Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 43

Gonna Go Back In Time: Wisconsin’s Legalized Sexism

Originally posted by yuki_onna at Gonna Go Back In Time: Wisconsin’s Legalized Sexism

It’s ok. You guys can tell me.

We all secretly went back in time, right?

That’s the only way I can get my head around Wisconsin’s repeal of their Equal Pay Act on the argument that “Money is more important to men”, piled on top of the birth control “debate” and Georgia passing legislation based on the idea that women are anatomically and ethically identical to pigs and cows. We fell through a time vortex and it’s 1959 and half of the twentieth century didn’t happen.

That is, of course, what Scott Walker and the rest of the charming gentlemen who are signing these grotesque reversions into law without mandate or recourse want. Hey, if we take away their birth control and don’t pay them for work, everything will go back to the way it was when pwecious Scotty was a kid and women will just stay at home and back cookies for everyone. Yay! No one will be gay anymore and America will drink its milk and be big and strong and we won’t have to worry about recycling and breast cancer (ew breasts!) and unwhite people and that rock n’ roll music the kids listen to. We can law it all away.

Yeah. And fuck you, too. And fuck you to everyone who told me to stop swearing about this on Twitter last night. WE SHOULD ALL BE SWEARING. We should all be laying down so much shit that fucking roses grow on Twitter. WE SHOULD CARE ABOUT THIS AT LEAST AS MUCH AS WE CARED ABOUT SOPA. Funny how I don’t see anyone shutting down portions of the Internet in protest, though. I mean, it’s only women. The headline on Reddit about this is: “Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has signed a bill that prohibits workers from collecting damages in employment discrimination cases.” No outrage, no commentary, just a link. No mention of Walker’s contention that women don’t work as hard, aren’t “go go go” like men, and shouldn’t be paid as much. Women not even mentioned, despite being the clear and stated target of the legislation. Why get upset? Should be fine!

After all, there’s no war on women. The Republicans promise there isn’t. Just because the massive portion of their efforts are bent toward reducing the rights and freedoms of a single group within the American population doesn’t mean it’s a war. Not like the War on Drugs is a war. After all, drugs are bad and need to be controlled or else society will fall apart. Just like the ladies. This is just Good, Small Government. Why, next week, they’ll be repealing the Equal Pay for Caterpillars Act.

The conservatives are at least partly right: birth control and equal pay (somewhat equal, anyway) were the great victories of first and second wave feminism. They are trying everything in their power to take those things away, in the hopes that it’ll activate a Time Turner that will erase the source of those changes as well as the changes themselves. They say we are pigs, they say we don’t need any silly pin money, they say these things and they should be embarrassed, they should be ashamed at what just came out of their mouths, but no one is shaming them. The news treats it like a simple partisan debate. Point for blue, point for red. But no matter what young folks might say, these men know we’re not in a post-sexist or post-racist culture, that they can rely on old, ugly misogyny and the reluctance to stand up for women’s rights that has tinted gender relations in this country for pretty much ever to lube their legislation up nice and slick. When women are outraged, you don’t have to listen, after all. Bitches be crazy.

I know Walker will almost certainly be recalled in November. Doesn’t really matter–he’s fiat’d this into law and there’s an inertia there. I’ve heard rumors that Walker is a top candidate for the GOP VP slot, so don’t get smug in the knowledge that he’s going away. I shouldn’t be surprised, you shouldn’t be surprised–but we should all be terrified. And angry.

I’ve seen a lot of people saying things like “only in the US” and “America is crazy” and “thank god I don’t live there” flitting around, both here and on my gendered online discourse post. (And I want to thank the BSFA for proving my point, that the sexist jackasses, they live everywhere.) And I want to say: knock it off. First of all, no matter how much we like to take credit for things, Americans did not invent sexism. I promise, it could not “only happen in the US.” Many countries, if not all of them, have huge gender problems and many of those are boiling over with regressive assholes in power. And since the UK and Australia are both having trouble with conservatives in their government pissing in the punchbowl, I wouldn’t get too excited about your immunity to this kind of crap.

But more importantly–stop thinking you’re special and it can never happen in your country. That is how America got like this in the first place. By thinking we were special, specially liberated and enlightened and awesome and only those other lamer countries had problems. That arrogance allows us to continue to let everything circle the drain, because we’re the best and OBVIOUSLY we’re not really sexist and stuff, it’ll get fixed, don’t worry. Our system can’t have been redesigned to let a few people destroy our economy–we have the best economy! USA! Everything’s fine! GROWTH 4EVAH.

