comradekellzwweapons-blog

[comradekellzwweapons-blog]

This is complete and total fuckin bullshit lmao fuck yall

Hey Tumblr–

A couple of weeks ago we announced an update to our Community Guidelines regarding adult content, and we’ve received a lot of questions and feedback from you. First and foremost, we are sorry that this has not been an easy transition and we know we can do a better job of explaining what we’re doing. We knew this wasn’t going to be an easy task and we appreciate your patience as we work through the challenges and limitations of correctly flagging tens of billions of GIFs, videos, and photos.

Today, December 17th, our policy begins to take effect. This means that we will start hiding – not deleting – posts that contain GIFs, videos, and photos from public view that are in violation of our policy. Again, this is a complex problem, and over the coming weeks we will gradually, and carefully, flag more adult content. (Yes, we will still make mistakes, but hopefully fewer and fewer.)

More importantly, we want to clarify the things that you, as a community, have asked about the most.

Tumblr will always be a place to explore your identity. Tumblr has always been home to marginalized communities and always will be. We fully recognize Tumblr’s special obligation to these communities and are committed to ensuring that our new policy on adult content does not silence the vital conversations that take place here every day. LGBTQ+ conversations, exploration of sexuality and gender, efforts to document the lives and challenges of those in the sex worker industry, and posts with pictures, videos, and GIFs of gender-confirmation surgery are all examples of content that is not only permitted on Tumblr but actively encouraged.

We also want to reiterate some important information from our Support post:

Your content will not be deleted. If your post(s) are flagged under the new policy, they will be hidden from public view and will only be visible to you. You can appeal these flags if you feel your content was erroneously marked as adult content. Upcoming feature changes will also make appeals more manageable for those of you with multiple flagged posts. Your blog won’t be deleted if you’ve posted adult content in the past, and there is nothing you need to do if you have interacted with adult content up until now–it will just be flagged and not publicly viewable. Don’t forget too that you can download your content. It’s yours after all, and we don’t take that lightly.

What is still permitted? We’ve heard a lot of concern about what the policy does not permit, but we want to make sure that you also know what is still permitted:

Written content such as erotica, nudity related to political or newsworthy speech, and nudity found in art, specifically sculptures and illustrations, is also stuff that can be freely posted on Tumblr. Although, photorealistic imagery or photography – images, videos, or GIFs – with real humans that include exposed genitals or female-presenting (yeah, we know you hate this term) nipples or depict sex acts is not allowed per our guidelines. 

Examples of exceptions that are still permitted but that you may need to appeal if they are misclassified are: exposed female-presenting nipples in connection with breastfeeding, birth or after-birth moments, and health-related situations, such as post-mastectomy or gender confirmation surgery.

The automated tools will improve. Having a post mistakenly flagged as adult totally sucks; we understand and agree that there have been too many wrongfully flagged posts since we announced the policy change. With tens of billions of GIFs, videos, and photos to review and millions of new posts every day, we really need your help to get it right.

The more you help by reporting content that’s not permitted and by appealing content that you believe was flagged incorrectly, the better our automated tools will get at classifying your posts correctly. The more content these tools review, the more they will learn the difference between what’s permitted and what’s not. Most importantly, your content won’t be deleted if erroneously flagged and all appeals will be sent to a real, live human who can make the appropriate call. 

We love Tumblr and the communities that call Tumblr home. You are Tumblr. This place has always been a reflection of the voices and communities that thrive here. As you’ve always done, help us continue to shape Tumblr into the community you want it to be.

<3

[comradekellzwweapons-blog]

Gun Control Lead Off

As a Marxist, I cannot and do not support gun control reforms. American violence did not begin with school shootings, nor will it end with regulating individual weapons. It's important to point out that school shootings are extremely rare, with statistics showing children are more likely to die on their way to school any given day than being shot inside of their school. Though a difficult topic to navigate emotionally, we should not let the media magnifying glass dictate how we approach the issue of violence in our society. With ever-increasing instances of police brutality, imperialist attacks on the working class abroad, deathly poverty and inequality, amongst countless other things, it's understandable to see America as becoming increasingly violent and needing a fix. Sadly, no quick fix exist. Any attempt to address violence in our society must also be paired with an analysis of the root causes of violence, how the State perpetuates and uses violence politically, and how careless reforms will mean increased violence in our most oppressed communities.

