we need to go back to hating tumblr. no more hellsite (affectionate). don't even think of giving these clowns your money. if i see you with a checkmark next to your name i'm opening fire

*sound of gun cocking* they can be disabled

tumblr's current business model isn't profitable and never will be and no amount of scolding from staff blogs or tumblr ad-free pay piggies is gonna fix that. don't let yourself be guilted into buying merch, badges or ad-free. you're throwing your money into a bottomless pit while the techbro ghouls running this website laugh about you at their next board meeting while applauding the shmucks coming up with new ideas on how to twitter- or tiktokify the website

''but tumblr needs to make money!!!''

if tumblr really wants its regular user onboard with keeping the website afloat then we should at least demand that they do the bare minimum in keeping the site functional. and right now, they're not even doing that. every change they've made lately has made the website/app worse. i should give my money to tumblr so what—they can make a more intrusive version of tumblr live? remove the chronical dashboard? come up with an even more transphobic way of doing content moderation? yeah, no thanks

I haven’t seen this article posted anywhere outside of my immediate library-sphere so I wanted to shout about it - remember that supporting your local libraries is super duper punk rock 📚❤️

This is great, but let's not forget that generating money shouldn't be the only way to measure the worth of libraries. Libraries are wonderful because they help people and communities. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

Click here to make a racist boomer angry by enrolling to vote. Nearly 11% of 18-24 year olds in Australia aren’t enrolled, while almost EVERY SINGLE person over 55 is. Do we want racist old boomers deciding if Indigenous people are recognised and empowered in our constitution or would you rather make sure young people get a say in what happens?

Shoutout to the person who tried to Blaze this but Tumblr unfortunately rejected it. I guess because it called boomers racist? Idk.

Anyway, organically blaze it the old fashioned way so we can shrink the margin of unenrolled young people and can actually have young people vote on the referendum instead of angry racist old boomers being in control.

Here’s the opposite story, though. With apologies because I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may get some details wrong, but I read this “Irena’s Children“ by Tilar J. Mazzeo.

Irena lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and dedicated her life to rescuing Jewish children from the Ghetto, and her story is complicated in a lot of ways but - well, this story isn’t actually about Irena, per se.

It’s about a bus driver.

It’s about a day when she’s traveling across town by bus with a very young Jewish child, and partway to their destination the child looks up and asks a question - in Yiddish. and the whole bus goes quiet, because everyone knows what that means. And Irena thinks, okay, we’re going to die here today.

And she’s running through her options - all of them bad - and suddenly the bus stops, and the bus driver announces that there’s been a mechanical failure and the bus needs to return to the depot immediately. Everyone off, please.

And she stands and goes to get off the bus and the driver says - not you two. Sit down. So she sits down as everyone else leaves, because, well, what else is she going to do? the options are all still bad, at this point.

and when the bus is empty the bus driver says,

“Where do you need to go?”

And then he drives them as close to their destination as he can, and lets them off, and drives away. And Irena lives, and the kid lives, and they never cross paths again.

So a janitor got three people killed, and a bus driver saved two lives - not to mention all the other lives indirectly saved because Irena was able to continue her work.

I think about that almost every day now, to be honest.

We can’t all be Irena. I couldn’t be Irena. She was in a unique place with very specific skills and connections that let her do what she did. I am just one mentally ill librarian. I can’t be her. But - I can be the bus driver. Or I could be the janitor. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter who you are. In a world like this, every single one of us has the opportunity to do massive harm or massive good. We can save lives or end them.

And that’s scary. but it’s also very comforting? at least for me. Because at the end of the day it means this: no matter of how small and helpless and unimportant you feel, you’re never powerless in the face of great evil.

You can choose to be the bus driver.

I have another story from the Holocaust.  

Two, actually.

One is long, and one is brief.

The first story is about my grandfather.

He was a slave in a Krups munitions factory in a Nazi concentration camp in Częstochowa, Poland.

