(via khaotunq)

bundibird:

Holy shit i am SO PLEASED TO SEE THIS TWEET ON MY FEED. My mum is one of the people that’s been helping the Djapwurrung people protect these trees for the last two years (the fight to save the sites has been going on for way longer; two years ago was just when works were about to begin, and attempts to stop the destruction moved from council/legal offices to people literally sitting in front of the trees to block access by large machinery), so it’s an issue I’ve been watching from up close, and and it’s one that hasn’t seen mainstream attention, even though it should have.

There is a core group of individuals who have been on site for TWO YEARS. Other volunteers come in and out to help and live onsite for anywhere between a few days to a few months at a time, but there’s a few individuals who have been on country for TWO YEARS, without pause. They have been camping, unceasingly, on the land to protect these sites (several trees with varying types of cultural importance, including an 800 year old birthing tree which has been the site of over 10,000 Djapwurrung babies being born) for two years. The sites haven’t been left unmanned even for a few hours since this all started.

One of these indigenous protectors has:

• been deliberately sprayed in the face with weed poison by a local farmer
• been endlessly targetted by the local cops, including being arrested for having an expired licence (even though he was driving a truck on a private field at the time, and not out on the road, so there was no grounds to arrest him) and put in jail for several months over this offence (even though a white would never be arrested for an expired licence. In the end when it finally got to court, the judge was like “You’ve imprisoned this man for months for an expired licence? What the fuck, get out of here, charges are dropped, give the man a warning and let him go”
• had the local MacDonalds threaten to call the cops on him for the “crime” of loitering (read: eating a meal in-store)
• had a different MacDonalds threaten to call the cops because he didn’t want to give the staff his name and phone number (the COVID restrictions require restaraunts to ask for phone numbers in case of a break out so they can notify people, but it’s not actually a requirement of diners to give those details, and the restaurant certainly doesn’t have the grounds to call the cops on someone for not supplying their number)
• strained himself so much by insisting on staying on the land to protect the sites that he wound up hospitalised with various illnesses that struck him because he was physically and emotionally exhausted by the whole situation
• walked from the site into Melbourne city, on foot, in an effort to raise awareness (over 200 kilometres/41 hours worth of walking)
• The front line camp is alongside a busy road, and all the asshole locals and truck drivers who go past that are pissed about the protest make sure to express their displeasure by honking their horns loudly and repeatedly whenever they go by, whether that’s at 2 pm or 2 am, which I’m sure you can imagine does wonders for the protectors ability to get a good night sleep

That’s just a snippet of what this one person has gone through. That doesn’t cover the constant abuse faced by all of them, the attempts at property destruction, the attitude they get by locals whenever they go into town for supplies, the constant red alerts because someone’s heard that the machinery is being mobilised and that they’re moving to start works tomorrow. There were several occasions where police were called to disperse the protectors so that works could begin, and it’s only because there were more protectors than cops that everyone wasn’t arrested and dragged off.

I could literally go on for days with details about this. An archeologist came out to the site and was absolutely staggered by the stuff that was there – in addition to the trees themselves, there was more archeological evidence of the local indigenous tribe that had lived there, sitting untouched on the surface of the earth than this archeologist has seen at any other site throughout Australia. A detailed report was sent to the supposed Minister for the Environment, who summarily ignored it and gave her stamp of approval for the works to commence without reading any of the reports. The protectors went to court over this and it was found that yeah, the Environment Minister hasn’t done her job at all, and a full review has been ordered —- but the works haven’t been cancelled altogether.

All this for a road that will shave a few minutes of travel off the road that currently already exists. All this for a road that’s got a speed limit of 80 that they want to boost to 110. All this for a road that could go a different route. There’s another route available that the protectors have been pitching for since the start, but VicRoads refuses to consider it for reasons they won’t specify.

This route that they’re insistent on not only cuts directly through several indigenous sites (some of the only ones left in Victoriaof this kind) it also costs around $630 million more. This route is full of hills and valleys that need to be flattened, and it’s twisty and turny. The Northern Route - the one protectors have been wanting since the beginning - is flat and straight, will be literal hundreds of millions of dollars less expensive, will take less time to complete, and doesn’t cut through any indigenous sites.

If you could sign this petition, that would be awesome. Here is another petition.

Here is a copy of an academic petition sent by RMIT to the Victorian government, signed by over 150 academics.

Here is an article written by an indigenous woman (which I am not, by the way; I’m just a white woman who is outraged by what my government is trying to do to these people) on the topic that has some more information.

And thank you, @whitepeopletwitter , for sharing this.

(via clotpolesonly)

wetwareproblem:

wrangletangle:

zoe2213414:

eabevella:

naryrising:

You can read the post here for more info, but I wanted to just add a bit about what this entails from my POV, on the Support team.  Somewhere between ¼ to 1/3 of all our tickets last month were in Chinese (somewhere upwards of 300 out of 1200 or so), almost all from users just setting up their accounts or trying to find out how to get an invitation.  A lot of the tickets are what I’d characterize as “intro” tickets - they say hi, list favourite fandoms or pairings, or provide samples of fic they’ve written. Although this isn’t necessary on AO3, this is not uncommon in Chinese fandom sites that you have to prove your credentials to get in (in fact it wasn’t uncommon in English-language fandom sites 15-20 years ago).  We respond to all of these tickets, even the ones that just say hi.  We check whether the user has managed to receive their invite or get their account sent up, and if they haven’t, we help them do so.  This means taking every single ticket through our Chinese translation team twice, once so we make sure we understand the initial ticket, and then again to translate our reply. 

