#global rights

[blk-achillean]

The Power of Our Words:

Reflecting on Identity and Acceptance with Bisi Alimi

Language shapes our identities and perceptions, acting as a mirror to society's values and biases. It can empower, but also marginalize. Today, I'm drawn into reflection by a friend's self-description as "sapphic," a term that echoes the complexity of identity and the nuances of language's power.

This reflection led me to explore the terms we use to describe our identities, like "achillean" for male or gay identities, particularly within African cultures. My journey brought me to the story of Bisi Alimi, a figure of courage and a beacon for change. Alimi bravely became the first Nigerian gay man to come out on national television. Facing threats for his openness, Alimi's story is a testament to the struggle for acceptance and the right to be oneself.

Bisi Alimi's activism goes beyond personal courage; it challenges us to confront the power dynamics in society and the role language plays in these battles. His life reminds us that change often comes from those who refuse to silence their truths, echoing Martin Luther King's words that "a riot is the language of the unheard." Around the world, LGBT protests and movements against unjust policies highlight the ongoing fight for rights and recognition.

Yet, our use of language in discussing these issues often falls short. "Tolerance" implies a begrudging acceptance, hiding behind phrases like "I love you but not your lifestyle" or "How's your little friend?" It's a language that distances, that refuses to see the full humanity of others.

In contrast, justice speaks a different language. It says, "My fiancé is doing well, and I hope one day you get to meet my husband." It challenges prejudice with the simple but revolutionary act of living openly and lovingly. It says to those unwilling to see, "Then poke your own eyes out and be blind."

As we reflect on the power of our words, we must ask ourselves: Are we contributing to a world of tolerance, or are we paving the way for true justice? Our language can build bridges or walls. Let's choose our words with the intention to understand, to accept, and to love.

In honoring figures like Bisi Alimi, let's commit to using our language as a tool for change. Let this be a call to action, to use our words to fight for a world where love is celebrated in all its forms, and where every identity is recognized and respected. How will you use your words?

By examining our language and its impact, we can contribute to a more just and inclusive society. Let's be inspired by activists like Alimi and join in the broader movements for social justice, understanding that our fight against inequity is interconnected and global. In the end, the power of our words lies in their ability to connect us, to challenge us, and to change the world.

[intersectionalpraxis]

48 million people in Sudan still can not contact their families across the diaspora. They're cut off from the internet, which includes their online banking services as well. Thousands of displaced Sudanese people were also recently turned away as asylum seekers:

This continues to be horrifying. Please keep talking about Sudan.

[mahoganygold213]

[empireofthestates]

What You Need to Know about Project 2025

The GOP's Radical Plans for America's Future

graphics from @/pinballwizardess on tiktok

[taviamoth]

[bidotorg]

Today, we take a moment to celebrate a historic milestone - the anniversary of South Africa legalizing same-sex marriage. 🇿🇦🏳️‍🌈 On this remarkable day, South Africa not only became the first country in Africa to recognize love in all its forms, but also set a precedent for human rights and equality across the globe. This day serves as a reminder of the progress we've made, and the work that still needs to be done. Let's continue to fight for love, acceptance, and equality for all. Today we celebrate love, human rights, and the beautiful rainbow nation of South Africa. 🌈❤️

[decolonize-the-everything]

"All our needs are met by this land, not by Enbridge.” That’s what Wenipashtaabe (Sandy Gokee), an Anishinaabe water protector, told the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) at a June 4 public hearing in Ashland, Wisconsin about a proposal to reroute Enbridge’s Line 5 oil pipeline. Line 5 currently trespasses through the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa’s reservation in northern Wisconsin, and a federal judge last year ordered Enbridge to remove that segment of pipeline off the tribe’s land by June 2026. Enbridge’s plan is to reroute the pipeline, but the company needs approval from the USACE first.

[...]At the meeting, Tribal leaders and environmental advocates from across the region voiced concern about the proposed reroute. That’s because Line 5 poses an environmental risk within Tribal boundaries—and the reroute wouldn’t change this, because it would still be located within the larger Bad River watershed. In other words, an oil spill in that area would still drain into the Bad River, endangering wetlands and groundwater along the river’s course to Lake Superior. “We said off the watershed. You said off the reservation,” Gokee told the USACE at the public hearing. The more than 70-year-old pipeline is 20 years past its expiration date. In some places, including the point where the pipeline intersects with a “meander” in the Bad River, it is in imminent danger of rupture.