He was also a smuggler.  If I did not have multiple corroborating witnesses to the sheer ludicrious balls that he had, I would dismiss the stories as exaggeration.  But he was a food smuggler–he would buy some kind of sugar from the Polish day workers coming into the factory, make candy out of them, sell the candy back to the workers at a profit, and buy food with the proceeds–which he then proceeded to share with the other slaves, free of charge.  Without him, they would have starved to death, but an extra hundred calories a day made a difference enough to keep them alive.

But that’s not the story.

The story is what happened in Spring of 1945.

My grandfather could hear the guns of the Russian Army off in the distance, and he and the other captives in the camp figured that they would be liberated any day now.  

And then a truck packed full with preteen Jewish children who had just been captured comes into the work camp instead of the extermination camp up the road.  Because the Nazis were so fixated on their hatred of Jews that they diverted war resources to hunting us down even as they were losing.  

So it’s pandemonium.  They’re unloading the truck of the kids, the guards are yelling at the driver, the kids are milling about not knowing what’s going on…

And my grandfather sees one boy who looked a little older, a little more mature, and figured that this one he can save.  It’s just a few days until the Russians arrive, after all.

So he tells the boy to come with him.

And the rest… got loaded back onto the truck and off they went to the gas chambers.

But it wasn’t a couple of days.

It was six weeks.

Stalin personally ordered the Army to slow their advance and told the Polish Resistance to rise up, and that the Russians would support them with food and weapons.  

So they rose up… and were slaughtered.  Because they got nothing from the Russians.  Stalin knew that anyone who would be resisting the Nazis would be resisting him next, and it was an elegant way to weaken Poland before he took it.

Meanwhile, my grandfather is hiding a fourteen year old boy in a NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP.

The risks they took to hide him… they would hold him up over empty shoes sewn to long pants at the evening roll call so that he would look taller.  They smuggled food to him…  If they had been caught… I have nightmares of what would have been done to them.

Finally, one night, they are all locked in their barracks as the Nazis evacuated the camp and the Russians were coming in, with the Nazis using the camp for cover for their escape.

And in the chaos… 

My grandfather lost track of the boy.

Twenty-two years later, he tells this story to my father when my father is 12, and has demanded to know something, be told something concrete.

So he doesn’t know what happened to the boy.  Did he live?  Did he die?  Did he find his mother and sisters?

He doesn’t know.

Six months later, my grandmother is planning my father’s bar mitzvah.  Not as a religious obligation, but as a 200 foot tall flaming middle finger to the Third Reich.  You are gone, and WE ARE STILL HERE.

So she plugs into what my father called the “Camp Network”–the trombonist in the band was on a death march with an uncle, the florist was in a work camp with a friend, etc.  And she’s asking, “I need a photographer, who is good?”

“You want Joe Brown, up in Queens,” she’s told.

So she invites him down to talk terms at their house in Brooklyn, which is quite a haul in NYC.  

And the first question one Holocaust survivor asks another is, “Where were you?”  Because maybe you know someone, maybe you can tell what happened.

“I was in Częstochowa,” he says.

“You were in Częstochowa?  My husband Teddy was in Częstochowa!”

“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum.”

“Oh, everyone knew Teddy.”

“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum!”

“When he gets home, you’ll see.  Everyone there knew Teddy.”  Because he was smuggling in the food that kept them all alive.

So the thing is, you live in the US for 20 years, you forget that your name was not “Teddy Baum” but “Tuvyas Bumps.”

And when my grandfather got home from work…

…sitting there at his kitchen table…

…was the boy he had saved.

…

(I’m not crying…)

That’s the first story.

The second story is that of my grandfather’s brother.

It is short.

He collaborated with the Nazis to save his own skin.  He let my grandfather’s first wife and son starve to death in the ghetto and informed on people who tried to escape or resist.  My grandfather said that “Good people went up the chimney and he stayed behind.”

Two brothers. 

One saved over a hundred lives.

The other betrayed his own flesh and blood to save his own skin.  

Your choices define you.

Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.– Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5

I, I was going to add some stuff, I had it all typed out, about how we never see shoplifting, right, about how we always help those less fortunate than ourselves.

I deleted it. It was trite, and general, and not anything like the stories in this post. So I went and found this image instead.

