DC Heads to the Polls But for Most it Looks Like More of the Same

Sports Bans Target Trans Athletes, Israel To Elect Figurehead For Apartheid Regime, How Hospitals Give Facebook Sensitive Patient Data

In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Karleigh Webb, an athlete, activist, journalist, socialist, contributor to @Outsports and host of the TransSporter Room to discuss an absurd new regulation by the International Swimming Federation barring transgender athletes from women’s sports, how attacks on transgender athletes like Lia Thomas have intensified and led to this and other bans on trans athletes, the deepening systemic violence against transgender women that this regulation is a part of and the complicity of liberals in this violence, and the importance of a movement to organize in solidarity with the LGBTQ community in the face of inaction by Democrats against rising right-wing attacks on the LGBTQ community.

In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Richard Becker, author of “Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire” to discuss the dissolution of the government in Israel and the outlook for the upcoming election in October, why the government’s inclusion of Arab parties ultimately failed and why this election means little for the Palestinian people, why the political dynamics likely will not fundamentally change with this election considering that all major parties will continue the zionist campaign of brutality against Palestinians, and how this most recent governmental failure is a result of a dispute of maintaining the apartheid regime in the legal arena.

In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by technologist Chris Garaffa, the editor of TechforthePeople.org, co-host of the ReBoot podcast to discuss the ongoing saga of Google engineer Blake Lemoine’s claims that Googles LaMDA AI is sentient and how this claim is a manifestation of the warnings from former Google engineers about its AI, why Google is resistant to moving toward ethical uses of its AI technology, a US defense contractor eyeing a purchase of Israeli spyware company NSO Group, which is responsible for the Pegasus spyware, and the serious concerns this purchase would raise, and how sensitive medical information is being given to Facebook by major hospitals with little data protection and how the for-profit healthcare system is encouraging this behavior.

Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Maurice Cook, founder of Serve Your City to discuss the primary elections in Washington, DC and how the campaigns run by the city’s mayoral candidates reveal a deficit in grassroots organizing and neglect of working and poor communities, what lessons the ongoing January 6th committee hearings hold about the constitution of the US and who is really included in the chosen people that document is supposed to concern, and Merrick Garland’s visit to Ukraine to discuss the investigation of war crimes.

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