Folks aren’t counting on Enbridge to fix this, because the Canadian energy company has a terrible track record. A rupture in another major Enbridge pipeline, 6B, caused the 2010 Kalamazoo River spill, which dumped nearly a million gallons of crude oil into the water over the course of 18 hours before Michigan authorities (not Enbridge) reported the spill. It’s one of the largest inland oil spills in US history. Construction along Enbridge’s Line 3 has caused ongoing harm in Minnesota, where Enbridge contractors released toxic fracking fluids while drilling under waterways, and destroyed wetlands.

The proposed new segment of Line 5 would cross and endanger nearly 200 bodies of water and over 100 acres of wetland as it passes through Ashland and Iron Counties. The $450 million reroute would require temporarily and permanently discharging fill material into wetlands, horizontal drilling under the White River (which flows into the Bad River), and would cause the loss or alteration of wetlands in the 30- to 50-foot wide maintenance corridor surrounding the pipeline, USACE states in an analysis of the plan.

“I can drink the water here now. Let’s keep it that way,” added Gokee at the public hearing.

You can donate directly to the tribe to help them on Defend the Bad River dot org and you can read more about their treaties and their history on the Bad River Band website. Absolutely utilize the tools available to you to educate yourself about this further, please and spread the word!

Their homepage

Bonus materials;

The oil pipeline laying in the Straits of Mackinac — is 21 years past it’s intended lifespan. A Line 5 rupture would impact 700 miles of Great Lakes shoreline, take years to clean up, and would devastate our Great Lakes economy — putting 214,000 Michigan tourism jobs at risk. The Great Lakes are 20% of the world’s freshwater — we can’t afford to contaminate them with oil.

Their PDF handout about the case:

I want to highlight their demands for people who just saw that wall of text and skipped it cuz this is important:

This is a decently nuanced 14 minute interview about how turning on Line 3 affected native communities; how most are still just taking actions to survive through ongoing oppression and colonization, how activism isnt a luxury a lot of people can afford with mouths to feed and systemic oppression keeping them in cycles of poverty.

Stand with the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

It shouldn't be on them to fight Enbridge on their own and nobody should be forced to choose between their people or their planet. Uplift their voices and make their demands known and make it known that they're supported and they're not alone.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates – but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.

The pitch from these prison-tech companies was that they could cut the costs of locking people up while making jails and prisons safer. Hell, they'd even make life better for prisoners. And they'd do it for free!

These prison tablets would give every prisoner their own phone and their own video-conferencing terminal. They'd supply email, of course, and all the world's books, music, movies and games. Prisoners could maintain connections with the outside world, from family to continuing education. Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Here's the catch: all of these services are blisteringly expensive. Prisoners are accustomed to being gouged on phone calls – for years, prisons have done deals with private telcos that charge a fortune for prisoners' calls and split the take with prison administrators – but even by those standards, the calls you make on a tablet are still a ripoff.

Sure, there are some prisoners for whom money is no object – wealthy people who screwed up so bad they can't get bail and are stewing in a county lockup, along with the odd rich murderer or scammer serving a long bid. But most prisoners are poor. They start poor – the cops are more likely to arrest poor people than rich people, even for the same crime, and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get convicted or be suckered into a plea bargain with a long sentence. State legislatures are easy to whip up into a froth about minimum sentences for shoplifters who steal $7 deodorant sticks, but they are wildly indifferent to the store owner's rampant wage-theft. Wage theft is by far the most costly form of property crime in America and it is almost entirely ignored:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees

So America's prisons are heaving with its poorest citizens, and they're certainly not getting any richer while they're inside. While many prisoners hold jobs – prisoners produce $2b/year in goods and $9b/year in services – the average prison wage is $0.52/hour:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

(In six states, prisoners get nothing; North Carolina law bans paying prisoners more than $1/day, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly permits slavery – forced labor without pay – for prisoners.)

Likewise, prisoners' families are poor. They start poor – being poor is a strong correlate of being an American prisoner – and then one of their breadwinners is put behind bars, taking their income with them. The family savings go to paying a lawyer.

Prison-tech is a bet that these poor people, locked up and paid $1/day or less; or their families, deprived of an earner and in debt to a lawyer; will somehow come up with cash to pay $13 for a 20-minute phone call, $3 for an MP3, or double the Kindle price for an ebook.

How do you convince a prisoner earning $0.52/hour to spend $13 on a phone-call?

Well, for Securus and Viapath (AKA Global Tellink) – a pair of private equity backed prison monopolists who have swallowed nearly all their competitors – the answer was simple: they bribed prison officials to get rid of the prison phones.