This is a challenging process, although we’ve found ways to streamline it and can normally get a reply out pretty quickly (like within a few days).  We do it because this is part of why AO3 exists in the first place - to provide a safe haven where users can post their works without worrying about censorship or sudden crackdowns on certain kinds of content.  We do it because this is important, and helping these users get their accounts and be able to share their works safely is why we’re here.  We hope that we’ll be able to help as many of them as possible.  

There have been a few (thankfully few, that I’ve seen) complaints about these new AO3 users not always knowing how things work - what language to tag with, or what fandom tags to use, for instance.  To this I would say:

1. Have patience and be considerate.  They are coming to a new site that they aren’t familiar with, and using it in a language they may not be expert in, and it might take a while to learn the ropes.  You can filter out works tagged in Chinese if you don’t want to see them.  Or just scroll past.  

2. You can report works tagged with the wrong language or the wrong fandom to our Policy and Abuse team using the link at the bottom of any page.  This will not cause the authors to “get in trouble” (a concern I’ve heard before, as people are reluctant to report for these reasons).  It means the Policy and Abuse team will contact them to ask them to change the language/fandom tag, and if the creator doesn’t, they can edit it directly. 

If you remember Strikethrough or the FF.net porn ban or similar purges, please keep them in mind and consider that these users are going through something similar or potentially worse.  This is why AO3 exists.  We are doing our best to try and help make the transition smooth.  

I am a Taiwanese and I’d like to put some context behind the recent influx of China based AO3 users.

China is tightening their freedom of speech in recent years after Xi has became the chairman (he even canceled the 10 years long term of service of chairman, meaning he can stay as the leader of China as long as he lives–he has became a dictator).

They censor words that are deemed “sensitive”, you can’t type anything to criticize the chinise government. Big social media platform won’t even post the posts containing sensitive words. You don’t have the freedom of publish books without the books being approved by the government either.

To disguise this whole Ninety Eighty-Four nightmare, they started to pick on the easy target: the women and the minorities (China is getting more and more misogynistic as a result of the government trying to control their male population through encouraging them to control the female population through “chinese tradition family value” but that’s another story).

Last year, the chinese government arrested a woman who is a famous yaoi/BL novel writer named 天一 and sentenced her 10 years in jail for “selling obscene publications” and “illegal publication” (she’s not the only BL writer who got arrested. Meanwhile, multiple cases where men raped women only get about 2 years of jail time in China). It’s a warning to anyone who want to publish anything that’s “not approved” by the government that they can literally ruin you. 

Just recently the chinese government “contacted” website owners of one of their largest romance/yaoi/slash fiction sites 晉江 and announced that for now on, for the sake of a Clean Society, they can’t write anything that’s slightly “obscene”. No sex scene, no sexual interaction, they can’t even write any bodily interaction below neck (I’m not kidding here).

But that’s not their actual goal. They also listed other restriction such as: can’t write anything that’s about the government, the military, the police, “sensitive history”, “race problems”, which is… you basically can’t write anything that might be used as a tool to criticize the government (as many novels did).

This recent development really hurt the chinese fanfic writers. They can’t write anything without the fear of being put on the guillotine by the government to show their control. Most of them don’t even think that deep politically, they just want to write slash fictions. But there are no platform safe in China, that’s why the sudden influx of chinese users to AO3.

I bet it won’t be long before AO3 got banned in China, but until then, be a little bit patient to them. As much as I hate the chinese government, I pity their people.

I’m crying so loud…As a Chinese, you don’t know how your kindness meant to us. When I’m young, I read 1984, and I thought this story is so unrealistic, but now, it’s getting tougher and tougher for fanfic and the writer in China. Thank you ao3. Thank you for the people who care about Chinese people. (hope I didn’t spell anything wrong)

The OTW’s account on Weibo, the biggest Chinese social media site, is constantly fielding questions from Chinese users about how to get invitations, how to post, all of it. Chinese fans deeply want to learn how to use AO3. The difference between Lofter’s posting system and AO3′s is perhaps even wider than the gulf between Tumblr and AO3. But imagine if you had to navigate across that gap in a language you didn’t speak, using translation programs that don’t understand fan terminology.

This is exactly what the AO3 was built to deal with. We just didn’t get a chance to get the internationalization done first, so things may be bumpy for a while. We are all part of fandom, so let’s take care not to leave anyone out.

Just in case it isn’t clear to anyone? This. This right here is precisely why the AO3 doesn’t police content or remove things that are icky or obscene.

Because it’s not you who defines what’s obscene. It’s the authorities.

(via shealwaysreads)