Notices by Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social), page 2

And as I mentioned earlier, virtually every anti-trafficking initiative in the US has served to further enlarge police budgets, expand surveillance, and encourage lawless behavior on the part of various law enforcement groups.

Human and sex trafficking are real problems but the US response has largely been to protect men like Epstein or Robert Kraft while prosecuting and making life more dangerous for sex workers.

It's also used to drum up support for racist closed borders and anti-immigration policies even though it's migrants, not US citizens, who are the most frequent victims and blocking asylum seekers puts them at heightened risk.

By and large, US political actors have exploited trafficking fears and concerns to support their own racist, sexist, and authoritarian agendas and political ambitions while protecting known abusers in their midst.

So yeah, it's a little hard to trust these anti-trafficking crusaders, especially when they're associated with conspiracy groups like QAnon, fascist paramilitary and police organizations, misogynist theocratic Christian organizations, or have deep ties and loyalties to the Epstein class themselves.

Anti-trafficking initiatives in the US are overwhelmingly concerned with protecting white girls and women from a racialized Other even as wealthy white men like Epstein and his accomplices trafficked and abused such girls in broad daylight with virtual impunity.

Sports betting feeds addictions and ruins lives, sure. Now do the stock market.

Polymarket, crypto, NFTs, "AI," sports betting, stock market bubbles -- US society is so heavily commodified and based in speculation and gambling that there's nothing some people won't try to manipulate for cash.

I think Israel is pretty much what a model fascist state would look like, but because it has rock concerts, the West largely gives it a free pass.

Femininity was nice but it was also somewhat beside the point as far as I was concerned. I was already feminine. What held me back from opening up to people was that I wanted to be and be perceived as female and that became a problem of escalating severity and eventually, an existential crisis.

As a trans girl who played D&D and was into sci-fi / fantasy, I was a pretty femmy kid but my heroes were always intelligent women like Romana or Ripley or Rogue or Psylocke (80s version) who would kick your ass while looking great doing it.

I never had the sense that physical strength was not an option or that there were skills or clothing women couldn't do or couldn't wear except as society was obnoxious about it. A slacker girl dressed "androgynously" was still a girl, obviously.

Meanwhile, I was mentally floating somewhere outside of my body, watching myself and the world from behind a fluffy veil of fluffy dissociation.

I saw an article that was like, "Ugh, why is NASA's Space Launch System still dealing with hydrogen leaks?" And I'm like, "Space is hard, yo."

Some people's digital lifestyles seem exhausting to me, the amount of effort they put into maintaining all these different presences.

I don't even like DM/PMs because I feel like the expectation is that I make myself available whenever people want.

Maybe it makes me old but I simply can't be bothered to make myself available to everybody on every platform 24/7.

I feel like I'm young enough to appreciate all of this technology and its potential and old enough to want to keep it over there in a box for only when I feel like messing with it.

And I suppose I'm fortunate that my life doesn't require me to be on all the time.

I don't think being online is "toxic" either. A lot of people, especially young queer people, rely on it to have any social support whatsoever, which I understand.

I myself would be a weird recluse if it weren't for the Internet.

My relationship to Discord is that I don't care about Discord and I don't use Discord and Discord keeps doing everything in its power to make sure it stays that way.

Re: LRT

People misunderstand that the conservative movement does not occupy the same political-philosophical space the rest of us do, where democracy, science, and human rights are important.

As right-wingers will happily tell you, the project is to abolish modern civilization and reinstate the rule of monarchs, warlords, and wealthy land-owning aristocrats. The goal is for massive numbers of people to die and for the rest of us to become slaves.

All throughout the Epstein e-mails, you can see these people recoiling at the idea of a global community and wanting to forcibly return to "tribalism" and authoritarian ethno-states. Undermining democracy and the rule of law and reducing women to a sexual slave caste and impoverishing people to make them totally dependent on neo-feudal overlords is the whole point.

The frontmen who run for office are loathe to tell you this because it sounds like supervillain shit.

Trump occasionally says the quiet part out loud when he talks about not having elections anymore and stuff.

But everyone backing them and working on their campaigns and all the think tanks and social media influencer guys know that repealing the 20th and 21st centuries is the entire point.

US "crime," policing, and immigration panics are deeply rooted in the country's history of slavery and the belief among the rich white former slave-owning elite that they won't be able to maintain control or enjoy "white culture" without a massively violent and oppressive system to keep themselves on top.

Everything else they say on the subject is bullshit.