93 Followers
95 Following
8 Posts
Remaining in Kyiv. Fond of ecoanarchists but not related to any active group. He or they equally okay.

State of Kyiv-based mainstream NGOs that claim to fight for queer rights:

Excommunicating a trans woman for being friends with a neurodivergent ally woman who insists the orgs call out specific bonehead groups beating up queer people and left-wing allies, and fund their legal cases instead of just telling everybody to go the police on their own, abandoning any systemic effort on bringing boneheads to justice, and sabotaging invites from antifa who offered self-defense training and organizational assistance.

Excommunicating another trans woman for a continuous protest against data mining and refusal to submit personal data to proprietary media, after her last-resort individual strike action involving self-harm (her health is OK but these NGO actions don't help her, they just marginalize her further and put the blame on herself).

More cases, but annoyingly people don't organize and remain silent about it, and from what I see the orgs ignore what's happening in their communities so the conflicts between people grow and leave them atomized, bitter against each other.

If you notice in Western media any interviews, collaborations or other positive spin about Insight, KyivPride, LGBT Military etc, remember they aren't much more than vehicles for promoting their bosses in media. They do trickle down grant money to organize korporativ-like gatherings and public celebrations that they present as community building, but they prevent any actual community from appearing. Yellow union type stuff, extremely toothless and "advocacy"-focused (if by advocacy we mean endless yapping to their existing audience on corporate social media), well-integrated into the capitalist machines and using their influence to harm dissidents, portray them as unhinged (while slowly driving them to actual mental issues in order to pull a "you see she was insane all along" card), ignore them, lie to them, ban them, sue them... Fuck this establishment, I hope they burn.

Yesterday evening, one of my user study participants called me panically and told me about the blog post by @LFLegal about the lawsuit AudioEye has issued against @aardrian. Please note: I am currently writing my master's thesis about #a11y #overlays.

The participant wanted to ensure that I won’t state their name or identity anywhere within my thesis linked to their comments during testing. They were afraid. I guess that’s the goal of the lawsuit and it makes me sad.

Hello everyone. We are Resistance Committee - group of anarchists and antiauthoritarians fighting in #Ukraine for a free and just world. #Anarchism #War
Another air raid siren.
I hate work. I hate my inability to escape it. I'm silently crying and cursing all day. Most days since before kindergarten. I hate writing this, it's cringe and useless as fuck. Not writing it isn't any better. I hate myself. I hate existing.
I see jokes about deaths in Pavlohrad from Western people who don't understand what exploded. In early 90s, Western countries and Russia together forced Ukrainians to start disarming and promised external protection and funding for recycling of nuclear and explosive weapons. In 2000s, when conservatives were in power in many places in the West, they stopped that funding, and only in 2015 there was a new short contract for a couple of years. In Pavlohrad there remained storage of Soviet rocket fuels on a chemical plant, impossible to get rid of or even transport anywhere without a restart of that funding. Pavlohrad is an industrial city, not that different from many of those near you, with a population of 100,000 civilians, impossible to relocate without more huge funding. Ukrainian local budgets tried to protect the fuel enough to not harm civilians by itself, but it could not withstand an air strike. Before giving "lifestyle" advice "not to store so much rocket fuels in the living room", read about how much dangerous chemicals there are in your own cities, and in the cities across the world where you outsource material production. Try to learn what exactly will stop being funded when your political leaders call for cessation of financing of anything abroad, especially if it's something related to military-industrial complexes of either your partners or adversaries, and please apply postcolonial optics to understand the consequences. Also stop deadnaming the cities where we live; the spelling is Pavlohrad, Odesa and Kyiv.
This instance's passivity when it comes to to deplatforming China/Russia apologists sucks. Disqordia is also shit with their admin's "I hate the genocider and the genocided equally" takes.
So difficult for me to argue. I'm publically confronting leaders of certain spaces about the general toxicity I feel there. They dismiss it by attributing it to a few bad apples. I know I have to double down and keep raising concerns. So that others see me take a stand, and they start asserting their presence as well. But why do they always remain invisible? Why is it me speaking, the one least capable of it? Don't hide! Stand for yourself. Every single one of you has more stamina, better rhetoric, wider support networks, more physical strength than I ever did... I blow up first but I can only burn for so long. Use every moment to rise when it appears, because each time it's someone making a sacrifice for you to have an opportunity to win.