Historically, gun control has been used against black/brown people and the working class to uphold white supremacy and the violent capitalist mode of production. This can, and should, be traced back to the conception of our country as a colony and then as a State. The United States was founded on violence, against both indigenous populations native to the lands, and towards the enslaved Black and brown populations who were made to literally build our country. The Second Amendment is a product of this time; the settlers were legally able to continue to use violent means to expand the colony state by waging war against the Natives they found to be in their way. Ridding the Constitution of the Second Amendment will not rid the Constitution, nor the country, of it's violence or hypocrisy. Tidying up the Second Amendment will have grave consequences. You can't erase history or simply smooth over centuries of racism, sexism, and class conflict. Especially not with gun control laws from the same institutions creating and upholding those oppressions. From slavery and colonization, to the Trail of Tears and the black codes, our “justice system” was crafted to uphold this violence for the continuation of capitalism. Mumia Abu-Jamal put it's it eloquently, 

“Social structures—courts, police, prisons, etc.—have within them a deep bias about what constitutes crime and what does not. Any social structure is a product of its previous historical, economic and social iterations, and these previous forms bear significant influence on later forms. The present system, in addition to being increasingly repressive, is the logical inheritance of its racist, hierarchical, exploitative past, and it is also a reactive formation against attempts to transform, democratize, and socialize it.”

When attempting to address violence, we cannot take reforms out of the context of the violent State in which laws and reforms are written and enforced. Any guesswork of demands will have very serious real-world consequences, especially in our communities of color and working class areas. These communities already bear the brunt of capitalist violence, with disproportional rates of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, and over-policing, to name a select few. Gun control laws will be a double-edged sword in increasing violence by ramping up racist enforcement of superfluous laws, and by leaving those who most need protection personally defenseless while under more policing. Once we acknowledge who the state prefers policed and defenseless, it's only logical to assume our government will act as it always has in the face of any “violence” related reform.

As socialists we understand that our society has enough homes, work, food, medicine, etc., to go around but supplies are increasingly monopolized in limited hands. Upholding this system of capitalism requires violence, from the police who enforce fundamentally unjust laws, the capitalists who enforce wage labor for survival, to the military who plunder the working classes in other countries when sectors our country has been squeezed to its pulp. If this is hard to conceptualize, imagine being homeless and sleeping underneath the window of an empty townhouse. What stops you from breaking inside to get a good, warm nights sleep? The property laws that enforce homelessness, the militarized police that enforce those laws, or the threat of violent prisons where lawbreakers are enslaved? We must ask ourselves, where is the violence in this situation rooted? Is it when the homeless person breaks a window, or when the police break the homeless person, or is it the fact that a home sits empty while members of our community freeze in the streets. This is a violence that effects every person that lives under capitalism and imperialism, as we all must participate in the system for survival. To address the violence we must address the system.

By acknowledging the root cause of our historical and overarching violence problem, we can analyze which reforms help the working class, and which do not address the root and in turn harm the working class. For example, the liberal reform of increasing the number of “school resource officers”. While on the surface this may seem helpful in the specific instance of fending off a school shooter, these officers essentially take on the role of school police throughout the school year when school shootings aren't happening. Armed guards, metal detectors, strict discipline, constant surveillance... These reforms manage to widen the school-to-prison pipeline by simply removing the pipeline. It has incalculable consequences for every black and brown student who are already 4 times as likely to be suspended, twice as likely to be arrested, and nearly twice as likely to be expelled than their white counterparts. This idea of reducing violence in a single theoretical scenario will definitely increase the violence our marginalized students face every single day. The resources could be better spent by hiring new teachers, ensuring classrooms have enough supplies, or expanding extracurricular activities. To quote Angela Davis, 

“When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison."

