My 1st study as part of my PhD has been published. It explores the circumstances of seriously harmed missing children and the associated guardianship opportunities and issues.
#TheMetalDogArticleList #Loudwire
Not Metal Enough - A Psychological Perspective on Gatekeeping
Psychologist Steve Byrne goes deep on the culture of gatekeeping in metal.
Les deux seules fois où j'ai pu donné mon sang avant, c'était au lycée, avant d'avoir une vie sexuelle. Depuis, et en tant que #gay - malgré la stabilité de mes relations, j'étais interdit de don, et ce jusqu'au 16 mars 2022.
J'ai un peu tardé à retrouver le chemin de l'#EFS, on ne m'en voudra pas trop j'espère, après (pour moi) 17 ans d'#exclusion (discrimination qui datait de 1983 quand même !).
Just days after arriving from England they all came down with covid, cancelling our imminent trip up north to see them.
The caravan then came to town a week later, led by my #ableist sister and #RightWing father fresh off #paxlovid.
My #immunocompromised wife and I were asked how we felt about spending two entire days at the PNE. My sister already knew we were opposed, this query was simply to demonstrate to visiting family how difficult we were due to our covid concerns.
We again respectfully declined, explaining this excursion was well beyond our daily risk level. We suggested a covid safe meetup outside the fair instead.
The group of 8, who had shared covid just ten days prior, then told us that this “would be difficult”.
It was explained by my sister that “unfortunately they only had 1.5 days” to spend at a crowded, wildfire smoke filled fair for what she called “A once in a lifetime experience for the kids”.
In response, she offered us a mere hour long breakfast at 8am on Sunday morning before they all returned to the fair for another 12 hours without masks.
I turned down this awkward meetup as we would have ended up driving longer than we would have seen them, and I was quite upset at being treated like we were being difficult simply because we wanted a family only visit outdoors in an unmitigated pandemic.
I suggested lunch, dinner or evening drinks on a porch; we would meet them anywhere in the city. I received no further response.
Family members I hadn’t seen in over five years chose to exclude and ignore us for their 2 days in the city due to our “paranoid” covid conscious mentality.
They came and left. No apologies or acknowledgement of what had happened, just silence and exclusion. We both felt beyond insulted and angry.
Weeks later (days ago) the phone rings. It’s my ableist right wing father who has only called me twice this whole pandemic.
He insinuates that it was disrespectful and selfish for us to miss their city visit, he’s let down that we didn’t join them at a pricey two day event with thousands of screaming strangers.
I am told that I can make it up to them by going out to the airport tomorrow morning at 8am to “spend a couple hours and see them off”.
I point out that the only reason we missed seeing everyone is because THEY all refused to put aside a moment for a covid safe visit with us.
I then explain that sitting on a covid skytrain tube for an hour to briefly meet family at an busy international airport terminal for a 2 hour long visit is once again, a risk that far exceeds my comfort level.
Dad scoffs, laughs at me and hands off the phone. “They never do anything anymore, a bunch of lazy disrespectful idiots.”
So ultimately, we the #vulnerable, not wanting to take unwarranted risks became the issue, rather than the ever-present virus itself.
All but two of the eight (including the kids who have had covid multiple times now) contracted covid on their extended vacation from reality.
My wife and I are still covid free but this time it came at a real cost. Anger, sadness, exclusion and disrespect.
We are now the black sheep of the family. Deemed selfish for not sacrificing ourselves. This is our new #covid19bc reality. Alienated, discriminated against, sacrificed and forgotten.
Can’t help but think how all this could’ve been avoided if my family had selflessly worn #masks and taken preventative measures to ensure a safe visit rather than doubling down on lies spun by #BonnieHenry and this soulless #BCndp govt.
“M-Enabling Summit is committed to the health and wellness of all participants. We will enforce all current CDC recommendations for health and safety protocols.”
“If the government is OK with you conducting a disabling virus, so are we. Come to our conference to get infected.”
The term “disability-related conference” gets a whole new meaning that way!
The Nowhere Men & Women: How India Abandoned 14 Crore Citizens on a Policy Paper
The government of India runs the world’s biggest food security scheme, which provides free ration to more than 80 crore people. The scheme has won Prime Minister Narendra Modi accolades. But what if we realise that there are over 14 crore people who have been omitted from the benefit of this scheme because the government has not counted Indian citizens in over a decade? Can its intransigence break the welfare structure of governance?
