I am not afraid to defend my book by discussing the real-world job performance of the MAHA/MAGA doctors featured in it. What about the authors of In COVID’s Wake?
The post A Tale of Two Books: We Want Them Infected & In COVID’s Wake first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
You’d have to be a special kind of loser to wake up in the morning, look at yourself in the mirror, and say “today, I’m going to have beef with sea lions.” Or dolphins, or whales, or any marine mammal, for that matter. None of them, after all, have ever done anything to harm humans. Whales are like ancient, wise wizards of the sea, who spend their days floating around hoovering up plankton and singing to each other. Dolphins are out there doing backflips and, sure, occasionally getting too friendly, but are still generally a good time. Sea lions mostly just slap their tails and go “bork bork.” The idea of going out and deliberately killing any of them is inherently repulsive.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 recently announced a study addressing the killings and attacks against Palestinian journalists and media workers, the destruction of media infrastructure in Gaza, and the production and dissemination of narratives that may enable, justify, or incite international crimes.
As part of this consultation, EFF contributed a submission that identifies a significant deterioration of press freedom and free expression in the period since October 2023, including an increase in censorship and wave of killings of journalists; adding to an already pervasive censorship and surveillance regime for Palestinians.
In particular, concerns raised in our submission relate to:
The concerns about censorship in Palestine are ever increasing, and include multiple international forums. Ending the deliberate digital isolation of the Palestinian people is critical to protecting fundamental human rights.
Read the briefing in full here.
A U.S. citizen who teaches Persian poetry classes online is suddenly unable to receive payments or access funds when his account is flagged and frozen by Paypal and its subsidiary Venmo. A Muslim city councilwoman in New York City has a Venmo payment blocked because she uses the name of a Bangladeshi restaurant in the transaction. Online hubs for erotic storytelling repeatedly lose their payment accounts. Others active in drug legalization fights struggle to keep their bank accounts.
These may sound like one-off issues, but they are not. They occur with frightening regularity, as former EFF Activism Director and Chief Program Officer, Rainey Reitman, who left EFF in 2022, describes in her new book, Transaction Denied. The book sheds new light on a serious problem that often hides in the shadows, and pushes us to ask an increasingly important question: “Is it ever OK for financial intermediaries to act as the arbiters of online expression?”
Both a storyteller and an advocate, Rainey exposes hidden systems of power that shape our choices, our speech, and, ultimately, our society. – Cindy Cohn
Reitman makes her case about the impact of financial institutions and payment intermediaries shutting down accounts and inhibiting transactions through compelling individual stories, some of which have not been shared before. The people impacted are diverse: authors, teachers, journalists, elected politicians, and more are suddenly unable to retrieve or receive funds, with little explanation, transparency, or recourse. Reitman shows the reasons are frequently speech-related, resulting often from arbitrary corporate policy, a broad (mis)interpretation of the law, or in response to pressure from anti-speech advocates.
In the example of the Persion poetry teacher, the blocking is due to the highly risk averse interpretation of U.S. sanctions on Iran—sanctions aimed at deterring weapons development or terrorism instead snared a poetry professor and a New York city councilwoman. Reitman demonstrates how these sanctions, and others, have an outsized impact on Muslims.
But Transaction Denied is also a guide for those interested in fighting for free speech. The book covers over a decade of successful campaigns and shows that advocacy can win the day—and is sometimes necessary to counter pro-censorship campaigns. Reitman offers a behind-the-scenes view of the campaign to help restore the Stripe account of the Nifty Archive Alliance, a nonprofit which supports the Nifty Archive, a hub of erotic storytelling for the queer community since 1992. She covers EFF’s successful coalition and campaign to restore the PayPal account of Smashwords, a hub for self-published fiction. And in what has become a critical moment for free speech and free press, she describes how several EFF staff members and two EFF board members became the seed for a new nonprofit, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which continues to partner with EFF today in advancing the rights of journalists.
It’s a banner time for books by EFF staff members and friends. If you’re concerned about how online privacy has changed over the last three decades, read EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn’s book, Privacy Defender, released in May. (All proceeds from the sale of hard copies of Privacy’s Defender are being donated to EFF, so your book order will help EFF continue fighting for the principles Cindy holds dear.) If you are worried about the individuals trapped in a system where massive financial companies can shut down their individual accounts, effectively locking up their access to money, based entirely on their speech, grab Transaction Denied, released earlier this month, at Beacon Press, Amazon, and Bookshop.org. (Half of the author proceeds go to Freedom of the Press Foundation.)
More likely—you’ll want both books on your shelf. Happy reading!
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently published an article on acupuncture. It’s a highly credulous take that tries to convince the reader that acupuncture is more than just a highly theatrical placebo. Quackademic medicine continues apace.
The post PNAS Publishes Rank Pseudoscience first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
The prices are too damn high. On that, basically everyone can agree. But what if your prices are higher than mine? For the same thing, at the same time? As the LPE Blog recently covered, it turns out that hidden personalized pricing is far more common than many people think. From big-ticket items like flights and hotel rooms to everyday purchases like food, when we see a price, we can no longer be…