Opinions

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Prosecutors in the northern Mexico border state of Sonora said Monday tests have confirmed that a badly decayed corpse is that of an Indigenous rights leader who disappeared almost four weeks ago.

The office said DNA tests and fingerprints were used to identify Tomás Rojo Valencia, a leader of the Yaqui indigenous community. His body was found last week near the Yaqui town of Vicam, Sonora.

Rojo Valencia disappeared May 27 following tensions over Yaqui roadblocks protesting gas ducts, water pipelines and railway lines that have been run across their territory without consulting them or giving them much benefit. Rojo Valencia served as the Yaquis’ spokesman during past conflicts over land and water rights.

Phyllis Webstad was six-years-old when the new orange shirt she excitedly chose for her first day of school was stripped off her back. She never saw it again.

It was the early ‘70s and Webstad was the third generation of her family to attend St. Joseph’s Residential School in Williams Lake, B.C. Most people knew it as The Mission.

She was a kid. She didn’t know that merely being born an indigenous child surrendered her to an education system designed to break down her identity.

So today is Orange Shirt day. Where we remember the victims of residential schools (compulsory boarding schools run by the government and religious authorities during the 19th and 20th Centuries with the aim of forcibly assimilating indigenous youth.) Stealing children and giving them to another group, destroying their culture, traumatizing and killing the children are all acts of genocide. The genocide continues today under a slightly different system, the child and family services across the provinces and territories. Just today articles have been published about a child, the body of an indigenous teenager was discovered hidden in the closet of his room in a B.C. care home three days after he was reported missing. I had to double check the date because I have heard this story before. Hamilton indigenous teenager was missing for months, until he was found by another resident. Another coroner’s inquest was called for.

Devon’s case bares similarities to a dozen other files recently reviewed by the chief coroner’s office last year.

After a panel analyzed the deaths of 12 young people in the care of the province’s child welfare system, Dr. Dirk Huyer concluded poor communication between key players risked leaving kids without the care they need.

Two thirds of the children whose cases were reviewed were Indigenous, most died by suicide, and all contended with mental health struggles while living away from home.

Denman Island, BC, June 30, 2017

from an LA lawyer

the state laws

article from women’s law abt finding lawyers trained in this area

big long list of resources

free crisis line for victims of non-consensual porn

even more info

“I don’t know who needs to hear this today but there is no such thing as a “leaked nude”! (obvs don’t mean colloquially) 1. if your nude is behind a paywall like onlyfans, it is: copyright infringement and onlyfans will fight for you. 2. if your nude was taken or sent in private, that is: revenge porn, and as of 2019, is illegal in most states and countries where social media is prominent.

in 2019 one of my girls came to me and said that her ex was threatening to leak her nudes. she played me his voicemail and I fucking laughed. homeboy left his full name and threat on a recorded message.

usually I’m not very supportive of the police if that’s not obvious (I made this decision based on the people involved and didn’t put anyone in danger) but in this situation I told her to call. she filed completely over the phone, never met with an officer and he never saw her face (she also said that he didn’t make any remarks or judgements on her which was important to her). that officer called the dumbass and told him that he was facing a felony in his state. basically, the dumbass wet himself and never contacted her again.

Japan “boasts” of a whopping 99% conviction rate in criminal cases. This is statistically horseshit, and the only way to “achieve” such a feat is through a lot of lying and through the assumption that, because someone’s been arrested, then that person must be guilty.

The way Japanese law enforcement manages to convict someone, even for minor offences, is to hold them in cells under constant interrogation until they break down and sign a legal confession. The punishment can range from paying a fine to jail time, but the thing is that indefinite detention is a clear violation of human rights. Often they do it without citing any charges. Lawyers can’t access their clients. The police do not make their methods transparent. Why do you think Ace Attorney has you playing on the side of the defense? Because prosecutors and the police often work together to ensure a conviction as quickly as possible. The simple act of being arrested often means you’re fucked. And that’s not even getting into what that means for your social image and employment prospects. Japan also has the death penalty. 

That quirky news report about Japanese crime being so nonexistent that cops don’t have anything to do? A total myth. Police make up honeypot traps over trivialities like stolent bikes to amuse themselves while they ignore cases of domestic violence, train chikan, and theft. The police turn a blind eye to organised crime and corruption (the seedy nature of pachinko parlours is an open secret)—often they have close relations with yakuza, and a lot of people say that yakuza aren’t a problem now, but what isn’t a problem about people who make money off child prostitution, loan sharking, and the drug trade?

What about the fact that you can’t film anything if the police don’t want you to? They can totally seize footage related to a detention and destroy it if it doesn’t paint them in a good light. A man was suffocated to death by an officer in front of a police box and the camerographer who filmed the incident was immediately told to turn the footage in to the police. 

What about that Nissan exec who was jailed? Sure, no sympathy for corporate types, that’s fine, but isn’t it convenient that pretty much the only high profile arrest was of the Brazilian born French-Lebanese man? Did I mention that the police are racist and xenophobic? If you’re a Nigerian tout in Roppongi the police will absolutely keep a closer eye on you than on the middle aged salaryman groping schoolgirls on the train. 

Not convinced yet? How about the fact that leftist activity and group organisation immediately puts people under scrutiny? Does anyone who called the Japanese police “wholesome” want to talk to the Zengakuren student activists who were attacked by them?

Like, it’s good that in Japan there’s a lesser chance of dying at their hands, but I’m honestly baffled that the first reaction people had when reading about them was to fawn and coo instead of getting suspicious over such positive headlines. But the reality is that cops aren’t your friends anywhere. They exist to uphold the status quo, not to really protect people—but that’d be too much of a bummer for the commenters on this thread, apparently. Taking the time to actually read about Japanese police would go against their image of Japan as this desexualised, neutered country where absolutely nothing bad ever happens. 