I hate that shit. I know you hate that shit. So stop telling me Americans are so weird and where you live this could never happen. It could. If you’re not vigilant, like we haven’t been, it will.

Doesn’t mean I know what vigilance looks like. I’ve been told not to call myself a feminist my whole life, well before the current skirmishes. I’ve seen vast swathes of young women grow up couching every sentence defending their right to exist in “I’m not a feminist, but…” Because feminists are bad and they hate men and they’re ugly. But I’ve also been told: well, obviously you’re not serious about marriage if you don’t take your husband’s name, if you must be pro-choice make sure you insist that you could never make that choice for yourself, don’t make the first move or boys will think you’re a slut (also you will be a slut), you can have a full time job but don’t think that means you get to slack off on cooking, cleaning, and childrearing, you lazy baby-hungry girl. Men work so hard. They shouldn’t have to worry about the home. After all, you’re just naturally better at cleaning–men just don’t see clutter like you do!

But everything’s fine in America now and all feminism should worry about are the poor ladies living in the Middle East so why are you complaining that you only get 80 cents to the male dollar? YOU GOT 80 CENTS, BITCH, AREN’T YOU HAPPY?

So yeah. I feel fucking miserable and helpless. The fact is that our system is only loosely democratic at this point. We vote nationally on a President and that’s it. We as citizens have no recourse when executive branches decide to get all War on Caterpillars on our asses, and it’s been made abundantly clear that not one fuck is given about organized protest at that level of government.

This is why Wikipedia shut down to protest SOPA. Because that’s all we have, really. Disrupt commerce and consumer culture. But I just can’t see that kind of concentrated action happening in defense of women, no matter how much what happens to us happens to the whole culture. Go ahead: take our birth control and our jobs and call us pigs, tell us to obey the Catholic Church’s most panicked and regressive ideas whether or not we are Catholic. Take our humanity and wipe Congress’s asses with it.

But don’t you dare take away smoothly torrenting Mad Men episodes. How else will we get new ideas for how the country should look?

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

Let Me Tell You About the Birds and the Bees: Gender and the Fallout Over Christopher Priest

[SIGNAL BOOST]

Originally posted by yuki_onna at Let Me Tell You About the Birds and the Bees: Gender and the Fallout Over Christopher Priest

I keeping thinking about the Priest situation. You know, the one where a well known male writer took to the internets to blast the Clarke Award list, make some pointed critiques, call authors, including some of the most famous and popular names in the field, and jurors very rude names, and suggest they all be scrapped, sacked, and sit in a corner and think about what they’d done.

I can’t stop thinking about it, actually.

Everyone has had their say, including me. I am pro people voicing their opinions on literature, even unpopular ones, and I fully support Christopher Priest’s right to weep over the state of science fiction as he sees it. And while I don’t care for name-calling, this is the internet, and aside from porn, that’s pretty much what it’s for. People wouldn’t have amused themselves for the better part of a week over this if it weren’t so savage, wouldn’t make it the centerpiece of the SFF news cycle if it wasn’t a delicious piece of part gossip, part hit job, part serious business, and part playground taunt. That’s how you get pageviews, folks. Everyone loves an entertaining dick.

But it’s not the piece itself that has stuck in my mind like so many bar-room darts.

It’s that if a woman wrote it, she’d have been torn to pieces. No quarter, no mercy.

I touched on this in my previous post. But it’s more than lolz, he’s got balls of brass, I could never get away with those blognanigans. I couldn’t, of course, even if I wanted to. But neither could almost any other woman writer or blogger I can think of. Go after popular SF writers and a respected award? She’d have gotten death threats, rape threats, comments telling her everything from shut up and make [unnamed internet male] a sandwich to wishing she’d be raped to death because that would shut her right up.

