notbecauseofvictories mentioned you on a post

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notbecauseofvictories mentioned you on a post “GUESS WHOMST HAS TAKEN THE BAR EXAM”

@bomberqueen17​ on the first day, the guy who read the instructions finished earlier than he anticipated, and told us “to take the next few minutes and relax.” You could FEEL the sudden swell of incredulity and subsequent homicidal rage, that he would DARE say something like that, even as a joke.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, there’s a time for jokes and that’s not it. 

Dude’s mom was talking about how there was some arcane system to set up so you could take the test on a laptop, and how for some of the test-takers, as it was coming down to the wire, they couldn’t get the laptops to run the weird system, and there were a few people who had to at the very last minute abandon the idea of taking the test on a computer, and take it by hand, even though they’d prepared to take it on a computer.

She also explained how no pens were allowed because information could be hidden inside the screw-apart barrels of cartridge-style pens, so no one was allowed to have them. 

No thanks! Oh my gosh, no thanks. I could never handle that kind of pressure.
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Defending Land and Environmental Rights Has Become an Increasingly Deadly Endeavor

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Defending Land and Environmental Rights Has Become an Increasingly Deadly Endeavor:

chamerionwrites:

In a new report released Tuesday, the anti-corruption watchdog organization [Global Witness] says that 2017 was the deadliest year for land and environmental defenders since it began keeping track in 2012, with a total of 207 defenders killed worldwide. The report attributes this increase to a surge of killings related to agribusiness opposition, as well as better reporting on the issue. Global Witness says the true number of deaths is even higher, and “many, many more were attacked, threatened, and criminalized.”

The highest number of killings was recorded in Brazil, which accounted for more than a quarter of reports. Brazil was followed by the Philippines, as well as Colombia and Mexico. Agribusiness was the most dangerous industry to oppose, a first since reporting began, although resistance to mining, poaching, and logging continued to be risky as well. Indigenous people remained a disproportionate target of attacks.

Although Global Witness identified government actors as the suspected perpetrators in 56 of the deaths, governmental culpability likely plays a role in many more. Officials are often in league with business interests, cutting local communities out of decision-making and creating a “culture of impunity,” according to the report.

“Perpetrators feel emboldened by the cumulative impact of these murders. Government is guilty by omission because they’re not prosecuting these crimes, and a lot of times, they’re guilty by collusion,” Ben Leather, one of the authors of the report, told The Intercept. Thus, deaths attributed to local militias, gangs, or businesses themselves still often involve government complicity. “Tackling impunity is possibly the only way to really end this in the long term,” Leather added…

Agribusiness — large-scale farming, processing, and manufacturing — has replaced mining as the deadliest industry for land and environmental defenders, according to the report. “Agribusinesses is land intensive,” said Ana Zbona, a project manager with the Business and Human Rights Resource Center. “Over the last decade or so, investors and companies, encouraged by governments, pushed increasingly into remote rural areas as they seek new lands.” Businesses typically make deals with governments that cut out the local community, leaving them on a “collision course,” according to Leather. “Communities have to become defenders because they’ve been excluded from proper channels,” he told The Intercept.

Although mining has been overtaken as the most dangerous sector to protest, Leather says this isn’t because of any improvement in the industry. Rather, the number of killings related to mining opposition has reached a new high as well.

The report concedes that it is most likely underreporting its figures in African countries, at 19 deaths last year, mainly from opposition to poaching and mining. The authors say this is a result of their methodology, which relies on local news and civil society reports for verification. When those sectors are underdeveloped or stifled, researchers say that they are unable to verify many deaths. As reporting improves and investment floods the continent, those numbers could rise.

Because of this verification process, and the focus on deaths over other outcomes, the report says the 207 killings are the “tip of the iceberg.” Other underreported areas include Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Russia, and China, where journalism and civil society are suppressed, and reports are few and far between. “We can safely assume that if defenders are unable to speak out, that they could well be facing other risks as well,” Leather said.
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wastingyourgum: nikkiscarlet: ewoman: pillowfort-io: The...

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wastingyourgum:

nikkiscarlet:

ewoman:

pillowfort-io:

The Pillowfort.io Kickstarter is now live!!

Pillowfort.io is a new blogging platform that aims to improve the current state of social media by providing better privacy and communication tools. We wanted to make a user-friendly space on the web for creativity, communication and content-sharing. Pillowfort aims to be a hybrid of Tumblr, Twitter, and LiveJournal– keeping the strengths of these sites while giving you more control over how your content is seen an shared, as well as providing better communication tools. Everyone who contributes $5 or more will get a registration key to create an account on the site once the Kickstarter completes, and we also offer a bunch of cool physical rewards pictured above, so click through to the Kickstarter for information about the site, our business plan, and more!

if you can support i highly recommend this platform, its a breath of fresh air after tumblr and all the ways you can customize your experience on pillowfort is A+

I’ve been really loving Pillowfort so far. It’s a great platform for fandom, giving us a lot of the same functionality as tumblr while also providing the same kinds of privacy / community tools that ye olde LiveJournal used to give us. I really, really recommend supporting the Kickstarter and joining us over there. I want to see this site take off as THE fandom hub.

One thing I feel like I need to talk about, though: right now, people are talking a lot about how friendly Pillowfort is and how much less toxic everyone is over there. This is absolutely true – the place is a total breath of fresh air. But bear in mind that this is just a natural result of it being a much smaller collection of people with more or less similar interests who are all really happy to be somewhere new at the moment. The bigger a social platform gets and the longer it’s around, the more toxicity has the chance to take root. There is ALWAYS a small percentage of toxic people and/or toxic behaviour in ANY group of people, and the number of people who make up that percentage grows in proportion to the size of the overall group. There is no magical social platform that is ever going to be completely immune from toxic elements, and nobody should join Pillowfort expecting sunshine and rainbows forever.

What you should expect is a platform that cares about its users, and offers plenty of tools to help curate your experience and cut down as much toxicity as possible. You can blacklist content you don’t want to see. You can set the privacy level of each individual post you make (visible to the public / followers only / only you). You can delete your posts and all reblogs of your posts. You can create your own communities and moderate them based on your and your community members’ needs. There’s no algorithm controlling what shows up in your feed. There are no ads being forced on you and no investors dictating how the site should be run. Also, “No Nazis allowed” is basically right there in the TOS, which is really nice.

There’s also native image hosting, nested commenting to encourage long discussions, and communities so that everyone who loves a thing can gather and squee about the thing and make friends over the thing. It’s everything I wish Tumblr could have been and everything LiveJournal and its clones should have evolved into but didn’t.

If this is of any interest to you at all, toss ‘em $5 on the Kickstarter, get your access key, and join us over there. Or if you cannot justify spending $5 right now but are genuinely interested? Get in touch with me. I’m going to be throwing a little more than $5 their way, so I’ll have a few extra invite codes to spread around. You won’t have to pay anything that way, but what I do ask is that if you want an invite code from me, you have to give me your word that you’ll be an active, positive member of the community and won’t waste my invite code by grabbing an account and then never using it, or using it for like a week and then abandoning ship. Be willing to commit. Be willing to help us build the Pillowfort community. If it’s not what you want it to be, help MAKE it what you want it to be.

I didn’t realise just how much I had missed nested comments until looking at this… Signing up just for the mere concept of coherent conversation threads!
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