or, how the world could come to be, in six acts. asymbolia is to look at pleasing things. i have no energy to like, exist frequently, but i assure you that i am still not run by a robot. (probably. love of robots is different.)
Right now, Thursday June 8th, Washington DC is under an air quality emergency due to wildfire hundreds of miles away. I just got hit with the same disaster, so I can tell you: Unbearable stink, burning eyes and throat, apocalyptic orange skies, pollution numbers three times the immediate danger level.
This is horrible, but it creates an interesting political opportunity. Take a page out of our enemies’ playbook and never let a crisis go to waste!
The House and Senate are in session, so they and their staff are in town. They are enduring the pain of climate change firsthand, perhaps for the first time in their lives.
Call them today, and say something like, “Look out the window! Look at what climate change is doing! What are we going to do about reducing carbon emissions and mitigating the effects of climate change?”
Leave your name and town, if you are comfortable doing so, to prove that you are a constituent.
Also, consider telling them you do not want the extra pay for wildland firefighters to end at the end of the summer! There has been a provision in place to pay wildland firefighters more, but it is coming to an end soon and if it does end we are going to see a MASSIVE exodus of firefighters which is exactly what we do not need right now. Even with the current extra pay the salaries for wildland firefighters are still shit, but if that extra pay is removed? Well. It won’t be good.
Greetings, folks! I have Another Friend in distressingly dire straights. Nikki deserves a safe place to sleep, shower, and work from home safely, but at the start of May 2023, their bathroom ceiling completely caved in on itself. The property has been ticketed multiple times in the past 2 years, and the landord has done nothing to solve the problem before it went critical.
Nikki deserves funds to help themselves find safe shelter that allows them to breathe, work and also lets them have their therapy rabbits. Please, cast your eyeballs on the post/donate, and help my friend find housing safely.
HELP JANA’AH, A YOUNG BLACK WOMAN WHO WAS KICKED OUT FOR BEING TRANS, RAISE $700 USD TO SECURE HER SAFE PLACE TO SLEEP!
Please Donate or Boost if you’re able, friends.
I am lucky enough to know an amazing young black trans woman who needs help; her name is Jana’ah, and she asked me to make this post on her behalf while she looks for a place to sleep in an unfamiliar city. Jana’ah is from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her mom has not been supportive of her transition at 17, and last week finally kicked Jana’ah out of the family home and onto the street. I and some other folks helped her get a bus ticket to LA, where Jana’ah has an Auntie who recognizes and loves her for who she is.
Auntie stays in an assisted independent living community, and is allowed to have a relative stay with her and work as her caregiver there. Her healthcare plan will even pay Jana’ah a wage for being a live-in carer. She and Jana’ah are both excited to spend more time together. Jana’ah has already started going through the process of being certified to be her Auntie’s carer.
Unfortunately, until she can pay the $700 deposit to be added to Auntie’s lease officially as a resident caregiver, Jana’ah cannot stay as a guest on the premises outside of “visiting hours”, 7pm-9am, and also that “visitors” are limited to visiting only 3 days out of every week. As a visitor Jana’ah is also not paid for working hours she spends caring for Auntie, but as a resident caregiver she will be earning a wage.
When Jana’ah called me and let me know she had gotten to LA, she filled me in on what happened, and eventually admitted that she’d not been able to walk from Auntie’s place to a shelter and wound up sleeping rough in the park last night (4/22/23) because Auntie’s finances are all tied up in her housing and care, even though she can promise the caregiver wage her insurance will pay for Jana’ah to be a resident caregiver, she can’t help Jana’ah raise the money for the deposit to officially join the lease.
Jana’ah was feeling stuck not being able to stay with her aunt until she can pay the deposit, but not being able to find a place to sleep in the meantime and the job on hold until she becomes a resident. I sent her what I can, and when I asked if there was anything else I could do she asked me to spread the QR code and the story around.
She’s a really good kid! Please boost and share, donate whatever you can spare. Thank you!
right now it’s almost halfway through 2023, and 2024 is an election year in the US. I have started to see a growing proliferation of posts suggesting that there is no difference between the republican and democratic parties–the exact same kind of posts I saw an awful lot of before the last major election here. I am unfollowing folks who post or reblog these sort of posts, as I consider these posts to be fascist propaganda framed as leftist discourse, designed to suppress anti-fascist votes and voters.
“mechs aren’t practical for combat” good. then it’s more ethical to use them for war, since they’re worse at killing. Obviously. Stop being so stupid and make giant robots instead of tanks and jets, and bombs, and other stupid shit. All international disagreements should be handled via a combination of anonymous hatemail and giant robots with swords
TDOR 2020. Each candle represents one of the 350 transgender individuals killed this year globally. The United States, where I live, had 37 cases of fatal violence against trans people.
