people have no idea like. how devestating this is. so many wheelchairs are custom made and repairing them is hellish, if they’re in a state to be repaired. most wheelchair users do not have the financial means to replace them, and SSI asset limits mean that if they’re on disability it’s a ridiculous set of hoops to even crowdfund past 2k to repair or replace.
airlines need to be held accountable for this in a major way. they see fucking over disabled people’s lives as more profitable than fixing how they handle wheelchairs. and i mean like, actually ruining lives, taking away comfort and freedom that they worked so, so hard to get. people take their lives because of this.
^ yes to all of the above.
But also like, how do you lose a wheelchair? I could understand them getting on the wrong flight, but it’s not like they’re going to fall behind the conveyor belt. If they’re labeled, shouldn’t they be able to get them back? I’m so frustrated!
Again how do you lose them? Didn’t they use them to get into the flight?
For the umpteenth time (does anyone ever check the notes?) airlines lose luggage all the time. But for those of you who clearly need more detail, here are actual things that have happened with wheelchairs.
1. The airline tells the wheelchair user at the check-in desk they have to transfer to an airport chair and then never takes their chair to the plane.
2. It gets left on the jetway.
3. It gets left on the runway.
4. It gets put on the wrong plane/sent to the wrong airport.
5. It gets put on the right plane but instead of returning it to the door of the plane, the airline sends it down to the baggage carousel and someone else takes it.
6. It gets put on the right plane and returned to the door of the plane and then while the disabled person is waiting for the whole plane to unload the airline just gives their chair to a random person/lets a random person take it instead of checking to see if the person taking it is the one who owns it.
On that last point, when you say “gives it to a random person”, do you mean they give it to a different disabled person, or just really let any old person grab it like they would one of the cheap folding chairs the airport offers to help people get across large terminals?
Both.
[ID: Reblog by @pagerunner “Never forgetting the time Julie, her mom, and I few to NC. And when you use a chair, you get on first and get off last. (On this freakishly narrow chair they strap you on while they put the actual chair - with your name on it - in the cargo, like a stroller.) And when we finally get off the plane, Julie’s chair isn’t there. ANOTHER PASSENGER SAID IT WAS HIS AND THEY JUST. GAVE IT TO HIM? IT HAD JULIE WRITTEN ON THE TAG. And then there were stewards trying to track down the wheelchair thief, and Julie’s stuck on this tiny, foot-wide chair until they finally show up the guy is angry she’s “taking it away from him”. Worst travel day.”]
[ID: Reblog by @liraelclayr “Frontier Airlines GAVE MY WHEELCHAIR AWAY to somebody. They told him it was an airport wheeIchair, even though there was a very large neon orange tag on it with my name on it, and it looked nothing like the wheelchairs in the airport. I was incredibly lucky to have gotten to the guy in time for him before he got away with it. He was a minute from getting away in a taxi. I will never, ever use Frontier again, and I tell my friends not to use them either.”]
[ID: Comment by @anywaybulletjournal “People who could or would steal something like that … 😰”]
[ID: Comment by @miranda_alfaro_ “I traveled from Richmond back to DFW my hometown this weekend and American let someone steal my wheelchair and transport it to another terminal. No one stopped anyone and thank god they found it but I was stranded for 2 hours I was so angry.”]
Just a reminder that this happens every day to wheelchairs users.
This happened to my great aunt the last time she traveled before she died.
She is forced to “check” her chair and it has her name on the back rest on both sides after a previous incident and her phone number.
She has limited mobility but she could walk for brief periods of time that she usually saved for specific times and has a walker and cane. She happened to have her cane with her at the time.
They sit her on the plane and proceed to TAKE her cane from her even tho it was collapsible and she put it in her lap.
Thy wouldn’t give her her cane to go to the bathroom and no one would help her to go.
They forced her to piss herself because of this and she still had another 3 hours before she could get off.
No one would help her, employees or passengers
They wouldn’t give her the cane back and wouldn’t bring her an airport chair for another hour so she could get off the plane
They lied straight to her daughters face about where she was.
They finally gave her a chair to get off the plane but still refused her her cane
They gave her chair to someone else
That person eventually called her while she was waiting for her daughter to be escorted to her so they could go home and actually gave her chair back, the airport broke the other person’s chair.
THEY STILL REFUSED TO GIVE HER CANE BACK.