When Trump slapped his immigration ban down and sowed chaos, these lawyers raced to the airport in New York, I think it was JFK, and they began rescuing people trapped on the wrong side of the world.

One person at a time.

[ID: first image is black text on a white background that reads:

“Most people who know the name Sophie Scholl know she was a 21 year old German student activist who was executed by the Nazis for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets on her college campus. But people don’t talk about what happened leading up to her execution, or what happened after.

Sophie and her brother Hans were caught be a university janitor named Jacob Schmid as they distributed pamphlets in a courtyard. He grabbed them, declared them “under arrest,” and turned them over to the Gestapo. Four days of interrogations later, they were in front of Nazi judge Roland Friesler (one of Hitler’s favorites, his “hanging judge flown in from Berlin) for a show trial that Hans and Sophie’s parents weren’t allowed in the courtroom for.

Hans, Sophie, and their friend Christoph Probst were all found guilty of treason, sentenced to death, and beheaded a few hours later.

No one talks about this janitor, Jakob Schmid. He got a cash reward and a promotion for turning in Sophie and Hans. The University of Munich threw him a celebration. Hundreds of students attended and cheered for him. He thanked them with a Nazi salute.

After the war, Jakob Schmid was arrested and put on a trial of his own. He said he only turned the Scholls in because distributing pamphlets was against university policy – it wasn’t because of the content of the pamphlets.

When you think of Nazis, you probably think of uniformed officers. But the Nazis were a political party of everyday people. So also think of a janitor tsk-tsking that someone wasn’t protesting “the right way.” A student at a rally applauding him. A judge towing the party line.

We like to tell ourselves Nazi Germany was so horrific it could never be repeated. Maybe you don’t personally know someone who would have flipped the switch on the gas chambers. But I can almost guarantee you know a Jakob Schmid.”

-Libby Jones (via Twitter)

second image: photo of eight people sitting or crouching in a group on the floor around a charging station in an airport, all of them in the midst of discussion, looking over paper notes, or looking at devices

/END ID]

very cool how the gender binary in the emerging trad terf synthesis is like, there are two genders, the one that does bad things and the one that bad things are done to. the only thing in the world is immorality and it flows from unexperiencing agents to unacting experiencers.

which naturally appeals to people who would like to be perceived as inherently lacking the capacity for immorality. for whatever reason

anyway remember bell hooks’s very cogent critique of second-wave feminist organizing in ‘sisterhood: solidarity between women’ where she argues that by “bonding as ‘victims’, white women’s liberationists were not required to assume responsibility for confronting the complexity of their own experience … Identifying as ‘victims’, they could abdicate responsibility for their role in the maintenance and perpetuation of sexism, racism, and classism.” it’s not by accident that terf gender essentialism dovetails so much with other biological-determinist & essentialist assumptions including Extremely Racist Ones   

So apparently, if you sign up for Threads and later decide to delete it, it will also nuke your Instagram account.

Source: Techcrunch.com

Think carefully before creating a Threads account (or anywhere else, really).

Please do your research and don’t blindly follow trends.

My cat is in dire need of help 😭

I don't even know how to start but my baby needs some emergency help. Pirate is 3 years old and my world. He has been healthy all this time up until a couple of days ago. His breathing wasn't right.. I knew something was wrong so I took him to the vet and they said he is definitely struggling and requires further testing which costs up to $670 that I just can't afford because my next payday is on July 25th which is already intended for rent and groceries :((( They said he will continue to get worse and eventually die if I don't figure out what's wrong for him to be treated. The Dr said he is probably in pain because he is struggling to breathe. If anyone can help me get him these tests it would really mean the world to me 😭❤️

I’ve tried finding cheaper in my area went to 4 different clinics and called 3 others all gave me close to the same price range. With it being close to the same price range I felt it was better to go with his normal vet.

My PayPal is linked down below, for anyone who’s going to send their love and support please consider sending it through friends and family as we would like to avoid fees as much as possible. 🙏

In case anyone actually cares about this issue, some good news: 227 migrants were rescued off the Canary Islands and 294 migrants were rescued off the coast of Italy yesterday/today.

It was in the news.

