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Women in Wisconsin will continue to have access to abortion services under a new ruling from the state's highest court that invalidates a 176-year-old state law that had banned abortions in nearly every situation.

In a 4-3 ruling July 2, the liberal-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed a lower court's previous decision that overturned the 19th Century law.

The decision ends three years of tumult over the issue following the 2022 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, which had provided women nationwide with a constitutional right to abortion.

Writing for the court's liberal majority, Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Dallet said the Wisconsin state Legislature had effectively repealed the 1849 law when it enacted additional laws regulating access to abortion.

"... this case is about giving effect to 50 years’ worth of laws passed by the legislature about virtually every aspect of abortion including where, when, and how health-care providers may lawfully perform abortions," Dallet wrote. "The legislature, as the people’s representatives, remains free to change the laws with respect to abortion in the future."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago

Duncan is an interesting guy these days. he is one of a number of Republicans who was basically run out of the party for refusing to be fascist and autocratic enough, and he was formally expelled from the party last year after endorsing Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. i doubt he has sufficient distance or credibility to make it through a Democratic primary, but you never know. the Republican-to-Never Trumper-to-Democrat pipeline has been a pretty successful move for other people

 

archive.is link

Former Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan is weighing a run for higher office as a Democrat. But is the party ready for him?

In a conversation with the “Politically Georgia” podcast airing today, Duncan, an AJC contributing opinion columnist, expressed his ongoing exasperation over the direction of the Republican Party under President Donald Trump. He called the “big, beautiful” bill moving through the Senate this week “an abomination of any sort of conservative values.”

And he expressed frustration with the field running for Georgia governor so far from both parties. That includes two Republicans, Attorney General Chris Carr and Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is expected to announce his campaign later this summer, and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and state Sen. Jason Esteves for the Democrats.

“From the right, I’ve got everybody embracing Donald Trump and that’s just an unacceptable strategy for me for a number of reasons,” he said of the 2026 field. “And on the left, I just personally don’t believe Mayor Bottoms is positioned well to beat a Republican.”

Duncan has been the subject of wide speculation as a potential candidate for governor. Asked if he’s considering a run, he said, “I’ve certainly heard the rumor. And, I’m certainly fielding phone calls from folks across the state that are asking the same question.”

He noted he’s getting calls from people across the political spectrum, but that his days as a GOP candidate are likely over.

“I’m certainly not going to run as a Republican. I’ve given up on them as much as they’ve given up on me,” he said.

 

The Steam Sale started a few days ago and people have been doing their recommendations. The Adventure Games Podcast has a nice page with their recommendations, Miri Teixeiri has a good recommendation thread on bluesky, but now I want to do one because that’s what blogs are for. As usual, I also think you should consider buying games on Itch.io but they’re not doing a sale right now. I’m also missing a ton of stuff because I can only write so much, so if you enjoy these then keep looking around. Despite the occasional discourse about it being dead, there’s constantly new games coming out and I even wrote a post a few weeks ago about all the releases this year. So in no order really, here’s a list of recommendations that are more focused on recent releases.

 

Another win for freedom to read legislation on the West Coast this week, as Oregon’s state House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 1098 on Monday, a bill that will protect access to books in school libraries. It’s great news: books can no longer be banned solely because they discuss sexuality, religion, or other topics, nor can books be removed because they are written by someone from a protected class. SB 1098 now goes to the governor, who is expected to sign it into law.

The successful legislative effort got a big lift from a coalition of advocates and citizens, including the ACLU of Oregon, Basic Rights Oregon, and Authors Against Book Bans, a organization with a great track record in fights like these.

 

from the "Pre-emptively Answered Questions" page

What made you go and do this?

Okay so on Trans Day of Visibility 2025, Checkpoint Gaming published what they called the "definitive list" of trans games throughout history. While it highlighted a great deal of excellent titles featuring trans representation and trans developers from the last decade or so, it could hardly be described as definitive or throughout history. Out of the whole list, only two games were older than 2010, one by a trans woman (M.U.L.E by Danielle Bunten Berry), and one with a prominent trans character (Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door). This honestly cheesed me off big time because we've always been here. of course we have, but articles like this risk implying the transphobic narrative that we're some kind of trendy social contagion invented by Joe Biden to sell more Cloud Atlas tickets or fucking whatever. So I decided fuck it. I'm making my own list. a list of as many games as possible from before 2010 which we know for a fact had a trans person on the dev team. We've probably touched way more games than you think.

