My Life is Disneyland...

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Cities also need to be shittable.

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my dudes (gn). i hate to be this person but those were the same people who wrote for the previous games as well. especially for inquisition. minus dgaider, ig. which is a good thing, actually.

First let me start with a disclaimer that I am speaking generally here. Of course both the U.S. and Europe are both massive and diverse places containing hundreds of millions of people, and a lot of regional differences. Neither the U.S. or Europe are a monolith (although a lot of people on the internet speak of both places as a monolith, which I wish people would stop doing, since neither are).

I could be wrong about this, since I don't live in the U.S., and haven't visited everywhere in Europe. But between where I have visited in the U.S., and where I have visited / lived in Europe, and from what I know from my friends in the U.S. and friends in other European countries, I get the feeling that overall the U.S. has stricter disability access laws than a lot of places in Europe do, especially in regard to building codes.

Of course there are exceptions, I know New York city is abhorrently hostile in its design towards anyone elderly and/or disabled. Although when I visited New York city it really just felt on par with a lot of major European cities with how abhorrently inaccessible it was.

One example of this is that recently I saw a Reddit discussion where a USAmerican vacationing in France was surprised at how many staircases didn't have handrails, because according to this man handrails are required by law in the U.S.

The comments were all Europeans having an absolute field day with this. Pretty much all of the comments were some variation of "I can't believe Americans are too stupid and lazy to use the stairs without a handrail 🤣🤣🤣 what's wrong with you fat lazy stupid Americans that you can't even use stairs without a handrail 🤣🤣🤣 thank GOD I was born in Europe where I was just taught how to walk up and down the stairs on my own and don't need a handrail like a lazy fat stupid American 🤣🤣🤣"

A few people tried to gently point out that this was about accessibility for elderly and disabled people, and it's not cool to laugh at building codes that are about accessibility, but those commenters were usually shut down with some variation of "yeah well in MY European country if someone is disabled or becomes elderly we either move to a more accessible building or we modify our home to be more accessible, we don't sit around whining like a bunch of Americans that our building isn't already accessible 🙄"

Which is, such a cruel way to talk about accessibility. Why wouldn't disabled and elderly people deserve the same access to a building as anyone else? Are elderly and disabled people not allowed to visit friends and family? Anyone could get hit by a car today, and after that struggle with going up and down stairs without the use of a handrail for the next several months, years, possibly the rest of your life. It's so easy to feel smug when you can easily trot up and down the stairs without a handrail, but so cruel to be unwilling to consider anyone who struggles with stairs should maybe be allowed access to the same places as you.

Honestly when I go on vacation abroad with my elderly + disabled mother, it's often easier to go to the U.S. with her than other places in Europe, because the U.S. does tend to be more accessible (in my experience, and except for New York city ofc) making going around to different public places with my mom generally a lot easier than somewhere like France or the Netherlands.

The USA has something called the Americans With Disabilites Act (ADA), and apparently it works fairly well. An American in my WhatsApp group went to a figure skating championship in Toronto a while back and was stunned that the arena didn’t have wheelchair access for spectators. Because an American arena would have.

Not everything about the USA is awful. Not everything about Canada and Europe is great.

Also, I live in Vancouver. We didn’t have a subway system until 1986, that’s when the Skytrain was finally built. Several of the Skytrain stations were originally built with no elevators. People with wheelchairs were expected to enter or exit the system at a different station that did have wheelchair access. In 1986.

The system wasn’t built in 1896 or 1926, when wheelchairs were a newfangled idea. It was built in 1986. British Columbian Rick Hansen’s Man In Motion world wheelchair tour started in 1985 (in Vancouver).

Or well, the Skytrain was opened in 1986. Let’s say the plans for it were finalized by 1983, since it would’ve taken a few years to build. In 1983, there was already a substantial disability rights movement in Canada, but several Skytrain stations didn’t have elevators anyway, presumably because it was cheaper.

Naturally, it eventually became politically unacceptable to make wheelchair users (and people with strollers, and people with canes or walkers, and people with suitcases) skip a station because they hadn’t bothered to put an elevator in that station.

So those stations had to be retrofitted at vast expense to make them wheelchair-accessible. It probably would’ve been cheaper to just build them accessible from the start, in retrospect. But we didn’t have a Made In Canada version of the ADA, so it didn’t happen.