Haven't seen anyone talking about it on here for some reason so I thought I'd share!

It’s sad that it’d probably go through disability pride month because I’ve been waiting for that all year to make disability pride shit but eh. I don’t wanna be a scab.

Actually no wait nevermind why the fuck are we doing it through disability pride month??? That seems weird as fuck nevermind

Why the fuck would you make it so that you start after queer pride month, but through disability pride month??? That seems weird as fuck to me I’m sorry not sorry but it does. Like it seems weird in a way I really can’t articulate properly but i hope my rambling makes sense

Everyone keeps reblogging the tumblr blackout post as though it isn’t probably gonna be through most of, if not all of, disability pride month, which is a horrible fucking idea, so like, maybe let’s not do that? Like if someone else is able to articulate it better than me please do so, but it feels so. Weird. And a horrible idea.

tumblr wouldn't be affected with a blackout like reddit would. reddit relies on volunteers to run all of the subreddits and, basically, run the app. they can shut down their spaces (and the entire website/app) if they want to. tumblr doesn't work the same way. it would probably be more effective to give one-star reviews in the app store, stop blazing posts/buying checkmarks/etc, send asks detailing problems to official blogs like wip, etc. a blackout won't have the same effect, and, like sillyfunny is stating above, would isolate people during disability pride month.

Yep. Boycott tumblr products! Don’t buy ad free or crabs or whatever, don’t buy the merch, don’t buy dashboard checks, use an adblocker, don’t blaze posts, all of that. What they care about is MONEY, not users. So many disabled use tumblr to connect, and a blackout would hurt us more than anyone else because many of us have limited access to irl connections whether that’s due to lack of accessibility, being housebound or bedbound, being immunocompromised in an area where not enough people are vaccinated and masking, or anything else. And yeah it’s super insidious that the proposed blackout would not start until disability month, because oh no, we can’t ruin pride month!! Get a grip and support us disabled people. I’m not gonna spend a cent on tumblr but I’m not participating in this blackout. It’s not gonna work and it’s going to hurt disabled people more than it’ll hurt tumblr.

Not crazy about people writing off the Titan submersible incident as some schadenfreudic buzzstory they can rag on for a handful of internet funny points. I get the frustration, I really do. At least three of the passengers had to shell out $250,000 a ticket for a glorified deep sea Disney ride. The CEO of OceanGate is a capitalist wackjob who has been complaining about and bypassing safety regulations for years, despite multiple warnings, and now the retrieval is taking up time and resources from multiple countries that could have been put to better use. But one of the crew members on board was also the nineteen year old son of another passenger. I doubt his involvement extended much beyond “I’m going on a fun trip with my dad.” Another was an unaffiliated researcher who joined the expedition to collect environmental samples for DNA analysis. Not everyone on board was a high-rolling corporate yuppie. (And even if they were, it’s still a pretty objectively horrific way to die.) Instead of memes, I’d rather see this prompt a discussion on the ethics and potential regulation of scientific tourism.

The above also doesn’t change the fact that this is dragging media attention away from more pressing issues, such as the sinking of the Andriana. I guess “THE TITANIC CLAIMS ANOTHER FIVE VICTIMS” is a more colorful headline than “the EU’s xenophobic migration policies have led to the deaths of hundreds of migrants seeking asylum in Italy, and an active cover up is now taking place, headed by Greek authorities.” Seeing all this energy be funneled towards dragging this tiny capsule out of the Atlantic when up to five hundred refugees - mostly women and children - were locked in the hull of a ship and left to suffer the exact same fate, while Coast Guard vessels looked on and did nothing (or even had an active role in the capsize after a botched attempt to tow it, according to some testimonies), illustrates the sway money and race have in what we pay attention to. It’s a gruesome example of inequity in action.

I had compared what happened to the Titan to the Kursk incident, but the Andriana doesn’t have the luxury of being a freak accident. Over 25,000 migrants have disappeared or drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean since 2014, with over 2,000 deaths taking place in 2022 alone. Those are staggering numbers. Protests have broken out across Greece over the past week in the wake of the tragedy, advocating for migration reform.

