I love life, and everything about it ;) I'll try everything once no matter what, otherwise you'll never know what you're missing right? been to hell, and they sent me back. True story, if I like you I'll tell you the details of my visit ;) I'm also 32, if you're curious. Some things I post may be NSFW, so if you're under 18 please go elsewhere. Living in the PDX area now and loving every minute of it.
Is this what you guys think it means when GMO comes up in conversation?
Do you know what else is a GMO?
Dogs. Literally ALL dogs have had their genetics modified to make them more docile, loyal, trusting, energetic, obedient ect.
Ears of corn used to be the size of your thumb. Through selective ‘breeding’ we chose the strains of corn that were the biggest, fastest growing, most resilient ect. Ect.
THAT is a GMO. I don’t know where the idea that genetic modification meant they’re injecting your food stuffs with chemicals to change its DNA. That’s not how it works.
However, they ARE spraying your veggies with pesticides and that is something you should be worried about.
Companies like Monsanto are evil. But not because they are breeding crops to feed more people. But because they’re monopolizing the farming market, sueing farmers who share a geographic area and have some of the same strains of crops in their fields because of unavoidable cross pollination and lying about their business practices.
This is Normal Borlaug. In 1942 he received his Ph. D in plant pathology and genetics. In Mexico, he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease resistant varieties of wheat. A genetically modified food. He introduced these to Mexico, Pakistan and India, resulting in double the wheat yields in a 5 year span. In 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for saving one billion lives from starvation, and contributing to world peace through increasing the world food supply.
This, a thousand fucking times this. Privilege is spouting and spreading pseudo-science bullshit you saw on your Facebook feed or on Twitter because unlike people in drought and famine prone areas of the world, you have the option to do just that. Those other parts of the world that don’t have the benefit of a food surplus and can’t pick and choose what they eat depend on GMOs to not die of starvation or watch their children waste away.
I despise Monsanto as much as the next person and if they ever go out of business, I’ll be the first to dance a jig, but condemning GMOs just because one megacorp is a pile of shitbags is beyond idiotic. If scientists can create new strains of seeds that can withstand disease, pests, all while yielding more foodstuff, then we should be throwing our support behind them.
I always laugh when people say “there are chemicals in my food!” because buddy…. you are chemicals. People are literally made of organic compounds, which are… chemical compounds with carbon in ‘em. YOU ARE THE CHEMICALS
I for one welcome multi crop per season, drought resistant staple crops like rice with vitamin A and iron, so people don’t starve, go blind or get anemic.
Cereal with vitamins A, D and C (aka GMOs) so kids don’t suffer scurvy as they started to suffer in Orange County, CA because they didn’t consume enough vitamin C.
Kids (particularly young kids) of vegetarians are at risk of kwashikor and anemia from not consuming enough protein and iron without GMOs, or do you want to try feeding a kid who likes neither peanuts or spanish either of those things?
Monsanto is a bad business model with terminator plants (plants that don’t reseed) and umteen thousand patents and Bayer-Monsanto is a nightmare already happening and we should all fight it and anything else that uses the same bad business model. However that doesn’t mean the GMOs themselves are bad.
Potential uses for GMOs that woud be super helpful. Flood and drought resistant rice and wheat. Plant in Bangladesh and Pakistan, two countries that experience this bi-extreme problem every year.
Multi crop quinoa - grow enough so developed countries aren’t artificially raising the price higher than Bolivians who eatthis as their staple crop can afford.
Low water rooibos tea. South Africa, where rooibos tea is grown, is now experiencing an extreme drought. Given the drought, many poorer people might now be turning to less than clean sources where they can find water and given the lack of tea, might just drink it rather than boiling it first (a major plus of tea).
Low water wheat and other crops. It would be awesome if we could turn the growing deserts into food growing deserts, particularly as climate change continues to advance the areas that get little water. That way Kenya and Somalia could have food despite more severe droughts and that way people can start growing crops in deserts.
so like I get, you know, power and malice and cruelty were ‘poured’ into the rings, but like. what did they actually put in those things. what fuckin gold gives a ring malice. why did the elves only get three.
