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Water fight part 2! I think the girls won this one

Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:

We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.

The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.

At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:

ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.

Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.

I was worried sick because one of my queer friends from high school had moved down there and visited that club. He wasn’t there that night, thankfully. But it was a Hispanic theme night at the club that day, and he was Hispanic.

I highly recommend watching this testimony from Aliya Rahman, the disabled woman who was dragged out of her car and kidnapped by ICE on her way to a doctor appointment in Minneapolis a few weeks ago.

Thank you members, for taking the time to be here today, and thank you staff for making this happen.

My name is Aliya Rahman, and I am a resident of South Minneapolis. I am a Bangladeshi American born in Northern Wisconsin. And I’m a disabled person with autism and a traumatic brain injury.

Not all autistic brains do this, but mine fixates on sounds, numbers, and patterns. And while what the world saw happen to me exactly three weeks ago today on video was a terrible violation it is still nothing compared to the horrific practices I saw inside the Whipple center.

So I am here today with a duty to the people who have not had the privilege of coming home, and I offer this data because these practices must end now.

On January 13th on the way to my 39th appointment at Hennepin County’s traumatic brain injury center, I encountered a traffic jam caused by ICE vehicles and no signs indicating how to get around it. I had not wanted to pull in to a blocked, chaotic intersection, but verbally agreed to do so and rolled down my window after an agent yelled, “Move! I will break your f-ing window!”

His first instruction.

Agents on all sides of my vehicle yelled conflicting threats and instructions that I could not process while watching for pedestrians.

Then, the glass of the passenger side window flew across my face.

I yelled, “I’m disabled!” at the hands grabbing at me and an agent said, “Too late.”

I felt immersed in a pattern, and I thought of Jenoah Donald, an autistic black man killed by the police during a traffic stop in 2021.

I remembered mister Silverio Villegas González, who was killed by ICE in his vehicle last year.

An agent pulled a large combat knife in front of my face, which I thought was for cutting me, and later learned was used to cut off my seat belt. Shooting pain went through my head, neck, and wrists when I hit the ground face first and people leaned on my back.

I felt the pattern, and I thought of mister George Floyd, who was killed four blocks away.

I was carried face down through the street by my cuffed arms and legs while yelling that I had a brain injury and was disabled. I now cannot lift my arms normally.

I was never asked for ID.

Never told I was under arrest.

Never read my rights.

And never charged with a crime.

Approaching the Whipple center, I saw black and brown bodies shackled together, chained together, being marched by yelling agents outdoors. I continued to hear the word “bodies”, because that is how agents referred to us:

“We’re bringing in a body.”

“They’re bringing in bodies 7, 8 at a time, where do I put ‘em?”

“We can’t use that room, there’s already a body in there.”

You have no reason to believe you will make it out alive if you’re already being called a body.

Agents repeatedly had to stop and ask how to do tasks. I received no medical screening, phone call, or access to a lawyer. I was denied a communication navigator when my speech began to slur. Agents laughed as I tried to immobilize my own neck. I asked for my cane and was told no, pulled up by my arms and prodded forward in leg irons by agents laughing and saying, “Walk! You can do it, walk.”

Agents did not know if the facility had a wheelchair.

When I was finally placed in one to be taken to interrogation an agent taunted, “You were driving, right? So your legs do work.”

I pleaded for emergency medical care for over an hour after my vision had become blurry, my heart rate went through the roof, and the pain in my neck and head became unbearable.

It was denied.

When I became unable to speak my cellmate pleaded for me.

The last sounds I remember before I blacked out on the cell floor were my cellmate banging on the door, pleading for a medic, and a voice outside saying, “We don’t wanna step on ICE’s toes.”

When I opened my eyes at Hennepin County’s emergency room, I learned I was brought there to be treated for assault.

The impacts of DHS detention on my physical, mental and financial well-being and safety have been very severe, but I do not deserve more humane treatment than anyone else, US citizen or not. And I am here today with a strong spirit and a duty to the many people who haven’t had the privilege to tell their stories or see their loved ones come home. I am extremely distressed by the pattern that violence from law enforcement has been happening to black and indigenous communities for centuries, and to DHS survivors for over 20 years.