Why the 2010 cutoff?

Couple of reasons. First of all, as said above, I was specifically looking for older games and Fifteen Years Ago seems like a good dividing line. It's where the Checkpoint list ran dry.

Also, the later we go the more that larger studios tend to balloon in size to the point where it would get statistically REALLY weird if it was all-cis teams. Like, case in point, did you know that there was at least one trans person on the GTA 5 dev team? (And there is btw. I know someone who knows her). That isn't nessecarily something people would KNOW know, but it's also just not an interesting fact at that kind of scale.. Rockstar North in Scotland alone had over 360 employees at the time of GTA 5's release, and thousands more people worked on the game across ALL of Rockstar's studios. Even if you take the most conservative estimate of what percentage of people are trans, and ignore the fact that a relatively high amount of trans people end up in tech, it would STILL be a hell of a statistical anomaly if absolutely NONE of those thousands of people had at least SOMETHING a bit gendery going on. So yeah it would basically get to the point where you could probably just list Every "AAA" Game.

Is that the page finished then?

Oh HELL no. I've still got to add a whole bunch of screenshots and descriptions and links about the various games. Heck, there's a bunch I've still got to get around to actually playing. ALSO I keep finding out about more games and more trans people. I swear I didn't think this was going to be as long a list as it is. You'd think I'd have learned not to underestimate other trans people by now but here we are.

Hey you missed a game/developer.

Brilliant! I want to know about this. Probably the best way to contact me right now is on the Fediverse so yell at me there about it. You can find me at https://chitter.xyz/@DotMaetrix

The list seems awfully transfem heavy. Aren't there more (or heck, any) trans men that have done videogames?

Probably. Once again, if you know about any, I REALLY want to know. TBH I think one of the side effects of the games industry being a bit of a Boys Club is that a lot of trans developers will have either got their starts while they were still presenting as men, or living stealth as men.

 

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a request from ExxonMobil to overturn a historic ruling allowing ordinary people and citizen groups to sue industrial polluters, upholding what legal experts say is a crucial mechanism to deter companies from continuously breaking environmental laws.

The decision concludes more than a decade of litigation over toxic pollution from Exxon’s petrochemical complex in Baytown, Texas. In 2010, environmental groups sued Exxon on behalf of residents living near the facility for years of reported violations of its Clean Air Act permits, including pollution of cancer-causing chemicals. A federal judge hit the company with a nearly $20 million penalty, later reduced to $14 million — the largest ever imposed on a company in a citizen-led public interest lawsuit to enforce the Clean Air Act.

Exxon did everything it could to battle the ruling. When its appeals failed, the oil giant asked the high court to reconsider whether citizens had standing to sue polluters for environmental harms in the first place.

“At trial, Exxon’s neighbors bravely testified to the harms they suffered from the company’s illegal pollution, painting an ugly picture of what it’s like to live in Exxon’s shadow,” said Josh Kratka, managing attorney at the National Environmental Law Center, one of the plaintiffs’ lead attorneys. “The Supreme Court saw through Exxon’s claim that its neighbors shouldn’t have the right to hold the company accountable for compliance with the Clean Air Act.”

Exxon will now have to pay the fine and make changes to its operations at the facility, where nearby residents continue to live with the consequences of its ongoing pollution.

 

As we all know, Mamdani has proposed making New York City’s bus system free. Writer Matt Bruenig makes the case for Mamdani’s free bus idea on the basis that school bus systems and libraries are already free and he asked for a more of an enlightened debate on the utility of bus fares rather than a hyper-charged culture war. Well, I’m here to do that!

I helped start a group called East Bay Transit Riders Union in 2020. Socialists members quickly realized that the organizers were all YIMBY liberals so they made their own socialist version: People’s Transit Alliance (PTA). While EBTRU focused more on technocratic things like bus lanes and service, PTA prioritized organizing with the transit workers union and popularizing free fares. In my article on this divide, I wimped out on taking a direct position, mainly because it felt like a culture war issue and those are boring.

