sharkgatherer.bsky.social
black disabled trans refugee - owner of trans tech company Blue Shark Friends - mother to two - polyamorous
364 posts
107 followers
71 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
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There are more of us than there are of them, and all we have to do is use empathy.
Never stop caring about the other. And we win. We leave a world for the next generation that is better than anything we could have imagined.
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But the thing about this war is that it is digital. Everyone is participating.
Social media made it clear to people in power, the vast majority of us want freedom, want peace, want democracy.
And now oligarchs are so scared, they’re using dictators to keep their power.
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We have let tyrants run rampant around the world in the name of “international security”.
But. We live in a global world. And giving space for Nazis to thrive anywhere.
They successfully undermined the entire global world order and have pushed us into world war 3.
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We don’t have to ask permission to organize and fundraise to keep deported people off the streets.
Solidarity is effective. Empathy is effective. So effective that they literally have to call it a sin.
We can no longer stick our heads in the ground about oppression around the world.
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The prison would close.
This administration is using international coordination to bypass US law.
2 can play that game. We can use international coordination to bypass the intentions a wannabe dictators.
We don’t have to ask for permission to join forces with the local resistance in El Salvador
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If enough Americans decided today that El Salvador is not going to have a prison that does human rights abuses, and we put our weight behind it, not governmental or political or military weight. But our cultural and social and financial weight. If we built solidarity with others in El Salvador.
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When people come into a community that you are trying to rule by force, and they show love and care and nuance and empathy and forgiveness and hope.
It’s the same strategy Nazis use trying to infiltrate spaces. Except empathy is so much more potent than fascism. Empathy inspires.
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A society cannot exist without empathy. It’ll collapse on itself. But also, no one wants to live there. It’s empty and hopeless.
Why do dictators go after NGOs. Why was USAID the first thing shut down?
Because we are in a cyberwar.
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There has been this movement among MAGA to identify empathy as a sin and a weakness (a core tenet of fascism). They are saying the quiet part out loud.
They cannot win against empathy. They have to root it out.
Which means. If we keep our empathy, we win.
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People are constantly asking what can we do to stop this administration from harming people.
And the answer is we can’t. In a lot of cases, harm is going to happen no matter what we do.
But.
We can mitigate harm. We can persistently protect and soothe and support the people being harmed.
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I personally trust popwink, the organization behind Friends of Indira. So if you can help at all, please do.
I have no spoons for alt text today but you can Venmo @popwink.
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I’m part (in a tiny mostly spectator way) of an artist collective called Friends of Indira.
A recently deported Venezuelan family, a mother and her three children have been living on the streets after being deported.
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The key to a democracy is not voting.
It’s power sharing. It’s the prevention of a single point of failure.
If moderate Republicans wanted to stop this, 10 congressional resignations would be enough. That’s how razor thin Felon 47’s hold on power is.
They don’t even have to fight just quit.
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I’ve always hated this idea that Putin has a dossier on the Republicans or Viktor Orban or Lukeshenko or etc.
He just found natural allies and helped them get to power.
He broke through front lines, found the central control point of the system and helped put an ally in charge.
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The enemy breaks past your front lines, hunkers down and hunts your positions between drones, satellites, and physical checks.
This. Is cyber warfare.
If you can find whoever is controlling the mechanized automated death machines, you win.
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I know enough not to be cruel. But, I wonder if any of my criticisms have ever hurt people I looked up to.
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How will this tool increase the agency, social mobility, and voice of those impacted?
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As a disabled black trans woman, I am doubly afraid if the checks and balances you are using depend on the estimations of someone’s need for guardianship by police officers and/or judges.
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And from stripping marginalized populations of dignity and agency.
If a guardianship can be used to destroy Britney Spears’s life, then dangers are already there and widespread.
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Are you open to questions with a stranger on this topic. I’ve been warned by disability advocates that guardianships are mostly used to strip rights from already vulnerable populations.
