This is the blog of a historian named Charlotte (she/it/they), known across the Internet as PhD, DSc, MD, PT Discworld. Officially a PhD! (also received a Professor of Thaumology from Unseen University, Ankh Morpork). She has interests in goth music, science, academia, Doctor Who, Discworld, and various other topics. Trans as fuck. GNU Terry Pratchett
Possibly the most horrifying thing that has ever happened to me occurred today. So I’m in a creative writing class at university right now and we had to print out twenty-five copies of our first, one page assignment to distribute to the class. I had to print mine at the computer lab as I don’t have a printer, but here are the three crucial facts that made this the worst mistake of my life.
1. Sometimes, when you log into Google on Chrome, it activates all of your extensions, even ones you’ve deactivated.
2. In high school, my friends and I got really into Ponify (a words replacing chrome extension) and switched the preferences so we could read political articles and have congress get into a “rousing snow ball fight” and the like.
3. Ponify reverted to its original My Little Pony lingo when opened on a new computer’s chrome.
So when I distributed my twenty-five copies of this I noticed the word “everypony”, my heart seized up and dropped into my stomach, and with my imminent death approaching, I began furiously correcting all twenty-five of them. My teacher, confusedly, agreed to let me correct them as I was too infuriated and ashamed to say my mistake aloud.
I just realized, however, that the line “as she watched the binding fall away in her hand” was changed to “as she watched the binding fall away in her hoof”.
And I just had to send this email:
And basically I’m ready for death how was your day
Top: in Super Paper Mario, one of Mimi’s most distinctive character traits is her transformation sequence. In her humanoid form, she snaps her neck, turns her head upside-down, and six spider-like legs emerge from it, turning her into an arthropod monster. Note how after the transformation, she no longer has eyes; the only feature left of her face in the monstrous form is the mouth. This sequence, being a cutscene, can never be seen in 3D in-game, and is instead always seen head-on in 2D as shown in the footage.
Bottom: viewing the sequence in 3D using a model viewer, we can see that the reason Mimi lacks eyes in her monster form is because her eyes actually turn into a pair of legs. Note how her eyes extrude forward into the camera, which is impossible to see in-game due to the fixed angle, and turn into legs. Also note the gears inside her head, which, unlike the eye/leg transformation, can in fact be seen in-game during battles against her by turning into 3D.
A moralistic program in Phoenix arrests sex workers in massive raids and brings them to a church, where they are held extrajudicially and offered alternative sentences without lawyers, judges, or due process.
In May 2013, Monica Jones, a student and sex-work activist, was arrested for “manifesting prostitution” by the Phoenix police.
Hers was one of more than 350 arrests carried out by Project ROSE in conjunction with Phoenix police since the program’s inception in 2011.
Project ROSE is a Phoenix city program that arrests sex workers in the name of saving them. In five two-day stings, more than 100 police officers targeted alleged sex workers on the street and online. They brought them in handcuffs to the Bethany Bible Church. There, the sex workers were forced to meet with prosecutors, detectives, and representatives of Project ROSE, who offered a diversion program to those who qualified. Those who did not may face months or years in jail.
In the Bethany Bible Church, those arrested were not allowed to speak to lawyers. Despite the handcuffs, they were not officially “arrested” at all.
In law enforcement, language goes through the looking glass. Lieutenant James Gallagher, the former head of the Phoenix Vice Department, told me that Project ROSE raids were “programs.” The arrests were “contact.” And the sex workers who told Al Jazeera that they had been kidnapped in those windowless church rooms—they were “lawfully detained.”
“Project ROSE is a service opportunity for a population involved in a very complex problem,” Lieutenant Gallagher wrote to me in an email. Sex workers were criminals and victims at once. They were fair game to imprison, as long as they were getting “help.”
Project ROSE is the creation of Dr. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz. She is the director of the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research and a tenured professor at Arizona State University, where Monica Jones is a student. Once, she and Monica had even debated Project ROSE.
