#. they talked about abortion laws and such

[hope-ur-ok]

The swiftie mood really has just become "disappointed but not surprised" huh

[hadesoftheladies]

the funny thing about people in the oppressor class is that they are so ignorant and entitled they genuinely believe that the oppressed are privileged in some way

a white person will complain about how “black people have all the jobs and they have a special privilege now because everyone hates the poor white man”

a man will say that he wishes he were a woman so “I can just cook and clean and let my guy bring home the bacon and stay with kids and not go to war and be given free drinks at the club”

and a straight person will say “you gays are so lucky that everything caters to you nowadays, I get so bullied for being straight because it’s ‘vanilla’”

they say this with no critical analysis of the nature of these systems in the first place, and they show they have no actual grasp on the real lived experiences that these people go through everyday. they’ll bring up shallow, niche scenarios that they themselves or a friend of a friend witnessed and run with that to the point of delusion saying “see? I told you these guys weren’t oppressed! It was us all along!”

racism still abounds in even more degrading levels today (blackness and “Asian girl” are now a porn categories that are accepted as morally okay, we’ve seen black kids shot for no reason and the white shooter gets more funding for the court case than the victims family), misogyny has reached astronomical heights on the internet alone (don’t even get me started on how lockdowns had women getting murdered by their husbands in faster rates and how predatory behavior in younger boys has become more prevalent, abortion rights are almost nonexistent nowadays), and gay people are still getting murdered brutally, in fact their rights are being revoked and in other countries, the judicial punishment is getting harsher.

you’re so privileged you don’t even know what privilege means because you’ve never had to fight for it and never lived without it

these people are so inhuman to you that you think their suffering is fun and you want the “experience” of it

fuck off sincerely

[betweenthings2]

You know what's absolutely fucking wild to me? The fact that Alex Turner/Arctic Monkeys/The Last Shadow Puppets are allegedly banned from Coachella because of the time Alex kissed Miles on stage, but The 1975 isn't. Matty Healy/The 1975 are banned from two whole countries and facing legal charges in one for being pro-LGBT+, but not from one homophobic American festival, and Alex Turner, who I've never seen say two fucking words about politics is.

[justgot1]

TFW your new friend turns out to believe right wing propaganda.

[ftl-faster-than-life]

Writing fanfiction will have you researching the most concerning combination of search terms.

[its-coda]

Oh. That’s a post about eugenics going around in my twitter timeline

[blessedmoonsoul]

kimmel's ugly ass crying just annoyed the hell out of me libs are so fucking irritating

[eurekavalley]

I am catching up on Dahlia Lithwick's Supreme Court podcast and the preview of the medication abortion case which was just heard this week, and I am totally floored by this invocation of aesthetics as a legal argument by the federal appeals court judge.

Potential outcomes of this case include a complete ban on medication abortion in the US and a ban on telemedicine. But you know... "aesthetic injury" to a third party. Which is totally a thing.

[dirt-goth]

People need to get more comfortable disobeying and challenging unjust laws btw. Practice breaking one or two dumb arbitrary laws every day. Get good at realizing what behaviors you do because you believe in them vs what things you do out of legal obligation. What laws make you betray your values? What laws keep you from helping your community? What laws hinder self sufficiency? Practice breaking the law and see how much your world opens up.

[varricscrossbowbianca]

had a dream that someone talked about the usa and how it’s basically unlivable there no matter which state you live in

[rodeodeparis]

decolonizepalestine has a great article on pinkwashing (and other types of washing)

Pride month is in four days and heres a reminder not to fall for pinkwashing

QUEERS FOR PALESTINE

OUR SOLIDARITY IS STRONGER THAN THEIR BIGOTRY

[chaoticjuless]

there's something both reassuring and terrifying that throughout history people don't really change

[serial-unaliver]

you can tell which people involve actual compassion in their political stances and which don't by how they respond to things happening to real people and not hypothetical scenarios.

earlier I was reading the comments section of a reddit post that screenshotted this woman's post in a religious community where she basically says she's pro life but now conflicted because she could die from having another baby (also her husband is blatantly abusive and uses her as a baby machine, but she talks about him like it's normal). so I opened the comments (of the post with the screenshot, not her original post) and there's a lot of people joking around and saying she should die basically because she's stupid for being against abortion and she should consider this "god's punishment". now judging by how this woman describes her role in her marriage she's quite clearly abused and currently willing to possibly sacrifice her LIFE for her husband. and as someone whose dad also treats women like this and uses religion as an excuse I had sympathy for her despite her "pro life" stance (I mean it's not like she's a politician passing anti abortion laws lol). I tried to comprehend the comments joking about this post but I couldn't. I can't find the situation funny. and it makes me realize some people's political convictions are very surface level. it's just about fun clapbacks on social media. no one is treated as a real person.