On this day, we remember those we have lost.
Statistics reported by Forbes and the Human Rights Campaign.
Look, Patreon cracking down on smutty fan-artists sucks, you’ll get no disagreement from me there, but folks are talking like this is the start of a slippery slope – and no, it isn’t. It’s the end of a slippery slope.
There’s a specific trajectory that platforms like Patreon tend to follow:
1. The platform starts out relying on sex workers for the majority of their business, typically presenting themselves as a safe venue for this type of transaction. Indeed, at first this may legitimately be the case!
2. Once they’ve become established and gained a reputation as a trustworthy service provider, the platform begins stealing money from those same sex workers, usually by freezing their accounts due to minor terms-of-service infractions and claiming any saved balance as “administrative fees”. Sex workers are specifically targeted because the quasi-legal nature of their work leaves them with few options for disputing the platform’s actions.
3. Owing to a combination of institutional inertia and the perception that there are no good alternatives, this misconduct is initially tolerated, allowing the platform to become increasingly brazen and steal increasingly large amounts of money, until a critical point is reached and sex workers begin abandoning the platform en masse.
4. When this tipping point is reached, the platform initiates widespread crackdowns to chase away the stragglers. This forms part of a broader effort to re-write history and claim the platform was never a haven for sex work in the first place, thereby rendering it more palatable to mainstream advertisers and other potential business partners.
5. Once all the sex workers are gone, the platform moves on to sex work adjacent targets and repeats the process. This cycle typically happens several times before they get to targeting smutty fan-artists, but they’ll get there eventually.
Again, I’m not saying it doesn’t suck, but there are a couple of things you need to recognise about the nature of the problem:
a. By the time they get around to going after Sonic the Hedgehog porn, you’re not looking at the thin end of the wedge – you’re looking at the culmination of a process that’s been ongoing for many years; and
b. What you’re seeing isn’t an exercise in misguided puritanism: it’s a business model. When crackdowns on smutty fanart occur, it’s tempting to view it through the lens of fandom drama, but it’s important to recognise that all the fandom drama is really doing is furnishing the platform with a thin veneer of justification for something they were planning on doing anyway. Reforming fandom culture isn’t going to stop it, or even meaningfully slow it down.
(And yes, Paypal itself when through this very process, probably one of the first platforms to do so. Bear that in mind the next time somebody tries to tell you that sure, Elon Musk may be an asshole, but at least he helped found Paypal! During Musk’s tenure, stealing money from sex workers formed a large part of Paypal’s core business model.)
So I’ve seen this post floating around a lot, and the pictures in it are immensely powerful. And almost all of them are real.
Almost.
One picture, though, bothered me—not because it looked fake, but because it looked like the moment before a truly horrific tragedy, and I was troubled by the idea that I was looking at something that perhaps only moments later resulted in death. It was this picture:
So I did a quick image search
and found that it was all over pinterest and twitter and such, which are… unhelpful sources at the best of times. But I did see the picture posted on Reddit, which is a cesspool but usually is pretty good about sourcing its shit. And:
Sure enough, when I looked up the trailer, here was that exact moment:
Welp.
But why does this matter? In the dozen or so pictures of that really great post, one of them wasn’t a genuine moment of protest against or confrontation with an oppressive, bigoted authority. That’s not a big deal, right?
Maybe not. But it shows how easy it is to sneak in fake information, misleading information, or just wrong information into posts that are largely accurate. And if you’re scrolling through and think “90% of this is stuff I agree with, the other 10% is probably fine too,” you’re more apt to digest the fake stuff along with the real stuff.
This is particularly important right now, when we’re on the eve of US elections that will quite literally decide our country’s fate for the next fifty years; we cannot, CANNOT trust the things that are reblogged onto our dashboard, even by our good friends (the person who reblogged this onto my timeline is a friend who is imminently trustworthy, for example). We have to be mindful, we have to check sources, we have to consider what we’re looking at.
And that’s not fun! That’s not what tumblr is here for, for most of us; God knows I’d much rather reblog the 1000th gifset of Schitt’s Creek or some shit. But unfortunately, social media isn’t just a place to have fun anymore; it’s been weaponized, quite literally, by people who want us to believe shitty things and are very, very good at sneaking those shitty beliefs into places where we won’t notice them until they’re part of our own ideology.
This isn’t a command that you have to source every single picture or bit of information you reblog; but it is a request that you stop to think. Humans tend to chase the feeling of validation and confirming their own beliefs, and that’s totally understandable. But don’t mistake validation for the truth.
So hey there all, I know this is an interruption of my brand
of Shitposts and Nonsensical Rambling, But I really need help.
The short of it is that unless we get 2575$ for rent
soonish, we won’t be able to keep the apartment. The long of it is like this,
see this image?
