natalunasans reblogged
Prison abolition. Today. Always.
natalunasans reblogged
A transgender employee of The Guardian – which once called itself the “world’s leading liberal voice” – has resigned accusing the newspaper in an email to staff of being “an incredibly transphobic organisation”.
In a cutting resignation letter sent last month, the employee said the paper “fundamentally not only stands against my own values but also against what I am”. A second staff member resigned weeks later, also citing the “harm” they say the newspaper is doing to trans people.
Following the leak of the email to BuzzFeed News, the trans employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she felt complicit in the newspaper’s “transphobic” reporting by continuing to work there, and revealed the damaging effect the Guardian’s coverage of transgender people has had on her wellbeing. This included fear of using the women’s toilet at work.
…
For Victoria, the turning point came in October 2018 when the Guardian published what became a notorious editorial – a leader article setting out its official position on trans rights – which, it said, “collide” with women’s rights and put women at risk. This was despite LGBT organisations and many prominent feminists and women’s groups asserting the opposite.
But Victoria’s immediate concern was that she had to go to work the next day, knowing what her employer’s publicly-stated position was on her. “It suddenly became real,” she said, before characterising her thought process that morning: “I’m entering this building with people who are denying my humanity.”
Victoria said that when she first transitioned, years ago, “I would be freaked out about toilets and would walk in very quickly, just run to the stall and run back,” but following the article written by colleagues, “I started doing that in the Guardian.”
She raised concerns about the editorial with her line manager who promised to take it further, but, Victoria said, “I never heard anything more from it.” The daily morning conference would have also provided an opportunity to respond to the editorial but Victoria feared a hostile reception. “I thought, ‘I’m not walking in that room, me, alone against this bunch of people to discuss this. I think they understand perfectly what they are doing. There’s power in that room and power differences – we are not all equals.”
Shortly after, during two separate incidents at informal drinks with colleagues, one member of staff who had previously been Victoria’s friend at work defended the article, she said, and began citing trans women in sports as a reason to attack trans rights. Another colleague, she said, “poked fun” at her, asked if she was trans, and told her, “If you went to prison I’m not sure which prison you should go to.”
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Before accepting her job two years ago, Victoria said she thought she could help change things at the Guardian, and hoped it was not prejudice informing the position of some there but rather a lack of knowledge. While she found the latter to often be the case there remains “a group of powerful people who are transphobic” at the organisation, “who have an agenda to push”, she said.
More at the link.
Defund the Guardian. Don’t support them monetarily. Use adblock if you visit the website.
everylimb
Worth remembering this as Suzanne Moore and her media mates try to spin Moore leaving the Guardian as a grand injustice.
hater-of-terfs
The grauniad used to be a centre/slightly centre-left paper (and for a while after it was founded in 1821, it might even have been centre-left/actually slightly left! Imagine that!). But it’s been moving rightwards and downwards for a while, possibly accelerating with the decline of print media. I am not the most aware crayon in the box and wasn’t paying attention anyway, but personally it hit me between the eyes in about 2015 or so.
For anyone looking for left/left-of-centre news media with a focus on the UK, there are a fair few worth considering (of which I only know a couple of the most obvious):
my own favourite is Novara Media (articles, filmed interviews, ranging from very short and succinct to full-length in-depth; plus a live news hour+ (often with excellent guests, and very engaging. Ash Sarkar is great!) three times a week. All available for free (donations/subscriptions welcomed if you like their stuff and can afford it - suggested amount is one hour’s worth of whatever your wage is, per month)). Check them out at https://novaramedia.com/
Also media like DoubleDown News and The Canary may be your thing (both talk to some outstandingly well-informed people, like Monbiot for example). There are loads more I don’t know, of course!
natalunasans reblogged
Doctor Who Series 12: Spyfall - Part 1
“How much do you know about her?”
“A bit…”
natalunasans reblogged
Why does the fandom hate Kathleen Kennedy so much? Don’t want to seem ignorant or anything, I simply don’t know why, so inform me, please?