Another liberal reform worth mentioning is the idea that stricter background checks will curve gun violence. Currently through the Brady Bill, firearm retailers must run a background check on purchasers through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, an FBI database that enforces the Gun Control Act of 1968. The word “criminal” should immediately alert anybody who understands the mechanisms of the State. To quote Mumia once again, “crime is simply a conception of harm held by those who have power to make laws.” Under the Gun Control Act, people prohibited from owning guns include anybody arrested of a crime facing over a year imprisonment, anybody taking illegal substances or medical marijuana, any immigrant that lives in the US illegally, and anybody tried for domestic violence. Granted some these sound reasonable enough, if it weren't for our racialized and inherently violent state upholding these controls. Black people are incarcerated at a rate of 3.6 times that of white people, and poorer people are more likely to be incarcerated than those of a higher class, meaning the “year in jail” limit disproportionately limits the working class, specifically working class black people, from owning arms. The undocumented community is also barred from legally owning arms, despite the constant threat of violence and deportation from ICE. While those convicted of domestic violence are barred, this does not include law enforcement, who's families are 4 times more likely to experience domestic violence than those of the general population. To allow the State to tighten background check criteria will only perpetuate the racialized enforcement of who can and cannot own arms. Men like Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter who murdered 58 people and injured over 500, routinely pass the background check as it was not crafted to stop them. How could a law be written that restricts certain types of people, frankly white males, usually with a history of DV, militarism, or right-wing ideologies, from owning guns when so many of those same types of people make up our police forces, militaries, and governing bodies? 

All of these examples are way the State prohibits people from legally owning guns, but we must not forget that legally obtaining arms is not the only way to obtain arms. Our country has an estimated 300 million firearms, not including black market guns for which we don't have an accurate count. If a person wants to buy a gun legally, they're subjected to State scrutiny that discriminates based on race and class. If a person wants to get a gun illegally, or off the books of the racist State, they risk much higher charges and longer incarceration if caught. Given the States lack of interest in regulating arms manufacturers, who “donate” to the NRA who then buy the politicians who run the State, guns themselves do not seem to be the problem. Rather, it's when the State's monopoly on violence is threatened by those who have the desire or material benefit in addressing the State itself. Gun control laws, and the police who enforce them, are simply self-preservation acts of racist, oppressive institutions. 

While this all may seem discouraging or abysmal, analyzing the root causes of violence and the politics surrounding violence is vital to eliminating it. Capitalism and our bourgeois government that upholds it was founded on violence and must inflict violence on the working class to keep itself running. Attempts to address violence without addressing the root cause will fall short, will not bring about a radical change, and can possibly backfire by placing the working class under tighter State scrutiny. If we attempt to change the system within it, our choices are largely between the Democratic and Republican parties. While the Republican party is quickly written off for its strong ties with the NRA, violent militarism, or general disregard for human life over profits, it's worth noting that the same can pretty much be said for the Democratic party as well. They're the "lesser evil” choice between the two, but once we adopt the realization that capitalism is the root cause of what we believe is so bad about the Republicans, we must also realize that the Democratic party is a capitalist party that overall exists to uphold capitalism and is extremely violent as well. For example, the most unarguably “progressive” of the Democrats, Bernie Sanders, supports the state of Israel in its colonization of Palestine, a mirror image of the colonization the white settlers perpetrated on the indigenous here in our own country. Are we willing to ignore violence as long as it's not us, not our country, not our people? Or do we stand in solidarity with the working class around the world in the rejection of violence, be it colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, etc. Democrat Barack Obama deployed drone strikes 10 times as much as his predecessor George W Bush. He spent billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out the failing big banks, while income inequality, homelessness, poverty, and wage stagnation continued to grow. He also built the deportation apparatus, the Department of Homeland Security, that Trump utilizes to deport people today. If I didn't say “Barack Obama,” you probably would have guessed he was of the Republican Party. And if so, it's due time to break with the idea that the Democrats are the “lesser of two evils” when even the “lesser evil” includes deportation, drone strikes, imperial wars, and general negligence to improving conditions of human life. 

It's becoming increasingly obvious that we must move away from the two-party, capitalist system and build towards something that prioritizes human life over greed, profit, and violence. Violence cannot be reformed away in an inherently violent system. As a matter of harm reduction for the time being, we must support any reform that challenges the capitalist hold on the working class is a reform that will in turn reduce violence. We need to demand higher wages and an end to austerity, to address income inequality that forces people into poverty while the wealthy exploit and squander. We need to demand guaranteed free housing to eradicate homelessness, as housing is a human right. We need to demand a socialized, single-payer healthcare system, as healthcare is a human right as well. “Demand” does not mean begging the capitalist class to piss pity upon us, but it is a declaration that we will stop at nothing to bring about our demands and the end of capitalism and its ills. It's inevitable that more people realize the violence capitalism perpetrates worldwide, and that is it in the material interest of society to eradicate capitalism by building socialism. We don't need racism, we don't need sexism, we don't need poverty or homelessness, we don't need wars, and we don't need to slave away our lives creating profit for the wealthy. This is in the interest of all of humanity. As Karl Marx once said, “Capitalism contains within it the seeds of its own destruction.”

