mostly gay things @floodedsky - Tumblr Blog

Posts

farmgf

IT’S SPRINGTIME YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS. PASS THE INSTRUCTIONS ON NOT GIVING UP BY ADA LIMÓN

farmgf

IT’S THE GREENING OF THE TREES THAT REALLY GETS TO ME!!!!!!!!!!!

woman-becomer

tumblr users love reading. you literally stopped for this post just because it has words in it

interpolationz

this is one of my favorite bits about tumblr

the users seem to actually prefer text posts to anything else, and treat it as a chore to play a video especially with sound

lazzarella

lambentgrey

me having a bad day: well at least it’s still not as bad as literally anything any character of tamsyn muir’s new york times bestselling tetralogy, the locked tomb series, has experienced

#tlt

blackdelia

SOFIA BLACK-D’ELIA and REBECCA HENDERSON in SINGLE DRUNK FEMALE (2022-)

#same same same

valtsv

adulthood is just telling yourself “and after i’ve done THAT i can finally relax” with increasing desperation

#hello

exigencelost

Call SQ warden. Tell him to turn on the phones!

The warden at San Quentin State Prison, Ron Broomfield, has just announced that the prison will be barring residents’ access to phones indefinitely: http://www.familiesofsanquentin.com/no-phones-for-inmates/ Getting our loved ones access to phones is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL TO THEIR SURVIVAL. People outside need to hear what’s happening in the prison; we need to hear our loved ones’ symptoms and whether they’ve been tested and what treatments they’re being given; we need to hear how the prison is handling the pandemic so that we can advocate for our people; we need to hear the continued demands of the San Quentin hunger strikers and what retaliation they’re facing from CDCR staff. Our loved ones inside need to hear information from us that they don’t have access to otherwise: what treatments have been shown to work for COVID, how to mitigate transmission, what caseload the CDCR is reporting, what organizers outside are doing to support them. Turning off the phones is an act of violence. It is designed to keep the inside of the prison hidden. To stop anyone from reporting the abuses happening inside, and to cut off communication between organizers inside and outside. Take a few minutes to call the warden of San Quentin and tell him to reinstate prisoners’ access to phones, NOW. You can read out what’s written here or use your own talking points. San Quentin Warden’s Office: (415) 455-5000 San Quentin Main Phone: (415) 454-1460 SQ’s Chief Executive of Health Care : (415) 721-3500 Send an email to Governor Newsom telling him the same thing. Gov. Newsom’s office: (916) 445-2841 Email Newsom here: https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov40mail/

exigencelost

July 15 update: Please keep calling the San Quentin Warden’s office. When the secretary answers the phone, ask to be transferred to their sergeant or their watch commander. Adding to the talking points above:

Eliminating phone access is a violation of the 1st Amendment, because it eliminates people’s ability to speak to the public. And it’s a transparent retaliation against prisoners complaining about prison conditions. If this goes on any longer CDCR will soon be facing a 1st Amendment lawsuit.

They don’t want that on their plate in addition to the deliberate indifference suit they’re already facing (and losing, from the most recent court reports).

It’s also a violation of the 8th amendment. Cutting people off from all contact with their families during what for many is a time of great psychiatric and medical crisis is cruel and unusual punishment.

#to do #san quentin #prison abolition

elenaalvar-deactivated20200112

#GoodbyeJane Week ❤️ Day Seven: Free Day → Jetra, a family of five

#jetra #jetra fam aaahhh

somethingmissingthiswaycomes

There are lots of ways to help in political crises. Protesting, voting, joining unions, calling your asshole representatives so they know their days in office are numbered, making sure people know their rights, protecting immigrants and minorities-in-general who live in your neighborhood, etc. are all good,

but in terms of the human rights violations happening in America right now, here’s something more immediate you can do.

fairfightbondfund.org/ lgbtqfund.org/ communitybondproject.org immigrantfamilies.org freedomforimmigrants.org

If you’re in a financial place to make donations, check out these links. If not, spreading the word on any tangible way to make a difference will help; if you have a twitter, you could retweet the original thread here: twitter.com/sarahmirk/status/1143201552657575937

I don’t usually make these posts myself, but my influence on Twitter is practically nil, so here I am.