I’M SORRY BUT I’M LAUGHING THE RING GIVES THE BIG BAD GUY LIKE DARK MAGIC AND A DEMON ARMY TO CONTROL BUT EESEELDOOR PUTS IT ON AND HE JUST TURNS INVISIBLE
bet they don’t mention his fireworks. There should be a verse about them
AW. AW. CUZ LIKE. I GUESS GANDALF WAS THIS BIG FAMOUS WIZARD OR WHATEVER BUT THE HOBBITS ARE THE ONES WHO KNEW HIM. THEY WERE HIS FAM. HE WAS THEIRS. AW. STOP THIS.
I’m suddenly finding myself wondering whether it’ll be Frodo or Aragorn who chucks the ring into the lava pit because it’s all like Frodo’s destiny or whatever but surely at some point there’s gonna be some symbolic scene where Aragorn is faced with the challenge of the ring and proves he’s stronger than his father or grandfather or whatever
you know in a modern AU these two would be the reluctant roommates who actually get along really well and always share the couch and use the shared space to kick each other when they talk about awkward things they pretend they don’t wanna talk about and whenever they go out Boromir ‘wingmans’ Aragorn even though Aragorn insists, every time, that he really doesn’t wanna be wingmanned, he’s quite happy single thank you, no Boromir stop, no, no I don’t wanna play have you met Arag- hi Tracy so nice to meet you
a) I fucking KNEW IT he’s going the dumb self-sacrificing route and Aragorn is fucking letting him????
b) SAM LOVES YOU YOU MORON TALK TO HIM
c) you’ve spent how much time going out of your way to protect your favourite hobbit and you’re just gonna let him run the rest of the way on his own?? have you forgot about the giant murdery fiery eye??? LOOK AFTER YOUR HOBBIT ARAGORN
And you thought Instagram's policy on nipples was ignorant
One week ago, the worst possible legislation curtailing free speech online passed and sex censorship bill FOSTA-SESTA is on its way to be signed into law by Trump.
Hours after the announcement, everything from the mere discussion of sex work to client screening and safe advertising networks began getting systematically erased from the open internet. Thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of women, LGBTQ people, gay men, immigrants, and a significant number of people of color lost their income. Pushed out of safe online spaces and toward street corners. So were any and all victims of sex trafficking that law enforcement might’ve been able to find on the open internet.
The Senate has passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA, and tacked-on FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act), by a vote of 97–2. Lawmakers did not fact-check the bill’s claims, research the religious neocons behind it, nor did they listen to constituents. Significant organizations, including the Department of Justice, ACLU, EFF, and more had assembled to object to the bill both publicly and in letters to elected officials. In the process, law professors and anti-trafficking groups, along with sex work organizations, unearthed the bill’s many alarming legal, constitutional, and human rights disqualifications.
It’s dubbed the “anti-trafficking” bill for the internet, but it’s really an anti-sex sledgehammer. The bill removes protection for websites under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and makes sites and services liable for hosting what it very, very loosely defines as sex trafficking and “prostitution” content. FOSTA-SESTA puts into law that sex work and sex trafficking are the same thing, and makes discussion and advertising part of the crime. Its blurry interpretation of sex and commerce, as well as the bill’s illogical, incorrect conflation of sex trafficking and sex work is straight out of a bad movie.
If only the politicians who voted this Morality in Media (NCOSE) mess into law had fact-checked it with Freedom Network USA, “the largest coalition of experts and advocates providing direct services to to survivors of human trafficking in the U.S.“ Freedom Network unequivocally states that protecting the rights of sex workers, and not conflating them with trafficking victims, is critical to the prevention of trafficking. They also have the data to back up the fact that “more people are trafficked into labor sectors than into commercial sex.”