(Before someone wants to call me a liar, I have sources: 

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20180929/p2a/00m/0na/002000c

https://litci.org/en/japanese-police-harass-and-assault-zengakuren-student-activists/ 

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-07-15-mn-142-story.html

https://www.jstor.org/stable/30209411?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/12/05/forced-to-confess

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201812230022.html

https://elibrary.law.psu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1094&context=psilr

as of 22nd April 2021 we have about 16.3M total cases and a death toll of 187K . Only about 1.4% of the population has been fully vaccinated yet.

on top of that, we've been facing a major shortage in oxygen supply (to the point where the govt has decided to airlift oxygen from other nations), a shortage in hospital beds and services. The numbers keep rising and with the spread of the new strain, the scenario has transformed into something deadlier than ever.

our infrastructures are falling apart and we need all the help possible at this very moment so the nation can be atleast saved when there's still a chance. I've already lost two of my friends, a teacher and family to the second wave and I can only imagine how much worse it can get. so i would like to take this opportunity to link in some donation posts below–

> Here is Akshaya Patra's Covid-19 relief service— help provide meals and packed grocery to those in need

Getting the word out at this time of crisis matters.

I've been on testosterone for 3 years, and frequently people have made comments about how it must be hard because now I can never have children. And for a long time, I would say that yes, it is hard to know that, because my sole regret about going on testosterone was how I'd never be able to get pregnant (as my doctor told me). But now I know that's not true-- transgender men, including those who have been on testosterone for many years, are capable of having healthy, happy babies. I see many posts on here talking about how testosterone should not be used as a contraceptive (true!) and resources for seeking an abortion when you're transmasculine, but I don't see anyone encouraging or providing information to those who may have medically transitioned but still want to pursue pregnancy.

Here is a Guide to Transmasculine Fertility, complete with several "lesson" sections on various topics such as assisted reproduction options and aging fertility rates, written by verified physicians and Trystan Reese, a transgender man who has pregnancy experience. This is an excellent and thorough resource, and not the only article that the site has on transgender pregnancy and parenting. In my opinion, this is the best resource on the list, so it's first.

Here are personal accounts of transmasculine pregnancies from Evan Hempel, Jason Barker, Thomas Beatie, Trevor MacDonald, and there are so, so many more just a Google search away.

Here is a Heathline article that discusses the issue of social stigma around transmasculine pregnancies, and how to combat it.

Here is a (short) NYT article about a reproductive endocrinologist's (supportive) perspective on transgender pregnancies.

Here is a list of resources that covers much of the above, and more.

Many of us are told when we begin testosterone that it can impact fertility, destroy our reproductive organs, etc. and not only is that blatantly untrue, but it's wildly harmful to those of us who want to be pregnant. We deserve this information, we deserve to know our options, we deserve to decide for ourselves what we want to do with our bodies. Yes, transgender men who want to be pregnant are certainly in the minority. But too many of us think we're infertile or are told that we are by doctors who don't know enough about transgender healthcare, leading to irreversible decisions that do render us infertile (such as hysterectomies). While this is aimed at transgender men, it is also worth mentioning that this applies to anyone and everyone who engages in HRT, mastectomy, etc. including nonbinary people, butches, genderfluid people and so on.

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans react to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

I think that what we’re experiencing now, as a reaction, is a resurgence of individual communities. More often than not these days, I see that individual fandoms or groups within fandoms have a Discord or other place to talk away from Tumblr.

I think that may also explain why some people tend to like more than they reblog. Reblogging means leaving yourself open to (often extremist/purity-motivated) criticism of your choices - or leaves the OP open to similar criticism from your followers, with you as the involuntary middleman whose reblog made that connection possible.

Resources and Donations:

https://www.advancingjustice-aajc.org/

https://www.asianamericanadvocacyfund.org/

http://cpacs.org/

https://www.asianmhc.org/about-us

https://secure.qgiv.com/for/apfund/mobile

https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/support-georgias-asian-american-community/

https://www.napawf.org/donate

https://www.apalanet.org/

we have this app called toogoodtogo where restaurants/cafes/bakeries/hotels and so on sell their leftovers for really cheap to reduce foodwaste

i got all of this for €4 from starbucks

I used to do community service at a community breakfast, we’d go to the local Safeway and get all their stale bread, the local bakery for their stale baked goods and whatnot.

It's also not like the knowledge of how to can is useful when you need the food NOW- it is food preservation after all. You have to prep before disaster strikes, not self recriminate once there's been a flood, deep cold, earthquake, wildfire, etc

Canning is definitely something you do during the months of summer abundance, but now is a good time to start learning if you're curious.

Anyway, have some reputable resources for learning how to can:

Covering the basics (including food safety): https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_home.html

A good place to go to learn and get recipes about canning is through the extension office network. Here's a link to mine with a bunch of recipes: https://extension.wsu.edu/foodsafety/food-preservation-canning/

Ball is also well regarded for their recipes, which makes sense, as they want you to buy their stuff: https://www.freshpreserving.com/recipes?fdid=recipes

Do you or somebody you know have PCOS? You are banned from international womens athletics because you are supposedly in posession of an unreasonable advantage in sports.

Folks disqualified for hyper-androgenism in womens athletics.

Francine Niyonsaba

Caster Semenya

Dutee Chand

Margaret Wambui

And more

-

Why are those disqualified overwhelmingly black and brown? Because testing is case by case when an athletes performance “raises suspicions”. They overwhelmingly test athletes of colour, for being too fast and not meeting white expectations of femininity.

i saw this on tiktok, if you’re canadian u shld watch this + sign this petition https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/Sign/e-3009 and reblog to spread the word!