Someone recently asked me what I think of #sports and #gender. Here's what I said:
The thing that frustrates me most is that anything gender in sports is based on "averages" while nobody doing sport on a professional level is average. They're super talented, physically on a different plain, and getting faster, stronger, better all the time; the better kinds of abnormal. I don't hear anyone talk about how those factors are considered. Furthermore, a lot of gender division and #exclusion isn't based on up-to-date science, but ideological grounds backed by outdated cultural views of gender differences and science of "averages", which is a biased metric that is really hard to pin down anyway. And science is only half the story. How do you measure sporting talent, performance quality based on mental state, dealing with stress and pressure, level of risk aversion? It's not just stats and bodies. It's the whole package. Sports need a serious overhaul, and that’ll be one hell of a chore.
@evan I’m ‘somewhat unsatisfied’ with the state of the fediverse
I can’t be satisfied when:
• the fediverse fails to attract huge swathes of people (not necessarily a problem with the fediverse per se)
• we miss out on things like academic discussions (and other good forms of ‘engagement’), which still happen in other, mostly awful places
• marginalised people, especially people of colour, find it uncomfortable to be here (despite potentially excellent human-scale moderation)
• almost everyone seems to be a (white) computer geek – hardly reflective of the wider population
• it can be hard if not impossible to find your community here
• the dominance of Mastodon™ masks the potential of the fediverse to host (non-micro) blog posts, photographs, music, videos, scrapbooks, you name it
• Mastodon gGmbH effectively dictates how microblogging happens in the fediverse by controlling the software most instances run
• Mastodon gGmbH also operates two of the largest instances, mastodon.social and mastodon.online (both of them, imo, a couple of orders of magnitude too big to form a reasonable ‘home’ community or to be moderated effectively)
I’ll leave it there for now. It’s nice here, but it could be so much better
Tracking Life & Death: Changes To A 54-Year-Old Law May Exclude Millions Of Poorest Indians & States
Requiring birth certificates to be mandatory for all major life moves—marrying, voting, enrolling for school, getting a government job—will shut out the poorest people and states, given the unreliable state of India’s registration system.
I installed and subscribed to #ParamountPlus, learned that #audioDescription isn't available on many pieces of content in the UK, and discovered that a US-based VPN doesn't work if you subscribed to the UK offering. I have now unsubscribed from and uninstalled Paramount Plus. #accessibility#exclusion
Attacking of the right of a marginalized group to participate publically in sports has a long history.
90 years ago Jewish athletes were banned from playing in Germany.
It was part of Germany's enactment of item 3 on the list of the 10 stages of genocide: Discrimination – The dominant group denies civil rights or even citizenship to identified groups. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship, made it illegal for them to do many jobs or to marry German non-Jews.
The Columbia Record (Columbia, South Carolina)
25 Apr 1933, Tue
Even while the barrier to women playing AT ALL has been broken, exclusion remains a barrier with 'you can't play against boys/men' STILL being a thing.
Black athletes in the US were often LEGALLY PROHIBITTED from playing on mixed-race teams or against white teams.
And again, EVEN AFTER the legal prohibitions were removed, some white teams CONTINUED refuse to play teams if they included Black players.
The first of the these articles was published in 1923.
The last was published in 1989: That's not a typo.
The school that was refusing to play against Black players in 1989 was a segregation academy established in 1965 to evade school racial integration.
It didn't close until 2006.
There are STILL a number of segregation academies founded in the 1960s that are operating in the US.
They are not LEGALLY allowed to discriminate against minority students, but in practice they still do and their student bodies are either nearly or entirely white even today.
#Target, who is well known to OutOfExile_IDR - Invisible Disability Rights for acts of #ableism, has now turned it's sights to exclude the #LGBTQIA+ community. If you'd like a t-shirt printed with sayings that force religious beliefs or threaten gun violence, no problem. If you want certain "pride" clothing, Target says, not in our stores.
The retail tyrant... I retail mean giant, announced "it was taking some LGBTQ-themed merchandise off the shelves", citing "anti-LGBT threats". They seem to be making it clear who their preferred "Target market" is. Who will they "Target" next?