Just in case we suddenly disappear. Tumblr is actively censoring Black and Native people.
#my wife is on the SOR for being gay #no joke #she hit on a girl in a straight bar once #in 1997 #and while the girl was into it #the off duty cop sitting nearby was not #and so he arrested her for ‘soliciting homosexual activity’ #which in our state was still a felony #in 1997 (and would remain so until Lawrence v Texas in 2003) #and since ‘soliciting homosexual activity’ was a felony and a sex crime #she got put on The List #she is still on there to this day #because it costs MONEY to ask a judge to take you off #and she has tried four times#since 2003 #to get taken off the SOR #but every time the judge has said something like ‘no you pled guilty to the crime i can’t possibly take you off the sex offender registry’ #with no acknowledgement of what the actual crime was #(the crime of being a butch lesbian hitting on a cute girl who was into it) #(in 1997)
Reposting these tags with consent from the person that wrote them. The post about the Sex Offenders Registry is locked, but these tags are too important to go unnoticed.
Younger queer people need to realize that the SOR being used against queer people simply for being queer isn’t some ancient history thing. It still impacts queer people today. And it can quite easily be used that way again.
Listen!
When you hear people throwing around the talking point of “well there’s a high rate of sex offenders in the trans/queer community”, this has to do with why.
Being on the sex offender registry isn’t inherently equivalent to whatever horrific sex crime you’re meant to think of when it’s mentioned. It evokes imagery of pedophilia and rape, but there is a lot that can get you put on it and not a lot you can do to be taken off of it.
Public crossdressing used to be able to get you put on the sex offender registry (and by used to I mean as recently as 2011).
Public urination (you know, the literal only option for someone who’s homeless and doesn’t have access to public bathrooms, a venn diagram where trans people are more likely to rest in the meeting zone) can get you put on the sex offender registry.
Sex work is pretty much an automatic way to end up on the sex offender registry if you’re caught. (This is especially weaponized against black trans women who do sex work)
“Deviant Sexual Intercourse” (aka literally any sexual activity aside from penis-in-vagina penetration) could get you on the sex offender registry as recently as the early 2000s. That effectively impacts the entire queer community in one way or another.
The sex offender registry is, first and foremost, useless. It tells you nothing about what someone did. It’s mentioned to quickly associate a person or a group of people with the worst possible crimes imaginable.
It has been used against us time after time and it will continue to be used for that.
“scratch a transphobe and a misogynist bleeds”
siobhan o'leary gives us a brilliant deconstruction of transphobia, and transmisogyny specifically
This is some scalding hot fucking tea and I’m here for it.
"whocares ita just a bug its just a bird its just a fish" ohhhh its just the miracle of life on earth . its just the beauty of biodiversity in my local area. its just millions and millions of years of tiny changes to a bucnh of little strands of amino acids and eventually all these circumstances brought us to this moment.but i only like this one kind of bugs so i want all the other ones to DIE I think their amino acids that took millenia to develop are DUMB AND WORTHLESS and who cares about them who cares I just want to have some stupid plants in my yard that wish they lived somewhere completely different so bad and I have to constantly battle to keep their sickly bodies functioning in this place they were never meant to live. because I saw it in a magazine
This post is about how total extermination on a species-wide scale for the sake of capitalist concepts of value and convenience is wanton destruction of unique and irreplaceable pieces of the one and only ecosystem we know exists for certain, which has taken millions of years to manifest as we know it.
Consumption of other individual animals, in sustainable amounts, is a feature of this ecosystem that cannot be written out. An animal being eaten to sustain another animal does not in any way diminish the value of the consumed.
This is a necessary exchange within the biosphere's self-perpetuating system. Death and consumption for the sake of survival are themselves a beautiful and irreplaceable expression of millions of years of evolution and circumstance coming together to allow us to exist in this moment and be consciously aware and able to appreciate it.
So like. Do consider sustainability! And be grateful for what you consume. But the responsible consumption of the meat of other animals as a necessary part of our diet as omnivores is a neutral act on an individual basis.
land back, bison from coast to coast
What is race? What is a social construct? What is “racism” versus “structural racism”? Our video toolkit, “What is Structural Racism?” answers these questions and more.
The tweet: https://twitter.com/Lionhearted_ben/status/1629919975203848192?t=HfF1j3BVqZMgZEIHgVnz3w&s=19
And in case Twitter is being a fool, here's the PDF itself: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PiO5JAc2_erXL9rEPU-Gj4DXQ3N0dTbe/view
Shout-out to a friend for showing me this!!
I think people need to be more comfortable with illegalism and I’m not kidding. Of course the more legal something is, the safer and easier it is to do, but the more people who disregard the law, the harder it is to enforce. There are plenty of laws on the books that people just ignore and are never or rarely policed.
Becoming more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities. Additionally, it is crucial to build a wall of silence. Nobody talks everybody walks.