#to do #donate

babybear

so you’ve probably seen the post going around detailing the horrific human rights abuses in what are, undeniably, concentration camps in the US…. accompanied by the suggestion that the only thing you can do is call your senators.

it’s unfathomable to me that someone would see we have actual nazi death camps in our country, and think the solution is writing to the politicians who allowed it to happen.

i have yet to see a post on any social media that has meaningfully helpful suggestions for how to get involved, so:

this article offers a number of suggestions including getting involved with your local chapter of Sanctuary Not Deportation, which connects faith groups to offer sanctuary to immigrants fleeing ICE. it also has a comprehensive list of immigrant-lead organizations to get involved with or donate to, as well as a link to crowdfund for detainee’s phone bills, which allows them to contact their families, legal counsel, and inform the outside world of the realities they are facing in detention.

here is a link for finding detention centers near you. there are many rallies directly outside of these camps you can participate in, and physically going to them is crucial in liberation efforts.

posting bond for detained immigrants is still one of the best ways to get people out of the death camps, even though ICE is increasingly unwilling to participate. the linked article has a list of both federal and state-by-state bail funds/organizations.

host a refugee if you have the room. Room For Refugees is still trying to build a network in the US. keeping people out of ICE’s grip and preventing detention in the first place is the best thing we can do because these camps are becoming more and more impenetrable.

help the legal organizations helping immigrants near you; if you’re anywhere close to NYC the New Sanctuary Coalition needs volunteers/donations, and if you’re on the border get involved with Texas Civil Rights Project.

on top of free legal aid, the NSC specifically also organizes rapid responses to ICE raids, which is one of the most important things you can do – there are many local networks already in place, but here is how to organize a rapid response network if your city doesn’t have one.

one of the easiest things we can all do is learn the rights of immigrants in this country, and how to react to ICE raids. spread this information to everyone you know and keep the toolkit in easy access on your phone.

the only government policy that can make an immediate and tangible impact is municipal policy; push your local politicians to support or build sanctuary city initiatives – here is a toolkit for local political action.

finally, get involved with local antifa and leftist orgs! follow their social media to get updates on calls to action and protests happening near you. i cannot stress enough how important it is to be aware of efforts in your own city. antifa international’s tumblr is one page you can follow, but please research the orgs specifically in your area that are fighting the rise of fascism. the torch network has a list of chapters in several cities around the US, but again this is just a place to start.

i encourage everyone to find at least ONE thing from this list you can do, beyond donating. i know we are all stressed and have our time/energy zapped by capitalism, but if we do nothing, nothing will change. and please share these links wherever you can – copy and paste this post or at least share the first article i linked.

fascism is here, NOW, and we need to step up, because no one is going to invade us to free the camps this time.

queeranarchism

I don’t think it’s a great idea to use the terms ‘concentration camp’ and ‘death camp’ interchangeably. Even though concentration camps could be very deadly and the distinction isn’t always easy to make, they were not historically the same thing, they’re not now.

But that doesn’t mean the time for action should be any other time than RIGHT NOW and calling your local naz- eehhh senator to ask them politely to close the concentration camps isn’t going to work.

So yeah, goooood post.

queeranarchism

A lot of the responses to this are “I don’t live near the border and I do not have the skills so I’m giving some money and that’s doing what I can”. & like, if you can give that money, definitely don’t stop. That’s good. But both of those ‘excuses’ for not doing other stuff are fake.

Detention centers are not just near the border. ICE offices that could be disrupted from doing their work are not just near the border. Deportation raids take place everywhere. Refugees need help everywhere. Several of the organizations listed here operate everywhere or want to start doing so.

And you literally always have skills. Actions don’t just need frontline activists, talented speakers, translators and lawyers. They need a lot of people doing a lot of footwork. From doing groceries to standing at an info stand to making big piles of sandwiches to handing out bottles of water to answering the phone to checking texts for spelling errors. People with every skill set and every level of physical and mental ability are participating in this work everywhere.

There are many injustices that require our attention and sometimes we are at a point in our lives where all we can do is just keep ourselves alive. If you have zero time and energy to give because survival itself is hard, I understand.

My life also exists of constantly deciding what to prioritize. Whether to go to that action or get some much needed rest. Whether to push myself harder or safe some energy for the long run. I understand.

But the “I don’t live near the border and I do not have the skills” line is bullshit.

#to do #activism

kibumkim

how every post on here about weather goes

southerner: 50 is cold

northerner: no its not

person from california: im from california

cheeratthegallows

any weather that is not exactly 62F and partly cloudy offends my delicate san francisco sensibilities

#hard same abbey!!!

mango-habanero-autism-deactivat

If you want to do something in the spirit of helping missing and murdered indigenous women for real, don’t you dare donate to police departments, donate to the Sovereign Bodies Institute (link)

The executive director runs the MMIW database completely independently and with the consent and blessings of families and communities and several of the board members are strong native women who do grassroots community work in Montana whom I know to have good community reputations and honour.

mango-habanero-autism-deactivat

Bringing this back to say: In honour of Mother’s Day, SBI is expanding their work and will now be looking more closely at documenting deaths of Indigenous women due to inadequate maternal care in the MMIW database, largely due to the same structural racism that does not value their lives in other spaces. Settler colonial systems of power are responsible for these deaths and SBI will be documenting them as such. SBI will also be adding how many children are growing up without their mothers due to MMIW violence to the MMIW Database.