Not just the phones, either: a pair of Michigan suits brought by the Civil Rights Corps accuse sheriffs and the state Department of Corrections of ending in-person visits in exchange for kickbacks from the money that prisoners' families would pay once the only way to reach their loved ones was over the "free" tablets:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/jails-banned-family-visits-to-make-more-money-on-video-calls-lawsuits-claim/

These two cases are just the tip of the iceberg; Civil Rights Corps says there are hundreds of jails and prisons where Securus and Viapath have struck similar corrupt bargains:

https://civilrightscorps.org/case/port-huron-michigan-right2hug/

And it's not just visits and calls. Prison-tech companies have convinced jails and prisons to eliminate mail and parcels. Letters to prisoners are scanned and delivered their tablets, at a price. Prisoners – and their loved ones – have to buy virtual "postage stamps" and pay one stamp per "page" of email. Scanned letters (say, hand-drawn birthday cards from your kids) cost several stamps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Prisons and jails have also been convinced to eliminate their libraries and continuing education programs, and to get rid of TVs and recreational equipment. That way, prisoners will pay vastly inflated prices for streaming videos and DRM-locked music.

The icing on the cake? If the prison changes providers, all that data is wiped out – a prisoner serving decades of time will lose their music library, their kids' letters, the books they love. They can get some of that back – by working for $1/day – but the personal stuff? It's just gone.

Readers of my novels know all this. A prison-tech scam just like the one described in the Civil Rights Corps suits is at the center of my latest novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Prison-tech has haunted me for years. At first, it was just the normal horror anyone with a shred of empathy would feel for prisoners and their families, captive customers for sadistic "businesses" that have figured out how to get the poorest, most desperate people in the country to make them billions. In the novel, I call prison-tech "a machine":

a million-­armed robot whose every limb was tipped with a needle that sank itself into a different place on prisoners and their families and drew out a few more cc’s of blood.

But over time, that furious empathy gave way to dread. Prisoners are at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve. They endure the technological torments that haven't yet been sanded down on their bodies, normalized enough to impose them on people with a little more privilege and agency. I'm a long way up the curve from prisoners, but while the shitty technology curve may grind slow, it grinds fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The future isn't here, it's just not evenly distributed. Prisoners are the ultimate early adopters of the technology that the richest, most powerful, most sadistic people in the country's corporate board-rooms would like to force us all to use.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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Flying Logos https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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KGBO https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Suncorp_Bank_ATM.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[she-is-ovarit]

It doesn't matter how many oppressor groups she belongs to. It does not matter how privileged she is on the axis of class, race, nationality, ability, etc. It doesn't matter what her politics are or how much of a horrible human being she is.

She still doesn't deserve rape. Rape is still not an act of liberation, justice, or self-defense. If you think any woman deserves rape, you are a rape apologist. If you think there are any exceptions to sexual violence towards any individual or group of female human beings, there's a disturbance with your core sense of morality and you are not safe to be around.

[johnbitchsociety]

I feel like both internet liberals and leftists have a tendency to reverse-Great Man Theory Ronald Reagan at the expense of any insight into the history of his policies or the conservative movement that led up to him.

[butterfly-95]

I think people need to realize that it was sheer luck that they have been born in developed countries with decent living conditions, away from the threat of war or civil conflicts. It is by pure coincidence at times that you end up being a citizen of a developed country, rather than one with an impoverished population experiencing man-made (because it is man-made in this day and age) famine, diseases that have been long eradicated or war (be it a civil conflict or due to selfish interests of developed nations who profit from these, at the cost of civilian lives). You could have been born into these conditions.

The point is: NO ONE should ever be made to witness the horrors of war, famine, poverty, disease or any other trauma inducing situation in which they have no free will or say about its outcome.

[intersectionalpraxis]

[kaapstadgirly]

Today at South Africa's Global Day of Action for Gaza, the Gift of the Givers Foundation handed out roses as part of their Roses For Palestine Campaign. Each Rose had a message on for a martyred child of Gaza and a QR code on the back to donate to this campaign.

This was my rose. I understand all of us are not able to donate to this campaign, but just sharing is enough.

Here's the link, too.

[alwaysbewoke]

[totallynotcensorship]

tags update: free palestine, palestine, gaza, free gaza, yemen, lebanon, middle east, human rights, united nationsm and jerusalem are trending

edit: yemen, lebanon, human rights, middle east, and united nations stopped trending? they are still in the "featured tags" on trending tho-

edit2: they are back to trending

with free palestine at 1st place on the page

DON'T STOP TALKING ABOUT PALESTINE

[hussyknee]