Dalindyebo Shabalala (he/him)

"AI agents are agents of the person or organization that deploys them—and should be treated by the law as such. ... To allow businesses to hide behind the excuse of faulty AI ... would introduce disastrous incentives for corporate misbehavior" www.schneier.com/blog/archive...

"Whatever the solution to the erosion of liberal democracy, it should be commonly held that no path back to power that does not consider Black America can be the American dream." Such a brilliantly insightful but beautifully heartbreaking ode of an essay, @tressiemcphd.bsky.social.

At #COP17Armenia, deliberations on digital sequence information #DSI continue in Friends of the Co-Chairs group Delegates address revised non-paper: www.cbd.int/documents/6a... Negotiations focus on certificates @unbiodiversity.bsky.social #BiodiversityAction

At #COP17Armenia, deliberations continue in different negotiating formats on: 🌿digital sequence information #DSI 🌿agriculture and #biodiversity 🌿mainstreaming 🌿the budget 🌿potential areas for further work @unbiodiversity.bsky.social #BiodiversityAction

Everyone who is saying "Dems in red states have to throw trans people under the bus to win" -- no. They don't. When they do that, we just start with no winning options on the table. It gives in to the fascist premise that we get to decide some groups don't get rights. THIS is what I want to see.

scott galloway and jessica tarlov held an event here in town yesterday where “don’t impeach or waste time on investigations because ‘28” was the consensus position of the panel. so yeah, this is something to anticipate.

Come back when you've realized it's more important to be knowledgeable than coddled and validated; come back when you realize the point of the conversation is something more than everyone agreeing with your nonsense; until then, pretty please, with sugar on top, fuck off into the Mariana Trench.

"I don't believe in that." OK, well that's good to know about you; you don't get to be a part of this conversation we're having about real issues and real problems—which are complicated & important and require solutions. The stakes are high. We don't have time to entertain dipshits and fevered egos.

"You haven't convinced me," who gives a shit, man. Literally who gives a single shit. You don't have to be convinced of reality or decency for the rest of us to recognize reality and value decency. Your failure to be convinced is a point in favor of excluding you and ignoring you, not engaging you.

"You won't debate me because you can't beat my IDEAS"—no, loser, I won't debate you because your ideas have been considered and rejected and no longer warrant debate, and the very act of engaging in debate frames you as better than you are and your failed ideas as worthy of anything but contempt.

"Debate" has been corrupted by codifying it into a competitive sport imo; at this point it is rarely a method for good faith actors to hit upon best solutions or refine a shared reality; it's mostly a vector for bad faith actors to keep failed and destructive ideas in perpetual zombie currency.

If a legal system likewise requires human beings assuming legitimate authority as they make judgments that bind other human beings, then the entire conversation about AI and the law is completely off the rails.

Big Pharma accused of free-riding on nature The Cali Fund’s negligible voluntary contributions offer a lesson for WHO’s PABS negotiations. Without enforceable benefit-sharing mechanisms, the world will only have handouts from corporations. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Yes, that is the assumption that some people make about us. That because we (and I mean Acton, me, and others SA'ed as kids) were abused, we must be crazy. That we must be mentally ill. That we must be broken or somehow rendered nonfunctional.

he's doubling down because if she was sexually abused as a kid she must be cray-cray. is i assume the strategy

e.e. cummings had it: genius.com/E-e-cummings...

It's out! My article in GRUR International is now available online. The article discusses the need for a breeder's exemption in patent law: academic.oup.com/grurint/adva...

I’ll be back in Nigeria in a few weeks for my favorite book festival, 🇳🇬😊.

Lim Li Ching, senior researcher with the Third World Network, presents our report “It is time to talk about the elephants in the room” at #COP17. Download the report 🔗 tinyurl.com/ElephantsCOP17

Corporate harm crosses borders; accountability must too: Last week [Oct 12-16], States met for the 12th session of the UN Working Group on transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights to negotiate a new treaty. A 🧵👇

this is how oligarchy operates. it’s not just billionaires dictating political choices, bad as that is. it’s his literal exercise of an authority that belongs with government. this should be his undoing but he exercises unaccountable power and trump allows it.