I don’t actually have to imagine this scenario and speculate as to its outcome–it’s happened. It happens all the time. Sady Doyle got absolutely eviscerated, along with such whimsical threats of violence and forcible silencing, for merely stating that A Song of Ice and Fire had some serious race and gender issues. She didn’t say it was a bad book, she didn’t call George Martin a pissing puppy, she simply stridently, without compromise, and with humor laid out her opinion concerning a book. Requires Only That You Hate is regularly showered with hatred for her thoughts on science fiction and fantasy–she was called a rabid animal by Peter Watts, a luminary in our field, who received very little public condemnation for his statements. (A rabid animal! Because she thought a book was sexist! I thought humorless feminists were the ones who took things too seriously!) Hell, yesterday Laurie Penny, a well-known activist, blogger, and author, was improbably saved from ongoing traffic by Ryan Gosling and upon writing an essay on obsession with celebrity, lack of coverage of regular people doing good things, and objecting to being portrayed as a damsel in distress because she forgot which way traffic runs in the States, was treated to about a thousand different flavors of “shut up, you dumb fucking bitch” in the comments of one of the most prominent “liberal” blogs on the Internet.

You don’t even have to kick an entire award slate to the curb. I know female authors who have gotten such threats for daring to own a bred cat instead of a shelter animal, for not having their books available on the Kindle as quickly as some fans would like, for minor infractions. I’ve gotten them for, as far as I can tell, simply existing online. Most women who blog or are active in the cultural commentary game know that they have to watch what they say. Always. It’s a horrible balancing act, and one I rarely see men having to do.

Yes, I know it’s the net and comments are a festering pile of venom, but you do have to notice that the venom cranks up to eleven when a woman posts. You can tell me well, Requires is so mean! Sady doesn’t say things super nicely! And I will point to all the men who say not nice things, some of whom even call out properties for sexism, and are applauded for their badassery and edginess, for their disinclination to suffer fools, and the total lack of screeching hate speech in their comments.

Because, yeah. If you threaten a woman with rape because she didn’t like a comic book you like? That’s hate speech. That’s invoking an act of violence specifically related to her status as a female in order to shut her up. Men can be raped, too, of course and obviously, but the kind of person who leaves comments like that doesn’t see it that way. Rape is what you do to a woman who pisses you off. To hurt her especially. To remind her of her place.

And if you want to see the ugliest fandom has to offer, all you have to do is be a woman and say something negative about a popular SFF property. Bonus if it’s male-authored and male-directed. Shit on urban fantasy all you want. But Game of Thrones is holy.

The fact is, to be a woman online is to eventually be threatened with rape and death. On a long enough timeline, the chances of this not occurring drop to zero.

Chris Priest can say what he says not only because he is a giant in his field (Sady Doyle is barely less prominent in hers, and while I do think that harsh criticism goes down better when it’s not the authors in the field at hand who do it, both Sady and Requires are not SF authors of any stripe) but because he is a man. And we respond to it with some anger, but mostly reasoned philosophical or humorous posts, macros, examining what it means, the value of juried awards, defending the authors and jurors but mostly accepting what he said as either a sad gesture by an old man, a hilarious and miserable rant, or valuing that at least someone cares that much–even wishing someone would go equally ballistic about a different award. There is a marked lack of viciousness–and what he said was every bit as bad as some of the stuff that gets Requires Only That You Hate a fever pitch of loathing and seething fury just about every time she posts.

I’m not saying everyone should just put their Asshole Hats on and have at it–but some people have their Asshole Hats on already, and they take them off for men who have a beef. I keep trying to think of what a male blogger would have to say about science fiction to have someone say they hope he gets raped to death. I’m not coming up with anything.

Misogyny in the West is coming up and it’s a gross, miserable, chthonic thing swirling at our feet. It’s getting worse, not better. Sites that consider themselves evolved, liberal-leaning, and intellectual (hello Reddit! Hello Gawker!) have comments and whole sections full of such boiling hate for women that it knocks you back. I hear people say with a straight face that the younger generation isn’t sexist or racist anymore, and unpacking how woefully wrong that is would take another post entirely. And geek culture isn’t immune, not even close. Sometimes it’s worse, because it’s so convinced it doesn’t have the same work to do as the mainstream. And, I suspect, because a lot of guys were rejected by girls when they were young and see gender as the only thing all those girls had in common, and so as adults take it out on a whole gender by either outright hostility or by excluding what they see as the source of their troubles from their presence, their media, their art.

Well, I was rejected by a LOT of guys when I was young. Often cruelly, often publically. Every awful thing “girls” do, a guy has done to me. And now, as when I was in school, I find myself navigating a world where everyone listens when the menfolk talk. When women say something even slightly off the path of accepted indietechsfgamer wisdom, for offenses as monstrous as suggesting that it’s hard to be a woman programmer in the open source world and as unforgivable as crossing the street the wrong way, a large and vocal cross-section simply screams obscenities until she shuts up. When I was a kid, I was told to soften my voice, make it higher, make it sweeter, smile more, keep my hand down in class, and over and over not to be so opinionated–a word that is not even used to describe men, because when a man has an opinion, it’s taking a stand or telling it like it is or whatever brand of keeping it real you’d like to slot in there.