I would love to know what kind of mechanisms will be in place to prevent this tool from being abused.
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If you are paying attention to the way in Ukraine, you will start to see that it has evolved into a war of screens.
The person controlling the weapon is so far removed. It’s turned less into a game of capture the flag and more into a game of hide-and-seek.
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I’ve paid special attention to the frontline of Ukraine.
Because in this world war, that is one of the frontlines.
Ukraine is one, Myanmar is another, Gaza is another, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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Building a separate internet was a decades long process. And even then China isn’t immune to protest.
So authoritarians were looking down the barrel at the inevitable triumph of democracy.
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The only countries to find a work-around were China and North Korea.
But North Korea is so locked down as to collapse under its own weight.
And China basically built a separate internet.
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We have been in a global battle between democracy and authoritarianism for a while now. You could say forever.
But I think the Arab spring was a fundamental shift in how this battle is playing out.
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So, if you want shit like the UN and the WHO and USAID and all the good America was doing to continue, imma need to build it.
And you know what, if you build it, there are a lot of Americans who would help fund it.
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So imma need yall to start thinking and discussing the next world order, because if I ever have to escape this country, I would like there to be somewhere to escape to.
Idk how to start that conversation. But I will say this.
Even if Trump is defeated, we aren’t going back.
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Everyone just pretend the US was a good dictator.
See the coups of the 20th century, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza.
We were not and are not good with unlimited power.
So, whatever we build next. We cannot go back to the previous world order.
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Because if no one is going to step in the whole and lead the free world, then fascist dictator Hitler 2.0 Trump was right about one thing.
The US was carrying too much. And it wasn’t fair.
I’m not complaining. The previous system was authoritarian in favor of the US.
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All I can think is… there aren’t any other Americas are there?
I’m a black disabled trans women who grew up as a military brat in Germany. I visited the ovens and gas chambers at Auschwitz as a child. I know where this train leads.
And I don’t know where to go?
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It’s hard not to be angry.
It truly is fucked up what my government is doing. I am scared.
But, no country out there seems interested in saving the Americans trapped in a fascist state.
Our immigration meltdown is because the US was so open to refugees that this sudden change is destroying lives
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Most people do not want to live in authoritarian countries. But when authoritarianism comes to your country, it takes everything just to fight for your own freedoms.
Why the fuck isn’t anyone taking up the slack on USAID. Why did we allow one country to control the levers of compassion.
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Power has to be redistributed all over the world so that no one person from no one country can bring down the system.
I truly am sad for broken treaties and relationships. But, this moment of re-alignment needed to happen. (Should have begun under Biden honestly).
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The US cannot be the leader of the free world. That doesn’t make for a stable world.
Hitler 2.0 now has access to the world’s largest and most powerful military.
Whatever we build past this moment, we cannot make this mistake again.
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Now, we live in a world that has gotten used to seeing genocide on its phones.
And I can’t help but wonder, if all of Europe wasn’t dependent on the US for security guarantees, would they still have let Gaza’s genocide happen?
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But, we also need to understand that this security arrangement made the US a single point of failure in a world-wide system.
And that power gave the US gov permission to do whatever it wanted.
That. Was. A. Mistake.
And the genocide in Gaza laid bare the consequences.
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And by that metric, the US gov has been authoritarian on the world stage. The genocide in Gaza made that clear.
I am truly grateful for the world order established in the 1950s.
We survived wild global power transfers relatively peacefully for 80 years.
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Here’s the thing, I completely understand that Trump is an existential threat to democracy, not just in the United States, but around the world.
But here’s the thing. Authoritarianism is what happens when one party has so much power that they can both create rules and then ignore their own rules.
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And they actually believe that they’re smarter than us.
In every way, they underestimate us.
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They actually believe that it was institutions and nonprofits, not a grassroots movement, that caused BLM to be so successful.
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I’m so sorry.