This is the start of our problem.
When we got hit with this I was newly diagnosed with
diabetes and had lost my job in November because of sleep apnea. (I’m also
mentally a hot mess with Ptsd and Depression, and I have mobility issues, but
those have been around for ages.) Mom is in her early 60’s and has a few years
to go until she can get ssi, but she also should be retired by now. She isn’t,
because teaching jobs pay squat and offer squat benefits. My other roomate is
far better off than us, but even then he couldn’t afford to cover the entire
rent increase.
With costs rising and red tape cutting off my food stamps, I
spent the summer trying to get well enough to work and find any benefit or
resource to keep us afloat. I worked on endless content to try and get
something patreon-worthy, I called up government agencies and third party aid,
I fussed at doctors and transit agencies, and I pulled countless times where I
didn’t sleep for over 24 hours because soon, soon, I’d have something that’d bring in money. It was going to be
like every story where the person busts their ass and a miracle happens, but
instead of a thrilling triumph, I got a trip to the ER and surgery. I guess on
the celestial event triggers “things work out” and “heart attack”
are right next to each other.
So now my meds were up to 8 wondrous flavors, with four of
them being absolutely vital to my survival. But I had a date set for a sleep
study, and that meant sometime after October 22nd I’d have the machine that’d
let me get back into the workforce. It would be hard, but there was finally
light at the end of the tunnel. Then to paraphrase my gofundme:
“Back in may we
noticed that the rent check hadn’t been cashed yet, even though it was nearly
time for next month’s rent. We checked back and forth with the bank and the
rental office, and both said things were fine on their end. Still, we didn’t
touch the money, because "just in case”.
Then all the
medical/financial disasters happened.
[…]
Then came last
weekend.
The check that was
“fine” went through, five months later. While we had enough to cover
it, we don’t have enough to cover our current rent of 2575$. Our rent comes due
on the 4th. While we’re trying to work with every charity and housing aid in
the area, many of them are badly funded, and we don’t have much time.
While our rental
office is more than willing to work with us, the problem lies with our third
roommate. If we don’t raise the funds, he’ll have to move out quickly, before
he runs out of money to move at all. Me and my mom can’t afford this apartment
alone. I’m not bringing in any money right now, and mom makes 2400 a month, we
couldn’t even fully cover rent, much less bills or food costs. We would be
homeless, and it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible for mom to
keep her job, and equally difficult for me to maintain my health.
This is a lot of money
to ask on a short notice, but there are no other choices. We’ve tried getting
lines of credit out, and we’re still trying to chase down any form of public
assistance, but at this point I’m the only one who has the time to research,
apply, and try and get something to work.“
Man isn’t that all some hot shit? Sure is!
At this point we have tried nearly every goddamn thing under
the sun: Trying charities, trying government assistance, trying to get loans,
and so here we are- trying to crowdfund. With government housing assistance
having no funding, the section 8 waitlist has been closed since 2008. The same
is true of low-income rental units. Private charities are very easy to donate
to, but getting assistance is meant to be as difficult as possible, and we’re
banging on those doors as hard as possible, but we don’t know if they’ll open
in time. So yeah, you guys. You people
reading this, this is probably how we’re going to survive, if we do.
I know that most of you can’t afford jack, because
statistically you’re likely to be in the same demographic as my crippled,
depressed, queer ass, and we’re not known for being fantastically wealthy. But
if you can even throw five bucks our way, or even reblog this (not like,
reblog), that gets it out to someone who might be able to donate. 500 people
chucking us five bucks? Would get us there safely. I know we’re no longer in
the days where a silky chicken post gets hundreds of thousands of reblogs, but
500 people giving something is doable.
Yooo I don’t suppose @copperbadge or @thebibliosphere could give this a nudge? Friend needs the help and needs it by next Sunday (ie, before the next RFM, otherwise I’d chuck it in there).
Any other reblogs would be great, given the link = won’t be shown in tags problem. I like this human and would like for them not to be homeless right when we can maybe turn some long term issues around. Thanks for listening.
![Steven Donziger @sdonziger@bird.makeup BREAKING: The historic "Cop City" protest movement today forced the city of Atlanta to allow a citizen's vote on the construction of the police complex to go forward. Need 75,000 signatures to get on the ballot in November. The vote will happen; Cop City will not.👊👊 [image] Jun 21, 2023, 21:13 | Steven Donziger @sdonziger@bird.makeup The "Cop City" referendum campaign needs resources to succeed. To support it, click on this link: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/stopcopcityref Jun 21, 2023, 21:27](https://64.media.tumblr.com/12747c2da18703f1fb4089b285be354d/61ddc3c5288ad077-66/s1280x1920/159afee4fb123d3305230c78d412d384919e6840.png)