While these sorts of mass casualty events tend to leave us feeling disheartened and helpless, there are ways to help. Below is a link to SOS Humanity’s donation page. Reputable search and rescue organizations such as SOS Humanity or SOS Mediterranée built their mission statements around helping migrants like the ones on board the Andriana. Donate if you can, spread the word if you can’t.

listen i am more than aware that hormonal birth control can do fucky things to your brain and body. i have been there and i have dealt with it and i don't take that lightly. but i do want to say that if you're sexually active and can get pregnant, the last people online you should be listening to are the "divine femininity" cryptofash tradgirl influencers who are spouting leftist-sounding rhetoric while telling you to throw out your birth control and "just track your cycles naturally" at a time when it's functionally impossible to get an abortion in many states. i cannot stress this enough. these people are white supremacists who have learned to cloak their right-wing, reject-modernity beliefs in language that sounds appealing to the left, and they are winning, and you need to be really vigilant about the influencers and messaging you are following and consuming and helping give more of a platform. because this shit is everywhere and women are going to die because of it.

Source

A third red state BLOCKS anti-trans legislation from becoming law.

Kudos to all the brave activists fighting their states hard on their bigoted legislation.

[ID: The Castiel "I love you" meme. On top is a man saying "I love you." On the bottom is another man edited to say "Illinois is the first state in the US to ban book banning." /end ID]

source:

"[Gov J.B.] Pritzker signed a bill into law on Monday to prohibit libraries from banning books, saying it’s the only one of its kind in the country."

"The association’s Library Bill of Rights states that reading materials “should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval” or “excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.”"

48hr tumblr blackout proposal

tumblr mobile has seadily become near unusable these past few updates. not just from a user experience perspective (which is important enough in itself) but also from an accessibility perspective.

examples include the new way the image viewer works (if you can call it "working"), the tumblr live button replacing the profile button, and that newly created blogs will be forced to have their main dashboard tab be the 'for you' page.

the demands of the protest would be along the lines of:

to protest against these usability issues, and inspired by the recent reddit blackout, i propose a 48 hour blackout (where you don't use tumblr at all). preferably of both mobile and web (since web has problems too) but mobile is the focus here.

I suggest the 48 hours between the 30th of June to the end of the 1st of July.

this marks the end of pride month (for the "queerest place on the internet") and the start of disability month (since accessibility is a massive issue here).

tumblr office is in San Francisco, USA, so the times and dates will be calculated using their time zone (PDT).

you can find out the times and dates for your timezone here.

i can't afford to blaze this post so please spread it around as much as possible! protests only work if significant numbers show up!

tumblr rejected the blaze campaigns for this post because they know it would hurt them. let's make this an indefinite blackout - it's the best way to get results.

(so the blackout would be from June 30th onwards)

staff statements, politician answers, disconnect

i do have to premise, many staff-involved posts are going to be from cyle's blog or written by him. some have other staff contributing to the answer! but he appears to be a sort of main front-end developer, so he's quite literally the most visible staff member, to me at least.

thanks for your feedback! no.

make it accessible? nah, no thank you.

empty words and a cash grab

I have seniority, tough luck! 🤷‍♂️

your gif quality sucks now? here's a solution to a completely different problem :)

getting their disconnect called out

disappointment w disconnect and attitude w older users.

discussion on transparency

asking for forever? list plz :)

further disconnect

issues w reblog chains

thought it was a bug. it is not.

deep dive

feedback on functionality

layout issues:

unintuitive

changes are needed, not this one

insight on ui changes

inconsistencies and broken ui

issues w video/picture viewer

hurts the curating of feeds+

lack of functionality

doubles w accessibility issues

issues w other long standing features

custom domains

legacy editor (expands on gif link above)

fun this is long standing now

user frustrations and rage

one two three four five six

and personally my favorite post

we didn't forget :)

Anyway with anti-sodomy laws back on the discussion table I'm going to repeat that you can personally be squicked out by the consensual sex someone else has, but saying that their consensual sex between willing, active, adult participants should be illegal and is indicative of some sort of moral failing is L I T E R A L L Y a major facet in extreme homophobia and absolutely has gotten people killed.