TSA was called for a suspicious person which was her crying, piss covered, and alone by the plane exit. They yelled at her until someone else finally got involved and helped her.
When she finally got her cane back, it was broken in 4 spots, where the pieces click together and the handle. You had to actually try to break it and it was purposeful.
Someone tore the embroidered cloth that had her name and number off the back but left the one that actually touches the person. Meaning someone did it intentionally.
Fuck the airport. Fuck airlines and their employees. They treat disabled people horribly and intentionally sabotage their mobility devices.
Hey remember when they found over 200 bodies of native children buried behind a residential school and the world cared for… what, a week?
They’ve counted about 6,000-7,000 now, for those of you who do still care
It should NOT fall on Indigenous people’s shoulders to keep this known still. We’ve been doing that for generations at this point and NO ONE wants to listen to us.
We’re tired, mourning and constantly reopening our trauma and pain to keep people caring about us. It’s terrible.
I should start by noting that I am white, and not Canadian, and that if op wants me to remove this comment for any reason, please let me know.
This is a map of all the residential schools in Canada:
Each dot on this map represents a residential school. Blue dots mean the school is considered completely searched. Yellow dots mean they are either in the process of being searched or there are plans to be searched. Red dots indicate that no search has happened and that no search is currently planned
There were more than 130 residential schools in Canada. This map suggests that only six have been fully searched, and a little more than a dozen partially searched (I counted 15 yellow dots). That leaves at least 109 schools completely untouched.
Let that sink in; if 6,000-7,000 unmarked, indigenous children’s graves were found by searching less than a fifth of all the schools, how many are still undiscovered.
Wikipedia estimates that the body count could be over 50,000, and honestly, that could be a low estimate
[ID: A map of Canada with dozens of dots on it, 6 of which are blue and 7 of which are yellow; the rest are red. Later there is a screenshot from wikipedia reading, “Estimates range from 3,200 to over 50,000 children that were killed. Most of the recorded student deaths at residential schools took place before the 1950s. /end ID]
OKAY So ever since the Tumblr announcement over Apple’s TOS for the app staying on the AppStore, I’ve been seeing so many posts spreading so much information AND misinformation.
If you haven’t seen the post, click here, but basically it boils down to Apple’s TOS for what Apps can and can’t exist on the AppStore are pretty damn draconian. Famously Discord had to disallow ios app users from entering Not Safe For Work/Mature servers. Discord also put in a work-around to this but I’ll get to that. Anyway, those TOS Apple’s put in place are now affecting tumblr.
Misinfo #1: Tumblr is deliberately making the app experience unusable - False
Tumblr is doing what Apple is telling them to do. Apple is the one making the iOS version of the app unusable. Not tumblr. Although their enforcement of Apple’s wants is rather obnoxious this isn’t tumblr’s fault. It’s Apple’s. Direct your ire to Apple, not tumblr, because this is directly their doing.
Misinfo #2: Tags have been ganked. - Well yes, but actually no.
It’s true tags are borped on the iOs app BUT!!! “Banned tags” work just fine in the web version of tumblr, or the Android app. All the tags I’ve seen in the “banned tags” lists going around work just fine on my phone (I have android) or on my laptop. THE TAGS ALSO WORK FINE ON THE BROWSER ON MY IPAD. That’s right, easy way to get around iOS shennangannery? Use the Tumblr website. It looks (and runs) just like the app. There are even other features on the website that aren’t on the app. So if you’re an iOS user frustrated by how the tumblr app now works, log in on Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, literally any internet web browser, and boom bam. Your original tumblr experience is back. Original bugs and all. Screenshot below of my android phone, and the tumblr website being able to access “banned tags.” Also a screenshot of the post from the wip tumblr saying that experiences on Android and the website will not be affected.
Misinfo #3: Tumblr’s doing nothing to combat the ultra-censorship on their iOS app - Maybe
In their post, staff said they’re working on a work-around. They left details pretty vague, as is staff’s wont, but they aren’t exactly out of options. This is where I get back to what Discord did when Apple did the same thing to them. Essentially you would have to go onto Discord on your laptop and allow access to not safe for work servers on iOS. It’s a setting only found in the laptop/desktop version of discord. (see screenshot for proof) I believe Tumblr is probably working on something similar. To allow users to have the original experience by going through the website. For now you still have the browsers on your phone. Also screenshotted, where staff said in their post they’re working on a workaround.