According to Project ROSE’s website, most costs are absorbed by taxpayers, who pay the salaries of the officers carrying out the raids. Fifteen-hundred dollars more per day goes to the Bethany Bible Church. Volunteers, including students from Arizona State University, fill in the gaps. SWOP-Phoenix, an activist organization by and for sex workers, is filing freedom-of-information requests to discover ROSE’s other sources of funding.
At first, Project ROSE may seem similar to the many diversion programs in the United States, in which judges sentence offenders to education, rehab, or community service rather than giving them a criminal record. What makes ROSE different is that it doesn’t work with the convicted. Rather, its raids funnel hundreds of people into the criminal justice system. Denied access to lawyers, many of these people are coerced into ROSE’s program without being convicted of any crime. Project ROSE may not seem constitutional, but to Roe-Sepowitz, “rescue” is more important than rights.
In November 2013, Roe-Sepowitz told Al Jazeera: “Once you’ve prostituted you can never not have prostituted… Having that many body parts in your body parts, having that many body fluids near you and doing things that are freaky and weird really messes up your ideas of what a relationship looks like, and intimacy.”
“As a social worker, you’re supposed to see your clients as human beings,” Monica told me. “But her way of thinking is that once you’re a sex worker, you can never not be a sex worker.”
To the best of Google’s knowledge, Roe-Sepowitz has not spoken to any press since Al Jazeera. She ignored my repeated requests for comment, and she has only been willing to engage sex workers if they risked their freedom by speaking to her class alongside members of the police.
Monica is a proud activist. Days ago she spoke to USA Today, comparing struggles against Arizona’s SB 1062 bill (which permits businesses to discriminate against LGBT individuals) to those her family fought for their civil rights. On her third year of a social-work degree, Monica volunteers with battered women, works at a needle exchange, and passes out condoms to sex workers. She is a member of SWOP-Phoenix. She describes herself as “homemaker at heart,” a girl who loves to cook, dance, and party, but also as an “advocate.”
Monica fears she was targeted for this advocacy.
On the day cops dragged Monica to Bethany Bible Church, she had posted on Backpage.com, an advertising service used by sex workers, to warn them of a coming sting. The day before, she had spoken against Project ROSE at a SWOP rally.
Monica told me she had accepted a ride home from her favorite bar the night of her arrest. Once inside the car, undercover officers handcuffed her. They were rude, she said, calling her “he” and “it” (Monica is trans, but her ID lists her as a female). They threatened to take her to jail. Like many incarcerated trans women, Monica had previously been imprisoned with men. Frightened, Monica agreed for them to take her to the church.
Ineligible for Project ROSE’s diversion program because of previous prostitution convictions, Monica now faces months in jail and worries incarceration will hamper her pursuit of a degree. She has been questioned on the street three times since her arrest. Once, police handcuffed her for 15 minutes.
“Because I was very outspoken about the diversion program, being out there protesting and also being a student of ASU School of Social Work, I feel like the police knew about me,” Monica said. “I was very loud, so they could pick me out of the crowd.”
Monica was arrested for “manifesting prostitution,” a statute in the Phoenix municipal code that takes everything from starting conversations with passersby to asking if someone is an undercover cop as proof that you’re selling sex. In the state where Sheriff Joe Arpaio lost massive lawsuits for racially profiling Latinos, “manifesting prostitution” is another way to discriminate. The main victims are trans women of color like Monica, who are seen as sex workers even if they’re buying milk.
Some might say Project ROSE is harmless. After all, those eligible for diversion can have their charges dropped if they’re among the 30 percent who manage to complete the program. But many of the hundreds arrested in Project ROSE’s raids are not eligible, either because cops find drugs or weapons on them or because they’ve been charged with prositution before.
“All persons found to be participating in prostitution activity are breaking the law, regardless of motive,” says the fact sheet Project ROSE gives the media. Those not eligible are criminals. Their freedom is a small price to pay for forcing others into a program that might remove them from “the life.”
To effect this rescue, Project ROSE offers a buffet of services, including emergency housing, detox, and counseling. All these services are available without being arrested, Jaclyn Dairman, an activist with SWOP-Phoenix, told me.
But at ROSE’s heart is DIGNITY Diversion, 36 hours of classroom time run by Catholic Charities.
