Notices by Kit Arvizu (thekitmalone@hoosier.social), page 5

Hey I don't know if there are any other trans girls who need to hear this but it's ok to want to be seen and known for the things you are good at. And to take up space.

I know the culture wants you to be Highly Visible and Beloved but only within a certain set of prescribed norms and otherwise kinda wants you to sit down and get outta the way.

Fuck that.

New year, new #Introduction post!

I'm Kit!

I'm on the admin team here at #HoosierSocial

I'm a political strategist, a retired semi-pro musician, a former teacher and a passionate community organizer.

My favorite things are civic involvement, coffee, #Indiana, camping, guitars, gardens, cooking, sushi, babies, beaches, kindness.

I live in #Indianapolis with my husband (@dragondaddy), two grouchy cats (Cosmo and Tiva), one hyper border collie (Deetz), and a lizard (Rosco).

#HoosierMast

#HappyBirthday #HoosierSocial !

Our little-instance-that-could turns 1 today!

We couldn't have done it without the #HoosierMast community -- @brian and I hope be good stewards as we grow this space in 2024.

If you are from #Indiana and are looking for a forever home on the Fediverse, you could do worse than joining us at @hoosiersocial.

PLUS! Don't miss our Virtual #BirthdayParty - today at at 4:30pm. It's an open house, so join this evening when you have time and say hi! Details below!

It's really annoying that, when I see an obscure but suspicious looking piece of possible misinformation being posted to social media often the only critical sources I can find are behind paywalls. The misinformation pieces are themselves inevitably free.

My dad got an Insta account like 10yrs ago because he wanted to see pics of his grandkids.

Strangers calling him a Nazi-sympathizer for not moving to a new platform where there are no pictures of his grandkids isn't gonna make him change.

My dad isn't at all a Nazi sympathizer. He's an old dude who isn't super-plugged-in who installed an app on his phone that gives him some joy.

If I want my dad here - and pictures of his grandkids for him - I gotta make here a place that they all wanna be.

I have no judgement at all for drinkers but god I'm so proud of my recovery from alcohol abuse (almost seven years!)

It may be the single thing I've done in my life that I'm most proud of.

Are you a grassroots activist group in #Indiana that is doing work that is antifascist and/or promotes racial justice, trans liberation, reproductive justice, women's rights, immigrants rights, voting rights, disability rights, or any other work that is justice oriented ... I will help you set up IT services *pro bono*.

Think email, comms, document services, web hosting, etc. I'll also provide you with tech support for those services for free.

/1

#HoosierMast

@vfrmedia yup. Which is why I tend to advise movement leaders to be incredibly careful with anyone who they bring into their leadership team or into their planning circle. It's everywhere in the movement - these days I only work on real stuff with people I've personally met and have a long-standing trust relationship with. It's also why I think this stuff is way better if it's ultra local.

I think it's really interesting to see how many comments sorta make the assumption that the purpose of such an effort would be to ask grassroots activists to switch wholesale to Mastodon, install some specific toolset, switch to free software, whatever.

Nah, but I do think that if we tell people "you should be self hosting your website and email" we have a duty to also help provide that labor, just as we might volunteer to pass out flyers at a rally or set up the chairs at an event.

It's a problem I see in non-tech activist spaces too. Folks would rather do something glamorous like start a new org or host a rally with themselves as the speaker ... or (on the tech side) start a whole new software project, create a Mastodon instance. But nobody wants to pass out bottled water, clean up trash, apportion email accounts, manage the backups.

Boring? Yeah. But if you wanna get activist groups out of the big tech surveillance bubble you need nerds willing to set up and maintain: DNS, email services, web hosting, secure comms, VPN, Mastodon instances, and document services. That's out of reach for many many groups doing the work of social justice. For much of the grassroots, throwing up a fb page and getting a Google account is honestly the only viable solution - they do not have the time or the resources to do anything else.

An antifascist IT collective that doesn't focus on ops but just helps local grassroots groups set up boring old web services and provides ongoing technical support

I don't know how we eliminate the two party system, overhaul elections to include ranked choice, install comprehensive campaign finance reform ... but gosh maybe tooting about it as if it's a brilliant new political insight will make it happen. I can't believe it's that easy!

Next maybe I'll finally find candy mountain and retire there.

The way I see it, all the worst, most powerful people on every side are getting exactly what they wanted and all the ordinary people on every side have to live or die with the consequences.

Smaller Pride events in #Indiana have always attracted some protest - typically local church folk who think they are out "preaching to the unsaved."

This year, they've gotten measurably darker. I'm hearing more slurs and threats.

Recently I worked a festival that was circled for hours by a man with AR-15
& full battle-rattle, calling us pedos and child mutilators.

This alarming escalation is due to increasingly vicious anti-#LGBTQ political posturing.

People are following their leaders.

If you tell people that your enemy is mutilating kids, it hardly matters if that's true or not.

A certain percentage of people are gonna believe you, and because they believe you -- a certain percentage of *them* are going to feel comfortable using any imaginable level of violence to stop what they think of as a credible threat.

When we talk about "stochastic terrorism" as one of the products of hate speech, this is what we mean.

In my more naive, younger days I used to ask the annual Pride protestors a couple of questions. Not a debate question, or any kind of gotcha.

I'd just ask, "What is your goal here?" And they'd usually say something vague about making sure people know about Jesus and sin and forgiveness, yadayada.

And then I'd followup with, "Do you think this is an effective means of achieving that goal?"

nmw their answer was, you could always tell that they hadn't really thought about it in those terms.

And back then, I (naturally) drew the wrong conclusion: that these were mostly harmless idiots with a bad plan.

Now I understand that I was wrong - because I presumed they were honest about their goal.

But I see now the goal never was about changing minds. Their goal was *always* to make sure that queer people felt nervous and unwelcome. But, formerly, with a veneer of respectable concern for their souls.

All they've done, recently, is just pull off that veneer.

Oh, one more every here:

It should alarm all of us how easy it was to get them to move from a public pose of "love the sinner, hate the sin" to "it is our civic duty to eliminate these groomers"

It only took about a year for that to become acceptable, mainstream discourse.

All it took was the sports issue to crack it open, radicalize a few prominent figures, and now we're investigating parents for having trans kids and running on the idea of eliminating us from public life.

We won preliminary injunction on SB480.

The state of #Indiana is prevented from enforcing it's ban on affirming care for trans youth while our case moves forward. The decision is broad, and applies to the entire state.

#Trans #HoosierMast #ACLUProud #INLegis