[comradekellzwweapons-blog]

A Marxist view on Sex Work and FOSTA/SESTA

Sex work can be defined as when people use their bodies in a sexual nature for financial or material gain. This is not to be conflated with “sex trafficking.” The actual instances of sex trafficking are small but the moral panic is extremely useful to liberal feminists, reactionaries, politicians, and evangelicals when attempting to “rescue” women in sex work. The conflation of the two are often used to attack both 'citizen' sex workers and migrant women who use sex work to survive. The term “sex worker” was coined by Carol Leigh “out of a feminist priority to end divisions between women.” To quote Kamala Kempadoo, “The conceptualization of prostitutes, whores, strippers, lap dancers, escorts, exotic dancers, etc, as 'sex workers' insists that working woman's common interests can be articulated within the context of a broader (feminist) struggle against the devaluation of 'woman's work' and gender exploitation within capitalism.” Louise White notes in her study on prostitution in colonial Nairobi, Kenya, “prostitution is a capitalist social relationship not because capitalism causes prostitution by commodifies sexual relations, but because wage labor is a unique feature in capitalism: capitalism commodifies labor.” It is true that many women go into sex work because of economic necessity vs pure desire to be a SWer, you could walk into any McDonalds, Walmart, or other minimum wage site of labor and find the same of its employees. Capitalism forces­ us to work for our survival, at the hands of capitalists, with little choice in the way we want to work. Just as guaranteed housing, healthcare, education, and food will cause a decrease in the number of McDonald's employees and of sex workers, as Marxists we should not support any rhetoric or reform that will hurt any workers in the process of winning these demands and transitioning to socialism. We must reject liberal feminism and it's ignorance to the material need of women to simply survive under capitalism, and it's rejection of the autonomy of women who choose (in any capacity) sex work. Quoting Kempadoo, “The prostitute cannot be reduced to one of a passive object used in male sexual practice, but instead it can be understood as a place of agency where the sex worker makes active use of existing sexual order.” It's hypocritical that feminists argue that woman's agency is an integral part of feminism, but the idea of woman's agency in prostitution is vehemently rejected, even to the face of Marxist sex workers. Though we can discuss if sex work will or won't exist after a socialist revolution, and many agree it probably won't, calls for abolition under capitalism means criminalization. This would strengthen the grip of the state against women, POC, the LGBTQ+ community, the most oppressed of the working class, and the intersections of those groups. Quite frankly, leading to their deaths. Abolition can either come in the form of a socialist revolution, or of criminalizing the industry out of the realm of safety, of workers rights, and of legal recourse for abusive John's, and into the realm of darkness and further marginalization for the workers involved. The International Prostitutes Collective has aptly described anti-SW laws as “punishing women for refusing to be poor.” Capitalists who write these laws prefer women to exploit themselves within the sphere of wage labor, or at the sites of social reproduction, but not on their own accord or by owning the means to their own production. Capitalists, as well as liberal feminists and evangelicals alike, quote “still want the marginalized and controlled [women] cleaning their boardrooms, plucking their chickens, and watching their children. But not as whores; never as whores.”

One such anti-SW legislation here in America is FOSTA/SESTA. House Bill (FOSTA) Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act /// Senate Bill (SESTA) Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act. The two became a package and was signed into law April 11th by Trump. Before this, internet platforms (websites) and ISPs could not be held legally responsible for the content it's user create or whatever illegal activity they may plan, under Section 230 in the 1996 Communications Decency Act. For over 20 years now, Section 230 has been regarded as the most important piece of internet legislation as websites had no legal obligation to ensure it's patrons abide by the law. This does not mean that websites weren't obligated to following laws at all, but notably many laws already entail what FOSTA/SESTA is attempting to regulate. FOSTA/SESTA creates an exception to Section 230 by deeming websites legally responsible if *third parties* were found to be posting ads for “sexual exploitation of children or sex trafficking” on their platform. Websites are pressured to censor and delete users content at the behest of the State, privatizing censorship. Of course, consensual sex work falls under the States description of “trafficking,” and it is sex workers who are primarily effected by this legislation, under the guise of reducing the comparably small instances of sex trafficking of children. The State is attempting to rip away one of the last safe places for sex workers to operate. One study has shown that Craigslist alone has reduced female homicide rates total (not of just sex workers) by 17% by offering an outlet for SW'ers to advertise and screen clients online, away from the dangers of the streets. That figure, along with the fact that street SW'ers are 13 times more likely to be murdered than those of the general population, shows that online resources are vital for sex workers autonomy, safety, and livelihoods, specifically in areas where sex work is criminalized. “Researchers at a public research institute in the Netherlands discovered that when major cities opened areas where street prostitutes could work legally, reports of rape and sexual abuse declined by as much as 30 to 40 percent in the first two years after the zones were opened. A few years ago, researchers at UCLA and Baylor University made a stunning find: When the Rhode Island legislature inadvertently decriminalized indoor prostitution for a number of years, that state saw a 31 percent decline in reported rapes and a similar decline in cases of gonorrhea.”

