"While #Mastodon and other #fediverse services may hold promising alternatives to the algorithmic Musk-Meta hellscape we’ve been herded into, the structural oppressions of #antiblackness, misogynoir, mestizaje and #queerphobia are able to thrive in all corners of the internet. I think the fediverse has more people of color on there, but I don’t think the domination of white voices has ceased in any way. We volunteered to be voices but at a great cost.” https://logicmag.io/policy/blackness-in-the-fediverse-a-conversation-with-marcia-x/
We'll probably be attending the council meeting on Tuesday, please come along and help show Orange Council that queer rights are human rights, and that queerphobia isn't acceptable.
You don't have to live in Orange to attend and support - we don't.
Taken from the Facebook post of David Mallard - Green's Councillor for Orange, NSW:
"Friends, I’m disgusted that Councillor Kevin Duffy is moving to cancel the upcoming Orange Rainbow Festival.
His bringing this motion and the ensuing public debate will cause harm within the local LGBTQIA+ community, and it will also damage Orange’s public reputation and perception by potential visitors. This motion is politically opportunistic and follows a coordinated campaign of misinformation and hate that has targeted Orange City Councillors during the past few months.
We need to meet the misinformation and fear with positivity, pride and allyship. The opponents of the Orange Rainbow Festival are trying to turn reality on its head and misrepresent this event as one based on ideology, when it’s actually about providing the inclusion, acceptance and affirmation that we know is needed to prevent the homophobia and transphobia that leads to discrimination, stigmatisation, harassment, bullying and other harms to LGBTQIA+ people.
To defeat this awful motion, we need the community to come together and show our support for the Rainbow Festival and for an inclusive community.
We need as many supporters and allies as possible to come to Tuesday evening’s Council meeting, which starts at 6:30pm on Tuesday, 5th March in the Council chamber on Byng Street.
We need you to bring positivity, pride, a rainbow of colours, and most of all love for our entire community. Unfortunately it likely there will be opponents of the festival and of the wellbeing of the LGBTQIA+ community in attendance as well. Come ready to withstand their hostility and intolerance, and prepared to overwhelm that with our pride, acceptance and love.
Please share this news and the opportunity to lend support to the LGBTQIA+ community with anyone who might be willing to support our efforts. Get in touch if you have any questions or thoughts.
Orange is better than this, and we can begin to make that clear as we respond to Councillor Duffy’s motion in the coming days."
We are posting here the messages from organizations, institutions, NGOs, etc. that have opened a channel on Mastodon and left #X/Twitter. Many of their arguments cite the same points as mentioned in our open letter calling the universities to become active on Mastodon and fediverse servers.
The messages represent a broad consensus among Internet users who want to bring the choice of social media in line with their mission statements. The first of these is the data protection foundation @DS_Stiftung.
It writes about itself: „Acting independently in the field of #DataPrivacy, Stiftung Datenschutz links politics and the public, academics and business. It complements existing organizations and initiatives while liaising closely with German data protection authorities on state and federal levels.“ https://stiftungdatenschutz.org/english
At the end of September, she drew the consequences and broke away from X/ #Twitter https://twitter.com/DS_Stiftung/status/1704059550335119522
Their website announces: "Due to the enormous increase in trans- and #queerphobia, #racism, #misogyny, #anti-Semitism and other misanthropic content, "X is no longer a sustainable environment for a public body," said the Independent Federal Commissioner for Anti-Discrimination, #FerdaAtaman, explaining the decision. ... The number of hate comments had also increased so massively that the anti-discrimination office could only counter this with a high level of staffing. "It is questionable whether this can still be justified with taxpayers' money," said Ataman.
"... Ministries and government agencies should ask themselves whether it is still acceptable to remain on a platform that has become a disinformation network and whose owner spreads anti-Semitic, racist and populist content," Ataman added.
Spoiler: It’s not the refugees or immigrants. White fascists are the main responsibles for violence against queer people.
Germany: Parlamentarians of the conservative (currently shifting further to the right by the day) CDU showed a sudden interest for the well-being of queer people, asking the German government a series of questions about hate crimes and violence.
The clear intention was to connect queerphobic violence to refugees from “societies with homophobic attitudes”, such as Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan. 😠
The statistics, however, state that German fascists are the main responsibles for the recent uptick in violence against queer people.
This shows again that the real problem is the rise of rightwing narratives, which are fueled by such actions of conservative players (like the CDU) that aim to promote racist narratives.
conservatives and reactionaries love to advocate on behalf of children b/c they see children as unpersons who can be ignored completely when they self-advocate and whose will ought to be subordinated to their adult owners; this is the main part of the freak out about "#criticalRaceTheory", "#wokeism", and all the #queerphobia targeting public education and educators.
right-wing adults believe they are entitled to their own children thinking and acting as those adults say the children should think and believe, and b/c the right engages in extreme indoctrination and coercion to achieve this, they also believe that any divergence of obedience must be due to some nefarious outside influence rather than the children themselves having agency or original desires.
these adults are looking to eradicate all competing forms of ideas children might be exposed to and to beat and even torture children that fail to comply e.g. "#conversionTherapy"
On dirait bien que ça ne fait réagir personne du côté de la «défense de la liberté académique»
📰 University of Waterloo removes course details from its website in wake of triple stabbing
"The University of Waterloo (UW) in southern Ontario says it is removing some details of its courses from the public domain after a triple stabbing on campus in late June that police have said targeted the LGBTQ community.
The university says on its website that after an assessment of its response to the June 28 attack inside a gender studies class that left an instructor and two students injured, it has decided to remove class locations and instructor names from public websites."