Why Mastercard’s New Porn Rules Should Scare Everyone -
So hey, here’s some info on the huge, generally un-talked-about-bc-sex-workers-are-banned-from-so-many-platforms issue that has been crippling my income due to secondary platform moderation issues and why these changes are so dangerous for an already marginalized worker community.
additionally if you could spare a few bucks towards my rent & therapy while this freight train rolls over online SWers income I’d appreciate it
c*sh*pp: $moonseye
v*nm*: awingedserpent
p*yp*l.me/ellipsislux“Mastercard puts us in danger because, for the first time, it requires Pornhub, OnlyFans, and other distribution companies to obtain copies of age-verification records instead of only the owner of the content having and maintaining them. If our records were not kept securely and someone infiltrated one of these platforms, they could blast performers’ info across the dark web, making us vulnerable to fraudsters, blackmail artists, and worst of all, people who want to harm us physically.”
November 17th 2021
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On this day, 24 November 1916, Concha Liaño, Spanish revolutionary feminist, was born in France. Joining an anarchist group aged 15, her mother beat her to get her to stop attending meetings, however her father told her mother to stop as Concha was “far more intelligent than” them.
Liaño was a leading member of Mujeres Libres (Free Women), a women’s group within the anarchist CNT union, to which some male union members were hostile. Liaño later recounted: “Now many years later we are accepted. Machismo, then as now, was as if genetic. That was the mentality then.”
Liaño played an active role in the Spanish civil war and revolution, then after its defeat escaped a French concentration camp and supported the underground resistance. She subsequently moved to Venezuelan and worked for the Maracaibo airline, living until the age of 97.
Learn more about the Spanish civil war in our podcast episodes 39-40: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e39-the-spanish-civil-war-an-introduction/ https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1861136914071450/?type=3
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[video]
All India Democratic Students Organization
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It’s November 18th, the John Deere strike is finally over, and the workers did pretty damn well in their contract.
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[video]
Cuba’s Vaccine Could End up Saving Millions of Lives -
Much of the press coverage of Cuba last week focused on the anti-government protests that didn’t eventuate. Less covered has been something of potentially greater global significance: its vaccination drive.
After a dire twelve months, when a too hasty reopening sent the pandemic surging, deaths peaking, and the country back into a crippling shutdown, a successful vaccination program has turned the pandemic around in the country. Cuba is now one of the few lower-income countries to have not only vaccinated a majority of its population, but the only one to have done so with a vaccine it developed on its own.
The saga suggests a path forward for the developing world as it continues struggling with the pandemic in the face of ongoing corporate-driven vaccine apartheid, and points more broadly to what’s possible when medical science is decoupled from private profit.
The Safer Gamble
According to Johns Hopkins University, as of the time of writing, Cuba has fully vaccinated 78 percent of its people, putting it ninth in the world, above wealthy countries like Denmark, China, and Australia (the United States, with a little below 60 percent of its population vaccinated, is ranked fifty-sixth). The turnaround since the vaccination campaign began in May has revived the country’s fortunes in the face of the twin shocks of the pandemic and an intensifying US blockade.
After a peak of nearly ten thousand infections and close to one hundred deaths each day, both figures have now plummeted. With 100 percent of the country having taken at least one vaccine dose by the end of last month, the country reopened its borders on November 15 to tourism, roughly a tenth of its economy, and has reopened schools. This makes Cuba an outlier among low-income countries, which have vaccinated only 2.8 percent of their combined populations. This is owed largely to vaccine hoarding by the developed world and their jealous guarding of patent monopolies, which bar poorer countries from developing generic versions of the vaccines that were produced through public funding in the first place.
Key to this outcome was Cuba’s decision to develop its own vaccines, two of which — Abdala, named for a poem penned by an independence hero, and Soberana 2, Spanish for “sovereign” — were finally given official regulatory approval in July and August. In the words of Vicente Vérez Bencomo, the internationally acclaimed head of the country’s Finlay Vaccine Institute, the country was “betting it safe” by waiting longer to manufacture its own vaccines. This way, it would avoid dependence on bigger allies like Russia and China while adding a new commercial export at a time of ongoing economic hardship.
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Opinion | We’re a Small Arkansas Newspaper. Why Is the State Making Us Sign a Pledge About Israel? -
It soon became clear that The Arkansas Times had to answer our advertiser. Though boycotting Israel could not have been further from our minds and though state funding is a significant source of our income, our answer was no. We don’t take political positions in return for advertising. If we signed the pledge, I believe, we’d be signing away our right to freedom of conscience. And as journalists, we would be unworthy of the protections granted us under the First Amendment.
And so, instead of signing, we sued to overturn the law, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, on the grounds that it violates the First and 14th Amendments. We are still fighting it.
The Arkansas legislature is dominated by conservative evangelicals, such as the former Senate majority leader, Bart Hester. He is featured in the new documentary film “Boycott,” directed by Julia Bacha and produced by the group Just Vision. “Boycott” follows three plaintiffs, including me, challenging their states’ anti-boycott laws. In the film, Senator Hester explains that his religious belief motivates everything he does as a government official, including writing Arkansas’s anti-boycott law. He also explains his eschatological beliefs: “There is going to be certain things that happen in Israel before Christ returns. There will be famines and disease and war. And the Jewish people are going to go back to their homeland. At that point Jesus Christ will come back to the earth.” He added, “Anybody, Jewish or not Jewish, that doesn’t accept Christ, in my opinion, will end up going to hell.” Senator Hester and his coreligionists may see the anti-boycott law as a way to support Israel, whose return to its biblical borders, according to their reading of scripture, is one of the precursors to the Second Coming and Armageddon.
In other words, Senator Hester and other supporters of the law entwine religion and public life in a manner that we believe intrudes on our First Amendment rights.
These types of laws are not restricted to states in which fundamentalist Christians hold sway. In 2016, California passed a law requiring large contractors working with a state agency to certify that they will not discriminate against Israel, and Andrew Cuomo, as governor of New York, signed an executive order that compels state entities to divest money and assets from a list of organizations regarded by the state as participating in the boycott. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York proposed national anti-boycott legislation.
Let’s be clear, states are trading their citizens’ First Amendment rights for what looks like unconditional support for a foreign government.
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