I’m frustrated. I’m tired of the disparity of voices, of who gets written off and who gets their blog posts discussed in The Guardian being dismally predictable. I’m tired of still having the “when men say it it’s awesome and when women say it it’s bitchy” conversation that was supposed to be sorted in 1985. Not because I have a whole bunch of horrible shit about awards that I’d like to say. I don’t. But I have to tell you that I don’t, so that you’ll think I’m a nice girl, so that I don’t come off as threatening, so that you’ll listen to what I say and not just write me off as an angry feminist…what? Bitch. Because feminist bitches are not to be listened to, don’t you know. They are not to be considered, not the way Priest was considered, even by people who disagreed, even by people who thought he went too far and too personal and too much.

And ultimately, it won’t matter. This post will still probably net me some ugly email and assumptions that I am in some fashion The Worst. Because there is no possible way to make myself as dulcet and charming and innocent and inoffensive as some people want women to be, most particularly women writers of children’s books, without killing some part of me, burning it out to replace it with a nice tea service and a demure smile.

That’s the line I walk, and most female authors and commentators walk. On one side of it is a silence which we can’t afford and on the other are the blowback and threats, which come quietly and secretly through email or boldly and baldly in comments.

I have no doubt professional life will be a bit dodgy for Priest in the near future. But no one will wish him death. No one will email him to tell him he should be raped. No one will call him a rabid animal (with the implication that such monsters are to be put down). That he will not suffer this is undeniably a good thing.

But it’s not an equal thing.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

Draftyhouse

Now up at Clarkesworld!

My 16th Apology

This actually has nothing to do with apologies, just the first line of the eponymous song by Shakespeare's Sister things were going well... till I died.  And things were going well, which made me feel kind of guilty for all that nearly everyone else I know and care for was getting shat upon.  Pro sale!  Rhysling nominations!  A decent refund on taxes!  A raise!  A bonus! 

This too, did pass.

Now, we have learned that the price of oil has risen to the point where our rent no longer includes heat.  It was a good deal when we took it, long ago, but the rent on this place was stretching what we could afford, back when d|p had steady full-time work and when the cost of my health insurance meant I took home more than I do now (two more raises and I will be taking home as much as I did when I first started working, and I have, by all accounts, really good insurance).  

d|p is not going to have steady, full time work for a really long time, this being her second semester of going back to school.  I could never carry this place, unless somehow I manage a pro sale a month (2 in a year is well, 2 more than ever, more or less, so I am not writing while holding my breath) so away we go.  Looking for something in the same general area, possibly a little further south and west (though too far south screws up d|p's commute and too far west screws up mine).  

I like this place.  It's got a lot of light and a lot of space and the cats like it and the pigs like it, and it has laundry hook-up, and the landlord is a great guy.  Problem is, we have no more money - the place was always just a little more than we should be carrying and we only went for it because it was heat-included.  

Things were going well.

Testing...

666 meters below is not a place any sane man wants to go.
666 meters below is not a place any sane man wants to go.
666 meters below is not a place any sane man wants to go.
666 meters below is not a place any sane man wants to go.
666 meters below is not a place any sane man wants to go.

Alice, Ballast, Chalice, Dallas, Ellis, Feliz, Gallus, Hellas, Iblis, Jalice, Kalice, Lalice, Malice, Nalice, Ollis, Pallas, Qualice, Raleighs, Salix, Talis, Ullis, Valice, Wallace, Xalice, Yalice, Zealous.

Apollo Phoebus , Apollo Loxias , Apollo Smintheus .  

Magnolias, walking walking - Thor, Hephaestos, Ogun Ferraille.  A hot little ball of iron in close orbit to the sun, sleeping, sleeping

Alice, Ballast, Cilice, Dalice, Ellis, Felis, Garrulous.  Cold Storage on a Hot Sphere, wherever we were, we haven't been here.

Testing.  

666 meters below is not a place any sane man wants to go.
666 meters below is not a place any sane man wants to go.
666 meters below is not a place any sane man wants to go.

