Scottish people prevented the home office kidnapping people in Edinburgh yesterday
Immigration officers turned up with multiple vans to detain and inevitably deport two Edinburgh residents. The local Anti Raids team put out an alert over social media and quickly people from across the city converged, blocked the vehicles with bins, their bodies, and bikes.
They then blockaded the road at both ends, and forced the kidnappers to eventually release their victims. Residents came together and used community power to prevent a government-sanctioned and police assisted kidnapping of people who’ve lived and worked in Edinburgh for years. They’re now safe at home, the Home Office have gone away empty handed, and we stand together in defense of our communities.
Get in touch with your local anti-raids team, time and time again it’s been proven when we organise we can stop the home office from kidnapping in our cities. Antiraids.net
This incident took place almost a year after a similar incident taking place in Glasgow, where hundreds of people swarmed on an immigration van with men trapped inside until they were released. Activists climbed on the roof, blocked the roads, one even got wedged under the van until the men were let go.
The UK government has recently forced through a much more authoriative borders and nationality bill, which enables them to have less oversight and more authority when detaining, deporting, and deturing immigrants or refugees in the UK. Priti Patel’s new act will enable the government torevoke someone’s citizenship without warning, as well as make anyone who crosses into the UK illegally inadmissable for asylum and immunity for border forces if any refugees die in their operations. While the legal means of seeking asylum usually takes no less than 15 months, frequently reject most applications, and commonly deny the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people seeking asylum.
This has happened alongside events such as a dingy boat sinking in the channel as both French and British authorities order the sinking boat to seek refuge in the other country, until ultimately 27 people onboard died.
The conservative government is constructing a hostile environment for migrants, where they can deny you entry, remove you at their convenience, and gridlock the only legal means they’ll allow without using violence to remove you. Our best way to combat these policies is make them unenforcable, blockade every immigration raid, disrupt deportation flights, enable refugees to escape war and human trafficking, and keep pressure on the UK government.
African Rainbow Familyhelps process applications of LGBTQ+ asylum seekers and provides support for LGBTQ+ people of African heritage in the UK
LGSM (Lesbians and gays support the migrants) are a UK based group that provides aid to queer refugees and uses direct action and solidarity to fight against the hostile environment against both migrants and queer communities.
Anti Raids Network spans most of the UK and puts out alerts when immigration vans are spotted in communities, or will post sightings made by locals. Their goal is to prevent as many immigration raids as possible.
I tend to think of DS9 as fairly recent (likely because, if you compare it to TOS, it is recent), but sometimes I get reminded that the audience it was originally written for had a different set of outlooks. When we discuss that, we tend to focus on issues of social justice, but it’s not just that.
My parents grew up during the Cold War, with the Soviet Union on the other side of the Baltic Sea. As the country was neutral, Soviet was not quite as closed off as to people from countries allied with the US. That, of course, meant that not only was the humanity of regular Soviet citizens more obvious, but the sense of everyday brutality was more well-known. (I promise this is relevant.)
While my parents been Trekkies since the 90s, they didn’t watch DS9, so I showed it to them a few years ago. I was excited to show them Destiny, because it’s a great episode, and I love Cardassians, and there are some great twists in the story.
When Dejar, the stony-faced undercover Obsidian Order operative, turns up at Quark’s, my parents both sat up straight and shouted: ‘Politruk!’ My reaction was ‘what? What’s that?’ ‘She’s a politruk - a political commissar, like the ones the Soviet Union would send with delegations to keep and eye on them - she’s there to make sure they don’t step out of line!’ I was flabbergasted. I definitely got a weird vibe off Dejar when I first watched the episode, but I didn’t figure out she was Obsidian Order before it was revealed towards the end. But my parents knew exactly what she was and why she was there.
For some reason, that moment really stuck with me. There are things in DS9 that may be obvious to people who grew up during the Cold War, which to me, who only caught the last few months of it, doesn’t register.
Happy Pride Month! Don’t forget that the founder of Pride is a bisexual woman, Brenda Howard aka Mother of Pride, who organized the first pride parade. Don’t forget that two of the most key figures in LGBT liberation were Marsha P Johnson, a black trans woman, and Sylvia Rivera, a puerto rican trans bi woman. Don’t forget that the person to start the fight against the police at stonewall was Stormé DeLarverie, a butch and gnc biracial lesbian.
“The story of one June night in 1969 in Greenwich Village often doesn’t mention how the outlaws and outcasts who patronized the Stonewall Inn made their living.” - Historian Melinda Chateauvert
“Indeed, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera — two trans women of color who have both been credited with throwing the proverbial “first brick” at Stonewall had sold sex.
In the years following Stonewall, Rivera and other sex workers united in the Gay Liberation Front and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, from which they launched organizing campaigns to combat discrimination, demand acceptance of gender and sexual nonconformity, and ultimately call for the overthrow of capitalism.
The erasure of sex workers from Stonewall began almost immediately. As early as 1973, “Rivera had to fight to speak at the gay pride rally celebrating Stonewall because the crowd didn’t want to hear from a transgender sex worker.” As mainstream lgbtq rights organizations gained respectability, these movements distanced themselves from their sex-worker pioneers.
Modern lgbtq right activists owe sex workers a debt. Repaying it will mean making sex-workers’ rights a policy priority, making sure that today’s organized activism is inclusive of their presence, their needs—and their history.”
“Only a handful of activists in the lgbt movement were there at Stonewall and never stopped their advocacy work until the day they died. Brenda Howard, 58, who died in Queens on June 28 of colon cancer, was one of those genuine articles and her memorial at the LGBT Community Center on July 31 brought together all the different aspects of her life as trouble maker, strategist, editor, Jew, friend, lover and distinguished phone sex worker.”
Throughout her lifetime, Howard was unapologetic about her sexuality, which included kink and polyamory, and worked for decades to increase understanding and visibility related to them. She also worked as a phone sex operator in the 1980s.”
ds9 writers: the bad guys are the bad guys them’s the breaks sorry folks
avery brooks:
[ID/ A black background with text that reads “Avery Brooks found analogies between the Jem’Hadar and contemporary teenagers, which Brooks found useful while directing “The Abandoned”. He commented “For me it was […] to some extent, a story about a society that is responsible for the creation of a generation of young men who are feared, who are addicted, who are potential killers.” However, the similarity between the alien species and young men of the 20th century was…”. The text abruptly ends there. /end ID]
Addition to ID: this is a screenshot from the Memory Alpha page on the Jem’Hadar.
