A little over three hours ago, I heard the news that the footage of the police killing 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago had finally been released. That, on top of the already mourning I’ve been wading through over the police murder of Daunte Wright on Sunday night, has just about leveled me.
So this isn’t going to be the lightest or most funny recap, or really even my best and most insightful if I being honest with you, but I’m here and that doesn’t count for nothing.
Queer as in F*ck You
How You Can Fight the Anti-Trans Bills Surging Across the U.S.
‘What If I Had Gotten a Head Start on Hormones?’ A 19-year-old from Arkansas about how access to gender-affirming health care saved his life.
“It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution — real girls’ talk.” The Brief, Brilliant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
Saw This, Thought of You
America Has Pandemic Senioritis (Very Much Related: In the Future, You Can Make Out Anywhere. “I predict a joyful PDA boom”)
Discord Will Block NSFW Servers on iOS. These things always make me pissed because they are almost uniformly tied to homophobia and anti-sex work hysteria and violence. Anyway, how will this impact our A+ Discord servers and their dating channels? Stay tuned.
Scientists Haven’t Figured Out Long COVID. Here Are 5 of Their Best Hypotheses.
Learning a New Language Can Help Us Escape Climate Catastrophe. “Many Indigenous languages have been forcefully wiped out by white people. They’re some of our main hopes for beating the climate crisis.”
Political Snacks
I’m including this version of the story because I appreciate the practice of not including videos that re-traumatize Black people. Video Shows Chicago Police Shooting 13-Year-Old Adam Toledo as He Raised His Hands (No Video in Story)
And from Autostraddle just last summer, it’s always worth remembering: How to Never Call the Cops Again
So glad you are here.
Thanks, Carmen. I’m grateful you’re here too.
Yes. After a week like this, a year like this, centuries like this, that counts for a lot, ¿no?
Damn, this week. Thank you so much for this roundup.
Did anyone here about Florida wanting to genital check hs & college athletes?
Really disgusting. Like that’s going to out many trans & intersex people. Fuck Florida’s politicians.
We’re also getting a new law that’s going to screw over protestors and protect the police from being defunded or facing any real consequences for their actions so along with the humidity it really IS hell on earth
While I’ve never used Discord and generally avoid anything Apple-related, this annoys me to no end. I’m one of those people who believes that 1.) casual nudity (and depictions thereof) are healthy and should never be banned; 2.) sexualized nudity is sometimes problematic but there’s usually not any good reason to ban it, at least within the current environment where some consider any nudity to be inherently sexual; and 3.) Only outright porn should be banned, except in environments where one would expect to see it, with appropriate gatekeeping to make sure that younger kids can’t easily access it. I will admit that the lines between the three categories can be blurry at times.
Unfortunately, whenever some social media or online community hits the big time, banning nudity is usually one of the steps they take to seem “respectable” to the general public, and also make it easier to police. I’m aware that there are exceptions. For example, Reddit allows “NSFW” communities, DeviantArt allows nudity but with some rather arbitrary restrictions which nevertheless do a decent job of keeping outright porn off the site, and supposedly Twitter allows some nudity, though so far I have
…haven’t seen any. [Not sure what happened, it auto-submitted before I was finished.]
Part of the problem is that the governments of United States, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China all have a major influence on the standards of the internet as a whole, and all of them are varying forms of “prudish”, even if the general population of their countries don’t necessarily agree. There are a lot of other governments which aren’t as influential but can sometimes be weird about it.
I’m not sure at what point we should stop “respecting” neurotic attitudes even if those attitudes are deeply ingrained in some people by longstanding cultural influences (i.e. dating back to anywhere from 1750 to 1950 in most cases, and sometimes forced on people by colonization), but it’s always annoying to see prudish attitudes being considered as part of the “global mainstream”.