SOON.

Good luck to all Apple users with the random lockouts

With the announcement that the UK Government plan to start detaining people for the Rwanda flights today, here are some resources if you are at risk of detention.

IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW HAS BEEN DETAINED OR YOU BELIEVE THEY WILL BE DETAINED SHORTLY:

If you are being made to report Right to Remain have an action plan toolkit for BEFORE you report

If you have received a letter from the Home Office dated after March 1st that mentions Rwanda or Notice of Intent, send a photo of the letter and your full name to Care4Calais via Whatsapp at +44 751 977 3268

If you are detained you can call any of the following for legal advice:

Detention Action 0800 587 2096

Care4Calais 0800 009 6268

Soas Detainee Support 0743 840 7570

BID (Bail for Immigration Detainees) 020 7456 9750 (mon-thurs 10-12)

JCWI (Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants) 0800 160 1004 (mon, tues, thurs 10-1)

If you do not have legal representation:

Duncan Lewis are taking on cases for anyone detained for the purposes of removal to Rwanda, contact [email protected] or call 0333 772 0409

Wilson are also taking on cases, contact [email protected] or call 0208 808 7535

IF YOU ARE DETAINED DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING WITHOUT LEGAL ADVICE, AND IF THEY OFFER YOU TO GO TO RWANDA 'VOLUNTARILY' OR FOR MONEY SAY NO.

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

People with depression or anxiety could lose access to sickness benefits, the work and pensions secretary has said, as part of major welfare changes that have been described as a “full-on assault on disabled people”. On Monday morning, Mel Stride announced the plans to overhaul the way disability benefits work and was due to address the Commons on the issue later in the day. In a green paper due to be published alongside Stride’s Commons statement, ministers will set out plans to change personal independence payments (Pip), the main disability benefit for adults, through changes to eligibility criteria and assessments. While he sought to portray the proposals as part of a “grownup conversation” about the best form of welfare provision, he also indicated the focus on the plan was part of a Conservative election strategy designed to put some pressure on Labour a general election in which his party is expected to suffer a heavy defeat. The plans, which will be consulted on over the coming months, also include proposals to “move away from a fixed cash benefit system”, meaning people with some conditions will no longer receive regular payments, but instead access to treatment if their condition does not involve extra costs. Stride batted away suggestions his government had created the problem by failing to adequately provide such care in the first place, saying it was introducing a scheme in which some healthcare support would be provided alongside “work coaches”. During a BBC Radio 4 Today programme interview on Monday, it was put to Stride that the Tories were picking apart the system they had themselves designed in the hope of starting a “row about welfare scroungers” they hoped might cause a greater political problem for Labour than for them. “As to Labour, Labour have nothing to say about welfare. In fact, the only thing they’ve been saying about welfare is that they’re very squeamish about sanctions. They don’t think they should be applied in the way that we think, which we believe will cost billions of pounds,” he replied. In an interview with the Times, Stride had suggested the proposals would mean people with “milder mental health conditions” would no longer receive financial support. And they follow a speech in which the prime minister announced major changes to the welfare system earlier this month, saying “people with less severe mental health conditions should be expected to engage with the world of work”. Stride said the system should not be paying people to deal with the “ordinary difficulties of life” and suggested that many voters “deep down” agreed with him. Describing the changes as “probably the most fundamental reforms in a generation”, he said: “There are those that have perhaps milder mental health conditions, or where perhaps there has been too great a move towards labelling certain behaviours as having certain [medical] conditions attached to them, where actually work is the answer or part of the answer. “What we’ve got to avoid is being in a situation where we too readily say: ‘Well, actually, we need you to be on benefits.’” Stride said a “whole plethora of things”, such as talking therapies, social care packages and respite care, could be used as alternatives to benefit payments. He added the main reason for the changes was to provide better help and not cut costs, but he acknowledged the cost “has to be one of the considerations”. James Taylor, the executive director of strategy at disability equity charity Scope, called for an end to the “reckless assault” on disabled people and to fix the “real underlying issues”. “It’s hard to have any faith that this consultation is about anything other than cutting the benefits bill, no matter the impact,” Taylor said. “Life costs a lot more for disabled people, including people with mental health conditions. Threatening to take away the low amount of income Pip provides won’t solve the country’s problems. “The government needs to end this reckless assault on disabled people and focus on how to fix the real underlying issues.”

Disability benefits spending is forecast to be £39.1 billion in Great Britain in 2023-24

£42 billion total in unpaid tax  

Wow I wonder what we could conceivably do that would entirely cover the cost of disability support with a little over? I wonder? Is it MAKE CORPORATIONS AND WEALTHY ASSHOLES PAY THE MONEY THEY LEGALLY FUCKING OWE

it's burning up

dangerous visuals 🪽

for @jkvjimin 🤍

According to a recent report published by the Aargauer Zeitung (h/t Golem.de), around three million smart toothbrushes have been infected by hackers and enslaved into botnets.

The most cyberpunk thing on your dash today.

Wow, so nice!

🤍🤍🤍

I really don’t know how to explain to you that activism, community outreach, meeting important goals in the realm of social justice, and just generally living life is much easier under the presidency of an average democrat than a republican who was so outspokenly racist, genocidal, inflammatory, misogynistic, and violent that he may have permanently skewed the american right to the furthest extreme possible. I don’t know how to explain to you that the candidate who was so extreme that he brought neo-nazis into the mainstream political landscape needs to be kept out of any political office at any cost. even if it means voting for a center-left democrat who won’t personally sign off on your glorious revolution.

John Sheppard & Rodney McKay - ‘‘Let’s go have some beer on the pier’’ (5x06 The Shrine)

Because of johnsheppard-assshaker post :)

The Iranian Regime is going to execute rapper Toomaj Salehi for supporting protests of Jina Amini’s murder by the regime in his songs.

Iranian activist Elica Le Bon says, “Iranians in the diaspora picked up on the fact that the regime tends not to execute people who become known to the international community. We have seen many examples of prisoners that were either released on bail or had their sentences commuted through our “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media, using hashtags to garner attention for their causes, and even before social media existed, through getting the stories of political prisoners to international media outlets. Once reported on, and once the eyes shift to the regime and the reality of its pending brutality, realizing that the action is not worth the repercussions, we have seen them back down and not execute. For that reason, this is part of an urgent campaign for readers to talk about Toomaj as much as you can, using the hashtag #FreeToomaj or #ToomajSalehi. Every comment makes a difference, and if we were wrong, what did we lose by trying?”