Seven of Spades, Two off Diamonds, Jack of Clubs/// /// Six of Hearts*

(Borrowed the walking walking thing from Claire, sorry.  I'm trying to conjure up a story [a lonely dream to conjure you but conjure hell is all I ... do].  So if all this looks weird, it should.  I left my notebook at home today, but I needed to write this down to get going.  To begin.  There is a blog called "A Magnolia's Heart Beats," and Caitlyn is right, those trees get creepier and creepier, branches like round shoulders, loping, loping)

Down in cold storage on a little hot sphere, wherever we've been, we haven't been here.

If I Ran the Zoo.

When instead of concentrating on what I should be doing, I am thinking up anything but.

For instance, rewriting the Green Lantern movie (the results I got were lackluster, honestly).  Superhero Origin Stories and Hal Jordan being what each is, there's only so far you can get.  I wouldn't cast Ryan Reynolds, but I wouldn't cast Mal Reynolds, either; I would rewrite Carol Channing as a GOD DAMNED ENGINEER, no really, a real engineer, and have some jumped up space pirate outfit be the main antagonists, with Sinestro as the mentor who's frustrations that will make him a villain are really starting to show.  That's about as far as I got.

Then I started thinking about the X-men and if I got a chance to reboot the original team, what I would do.  The short version ETA got eeted by the LJ Cut, wasn't so short, nor very interesting.

To be clear, I don't think I could do better from nothing than the people who created these things in the first place, at least, not creating them, it's just fun to play with other peoples' toys, sometimes.  

It's not as bad as when I rewrite the Star Wars Prequels (that was epic), but pretty bad.  Wow.  I wonder if the cats need a fresh coat of wax.

BARCC Walk for Change!

Originally posted by shadesong at BARCC Walk for Change!The BARCC Walk for Change is less than a month away! You should sponsor me!

I've been volunteering with BARCC for five years, as a community awareness and prevention services volunteer and a survivor speaker. I've found it to be an intensely rewarding experience, and I've seen the amazing and powerful work that's been done and continues to be done by BARCC's presence in our community and BARCC's volunteers and staff. The Walk is one of the two big fundraisers BARCC does, and donations are slower this year - more than ever, we need sponsorships!

See, all of BARCC's services are free of charge - and the Walk is a big part of how we keep them free. This includes hotline services, medical advocates to accompany survivors to the hospital, up to 12 free sessions of one-on-one counseling, group counseling, legal advocacy for survivors who wish to press charges, case management services for survivors who need to break a lease or change locks to be safe from their perpetrators, educational workshops for every college in the Boston area and any community group who wants us, and so much more.

I'm not doing Blogathon this year; I've decided that after these five intense years, I'll be taking a few months of leave. Volunteering at my current level and writing Cicatrix at the same time isn't good for me, so I'm going to focus on getting the book done! But that means that, sans Blogathon, this is my one big fundraising push of the year. If you usually back me during Blogathon, please sponsor me now!

And I'm still recruiting for Team Venture - sign up if you want to walk with me!

So yes. Walk for Change. SPONSOR ME! And pass it on!

Stone Telling 7 is HERE!

Originally posted by rose_lemberg at Stone Telling 7 is HERE!(cross-posted from rose_lemberg )

And it is glorious! In addition to the poetry, don't miss the roundtable, B.'s article on translating queer poetry, the second installment of Brit Mandelo's article on the poetry of Joanna Russ... in fact, I hope you won't miss anything!

Special thanks to Julia Rios on her work on the roundtable, and Jennifer Smith for tirelessly reading, coding, proofreading, and doing hundreds of other things without which this issue would not now be in front of you. Huzzah!

Aaaand congratulations to the following poets on their Rhysling Award nominations for the year 2011:

Erik Amundsen, "The Lend," Stone Telling 5, Sept. 2011.
Mary Turzillo, "Moving to Enceladus," Stone Telling 3, Mar. 2011.
C. S. E. Cooney, "Postcards from Mars," Stone Telling 6, Dec. 2011.
Shira Lipkin, "The Changeling's Lament," Stone Telling 5, Sept. 2011.
Sofia Samatar, "Girl Hours," Stone Telling 6, Dec. 2011.
Alexandra Seidel,"A Masquerade in Four Voices," Stone Telling 5, Sept. 2011.
Catherynne M. Valente, "The Secret of Being a Cowboy," Stone Telling 3, Mar. 2011.

