Tootfinder

The discussion around "age verification" in systemd/XDG has been largely focused against the California law. But honestly, there's a much deeper problem there.
Firstly, the data collected. The question initially asked is "are you at least 18 years old?" However, that's not the data collected. In fact, the data collected is not even the age — it's the full birth date. It's a perfect example of collecting more data than you need, and a sensitive information too, and sharing it with any application that asks.
Secondly, the extended goal of "parental controls" used as a justification to collect more data. When you think about it, you realize how bad this is: it isn't the case of asking the user about their birth date (with the assumption that a kid will enter a fake date to workaround the limitations). It is effectively a tool for *parents* to impose restrictions on their children, which means that they are more likely to enter the real date to ensure that these restrictions work. And given how popular sharenting is today, do you really think they'd come up with a fake birth date that happens to roughly match their child's age?
This is simply irresponsible.
https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1922

I wanna jump one more time on the whole "distraction" framing, because this is a point that needs to be hammered home (and I need a reminder to write something longer).
Attacks on trans youth are not a distraction from other types of coercion, they are central to it. Attacks on trans youth come from a conceptualization of children as property, which is literally patriarchy in the Roman sense of the legal objectification all people who share a household as belonging to a man. This legal structure, Roman slave law, continues to be the root of property rights and therefore the foundation of capitalism.
But colonialism also extends from it through the infantalization of colonized people as a justification for oppression. This can also be turned inward again manifesting as the justification for police (that is, some people "can't handle themselves and need external authority to act right").
The #Epstein stuff isn't some weird thing that rich people get away with, it's core to how wealth works. Money isn't useful by itself, it's a proxy for power. One manifestation of power is being able to violate laws that constrain others (this is the "freedom of the monarch" that Graeber talks about in Dawn of Everything). The war in Iran, especially the threats of nuclear weapons and genocide is not a distraction from the #EpsteinFiles, but rather a manifestation of the same thing.
Power must be demonstrated to affirm that it is real. War is a demonstration power. Violating the law without consequences is a demonstration of power. The most taboo things are using nuclear weapons and child sexual abuse. He has already done one of those, and he is going to do everything he can to do the other.
These are not distractions, these are all manifestations of the underlying thing that we need to fight. But we need to make sure we're fighting it as a single thing. We have to tie these things together, because if we do not then we risk reproducing the same thing again but worse.

Gotta up the body count with some civilians to justify continued hostilities...and an emergency declaration?
US Embassies Tell Americans in Middle East They Can't Help Evacuate Them - Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-embassies-say-they-cannot-evacuate-americans-middle-east-iran2026-3

Judge seems skeptical of legal justification for Pentagon's punishment of Sen. Mark Kelly (Michael Kunzelman/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-kelly-hegseth-illegal-orders-lawsuit-57e0ff8794f09c27029695226ca0572d
http://www.memeorandum.com/260203/p117#a260203p117

In the new episode of the YDS “Quadcast,” Professor of American Religious History Tisa Wenger discusses the early U.S. government’s use of Christianity to justify Indigenous land theft, the limits of religious freedom in America, and the importance of Yale’s new certificate in Native American and Indigenous studies.
https://