[vaspider]

Tonight, the night before Election Day 2024 in the US, I am thinking about my stepkid.

I am thinking about the phone call they made to us earlier this year, the one where they told us they'd gone to the hospital thinking they had appendicitis and found out, instead, that a zygote - a tiny splodge of cells - had taken up residence not in their uterus but in a fallopian tube. The one where our kid said they were waiting for their partner to arrive, hoped that said partner would get there before the docs took our kid back to terminate that pregnancy, & assured us that they'd be okay.

After all, our kid lives in a state with choice measures embedded in state law. That pea-sized blot of tissue doesn't have more right to their health than they do. Nobody is standing between them and their doctors. They made a decision, and that was that.

In this tiny tragedy, the kind that plays out dozens of times a day at minimum across the country, we only had to worry about the small risk of surgery complications. We didn't have to worry about Ken Paxton threatening to charge their doctors with felonies. We didn't have to think, "What if the hospital's legal team doesn't think an ectopic pregnancy - which is never ever viable and must be terminated before it kills our kid - is really that big of a deal?" We didn't have to worry that they live in a state where ob-gyns are fleeing, leaving few experts behind, as has happened in Idaho.

We didn't have to watch our kid vomit up black blood before dying the day after their baby shower the way Neveah's mom did. We didn't have to pray in a waiting room (while doctors took our kid apart until their heart stopped because the doctors waited too long out of fear of anti-choice laws) until a doctor came to tell us we'd have to bury them the way that Amber's mom did. We aren't having to pick up our lives after fully treatable miscarriage-related sepsis took them from us the way that Josseli's husband and daughter must.

I could go on for far, far too long.

Listen. If you are a single-issue non-voter and have already decided that "both parties are the same" or whatever other thing you've told yourself so you can sleep at night, smug and secure, then I can't reach you and I can't help you. But if you genuinely think that your votes don't matter, if you're just suffering from a bout of overwhelm or apathy, if you're too young to remember the 2000 election and can't see that Dobbs is a direct result of that election and every one that's followed, please, I am fucking begging you.

I didn't really talk about this when it happened. I mentioned something briefly, maybe. The posts I've started writing about it are still in my drafts. It was too fresh, too frightening. It's not any less frightening now, honestly - because if this week doesn't end with President Kamala Harris, we're headed for a national abortion ban, at the minimum - but it's not about how fucking frightened I was or how sad and bewildered I was to realize that my kid was going through this crisis in a nation more hostile to them than when I needed a D&C for an abortion at 21, in 1998.

It's about stopping this chapter of this fucking bullshit and at least finding some new fucking bullshit.

Vote, dammit.

Do the other work on Wednesday. Tomorrow, the work is to vote.

[legal-poppy]

people who have actually read the whole Dobbs decision, what is the actual argument for why it's wrong? like i don't actually see anything wrong with their reasoning that since abortion isn't a right guaranteed by the Constitution, that abortion laws should be left to states.

[fullhalalalchemist]

URGENT: 🚨🚨EARN IT ACT IS BACK IN THE SENATE 🚨🚨 TUMBLR’S NSFW BAN HITTING THE ENTIRE INTERNET THIS SUMMER 2023

April 28, 2023

I’m so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this

What is the EARN IT Act?

The EARN IT Act (s. 1207) has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country.

This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims "protects children and victims against CSAM" by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate "best practices" that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These "best practices" would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can't already do that. These "best practices" also create new laws for "removing CSAM" online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don't follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.

Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It's the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren't responsible for what users upload online unless it's criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can't publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)

This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.

NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an "anti-trafficking" organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being "against trafficking" while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That's how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.

The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.

EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from "grooming and exploitation", is how they will successfully censor the internet.

As long as state legislatures can tie in "fighting CSAM" to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.

This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.

This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.

Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn't care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.

It will make CSAM much much worse.

One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.

(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)

The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.

I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.

HOW TO FIGHT BACK

EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.

CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.

This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.

(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don't know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.

2. Sign these petitions!

Link to Petition 1

Link to Petition 2

3. SPREAD THE WORD ONLINE

If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don't fight back.

Here is a linktree with more information on this bill including a masterpost of articles, the links to petitions, and the call script.

DISCORD LINK IF YOU WANT TO HELP FIGHT IT

TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven’t seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.