Heuristic Ideation Method (for Skogkatt)

I'm sorry this took so damned long.  A couple of weeks ago, I got to spend some time at the Wanderer's Hut with some cool people doing writerly things.  I am sort of betwixt and between and stalled out bad, so I wanted to get something done, and I'd heard of this, a brainstorming tool with the I'm-not-quite-sure-it's-actually-heuristics name.

The basic idea of the tool is you make a grid, and two things, doesn't matter what they are, really.  In the case of the one I am attaching, those two things were a free association based on a story I want to write of people falling into abysses, which I think comes from all the abysses I have been falling into playing Dark Souls (YOU DIED).  The other was, ironically enough, given yesterday's screed, a song by Lana Del Rey I was listening to during the 25 minutes of focused activity we were taking in turns (if you're thinking Pomodoro, yeah, it was).  

When you have the two things, you break them up into 5 things the describe or compose or are part of the larger thing, arrange them on their axes and then try to combine them and see what you come up with.  In this case, the Y axis is the stuff I came up with for images, and the X is the stuff I picked up from the song.

Sealed FateRainWORDSRedemptionLaughterAbyssDamnationRain in the AbyssFill the Abyss with WordsKatabasisLovecraftian SiginificanceGreen GlassScrying GlassRain on GlassEtched in Glass, the Message in CracksThe Glass UnbreaksThe Glass that Laughs at YouLurchGuy Pearce CausalityThe Raindrop as it Forms in the CloudsThe Word that Drops You."Mote" DamnationThe Best Worst Joke Ever.DimensionsOmniscient Perspective PointElemental Plane of AirVERBUMMirror UniverseThe Game (I Lost)HolesBroken FateWalk Between the RaindropsMagic WordsGetting Away with itTrickster Spirit

This one turned out to be less fruitful than I hoped in terms of something writeable, and some of the things I don't remember what I meant (Guy Pearce Causality... Memento?  Maybe?), but it was kind of fun and had a couple of interesting bits in there.  

The Glass that Laughs at You, The Raindrop as it Forms in the Clouds, The Word that Drops You...  Interesting ideas.  I did one other using a random draw of 6 tarot cards and Bat for Lashes' "Moon and Moon" which seems to be a little more promising.  

I don't expect this to work for you, but I like to remix and mashup and get my ideas that way (the downside is that character, theme and story are often like three shy virgins that I have to orchestrate into a threesome, from another room, over the phone.

All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012

Originally posted by lupagreenwolf at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by tristissima at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by blindwebster at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Never have I found a more appropriate subject for this icon.

Originally posted by unknownbinaries at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by gesundyke at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by rainflowermoon at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by miintikwa at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by heartbreakangel at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by atalantapendrag at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by ericadawn16 at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by hoperomantic at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by southrnbygrace at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by ultra_fic at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by jesco0307 at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by sheryden at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by meridian_rose at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by brontefanatic at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by philstar22 at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Originally posted by lk737 at All U.S. Internet Providers will be policing downloads by July 12, 2012Please repost this? I have never begged for one of my posts to be boosted. I am just so worried for my friends and want you to know.

According to this article, dated March 15, 2012:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/webnews/...

"File-sharers, beware: By July 12, major US Internet service providers (ISPs) will voluntarily begin serving as copyright police for the entertainment industry, according to Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The so-called “six-strikes” plan is said to be one of the most effective anti-piracy efforts ever established in the US."

The article goes on to give details. After six notices, internet providers will decide to throttle a person's internet speed, or cut it off altogether. I don't know if they will crack down on torrents only, or if it is up to the internet provider. I get the sense it is up to the internet provider. So some people could get away with downloading non torrents, while others might get their internet service cut off. I urge you to click it and read, as we all know people who download.

No more downloading eps of your favorite shows for vidding, gifs, or fanfiction art. No more downloading screencaps possibly. I'm so sorry my friends. I don't even know if BT Guard will work to protect you, but I would google it if I were you. It is a professional service that supposedly can protect you from the invasive eyes of your internet provider.

Just, my friends, please make each other aware. Please be aware of the date JULY 12TH. Mark your calendar and double check with your internet provider by then. If you start receiving notices of downloaded activity, this is why. And your internet service could be throttled or cut off.

Fox news confirms this:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/0...

Youtube video explaining this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5OG0...

SIGN THE PETITION!
http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/backdoor_sopa/?source=fb