So I’m going to take a position here: free bus fares is not the optimal approach to easing low-income rider burdens, but it’s a well-intended idea and would have mostly positive benefits if implemented. I don’t think Mamdani is actually concerned with the optimal decision for transit agencies but rather the politically optimal decision to build his movement — and that’s not bad.

 

Over the past year, we’ve completely rebuilt the Namesake app. It has a new design, more accessible forms, improved security, and is now open source. This new app builds a foundation for us to support name changes in many more locations and for different types of activities. You can sign up today.

 

The U.S. student movement in solidarity with Palestine is facing ferocious repression as the Trump administration revokes student visas en masse. Masked federal agents roam around looking to snatch students and faculty off the streets and send them to jail for their activism, including their mere beliefs. One of the students targeted is Momodou Taal, a graduate student at Cornell University who led pro-Palestine activism there and was suspended twice by the university. A dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the Gambia, he joined another graduate student and a faculty member in suing the Trump administration for allegedly violating their First and Fifth Amendment rights by punishing speech and quashing political dissent. On March 21, Taal’s lawyers were notified that the State Department had revoked Taal’s student visa after Immigration and Customs Enforcement condemned his “disruptive action” and ICE requested that he turn himself in. Instead, Taal left the country on his own terms, “free” and with his “head held high,” and continues his struggle on behalf of a free Palestine, upholding the Pan-Africanist tradition.

Taal and Hammer & Hope editor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò spoke in April 2025.

 

To enact his ambitious agenda to make the city more affordable, [Mamdani] would need to strike a better relationship with his former colleagues in Albany than Walker did.

Two of the three key planks in his platform — making buses free to ride and providing universal free child care — would require action from the governor and state legislature, including raising taxes by billions of dollars. (The third, freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments, can be accomplished at the city level.)

His five years in the legislature may serve him well in navigating Albany politics. He’s built alliances with legislators, especially fellow progressives, and seen the state capitol’s byzantine budget process up close.

“The budget process is almost a living, breathing thing,” said Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris, a frequent ally of Mamdani’s. “There’s a long line of mayors who thought they knew how to handle state government who have failed at doing so … I think he knows how to do it better than other mayors who have come before.”


The biggest thing Mamdani needs from Albany is money. His plan rests on the state’s willingness to raise $9 billion in taxes on corporations and high-earners.

Gianaris noted that in recent years, both houses of the legislature have supported raising taxes on the wealthy. “So there’s two out of the three players already on board with the broad strokes of that proposal,” he said.

Governor Kathy Hochul, on the other hand, has firmly opposed tax increases, recently saying, “I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach.”

Not all legislators are on board, either.

“I’m not a fan of any of his tax proposals,” Weprin said. “I think they’re unrealistic and would have a very tough time getting approval in Albany.”


Mamdani will also need Albany’s backing to enact his promise to make buses fast and free. The Metropolitan Transit Authority is controlled by the state, not the city; its yearlong experiment with fare-free buses, approved in the 2023 state budget, was one of Mamdani’s signature legislative victories. But his colleagues declined to renew the program in 2024, and MTA chair Janno Lieber has been critical of the effort since it ended.

“We tried [Mamdani’s] idea of free buses on different lines,” he told radio host Brian Lehrer in April. “Most of the additional ridership [that] was identified cannibalized other lines. You’re taking people who are paying on other lines, and they were just getting a free ride.”

Lieber has also said that the free buses sent the “wrong message” at a time when the MTA has prioritized cracking down on fare evasion. He has said he prefers to reduce fares for low-income people through a more targeted approach.

 

Esther Fallick wants her comedy to be an escape from the horrors. But that escape has a purpose: to make it easier to face these times for what they are. By poking fun at something that can feel so heavy, like the president pitting his administration against transgender people, Fallick wants to find ways to bring people together and laugh off the darkness creeping in on everyday life.

