love's other trumpet

this blog is dead

[dr-archeville]

Congress just legalized sex censorship: What to know

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.

—

[therebelqueen]

Everyone should be concerned by this!

Are you one of two (or more) consenting adults with a healthy sex life? Is a partner located far away?

Too bad, no sexy-time for you!

They can monitor your private Skype calls or get you for writing a racy letter in Microsoft Word!

I’d say you could resort to writing & mailing things longhand, but hell, that’s illegal too!

Be concerned!

[thunderboltsortofapenny]

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/28/microsoft_services_agreement_bars_offensive_language/

Citation for the nonsense Microsoft is doing now.

[deebott]

I’m so tired

[nonconformist-vegan]

Slaughterhouse 1,100: The Emotional Impact of Killing Animals There are approximately 1,100 federally inspected slaughterhouses in the United States, about seventy of which are in Texas. Most of them are located in rural hinterlands such as Mineola, Muenster, and Windthorst. The majority of these operations both slaughter and process animals, thus employing thousands of workers whose job it is to turn a constant stream of live creatures into a commodified array of profitable by-products.

A farm animal entering the front door will reach the exit about nineteen minutes later. It will do so not only as familiar chops destined for domestic meat counters, but as pelts bound for Turkey, lungs sent to dog-treat manufactures, bile for the pharmaceutical industry, caul fat (the lining of organs) for many Native American communities, and liver destined for Saudi Arabia (which, go figure, distributes cow liver globally).  There’s no question that these operations are models of efficiency. They’re also hidden sites of suffering–and not only for dismembered animals. The literature currently emerging on the psychological affects on humans who work in slaughterhouses is startling. It’s often said that consumers are disconnected from the meat we eat. Rarely noted in this common observation is the fact that the slaughterhouse is a site of unfathomable connectivity. Indeed, the most intimate and bloodstained bond between humans and the animals we consume transpires between nearly voiceless slaughterhouse workers and the completely voiceless animals they’re employed to kill.

The results are devastating.  Slaughterhouse employees are not only exposed to a battery of physical threats, but the psychological weight of their work erodes their well being in quietly tragic ways. As one former abattoir employee attests:

The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in the stick pit [where the hogs are killed] for any period of time– that let’s you kill things but doesn’t let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking around in the blood pit with you and think, “God, that really isn’t a bad looking animal.” You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up to nuzzle me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them… .I can’t care. 

“I cant care.” It will come as no surprise that the consequences of this emotional dissonance include domestic violence, social withdrawal, drug and alcohol abuse, and severe anxiety. As slaughterhouse workers are increasingly being treated for PTSD, researchers are finally starting to systematically explore the disturbing results of killing sentient animals for a living.

At the University of Windsor, the criminologist Amy Fitzgerald has found a strong correlation between the presence of a slaughterhouse and high crime rates. One might object that the increasing presence of a poor, working-class, largely male population might also cause an uptick in crime. Fitzgerald, however, controlled for these possibilities by comparing her data to counties with comparable populations also employed in factory-like operations. It was the abattoir, she concluded, that stood out as the lone factor most likely to have spiked the crime statistics. Workers, in essence, were “desensitized,” and their behavior outside of work reflected it. Humans eat meat. A freaking lot of it. The average American consumes 212 pounds of it a year. I’m going to guess this figure is higher for the everyday Texan. Naturally, in places such as Austin, there will always be a conspicuous percentage of consumers who buy animal products sourced from small farms and think themselves absolved from all this messiness. But the hard truth is otherwise.

The vast majority of “humanely” sourced animal products are slaughtered and processed in the same industrial slaughterhouses that provide animal products to fast food joints.  Even farms that employ mobile slaughterhouse units–USDA approved trucks that will come to the local farm and kill on site–are equally implicated. As one mobile slaughter worker noted of the tiny moving slaughter-mill in which he worked, “It functions the same as any livestock facility, except it is much more condensed and put on wheels.”

Animal products these days are sold with a story–the animal was humanely raised, it was cage free, it was free ranged, it’s hormone free, it was pasture fed. Whatever. The bottom line is this: she was killed, she was a sentient being, she did not want to die, and the person who killed it so you could enjoy her with a bottle of Bordeaux and a side of arugula has been forced to declare, “I can’t care.” This story, needless to say, won’t make it onto the label that’s designed to make us pay more and feel better about the animals we eat.

— James McWilliams, The Emotional Impact of Killing Animals

[mercyforanimals-deactivated2020]

Study: Fish on Factory Farms So Stressed and Depressed They “Give Up On Life”

A new study by Royal Society Open Science reveals that farmed fish suffer from severe depression. Salmon who appear to have given up and float lifelessly are known as “drop outs.”

According to Seeker.com, Marco Vindas, the study’s lead author and a biologist at the University of Gothenburg, told Discovery News:

I would not go so far as to say they are committing suicide, but physiologically speaking, they are on the edge of what they can tolerate, and since they remain in this environment, they end up dying because of their condition.

Scientists measured significantly higher levels of cortisol, a stress-response hormone, in the drop-out salmon. They also observed increased activity in the serotonergic system, a key regulator of sleep, respiration, and mood. Studies of humans suffering from poverty and other socioeconomic hardships reveal similar findings.