Please donate, check out their website, talk to your friends, and look for grassroots native organizations in your area to see if they need volunteers or donations.

#donate #signal boost

star-anise

If you feel like telling someone that a common word is ableist:

Learn about wheelchair accessibility standards (text alternative), find a local business that flagrantly ignores them (which is very easy) and contact the manager to say, “My disabled friend would love to visit your shop/bar/restaurant, but it isn’t wheelchair accessible!” (If the staff have to move or unlock something, that isn’t accessible —especially if you have to go inside to request it)

Boom. You’ve done more for disabled people than 50 callouts for the word “lame”. I hate that word used as a pejorative too! But of the two methods of activism, this one gets way more shit done.

grison-in-space

The other thing that gets me about ableism dialogue on the broader Internet being 90% centered on word choice is that… I think it serves to make conversations and socially aware spaces less accessible to some people. Me, for example: I find that the additive cognitive load of monitoring my vocabulary for potentially ableist words and turns of phrase to be an extremely reliable overload trigger. I’m constantly semi-consciously monitoring my everything anyway when I’m communicating–hi, I’m autistic–and when I overload my ability to manage that cognitive load, I get very anxious, generally erode my mental health, and stop being able to participate in conversation at all. I have effectively lost access to the community or discussion where these modes of politeness take root.

(What I generally do instead is keep note of certain words that certain people I know cannot handle because they are poisoned forever for them, and I avoid those words around those people. That’s a cognitive expenditure that is worth it to me: I’m willing to budget the cognitive energy if it’s a use that is actually directly helping someone else. One thing I find that a lot of currently non-disabled people don’t think about is that not all accommodations and access needs for disabled people are compatible with one another at all times, and this is a common example of that sort of thing.)

Moreover, a lot of people have begun using a “fence around the sin” approach to ableist language: I have been “corrected” for metaphorical references to disability that aren’t necessarily pejorative, like “willfully blind.” Not only does this re-emphasize the cognitive load concerns that I I’m concerned that this trend of treating all references to disability as off-limits in language increases the euphemism treadmill that tends to affect several types of disability, effectively acting as if there is something shameful about referencing disabled people at all. Which… doesn’t solve the problem of the ableism in the language. It’s just that the slur is in the opinion that the slur-thrower has of the people the word applies to, and that’s often what people are really doing when they use ableist slurs. You fix the slurs not by placing them off limits entirely but by changing the opinion that the general public has about the people they refer to: think about reclaiming “queer” and pushing back against “that’s so gay”; these successful movements work because they reaffirm the humanity of queer and gay people in the minds of people who would otherwise use those identities and comparisons to them to denote bad things. If that doesn’t happen–and the disability euphemism treadmill is notorious for this–you just cycle through acceptable and unacceptable words for the same concepts, because the concept of a given disability is the origin of the insult. As long as that concept is poisoned, any word that describes it will become poisoned, too.

And the thing is, I just pointed out that my own experience of disability is such that I have been known to actively request that people not police my language as an accommodation, because I can’t handle the cognitive load of balancing that with the semi-conscious load of balancing the cognitive demands of monitoring the nonverbal shit? Yeah, uh, I have known people to respond to that request for accommodation with total rage, and by telling me that I am being hateful, and dropping me completely. If your disability activism involves reacting like that to a good-faith accommodation request over word choice, your disability activism is not good.

The problem with hard and fast rules (like “you must be able to take your own notes to succeed in college,” or “this word is never acceptable”) is that by its very nature, hard and fast rules without any thought taken to consider accommodation and accessibility for people with a wide variety of unexpected needs create barriers for disabled people. I don’t see a lot of awareness of this in people whose disability activism focuses largely around call-outs for word choice, and I really do not see people really interacting with the super useful concepts for disability, like the curb cut effect or accessible design or varying models of disability or conflicting accommodation or or. It just… winds up being about word choice and social signaling that one is The Right Sort Of Person.

(I’m pretty sure you know all of this already, star-anise, but I figured: maybe someone reading me doesn’t. So.)