“We could be having a little more fun as a community, as a country. I just feel like so much of what we’re talking about as trans people right now is so dire. There’s reason for that, but I just wanted a space to be intentionally silly,” she said. Intentions aside, she still spent the first episode of her podcast — aptly titled, “Having Fun” — joking about fleeing anti-trans violence in America with fellow comedian Ella Yurman. The gallows humor is inescapable.

Her weekly variety show in Brooklyn, titled “While We’re Here,” is also a dark joke: We’re only here, alive and on this planet, for so long. And life is only getting harder. So what should we do in the meantime? Fallick suggests laughter, to start, followed by music, reading and teach-ins on topics ranging from transmisogyny — how trans women are hurt by both misogyny and transphobia — to demilitarizing New York City’s police force, especially in Brooklyn.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago

because western media--at least on the issue of Palestine--is almost entirely biased toward Israel, Israel's right to exist without change to its apartheid and oppression of Palestinians, and the legitimacy of Zionism as an ideology; Al Jazeera obviously is not, and is far more willing to cover what Israel is doing without attempting to justify it, explain it away, or downplay it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

the "chart" is just the thumbnail for the submission, so yeah; you have to actually click through, since that's the point of a link aggregator

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

for more on this, see the New York Times article on the observatory: How Astronomers Will Deal With 60 Million Billion Bytes of Imagery

Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.

As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory’s computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so.

It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade.

The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a “6” followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

the Supreme Court is not a legitimate institution and you should be screaming at the Democratic Party to annihilate it if they ever come back into power, because otherwise it will be yet another reason this country croaks

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

the study: Majority support for global redistributive and climate policies

We study a key factor for implementing global policies: the support of citizens. The first piece of evidence is a global survey on 40,680 respondents from 20 high- and middle-income countries. It reveals substantial support for global climate policies and, in addition, for a global tax on the wealthiest aimed at financing low-income countries’ development. Surprisingly, even in wealthy nations that would bear the burden of such globally redistributive policies, majorities of citizens express support for them. To better understand public support for global policies in high-income countries, the main analysis of this Article is conducted with surveys among 8,000 respondents from France, Germany, Spain, the UK and the USA. The focus of the Western surveys is to study how respondents react to the key trade-off between the benefits and costs of globally redistributive climate policies. In our survey, respondents are made aware of the cost that the GCS [a global carbon price funding equal cash transfers] entails for their country’s people, that is, average Westerners would incur a net loss from the policy. Our main result is that the GCS is supported by three quarters of Europeans and more than half of Americans.

Overall, our results point to strong and genuine support for global climate and redistributive policies, as our experiments confirm the stated support found in direct questions. They contribute to a body of literature on attitudes towards climate policy, which confirms that climate policy is preferred at a global level17,18,19,20, where it is more effective and fair. While 3,354 economists supported a national carbon tax financing equal cash transfers in the Wall Street Journal21, numerous surveys have shown that public support for such policy is mixed22,23,24,25,26,27. Meanwhile, the GCS— the global version of this policy—is largely supported, despite higher costs in high-income countries. In the Discussion, we offer potential explanations that could reconcile the strong support for global policies with their lack of prominence in the public debate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

this is going over hilariously on social media, despite the insistence by the Grammy's that it has nothing to do with Beyonce's win last year:

Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. told Billboard that the proposal for the two new categories was submitted previously several times before it passed this year. The new categories “[make] country parallel with what’s happening in other genres,” he explained, pointing to the other genres which separate traditional and contemporary. “But it is also creating space for where this genre is going.”

Traditional country now focuses on “the more traditional sound structures of the country genre, including rhythm and singing style, lyrical content, as well as traditional country instrumentation such as acoustic guitar, steel guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, piano, electric guitar, and live drums,” the 68th Grammys rulebook explains.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

see also the associated Waging Nonviolence article Timely lessons for keeping people safe in the streets

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

i think this topic has about run its course in terms of productiveness, and has mostly devolved into people complaining about being held to (objectively correct) vegan ethics. locking

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

for context: Shawn Fain has been pushing for this since at least the beginning of 2024. so by the time the date happens, he will have been organizing this for over four years--that is the kind of lead time you need for this to not just be toothless posturing (and there's a decent chance it still won't be nearly as sweeping as you might expect of a general strike due to low US union density).

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