People who give out food without a permit, hold a march without a permit, grow a garden without a permit, are more likely to be people you could turn to to work with on preventing an eviction, or keeping people out of cop hands, or helping your friend Jane get crucial healthcare when it’s not legal in your state.
Communities comfortable with these acts won’t call the cops, and then nobody knows that it’s happening.
People have got to shift from both the idea that lawful = good/ illegal = bad, and that the illegality of something means that’s the end of it, and the only fight left is to make it legal again.
For my Americans out there, here is a map with the safest states for trans folk. These are the states that have the most laws in place to specifically protect trans people.
Maryland is currently the safest, here is an article about it.
There’s a road in between where I live and another town I go to called Dead Indian Memorial Road, and when you look up how it got its name and it was because there used to be a native village in the area but one day they were discovered to all have been poisoned, and the official histories are like “it is possible they poisoned themselves accidentally, buuuuuut this was during a gold rush in the area, soooooooo……,,”
This is important.
Also Lakota Man is racist af and super toxic/performative so don't follow him anywhere actually.
Research on transsexuals also shows how the elicitation of deference depends on the type of man one is perceived to be. Based on in-depth interviews with 29 transmen, Schilt (2006) found that whereas white transmen beginning to work as men were taken more seriously, had their requests readily met, and were evaluated as more competent than they were as women, young, small Black, Latino, and Asian transmen did not gain similar advantages. Similarly, in her interview study of 18 transmen, Dozier (2005) found that, as men, white transmen reported being given more respect and more conversational space and being included in men's banter. They also experienced less public harassment. Transmen of color, on the other hand, reported being more frequently treated as criminals, and short and effeminate transmen reported being publicly harassed as gay. Gaining the full privileges of manhood is thus shown to depend not merely on being recognized as male, but on the whole ensemble of signs that are conventionally taken as evidence of a masculine self.
— Men, Masculinity, and Manhood Acts by Douglas Schrock and Michael Schwalbe (2009)
LAP Bands should be illegal
This post is going to deal with medical fatphobia, weight loss surgery, coercion, emetophobia, food issues, disordered eating, and just all around bad shit. But it’s important.
Shortly after I reached adulthood, I was coerced into weight loss surgery. I weighed about 250 pounds and was considered morbidly obese.
The Lap Band is a disgrace to the medical profession and is just another example of how the medical profession does not care about the lives of fat people.
To preface this: the surgery works. I lost 70 pounds and people treated me differently and I hated them all for it.
The Lap Band made my life miserable. When it was filled, I could not eat until noon without getting stuck. Even then, getting stuck was always a risk. There was a strict diet to follow and you were supposed to be safe from that if you followed it. On top of that, there were rules for how you ate. One standard I saw was not to eat in bites larger than your fingernail. Can you see yourself doing that for a week, let alone years and years?
Getting stuck is a horror you can't imagine. The food lodges in the top of your stomach, blocking off your system. You continue to produce saliva and swallow it down. Slowly, the mucous in your saliva builds up. It feels like you're drowning. Eventually, you have to essentially throw it all up. A disgusting experience (and a mortifying one if you're in public.) The saliva is thick and ropy. This experience is often called "sliming" on the forums.
I became frightened of eating in public. In a way, I became frightened of food altogether. I knew something had to give the day I reacted to someone biting a hamburger in a tv show the way a regular person would react to a killer jumping out in a horror movie. I developed the disgusting and unhealthy habit of chewing and spitting out food. I completely lost my enjoyment of many foods I had previously enjoyed because of how problematic they were (I can no longer enjoy a chicken thigh for example.) I stopped eating meals and began grazing. I developed eating habits worse than the ones that "made me fat"
After 3 years, I had the band emptied of fluid, which significantly decreased, but did not stop, these problems. I regained the weight, and found it didn't bother me. (Along the way I discovered that my discomfort with my body had never been weight related)
I had my band removed after 6.5 years earlier this year. I am in a support group on facebook for victims of this malpractice. There are 5.6 thousand members, each with their own horror stories. Some of them cannot get the band removed because insurance will not cover the procedure, though they happily covered the band's placement. Some have tried to go through with removal but have had surgeons try to coerce them into getting a different weight-loss surgery instead of just removing it. Many have long-term damage from the band eroding the walls of their stomach or esophagus, or from the band adhering to multiple organs. Many of them had the band for 12-14 years, before removal because none of our doctors told us it needs to be removed within 10.
Many practices no longer perform Lap Band surgery and now believe it is unethical. The surgeon who removed my band still performs this surgery regularly.
A study performed in 2011 with 151 lap band patients, found that 22% of patients experienced minor complications and 39% experienced major complications. The person who coerced me into surgery actually experienced major complications and needed an emergency removal.
I experienced no serious complications. Everything I described above is considered normal. And It still drastically lowered my quality of life.