Also, wheelchair accessibility does not only help wheelchair users. It also helps people with babies or toddlers in strollers, people using walkers, crutches, or canes, travellers with heavy suitcases, elderly people, etc, etc. I take the Skytrain several days a week, and I see all those people taking the elevator instead of the stairs or escalators.

The fight for the ADA was long, and bitter, and every single line of it is thanks to decades tireless activism work. Evangelical religious groups widely opposed the ADA because they believed that disability (and especially particularly disabling conditions, such as being HIV+) was God’s will, and wanted disabled people to be reliant on (religious) charity. Most large corporations and business interest groups opposed the ADA, because complying with accessibility requirements might hurt their bottom line. The US Chamber of Commerce came out swinging against it. The National Federation of Independent Business called it "a disaster for small business" and fear-mongered about it shutting down mom & pop shops and throwing hard-working American out of work. Greyhound Bus Lines literally testified before Congress that they were ~so concerned~ about the costs of requiring disability accommodations that they believed that passing the ADA would be tantamount to denying all rural people access to any buses, because apparently having to install a few fold-out ramps and fold-up seats would instantly bankrupt every extant bus company.

The bill was trapped in limbo for months. It looked hopeless. A lot of people thought it couldn’t happen – that the lobbies against disability rights and the disabled were simply too strong.

And in response, hundreds of disabled protesters showed up in Washington, DC and crawled up the steps of the Capitol.

But whether or not that is true depends on whether the federal government is willing to actually enforce it, and they weren't.

And so a group of disability advocates led by Judy Heumann and others occupied a government building in San Francisco for 26 days, and managed to put enough pressure on the Federal government to get Section 504 officially in place. (They were assisted by the Black Panther Party and others.)

This is a man who is VIOLENTLY aware that when it comes to conservatives, he is a Muslim first, a Brown Man second, an Immigrant third, a Socialist fourth, and a human a very distant fifth, if considered at all. He was also a young adult during the Obama Years and will have seen Republicans rip Obama to shreds for wearing a tan suit instead of a dark one and use literally ANY excuse they could to try and degrade his image.

Steven J. Demetriou, guest 92 of 93 as photographed by Backgrid

He is the executive chair of Amentum, a company that provides engineering and technology to the USA’s army and nuclear programs. They operate the most test and training ranges of any contractor if their site is to be believed.

It appears they run the East Montana concentration camp, the largest in the USA. While much of the abuse, including sexual and physical abuse, occurred under the camp’s previous contractor, Acquisition Logistics, the ACLU has confirmed Amentum was WORKING AS SUBCONTRACTORS at the East Montana camp during this time. Amentum's current role as sole contractor from March onwards proves no less deadly, with 2 overdoses with the intent to commit suicide from inhumane conditions. Representative Escobar confirmed nothing has changed since Amentum’s takeover. Lawyers representing prisoners report being unable to reach their clients.

The following conditions are BY DESIGN, as "Guards tell people detained at Camp East Montana who complain about conditions that if they do not like the conditions, they should self-deport." Civil Detention Centers are not supposed to be punitive. This is only a civil detention center on paper. It is a concentration camp.

The ACLU lists: I already linked this but I'm doing it again bc if you read one source, it should be this one.

Medical neglect, including for people with pregnancies, diabetes, cancer, and HIV.

Severe beatings. One man was beaten to death for requesting his asthma medication.

solitary confinement

unclean water

Tuberculosis and Measles outbreaks

Limited to no sunlight

no or limited hygiene products

rotten food, not enough food, no special diets for medical conditions

SEXUAL ASSAULT

No ventilation in a DESERT leading to lung damage

Not enough toilets, overflow often, whole tent smells of urine and feces

No privacy to use said toilet

Threats and beatings for those that refuse to sign deportation papers, sometimes to places they are NOT FROM

No activities, punished for attempting to make art from recycled items like cracker boxes, can only practice own religion at guards' discretion

no dental care. This is likely universal across US concentration camps. Note Emmanuel Damas, the Haitian immigrant that died from a dental infection due to lack of care

Unable to receive legal representation if not already represented

LOCATED ON FORMER JAPANESE DETENTION CAMP BECAUSE TIME IS A FUCKING CIRCLE

Taylor Swift's guest is directly responsible for these. This is the LARGEST CONCENTRATION CAMP IN THE US, made to hold 5000 people. He's not just any ICE contractor he is the biggest and baddest. At least this will get people talking about just HOW bad this camp is.