Farm-raised fish live in crowded tanks where they often face aggression and a battle for food. They must also endure constant changes in lighting, water depth, currents, and more.

Like pigs, cows, and chickens, fish raised on factory farms suffer immensely. You can help spare fish from these inhumane conditions by switching to a compassionate vegan diet.

Click here for six savory vegan seafood recipes.

[elithebarrowboi-deactivated2020]

daily reminder to “animal lovers” that you contribute to animal abuse if you 

eat animals 

consume dairy

use things tested on animals or that have animal ingredients in them

wear any fur or skin of an animal

go to places that mistreat and use animals like zoo’s, circuses, and aquariums

[i-speak-for-the-deer]

Animal rights is the most un-extreme philosophy I can imagine. It is about nonviolence. It is about compassion. It is about not harming and not causing suffering and not killing when we don’t need to. That is it. It is really, truly that simple.

Stephanie Ernst  (via i-speak-for-the-deer)

especially in 2016/17 its sooooooooo freakin easy

(via bernadettehenry)

[blackness-by-your-side]

And remember, this is 2016. The government itself starves Native Americans who just protect their own land. 

The media is silent, as usual.

God bless these warriors. 

#NoDAPL #NoJusticeNoPeace

[the-real-eye-to-see]

In two days, two black people, James Means and Will Sims, have been killed for being black by white supremacists. But these murders went unnoticed due to Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and this is very sad.

Sending all my love to the families of these victims. Y'all don’t deserve this. We will fight for you because we love you.

The lives of James Means and Will Sims mattered. Their lives had inherent value and worth.

#JamesMeans #WillSims

[4playchef]

[fullpraxisnow]

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” 

– Malcolm X

[lagonegirl]

source

‘He Just Smiled and Shot Both My Kneecaps’

Young native man from the Ojibwe nation, reports being openly targeted by a police officer using “non-lethal” weapons to cause serious harm.

“He shot me with a rubber bullet right in the belly button, and when I showed him that he had hurt me, he just smiled and shot both my kneecaps,” he said.

“I was tear gassed over 15 times, which made it hard to breathe and left my face burning for hours. I got hosed down with a water cannon in freezing temperatures leaving me hypothermic, and I was slammed into a barbed wire barricade out of panic caused by the police after a flash grenade was thrown and caught fire to a field,” said Cheyenne, a young native woman from Michigan, whose face was streaked with tear gas, and whose eyes were red and swollen.

read here

Yep. Thanksgiving. Native American Heritage Month. Celebrated in 2016 by encroaching on Native land and assaulting Native bodies.

It’s the traditional American way. 

Oh yeah its the time of year to be thankful, therefore give thanks for rubber bullets, tear gas, water / sound cannons, concussion grenades and the freedoms for a bunch of evil bastards to attack groups of unarmed people without the “legal” ability to defend themselves.

#NoDAPL #NativeAmerican #Thanksgiving #FuckThePolice #StayWoke

[trash-friend-blog]

You can donate money or supplies to help support protesters at this link: http://sacredstonecamp.org/donate/

[refinery29]

Law enforcement officials at the Standing Rock DAPL protests sprayed people with water cannons in subzero temperatures. 300 have been hospitalized

 A video released by The GuardianMonday night shows police spraying Dakota Access Pipeline protesters with what Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmaier claims are fire hoses. But the Standing Rock Medic & Healer Council, a medical group in support of the protest, wrote on Facebook that the machines were water cannons and that pepper spray, tear gas, concussion grenades, and rubber bullets were also used. And now a young protestor may have to have her arm amputated thanks to law enforcement violence.

[exgynocraticgrrl-archive-deacti]

Porn Performer and Pornographer Confessions (and here)

{More quotes from pornographers can be found here}

To know more about Linda Boreman Marchiano's story/Linda Lovelace, click here. (gif below)

The Real Linda Lovelace

MORE PORN SURVIVORS:

{Visit AntiPornographyOrg for more details}

JESSIE ROGERS:

VANESSA BELMOND:

DANIELLE WILLIAMS:

JENNI CASE/ “VERONICA LAIN”:

SIERRA SINN:

APRIL GARRIS:

JENNA PRESLEY:

JAN VILLARUBIA:

FORMER PORN PRODUCER FOR PLAYBOY DONNY PAULING:

"Donny Pauling recruited 500 1st time porn actresses. He says most were college students." - (x)

Want to put a stop to this? Go to STOPPORNCULTURE for Information and Resources!

{StopPornCulture’s Tumblr Blog}

[fucknopornblogs]

painfully important. the courage these women had to describe these things… makes my heart ache all the more for those who can’t

[vaervaf-deactivated20160101]

don’t ignore this

[purely-vegan]

[anarchavegan]

A 4-minute glimpse into the story of 10 billion lives.

[fuckmaker]

A 4-minute glimpse into the story of 10 billion lives.

please watch this video. nobody is asking you to drop all your habits at once but try to consider what impact your consumer choices have on others. 

[hellwatermelon]

[fuckmaker]

I made two gifs from this video, find them here

[chonostoff]

[kuntsuragi]

[fuckmaker]

This is what I imagine my female followers experience while scrolling through this blog....