The Death of the Mind

In the first week of January, we closed the Free Software Foundation’s end of the year fundraiser and associate membership drive, and we’d like to thank you for your generosity and support. Because of you, we’ve raised $441,802 and had 488 new associate members join — surpassing our goal of 400 new members. Thank you for donating, joining, and spreading the word. Your support is just what we need to push the free software movement…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/the-fsf-is-5-000-members-strong-thanks-to-you

With only days to go before the planned conclusion of the new EU Directive on Copyright in the Single Digital Market, Europe’s largest and most powerful rightsholder groups — from the Premier League to the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Association of Commercial Television in Europe — have published an open letter calling for a halt to negotiations, repeating their message from late last year: namely, that the Directive will give the whip hand…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/15/breaking-ranks.html

Professionalization isn’t perfect: historically, professional societies “were structured around hierarchies of gender and race and laypeople were expected to obey expert judgment without even asking questions.” But professionals were also organized around ethics of service and morals, with professional standards that required practitioners to use their expertise to further the public good. Decades of neoliberal marketization has flattened out these service-based ethics, turning every kind of professional into just another kind of business with customers…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/13/purdue-poisoned-the-well.html

Law Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos here analyzes the part of H.R. 1 that requires all states to use nonpartisan methods to draw U.S. House boundaries. H.R. 1 is the bill introduced in the U.S. House and supported generally by Democrats in the House. The text of the bill is still not on the web page for Congress, but it should be shortly. Stephanopoulos supports the part of the bill concerning gerrymandering, but he has some suggestions…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2019/01/09/law-professor-analyzes-anti-gerrymandering-provision-of-hr-1/

Bird Scooter tried to censor a Boing Boing post. So that’s going well:Last month, I published a post discussing the mountains of abandoned Bird Scooters piling up in city impound lots, and the rise of $30 Chinese conversion kits that let you buy a scooter at auction, swap out the motherboard, and turn it into a personal scooter, untethered from the Bird company.In response, Bird sent us a legal threat of such absurdity that we…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/01/today-in-landfill-capitalism-bringing-a-scooter-to-a-knife-fight/

The last time he was attorney general, Barr proclaimed that only prisons reduce crime, and that we need a lot more of them. In 1992, a little less than a year into his new job, Attorney General William P. Barr added to the zeitgeist of “tough-on-crime” policies when he issued the Bush administration’s “24 Recommendations to Strengthen Criminal Justice.” Barr’s harsh approach, which included expanding capacity for pretrial detention and offsetting the cost of such…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.aclu.org/blog/smart-justice/mass-incarceration/william-barr-was-ardent-champion-mass-incarceration

Back in October, we wrote about how Google had declared — with no details — that an earlier post we had done was “dangerous or derogatory” and that it would no longer allow AdSense ads on that page. The real irony? The original post (which contains nothing dangerous or derogatory) was about the “impossible choices” platforms have to make when moderating speech on their platforms. So, what better example than “moderating” an article about how…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190108/00410741352/google-still-says-our-post-content-moderation-is-dangerous-derogatory.shtml

The Senate wants to provide legal cover to the many states violating the First Amendment by punishing people for their views on Israel. In the middle of a government shutdown, the Senate leadership’s first order of business in the 116th Congress is not legislation to reopen the government. Instead, and incredibly, the Senate is again trying to slip a measure intended to suppress protected political expression past public scrutiny. The bill is the “Combatting BDS…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/instead-ending-shutdown-senators-plan-encourage-punishment-israel-boycotts