Catholic Charities’ website boasts a photo of a white girl, a tear running down her cheek. Who could resist opening their wallets before such innocence destroyed? Catholic Charities offers walking tours of the sketchy parts of town. Tender-hearted folk can gawk at sex workers. These excursions are like the slum tours beloved by Victorians. Popular enough in the 1890s to be listed in guidebooks, these tours of impoverished London neighborhoods gave a philanthropic gloss to the thrill of mingling with the poor in brothels, bars, and boarding houses. Then and now, participants got the self-satisfaction of pity mixed with the frisson of proximity to vice.
This cocktail may be why sex trafficking, as opposed to trafficking in maids or construction workers or farm labor, is always a fashionable cause.
Monica is a graduate of DIGNITY Diversion. Forced into this program by another prostitution arrest, Monica sat in a classroom from 8 AM to 4 PM, without food, while vice cops described girls overdosing on heroin. Jail was held over the heads of attendees until they finished the program, though many were going broke from their loss of sex-work income. Monica described the class as having the religious overtones of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In keeping with the program’s Catholicism, no condoms were provided. Neither was child care.
“I wasn’t ashamed about being a sex worker. I kept bringing this up during the diversion program,” Monica told me. “Girls would ask me why I didn’t feel this way. Well, ‘cause I don’t. I have the right to my own body.”
Catholic Charities requested that Monica leave early, fearing her influence on others.
Monica’s trial is in March. The prisons she may be sentenced to are brutal. Arizona is the home of the notorious Tent City, an outdoor complex of bunks and razor wire, where prisoners’ shoes melt from the relentless heat.
In 2009, Marcia Powell, a sex worker serving two years for agreeing to a $20 blowjob, was left in an open cage in the maximum-security yard of Perryville Prison Complex for four hours. Guards ignored her pleas for water. Under the pitiless sun, her organs failed her. Her corpse was covered with burns.
No guard has ever been charged for Marcia Powell’s death.
“There is no gray. It’s illegal behavior,” Dominique Roe-Sepowtitz said, speaking about prostitution to Al Jazeera.
Like Catholic Charities’ hooker tours, her attitude is Victorian. To those like Roe-Sepowitz, there are God’s poor and the Devil’s poor. There are victims Project ROSE can save, and there repeat offenders, unrepentant whores. They can be locked in cages and dismissed.
When the police brought Monica to the Bethany Baptist Church, she saw Dominique Roe-Sepowitz. “She refused to talk to me,” Monica said. “She wanted nothing to do with me.”
Why would she? It’s easier to speak for people if you pretend they have no voice.
hey what’s up how’s everybody’s weekend going it’s 11am here and i just had to hear my nana use the word ‘precum’ incorrectly in a room full of like 40 people how y’all doin today
it’s rly important to my nana to stay ‘hip and cool’ so she parrots a lot of the slang she hears us use. so last thanksgiving i was trying to put ketchup on smthn and i forgot to shake the bottle and got that gross watery bit first and went “oh no the ketchup precum” and my nana overheard and asked what that meant, and instead of telling my sweet 70 y/o nana what precum meant, i told her it was just a silly word for the unmixed liquid that comes out of squeeze bottles
anyways, cut to today where we’re having a birthday lunch for my cousin and she goes to put mustard on smthn and gets the watery shit and sighs to herself “mustard precum” in her sweet lil welsh accent and every single person who knew what it meant and overheard took 30pts of psychic damage and sat there for a minute like
hey so denmark is most definitely becoming a nazi nation sooner rather than later. they’ve like done some really fucked up shit, but this might be one of the more messed up things i’ve come across from there.
the government is going to have outlined “ghetto zones” in a legal definition, wherein which they are going to have double punishment for any crime.
these areas will be areas with high populations of muslim, immigrant and worker class people. meaning they are planning to give double the amount of punishment to people for living in poorer neighbourhoods with large amount of minority people.
this is a very transparent act. and they are trying to justify it by claiming it’s about maintaining the safety and peace of the country.
but what it really means is… they are not even trying to hide that the police and prison system is about targeting minorities and poor people now… and it will not surprise me if they use this to escalate the en-masse detainments they’ve had.