You don't have to like their business but as long as everyone involved in the encounter is saying yes, it's also really not your business.

This is the precident you are helping further by digging your heels in and saying 'but I think it's gross and makes them bad people'. This is what happened last time that was the reasoning for law, and what is being threatened to happen again.

"but Jaz, how would they enforce it"

Easily.

People would report you to the police for any hint of it. Whether real or imagined. You held hands with someone of the same sex. Someone started a rumor that they saw you kissing. You bought a sex toy and the vendor automatically reported you. You clicked a web page or picked up a magazine that had a different suspected deviant on it and the shop owner or internet service provider automatically reported you. You had certain mannerisms. You hung out to much with a specific friend. You seemed too close to a family member. Literally anything.

In some cases people would literally peep through windows, listen at the door, even wait across the street for your guest to come over and then call the police to kick the door down and catch the two of you in the act.

Never forget that the Stonewall riot was started by one such raid where police stormed a gay bar looking to arrest as many "sodomy" and "public indecency" suspects as possible.

That's how. By encouraging people to barge into other people's private, consensual sex lives and make reports to the authorities. By encouraging people to lay traps so unsuspecting gay people could stumble into them. By encouraging people to stalk and harass anyone who showed any sign of 'being a pervert' in the name of 'protecting neighborhoods from predators'. By weaponizing the real concern for predatory behavior against people who were engaging in consensual intimacy in a way they happened to not like.

By doing exactly what I've been continuously saying is bad behavior that has gotten countless LGBT people jailed and killed.

We're not turning this against our own community. Homophobes and transphobes have already made it plenty clear they don't care how good or respectable we are, they just want us all dead.

"how would they enforce it"

well in 2012 a guy named snowden let us know they're basically wiretapping us at all times and have gigantic collections of all our metadata and we have been living in a nice little surveillance state since 2001's patriot act

My uncle used to hang out in those public parks after dark where gay men would solicit sex - from each other, from sex workers, and (when they were particularly unlucky) from undercover cops.

Having sex with a partner in your home was dangerous because it was too identifiable. Your neighbors, your landlord, your family, your friends, any one of them could happen to notice if you brought a boyfriend or a one night stand home, and this was before we had any right to privacy in our homes.

So anonymous sex in the park was SAFER for gay men. As long as you didn't draw the short stick and snag a cop. A cop who would, just as they often do today with sex workers, happily have sex with you before cuffing you, walking you into the station through every reporter in town, and splashing your name and face across the morning paper with a sodomy charge. Then your life was effectively over. And they would leverage that to make you tell them names, give up others to have their lives ruined in the hopes of salvaging what was left of your own.

My uncle came a little too close one day, nearly got caught up in a raid at the park he was at with some friends. He illustrated children's books for a living. If he was caught he would never work again. So he fled. Borrowed some money from my mother and *fled the country*. He only came back once a year, long enough to fulfill visa requirements. He only came back with his boyfriend in 2005 when my mother assured him that things were safer.

If the enforcement of these laws could ruin lives like that back then, how badly do you think it could go for us in the era of unprecedented near total surveillance? Our memories need to be long enough to remember that these laws and the methods used to enforce them are not hypothetical. They have already happened and ARE already happening. There is precedent, there are known mechanisms, and there are known ways to gum up the works too.

You also don't have to be doing anything at all to tip people off; all it takes is someone REPORTING that you have. I assure you, if the cops are looking to arrest people for being queer, most aren't going to care if the report is true or not- just whether it is actionable. You could be completely straight and still wind up with your name splashed across the local papers for "breaking sodomy laws".

You wonder how they can prove you did; I wonder how you expect to prove you *didn't*, in the court of social opinion if not the court of actual law. (I'm sure everyone in town will both notice and believe the retraction you get the paper to print six months later.)

My husband and I grew up under the anti-sodomy laws. They are the reason why we "straighten up" in public: we don't hold hands, we don't hug, we don't use pet names, we don't even look at each other very much. We do such a good job of it the straights regularly mistake us for brothers.

