Team “not actually oblivious to flirting, just terrified of appearing presumptuous” represent.
“Yes, in the balance of consideration this person’s behaviour could certainly be interpreted as flirtatious, but it would be purest arrogance for me to just assume they actually meant what they said. I should gather more evidence. Forever.”
Sorry, I could never be a capitalist, I suffer from “wanting humans to have their basic needs met” disorder, where I care about people who aren’t me.
Someone once asked me if, assuming we got universal healthcare, I would be okay with the rise in “healthcare tourism” where people who are sick come to our country to get their medical bills taken care of and life-saving medical treatment cheaper than in their home countries.
I was just like, yeah thats fine, I’d actually prefer it if 0 people died from preventable causes kept behind a paywall for no reason.
“even the addicts?” yeah dude did i fucking stutter
This already happens in other places and it doesn’t strain the countries’ healthcare systems nearly as much as ppl might assume. All of this is just a smokescreen for the maintenance of the for-profit healthcare industry.
This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims “protects children and victims against CSAM” by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate “best practices” that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These “best practices” would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can’t already do that. These “best practices” also create new laws for “removing CSAM” online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don’t follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.
Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It’s the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren’t responsible for what users upload online unless it’s criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can’t publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)
This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.
NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an “anti-trafficking” organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being “against trafficking” while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That’s how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.
The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.
EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from “grooming and exploitation”, is how they will successfully censor the internet.
As long as state legislatures can tie in “fighting CSAM” to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.
This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.
This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.
Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn’t care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.
It will make CSAM much much worse.
One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.
(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)
The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.
I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.
HOW TO FIGHT BACK
EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.
CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.
This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.
(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don’t know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.
If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don’t fight back.
TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven’t seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.
Ok but like why are they trying so hard to get ppl in the office
my thoughts on why they want everyone back to the office:
the companies don’t want to give up their valuable office real estate assets and need to justify keeping them.
they have to justify the existence of a lot of middle management people who are otherwise useless.
more control and surveillance over their employees.
people working from home and having more work/life balance and time with loved ones is dangerous to the corporate status quo. they don’t want you thinking too much or realizing life is more than just mindlessly working in order to buy things.
Cops lie all the time about being contact poisoned with fentanyl, saying touching someone using/some contaminated surface RESULTED IN FOUR COPS OVERDOSING AND NEARLY DYING !!!11!!1 despite the fact that this is physically not possible. Primarily it is done to either hide the fact that cops are using, or to fearmonger about fentanyl and addicts. No this cop wasn’t using fentanyl, it was some junkie scum who used and then when the cop touched the desk it was strong enough to make him OD ! Also if fentanyl can make four pigs OD just by touching traces, what would happen if little Jimmy had touched it ? we have to kill junkies to protect our cops and your children !!
The joke is that theyve blown it so far out of proportion that even being faxed an image of fentanyl would cause the whole precinct to OD and keel over dead.
just wanted to add some resources to back this up cause i didn’t know it was bs until now
Reblog to make all the cops die from touching a fax machine
Adding to this, y’all realize that if fentanyl could kill you merely by existing in its presence a lot of healthcare workers and healthcare patients would be dead. Heck, I had to clean up a broken fentanyl vial at work the other day and even touched a droplet of the liquid by accident, and I’m still alive. This isn’t even looking at how stigmatizing drugs and drug users like this makes them less likely to seek help for their situation.
oh so the military propaganda in the beginning of the super bowl about the player who joined up after 9/11 and was killed “in the line of duty” is actually so much worse than I thought because he was killed by FRIENDLY fire after he criticized the war/called invading iraq “fucking illegal” and the army tried covering up his death
His name was Pat Tillman.
Some day, on someone’s death bed, they’re going to admit that Pat Tillman’s death was a murder. I’m not saying there was some grand conspiracy to lay a hit, but someone didn’t like what he had to say and took advantage of the fog of war.
Pat Tillman was also an atheist. His family is atheist. The military and U.S. politicians who wanted to make hay out of the all-American boy giving up his NFL contract to fight for ‘our way of life’ did not like that he and his family were not Christian and refused to go along with the “Onward Christian Soldiers” narrative of the ever-increasingly-Evangelical U.S. Armed Forces.
Oh my god Chloe you’re right and you should say it
Fun fact: Victor Gruen, the “inventor” of the modern shopping mall, wanted his malls to be full of apartments, schools, medical facilities, and indoor parks in addition to the stores, so people could live, work, and shop under one roof. This never happened and instead all the space was used for stores, something that he hated.
It’s not just a case of ‘hey it would be easy to repurpose all this space’, malls were originally designed to be living centers and it wouldn’t take that much tweaking to bring them back to it.