Wow they’re openly targeting immigrant neighborhoods, classifying areas where “the population is more than 50% non-Western immigrant” as ghettos.
The laws, which will in part start to be rolled out in 2019, get their name from the government term for 25 low-income immigrant-majority neighborhoods which are mostly populated by Muslims. The government says they aim to better integrate people living in these enclaves with the wider Danish society.
“Under the provisions of the law, “ghetto” children from the age of one will spend 25 hours per week separated from their families in order to undergo classes in “Danish values.” These would include learning the Danish language as well as all about Easter and Christmas. If people fail to comply with the measures their welfare payments would be stopped.
However, in the eyes of the UN, the measures will only increase “racial discrimination against people of migrant origin” - further ‘ghettoizing’ them.
Other, more punitive measures, include a doubling in criminal sentences for crimes committed in these ghetto neighborhoods and a four-year prison sentence for parents who send their children back to their country of origin for extended periods of time. Calling such “coercive assimilation measures” ineffective, High Commissioner Zeid said the laws “run risk of fueling racial prejudice, xenophobia & intolerance.”
Echoing Zeid’s sentiments, Danish Social Democrat politician Yildiz Ajdogan - whose Tingbjerg constituency is classified as a ghetto - told the New York Times that Danes had already become so used to the harsh rhetoric peddled by anti-immigrant politicians that they no longer register the negative connotation of the word “ghetto” and its echoes of Nazi Germany’s separation of Jews.
But criticisms of the law have been dismissed by Justice Minister Soren Pape Poulsen: “To me this is about, no matter who lives in these areas and who they believe in, they have to profess to the values required to have a good life in Denmark,” he told the NYT.
In 2017, 66.5% of all non-Western immigrants to Denmark lived in “ghettos”, according to the housing ministry.
this response from the google stadia ama is creeping the shit out of me
Nothing makes you
∑(O_O;) quite like a corporation responding to a straightforward, non-aggressive question with four paragraphs of stalling, quibbling, mind tricks (”of course it’s totally okay if you don’t believe me :)” ) and never actually answering that question
this has the same energy as a cult member talking about how the cult has changed their lives in so many wonderful ways that they can’t actually elaborate on
“Eventually all of our games will be safely in the cloud too, and we’ll feel great about it.”
unhappy reminder that amphibians are going through a pandemic right now and anything you can do to support conservation efforts would be greatly appreciated by literally everyone in the world
and for those of you who don’t click links here’s a summary of the scale of the issue as of march 28 2019:
basically a pathogen is affecting and killing off amphibians at an alarming rate globally
it’s been spread through trade of frog meat and pets primarily
its already done more damage to biodiversity than cats and rats
the pathogen can affect at least 695 species to varying degrees
90 species either confirmed extinction or assumed extinct in the wild
124 species undergoing a decline of over 90%
501 species in decline which means about 1 in 16 of every species known to science is affected
it has “has damaged global biodiversity more than any other disease ever recorded.” which is fucking terrifying
efforts to curve the effects include urging governments to crack down on the trade of amphibians, protecting their natural habitats, combatting invasive species, and supporting breeding programs
Because the statement was so vague and could be twisted to mean anything, I researched it to find a more transparent statistic… this is from 2 different sources from 2017 and 2018. In short- it’s worse
“In Montana, state law reads that “seven or more Indians are considered a raiding or war party and it is legal to shoot them.” As far as I know, this law is still valid. I saw no (Repealed) beside it. Just think about it, if you and six other Native friends walked into a café to grab some grub, you could be legally shot according to that law. Frightening….
In the great, compassionate, understanding state of South Dakota, state law reads, “If there are more than five Native Americans on your property you may shoot them.” I would advise against traveling in groups of six or more if you’re Native and in South Dakota. “Excuse me sir, my five friends and I were headed to the powwow when our van broke down in front of your home. Hey, what’s with the gun?”
It gets even worse in Spearfish, S.D., because city law states, “If three or more Indians are walking down the street together, they can be considered a war party and fired upon.”