Even in the months leading up to FOSTA/SESTA passing in the House and Senate, websites began closing their services or shutting down entirely. Sites like Backpage, Craiglist personals, many escort services, The Erotic Review -which helped sex workers store communal blacklists of clients, all closed. Even Reddit, which hosts many alt-right and incel subreddits, closed down any subreddits related to sex work. Sex workers began reporting that their Google drive accounts had been locked or deleted, and Microsoft began warning its customers that “offensive language” on Skype, in email, or even word document could result in closing accounts. Sex workers were used a canary in the coal mine for capitalists and lawmakers to censor online spaces for activity it deems “illegal.” This should alert any leftists as some of our most visible organizing spaces are online, and what we are organizing is the downfall of capitalism… the very thing that the entirety of our laws protect. FOSTA/SESTA has been strongly opposed by current and past sex workers, citing how dangerous it makes working conditions, by anti-trafficking groups, as taking away online spaces actually makes it harder to catch instances of legitimate trafficking, and even by legal experts and internet advocates, as it basically creates a wormhole in the law keeping websites from needing to legally censor it's patrons. Demanding its repeal should be an immediate demand to protect sex workers from imminent violence and death, and to prevent further censorship that will inevitably creep into other marginalized communities and/or organizing spaces. Knowing that an attack on one is an attack on all, it would be hypocritical for us as leftists to excuse this legislation but decry similar legislation that could negatively effect us in the same ways. Hypothesizing future laws, if Facebook is to be held responsible for any arrests at rallies that were Facebook events, why would Facebook not delete the events and block those creating these events? As racial justice activism can be defined by the FBI as “black identity extremists,” why would Facebook or Twitter allow for the sharing of police brutality instances or documentation of racial discrimination? We know that the State is conniving and will weasel through any legislation we don't oppose, we must be as many steps ahead as possible to beat back this and future attacks.

Other anti-SW legislation includes Chicago City Council's recent “prostitution-related loitering” ordinance. This makes an offense of “remaining in any one place under circumstances that would warrant a reasonable person to believe… the purpose is facilitating prostitution.” Leftists should know better. This mirrors the current gang-related and narcotics-related loitering ordinances in Chicago and in many other cities. Police are given carte blanche to discriminate based on race, gender, or identity, given that vagrancy of the working class has been illegal since Jim Crow era. We just aren't allowed to not work. Existing loitering laws are applied racially and misogynistically, with nearly 85% of loiterers arrested being Black or Brown, despite making up only 54% of the population of Chicago. Arrest records cite women’s clothing — including bra straps, tank tops and leggings — as evidence of intent to engage in prostitution. This especially effects trans women and women of color who are already oppressed by the State misogynistic laws, by its racist laws, and by its anti-SW laws. Women arrested are thrown into cycle of the legal system that seeks to make wage laborers of them one way or another. Second arrest leads to mandatory five day jail sentence, making it more likely for women to rely on sex work once released, as they find a way to survive until the third arrest and more permanent incarceration. Women are driven further into poverty, exacerbating their conditions and making it everharder to climb out of their dire material conditions. As was stated in the Combahee River Collective Statement, “If the Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” When sex workers are viewed as working class comrades, not as whores, not as misguided women, or not as pawns in awful sexist needing-abolishing-now industry, we can work together to fight back the State when it pulls the lowest rung of workers into its undertow of poverty and oppression.