[stay in your coma]

Heres a not so friendly reminder, as an lgbt metis person, i dont give a single fuck what your blog is themed or if this is too painful for you to look at. Reblog this post. Reblog this post with the sources of the 751 children who were found.

Your compliance and silence as well as the compliance and silence of your ancestors is what allowed these schools to open and kill first nations children. The children of MY people.

Dont follow me if you cant reblog this post or the one with sources to your political blog or your most popular blog. Add trigger warnings if you must but if your political blog is only focused on the harms you personally face like being lgbt then you need to see some bigger pictures and stop being afraid of angering your racist mutural or actually saying some shit about racism. If you can reblog some antifa graphics or add blm to your bio to be a surface level ally, you can reblog some sources on the genocide first nations people faced and still face today.

They were CHILDREN.

I’d like to add this photo I took last night in Victoria of the statue of Captain Cook. Though I myself am not indigenous, I 100% agree that these murderers, kidnappers and rapists shouldn’t have huge statues and plaques that decorate them and say how “great” they were.

Here’s another photo of the legislative assembly from yesterday. Later on there were more items, candles and signs at the memorial, as well as a big poster with 1505 painted on it but I didn’t get a picture

People need to see this. Not just quickly glance at the photos and keep on scrolling. They need to see this.

I went to a “Cancel Canada Day” event and burst into tears - not because I was surprised to learn of the unmarked graves (survivors told us they were there. Our government pushed it aside, and we let them), but because seeing all the people gathered in mourning drove it home: They. Were. Children.

This is my country’s legacy - and it’s not history. The last schools closed during my lifetime. My Father went to school with students who lived at the local residential school, after it was changed to a boarding house (read: holding centre) for indigenous youth who went to local schools.

i like them a lot ,,,

people often talk about either butch or guillotina, but not together — which makes me sad because i think their relationship may have been quite interesting.

butch raised guillotina and then helped the person who killed her ,, i imagine even he feels SOMETHING about the situation. Especially considering guillotina had a grave, it seems Butch buried her?

some WIP i finally decided to finish

This is worrying. If you aren't worried, you aren't paying attention. This should scare you even if you believe that all porn is ontologically evil and should be banned. First of all, who gets to decide what "porn" is, and how much do you trust the judgement of random payment processors at Visa and Mastercard? How long is it until SFW selfies of trans women start getting taken down in the name of "removing porn," like we've already seen happen on Tumblr? Second of all, when does it stop just being about porn? If these companies get comfortable wielding this kind of power, it's only a matter of time until they start using it for explicit political censorship or otherwise arbitrarily striking down random businesses they don't like. In the worst-case scenario, free speech could effectively die across the globe without a single law having to change anywhere.

Granted, this toy doesn't suspect it'll actually get that bad, but the possibility is there if things go particularly poorly and the US government winds up siding with these corporations. And given the current state of the US government... Things aren't looking great. This toy does not foresee anything good coming from payment processors learning that they can get away with arbitrarily censoring random businesses, nor does it foresee anything good coming from investors (especially ones with government ties) learning that.

The bottom line is that damn near every business on the planet relies on these companies to make money, and if these companies decide to cut ties with a business, then that business is instantly dead. The only preventative measures that can be taken are establishing crypto, physical cash, and/or direct bank transfer payment schemes, but most consumers aren't going to be willing to interact with those. Getting dropped by Visa/Mastercard/etc. would still be a death sentence, just a slower one.

And while Collective Shout is the group who convinced these companies to start censoring Steam and itch.io, trying to directly fight them would not prove productive. They're small game, hardly worth the energy spent thinking about them. What we need to be focused on is not individual anti-porn ideologues, but rather the fact that these corporations worth hundreds of billions of dollars hold more power than most governments, and that they wield this power arbitrarily with no oversight, no regulation, and no accountability.

So what can we do, then? Well, there's a few things:

Harass/annoy these payment processors just the same as Collective Shout does, but we do it louder and over a longer timescale. We have more numbers than they do, and if we get enough people to keep at it for long enough, we can definitely get their attention. Emails are worthless, as they're easy to filter out and ignore. Focus your attention on phone calls and physical mail. When calling, make sure your call takes as long as possible, and if you're up to the task, keep calling them back over and over. Really spam the hell out of them.

Do the same thing to your local politicians, telling them that we want government action against these payment processors ASAP and that this is going to become a substantial part of our political identities going forward that will decide how we vote.

Support the ACLU petition. Unlike a change.org petition, this is backed by an actual group of lawyers whose whole schtick is raising hell about various causes and bringing things all the way to the supreme court when possible.

This is a fight that will be won by whoever is more persistently annoying. This is how most politics seems to go, truthfully. Luckily for us, people who grew up on the internet tend to have a lot of experience annoying people on purpose over large timescales just for the thrill of it. If you were a forum troll as a kid, harness that drive and use it to make a corporate executive want to kill themself.