Entries tagged "tech"
DM to a Mansplainer: Final Notice Any Woman Deserving a Real Apology Can Use to Save Emotional Labour
I’m sharing this text of a Final Notice to help any woman out there who needs it to save time and labour.
Taking responsibility means making it about you. Understanding something of what life is like for women means reading and paying attention and listening to us and not presuming you always have something to teach us without paying any attention to the context or listening to me. I am taking my own valuable time to have interacted with you about this several times and explain a piece of misogyny to a white guy for free. I will not do it again. You have all the tools as a nerd to figure out more about this if you wish to. I will be making use of the time I put into writing this to share it on my feeds in general. Imagine this was all day long. All day long. And it’s a fraction of the crap we deal with. For WOC and queer women there’s more. All unpaid.
Why Did President Obama Post About DACA On Facebook?
While I’m glad President Obama addressed DACA, I am very concerned that he posted his response on Facebook. Facebook is a privately owned platform. The company chooses who sees the post in their feeds without explaining to anyone why or how it makes that decision. It is also a platform responsible (though we yet don’t exactly know how responsible) for targeted voter suppression campaigns run on the last election. President Obama has a web site. Why did he not first post his statement there? He could have easily had that post cross-posted to various other platforms like medium, twitter and yes, Facebook, if his concern was reaching the most people.
Privatizing our public space, not to mention handing over data about our political positions and stances to a private company, are incredibly relevant to DACA and immigrants safety. President Obama asked for Dreamers data while President. This data can now be used to target them by the current administration. Now he’s helping Facebook get data by posting his support of DACA only on Facebook.
Happy Pride: If you’re using that Facebook LGBT flag emoticon, a small request.
Happy Pride! I’ve got a few words for everyone who is excited about Facebook putting out a new rainbow flag icon during LGBT Pride month this June. Facebook sponsored the RNC after many many anti-queer stances by the GOP. A major Facebook shareholder has been a core part of Il Dupe’s campaign. Facebook sent its COO to help give Il Dupe a photo of business support when his new election was in doubt. Facebook also took a long time to address the real names policy which posed a true threat to many queer folks. Thanks to Roma Roma and more who advocated on this issue. Enjoy Pride but know that real LGBTIQQ2S leadership comes from lives lived, real risk and real backbone. Here’s to the drag queens and the civil rights activists and to every queer who came before me. Thank you. Here’s to every kid and every grown up coming out to themselves. Welcome! I care. Here’s to every small town queer, every swishy boy in the south, every person getting policed by someone else’s discomfort around gender.
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If you’re not queer and you really want to be supportive, rather than focusing your energy on displaying something about you…ask queer folks you know about their lives, about the parts you don’t get to see, that people don’t always post about. Be an interested person and a willing listener to folks who have often been through a great deal. Among many other stories, there are people who have been through a plague and were never really heard by the straight part of the country. Signal boost their feeds this month. Realize that queer people you know are always reading your posts, all year long. Take some time and learn about the gay pogroms happening in Chechnya and the serious obstacles still here in the US for many queer folks legal and otherwise.
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Queer folks often have to deal with their biggest challenges in the families they grow up in. This can mean anything from difficulty to outright abuse and losing a home and these things can begin as early as 3.
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Now that Pride is a more popular and commercially acceptable thing to decorate for, I ask you to consider using Facebook for something that truly can matter and make a difference. And that will come from you, your witnessing, your time attention and caring, not from any symbol. Showing one queer person you care and are interested in really hearing what something was like to live through and deal with can make a meaningful difference. Queer lives are often code switched.
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So this is my Pride wish: that every person on Facebook who isn’t queer and wants to use that flag emoticon thing also is willing to spend the time online to ask, listen to and acknowledge one queer person once this month.
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Thanks for your time.
Removing Dropbox, Wifi, Spotlight + Notification Center From Your Menu Bar
My mind often follows what I see. I’m a visual-spatial thinker.
So I wanted to get rid of as much of the stuff in my Mac’s menu bar as possible so I can focus on what I’m writing right now. This may be the nerdiest post I’ve ever written, but it’s part of my new commitment to myself to return my expression to my own blog first (thanks for the inspiration Scott Rosenberg) before social media or elsewhere, and to write more often.
