Dinga, Troll Protection Warrior

🔥 With your help, we passed Title II net neutrality protections. Now we need to defend it.🔥

On December 14 the FCC will vote on Commissioner Pai’s plan to repeal Title II rules. This week he tried to justify that decision with a “myth busting” explainer where he makes a lot of sweeping claims he doesn’t think you’ll fact check. 

So let’s go through his big points:

❌ Mr. Pai claims ISPs won’t block access or throttle content

These are the real facts. Before Title II, the internet was so “free and open” that… 

Comcast blocked P2P file sharing services (EFF).

AT&T blocked Skype from iPhones (Fortune) and, later, wanted FaceTime users to pay for a more expensive plan (Freepress).

MetroPCS blocked all streaming video except YouTube (Wired).

In today’s media market where the same huge companies make and deliver content, Commissioner Pai wants us to trust that corporations won’t use their dominance to bury competitive content or services. 

❌ Mr. Pai claims Title II keeps ISPs from building new networks

Here’s another claim Commissioner Pai doesn’t want you to fact check, but:

AT&T’s own CEO told investors that the company would deploy more fiber optic networks in 2016 than 2015 when the FCC passed Title II protections (Investor call transcript). 

Charter’s CEO said “Title II, it didn’t really hurt us; it hasn’t hurt us” (Ars Technica).  

And Comcast actually increased investment in their network by 10% in Q1 of this year (Ars). 

❌ Mr. Pai claims repealing Title II won’t hurt competition

As we mentioned above, ISPs tried to interfere with the services their customers could access and courts had to step in to stop them.

The FCC tried to craft net neutrality rules in 2010 called the Open Internet Order but the ISPs sued and won. The courts told the FCC that the only way to guarantee a free and open internet was using their Title II authority. Without those protections, any of these things would be legal:

Your ISP launches a streaming video service and starts throttling other streaming services until they’re unusable.

Your phone company cuts a deal with a popular music streaming service so it doesn’t count towards your data cap but lowers your overall data limit. If a better service comes along (or your favorite artist releases new tracks somewhere else) you can’t use it without incurring huge data fees.

A billionaire buys your ISP and blocks access to news sites that challenge their ideology. 

Repealing Title II would be like letting a car company own the roads and banning a competitor from the highways.

❌ Mr. Pai claims there won’t be fast lanes and slow lanes

Let’s break this down: We won’t have fast lanes and slow lanes, we’ll have “priority access” and…non-priority access? Well gosh.

🚨 Please help us protect Title II one more time! 🚨

This week we co-signed a letter with more than 300 other companies—businesses Mr. Pai gleefully ignores—urging the FCC to retain the Title II internet protections. Now we need you.

Go to 👉 Battle For The Net 👈  to start a call with your representatives in Congress. Tell them to publicly support Title II protections. 

The FCC votes on December 14.

We’re only powerful when we work together.

Oh, also: that post about automatically unfollowing the #net neutrality tag—it’s not true. It’s really not. That’s not who we are. Whatever happened, we haven’t been able to reproduce it. We tried. A lot.

But if it were true—which it’s not, we feel compelled to say again—THAT’S EXACTLY WHY YOU SHOULD CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES and demand a free, open, and neutral internet.

rest stops on highways

trails by the highway just out of earshot of traffic

schools during breaks

those little beaches right next to ferry docks

your friends living room once everybody but you is asleep

the lighting section of home depot

A lot of these places are called liminal spaces - which means they are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.

The other spaces feel weird because our brains are hard-wired for context - we like things to belong to a certain place and time and when we experience those things outside of the context our brains have developed for them, our brains are like NOPE SHIT THIS ISN’T RIGHT GET OUT ABORT ABORT. Schools not in session, empty museums, being awake when other people are asleep - all these things and spaces feel weird because our brain is like “I already have a context for this space and this is not it so it must be dangerous.” Our rational understanding can sometimes override that immediate “danger” impulse but we’re still left with a feeling of wariness and unease. 

Batman

Never

Bothered

Attacking

The

Roots

Of

Social

Problems

WHAT THE HELL KIND OF BATMAN HAVE YOU BEEN WATCHING?

Fake geeks, I swear to god…

The best part is that most of the lore, especially Batman: The Animated Series, gets to a point in Batman’s career when everyone asks the question of why someone would rob a bank in Gotham when they know that if they approached Batman, and coincidentally Bruce Wayne, they could get the help they needed.

BEGONE

BEGONE

IN THE FIFTH GIF HE PATS THE CUPS WITH HIS LITTLE PAWS TO MAKE SURE IT’S IN. BRB, DYING.

Chuckie, for most of the series is raised by a single father

Angelica’s mother was a high ranking corporate executive

Phil and Lil’s mom was a feminist 

She also breastfed them (which the show actually depicted)

Tommy is half-Jewish and the show actually explored this part of his heritage

Counting Stars - Nujabes