It’s already an unmitigated disaster for free speech in America. Which was, of course, predicted. The Technology and Marketing Law Blog wrote that there’s no mistaking that FOSTA-SESTA violates the First Amendment; it plainly stated that “this statute implicates constitutionally protected speech.”
It’s unconstitutional, but the damage is already being done. Despite the fact that FOSTA-SESTA isn’t even law yet – it could take anywhere from 90 days to until 2019 to take effect – online companies, always dangerously prudish with their algorithms, or hypocritical with their free speech rhetoric, appear to be in a rush to proverbially herd sex workers (and all us people who talk about sex for a living) out of the airlock into places where no one can hear us scream.
Safety resources disappear overnight
Websites are removing content and communities wholesale, the result of FOSTA-SESTA making safer working conditions more difficult by criminalizing digital conversations about sex work, screening tools and discussions about how to be safe doing it.
By way of its ambiguity, FOSTA-SESTA has begun the largest wave of censorship the open internet may ever see.
Craigslist removed its entire Personals section. All these amazing moments can never happen again.
As some may recall, Craigslist already voluntary closed its Erotic Services section in 2010 under pressure from conservative groups. This is despite a study from Baylor and West Virginia Universities, which found that Craigslist’s erotic services page directly reduced female homicides in the US by 17 percent, “principally because sex workers were able to use the free advertising service to move into safer indoor environments and screen clients more carefully.“ Request for comment to Craigslist and our queries asking why Personals was removed ahead of the bill’s signing were not responded to by time of publication.
Within days, Reddit removed entire communities. Notably, its r/escorts and r/sugardaddy subreddits. We asked Reddit for comment about its pre-emptive removal of those subreddits, and how that lines up with the company’s controversial philosophies regarding freedom of speech, but did not receive a response by press time.
Right now, sites and safety resources are falling like dominoes. In short order, sex work networks NightShift, CityVibe, and furry personals site Pounced shut down entirely. Sites that facilitated safety in sex work including The Erotic Review, VeryfyHim, Hung Angels, YourDominatrix, and Yellow Pages shut down their discussion boards, advertising boards, and community forums. Other sites, like MyFreeCams, have changed their policies to ban any talk about transactions of any kind.
FOSTA-SESTA’s timing puts a dark spin on recent Terms enforcement by Google Drive and changes with Microsoft products.
On the Survivors Against Sesta shutdown list of services, growing every day, Google Drive is listed as “deleting explicit content and/or locking out users.“ Google declined to comment on the record, but Engadget was assured via email from a source with knowledge of the situation that the enforcement wave on Drive has nothing to do with FOSTA-SESTA.
Similarly, Microsoft released a Terms update this week that got the company put on the FOSTA-SESTA censorship list as well. A spokesperson for Microsoft told Engadget in an email that the changes are not related to FOSTA. Further, the spokesperson told us, “The recent changes to the Microsoft Service Agreement’s Code of Conduct provide transparency on how we respond to customer reports of inappropriate public content.”
Human canaries in the free speech coal mine
The hashtag #LetUsSurvive is a current rallying point on Twitter, directing attention to the sex work community’s determination to get out of this insidious wave of conservative anti-sex silencing alive. To that end, sex work websites feature guides to self-censoring, the kind of thing you’d expect belongs more in Weimar-era Berlin than coming out of modern-day San Francisco.
Sex workers are right to be scared. They’re facing all this sudden and casually disastrous censorship as a threat to their safety and livelihoods, and are well aware that few are willing or brave enough to fight for their free speech and human rights. Even sex writers such as myself know this; any of us who’ve tried to make a living off anything relating to sex online has a list of products, services, banks and payment processors, social networks, companies, and business tools that everyone else takes for granted — that we are expressly prohibited from using.
It has been a speech issue for a long time, one most people have turned away from as Instagram censors more nipples, as PayPal freezes and shutters the accounts of sex bloggers and book authors, Tumblr deep-sixes erotic artists, and more.
