DO NOT TRY TO PERSUADE PEOPLE TO VOTE FOR A CANDIDATE AT THE POLLS.
DO NOT ENGAGE IN ANY KIND OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE AT THE POLLS.
NO ELECTION IS EVER A SURE THING, EVEN IF YOU’RE IN THE BLUEST OR REDDEST OF STATES. IF SOMEONE TRIES TO TELL YOU THAT YOU CAN SIT THIS ONE OUT, THEY ARE EITHER IGNORANT OR MALICIOUS.
The bitterest satire can’t keep up with plain vanilla reality right now.
We are living in the dystopian future
Look up the phrase “astroturfing”. It’s things like this, where corporations create fake movements that appear, at first glance, to be grassroots (hence the name) in order to trick people into buying into their causes/voting in favor of their interests. It’s absolutely some dystopian capitalist bs.
“rewarded with Amazon gift cards.” That’s not even the biggest problem here, but it stinks strongly of coal miners being paid in company store vouchers.
Japan’s complete lack of understanding of declining birth rates in relation to its work culture reminds me a lot of how America has an assumption that millennials are killing industries when the truth is they are more frugal because of a lack of funds.
Both come from a conservative mindset that neglects the impact that a toxic work culture can have on society.
A 80+ hour work week in order to maintain financial stability isn’t exactly a solid ground to date people and eventually build a family from a healthy relationship.
A workforce comprised of 20 somethings that make between 20-40k a year in entry positions isn’t a good ground to build a reliable consumer base when a huge chunk of that is going to rent, utilities, car payments, and student loans.
This is a fascinating connection, you should write a paper on this
I am convinced that, in general, people want to have families. Many, if not most, would be happy to raise children. But in order to have children and raise them, especially to do so well, people need happy, stable relationships, financial security and time to devote to – you know – actually raising the child. You need both money and time to do that.
If people are not given the time and means to be able to create social connections and strong relationships, to devote to parenthood and family, then they are not going to do it. How can they?
please spread the word, and get in contactvia this websiteit is so easy to send a pre-worded email over and get things rolling. help us out!! we made it through the july vote, but it’s come back round super fast.
AO3 just posted an update on how it could be affected after the recent vote. basically it is definitely bad for the environment of creativity, but it’s not the end right now – and it’s important as much as we can now we channel concerns intoaction because in the run up to the final vote and we can influence the outcome for the future of creative works and for our fandom experiences!!!
the post AO3 made is a really good outline for people to read and catch up on what’s going on, and see how they can help.
Kill fandom and I guarantee you will kill the franchise. Fandom is the life blood that makes something successful and keeps it successful for years to come.
please spread the word, and get in contactvia this websiteit is so easy to send a pre-worded email over and get things rolling. help us out!! we made it through the july vote, but it’s come back round super fast.
AO3 just posted an update on how it could be affected after the recent vote. basically it is definitely bad for the environment of creativity, but it’s not the end right now – and it’s important as much as we can now we channel concerns intoaction because in the run up to the final vote and we can influence the outcome for the future of creative works and for our fandom experiences!!!
the post AO3 made is a really good outline for people to read and catch up on what’s going on, and see how they can help.
If you’re a parent and you decide to homeschool your child YOU are responsible for giving them an education that will benefit them into their adult life. YOU as the PARENT need to take the initiative to teach your child. Your child is not responsible for their own schooling.
Learning is HARD. Learning about math gets harder the more complex it gets, it is discouraging. If you are not prepared to help your child and encourage them to learn and understand difficult and advanced math, you should not homeschool.
It is HARD to learn history and names and dates and science and grammar structure when they want to play outside.
It is your job to teach them anyway. You have made the conscious choice to withhold your child from school and teach them yourselves. It is not your place to give up when your child doesn’t want to learn.
It is not your place to give your child schoolbooks and expect them to teach themselves.
The second you decide to take schooling into your own hands you do not get to pass that responsiblity onto your child.
You alone are responsible for teaching them things appropriate for their age. The older a child gets the more selective their interests may get. You can discuss them researching and learning more about that topic on their own , but you do not get to step away and let them handle the entirety of their own education.
You are responsible for teaching them.
My mother homeschooled me my whole life and while I know I’m not unintelligent by any means, I know there are some topics on which I am extremely ignorant because I was never taught about them.
My mother neglected my schooling and refused to put me in school even when I begged. I did not learn any history apart from her Jewish stories and the WW2 documentaries my older brother watched on TV.
All of my English is self-taught because of fanfiction.
I cannot do most forms of math, and rely heavily on google and have to use overly complicated ways to figure out numbers with my job.
I did not have any education in science until I reached 10th grade and found Khan Academy videos. All of my science has been self-taught.
My mother started every ‘school year’ by selecting ‘grade-appropriate’ books from the back closet of our house. They were all old, outdated, and heavily skewed towards extremeist Christian and Right-Wing views. I would be handed a pile of books and told to learn.