Newspapers used to have "Police Blotter" sections, which were the favorite places to name people who had been caught in anti-sodomy raids. I know men who lost their jobs and families because of this, and had to move far away. Later, when sex offender registries became a thing, moving didn't help.

I missed getting caught in a bar raid by about an hour, just because my friends and I had left to go get dinner. When we went back after dinner, we saw all the cops and at first we thought the bar had been attacked somehow, but then we figured out that no, the cops were just there to arrest everyone for the hideous crime of Being Gay In Public. (The Denver DA at the time had a hardon for closing gay bars; his public excuse was "drugs" but her office was more than happy to charge everyone under the sodomy laws and publish their names in the Denver Post's Police Blotter. The drug charges were clearly incidental.)

Regarding: "You also don't have to be doing anything at all to tip people off; all it takes is someone REPORTING that you have. I assure you, if the cops are looking to arrest people for being queer, most aren't going to care if the report is true or not- just whether it is actionable."

I read Dale Carpenter's book Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas, about the Supreme Court case that struck down anti-sodomy laws nationwide in the U.S. (This did not happen until 2003, for anyone who didn't already know how recent this history was.) It's an excellent book that goes over the entire history of the case and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know more about it.

The two men who were arrested for sodomy — and who, like heroes, agreed to let their case be argued all the way to the Supreme Court, to the benefit of us all — were John Lawrence and Tyron Garner. And, fascinatingly, there is good reason to believe they were not having any kind of sex at all when the police came in to John Lawrence's home and arrested them both for sodomy.

Garner and Lawrence were both gay, but they weren't in a relationship with each other. Lawrence's ex-boyfriend maliciously called the police and falsely reported a man with a weapon in Lawrence's apartment. Lawrence and Garner stated afterwards that they weren't having sex when the police entered the apartment — and two of the four police officers who responded to the call agreed. Nevertheless, they were arrested and charged with sodomy.

So, odd as the idea might seem that there was no actual sodomy at the center of the case that struck down anti-sodomy laws in the US — it actually is perfectly in line with the warning above about what the dangers of anti-sodomy laws really are, and how they have historically been used.

(This book also gives the lie to the idea that, even if they were still on the books, anti-sodomy laws "weren't really enforced anymore" and so weren't anything to worry about. Obviously Lawrence and Garner were arrested for it, but they weren't the only ones being charged with it, either.)

i’m starting a movement to stop calling this shit “artificial intelligence” cause it’s fucking not. it’s not intelligent, and the things it produces are not informed by logical choices. it doesn’t know how to research sources for you. it doesn’t compose art thoughtfully or meaningfully.

call it machine-generated, text generator, chat bot, but it’s not intelligent.

Help For Canada

Here are some ways to help out some of the Canadians who's lives have been forever changed by the wildfires. (From @mugsy, someone who's there, in the country, and feeling pretty damn scared.) United Way Halifax (https://www.unitedwayhalifax.ca/give/united-way-halifax-wildfire-recovery-appeal/)

Alberta.ca Disaster Assistance (https://www.alberta.ca/disaster-assistance-and-recovery-support.aspx)

RedCross.ca Disaster Assistance (https://www.redcross.ca/how-we-help/current-emergency-responses/atlantic-canada-wildfire-responses)

And a GoFundMe for their coworker (https://gofund.me/f30934aa)

I would also highly recommend donating to victims from East Prairie Métis Settlement and Little Red River Cree Nation in Alberta, which were hit extremely hard by the fires.

You can find a collection of links for EPMS here (https://linktr.ee/epmsfire)

Little Red River has an official GoFundMe here as well (https://www.gofundme.com/f/fox-lake-fire-evacuees)

Indigenous communities have been some of the hardest hit and least assisted. If you have the means to donate, please please give directly to impacted communities. It goes a long way

the smoke from the wildfires in canada are crossing the atlantic and is now bringing a haze to the nordic countries

it's said that the soot from the smoke will deposit onto the snow and ice of the arctic which will in turn increase local warming (i.e worst wildfires, ice sheets melting, oceans warming and rising, stronger tropical cyclones, etc. etc.)

From the NY Times:

Ways to Help