Dace McGraw

Writing was never a blissful, easy endeavor and reading often entails a slog to find startling gems, but it was always worthwhile when it was part of human connection. For a lot of people who don't already read, I could see mining the slop for gems to not be worth the gems.

The burden of vigilance for readers is driving people to distrust anything they do read, or deter them from reading at all. It's discouraging people who have good ideas and want to write them because they're lost in the slop. And if you speak out against it, there's a lot of defeatism that answers.

Please.

Sex workers have more self-respect than spokespeople for pedophiles and bigots.

Happy Amazon Prime Day! Amazon collects mountains of data about how you use the service, but there is a setting you can change to make it harder for the company to use that data to sell you more things. #OptOutOctober www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Evergreen.

I am just going to ask it again: why are Illinojs state police not videotaping ICE, and asking for badge numbers and IDs? Why is ISP not protecting protesters?

@govpritzker.illinois.gov @royalpratt.bsky.social

We need a bigger national spotlight on this building raid, fam. Agents dropped from helicopters onto the roof. Citizens and non-citizens alike were dragged from their homes in the night. People who weren't kidnapped during the raid had their belongings seized after the fact. This is madness.

ICE agents raid South Shore apartments; Trump says Chicago could become military training ground ICE agents raided a South Shore apartment building overnight as the city braces for a possible military deployment.

“ABC7 spoke to Pertissue Fisher, a woman who lives in the building. She said ICE agents took everyone in the building, including her, and asked questions later….’They was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other.’”

It can’t happen here, you say. But it is happening.

These folks are literally being targeted by ICE for documenting their atrocities. Help support their vital work in this crucial time:

"Let’s all just sit here motionless for the next four years and hope things work out! Then the merger can go through; then the shareholders can breathe a sigh of relief. Surely someone else will say something before it’s too late. It’s a beautiful fall day. Look at the fall."

House Bill 4938 of 2025 Sponsors Josh Schriver (District 66) Joseph Pavlov (District 64) Matt Maddock (District 51) James DeSana (District 29) Joseph Fox (District 101) Jennifer Wortz (District 35)

The "Anticorruption of Public Morals Act," intro'd by Rep. Schriver, is unlikely to go anywhere. But it does have 5 co-sponsors— a ludicrous bill is backed by 20% of Republicans in the MI House. That's not nothing.

Republicans are telling you what they would do if they could get away with it.

So:
a) none of political assassins were students, or even shared a coherent ideology - shameful to blame universities
b) Trump is already engaged in the attack on campus speech the Free Press wants
c) I worry a lot more about the animosity to campus The Free Press is fueling than any of my students

Pritzker: "When did we become a country where it's ok for the US president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything? Especially something we don't want. Have we truly lost all sense of sanity in this nation that we treat this as normal?"

58 shot over weekend in Chicago as governor rejects Trump's threat to send in National Guard At least eight people have been killed and 58 others injured in shootings across Chicago over Labor Day weekend, according to police.

Buried 35 paragraphs in:

"Violent crime in Chicago has dropped significantly in the first half of the year, according to official data released by the city. Shootings are down 37% and homicides have dropped by 32% compared to the first half of 2024, while total violent crime dropped by over 22%..."

twice today, when pressured, Stripe operators have said, plainly, that i cannot use stripe for the purchase of LGBTQ content. not just adult content, but explicitly LGBTQ.

More and more people reporting today that Stripe - the payment processor that Itch said were putting the most pressure on them - now have staff actively confirming that yes, they are censoring LGBT content, adult or otherwise. That this is official company policy.

This seems kinda significant.

kennedy is going to kill a lot of people

Blocking Access to Harmful Content Will Not Protect Children Online, No Matter How Many Times UK Politicians Say So The UK is having a moment. In late July, new rules took effect that require all online services available in the UK to assess whether they host content considered harmful to children, and if so, these services must introduce age checks to prevent children from accessing such content. Online...

When politicians pass laws restricting "pornography," this is what they actually restrict:

video games
romantasy
drag
sex education
healthcare
LGBTQ+ sites
young adult novels
sexual assault resources
dating apps
contraception
social media
Wikipedia
wifi access

It is my opinion that introducing age verification now is irresponsible, mainly because we have now reached the point where Western governments *are* using "the database state" and exploiting online surveillance to be repressive - just as privacy activists warned for decades. This applies to UK & US

Do you want to understand how Mastercard controls sexual content? The ACLU submitted a complaint to the FTC a couple of years ago that walks through all of the details. assets.aclu.org/live/uploads...

We don’t make much that would fall under “adult content”, but I think it is very wrong for payment processors to seize moral control of what can be sold.

‘Adult content’ has long been the canary in the coal mine. And it is wrong and dangerous for art and creators to be attacked this way.

The first and most difficult BBEG is the calendar 😭

But they *are* nice dicks 👀...

Having been a gay kid in homophobic countries that the US is currently taking cues from, respectfully: you don't understand the scope of the problem. Plucky teenagers isn't going to change librarians being fired or LGBT authors being arrested. The content itself will be made criminal.

THE STRUGGLE IS SO REAL 🤣😭😅

Not if branding it as pornography removes it from the shelves entirely, criminalizes possession of it, and has the authors thrown in jail as sex criminals. That's what's on the table now for LGBT content, and sonce cruelty is the point and these bigots have no shame, I imagine it'll get worse.

Don't see much winning from the moderates from where I'm sitting.

1. Alert, and please share widely. A lawyer at the ACLU has asked me to inform my transgender readers that they should NOT be applying for passports right now - the state department has not issued guidance to comply with the court order and they are urgently trying to get them to do so.
🧵

BREAKING: Federal agents in plain clothes and unmarked cars tried to snatch 1st graders from LA elementary schools—told staff they had “parental consent.”

They lied. When pressed, they HID THEIR IDS. DHS admits they sent them. This wasn’t a welfare check. It was a test run for a police state.

My bad, I did see you reference and thought you weren't aware of the capacity. Good luck and hope a solution is out there!