- She was pretty against casting John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran - Has a clear pattern of intervening in casting so the female leads are white brunette women - (That Rey, Jyn, and whoever Emilia Clarke plays are all white is all on her as we know they tested for several women of color and none were casted. KMT was only picked out in the end because Rian Johnson intervened) - Authorized the kill-them-all end of Rogue One when at the very least Cassian was supposed to make it (making the movie where most of the leads were nonwhite all die horribly) - Made a pretty conscious decision to leave out Finn, Rose, and Poe out of TLJ merchandising to focus on the white protagonists when this is an ensemble piece just to cater to white racists and scrounge up a little more money - Ignored all the nonwhite characters at the celebration yesterday, even when John Boyega took a flight all the way from London just to show up to have his character, the MALE LEAD OF THE NEW STAR WARS TRILOGY, be forgotten and shafted and be given a single shot in the trailer and excluded from the poster
I know there’s more but this is what’s on my mind
autisticvaswani
Please don’t tell me she’s also behind the lack of Bodhi merch for r1 😬
theamazingcat
Wasn’t she not just against John Boyega’s casting but specifically wanted a white actor to play Finn?
notasithlord
She pushed for both Finn and Rose to be played by white actors.
natalunasans reblogged
while we were all focusing on the muslim ban, trump took the opportunity to quietly remove the joint chiefs and director of Intelligence from the national security council and put steve bannon there instead [x]
for those unfamiliar with bannon, this is the neo-nazi who used to run breitbart, have previously said he wants to “destroy the state, bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment”, and could likely be the mind behind all of trump’s executive orders (including the muslim ban)
so to say this is scary would be an understatement
trebaolofarabia
So, this is extremely important and mind bogglingly absurd.
WHAT you may ask is the National Security Council?
It’s a group formed in 1947 inside the US government to provide counsel to the President because the world is too complex to merely have the State Department provide all of the intel and major points of interest.
WHO is part of it traditionally? Well, consider, if you have a council made specifically to guide you in matters of national defense, domestic security, policy, economics, espionage, technology…etc etc you would have the heads of the major players. Like the Director of National Intelligence and the Director of the Joint Chief’s of Staff who in their turns represent our spies and our military respectively.
HOW has Trump altered this? He has in effect said that the National Security Council doesn’t need authorities from the various departments to help the President understand or provide their personal insight to decisions…instead they will be replaced in the NSC by Steve “Actual Nazi” Bannon and RNC chief Reince “Fucko” Priebus.
BUT WAIT…what about matters of national defense and espionage or counter intelligence? According to Der Fuhrer Bannon and Priebus will do the trick, since they clearly have spent so much time in the military and intelligence communities. If a really tough question comes up the traditional members of the council can be called, but hey, who needs those guys anyway, if they were actually important they’d be there right?
SO WHAT’S THAT MEAN? It means that the President’s foreign and domestic policy is basically guided by a Nazi and the head of the Republican National Convention. I don’t mean that lightly, imagine if you wanted to run a country and needed goals and guidelines for what you would do, you’d ask the heads of your governments various offices and groups to tell you what’s happening to make those decisions right? What the Piss Lord in Chief has done has said 'I don’t want to meet with them because I think the world is too complicated to be described by these types…instead I’ll have a Nazi news pundit, and the guy who directs the Republican party’s campaign finances to tell me how things should go and who I need to look out for.’
HOW’S IT GET WORSE? Oh yeah, this is kinda important, you see we used to have a system in place where the Pentagon, the Joint Chief’s of Staff, and the NSC all had to agree on when to target someone for killing, specifically for when a US citizen needed to be assassinated, those three groups had to agree that it should be done. Well…You see, Susan Rice under Bush, and continued under Obama created the Disposition Matrix, that streamlined the process. The argument was that things could move so rapidly that trying to get so many divisions of the government together to agree on a target was unfeasible, so let the NSC just decide unilaterally, since the Joint Chief’s of Staff are literally always part of it. EXCEPT MY FUCKOS that now the power to selectively assassinate any US citizen has been handed to the President, Steve ‘Sieg Heil’ Bannon, and Reince ‘Dumbass Name’ Priebus…and the Joint Chief’s are out of the picture.
Guess who just put a gun to the head of every American domestic and abroad? The President.
Anyone wanna guess how long before he decides that any dissent is considered an act of terrorism? Probably not long.
When exactly do we use the Disposition Matrix? When the President and the NSC want an American citizen dead for any reason?
So you maybe see where this can go? Right? I don’t need to go any further in explaining to you how fucked up it is that the NSC is now populated by the President and a Nazi as two thirds of its major decision making components.
“[Trump] said it would bring ‘a lot of efficiency and, I think, a lot of additional safety’” This is literally what Chancellor Palpatine said to justify granting himself emergency powers. “Oh it’s okay, it’s just for safety. I’ll put it back when we’re safe.” Soon there’ll be another domestic “terrorist” attack, just like the Reichstag fire, and we’ll see civil liberties shot out the window