All this to say, you guys need to stop freaking out. Yes, tumblr is broken, tumblr’s been broken for a hot minute, but you know what? This latest censorship dirge is not tumblr’s fault. It’s apples. And there are workarounds, pretty piss easy workarounds like using your browser instead of your app. It’s not even that much more difficult. I know this is frustrating, but being reactionary and spreading misinformation isn’t going to do anything but harm people who are looking for solutions.
For those of you who haven’t seen this announcement, tumblr recently made some changes to the iOS version of the app, purportedly to comply with Apple’s content guidelines. These changes took effect on Dec 21, starting in version 22.5.1 of the iOS app. As some of you may recall, Apple’s strict guidelines were the driving force for the infamous Great Purge of 2018, which coincidentally also happened around this time of year, but it seems banning all of the female-presenting nipples wasn’t good enough for Apple.
Below is a summary of the important changes. Note that these changes technically ONLY affect those using the iOS app. If you’re accessing tumblr through a different app or operating system (Google Chrome, Android app, etc) it won’t affect you directly but it will affect your followers who use iOS so you should definitely be aware of it.
The list of banned tags has been expanded. As before, there’s no way to know which words or phrases have been banned until you try searching for them, in which case you’ll either get no search results or the following message: “This content has been hidden because of potentially suggestive or explicit content.” You may think this doesn’t concern you if you don’t post explicit material, but do not make the mistake of expecting the banned tags to be logical or reasonable. I’ve already encountered multiple completely innocuous posts (random fandom gifsets) that seem to be hidden on iOS for no discernible reason.
Blogs that have been flagged as explicit can no longer be viewed. Previously, flagged blogs just had their posts hidden from searches, but if you knew the username you could still visit it after clicking through a warning about sensitive content. Now you can’t access it at all.
Likes and reblogs from blogs that have been flagged will no longer show up in your notes. This one won’t affect most people’s user experience as much as the others, but it does mean you may be missing notes. It’s unclear if likes and reblogs from flagged blogs will still count towards the overall note total (and only be missing from the activity feed and note viewer) but I suspect that’s the case.
THE BIG ONE: ANY POST TAGGED WITH A BANNED TAG WILL NO LONGER SHOW UP ON YOUR DASHBOARD. Previously, if you tagged a post with a banned word or phrase (even if the words were used inside another tag), that post would not show up in searches, but your followers would still be able to see it on their dashboard. Now those posts are hidden from your own followers as well. This includes both original posts and reblogs. And if that wasn’t bad enough, here’s the real kicker: even if you don’t tag something with one of the banned words, if the OP used a banned tag, any reblogs of that post will not show up on anyone’s dashboard (on the iOS app). The only saving grace here, and I hate to even call it that, is that the blocked posts are still visible if you visit a blog directly or if you have post notifications turned on.
As usual, tumblr was extremely unclear and evasive about all of this in their official announcement. Not surprising, of course, since if more people were aware of these new draconian tactics I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be more of an uproar about it. Tumblr claims that these changes are somewhat temporary and that they are currently working on something that will allow for a less restricted iOS experience, but they refuse to say what that something is and when it will be implemented. And let’s just say, considering their track record, I’m not hopeful.
All of this is horrible and infuriating for many reasons, but the worst part is how insanely counterproductive it is to creating the “safe” environment tumblr (or more specifically Apple) supposedly wants.
Tags have always been used for both blog organization and filtering purposes. Tagging posts with triggers and content warnings is a common practice that gives users the ability to filter out content they may find upsetting or just don’t don’t want to see for whatever reason. By choosing to ban a bunch of unlisted “sensitive content” tags, all they’re doing is encouraging people who want to share that kind of content to come up with alternative less well-known tags or simply not tag that content at all anymore if they want it to show up on their follower’s dashboards, thereby making it more likely for someone to encounter it when they didn’t want to.
So really, with all of the alleged concern for safety and “protecting the children,” all they’ve done is make tumblr less safe for everyone. Typical.
On this day, 26 December 1862 the largest mass execution in US history took place when 38 Native American Dakota people were hanged during the US-Dakota War of 1862. Some of the trials of the Native Americans lasted less than 5 minutes, and president Abraham Lincoln personally reviewed the trial paperwork and approved the death penalties.
*
Learn more Indigenous resistance and genocide in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, available here: https://bookshop.org/a/80203/9780807057834https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1884859665032508/?type=3
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