I don't know why I'm sharing this or who I'm sharing it for, but here I am. If you know anyone considering the lap band surgery, don't let them go through with it without knowing the truth. And please be kinder to your body than the medical profession wants you to be.
The Joshua tree is on its way to extinction because so-called green energy companies want to keep the death machine of civilization going by installing large swaths of solar panels over the desert floor, a big metal blanket that will kill everything it covers: the desert tortoise, the sage grouse, the hawks and snakes and beautiful flowers that have flourished for thousands of years. Gone. Gone.
All so that we can keep the dead heart in the rotting corpse of industrial civilization beating into the next decade. These are the "good guys" btw, these are the "renewable" "carbon neutral" options: covering the desert in miles of metal and microchips until every living being without a bank account is dead.
Indieginous sites are also being bulldozed.
And residents of towns near the panels are also experiencing health problems due to the panel construction causing dust.
The purpose is to achieve clean energy goals and to provide energy to the metro of LA county. But also, why in the desert?
This article was just published May 21 2023 on the topic. I didn't know about this angle of solar energy until I saw this post despite living in LA.
It's a great reminder; if we're working towards a sustainable future, we can't outsource the solution our problems. As climate change gets worse we are seeing more solutions like this, where habitats and indieginous soviergnty are threatened for progress and comfort of industrialized communties. We have to do better and be willing to implement solutions at the source before enacting harmful solutions on other communities.
I feel like, regarding the recent shit with the laws in FL, this is a really important time to say y'all should be for the whores and the hookers too, because y'all did not say shit when SESTA/FOSTA was goin on, y'all kept quiet when new banking laws rolled out that specifically targeted sex workers (from FSSWers to cam workers to strippers to professional pornstars) and I need y'all to understand that a straight line can be drawn between the censorship/deplatforming of sex workers and what is happening regarding legislation against trans people now. mainstream leftist orgs and individuals scrambled to distance themselves from sex workers and sex worker organizations and catch it! that's now biting y'all in the ass
“anti-trafficking” “anti-sexual exploitation” “child safety” are all euphemisms for pushing censorship and criminalization of sex education, LGBTQ+ ID and existence, abortion, anything right wingers deem unsavory; it is so easy to deplatform something by calling it "pornographic" or "exploitation" and if you give a fuck about liberation for all that needs to include the decriminalization of sex work because we (queer non-white SWers) were the TRIAL RUN; now trans people are the next step and after that it's going to be other LGBTQ+ people, and best believe that will also eventually include POC, LGBT+ or not.
you can understand the timeline of the deplatforming of sex workers by reading this thread by the amazing Ashley Lake. because believe that this is the same playbook that will be used, is being used, on other people the GOP deems "undesirable" (like trans people)
this is ok to rb btw bc as someone whose sex work is keeping my lights on and funding the MAJORITY of Decepticon Disaster Relief/Kaon City Medics rn I'm fucking tired of beating this drum, I'm the first to rock with ANYONE else who needs help but y'all don't like the yucky whores and hoes and hookers when we're the ones who need help even though our liberation is INTRICATELY entwined with y'all's so get with it
So Arizona launched an “education hotline” that allows “concerned parents” to report “””critical race theory””” and other things like ~gender identity~ being taught in the classroom
It would be a shame if the number and email were spread to bad actors looking to prank call the AZ Department of Education
602-771-3500 or empower @ azed .gov 🤡
In recent years, Google users have developed one very specific complaint about the ubiquitous search engine: They can’t find any answers. A simple search for “best pc for gaming” leads to a page dominated by sponsored links rather than helpful advice on which computer to buy. Meanwhile, the actual results are chock-full of low-quality, search-engine-optimized affiliate content designed to generate money for the publisher rather than provide high-quality answers. As a result, users have resorted to work-arounds and hacks to try and find useful information among the ads and low-quality chum. In short, Google’s flagship service now sucks.
And Google isn’t the only tech giant with a slowly deteriorating core product. Facebook, a website ostensibly for finding and connecting with your friends, constantly floods users’ feeds with sponsored (or “recommended”) content, and seems to bury the things people want to see under what Facebook decides is relevant. And as journalist John Herrman wrote earlier this year, the “junkification of Amazon” has made it nearly impossible for users to find a high-quality product they want — instead diverting people to ad-riddled result pages filled with low-quality products from sellers who know how to game the system.
All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user’s experience has become subordinate to the company’s stock price. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech companies have monetized confusion, constantly testing how much they can interfere with and manipulate users. And instead of trying to meaningfully innovate and improve the useful services they provide, these companies have instead chased short-term fads or attempted to totally overhaul their businesses in a desperate attempt to win the favor of Wall Street investors. As a result, our collective online experience is getting worse — it’s harder to buy the things you want to buy, more convoluted to search for info
Source: Business Insider
cultnervous-deactivated20230607
some beautiful graffiti downtown
LANDBACK
https://ictnews.org/news/tohono-oodham-nation-to-get-ancestral-land-back