marjaerwin

When police fire tear gas and concussion grenades at protesters, that doesn’t mean the protesters were or are committing violence. It means the police are committing violence.

I wasn’t able to participate in today’s protests, due to my disabilities, but while peacefully protesting years ago, police attacked the group I was with, and someone knocked me to the ground, and police repeatedly sprayed pain into my eyes and mouth. Judging by photos of the beating, and bruises afterwards, they also beat me with an improvised club. I have severe asthma, and I could have died if it had gone down my throat instead of my esophagus. I don’t have epilepsy, but I had some kind of seizure due to the pain.

Blaming protesters is victim-blaming. Bullying survivors to try to figure out what we must have done to deserve the violence can be triggering for some of us with ptsd from this violence. It’s not right, factually or morally.

A word to those of you unfamiliar with tumblr: it collects together all the blogs of the people you follow, and automatically adds them to your dashboard. So here, it's easier to decide whether to check up on friends who post on important-but-triggering topics, or wait another day, but there's it's automated. it allows users to post stuff below the fold/behind a link, and to post tags. At present, the usual expectation is that it's each user's responsibility to install special software to block tags which they associate with triggering material. I think this puts too much of the responsibility on victims/survivors and too little on posters.

First off, blocking entire tags means blocking supportive posts, hostile posts, peripherally-related posts, and directly related ones.

We all have good days and bad days, and can handle some posts but really need to avoid other posts.

Second, it’s a pain to tag everything, a literal pain for those of us with arm injuries, and I don’t usually bother. It’s no more of a pain and a good deal more helpful to insert a fold with an intro above fold and the likely-to-be-triggering sections below the fold.

We don’t all have the same triggers, but many of us have common triggers involving sexual assault and common situations which may have exposed us or our friends to sexual assault. A ten-paragraph essay on sexual assault can probably go below the fold.

Third, most of the tag-blocking software is written for Chrome, and the rest is indecipherably documented.