The last legal path to desegregate schools is on the line here. SCOTUS took a case that could doom any race-neutral plan (lotteries, zones, income preferences) aiming to improve diversity, even when courts find no group was proportionally disadvantaged. Voluntary desegregation would virtually end.

There is no world in which a police officer should be justified in shooting at a parent accused of shoplifting diapers for their child. www.cnn.com/2026/10/19/u...

theonion.com/sighing-resi...

The wrong call on the part of Mississippi's Attorney General's Office. That anyone would think that using deadline force when responding to a call on shoplifting is objectively unreasonable. www.mississippifreepress.org/police-shoot...

History and tradition is originalsm unconstrained by textualism

When asked why we should mourn the turn away from Black Lives Matter it is because this continues. And institutions are now emboldened to simply disregard even the killings of black babies. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/u...

The other category of coverage is *extremely* implausible first-person accounts from estranged parents. According to this woman, her son cut her off after she was mildly rude to his fiance's family a single time. There's no way this is the entire story. www.goodhousekeeping.com/relationship...

Another one. The premise: Young people are cutting off their parents for minor mistakes and misunderstandings. The lead anecdote: A woman severs ties with her family for refusing to get vaccinated before her wedding — to a man who *lost his mother and brother to COVID*

Every article has the same premise: Young people are characterizing their normal, happy childhoods as abusive and going "no contact" with their parents over minor disagreements. Every article also, late in the text, blithely acknowledges that this premise is false. www.nytimes.com/2024/07/14/h...

This is a quietly metastasizing moral panic

ICYMI: I have a new draft with reflections on Trump v. Barbara and the arguments the government and legal academics used to support Trump. Folks adopted moves similar to those of 19th-century lawyers and, just as much, violated a basic commitment to the Constitution. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The kicker is more like a twister. Reached so hard to red bait that it almost breaks a back.

This is unsustainable and unconscionable. It’s characteristic of long term trends that have pushed costs down to the working class and multiplied returns to investors. It’s not a one time thing or election. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/u...

This is unsustainable and unconscionable. It’s characteristic of long term trends that have pushed costs down to the working class and multiplied returns to investors. It’s not a one time thing or election. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/u...

#IPCC65 The Panel was unable to reach agreement on either the timeline or the budget for the Seventh Assessment Report cycle, forcing a suspension of the meeting and raising alarm among #IPCC authors. Read the summary: enb.iisd.org/intergovernm...

it is the same exact thing as demanding that black candidates for office “disavow farrakhan,” which happened quite a bit in the 90s and 2000s

The Leaders’ Summit on Biodiversity provided strategic direction and mobilized action to accelerate implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. @cop17arm.bsky.social @unbiodiversity.bsky.social ➡️ enb.iisd.org/un-biodivers... #COP17Armenia #BiodiversityAction #ForAction

Happy weekend www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications...

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com President Trump’s administration “is tacitly declaring the citizenship of all foreign-born people provisional, their Americanness something that can be revoked,” our columnist Michelle Goldberg writes. “It’s a frontal attack on the idea of constitutional equality.”

My presentation on "Applying human ingenuity to advance zero hunger" is on YouTube. Here's the link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZsE...

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how to talk about international law so the public will listen. We held a conference on this topic cosponsored by @carnegieendowment.org, @asilorg.bsky.social, and Lex International. Read all about it here! carnegieendowment.org/research/202...

This is about Ilhan Omar. But it's also about control, intimidation, & authoritarianism. The message is: we can do this to a member of Congress; no foreign-born American is safe. The administration is using fear as a tactic to discourage people from voicing opposition.

My book on copyright and AI is free to read at aicropyright.ai because i thought the url was cute