I was not taught. I did not have the capability, as a CHILD, to teach myself.
My mother gets mad when I state how I didn’t receive an education and says that it’s my fault because I didn’t want to learn.
She is wrong. It was not my choice, and it was not my responsibility to teach myself.
So, if you choose to homeschool a child, consider the fact that you will become parent and teacher. Your child may fight you because learning is HARD and BORING and the television or video games or YouTube is much more exciting and fun, but it is your responsibility as their TEACHER to teach them.
You don’t get to be tired and neglect their education. You made that choice and it is your responsibility.
“Big Pharma” okay are we talking about how privatization and monetization has deeply corrupted the field of medicine or are you talking about how you think chemicals in the water are making the frogs gay
“GMOs”? Are we talking seeds that grow sterile plants and patenting genetic modifications then destroying any competition no matter how small they are? Or are we talking life saving rice with vitamin a to make sure kids don’t go blind in regions not suited for other high vit a veg? … or are we talking about your chidoodle?
Conversely, “alternative medicines”? Are we talking the traditional practices of non-Western societies which have an ancient history of being the cultural tools that allowed communities to take care of the health of their members and are nowadays rigorously studied within these communities to adapt them to the needs of the contemporary life, and can offer important prompts to modern medicine? Or are we talking about a white woman who traveled to India twice, followed a five-hour seminar and knows everything about inner energies now
Also, I’m in Europe and ngl, had no idea this was even an article up for debate let alone it being fucking passed.
Don’t panic! This was expected at this stage and it is only the beginning. If you are a European and feel passionate about this, please keep on reading and help!
So what has happened so far … the Commission has drafted up a long overdue copyright reform. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/procedure/EN/2016_280 It contains a lot of good, and some bad: mainly Article 11 and 13.
This was put forward as a whole to the European Parlament, where it was voted down on the 5th of July 2018
This meant, this will not go through the fast way, and will be subject to scrutiny and change.
The Commission made some alterations https://eur-lex.europa.eu/procedure/EN/2016_280 and put it forward again. If Parlament would have voted it down again, it probably would have meant back to the drawing board, but most people (including me) agree that Europe does need copyright reform, so on the second vote it passed the first step:
So what happens now?
This will now go into what is called the Trilogue, where Commission, Parlament and representatives of all national governments will sit together to make alterations until everybody is happy implementing the regulation.
This means we can now influence this via our MEPs and our National Government!
In countries that are red your government is likely to support Article 13.
What to do now?
There are a lot of organisations that organise actions against article 13. Check out their websites and get in touch with your MEP or local government and let them know you are unhappy about this.
… and many many more, just google to find one in your country.
Also, as @asthesea-breezehitsmylungs pointed out, a lot of people are not aware of this going on. So make them aware! Share the memes and point them to the petitions. And don’t just complain how shit this is, get in touch with your politicians!
Lobbyists for “creators” threw their lot in with the giant entertainment
companies and the newspaper proprietors and managed to pass the new EU
Copyright Directive by a hair’s-breadth this morning, in an act of
colossal malpractice to harm to working artists will only be exceeded by
the harm to everyone who uses the internet for everything else.
Here’s what the EU voted in favour of this morning:
* Upload filters: Everything you post, from short text snippets to
stills, audio, video, code, etc will be surveilled by copyright bots run
by the big platforms. They’ll compare your posts to databases of
“copyrighted works” that will be compiled by allowing anyone to claim
copyright on anything, uploading thousands of works at a time. Anything
that appears to match the “copyright database” is blocked on sight, and
you have to beg the platform’s human moderators to review your case to
get your work reinstated.
* Link taxes: You can’t link to a news story if your link text includes more than a single word
from the article’s headline. The platform you’re using has to buy a
license from the news site, and news sites can refuse licenses, giving
them the right to choose who can criticise and debate the news.
* Sports monopolies: You can’t post any photos or videos from sports
events – not a selfie, not a short snippet of a great goal. Only the
“organisers” of events have that right. Upload filters will block any
attempt to violate the rule.
Here’s what they voted against:
* “Right of panorama”: the right to post photos of public places despite
the presence of copyrighted works like stock arts in advertisements,
public statuary, or t-shirts bearing copyrighted images. Even the
facades of buildings need to be cleared with their architects (not with the owners of the buildings).
* User generated content exemption: the right to use small excerpt from
works to make memes and other
critical/transformative/parodical/satirical works.
Having passed the EU Parliament, this will now be revised in secret,
closed-door meetings with national governments (“the trilogues”) and
then voted again next spring, and then go to the national governments
for implementation in law before 2021. These all represent chances to
revise the law, but they will be much harder than this fight
was. We can also expect lawsuits in the European high courts over these
rules: spying on everyone just isn’t legal under European law, even if
you’re doing it to “defend copyright.”
