. Unlike the traditional union model, USSW treats political education not as ancillary training, but as a core component of its method; it is a dimension of the union’s approach that makes victories durable and transforms workers into long-term leaders.

This surge in discourse—like most other ongoing “debates” around trans people in politics and culture—is entirely manufactured, most recently sparked by Cunningham’s statements and egged on by a media ecosystem well versed in alienating trans people and stoking moral panic.

The number of papers indexed in the databases Scopus and Web of Science, for example, has recently been increasing exponentially, at a rate of 5.6 percent per year. By one estimate, researchers around the globe are devoting a collective 15,000 years of work to peer review every year—work that, if paid, would cost $1.5 billion for the share done in the US alone. Increasingly, researchers are finding it hard to donate that kind of time.

As new electricity generation skews toward solar and battery storage in Texas, Republican state senators are questioning whether it’s time to impose minimum standards for building gas plants and move away from free trade in the state’s electricity marketplace.

Dockworkers unions in France, Greece, Basque Country, Turkey, Morocco, and Italy are calling an international day of action “against war and militarization” on October 30. They are demanding an end to “the genocide of the Palestinian people” and the “US-Israeli wars of aggression in the Middle East and against Iran.”

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I’ve been writing about accessibility and the disabled perspective for nearly 7 years. I’ve had the absolute privilege and immense responsibility of breaking some of the biggest stories in the gaming industry, holding powerful organizations accountable, and even helping disabled players process uncomfortable truths about a community that doesn’t always have their best interests at heart. For almost 7 years, I’ve been pushing myself to be a better journalist, not for myself, but for disabled individuals that deserve to have a voice in the gaming space. But for the past six months, I’ve realized that things need to change.

[…]because social work embodies an ethic of care, dignity, and human need, it is often recruited into reformist systems. When the government finally recognizes the damage of its own failed policies, it frequently turns to social workers—and the profession’s language of compassion—to mitigate harm and make its systems look more humane. Social work becomes carceral not only when it operates inside punitive institutions, but when it becomes accountable on their terms. When the work is organized around assessing risk for courts, monitoring families for agencies, proving compliance, or translating hardship into categories institutions can sort and act on, care becomes inseparable from control. The profession’s ethical language remains, but its function shifts. It begins to stabilize people on behalf of the state rather than standing with them against the harm the state is producing.

If a DVD owner from the year 2005 found herself transported back to a video store circa 1982, she would likely find the space remarkably familiar: videocassette cases lining the walls, a movie playing on a television set, maybe some marquee lights framing an announcement board over the checkout counter — all in all, not terribly unlike the video store of two and a half decades later.

Governments that deploy internet shutdowns to thwart protesters have struggled to clamp down on offline messaging apps. India’s recent response to Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat suggests that battle is entering a new phase.

Four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the fight over abortion access continues to rage.

On a cold, windy, wet summer evening last month, Pete Beachy giggled as he peered into his binoculars and prepared to do something even he admitted can seem very, very stupid. “There she is,” he muttered. “That’s a wave.”

Nature paper

Massachusetts has decided to lead the country on artificial intelligence. Over the past two years, the state has put a hundred million dollars into a new AI Hub, placed a ChatGPT assistant on the desks of forty thousand state employees, and directed every agency to work out what the technology can do for the public’s business. The public is warier than its government: two thirds of Massachusetts voters tell pollsters they are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence.1

Can’t you leftists understand? Mass death is good for you. Reject the woke love of life! Welcome civilisational collapse! Watch it all burn, then dance in the ashes! This, roughly speaking, is how the dismissal of climate action is now being justified: the argument has shifted from science denial to outright nihilism.

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No more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to resist, if our new prime minister is as weak and suggestible as the last one, this is what we will get. In fact, we are halfway there already.

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My daughter tore a large rip in her favorite overalls (they already had a hole in the knee but this was a long vertical tear coming off the hole she wanted). I decided to try mending the tear and instead of trying to hide it, which I wasn’t confident I could do well, to just make the mended tear part of some decorative embroidery. I think the final result turned out really nice looking!