chaos-and-discourse

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Someone made an engagement map for TERF tweets

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a few things to keep in mind as you talk about the current situation with roe v wade:

women are not the only people who can get pregnant, and therefore are not the only people who get abortions or the only people affected by restrictions to abortion access — sincerely, a man with a uterus

the recent legislation against trans people transitioning, particularly as it relates to trans men and transmasc people, has been justified by the politicians supporting it using the argument that transitioning jeopardizes our reproductive potential, which they see as more important than our actual lives. if you support the legislation against us or have been silent about it, you cannot claim to be fighting for reproductive rights. you don’t get to only care about it when it affects you — if you let them get away with that rhetoric against trans people, you give them the power to use it against you. if you can’t stand in solidarity with us, you will end up standing against yourself

please don’t forget us in these conversations, and don’t be silent about the attacks on our bodily autonomy

all of this is connected — criminalizing transition, overturning roe v wade, it’s all working toward the same goal. if you care about one part of it, you have to care about all of it, or any efforts against it will fail

if you don’t care enough about us to fight our oppression for our sake, do it because you cannot fight against your own oppression without fighting ours too

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This kicks ass. Disabled activists are protesting for their rights in South Korea by literally just riding the train during rush hour.

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If you see that Amazon is a great place to work, you know it was an article paid for by Amazon.

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In case anyone doesn’t know, Club Penguin Rewritten was a fan project that started 5 years ago. A team of independent artists and developers successfully revived Club Penguin, and had a community of 11 million up until today. They even rewrote all of the code for HTML5 after flash was taken down, and were always coming out with custom parties, items, and content.

Today, we learned this:

As they investigate, they have been deleting code.

Now, if you go to the website, you see this:

Fuck Disney. Fuck everything they do, and everything they stand for. Fuck your shitty movies, fuck your shitty politics, and fuck the way you destroy everything you touch. Fuck your copyright, too.

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do not use betterhelp. do not support betterhelp. do not believe betterhelp.

they:

-do not vet their therapists

-forcefully shut down negative commentary

-lie to therapists

-lie to consumers

-trap therapists in exploitative contracts

-sells users data

etc

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I hate that post going round that’s like “haha you wouldn’t tell a disabled guy he’s using his crutch as a crutch” ecause that very thing literally happens to people that use mobility aids.

I can’t count how many time people (including physiotherapists who’re supposed to be understanding and help me) have said “you need to stop relying on your crutches” and the like.

I literally had a physiotherapist remove my crutches from under me without my consent and tell me to walk.

And it’s not even a rare thing.

Wheelchair users get told they need to stop relying on their wheelchairs, cane users get told they shouldn’t rely on their canes etc.

I’m just so bored with the depression-centric ableism rhetoric, erasing the ableism people with physical and visable disabilities experience

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every time there's a boycott calling itself a strike and telling people not to cross the picket line by shopping at a place i am 🥴

that's not what any of those words meeeaaaan. "crossing the picket line" refers to workers who accept jobs at a company whose existing employees are on strike. arguably, the meaning has sort of extended to mean "don't do business with a company whose employees are on strike" but only if that's specifically something the union has called for.

notice i mentioned a union. a union is essential for an effective strike. a union means that a decision to strike was voted on and the majority of workers want it. a union also means some degree of financial and legal protection for the strikers.

in case it wasn't clear, etsy sellers are not unionized, do not have any protections in place, and did not vote to strike. a small number of sellers essentially made this decision for everyone and, most confusingly, only plan to "strike" / boycott for one week. that's.....not how this works. i very much doubt this ONE WEEK of action is even going to be a blip on etsy's bottom line at the end of the year. shops will reopen. sales will resume as usual, or maybe even at a higher rate as people make purchases they would have made during the one-week boycott. and...etsy's ceo makes just as much money as usual.

successful strikes (as in, ones that result in the actual demands being met) are rare because they're hard. as an example, take a look at the 1985-1987 Watsonville Cannery strike (link). the years in the title should clue you in that this strike lasted 18 months, and involved complete worker solidarity (not one worker crossed the picket line in all that time), weekly stipends for the strikers, several rallies and marches, and lots of community support (I'm talking about material support: food donations, rent forgiveness, etc etc). it succeeded at enormous effort and cost and no set end date in sight when it began, obviously. if you have an end date planned at the start it is extremely easy for the boss to just. wait you out lol. it's particularly easy if they only have to wait one week.

anyway. sorry to still be complaining about the etsy "strike." I'm not knocking individuals who have chosen to participate. i agree with the spirit of the protest, but not its implementation. and i'm annoyed that my sales will likely be negatively affected by all this when hey. this is not the action all or even most sellers on etsy (especially those who depend on their shops for their livelihood) called for.