Hateful gamers? No problem. Death threats toward women? Here’s a form to fill out. MAGA racists terrorizing women and people of color off the platform? Gotta hear both sides. But expose a nipple in artwork, discuss non-reproductive sex ed, or talk about making sex work safer by screening clients? Now that’s a misguided business plan guaranteed to create lasting cultural harm. Let’s definitely keep Peter Thiel on the board. If you thought all that was bad enough, just you wait. FOSTA-SESTA is making us disappear before your very eyes — and it will affect you, too.
Under FOSTA-SESTA, we’d most likely have no Stormy Daniels. That Stormy Daniels is making headlines while the absolute worst is happening to sex workers online is not lost on anyone.
“In a titillating cross-section of lawmaking and scandal,” wrote sex worker Morgan Claire-Sirene, “we have on one side Stormy Daniels suing 45 for unlawful payoffs and calling him to account publicly for his associates’ threats against her, and on the other side, legislation that has already silenced common sex workers, with the overlaying intersections of race and class; good whores and bad whores; victims and perpetrators; and misinformation all around.”
Daniels is a perfect lens with which to view the exact way FOSTA-SESTA harms one of America’s largest at-risk populations. Writer Ben Udashen points out, “The level of sex worker whose lives will be harmed by SESTA are not at the same level of fame and notoriety as Stormy Daniels”
“Daniels won’t be caught up in a sting sending her to jail because she had to work as a streetwalker to help pay her rent and feed her children. Daniels won’t have to carry a weapon to defend herself when she meets with a new client.
“Most importantly, Daniels’s children won’t be woken up to the news that their mother didn’t come home last night because she was murdered by a serial killer, a class of criminal who have always targeted sex workers from Jack the Ripper to the Green River Killer. Poor and working class sex workers, regardless of gender identity, will pay that price.”
And for a short moment in history, the advent of the open internet reduced that horrible cost.
Also to those in the comments simply blaming the Great Orange Dope, this bill was originally pushed by Kamala Harris. Don’t forget NONE of them are on your side 🙃
CA friends, PLEASE call about this. This bill has already affected outreach services similar to the ones STROLL provides; if you care about sex workers, if you’ve been wanting to do something to help us and regretting not harassing the heck out of Kamala pre-SESTA, this is your chance. Call your famous friends, call your family, use your fan base, whatever. Please don’t allow this to happen.
CALL BEFORE NEXT TUESDAY 4/10!
Text of the image:
Via a sex worker friend, please read:
CA is passing a bill that changes the definition of pandering making it a felony to provide any help or out reach for sex workers.
That means distributing condoms to street based workers, know your rights pamphlets, any kind of mentoring, basically all harm reduction will be a felony. I know I talk a lot about sex work and y’all are probably are bored but my community is on fire. The government wants sex workers dead, in jail and exploited.
This bill and fosta will literally mean life and death for REAL HUMAN BEINGS who just want to survive. This feels hopeless and is an incredibly dark time.
If you care about poverty, feminism, trans people, poc, sex workers and sexual freedom PLEASE CALL Nancy Skinner (chair of the CA state committee) to let her know you oppose SB 1204
(510) 286-1333 (local office)
(916) 651-4009
BY 4/10 (tues)
Call your senators, call your representatives, tell them SESTA needs to die and demand they address the institutional and generational effects of poverty—especially in CPS
I have decided to slowly close down our bigcartel shop and combine that into our existing etsy….we will also re-open our old etsy shop ‘summoning muses’ and start selling a variety of salvaged supplies for All you fellow makers and jewelers. We will be selling salvaged beads, handmade bone beads, wire bases and all kinds of alternative supplies including partial made/ready to string up pieces as well. I want to create a shop that is affordable, ethical, reclaimed and can help folks summon their own creative muses. Let me know why kinds of supplies you would like to see! keep in mind it is not your typical supply shop…. It is more like a rustic online flea market. #etsy #supplier #maker #etsyshop #shouldi?