We call ourselves a civilized nation, but we lack rules and accountability around what a person claiming to be law enforcement is permitted to do to another human being.

The short of it: The newly-proposed bill C-34, the "Safe Social Media Act", aims to ban people under 16 from using any social media site that doesn't adequately prove that it's safe for children to use. It also requires chatbots like ChatGPT to "mitigate the risk of harmful content" — though chatbots will notably not be banned for under-16s (which suggests it might be the big AI money that's partially motivating this movement).

https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/safe-social-media-act.html

https://theccf.ca/billc34explained/

Now, this is not inherently a bad idea; I don't have to tell you how dangerous it is for kids to have unrestricted access to the Internet. But we all know where this is going. Whether or not it's a good idea to restrict people under 16 years of age from using social media, in practice this is almost certainly going be enforced either by using an AI-based algorithm to analyze user behavior a la YouTube's age verification system (which is notorious for false positives) or by outright forcing you to upload a scan of your ID (which, to be fair, is strictly illegal as far as I know — for now). This is not speculation — this is what happens time and again whenever a country or jurisdiction implements a policy like this.

Furthermore, censoring so-called "harmful content" is a dangerous attack on freedom of speech. We can't yet be sure that the commission created by this bill won't ban us from simply talking about dangerous topics. Do we want to risk that? And what about the requirement for chatbots to avoid creating harmful content — sure, we shouldn't be using AI anyway, but do we want Google's search summary to get censored if you happen to search something "problematic"?

The bottom line: This is just another attempt by our government to establish further surveillance over all citizens. It's a good idea in principle, but in practice is far too sweeping and invasive.

As always, there are ways we can oppose this right now.

What you can do as a non-Canadian

You can share this post and make your Canadian friends aware of what's going on. Erosion of online privacy is an issue being faced in many countries across the world right now, and we need to stand together to oppose it.

What you can do as a Canadian

You can write to your member of parliament, inform them of your concerns about the bill, and ask them to vote against passing it as it currently stands. You should also write to other important members of the government, such as the Cabinet. In particular, consider writing (politely-worded) emails and/or letters to Marc Miller (who as the Heritage Minister is responsible for online harms legislation), Evan Solomon (the Minister of Digital Innovation), Sean Fraser (the Justice Minister), Mélanie Joly (the Minister of Industry), and of course mister Mark Carney himself.

One hilarious note: As I write this, I can't actually get to the official parl.ca page to view the full legal text of the bill — the website seems to have been inadvertently DDOSed, or at least majorly slowed down, by the sheer number of people trying to access it. That's a good sign, since it shows that this bill is getting widespread attention. Now, I confess that means I am not yet fully informed on this matter. But I will be continuing to educate myself and research what this bill will mean going forward, and I will share important information as it becomes available to me.

I don't yet know of any official petitions against bill C-34, since it's so recent, but I'll post about them when I find them.

yes, i also have a lot of crazy ideas that i believe and i see and hear things that aren't there and sometimes i start freaking out because i think someone close to me died when they're perfectly fine or that someone's coming to kill me or that my pets have been replaced with alien creatures, but i'm also a person with a life and a childhood and friends and i am not a threat to anyone.

and i'm here. on tumblr. on youtube. in real life. i can see and hear what everyone says about people like me. and i'm fucking tired of it.

One day a scientist hands you a poptart and says "eat this". You say "is it full of some kind of fucked up interdimensional poison". The scientist says "eat it or that security guard will tase you and tie you down and make you eat it". You eat the poptart. It is not full of fucked up interdimensional poison, but it is kind of stale. You describe the taste to the scientist and he shrugs and writes something down and you go back to your shitty cell.

I've been incorrectly credited with inventing rotational pseudogravity in colony ships and the "humanity, fuck yeah" subgenre, so this assumption would be par for the course.

(For the record I have never invented anything.)