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Babies don’t forget there’s an Etsy boycott from April 11-18 to protest the higher service fees recently instated for shop owners despite the fact that the company reported record profits last year. Etsy is usually one of my go-tos but I am absolutely going to stay off for the week. Without its vendors (many of whom are independent artists/creators) Etsy is literally nothing, and if these new policies are undermining their ability to stay on the site without risking their financial stability then they 100% deserve our support. No Etsy this week!!!

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Plutocrat siege. #TaxTheWealthy #SaveEarth

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So, with all the nightmarish tech bills that’ve been going around in the US (Including one I haven’t even made a post on yet), I figured I might as well use this opportunity to give a breather by showing off an opportunity to fight for good things.

Specifically, they’re using April 4th as a day of action to get people to try and fight for major antitrust bills in Congress. You know, to deal with the horrible; horrible monopolies that have been actually screwing up the internet rather than; say; Too Much Free Speech or Not Enough Punishment of Piracy like the jerk brigade is pushing.

The link shows you the steps you need to do for the sake of getting Antitrust Day rolling, and this is important because, in an inverse of the bad laws we’re fighting, while this antitrust push is targeted at big tech, it sure as shit isn’t going to stop there.

In other words, Today Facebook, Tomorrow Disney. And I think that’s sure as hell worth fighting for…

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so i'm seeing this post go around quite a bit uncritically with links to straight up donate to ukrainian neo-nazi groups so i'll break it down, here's the post you'll probably see:

here's the contents of one link, calling themselves "freikorps" and using what looks to be an azov battalion insignia as an avatar:

and here's what the azov battalion is if you don't know:

now here's another link this time with with a pic of ppl flying a right sector flag:

if you dont know what right sector is:

so please don't donate to this shit, the situation isn't just some simple little good guy vs big bad guy thing, if you see someone sharing that post, try sharing this with them bcus they probably don't know

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to summarise what’s happening, the queen was exposed for lobbying the government to hide her private wealth, and shit is sort of starting to hit the fan.

for those of you who aren’t familiar with how uk parliament works, there are several “formalities” that exist within the legislative process which involve the monarchy - for example, every bill must gain royal assent (i.e. must be approved by the queen) to become law. you might be thinking: wait a second, the monarchy is unelected, that doesn’t sound very democratic. and you’re right! this is an argument that’s been ongoing for years, but mostly it’s been ignored because until recently these formalities were seen as harmless (it’s incredibly rare, as in it hasn’t happened in centuries, for the monarch to refuse to pass a bill that’s gone through parliament into law).

this scandal, however, has brought into light the reality of what these formalities actually mean for uk democracy. see, there’s this fun little thing called “Queen’s consent”. essentially, this is where the government asks the queen’s permission for parliament to be able to debate laws that affect her, and it happens before the debate takes place (rather than royal assent, which is the final stage of the legislative process). it was this procedure that the queen used back in the 70s to conceal her private wealth from the public and save her own arse by having government ministers alter a transparency law. no one has ever paid much attention to it, primarily because most people didn’t know it existed until now.

it seems, however, that the queen has repeatedly used Queen’s consent to privately lobby the government. the guardian’s investigation found that the queen used Queen’s consent to vet over 1000 laws, along with evidence of her lobbying for changes to at least four draft laws, though she might have interfered with way more. the laws she’s interfered with range from wealth and taxation laws (shocker), to laws regarding the nhs and even animal welfare. if it’s still not obvious to you why this is a problem, let me explain:

Queen’s consent is democratically dangerous enough as it is, seeing as its existence basically allows the monarchy to alter and even put a stop to legislation that has the potential to limit its power. the way that it’s being used is worse. the sheer breadth of policy that the procedure covers means that the queen, as we’ve discovered, has access to basically all legislation created by parliament, regardless of whether it affects the crown.

tldr: the queen is using parliament as means of maintaining her wealth and power, and Queen’s consent is an inbuilt tool within our democracy that facilitates that. This Is A Problem.

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I've seen almost no-one talking about how the human right's commission in the UK has been exposed as blatently been pursuing an anti-trans agenda to the point of recommending that conversion therapy bans should not cover trans people and collaborating with TERF organisations, or if they do, it's always in the tone of 'this could be us next'

and in the context of seeing people braying about how 'TERF Island should be shot into the sea', I just have to conclude British trans people are acceptable collatoral damage to some people

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Just so everyone knows how much Britain hates Romani people and other traveller communities...in Jimmy Carr's new Netflix show, he made this joke:

No one ever wants to talk about the thousands of Gypsies killed by the nazis, because no one wants to talk about the positives.

Minimal pushback, Netflix UK thought that was fine to air, and I have neo-Nazis in my Twitter mentions telling me to drink bleach because I dared to say that making a joke about the genocide of my people is evil, actually.

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