In the meantime, what a disaster for creators. Not only will be we liable to having our independently produced materials arbitrarily censored by overactive filters,
but we won’t be able to get them unstuck without the help of big
entertainment companies. These companies will not be gentle in wielding
their new coercive power over us (entertainment revenues are up, but the share going to creators is down:
if you think this is unrelated to the fact that there are only four or
five major companies in each entertainment sector, you understand nothing about economics).
But of course, only an infinitesimal fraction of the material on the
platforms is entertainment related. Your birthday wishes and funeral
announcements, little league pictures and political arguments, wedding
videos and online educational materials are also going to be
filtered by these black-box algorithms, and you’re going to have to get
in line with all the other suckers for attention from a human moderator
at one of the platforms to plead your case.
The entertainment industry figures who said that universal surveillance
and algorithmic censorship were necessary for the continuation of
copyright have done more to discredit copyright than all the pirate
sites on the internet combined. People like their TV, but they use their
internet for so much more.
It’s like the right-wing politicians who spent 40 years describing
roads, firefighting, health care, education and Social Security as
“socialism,” and thereby created a generation of people who don’t
understand why they wouldn’t be socialists, then. The copyright
extremists have told us that internet freedom is the same thing as
piracy. A generation of proud, self-identified pirates can’t be far
behind. When you make copyright infringement into a political act, a
blow for freedom, you sign your own artistic death-warrant.
This idiocy was only possible because:
* No one involved understands the internet: they assume that because
their Facebook photos auto-tag with their friends’ names, that someone
can filter all the photos ever taken and determine which ones violate
copyright;
* They tied mass surveillance to transferring a few mil from Big Tech to
the newspaper shareholders, guaranteeing wall-to-wall positive coverage
(I’m especially ashamed that journalists supported this lunacy – we
know you love free expression, folks, we just wish you’d share);
What comes next? Well, the best hope is probably a combination of a
court challenge, along with making this an election issue for the 2019
EU elections. No MEP is going to campaign for re-election by saying “I
did this amazing copyright thing!” From experience, I can tell you that no one cares what their lawmakers are doing with copyright.
On the other hand, there are tens of millions of voters who will vote
against a candidate who “broke the internet.” Not breaking the internet
is very important to voters, and the wider populace has proven
itself to be very good at absorbing abstract technical concepts when
they’re tied to broken internets (87% of Americans have a) heard of Net
Neutrality and; b) support it).
I was once involved in a big policy fight where one of the stakes was
the possibility that broadcast TV watchers would have to buy a small
device to continue watching TV. Politicians were terrified of
this proposition: they knew that the same old people who vote like crazy
also watch a lot of TV and wouldn’t look favourably on anyone who
messed with it.
We’re approaching that point with the internet. The danger of internet
regulation is that every problem involves the internet and every poorly
thought-through “solution” ripples out through the internet, creating
mass collateral damage; the power of internet regulation is that every
day, more people are invested in not breaking the internet, for their
own concrete, personal, vital reasons.
This isn’t a fight we’ll ever win. The internet is the nervous system of
this century, tying together everything we do. It’s an irresistible
target for bullies, censors and well-intentioned fools. Even if the EU
had voted the other way this morning, we’d still be fighting tomorrow,
because there will never be a moment at which some half-bright, fully
dangerous policy entrepreneur isn’t proposing some absurd way of solving
their parochial problem with a solution that will adversely affect
billions of internet users around the world.
This is a fight we commit ourselves to. Today, we suffered a terrible,
crushing blow. Our next move is to explain to the people who suffer as a
result of the entertainment industry’s depraved indifference to the
consequences of their stupid ideas how they got into this situation, and
get them into the streets, into the polling booths, and into the fight.
Furious about this vote. I foresee a lot of leaning on my MEPs in the near future. And further.
Damn it all!
The upload filter thing is going to be DISASTROUS for classical musicians. We already get copyright claims on our content by major media distributors like Sony, because they own SOME recordings of certain works, even though the works themselves are public domain – bots don’t understand the difference.
If you don’t know what this means, it’s basically then end of how the internet currently is in Europe. Memes? Nope. Youtubers? Bye!
You’d need a license for everything!!!!
And my fellow Americans my be all like, well, what’s the big deal for us? It’s a Europe deal.
No, because the Youtubers there that you love so much? This effects them too! I’m freaking out because Jack, the person who helps my depression go away, may no longer be able to do what he does!
Guys, we need to stop this somehow. Please.
Call your MEPs. Sign petitions. Protest (Peacefully please. Don’t get hurt).
I’m sorry for tagging you guys if you don’t want to be or already know, I just want as many people to know as possible!
I can’t tag everyone, but if you see this, please reblog it. Spread the news. Sign the petition. Call your MEPs. Do what you can to help stop this from passing in January.
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